Allen Wells

Modernizing Visions, "Chilango" Blueprints, and Provincial Growing Pains: Mérida at the Turn of the Century

El presente articulo arroja luz sobre un capitulo dejado a un lado por la historiografia del Porfiriato: el impresionante desarrollo de las capitales de provincia mexicanas. Centrada su atencion en Merida, Yucatan, hace hincapie en las maneras en que las elites, tanto locales como nacional, compartian una vision modernizadora comun. Tambien ilustra los fracasos y las consecuencias sociales que provocaron los esfuerzos de los gobernantes locales al ajustar el model urbano capitalino a las muy diferentes condiciones en que se encontraba la periferia regional.

Summer of Discontent: Economic Rivalry among Elite Factions during the Late Porfiriato in Yucatán

The past decade has witnessed a rich harvest of regional studies of the Mexican Porfiriato. There are two predominant currents in the recent literature. One group of scholars has focused attention on the political sphere, examining the process whereby the Porfirian central state increased its power at the expense of the regional peripheries. Invariably, the federal cause was advanced by Don Porfirios ability to manipulate local factional struggles, playing off contending parentescos or elite family networks. Another group of historians has explored the external dimension of the Porfirian regional economy, examining patterns of cooperation and conflict between local elites and foreign investors. The contradictory nature of such transnational alliances and their impact on non-elite groups have now been analyzed for several important Porfirian regions.

Entre la aceptacion y el rechazo: America Latina y los refugiados judios del nazismo (review)

exile, migration and the crisis of individual and social identities, go in a similar direction. Of course, Trigo deeply values such theoretical contributions but he proposes to use them according to specific contexts. Thus Trigo poses an alternative way to rethink the constitution of history: from social life, from the record of voices of migrants (the book is organized as a montage where the essays dialogue with those voices), and simultaneously interrogating the ethnographic and socio-cultural conformation of the communities—both real and imaginary communities. To this end, the interdisciplinary frame used by Trigo is reconsidered from the ontological (and theoretical) practiced of everyday life and its remembrances.

Oaxtepec Revisited: The Politics of Mexican Historiography, 1968-1988

Nearly twenty years after the third congress of Mexican and North American historians held a conference on Mexican historiography at Oaxtepec, Morelos, a similar gathering of 150 eminent Mexican, North American, and European scholars returned to that site, October 11-14, 1988, to analyze and critically evaluate what had been published in the field over the last two decades. By a simple twist of fate the first reuni6on (held November 4-7, 1969) and the return to Oaxtepec almost twenty years later came on the heels of the two most important events in recent Mexican history, the massacre at Tlatelolco and the July 1988 elections. The significance of these two milestones and the political crises they engendered, not only shaped the lively discussions among ponentes and comentaristas at both conferences, but as the papers collected in Memorias make clear, they also influenced the course of historical writing over the last twenty years.

Forgotten Chapters of Yucatán's Past: Nineteenth-Century Politics in Historiographical Perspective

Los historiadores contemporaneos han dejado de lado de manera por demas expedita lo que a los historiadores criollos del siglo XIX les toco vivir y sobre lo que se ocuparon de dar cuenta por escrito. Estos olvidados capitulos se volveran de mayor utilidad para los historiadores contemporaneos cuando tomemos lo que ahora sabemos acerca de la historia social, economica y cultural del siglo XIX y lo apliquemos a las cuestiones politicas en los niveles locales, regionales y nacionales.