Deference and Defiance in Monterrey

The first comprehensive history of labor relations and the working class in twentieth-century Monterrey, Deference and Defiance explores how both workers and industrialists perceived, responded to and helped shape the outcome of Mexico’s revolution. Snodgrass’s narrative covers a sixty-year period that begins with Monterrey’s emergence as one of Latin-America’s preeminent industrial cities. He then explores the roots of two distinct and enduring systems of industrial relations that were both historical outcomes of the revolution: company paternalism and militant unionism. By comparing four local industries – steel, beer, glass, and smelting – Snodgrass demonstrates how workers and managers collaborated in the development of paternalistic labor regimes that built upon working-class traditions of mutual aid as well as elite resistance to state labor policies. Deference and Defiance in Monterrey thus offers an urban and industrial perspective to a history of revolutionary Mexico that remains overshadowed by studies of the countryside.