Caritina Piña and the legacy of women anarchists in Mexico

Collage featuring the image of Caritina Piña by Hannah Matthews for Ojalá.

Libros • Dawn Marie Paley • 27 de octubre, 2023 • Leer en castellano

Mexico has an incredibly rich tradition of anarchist thought and political organizing, and an equally rich tradition of state repression and erasure of that history. At the turn of the 20th Century, Mexican anarchists, in dialogue with their comrades in the United States and elsewhere, promoted many radical and forward thinking ideas about social rights. Before, during and after the Mexican Revolution, anarchists put out newspapers, created their own organizations, fought the federal army, and were exiled and jailed. 

A sanitized reading of this history makes visible a single strain of anarchism, holding up Ricardo Flores Magón as a “precursor” to the revolution. But beyond his towering (and sometimes problematic) figure, there is so much left to learn about anarchist and anarcho syndicalist thinking and praxis in Mexican history.

An exciting new book about Caritina Piña, a woman anarcho syndicalist from Tampico, Tamaulipas, attempts to break through this silence. Piña was an activist active in the state of Tamaulipas in the 1920s and 1930s. She was one node in a remarkable movement of anarchist women pushing for the organization of the working class, freedom for political prisoners, and active in the circulation of ideas about social transformation. 

Historian Sonia Hernández first came across mention of Piña in the state university archives in Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, while working on her first book Working Women into the Borderlands, which explores women’s role in labor history on both sides of the Mexico-US Border. She filed Piña’s name away, hoping eventually she would have the time to dig deeper into her life and her story.

Eventually, Hernández did start to track down more information about Piña. When she went to the archives in the port city of Tampico, where Piña lived, there was no mention of her. “And then I came across the Mexican Census of 1930, and it had Caritina Piña living in Ciudad Madero, on the outskirts of Tampico, and listed her as dedicated to domestic work,” said Hernández by phone from her home in Texas. “This woman was pretty prominent, engaged in the circulation of information about labor matters. And I thought, ok, we gotta revisit this.”

Hernández does just that in her new book For a Just and Better World, which explores Piña’s life as an anarchist organizer and agitator in Tamaulipas, and situates her political activities within a vibrant tapestry of transnational labor and women’s activism. 

Radical labor organizing flourished in the Gulf of Mexico in the period following the revolution, as the discovery of oil attracted workers from all over Mexico and beyond. For a Just and Better World meticulously documents the contours of labor organizing, in the region, and traces the connections between local activists like Piña and better known groups like the Mexican Liberal Party and the Casa del Obrero Mundial [House of the World Worker]. 

Piña’s main political work was carried out with the Comité Internacional Pro-Presos Sociales, an organization dedicated to freeing imprisoned labor activists. Piña was born in Ocampo, Tamaulipas, at the end of the 1800s, and died in 1981. Little is known about her political activity after 1936.

A few weeks ago, I was able to hop on a video call with Hernández, who is a Professor of History at Texas A&M University. We talked about some of the key contributions of For a Just and Better World to women’s and labor history in the Gulf of Mexico. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Dawn Marie Paley: First, can you tell us a little about the context of the kind of salaried work women were doing in northern Mexico in the early 20th Century.

Sonia Hernández: Women were engaged in a range of industries, known as light industry. These used to be referred to as secondary industries, placing them below steel, oil and mining, which robs those industries and the people who work in them of their value and the primacy of those industries, which were crucial in addressing huge demographic growth as the north became more populated.

You have women engaged as seamstresses in the garment industry, in the bread and pasta industry, in foodstuff, cigar rollers, textiles, and that kind of thing. Women also worked as public washers, as washing women, and in the nixtamal industry.

DMP: Your book describes an effusive anarchist movement that involved a great deal of independent union and guild organizing by both men and women in Tampico in the 1920s and 1930s. Can you tell us more about what happened to this movement?

SH: In the 1920s, there was a major crackdown on mostly anarchists and anarcho syndicalists, a lot of them involved in the Casa del Obrero Mundial which was founded in 1912, and the branch in Tampico was co-founded in 1915 by another woman. 

It’s really interesting what happens in Tamaulipas. Emilio Portes Gil [a politician born in Ciudad Victoria], emerges as a pro organized labor politician, and becomes president in 1928. 

Portes Gil began to create a cross class alliance, including landed rancheros, dock workers and oil workers, and began to talk about the socialist state, but it was a state-approved labor activism that promoted social issues, not one that favored more radical forms of activism including anarcho-feminism. He brings the workers into the revolutionary state, and that's the model that was replicated years later by what we now know as the Institutional Revolutionary Party. 

He creates his political party in Tamaulipas, the Partido Socialista Fronterizo, and he brings in a lot of women who are promoted as mothers in the home, espousing a kind of revolutionary motherhood but that is not politicized in the way Piña and others are promoting motherhood, which was to serve the interests of mothers and communities themselves, not the interests of the state or a political party. 

There were raids during anarcho syndicalist meetings, often in the IWW locales, which had been organizing there since at least 1912. Labor activists were also tortured while in detention. Sometimes the military was brought in. 

As president, both Venustiano Carranza and later Portes Gil did this; they promoted a particular type of labor activism, not radical activism, but a safe labor activism. And we remember these guys as revolutionary heroes.

Anarchism and anarcho syndicalism decline in Mexico because, in many ways, anarcho-syndicalists become kind of irrelevant. Labor rights are codified, with the Labor Law in the 30s, the 1917 Constitution gives workers the right to organize. It established a minimum wage, which was still difficult to enforce. But still, those demands had been heeded. 

And so from the perspective of organized labor, why not support the state? If the state has done this why not collaborate with it? But that was antithetical to the anarcho syndicalists.

DMP: How did Caritina Piña fit into this political landscape?

SH:  Caritina didn’t come from a working class background, she came from privilege, her father was a general in the army and served the Porfirio Díaz Regime, and the Carranza regime during the Revolution. His family had land, and she actually inherited land from him which ironically, in the 1930s, became part of an ejido. We have no evidence she protested or complained about this, which wouldn’t surprise me because of her continued commitment to working class issues.

She was involved in what I call ‘political labor,’ she was the person in charge of correspondence, she handled correspondence between organizations in Tampico and those across into Texas, in other parts of the United States and across the Atlantic. Her main involvement was with the Comité, the committee that supported political prisoners, and these were labor activists. She also defended women from different parts of the globe, women involved in this kind of activism were characterized as ‘lacking morality’ because they were seen as public women, engaging in matters that were sort of beyond the women’s sphere.

Piña also engaged in correspondence with women who worked as seamstresses.  There was not a huge labor force of seamstresses in Tampico, but in the region closer to Monterrey there were. 

It's important to remember that women in Mexico were not considered full-fledged citizens at this time. They didn’t have the right to vote, not that Caritina Piña wanted the right to vote, there’s no evidence indicating that she supported suffrage and a lot of the anarcho syndicalists and anarchists felt that way, because if you voted then you just became a political pawn of the state, and they were highly critical of the state.

As she became a mature activist you had the emergence of the Revolutionary state, but to her it was not a real revolution, it was a bourgeois revolution, and it was a revolution that co-opted organized labor. By the mid-30s organized labor became part of the Mexican state. Her work is very ideological in nature, it’s almost like intellectual work, but she always engaged the state. 

The position of Piña and other anarcho syndicalists was to always critique the state, they saw the nation state as leading to divisions and borders, and racism and classism. Her political labor indicates she was highly engaged with the state, but in a very critical way. 

DMP: It’s so interesting seeing how co-optation and repression were used, even in this immediate post-revolutionary context in Mexico. There’s so much more in your book I’d love to discuss with you, but maybe we could end on what you think some of the key learnings from For a Just and Better World are?

SH: I think to me, it’s that we cannot lose hope. It’s very easy to do that. Even if you don’t believe in the state, you have to be critical, to keep it on its toes and hold the state, in all of its manifestations, accountable. 

Then there’s the strategies that these anarcho syndicalists employed, especially around sharing of information. It’s so much easier for us to do that now with social media platforms. The #MeToo movement became global, and that’s because people were able to share their stories. Really it’s a strategy of labor solidarity and women such as Piña, who constantly shared their stories, have much to teach us.