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This historical study argues that workers and their families in the textile-producing region of Atlixco in the state of Puebla were important historical forces, shaping the institutions that came to define the revolutionary Mexican state and significantly affecting the trajectory of local, statewide, and national politics. Drawing from local sindicato (labor union) archives, municipal and state government archives, police and court records, labor newspapers, as well as oral sources, this dissertation examines how individual sindicato bosses took advantage of national labor laws, connections to larger political networks, and control of the means of violence to build patronal systems of power throughout the mill communities of Atlixco. In turn, workers interpreted these systems and developed strategies for dealing with the patrones. Sindicato repression efforts in Atlixco, strengthened in the bloody and acrimonious conflict among labor bosses vying for areas of control during the 1930s, ultimately revealed an underside to the politics of state "corporatism" and social mobilization practiced by the populist architect of Mexico's political system, President Lazaro Cardenas. These efforts also facilitated the ascendance of the conservative and exclusionary Avila Camacho political machine, with military general Maximino Avila Camacho rising to the state governorship (1937-1941) and younger brother Manuel to the presidency of the Republic (1940-1946). Emphasizing working-class perspectives, the thesis also explores how the political issues and images of the inter-sindicato conflict took on different meanings at various levels of local and national interpretation.