Mexican Workers and the Mexican Labor Movement: A History

Presented by Dan La Botz

This course will deal with the history of Mexican workers and their union and political organizations from ancient times until today. The course will look at the political economy and the organization of work from indigenous communal organizations in the pre-Columbian period to the self-organization of workers in the colonial and early independence periods, through the era of the Porfiriate, the Mexican Revolution, and into the modern era. We will look at the interaction between the United States and Mexico and between the U.S. and Mexican labor movements in the modern era and touch on Mexican immigrant workers in the United States. The course will be taught through a combination of lectures, readings, and discussions. Student will read about one or at most two articles of about 70 pages per week.

Dan La Botz is the author of several books on Mexican labor and social movements as well as a biography of César Chávez. He was a founding member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, later a Socialist Party candidate in Ohio for the U.S. Senate. He was for 20 years the editor of Mexican Labor News and Analysis and is currently a co-editor of New Politics (newpol.org). He was a Fulbright scholar in Mexico and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati. Most recently he taught Comparative Labor, the Latin American Labor Movement, at the Murphy Institute.