Doctoral Dissertation Research: Railroads, Railroad Workers, and Geographies of Social Change

Cuny Graduate School University Center, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

This project will focus on the role of railroads and railroad workers during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) in order to systematically analyze the role of transportation in the production of space and democratic social change. Although the Mexican Revolution is usually thought of as a series of agrarian revolts, the railroad and railroad workers played an important and often decisive role at various stages of the Revolution. This project focuses on railroad workers and their working conditions in order to understand how transportation infrastructures are fundamental to social change. In so doing it will offer new insights into the process of national identity formation and make novel theoretical contributions to labor history, transportation geography, and critical social theory. An additional benefit of this study is the indexing of a variety of archival materials and the creation of original, historical GIS datasets that future scholars can build upon. As a defining moment in the country's history, the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1920 continues to shape the politics and culture of Mexican society. Although the Revolution has been extensively documented, the role of the railroads, railroad workers and the use of rail infrastructure remain largely unexplored from an historical, as well as a geographical, perspective. This work blends theoretical concepts from political economy, actor-network theory and labor geographies and uses a mixed methods approach that combines archival research, prosopography and historical GIS to reconstruct the socio-spatial environments of railroad workers. By analyzing railroads and railroad workers as active agents in the Revolution this project aims to understand how a means of accumulation like the railroad became an instrument to achieve democratic social change.