The Geography of Central America and Mexico: A Scholarly Guide and Bibliography by Thomas A. Rumney (review)

Once upon a time, having a scholarly bibliography was absolutely essential for graduate training. Many members of my generation counted on this resource. It was usually a book housed in the reference section of the library, or perhaps a faculty member had one and would guardedly share it with graduate students. With the advent of the Internet, however, these types of bibliographies seem to have become less common.

Thomas A. Rumney has assembled a comprehensive collection of geographic references that are germane to Central America and Mexico. The book is organized along nine chapters. It begins with one titled “The Region as a Whole”, and then follows Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and all the way down (in latitude) to Panama. Citations (non-annotated) follow the University of Chicago format, with authors listed first, then the article title, followed by journal, volume, and publication year.

The format is standardized in each chapter by commencing with a section entitled general works, which constitutes atlases and graphic presentations, followed by books, monographs, and texts, scholarly articles and book chapters, cultural and social geography, economic geography, historical geography, physical geography, political geography, and urban geography. Each of these major headings is further subdivided by secondary headings. For example, under the major heading ‘physical geography,’ the subsections include general works, biogeography, climatology, geomorphology, hydrology, soils, and theses and dissertations. Each other sub discipline in geography has a similar breakdown.

By my rough count, approximately 200 journals were covered in this compilation, of which about 12 percent were from non-English sources (Dutch, Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese; I noticed that most Romance language citations lacked appropriate accent marks). I confess that I probably have not opened more than half of these journals at any time during my career. However, they appear to provide a fair representation of topics that will interest both human and physical geographers. In all, I estimate that there are more than 2,800 citations included in this bibliography that spans contributions from the 19^th century up until recent years. Because the topical listing of the works, a subject index is not included as it would be redundant. There is, though, an author index with more than 2,100 entries.

One wonders whether or not the purchase of this book (just under $100 USD) is something that could not easily be turned into an online PDF file (but monetizing it would be challenging for the publisher). Curiously, the e-book is only a penny less than the cloth copy, which means that most masters or doctoral students will probably be unable to buy the work. Usually, e-books are considerably discounted from the hard-copy price and the publisher’s pricing strategy is very unorthodox.

I spot-checked what I thought would be a couple of classical works from Guatemala that date to the 1940s and, lo and behold, was pleasantly pleased to find that reference there. I did the same with a few key works in Mexico and Costa Rica. However, I noticed a few journals that cover geographic topics (like the Colegio Mexiquense’s publication of Espacio, Territorio y Sociedad) were not included.

This is a painstakingly documented monograph. Latinamericanists geographers, graduate students, and scholars in allied fields will find this work to be of value. It can provide a metric for writing certain literature reviews, providing background for graduate student work, and for tenure and promotion reviews. Most of the dissertations noted were written at North American universities; it would be have been useful to include in-country graduate theses, though the compilation of those works would be a daunting task. Another element that would improve the book would be a sentence or two about each of the works listed. That however, is the task of another and different (annotated) bibliography...