Railway Economics
Railway Economics

Author: Association of American Railroads. Bureau of Railway Economics

Publisher: Chicago, University Press [1912]

Published: 1912

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13:

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Fueling Mexico
Fueling Mexico

Author: Germán Vergara

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-06-24

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 1108918077

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Around the 1830s, parts of Mexico began industrializing using water and wood. By the 1880s, this model faced a growing energy and ecological bottleneck. By the 1950s, fossil fuels powered most of Mexico's economy and society. Looking to the north and across the Atlantic, late nineteenth-century officials and elites concluded that fossil fuels would solve Mexico's energy problem and Mexican industry began introducing coal. But limited domestic deposits and high costs meant that coal never became king in Mexico. Oil instead became the favored fuel for manufacture, transport, and electricity generation. This shift, however, created a paradox of perennial scarcity amidst energy abundance: every new influx of fossil energy led to increased demand. Germán Vergara shows how the decision to power the country's economy with fossil fuels locked Mexico in a cycle of endless, fossil-fueled growth - with serious environmental and social consequences.

Iron Horse Imperialism
Iron Horse Imperialism

Author: Daniel Lewis

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2008-10-01

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9780816528035

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Available in paperback October 2008! The Southern Pacific of Mexico was a U.S.Ðowned railroad that operated between 1898 and 1951, running from the Sonoran town of Nogales, just across the border from Arizona, to the city of Guadalajara, stopping at several northwestern cities and port towns along the way. Owned by the Southern Pacific Company, which operated a highly profitable railroad system north of the border, the SP de Mex transported millions of passengers as well as millions of tons of freight over the years, both within Mexico and across its northern border. However, as Daniel Lewis discloses in this thoroughly researched investigation of the railroad, it rarely turned a profit. So why, Lewis wonders, did a savvy, money-minded U.S. corporation continue to operate the railroad until it was nationalized by the Mexican government more than a half-century after it was constructed? Iron Horse Imperialism reveals that the relationship between the Mexican government and the Southern Pacific Company was a complex one, complicated by MexicoÕs defeat by U.S. forces in the mid-nineteenth century and by SPÕs failure to understand that it was conducting business in a country whose leaders were ambivalent about its presence. Lewis contends that SP executives, urged on by the media of the day, operated with a reflexive imperialism that kept the company committed to the railroad long after it ceased to make business sense. Incorporating information discovered in both Mexican and American archives, some of which was previously unavailable to researchers, this comprehensive book deftly describes the complicated, decades-long dance between oblivious U.S. entrepreneurs and wary Mexican officials. It is a fascinating story.

Americans in the Treasure House
Americans in the Treasure House

Author: Jason Ruiz

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2014-01-01

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 0292753829

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This study of American travel to Mexico from 1884 to 1911 examines how the influx of tourists and speculators altered perceptions of US influence. When railroads connected the United States and Mexico in 1884, travel between the two countries became easier and cheaper. Americans developed an intense curiosity about Mexico, its people, and its opportunities for business and pleasure. Indeed, so many Americans visited Mexico during the Porfiriato—the long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz—that observers on both sides of the border called it a “foreign invasion.” This, as Jason Ruiz demonstrates, was an especially apt phrase. In Americans in the Treasure House, Ruiz argues that this influx of travelers helped shape American perceptions of Mexico as a logical place to exert its cultural and economic influence. Analyzing a wealth of evidence ranging from travelogues and literary representations to picture postcards and snapshots, Ruiz shows how American travelers constructed an image of Mexico as a nation requiring foreign intervention to reach its full potential. Most importantly, he relates the rapid rise in travel and travel discourse to complex questions about national identity, state power, and economic relations across the US–Mexico border.

Frontiers in the Gilded Age
Frontiers in the Gilded Age

Author: Andrew Offenburger

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2019-06-25

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 0300245254

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The surprising connections between the American frontier and empire in southern Africa, and the people who participated in both This book begins in an era when romantic notions of American frontiering overlapped with Gilded Age extractive capitalism. In the late nineteenth century, the U.S.-Mexican borderlands constituted one stop of many where Americans chased capitalist dreams beyond the United States. Crisscrossing the American West, southern Africa, and northern Mexico, Andrew Offenburger examines how these frontier spaces could glitter with grandiose visions, expose the flawed and immoral strategies of profiteers, and yet reveal the capacity for resistance and resilience that indigenous people summoned when threatened. Linking together a series of stories about Boer exiles who settled in Mexico, a global network of protestant missionaries, and adventurers involved in the parallel displacements of indigenous peoples in Rhodesia and the Yaqui Indians in Mexico, Offenburger situates the borderlands of the Mexican North and the American Southwest within a global system, bound by common actors who interpreted their lives through a shared frontier ideology.

Traqueros
Traqueros

Author: Jeffrey Marcos Garcilazo

Publisher: University of North Texas Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 157441464X

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Perhaps no other industrial technology changed the course of Mexican history in the United States--and Mexico--than did the coming of the railroads. Tens of thousands of Mexicans worked for the railroads in the United States, especially in the Southwest and Midwest. Construction crews soon became railroad workers proper, along with maintenance crews later. Extensive Mexican American settlements appeared throughout the lower and upper Midwest as the result of the railroad. The substantial Mexican American populations in these regions today are largely attributable to 19th- and 20th-century railroad work. Only agricultural work surpassed railroad work in terms of employment of Mexicans. The full history of Mexican American railroad labor and settlement in the United States had not been told, however, until Jeffrey Marcos Garcílazo's groundbreaking research in Traqueros. Garcílazo mined numerous archives and other sources to provide the first and only comprehensive history of Mexican railroad workers across the United States, with particular attention to the Midwest. He first explores the origins and process of Mexican labor recruitment and immigration and then describes the areas of work performed. He reconstructs the workers' daily lives and explores not only what the workers did on the job but also what they did at home and how they accommodated and/or resisted Americanization. Boxcar communities, strike organizations, and "traquero culture" finally receive historical acknowledgment. Integral to his study is the importance of family settlement in shaping working class communities and consciousness throughout the Midwest.