In El Pan Nuestro, Gómez-Galvarriato Freer embarks on an ambitious plan: to use the tortilla to unravel a narrative of Mexican technology adoption and the interaction it had with the division of labor in Mexican households. In other words, this is a book that is a History of Capitalism in Mexico, a history of female labor force participation in Mexico (since tortillas were traditionally made by women), a history of tortilla-making technologies and their diffusion, and a political economy history behind the adoption of these technologies.
The book is a collection of stories about five technologies: nixtamal, the metate, nixtamal mills, tortilla-making machines, and nixtamalized flour. Nixtamal is the tortilla dough, made using the following process: dried corn kernels are soaked and cooked in an alkaline solution, usually limewater (calcium hydroxide), and then hulled either with a metate (a hand-pressing process used until the mid-twentieth century) or in a nixtamal mill. The nixtamal dough is then used to make tortillas by hand or in larger industrial tortilla-making machines. In fact, the book can be read as a series of separate stories for each technology and how they relate to gender roles in the household, since women mostly invested hours making tortillas at home until the twentieth century, and to the political economy of technology adoption, since many of the labor-saving technologies invented in the last 150 years were adopted slowly or monopolized by well-connected parties. In fact, the main question the book explores is: Why did Mexico not introduce these labor-saving technologies earlier?
The book begins with a historical x-ray of nixtamal and tortillas and their democratization in Mexico compared to bread. Thus, the first chapter focuses on the history of metate technology and its female-labor-intensive nature until the twentieth century. In this chapter, the author begins to explore why a better (less labor-intensive) technology was not adopted before the twentieth century. By 1856, Vicente Ortigosa de los Ríos had already found a technique to replace the metate with a nixtamal flour that could be mixed with water, but that produced very grainy and chunky tortillas. The book then uses multiple chapters to explain the barriers to the development and diffusion of inventions, such as this nixtamalized flour, of nixtamal mills patented at the end of the nineteenth century, and of tortilla-making machines. Among the explanations for the slow diffusion of these technologies are the low population density in Mexico, low industrialization, underdeveloped capital markets, a lack of scientific education, and, more controversially, low female wages, which delayed the adoption of labor-saving technologies. For similar unskilled work, women in Mexico earned 0.40 to 0.50 cents for every dollar a manmade throughout the nineteenth century.
The book then focuses on patents and patent legislation. It argues that the backwardness and confusion of patent legislation until 1890 were also factors that delayed the development of new technologies for making nixtamal and tortillas. This section is the best text to date to understand the history of patent laws in Mexico.
Subsequent chapters focus on a detailed account of the inventions of nixtamal mills and machines to simplify tortilla production, starting in 1859. These accounts are a very careful effort to follow all the patents for these technologies, explaining in detail how they worked.
The final chapters of the book focus on the commercialization of industrial tortilla mills and nixtamal flour and how they were sold in Mexico after the Porfiriato. The book then provides two very interesting discussions of the political economy of these inventions and how they ended up in the hands of connected rentiers who monopolized these industries. In any case, the book ends up on a positive note, showing us how these labor-saving technologies could have been behind the increase in female labor force participation in Mexico in the second half of the twentieth century. The final chapter is a jewel for an undergrad class on labor economics, as it relates technology adoption to household economics and to the labor economics of gender in a developing country.
Even though the book is in a way a technology and labor history of Mexico, it has general appeal, and it reads like the classic studies of U.S. technology adoption and diffusion. The English version (not yet out) will be more concise and easier to use in the classroom. The versatility of the book will allow it to be used in history and economic history courses alike and will certainly turn it into a reference book for Mexican economic history.
