“With misery but honor”: social class interaction in the public markets of Oaxaca, Mexico, 1870 to 1970
Creators: name: Brown, Brian R.
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2022

description: With Misery but Honor” analyses the importance of the public markets of Oaxaca City, Mexico as sites in which the city’s various social and economic classes negotiated their interests. An examination of archival records pertaining to the city’s ubiquitous markets offer a unique perspective that enhances scholarly understandings of the lived experience of the people of Oaxaca and the class-based alliances Oaxacans created to advance their interests in these same markets. This interrogation of the period from the 1870s to the 1970s, reveals that the Oaxaca City Council’s priorities, extracting revenue from the city’s public markets through market fees assessed on the city’s working poor and preserving the council’s authority over the city’s markets, remained largely unchanged for nine decades despite the profound political changes that accompanied events such as the Mexican Revolution and Oaxaca’s incorporation into Mexico’s postrevolutionary government. A simultaneous examination of collective activism amongst public market vendors that began after the ravages of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) demonstrates the critical distinctions that informed the divergent priorities and strategies employed by vendors’ alliances as they sought to advance their shared interests in Oaxaca City’s public markets. This dissertation recovers the rich history of advocacy amongst the city’s vulnerable population of female market vendors. In doing so, this project illustrates the strategies and tactics devised by the women who organized and led coalitions of vendors that arose in the 1920s and 1930s. The city’s vendors utilized the preserved knowledge of the city’s female vendor-advocates during moments of discontinuity in the late 1930s and early 1940s and for inspiration for mutual-aid societies, established by the city’s vendors in the mid-1940s. Drawing on the collective memory of the Benito Juárez Maza Market, these mutual-aid societies played a pivotal role in the social movements that successfully removed two state governors, Edmundo Sánchez Cano (1944-1947) and Manuel Mayoral Heredia (1950-1952), from power.This dissertation contributes to scholarly understandings of Oaxaca City and its public markets by recovering the perspectives of stakeholders, such as market vendors, with vested stakes in the city’s public markets. Chapter 1 reveals how the practical experience and modernizing aspirations of the Oaxaca City Council shaped the construction of the Benito Juárez Maza Market, the city’s new principal market, in the 1890s. Chapter 2 details the priorities of the Oaxaca City Council in the city’s public markets and illustrates how those priorities shaped the Administration of the city’s public markets. Chapter 3 recovers the voices of female market vendors during the little-examined period between 1920 and 1944, and in doing so, extends historical understandings of advocacy amongst the city’s market vendors, which have primarily focused on events that occurred after 1945. Chapter 4 examines the role that mutual aid societies created by the city’s public market vendors played in the social movements that opposed governors Edmundo Sánchez Cano (1944-1947) and Manuel Mayoral Heredia (1950-1952) and what became of the city’s vendor alliances in the 1960s and 1970s. This dissertation demonstrates how Oaxaca City’s ubiquitous public markets became crucial sites in which Oaxacans from a wide range of social and economic classes negotiated their interests, while highlighting the importance of collective advocacy in Oaxaca City during Mexico’s Post-Revolutionary political regime.