Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City - Softcover

Montaño, Diana

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1477328254 ISBN 13: 9781477328255

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 2023

Synopsis

2022 Alfred B. Thomas Book Award, Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies (SECOLAS)
2022 Bolton-Johnson Prize, Conference on Latin American History (CLAH)
2022 Best Book in Non-North American Urban History, Urban History Association (Co-winner)
2023 Honorable Mention, Best Book in the Humanities, Latin American Studies Association Mexico Section
2023 Turriano Book Prize, International Committee for the History of Technology
2023 Michael C. Meyer Award for Best Book on Mexican History in a Five-Year Period, Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies

Many visitors to Mexico City’s 1886 Electricity Exposition were amazed by their experience of the event, which included magnetic devices, electronic printers, and a banquet of light. It was both technological spectacle and political messaging, for speeches at the event lauded President Porfirio Díaz and bound such progress to his vision of a modern order.

Diana J. Montaño explores the role of electricity in Mexico’s economic and political evolution, as the coal-deficient country pioneered large-scale hydroelectricity and sought to face the world as a scientifically enlightened “empire of peace.” She is especially concerned with electrification at the social level. Ordinary electricity users were also agents and sites of change. Montaño documents inventions and adaptations that served local needs while fostering new ideas of time and space, body and self, the national and the foreign. Electricity also colored issues of gender, race, and class in ways specific to Mexico. Complicating historical discourses in which Latin Americans merely use technologies developed elsewhere, Electrifying Mexico emphasizes a particular national culture of scientific progress and its contributions to a uniquely Mexican modernist political subjectivity.

About this title

About the Author

Diana Montaño is an assistant professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1477328254
• ISBN 13: 9781477328255
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 392