Mexican History Research Articles

Illusions of Empire: The Civil War and Reconstruction in the US-Mexico Borderlands

Illusions of Empire: The Civil War and Reconstruction in the US-Mexico Borderlands

Viva Mexico! The Cultural Politics Behind the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Bid

Abstract This article is a case study of the vision of Mexican history, identity, and culture that won the 1968 Summer Olympic Games for Mexico City. The Mexican elites’ portrayal of Mexico as a modern, cosmopolitan nation contributing to emerging global institutions and ideals in the postcolonial era ensured the bid's success. The article's core is a close reading of the official bid and bidding process. This analysis is supplemented and sharpened by contrasting it with alternative visions of Mexican nationalism and the competing Buenos Aires bid. Guided by symbolic interactionism and theories of cultural politics, the study highlights the unique status of Mexico and Latin America in the Olympic Movement, reminds us of the role of the International Olympic Committee in constructing global order in the Cold War era, and shows the value of studying alternative and unsuccessful visions of nationalism, modernity, and global cosmopolitanism.

The Grammar of Civil War: A Mexican Case Study, 1857–61 by Will Fowler

This book grows out of Fowler’s previous studies of the forceful negotiations that dominated the early political life of nineteenth-century Mexico. Known as pronunciamientos, these tense affairs usually ended without cataclysmic violence and led to concessions and agreement between the contending factions. In short, Fowler has already demonstrated how democracy by other means functioned in Mexico. Such was not the case with the War of Reform from 1857 to 1861, in which the fighting claimed approximately 200,000 lives. The Grammar of Civil War explores how and why this exceptional violence came to pass.But Fowler has more than the history of Mexico on his mind this time around. After all, his previous monograph, La Guerra de Tres Años, 1857–1861 (Mexico City, 2020) delves fully into that conflict as a singular military episode. The titular “grammar” of his present study amounts to an analytical framework that Fowler proposes for the study of any modern civil conflict around the world. He maintains that the deployment of this model can explicate even such far-flung events as the seventeenth-century English Civil War and the twenty-first-century Syrian civil war.Fowler begins by drawing from the contributions of political scientists like Kalyvas, Sambanis, and Conteh-Morgan to develop his definition of civil war.1 Crudely summarized, civil wars are conflicts located within the bounds of a nation-state that features a single government prior to the commencement of hostilities. They also involve at least two warring parties—one of which enjoys government sponsorship. Finally, civil wars require competing political factions that lay claim to national authority, sustained military operations, and a significant death toll of military and civilian lives on each side (7). Fowler closes his introduction by elucidating a tripartite framework for understanding how civil wars begin, the internal dynamics that compel people to continue fighting once war has begun, and the ways in which civil wars end.Each of these components receives consistent and clear explanation in a chapter of its own. To understand how civil wars begin, Fowler examines the macro-transnational sphere alongside the national-regional context, which encompasses structural contributing factors, social divides, ideological disputes, and cultural concerns. Amid these swirling forces, an activation period that is difficult to predict and even more challenging to defuse commences. He identifies eight unique but linked components that must become manifest before the preceding stress factors culminate in a civil war.Once it arrives at the actual fighting, the book explores how and why people decide to wield such brutality against others whom they might know intimately. Fowler’s model accounts for the tit-for-tat nature of violence and how it becomes justifiable to a range of participants, including those initially seeking to avoid it altogether. By examining evolving group dynamics and individual agency—everything from emotional grievance to economic gain—Fowler identifies multiple paths that generate a cold logic for waging total war against dehumanized opponents. The implications of this process are beyond sobering, and the third element of Fowler’s framework offers little solace. Although the fighting theoretically could end via exhaustion or negotiated resolution, he finds that, in most cases, the cycle of violence usually concludes where it began—at the business end of a rifle.Aside from the model building that sits at the center of the book, The Grammar of Civil War has much to offer scholars examining military conflict, civil war, and modern Latin America. Fowler draws deeply from primary sources to illustrate how violent conflict has unfolded in the past. The book’s second chapter provides a narrative of Mexico’s War of Reform as a stand-alone episode, with renewed emphasis on the critical roles played by the 1857 Plan de Tacubaya and the subsequent massacre of civilians at the same site in 1859. The war remains firmly in view, even as Fowler deploys that conflict in the service of his theoretical model in the chapters to follow. Although such an exercise potentially could dilute the history or the analytical framework, Fowler’s linguistic dexterity, respect for contingency, and clarity of vision hold the endeavor together.Along the way, Fowler compellingly examines why scholars and the reading public tend to overlook the War of Reform, especially in comparison with the U.S. Civil War. Fowler makes a convincing case for why the War of Reform deserves more consideration as a historical turning point. The book also effectively incorporates the perspectives of civil-war participants from a broad social and geographical swath of life. The ideological and religious imperatives guiding politicians, military leaders, and high clergy in Mexico City may dominate the proceedings, but Fowler does not neglect the imperatives of peripheral indigenous communities and regional bosses. Those seeking a better understanding of nineteenth-century Mexico or the cruel prerogatives of civil war elsewhere in the modern world will be well served by reading this book.

Unintended Lessons of Revolution: Student Teachers and Political Radicalism in Twentieth Century Mexico by Tanalís Padilla

Reviewed by: Unintended Lessons of Revolution: Student Teachers and Political Radicalism in Twentieth Century Mexico by Tanalís Padilla Yoly Zentella Padilla, Tanalís. Unintended Lessons of Revolution: Student Teachers and Political Radicalism in Twentieth Century Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. [End Page 235] Unintended Lessons of Revolution: Student Teachers and Political Radicalism in Twentieth Century Mexico is based on a study of the rural normales, Mexican teacher training schools with a long tradition of radicalism and struggle for social justice, with origins in the Revolución of 1910. In eight chapters and an epilogue, Padilla succinctly and chronologically unwraps for the reader the role of the maestro, the teacher, as a radical archetype in the history of Mexican education, describing the interrelationship between the local populations, students, and government policies. The study, conducted by Padilla from which the book evolved, is of national scope and based on sources including declassified Mexican government documents from 2002, US Department of State records, local school archives, published memoirs, and more than fifty interviews conducted by the author in rural normales throughout Mexico. The author's intention was to fill a void in the Secretaria de Educación Publica's (Office of Public Education [SEP]) national archives, beyond the 1940s, by telling the story of rural normales from the perspective of student and graduate activists. Unintended Lessons of Revolution is an absorbing read for academics, students, activist scholars, and others interested in Mexican history, the education component, and student radicalism and its relationship with the Mexican state. Padilla is a historian of Latin America and history professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her focus is political and agrarian movements of modern Mexico. Among her publications is Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: The Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of the Pax Priísta, 1940–1962 (2008) centering on the history of an agrarian movement turned armed struggle. In 2013, she coedited and contributed to a special issue of the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research (JILAR), in which the implications for post-revolutionary historiography of Mexico's recently declassified intelligence documents are analyzed. Padilla frequently publishes in Mexican periodicals. Unintended Lessons of Revolution narrates the relationship between student political struggle and the Mexican state. It also describes the progressive possibilities inherent in education and the development of student political consciousness as their identities unfold from campesino, to student, to teacher. Written in a linear, dynamic style, the chapters are chronological in nature, with a clear overlap of content, taking the reader from the revolutionary roots of the rural normales, their early formation during the 1920s, the impact of the liberal policies of president Cardenas (1934–1940) on the rural schools, and the [End Page 236] government's later shift to the political right resulting in a reduction of normales and demonization of activist-teachers during an anti-communist, Cold War climate. Padilla's narrative continues as students engage in agrarian struggle and political protests associated with uprisings leading to the student massacre at Tlatelolco in 1968 during the Ordaz administration (1964–1970), an atrocity that changed the normalista political approach to one of heightened activism. Here, the state accelerated the suppression of student militancy by reducing the number of rural normales and disbanding of the Federación de Estudiantes Campesinos Socialistas de Mexico (Mexican Federation of Rural Student Socialists [FECSM]). The book ends with attempts by rural normales at recovery and the re-establishment of the FECSM during the presidency of Echeveria (1970–1976). However, the rise of guerilla groups tied to the massacre at Tlatelolco, normalista collaboration with the guerrillas, the radical sector's realization of the government's unwillingness to bring about social justice to rural areas, and neoliberal encroachment on education created an explosive conflict between the rural normales students and the state. The state's response was heightened surveillance, infiltration, and horrific retaliation as in the disappearance in 2014 of the Ayotzinapa 43, students of the Ayotzinapa normal. The book is thorough, giving the reader a variety of ways to appreciate the importance of the topic—an appendix, notes, maps, and photos. While Unintended Lessons of Revolution is based on an academic study and...

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Drawings in Smoke

Rafael Lozano-HemmerDrawings in Smoke Irina Sheynfeld (bio) "I grew up in Mexico City with parents who were nightclub owners and the artificial lights, strobes, disco balls—all of this is part of how I grew up. Most of the time, I think of art as a good party. You can play good music and bring in ambiance with lights but it's the people that make the party. You create a setting but it is only in the arrival of the people that the participation of the piece comes alive. "1 —Rafael Lozano-Hemmer Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (b.1967) is a Mexican-Canadian artist known for his monumental participatory projects that involve proprietary technology and often deal with political themes of globalization, surveillance, and government control. While the artist's work is often politically and socially attuned, Lozano's solo exhibition Common Measures (on view at Pace in New York City in the fall of 2022) was more than a didactic lecture on the postindustrial human condition. Three works in the exhibition—Pulse Topology (2021), Call on Water (2016), and Hormonium (2022)—were mesmerizing, thought provoking, deeply spiritual, and personal. In his latest work, Lozano-Hemmer surpasses the practice of social commentary and crosses over into the phantasmagoric and magical realm of art that deals with themes of mortality, vanishing poetry, and disappearing archives. (See figure 1.) Lozano-Hemmer started to create installations of Pulse in 2006, and the first Pulse work made its debut at Plataforma, Fábrica La Constancia in Puebla, Mexico. The centerpiece of Common Measures is an immersive, biometric artwork, Pulse Topology. It consists of three thousand light bulbs suspended from the ceiling to create an inverse topographical model. The network of lightbulbs forms hills and valleys of light above visitors' heads. The darkness of the gallery is illuminated by the pulsating world above and the artwork shimmers like a city viewed from an airplane, except that the relationship to the viewer is inverted. The flickering pattern of civilization is above our heads and we move below, [End Page 95] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer Pulse Topology, 2021 3000 LED filament lightbulbs, DMX controllers, custom-madephotoplethysmography sensors, computers covers any area between 1,000 and 5,000 square feet. under its luminous and delicate mantle. The viewer feels small, alone, and disconnected in Lozano's upside down forest of electric fireflies. The latest Pulse installation is a large-scale and immersive work in the tradition of Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco. Similar to his predecessors, many of Lozano-Hemmer's pieces, such as Voz Alta (2008), deal with violent chapters of recent Mexican history. Voz Alta is a commentary on a bloody massacre that occurred on October 2, 1968, when Mexican Armed Forces opened fire on a peaceful rally, killing several hundred people. Yet, Pulse is different from other works in the artist's practice. It remains politically neutral and deals with timeless questions of life, death, and time. Also, unlike Rivera's and Orozco's murals, which were meant to appeal to the masses, in Pulse, Lozano-Hemmer's work becomes personal, intimate, and poetic, even though many people can view it at the same time. The lights in Pulse Topology react to sensors that record new visitors' heartbeats. Each newcomer is assigned a light bulb. The digital traces of visitors' presence linger for a while, creating a temporary visual archive of gallery goers coming and going as well as commenting on their short life spans. In their chapter from Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Unstable [End Page 96] Presence, "Pulse on Pulse: Modulation and Signification," Merete Carlson and Ulrik Schmidt write, The visitor's relation to the work … begins as an encounter with the sculpture as physical structure (object), but evolves into a complex subject-interface situation, in which the visitor animates the light bulb and faces a visual representation of their pulse. This representation is heavily loaded with symbolic meaning: what you see in front of you is a copy of your own pulsating heart.2 The light bulb becomes you for a while until you are replaced with a representation...

‘Mauser Japonés’ & ‘Remington Ruso’: A History of the Arisaka and Mosin–Nagant Rifles in the Mexican Revolution

During periods of arms scarcity, the Mexican army imported several different patterns of bolt-action rifles to address shortages and maintain firepower. During the Mexican Revolution (ca. 1910–1920), the Mexican Army—facing multiple domestic rebellions, European reluctance to supply weapons, and a U.S. arms embargo—turned to Japan to fill the growing gaps in its rifle inventory. Once the U.S. arms embargo was lifted, Mexico purchased numerous bolt-action rifles from the United States, including U.S.-produced Mosin–Nagant rifles. This article seeks to elaborate the historical background of these two unconventional and intriguing arms deals, and examines how a country engulfed in continuous civil wars managed to utilise the purchase and disposition of foreign surplus arms as part of its diplomatic agenda in the 1930s. The author presents a narrative of a twenty-year period of Mexican history as viewed through the histories of two obscure, yet important, rifles.

Mexico and the Qhājār Empire: The Genesis of a Diplomatic Friendship

This study analyzes the genesis of the diplomatic relations between Mexico and Qhājār Persia, from their conception in 1864, when Mexico was under French occupation, to 1925, the rise to power of the Pahlavi Dynasty in Iran, paying special attention to the Porfiriato (1876-1911) and the Mexican Revolution. This is a period of Mexican history that illustrates the interest of this Latin American country in expanding its foreign relations to latitudes never reached before, as well as the role of its embassies in Europe as the main diplomatic liaison with the Middle East. It is thus at this time of history that Mexico City and Tehran, despite the distance between them and their seemingly discrepant nation-state building processes, decide to establish an official relation, thus planting a seed of friendship whose fruit still blossoms today.

A peaceful old age? Pensions in Mexico's history, 1850-2021

A peaceful old age? Pensions in Mexico's history, 1850-2021

Between fiction and passion. Two centuries of mexican history through the telenovela

Between fiction and passion. Two centuries of mexican history through the telenovela

Teacher training and conceptions in teaching and throughout history in Mexico

The work presented by the authors offers a journey of the role of the teacher in different historical periods of Mexico. To say: Liberalism and lights in education, The Mexican Revolution and the Ministry of Public Education, Socialist education in Mexico, National Unity, Neoliberalism and globalization, The "community" as the central axis of/for citizen formation. In each of them, the aforementioned role is argued and analyzed, as well as its representations. To do this, the analogy of photography is proposed, where the possibility of observing important details over the years is sought. Concrete and upcoming situations, which were the channels for axiological, theoretical and ethical frameworks to show an active teacher, as a critical and reflective subject in their context and that, historically, has been built and institutionalized.

New insights into El Chichón (Chiapas, Mexico) hydrothermal system from an aeromagnetic survey

El Chichón is the northernmost and youngest volcano of the modern Chiapanecan volcanic arc and is responsible for the deadliest volcanic disaster in Mexico's modern history. Forty years after the eruption, there are still uncertainties in the subsurface architecture of the volcano and its basement. Based on this, we performed aeromagnetic data analyses using reduction–transformation techniques, spectral analysis, and forward modeling to delineate the magnetic rock–strata and to image the boundaries of the magmatic reservoir or regions of molten rock. Results show that the magnetic alignments identified correlate well with the local geological features. Our preferred interpretation of the estimated Curie point depth is as a region of mush composed of crystals and molten rock below the volcano (4.77 km), depicting the transitional sector to a deeper magma reservoir. We compute values of 101.57 °C km−1 and 253 mW⋅m−2 for the geothermal gradient and conductive heat flux, respectively. In addition, we identify two complementary aquifer formations representing the shallow−local and deeper−regional aquifer units using geomorphology, topographic, and stratigraphic characteristics. The magnetic anomalies analyzed and the identification of aquifer units in this study provide new detailed information about the geological, geophysical, and hydrogeological conceptual models of the El Chichón geothermal system.

Mexico's Independence and Republican Construction in Spanish Political Thought (1821–1848)

ABSTRACT The article analyses the role that Mexico's independence played in Spanish political thought. The text focuses on the quarter of a century that followed the signing of the Treaty of Cordoba in 1821. We argue that the images of the former viceroyalty were of primary importance in the public debates of the period. Anti-liberal absolutists, progressive liberals, moderate liberals and republicans made subjective readings of the processes that shaped Mexican republican construction. All these tendencies instrumentalised Mexican history to reinforce their ideological agendas. The rhetorical disputes to which the interpretation of Mexican modernity gave rise were vital in shaping the Spanish political lexicon, specifically for some essential concepts: republic, democracy, federalism and race.

Enslaved in a Free Country: Legalized Exploitation of Native Americans and African Americans in Early California and the Post-Emancipation South

In 1850, California joined the United States as a free state. However, one of its first laws, the 1850 Law for the Government and Protection of Indians, legalized the enslavement of California Indians. Drawing comparisons between early Californian and Southern statutes that maintained racialized political economies, we argue that the institutionalized oppression perpetrated against Native Americans in California bears important legal similarities to that perpetrated against African Americans in the South, both before and after Reconstruction. This similarity is not a coincidence; the presence of both African and Native American populations in Southern legislation, the movement of Southerners to the West to participate in California’s development, the regional history of Mexican and Spanish systems of Indigenous enslavement, and a political economy reliant on racialized underpaid or unpaid labor, all created the conditions for California to legally retain de facto systems of slavery in a context of de jure freedom.

New Mexico's Spanish Catholic Past

New Mexico's Spanish Catholic Past Ramón A. Gutiérrez La Conquistadora: The Autobiography of an Ancient Statue, by Fray Angelico Chavez (Paterson, NJ: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1954), 96 pp. In the years following the initial voyage of Christopher Columbus seeking a western route to the riches of the East Indies in 1492, Spain rapidly established a far-flung empire. By the 1560s Spain's sovereignty extended from Madrid to Manila. Its expeditionary forces had captured the wealth of the Aztec and Inca Empires and explored much of what became known as the Spanish Borderlands of North America, that southern third of what became the United States extending from Florida to California. The Kingdom of New Mexico, established in 1598, is the oldest and most enduring of Spain's settlements in the United States, antedating the founding by the English of Jamestown in 1607 and Plymouth colony in 1620. The person who chronicled New Mexico's Catholic history most intensively during the twentieth century was Fray Angélico Chávez. In his lifetime he published twenty-three books and more than six hundred articles describing different facets of Catholic experiences here under Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. rule. The focus of this essay is on Chavez's 1954 book, La Conquistadora: The Autobiography of an Ancient Statue, in which he narrates the history of New Mexico's Christianization through the eyes of a wooden statue of Our Lady of the Rosary, brought by the Franciscan friars in 1625. Fray Angelico performs as a ventriloquist, giving the statue her feminine voice, which in turn she uses to narrate her triumphs and travails as New Mexico's virgin, queen, and mother over a span of more than three centuries. Chavez occasionally wrote with the female pseudonym as "Ann Jellico" assuming the persona of a woman, making his work by today's standards rather queer and campy. Males assuming female personas in [End Page 61] European and American literature is hardly unusual; what is, is that a piece of wood does. Chavez was born in 1910 to Fabian and Nicolasa Roybal in Wagon Mound, New Mexico and baptized as Manuel Ezequiel. When ordained a Franciscan friar in 1937 he chose Angélico as his clerical name to honor Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles, the Catholic patroness of Los Angeles, California. Fray Angélico was born into an ancestral line he traced to members of one of the first Spanish colonizing parties to enter New Mexico in 1598. A year after Angélico's birth his family moved to San Diego, California where his father worked as a carpenter building the pavilions for the Panama-California Exhibition inaugurated in 1915 to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal. New Mexico's exhibition there, modeled after Acoma Pueblo's Franciscan church, became the pavilion that attracted the fair's largest crowds and subsequently inspired Santa Fe's city fathers to refashion the town's architectural style from Victorian to Spanish colonial in the 1930s. Some scholars opine that young Manuel's exposure to Spanish neocolonial architecture in San Diego and later Santa Fe may have inspired his fascination with the region's Spanish past. As a child Angelico was educated by the Sisters of Loretto who undoubtedly encouraged his pursuit of a clerical career. At the age of fourteen he enrolled at St. Francis Seraphic Seminary High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, moving to the nearby novitiate of the Saint John the Baptist Province of the Order of Friars Minor in 1929, obtaining a bachelor's degree in theology at Duns Scotus College in 1933. On returning to Santa Fe he was ordained a Franciscan priest at St. Francis Cathedral on May 6, 1937. He was the first native-born New Mexican ordained by the Order of Friars Minor begun by St. Francis of Assisi in 1210, having been educated entirely in Catholic schools by priests and nuns. Angelico Chavez became a prolific writer at a young age, first of poetry while he was still in high school, eventually adding essays and tomes on colonial art, history, and imaginative fiction to his literary repertoire anchored in themes derived from New Mexico...

Women in Battle

The 1910 Mexican Revolution began in protest against Mexican President Porfirio Diaz's dictatorship, unequal land distributions, and economic inequality. Split between the Diaz’s Federal army and the Rebels, led by Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. Considered to be one of the most important events in modern Mexican history, the war glorified the men that fought for their country. Yet, some of the most important members were the women of the Mexican Revolution. Split into two groups, some women worked as camp-followers, Soldaderas, and others joined their male counterparts in the fight, known as Soldadas. Many of the women joined willingly to be with their husbands or for the opportunity of work and freedom, but many were forcibly taken and made to become soldaderas. The roles of the women of the Mexican Revolution were so prominent that their image was twisted in a way that romanticized and sexualized them to promote Mexican Machismo and Mexican Pride. It is the intention of this paper to explore the significant roles that the soldaderas played during the Revolutionary War.

Vendors' Capitalism: A Political Economy of Public Markets in Mexico City

Public markets in Mexico City have everything to satisfy human wants. Vendors hawk essential food items alongside everyday necessities. Ingrid Bleynat's Vendors' Capitalism takes the reader beyond this impressive range of goods to explore the historical significance of such markets and, most importantly, of their workers to Mexico's capitalist development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The self-employed workers (trabajadores por cuenta propia) in these markets, as the author maintains, were neither wage workers nor capitalists; with minimal capital, they managed to acquire goods offered inside and outside public markets. Myriad studies have shown that old and new forms of production coexisted in nineteenth-century Latin America and that historical actors variously resisted and embraced capitalist labor norms. Opposition and accommodation notwithstanding, scholarship in this field demonstrates a general consensus that capitalism bulldozed previous work arrangements, at least in most urban centers across the subcontinent. Bleynat's poignant study of Mexico City challenges this received opinion, persuasively demonstrating how these vendors—in interaction with other social actors—forged unique labor and political practices that endure to this day.Vendors' Capitalism is a fascinating window on the economic, social, and political world of a large segment of Mexican laborers. It begins in the mid-nineteenth century, when Mexico administered doses of economic liberalism, and ends in the 1960s, at the apogee of the developmental state. Bleynat elucidates Mexico's broad transformations through the eyes and experiences of street sellers, proprietor vendors, politicians, and policymakers. Based on extensive archival research and comprehensive analysis of the printing press, this book captures the public debate over the functioning of markets. It also emphasizes vendors' relevance to Mexico City's supply system and consumers—although the links between purveyors and vendors would have warranted further examination.Bleynat's study evokes discussions about what social scientists once called the informal sector. As other authors have asserted, the subsistence strategies of these laborers demanded a great deal of negotiation, political engagement, and permanent working arrangements. Yet vendors carved out precarious spaces in the labor market and the political system. Firstly, the disputes between the city and the federal authority left, on occasion, gaps as to who oversaw what. Although vendors could use these fissures to their advantage, different layers of public administration sought to regulate public spaces, control access to stalls, and increase tax collection. The extent to which government officials enforced such policies shaped vendors' livelihoods to the point that they lived under perpetual make-or-break conditions. Secondly, vendors never constituted a homogeneous group. Rich sellers rented out stalls (puestos), less affluent merchants ran these puestos, and viento vendors occupied booths outside the markets; they all had competing interests.Bleynat weaves well-crafted political and economic summaries into each chapter, describing how, over a century, the concerns of vendors collided and converged with the polity du jour. In 1860s Mexico, Catholic ethics provided philosophical sustenance to sellers' arguments, in part because their survival was predicated on charity. But as street vendors multiplied at the turn of the century, the city government became less sympathetic to their plight. Certain parties came to see peddlers as remnants of a bygone era, incompatible with Porfirian modernization. The elite framed them as traffic impediments and sanitary nuisances; other vendors labeled them unfit competitors. The 1910 revolution was still running its course when vendors reshaped their discourse. They used words like “labor” and “capital” in their petitions and recast the “bad government” in new terms. For most vendors, however, real gains rested more on their ability to renegotiate their precarious position within the new system than on structural economic changes. In the 1930s, they joined vendor organizations, taking up the revolutionary mantle of the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana. But some of vendors' most basic demands—working on Sundays, for instance—were at odds with the traditional working-class agenda.Ingrid Bleynat masterfully takes the reader through similar conflicts over 100 years of Mexican history. One of the book's vital themes is how state intervention in favor of the traditional workforce or established sellers often clashed with peddlers' interests. From the early years of liberalism to the era of developmentalism, urban renewal and market building delivered some benefits to organized vendors. Street sellers, however, continued to suffer repression outside the markets and remained at the margins of economic and political systems. Yet they were in plain sight. In Bleynat's work, they also embody the limitations of Mexico's capitalism. As such, the argument that Vendors' Capitalism presents is of tremendous value to scholars of Mexico and Latin America and to any observer of global capitalism in the era of the gig economy.

Islands in the Lake: Environment and Ethnohistory in Xochimilco, New Spain

Islands in the Lake: Environment and Ethnohistory in Xochimilco, New Spain

Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas by Sam W. Haynes

Reviewed by: Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas by Sam W. Haynes Gregg Cantrell Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas. By Sam W. Haynes. (New York: Basic Books, 2022. Pp. 447. Illustrations, notes, index.) The Texas Revolutionary era is experiencing something of a moment. In the wake of last year's controversial journalistic treatment of the Revolution, Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth (Penguin) by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford, the Texas legislature passed two laws regulating how public educators can discuss the history of racism. At the same time, the lawmakers launched the 1836 Project to promote "patriotic education," the title clearly intended to serve as a counterweight to the New York Times's 1619 Project, which emphasized the centrality of slavery in American history. Sam Haynes's new scholarly treatment of the era, then, comes at a fortuitous time, and it does not fail to deliver on its promise to give us a new, state-of-the-art history of this contentious period. The book's title foreshadows the main theme of this boldly revisionist book. Texas in the early years of the nineteenth century was truly an "unsettled land," not in the sense that it was unpopulated but rather that it was a crazily complex cultural mosaic. Instead of the armed conflict of 1835–36 as the culmination of the Anglo-versus-Mexican political struggle for Texas, Haynes argues that the true Texas "revolution" took place [End Page 269] over a longer period, and it involved much more than simply the secession of Texas from Mexico and the founding of the Lone Star Republic. As the introduction explains, "Anglo Americans were not the only inhabitants of Texas to experience the upheaval of revolution. For a large segment of the population, independence from Mexico meant the loss of freedom, a fact that only became evident in the years that followed, as the Lone Star Republic moved aggressively to expel Indians, marginalize Mexicans, and tighten its grip on the enslaved. Thus the revolution was far from over in 1836. The work of creating a new society, radically different from anything Texas had known under Mexico, had only just begun" (7). Over the ensuing 366 pages, the author makes a compelling case for this thesis. From the start, the book turns the conventions of Texas Revolutionary historiography on their heads. It begins not with Stephen F. Austin and his colony on the lower Brazos and Colorado but rather in East Texas. Figures such as the Cherokee leaders Richard Fields and Chief Bowls play leading roles rather than the bit parts usually assigned to them. Indeed, this is the first general history of the era, truly, to give Indians their due. The book does the same for free Blacks like William Goyens and Tejanos like Vicente Córdova. Without downplaying the importance of Austin, Houston, Crockett, et al., Haynes offers penetrating analysis of other important Anglos, such as Jared Groce and William Wharton. Perhaps the book's greatest strength is its masterful integration of the events in Texas into the flow of Mexican history. Haynes brings the training and insights of an academically trained Mexicanist to his task, and it shows. Particularly revealing are the central roles played by Lorenzo de Zavala and José Antonio Mexía, two Mexican federalists whose views and interests in Texas clashed with those of Antonio López de Santa Anna. Haynes also vividly portrays the plight of those most caught in the crossfire of the conflict, the Tejanos, revealing the wrenching decisions that men like Juan Seguín and José Antonio Navarro made, or had forced upon them. Likewise, Haynes explains how the memory of the American Revolution led the actions of the Anglo revolutionaries "to take on a weirdly performative character," making the Texan soldiers "for all intents and purposes, historical re-enactors in a struggle against tyranny and military despotism" (144). By extending the story of Texas (and Mexico) up through the Republic years, Haynes does much to historicize and contextualize the events of 1836. The story he tells is a devastating one if considered from the perspective...

영화 <로마>: 멕시코 사회에 내재된 인종주의

The purpose of this study is to analyze the racism and social condition of the indigenous people represented in the film "Roma" (2018) by the Mexican director Alfonso Curarón. The director, through the character Cleo, an indigenous woman of lower social class, openly displays racial, social and sexual discrimination that exists in Mexican society. In addition, the film in which no character problematizes the living conditions of domestic workers shows that Mexicans naturally and (un)consciously internalized racial and sociocultural discrimination based on racial difference. In this way, the film, through Sofía''s family as a miscocosm of Mexico, configures the character Cleo as a being included exclusively in Mexican society. In this sense, the movie would be the most controversial work that has opened the contentious debate about racism in Mexico, which has been denied throughout the Mexican history.

Signs of the Inhuman: Hauntings and Lost Futures in Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s <em>La Compañía</em>

Current criticism of works of eco fiction maintains that one of the central contributions of this literary genre is a consciousness-raising effect that these works have on their readers by virtue of alluding, with varying degrees of specificity, to real-world environmental problems, implying that this is a central step towards remedying our current planetary climate crisis. This article suggests, conversely, that literary criticism of eco fiction necessitates a more rigorous material analysis—specifically one attentive to class and class antagonism—of these works and their conditions of production to understand their relation to power, as well as their affordances and limitations as tools for climate justice and remediation. Taking the example of the critically acclaimed book La compañía (2019), by Mexico’s Verónica Gerber Bicecci, this article deploys a material analysis to evaluate the political implications of its strategy of appropriation of previously existing materials, the periodization it chooses and its haunting significance in Mexican history, and the expression of the inhuman nature it bestows on its working-class characters. The article ends with a series of observations towards a further theorization of the inhuman as an epochal figure evoked in this and other works of eco fiction.