Revolutionary Women in Post-Revolutionary Mexico by Jocelyn OlcottReview by: Anne RubensteinThe American Historical Review, Vol. 113, No. 1 (Feb., 2008), pp. 235-236Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40007416 .

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Caribbean and Latin America 235

pands our understanding about how people know about the law.

Blanca G. Silvestrini university of Connecticut

Jeffrey M. Pilcher. The Sausage Rebellion: Public Health, Private Enterprise, and Meat in Mexico City, 1890-1917. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2006. Pp. x, 245. $29.95.

Jeffrey M. Pilcher breaks new ground in this book on Mexico City's meat supply. The author of the highly re- garded and sweeping study's Que Vivdn los Tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity (1998), Pilcher shifts his focus to a specific commodity and time frame to provide a deep history. This tightly focused study blends political, economic, social, and cultural history to explore the inner workings of meat supply and dis- tribution in Mexico City from the dictatorship of Por- firio Diaz to the early revolutionary period. The result is an important study that contributes not only to the new food history of Latin America but also to the bur- geoning literatures on public health, urbanization, and business history.

Based on archival research, the book is organized into five substantive chapters. The first chapter consists of a social history of the industry from the colonial pe- riod to the late nineteenth century and a discussion of government regulation. The second and third chapters explore the business history of the industry, efforts to modernize the Mexico City meat supply, and resistance to this modernization. Pilcher demonstrates the close relationship between business and the state by showing how the politically connected cattle-ranching Terrazas- Creel family came to control the largest Mexico City slaughter house.

Among the book's important contributions is its ex- ploration of the role of foreign capital in Porfirian Mex- ico. While nationalist historians initially argued that Porfirio Diaz was captured by foreign capital, over the past few decades a more nuanced portrait has emerged. Nevertheless, Pilcher shows that personal connections with the Porfirian elite yielded significant results. In chapter four, we are introduced to the fascinating story of John W. DeKay and his Mexican National Packing Company. DeKay, trained in U.S. meatpacking tech- nology and strategies, hoped to modernize the Mexican industry by creating a series of meatpacking houses and shipping meat to Mexico City via refrigerated railcars. DeKay and his London backers, after several missteps, won the trust of key members of the Porfirian elite and following the economic recession of 1907 acquired Mexico City's principal slaughterhouse. The DeKay company was positioned to modernize Mexico City's meat supply.

The story culminates in chapter five, "The Sausage Rebellion," where we see that modernization and its efficiencies came at the expense of merchants and butchers while not solving meat shortages and price hikes; this ultimately doomed Dekay's plans. The Na-

tional Meatpacking Company's control over the Mexico City meat supply was challenged by cross-class mobi- lizations after the fall of Diaz in 1911. With Diaz gone and a weak central government, there was no central arbiter to stop the popular assault. Without financial resources, DeKay bartered with the government of Vic- toriano Huerta to sell the Mexico City slaughterhouse to the state. Over time, an authoritarian corporatist sys- tem developed in which merchants and butchers gained market security and consumers continued to get fresh meat - but at higher prices. Hence, economic modern- ization was thwarted by popular, though not demo- cratic, nationalism.

Pilcher's book elevates Mexican food history to a new level by uniting trends in the literature. While many of the early works on food commodities addressed issues of price, production, and supply, they tended to ignore issues of consumption. By contrast, the new food his- tory of Latin America that Pilcher helped to pioneer centers on food, consumer culture, and culinary history. In doing so, it often separates food consumption from the politics of food production and supply and the per- sistence of hunger and malnutrition. Pilcher links these two approaches, yielding critical insights into the ways that politics, business, and social struggles interact with consumer taste.

Yet, this work's contributions go well beyond food history. Pilcher contributes to the growing literature on the Porfiriato by examining how the system worked in an important but often overlooked arena. While food prices and politics have long been discussed as short- term sparks of the Mexican Revolution, few have ex- amined how the Porfirian elite sought to address these shortages and the resulting problems that ensued. By linking his analysis to social struggles, business history, modernization, and consumer politics, Pilcher treats his readers to a riveting story of how foreign-imposed mod- ernization can go awry.

This engagingly written study reconfirms Pilcher's place as a leader in Latin American food studies. It- deserves a broad readership and will be of particular interest to scholars and students of modern Latin American history as well as those interested in food his- tory more broadly.

Enrique C. Ochoa California State University, Los Angeles

Jocelyn Olcott. Revolutionary Women in Post-Revolu- tionary Mexico. (Next Wave: New Directions in Wom- en's Studies.) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2005. Pp. ix, 337. Cloth $79.95, paper $22.95.

Jocelyn Olcott has given her book a remarkable title: it conveys the volume's contents and argument so clearly that no subtitle is required. Throughout the mono- graph, Olcott continues this rhetorical strategy, eschew- ing colorful flourishes in favor of clarity and accuracy. The "revolutionary women" of the title would have been easy to romanticize, but Olcott avoids that temp-

American Historical Review February 2008

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236 Reviews of Books

tation. Instead, her analysis of female radical activism in Mexico, from a feminist conference in 1916 through the 1934-1940 presidency of Lazaro Cardenas, relies on carefully structured comparison based in rigorous research to make its case. Olcott argues that specific initiatives by women activists often failed, but by re- maining active in local and national politics, these women redefined the meaning of citizenship in Mexico even as the Mexican Revolution's seemingly infinite possibilities gradually narrowed into a rigid populism.

Scholarship on Mexican political history in the after- math of the armed phase of the revolution has tended to the binary: either the revolutionary generals were radicals, or they were pragmatic moderates; either Mexico's rulers were honest, or they were corrupt; ei- ther the revolution was nationalist, or it was socialist; either Mexicans were patriots, or they were dupes of the United States; either Mexicans were revolutionaries, or they were staunch Catholics. The great wave of revi- sionist historiography has added nuance to these black- and-white images, of course. Often, though, historians manage this by turning away from national-level politics to concentrate instead on detailed examinations of or- dinary people's responses to new policies in a very lim- ited geographical region, or by falling into semantic de- bates, asking how to characterize policies and politicians. (Scholarly argument over the Cardenas era exemplifies both trends.) Olcott's research design, com- paring activists and activism in five regions over a rel- atively long period, enables her to build on the best of this scholarship while tackling the biggest questions in the study of modern Mexico: questions about the na- ture of the state and Mexicans' relationships with it, about how Mexico's economic and cultural transforma- tion was connected to seeming political stability, and about how Mexicans understood themselves, their rev- olution, and their nation.

Olcott paints a complex picture. The activists she studies sometimes succeeded in setting the national agenda, but more often - especially around the crucial issue of votes for women - they failed. They sometimes focused their efforts on bringing practical improve- ments to most women's daily lives, but sometimes their energies went into more abstract causes, and sometimes their issues had little or no obvious gender component. Sometimes these activists opposed elements of the na- tional government or its local representatives, and sometimes they were eager to declare their affiliation with one or the other or both. Eventually, all this con- tradictory detail coalesces into Olcott's underlying ar- gument about "revolutionary citizenship" as a "contin- gent, inhabited, and gendered" practice (p. 25) - a process rather than a thing.

This is not a perfect book. It is so uncompromising in its refusal to essentialize or romanticize the women it depicts that it misses some opportunities to generate narrative interest by detailing activists' lives and deaths. It is so tightly focused on Mexican political history that it offers only tantalizing hints of women activists' par- ticipation in international movements, whether femi-

nist or communist. For example, chapter three opens with this sentence: "In late 1933, Concha Michel re- turned from the Soviet Union committed to promoting grassroots mobilizations by encouraging rural Mexicans ... to demand that the revolutionary government in- tervene on their behalf" (p. 93). This gets right to the point, admirably, but I would have appreciated a bit less authorial self-discipline here. Olcott left me wondering how Michel got to the Soviet Union, what she did while she was there, and what difference the journey made in her life and politics.

But these are minor flaws. Olcott has made an im- portant contribution to the study of Mexican gender history and enriched our understanding of the Mexican Revolution's institutionalization, and her study has im- plications for historians' thinking about gender, citizen- ship, and revolution anywhere in the world.

Anne Rubenstein York University, Toronto

Todd Hartch. Missionaries of the State: The Summer Institute of Linguistics, State Formation, and Indigenous Mexico, 1935-1985. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 2006. Pp. xxi, 245. $39.95.

This monograph is a careful and interesting look into the development and activities of the controversial Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), a religious/po- litical/scientific organization that became entrenched in the Mexican countryside after its establishment there in 1933. Todd Hartch searches for the reasons that Pres- ident Lazaro Cardenas not only permitted but encour- aged a Protestant missionary organization, and one from the United States at that, to become involved working with Mexico's indigenous population only a few years after the end of a revolution that was anti- clerical in nature. The answer, he finds, is a combina- tion of goals and strategies. First, the nationalistic Mex- ican government wanted to make use of the organization's offer to learn native languages, develop alphabets, and write primers for teaching so that the groups so served might be brought into a more homog- enous, unified nation. Its religious nature was not nec- essarily a plus, but not much of a minus, as the powerful Roman Catholic Church was the target of its concern rather than the less threatening and, in domestic po- litical terms, almost totally powerless organization studied here. And second, the original founders of the organization, Cameron Townsend and L. L. Legters, severed all ties with religious institutions in the United States, in particular the fundamentalist Central Amer- ican Mission, before trying to gain the permission of the Mexican government to work there. Third, the founders were shrewd about making important connections within the Mexican government, initially through the leading American scholar working on Mexico, Frank Tannenbaum of Columbia University, and then on their own. Fourth, they offered a service that the Mexican government officials believed was crucial but that, in

American Historical Review February 2008

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