The 1968 publications of John Womack’s Zapata and the Mexican Revolution and Luis González y González’s Pueblo en vilo showed how imaginative research could be used in regional history or “microhistory. The new challenge was vigorously undertaken by many Mexicanists, some seeking support for their revisionist views, others rediscovering Mexico’s past. The nation was parceled in regions, which varied in both accessibility of sources and national political or economic relevance. In some places, like Yucatán, social scientists had already started research, and historians were forced into a useful collaborative enterprise that has produced valuable information, approaches, issues, and debates in Mexican microhistory.
Gilbert M. Joseph’s work is a fascinating and lucid exercise in synthesis and analysis of the most recent Yucatecan historiography written by national and foreign historians and social scientists, and representative of the high quality that Mexican regional research has attained in the past two decades. “The recent boom has seen remarkable progress in professional craftmanship and ingenuity” (p. 129), and Joseph describes its excellence and drawbacks. Part one of the book examines the condition of historical sources and the post-1970 growth of scholarly institutions in Yucatán. It also discusses the pre-1970s major North American works and topics that influenced later Yucatecan research. Part two surveys the early expansion of commercial agriculture, the political economy of monoculture, and the impact of the Mexican Revolution in Yucatán. Throughout the book, Joseph reassesses the topics, the problems, and the debates characterizing current Yucatecan historiography. Moreover, he discusses a new regional periodization, and provides the themes and questions to be researched for a more accurate view of Yucatán’s past that could also help disentangle the webs of Mexican national history.
The author is fair in his treatment of the works analyzed, including his own, criticizing their particular strengths and flaws. He emphasizes that “the henequen boom has received significantly more attention than any other aspect of Yucatán’s modern past” (p. 130), and even implies that a certain bias exists in the latest studies that favor economic and social analysis “of a capitalist development in a dependent economy” (p. 24). The book is a valuable contribution to our knowledge of regional Yucatecan studies. Although mainly relevant for Mexicanists, it presents imaginative and ingenious examples useful for other areas of Latin American historical inquiry. Joseph’s work enriches the field under the premise that “history is ultimately an interpretation, a calculation of probabilities, conditioned in great part by one’s theoretical orientation’’ (p. 91).
