Modern Mexico Research Articles

Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Nationalism by Elena Jackson Albarrán

Reviewed by: Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Nationalism by Elena Jackson Albarrán Stephen E. Lewis Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Nationalism. By Elena Jackson Albarrán. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. xvi + 393 pp. Cloth $75, paper $35. [End Page 338] In recent years, historians of Mexico have offered detailed accounts of how the country’s Ministry of Public Education (SEP) implemented an ambitious state- and nation-building program in the immediate postrevolutionary period (1920–1940). They have described an uneven process involving a great deal of negotiation; parents often resented and resisted an official curriculum that could challenge gender roles, threaten social hierarchies, and attack religious beliefs. But until now, historians have not addressed how children themselves experienced Mexico’s cultural revolution. Elena Jackson Albarrán attempts to do just that in this ambitious and well-written book. Some of the primary documents that she uses—children’s letters and drawings, photographs, and documents generated at child-centered conferences—are uniquely rich. These sources offer a view into the minds of Mexican children who “were at the forefront of a country reinventing itself as a nation of literate, productive, modern citizens” (269). Mexico was not the only country to take special interest in its young people at this time. Adults the world over turned to children to redeem societies that had been shattered by the Great War. In Latin America, Mexico emerged as the vanguard for its child-centered initiatives. Jackson Albarrán describes a child-centered society that “offered new opportunities for the child to serve as an active member of society in his or her own right, and not simply as a future citizen” (6). Following the 1934 reform to Article 3 of the Constitution, which introduced a brief but intense experiment in socialist education, the niño proletario—the proletarian child—took center stage as a political actor. Perhaps the book’s most fascinating chapter looks at the children’s art magazine Pulgarcito, published from 1925 to 1932. Jackson Albarrán argues that this magazine, with its almost entirely child-produced content, promoted an aesthetic shift in the art world. Schoolchildren taught to draw using Adolfo Best Maugard’s indigenous motif-based curriculum submitted their drawings for publication. In the afternoons, the magazine’s editors also invited children to produce art in their studio, and the best child artists became celebrities. The magazine also organized trips to allow children to draw volcanoes and other iconic scenes using Best Maugard’s method. Pulgarcito contributors won international acclaim for their art. Yet the nation-building function of Pulgarcito had its limitations; the magazine’s editors and art educators distinguished between urban children, who consumed and produced the art, and rural, often indigenous children, who were not considered citizens of modern Mexico and were discouraged from submitting drawings of factories, airplanes, and other images of modernity. [End Page 339] SEP radio programming for children was marked by the same disjunction: modern urban children were more likely to have radios, receive the SEP’s signal, and relate to the content of the programs. The 1933 program Troka el Poderoso—The Powerful Truck—starred a man-made supermachine that seemed to embody all things mechanical and modern. The Troka character was attuned to his urban listening audience; he referred to his rural audience as his amigos invisibles. Jackson Albarrán suggests a gendered dimension to SEP radio programming—modernity was depicted as masculine, while rural, traditional lifeways were feminized. Other chapters in this impressive book discuss children’s participation in a dizzying array of committees at SEP schools. Participation on student councils and anti-alcohol committees encouraged children to be civic actors while their parents were being channeled into the official institutions of the emerging corporatist state. The 1935 Conference of the Proletarian Child was held just months after the Mexican congress endorsed socialist education. Adults organized the conference, but children elected the delegates—boys and girls—democratically. The child delegates then gave impassioned speeches decrying social inequality. The Children’s Anti-Alcohol Assemblies in 1936 and 1940 were also remarkably democratic and child centered. The young delegates were chosen from among the...

Keynote Speech: Opportunities and Challenges for Mexico Today

Since its pre-colonial history, Mexico has demonstrated two contrary tendencies: the outward-looking, global trader and the protective, nationalist instinct. Today, the seven major constitutional reforms of the PRI government reflect the former. However, the teacher’s union, some presidential advisors, and the criminal justice system reflect a preference for the latter. The more progressive sectors of Mexican society assert the need to participate in the global economy, but latent protective and nationalist tendencies throw up challenges. This article examines several contemporary examples of each tendency and demonstrates how they coexist uneasily in modern Mexico.

Review: The Mestizo State: Reading Race in Modern Mexico by Joshua Lund

Review: The Mestizo State: Reading Race in Modern Mexico by Joshua Lund

Building the nation of the future, one waiting room at a time: hospital murals in the making of modern Mexico

Mid-twentieth century Mexican hospitals – the buildings themselves and their interior and exterior walls – became stages that depicted national hopes and aspirations. Hospitals and clinics became ideal spaces that married science and medicine with the state’s version of a triumphant social revolution. Visitors and patients to hospital waiting rooms, lobbies and auditoriums would see, indeed be surrounded by, depictions of the complicated hopes placed on science and medicine as interpreted by politicians, architects, and artists. Hospital walls became contested spaces where art depicted Mexico’s embrace of modern technology and medical practices while also showcasing, in vivid color, citizens challenging the government’s broken revolutionary promises, especially the right of all to health and social security.

Elena Garro and Mexico's Modern Dreams by Rebecca E. Biron (review)

Reviewed by: Elena Garro and Mexico's Modern Dreams by Rebecca E. Biron Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado Keywords Elena Garro, Mexico, Modernity, Nation Elena Garro and Mexico's Modern Dreams. By rebecca e. biron. Lanham: Bucknell UP, 2013. 294pp. La publicación de Elena Garro and Mexico's Modern Dreams de Rebecca E. Biron es, sin duda, un acontecimiento de gran importancia, particularmente para todos aquellos mexicanistas y latinoamericanistas que, en congresos y revistas, hemos escuchado y leído las provocadoras ideas de su autora sobre una de las escritoras más complejas y polémicas del continente. Escribir sobre Elena Garro, sobre todo con la extensión profundidad con que lo hace Biron, es un reto crítico mayor, debido no solo a la importante cantidad de adeptos y detractores que tienen su obra y figura, sino también a lo mucho que Garro se presta a los clichés: su silenciamiento por ser mujer, el enfoque en su tormentosa relación personal con Octavio Paz y la exageración de los escándalos políticos y de tabloide que definieron su figura pública. Asimismo, es importante recordar que, si bien cuando Biron empezó a escribir sobre Garro solamente existía un puñado de estudios sobre su obra —notablemente de Jean Franco y Amy Kaminsky—, hoy existe un gran número críticos dedicados a su estudio: Lucía Melgar, Margarita León, Joshua Lund, Gabriela Mora y Patricia Rosas Lopátegui, por mencionar a unos cuantos. Incluso, de manera simultánea al libro de Biron, apareció también el valioso Uncivil Wars de Sandra Cypess, que discute los debates explícitos e implícitos entre Garro y Paz. Sin embargo, el libro de Biron es único dentro de esta producción, ya que propone una lectura que encara abiertamente los conflictos y contradicciones del pensamiento y literatura de Elena Garro, para plantear desde ellos una sugerente y original lectura de las dos cuestiones que definieron el debate cultural de México en el siglo XX: la identidad y la modernidad. Biron divide su estudio en ocho capítulos. El primero establece la posición central de Biron: evitar la tentación de rescatar o redimir a Garro, para leerla como síntoma de las aporías culturales de la modernidad en México. El capítulo siguiente discute la forma en la que la obra de Garro desafía las fronteras entre vida y ficción, y entre lo público y lo privado, y la manera en que este desafío plantea cierta ilegibilidad de su obra desde el campo de los estudios mexicanos. Esta idea es una de las contribuciones cruciales del libro, dado que, en vez de hacer transparente la obra de Garro, Biron muestra cómo el punto central de sus intervenciones radica en la opacidad y las contradicciones de su trabajo y en la manera en que su obra se resiste a ser incorporada a la normalidad discursiva de la cultura mexicana. El tercer capítulo reconstruye las intervenciones de Garro en tres acontecimientos públicos de los años sesenta: la investigación del asesinato de Kennedy, un evento del Fondo de Cultura Económica de 1965 y la [End Page 99] masacre de Tlatelolco. El capítulo cuatro prosigue este tema y expone expone las contradicciones puntuales de Garro con respecto a temas como el realismo mágico, la Guerra Fría, la mujer y el “personalismo”. El capítulo cinco contrasta la figura pública discutida en los capítulos anteriores con la que emerge de su obra literaria. Aquí Biron realiza otra intervención teórica sugerente: afirmar no solo el principio según el cual la persona literaria de Garro no se puede recrear como una totalidad unificada, sino además que dicha recreación se opone al espíritu mismo de su obra. El capítulo seis traslada este principio de fragmentación al concepto de nación articulado por Garro, que, según Biron, resiste los gestos totalizantes que caracterizaron la obra de sus contemporáneos en el medio intelectual mexicano. El capítulo siete continúa esta crítica desplegando la forma en...

Searching for Madre Matiana: prophecy and popular culture in modern Mexico

Searching for Madre Matiana: prophecy and popular culture in modern Mexico

Forced Marches: Soldiers and Military Caciques in Modern Mexico - edited by Fallaw, Ben and Rugeley, Terry

Bulletin of Latin American ResearchVolume 34, Issue 2 p. 253-254 Book Review Forced Marches: Soldiers and Military Caciques in Modern Mexico - edited by Fallaw, Ben and Rugeley, Terry Halbert Jones, Halbert Jones St Antony's College, University of OxfordSearch for more papers by this author Halbert Jones, Halbert Jones St Antony's College, University of OxfordSearch for more papers by this author First published: 05 March 2015 https://doi.org/10.1111/blar.12303Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. Volume34, Issue2April 2015Pages 253-254 RelatedInformation

Pesos and Politics: Business, Elites, and Government in Mexico, 1854–1940 by Mark Wasserman

Reviewed by: Pesos and Politics: Business, Elites, and Government in Mexico, 1854–1940 by Mark Wasserman Ted Beatty Mark Wasserman. Pesos and Politics: Business, Elites, and Government in Mexico, 1854–1940. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. xv + 257 pp. ISBN 9780804791540, $55.00 (cloth). Pesos and Politics extends the longstanding view that political deals were central to both the economic growth and political stability that characterized the “Porfiriato,” that late–nineteenth-century era in Mexico governed by President Porfirio Díaz from 1876 to 1911. Moreover, Wasserman extends the argument through the next thirty years—roughly ten of revolution and civil conflict, and twenty of reconstruction and reconsolidation, running to 1940. This, too, follows recent trends among at least some scholars, who have argued that the revolution, dramatic and traumatic as it was, changed the dominant system less than we might have supposed. Whatever changes the revolution wrought (and they were substantial), there was much that did not change, and at the center of this lay “an evolving elite-foreign enterprise system” (p. 181) that shaped modern Mexico. This is not an entirely novel argument, as Wasserman acknowledges, but this book effectively presents it in concise, accessible form. The substantive chapters of the book present the main actors of this system in turn, beginning with Mexican entrepreneurs (chapter 2) and then turning to foreign business in the form of railroads (chapter 3), landowners (chapters 4 and 5), and mining corporations (chapters 6 and 7). Through these chapters, Wasserman pursues several important threads that run against views still widely accepted by historians. For example, the book argues that the Mexican state exercised considerable autonomy in its ability to control (or at least shape) the environment for foreign business (illustrated here by a nice account of the railroad consolidation), that the behaviors of Mexican and foreign businessmen and corporations differed relatively little from each other, and that foreign investment was not typically profitable, nor necessarily pernicious to Mexican interests, including (even) those of laborers. These points will not get a sympathetic hearing from some readers, but are supported by the recent work of others, and are compelling in the context of the evidence presented here. In short, this book offers a fine overview of the now common understanding of the political economy of Mexico through this decisive long period—arguably, the formative period for modern Mexico. However, a reader using this book as a first entry into the issues should be aware of several caveats. First, the core of this argument has been long accepted by most historians, whether under the guise of Porfirian politics, científico camarillas, crony capitalism, or vertical political integration. There are some important and subtle distinctions [End Page 233] between the ways in which historians have characterized the interrelationship of business and politics, but the core assertion has remained relatively constant. In other words, this book builds on a foundation of well-established secondary literature, fleshed out with significant new material to illustrate the components of the system. Second, despite arguing that the book traces the elite-foreign enterprise system to local and regional as well as national levels, it focuses overwhelmingly on the biggest players in the nation, and especially in the north. The federal state, railroad corporations, a handful of landowners who controlled millions of hectares, mining companies that rivaled the largest anywhere in the Western Hemisphere— these are the exemplars for the central arguments of the book. The caveat, of course, is first that these are exactly the cases one would expect to best illustrate the interrelations between business and the state, and second that the scale of these enterprises made them outliers (as Wasserman admits). On one hand, the book argues— rightly—that this small set of gargantuan and influential enterprises were less monolithic and more complex in their impact on business, politics, and society than most historians have asserted. On the other hand, we get no glimpse here of the broad world of mid-sized and small enterprises that either long existed or were newly emerging in the fertile, if highly contested, environment of the pre-and post-revolutionary eras. Third, it is not entirely clear whether the central argument here...

Військова логістика та національна валюта у міжнародному туризмі в історико-географічному аспекті: латиноамериканський досвід

Revealed the relationship of military logistics and national currency in the international tourism in historical and geographical perspectives on the Concista example, that is the Spanish conquest of Central and South America, including the Aztec and Inca empires in the XV-XVI centuries. Special attention is devoted to seizure by Spanish conquistadors led by Hernan Cortes Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan (modern Mexico) and geologistical aspects of the operation.

Me acuerdo… ¿Te acuerdas?: Memory, Space and the Individualizing Transformation of the Subject in Twenty-First-Century Mexican Fiction

During the second half of the twentieth-century, Mexican fictions operated under a revisionist historical logic that employed national spaces to allegorize the relationship between the individual, society and the nation. Countering this trend, since the mid-nineties, Mexican literature has witnessed a departure from an interest in collectivizing discourses of identity, displaying instead a growing faith in individualism as a means to resist state-driven cultural visions. To analyze this emphasis in individual personal emergence, this paper proposes a comparative reading of subject-formation in Álvaro Enrigue's <em>Vidas perpendiculares</em> (2008), and in José Emilio Pacheco’s canonical novella <em>Las batallas en el desierto</em> (1981). The publication of <em>Vidas</em> and <em>Las batallas</em> coincides with two moments of crisis and transformation in Mexico. Consequently, these novels of formation reflect the reconceptualization of the multiple relations between individuals, communities, and the state prompted by such changes. These coming-of-age fictions use the personal recollections of their protagonists to articulate the narration of their characters’ emergence into adulthood. <em>Vidas</em> and <em>Las batallas</em> present two highly divergent visions of the subject and her or his relationship to the social body, where in the case of <em>Vidas</em> the individual takes primacy over the community. Following Ulrich Beck’s insights regarding individualization in industrial societies, and informed by theories of memory and nostalgia, this study explores how literary understandings of identity have transformed to reflect the experience of late modernity in Mexico. This paper argues that in recent Mexican fiction history is spatialized as a way of examining individual subjectivity outside the framework that views history in literature as a discourse directly linked to collective, often national, identity.<br />

Diferencias por género en el discurso publicitario impreso de la industria farmacéutica durante los primeros años del México postrevolucionario

A partir de la idea de los “regímenes de saber”, es decir, el conjunto de sentidos construidos históricamente sobre algún asunto de interés para la sociedad a través de discursos estructurantes que se imponen como válidos, se analizó la publicidad impresa sobre medicamentos aparecida en la prensa mexicana del año 1928. Tomando como base algunas propuestas de Patrick Charaudeau acerca del “contrato de comunicación” en los productos mediáticos, se encontraron claras diferencias de género en lo que hace a la relación que mujer y hombre mantienen hacia el binomio salud-enfermedad y los roles que de esta relación se derivan. En esta etapa fundacional de la publicidad masiva asociada el surgimiento de la modernización en México se encuentran algunas claves de los regímenes de saber vigentes en este campo.

The Mestizo State: Reading Race in Modern Mexico

The Mestizo State: Reading Race in Modern Mexico

My experiences in the study of selected Mexican medicinal plants and fungi

In modern Mexico, as in many regions of the world, an important segment of the population relies on traditional medicine for primary health care. Therefore, it is important to study these species from a multidisciplinary point of view to assure their rational use, conservation, and to assess their potential as a source of new drugs and understand. Along these lines, for almost three decades we have systematically investigated some medicinal species, highly prized for their medicinal value. A concise overview of this research will be presented emphasizing the role of traditional knowledge in the understanding of the pharmacology of medicinal plants and the discovery new drug leads, as well as its positive impact in the global market of natural health products. Examples of interesting compounds obtained from fungi isolated from these plants will be presented, highlighting those with calmodulin-binding properties.

Altepetl – podstawowa jednostka organizacji społeczno-politycznej w późnym okresie poklasycznym w środkowym Meksyku

The altepetl (pl. aletpeme) was the basic political entity in Late Post-classic Central Mexico (from the half of 14th century to Spanish Conquest). This is the Nahutal term usually translated as city-state. Like other city-states (for example poleis) altpetl was characterized by small territory, one central town and a ruler called tlatoani. Altepeme was founded by immigrant people from the north of modern Mexico, called Chichimecs. Tlatoani ruled the altepetl as a despot, and decided about both internal and external affairs. In Tenochtitlan, which is the best described altepetl, tlatoque were chosen by the elite electors. Cihuacoatl and the Council of Four formed a type of „central administration” and gave advice to the ruler. Tlaxcallan is an example of a complex altepetl, which was ruled by not a single tlatoani, but a council consist the highest nobility. Another example of complex altepetl is Chalco. However a Chalco was a kind of a complex confederacy.

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.

Revolution and State in Modern Mexico: The Political Economy of Uneven Development ‐ by Morton, Adam D.

Revolution and State in Modern Mexico: The Political Economy of Uneven Development ‐ by Morton, Adam D.

Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico

Deborah Cohen theorizes and documents Mexican workers in the United States in the mid-twentieth century as complex transnational and gendered agents acted upon by two governments but also acting on their own behalf for various reasons. Her analysis offers the most complicated view yet of these workers in the World War II and Korean War eras, part of a growing movement to capture these men’s stories, which are increasingly becoming unavailable.Cohen positions her narrative between those black-and-white analyses of the bracero program as either exploitation or opportunity; her account is rather one containing nuanced voices. The book focuses on the multiple stakeholders, expectations, and rationalized agendas of nations, interest groups, and individuals involved with the program. She builds national, transnational, and supranational themes as they intersect with individual workers, their families, and their communities. Located within these multiple discourses is the Mexican worker, neither a victim nor a martyr but a historical agent perhaps hoping to gain wealth, occasionally a war hero, or a transnational spouse and father taking a chance on working in the United States.The book is structured around three unofficial phases of the bracero program: 1942–1947, 1948–1951, and 1951–1964 and its legacy. Cohen’s analysis of the diplomatic rhetoric and agendas of the two nations is superb, highlighting the irony of the Mexican government touting the modernizing effects the program would have on the country through workers returning from the United States with new technological skills, competencies that they were often denied as growers favored braceros serving as hand workers. Instead, the little technological access and modernization received by Mexico came from the individual consumption and products braceros brought back from the United States. The Mexican government’s goal of elevating the country through exposure to returning mexicanos, while perhaps more symbolic and discursive than anything, did not preclude braceros from being agents of change for their home families and communities, as Cohen aptly demonstrates in her interviews with many returning workers. She also documents the costs of the program to transnational bracero families, particularly to women and children left in Mexico, not just the benefits of returned income and goods.The US government and agribusiness sectors had their own goals and narratives. Cohen excels at explaining the rhetoric by which US farmers positioned themselves as Jeffersonian models of self-sufficiency, which masked the massive governmental aid they received, of which braceros were a part. Growers also presented themselves as beleaguered businessmen, national heroes during two wars who desperately needed help. Yet, in reality, by 1940, 50 percent of the nation’s food was grown on less than 10 percent of its farms; one-third of farmworkers labored on less than 3 percent of the farms. The mythic image of the yeoman farmer as a small businessman trying to scrape by was just that, mythic, and it shaped the trajectory of the bracero program and the treatment of the men coming from Mexico.Cohen also details how the individual worker fared within both these larger themes of modernization in Mexico and salvation in the United States. As other scholars have, Cohen describes the hurdles and processes for selection into the program from the Mexican side, but she highlights better than any previous researcher the role the United States played in manipulating workers in Mexico through selective opening of the border or the use of Operation Wetback. Again, the strength of Cohen’s work lies in those sections that describe the need for applying workers to appear to be Indian and in need of modernization in order to be selected, or that chronicle the attempts by the US government and social service agencies to control men and their bodies. Both sides attempted to circumscribe bracero agency as individuals in favor of a broader national agenda.The book concludes with critical analysis of contemporary guest-worker issues such as the H-2A provision of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act or missing bracero pensions from over a half-century ago. Cohen effectively predates and predicts the contemporary immigration and guest-worker debate due to her profound understanding of these historical policies and discourses. These “ambassadors in overalls” (p. 251) were suspect in the eyes of their countrymen for leaving and in the eyes of US residents for coming. This distrust prevented workers on either side of the border from finding common cause with braceros, a lesson that still resonates in the present as competing interests once again politicize, imagine, and rhetoricize another transnational labor agreement.

Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food

A well-known saying in Spanish declares, “Explain who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are.” In our own era, in which global food industries cater to mass markets while the upper middle classes partake in local food movements and post photos to Instagram of exotic meals, perhaps a more apt aphorism would be, “Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you who you are.” Jeffrey Pilcher’s most recent book shows that food is linked with identity, albeit in sometimes unexpected ways. Planet Taco provides a magisterial history of cuisine in greater Mexico from the domestication of maize to the present and includes detailed discussions of how food has historically functioned as a marker of social and regional distinctions. Nevertheless, the book at its heart is not intended as a history of Mexican cuisine. Rather, it focuses on the changing intentionality of people’s culinary choices by investigating how years of marketing, international displacements, and changing consumer tastes made Mexican food into a contested historical category.Pilcher illustrates this point by referring to a wide variety of Mexican dishes, including the humble but iconic taco. While people have used tortillas as a staple food and makeshift casing for victuals since pre-Hispanic times, the term taco dates only to the late nineteenth century, when Mexico City street vendors first started selling the pre-rolled tortilla snacks to the burgeoning urban working class. Although the national elite initially scorned the street-food delicacy, later generations, confronting growing Americanization during the mid-twentieth century, embraced it as “a rival and nostalgic national cuisine” (pp. 152–53). By that point, however, differences of opinion already existed about what constituted an “authentic” taco. Was it the soft, rolled tortilla version sold in Mexico City or the hard-shell one invented by Mexican Americans in the US Southwest and soon embraced by corporations such as Old El Paso and Taco Bell? The answer might seem obvious, but Pilcher undermines any pat conclusions. After all, Mexico City’s quintessential taco al pastor is filled with meat cooked in a rotisserie of Lebanese origin (hardly a pre-Hispanic technology), while hard-shell tacos have been around for nearly as long. Until recently, moreover, most of the world embraced the hard-shell variety, because US corporations, restaurateurs, and (predominantly Anglo) travelers took the lead in introducing Mexican food to the global marketplace.Pilcher traces the globalization of Mexican food beginning with the transfer of maize to the Old World during the Columbian exchange. The book quickly moves through the colonial era and to the United States’ violent annexation of northern Mexico, which represented a turning point because the regional cuisines of what was now the US Southwest lost their claim to real Mexicanness thereafter. These North American cuisines continued to thrive, however, and soon garnered the attention of outsiders, as Pilcher demonstrates through an extended discussion of the San Antonio “chili queens” who catered to the lunch crowd in the central square, much to the displeasure of the city fathers, and who eventually became iconic figures thanks to the growing cadre of culinary tourists eager to taste San Antonio’s exotic fare. Most of the book focuses on the twentieth century, when enterprising North American chefs and corporations popularized the foods they defined as Mexican, first in the United States and then throughout the world. The globalization of a cuisine with multiple national origins, regional variations, and even a binational heritage naturally sparked a backlash among Mexicans (and self-appointed culinary purists abroad) eager to define what counted as authentic Mexican food and what to dismiss as phony, mass-market fare.Planet Taco is a sophisticated work of history that will appeal to cultural historians, food historians, and specialists of modern Mexico. Yet it is oriented above all to broad audiences, including undergraduates. (Although currently available only as a hardback, the price is lower than many academic paperbacks and thus is not a barrier to course adoption.) Pilcher writes in a breezy and accessible style that combines ethnographic detail with complex analyses of topics such as cultural imperialism, globalization, and business history. The book even features recipes drawn from historical sources for those who want to taste what they are reading about. The book’s few weaknesses derive from its ambitious scope. Planet Taco sometimes jumps from one example to another for no clear reason, while at other points Pilcher’s justifiable debunking of authentic Mexican food leads him to flatten out the moral questions surrounding outsiders from Glen Bell to Rick Bayless, who have made fortunes by repackaging someone else’s cultural patrimony. Nevertheless, Planet Taco will be widely read, and deservedly so, because it complicates seemingly familiar historical categories—nation, ethnicity, and culture, among others— through a culinary idiom that his readers already think they understand.

Christopher R. Boyer (ed.), A Land between Waters: Environmental Histories of Modern Mexico (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2012), pp. viii+307, $55.00; £46.50, hb.

Christopher R. Boyer (ed.), A Land between Waters: Environmental Histories of Modern Mexico (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2012), pp. viii+307, $55.00; £46.50, hb.

Ben Fallaw and Terry Rugeley. Forced Marches: Soldiers and Military Caciques in Modern Mexico.

Ben Fallaw and Terry Rugeley. Forced Marches: Soldiers and Military Caciques in Modern Mexico.