front cover of Americans in the Treasure House
Americans in the Treasure House
Travel to Porfirian Mexico and the Cultural Politics of Empire
By Jason Ruiz
University of Texas Press, 2014

When railroads connected the United States and Mexico in 1884 and overland travel between the two countries became easier and cheaper, Americans developed an intense curiosity about Mexico, its people, and its opportunities for business and pleasure. Indeed, so many Americans visited Mexico during the Porfiriato (the long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, 1876–1911) that observers on both sides of the border called the hordes of tourists and business speculators a “foreign invasion,” an apt phrase for a historical moment when the United States was expanding its territory and influence.

Americans in the Treasure House examines travel to Mexico during the Porfiriato, concentrating on the role of travelers in shaping ideas of Mexico as a logical place for Americans to extend their economic and cultural influence in the hemisphere. Analyzing a wealth of evidence ranging from travelogues and literary representations to picture postcards and snapshots, Jason Ruiz demonstrates that American travelers constructed Mexico as a nation at the cusp of modernity, but one requiring foreign intervention to reach its full potential. He shows how they rationalized this supposed need for intervention in a variety of ways, including by representing Mexico as a nation that deviated too dramatically from American ideals of progress, whiteness, and sexual self-control to become a modern “sister republic” on its own. Most importantly, Ruiz relates the rapid rise in travel and travel discourse to complex questions about national identity, state power, and economic relations across the U.S.–Mexico border.

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Barbarous Mexico
By John Kenneth Turner
University of Texas Press, 1969

American historians preoccupied with the stirring events of the Mexican Revolution and the years following tend to neglect the basic causes of the conflict. John Kenneth Turner—a crusading California newspaperman—presents these causes with brilliance and passion in Barbarous Mexico, his exposé of the Díaz regime. Published serially beginning in the fall of 1909, his articles received scores of favorable reviews. The Rochester Times wrote: "The abolitionists in our own ante bellum days did not formulate an indictment as repulsive as that brought against Mexico by this impassioned writer." A British periodical called Turner "an American humanitarian who deserves the thanks of civilisation." Mexican President Francisco I. Madero himself said that Barbarous Mexico contributed greatly to the success of the Revolution.

Despite its fame early in the twentieth century, Barbarous Mexico was out of print for close to sixty years. The present edition, with an introductory biographical essay on Turner by Sinclair Snow and photographs of the principal characters involved, not only reemphasizes the causes of the Mexican Revolution, but provides both lay reader and scholar with a vivid and exciting account of life in Mexico under Porfirio Díaz.

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Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border
Elliott Young
Duke University Press, 2004
Catarino Garza’s Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border rescues an understudied episode from the footnotes of history. On September 15, 1891, Garza, a Mexican journalist and political activist, led a band of Mexican rebels out of South Texas and across the Rio Grande, declaring a revolution against Mexico’s dictator, Porfirio Díaz. Made up of a broad cross-border alliance of ranchers, merchants, peasants, and disgruntled military men, Garza’s revolution was the largest and longest lasting threat to the Díaz regime up to that point. After two years of sporadic fighting, the combined efforts of the U.S. and Mexican armies, Texas Rangers, and local police finally succeeded in crushing the rebellion. Garza went into exile and was killed in Panama in 1895.

Elliott Young provides the first full-length analysis of the revolt and its significance, arguing that Garza’s rebellion is an important and telling chapter in the formation of the border between Mexico and the United States and in the histories of both countries. Throughout the nineteenth century, the borderlands were a relatively coherent region. Young analyzes archival materials, newspapers, travel accounts, and autobiographies from both countries to show that Garza’s revolution was more than just an effort to overthrow Díaz. It was part of the long struggle of borderlands people to maintain their autonomy in the face of two powerful and encroaching nation-states and of Mexicans in particular to protect themselves from being economically and socially displaced by Anglo Americans. By critically examining the different perspectives of military officers, journalists, diplomats, and the Garzistas themselves, Young exposes how nationalism and its preeminent symbol, the border, were manufactured and resisted along the Rio Grande.
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The City of Palaces
A Novel
Michael Nava
University of Wisconsin Press, 2014
In the years before the Mexican Revolution, Mexico is ruled by a tiny elite that apes European culture, grows rich from foreign investment, and prizes racial purity. The vast majority of Mexicans, who are native or of mixed native and Spanish blood, are politically powerless and slowly starving to death. Presiding over this corrupt system is Don Porfirio Díaz, the ruthless and inscrutable president of the Republic.
            Against this backdrop, The City of Palaces opens in a Mexico City jail with the meeting of Miguel Sarmiento and Alicia Gavilán. Miguel is a principled young doctor, only recently returned from Europe but wracked by guilt for a crime he committed as a medical student ten years earlier. Alicia is the spinster daughter of an aristocratic family. Disfigured by smallpox, she has devoted herself to working with the city’s destitute. This unlikely pair—he a scientist and atheist and she a committed Christian—will marry. Through their eyes and the eyes of their young son, José, readers follow the collapse of the old order and its bloody aftermath.
            The City of Palaces is a sweeping novel of interwoven lives: Miguel and Alicia; José, a boy as beautiful and lonely as a child in a fairy tale; the idealistic Francisco Madero, who overthrows Díaz but is nevertheless destroyed by the tyrant’s political system; and Miguel’s cousin Luis, shunned as a “sodomite.” A glittering mosaic of the colonial past and the wealth of the modern age, The City of Palaces is a story of faith and reason, cathedrals and hovels, barefoot street vendors and frock-coated businessmen, grand opera and silent film, presidents and peasants, the living and the dead.

Winner, International Latino Book Award for Latino Fiction, Latino Literacy Now

Second place, International Latino Book Award for Historical Fiction, Latino Literacy Now

Finalist, Gay Fiction, Lambda Literary Awards

Honorable Mention in Drama, Latino Books into Movies Award, International Latino Book Awards

Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians

Outstanding Book, selected by the Public Library Reviewers
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Everyday Forms of State Formation
Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico
Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds.
Duke University Press, 1994
Everyday Forms of State Formation is the first book to systematically examine the relationship between popular cultures and state formation in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Mexico. While most accounts have emphasized either the role of peasants and peasant rebellions or that of state formation in Mexico’s past, these original essays reveal the state’s day-to-day engagement with grassroots society by examining popular cultures and forms of the state simultaneously and in relation to one another.
Structured in the form of a dialogue between a distinguished array of Mexicanists and comparative social theorists, this volume boldly reassesses past analyses of the Mexican revolution and suggests new directions for future study. Showcasing a wealth of original archival and ethnographic research, this collection provides a new and deeper understanding of Mexico’s revolutionary experience. It also speaks more broadly to a problem of extraordinary contemporary relevance: the manner in which local societies and self-proclaimed "revolutionary" states are articulated historically. The result is a unique collection bridging social history, anthropology, historical sociology, and cultural studies in its formulation of new approaches for rethinking the multifaceted relationship between power, culture, and resistance.

Contributors. Ana María Alonso, Armando Bartra, Marjorie Becker, Barry Carr, Philip Corrigan, Romana Falcón, Gilbert M. Joseph, Alan Knight, Florencia E. Mallon, Daniel Nugent, Elsie Rockwell, William Roseberry, Jan Rus, Derek Sayer, James C. Scott

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The Juarez Myth In Mexico
Charles A. Weeks
University of Alabama Press, 1987
The embodiment of a myth—Benito Juarez
 
Like many capitals the city of Mexico is a place of monuments-large monuments, small, ancient monuments, and new, representational monuments, and allegorical monuments—each bearing a message from the past. Among them is the Hemiciclo. It stands in a spacious, old, beautiful park, the Alameda Central, where the young and old of the city still promenade on Sundays and holidays as people do in the plazas throughout the country and, indeed, as people do in many parts of the world. Amid green trees and a great variety of flowers and shrubs and flanked by a semicircle of twelve doric columns of white Carrara marble stands the central pedestal of the Hemiciclo supporting the statues of three figures. One statue represents a former president of the republic, Benito Juarez, who appears solemn and grim as a Roman proconsul administering justice. Juarez the Lawgiver is seated, and surrounding him are two allegorical figures, also of marble, one representing Glory, who is placing a crown on Juarez’s head, and the other, the Republic, who stands behind, resting her sword on the ground to signify the end of a gigantic struggle. The letters of the pedestal read: “Al Benemerito Benito Juarez. La Patria.” Many years have passed since 1910, when the Mexican government built and dedicated the Hemiciclo after a design by the architect Guillermo Heredia.
 
Like many other such monuments it is the embodiment of a myth. In life Juarez offered little to the mythologizers-he was never able to boast a military career, he often impressed people as reserved or even impassive. he stood a little over five feet; with small hands and feet and dark staring eyes, a coppery complexion that helped disguise a large scar across his face, of Zapotec Indian parentage, he was no striking figure. He did, however, lead Mexican liberals in the I 850s and 1860s in their titanic struggle against formidable opposition, both foreign and domestic, and in the years since his death his worshipers have gathered at the Hemiciclo, at his tomb, or in many other places in Mexico sacred to his memory, usually on anniversaries of his birth or death. For them Juarez is, in agreement with the golden inscription on the central pedestal of the Hemiciclo, “Benemerito de la Patria” or even “Benemerito de las Americas.”
 
Development of a Juarez myth has had all the classic characteristics of myths and mythmaking, especially the subjective view or image of a reality, whether it be of an historical figure, as in the case of Juarez, an event, an institution, or even a geographical region. Image or meaning ascribed to what is assumed to be a reality constitutes one of the main elements of myth and when manipulated to promote a cause assumes a reality of its own. The apotheosis of Juarez projected a subjective view or image of the historical reality. In all myths, to be sure, the assumed reality is a feature useful to an individual or a group.
 
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Race, Nation, and Market
Economic Culture in Porfirian Mexico
Richard Weiner
University of Arizona Press, 2004
Prior to the Revolution of 1910, economic ideals were a dominant mode of political and social discourse in Mexico. Scholars have focused considerable attention on the expansion of the market economy during this period—particularly its political, economic, and social importance. Richard Weiner now enhances our understanding of the emergence of modern Mexico by exploring the market's immense symbolic significance. Race, Nation, and Market traces the intellectual strands of economic thought during the late Porfiriato. Even in the face of Díaz's political reign, the market became the dominant theme in national discourse as contemporaries of all political persuasions underscored its social and cultural effects. This work documents the ways in which liberals, radicals, and conservatives employed market rhetoric to establish their political identities and map out their courses of action, and it shows how the market became an emblem linked to the identity of each group. Weiner explains how the dominant political interests—the científicos, the Mexican Liberal Party, and the social Catholics—each conceived economic issues, and he compares how they rhetorically used their conceptions of the market to promote their political objectives. Some worshiped it as a deity that created social peace, political harmony, and material abundance, while others demonized it as a source of social destruction. Weiner delineates their approaches and reveals how distinct notions of race, gender, community, and nationality informed economic culture and contradicted a laissez-faire conception of society and economy. By focusing on these rhetorical contests, Race, Nation, and Market offers a new perspective on social mobilization in late nineteenth-century Mexico as it also explores the related field of Porfirian economic culture and thought, about which little thus far has been written. In the face of today's controversy over globalization, it offers a unique historical perspective on the market's long-standing significance to political activism.
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The Tyranny of Opinion
Honor in the Construction of the Mexican Public Sphere
Pablo Piccato
Duke University Press, 2010
In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, as Mexico emerged out of decades of civil war and foreign invasion, a modern notion of honor—of one’s reputation and self-worth—became the keystone in the construction of public culture. Mexicans gave great symbolic, social, and material value to honor. Only honorable men could speak in the name of the public. Honor earned these men, and a few women, support and credit, and gave civilian politicians a claim to authority after an era dominated by military heroism.

Tracing how notions of honor changed in nineteenth-century Mexico, Pablo Piccato examines legislation, journalism, parliamentary debates, criminal defamation cases, personal stories, urban protests, and the rise and decline of dueling in the 1890s. He highlights the centrality of notions of honor to debates over the nature of Mexican liberalism, describing how honor helped to define the boundaries between public and private life; balance competing claims of free speech, public opinion, and the protection of individual reputations; and motivate politicians, writers, and other men to enter public life. As Piccato explains, under the authoritarian rule of Porfirio Díaz, the state became more active in the protection of individual reputations. It implemented new restrictions on the press. This did not prevent people from all walks of life from defending their honor and reputations, whether in court or through violence. The Tyranny of Opinion is a major contribution to a new understanding of Mexican political history and the evolution of Mexican civil society.

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Visions of the Emerald City
Modernity, Tradition, and the Formation of Porfirian Oaxaca, Mexico
Mark Overmyer-Velázquez
Duke University Press, 2006
Visions of the Emerald City is an absorbing historical analysis of how Mexicans living in Oaxaca City experienced “modernity” during the lengthy “Order and Progress” dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911). Renowned as the Emerald City (for its many buildings made of green cantera stone), Oaxaca City was not only the economic, political, and cultural capital of the state of Oaxaca but also a vital commercial hub for all of southern Mexico. As such, it was a showcase for many of Díaz’s modernizing and state-building projects. Drawing on in-depth research in archives in Oaxaca, Mexico City, and the United States, Mark Overmyer-Velázquez describes how Oaxacans, both elites and commoners, crafted and manipulated practices of tradition and modernity to define themselves and their city as integral parts of a modern Mexico.

Incorporating a nuanced understanding of visual culture into his analysis, Overmyer-Velázquez shows how ideas of modernity figured in Oaxacans’ ideologies of class, race, gender, sexuality, and religion and how they were expressed in Oaxaca City’s streets, plazas, buildings, newspapers, and public rituals. He pays particular attention to the roles of national and regional elites, the Catholic church, and popular groups—such as Oaxaca City’s madams and prostitutes—in shaping the discourses and practices of modernity. At the same time, he illuminates the dynamic interplay between these groups. Ultimately, this well-illustrated history provides insight into provincial life in pre-Revolutionary Mexico and challenges any easy distinctions between the center and the periphery or modernity and tradition.

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Yaqui Resistance and Survival
The Struggle for Land and Autonomy, 1821–1910
Evelyn Hu-DeHart
University of Wisconsin Press, 2016
Evelyn Hu-DeHart brings into focus the Yaqui in the nineteenth century, as the newly independent Mexico lurched through immense economic and governmental transformations, wars, insurgencies, and changing political alliances. This history includes Yaqui efforts to establish a native republic independent of Mexico, their resistance against government efforts to reduce their communal land to individual holdings, the value of their labor to mining and agricultural companies in northwest Mexico, their several revolts and guerrilla actions, the massive deportation of Yaquis from Sonora to Yucatán, the flight of some Yaquis across the U.S. border to Arizona, and their role in the 1910 Mexican Revolution.
            In this revised edition of her groundbreaking work, Hu-DeHart reviews and reflects on the growth in scholarship about the Yaqui, including advances in theoretical frameworks and methodologies on borderlands, transnationalism, diaspora, and collective memory that are especially relevant to their history.
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