Between 1889 and 1919, Weetman Pearson became one of the world's most important engineering contractors, a pioneer in the international oil industry, and one of Britain's wealthiest men. At the center of his global business empire were his interests in Mexico. While Pearson's extraordinary success in Mexico took place within the context of unprecedented levels of British trade with and investment in Latin America, Garner argues that Pearson should be understood less as an agent of British imperialism than as an agent of Porfirian state building and modernization. Pearson was able to secure contracts for some of nineteenth-century Mexico's most important public works projects in large part because of his reliability, his empathy with the developmentalist project of Mexican President Porfirio Díaz, and his assiduous cultivation of a clientelist network within the Mexican political elite. His success thus provides an opportunity to reappraise the role played by overseas interests in the national development of Mexico.

Liberalism as Utopia challenges widespread perceptions about the weakness of Mexico's nineteenth-century state. Schaefer argues that after the War of Independence non-elite Mexicans - peasants, day laborers, artisans, local merchants - pioneered an egalitarian form of legal rule by serving in the town governments and civic militias that became the local faces of the state's coercive authority. These institutions were effective because they embodied patriarchal norms of labor and care for the family that were premised on the legal equality of male, adult citizens. The book also examines the emergence of new, illiberal norms that challenged and at the end of the century, during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, overwhelmed the egalitarianism of the early-republican period. By comparing the legal cultures of agricultural estates, mestizo towns and indigenous towns, Liberalism as Utopia also proposes a new way of understanding the social foundations of liberal and authoritarian pathways to state formation in the nineteenth-century world.

In early 1914, Clemente Vergara discovered several of his horses missing and reported the theft to local authorities. The Webb County sheriff arranged for the South Texas rancher to meet with Mexican soldiers near Hidalgo to discuss compensation for his loss. Vergara crossed the Rio Grande, soon succumbed to a vicious physical assault, and was jailed. Days after incarceration in Hidalgo, his body was found hanging from a tree. The murder of Clemente Vergara contributed to events that put the United States and Mexico on the brink of war and opened the door for expanded American involvement in Mexico. Texas governor Oscar B. Colquitt seized upon the incident to challenge President Woodrow Wilson—a fellow Democrat—to intervene and even threatened retaliation by the Texas Rangers. Meanwhile, the White House played a larger strategic game with competing factions in the midst of the Mexican Revolution. Wilson’s apparent inaction heightened Colquitt’s demands to guarantee the safety of Americans and their property in the Texas borderlands, and the Vergara affair’s extensive media coverage convinced many Americans that intervention in Mexico was necessary. Author John A. Adams Jr. shows how an otherwise commonplace horse theft and murder revealed a tangled web of international relations, powerful business interests, and intrigue on both sides of the border. Readers will be captivated by Murder and Intrigue on the Mexican Border and the continuing legacy that border events leave on Texas history.

In 1909, young William F. Buckley Sr. (1881–1958), who grew up in the dusty South Texas town of San Diego, graduated from the University of Texas law school and headed for Mexico City. Fluent in Spanish, familiar with Mexican traditions, and soon fit to practice law south of the border, Buckley was headed up the aisle to vast wealth and cultural power. On the way, he took a front-row seat at the Mexican Revolution and played a key role in steering the nascent oil industry through tumultuous and dangerous times. This book for the first time tells the story of the man behind the family that would become nothing short of a conservative institution, reaching its apogee in the career of William F. Buckley Jr., arguably the most prominent conservative commentator of the twentieth century. Buckley witnessed the overthrow and exit of President Porfirio Díaz, the rise of Madero, and the coup of General Victoriano Huerta, all while building the Pantepec Oil Company, the most profitable small petroleum producer in Mexico. He faced down Pancho Villa, survived encounters with hired assassins, evaded snipers in the streets of Veracruz, gambled and won in many a business venture—and ultimately was expelled from the country. As the narrative follows Buckley from his small-town Texas beginnings to the founding of a family dynasty, the streak of independence and distrust of government that would become the Buckley hallmark can be seen in the making. An eventful chapter in the life and career of a singular character, this dramatic account of a man and his moment is a document of political and historical significance—but it is also a remarkable story, told with irresistible brio.

A Companion to Mexican History and Culture features 40 essays contributed by international scholars that incorporate ethnic, gender, environmental, and cultural studies to reveal a richer portrait of the Mexican experience, from the earliest peoples to the present. Features the latest scholarship on Mexican history and culture by an array of international scholars Essays are separated into sections on the four major chronological eras Discusses recent historical interpretations with critical historiographical sources, and is enriched by cultural analysis, ethnic and gender studies, and visual evidence The first volume to incorporate a discussion of popular music in political analysis This book is the receipient of the 2013 Michael C. Meyer Special Recognition Award from the Rocky Mountain Conference on Latin American Studies.

This book examines culture and diplomacy in Mexico’s relations with the rest of Latin America during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940). Drawing on archival research throughout Latin America, the author demonstrates that Cárdenas’s representation of Mexico as a revolutionary nation contributed to the formation of Mexican national identity and spread the legacy of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 beyond Mexico’s borders. Cárdenas did more than any other president to fulfill the goals of the revolution, incorporating the masses into the political life of the nation and implementing land reform, resource nationalization, and secular public education, and his government promoted the idea that these reforms represented a path to social, political, and economic development for the entire region. Kiddle offers a colorful and detailed account of the way Cardenista diplomacy was received in the rest of Latin America and the influence his policies had throughout the continent.

The Mexican Heartland provides a new history of capitalism from the perspective of the landed communities surrounding Mexico City. In a sweeping analytical narrative spanning the sixteenth century to today, John Tutino challenges our basic assumptions about the forces that shaped global capitalism setting families and communities at the center of histories that transformed the world. Despite invasion, disease, and depopulation, Mexico's heartland communities held strong on the land, adapting to sustain and shape the dynamic silver capitalism so pivotal to Spain's empire and world trade for centuries after 1550. They joined in insurgencies that brought the collapse of silver and other key global trades after 1810 as Mexico became a nation, then struggled to keep land and self-rule in the face of liberal national projects. They drove Zapata's 1910 revolution a rising that rattled Mexico and the world of industrial capitalism. Although the revolt faced defeat, adamant communities forced a land reform that put them at the center of Mexico's experiment in national capitalism after 1920. Then, from the 1950s, population growth and technical innovations drove people from rural communities to a metropolis spreading across the land. The heartland urbanized, leaving people searching for new lives--dependent, often desperate, yet still pressing their needs in a globalizing world. --