This volume joins the groundswell of historical studies that views Mexican history from the local level and to some extent from the underside of society. Gil develops his perspective from the municipio of Mascota and the cabecera of the same name, a hundred miles due west of Guadalajara. The town has a current population of approximately 6,000, and the municipio contains just over 15,000 inhabitants. It is a mountainous district and until a half century ago was very isolated.
The author divides his study into three parts: the Porfiriato and the revolution; the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas; and the decade of the 1970s. He focuses attention on such matters as health, land ownership, education, and social patterns as he ranges up and down the social ladder to include arrieros, peons, storekeepers, and hacendados as his subjects. Frequently he contrasts the Mascota story with those of other areas of Mexico. He makes no claim that Mascota is necessarily representative of Mexico’s provinces, wisely pointing out that no definitive judgments are possible until more studies of other locales can be written.
Curiously, he pays little attention to the influence of religion in the lives of Mascotans and, except for one paragraph, he ignores the institution of the church and the role priests might or might not have played in influencing provincial society during the century under study. This neglect, relating to a state that was a seedbed of religious rebellion in the 1920s, leaves an unfortunate gap.
One could also wish that the author had given more attention to the revolutionary period from 1910 to 1917. How many Mascotans left to join the ranks of the various factions, and to which factions did they adhere? Only one combatant, a son of a local merchant, receives notice. Was he the only one who fought? And if there were others, did they return or go elsewhere after the wars? If they returned, why did they not serve as agents of change?
Gil’s book is not political history. Rather it is more an analysis of social, cultural, and economic patterns set against the background of political events. Sometimes the patterns are affected to some degree by the larger, distant, “national” events; at other times, Mascota seems to have been immune. The author proposes that for the isolated district there were two periods of major change: the Spanish conquest of the sixteenth century and the Porfiriato of the late nineteenth. The Mexican Revolution of 1910 did not profoundly affect the municipio and its people. An all-weather road finally came in the 1930s; and some redistribution of lands, although requested by the citizens in the early 1920s, was not implemented until the Cárdenas administration.
Life in Provincial Mexico is firmly based on archival sources and documents generated locally and regionally; in addition, it draws on interviews with Mascota citizens over a six-year period. There are abundant tables and graphs that enhance the well-written text. It is a valuable addition to the growing microhistorical literature on Mexico.
