Chapter 3: Mexico
Mexico is fortunate in having a detailed, well-balanced, and up-to-date one-volume history in Michael C. Meyer and William L. Sherman, The Course of Mexican History, 7th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); it includes chapter-by-chapter bibliographies in both English and Spanish. For a powerful statement of a Mexican viewpoint, see Enrique Krauze, trans. Hank Heifetz, Mexico: Biography of Power: A History of Modern Mexico, 1810–1996 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997). An insightful history of Mexico’s national identity is given in Enrique Florescano, trans. Albert G. Bork, Memory, Myth and Time in Mexico: From the Aztecs to Independence (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997). In Blood, Ink, and Culture: Miseries and Splendors of the Post-Mexican Condition (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), Roger Bartra offers a brilliant commentary on the contemporary scene.
The Mexican Revolution has come to dominate the nation’s twentieth-century historiography. A rich and highly readable synthesis is found in Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986). The finest study of the agrarian revolution is John Womack, Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), while Friedrich Katz has published a monumental biography about The Life and Times of Pancho Villa (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998). Outstanding studies of the social effects of the Revolution are Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930–1940 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997), Jocelyn Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), and Ben Fallaw, Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutioanry Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013)
An excellent overview of Mexico’s neoliberal economic adjustment appears in Nora Lustig, Mexico: The Remaking of an Economy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1992). For the most recent period, see Susan Kaufman Purcell and Luis Rubio, eds., Mexico Under Zedillo (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1998), and Richard Snyder, Politics After Neoliberalism: Reregulation in Mexico (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001). The predominant role of the technocrats is analyzed in Miguel Ángel Centeno, Democracy Within Reason: Technocratic Revolution in Mexico (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994); for historical perspective see Peter H. Smith, Labyrinths of Power: Political Recruitment in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979). The emerging political roles of women are captured in Victoria Rodríguez, ed., Women in Contemporary Mexican Politics (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003).
Mexico’s relationship with the United States is traced in Rafael Domínguez and Jorge I. Fernández de Castro, The United States and Mexico: Between Partnership and Conflict (New York: Routledge, 2001) and Peter H. Smith and Andrew Selee, eds., Mexico and the United States: The Politics of Partnership (Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner, 2013). For an intriguing cultural analysis see Jose E. Limón, American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States, and the Erotics of Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). NAFTA and its consequences have received analytical treatment in Maxwell A. Cameron and Brian W. Tomlin, The Making of NAFTA: How the Deal Was Done (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002); Carol Wise, ed., The Post-NAFTA Political Economy: Mexico and the Western Hemisphere (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998); Edward J. Chambers and Peter H. Smith, eds., NAFTA in the New Millennium (Edmonton and La Jolla: University of Alberta Press and Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 2002); and Kevin Gallagher, Free Trade and the Environment: Mexico, NAFTA, and Beyond (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004). Immigration and border issues are analyzed in Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000) and in an intriguing work by former Mexican foreign minister Jorge G. Castañeda, Ex Mex: From Migrants to Immigrants (New York and London: The New Press, 2007).
The history of migration of Mexicans to the United States has been carefully analyzed by Deborah Cohen in Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), Omar S. Valerio-Jiménez analyzes transnational identities of Mexican immigrants in River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). The impact of migration is also studied in Adriana Cruz-Manjarrez, Zapotecs on the Move: Cultural, Social, and Political Processes in Transnational Perspective (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2012).
The Chiapas rebellion of 1994 has provoked a rethinking of the nature of Mexican society and politics. Details can be found in Neil Harvey, The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999); John Womack, Jr., Rebellion in Chiapas: An Historical Reader (New York: New Press, 1999); and Lynn Stephen, Zapata Lives! Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Dolores Trevizo explores popular mobilizations in Rural Protest and the Making of Democracy in Mexico (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2011).
For recent overviews of politics and economics, see Kathleen Bruhn and Daniel C. Levy, Mexico: The Struggle for Democratic Development, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Emily Edmonds-Poli and David A. Shirk, Contemporary Mexican Politics (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), Nichole Sanders, Gender and Welfare in Mexico: The Consolidation of a Postrevolutionary State (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2011), and Roderic Ai Camp, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Mexican Politics (New York: OUP, 2012).