The great struggle for justice and dignity of coal miners in Coahuila, Mexico

Abstract

In the mid-1950s, thousands of coal miners working in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila began a long and stubborn struggle - which would be defeated the following year - to preserve their union autonomy and independence of opinion. To confront the slander about their movement, the workers had to find a way to respond to the attacks. In this work of counter-information, they mainly resorted to the use of oral language to spread the outlook around events at meetings, rallies and marches. Some solidarian intellectuals also participated in the dissemination of popular struggles, accompanying the movement of the miners with articles that reflected the working experience. All that information, all that experience, rested for a long time in the collective memory of those coal miners, their relatives and their neighbors. It survived and was refreshed every time they recalled some facts for educational, family and union purposes, becoming a source of oral tradition within the mining worker culture. For this article, I selected fragments of interviews that have more to do with the origin of the mining community and the union, with the role of freemasons workers and with the experiences of some miners in the strike. The testimonies document the recurrence of certain components of the rebellion of the subordinate classes. It is interesting to note that throughout the recent history of Mexico, popular protest, urban and rural, stubbornly includes the concepts of "truth", "justice", "dignity" and "solidarity" in its moral code as values that we do not know how far they direct their daily life, but ultimately come to light guiding their action when they denounce the betrayal from the established power of those values in the exercise of their authority. Although for many studies it is known that memory is selective, in the case of miners the precision in the recording of what filled the mind of men as a daily theme is remarkable. What follows is, then, an attempt to make known a part of the experience and the feeling of a stage in the life of the coal mining community.