Bakers and Basques
Bakers and Basques

Author: Robert Weis

Publisher: UNM Press

Published: 2012-09-15

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0826351476

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Mexico City’s colorful panaderías (bakeries) have long been vital neighborhood institutions. They were also crucial sites where labor, subsistence, and politics collided. From the 1880s well into the twentieth century, Basque immigrants dominated the bread trade, to the detriment of small Mexican bakers. By taking us inside the panadería, into the heart of bread strikes, and through government halls, Robert Weis reveals why authorities and organized workers supported the so-called Spanish monopoly in ways that countered the promises of law and ideology. He tells the gritty story of how class struggle and the politics of food shaped the state and the market. More than a book about bread, Bakers and Basques places food and labor at the center of the upheavals in Mexican history from independence to the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution.

Gamboa's World
Gamboa's World

Author: Christopher Albi

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press

Published: 2021-11-15

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0826362966

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Gamboa’s World examines the changing legal landscape of eighteenth-century Mexico through the lens of the jurist Francisco Xavier de Gamboa (1717–1794). Gamboa was both a representative of legal professionals in the Spanish world and a central protagonist in major legal controversies in Mexico. Of Basque descent, Gamboa rose from an impoverished childhood in Guadalajara to the top of the judicial hierarchy in New Spain. He practiced law in Mexico City in the 1740s, represented Mexican merchants in Madrid in the late 1750s, published an authoritative commentary on mining law in 1761, and served for three decades as an Audiencia magistrate. In 1788 he became the first locally born regent, or chief justice, of the High Court of New Spain. In this important work, Christopher Albi shows how Gamboa’s forgotten career path illuminates the evolution of colonial legal culture and how his arguments about law and justice remain relevant today as Mexico debates how to strengthen the rule of law.