Tools of Progress: A German Merchant Family in Mexico City, 1865-Present (review)

As the title suggests, this book offers a narrative of a German family's endeavours to establish, and then sustain, a prominent commercial presence within Mexico City over the last one hundred and fifty years. Flourishing under the foreign-led economic boom under Porfirio Díaz, the book reveals how the owners of the Casa Böker hardware store subsequently struggled to survive periodic waves of nationalism, civic turmoil, economic downturn, and xenophobia.

The book can be read at different levels. From a critical perspective, it could be said to be an indulgent study of a family's history by one of its own. The author is related to the subjects of his study and he occasionally drifts into lengthy narrative concerning less relevant aspects of his relatives' lives. While this has produced a book which is broadly sympathetic to the family's activities in Mexico, Buchenau must be credited with providing considerable evidence that casts the family in a fairly negative light: its dubious beginnings in arms dealing; its exploitation of Mexican workers; the barely concealed contempt that early generations of the family held for Mexicans; and the anti-Semitic sympathies of those supporting Hitler's rise in Europe. At another level, these same damning characteristics provide a means of understanding the broader experience of many European families living within Mexico City. They could not help but be influenced by socio-political developments across the Atlantic and, indeed, these same developments had serious implications for the foreign contingent of the capital's social elite. The arbitrary violence of the revolution, the growing nationalism of the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas, the economic protectionism of the so-called "Miracle Years," all represented serious challenges to foreigners. The Bökers' and others ability to improvise and adapt to punitive domestic policies was crucial to their economic survival.

Beyond the focus of commerce, the family's plight serves to highlight the broader process of cultural assimilation. Buchenau describes the early generations of the family as members of a "conquistador" enterprise, foreigners determined to live in Mexico for a short period while repatriating profits in readiness for their eventual return to Europe. Such an attitude reflected a common desire among early generations of migrants to cling to their culture through education, social clubs, and commercial networks. While remnants of this self-imposed cultural isolation survived throughout the twentieth century, the book clearly shows how, through a mixture of pressure and free will, later generations of Bökers began to reject the values of their homeland and embrace those of their Mexican hosts.

The writing style is accessible, the content, for the most part, interesting, and the chronological structure of the study lends itself to an appreciation of the periodic traumas that affected the family and the Mexican economy. Although those sections focusing on family details will be of limited interest, the way in which the author uses his study to display the broader range of issues affecting immigrant families will be of interest to anyone studying commercial life in Mexico City, international relations in the twentieth century, and the ways in which migrant families integrate, or otherwise, into the host society.