This groundbreaking study marks the culmination of over twenty years of research by one of this country's most prominent Mexico scholars. Roderic Ai Camp provides a detailed, comprehensive examination of Mexico's power elite—their political power, societal influence, and the crucial yet often overlooked role mentoring plays in their rise to the top. In the course of this book, he traces the careers of approximately four hundred of the country's most notable politicians, military officers, clergy, intellectuals, and capitalists. Thoroughly researched and drawn from in-depth interviews with some of Mexico's most powerful players, Mexico's Mandarins provides insight into the machinations of Mexican leadership and an important glimpse into the country's future as it steps onto the global stage.
The History of Mexico: From Pre-Conquest to Present traces the last 500 years of Mexican history, from the indigenous empires that were devastated by the Spanish conquest through the election of 2006 and its aftermath. The book offers a straightforward chronological survey of Mexican history from the pre-colonial times to the present, and includes a glossary as well as numerous tables and images for comprehensive study. In lively and engaging prose, Philip Russell guides readers through major themes that still resonate today including: The role of women in society Environmental change The evolving status of Mexico’s indigenous people African slavery and the role of race Government economic policy Foreign relations with the United States and others The companion website provides many useful student tools including multiple choice questions, extra book chapters, and links to online resources, as well as digital copies of the maps from the book. For additional information and classroom resources please visit The History of Mexico companion website at www.routledge.com/textbooks/russell.
A groundbreaking historical narrative of corruption and economic success in Mexico Ethnic Entrepreneurs, Crony Capitalism, and the Making of the Franco-Mexican Elite provides a new way to understand the scope and impact of crony capitalism on institutional development in Mexico. Beginning with the Porfiriato, the period between 1876 and 1911 named for the rule of President Porfirio Díaz, José Galindo identifies how certain behavioral patterns of the Mexican political and economic elite have repeated over the years, and analyzes aspects of the political economy that have persisted, shaping and at times curtailing Mexico’s economic development. Strong links between entrepreneurs and politicians have allowed elite businessmen to receive privileged support, such as cheap credit, tax breaks, and tariff protection, from different governments and to run their companies as monopolies. In turn, successive governments have obtained support from businesses to implement public policies, and, on occasion, public officials have received monetary restitution. Galindo notes that Mexico’s early twentieth-century institutional framework was weak and unequal to the task of reining in these systematic abuses. The cost to society was high and resulted in a lack of fair market competition, unequal income distribution, and stunted social mobility. The most important investors in the banking, commerce, and manufacturing sectors at the beginning of the twentieth century in Mexico were of French origin, and Galindo explains the formation of the Franco-Mexican elite. This Franco-Mexican narrative unfolds largely through the story of one of the richest families in Mexico, the Jeans, and their cotton textile empire. This family has maintained power and wealth through the current day as Emilio Azcárraga Jean, a great-grandson of one of the members of the first generation of the Jean family to arrive in Mexico, owns Televisa, a major mass media company with one of the largest audiences for Spanish-language content in the world.
The history of Mexico in the twentieth century is marked by conflict between church and state. This book focuses on the efforts of the Roman Catholic Church to influence Mexican society through Jesuit-led organizations such as the Mexican Catholic Youth Association, the National Catholic Student Union, and the Universidad Iberoamericana. Dedicated to the education and indoctrination of Mexico’s middle- and upper-class youth, these organizations were designed to promote conservative Catholic values. The author shows that they left a very different imprint on Mexican society, training a generation of activists who played important roles in politics and education. Ultimately, Espinosa shows, the social justice movement that grew out of Jesuit education fostered the leftist student movement of the 1960s that culminated in the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968. This study demonstrates the convergence of the Church, Mexico’s new business class, and the increasingly pro-capitalist PRI, the party that has ruled Mexico in recent decades. Espinosa’s archival research has led him to important but long-overlooked events like the student strike of 1944, the internal upheavals of the Church over liberation theology, and the complicated relations between the Jesuits and the conservative business class. His book offers vital new perspectives for scholars of education, politics, and religion in twentieth-century Mexico.
Since the mid-1980s, a dramatic opening in Mexico's political and electoral processes, combined with the growth of a new civic culture, has created unprecedented opportunities for women and other previously repressed or ignored groups to participate in the political life of the nation. In this book, Victoria Rodríguez offers the first comprehensive analysis of how Mexican women have taken advantage of new opportunities to participate in the political process through elected and appointed office, nongovernmental organizations, and grassroots activism. Drawing on scores of interviews with politically active women conducted since 1994, Rodríguez looks at Mexican women's political participation from a variety of angles. She analyzes the factors that have increased women's political activity: from the women's movement, to the economic crises of the 1980s and 1990s, to increasing democratization, to the victory of Vicente Fox in the 2000 presidential election. She maps out the pathways that women have used to gain access to public life and also the roadblocks that continue to limit women's participation in politics, especially at higher levels of government. And she offers hopeful, yet realistic predictions for women's future participation in the political life of Mexico.
Together with its predecessor, The Wages of Conquest: The Mexican Aristocracy in the Context of Western Aristocracy, this book continues Nutini's comprehensive structural and expressive treatment of the Mexican aristocracy, its evolution through nearly five centuries, and its place in the stratification system of Mexico."--BOOK JACKET.
The 2000 Mexican presidential race culminated in the election of opposition candidate Vicente Fox and the end of seven decades of one-party rule. This book, which traces changes in public opinion and voter preferences over the course of the race, represents the most comprehensive treatment of campaigning and voting behavior in an emerging democracy. It challenges the "modest effects paradigm of national election campaigns that has dominated scholarly research in the field. Chapters cover authoritarian mobilization of voters, turnout patterns, electoral cleavages, party strategies, television news coverage, candidate debates, negative campaigning, strategic voting, issue-based voting, and the role of the 2000 election in Mexico's political transition. Theoretically-oriented introductory and concluding chapters situate Mexico's 2000 election in the larger context of Mexican politics and of cross-national research on campaigns. Collectively, these contributions provide crucial insights into Mexico's new politics, with important implications for elections in other countries.
The Metamorphosis of Leadership in a Democratic Mexico is a broad analysis of Mexico's changing leadership over the past eight decades, stretching from its pre-democratic era (1935-1988), to its democratic transition (1988-2000) to its democratic period (2000-the present). In it, Roderic Camp, one of the most distinguished scholars of Mexican politics, seeks to answer two questions: 1) how has Mexican political leadership evolved since the 1930s and in what ways, beyond ideology, has the shift from a semi-authoritarian, one-party system to a democratic, electoral system altered the country's leadership? and 2) which aspects of Mexican leadership have been most affected by this shift in political models and when and why did the changes in leadership occur? Rather than viewing Mexico's current government as a true democracy, Camp sees it as undergoing a process of consolidation, under which the competitive electoral process has resulted in a system of governing institutions supported by the majority of citizens and significant strides toward plurality. Accordingly, he looks at the relationship between the decentralization of political power and the changing characteristics, experiences and paths to power of national leaders.The book, which represents four decades of Camp's work, is based upon a detailed study of 3000 politicians from the 1930s through the present, incorporating regional media accounts and Camp's own interviews with Mexican presidents, cabinet members, assistant secretaries, senators, governors, and party presidents.
Zusammenfassung: Her research makes an important methodological contribution to exploring legal culture and to comparative, ideational studies of judicial behavior. --Rachel Sieder, CIESAS, Mexico City. This rich sociolegal analysis is a welcome addition to the judicial and legal scholarship in Mexico and beyond. --Julio Ríos Figueroa, ITAM. This book explores the careers, professional trajectories and legal cultures of judges in the federal judiciary in Mexico. So far, there has been limited research on internal factors contributing to the understanding of judicial power dynamics in Mexico and other Latin American countries at large; this Work fills an important gap in the literature through its empirical investigation of internal legal cultures and judicial norms, offering new data, measurement strategies,and insights into the interactions between law, politics, norms, legal culture(s), as well as judicial behavior. Utilising an original survey, the chapters analyse judicial conceptualizations of role norms, legal cultures, proclivities for judicial activism, and judicial behavior. In so doing, this book contributes to understanding of underlying key internal factors of judicial activism or restraint, in turn moving forward the debate that seeks to explain judicial behavior reliant on internal and ideational perspectives. Complementing limited but existing studies of judicial politics in Mexico through its analysis of judges beyond those that sit at the Supreme Court, this book will be of particular interest to Latin-American judicial politics scholars due to its focus on the judicial power from internal perspectives as well as sub-national judges, filling a void in the literature vis-à-vis the study of courts in Latin America. This Work was originally written in Spanish, and the translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence. A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content. Azul A. Aguiar Aguilar is Professor of political science in the Department of Sociopolitical and Legal Studies at ITESO, the Jesuit University of Guadalajara, Mexico. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Florence, Italy. She teaches courses of political science, judicial politics and theories of democracy in undergraduate and graduate programs at ITESO and the University of Guadalajara. Her research interests include comparative judicial politics and democratization processes. Professor Aguiar has edited books and published several articles in peer review journals about democracy, courts, and justice-sector institutions. She has been distinguished as a member of the National Researchers System in Mexico
This book explores environmental policymaking in Mexico as a vehicle to understanding the broader changes in the policy process within a system undergoing a democratic transformation. It constitutes the first major analysis of environmental policymaking in Mexico at the national level, and examines the implementation of forestry policy in Mexico's largest rain forest, the Selva Lacandona of the state of Chiapas.
