Linda B. Hall

The Virgin of Guadalupe and the Americas: Migration and Movement

Hall examines the devotion to Mexico’s Virgin of Guadalupe in Spain and then in Mexico during the last six centuries. She draws the attention on how the Virgin was seen as a protector, mother and helper for travelers, pilgrims and migrants, from the Reconquest and Conquest in Spain through Mexico and into the United States. “Guadalupe. Queen of Mexico and the New World” concludes with Pope Francis’s visit to the Virgin of Guadalupe in February 2016, analyzing especially issues of Mexicans and other migrants into the United States.

Satan's Playground: Mobsters and Movie Stars at America's Greatest Gaming Resort (review)

Some elements of the 1950 to 1980 period stand out in Dávila’s treatment of the phases in the two regions’ relations. The pro-Portuguese lobby in Rio de Janeiro and the government in Lisbon were very successful in prolonging Brazilian support for Portuguese colonialism, or at least in encouraging abstention in the United Nations. Very few Brazilians were involved in the openings to Africa, in either the government or society, and almost all of them were white elites based in Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and Brasília. Many of the precepts underlying the openings to Africa, and the resistance to them in Brazil, were symbolic, ideological, illusory, and based on stereotypes and scant mutual information and comprehension. The few black Brazilians who visited Africa discovered there how Brazilian they were, and that race is not culture. African diplomats in Brazil quickly learned from experience the realities of the racial system there and the fallacies in Gilberto Freyre’s racial myths when seen from a black viewpoint. That interchange added to the growing empirical re-examination of race relations in Brazil.

Los origenes de la industria petrolera en México 1900-1925 (review)

Los origenes de la industria petrolera en Mexico 1900-1925. By Joel Alvarez de la Borda. Mexico: Petroleos Mexicanos, 2005. Pp. 308. Illustrations. Tables. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. * This volume is an extremely useful, quick introduction to the history of the oil business in Mexico. At the same time, it offers a short guide to the Archivo Historico de PEMEX. The main body of the volume opens with a long essay by Alvarez de la Borda detailing the major outlines of the history of the petroleum industry from 1900 to 1925. This basic discussion will be helpful for anyone interested in the major outlines of that story, though there is little that will be unfamiliar to professional historians conversant with the topic. The discussion is always measured and careful, avoiding the polemics that often accompany this theme. It would, therefore, be a good introductory text for Spanish speakers.

Deference and Defiance in Monterrey: Workers, Paternalism, and Revolution in Mexico, 1890-1950 (review)

opposition to this ideology, but only in passing. And, thirdly, it is one thing to describe elitist, anti-working class ‘middle-class’ ideology; it is another to accept its assumptions. Thus, as historians have problematically equated home ownership with middle-class status, it is not clear that in fighting for education and shorter hours to “do as we will,” artisans and workers forsook the working class. In addition, representing workers and the new middle as a binary through these conservative voices and in the case of the ‘professionalizing’ engineer, obscures many continuities and murkiness. Scholarship of the last generation has fought against modernization theorists who see the machine and factory as the hallmarks of the Industrial Revolution. Sean Wilentz’s idea of metropolitan industrialization and Raphael Samuels’ seminal History Workshop Journal essay on the Workshop of the World remind us of the overwhelming persistence of handwork in the industrial revolution. Finally, readers of Rice’s account need to consider three issues the book skirts: first, professionalization is a legitimizing project, an identity asserted as part of a status ideology, not itself evidence of the superiority of ‘mind’ work. Second, many emerging ‘professionals’ like engineers were dependent on bosses for a wage or salary, and in time, would consider unionizing themselves. And third, we need to unpack languages of class as markers of difference or as distinct social classes rather than class fractions: how do those imagining themselves as a ‘respectable’ labor aristocracy differ from other workers, what does it mean to say white collar professional-managerial workers hold ‘middle-class values? These questions remain to be interrogated in the history of the role and formation of the middle class.

Revolution, State Building, and Foreign Policy

Book reviewed in this article: n n n nDaniela Spenser, The Impossible Triangle: Mexico, Soviet Russia, and the United States in 1920s