Measuring Up addresses a central characteristic of Mexico — that growing numbers of Mexicans lived in poverty throughout the country’s national history — from multidisciplinary perspectives. Challenging traditional historiography’s inadequate measurements of and explanations for persistent and growing poverty and inequality in Mexico, Mora-may López-Alonso turns to a methodology that blends biology, economics, and history, contributing to the emerging field of historical anthropometry.
The first section reviews reforms and policies aimed at poverty alleviation from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. Through secondary literature, López-Alonso argues that the growth in poverty from the mid-nineteenth century on was rooted in anticlerical liberal reforms that decimated the religious institutional safety net, with secular welfare organizations unable or unwilling to replace religious institutions in providing charity until after 1930. López-Alonso offers a lively synthesis of a century of liberal policy from the Bourbons to the Porfirians that redistributed wealth to a...
