The Mexican Labor Movement and the Global Scripts of Revolution, 1910–1929

Abstract:This article examines the influence of global revolutionary scripts on the nascent labor movement in revolutionary Mexico. During the turmoil of the 1910s and 1920s, Mexican workers appropriated and utilized a wide range of revolutionary examples from the classical world, the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, and the October Revolution to create a frame and a narrative for events in Mexico. The influence of global scripts was determined by the agency of local actors. Over time, they formed a repository of mobilizing tools and were used or suppressed depending on the current framework of revolutionary politics. Since the historiography of the Mexican Revolution is predominantly national in its perspective, the examination of this process among subaltern actors opens the possibility for global comparative approaches that connect the Mexican case with the development and spread of revolutionary thought in other parts of the world.