Connecting Class and Community in Mexico’s Postrevolutionary Popular Movements

The scholarship on Post-Revolutionary Mexico has established the rise of popular organizing and social movements as critical elements of the 1920s and after, but it has usually not mentioned or explained how class-based social movements organized across class and united in powerful national alliances with community-based social movements. This paper provides one explanation for how this happened by exploring two social movements, the independent labor unions and the agrarian leagues, and their attempts to unite in the context of Mexico’s Post-Revolutionary state formation. The paper studies the ways in which the unions and leagues responded differently to similar forms of political mobilization and repression and how they began to overcome their common challenges through unifying alliances. At the same time, by considering the incomplete ways movements connected competing concerns about class and community, the paper seeks to clarify some of the major difficulties of popular organizing after the Mexican Revolution.