Routes of Compromise
Building Roads and Shaping the Nation in Mexico, 1917-1952
Format:Paperback
Publisher:University of Nebraska Press
Published:1st Dec '17
Should be back in stock very soon
In Routes of Compromise Michael K. Bess studies the social, economic, and political implications of road building and state formation in Mexico through a comparative analysis of Nuevo León and Veracruz from the 1920s to the 1950s. He examines how both foreign and domestic actors, working at local, national, and transnational levels, helped determine how Mexico would build and finance its roadways.
While Veracruz offered a radical model for regional construction that empowered agrarian communities, national consensus would solidify around policies championed by Nuevo León’s political and commercial elites. Bess shows that no single political figure or central agency dominated the process of determining Mexico's road-building policies. Instead, provincial road-building efforts highlight the contingent nature of power and state formation in midcentury Mexico.
“A richly documented study of the national, regional, and local politics surrounding road construction in Mexico. Obligatory reading for students interested in state-building, economic development, and everyday conflicts over the spoils of modernization.”—Barry Carr, professor emeritus at La Trobe University and coeditor of The New Latin American Left: Cracks in the Empire
“Comparative in approach and sensitive to the transnational dimension and the agendas of politicians, bureaucrats, and members of an array of social groups, Michael Bess’s nuanced treatment of Mexican road-building is a must-read for anyone interested in Mexico’s postrevolutionary experience.”—Samuel Brunk, professor of history at the University of Texas, El Paso, and author of The Posthumous Career of Emiliano Zapata: Myth, Memory, and Mexico’s Twentieth Century
“A compelling analysis of the essential but overlooked impact of road building in modern Mexico. Exhaustively researched and cogently argued, few recent works are as important to understanding how state power, economic modernization, and nation-building converged in twentieth-century Mexico.”—Susan Gauss, associate professor of Latin American and Iberian studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston
ISBN: 9781496202468
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
234 pages