"Women Coffee Sorters Confront the Mill Owners and the Veracruz

34 JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY SPRING WOMEN COFFEE SORTERS CONFRONT THE MILL OWNERS AND THE VERACRUZ REVOLUTIONARY STATE, 1915–1918 Heather Fowler-Salamini When the Mexican Revolution(1910–1920) erupted, seasonal women coffee sorters like permanent workers were forced to defend their economic livelihood in the face of rampant inflation. This article examines the discourse and strategies of Veracruz women coffee workers, anarchosyndicalist organizers, agro-industry, and the revolutionary state as they negotiated with each other. The embryonic revolutionary state and the trade union activists had different objectives linked to controlling working-class mobilization. As a result, the coffee sorters’ discourse can best be framed within the context of women’s responsi- bility for preserving the family and their struggle to fulfill that obliga- tion. or a long time, the question of gender was ignored or marginalized in FLatin American labor history.1 While South American historians have taken the lead in addressing this issue, Mexican scholars have lagged some- what behind.2 This study seeks to add a new dimension to Mexican gendered labor history by examining the making of Veracruz woman coffee sorters and how they organized and confronted mill owners and an emerging revolutionary state. Their actions were intimately linked to the development of a new coffee export industry, anarchosyndicalism, and the emergence of an embryonic revolutionary state in the midst of the Mexican Revolution, 1910–1920. My first objective here is to explore how gender intersects with work in the Veracruz coffee mills. I use historian Joan Scott’s definition of gender as a social construct based on perceived differences between the sexes as well as a way of signifying dynamic relationships of power.3 Gender is an important determinant of the division of labor. Women were placed in less prestigious positions in gender-segregated workshops, and coffee sorting was no exception because the task had always been considered an extension of domestic duties and therefore “women’s work.” Rural women, who migrated to the cities of central Veracruz at the turn of the twentieth century and entered into the new coffee mills, were aware of the gendered nature of their work and decided to organize themselves separately from the men. In the face of economic disruption and revolution, these women’s desire to earn a living wage was articulated in terms of the need to feed © 2002 I NDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS, VOL. 14 NO. 1 (SPRING) 2002 HEATHER FOWLER-SALAMINI 35 and protect their families. Historian Temma Kaplan analyzed the collective mobilization of urban women living under similar circumstances, who were motivated for the same reasons, in her study of Barcelona between 1910 and 1918.4 In the Veracruz case, the spiraling inflation of 1915 com- pelled seasonal women workers to follow male workers’ example to demand higher wages and protection of their workers’ rights, but they did so within the framework of the high cost of primary necessities and a gendered division of work. A second dimension of gender in this case study is its intersection with class. When rural women entered the coffee mills of central Veracruz, they had little sense of urban working-class consciousness. However, the anarchosyndicalist organizers were employing strategies and couching their discourse in terms of class relations. In particular, anarchosyndicalist political strategies and libertarian communist ideology, which stressed working-class consciousness and greater gender equity, played a critical role in the coffee sorters’ mobilization. Under anarchosyndicalist guid- ance, women coffee workers challenged mill owners and the Veracruz revolutionary state from below to open spaces for them to negotiate and fight for workers’ rights. Indeed, the greater the depth and intensity of working-class mobilization in Veracruz became during the Revolution, the more involved and visible the working-class women became.5 The third level of analysis focuses on the intersection between gender and a revolutionary state in formation. Popular rural and urban insur- gencies led to the overthrow of the old regime in 1911 and the development of a political vacuum where popular groups found spaces for entering into negotiation with old and new elites. Historian Gilbert Joseph and anthropologist Daniel Nugent have characterized the dynamics of state formation in this milieu, as “the quotidian process whereby the new state engaged the popular classes and vice versa” in order to regain control of the countryside. Popular agency signified understanding the dynamics of negotiation from below as well as negotiation with above.6 While the Con- stitutionalists were trying to win greater popular support throughout Veracruz, they entered into a series of negotiations from above with peas- ants, workers, and local authorities in an attempt to satisfy the demands of these groups. They created new state institutions, which opened up spaces for addressing their grievances. While this approach to popular agency has inspired many studies on subaltern groups, it has not done so for gender.7 This study explores the ways in which seasonal women workers in collaboration with anarchosyndicalist activists negotiated from below with mill owners and the embryonic Veracruz state and resorted to collective action to demand the same rights as men workers. Three ad hoc petitions sent by coffee sorter unions to the newly cre- 36 JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY SPRING ated Junta Central de Conciliación y Arbitraje (Veracruz State Conciliation and Arbitration Board, JCCA) are the principal primary sources for this article. Their demands and the responses of the factory owners and the state to these demands form part of the official transcript. James C. Scott has described the official transcript as “the open interaction between sub- ordinates and those who dominate.” However he points out that it does not reveal the whole story because it is much closer to the way the dominant group would wish things to appear than the way subordinate groups conceptualize the situation.8 This article analyzes the public transcript of the four principal actors: the women workers, anarchosyndicalist organizers, industry, and an emerging revolutionary state. The dominant discourse of the factory owners is dismissive of the women workers’ demands while that of the state officials is heavily influenced by political strategies rather than by genuine class and gender concerns. The subordinate discourse attempts to carve out women’s spaces on the fringes of a male- dominated agro-industry and a militarized political environment. Reading against the grain we find the coffee sorters’ voice demanding concessions from this foreign-dominated agro-industry. Seasonal coffee sorters began to develop a different sense of themselves as wage earners and as primary providers through their work outside the home and their participation in the trade union movement during the Mexican Revolution. Influences outside as well as inside the house- hold pushed them to demand many of the same worker rights being de- manded by full-time men workers. I first establish the context in which these changes occurred. Three long-term modernizing processes converged before or during the revolutionary upheaval to create a window of oppor- tunity for these Veracruz working women: the emergence of an export coffee agro-industry dependent on wage labor, the outbreak of the 1910 revolution which was followed by the formation of a weak revolutionary state interested in negotiating with women’s unions, and the development of a militant anarchosyndicalist movement which championed working- class consciousness as well as greater gender equity. These three case studies of the coffee sorters in the central Veracruz towns of Córdoba, Jalapa, and Orizaba illustrate how working women, once organized, could pres- sure mill owners and the state just as men workers did in the face of tre- mendous economic hardship. The Veracruz Coffee Export Industry and the Making of the Woman Coffee Sorter Coffee processing was intimately linked to the harvest season because the coffee started spoiling two days after it was picked. It commenced on 2002 HEATHER FOWLER-SALAMINI 37 the day the first cherries were harvested in November and continued through April or May. It was a seasonal economic activity, spanning any- where from three to seven months. Coffee production and preparation of the coffee bean by the traditional “dry” method on the small farms, ranchos (medium-sized farms), or even haciendas throughout the nineteenth century was generally gender-segregated work. Men planted the trees, cleaned the coffee groves, and removed the mucilaginous pulp of the coffee cherry with a mortar and pestle. Sorting was considered an extension of rural women’s domestic work. Girls learned the skill as children from their mothers, and they used these same abilities throughout their lives.9 The rising demand for high quality, well-cleaned coffee beans in the United States and European markets during the last two decades of the nineteenth century brought sweeping transformations in cultivation methods and milling techniques to the Mexican coffee industry. When coffee prices reached an all-time high in the early 1890s, entrepreneurs, in particular foreigners, began to invest large sums of money in the Mexican coffee export industry. At this time, Veracruz was producing more coffee than any other state in the republic, and therefore it attracted more capi- tal, with the possible exception of Chiapas.10 By the turn of the century European and North American entrepreneurs practically dominated the coffee export industry in Veracruz. Coffee mill owners concentrated their efforts on importing state-of- the-art European and U.S. machinery to remove all three coverings of the coffee cherry in the “wet” and “dry” milling methods. The “wet” coffee mills (beneficios húmedos), which had first appeared in the mid-nineteenth century, employed large quantities of water to squeeze, wash, ferment, and dry the cherries in order to remove the skin with its mucilaginous underlayer from the two coffee beans.

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