Post-revolutionary Governments Research Articles

Género y ciudadanía en la revista feminista ‘Mujer. Periódico independiente’, 1926–1929

This article examines the evolution of sociopolitical ideas of female citizenship and gender relations in Mexico, particularly in the principles of maintenance and domestic care. These transformations occurred in the context of the post-revolutionary governments and the construction of the welfare state in Mexico. The study explores the cultural representations of feminine ideology in the feminist press that influenced the disruption of new gender regimes. The analysis delves into how feminist movements, which are exemplified in the magazine Mujer. Periódico independiente para la elevación moral e intelectual de la mujer, published from 1926 to 1929, they promoted the intellectual, political and economic emancipation of women. The article is based on a qualitative historical analysis through which we examine how feminist narratives contributed to a redefinition of female roles, by claiming their position as active citizens and favoring social justice within a democratic framework.

The Russian Income Tax Against the Background of the Sociopolitical Events of 1917–1920s

The introduction of income tax in Russia has a long history, but not all stages of this process have been covered in scholarly publications. Due to the low efficiency of the tax institutions of the post-revolutionary governments, their law-making activities and attempts to collect income tax in 1917–1921 remain under-researched. What little the Soviet and White governments had in common was their willingness to base their fiscal practices on the imperial legislation. The practice of application revealed differences. The Bolsheviks consistently developed the existing framework, trying to find forms of tax collection appropriate to the country’s situation despite a long phase of failure in their attempts. Not only the central authorities, but also the county councils and congresses were given greater freedom in rulemaking. In contrast to this experience, the opponents of the Soviet power, didn’t work out the contours of the emergency financial system. The decrees and orders of the White governments were only created to respond to inflationary processes. The construction of the peacetime tax system continued under the extraordinary conditions of economic crisis and famine. The Soviet government and the People’s Commissariat of Finance did not abandon the idea of the income tax, considering its presence a sign of maturity of the tax system and the guarantee of stability of revenue receipts in the budget. At the stage of the class struggle in the economic sphere in the 1920s, it was used as a tool to restrain the growth of bourgeois elements in trade and production. The introduction of this type of tax in the agricultural collective sector lasted for decades. Sporadic attempts to use it in the 1920s were unsuccessful. It was not until 1992 that it took the form of a personal income tax.

Hizballah: Between Iran and Lebanon

Hizballah: Between Iran and Lebanon

Catholic Women and Patriotism: Acción Católica Mexicana and Women’s Organizing in World War II

Mexico entered World War II in 1942, and the government quickly instituted a draft of young men. Catholic women’s lay organizations immediately organized to support the troops, claiming patriotism as their religious calling. This article examines Catholic women, ideas of patriotism and support for the national war effort. Despite the previous antagonism between Catholics and the post-revolutionary government, the rapprochement between the Catholic Church and the government of the 1940s allowed Catholic women participating to finally embrace a national project through dedicating their charity and service to the war effort, they defined their citizenship as a religious calling.

“Evolusi-Devolusi” Pemerintahan Demokratis dalam Nalar Filosofis Abdolkarim Soroush

This article tries to offer Abdolkarim Soroush answer to problem of inaccuracy of religious attitudes in addressing religion and democracy as a government system. In Soroush’s view, peoples sees ideology as no longer valid, when they keep on a single interpretation as solid idea. They prefer on compound, nonsecterian and charitable ideas. This study uses a philosophical-critical analysis method. The article confirms: Soroush offers a new kalām (theology) approach as intermediary way between Islam and social problems. As an intellectual-mondial, he want to present Islam that can be universally understood, follows world community common sense, is not just traditional textual approach. This option is quite sensitive and full of risk, like his criticism toward Iranian post-revolutionary government.

Territorial Conflict, Domestic Crisis, and the Covid-19 Pandemic in the South Caucasus. Explaining Variegated EU Responses.

Territorial Conflict, Domestic Crisis, and the Covid-19 Pandemic in the South Caucasus. Explaining Variegated EU Responses.

Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans: Indigenous Communities and the Revolutionary State in Mexico's Gran Nayar, 1910–1940

Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans: Indigenous Communities and the Revolutionary State in Mexico's Gran Nayar, 1910–1940

Risking Immeasurable Harm: Immigration Restriction and US-Mexican Diplomatic Relations, 1924–1932

In Risking Immeasurable Harm, Benjamin Montoya examines the factors behind, and the response to, a campaign in the United States during the late 1920s and early 1930s to impose tough restrictions on Mexican immigration. Though measures enacted between 1917 and 1924 had significantly curtailed the flow of migrants to the United States from Europe and Asia, the national quotas introduced by this legislation did not apply to the countries of the Western Hemisphere. A concern over Mexican immigration in particular—fueled largely, as Montoya shows, by the view that Mexican migrants were racially inferior and unassimilable—prompted restrictionists to seek to remedy this omission. Calls by some legislators for an extension of the quota were opposed by the State Department, which argued that such a move would damage an improving relationship with Mexico's postrevolutionary government. In a bid to defuse congressional efforts to write new limits on Mexican immigration into law, consular officials resorted to “administrative restriction”—the much stricter application of existing rules and regulations—to bring about a substantial reduction in the legal cross-border movement of Mexican workers. With the successful application of this strategy, followed by a reversal in the flow of migrants with the massive repatriation of Mexicans during the early years of the Great Depression, the push for additional legal curbs on Mexican immigration dissipated, and a potential crisis in bilateral relations was averted.Montoya's study captures a moment at which immigration was at once becoming increasingly prominent as a domestic political issue and emerging as a phenomenon that could affect relationships between states. He provides a valuable account of the way in which the United States resisted acknowledging that immigration could be a legitimate foreign policy issue, insisting to other governments that bilateral or multilateral approaches to managing migration would impinge on US sovereignty to an unacceptable extent. Nonetheless, top officials such as Secretary of State Frank Kellogg were mindful of the potential consequences for US foreign relations of a less welcoming immigration regime for citizens of Mexico and other American nations. Indeed, Kellogg told a Senate committee in 1928 that the introduction of a quota would “adversely affect the present good relations” enjoyed by the United States across the Western Hemisphere and that it would be especially unfortunate to imperil an improved relationship with Mexico that was “a source of considerable satisfaction to [the US] government” (pp. 75–76).A central contention of Risking Immeasurable Harm is that it was largely “diplomatic pressure”—rather than economic considerations—that “prevented congressional efforts to curb Mexican immigration” (p. 1). There is little evidence, however, that Mexican diplomatic representations or activism by Mexican officials had a significant bearing on the course or outcome of the debate over immigration restriction. Though Foreign Minister Genaro Estrada is said to have warned US ambassador Dwight Morrow that the imposition of a quota would give rise to “considerable feeling” on the part of the Mexican people, Mexican leaders generally accepted the right of the US government to regulate immigration as it saw fit and were ambivalent about the phenomenon of migration to the United States in any case (p. 89). US officials recognized, however, that Mexican public opinion would deeply resent the insult of an immigration quota that was justified on the grounds of the supposed inferiority and undesirability of the Mexican people. (It is noteworthy that Montoya's citations of Mexican press comment on proposals for immigration restriction show that he encountered the relevant clippings in US diplomatic files, giving an indication of the way in which US officials monitored and assessed Mexican views on the issue.) Administrative restriction was therefore seen as a preferable way to assuage congressional concerns. Though the effect—a massive reduction in Mexican immigration—was the same, the rigid application of literacy, health, and passport requirements did not carry with it the same relationship-damaging sting of legislation founded on an assertion of racial superiority.Risking Immeasurable Harm draws on significant research in both US and Mexican archives to provide original analysis of an early and little-known episode in the history of immigration as an issue in the relationship between the two countries. (Perhaps unsurprisingly given the focus on a policy debate centered in Washington, there is a greater reliance on US sources than Mexican ones, and engagement with relevant secondary literature in Spanish is limited.) For historians of US foreign policy, this book also provides a fascinating early case study of an executive branch effort to avoid having constraints placed by Congress on its ability to conduct foreign relations.

Educación artística y autonomía universitaria en México: orígenes de la Orquesta Sinfónica de la Universidad Nacional (1929-1936)

Este artículo tiene como principal objetivo develar los orígenes de la Orquesta Sinfónica de la Universidad Nacional en sus distintos momentos nodales: el conflicto de autonomía y la segregación de los músicos del conservatorio, la creación de la facultad de música y la organización de su propia orquesta dentro de un campo en un tiempo y espacio definido, en el contexto de los gobiernos posrevolucionarios. En este campo se discutieron y debatieron los problemas comunes en lugares comunes como sucedió en las sesiones extraordinarias de las asambleas para la creación de una nueva escuela de música universitaria. En esta investigación se sientan bases para el estudio de la transición del Departamento de Extensión Universitaria al Departamento de Acción Social, de la Orquesta de la Facultad de Música a la Orquesta Sinfónica de la Universidad Nacional, así como de la formación integral del músico universitario.

Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Post-revolutionary Mexico by David S. Dalton (review).

Reviewed by: Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Post-revolutionary Mexico by David S. Dalton Jethro Hernández Berrones (bio) Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Post-revolutionary Mexico By David S. Dalton. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2018. Pp. 248. In Mestizo Modernity, David S. Dalton examines the role of technology in the construction of the national Mexican identity after the Mexican Revolution and throughout the twentieth century. Analyzing theater plays, murals, films, and novels, the author exposes the contradictions of the project of post-revolutionary governments to create a mix-raced, mestizo, population that adopted and adapted technology in order to become part of a modern nation and a modern world. Theoretically sophisticated yet with deeply engaging examples, the analysis explains that writers, painters, and filmmakers viewed the incorporation of Western science and technology as a tool that redeemed Mexicans through mestizaje. The author uses the concept of technological hybridity to expand the work on the intersections of science and culture in Latin America that other culture studies scholars such as Pilar Blanco, Joanna Page, Ruben Gallo, and Andrew Brown have developed in the last two decades. Technological hybridity equates the entities and characters represented in Mexican literary and visual productions with Donna Haraway's cyborgs—entities defined by human-machine interactions, and the resulting mestizo modernity with a post-human society. Through this lens, the author shows that post-revolutionary discourses on mestizaje embraced ideas about human-machine identities half a century before scholars theorized about them. If Haraway's cyborg promised to denaturalize—and therefore escape from—the issues of human identity, Mestizo Modernity shows the limits and complexities of this liberatory promise. Cyborgs and post-humanist perspectives in the post-revolutionary culture represented an internal imperialistic project to colonize the indigenous at the same time that the resulting mestizos resisted external imperialistic forces. The key element of this analysis is that mestizo cyborgs and post-humanism reframed indigenous Mexicans in oppressive ways that still offered spaces for resistance through the technologically-mediated selective preservation of traditional indigenous values against some colonial forms of oppression centered around class, race, and gender. The four chapters trace instances of technological hybridity chronologically, from the elitist cultural space of literate government officials to more popular, visual forms of art that could reach illiterate, Spanish-speaking Mexicans. José Vasconcelos' theater play Prometeo Vencedor describes the transformation of an indigenous proto-humanity into a celestial/cosmic [End Page 1268] post-human race through technological and racial hybridity. José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera embraced Vasconcelos' view in contrasting ways. While Orozco's Cortés y la malinche and La conquista de México aligned technology with the Catholic Church, European influences, and male domination to transform and subjugate the indigenous population, Rivera's Panamerican Unity and Mecanización de la tierra emphasized the role of indigenous spirituality and women to balance technologies' potential harms. Emilio Fernández's films María Candelaria, Río Escondido, and The Torch centered social progress on a technologically hybrid body. In them, immunized cyborg and mestizo virgins mediated between traditional racial, gender, socioeconomic structures and modern ones. These women, for instance, raise their voices publicly to challenge local strongmen while still performing the domestic roles of housewives and teachers. El Santo films epitomize the official government discourse of mestizo modernity. Carlos Olvera's novel Perdidos en el espacio criticized nationalist state discourses of the 1950s and 60s. Displacing colonizing efforts from the Earth to other planets allows Perdidos to equate global with national imperialistic efforts. Controlling Martians with devices that speak multiple languages, Central mexicans become one, post-human society with the Martians, where Martians can only talk to themselves, and the state can only listen to them when mediated by technology. Dalton's elegant analysis demonstrates the power of cyborg and post-humanism theories to explain the key role technology had in framing the bodies of twentieth-century Mexico's national identity. This analysis will fascinate scholars and graduate students. Undergrads interested in Mexican culture will enjoy the interpretation of visual art and performances through this lens. The book's theoretical framework will help historians, sociologists, and visual and literary...

Entre la vida parroquial y la militancia política: el espacio urbano para la Unión de Damas Católicas, 1912-1930

<p>El artículo analiza la forma en que la Unión de Damas Católicas Mexicanas (1912-1932) desarrolló su vida asociativa a partir de promover un programa de acción político-social utilizando diversas dimensiones del espacio urbano de la ciudad de México: la parroquia, la manzana, los barrios y las colonias. Igualmente, examina cómo sus acciones por la ciudad posibilitaron a la Unión construir un entramado social a través del cual actuaron en distintos campos de manera simultánea, múltiple y articulada. Así, mientras crearon un sistema catequístico, fundaron sindicatos, establecieron escuelas, instaurando una estructura material y espacial que les dio soporte para enfrentar pública y políticamente a los gobiernos posrevolucionarios. Se evalúa el papel de la parroquia como una institución fundamental en la composición y acomodo de las Damas Católicas en la estructura urbana.</p>

La Orquesta del Conservatorio en el seno de la Universidad Nacional (1917-1929)

El artículo tiene como principal objetivo analizar la configuración del campo artístico de los músicos del Conservatorio en el seno de la Universidad Nacional de México, permitiendo develar elementos de pertenencia para el fortalecimiento de su identidad y su proyección en agrupaciones musicales instrumentales como la Orquesta Sinfónica de Alumnos del Conservatorio y la Agrupación Universitaria de Música de Cámara. En este campo, los músicos universitarios siguieron siendo legitimados por el Conservatorio como los destinatarios titulares en su acercamiento a la alta cultura, para llevarla a las capas populares en el contexto del nacionalismo de los gobiernos posrevolucionarios. Se demuestra que el proyecto de fundación del Conservatorio de Música incluyó la creación de una orquesta representativa de alumnos y maestros, y que en la etapa en que se integró esta institución a la Universidad Nacional, la actividad musical se apuntaló con el Plan General de Trabajo del Departamento de Extensión Universitaria, acorde con los principios de difusión, cooperación y servicio social.

Los estudiantes normalistas rurales y el Partido Comunista Mexicano en la historia política del siglo XX

Durante el siglo XX, el Partido Comunista Mexicano participó en el reclutamiento y organización política de los miembros de diversos entornos educativos. Mostró protagonismo en su organización política, además de haber sido un actor clave en la creación de centrales y sindicatos en las que estudiantes y docentes se unificaron. En la década de 1930, el Partido Comunista Mexicano impulsó algunas de esas iniciativas en asociación con el Estado posrevolucionario, lo cual cambió en la década de 1960 cuando lo hizo al margen de él. Este artículo tiene el propósito de mostrar la relación que el Partido Comunista Mexicano tejió en el entorno de las Escuelas Normales Rurales, ámbito escolar en el que su legado sigue vigente por mediación de la Federación de Estudiantes Campesinos Socialistas de México, una de las organizaciones estudiantiles más longevas que existen en México y que fue impulsada por el magisterio normalista rural que militaba en ese partido adscrito a la Internacional Comunista. Los estudiantes normalistas rurales organizados en la Federación de Estudiantes Campesinos Socialistas de México, como otras organizaciones estudiantiles universitarias, también se organizaron en una central y, a partir de ella, formaron parte de la estructura corporativa con la que los gobiernos posrevolucionarios gobernaron este país durante varias décadas del siglo XX.

Carnation Atoms? A History of Nuclear Energy in Portugal

Drawing upon the concepts of civic epistemologies and sociotechnical imaginaries, this article delves into the history of nuclear energy in Portugal, analyzing the ways in which the nuclear endeavor was differently enacted by various sociopolitical collectives – the Fascist State, post-revolutionary governments and the public. Following the 1974 revolution - known as the Carnation Revolution - this paper analyzes how the nuclear project was fiercely contested by a vibrant anti-nuclear movement assembled against the construction of the Ferrel Nuclear Plant, the first sociotechnical controversy in Portugal, paving the way for the emergence of a combative civic epistemology. Supported by semi-structured interviews with scientists, activists and local residents of Ferrel and the analysis of historical material, this article presents the failed Portuguese nuclear endeavor as an emblematic case study to explore the co-production of science and society, in particular the role of revolutionary processes in the unfolding of sociotechnical controversies.

Cultural Globalization and Foreign Policy Strategies of the Islamic Republic of Iran (Case Study; the Seventh and the Ninth Governments)

Nowadays, cultural globalization is one of the most important aspects of expansion and deepening of capitalistic relations. This process exerts a great influence on all communities, especially non-Western societies, so that it has prompted them to adopt different approaches towards it. Thus, understanding the phenomenon of globalization for countries such as Iran that insists on their specificity (especially on their indigenous cultural values), to identify threats and crises which this phenomenon will be looking for them is of high importance. So, the main purpose of this research is to analyze how the seventh and the ninth governments of Islamic Republic of Iran dealt with the issue of globalization, particularly, its cultural aspect. Indeed, with realization of the differences between post-revolutionary Iranian state and most of existing ideologies in the world and also its geopolitics and strategic sensitive location in the region; all Iranian post-revolutionary governments adopted logical and rational policies in dealing with this worldwide wave. However, as regards the specific national, regional and international conditions, the seventh and the ninth governments were much more exposed to globalization and taking a clear stance. Research findings, according to the theory of ‘James N. Rosenau “Fragmegration” show that the seventh government, based on adopting political culturalism, sought for interaction and ‘convergence’ in the form of “dialogue between civilizations" as well as pacifism in addition to criticizing world’s dominant relations. Whereas, the ninth government adopting justice-oriented approach and political spirituality in the form of public participation and management in managing the world led to “divergence” of the existing global order considering realistic and power-based relations of international order.

La crisis como oportunidad. Grupos intelectuales y la construcción del Estado post-revolucionario: su contexto político e intelectual (1934-1950)

O objetivo deste trabalho é fornecer uma visão geral do contexto político e intelectual dos anos de construção do Estado mexicano e algumas importantes instituições e empresas culturais, após a Revolução Mexicana. A relação entre os três governos diferentes, diferentes grupos de intelectuaisno período, o seu papel na formação do Fondo de Cultura Economica, Cuadernos Americanos e Revista Mexicana de Sociologia mostrado e como eles deram algo que é característico do México e talvez você além de outros países da América Latina: uma profunda interação entre os governosrevolucionários e participação de intelectuais em posições acadêmicas, técnicas e políticas.

Tyrannicide: Forging an American Law of Slavery in Revolutionary South Carolina and Massachusetts by Emily Blanck

Reviewed by: Tyrannicide: Forging an American Law of Slavery in Revolutionary South Carolina and Massachusetts by Emily Blanck James J. Gigantino II (bio) KEY WORDS Slavery, Privateers, South Carolina, Massachusetts, Freed slaves Tyrannicide: Forging an American Law of Slavery in Revolutionary South Carolina and Massachusetts. By Emily Blanck. ( Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014. Pp. 217. Cloth, $49.95.) Emily Blanck uses a little known interstate dispute to discuss some sweeping issues in the legal history of slavery and the larger historiography of the nation’s founding. Tyrannicide tells the tale of a group of thirty-four slaves captured by British privateers from their South Carolina plantations during the American Revolution who, by varieties of happenstance and chance, ended up captured by the American privateer Tyrannicide and escorted to Boston in 1779. Their story is the backdrop for Blanck’s analysis of the fissures that developed between North and South concerning the institution of slavery during the revolutionary period. Blanck organizes her work very much as a tale of two states, showing the divergent paths that South Carolina and Massachusetts had embarked on from the colonial period forward. By the onset of the Revolution, both remained slaveholding states, yet the economic purpose and overall understanding of the institution’s in each state was quite different in opinion and especially law. The author’s exploration of the colonial [End Page 405] legal past identifies some strong differences between both locales as they emerged as states in 1776, with Massachusetts being quite comfortable identifying slaves as persons under the law and therefore entitled to certain fundamental rights. South Carolina, on the other hand, repeatedly affirmed slaves as property and therefore unable to access those rights, most importantly habeas corpus, which Massachusetts slaves had successfully used in the late colonial period to argue for freedom. Beyond the differences in their colonial past, Blanck illustrates how the revolutionary experience dictated separate reactions to the continuation of slavery. South Carolinians, surrounded by an enslaved population hungry to seize the freedom offered by the British, created laws that further regulated the institution, while Massachusetts residents, who had far fewer slaves for the British to coopt, became more interested in abandoning it. Blanck argues that they would have done just that if the institution’s destruction would not have shattered the fragile unity that held the various states together in the midst of war. The divergence of the states on the role of slavery comes into full view when those thirty-four South Carolina slaves arrived in Massachusetts. Though more than half quickly returned to South Carolina, fourteen lived in Boston and its environs for the next four years as their owners could not afford to easily reclaim them. Those fourteen individuals not only soaked up the revolutionary rhetoric and ideas promulgated by the city’s free black community but also possessed a front-row seat for a series of court battles from 1780 to 1783 that started Massachusetts toward the path of becoming a free state. By 1783, when the owners tried to reclaim their slaves, they faced an uphill legal battle that tested the new union between the states in respecting each other’s property. At its core then, Tyrannicide explores the tension between the post-revolutionary governments of South Carolina and Massachusetts over the fate of these fourteen slaves. Officials from both states traded numerous letters that reveal just how different the two states’ legal systems were on the issue of slavery during this critical period. In a process fraught with legal misunderstandings on both sides, the fourteen individuals gained de facto freedom as their South Carolina owners and the state’s representatives declined to continue advocating the case against their northern neighbors. Blanck shows how this episode tested the limits of colonial unity and created the first fissures that would eventually come to bear on the constitutional debate over the fugitive slave clause. The Tyrannicide affair acted as a rehearsal for those issues and powerfully [End Page 406] shows that contention between slave and free states pre-dated the Constitution and remained a divisive concern from the nation’s very beginning. Although Blanck sets up a clear dichotomy between crumbling Massachusetts slavery and...

“Latin American News Agency Should be Formed…” Las agencias de noticias internacionales en el México posrevolucionario, 1920-1934

En el presente artículo se analizan las agencias de información internacionales vinculadas a los gobiernos posrevolucionarios, entre 1920 y 1934. Este tema no ha sido previamente abordado ni por la historiografía mexicana, ni por los estudios comunicacionales. El objetivo es penetrar en el complejo escenario informativo que se comenzó a construir durante este periodo. Las agencias fueron diseñadas en un contexto donde Estados Unidos realizaba una fuerte campaña propagandística en contra de la revolución mexicana, y los gobiernos de México decidieron contrarrestar esta situación a través de una serie de iniciativas donde las agencias ocuparon un espacio importante. En este escenario se recurrió metodológicamente a la idea de construcción de frentes contrahegemónicos desarrollada por Jorge González. A lo largo de la investigación se distinguieron más de una decena de este tipo de entidades, y se lograron establecer los mecanismos que utilizó el Estado mexicano para desplegar sus objetivos

Medical Genetics in Mexico

In this paper, I explore the origins of medical cytogenetic knowledge and practices in the 1960s and 1970s in Mexico, focusing on the work of the group headed by Salvador Armendares, who spent two years in Oxford, England, with human genetics expert Alan C. Stevenson. Upon Armendares’ return from England in 1966, the first Unit for Research in Human Genetics was created at a medical setting, the Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social (Mexican Institute of Social Security). Soon after its creation, Fabio Salamanca and Leonor Buentello began to work with Armendares in the implementation of cytogenetics. Some of the research projects showed the embeddedness of these researchers in both public health policy and medical care, as they tackled the effects of malnutrition on chromosome structure, child mortality, chromosome aberrations, and Down syndrome. Armendares, Salamanca, and Buentello had trained at different academic institutions at many different times, and contributed to transforming hospital medical practice into a medical research discipline. By posing malnutrition, one of the main concerns of Mexican post-revolutionary governments, as both a medical and a genetic problem, the unit contributed to positioning cytogenetics as a medical practice and a medical research domain. The focus of this paper will be this set of institutions, physicians, practices, and ideas that began to reshape medical genetics in Mexico. The reconstruction of the early days of cytogenetics in Mexico demonstrates the major roles played by both the clinic and post-revolution public health policies in the origins of medical genetics in Mexico, within a global movement to deliver the benefits of scientific knowledge to the general population.

Made in Mexico: Regions, Nation, and the State in the Rise of Mexican Industrialism. 1920s–1940s by Susan M. Gauss

Reviewed by: Made in Mexico: Regions, Nation, and the State in the Rise of Mexican Industrialism. 1920s–1940s by Susan M. Gauss Aurora Gómez-Galvarriato Susan M. Gauss. Made in Mexico: Regions, Nation, and the State in the Rise of Mexican Industrialism. 1920s–1940s. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011. xii+ 292 pp. ISBN 978-0-271-03759-2, $64.95(cloth); 978-0-271-03760-8, $24.05(paper). There is a wide body of literature that studies import substitution industrialization (ISI) in Latin America, yet most of these studies deal with this policy from an economic perspective, related to questions of development and underdevelopment, and the economic ideas that supported it. However, few studies deal with the politics behind it, the different actors that had a stake in it, and the conflicts and negotiations involved in its shaping and implementation. In this book, Susan Gauss makes an important contribution to the literature by exploring these issues in Mexico, a country where ISI policies were carried out with particular strength and endurance. As she points out, in Mexico protectionist policies became more than simply a means to enhance revenue or develop industry: “They became the cornerstone of ruling-party efforts to forge political unity, achieve economic independence from the United States, and improve national standards of living” (p. 5). Through a very well researched and eloquent narrative, the book succeeds in providing a wide picture of the several heterogeneous groups within the government, the business community, and labor that intervened in the political arena from which ISI policies emerged. It shows that different conflicting views were in contention on what development meant, what role the state should play to achieve it, and how different regions would take part in it. The book reexamines the challenges to state intervention posed by an organized capitalist class that coalesced in regional groups to place limits to a centralizing state. It solidly argues that protectionist policies were not a result of a planned project devised by a hegemonic state based on the economic ideas then in vogue, but rather were the instrument that the state used to accommodate and reconcile the diverse interests in dispute to increase and retain its power. The book explores the relation between the state and industrialists from the end of the Mexican Revolution to the 1950s and the different ways by which ideas on industrialization and protectionist policies evolved. It delves into the formation of Mexico’s post-revolutionary governments and on the role played by a group of educated “technocrats” who served in different offices related to economic issues—particularly in the Bank of Mexico—with a clear vision about the importance of fostering industrialization as a way to economic development. Although these technocrats promoted [End Page 467] protectionist policies, they wanted these policies to be carried out in a rationalistic and scientific way through well-analyzed, planned programs targeted to specific sectors. They advised against the dangers of ill-devised protectionism and excessive state intervention. However, they were a minority within a government that was not strong enough to carry such policies even if it had desired to. Instead, government politicians forged alliances with different sectors of society to remain in power, through pragmatic protectionist policies based on a political, not an economic, rationale. Among these interest groups were several business associations that became important actors in the shaping statist industrialization. The book makes a splendid work in describing the genealogy, character, and political stance of these groups that continue to be influential in Mexico until today: CANACINTRA, CONCAMIN, COPARMEX, CONCANACO, and so on. This is, by itself, an important contribution of the book, as the role played by these groups is key to understanding Mexico’s contemporary history. As Gauss convincingly argues, the spurt of so many business associations in Mexico in the course of a few decades was the result of the failed attempt of the government to organize business as part of a corporatist structure that successfully included other sectors of society, such as peasants, workers, or bureaucrats, within the ruling party. Taking advantage of caveats in the Law on Chambers of Commerce and Industry that sought to control them, businessmen...