Adrian Bantjes, University of Wyoming

This paper seeks to explain the isolated, conservative political role played by mineworkers during the radical presidency of Lazaro Cardenas (1934 1940), using the Sonoran miners as a case study.

The paper first examines traditional studies of mineworkers based on the outdated "isolated mass" hypothesis postulated by Kerr and Siegel in 1954. Despite severe criticism, this structuralist approach, which explains the miners' perceived militancy in t erms of their existence as an homogeneous isolated mass in foreign controlled enclave settings, continues to influence the field of Latin American labor history. Mineworkers are still considered "archetypal proletarians" who have played a key role in rev olutionary struggles throughout Latin America, including the Mexican Revolution.

A detailed examination of the Sonoran mineworkers' traditions, work habits, culture and mentality demonstrates that, far from being an homogeneous isolated mass, the mining workforce was severely divided by cultural, geographic, work and wage differences.

Instead, I argue for the use of a moral economy approach to explain the political behavior of miners. Though politically aloof from the Cardenas regime, miners did engage in large scale collective action to protest mass layoffs and other negative effects of the Depression. Miners felt that they had a moral right to work the mines, either as workers contracted by a company for specific tasks, or as independent gambusinos. When mines closed on a massive scale during the 1930s, former mineworkers engaged in "radical"collective action, invading mines and ignoring private property rights, working in a "haphazard" fashion, totally at loggerheads with modern industrial discipline. This did not reflect a radical anti imperialist political stance, but the reaction of semi-artisanal, privileged workers against the violation of their moral principle.

The moral economy of the Mexican miner was not accepted by the State, which imposed cooperativism, mass unionism, and de-skilling on this "labor aristocratic" sector of the workforce. The relative freedom and independence of the Mexican miner would soon be a thing of the past.