Mexican Elites Research Articles

Tables and families. Value, emotions and aesthetics of conviviality in two culinary manuscripts of the Mexican elites of the 19th century

ABSTRACT The attributes and cultural meanings of the table as a place for coexistence around food are sources of relevance for the study of the history and daily life of families from the past. The aim of this article is to analyze the social value given by families to the shared act of consuming food at elite 19th-century Mexican tables. This is done through the documentary study of two early and unpublished family culinary manuscripts, handwritten cookbooks created and in use in the period around the declaration of independence of Mexico in 1821. The identification of technical language and words that express affection in recipes, as well as table-mounting related sections in these manuscripts, allows for the assessment of females’ practice or male’s intention of transmitting culinary knowledge orally and in writing. The importance of seasoning as a cultural identity trait is also evident, as well as the weight given by families to affection and aesthetics when transforming, serving, and sharing food in both intimate and public tables. The capacity of Mexican consumption spaces and their associated practices to communicate, maintain or increase prestige is observed as well. These results could be comparable with other environments and historical contexts with similar characteristics and deserve further study.

A Mythic France for Export: Auguste Genin, Cultural Brokers, and the Third Republic's Mission Civilisatrice in Porfirian Mexico

Abstract: Historians of Mexico after its independence from Spain in 1821, especially during the era of rapid modernization under President Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911), speak generally of the strong French cultural influence on the middling and privileged classes in the Republic who viewed France as a model of emulation for national development. This afrancesamiento (Francophilia) is often taken for granted and few have questioned what "Frenchness" meant at a time when France itself was constructing a national identity, who were its greatest promoters in Mexico, and how did the Mexican experience compare with the Third Republic's (1870–1940) civilizing mission ( mission civilizatrice ) in France's formal colonies in Southeast Asia and Africa. The goal of this article is two-fold. The first is to advance the notion of certain members of the French immigrant community in Porfirian Mexico as cultural brokers, and the second is to place the French model of modernity to which these foreign residents and Mexican elites referred to in its domestic and larger imperial context. The influential Franco-Mexican Auguste Genin and his writings offer an illustrative case study through which to introduce and assess this. Particularly revealing is how Genin imagines the process by which the indigenous population of Mexico would be transformed into modern citizens and how this project—this imaginary construct—found a source of inspiration in the simultaneous French project to construct a French identity and a model ideology for overseas empire during the Third Republic.

Abandoning Their Beloved Land: The Politics of Bracero Migration in Mexico. By Alberto García

In a 1948 letter to Mexico’s federal agrarian officials, Cleofas Hernández and Alberto Rodríguez expressed their desire to migrate to the United States as braceros. For years, socio-economic precarity in Southern Guanajuato made it difficult for them to provide for their families. Then came the final straw: Presa del Aguacate’s ejidatarios seized their land. Authorities refused to intervene on campesinos’ behalf. And so, the pair decided, they had one choice: to “abandon their dearly beloved land.” This is one of many evocative testimonies that Alberto García skillfully mines—along with a trove of government documents from federal, state, and municipal archives—to unravel the politics of bracero migration in Mexico. For García, bracero migration was much more than a socio-economic phenomenon. Instead, it was shaped by the ideologies and ambitions of Mexican elites, Catholic activists, local powerbrokers, and migrants themselves. As the author convincingly explains, the roots of bracero migration lie in the failures of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional’s (PRI) agrarian reform and the upheaval generated by conservative Catholic opposition to the revolutionary state’s secular agenda. Importantly, García reveals that while politicians of all stripes treated prospective braceros like pawns, the men who wished to join the program were anything but pliable victims. At its core, the decision to migrate was a shrewd rejection of the PRI regime and the endemic corruption that gripped large swathes of Mexican society.

Review: Homeland: Ethnic Mexican Belonging since 1900, by Aaron E. Sánchez

Aaron Sánchez explores how the emergence of the nation-state and the notion of citizenship shaped ethnic Mexicans’ sense of cultural belonging in Texas since 1900. Sánchez consults U.S. Spanish- and Spanglish- language newspapers, journals, magazines, oral histories, poetry, and literature to build this rich and linguistically complex narrative that challenges who we define as intellectuals in these communities. This more inclusive history of manual laborers, barrio residents, and women from communities of color takes a cultural and literary lens to get at their thoughts, expressions, and political involvement. It is also a history of the long civil rights movement, especially as these intellectuals contributed to and were in conversation with global discourses and ideas of belonging since the 1920s. How did belonging change, Sánchez asks, for the 1.5 million Mexicans that the Mexican Revolution displaced from 1910 to the 1920s? How did they resist the “American infections,” such as the English language, that the Anglo cultural milieu imposed (p. 8)? How did notions of Mexicanness change for ethnic Mexicans born in the United States? What did McCarthyism do to their identities in the 1950s? And what about the “many Chicanismos” after the 1960s, some of which transcended the geopolitical limitations of the nation-state (p. 125)?The meaning of belonging for ethnic Mexicans in the U.S. was thus multi-faceted, complex, and ever-changing. Wealthy and conservative Mexican exiles of the revolution aspired to return to Mexico, keep the essence of being Mexican while abroad, and maintain the putative cultural pillars of the Spanish language, that is, “male power and performative masculinity, and Mexican femininity” (p. 15). By the 1930s, exiled Mexican elites in the United States labeled ethnic Mexicans who could not uphold these tenets as traitors, pochos, and “sad wannabe Americans” (p. 38). In response to these antagonisms, many U.S.-born ethnic Mexicans increasingly sought the benefits of U.S. citizenship and middle-class behavior, and emulated eugenic ideas about evolution, progress, and white supremacy. So much, in fact, that they blamed their own ethnicity for failing to assimilate to the United States. On one hand, the unconstitutional expulsion of 1.5 million ethnic Mexicans in the 1930s taught them the harsh lesson that even birthright citizenship was tentative in the eyes of the state. On the other hand, the concept of Aztlán for Chicanas/os in the 1960s and 1970s provided intellectual spaces in which to imagine the possibility of an independent nation, a nation within a nation, or “a philosophical state of independence” (p. 124).Notwithstanding that citizenship was the “main arbiter” of belonging, Sánchez reveals the various forms of ethnic Mexican cultural nationalisms that transcended the state (p. 5). There was the labor internationalism that leftist ethnic Mexicans before the 1950s embraced to become “part of the global proletariat” (p. 91). There was a barrio nationalism that resisted not only state penetration into ethnic Mexican communities but also university-educated, non-barrio Chicanos/as who, in one barrio nationalist's estimation, were simply “‘the new oligarquía’” (p. 142). Patriarchy and hyper-masculinity were persistent problems in these movements, however. In response, a new Chicana feminist transnationalism fought sexism within Chicanismo, racism in the United States, and classism within women's liberation movements.Sanchez’s merging of Spanish and English in the book’s chapter titles, narrative, primary sources, and notes brings depth to his telling. But given that Homeland is a borderlands and transnational intellectual history, this reviewer found the secondary literature wanting in Mexican academic sources. Octavio Paz gets a mention, but perhaps some mobilization of Mexican historical frontera scholarship would round out this borderlands history; Moisés González Navarro and David Piñera Ramírez come to mind. Nevertheless, Homeland is a great contribution to intellectual history in that Sánchez broadens the historiographical scope of who counts as an intellectual and in showing the political heterogeneity of ethnic Mexicans in the United States.In an age of white supremacist coups, Sánchez’s monograph comes at a most opportune moment to show that anti-immigration and white nationalism are historically grounded movements that ethnic Mexicans in the United States still adapt to or reject.

A shared professional space: networks of colonial lawyers in Cuba and Mexico (1508–1832)

During the colonial period, legal professionals from Mexico and Cuba maintained a closed relationship. Legal experts arrived in America to join the colonial establishment, but excessive litigiousness among settlers forced the Crown to forbid lawyers from overseas. However, it became increasingly necessary for functionaries to hold law degrees to occupy municipal positions, and thus, Spain created colonial universities. Cuban students increasingly studied law in Mexico and, upon graduation, joined the professional network across the Spanish Empire. The foundation of the University of Havana in 1728 further strengthened the intellectual connections between Cuba and Mexico. In 1760, Mexican elites created a Colegio de Abogados with strict membership requirements based on lineage, race, and class, and lawyers in Havana submitted a petition to open their own Colegio in 1812 to preserve the exclusivity of the legal professions.

¡Revolución Sin Fronteras! Mexican Immigrants, Mexican-Americans, and Magonistas in Los Angeles, 1900-1930

From the 1900s to the 1930s, the Anglo power structure in Los Angles silenced all groups who challenged their rule. Ricardo Flores Magón, who was the intellectual writer for the Mexican Revolution in the early 20th century, resisted the Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz and the Anglo rule in Los Angles. This paper argues that the Anglo power system targeted Magonistas, followers of Ricardo Flores Magón, Mexican immigrant workers, and Mexican Americans during the Mexican Revolution to prevent an uprising in Los Angeles and to maintain close economic ties with Porfirio Diaz and Mexican elites in general. To prove my thesis, I utilized the Archivo Digital de Ricardo Flores Magón. This online archive contains Ricardo Flores Magón’s newspapers Regeneración and Revolucion. I also utilized the Los Angeles Times Historic. This online archive contains all newspaper articles published by the Los Angeles Times. I used the two newspapers to compare the Magonista and Anglo perspectives. The third online archive I used was the Strachwitz Frontera Collection which contains music written by Mexican and Mexican Americans. The final online primary source collection that I referenced was the Anarchist Library. This online collection contains various documents written by anarchists; including the works written by Ricardo Flores Magón. Using the four primary source collections will support my thesis.

The Southern Exodus to Mexico: Migration across the Borderlands after the American Civil War by Todd W. Wahlstrom

Reviewed by: The Southern Exodus to Mexico: Migration across the Borderlands after the American Civil Warby Todd W. Wahlstrom John McKiernan-González The Southern Exodus to Mexico: Migration across the Borderlands after the American Civil War. By Todd W. Wahlstrom. Borderlands and Transcultural Studies. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Pp. xxx, 189. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8032-4634-8.) How does southern history shift when Native Americans, Mexicans, and African Americans share pages and a central narrative with Confederates after the Civil War? Todd W. Wahlstrom’s The Southern Exodus to Mexico: Migration across the Borderlands after the American Civil Warprovides a clue. The book seeks to anchor Confederate ambitions after the Civil War in a more global and multiethnic cultural frame. To me, this is the abiding tension in the project: Wahlstrom brings southern history to the northern Mexican borderlands, treating individual Confederate merchants and soldiers alongside [End Page 946]Comanche and Kickapoo migrants within a sharp-edged Mexican political context. The tension lies in keeping the southern dimensions of this North American migration prominent but not overwhelming. By bringing the tenuous dimension of the commercial allegiances between erstwhile Confederate elites and conservative landowners and politicians in Tamaulipas and Coahuila into view, Wahlstrom has done Mexicanists a great service. The book mines a variety of personal papers in special collections across the United States that give both day-to-day reports and textured portraits of the way Confederate southerners learned to work with politically conservative Mexican elites. These documented interactions provide a window into the direct military challenges Confederate soldiers faced from local Mexican, Apache, and Kickapoo militias when they sought to take possession of land south of the Nueces River. Many U.S.-based historians portray an easy projection of American power southward; Wahlstrom makes the weak jury-rigging of these projects very clear. In this fashion, he challenges the seamless way classes and popular books proclaim “America in the World.” Wahlstrom has done historians of the West and Native America a large favor. The same papers and documents that illuminate the transnational alliances between conservative elites also make a political project of various Comanche, Kickapoo, and Apache bands clear. They worked to remove white southern and conservative political influence from the Coahuila and Nuevo León borderlands. Wahlstrom’s analysis of the attacks makes it clear that these bands fought French and southern influence and often allied themselves with Mexican popular militias for this purpose. His discussion of African American movement south hints at individuals’ ability to seize the moment when Confederate authority and anti-black conservative political power receded in the regions, using the violence and chaos to escape owners and employers and to make new and perhaps more peaceful lives away from their earlier bonds. Wahlstrom’s account points to the territories opened to peasants and workers by the collapse of the French empire in Mexico, an opening rendered tragic by the rural enclosures that came with mines, railroads, and resurgent haciendas under the Porfiriato. The Southern Exodus to Mexicoadds to the growing argument that Mexico is a key part of the American West. This brings us back to the earlier question: how southern is The Southern Exodus to Mexico?If southern history predates nineteenth-century U.S. territorial expansion, includes Mexican Americans and Comanche leaders by name, and treats the movement of families as a key theme, the chastening of Confederate exiles in northern Mexico by multiple ethnic communities—as Wahlstrom amply demonstrates—should be central to the South. I am not convinced that northern investors eluded similar obstacles in imposing their vision on Mexico, in particular if the time frame for their investments included the Mexican Revolution. The Southern Exodus to Mexicoshould be included in any conversation about the global dimensions of southern history. [End Page 947] John McKiernan-González Texas State University Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association

Choreographing Modern Mexico: Anna Pavlova in Mexico City (1919)

In this article, I examine the role that Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova played in Mexico's attempts to produce an embodied mestizo modernity that resonated with efforts to construct a post-revolutionary modern nation. After the revolution of 1910, cultural modernization consisted in the integration of Mexico's histories of indigenous civilizations and European influences in the production of expressive cultures intended to be local in character but universal in their appeal. I argue that Pavlova's performances from her Europeanized ballet repertoire as well as her balleticized rendition of Mexican folk dances helped to create a social space in which Mexican elites could reaffirm their affinity with international cosmopolitan classes while also attempting to retain a sense of Mexican distinctiveness. I contextualize my analysis by attending to racial and class formations implicated in the production of Mexico as a modern nation within the context of colonialist legacies informing notions of Western cultural modernity.

Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs

Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs

Elites and Poverty in the Neoliberal Era: The Case of Mexico

AbstractMexico is an upper‐middle‐income country, an OECD member, and the homeland of the richest man on earth, yet most Mexicans are poor. This article explores how Mexican elites perceive poverty and the poor, and how such perceptions are linked to particular policy preferences. Findings suggest that when Mexican elites talk about poverty, some things often remain unsaid. Mainstream perceptions of poverty were chiefly silent about power and inequality. In other words, depoliticized views of poverty seem to be prevailing among Mexican elites. This qualitative analysis contributes to understanding the specific nature of policies implemented to tackle this social problem in Mexico.

Crafting Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans, and the State after the Revolution

Beginning in the 1920s and extending up until today, Mexican elites have encouraged cultural production (including a variety of popular art and crafts) in promoting a larger, unifying sense of national awareness. Some, like cultural theorist Néstor García Canclini, suggest that Mexico is unique in this, claiming that local artisans achieved a sense of “national identity” even before mass communication and the tourism industry achieved maturity (p. 16).The first part of Crafting Mexico discusses several early state-sponsored or commercial events that helped forge the new cultural nationalism. Here, Rick López explores the role that Mexican popular art played in developing a fresh aesthetic by detailing the many individuals and expanding bureaucratic infrastructure needed to support such an undertaking. The latter half of the book offers a close case study of artisanal work in the village of Olinalá, Guerrero, where craftspeople have fashioned beautiful lacquered boxes, chests, gourds, tableware, masks, and other objects for hundreds of years.In his first chapter, López recounts the history of Félix Palavicini’s (founder and director of El Universal, a Mexico City daily) 1921 India Bonita Contest. Palavicini hired journalist Rafael Pérez Taylor to search high and low for indias bonitas (also called gatitas, or “little kittens”). At first, somewhat surprisingly, they found few. Expanding their gaze beyond the capital and its immediate environs, Pérez Taylor and his crew followed up on photos of possible contestants sent in by newspaper readers. They also sought out candidates in provincial places such as Xalapa, Oaxaca City, and Guanajuato, as well as various “peasant huts and the cane fields” in assorted “picturesque populations” (p. 35).Revealing the exploitative motivation underlying the endeavor, López notes that “when the newspaper published the photos, the accompanying profiles regularly listed the name of the discoverer before the name of the girl herself ” (p. 35). Not surprisingly, elite efforts to advance indigenous culture and identity through the India Bonita project proved superficial, as elite “policing of the indigenous female body” had more to do with mestizo male ideas than anything else.López continues his careful look at state-led arts programming with the Noche Mexicana (Mexican Night) and the Exhibition of Popular Art, both organized to coincide with the 1921 centennial celebration. These events proved part of a global trend seeking to “recast native craft industries from symbols of peasant backwardness into integral components of national identity” (p. 65). At a critical moment in this history, when national identity (re)formation represented a key requirement for capitalist development, several key players in Mexico’s cultural industry took center stage, including President Álvaro Obregón’s foreign minister Alberto Pani, education minister José Vasconcelos, Noche Mexicana head Adolfo Best Maugard, anthropologist Manuel Gamio, artist-intellectual Gerardo Murillo (aka Dr. Atl), and painters Roberto Montenegro and Jorge Enciso, along with a veritable who’s who of postrevolutionary Mexico. As their ambition was nothing less than a near-complete remaking of Mexican national identity, these individuals often clashed. Objectives for both this and other endeavors would prove exceedingly difficult, and success elusive. As López points out, “in the end, the Exhibition of Popular Art and the Noche Mexicana recognized neither indigenous people nor artisans as agents possessed of their own volition and able to define themselves, their art, or their destinies” (p. 94). For elites determined to distinguish their generation from what had existed before the revolution, their idea of native peoples rather than living native people was most often the cornerstone for Mexican national identity building. Bridging this vast chasm would prove difficult, to say the least.When marketing popular art became profitable in the 1940s, some criticized the Mexican government for exploiting artists and encouraging the production of inexpensive, mass-marketed goods. These charges do seem to have helped cause a mild correction starting during the middle decades of the twentieth century. As López summarizes, “promoters of popular art grappled with the tension between their desires to protect handicrafts as patrimony, on the one hand, and their commitment to addressing the social and economic needs of artisans, on the other” (p. 192). Indeed, dealings between business, government, and popular artists — especially after the inception of Fonart (Fondo Nacional para el Fomento de las Artisanías) in the 1970s — were highly contested, with clear winners and losers depending on time and place. One artist in Olinalá stated bluntly, “los ricos win.” But other times, as López argues, there has been an occasional “triumph from below” (p. 263). Outcomes vary depending on a variety of factors. In the end, Crafting Mexico reminds us that quality scholarship does not resort to sweeping generalizations but rather assesses what is often a complex situation case by case. It is an impressive interdisciplinary study that adds much to our appreciation of modern Mexican culture and society.

Language policy and the drawing of social boundaries

Educational institutions developed in Tucson, Arizona in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, during a critical time in cultural and political shifts of power between Anglo and Mexican elites in Southwestern United States. My qualitative analysis reconstructs language policies in the incipient educational system in Territorial Tucson. This article examines official and unofficial language policies in both public and private schools in Tucson that reflected this accommodation of power and the negotiation of a new racial hierarchy in the context of westward expansion. I argue that the private schools Mexican elites founded in this period maintained bilingual instruction and promoted biliteracy as a means of racially and linguistically distancing themselves from Anglos, Indians and Mexicans from lower socioeconomic classes in public schools.

<i>Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares: Globalization in Recent Mexican and Chicano Narrative</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares: Globalization in Recent Mexican and Chicano Narrative Jorge Bastos da Silva Miguel López-Lozano . Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares: Globalization in Recent Mexican and Chicano Narrative. Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures, Vol. 42. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2008. ix + 294 pp. Paperback, ISBN: 978-1-55753-484-2. Miguel López-Lozano's Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares sheds light on a hitherto relatively unknown area within the territory of the utopian imagination. It is a study of the contributions of four Mexican/U.S. Chicano authors of narrative fiction to the ecocritical current of dystopian writing, which "addresses the effects of industrialization on the environment, proposing alternative worlds in which humankind lives in harmony with nature" (26). It focuses on works published in the last two decades of the twentieth century that for the most part amount to imaginative representations of Mexico City: Carlos Fuentes's Cristóbal Nonato (1987); Alejandro Morales's The Rag Doll Plagues (1992); Carmen Boullosa's Cielos de la Tierra (1997); and two novels by Homero Aridjis, La Leyenda de los Soles (1993) and its sequel, ¿En quién Piensas cuando Haces el Amor? (1996). López-Lozano postulates a genre for these works by suggestively comparing them (albeit in passing) with Zamyatin's We, Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and [End Page 360] Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. The point is more argumentative than analytic: it is not so much that there are specific textual correspondences to be detected as that those earlier works can function as a background by way of (apposite) historical analogy. López-Lozano's main interest lies in "cautionary tales of ecoapocalypses" and "the excavation of the history of exclusion" (5—the notion that history is indeed rewriting being at the core of his project). This he proceeds to do by providing a context that allows him to interpret his canon of works within the larger dynamics of South American social and political history. The introduction very much focuses on what may be described as the utopian invention of the Americas, taking two dates as symbolic: 1492, the arrival of Columbus, and 1992, the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Going back to the colonial period, López-Lozano examines the utopian projections that were made to bear upon the New World as the earthly paradise, briefly considering how "the discovery of the Americas . . . provided Europe with a locus upon which to project its own preconceived myths and desires" (7). After independence, he points out, "Latin American elites began to conceptualize modernization as a new kind of utopia, one that encapsulates the desire to achieve the levels of productivity, comfort, and consumption associated with the nations and economies of the First World" (5-6). Both conceptualizations of South American identity are perceived to entail the establishment of a sense of domination over the peoples, the territories, and the cultures of the Americas, and both are challenged by the authors López-Lozano has chosen to study as they explore the potential of dystopian science fiction to question prevailing assumptions. Specifically, their work is seen to reflect the obvious ambivalence—in a country that was left behind in the process of modernization—between a striving for progress and the cultural and psychological dangers of life in industrialized society. López-Lozano describes the process of Mexico's belated industrialization, which took place only decisively after World War II, and traces the story of industrialized capitalism through several political and economic crises, seeing modernization itself as the utopia par excellence of Mexican elites (see 26-40). In such conditions, López-Lozano submits, art emerges "as a viable form of resistance to the rules of the market, since local artists can create awareness of social issues and problems, thereby forming a critical voice that questions the illusory logic of unlimited progress that supporters [End Page 361] of neoliberalism propose" (40). Does this mean, one wonders, that all relevant works stand in direct opposition to the establishment as a whole, or do they connect to significant social or ideological movements that remain within the accepted rules of the states...

Cognitive Images and Support for International Economic Agreements with the United States Among Mexican Citizens

A 1995 survey shows that Mexican citizens depend on their cognitive and affective orientations toward the United States in forming opinions about economic agreements between the two countries. The degree to which respondents utilized general feelings toward the United States rather than images of the United States varies by educational level and across the two agreements that were examined, NAFTA and the Clinton economic stabilization package of 1995. Whether respondents utilized an image of U.S. economic imperialism or of racial discrimination against people of Mexican origin in forming their opinions also depends on the level of education attained and on the policy domain of the agreement. The cognitive processes respondents utilized to form opinions about these economic agreements also differ across educational levels and policy domains. The findings have important implications for the capacity of Mexican elites to mobilize support for agreements with the United States and more generally for U.S.-Mexican relations.

Cognitive Images and Support for International Economic Agreements with the United States Among Mexican Citizens

AbstractA 1995 survey shows that Mexican citizens depend on their cognitive and affective orientations toward the United States in forming opinions about economic agreements between the two countries. The degree to which respondents utilized general feelings toward the United States rather than images of the United States varies by educational level and across the two agreements that were examined, NAFTA and the Clinton economic stabilization package of 1995. Whether respondents utilized an image of U.S. economic imperialism or of racial discrimination against people of Mexican origin in forming their opinions also depends on the level of education attained and on the policy domain of the agreement. The cognitive processes respondents utilized to form opinions about these economic agreements also differ across educational levels and policy domains. The findings have important implications for the capacity of Mexican elites to mobilize support for agreements with the United States and more generally for U.S.-Mexican relations.

Convent Reform, Catholic Reform, and Bourbon Reform in Eighteenth-Century New Spain: The View from the Nunnery

Convent Reform, Catholic Reform, and Bourbon Reform in Eighteenth-Century New Spain: The View from the Nunnery

Off-White in an Age of White Supremacy: Mexican Elites and the Rights of Indians and Blacks in Nineteenth-Century New Mexico

Off-White in an Age of White Supremacy: Mexican Elites and the Rights of Indians and Blacks in Nineteenth-Century New Mexico

Ignacio E. Lozano: The Mexican Exile Publisher Who Conquered San Antonio and Los Angeles

In the first quarter of this century, three Southwestern U.S. cities made up the Mexican American heartland—San Antonio, Los Angeles, and El Paso. All three had large Mexican and Mexican-American populations. Small Spanish-language newspapers rose and fell quickly in these cities, as Mexican intellectuals and political elites sought to express their disenchantment with various factions of their homeland. Those publications were, from many accounts, run much as “pamphlets,” rather than as business concerns. Enter Ignacio E. Lozano, who arrived virtually penniless in San Antonio in 1908. Within two decades, he had established a successful newspaper in the competitive San Antonio market and began a second one in Los Angeles. This article examines the role of Lozano's newspapers and includes criticisms leveled at the elitist content of both. It offers an explanation of why La Prensa and La Opinión succeeded where others failed. And, finally, it provides insights into Lozano's character and his attitudes toward acculturation.

Integral Outsiders: The American Colony in Mexico City, 1876-1911

Chapter 1 Introduction: Integral Outsiders: Model and Overview Chapter 2 Life Sketches of the American Colony Chapter 3 Colonel R. C. Pate: Culture, the Economy, and Hemispheric Politics Chapter 4 Land, Church, and Society Chapter 5 Tourist Investors and Tributary Capitalism Chapter 6 Tropical Mafia: The Deep Politics of Dollar Diplomacy Chapter 7 Greater Mexico: The Deep Politics of Hegemony Chapter 8 Chaos at Porfirian Twilight

The Structure of Mexican Elites: An Enduring Puzzle

The Structure of Mexican Elites: An Enduring Puzzle