This collaborative effort, in addition to providing valuable case study details on an important Mexican region in the national period, seeks to demonstrate the fundamental bases of regional historical study: the region as the appropriate scale to illuminate the underlying processes at work in the nation and an intense utilization of local primary documents. This anthology on the Northeast, centered in Monterrey, rigorously and successfully attends to these guidelines, though with some unevenness in the use of primary evidence.
Mario Cerutti, the coordinator, has crafted a unified spatial and temporal framework, centered on the spread of modern capitalism in the regional economy. Subthemes and important historical figures are presented, often overlapped, and even later reprised in a subsequent chapter. The reader is taken into varied facets of the regional experience, but with the larger whole kept continually in focus.
The initial study, of the conflict over land tenure and water use in the first 50 years after independence, sets a solid tone for the blending of larger themes and local documentation. Unfortunately, the examination of the corollary struggle to expel the “indios bárbaros,” which follows, fails to move beyond a string of incidents knit together narratively. The studies of Generals Gerónimo Treviño and Francisco Naranjo as entrepreneurial prototypes (by Cerutti), of the rise of citrus estates in one district as an example of the general Porfirian economic transformations, and of the North American investor’s role, flesh out the process of the capitalization of the regional economy. They offer a wealth of illustration from the local archives. The impact of the Mexican Revolution (in both its armed and its consolidation phases) on this larger process is measured through a reconsideration of the citrus industry (which provides a few collective statistics but is largely void of concrete, human examples), and the responses of two of the principal industrial concerns in Monterrey. This last study employs extensive documentation to contrast their divergent responses to the new revolutionary ruling groups with their similar strategies in facing the emerging workers’ movement.
Despite the book’s notable achievements in binding together more than a century of regional history around a common theme, two important failures in continuity appear. The conclusion of the initial study that a new social group emerged at midcentury with the changes in land tenure and water use of the Reforma period is ignored. Indeed, there are frequent inferences in later chapters that regional entrepreneurship was somehow immaculately conceived in the late nineteenth century, without prior ancestry. Secondly, though family connections are noted or suggested in several of the studies, they are not systematically analyzed. Those connections may very well have played an important role in the century-long transformation of the regional economy.
