Race, Nation, and Market: Economic Culture in Porfirian Mexico (review)

In Race, Nation, and Market: Economic Culture in Porfirian Mexico, Richard Weiner provides an innovative exploration of turn-of-the century Mexican economic history. Focusing on the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, Weiner analyzes the way that the market functioned as contested signifier. Rather the empirical approaches to Mexican economic history that characterize the scholarship of John Coatsworth or Stephen Haber, Weiner examines the discursive construction of various meanings associated with the concept of the market and emphasizes the relationship among these constructions and political positions in the larger social field.

In the first chapter, Weiner describes his methodology, explaining that he "analyzes discourse," or more specifically "public discourse" (7), in order to examine the competing notions of market that circulated in the Porfirian period and the rhetorical defects achieved by these notions in the struggle for power. Inspired by the scholarship of Albert Hirschman and of Ricardo Salvatore (the latter also examines economic discourse in Latin America), Weiner notes that "the market is not a physical place where goods are exchanged but a symbolic site where the identities and programs of social movements are constructed" (5). Following from this insight, he identifies a series of different markets that are discursively contested during these decades: "land, labor, capital, commodity, and international markets" (8). According to Weiner, at this particular historical moment, the market and economic discourse became central for a variety of reasons. Unprecedented political stability had finally allowed for attention to economic matters. International economic changes underscored the importance and impact of modernization processes. State emphasis on material progress directly linked the nation to notions of market success and competition. And discourses critical of the state also used the market rhetorically to formulate justifications for dissent and opposition. In order to follow through on this analytical model in the ensuing chapters, Weiner identifies principal symbolic uses of the market formulated from three particular social positions: developmentalist liberalism, social Catholicism, and radical liberalism/anarchism. Throughout, Weiner emphasizes the ways that the symbolic conceptualizations of market participate in the notions of identity, serve to construct racialized identities (especially of Mexico's indigenous population), and supposedly affect behavior depending on the social power attributed to the market.

In chapters two and three, Weiner examines the establishment discourse of the group known as los científicos, the members of the ruling elite who were "scientific" because of their positivist legacy. Weiner takes a term from Alan Knight and characterizes this group as "developmentalist liberals" (21–22): they were interested in the creation, not distribution, of wealth as the key to Mexico's progress. In chapter two Weiner attends particularly to the domestic policy implications of developmentalist liberalism: market rhetoric emphasizes discipline and control with the goal of creating a manageable, educated labor force able to increase national productivity. Weiner concludes that although nineteenth-century market theories such as those of Adam Smith and David Ricardo attributed power to the market and the inevitable emergence of homo economicus, the Mexican versions of this liberal discourse attenuated the power attributed to the market and noted the failure of the market to conjure individuals economically driven to maximize profit. Indians in particular, with communal lands and misunderstood behavior, were outside the market system and thus developmentalist liberals supported state intervention through practices such as forced labor, vagrancy laws, mandatory consumption, labor contractors, and education. The hacendado class and the hacienda system were diagnosed as needing more forceful state intervention to inculcate a capitalist ethic of productivity. In chapter three, Weiner keeps his focus on the científicos, but turns toward international markets. With the dramatic changes in global flows of capital, labor, and goods in the late nineteenth century, the international markets had an immense impact on Mexico. Whereas nineteenth-century liberalism ascribed to the concept of competition in a free market, Weiner notes that developmentalist liberalism, influenced by social Darwinism and the desire to consolidate national sovereignty, called for strong state intervention...