This Day in Labor History: March 6, 1922
By 
On March 6, 1922, a group of sex workers in Veracruz, Mexico burned their beds and mattresses as part of a growing rent strike in that city. This became a nationwide grassroots leftist movement that many hoped was the next phase of the Mexican Revolution. It was not, but it proves a great window into Mexican leftism at the moment the revolution had ended.
The Mexican Revolution was an unspeakably awful period of upheaval in Mexico. Started in no small part in 1910 due to the protests of workers over the exploitation they faced from Porfirio Diaz’s beloved western companies, it became a decade of unprecedented violence and the 1920s were almost a second decade of equal violence due to the Revolution’s ramifications, especially the Cristero Rebellion. The leftist workers movement had basically nothing in common with the Catholic fighters in the Cristeros, but it was all a sign of the weakness of civil society in Mexico at that time. Would the revolutionary leaders be able to institutionalize the Revolution? This was a constant challenge at the time.
Much of the Mexican Revolution is better understood as battles between different visions of nationalism than as having any ideological consistency. On the left, the anarchists in the North under the leaderships of the Flores Magón brothers has received the most attention, but after the success of the Soviet Union in 1917, the Communist Party became deeply appealing for many leftists, as it did throughout the world. However, anarchism remained popular in other parts of Mexico. It would take time for the CP to dominate the left.
Rent issues were a big part of the late Revolution and its aftermath. In 1917, leftists in Mexico City created the Tenant League of the Federal District to promote the ideas of rent reforms popular among that city’s leftists. A socialist congress in 1919 made rent reduction a central tenet of its platform. In 1921, Melitón Romero and Miguel Ángel Cuevas created a tenant union in the city. The core of this union’s ideas was that the Revolution had focused so much on rural oppression that it had forgotten how renters were oppressed and it urged forcing owners to update their properties to be remotely safe and healthy or have them expropriated by the state.
But the communists were politically split and the CP was in decline by the end of 1921. So José Valadés, a 22 year old radical who wanted to build toward what today we would call a broader Global South pan-nationalism within Marxism, decided to promote tenant strikes in order to rebuild the party. He and his friends in the Communist Youth saw that the poor were engaging in tenant strikes around the country and he thought organizing these together could build toward revolution.
Those rent strikes had begun among sex workers in Veracruz back in February, These were the poorest of the poor and they were furious about continued increases in their rent. At first, these protests were just around rent but they soon became radicalized, arguing to eliminate private property in Mexico entirely. They began organizing rural workers as well and Veracruz became a hotbed of this new grassroots radicalism that connected with revolutionary intellectuals to channel the discontent into something more concrete.
By late February, the rent strikes in Veracruz were growing. The sex workers began to take a greater lead. A group of six leaders from the state of Guerrero, on the nation’s west coast, became known as Los Horizontalaes de Guererro, which should need no translation. On March 6, they burned their belongs in a public protest and this became a moment in which people rallied behind them. That soon spread to Mexico City, reaching the capital by March 15. That day, a rally with about 500 people attending and led by the communists, to bring tenants together to engage in a huge rent strike. By April, these protests were in the thousands. Trade unions also organized their workers to go in and repair people’s homes, with the promise that their wages would be taken out of future rent payments that would usually have gone to the owners but instead would go to them for their work.
Veracruz really remained the center of this strike there. There, an anarcho-syndicalist leader named Herón Peral really was a good organizer and kept this going with all the help from the women at the core of the strike. But the communists in Mexico City hated the anarchists in Veracruz and the feeling was more than reciprocated. The Veracruz movement pulled its support of what was happening in Mexico City because of the Communist Party’s involvement. Meanwhile, moderate Mexican unionists with close ties to the American Federation of Labor felt all of this was way too radical for their participation.
Eventually, Alvaro Obregón, the first post-revolutionary president of Mexico, sent the military to Veracruz to end the strike there, with smaller forces dealing with Mexico City. Property owners organized and allied themselves with the state. One worker died trying to stop an eviction in Veracruz. But overall, this wasn’t a massive state repression per se. Rather, it took on what became the hallmark of the post-revolutionary state, which was to wrap its arms around leftist movements in order to bring them into the state and diminish class tensions. It ensured that working class housing was at the forefront of national projects. The government soon tasked the legendary architect Miguel Angel de Quevado with organizing this effort. He was happy to do so, as he believed that building was the way to diminish class tensions.
As the post-revolutionary state became institutionalized in the PRI, which was the dominant party in that nation for nearly a century, it became masterful at undermining leftist movements through state intervention and cooptation. Whether this was good for the Mexican working classes probably depended very much on who you talked to, but most certainly by the 1960s, the government was far more willing to use murderous violence against the Mexican left and to use its bought and sold unions to help out. Mexico was not going to be a nation where leftist sex workers set the agenda.
I borrowed from Matthew Vitz, A City upon a Lake: Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City to write this post.
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