Yankee Don't Go Home!: Mexican Nationalism, American Business Culture, and the Shaping of Modern Mexico, 1920-1950 (review)

The story of the incursion of American capitalism in Latin America has sharply divided Latin Americanists for decades: some see this process as one of modernization, while others underline developing countries' increasing dependency on their northern neighbor. Historians of modern Mexico are also at odds on the subject. But during the last decade, scholars influenced by the new cultural history have used more nuanced approaches to reevaluate the spread of U.S. capitalism southward, hoping to debunk the binary opposition between resistance and domination. Julio Moreno's excellent Yankee Don't Go Home! is part of this trend. According to Moreno, despite the nationalization of U.S. oil companies in 1938, American business culture was not antithetical to Mexican nationalism and revolutionary rhetoric. He asserts that "Americans and Mexicans consciously 'syncretized' values and practices as they insisted that modern industrial capitalism was mutually beneficial to Mexico and the United States" (p. 6). This close collaboration between political leaders and capitalists from both countries was prompted, according to the author, by the fact that every Mexican president from the 1920s to 1950 saw the progression of industrial capitalism as the most important tool to achieve social justice and other ideals of the revolution. Americans, on the other hand, were concerned with the increasing German influence south of the border, which had both economic and geopolitical consequences.

The author's meticulous research in a wide variety of archives— corporate, governmental, and religious—sheds light on this new form of collaboration between the United States and Mexico, which overshadowed the dollar diplomacy and "big stick" politics of previous American administrations. Moreno documents how Nelson Rockefeller's rejuvenated vision of the "Good Neighbor Policy" and efforts made by American business leaders and Mexican advertisers allowed for the creation of a breathing space where the most conflicting aspects of this collaboration could be mediated by amalgamating American and Mexican culture. One of the most significant contributions of this study is in its innovative conceptualization of this process. Moreno employs the concept of the "middle ground," first elaborated by Richard White in his study of the cross-cultural adaptations necessary for the French and the Great Lake Indians to carry out commercial exchanges during the colonial period (The Middle Ground, 1991). Moreno rightfully points out this concept's utility in the context of postrevolutionary Mexican reconstruction by explaining that the middle ground "suggests that 'agency' exists in a specific multifaceted context in which power, agency, and ideology become muted in a 'hypereal,' to use Baudrillard's phrase, to the extent that, at the cultural level, the lines between Mexican and American, as well as the hierarchical imperial power structure, become blurred" (p. 238). Using this concept, the author successfully demonstrates throughout the seven chapters of the book that the shaping of modern Mexico was neither dominated by United States's dictates, nor completely devoid of American influence, as Mexican nationalist rhetoric claims.

The structure of the book, being well balanced between context and case studies, clarifies and strengthens Moreno's thesis. The two first chapters introduce the Mexican and American contexts. He clarifies the active role played by the Mexican state in the promotion of industrial capitalism—in comparison to the role of the state in the United States—and how the political elite filtered this agenda through nationalist and revolutionary rhetoric. His discussion of liberalism is particularly useful to understanding how ideological continuities from the nineteenth century could be maintained without undermining the dominant discourse about the revolution. While other historians have successfully analyzed American incentives to pay more attention to Mexico during World War II, Moreno's examination of the role played by the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA) in the promotion of a more "progressive" form of diplomacy...