Mark Wasserman

The expulsion of Mexico's Spaniards, 1821-1836

Drawing on manuscript records in the Mexican national archives. Harold Sims provides an account of the expulsion laws passed in 1827-29 and 1833-34 and the chaos they caused in the new Mexican republic. Mexicos colonial experience had left a bitter legacy. Many believed that only the physical removal of the old colonial elite could prevent the consolidation of a new economic and political oligarchy in the republic. While expulsion seemed to provide an answer, the expulsion decrees met stiff resistance and caused a tug-of-war between enforcement and evasion that went on for years. The issue embroiled national and local governments in partisan battle. Friendship, family influence, intrigue and bribery all played a role in determining who left and who stayed. Because exemptions were granted for illness, a thriving business emerged among corrupt physicians. The expulsion issue also fueled rebellions, with anti-Spanish feeling often the proncipal motive for insurgency. After years of struggle, the movement died down. but not until three-quarters of Mexicos peninsulars had been forces to leave. Expulsion crippled a once flourishing economy by spurring massive capital flight. Spaniards were virtually eliminated from the military, the bureaucracy, the mining industry and the Church; they survived only in commerce. The primary victim was republican government itself in 1834, conservatives sought to halt social upheaval by installing a dictatorship. This study analyzes the strength of the Spanish community in the 1820s and 1830s and examines the ramifications of the hostile reaction caused by Mexicos former domination by Spain.

You Can Teach An Old Revolutionary Historiography New Tricks: Regions, Popular Movements, Culture, and Gender in Mexico, 1820–1940

Plutarco Elías Calles and the Mexican Revolution. By Jürgen Buchenau. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefi eld, 2007. Pp. 275.

Enrique C. Creel: Business and Politics in Mexico, 1880–1930

34.95 paper. Bandit Nation: A History of Outlaws and Cultural Struggle in Mexico, 1810–1920. By Chris Frazer. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Pp. 243.

Foreign Investment in Mexico, 1876-1910: A Case Study of the Role of Regional Elites

45.00. Bitter Harvest: The Social Transformation of Morelos, Mexico, and the Origins of the Zapatista Revolution, 1840–1910. By Paul Hart. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. Pp. 328.

In Memoriam: Robert J. Alexander (1918-2010): Pioneer Latin Americanist

42.50 cloth. Sons of the Sierra: Juárez, Díaz, and the People of Ixtlán, Oaxaca, 1855– 1920. By Patrick J. McNamara. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Pp. 296.

Forty Miles from the Sea: Xalapa, the Public Sphere, and the Atlantic World in Nineteenth‐Century Mexico. By Rachel A. Moore. (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2011. Pp. 240.

24.95 paper. The Sausage Rebellion: Public Health, Private Enterprise and Meat in Mexico City, 1890–1917. By Jeffrey M. Pilcher. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. Pp. 245.

49.95.)

29.95 paper. The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940. Edited by Mary Kay Vaughan and Stephen E. Lewis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Pp. 363.

The Mexican Revolution. Volume 1, Porfirians, Liberals, and Peasants. Volume 2, Counter-Revolution and Reconstruction

23.95 paper.

It's Not Personal. . . It's Strictly Business: The Operation of Economic Enterprise in Mexico, during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Enrique C. Creel was Mexicos leading banker, an innovative industralist, venture capitlist, and representative of the nations largest land and cattle owner; he was also the political boss of the state of Chihuahua and the key conciliator of the conflicting intersts of the north and the national regime of dictator Porfirio Diaz. In this essay, Professor Wasserman describes Creels activities, showing how he and his family built the greatest business empire in Mexico before 1910, survived the decade-long destruction of the revolution (1910–20), and rebuilt their empire in the 1920s. Better than any of his contemporaries, Creel combined managerial talent and vision with a mastery of the interplay of politics, regional interests, and foreign capital that comprised his economic entrepreneurship and the special nature of economic entrepreneurship and the intimate relationship between business and politics in pre-and post-revolutionary Mexico.

The bad yankee = El peligro yankee : American entrepreneurs and financiers in Mexico

FOREIGN investment, mostly from the United States, fueled the rapid growth of the Mexican economy under the regime of Porfirio Diaz. By 1910, foreigners had invested well over a billion dollars in Mexicos railroads, mines, and a variety of other undertakings. At the core of the expansion and development of foreign investment was the connection between foreign entrepreneurs and the native elite. This association, worked out over three decades, greatly affected the economic, political, and social development of the nation. The relationship between native elite and foreign entrepreneurs was based on three sets of factors. First, the native elite controlled both the government which in Mexico, on all levels, played an important role in the success or failure of any enterprise and, through their ownership of much of the nations land and mines, the rich natural resources which foreign enterpreneurs sought to develop. Second, the native elite was willing to permit foreigners to develop the nations resources, to participate in a wide range of economic activities, and to dominate certain sectors of the economy, such as mining. The native elite allowed this, because on one hand, one group within the elite, the cientificos , was ideologically committed to the modernization of the country and saw foreign investment as the quickest and most efficient method to modernize and, on the other hand, the traditional groups within the elite saw foreign investment as a means to increase their own incomes (through bribes, commissions, and the sale of their property) and to preserve their traditional privileges. The only conceivable alternative to the development of the nations economy through foreign investment would have been through the expansion of direct government participation in the economy, but this would have required (apart from an implausible ideological reorientation towards the discredited conservatism of an earlier era or the exotic doctrines of European socialism) a considerable redistribution of the nations wealth (through taxation and other means of “forced” savings) to the disadvantage of the elite. The development of Mexicos economy through foreign investment did not disturb the political status quo. Third and finally, foreign entrepreneurs had both the capital and technological know-how to develop the nations resources, neither of which was present in Mexico.