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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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In Monuments of Progress, Claudia Agostoni navigates the history of Mexico City's public health and public works in the context of the evolving disciplines of epidemiology, urban design, and engineering to explain the connections of environmental management endeavors to the Mexican national government's goal of becoming "modern," a constantly evolving notion that legitimates a country. Agostoni states that her chief objective was to "analyze and discuss why the construction of public works (the drainage system and historical monuments) embodied materially and symbolically the confidence of an era of "order" and "progress" in a context of a largely non-modern society, and why it was thought that the construction of public works would transform the city into a health-giving environment" (p. xii). |
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New organizing concepts and progressive ideas emerged during this period and they became lynchpins to the solutions of pestilence and urban design problems. For instance, the etiological premise for epidemics was slowly shifting from an "environmental" cause (miasmas), to the germ theory of disease transmission. New conceptualization of disease transmission generated new approaches to solving outbreaks of communicable disease. "Old" approaches included, for instance, the freshening of air in cramped, filthy neighborhoods by dictating design standards, setting limits to occupancy, and even the building of tenements for the poor. "New" approaches focused upon the elimination of disease vectors and the conditions that supported them. These ideas were thus achieved by the adherence to modern notions of cleanliness, of free-flowing urban space, and other concepts arising fromfin de siècle Europe. Similarly, Agostoni effectively demonstrates the old-new tension embodied in the effort to create a Mexican nationalism in a modern Mexico born of the prehistoric Aztec base of its people and its main urban place. |
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This book is well written and well organized. The production of the book is attractive and the text is well edited. Though well written, the monograph would best serve researchers of pre-modern urban design and environmental management and in advanced graduate seminars. The only shortcoming that I would mention is the unfortunate lack of illustrations, particularly maps, in the first three chapters of the book (there are only five chapters in all). The first figure appears on page 89 after three chapters that discuss and describe, in great detail, spatially important facts of the trials and tribulations of Mexico City, its site, its setting, its expansion—all of which would have been significantly easier to comprehend for readers unfamiliar with Mexico City's neighborhoods with the addition of some maps. Their absence is a minor impediment to a very interesting and useful book. |
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Dr. John Tiefenbacher is professor of geography at Texas State University-San Marcos. His research interests include the geographic aspects of hazard management, environmental problems, human dimensions of wildlife, and the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. |
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