Fueling Mexico: Energy and Environment, 1850–1950 by Germán Vergara, and: Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City by Diana J. Montaño (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• Fueling Mexico: Energy and Environment, 1850–1950 by Germán Vergara, and: Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City by Diana J. Montaño
• Helge Wendt (bio)

Fueling Mexico: Energy and Environment, 1850–1950 By Germán Vergara. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 322. Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City By Diana J. Montaño. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. Pp. 373.

Energy history is back in fashion. As environmental history and in light of the Anthropocene, it participates in global historical debates. This environmental history of energy system transformations is the subject of Germán Vergara's Fueling Mexico. Based on the example of Mexico from 1850 to 1950, it looks at the diverse transformations of the Mexican energy system and increases in fossil fuels. The book analyzes structural shifts, the long-term effects of which shaped politics and power dynamics. A second aspect of current energy history looks at sociocultural dynamics. Energy history is no longer written from the perspective of entrepreneurs and large, ever-expanding corporations alone. Instead, as Diana Montaño points out in Electrifying Mexico, conditions such as everyday culture, contexts of use, and (rather Foucauldian) novel discourses are equally important for the diffusion of new technologies.

These two studies of Mexico's energy modernity could not be more different. In Vergara's book, the entire country is scrutinized; in Montaño's, the expanding juggernaut of the capital is the focus. Vergara considers the modernization process from the aspect of material conditions and places coal and petroleum at the center. Montaño meets the public debating culture head on, refraining from an investigation of technical innovations or preconditions, instead focusing entirely on the users and collateral damage. Indeed, the detailed presentation of accidents caused by electric streetcars, complete with police and court records as well as newspaper and magazine reports, shows the full range of social discourse in the dynamics of appropriation and (sometimes fatal) application.

Vergara's study is a journey through Mexico from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The environmental history of Mexican society is also a history of knowledge about geology, focusing on coal and petroleum. Part of Vergara's account is already known from the work of, for instance, María del Mar Rubio's article from 2010 on the economic history of Mexican oil in the first third of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the perspective taken in this book on the transformations of the Mexican energy system in this long period is particularly innovative. Also, it is beneficial to follow Vergara's accentuation of the regional transformations. These were driven by the respective regional possibilities to switch to new energy sources, by [End Page 685] investment patterns, production conditions, and political support, as well as the geological conditions. In respect to the global context of energy history, Mexico went its own way. Coal bridged the country's energy requirements in the short term only. Moreover, its use was highly regional, partly due to the strong role of U.S. investments in Mexican coal mining.

With that focus on fossil fuels, Vergara does not study the impact of hydroelectricity used in most Mexican cities, which Montaño addresses in Electrifying Mexico. In contrast to Vergara's study, here "Mexico" refers only to the capital city. In Montaño's book, foreign companies and imported technology and its Mexicanization link the global-historical context and forms of everyday use of electricity in the city. As in Edward Beatty's 2015 book on technological innovation in Mexico, the focus is on adaptive developments. We learn from that perspective that the adaptation of technical systems and apparatuses to a sociocultural system like Mexico's led to further innovations, some of which may not only lie in their application but also in a technical modification of the supplied equipment.

The two studies meet exactly at the point where they highlight the historic specificity of Mexico. The path to the petroleum age was different in Mexico than in the United States or in European countries, where coal determined much larger parts of the respective energy systems. Mexican petroleum was mainly either...