The timeline of revolutions is never clear in regards to when we can say it began or ended. For example, we traditionally mark the storming of the Bastille as the start of the French Revolution, but there were agricultural strikes in the year preceding this. Likewise, the Mexican Revolution (dated roughly 1910 to 1920) is often cited as beginning on November 20 1910 when Francisco Ignacio Madero’s call for revolt was answered. However, historians have problematised this original starting date, and there are several other events which worked into the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. One of these we will be looking at today – the Cananea miners’ strike of 1906.
Background
From 1876 to 1911 Mexico was ruled either directly or indirectly by Porfirio Diaz, his rule called the Porfiriato or Porfirismo. From the southern state of Oaxaca Diaz had earned support from fighting against the French invasion forces in the 1860s, and in 1876 would use this support for staging an uprising that brought him to power. For decades Diaz ruled with an iron fist, but one that ruled with a thin veneer of liberal democracy – Diaz ‘won’ elections that were either rigged or were unopposed. Diaz aimed to ‘modernise’ Mexico using a cabal of experts called cientificos to construct an industrialised, capitalist Mexico, and part of this invited foreign businesses to buy up Mexican resources. British, German, Spanish, and American companies eagerly bought up mines, railroads, oil fields, and plantations across Mexico, and with this came the economic exploitation of Mexican workers. To keep foreign investment in place the Diaz government gave concessions to foreign capital in accompaniment with rural police, the rurales, keeping order.
Cananea is still today a mining town as it was in 1906. Located in the state of Sonora it is not too far away from the US border, so it is not surprising that it would be US investors who would come to own the Cananea mines. Like many communities in northern Mexico Cananea served as a ‘frontier community’ – used by Spain and, after 1821, Mexico used these settlements to colonise the sparsely populated northern desert. Fearful of the weakness of state power in the north, especially as Mexico lost the northern half of its territory to the United States in the US-Mexican War, these settlements were geared towards expanding Mexican control to where the state was weak. However, people already lived here. Various indigenous communities lived in the area, such as the Yaqui and Raramuri, who would resist settler colonialism until the twentieth-century. Furthermore, being isolated from the centre of Mexico meant northern communities developed their own sense of independent identity – while still seeing themselves as Mexican they identified more with their local communities.
The US and Cananea
The area around Cananea was good for cattle farming and copper mining. In 1896 American businessman William Cornell Greene formed the Cananea Consolidated Copper Company (CCCC) to control the copper mines in Cananea, Sonora. With the rise of telegram and electrical wiring copper was in high demand, so this made Greene one of the richest men in the world, and this wealth was built upon the exploitation of Mexican workers. This was done with collaboration with Mexican elites where the CCCC could step in to the void left by the absentee government, so Diaz’s power could be felt through the CCCC’s control over Cananea. The CCCC managed to further connect northern states into a capitalist market through the purchase of timber producing forests in the Sierra Madre of Chihuahua connected via railroad. The infrastructure development of the northern states of Sonora and Chihuahua was done solely for the purpose to aid the development of capital. Similarly, transport links from Cananea to Bisbee, Arizona were constructed as a way to ensure the smooth flow of capital. Like Cananea Bisbee was another community that revolved around mining, and was another major copper mine in the region.
Demonstrating the state’s support for the CCCC the rurales were used to keep the peace and propaganda was made to back up the CCCC. In 1907 Frederico Garcia y Alva published Mexico y sus Progresos writing that at Cananea ‘Like the palaces and cities of the marvellous tales emerged rapidly and grandly from barren fields and solitary mountains.’ Here Garcia y Alva presents the mine as bringing civilisation and life to the Sonoran desert, conveniently omitting the brutal exploitation of workers and the expulsion of Native Americans. Also the date this book was released is important. It is a year after the strike showing that it is more than likely to dissuade ideas that US, and other foreign, concessions was harmful to Mexico following the strike. Instead, the concessions were depicted as bringing resources and expertise to modernise Mexico, even though these companies were draining Mexico of its resources.
Greene’s mine held many of the same issues that early-twentieth-century mines had – poor ventilation, high risk of death, risk of injuries. What added to Cananea was that American style discrimination. This is not to say that racial discrimination did not exist in Mexico. Afro-Mexicans and indigenous peoples were regularly depicted as being backward and savage, and the more mixed-raced workers that came to Cananea from the central states of Aguascalientes and San Luis Potosi were mocked by Sonorans. Likewise, Mexico’s Chinese population would regularly face racialised violence. In 1885 the United States would pass the Chinese Exclusion Act barring Chinese from entering the US. While Chinese did try and cross the Canadian and Mexican borders to enter the US many remained in the areas where they migrated to. Intense racial discrimination that would often become violent was meted out against Chinese happened on both sides of the border culminating in several massacres during the Revolution. Despite being in Mexico, and Sonora which had a law where 70% of workers in a company had to be Mexican, Mexicans were barred from management positions in the mines, and received a fraction of the pay of American workers. Mexicans were paid 40% of the wages that an American in a similar position would be paid (5 to 3 1/2 pesos per day)!
The Strike
The strike started as a protest on one of the most important days in the Mexican calendar – Cinco de Mayo. On May 5 1862 the Mexican army managed to defeat the French forces at the Battle of Puebla, and since it has been a major day of celebration. During the Cinco de Mayo celebrations at Cananea in 1906 mineworkers were together so decided to band together to protest the discrimination in employment and pay. The authorities responded as expected when capital is threatened – martial law was put in place. This would not dissuade workers and the border helped in this. We imagine the US-Mexican border as it is today as being one of the most heavily militarised borders outside of an active warzone, but this is a recent phenomenon. Right through to the 1940s the border was somewhat porous and many communities in the border region relied on this porousness to survive. The anarchist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and Western Federation of Mineworkers (WFM) had been trying to unionise workers in the region and across the border in Arizona they were free from martial law to send material south. Also active in the region, and closely connected to the IWW, was the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM). Despite its name the PLM was anarchist and offered a radical alternative to the Diaz dictatorship. This allowed organisers to draw from examples to the north and they were aided by the state government’s misstep. Not only did they institute martial law on a nationalist holiday, but also because Mexican workers were protesting discrimination in their own country.
Eventually, pressure built and the strike finally broke out on June 1, just under a month since martial law was declared. The strike did not have much of a central leadership but three names, (Juan José Ríos, Manuel Macario Diéguez and Esteban Baca Calderón) do appear in the historical record and they were incarcerated for organising the strike. We can assume that these three men were perhaps to main organisers at the Cananea mine. The united workers made a series of demands – all workers to receive 5 pesos for an 8-hour work day; Mexicans to be eligible for promotion; the removal of unpopular foremen; greater safety precautions; and that 75% of the employees to be Mexican to 25% American. When the strikers’ petitions were rejected, personally by Greene, the strike expanded as people from local areas joined the workers in sympathy ballooning the numbers there to 3,000. Bear in mind Cananea had a population of only 23,000. Marching in front of the company’s woodworking shop some American workers set high powered hoses on the striking miners – race here triumphed over class solidarity. Three workers were killed by the hosing, through the power of the water and trampling by the crowd, so they responded by setting fire to the shop. Four Americans died as a result but the violence would not end here.
Company police, the feared rurales, and even the federal army would come to break the strike, but Greene did not trust them fully so sent for help north of the border. Before settling into the capitalist life Greene had been involved in paving the way for capitalism by taking part in conflicts against local indigenous people, I should really have introduced him as Colonel William Cornell Greene. Through his military ties he managed to reach out to the Arizonan governor (Joseph Kibbey) who sent the Arizona Rangers, an armed militia modelled after the rurales and Texan Rangers, across the border to help put down the strike. As a precaution the US president Howard Taft also stationed the army on the border in case things escalated. The New York Times would claim the Sonoran governor Rafael Izabel would also ask his Arizonan counterpart for help although as the paper misspelt his name, calling him ‘Yzabel’, we can doubt this. With four separate armed forces from two separate nations coming down on the miners it is unsurprising that a massacre happened. Around twenty were killed, an equal number were injured, and over fifty arrested.
Before we go into the aftermath of the strike I want to discuss the two-nation strikebreaking force. Firstly, it shows the interconnectedness of capital in the border regions. The continued output of the Cananean copper mines was seen as essential to both Sonora’s and Arizona’s economies, where the border was more like a line in the sand so it was acceptable for Americans to cross the border to put down a Mexican strike. However, the border was still seen as real by officials; the New York Times quoted Governor Kibbey who, in an attempt to cover his back, said ‘Volunteers going into Mexico go at the risk of divesting themselves of their American citizenship and protection as such while there. I cannot permit an officer or man in the Territorial service to go into Mexico at this time. Use every precaution to preserve order on our side of the line.’ The brings us to the second point I would like to discuss, the rurales and Arizona Rangers saw themselves as the forgers of civilisation. The militias often recruited from the region and positioned themselves as the defenders of civilisation and masculinity – they were the strong men who were to fight against the ‘savage Indians’ spreading the respective American and Mexican civilisation to those regions. The socialist and anarchist ethos of several strikers fed into this ‘defense of civilisation’ rhetoric. Rejection of the central state and capital was a rejection of their idea of civilisation, so therefore had to be crushed.
Aftermath
Instead of snuffing out the flames of resistance the crackdown on Cananea ignited them. Miners fell into the open arms of the IWW and the PLM, so it is no surprise that northern Mexico became a centre of radical politics throughout the next decade. In conjunction with the Cananea strike six months later a textile strike in Rio Blanco, Veracruz would also be violently crushed (although this time it would only be Mexicans putting down the strike). These two events together helped break the veneer of the Porfiriato’s benevolence which would culminate in the Mexican Revolution in 1910, so much so that Cananea and Rio Blanco can be considered the ‘first battles’ of the Revolution. This also challenges a conventional view of the Revolution which portrayed it as an overwhelmingly rural revolution with the urban areas playing a minor role. In both these cases we see urban and industrial workers taking centre stage where even historians who downplay the urban elements, such as Alan Knight, recognise the importance of these events.
The Cananea strike would have other impacts. Immediately it caused a disaster for the governorship of Rafael Izabel. While he had secured the valuable copper concession from the strikers by allowing Arizona Rangers to cross the borders it was a flagrant overstepping of what could be allowed. He had allowed Americans, the same people who took half of the country barely fifty years earlier, to enter Mexican territory and kill Mexicans. His governorship would not last long soon after. Meanwhile, the personal rule William Cornell Greene had over the Cananea mine came crashing down during the strike. During the strike the board managed to undermine Greene resulting in him losing control of the CCCC, within the decade it would simply be another company in the Rockefeller capital empire. Finally, and most importantly for the Revolution, the strike solidified the radical unions place with the Sonoran miners. The IWW provided answers for strikers whose message of a borderless anti-capitalism resonated with those who had witnessed armed forces of two nations crush the strike. The anarchist trend further garnered support for the PLM, after all the PLM had helped the strikers, and over the next five years the PLM would use this support to try and launch several uprisings. By the 1920s anarchist unions helped organise workers in Cananea for another round of strikes. Continuing the radical history of the mine in 2007 went on strike in Cananea and would fight for their rights in an amazing 10 year struggle.
This week, which saw International Workers’ Day, it is important to remember the struggle at Cananea. Racism and capitalism go hand in hand, international capital will unite to crush workers, and chauvinism divides the working-class. Workers of the world, unite!
Bibliography:
- Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire and Revolution in the Borderlands, (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2022)
- Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)
- Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the US-Mexico Borderlands, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006)
- D.L. Turner, ‘Arizona’s Twenty-Four Hour War: The Arizona Rangers and Cananea Copper Strike of 1906’, The Journal of Arizona History, 48:3, (2007), 257-288
- Norman Caulfield, ‘Wobblies and Mexican Workers in Mining and Petroleum, 1905-1924’, International Review of Social History, 40:1, (1995), 51-75
- Rodney Anderson, ‘Mexican Workers and the Politics of Revolution, 1906-1911’, The Hispanic American Historical Review, 54:1, (1974), 94-113
- Michael Gonzales, ‘United States Copper Companies, the State, and Labour Conflict in Mexico, 1900-1910’, Journal of Latin American History, 26:3, (1994), 651-681
- ‘Went Against Orders: Governor of Arizona Warned Capt. Rynning and other Americans’, New York Times, (03/06/1906)
- ‘Armed Americans at Greene’s Mines’, New York Times, (03/06/1906)
- ‘Mexicans Resent Invasion’, New York Times, (22/10/1906)
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