San Miguel de Allende: Mexicans, Foreigners, and the Making of a World Heritage Site by Lisa Pinley Covert (review)

Emigdio Ledesma Pérez. Stirling Dickinson. Father José Mercadillo Miranda. These are among the "Mexicans and foreigners" College of Charleston assistant professor of history Lisa Pinley Covert features in her economic, political, and cultural study of how a modest Mexican pueblo became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

San Miguel de Allende was not a natural mecca for artists and expatriates. Founded in the sixteenth century, situated in an agricultural and industrial center of the highlands of central Mexico, San Miguel originally produced leather goods, textiles, and metal supplies. By the eighteenth century, after nearby Zacatecas and Guanajuato discovered silver and León and Querétaro surged in manufacturing, San Miguel stalled.

Distant from Mexico City, deriving little assistance from the central government, it still exercised a certain self-sufficiency. It played a role in Mexico's 1821 independence ("de Allende" commemorates local revolutionary hero Ignacio Allende), and it resisted post-revolutionary governmental efforts to eradicate influences of the Catholic Church.

This history as her foundation, Covert focuses her study on twentieth-century San Miguel. As Mexico struggled to forge a modern identity after its revolution, San Miguel struggled to forge a viable economic base.

Emigdio Ledesma Perez, Stirling Dickinson, and José Mercadillo Miranda, who all arrived in San Miguel in the 1930s, represented competing developmental visions for the city. Ledesma, a Mexican textile industry laborer who rose to union leadership, represented the argument for industry. Dickinson, a privileged American who established an art institute and advertised San Miguel abroad, represented an international, architectural preservation, arts, and tourist-attracting model. Mercadillo, a multilingual, Guanajuato priest who cozened the Mexican government into restoring a sanctuary for pilgrims' retreats, represented a traditional conservative religious model.

In various iterations, these visions grappled with each other throughout the century. Industry and agriculture withered, however, and tourism for colonial architecture and Mexican culture won out. But that was not without its problems. One was the conflict between traditional, conservative, patriarchal Mexican mores and those of the liberal international community; another conflict arose because of the shift in occupational opportunity. Work in industry and agriculture dried up as the female-oriented, tourism-supporting service industry grew, and large numbers of men left San Miguel for the United States.

As the century wore on, the burgeoning gringo population demanded developed-world city services and infrastructure. However, it also provided initiative and funds to improve weak education and social services. Thus, according to Covert, two service economies evolved—one tourist, to serve foreigners; the other philanthropic, to give back to the community. Although fragile and difficult to sustain, these two helped create the environment for the UNESCO designation.

Covert writes that her research on San Miguel de Allende was originally stymied by limited available archival material, so she turned to formal and informal interviews and cultural studies critical analysis for her sources. That contributes to the personal, narrative quality of the writing. Its organization is at times recursive, which can feel repetitive and chronologically blurred, but San Miguel de Allende: Mexicans, Foreigners, and the Making of a World Heritage Site is nonetheless an accessible text, one in which the particulars of the city's identity also reflect larger aspects of Mexico's identity.