Don Eugenio Garza Sada

Do commissioned biographies have anything to teach us, or do they only offer self-serving pablum? The question is germane in Mexico, where independently written lives are a scarce commodity. A dearth of quality is especially notable in business biography. In contrast to UK or US traditions, which have produced warts-and-all lives of such titans as Rupert Murdoch and Steve Jobs by writers whose subjects gave them open access, in Mexico the great business families expect from their chroniclers utmost deference.Gabriela Recio Cavazos's Don Eugenio Garza Sada: Ideas, acción, legado is thus a rare creature: a family-commissioned work that, while generally flattering, situates a business leader in an often-tense relationship with the federal government, acknowledges the limits to his iron will, and gives historians plenty to ponder with its main areas of focus: the building of a multi-industrial empire based on the Cervecería Cuauhtémoc, with little help from an interventionist state, and the creation of Mexico's top-ranked private university. The book also features a depth of research and clarity of analysis unusual in Mexican biography.Recio starts her story at its bloody end. When the 81-year-old Eugenio Garza Sada, captain emeritus of the Monterrey industrial elite, was shot during a botched kidnapping in September 1973, the news hit the business community rather in the way that the Tlatelolco massacre of five years earlier appalled students and leftists. The killing was not an anomaly; it numbered among a series of abductions and attacks on businessmen and foreign diplomats made by radicals who allegedly felt themselves empowered by the populist rhetoric of President Luis Echeverría. Hence the author frames Garza Sada's life within a battle of wills between the Monterrey elite and the leftist-statist politicians of Mexico City, a feud that had its origins in the 1920s, when the federal government heavily taxed alcohol, and the 1930s, when President Lázaro Cárdenas allowed scores of strikes against Monterrey's industries.The latter decade saw Eugenio and his brother Roberto take the reins of the family business from their father, Isaac Garza Garza. By then they controlled one-third of Mexico's beer market, with brands such as Bohemia and Carta Blanca, and owned a major glassmaker and a major paper mill. Eugenio continued to grow the enterprise while Roberto continued to diversify it, chiefly via vertical integration, into metalworking (initially for bottle tops) and finance. By their retirement in 1969, Eugenio and Roberto directed some 50 companies, and their Valores Industriales (VISA) holding company was Mexico's largest conglomerate.Told in functional if slightly repetitive prose, the biography is structured thematically as well as chronologically as it tracks its subject's family background and 60-year career. Early chapters on the brewery's Porfirian origins (built on US and German expertise) and the education and professional beginnings of Eugenio (a Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT] graduate) emphasize the cosmopolitan outlook of father and son but also the company's success as a model of Mexican entrepreneurship.Three subsequent chapters follow the evolution of the brewery, examining employee welfare, sales and marketing (Eugenio's forte), and innovation (Cuauhtémoc employees registered dozens of patents). The first of these chapters might be expected to be a mere exercise in congratulation, featuring a series of token favors to workers by philosopher-king Garzas. There is something of that, but Recio illustrates how the Cuauhtémoc provided important benefits, such as comprehensive medical services and interest-free mortgages, before they were federally mandated or instituted.Fully a third of the book is then devoted to the creation and nurturing of the MIT-inspired Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, which in this telling dominated the second half of Garza Sada's professional life. As an apostle of a pedagogical gospel distinct from state-sponsored “socialist education” and as a persuasive fund-raiser, Eugenio built his brainchild into a well-appointed, vocational university for 12,000. The last of these three chapters is particularly good, enriching our understanding of 1960s student unrest by detailing what happened on a campus generally ignored in the literature. Those conservative, capitalistic, pious regiomontanos did not oppose the activist zeitgeist en bloc, it turns out. Many of them wanted a say in the running of the Tec, as the university was known; some used their annual pastorela (Christmas musical) to mock Garza Sada and the Virgin of Guadalupe.Garza Sada himself emerges mainly as one would expect from a hagiography: visionary, hardworking, detail-oriented, paternalistic, a committed educator. There is no sign of scandal, either personal or professional. But there are many hints of human complexity and controversy: an autocratic streak, a monopolistic instinct, his expulsion of Jesuit faculty from the Tec, his refusal to admit that his nephew would make a better heir at VISA than his son.The book evinces two further weaknesses. One is a tendency to assert claims for the Cuauhtémoc's achievements—the first Mexican firm to found its own technical school, the first to set up a holding company, etc.—with reference only to internal sources. Another is a lack of comparative context. We are often told that the Cuauhtémoc or the Tec set this or that standard, yet supporting evidence is absent. Nonetheless, Recio's volume enhances our understanding of Monterrey entrepreneurship, as distinct from the cronyish business model long prevalent in Mexico City and Puebla, and also our appreciation of the ideological influence of one of Mexico's signal business leaders

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