México en sus libros (review)

Given a marked tendency within Latin American historiography classes to assign only works in English, Anglophone historians too often graduate with but a vague notion of the depth and breadth of Spanish-language scholarship. If it has not been translated, goes the implicit assumption, it has not entered the canon. Enrique Florescano and Pablo Mijangos afford a useful antidote to such myopia with México en sus libros, a guide to some 600 available works about Mexico. While chiefly designed for a domestic readership, this compilation conveniently informs the foreigner what Mexico's eminent scholars have been writing—and hence what they are reading. Organized by chronological epoch, and then subdivided by theme, the guide focuses on history but sensibly includes key works in political science, anthropology, literature and other fields. It also embraces a substantial amount of work in translation, which in turn suggests that Mexican historians may well be better versed in the work of their Anglo counterparts than vice versa. It further suggests their greater reverence for classic analyses. One notes that David Brading's early scholarship remains readily accessible to Mexicans, long after Cambridge University Press de-listed the English editions. The same is true of Charles Cumberland's work on the Mexican Revolution.

Any attempt to posit a core library confronts multiple pitfalls, but Florescano and Mijangos succeed in dodging most of them. Their guide forestalls any temptation to indulge in the obscure by limiting itself to books in print. It is less Zeitgeist-driven than one might think, in part as it is based on a Florescano-edited guide (México en 500 libros) first published in 1980 and revised in 1987. It compensates for the authors' lack of expertise in the post-Porfirian era—Florescano is Mexico's leading colonialist, Mijangos a specialist in the nineteenth century—with input from historians of the twentieth century. And it is refreshingly free of elitism. Enrique Krauze, a narrative historian who heads a conservative coterie traditionally at odds with Florescano's left-leaning circle, is well represented; Hugh Thomas, whom U.S. academics often pooh-pooh as a popularizer, earns praise for the elegant style and psychological complexity he brought to La Conquista de México (1994).

A few lacunae do emerge. The mass media are ignored. Coverage of business history, admittedly a meager genre in Mexico, is thin. A misleading single listing for the Colegio de México's Historia de la Revolución Mexicana—which reached 19 volumes not the purported 23, as four never appeared—glosses over the fact that the series' achievements vary greatly; the titles covering 1940 to 1960 are little more than summaries of what appeared in the press. Further, certain Marxist histories prominent in the 1970s and 1980s are absent; they may have fallen out of fashion, but their influence at the public universities still hangs heavy, and some, like Juan Felipe Leal's bestselling La burguesía y el Estado mexicano (1972) remain in print. One might carp that, by limiting themselves to books in print, the authors obscure the importance of some seminal texts, but Florescano in effect pre-empted that problem with his 1995 guide, Historiadores de México en el siglo XX, co-edited with Ricardo Pérez Montfort. In sum, México en sus libros offers to help historians bridge the unfortunate gulf between academies north and south of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo, and as such it belongs on every Mexicanist's shelf.