With Mexico in the 1940s, Stephen Niblo has written an excellent companion volume to his 1995 War, Diplomacy, and Development: The United States and Mexico, 1938–1954. Both books should be read by anyone interested in modern Mexico. The new book covers what one might call Mexico’s long 1940s, from the Cárdenas administration’s right turn in 1938 through the end of the Alemán presidency in 1952; thus, the two volumes share periodization. The two books also use similar sources: Niblo supplements the untrustworthy, sometimes inaccessible, and frequently insufficient documentation available from Mexico’s central government with diplomatic records from Britain and the United States. The two books approach these sources in the same way. Niblo eschews close readings—there’s no postcolonialist discourse analysis here—preferring to take documents more or less at their word. Niblo has written a straightforward, “top-down” history of Mexican politics in this era, but readers should not mistake his...
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