Competing Market Discourses in Porfirian Mexico

Abstract

At a recent meeting of the Group of Seven in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in September 1996, Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo contended that the free market without limits was the answer to poverty in Latin America. Zedillo, by using the term market as a rhetorical tool, was building upon a tradition that has a long history in Mexico, for during the Porfiriato the market was employed as a rhetorical device. Some Porfiristas worshipped the market as a deity that created social peace, political harmony, and material abundance, but contemporaries also demonized it as a source of social destruction. Thus, the market became the object of a kind of secular religion-albeit a controversial one-during the age of Diaz.' The market's rhetorical importance has, however, largely been ignored by scholars of Porfirian Mexico. This oversight has a touch of irony, for many specialists agree that the most profound and far-reaching development in Porfirian Mexico was the expansion of the market. The spread of a market economy seriously challenged traditional ways of life and marked the emergence of modern Mexico.2 Scholars have documented the impact of market expansion from a variety of perspectives,3 and some have suggested that market expansion was a principal cause of the 1910 Revolution (Tutino, 1986; Womack, 1968; Hart, 1987; Knight, 1990). Scholarly neglect of the market's symbolic importance is not surprising; modern scholars (particularly economists), following the precedents of classical political economy, treat the economy as divorced from politics, society, and culture. (Indeed, the creation of the market supposedly freed the economy from social constraints.) The effects of the market on the realms of politics, culture, and society have, however, been a central theme in Western economic discourse. Indeed, the researcher does not need to read between the lines to analyze the market from this vantage point. In the discourses of Quesnay and other precursors of modern political economy, commerce was lauded