Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico Research Articles

The Metropolis in Latin America, 1830–1930: Cityscapes Photographs Debates

The Metropolis in Latin America, 1830–1930: Cityscapes Photographs Debates

“The Path of Dictatorship”: The Erosion of Democracy and Capitalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico and Colombia

The first erosion of democracy in Latin America did not occur in the twentieth-century, but, rather, the nineteenth. I will argue that in Mexico and Colombia a vibrant, democratic political culture...

Talking back: nuns, beatas, and colegialas invoke rights and constitutional principles in late colonial and early nineteenth-century Mexico

In the spirit of the now-substantial body of scholarship that reveals the feistiness and political savviness of people formerly thought to have none, this article focuses on the ways that cloistere...

Iniciativas sobre la enseñanza del español en México a finales del siglo XIX

En este trabajo se analizan las iniciativas de enseñanza del español en México desde una perspectiva polí­tica y pedagógica, en un periodo en que en el gobierno federal logró retomar los principios constitucionales de la instrucción pública. Los educadores interesados en abandonar las prácticas memorí­sticas de enseñanza difundieron en periódicos y revistas locales iniciativas para modificar la enseñanza de la lectura y escritura en las escuelas primarias y normales. Las editoriales también contribuyeron en los acuerdos institucionales de los grupos intelectuales localizados en diferentes ciudades del paí­s. Se destaca el interés polí­tico y pensamiento pedagógico, así­ como los recursos metodológicos que evidencian distintas perspectivas para conciliar un programa nacional de enseñanza de la lectura y escritura del español que, aunque generó tensiones, consiguió una polí­tica lingí¼í­stica de estado.

Illegal Military Recruitment and Constitutional Law:The Judicial Protection of Forced Recruits in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico

Juana Tapia did not know how to sign her own name. Yet, on September 12, 1900, Tapia successfully initiated a suit in federal district court for her son's release from military service. Her son, Miguel Álvarez, had been imprisoned by a local prefect during the recent municipal elections in the city of Hermosillo, Sonora, for alleged criminal activities. Instead of consigning Álvarez to a criminal judge to be prosecuted for these alleged crimes, the local prefect had ordered Tapia's son to nearby Torim to serve in the Mexican army's twelfth battalion.

Editorial

I am pleased to introduce Boyhood Studies, Volume 11, Issue 1. This issue’s authors unanimously invite an appreciation of the many regional, temporal and contextual inflections of manliness-in-the-making. After all: “Among boys, as among men, there are ‘all sorts and conditions;’ environment moulds them” (Anon. 1890: 147). This merits a bit of intercontinental timetravel. Ecce puer: from Lord Baden-Powell’s and American contemporaries’ middle ages to late nineteenth-century Mexico’s French Third Republic, back to Baden-Powell and into the Great War, and back again to presentday Mexico. In Mexico, on both visits, we are travelling back and forth as well, between the rural and urban experience.

"The Disrepute of the Old Revolutionary Utopias" and Conrad's Nostromo : Disparaging and Forgetting Democratic Innovation in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico and Colombia

"The Disrepute of the Old Revolutionary Utopias" and Conrad's Nostromo : Disparaging and Forgetting Democratic Innovation in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico and Colombia

“The Disrepute of the Old Revolutionary Utopias” and Conrad's Nostromo : Disparaging and Forgetting Democratic Innovation in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico and Colombia

“The Disrepute of the Old Revolutionary Utopias” and Conrad's <i>Nostromo</i> : Disparaging and Forgetting Democratic Innovation in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico and Colombia

“¿Te lo digo o te lo cuento…?” Guillermo Prieto en la prensa infantil (1888; 1895-1896) ed. by Yolanda Bache Cortés

Reviewed by: “¿Te lo digo o te lo cuento…?” Guillermo Prieto en la prensa infantil (1888; 1895-1896) ed. by Yolanda Bache Cortés Margarita Peraza-Rugeley (bio) “¿Te lo digo o te lo cuento…?” Guillermo Prieto en la prensa infantil (1888; 1895-1896) Edition and Introduction by Yolanda Bache Cortés. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México/Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, 2012. 127 pp. isbn 978-6070236990 Yolanda Bache Cortés’s “¿Te lo digo o te lo cuento…?” anthologizes selected works of one of late nineteenth-century Mexico’s most important authors, Guillermo Prieto.1 The work is a joy to read, thanks to the elegant simplicity with which Bache Cortés expresses her thoughts, and to her impeccable command of the Spanish language. The book’s production values are similarly outstanding in terms of images, graphics, titles, and photographs, all directly relevant to the text. The book also provides different symbols to mark each entry in the index and each footnote. Cumulatively, these features endow the text with a playful format, but without diminishing the seriousness of the work’s content. Beginning with its evocative title, which calls to mind the playful way in which Mexican children of an earlier era answered questions with questions, Bache Cortés draws the reader into a narrative describing the vicissitudes of childhood in the nineteenth century. Moreover, the collection manages to insert glimpses of the adult world at the same time. The book reproduces the weekly accounts published by Guillermo Prieto, with purposes of instructing and entertaining children in Mexico City. He couched most of his narratives in the form of dialogues, using informal expressions that provide brief, easy-to-understand explanations of customs, often bearing a moral. Bache Cortés not only compiles Prieto’s stories, but also modernizes them for the benefit of contemporary readers. Her collection brings order to, and in some cases completes, those stories, especially where the original syntax might prove difficult to follow, or where the original narrative suffers from missing words, phrases, or even titles. Bache Cortés is eminently qualified for this work. She holds a prominent position at Mexico’s National Autonomous University, where her teaching and prolific publications focus on nineteenth-century Mexican literature. She has published articles on newspaper supplements for children, and this new study of Guillermo Prieto’s work serves to connect writing for children with her ongoing research. In creating “¿Te lo digo o te lo cuento…?”, she collects material from the 1890s, particularly from weeklies such as El Escolar Mexicano: Periódico de Instrucción Moral y Recreo dedicado a la Niñez y los profesores de Enseñanza Primaria, and El Niño Mexicano: Semanario de Instrucción Recreativa para Niños y Niñas, newspapers where the works of Prieto and similar authors appeared between 1888 and 1896. “¿Te lo digo o te lo cuento…?” depicts an invaluable cross-section of late nineteenth-century society, in the nation as a whole and central Mexico in particular. To the modern scholar of Mexican education, it offers a series of vignettes written by one of the Porfiriato’s2 most distinguished authors, whose writings reflect the philosophical influences prevalent among educators of the time. Linguists will find in this book a copious source of names, expressions, and terminologies that were in vogue during Mexico’s pre-Revolution Belle Époque, a time when economic growth and technology followed European norms, to transform the nation. Finally, a wide spectrum of scholars in the social sciences will find in the characters, dialogues, and situations of Prieto’s narratives the mechanisms of power and ideology that informed Porfirian social relations. Indeed, prevailing stereotypes of gender, age, and socioeconomic level are present in force throughout Prieto’s work. Without a doubt, “¿Te lo digo o te lo cuento…?” fills a void for our understanding of children’s education and acculturation in Mexico. It challenges the reader, and provides an extraordinary body of material for consideration. This fine work will be useful both for the classroom and the research library, and constitutes a solid contribution to...

British Lions and Mexican Eagles: Business, Politics, and Empire in the Career of Weetman Pearson in Mexico, 1889-1919, by Paul Garner

British Lions and Mexican Eagles: Business, Politics, and Empire in the Career of Weetman Pearson in Mexico, 1889-1919, by Paul Garner. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 2011. xiv, 319 pp. $65.00 US (cloth). The spectacular rise of Weetman Pearson from head of a small British construction firm to leader of a multinational oil corporation was in no small measure due to his business activities in late nineteenth century Mexico. It was--and remains--the type of evidence used to criticize the economic model pursued by Mexico's leader at the time, Porfirio Diaz, a dictator whose long regime lasted from 1876 to 1910. In the literature this dictatorship is often not only portrayed as authoritarian and corrupt, but also as one which partly gained international support through its preferential treatment of foreigners and all things non-Mexican. A popular saying of the times captures these political and economic tensions by speaking of a Mexican mother who is kind to foreigners but acts like a stepmother to Mexicans. The contribution of British Lions and Mexican Eagles to the historiography on Porfirian Mexico and to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century global economic thinking and Latin American history, more generally, is to evaluate Pearson's business activities in Mexico in historical context. Usually these topics are viewed through nationalist or dependency theory analyses (as summarized above), which create distortions that Garner finds unhelpful. With the goal of obtaining a more nuanced historical vista of his subject, Garner highlights the interplay between historical continuities and junctures. He does this, on the one hand, by looking at the business and political cultural practices of fin-de-siecle Britain and Mexico that enabled Pearson to become an important spokesperson for Mexican interests in British financial and government circles. On the other hand, the increasing disentanglement of politics and finance in early twentieth-century, public political discourse created a number of stresses for the global economy which need not have resulted in Pearson's divestment of his by then mostly Mexican oil holdings. Now, the reassessment of the the intrinsic value of the Porfirian modernizing project--rather than its later, post-revolutionary reaction to it--provides us with an expanding picture in which Mexican developmentalist thinking is independent of the figure of Diaz. International developments tested the developmental model in unexpected ways. Here the emergence of an American hegemon around the turn of the twentieth century and a still-powerful British Empire to some degree divided the world into spheres of influence. Furthermore, during the global conflict spawned by World War I, London became increasingly deferential to American foreign policy objectives in the New World, lest America jeopardize British--and later Allied--access to Mexican oil (p. 206). British imperial goals, for their part, readily identified other investment alternatives for British capital, for example, the oil deposits in the Persian Gulf. In the process of discussing the globalization of Pearson's business ventures, Garner also allowed specialist and non-specialist alike the opportunity to grasp the historiographical debates surrounding the figures not just of Weetman Pearson but also Porfirio Diaz. …

Un intérprete huasteco de Serapio D. Lorenzana

This article introducing an old manual written in a didactic way which was printed for travelers, merchants and government employees in late nineteenth century Mexico in the Huasteca region. The little book shows the manner to talk and relate with Teenek producers to purchase it raw materials, goods, sumptuary merchandise or charge taxes. Therefore the intention of this paper is to make available to scholars material that focuses in the Huasteca region. The book contains ethnohistorical information as well as invaluable economic dates of the area in the twilight of XIXth century. The work was complemented by an ethnographic study to invite to take a first look at the daily life of the Teenek, to see later what changes and permanence have among them.

Between Cultured Young Men and Mischievous Children: Youth, Transgression, and Protest in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico

This article traces the progression of "youth" in Mexico from 1867 to c. 1900. It argues that the historical "images" of youth that developed during this period are telling as to youth culture, but also reveal much concerning greater societal and national aspirations. As this burgeoning vision of youth took shape in the late nineteenth century, its preeminent expression was the preparatoriano, or the student of the National Preparatory School. This "positivist image" of youth, hitherto overlooked in the historiography, was particularly celebratory and bespoke the transformative nature of the modern state. This group of young students, however, was not homogenous. As the restored nation tried its find its course (through local notions of liberalism and positivism), different notions of youth were imagined, experienced, further defined, and contested. This relationship between official ideology and reality was evident in the subcultural behavior of young men and the reactions these contested images generated among the old or the parent culture. This essay traces the contested relationship between official representation and subculture in the rise of student activism, the appropriation of new and public spaces, the creation of innovative style, and the celebration of an illicit bohemian lifestyle, on the one hand, and in public reaction, on the other.

The Imagined Underworld: Sex, Crime, and Vice in Porfirian Mexico City

James Alex Garza has written a thoughtful social history of sex, crime, and vice in late nineteenth-century Mexico. He uses judicial archives, newspaper accounts, secondary literature, and correspondence to examine six sensational criminal trials in Mexico City during the Porfiriato. Garza pays special attention to a serial killer, a young woman who died at the hand of a former lover, burglars and murderers of store owners, a woman who died from a botched abortion, and the would-be assassin of Porfirio Díaz. Building on the works and ideas of eminent scholars such as William H. Beezley and Benedict Ander-son, Garza analyzes “the ways in which urban elites . . . imagined, forged, and populated this underworld of crime and vice” (p. 3). “In an effort to maintain moral superiority, erect an ideological barrier between the educated and popular classes, and instruct the middle class in what they believed were appropriate behaviors and customs,” he continues, “elites invented a criminal underworld and populated it with imaginary, stock Mexicans: degenerate, foul, drunk, deviant, and murderous” (pp. 3 – 4). The author convincingly demonstrates that the government sought “to validate the ideal city by labeling impoverished neighborhoods and their residents as disease and crime ridden” (p. 17).Like any provocative work, Garza’s inquiry forces the reader to contend with complicated issues. This reviewer found some of Garza’s conclusions less satisfying than others. While the author focuses on the “imagined underworld,” his painstaking and at times overly detailed depictions of specific events suggest that científicos did not need to exaggerate the level of crime in order to promote their agenda of order and progress. Garza correctly criticizes the state for ignoring the economic basis of poverty and depicts the Porfirian elite as manipulative. But not every project of the state (sewer projects, campaigns to eradicate typhus, vaccination programs, etc.) was meant “to control the lives and the bodies” of the popular class (p. 132). The tragic case of María Barrera, who died from a massive hemorrhage, serves as an example of a forced conclusion. The author contends that this incident “threatened not only to undermine official efforts to promote modern medical science, but to link professional medicine with the imagined underworld” (p. 132). Later, Barrera is said to have “fallen victim to modernity’s grasp, for the abortion she died from clearly had a modern aspect [and she . . . ] became entangled in the bowels of the underworld” (p. 153). A simpler explanation would have been that this ashamed and frightened unmarried woman (with or without the help of her boyfriend) became mortally ill after a botched abortion, and detectives and medical examiners sought to determine the cause of death. In his introduction, Garza stated that his study (especially the characters in chapter four) reveals “how average Mexicans coped with the intrusive powers of the state” (p. 9). But these protagonists were thieves and murderers, not average people. Their sophisticated arsenal may have included “careful planning, rendezvous sites, and street tactics,” but these individuals made life difficult for average Mexicans (p. 110).Garza’s final section, “The Porfiriato Revisited,” reveals an interesting perspective on class dynamics. He comments on a massive protest march in 2004 in which “Mexicans, mostly from the middle and upper classes, marched . . . [while] millions of other Mexicans reported to work as usual . . . . [For these latter citizens] crime was not an issue to protest but part of everyday life . . . not an abstract issue but a horrifying reality. However, for the press and the government, crime is a social phenomenon that often takes on imagined aspects . . . . like its late nineteenth-century incarnation, the imagined underworld of the present is judged by those in power to be a threat to the nation” (pp. 181 – 82). I participated in that march and remember it differently. People from all backgrounds protested that Sunday afternoon against the drug-related violence, organized crime, carjackings, taxi-jackings, and kidnappings that gripped (and continue to grip) the country. My hunch is that both those who marched and those who did not, regardless of social class, view the underworld as a true threat to the nation. Perhaps Garza’s focus on and sympathy for members of the underclass — during the Porfiriato and in 2004 — prevented him from seeing those occasions when criminals are, in fact, part of the problem and those other occasions when public officials (detectives, medical examiners, and even some policy makers) have sincere, if misguided, motives.These concerns should not detract from appreciating Garza’s effective research and narrative of Porfirian society. Chapters from this valuable work would perfectly complement university courses on Mexican history and the Porfiriato and Mexican Revolution.

Performing their right to the city: political uses of public space in a Mexican city, 1880–1910s

As public spaces, such as plazas and parks, were increasingly aestheticized and commercialized in late nineteenth-century Mexico, these visual and accessible shared spaces became subject to the competing visions of different urban groups. This article argues that these transformed public spaces enabled a wide range of city residents, not just the elite class, to assert their own claims to the city. Street vendors and petty entrepreneurs, in particular, found the opportunity to demonstrate their contributions to public aesthetics, the local economy and consumer needs, while simultaneously claiming their rights as political actors and their identity as civic-minded residents. Through a close analysis of letters written by working residents, the article suggests how enterprising men and women performed their ‘public civility’, ‘honest occupation’ and ‘morality’ in the ‘Lettered City’ through their written dialogues with municipal and state officials. These exchanges also reveal how the slippage between the categories of vecino (literally, neighbour) and cuidadano (literally, citizen) functioned in the everyday politics of the provincial Mexican city, highlighting how citizenship in Mexico was not just an outgrowth of nineteenth-century liberalism, but also rooted in local customs and much earlier historical notions of community membership.

Subjectivities and Techniques of Control In Late Nineteenth–Century Mexico: Emperor Maximilian's ‘Registro De Mujeres Públicas’

Subjectivities and Techniques of Control In Late Nineteenth–Century Mexico: Emperor Maximilian's ‘Registro De Mujeres Públicas’

The Paradox of Share Tenancy under Capitalism: A Comparative Perspective on Late Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century French and Italian Sharecropping

As a tenurial solution, sharecropping has been a source of constant fascination and controversy for centuries. It is as old as written history. Furthermore, it has existed and to a certain extent still exists, in very different institutional frameworks, and it constitutes one of the most common tenurial solutions in the history of agriculture.Sharecropping dominated the agricultural scene in central Italy from the late Middle Ages until the early 1960s. An especially exploitative form was the backbone of Rumanian agriculture before the First World War. In Asian agriculture, sharecropping has been and still is highly dispersed, not only in wet rice production but also in non-irrigated crops such as wheat, or industrial crops like jute. The postbellum American South consituted the sharecropping region par excellence in the USA, although it was not unknown in other parts of the country. In the 1970s share tenancy reappeared in Californian strawberry production. Even if service tenancy dominated the Andean and Mexican hacienda, it was frequently supplemented with sharecropping on specific crops. In late nineteenth-century Mexico share tenancy expanded significantly in maize production. The cases mentioned above represent only a brief and highly incomplete list of economic, social and institutional frameworks where various forms of share tenancy are found.

The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth Century Mexico

The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth Century Mexico

The Transormation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico:The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico.

The Transormation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico:The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico.

The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico.

The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico.

The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico

The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico