The Sausage Rebellion: Public Health, Private Enterprise, and Meat in Mexico City, 1890–1917 (review)

In this short but densely packed, wide-ranging, and ambitious work, Jeffrey Pilcher underlines the new directions that historical research and writing have taken in recent years through a careful and documented study of meat production, commercialization, consumption, and state regulation in Mexico City during the final decades of the Porfirio Díaz regime (1876–1910) and the armed phase of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920). The author, who has also written !Que vivan los tamales¡ Food and the Making of Mexican Identity (1998), explores in this welcome contribution the ways in which the meat trade affected mass behavior, political power, and ethnic identity through the analysis of many different stories. Thus, The Sausage Rebellion comprises the "social history of the Mexico City slaughterhouse" (p. 4); the "business history of the meat sector that throws light on the process of industrialization during the Porfirian era" (p. 5); the "political history of state power and regulation" (p. 7); and the "cultural history of the practices of meat consumption in Mexico and how they helped to shape the political arena" (p. 9).

In the first chapter Pilcher outlines the colonial and early republican origins of the Porfirian meat trade; explores the activities of livestock merchants, meat cutters, butchers, city officials, and consumers in this trade; and stresses that despite the "divisions of class, gender and ethnicity in the access to meat, late-nineteenth-century Mexicans shared a number of food habits, particularly the desire for freshly slaughtered beef" (p. 25). Chapter 2 is a study in great detail of the ill-fated attempts of the city government to modernize the meat supply by replacing the old municipal slaughterhouse, as well as the political and business underpinning that made possible the construction of one of the major investments of Mexican modernity, the Peralvillo slaughterhouse. Chapter 3 explores the motives of city officials who decided to turn the slaughterhouse over to private contractors—notably to Alberto Terrazas and Enrique Creel—and the larger plan of establishing a national meatpacking trust that led to protests by local butchers and to clandestine slaughter. According to Pilcher, the most serious threat to the Terrazas-Creel clan came from the competition of foreign businessmen, notably John DeKay and his Mexican National Packing Co. This company began to operate in Mexico in 1908 with the support of the Chicago meatpacking interests, and promised consumers that it would supply only clean, wholesome, and refrigerated meat in accordance with "U.S. standards of hygiene" (p. 131). DeKay's company was constantly questioned by Mexico City's newspapers and by consumers, and Mexican businessmen used their political connections to force the foreign company to buy out their interests in Mexico City's slaughterhouse. The final chapter narrates the effort of livestock importers, retail meat cutters, and slaughterhouse workers to regain control of Mexico City's meat supply. Resorting to sabotage, union actions, attacks on retail shops, and attempts to murder foreign plant managers, the sausage rebellion adopted a "revolutionary language" in its attacks on the foreign company, and insisted on the rights of "citizens to carry out their traditional meat trades" (p. 183), putting an end to the Mexican National Packing Co. and its campaign to shift consumer tastes from fresh to refrigerated meat.

This book reveals a number of interesting aspects of Mexico's public health policies and programs during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the frustrated attempts of health professionals, veterinary medicine, and scientific knowledge to screen livestock for dangerous diseases; the conflicts that arose among health inspectors, butchers, workers, and consumers over the selection of healthy livestock; and the numerous attempts of health professionals to reclaim authority over the meat-trade market in an effort to protect the health and well-being of consumers. Overall, The Sausage Rebellion is a very well...