SUSAN GAUSS

My research interests focus on industrialization and development in modern Latin America. My current project examines the political and social origins of Mexico’s postrevolutionary transition from reformist agrarianism to the state-led, urban-industrialism that underpinned the consolidation of the Partido Revolucionario Institutucional as a ruling party. In particular, I focus on how debates between industrialists, labor leaders, and the state over industrial policy provided the context for broader struggles over issues such as labor-owner relations, poverty and consumption, technological modernization, and local authority amid the rapid expansion of state authority and modernizing growth during the 1940s.

In a second project, I am examining the relationship between gender, class, and industrial modernization in the textile industry in Puebla, Mexico amid challenges presented to the stability of the workforce by transnational pressures. My interests also extend to trying to understand how gendered beliefs traversed the fictive boundaries between household, community, and factory as a means to examine how communal identities linked rural agrarian and urban industrial conflicts. Publications from this project include an upcoming chapter in a collection on gender and the state in postrevolutionary Mexico, as well as:

“Masculine Bonds and Modern Mothers: the Rationalization of Gender in the Textile Industry in Puebla, 1940-1952,” International Labor and Working-Class History 63 (Spring 2003).