Routes of Compromise: Building Roads and Shaping the Nation in Mexico, 1917–1952 by Michael K. Bess (review)

Michael K. Bess’s new book on road building in post-Revolutionary Mexico uses the network of federal highways and local dirt roads constructed in the first half of the twentieth century as an apt metaphor for the mediated and uneven penetration of state power during that era. Introducing the reader to actors as varied as peasants building roadblocks and presidents negotiating treaties, Bess ably navigates the vagaries of politics on all scales to illustrate the continually contested nature of state formation. Roads, like the state, were built from both the ground up and the top down.

Bess pays attention to both the shifting bureaucratic forms that governed infrastructural expansion and the myriad ways in which campesinos and laborers asserted influence over both decision-making and the actual construction of new roadways. The book demonstrates that despite calls for a national road building program going back to Venustiano Carranza, the national government only gradually asserted its primacy over infrastructural expansion. Instead, the central government delegated most authority over road building to the states. While it retained a role via the provision of funds and the management of interstate and international highways, state and local governments managed the roads that served the majority of Mexicans. In turn, regional elites and campesinos decided for themselves what roadways were most necessary.

With chapters organized more or less by presidency, the book maintains our standardized periodization of the era. Yet even as chapters introduce us to new presidents and new political orientations toward popular sectors and elites, the centering of state and local politics helps cut through that Mexico City-focused chronology. Yes, Calles’s insistence on nationalizing infrastructure funding and labor procurement mattered. Yes, Cárdenas furthered that nationalization through expropriation and a juridical emphasis on public utility. Yes, Ávila Camacho brought a more business friendly approach that undercut earlier enthusiasm for granting public access to private roads and opened the country to foreign investment. Yet across the presidencies in question, local organization of labor, local economic orientation, and local use of the roads in question proved much more influential over the implementation of road building projects. Only towards the end of the book, with the Alemán presidency, do the federal government’s preferences come to the fore in both Bess’s narrative and the actual experience of people in the provinces. Implicitly, at least, it is only in this final reorganization of bureaucracy and funding mechanisms that Bess asserts a consolidated role for the national government.

While Bess pays attention to marquee federal and international highway projects like the Meridian Highway and the Pan-American Highway, his real contributions come in his explorations of the multitude of regional political and economic projects at play in the post-revolutionary period. Presidents proclaimed the economic and social benefits of road building, but the decentralized nature of the bureaucracies charged with overseeing projects suggests that there was little impulse toward hoarding political power. Instead, the diversity of local and regional roadways that Bess explores helps us understand how a stillconsolidating state gradually extended its reach.

To further explore this process, Bess uses the states of Nuevo León and Veracruz to illustrate two models of political and bureaucratic organization and re-organization. In the first, the centralized nature of both economic and political life in the city of Monterrey dictated the form that the road network and the bureaucracy governing it would take. In the second, the lack of such a preeminent city provided space for a multitude of localized bureaucracies and projects to take shape. Though he never explains whether these represent the two predominant patterns or just two options among many, Bess uses the contrasts between them to illustrate the contingencies of both state making and road building. Bureaucratic norms and the men who embody them matter to Bess. Yet so too do all the spaces that bureaucracies create for...