Redeeming the revolution : the state and organized labor in post-Tlatelolco Mexico / Joseph U. Lenti.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A tale of sin and redemption, Joseph U. Lenti's Redeeming the Revolution demonstrates how the killing of hundreds of student protestors in Mexico City's Tlatelolco district on October 2-3, 1968, sparked a crisis of legitimacy that moved Mexican political leaders to reestablish their revolutionary credentials with the working class, a sector only tangentially connected to the bloodbath. State-allied labor groups hence became darlings of public policy in the post-Tlatelolco period, and with the implementation of the New Federal Labor Law of 1970, the historical symbiotic relationship of the government and organized labor was restored.





Renewing old bonds with trusted allies such as the Confederation of Mexican Workers bore fruit for the regime, yet the road to redemption was fraught with peril during this era of Cold War and class contestation. While Luis Echeverría, Fidel Velázquez, and other officials appeased union brass with discourses of revolutionary populism and policies that challenged business leaders, conflicts emerged, and repression ensued when rank-and-file workers criticized the chasm between rhetoric and reality and tested their leaders' limits of toleration.

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CHOICE Review

Why was the Mexican Revolution in need of redemption after 1968, and how was it redeemed? Lenti (Eastern Washington Univ.) argues that Mexican state builders constructed two paradigms: the nation and the Mexican Revolution. The resulting nation-revolution equivalency established the ruling regime's legitimacy, solidified workers' loyalty toward it, and subsequently reinforced its authority, employing organized labor as the redeeming vehicle. The author proves how the Mexican Revolution, an institution that itself needed redemption, was saved after 1968 by demonstrating to organized workers the benefits of this reciprocal relationship. To make sense of the state's success, Lenti's theoretical framework includes Kevin Middlebrook's concept of post-revolutionary authoritarianism. To understand episodes of mass politics that occurred over five decades after the revolutionary violence, the author uses Florence Mallon's concept of hegemony. Methodologically, Lenti uses archival sources from Mexico's National Archives in the form of unpublished secret police files reports, and labor suits and collective contracts from the Ministry of Labor and Social Prevention archives, to infer the government's objectives and to create a general chronology of its efforts to monitor and, in some instances, suppress unsanctioned labor activity. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --Carlos A Hernandez, California State University, Northridge