Routes of Compromise

Michael K. Bess's book examines an important, practical aspect of postrevolutionary nation building in Mexico. Creating a viable transportation network was crucial to vitalizing the Mexican economy following the years of revolutionary warfare that began in 1910. Using as examples the states of Nuevo León and Veracruz, Bess shows how highway construction projects involved complex interplay between the policies of the national government and the actions of local powers who exerted substantial influence over the building of roads in their particular locales.Bess organizes the individual chapters according to Mexican presidential terms. The first two chapters analyze the roles of Álvaro Obregón (1920–24) and then Plutarco Elías Calles (1924–28) in creating roadbuilding programs out of the devastation of the revolutionary years. During these years, the cash-strapped national government shared a great deal of control over road construction with the state and local governments that helped mobilize capital and labor. Because Mexico lacked access to international credit markets in the 1920s, Calles in particular portrayed road construction works as nationalist efforts. Businessmen and local elites especially benefited from these earliest projects. The next chapter shows that during the 1934–40 presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas, the well-placed found themselves less likely to prevent eminent domain seizures of their land for roadways. As those familiar with Mexican history might expect, construction workers enjoyed more rights under the Cárdenas regime than before, and the use of unpaid labor virtually disappeared. Renewed access to credit enabled Cárdenas to issue bonds to foreign investors to fund the expansion of the highway system and achieve substantial progress thereby. The chapter covering the presidency of Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940–46) shows a turn back to the right as the Second World War approached. Out of needs for war materials and support from Mexico, the United States assumed a cooperative role with Ávila Camacho, one that continued after the war during Miguel Alemán's six years in the presidency commencing in 1946. Ávila Camacho and Alemán both gave lip service to labor concerns, and individual property rights more often prevailed against national concerns than during Cárdenas's term. But by the end of his term in 1952, Alemán established that the national government would henceforth be the primary actor in this important aspect of nation building.Rhetoric and promises always exceeded reality and achievements, no matter who was president. Besides documenting the significant improvements in absolute terms achieved by the various regimes, Bess also shows that their successful expansion of the highway network had its limits. Budgetary constraints meant that many areas in rural Mexico remained physically and economically isolated. Individual corruption increased construction costs, siphoning away resources that did exist and could have been used to build more roads. The benefits of modernization were unevenly spread.Bess's research into archival and other primary sources is quite thorough and extensive. His concrete evidence about nation building after the revolution reinforces an understanding of twentieth-century Mexican governments as less than monolithic. Roadbuilding itself, however, is new historiographic territory. Bess explains the technical aspects of his subject for a nontechnical readership without descending into complex jargon. The end of revolutionary warfare in Mexico coincides closely with the emergence of new transport technology, which then created a need for roadways to support cars, trucks, and buses. Therefore, the years from 1917 to 1952 as a periodization work very well, but this focus perhaps forgoes in the process comparisons of local actors' agency in the years of stagecoach and mule travel. Two maps clearly show schematic diagrams of the highway networks in Nuevo León and Veracruz, although some places important enough to appear several times in the text do not appear on the maps. These are, at most, minor quibbles.Michael K. Bess has provided us with an easily readable and very valuable book. He weaves strands of economic development and political struggle into a cohesive and coherent analytic narrative. Routes of Compromise will prove valuable to historians of Mexico and students alike, as well as to anyone interested in transnational comparisons of roadbuilding in other situations

Compromise · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Government (linguistics) · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Presidency · State (computer science) · History · Law · Mexican Socioeconomic and Environmental Dynamics · Public Administration

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