El Porfiriato (review)

Between l876 and l9l0, President Porfirio Díaz and his policymakers transformed Mexico to an extent rarely seen in post-colonial Latin America. Revolution brought his swift and stunning downfall. But Díaz's legacy endured and, like Perón or Pinochet, both the dictator's contemporaries and succeeding generations have grappled with the nature and consequences of his rule. This historiographical essay—part of CIDE's Herramientas para la Historia series—analyzes three generations of scholarship on this watershed period in Mexican history.

The authors divide their labor into two chapters, replete with exhaustive footnotes and a forty-five-page bibliography. Chapter 1 surveys the extant historiography. A much shorter, concluding chapter suggests future paths of research. The authors are well-suited for the task. Tenorio (University of Chicago) specializes in the history of ideas, while Gómez (CIDE, Mexico City) is one of Mexico's leading scholars of Porfirian-era business and labor history. These themes and the period's political and cultural history get the most attention. What is missing, both from the historiography and the authors' prescriptions for future scholarship, is more research on foreign policy, the military, and internal migration/emigration studies. (One could begin at the under-utilized Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores archives.) Overall, scholars versed in this historiography will gain few insights here, as they would from two other titles in CIDE's series: those by Elisa Servín (La oposición política [2006]) and Ben Vinson and Bobby Vaughan (Afroméxico [2004]).

The authors' extraordinary bibliography may prove as valuable as the text. The section starts with a concise overview of archives and libraries, mainly in Mexico City and at U.S. universities. It then surveys three generations of books, articles, and theses, divided by category. Like the essay, the bibliography falls a bit short on regional history. But I can think of few better places for graduate students to start preparing for oral exams or dissertation research on the Porfiriato.