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Ferrocarriles y vida económica en México (1850-1950):
del surgimiento tardío al decaimiento precoz
National Period
Ferrocarriles y vida económica en México (1850-1950): del surgimiento tardío al decaimiento precoz. Edited by Sandra Kuntz Ficker and Paolo Riguzzi. Zinacantepec: Colegio Mexiquense; Mexico City: Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México; Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Xochimilco, 1996. Plates. Tables. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. 384 pp. Paper. For the past several years Sandra Kuntz Ficker and Paolo Riguzzi have been among the most assiduous academic researchers in Mexico on economic history during the nineteenth century and the Porfiriato, particularly with regard to railroads. Like their previous work, this excellent edited collection builds upon the pioneering scholarship of John Coatsworth and others, creating not so much a revision of interpretation as a deepening of domestic contextualization. Moreover, the current volume carries the analysis of Mexican railroads beyond the era of their promotion, construction, and successful operation into their long decline after the Mexican Revolution.
The six essays and conclusion of Ferrocarriles y vida económica en México tell a story, as the subtitle aptly states, of late arrival and premature decline. After a long period of unsuccessful attempts at construction, Mexico's rail system expanded quite rapidly, particularly during the 1880s. Railroads made an enormous yet short-lived contribution to Mexican economic growth. Coatsworth attributed a quarter of the country's productivity gains during the Porfiriato to the railroads. With the revolution came a decline that was never reversed. As one indicator of decay, Kuntz Ficker and Riguzzi calculate that by the middle of the twentieth century, Mexico's railroads spent 12 times as much per kilometer on their operations as they had in 1908 (p. 319).
Following a brief historiographical essay by Sergio Ortiz Hernán, director of the Museo Nacional de los Ferrocarriles Mexicanos, Riguzzi analyzes the economic, social, and institutional weaknesses that retarded both the arrival of the railroad and the diffusion of economic and technological change once it had come. Kuntz Ficker then examines railroad freight classifications and rates during the Porfiriato, concluding that in the main they were both rational and economically reasonable. She disputes the idea that the railroads disproportionately aided exports and impeded the formation of an integrated domestic economy. In a reversal of many long-standing views, Arturo Grunstein Dickter's essay favorably interprets government rail policy during much of the Porfiriato, stressing the learning experience undergone by the Mexican state and the general effectiveness of its regulatory efforts, while criticizing the nationalist "Mexicanization" schemes of José Yves Limantour that resulted in the creation of the Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México by 1908.
The final two essays, one by Guillermo Guajardo Soto and another by Kuntz Ficker and Riguzzi, study in great detail the domestic reasons underlying the lack of "backward linkages" by which railroads might have stimulated Mexican manufacturing during the twentieth century through their own need for steel, machinery, and other products of heavy industry. Due to technological weaknesses, poor state policies, and the attitudes of organized labor, Mexico manufactured only a tiny fraction of its own [End Page 197] rail stock until after midcentury, even though its railroads had literally been falling apart for decades. By the time of World War II, output per employee barely exceeded late Porfirian levels, and over 70 percent of all locomotives were more than 30 years old.
With their consistent attention to detail and their wealth of regional and national data, the essays in Ferrocarriles y vida económica en México constitute an example of the excellent work currently under way in Mexican economic history. The authors are generally cautious about reaching beyond their evidence and make no claim of articulating a comprehensive revisionist interpretation. Many of their arguments concerning government policy and the way in which the railroads influenced specific sectors of Mexican economy and society remain open to discussion. Collectively, these essays highlight the importance of the railroad for Mexico's...
Ferrocarriles y vida economica en Mexico (1850-1950): del surgimiento tardio al decaimiento precoz (review)
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