Made in Mexico

“Bucking the culturalist trend of much recent Mexican historiography, Gauss gives us an ambitious and cogent analysis of the postrevolutionary political economy, combining a perceptive national overview with illuminating regional case studies, the whole based on extensive original research, lucidly deployed. Among the best recent monographs on modern Mexico, the book sheds light on national politics, state-building, foreign relations, and the role of the PRI, business, and organized labor in forging the new Mexico of the postwar era.”

—Alan Knight, University of Oxford

“The strength of [Made in Mexico] is the author’s research in the state archives of Jalisco, Nuevo Léon, and Puebla. Gauss constructs the history of relations among the economic elites of the three main industrial areas outside the capital (Guadalajara, Monterrey, and Puebla), the state governments, and the central government in Mexico City. . . . The author is quite adept at sorting out the complex relations between the various levels of government and the three groups of regional industrialists, showing how they tied into the shifting politics and economic exigencies of the era.”

—Mark Wasserman American Historical Review

“Made in Mexico is a very important book that fills a number of gaps in the literature on postrevolutionary Mexico by tracing the national and regional development of the country's industrial sector. The book, which explores the conflicts among industrialists and labor leaders as well as state and federal policy makers over statist industrialism, is well written, thoroughly researched, and rests firmly on materials from Mexico City’s national depositories as well as the state archives of Jalisco, Nuevo León, and Puebla.”

—John J. Dwyer Hispanic American Historical Review

“The relationship between state, capital and labour has a seminal place within the scholarship of Latin America’s statist political economy. Made in Mexico adds the dynamic variable of regionalism to the literature, which provides an important revision to traditional understandings of the Mexican case. . . . Gauss’s important study . . . illustrates how divergent industrial sectors and their particular histories of capital formation, from textiles to glass-making, generated Mexico’s many paths toward statism.”

—Glen David Kuecker Bulletin of Latin American Research