Stephen R. Niblo’s book is the first of two he plans on Mexico’s evolution after 1938, when the country embarked on what he considers a flawed program of industrialization that ultimately yielded only poverty and environmental degradation. The second volume will focus on domestic politics, but here the emphasis is on the interaction among policymakers and business people in the United States and Mexico during the 1940s, as wartime cooperation eased the way for massive levels of foreign investment after 1945. Niblo contends that although the perceived interests of both countries converged during this period, U.S. officials always set the rules of the game, and Mexican elites internalized them, eagerly embracing the new U.S. informal empire.
Niblo bases his study on a large array of manuscript sources, including the papers of Mexican and U.S. presidents and of George S. Messersmith, who arrived in Mexico City in 1942 to coordinate Mexico’s contribution to the Allied war effort. Niblo makes clear that even before the United States entered World War II, Mexico offered its full support. “There was to be no neutrality, much less any attempt to use the northern neighbor’s problems to avenge old wrongs” (p. 63).
The three chapters dealing with Mexico’s wartime collaboration with the United States are the strongest in the book. Overall, however, the book suffers from several weaknesses. First, Niblo sees Mexico’s commitment to industrialization with U.S. support as a disastrous shift from the economic nationalism of the Cárdenas administration, which favored autonomous industrial development. Yet he fails to make a convincing case for Cárdenas’ radicalism, which he acknowledges was tempered by moderation even before 1938. As an example, he cites the outcome of a conflict between the Monterrey Group and the Confederation of Mexican Workers in 1935-36. “In retrospect the battle seemed to be something of a turning point as the president began to pull back from the more radical experiments of the earlier years, except for the petroleum expropriation, which is best viewed as a special case” (p. 169). The reader is thus left wondering whether the post-1940 policies represented as drastic a shift as Niblo indicates. A related weakness is that Niblo mentions but never systematically addresses the alternative paths that might have been taken or their viability. Finally, the text often lacks coherence, as the author shifts from topic to topic without adequate transition or apparent logic.
As a result of these flaws, the author’s argument is less persuasive than it might have been. Nevertheless, he has amassed a large amount of valuable information on U.S.-Mexican political and economic relations in the 1940s, and for this reason alone his book should be of interest to all students of modern Mexico and U.S.-Latin American relations.
