Michael Snodgrass explores how workers and industrialists perceived, responded to and helped determine the outcome of Mexico's revolution over a sixty-year period. His study begins with Monterrey's emergence as one of Latin-America's preeminent industrial cities and home to Mexico's most powerful business group. Snodgrass explores the roots of two distinct and enduring systems of industrial relations that were historical outcomes of the revolution: company paternalism and militant unionism. This book offers an urban and industrial perspective to a history of revolutionary Mexico overshadowed by studies of the countryside.

The first comprehensive history of labour relations and the working class in twentieth-century Monterrey, Deference and Defiance explores how both workers and industrialists perceived, responded to and helped shape the outcome of Mexico's revolution. Snodgrass's narrative covers a sixty-year period that begins with Monterrey's emergence as one of Latin-America's pre-eminent industrial cities. He then explores the roots of two distinct and enduring systems of industrial relations that were both historical outcomes of the revolution: company paternalism and militant unionism. By comparing four local industries - steel, beer, glass and smelting - Snodgrass demonstrates how workers and managers collaborated in the development of paternalistic labour regimes that built upon working-class traditions of mutual aid as well as elite resistance to state labour policies. Deference and Defiance in Monterrey thus offers an urban and industrial perspective to a history of revolutionary Mexico that remains overshadowed by studies of the countryside.