The process of how the frontier became a border serves as the unifying concept for Juan Mora-Torres’s analysis of nineteenth-century Nuevo León. Mora-Torres expands upon historical understandings of 1848 by illustrating its long-term implications for Nuevo León. The border’s formation brought about a process of political centralization that led to Nuevo León’s successful but uneven integration into global capitalism by the end of the Porfiriato. The book illustrates how political and economic forces on the international and national level converged to transform local contexts, both urban and rural, in the formation of modern Nuevo León.
The author’s placement of the border within a national narrative contextualized through the lens of Mexican regional history is a significant contribution to the growing literature on Porfirian nation-state formation and modernization. While others have explored similar topics, Mora-Torres adds an aggressive application of divergent historical approaches. Political, business, urban, agrarian, working-class, and “new” histories...
