Confluencias – serie

When late eighteenth-century New Spanish viceregal administrators installed public lamps in the streets of central Mexico City, they illuminated the bodies of Indigenous, Afro-descended, and plebeian Spanish urbanites. The urban patrolmen, known as guarda faroleros, or “lantern guards,” maintained the streetlamps and attempted to clear the streets of plebeian sexuality, embodiment, and sociability, all while enforcing late colonial racial policies amid frequent violent resistance from the populace.In The Enlightened Patrolman Nicole von Germeten guides readers through Mexico City’s efforts to envision and impose modern values as viewed through the lens of early law enforcement, an accelerated process of racialization of urban populations, and burgeoning ideas of modern masculinity. Germeten unfolds a tale of the losing struggle for elite control of the city streets. As surveillance increased and the populace resisted violently, a pause in the march toward modernity ensued. The Enlightened Patrolman presents an innovative study on the history of this very early law enforcement corps, providing new insight into the history of masculinity and race in Mexico, as well as the eighteenth-century origins of policing in the Americas.

In the 1940s, as Mexican families trekked north to the United States in search of a better life, tens of millions also left their towns and villages for Mexico’s major cities. In Mexico City migrant families excluded from new housing programs began to settle on a dried-out lake bed near the airport, eventually transforming its dusty plains into an informal city of more than one million people.In Informal Metropolis David Yee uncovers how this former lake bed grew into the world’s largest shantytown-Ciudad NezahualcÓyotl-and rethinks the relationship between urban space and inequality in twentieth-century Mexico. By chronicling the residents’ struggles to build their own homes and gain land rights in the face of extreme adversity, Yee presents a hidden history of land fraud, political corruption, and legal impunity underlying the rise of Mexico City’s informal settlements. When urban social movements erupted across Mexico in the 1970s, Ciudad NezahualcÓyotl’s residents organized to demand land, water, and humane living conditions. Though guided by demands for basic needs, these movements would ultimately achieve a more lasting significance as a precursor to a new urban citizenry in Mexico.In the first comprehensive history of modern housing in Mexico City, Yee challenges widely held assumptions about urban inequality and politics in Mexico.

Strength from the Waters is an environmental and social history that frames economic development, environmental concerns, and Indigenous mobilization within the context of a timeless issue: access to water. Between 1927 and 1970 the Mayo people-an Indigenous group in northwestern Mexico-confronted changing access to the largest freshwater source in the region, the Fuerte River.In Strength from the Waters James V. Mestaz demonstrates how the Mayo people used newly available opportunities such as irrigation laws, land reform, and cooperatives to maintain their connection to their river system and protect their Indigenous identity. By using irrigation technologies to increase crop production and protect lands from outsiders trying to claim it as fallow, the Mayo of northern Sinaloa simultaneously preserved their identity by continuing to conduct traditional religious rituals that paid homage to the Fuerte River. This shift in approach to both new technologies and natural resources promoted their physical and cultural survival and ensured a reciprocal connection to the Fuerte River, which bound them together as Mayo.Mestaz examines this changing link between hydraulic technology and Mayo tradition to reconsider the importance of water in relation to the state’s control of the river and the ways the natural landscape transformed relations between individuals and the state, altering the social, political, ecological, and ethnic dynamics within several Indigenous villages. Strength from the Waters significantly contributes to contemporary Mexicanist scholarship by using an environmental and ethnohistorical approach to water access, Indigenous identity, and natural resource management to interrogate Mexican modernity in the twentieth century.

In the decades following the 1910 Mexican Revolution, Guadalajara faced immense demographic and economic transformation, stunning both longtime residents and new arrivals. The city’s population nearly tripled from 1920 to 1950, and the resultant population boom strained government resources and challenged living standards for all.In Conflict and Correspondence Jason H. Dormady examines the critical transition period when Guadalajara lost control of urban growth after 1939 and when the newly empowered state and federal governments began to exercise immense control over the development of the city in 1947. As the city changed around them, residents used petitions and letters to municipal officials to help address their feelings of alienation, isolation, and separation from the community around them. Petitions took the form of sensate, moral, recreational, spiritual, and gendered arguments about creating livable communities and avoiding the disorientation experienced by urban transformation. In the context of infrastructure failures, tight housing markets, and a dramatic aesthetic transition, petitions on these topics reinforced to residents-and, they hoped, city officials-their belonging to the community. Resident petitions reveal how everyday people lived the consequences of the 1910 revolution as they advocated for shaping space and building place in midcentury Guadalajara.

The interpretation of the revisionist historiography of the Mexican Revolution (1910–17) has focused primarily on revolutionary leaders who were men, pushing the heroines of the war to the sidelines. If women happened to be mentioned, they appeared only as symbols, not as social agents. However, the role of the Adelitas, the Cristeras, the Hijas del AnÁhuac, and the women of the Ácrata Group were essential to the revolution. In Freethinkers and Labor Leaders MarÍa Teresa FernÁndez Aceves tells the stories of five militant feminist women who aided in the creation of a modern culture in revolutionary and postrevolutionary Mexico and, in some ways, Latin America as a whole: BelÉn de SÁrraga HernÁndez (1872–1950), Atala Apodaca Anaya (1884–1977), MarÍa Arcelia DÍaz (1896–1939), MarÍa Guadalupe MartÍnez Villanueva (1906–2002), and MarÍa Guadalupe UrzÚa Flores (1912–2004).These five women formed part of two cultural generations that participated together in the Mexican Revolution, in the consolidation of state cooperative institutions, and in the antiestablishment and dissident politics that evolved in the late 1940s. Through these social processes and their struggles as women, mothers, and workers, these women fought for secular education, labor rights, and the civil and political rights of women, redefining cultural and social constructions. Based on original, pathbreaking research, Freethinkers and Labor Leaders demonstrates how five women transformed Latin American society’s ideas of citizenship, femininity, masculinity, and politics.

Strength from the Waters is an environmental and social history that frames economic development, environmental concerns, and Indigenous mobilization within the context of a timeless issue: access to water. Between 1927 and 1970 the Mayo people-an Indigenous group in northwestern Mexico-confronted changing access to the largest freshwater source in the region, the Fuerte River.In Strength from the Waters James V. Mestaz demonstrates how the Mayo people used newly available opportunities such as irrigation laws, land reform, and cooperatives to maintain their connection to their river system and protect their Indigenous identity. By using irrigation technologies to increase crop production and protect lands from outsiders trying to claim it as fallow, the Mayo of northern Sinaloa simultaneously preserved their identity by continuing to conduct traditional religious rituals that paid homage to the Fuerte River. This shift in approach to both new technologies and natural resources promoted their physical and cultural survival and ensured a reciprocal connection to the Fuerte River, which bound them together as Mayo.Mestaz examines this changing link between hydraulic technology and Mayo tradition to reconsider the importance of water in relation to the state’s control of the river and the ways the natural landscape transformed relations between individuals and the state, altering the social, political, ecological, and ethnic dynamics within several Indigenous villages. Strength from the Waters significantly contributes to contemporary Mexicanist scholarship by using an environmental and ethnohistorical approach to water access, Indigenous identity, and natural resource management to interrogate Mexican modernity in the twentieth century.

When late eighteenth-century New Spanish viceregal administrators installed public lamps in the streets of central Mexico City, they illuminated the bodies of Indigenous, Afro-descended, and plebeian Spanish urbanites. The urban patrolmen, known as guarda faroleros, or “lantern guards,” maintained the streetlamps and attempted to clear the streets of plebeian sexuality, embodiment, and sociability, all while enforcing late colonial racial policies amid frequent violent resistance from the populace.In The Enlightened Patrolman Nicole von Germeten guides readers through Mexico City’s efforts to envision and impose modern values as viewed through the lens of early law enforcement, an accelerated process of racialization of urban populations, and burgeoning ideas of modern masculinity. Germeten unfolds a tale of the losing struggle for elite control of the city streets. As surveillance increased and the populace resisted violently, a pause in the march toward modernity ensued. The Enlightened Patrolman presents an innovative study on the history of this very early law enforcement corps, providing new insight into the history of masculinity and race in Mexico, as well as the eighteenth-century origins of policing in the Americas.

Located in the Papantla municipality of the Mexican state of Veracruz, El Tajín is a UNESCO World Heritage site but a lesser-known tourist destination and national symbol. The Indigenous Totonac residents of the region know well that the site’s relative absence from discussions of global archaeology and heritage belies a century of wide-ranging labor, extractive industries, and commodity exchange.Drawing on ethnographic interviews and rarely consulted administrative archives, In the Shadow of El Tajín tells the story of how a landscape of ancient mounds and ruins became an archaeological site, brings to light the network of actors who made it happen, and reveals the Indigenous histories silenced in the process. By drawing on the insights of Indigenous Totonac peoples who have lived and worked in El TajÍn for more than a century, Sam Holley-Kline explores historical processes that made both the archaeological site and regional historical memory. In the Shadow of El Tajín decenters discussions of the state and tourism industry by focusing on the industries and workers who are integral to the functioning of the site but who have historically been overlooked by studies of the ancient past. Holley-Kline recovers local Indigenous histories in dialogue with broader trends in scholarship to demonstrates the rich recent past of El Tajín, a place better known for its ancient history.

Honorable Mention for the 2024 Alfred B. Thomas Book Award Two generals from the northwestern state of Sonora, Álvaro ObregÓn and Plutarco ElÍas Calles, dominated Mexico between 1920 and 1934, having risen to prominence in the course of the Mexican Revolution. Torn between popular demands for ending the privileges of wealthy foreign investors and opposition by a hawkish U.S. administration and enemies at home, the two generals and their allies from their home state mixed radical rhetoric with the accommodation of entrenched interests.In The Sonoran Dynasty in Mexico JÜrgen Buchenau tells the story of this ruling group, which rejected the Indigenous and Catholic past during the decades of the revolution and aimed to reinvent Mexico along the lines of the modern and secular societies in western Europe and the United States. In addition to ObregÓn and Calles, the Sonoran Dynasty included Adolfo de la Huerta and Abelardo L. RodrÍguez, four Sonorans among six presidents in less than two decades. Although the group began with the common aims of nationalism, modernization, central political control, and enrichment, Buchenau argues that this group progressively fell apart in a series of bloody conflicts that reflected broader economic, political, and social disagreements. By analyzing the dynasty from its origins through its eventual downfall, Buchenau presents an innovative look at the negotiation of power and state formation in revolutionary Mexico.

Honorable Mention for the 2024 Alfred B. Thomas Book Award Two generals from the northwestern state of Sonora, Álvaro ObregÓn and Plutarco ElÍas Calles, dominated Mexico between 1920 and 1934, having risen to prominence in the course of the Mexican Revolution. Torn between popular demands for ending the privileges of wealthy foreign investors and opposition by a hawkish U.S. administration and enemies at home, the two generals and their allies from their home state mixed radical rhetoric with the accommodation of entrenched interests.In The Sonoran Dynasty in Mexico JÜrgen Buchenau tells the story of this ruling group, which rejected the Indigenous and Catholic past during the decades of the revolution and aimed to reinvent Mexico along the lines of the modern and secular societies in western Europe and the United States. In addition to ObregÓn and Calles, the Sonoran Dynasty included Adolfo de la Huerta and Abelardo L. RodrÍguez, four Sonorans among six presidents in less than two decades. Although the group began with the common aims of nationalism, modernization, central political control, and enrichment, Buchenau argues that this group progressively fell apart in a series of bloody conflicts that reflected broader economic, political, and social disagreements. By analyzing the dynasty from its origins through its eventual downfall, Buchenau presents an innovative look at the negotiation of power and state formation in revolutionary Mexico.

A broadly researched cultural history, Men of God offers a path to understanding the concept of religious masculinity through an intimate approach to the study of friars and lay brothers in colonial Mexico. Though other scholars have focused on the missionary work of the Augustinian, Franciscan, and Dominican friars, few have addressed their everyday lives and how the internal discipline of their orders shaped them. In Men of God AsunciÓn Lavrin offers a sweeping yet intimate history of the mendicant friars in New Spain from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.Focusing on these individuals’ lives from childhood through death, Lavrin explores contemporaneous ideas, from how to raise a boy to the friars’ training as novices, and the similarities and differences in the life experiences of lay brothers and ordained members. She discusses their sexuality to reveal the challenges and failures of religious manhood, as well as the drive behind their missionary duties, especially in the late seventeenth through the eighteenth centuries. Men of God also explores the concepts and realities of martyrdom and death, significant elements in the spirituality of the mendicant friars of colonial Mexico.

Mexico is a country beset by violence and insecurity, with 98 percent of violent crimes unsolved and 94 percent of crimes unpunished. These staggering statistics illustrate the critical need to understand the history of Mexico’s penal law and justice system, from its evolution and development to its public image and effects on Mexican society.In A Question of Justice Elisa Speckman Guerra elucidates Mexico’s penal law and justice system in the twentieth century from the disciplinary perspectives of both history and law. Looking at the critical period from 1929 to 1971, Speckman Guerra investigates the democratic rule of law and to what extent it was followed within the justice system, as well as judicial proceedings considering the role of gender, class, and race. For that reason, Speckman Guerra also delves into homicides involving very well-known victims, like the famous singer Guty CÁrdenas, and notorious murderers, such as the Olympic medalist Humberto Mariles; the public image of police, judges, defendants, lawyers, and other actors involved in penal processes; and the representations of crime and justice in print and on film. This extensively researched study illuminates the evolution of Mexico’s penal laws, institutions of justice, and sensationalist media and violence, thereby addressing issues that are critically relevant today.

A broadly researched cultural history, Men of God offers a path to understanding the concept of religious masculinity through an intimate approach to the study of friars and lay brothers in colonial Mexico. Though other scholars have focused on the missionary work of the Augustinian, Franciscan, and Dominican friars, few have addressed their everyday lives and how the internal discipline of their orders shaped them. In Men of God AsunciÓn Lavrin offers a sweeping yet intimate history of the mendicant friars in New Spain from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.Focusing on these individuals’ lives from childhood through death, Lavrin explores contemporaneous ideas, from how to raise a boy to the friars’ training as novices, and the similarities and differences in the life experiences of lay brothers and ordained members. She discusses their sexuality to reveal the challenges and failures of religious manhood, as well as the drive behind their missionary duties, especially in the late seventeenth through the eighteenth centuries. Men of God also explores the concepts and realities of martyrdom and death, significant elements in the spirituality of the mendicant friars of colonial Mexico.

In the 1940s, as Mexican families trekked north to the United States in search of a better life, tens of millions also left their towns and villages for Mexico’s major cities. In Mexico City migrant families excluded from new housing programs began to settle on a dried-out lake bed near the airport, eventually transforming its dusty plains into an informal city of more than one million people.In Informal Metropolis David Yee uncovers how this former lake bed grew into the world’s largest shantytown-Ciudad NezahualcÓyotl-and rethinks the relationship between urban space and inequality in twentieth-century Mexico. By chronicling the residents’ struggles to build their own homes and gain land rights in the face of extreme adversity, Yee presents a hidden history of land fraud, political corruption, and legal impunity underlying the rise of Mexico City’s informal settlements. When urban social movements erupted across Mexico in the 1970s, Ciudad NezahualcÓyotl’s residents organized to demand land, water, and humane living conditions. Though guided by demands for basic needs, these movements would ultimately achieve a more lasting significance as a precursor to a new urban citizenry in Mexico.In the first comprehensive history of modern housing in Mexico City, Yee challenges widely held assumptions about urban inequality and politics in Mexico.

The interpretation of the revisionist historiography of the Mexican Revolution (1910–17) has focused primarily on revolutionary leaders who were men, pushing the heroines of the war to the sidelines. If women happened to be mentioned, they appeared only as symbols, not as social agents. However, the role of the Adelitas, the Cristeras, the Hijas del AnÁhuac, and the women of the Ácrata Group were essential to the revolution. In Freethinkers and Labor Leaders MarÍa Teresa FernÁndez Aceves tells the stories of five militant feminist women who aided in the creation of a modern culture in revolutionary and postrevolutionary Mexico and, in some ways, Latin America as a whole: BelÉn de SÁrraga HernÁndez (1872–1950), Atala Apodaca Anaya (1884–1977), MarÍa Arcelia DÍaz (1896–1939), MarÍa Guadalupe MartÍnez Villanueva (1906–2002), and MarÍa Guadalupe UrzÚa Flores (1912–2004).These five women formed part of two cultural generations that participated together in the Mexican Revolution, in the consolidation of state cooperative institutions, and in the antiestablishment and dissident politics that evolved in the late 1940s. Through these social processes and their struggles as women, mothers, and workers, these women fought for secular education, labor rights, and the civil and political rights of women, redefining cultural and social constructions. Based on original, pathbreaking research, Freethinkers and Labor Leaders demonstrates how five women transformed Latin American society’s ideas of citizenship, femininity, masculinity, and politics.

In the decades following the 1910 Mexican Revolution, Guadalajara faced immense demographic and economic transformation, stunning both longtime residents and new arrivals. The city’s population nearly tripled from 1920 to 1950, and the resultant population boom strained government resources and challenged living standards for all.In Conflict and Correspondence Jason H. Dormady examines the critical transition period when Guadalajara lost control of urban growth after 1939 and when the newly empowered state and federal governments began to exercise immense control over the development of the city in 1947. As the city changed around them, residents used petitions and letters to municipal officials to help address their feelings of alienation, isolation, and separation from the community around them. Petitions took the form of sensate, moral, recreational, spiritual, and gendered arguments about creating livable communities and avoiding the disorientation experienced by urban transformation. In the context of infrastructure failures, tight housing markets, and a dramatic aesthetic transition, petitions on these topics reinforced to residents-and, they hoped, city officials-their belonging to the community. Resident petitions reveal how everyday people lived the consequences of the 1910 revolution as they advocated for shaping space and building place in midcentury Guadalajara.

Located in the Papantla municipality of the Mexican state of Veracruz, El TajÍn is a UNESCO World Heritage site but a lesser-known tourist destination and national symbol. The Indigenous Totonac residents of the region know well that the site’s relative absence from discussions of global archaeology and heritage belies a century of wide-ranging labor, extractive industries, and commodity exchange.Drawing on ethnographic interviews and rarely consulted administrative archives, In the Shadow of El TajÍn tells the story of how a landscape of ancient mounds and ruins became an archaeological site, brings to light the network of actors who made it happen, and reveals the Indigenous histories silenced in the process. By drawing on the insights of Indigenous Totonac peoples who have lived and worked in El TajÍn for more than a century, Sam Holley-Kline explores historical processes that made both the archaeological site and regional historical memory. In the Shadow of El TajÍn decenters discussions of the state and tourism industry by focusing on the industries and workers who are integral to the functioning of the site but who have historically been overlooked by studies of the ancient past. Holley-Kline recovers local Indigenous histories in dialogue with broader trends in scholarship to demonstrates the rich recent past of El TajÍn, a place better known for its ancient history.

Mexico is a country beset by violence and insecurity, with 98 percent of violent crimes unsolved and 94 percent of crimes unpunished. These staggering statistics illustrate the critical need to understand the history of Mexico’s penal law and justice system, from its evolution and development to its public image and effects on Mexican society.In A Question of Justice Elisa Speckman Guerra elucidates Mexico’s penal law and justice system in the twentieth century from the disciplinary perspectives of both history and law. Looking at the critical period from 1929 to 1971, Speckman Guerra investigates the democratic rule of law and to what extent it was followed within the justice system, as well as judicial proceedings considering the role of gender, class, and race. For that reason, Speckman Guerra also delves into homicides involving very well-known victims, like the famous singer Guty Cárdenas, and notorious murderers, such as the Olympic medalist Humberto Mariles; the public image of police, judges, defendants, lawyers, and other actors involved in penal processes; and the representations of crime and justice in print and on film. This extensively researched study illuminates the evolution of Mexico’s penal laws, institutions of justice, and sensationalist media and violence, thereby addressing issues that are critically relevant today.

In Rebellious Citizens Ulices Piña shows that democracy in Mexico has never been the exclusive domain of elites, nor confined to the ballot box. Focusing on the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20, Piña explores how citizens forged a substantive democratic culture in the crucible of three successive social upheavals that shook the established social order in the central western state of Jalisco during the 1920s and 1930s—a formative period in the nation's political history.Piña examines how ordinary Mexicans actively shaped the political process, made their own history, and fought for equality in the country's long fight for democracy. The long-term effects of the recurring uprisings in Jalisco were central to the new political system produced by the postrevolutionary state: After each rebellion, authorities consolidated institutional power, elected officials debated the strictures of government, and ordinary people grappled with the promise and limits of political emancipation. Because of the contradictions that arose from the creation of this modern political system, especially those that emerged at the nexus of democratic inclusion and authoritarian rule, seemingly powerless populations claimed equality, exercised participation rights, and demanded respect, even amid the violence and surveillance the state deployed against marginal groups to achieve its goals. Rebellious Citizens brings into focus the struggles of ordinary people to experiment with new ways of doing politics to remake the nation.

The construction of the nation-state, the development of capitalism, and the modernization of society have historically been defined as masculine endeavors, with women on the sidelines. This biography of Juana Catarina Romero (1837–1915) shatters many of the stereotypes of nineteenth-century women and provides a new perspective of women's national agency during a time in which women could neither vote nor hold political office. Romero's breathtaking climb from illiterate cigarette peddler and Liberal spy to wealthy entrepreneur, philanthropist, and, finally, cacica (political boss) of the city of Tehuantepec, despite the opposition of male elites, reveals the growing fluidity of class, race, and ethnicity.Francie Chassen-López's fascinating biography of Romero offers rich insight into the complexities of modernization as it developed on the periphery of Mexico. Romero sought a Tehuantepec-style modernity, a modus vivendi between modernization, Catholicism, and isthmian Zapotec culture. Like her friend President Porfirio Díaz, Romero formed part of a group of ambitious Mexicans of modest origins, forged in civil war, who would build the Mexican nation-state.

The construction of the nation-state, the development of capitalism, and the modernization of society have historically been defined as masculine endeavors, with women on the sidelines. This biography of Juana Catarina Romero (1837–1915) shatters many of the stereotypes of nineteenth-century women and provides a new perspective of women's national agency during a time in which women could neither vote nor hold political office. Romero's breathtaking climb from illiterate cigarette peddler and Liberal spy to wealthy entrepreneur, philanthropist, and, finally, cacica (political boss) of the city of Tehuantepec, despite the opposition of male elites, reveals the growing fluidity of class, race, and ethnicity.Francie Chassen-López's fascinating biography of Romero offers rich insight into the complexities of modernization as it developed on the periphery of Mexico. Romero sought a Tehuantepec-style modernity, a modus vivendi between modernization, Catholicism, and isthmian Zapotec culture. Like her friend President Porfirio Díaz, Romero formed part of a group of ambitious Mexicans of modest origins, forged in civil war, who would build the Mexican nation-state.

In Rebellious Citizens Ulices Piña shows that democracy in Mexico has never been the exclusive domain of elites, nor confined to the ballot box. Focusing on the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20, Piña explores how citizens forged a substantive democratic culture in the crucible of three successive social upheavals that shook the established social order in the central western state of Jalisco during the 1920s and 1930s—a formative period in the nation's political history.Piña examines how ordinary Mexicans actively shaped the political process, made their own history, and fought for equality in the country's long fight for democracy. The long-term effects of the recurring uprisings in Jalisco were central to the new political system produced by the postrevolutionary state: After each rebellion, authorities consolidated institutional power, elected officials debated the strictures of government, and ordinary people grappled with the promise and limits of political emancipation. Because of the contradictions that arose from the creation of this modern political system, especially those that emerged at the nexus of democratic inclusion and authoritarian rule, seemingly powerless populations claimed equality, exercised participation rights, and demanded respect, even amid the violence and surveillance the state deployed against marginal groups to achieve its goals. Rebellious Citizens brings into focus the struggles of ordinary people to experiment with new ways of doing politics to remake the nation.