Mexico's Crucial Century, 1810-1910: An Introduction (review)

Colin M. MacLachlan and William H. Beezley have collaborated before in producing introductory textbooks for classroom use, and in this book they have turned to Mexico's nineteenth century, following the usual periodization that dates it from the beginning of the Wars of Independence to the beginning of the Revolution. Although very well written, the volume lacks adequate copyediting and presents a number of typos and missing words as well as a number of proper names given with surnames only. There are very few notes, and suggested readings are limited to English-language titles. The volume deftly skirts some of the complex political narrative related to this century, but at the same time, perhaps unavoidably, it often seems too brief to allow the neophyte to absorb the narrative.

Topical coverage after the 1847 war with the United States is fuller than that for the earlier period. But as the narrative enters the age of Porfirio Díaz, starting in 1876, it becomes so much more detailed that altogether half the volume relates to the Porfiriato. Coverage of the Porfirian age is excellent and discusses the achievement of national order, peace, and consolidation, as well as labor, women, education, social attitudes, foreign relations, economic development, and the "fatal vulnerabilities" of the Pax Porfiriano. Even so, since more pages are devoted to this period than to the three-quarters of a century preceding it, the book should be considered an introduction to the Porfirian age rather than to the nineteenth century. This is disappointing: if the nineteenth century is "Mexico's crucial century,"—and I agree that it is—it is also one of the least studied centuries of Mexican history. And the period between 1821 and 1835 (to which only about 31 of the book's 296 pages are devoted) is the first formative chapter of national history and identity and the key to the origins of most of the major issues that would recur during the course of the century and beyond. Four different constitutions were adopted before 1876. Mexico was a monarchy on two occasions, a federal republic on three occasions, a central republic once, and a dictatorship twice, and there were three civil wars. It is also beginning to emerge, from the work of Will Fowler and his group, that the pronunciamiento, that unique Mexican form of armed political protest, dominated the period between 1824 and 1876, during which time there were more than 1,500 of them. Fowler's work began to appear in the same year as MacLachlan and Beezley's book (and from the same press), but even so the phenomenon of the pronunciamiento is not addressed anywhere in this volume, although some individual instances are).

Where the coverage in this book is more detailed or multidimensional, that is, in the four chapters on the Porfiriato, the treatment is thoughtful, balanced, and up to date. That portion can be used to provide students with an overview of the Porfiriato. Throughout the book there is special reference to social, political, and economic relations in the border region with the United States that readers will find enlightening and instructors can use to develop discussions about what MacLachlan and Beezley in another book called "greater Mexico." It is disquieting, however, that the sparse treatment of the first decades of the national era will not prepare the novice reader to contextualize the Porfiriato and the Revolution, which were of course attempts to deal with the issues originating in the earlier years.