Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City by Diana Montaño

Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City
by Diana Montaño
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS, 2021, 390 PP. HARDCOVER, $50.00
ISBN: 978-1-477-32345-8

 

On september 27, 1960, the Mexican government nationalized its electricity system. After Don Pedro Romero de Terreros illuminated the Zócalo of Mexico City on November 2, 1850, electricity transformed the daily life of the capital and the country. During this period, electricity transformed from a “beautiful unknown” experienced in the city to a technology destined to cross valleys and mountains in Mexican territory. This century is the focus of Diana Montaño, professor of history at Washington University, St. Louis, in her book Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City, which takes readers through multiple transitions in the country’s political life over the first half of the twentieth century. Grounded in vast archival research of official documentation, newspapers, medical journals, novels, letters, court records, and popular sources, Electrifying Mexico aims to “uncover the particular circumstances that shape and characterize different experiences of modernity and relationships to electricity” (5).

The book consists of three parts featuring multiple entry points to what Montaño calls the “electric-scape.” In chapter 1, the author examines the transformation of public spaces and the social differentiation that such an infrastructure project reinforced. Chapter 2 moves to ideas of scientific representation embodied not only in exhibitions of electricity as a spectacle but also in statistics and technical studies validating Mexico’s modernity abroad. While the first part of the book aims to show the big picture of electricity, the second part focuses on the actual practices of what Montaño identifies as “electrifying agents.” Accidents caused by electric streetcars are studied in chapter 3, while crimes related to electricity theft unfold in chapter 4, all of which turn into everyday responses to the expected uses of electricity. The last part of the book considers labor issues in two different settings: the domestic space of the kitchen and the electrical factory of midcentury Mexico.

While the book offers many paths due to the rich nature of the sources and topics presented, this review emphasizes three aspects of how a history of electricity and its agents addresses the relationship between information and culture. One significant contribution by Electrifying Mexico is its note of the production and circulation of statistics both locally and internationally. Since the nineteenth century, the rise in electricity has also coincided with international exhibitions worldwide. Montaño explains, “As exhibits rendered possible futures visible, nations became obsessed with measuring where they stood visà-vis other nations” (81). Statistics on population characterized many governmental measures, as well as statistics about trade. However, in the commissioned work of Mexican engineers, “the gathering of statistical data relating to electricity became a significant endeavor, a barometer of the country’s material progress” (81). Since then, statistics have been used to survey national resources and attract foreign investors, combining the “rational” statistical aggregation with a narrative style that served to highlight Mexico’s adoption of technologies. Through this case study, readers can find early development ideas in the making, linked together to demonstrate Mexico’s capacity for progress.

Using statistical sources to form a cultural history exemplifies most of Electrifying Mexico’s approach to a history of infrastructures. Statistics as a social construction intertwine with a vast landscape of archival sources and popular media. While similar paths can also be found in works on electricity in the United States and Europe, Electrifying Mexico innovates by highlighting the centrality of historical constructions such as race, gender, and class particular to this Latin American country. In the process, the author reveals, to paraphrase Janet Abbate, the specific, locally situated technologies and culture of the internationalization of electrical systems worldwide.¹ As Montaño points out, more recent years have seen the Latin American approach to technology stripping away “the vestiges of framing science and technology as imported magic” that determined earlier practices (6). Following these ideas, the book localizes the social construction of a technology framework to show how “the relation that a society develops with electricity and electrification must be treated as unique and discrete” (5). More explicitly, many examples in Electrifying Mexico uncover the micropolitics of technology adoption, identified as sites of resistance and innovation. For example, the case studies concerning power theft explore improper but innovative uses of electricity, which challenged the original designs of electric companies (188).

From this perspective, an obvious but not always asked question is how people learn about infrastructure. Following Lisa Parks’s idea of a populist approach to infrastructure as the way people make sense of complex systems, readers of Electrifying Mexico can find intense work in constructing a social meaning for technology.² More than ideological concerns, the emergent realities of electricity generate many reactions expressed in everyday chatting, captured in many of the sources used in this book. Montaño points to licit and illicit practices alike as companions to light bulbs and washing machines in constituting the electric landscape in Mexico. The book offers many examples of disobedience, some of which involve technical expertise, such as electricity theft, while others simply bypass the use of electricity as proposed by their advocates.

As a result, Electrifying Mexico contributes to many of the histories crossed by electricity adoption worldwide. Historians of computing and informatics might find a great companion for understanding the overlap of electricity and information politics. Several projects and practices registered by Montaño anticipated the obstacles and possibilities in modernizing the country through infrastructure. Similarly, the presence of the Catholic Church and other institutions, especially during the early stages of electricity, invites readers to consider colonial articulations in defining the adoption and uses of modern technologies. Therefore, this book is a significant contribution to historical studies of infrastructure supported under the idea of technologies-in-use, particularly in contexts where, as expressed by David Edgerton, technologies find a distinctive set of uses outside the time and place they were first used on a significant scale.³ Electrifying Mexico offers a balanced contrast in approaching novelty and its aftermath for advocates of studying technologies away from the hype of invention. In the end, says Montaño, a history of electricity in Mexico is a people’s history of challenges and opportunities presented by electrification, as well as of their creativity in constructing a Mexican electric-scape.