Book Reviews

working against sorters interests not in the impersonal and implacable structures of
global capitalism, not in the foreign purchasing rms like Arbuckle Coee, or among
the local owners of the benecios, or in state ocials and politicians, but rather within
the small handful of women who emerged to lead the sorters union from the s to
the s. Assessing their story is complicated, and Fowler-Salamini traces their
success in building union strength as well as their failure consistently to represent the
best interests of their rank and le.
The rich portrait oered by Fowler-Salamini in this book satises, but its success
serves also to beg further questions. She argues, for example, that although coee
sorting provided a decent livelihood for thousands of women, and crucial support
for their families, it did not provide a venue for upward mobility. Half a century
later, well after manual coee sorting had been replaced by machines, these women
worked as street vendors, waitresses, owners of small stores, and food preparers
(p. ). Some of their children got an education and joined the ranks of the middle
classes, from shop owners to professionals, but these experiences were exceptional.
Most, by implication, remained among Mexicos working poor at the end of the
twentieth century. Was coee sorting, like so many once manual operations in an
increasingly industrial economy, a dead end for most of its workers? If sorting
represented a real opportunity for working women to improve their material and
social positions in the rst half of the twentieth century, as Fowler-Salamini implies,
why were they not able to translate this opportunity into some kind of
intergenerational upward mobility? One large part of the answer certainly lies
with the state, and the kinds of public goods and services (like education) that were or
were not provided by municipal, state and national authorities. But such questions
would require another book altogether. This ne study adds to an increasingly deep
literature on three topics: coee economies and cultures in Latin America (and
agricultural exports generally); the history of womens labour and lives during the
critical transition from rural to urban societies; and increasingly diverse and regionally
situated studies of a modernising Mexico.
University of Notre Dame

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. ().

EDWARD BEATTY

doi:./SX

William J. Suarez-Potts, The Making of Law: The Supreme Court and Labor
Legislation in Mexico, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
), pp. x + , ., hb.
The Making of Law is a sound legal history that uses Supreme Court opinions, legal
texts, US State Department memoirs, and law and policy articles to prove that
adjudication was an integral part of the law-making process in Mexico during a period
when the Supreme Court played an important role in the nation. Additionally, the
book demonstrates how the conduct of social actors employers, workers, legal
scholars and politicians inuenced judges decisions and shaped labour law. In all,
this skilfully structured and superbly researched work illuminates how labour
legislation came into being as an independent category of law, and portrays how the
lack of overarching federal legislation set the tone for state, business and labour
relations in the Porrian and early postrevolutionary periods.
The books introduction provides a primer on Mexicos legal system that will
benet the legal scholar and general history student alike. Here the reader learns that,

 Book Reviews
despite a constitutional separation of powers in place to restrict political decisionmaking to the legislature and the application of laws to judges, jurisprudencia, or
case law, had an inuence on the making of law in Mexico after at least .
Jurisprudencia, we also learn, was a factor in the legislative process that became
especially important after , when the federal judiciary adhered to a narrow policy
of stare decisis that allowed the creation of a controlling precedent after ve consistent,
consecutive rulings by the Supreme Court. Similarly, the Supreme Court used the
juicio de amparo, a judgment of support or protection that was essentially injunctive,
to exercise a degree of independence from the executive and, in some cases, eventually
to invalidate labour laws and practices it deemed unconstitutional.
Subsequent chapters present case studies that examine the amparo and the shifting
tendency of the Supreme Court to grant or deny the petition consistent with or
counter to the will of the executive. Chapter examines cases disputed on the topic of
debt peonage, an institution that was constitutionally prohibited but one that Porrio
Daz permitted to continue in the interests of agrarian development. Consulting
published opinions from a wide array of states, Suarez-Potts demonstrates that the
Supreme Court prior to routinely contravened the will of the government by
upholding the right of free labour and by granting amparos that freed petitioners from
penalties such as imprisonment, forced payment of debt or forced return to work.
In contrast, in the case of La Corona, described in chapter , the Supreme
Court decided an amparo petition to the executives advantage. This ruling saw
the Supreme Court withdraw an amparo that had been granted to a Veracruz oil
company by a federal judge and restore the order issued by the states conciliation and
arbitration board that required the company to compensate the widow of an employee
killed on the job. In overturning the decision of the lower court, the Supreme Court
eectively gave the state labour boards, which had been established only in ,
the power to make law by resolving disputes or ratifying outcomes. As importantly,
the Supreme Courts decision empowered the federal government, whose control
over the newly established boards increased its inuence in the sphere of industrial
relations.
The Supreme Courts independence from the executive resurfaced again in ,
when it overturned an order of the federal labour ministry and ruled in favour of
railway workers who were members of a union that was a rival of the Mexican
Regional Labor Confederation, then a pivotal government ally. The high courts ruling
was made moot, though, when President Calles took preemptive action and
established a federal labour board to adjudicate that and all future disputes having a
national scope. The railway workers conict of , described in chapter , thus
revealed that the revolutionary state had little tolerance for an independent judiciary
and that a federal labour law was required if the government wished to channel
the course of industrial relations and prevent similar future shows of judicial
insubordination.
Whereas Suarez-Potts vividly details the legal and philosophical rationales for
judicial decisions, he presents a sometimes sterile narrative that excludes its human
participants. What killed the employee of La Corona? Why did conditions at
Cananea cause workers to revolt in ? The author admits the obstacles of using
legal opinions to illuminate broad historical patterns when he explains: The published
opinions normally discuss the rationale of their ruling but rarely is the social context
of the underlying conict fully presented (p. ). This is undoubtedly true, as any
historian who has tried to craft a narrative using only dry and minimalist pleitos

Book Reviews
(lawsuits) surely knows. Yet, being aware of the personal circumstances of the
petitioners and knowing about the Porrian or revolutionary social contexts within
which they lived may be as useful in understanding the courts decisions as knowing
the legal doctrines that founded them. Many of the episodes examined here, such as
La Corona or El guila, are documented in other media and may be more colourfully
told by cross-referencing amparo petitions with reportage in newspapers, a source
Suarez-Potts uses primarily for editorial commentary.
The Making of Law reveals how new paradigms and social orientations inuenced
labour law in Mexico long before their codication in . The book also stresses
continuity by demonstrating how the judiciary was a constant factor in law-making
and exerted a greater than realised independence from the executive during both the
Porrian and early postrevolutionary periods. The books sole shortcoming is its voice,
yet its tendency to speak primarily to matters of legal doctrine does not prevent it from
making a broad historiographical contribution. Historians of even late twentiethcentury Mexico will benet from consulting the books nuanced exploration of how
Mexican policy-makers worked to enact a federal labour code and create conciliation
and arbitration boards that transferred the power to resolve industrial questions out of
the hands of an unreliable judiciary and into those of a centralising and increasingly
authoritarian federal state.
Eastern Washington University

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. ().

JOSEPH U. LENTI

doi:./SXX

Thomas Rath, Myths of Demilitarization in Postrevolutionary Mexico,

(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, ), pp. ix + ,
$., $. pb and e-book.

Military history remains, to a considerable extent, a subject dominated by great battles

and legendary gures. Joseph Glatthaar has shown the way to go beyond this approach
in his treatment of the lives of everyday soldiers in Robert E. Lees army during the
American Civil War. In a similar vein, Thomas Rath has written a useful book that
recognises the shortcomings of the traditional approach and conceptually delves into
the complicated cultural and political history of the postrevolutionary Mexican army.
He dates the beginning of the postrevolutionary era at because that is the point
when highly organised violence ended and government hegemony set in.
The author oers a nineteenth-century context for the postrevolutionary military
that includes a debate regarding the circumstances under which the army could coerce
the nations own citizens (p. ). In the ensuing discussion the author asserts that
conservative ocers were correct to be concerned about the eectiveness of militias
in the era between the early s and the s. From the perspective of combat, the
author does not include the highly successful militia-based guerrilla campaign
of Liberal general Santos Degollado against the US supply lines between Veracruz and
Mexico City in his assessment, nor the leading role played by the militia at Loreto on
May . What is important here, however, is the creation of local strongholds that
can lead to an ineectiveness of government.
Rath skilfully treats the Porrian era as one of modernisation and the building of
capitalism. He also describes the racism of the period and how it aected the army, but
the reader would have been well served from the standpoint of historical context if he
had mentioned the suppression of organised labour in the late s, the slaughter of

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