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Book Review
| Monuments of Progress: Modernization and Public Health in Mexico City, 1876–1910. By Claudia Agostoni. Latin American and Caribbean series. Calgary, Alta.; Boulder, Colo.; Mexico, D.F.: University of Calgary Press; University Press of Colorado; Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 2003. xvii+ 228 pp. Illustrations, map, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $45.00, paper $21.95.
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| This monograph examines Mexico City's late-nineteenth-century push to improve both its image abroad as an unsanitary, backward, and dangerous metropolis, and its internal reality of rampant public health crises and frequent natural disasters, by achieving the status of a modern republic. Indeed, Mexico's problems were insurmountable by small plans, but were remedied only through grandiose vision and substantial, expensive plans. |
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General Porfirio Díaz ruled the republic from 1876 to 1880 and again from 1884 to 1911. This period is known as the Porfiriato and was an important period in Mexico's history; a Mexican-run dictatorship that led to the revolution of 1910. By the 1860s, Mexico City had acquired a reputation as the most unsanitary city in the world and had for centuries suffered frequent disastrous and persistent flood events, epidemics, and dysfunctional urban systems. Pre-Porfiriato leadership made many feeble attempts at remedy. Superficial schemes were bound to fail because of the simple truth that the natural setting and situation produced the city's hydrologic problems, and that these were exacerbated by soaring growth of the metropolitan area, urban population, and unmanaged development. |
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