This regional study demonstrates that Monterrey was one of the few Mexican locales in which a notable network’s hegemony survived the revolution basically intact, and in which its regional autonomy persisted with considerable strength and duration. By the 1940s, this provincial center’s notables too had succumbed. For though its dominant position in the region was preserved, the price was the subordination of its regional autonomy to a centralized political structure with which it was increasingly forced to accommodate.
Spanning the Porfirian, revolutionary, and postrevolutionary periods, Saragoza’s analysis of the Monterrey network’s rise to national prominence in the formation of the modern Mexican private sector—to the point of becoming its “lightening rod”—is articulate, sophisticated, and insightful, though a bit redundant at times. Politics becomes the focus as the study progresses. Yet Saragoza integrates the evolving economic, social, and ideological strands of the network as well. He makes rich use of quantitative data for the Porfiriato.
Where Saragoza’s thesis runs into question is his claim that the Monterrey network’s evolution was unique and its national role paramount. He admits that the assertion of overriding national importance is based largely on inference (p. 209). Few other factors are seriously explored to explain the national private sector’s formation and its resistance to state domination until the accommodation of the 1940s. Moreover, the interpretation for national politics after 1929 relies largely on U.S. diplomatic dispatches and a single newspaper. Saragoza’s claim to the network’s unique formation is undercut by the apparently contradictory assertions of economic diversification and concentration in the manufacturing sector. Mario Cerutti’s collaborative study (El Noreste: Siete ensayos históricos) has amply demonstrated the network’s extensive investments in other sectors, including agriculture, which Saragoza disclaims. And in such diversification, Monterrey notables pursued a path followed by other regional networks. That they attained such a prominent national role in the 1930s does not in itself establish either that the network’s formation was unique, or even that such uniqueness directly led to that national prominence.
