Today's Topics:
1. cnt.es: March 4 to 8. 8M, Working Women's Day | Feminismo
CNT Burgos (ca) (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
2. [Mexico] Let's march for life! Insurrection is life! By ANA
(pt) [machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
3. France, Union Communiste Libertaire UCL - Debate evening:
police violence (fr, it, pt)[machine translation]
(a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
4. France, Union Communiste Libertaire AL #302 - Culture,
Adeline de Lépinay: "It is an issue that popular education finds
its roots in the social movement" (fr, it, pt)[machine
translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
5. icl-cit: [Italy] The reasons for the suspension of the
general strike of 9 march (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
6. US, black rose fed - Post-Revolutionary Pioneer: Anarchist
María Luisa Marín and the Veracruz Renters Movement by Andrew
Grant Wood. (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
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Message: 1
CNT Burgos and the recently created Association of Free Women of Burgos present a series of activities around the revolutionary feminist
struggle throughout this week.
From these organizations they call to participate in the rest of the actions organized by the 8M Burgos Strike assembly.
https://www.cnt.es/noticias/4-al-8-de-marzo-8m-dia-de-la-mujer-trabajadora/
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Message: 2
" Abusers on duty find themselves outdated everywhere. Today, they can only resort to terrorism, assembly and manipulation through their
regular channels: their armed forces, their means of (in) communication and their political theater ... "Words of the Chilean insurrection.
---- We are a collective of anarchic women in struggle who join the call of companions who call to form a black anarchist bloc on March 8.
---- We take to the streets validating the beautiful exercise of anarchic violence. Without leaders or parties, far from any group,
collective, coordinator or petitioners, far from hegemonic, partisan, academic or altruistic feminism. Our struggle is against patriarchy,
which is the basis of the family, the capital state, all religions and everything that oppresses us. ---- We fight for the destruction of
everything that exists. Our lives are at stake.
The right to live our lives and decide on our bodies is not begged, it is taken! For this reason, we do not seek dialogue, we do not want
reforms, we do not promote laws, nor demand rights, we promote the frontal struggle against power in all its dimensions.
We fight against all authority, that's why we resume our anarchic war cry:Neither God, nor State, nor Boss, nor Husband!
We have also joined the call of the Witches of the Sea Collective that calls for a strike across the territory of what they call Mexico, but
as the fellow Phenomenal Witches and Insurrectionists say: in one day there is no room for all our anger! That is why we support the
proposal for a hot March, extending the fighting in the streets and the stoppage of work throughout the month of March.
The destruction of work is part of our total liberation, let's start freeing ourselves!
We will release the subway turnstiles throughout the month of March, continue the strike in colleges, cchs and prepas, take over all the
squares in the country and declare ourselves on permanent duty throughout the month, face all the institutions that propagate the
patriarchal rule ( the Church, State and Capital), it is not enough to blow up the glass roof, you need to blow up the sky with everything
and with your God!
We invite all anarchic individuals and collectives to join the anti-patriarchal struggle and those who do not agree with our methods and
still believe in reforms, in the peaceful struggle, in the promises of the State and in their Lord Jesus, we invite you not to disturb:
March 8 it is not a day to celebrate, it is a day of war.
We will not accept the presence of policies from any party or government authorities. If you want to participate, bear the consequences ...
We know how to distinguish the enemy.
We know that in government offices they are preparing the strategy to crush us. They designed the route where they want the march to pass in
their blessed monuments, institutions and sheltered stores, located the points where they plan to encapsulate us, summoned all the women of
the National Guard dressed in civilian clothes to join the 3000 police women to repress us, once again ordered the state authorities and the
AMLOvers to form a "peace cordon" to prevent us from speaking out...
FOR THOSE WHO CHOOSE TO BE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE BARRICADE IS NOSSX INIMIGX, WHETHER MAN OR WOMAN; CIVIL OR UNIFORM.
Overflowing the paths, we will create a chaotic and uncontrollable black block that gives life to Anarchy.
Against the State and Capital Anti-patriarchal struggle!
Neither God, nor State, nor Amo, nor Husband!
For the control of our lives!
For the destruction of gender!
Destroy everything that dominates and conditions us!
By insurrectionary anarchic tension!
For total liberation!
LIVE THE ANARCHY!
Collective of Anarchic Women"Alegria de Viver a Vida", CDMX, 2/28/20
Translation> Liberto
Related content:
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Message: 3
Police violence is not a coincidence, nor exceptions or errors but the product of a system. Applied as a laboratory in working-class
neighborhoods, after being tested in the colonies, they are the product of anti-social policies, of state racism and used as a means of
controlling populations which do not correspond to the standards of capitalism. ---- The evening proposes to show this system of domination
at the service of the bourgeoisie and the State, by making a reminder on the history of the BAC, the exceptional police forces and the
ideology which they defend. The evening also offers a return on the struggles against police crimes and on the means of defending oneself.
A free nursery will be set up as well as a small restaurant at free price.
https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Soiree-debat-les-violences-policieres-8556
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Message: 4
Reading Let's Organize ! by Adeline de Lépinay made us want to extend her reflections by talking to her both about her writing project and
about the questions posed by current mobilizations and movements of struggle. ---- Alternative Libertaire : How did you come up with the
idea for this book ? ---- Adeline de Lépinay : It came to me from the need to have a reflexivity on my practices, to link my experiences of
popular education, activism and community organizing, and beyond questioning our practices for emancipation and social transformation. ----
I did not grow up surrounded by activists or union or political activists: the strike and the demonstrations were basically nothing obvious
to me. On the other hand, I am steeped in the values of popular education which place the collective construction of emancipation at the
center of the dynamics of social transformation. While popular education and the struggles of the workers' movement were once closely
linked, they are today clearly separated. The community of popular education has trouble moving on to the concrete struggle, it is not
uncommon for it to concentrate all its efforts on the transformation of people and spirits, which it underestimates the need to transform
materially social structures, and thus, starting from a libertarian ambition, it gradually becomes very compatible with the liberal reading
grids. Activism on the other hand is a small medium, and many revolutionary organizations have no social base: for my part, having always
worked in very small associations, it was very late that I really saw a trade unionist from close.
The question of the social anchoring of contestation obsesses me, I do not conceive that a social transformation can be carried by a
minority, but I also do not think that changing minds is enough to change society (it is necessary, but not sufficient).
The community organizing, practice unienne states, is characterized by a body of very stratégisées methods (or standard) to achieve some
success in mobilizing broadly structured powerful organizations, train activists and develop action strategies [1]These methods directly
take up certain principles stemming from popular education approaches, and that is why, despite certain strong reservations that I had, in
2014 I decided to try the experiment. So I left my job and practiced community organizing for two years in Aubervilliers in Seine-Saint-Denis.
This experience deeply destabilized me, undermining my professional and militant ethics. To try to understand, I applied for and obtained a
research grant that allowed me to spend several months in the United States, to meet dozens of organizers and organizations. It appeared to
me on the one hand that these practices are very diverse, that it is impossible to generalize them, and on the other hand that, beyond the
heavy criticisms that we must make them, the questions that they (arise) can help us shift our gaze and question our own practices in France.
It was then that I thought it would be good to make a book out of it. Because I remain convinced that we must manage to recreate the link
between the struggles and the collective popular education approaches: that the articulation between practices and ethics must structure the
pillars of collective action which constitute the web of the book: regroup and mobilize ; define our values, our project and disseminate
them ; to structure ourselves democratically ; take action in, with, against and out of the system.
By writing this book, it was also for me to give my vision and my analysis of organizing (whether union or associative): there are many
fantasies in France concerning these methods, which basically want nothing to say more original than the need to take seriously the fact of
organizing to fight and transform society, but whose particularity is to have developed in a deeply liberal context. In France, we find
enthusiasts who think they have found the ultimate solution there, and violent criticisms that too often fall a little aside: I tried in the
book to propose principles that it would be interesting to integrate into our practices, and denounce things that are really problematic.
Who is our priority? Let's organize ! ?
Adeline de Lépinay: I think that the book is primarily aimed at people who want to act today to change the world but who feel distant from
traditional activist frameworks (unions, parties). People who say they don't see the point in plan-plan demonstrations where you collect
leaflets that you never read, who register online to participate in dawn coup actions -fist and / or symbolic, who are fed up with salaried
workers and ready to struggle to build a different life ... People I meet in my initial professional environment (social work, animation,
politics of city, local democracy: sectors which are concerned with "mobilizing" and in which the notions ofempowerment and empowerment
[2]are increasingly present) ; that I meet in various militant settings, from yellow vests to feminist or anti-racist collectives, via
citizen lists [3]; which I visit in their permaculture gardens ; that I meet because they ask me to tell them about community organizing or
they want me to train them in the "tools" of popular education (requests that I try to transform with them, because entering through the
tools runs the risk of losing political acumen).
Read also the chronicle of the book Let's organize ! Critical Manual
But I think that this work can also interest activists who have been active for a long time and who are invested in unions or other
"traditional" organizations of the social movement: if it may not teach them much, it addresses the militant questions with an angle which
will undoubtedly be able to give them some ideas and desires of things to try. And above all because I am convinced that there is an urgent
need for collective popular education approaches to regain the central place they once had in the workers' movement.
Beyond that, I hope that this book will humbly contribute to limiting the contempt that the forms of action carry each other, while they all
contribute, with weaknesses certainly but also each with their own energy, to build the possibility of radical social transformation.
How do movements like #MeToo, Nuit Debout, yellow vests or the climate movement contribute to nurturing and renewing collective action and
the emancipation project ?
Adeline de Lépinay: These movements constitute some of the forms that protest and social unrest have taken in recent years. They are
powerful and are the framework for a significant liberation of speech, of protesting thought and of the passage to collective action for
people for whom all this is quite new. They take unconventional forms, often very centered on a "horizontality»Desired, sometimes adopting
principles from popular education approaches. Often, they reject the organizations which have hitherto supported the demands of the popular
classes (unions, parties), and, sometimes, they run the risk of being easily recoverable by the neoliberalism which they claim, however, to
be. These movements raise the question of the action strategy and spread new energy for the struggle.
The challenge today is much to succeed in mobilizing widely and developing the self-organization of collective action. How do popular
education and organizing contribute to this in your opinion ?
Adeline de Lépinay: Popular education and organizinghave in common to make a clear difference between on the one hand the ambition to
disseminate our ideas and our analyzes, which amounts to putting ourselves in a posture of conviction and argumentation, and on the other
hand that of mobilizing around us , which requires a listening and restless posture. In this second case, it is necessary to decentralize
our own opinions and realities, to go and take an interest in people, their situations, their concerns, their questions, their anger, their
dreams. The mobilization posture does not consist in talking to people, but in talking with people, and for that we cannot be content with
writing analyzes and inviting them to attend our meeting-debates: we must go and discuss with them where they are, door-to-door, where they
work (on construction sites, workshops, everywhere ...),
In addition, organizing is interesting in its main objective of organizing mobilization. This is how he intends to radically differentiate
himself from activism: while an activist acts directly by himself (going to meetings, demonstrations, actions, etc.), an organizer sets
himself the ambition to ensure that as many people as possible get involved in these activist activities and create links between them that
will extend beyond their common action. The organizing also differs from Mobilizing,which consists of promptly mobilizing people around a
cause decided from above: it wants to start from the concerns of people and build from this sustainable organizations. The big question of
organizing is "What's next ?" (And after ?):"Very well, there were a lot of people in this action, but what does it change for the future,
what did it build?"
Repression and state violence constitute a major obstacle to collective action, even if it is not the only one. Is nonviolent action the
solution in the current context ? How does organizing handle this question ? Does the latter also cause debate in the movements which claim
to be popular education ?
Adeline de Lépinay : Today, many movements raise the question of repertoires of action, and more and more choose to resort to "actions of
civil disobedience". If it is often more symbolic actions than direct actions, they say "disobedience Because they assume to pose the
legitimacy of the action above the law. Aiming to denounce illegitimate situations (for symbolic disobedient actions, such as brushing with
black liquid at the Bayer-Monsanto headquarters) or even to circumvent them (for direct disobedient actions, such as people who expose
themselves to the crime of solidarity) , they generally proceed by strategic non-violence because it is necessary for their success that
they appear legitimate in the eyes of public opinion. If certain organizations have a dogmatic position on non-violence (this is notably the
case of Action non-violent-Cop21, an offshoot of Alternatiba dedicated to action), most of those which resort to actions of civil
disobedience assume that the state is using violence to counter the challenge,
The end is in the means ; the bottom is in the form and the form determines the bottom: one cannot consider violence as a desirable weapon,
and the action of small insurrectionary groups cannot produce the same results in terms of social transformation as that of large popular
groups . But if, as Saul Alinsky wrote in 1972, the confused character who developed community organizing practices from the late 1930s [4],
"it is stupid to say that power is at the end of the rifle when it is the opposing camp which holds the machine guns It is probably just as
stupid to deny that it is necessary to give us the means to organize our self-defense, to be able to collectively resist attacks,
repression, criminalization.
How do you explain that in France the political dimension of popular education rarely mixes with its social dimension unlike what happens in
other countries ?
Adeline de Lépinay : There are different traditions of popular education in France. A first tradition comes to us from the French
Revolution, carried by a certain bourgeoisie enlightened in the context of the Enlightenment: it wants to "educate the people At the moment
when he (finally, the men...) accesses the right to vote. A second tradition is linked to social Christianity and to the movement of worker
priests who want to fight actively against poverty and which can be compared to practices linked to the theology of liberation in South
America. And a third tradition rooted in the workers' movement, which gave rise to the proliferation of public meetings which contributed to
the start of the Paris Commune in 1871, and which flourished on the labor exchanges of the anarchist Fernand Pelloutier before that these
did not merge with the National Federation of Trade Unions to create the CGT in 1902.
During the second half of the XX th century, the labor movement has abandoned its formal popular education activity while associations with
this ambition were gradually institutionalized through subsidies, operating constraints related to hiring of employees and room management.
At the same time, the bourgeois tendency of popular education continued with the ambition thought from the outside to educate the people: it
is for example the popular universities in the style of Michel Onfray, which, by encouraging the fact of to rely on experts and
intellectuals to think about the world and our situations, do not question the fact of relying on "great men" to transform it.
Popular education rooted in the social movement obviously exists, but it is most often not thought of and named as such. However, it is an
issue for it to become so again, because we must assume the need to collectively take the time to work on the tensions that inevitably arise
when we act, to debate, to share our experiences and our knowledge, 'Go and feed us with other experiences and other knowledge, to be able
to decide together on our objectives and our modes of action, and to implement them in order to build our collective emancipation and social
transformation [5].
Interview conducted on January 19, 2020 by Laurent Esquerre (UCL Aveyron)
[1] The community organizing is detailed and analyzed in order Organizing ! Critical manual . We can have a few glimpses of it by reading
articles written by the author for the journal of Alternative Libertaire during her experimentation with these methods (the analysis of
these then not being as successful as she was. is in the book): "the community organizing husked' , Alternative libertaire February 2016. "
Community organizing : libertarian or neoliberal? " , Libertarian alternative, June 2016. "United States: Organizing Precarious People" ,
Alternative Libertaire , June 2016.
[2] The empowerment is a process that is to develop individually and collectively on the one hand its power, its capacity, its power, and
secondly its power in society, its power over what surrounds us, all this in order to fight against his dominated situation and transform
social relationships. It is an approach which opposes the paternalism suffered and which consists in collectively taking charge of our own
emancipation. In this, it is to be distinguished from what is described in France as "development of the power to act", which is most often
thought of for others in a process of committed social work. In the 1990s, the concept of empowermentbegan to be misused when liberal
international institutions (UN, World Bank, IMF) integrated it into their recommendations. In doing so, they transformed what was a
liberating self-constituted approach into a liberal injunction to autonomy, which in no way integrates the requirement of an institutional
or structural transformation of society: by a relentless semantic shift, the words d The order "Do not free me, I will do it" or "The
emancipation of the workers will be the work of the workers themselves", have become "Take yourself in hand: when we want, we can". Read in
the archives of the journal Alternative Libertaire the presentation of the book "L 'empowerment , an emancipatory practice" ,Alternative
libertaire, April 2014
[3] Read, in the archives of the journal Alternative Libertaire , the articles of March 2017 "Citizenship: citizen electoral initiatives"
and "Local democracy in Saillans: an experience that becomes an example"
[4] Read "Alinsky, Myths and Realities" , by Clément Petitjean, published on Contretemps , January 2018. "Alinsky, why you have to know it,
then forget it" , by Jean-Michel Knutsen, published on the Organizewebsite you! , February 2019. As well as "What rules for radicals ?
Critical dive in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals" , a brochure published by Le Poing.
[5] We could for example be interested in the practices of the organization of radical organizing City Life / Vida Urbana in Boston: an
assembly of this organization is described in Critical Pedagogies, dir. Laurence De Cock and Irène Pereira, Agone, 2019, in the chapter on
popular education written by the author. This work was reviewed in Alternative libertaire in May 2019.
https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Adeline-de-Lepinay-C-est-un-enjeu-que-l-education-populaire-retrouve-un-ancrage
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Message: 5
In view of the positions that emerged from "Non una di Meno" to renounce the day of productive strike (not the mobilizations expressed in
various forms on 8 and 9 March) following the ban imposed by the government, as Unione Sindacale Italiana we withdraw the proclamation of
the strike on 9 March. ---- We confirm our union's commitment to all those motivations behind the strike itself and our participation in all
the initiatives and mobilizations that will take place on 8 and 9 March, for the claim of all women's rights, against all forms of
oppression and gender-based violence and against all discrimination against all those who escape the rigid, heteronormed vision of society.
---- We will participate in the mobilizations in Italy and in the various parts of the world where it is possible through the CIT, an
international trade union association in which we participate.
We also want to denounce all the blatant instrumentalism, accompanied by a campaign to spread panic, from the government, which is taking
advantage of the situation to hit the basic right to strike, at the same time as it's letting loose the reins to the employers in cutting
the rights of workers with impunity, as it's doing in several companies.
We also want to denounce how, above all, the weaker strata, the precarious workers, with atypical contracts, the employees of cooperatives,
suspended by authority from work due to the emergency, without precise guarantees in the loss of income, are paying the consequences of this
situation of alarm.
We will find suitable ways and methods to give concrete answers to these repressive acts against the working class which are linked to the
same "decrees of the so-called security", in reality forms of heavy repression which pass from one government to another.
Unione Sindacale Italiana - CIT
https://www.icl-cit.org/italy-the-reasons-for-the-suspension-of-the-general-strike-of-9-march/
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Message: 6
A history of the Mexican anarchist María Luisa Marín and the 1922 Veracruz Renters' Movement -- By Andrew Grant Wood ---- Compañeros: ¡Viva
el amor Universal! ¡Viva la emancipación de la mujer! ¡Arriba el Comunismo! ¡Viva la humanidad libre! ¿Mujeres? ¡A la lucha! ---- María
Luisa Marín, 1923 ---- When female prostitutes in the Veracruz working class neighborhood of La Huaca quit paying rent to their landlords in
February of 1922, they sparked a social protest that would soon involve more than half the city's population. Fed up with bad housing
conditions, excessive rents and constant harassment by rent collectors, residents of some of port's poorest neighborhoods along with local
anarchists and members of the Mexican Communist Party founded the Revolutionary Syndicate of Tenants (Sindicato Revolucionario de
Inquilinos) directed by local agitator Herón Proal. As the mobilization grew, protesters first called for specific housing reforms but then
added a number of other demands influenced by the internationalist ideals of the time: the abolition of private property, the emancipation
of workers and the eventual elimination of the state.
Demonstrations involved hundreds of men, women and children. By the end of May, approximately 30,000 had stopped paying rent. At this time,
the occupants of more than 100 tenements (patios de vecindad)-consisting of a collection of rooms situated around a central courtyard where
residents shared cooking and bathing facilities-displayed red banners and signs which read: "I am on strike and not paying rent" (Estoy en
huelga y no pago renta!). Once the protest was underway, regular confrontations between landlords, tenement administrators, uncooperative
renters, market salespeople, police and politicians helped create a tumultuous social climate that persisted for much of the 1920s.
With the help of populist governor Adalberto Tejeda, protesters established what they called the "communist" settlement (colonia comunista)
on the edge of town and also began organizing among rural workers throughout the state.[2]Adding to the vibrant oppositional culture in the
port that included militant action by organized labor, some radical tenants contributed articles to the local communist paper El Frente
Unico, while also producing a radical publication called Guillotina.
Inspired by events in the port, rent protests took shape in several other cities in the state of Veracruz including Orizaba, Córdoba, and
Jalapa. At the same time activists launched fullscale strikes in Mexico City and Guadalajara while others in Mérida, Puebla, San luis
Potosí, Mazatlán, Monterrey, Tampico, Aguascalientes, Torreón and Ciudad Juárez also began tenant organizing efforts. Though lacking any
central coordination, the many women and men who joined in these collective actions essentially constituted a pioneering urban social
movement dedicated to the cause of housing reform in postrevolutionary Mexico.[3]
Interestingly, it was the strong presence of women in the Veracruz protest during these years that attracted the attention of many outside
observers. The fact that so many participated in the movement during these years led one male participant to refer to the movement later as
a "women's rebellion."[4]
Occasionally, some critics argued that the tenant leader Proal had cast a seductive spell over the female strikers, "conquering them with
his strange theories." Contrary to such claims, however, the historical sources suggest that women were to a great extent acting as
autonomous agents in the tenant movement, even if nearly all of them remained largely anonymous. Prominent among these activist women,
though only occasionally mentioned in the sources available to a historian of these times, was a militant recently arrived from Mexico City.
Her name was María Luisa Marín.
María Luisa was a young woman inspired by the revolutionary ideas of those times. In a rare 1923 photograph of twenty-eight women affiliated
with the Revolutionary Syndicate of Tenants, one finds María Luisa at the center of the group. Standing along with twenty seven other female
collaborators in the only known photograph that identifies female tenant protesters by name, María Luisa appears a mestiza in her
mid-twenties with braided, long dark hair, of medium build and a slightly mischievous yet determined look which suggests she played an
important role in organizing the women of Veracruz.
Marín, along with her brothers Lucio and Esteban, had come to Veracruz with the purpose of helping organize workers. While we know next to
nothing about her life before that time it is clear that she must have acquired prior experience in the anarcho-syndicalist trade union
movement. Soon after arriving in Veracruz in the spring of 1922 she quickly emerged as a propulsive force for the protest, gathering several
female residents into a powerful anarchist group known as the Federation of Libertarian Women (Federación de Mujeres Libertarias).[5]They
agreed to a mutual pact that stipulated that if any renter were in danger of being evicted, a general alarm would be sounded to call other
tenants to their defense. Armed with police whistles and a strong commitment to social justice, these women regularly challenged housing
administrators, police and other renters unfriendly to the union. They also canvassed the local markets where they encouraged domestic
servants to organize a union and strike for higher wages. Generally, these anarchist women acted out a popular politics that was staged in
the streets, parks, plazas, cantinas, auditoriums, union halls, government offices, the state legislature and even the Veracruz city jail.
Newspaper accounts occasionally referred to María Luisa as the "partner of Proal." Rumored to be the anarchist's lover, she was more than
just the influential tenant leader's sidekick. María Luisa coordinated many of the Revolutionary Syndicate's activities. Over the course of
the protest, she borrowed liberally from anarchist, communist, Mexican nationalist and, to a degree, early feminist thought to challenge
elites. Her speeches, prison dispatches and participation in the rent strike consistently demanded radical solutions to social problems.
Through anarchist direct actions, public meetings, petitions and propaganda, she established herself as a truly vital element in the Mexican
tenant movement. Though largely forgotten, María Luisa Marín represents for us a generation of Mexican women inspired by revolutionary ideas
and passionately dedicated to the cause of human rights, fair housing practices and economic justice. Central to explaining the rise of
tenant protest in Mexican cities are two fundamental issues: (1) rapid urbanization after the turn of the twentieth century and (2)
institutional and political change in Mexico in the decade immediately after the Revolution of 1910.
Background to Urban Popular Protest
In 1907, a visitor commented on the changing condition and status of the nation's capital:
The city of Mexico represents progressive Mexico. In it is concentrated the wealth, culture and refinement of the republic. It is the
political, the educational, the social and the commercial center of the whole country. It is to Mexico what Paris is to France...The same
glare and glitter of a pleasure-loving metropolis are to be found here.[6]
Similar to North American and European cities of the time, urban planners in Mexico City transformed the metropolitan area into a new and
improved site for consumption and state power. Important modifications included the establishment of electrical service, improved water
supply, drainage, roads and telephone service[7]
Beginning with the widening, paving, illuminating and embellishment of the Paseo de la Reforma in the 1860s, Mexico City residents
increasingly saw an accelerated transformation of urban space. In 1857, tramways articulated new connections between the city center and the
new suburban districts of Tacubaya, La Villa, Tlalpan and San Angel. Gradually, new colonias (Cuauhtémoc, Juárez, Roma, Condesa) rose up on
the higher lands to the west. Still, the majority of the population remained in the city center. Behind a thin veneer of advancing
modernity, growing numbers lived in grinding poverty.[8]
In fact, nearly one quarter of the residents of Mexico City lived in run-down tenements around the turn of the century. Then, as the city
population increased by 59 percent between 1900 and 1920, problems associated with popular housing grew worse.[9]Known as vecindades, many
inner-city buildings had been fashioned out of Colonial era structures which had once served as residences for single families and their
servants.[10]Not surprisingly, many landlords took advantage of the situation. At the time, the newspaper El País described popular
neighborhoods in the city "centers of sickness and death" as sometimes more than seven people were known to share a rented room. Estimates
figure that nearly sixteen percent of the city's population was homeless. If they could afford the fee of a few centavos, some stayed in
public lodging houses or mesones.[11]
In part it was urban renewal-or the "demolishers' pickaxe" as one observer termed it-that had contributed to a growing housing crisis.
Displaced residents from the central city moved to areas to the east and north of the main plaza where thousands crowded into high-density
tenements. Districts one and two (to the east of the Zócalo) saw the highest levels of crowding. There, tenants lacked basic water and
sewage facilities. These areas registered the highest mortality rates in the city around 1900. At the same time, other, illegal settlements
on the periphery of the city such as La Bolsa, Valle Gómez, Cuartelito (later Obrero) also saw little or no connection to municipal services.
By the time the Mexican Labor Department issued its report on popular housing in 1920, conditions had deteriorated further. As the study
revealed:
Within a few meters of the Zócalo and 5 de Mayo Street can be found houses in ruins where dozens of families sleep exposed to the weather or
among hundreds of rats or decomposing vegetables...[T]he majority of these ruins and centers of sickness are owned by wealthy and well-known
people.[12]
Authorities found many tenements in the capital lay in a "pathetic" and "ruinous" state. They also stated that since 1914, many rents in
Mexico City had as much as tripled and "now absorbed as much as thirty percent of a worker's salary."[13]Subsequently, a December 1922
report by the Department of Labor stated that rents in the eight different districts in Mexico City had again risen significantly after
1917. Similarly, the cost of popular housing had increased at comparable rates in other Mexican cities such as Guadalajara and the port of
Veracruz.
Railroad development helped secure Guadalajara's place as the focus of a regional market which extended to the states of Colima, Nayarit,
Sinaloa and Sonora. At the time, Mexico's second city hosted a growing number of two story houses and as well as the introduction of
electrical lighting, a trolley system, improved water supply and other urban services in key areas. Workers constructed new schools,
hospitals and markets while elites founded a state university. In the 1880s, the city became the state capital.[14]
As waves of rural migrants moved to the city during the late nineteenth century, many of Guadalajara's working classes established popular
neighborhoods to the east and north of the central district. Soon, new areas also rose up to the west. In 1880, observers counted 812 city
blocks compared to the 334 city blocks enumerated in 1800. In the coming decades, urbanization would continue apace, eventually straining
existing infrastructure, urban services and housing. An uneven distribution of urban services in Guadalajara resulted in the shaping of what
one scholar has called a "divided city":
[T]he location of[urban]services favored and reinforced the pattern of class segregation. Transportation systems in the central zone were
designed to improve access to commercial establishments and elegant new avenues led to the upper class residential areas. Basic services
such as water, paved streets, and sewage were long in coming to the poor neighborhoods, despite their great need. In short, rather than
attempting to counteract the trend toward a divided city that began in[the early decades of the twentieth century]the state joined hands
with the privileged classes by providing them the public resources necessary for their convenience.[15]
Similarly, this trend toward favoring elite areas at the expense of others proved to be true not only in Mexico City and Guadalajara but in
the smaller Gulf Coast city of Veracruz as well.
Between 1873 and 1902 Veracruz had seen the completion of new railroad, harbor and associated urban facilities.[16]And while many believed a
"new era of civilization" had begun in the port, not everyone benefited equally from economic growth. In fact, most residents lived either
in haphazard constructions on the city's periphery or crowded into cramped tenements whose design featured individual rooms located off a
central courtyard (patio de vecindad).
In early November 1920, the Veracruz newspaper El Dictamen printed an editorial which offered an intimate portrait of living conditions in
the city's popular neighborhoods. "The patios," the author began, "primarily found in the neighborhoods[just south and east of]the city
center leave much to be desired."[17]A similar exposé asserted that "the sanitation of the tenements is the most important issue of public
health in the city."[18]Responsibility for the problem, the article suggested, lay with landlords who "charged inflated rents and did little
to maintain their properties while tenants only seemed to make deplorable conditions worse."[19]
Comparing housing rates between the three cities, observers asserted that rents in Veracruz exceeded those recorded in Mexico City and
Guadalajara.[20]Indeed, the cost of housing in the port had jumped considerably after the revolution. A room priced at 10 pesos in 1910
rented for 30 to 35 in 1922.[21]Many agreed that the cost of rental housing "had risen terribly, to the point where it (was) almost
impossible for any employee of an average business to find adequate shelter."[22]One Mexico City newspaper wrote that "housing[in
Veracruz]as well as the cost of living in general, has always been higher than many other places in Mexico, but now rents are simply out of
control."[23]
A report to the federal Department of Labor in the summer of 1922 summed up the housing situation:
This office has reliable sources which suggest that renters (inquilinos) have a legitimate reason to protest against landlords in the port,
many of whom own property constructed with the intent of collecting as much rent as possible yet left, for some time, in a complete state of
abandonment. This situation is a threat to the health and well-being of a great number of the population in the port. (P)igsties that in
1910 rented for ten pesos monthly in 1918 cost fifteen and now are priced at thirty to thirty five. Other (smaller rooms) in worse shape
could be rented in 1910 for three pesos monthly, in 1914 for six now cost fifteen. In sum, the housing condition of the poor in a state of
complete abandonment...many are without water...and most live with only the most rudimentary hygiene.[24]
With government reports verifying tenant grievances, who did residents blame for such conditions? With the resurgence of Mexican nationalism
during the revolution, tenants increasingly began to articulate their demands in politicized terms. Important precedent for this change of
consciousness had come first in 1914 with the occupation of the port by U.S. forces and then the subsequent issuance of the 1917
Constitution by the administration of Venustiano Carranza.
Motivated by the desire to intercept a German arms shipment intended for counterrevolutionary General Victoriano Huerta, the North American
invasion of Veracruz imposed a new sanitary discipline in Veracruz by forcing residents to clean up the city and to comply with a new set of
public health regulations. While many in the port may have appreciated the fact that the city accumulated wastes had been disposed of, they
deeply resented the means employed by the North Americans. As a result, the occupation helped transform local culture by both raising
expectations about housing and public health conditions while also sparking a new wave of popular nationalism. Evidence of important changes
in "citizen consciousness" sparked by resistance to foreign invasion can be seen in memorial statues to heroic defenders of the city,
newspaper cartoons, contemporary fiction, poetry and popular ballads (corridos) as well as an initial wave of organizing on the part of
house renters soon after.
As the military phase of the Revolution gradually came to a close, the Constitution of 1917 subsequently issued an official discourse
intended to legitimate the rule of revolutionary elites. At the same time, however, dissemination of the document also raised expectations
and provided Mexican citizens with an effective language for demanding improved political, economic and social conditions.
As these changes soon gave rise to a period of political euphoria as well as increasingly fierce reaction from conservative elements in the
state, veracruzanos elected Senator Adalberto Tejeda as governor in mid-1920. Over the course of his term, the state would become one of the
"experimental laboratories" during the immediate postrevolutionary decade. As such, individual politicians such as Tejeda were afforded the
autonomy necessary to build their own power base through the use of populist appeals articulated with the language of the Revolution. Thus,
as revolutionary elites in Mexico City worked to consolidate the power of the federal government "from above," regional leaders such as
Tejeda ostensibly encouraged grassroots organizers-many of them affiliated with various labor, anarchist and communist organizations-to
campaign throughout the state. In doing so, militants effectively tapped into a growing sense of moral outrage felt by houserenters-many of
them women.
The Libertarian Women
On the afternoon of February 27, 1922 Herón Proal met with nearly eighty women in the courtyard of the de la Vega tenement. "Beloved
compañeras," he began, "the hour of social vindication is here and for you it is the time of liberation. You are great citizens," he
continued, "and I am here, sisters, to say that you can burn down those filthy hovels where you are being miserably exploited by the
bourgeoisie." Encouraged by their cheering response, he pressed on: "you need to burn these houses and destroy the bourgeoisie...All of you
are energetic women, and you do not have to stand for this exploitation." After this, Proal finished his speech and departed. Just as the
women returned to the street they ran into their hated rent collector, José "el Chato" Montero. Emboldened by Proal's incendiary discourse,
they pelted the administrator with stones.[25]Soon, word of a fast growing movement of resistance to local landlords spread rapidly
throughout the poorer neighborhoods of the port. By the time a group of prostitutes threw their mattresses into the street in early March
1922, most everyone in the city knew that a major confrontation was underway.
Subsequent action taken by the women of patio San Salvador on the night of March 6 provided the initial spark needed to start the Veracruz
protest. The following day El Dictamen reported that "many of the prostitutes (had taken) their rented mattresses, chairs and other
furniture into the street with the idea of starting a giant bonfire."[26]Although police had managed to restore order at the last minute,
they could not prevent news of a growing collective action against local landords from spreading across town. A few days later, porteños
heard of several other tenements whose inhabitants had declared themselves on strike and joined Proal's union. By the end of the first week
in March, the paper had registered the protests of tenants from patios El Perfume, La Hortaliza, El Aserradero, Vallejo, La Providencia, La
Josefina, San Bruno, Ni me olvides, Paraíso, Liébano, La Conchita, and 21 de Abril.[27]Soon, representatives of the renters' union had
established themselves in each of these tenements and were working to coordinate the strike. By mid-month, thousands of the city's tenants
had joined the rent boycott, with well over one hundred patios on strike.
Women took an active part in all aspects of the protest and eventually took on leadership of the Revolutionary Syndicate itself. Female
strikers engaged regularly in anarchist "direct actions," maintained strike committees and filled the ranks of innumerable demonstrations
that animated the city streets. At their nightly rallies, demonstrators denounced those in Veracruz who they felt lived off the "misery of
their renters." Often the people making these assertions were the outspoken anarchist women headed by María Luisa Marín. Armed with police
whistles they challenged housing administrators, police and fellow tenement dwellers that were unfriendly to the union. They also applied
direct action strategies in several of the city's markets with the hope of convincing the local women who worked as domestic workers for the
city's middle and upper class residents to go on strike. Evidence of their revolutionary practice can be most clearly seen during the
citywide protest that was staged by organized labor in mid-June 1922.
That month, hundreds of workers in the city of Veracruz launched a general strike. Taking advantage of the situation, María Luisa and
members of the Libertarian Women organized to stop the sale of meat in the Fabela market while inviting domestic workers to join their
struggle. Early on the morning of Tuesday June 13, several small groups positioned themselves at the market entrances in an attempt to
prevent anyone from entering or leaving the building. As more and more shoppers began to gather outside the market, the anarchists were
eventually unable to prevent the crowd from breaking through. A noisy exchange of insults, yelling and shoving ensued following which the
female organizers walked over to another 16 market where they again encouraged domestic servants shopping there to organize and go on
strike.[28]
Hearing of the commotion, city officials called Proal and advised him that such "scandals" as were being provoked by these women would have
to stop. The tenant leader disagreed and backed up the claims of the female militants by informing the municipal leaders that, given their
miserable working conditions, it should not be surprising that maids and cooks had in fact asked for the help of the Tenant Syndicate. Proal
added that it remained the right of every Mexican citizen to organize, bargain collectively and strike when necessary.
Shortly thereafter, the police received orders to position themselves outside each of the two markets on the following day. Worried that not
only tenant but other labor organizing activities might result in major civil disorder, officials sent in four hundred soldiers from the
27th regiment of the state headquarters in Jalapa to help maintain the peace. Soon, federal forces were patrolling the city regularly.
Having heard rumors that female agitator, with the support of the tenant union, might again attempt direct actions, the authorities ordered
several troops to reinforce the police stationed at the entrances to both Fabela markets. Twenty mounted police were also sent to stand
guard outside the city meat market.
On June 16, El Dictamen reported that port workers had decided to return to their jobs. Many others, however, including bakers, restaurant
employees, barbers, tailors, various terminal and dockworkers remained on strike.[29]At the same time, residents received word of a telegram
from President Obregón urging workers and members of the Tenant Syndicate in the city to "avoid acts of violence."[30]Clearly, the
strategies of Marín and other tenant strikers had raised the ire not only of local citizens but of the President as well.
During the first months of the protest María Luisa Marín was never identified by the press as part of the "crowd" gathered in Juárez park,
marching in the streets of the port or assembling strike committees in the city's many tenements. Then, after a violent confrontation
between members of the Revolutionary Syndicate of Tenants and federal forces left several dead in the streets of Veracruz on the night of
July 5, María Luisa rose from anonymity to become a dynamic local leader in her own right. Accused of homicide and sedition along with Proal
and approximately ninety men and fifty women, Marín began what would eventually be an elevenmonth incarceration inside the Veracruz Allende
jail.[31]
Two days after their arrest, striking tenants wrote directly to President Obregón demanding the release of Proal, Marín and other
Revolutionary Syndicate members. In justifying their request, they asserted that:
The tenant strike...has proved a blessing because, if for no other reason, it has alerted workers to the fact that behind the words and
"advanced posturing" of public officials...lay an abuse of power...The "revolutionary liberalism" of government officials has fallen like a
miserable house of cards. (A)nd in its place they ostentatiously have shown us how they are "friends" of the "people" by shoving the barrel
of a gun down our throats. In "respecting the[worker's]right to strike," they have sent in a military force to protect the squirrels and
guarantee the "rights of workers and industrialists." ...We lament the fact that bayonets continue to sustain the bourgeoisie of the
country[while]they miserably exploit the sweat of the Indian in the countryside and the blood of the proletariat in the cities.[32]
The petition revealed the deep frustration and anger felt towards military and government officials as well as the newly critical
ideological perspective that had now been assumed by many Veracruz residents. Denouncing the revolutionary populism of state agents,
strikers grounded their frustration in the framework of class struggle to argue that the Mexican government was operating with only the
interests of national "bourgeois" elites in mind. Like anarcho-syndicalists elsewhere in the Americas and Europe, the Veracruz tenants
identified themselves-at least on paper-as part of a larger urban "proletariat" on the front lines of a international war being waged by a
exploitative bourgeois class against common people everywhere. Interestingly, their communication also suggested a hard to demonstrate
solidarity between Mexico's "Indian" campesinos and laborers in the nation's cities. As the news of what many saw as the massacre of
innocent citizens spread throughout Mexico, petitions from sympathetic groups similarly expressed similarly strong objections about what had
happened in the port.[33]
On July 10, members of the Tenant Syndicate recorded their account of the bloody confrontation and wrote to Minister of the Interior
Plutarco Elías Calles in Mexico City. Registering their grievance they claimed that members of the military had disregarded "the most
rudimentary principles of justice."[34]To begin to rectify this situation, tenants demanded the immediate release of Herón Proal, María
Luisa Marín and other Tenant Syndicate members as well as a full investigation. More than one hundred sympathizers signed the
letter.[35]Despite countless efforts calling for the release of the Veracruz tenants, however, it would not be until the following May that
they were released from Allende jail. In the meantime, Proal and Marín established a lively presence in the prison by singing "The
International" and other Communist songs while also taunting prison officials with their red and black banners.
A Red Dance and the Strike of the Tortilla Makers
Despite their incarceration, the two tenant leaders continued to organize tirelessly from inside the jail. There, they encouraged renters to
agitate against prison staff as well as uncooperative detainees. Proal and Marín also maintained a spirited defense of their revolutionary
ideology. On September 18, for example, tenants gained permission to hold what outsiders later referred to as a "red dance." Appropriately,
the event coincided with the national celebration of Mexico's Independence Day. According to El Dictamen, prison director Andrés Andrade
even lent the inmates his phonograph for the occasion.
For the occasion, Proal and Marín ordered the inside of the jail decorated with red banners and pictures of Russian revolutionary leaders to
express their solidarity with the growing international Communist movement. That night prisoners gathered to sing and dance in the women's
department. The next day, El Dictamen reported that the tenants had sung the praises of the international workers movement by offering
renditions of various "Communist hymns." To the chagrin of many outsiders, the dance marked the first time such a "red" gathering had taken
place within a Mexican jail. For their part, the editors of El Dictamen charged that tenants had been given too much freedom in being
allowed to continue their "red" organizing.[36]
A few days later, María Luisa Marín organized a work stoppage among the tortilla makers in the jail to protest insufficient supply of
drinking water and poor treatment by prison staff. At first, the tortilla makers' strike seemed to unify the women. Soon, however, some grew
disillusioned with the effort. A week later, El Dictamen characterized María Luisa as a "boss" (cacique), suggesting she had ordered
prisoners to "commit abuses" within the jail:
María Luisa Marín, the inquilina leader has turned into a boss who demands everyone answer to her. Already there is a sizable group of women
who are not willing to cooperate with her desire to continue the tortilla-makers strike.[37]
Later in the month, several women sent a letter to Governor Tejeda, saying that they "had no interest in taking part in the altercations in
the Allende jail." Their only wish, they said, "was to regain their sacred liberty in order to return to their homes and children who now
live in a frightening state of abandonment."[38]
Disagreements within the women's department exploded shortly thereafter when, on October 5, a three-hour battle broke out. According to one
account, María Luisa had challenged a group of women prisoners who intended to break the tortilla strike. The confrontation reached a high
point when Marín and her followers, after first shouting insults at the women as well as members of their families who had been visiting,
then took up sticks and stones to attack them. During a period of intense fighting, one woman broke away and managed to call for help. Soon,
ten members of the prison staff were obliged to intervene and restore order. Following this, officials put María Luisa and two other women
in special confinement for fifteen days. The next morning, female prisoners returned to the business of tortilla making.[39]
Despite the controversy generated by renters inside the prison, labor organizers in the city maintained their support for the jailed
tenants. On October 11, a group of workers wrote to Governor Tejeda requesting that Proal and the others be released. They stated that
further imprisonment of the protesters "represented a great injustice because many of the tenants have small children who need to be cared
for." The real crime, the letter read, was the robbery carried out by "unscrupulous landlords in the port." The committee suggested that the
governor take three days to consider the matter. If the governor did not use his "intelligent powers" to reply after that point, they warned
"there would be negative consequences."[40]On October 23, labor leader José Mancisidor wrote to Tejeda informing him that the Pro-Prisoner
committee intended to continue to work for the release of Proal and Marín as well as "other workers and women held in Allende jail...even if
it meant launching a general strike." Mancisidor advised the governor that "if matters are left unresolved for some time things will only
get worse and[possibly]more dangerous."[41]
Conflict within the prison escalated again during the fall of 1922 and early months of 1923. With Proal heading up the group in the men's
section, Marín continued to lead in the women's department. Each contingent complained that prison officials were mistreating the renters.
Outside the jail, El Dictamen reminded readers about the "inappropriate behavior" of the tenants and suggested that Proal, María Luisa and
the others represented a corrosive element in Veracruz society.[42]
Events leading to the eventual release of Proal and Marín began in mid-January 1923 when a lawyer helped prisoners write and file a petition
asking for political amnesty. As word spread throughout the tenements regarding the possible release of the jailed tenants for some time
still, the porteños sympathetic to the Syndicate cause set off firecrackers, decorated the front of their houses with banners and organized
dances to celebrate.[43]While amnesty for the militants would have to wait, residents prepared to commemorate the first year anniversary of
their strike.
For the occasion, organizers printed a special edition of the local communist paper El Frente Unico. Writing from jail, María Luisa
contributed two articles. The first, simply entitled "The Fifth of March," celebrated the "ideal of communism" and the founding of the
Tenant Syndicate the year before. The other expressed her commitment to female emancipation, arguing "women are the owners of the
world...because of their caring, limitless self-denial and incredible generosity." She wrote that her enthusiasm for the tenant cause
stemmed from her tremendous love of humanity and admiration for Proal who she saw as the "liberator of the people of Veracruz. I admire the
man...and for him I would gladly offer my life." Marín ended with a call to her readers:
Compañeros, Long live Universal Love!
Hooray for the emancipation of women!
Up with Communism!
Long live free humanity!
Women, to the struggle![44]
Her article, while endorsing a somewhat romanticized notion of women as self-sacrificing caregivers, advanced a radical mixture of communist
and feminist ideas as well. María Luisa's demand for female emancipation also embraced aspects of an incipient women's movement emerging in
Europe and the Americas at the time. Although she would remain in jail for another two months, her contribution to El Frente Unico certainly
distinguished her in the eyes of the Veracruz public as one of the movement's visionaries. The editors of El Dictamen, as always, saw things
differently. Anticipating a potential amnesty for the tenants, their columnists commented that the union represented a "seditious force" in
Veracruz politics. With Proal, Marín and the others soon to be released, they figured that the character of tenant action could only become
more "odious."[45]
On May 11, 1923, when Governor Tejeda allowed the tenants to walk free, they marked the occasion in their usual flamboyant manner. In groups
of ten, the men left first, followed by María Luisa and the other women who dressed in cream colored dresses and straw hats with red
ribbons. Then Proal, with a group of his most intimate compañeros, came out last. As the prisoners made their exit, their supporters
jubilantly set off firecrackers, applauded their peers, sang songs and shouted slogans to celebrate the occasion. Once the nearly one
hundred and fifty tenants had walked out of Allende, the crowd paraded through several of the city's main streets and eventually ended up at
the offices of the renters union. In an interview given shortly after leaving the jail, Proal promised the "street activities" of the union
would continue as they had before. "We will restart our open air cultural conferences, demonstrations and public meetings," he told
reporters, "and of course, our commitment to direct action."[46]
Street Fighting Women and Men
As Proal had foreseen, events during the spring and summer of 1923 testified to a new level of militancy among union members. In the city,
the deployment of anarchist tactics proved especially controversial. Just four days after marking the first anniversary of the July 6
confrontation, for example, protesters staged assaults on two boarding houses where, they claimed, the Spanish landlords lived off the
misery of their tenants. While not always identified by newspaper sources, it is reasonable to say that María Luisa Marín probably played an
important role in these actions.
On the night of July 10, 1923 some seventy tenants, armed with sticks, clubs, rocks, knives and a few guns first approached the hotel Santo
Domingo, property of Jesus Castañón. Soon they had the place surrounded. With red banners, they formed a semi-circle in the middle of
Aquilles Serdan Street, stopping traffic, and then sent a commission inside to demand the room keys from the owner. "Our intention," they
shouted, "is to take over this posada in order to find lodging for some of our compañeros and to unionize those who are already living here!
Houses, we want houses and rooms!" In response, the proprietor resisted briefly but had no choice but to give in to the protesters' demands.
They quickly then found their way upstairs and hung banners from the windows looking out onto the street. Soon, mounted police arrived just
as the crowd was beginning to set off firecrackers in celebration of their momentary victory.
Not to be stopped, the tenants next moved down the street to another boarding house named El Cosmopólita, belonging to Bernardo Francisco
Prida. By this point, the crowd had grown to nearly one hundred men and women marching under the union's red and black banners. Moving
closer to the pension, they were soon confronted by a heavily armed unit of the police. Nevertheless, some of the protesters managed to get
inside this second building and began breaking bottles, glasses, light fixtures, furniture and windows in the downstairs bar. A few even
started a fire inside when a group of police broke in behind them. Eventually, police managed to disperse the crowd but not before
considerable damage had been done to both establishments. In the evening, a group of tenants briefly returned to the scene and shouted the
derogatory term for Spaniard "gachupin" and "viva Proal" from the street.[47]During the next few days, the authorities apprehended a number
of tenants associated with the union, including the brothers of María Luisa, Lucio and Esteban.
Shortly thereafter, tenants and police tangled anew. This time, union members including María Luisa Marín, allegedly tore down a Mexican
flag displayed by a landlord in the port.[48]This incident took place on July 18; the day Mexican citizens commemorate the death of their
national hero Benito Juárez. Because of the strikers' disrespect for authority as well as their egregious demonstration of anti-patriotic
sentiment, the action proved particularly controversial.
Even the New York Times saw fit to comment on the clash between tenants and police.[49]Three days later, a Mexico City paper sharply
criticized the Veracruz militants:
The serious disorders committed in the unruly port as a result of the disrespectful attitude assumed by member of the Union of Renters
against the authorities has obliged the latter to seek guarantees from the president.[In response]The First Magistrate[has]categorically
reprimanded the renters, deploring the fact that they do not respect property or the authorities.[50]
An exchange of telegrams then took place between members of the Tenant Syndicate and President Obregón. On July 18, Syndicate member Marcos
Gutiérrez complained that the city had been invaded by police and requested that the President step in to restore the citizens' rights:
At this time the police are overrunning the city with guns and swords. Urge guarantees and immediate liberty, since already several
compatriots of the city have been wounded, beaten and imprisoned.[51]
Unmoved, Obregón expressed only his disapproval of the tenants:
The Executive office under my charge sincerely regrets that the directors of that union recognize authorities and laws only in those cases
in which they seek guarantees from the former granted by the latter: but do not equally recognize the one or the other when there is call
for respect of their decisions and the rights of others granted by these same laws which you invoke on account of violations. The case under
reference will be made known to the respective authorities and they will decide the responsibility and impose the corresponding punishment.[52]
In pointing out that the tenants wanted both to express their contempt for the government and to make claims that relied on the state's
guarantees to citizens, the President showed little sympathy for members of the revolutionary union. In the end, the authorities arrested
several female militants including María Luisa Marín. A few days later, city councilmen requested that army troops again be brought in to
help support local police.[53]
These two incidents, probably some of the more dramatic examples of direct action by tenants, shocked the "respectable" residents of
Veracruz. In the months that followed, calls for federal intervention to "protect the city" and "establish law and order" again came from
public officials who saw the contentious tenants as a potent social force. In December that year, the recently elected President Plutarco
Elías Calles used a skirmish between rival factions of the tenant movement as a pretext for federal intervention. Soon, he called for the
arrest and jailing once again of Herón Proal in mid-December 1924. In his place, María Luisa Marín assumed the position of Secretary General
of the Revolutionary Syndicates of Tenants.
María Luisa Marín with other members of the tenants' group
Madame Secretary
After assuming leadership of the Revolutionary Syndicate in late 1924, María Luisa intensified her appeal to the public. One of her first
acts as Secretary General was to issue a passionate call to Veracruz residents urging them to demand the release of Proal and to "unite
against the exploiters of the world:
We will do what we can so that our children will not denounce us as traitors and cowards...(W)e will prove that with Proal and without him,
the Veracruz renters (Pueblo Inquilinario) will...defend their rights...In view of the danger that now threatens us...we issue an urgent
call to the people. Don't wait for the powerful to help you...they will never appreciate the dignity and value of our solidarity which some
day will triumph. The supreme hour of the people has arrived. People of Veracruz, wake up and join the struggle.[54]
With Proal in jail, Marín argued the "struggle" was one that required the men and women of Veracruz to reaffirm their commitment to the
ideal of an independent, egalitarian municipality. For María Luisa, "the supreme hour" had arrived. As she saw it, the eyes of future
generations were upon them.
Meantime, María Luisa was coordinating efforts asking federal officials for Proal's release. This included letters to President Calles as
well as a petition sent in mid-January 1925 to the Mexican Supreme Court that was signed by nearly two-hundred women.[55]In addition to
working to secure Proal's freedom, Marín continued to organize regular demonstrations, petitions to state officials and direct actions, as
well as making plans to commemorate the third anniversary of the founding of the Veracruz renters' union.
On February 5, 1925, María Luisa Marín instructed tenants to decorate their patios with red banners to show their commitment to the
continuing tenants' strike. Many, including residents of El Obrero, Tanitos and La Malinche tenements, soon arranged colorful displays.
Expressing their loyalty to tenant leaders, renters hung two large red banners from the roof of Proal's house at Arista 33. Enthusiasts also
decorated the union's headquarters on Landero y Cos street. Later in the afternoon, Marín and other leaders spoke to a crowd assembled
before Hotel Diligencias which faced the city's main square. After demanding the release of Proal, María Luisa launched into a speech
attacking property owners. Many women, who constituted the majority of those assembled, carried banners which read: "Women Of The Port
Struggle For Progress," "In The Name Of Humanity We Ask For The Freeing Of Proal," "The Women Of The Port Protest The Unjust Imprisonment Of
Compañero Proal and The Proletarian Women Will Make The Social Revolution."
After the rally, accompanied by a number of children playing tambourines and banging tin cans, María Luisa led a group of demonstrators over
to the nearby newspaper offices of El Dictamen. Ignoring police orders to disperse, the protesters continued to mill about outside. Angered
by the tenants' apparent lack of respect for the law, police then pushed their way into the crowd. A general panic ensued. As some took
refuge outside the nearby Blanco y Negro cantina, the authorities closed in. Seeing the police approach, someone threw a rock that hit one
of the officers in the shoulder. Screams, pistol shots and a tremendous noise followed before police eventually gained the upper hand. In
response, municipal authorities ordered the city patrolled and tenant activities closely monitored to prevent any further disturbances.[56]
The following day, El Dictamen commented on María Luisa Marín's recent assumption of the Tenant Syndicate's directorship. As was typical,
they tried to discredit the way strikers had presented their demands by characterizing the protest as a virtual reign of terror imposed by
an unruly mob. On this particular occasion, they also challenged the independence and integrity of the tenant leader by simply calling her
"his woman":
Herón Proal...[has]sent his woman, María Luisa Marín[to take]his place.[Since then, Marín has]...brought new energies and enthusiasms to the
tenant cause. With equal vigor[she has]directed the[Syndicate's]business and, as in the past, collected dues that have made the protest such
a prosperous enterprise for some time. María Luisa, as Proal has said, is an "intelligent" woman and one need only spend a short time here
to become familiar with her activities: agitation in the patios, aggressive commentaries...against the authorities, firecrackers and a full
range of other gestures that usually culminate in the tumultuous public demonstrations that are by now well known and recalled with horror
by the long suffering residents of this city.[57]
Failing to address any particulars in María Luisa's "aggressive commentaries," El Dictamen's editors tried to persuade the Veracruz public
to see her simply as a menace to society. Not to be discouraged, she and members of the Libertarian Women coordinated much of the day-to-day
demonstrations, direct actions and public relations of the Tenant Syndicate. Yet as María Luisa continued to organize locally while also
lobbying officials for Proal's release in early 1925, herefforts in the spring of that year soon led to the final showdown with
unsympathetic local elites.[58]
On April 1, 925, delegates from various labor organizations under the auspices of the Mexican Federation of Labor (Confederación Regional
Obrera Mexicana or CROM) met in Veracruz to try to bring an end to the housing protest. Unhappy with these proceedings because of their
refusal to recognize the Revolutionary Syndicate of Tenants, María Luisa Marín and several of her supporters attempted to block the opening
of the convention by barricading the entrance to the stevedore's union hall. Unsuccessful in stopping the meeting, they entered the hall,
interrupting the proceedings by insulting speakers, yelling "death to the exploiters of the people" and as always viva Proal. Later that
night, militants assembled outside the Tenant Syndicate headquarters expressed their desire for the strike to continue. Then, after renters
paraded through the streets for a time, police moved in to disperse the gathering. By the end of the evening, thirteen affiliated with Marín
and her organization had been arrested.
The following day, the authorities formally charged María Luisa with attempting to burn down a local union headquarters. That morning,
twenty-five police gathered to take her into custody. Talking to a group standing outside the renters' union office, they could gather no
information as to the whereabouts of the tenant leader. A few hours later, María Luisa was seen walking down the city streets with some
other union members, about to call a public meeting. As several tenants gathered around her, she told them that they should not abandon the
strike because of the hostility of trade union leaders who had "betrayed the cause of the proletariat." As she continued, the police
gradually closed in to arrest her. Telling her audience "the government had forgotten their responsibilities to the people and sold out to
the bourgeoisie," she ran into the union headquarters at the last minute to avoid the police. Several minutes of pushing and shoving
followed on the street, leaving a policeman and several tenants injured. During the fray, María Luisa managed to escape.
Three days later, the police took her into custody.[59]Justice officials charged María Luisa with sedition. She denied the charges. While
the authorities eventually dropped the case, they had nevertheless come to think of María Luisa as a dangerous and uncontrollable element on
the Veracruz political scene. If they were ever to restore law and order, her power would have to be neutralized.
A few weeks later, the authorities released Herón Proal from prison. During the remainder of the year he returned to Veracruz and continued
organizing. Nevertheless, on January 12, 1926, the veteran anarchist leader was arrested once again in his home on Arista Street. Taken
before a local judge, he was charged with refusing to cooperate with an earlier ruling that demanded that renters remove the red banners of
the Syndicate from their tenement doors and windows.[60]Orders sent down from Mexico City now demanded that Proal be expelled from the
state. The next day, local officials warned María Luisa Marín to avoid any action that was intended to interfere with the proceedings
against Proal.[61]At that point it became clear that the national labor federation representatives and state officials had worked out a plan
to marginalize the threat posed by Proal, Marín and the entire membership of the Revolutionary Syndicate of Tenants.
When Proal boarded a steamer for Frontera, Tabasco on January 14, 1926, city officials served María Luisa Marín an ultimatum: discontinue
agitation in the tenements and help bring the strike to an end or be expelled from the state herself.[62]At four o'clock that afternoon,
accompanied by a group of Syndicate women María Luisa walked into city hall. There the head of a city council dedicated to ending the rent
strikers' movement met with the tenant leader. Officials requested that she and other rival groups join forces with labor organizations in
the city in the interest of ending the strike. Ever defiant in the face of authority, María Luisa told city officials that she would never
agree to disband the Tenant Syndicate. Marín was then told that if she did not relinquish her post within forty-eight hours she would be
arrested and eventually kicked out of Veracruz. If her followers refused to "quit painting red stars on the doors and windows of their
tenements," she was warned, "They too would be apprehended and sent to jail."[63]
The next day, María Luisa filed an injunction against President Calles, the mayor and police chief of Veracruz in an attempt to block her
arrest and possible expulsion from the state. Upon receiving the request, a local judge suspended charges against Marín until a ruling could
be made. Believing that the tenant leader intended to renew her campaign, the police again arrested María Luisa on January 28, 1926.[64]City
officials informed the public the next day that the unrepentant agitator would be given the opportunity to remain in jail or leave Veracruz
and travel to Mexico City. After hearing the ultimatum, she told officials that she would leave the city on Monday, after taking time to
sell some of her things. In wishing her good luck as she left, members of the Tenant Syndicate assured María Luisa that they would continue
their protest until an acceptable agreement with landlords could be reached.[65]
Although María Luisa Marín returned a couple of years later to Veracruz, she would never again command the degree of political influence
there that she had enjoyed during the earlier years of the strike.[66]As renters in Veracruz were gradually obliged to sign new contracts
with their landlords, the power of the Revolutionary Syndicate declined. By the time Marín reunited with her militant colleagues, urban
popular politics in Mexico were rather more tightly controlled by the national government than they had been during the early 1920s.[67]
The career of María Luisa Marín marked the beginning and the end of the radical tenant movement in Mexico. Her work as a popular organizer
testified to a tremendous strength of character and commitment to social justice. Encouraged by the ideals of democracy expressed in the
official discourse of the revolution, she demanded radical changes in the nature of Mexican society. Inspired by the rhetoric of
international communism and by the early campaigns to emancipate women, Marín dedicated herself unstintingly to improving the everyday lives
of working class residents in Veracruz. Despite her sometimes-overzealous use of direct action tactics, María Luisa never failed to insist
that property owners and public officials consider the substandard housing conditions in which many residents in the port were forced to
live and that they do something about them. Although the utopian vision for an emancipated humanity that she shared with other rent
protesters was never fulfilled, María Luisa Marín's passionate adherence to the tenant movement in Mexico represents a powerful example of
one woman's dedication to the goals of social justice.
This piece was reproduced from libcom.org and was originally published in A Contra corriente, Vol. 2, No. 3. Spring 2005, Primavera 2005,
pp. 1-34.
If you enjoyed this piece we recommend "Anarchism in Latin America: The Re-Emergence of a Viable Current."
Notes:
1. The author wishes to thank David Sweet for comments on an earlier version of this essay as well as suggestions made by anonymous
reviewers at A contracorriente. A generous grant from Dean Tom Benediktson as well as the Office of Research and the Department of History
at the University of Tulsa made regular travel to Veracruz from 2000-2005 possible.
2. On Tejeda see Andrew Grant Wood, "Adalberto Tejeda: Radicalism and Reaction in Revolutionary Veracruz," (in) Jurgen Buchenau and William
H. Beezley (ed.), Governors of the Mexican Revolution. Forthcoming.
3. Andrew Grant Wood: Revolution in The Street: Women, Workers and Urban Protest in Veracruz, 1870-1927. (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly
Resources Inc., 2001). For an earlier history of the Veracruz rent strike see: Octavio García Mundo, El movimiento inquilinario de Veracruz,
1922. (Mexico, Sepsetentas. 1976). Discussion of the protest by one of the main participants can be found in: Arturo Bolio Trejo, La
rebelión de mujeres: Version historica de la revolución inquilinaria de Veracruz. (Veracruz: Editorial "Kada." 1959). See also the work of
Erica Berra-Stoppa comparing the Veracruz and Mexico City strikes. See: Erica Berra Stoppa, "Estoy en huelga y no pago renta!," Habitacion,
vol 1, no. 1, (January-March 1981), p. 35. On the rent protest in Mexico City see: Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Bolshevikis: historia narrativa de
los orígenes del comunismo en Mexico, 1919-1925. (Mexico City: Editorial Joaquín Mortiz, 1986), pp. 155-197. On the strike in Guadalajara
see Jaime Tamayo, "El sindicato revolucionario de inquilinos y la huelga de rentas de 1922," (in) Jalisco desde la revolución, vol. iv. (Los
movimientos sociales, 1917-1929). (Guadalajara: Estado de Jalisco/Universidad de Guadalajara, 1988), pp. 129-140 and Jorge Durand Arp-Nisen,
"El movimiento inquilinario de Guadalajara, 1922," Encuentro, 1983. pp. 7-28. For discussion of popular politics in Veracruz during the
1920s see: Olivia Domínguez Pérez, Politica y movimientos sociales en el tejedismo. (Jalapa: Universidad Veracruzana, 1986). On the related
peasant movement in Veracruz see: Heather Fowler Salamini, Agrarian Radicalism in Veracruz, 1920-1938. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1971) and Romana Falcón, El agrarismo en Veracruz: La etapa radical, 1928-1935. (Mexico City: Colegio de Mexico, 1977). For a
wonderful photographic history of the city of Veracruz see: Bernardo García Díaz, El Puerto de Veraruz. (Jalapa, Universidad Veracruzana,
1992). A novel which deals with the rent strike is José Mancisidor La ciudad roja: Novela proletaria. (Jalapa: Editorial Integrales, 1932).
In addition to my Revolution in the Street see other recent work including a study of labor and politics in the central Veracruz area by
Benedikt Behrens, Ein laboratorium der revolution: Stadtische soziale Bewegungen und radikale reformpolitik im mexikanischen bundessstaat
veracruz, 1918-1932. (Bern and Berlin: Peter Lang, 2002), esp. pp. 282-318 Rogelio de la Mora V. Sociedad en crisis: Veracruz 1922. Xalapa:
Universidad Veracruzana, 2002.
4. Arturo Bolio Trejo, Rebelión de mujeres: version historica de la revolución inquilinaria de Veracruz. (Veracruz: Editorial "Kada" 1959).
5. The term "libertarian" at that time was closely affiliated with anarchist ideals at the time.
6. Nevin Winter, Mexico and Her People Today. (Boston: 1907). Quoted in John Lear, "Mexico City: Space and Class in the Porfirian Capital,
1884-1910," Journal of Urban History, vol. 22, no. 4 (May 1996), p. 455.
7. José Luis Lezama, "Mexico," (in) Latin American Urbanization: Historical Profiles of Major Cities. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994), p.
393. On this process elsewhere see David Harvey, "Paris, 1850-1870," (in) Consciousness and the urban experience: studies in the history and
theory of capitalist urbanization. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).
8. For a general overview of Mexico City growth see Peter Ward, The Production and Reproduction of an Urban Environment. (London: Belhaven
Press, 1990), Martha Schteingart, Los productores del espacio habitable: estado, empresora y sociedad en la Ciudad de México. (Mexico City:
El Colegio de México, 1989) and Michael Johns, Mexico City in The Age of Díaz. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997).
9. María Dolores Morales, "La expansion de la Ciudad de México en el siglo XIX: el caso de los fraccionamentos." (in) Alejandra Moreno
Toscano (ed.), Ciudad de México: ensayo de construccion de una historia. (Mexico City: I.N.A.H., 1978), pp. 189-200.
10. Gisela von Wobeser, "La vivienda de nivel socioeconómico bajo en la Ciudad de México entre 1750-1850." Paper presented at the 9th
Meeting of Canadian, Mexican and United States historians in Mexico City, October 27-29, 1994.
11. Rodney Anderson, Outcasts in Their Own Land: Mexican Industrial Workers, 1906-1911. (Dekalb: Northern Illinois Press, 1976), pp. 43-4.
12. Quoted in Lear 477.
13. Quoted in Ignacio Taibo II, "Inquilinos del D.F..." pp. 103-6. Ignacio Taibo II offers detailed description of several viviendas based
on the 1920 report.
14. Lezama, "Mexico" 363-4.
15. John Walton, "Guadalajara: Creating The Divided City," (in) Wayne Cornelius and Robert Kemper (eds.) Latin American Urban Research.
Volume 6, Metropolitan Change in Latin America: The Challenge and The Response. (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1978): 33.
16. Bronze statues of English businessman and engineer Weetman Pearson, Porfirio Díaz and various workers who completed the harbor front
works recently appeared on the Veracruz malecón.
17. "Los patios de vecindad ‘en su tinta,'" El Dictamen, November 4, 1920.
18. "Los patios de vecindad y el departamento de ingenieria sanitaria," El Dictamen, November 5, 1920.
19. Ibid.
20. Berra-Stoppa, p. 37. For reports on worker housing and cost of living in Mexico City see "El trabajo de sastreria y sus asimilares en
México D.F.; labor a domicilio." Boletín mensual del departamento de trabajo, January 1922 and "Higiene de la habitación; la habitación
obrera en México, D.F." Boletín mensual..., February 1922.
21. Berra-Stoppa, "Estoy en huelga...," p. 37. Historian Robert Quirk notes that during the North American invasion, "(t)he thorniest
problem dealt with by the legal department was that of rent disputes. During the period of anarchy which accompanied the revolutions against
Díaz and Madero and now against Huerta, many of the Mexican tenants had deferred paying their rents as long as possible, and they were now
months or even years in arrears. Nearly six thousand cases involving nonpayment of rent were brought before the informal American courts."
Robert Quirk, An Affair of Honor: Woodrow Wilson and the Occupation of Veracruz. New York: Norton Press, 1967): 142.
22. Ibid.
23. "Son muy altas las rentas de casas," El Universal, August 1, 1920. For reports on worker housing and cost of living in Mexico City see
various reports in Boletín mensual del departamento de trabajo. January-December 1922.
24. "Las ultimas huelgas en el puerto de Veracruz," Boletín mensual del departamento del trabajo, June, 1922. p. 81-82. AGN, ramo Trabajo,
box 502, exp.1.
25. El Dictamen, February 28, 1922.
26. Ibid., March 7, 1922
27. Ibid., March 8-9, 1922.
28. Ibid., June 14, 1922.
29. Ibid., June 16, 1922.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., July 7, 1922.
32. Petition signed by approximately 190 residents (many of them women) from patios San Francisco and Consuelo to Obregón, July 8, 1922.
Archivo General de la Nacion, Mexico City (hereafter AGN), gobernación, vol. 24, file 107. A note attached to the back of the petition
states that "there are many more from other vecindades who wish to sign but are afraid."
33. See examples in AGN, gobernación, box 26, C.2.51. 258.
34. Letter from Revolutionary Syndicate to Calles, July 10, 1922. AGN, gobernación, vol. 24, file 107.
35. Ibid.
36. El Dictamen, September 18, 1922.
37. Ibid., September 27, 1922.
38. Concepción Pérez and over 20 others to Tejeda, September 29, 1922. Archivo General del Estado de Veracruz, Jalapa, Veracruz (hereafter
AGEV), gobernación, 1922.
39. El Dictamen, October 6-7, 1922.
40. El Comite Pro-presos to Tejeda, October 11, 1922. AGEV, gobernación, 1922.
41. José Mancisidor to Tejeda, October 23, 1922. AGEV, Archivo Tejeda volume 68.
42. El Dictamen, November-December, 1922.
43. Ibid., January 16, 1923.
44. El Frente Unico, March 5, 1923.
45. El Dictamen, January, 17, 1923.
46. Ibid., May 12, 1922.
47. Ibid., July 11, 1922.
48. Ibid., July 18, 1923.
49. New York Times, July 20, 1923.
50. El Demócrata, July 23, 1923. Quoted in Summerlin to Secretary of State, July 27, 1923. Records of the United States Department of State
(hereafter RDS), reel 161.
51. Marcos Gutiérrez to Obregón, July 18, 1922. RDS, reel 161.
52. Obregón to Gutiérrez, July 19, 1923. Ibid.
53. El Dictamen, July 18, 1923. Proceedings concerning the incident continued during the rest of
the month. See July 23, 27, 28, 1923.
54. "Boletín del Sindicato Revolucionario de Inquilinos," December 24, 1924. AGN, gobernación, C-28.
55. Letter from María Luisa Marín to Calles, December 25, 1924. Petition from the Federación de Mujeres Libertarias to Presidente del
Tribunal Superior de La Justicia de La Nación, January 14, 1925. AGN, Justicía, 2019-9, 1925.
56. El Dictamen, February 6, 1925.
57. Ibid., February 7, 1925.
58. See, for example, various communications from María Luisa Marín to Calles, February 1925. AGN, gobernación, C-28, 1925.
59. El Dictamen, April 1-3, 1925.
60. Ibid., January 13, 1926
61. Ibid., January 14, 1926.
62. In Tabasco, governor Tomás Garrido Canabal refused to let Proal enter the state. On January 24, officials installed him in the Santiago
Tlatelolco prison in Mexico City.
63. El Dictamen, January 15, 1926.
64. Ibid., January 28, 1926.
65. Ibid., February 1, 1926. Following the departure of Marín, Inés Terán took over as Secretary
General of the Syndicate.
66. Historian Mario Gill writes that Proal "abandoned" María Luisa and married a woman named Lola Muñoz as soon as his political influence
had declined. Mario Gill, "Veracruz: revolución y extremismo," Historia Mexicana, vol. 2, no. 4 (April-July 1953) p. 626.
67. Although the details are unclear, letters written by residents from the neighborhoods of 22 de Marzo and Colonia Vicente Guerrero to the
governor in November 1928 complaining about María Luisa suggest that she was no longer welcome. See: communication to Obregón from Union
Cooperative de Colonias Obreras 22 de Marzo and Colonia Vicente Guerrero, October 21, 1928. Governor Rodríguez received a similar letter
from residents in the port regarding María Luisa on November 7, 1928. AGN, Obregón/Calles 802-v-58
https://blackrosefed.org/maria-luisa-marin-veracruz-renters-movement/
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