Measuring Up: A History of Living Standards in Mexico, 1850-1950

Abstract

Measuring Up addresses a central characteristic of Mexico — that growing numbers of Mexicans lived in poverty throughout the country’s national history — from multidisciplinary perspectives. Challenging traditional historiography’s inadequate measurements of and explanations for persistent and growing poverty and inequality in Mexico, Mora-may López-Alonso turns to a methodology that blends biology, economics, and history, contributing to the emerging field of historical anthropometry.The first section reviews reforms and policies aimed at poverty alleviation from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. Through secondary literature, López-Alonso argues that the growth in poverty from the mid-nineteenth century on was rooted in anticlerical liberal reforms that decimated the religious institutional safety net, with secular welfare organizations unable or unwilling to replace religious institutions in providing charity until after 1930. López-Alonso offers a lively synthesis of a century of liberal policy from the Bourbons to the Porfirians that redistributed wealth to a small middle class while bypassing the poor, even though she misses policies involving the Monte de Piedad, a central institution for poverty prevention and alleviation since the eighteenth century. There are confusing circular statements, such as the claim that “many of these welfare institutions were short-lived due to multiple obstacles that were imposed by government restrictions. Such obstacles resulted from the absence of legislation for these kinds of institutions” (p. 38). Would not government restrictions be effected through legislation? Relying on secondary works, the author does not offer evidence of restrictions or of the claim that government authorities “feared the possibility that the poor might come to think that they were entitled to receive help from the government” (p. 52). Section 1 concludes with the argument that the government was late in building a welfare state due to political instability and political neglect of the poor majority.It is in the second section, “Anthropometric Evidence,” that López-Alonso plies the historian’s trade of arguing from evidence about change and continuity across time and space. Despite problems inherent in using height data (including limited series across time, inaccurate measurements, and the fact that such measurements offer only a snapshot of one point in an individual’s lifetime), the author finds “height as the best measure of income distribution and of living standards” (p. 61). Following a discussion of the unreliability and other limitations of economic sources such as wage and price indexes, she examines three sets of statistical evidence for her anthropometric analysis: 6,236 soldier recruitment files from the federal army from 1870 to 1950, rural militia files representing 6,820 soldiers from 1821 to 1910, and 16,612 passport applications with sufficient data for regression analysis from 1910 to 1942. The author shares about the day-to-day labors of the historian’s craft, detailing in the first person her archival experiences and narrating her deliberative process in weighing the strengths and weaknesses of samples. Multiple data tables and line graphs illustrate biases in the samples. The federal soldier sample is most representative of the Bajío region, and its bias is “toward the better-off portion of the lower classes” (p. 96); the passport sample is biased against frontier states and in favor of middle- and upper-strata Mexicans.The second chapter in section 2 examines the evolution of living standards through macrotrends in height data across time and space and through policy changes such as the disentailment of communal property and Porfirian industrialization. López-Alonso suggests that her height samples better represent the breadth (in terms of class, region, and gender) of the population than do “anecdotal evidence or price and wage series” (p. 107). She uses the sample data to confirm that living standards did not improve in Mexico until after the 1930s, yet she also asserts that Mexico was not a poor country but rather one of persistent inequities. The final section layers a century of public health policy, using qualitative and quantitative measures, over the anthropometric data to argue that while infectious disease abated by 1950, living standards were no better than they had been in 1830, especially in rural Mexico.Measuring Up succeeds in harnessing multiple disciplinary methods and a broad secondary literature to engage, if not wholly convincingly answer, vexing historical questions. While her treatment of the historiography is thin, the range of demographers, biologists, economists, historians of health, and anthropologists that López-Alonso draws on is impressive. Comparisons situating Mexico among other nations offer some well-taken points, but overall the comparative approach is not very illuminating. The conversational tone of some sections is alternately engaging and off-putting for a scholarly work. Add to this poor editing, which leaves in the text repetition and a few unintelligible phrases, such as “the oligarchy that emerged after the 1910 Mexican Revolution were even fit generous than their predecessors” (p. 3), and the book does not fully satisfy the promise of its interdisciplinary approach.