Mexico's energy history presents a curious paradox. Although the literature is vast and stretches back to the early decades of the twentieth century (or perhaps even the late nineteenth, if one considers some Porfirian treatises as historiography), its coverage is highly uneven. Oil has been by far, and for understandable reasons, historians’ favorite topic. In particular, Mexico's oil expropriation and themes such as oil and the Mexican Revolution, oil and labor, and the oil industry have been extensively analyzed. Coal and natural gas have, on the other hand, attracted only a few enthusiasts. Electricity and the electric sector boast a sizable collection of works, focused mostly on the history of the electric industry itself. Almost entirely absent from both the historical literature on oil and electricity are studies of their social, cultural, and environmental impacts. That makes Diana Montaño's excellent cultural history of electricity in Mexico a pioneering work in the field.
Adopting a bottom-up approach, Montaño examines the role of consumers and people of different classes, genders, and races as “agents of technological change” (6) who shaped the emergence and growth of what she calls the “electriscape,” a notion that aims to capture both the “physical and symbolic aspects of electrification” (7). The book argues that Mexico City's electricity users were not mere passive observers of the electrification of their lives, but active agents who molded the process.
Organized less as a strict chronology than a series of deeply researched snapshots that explore different aspects of electrification between (roughly) the 1880s and the 1960s, the book is divided into three parts, each containing two chapters. The first chapter deals with the installment of public electric lighting in Mexico City during the late nineteenth century. Chapter 2 focuses on the role electricity played in the patriotic festivities, fairs, and other public events of the Porfiriato; in the process, electricity became associated with contemporary ideas of progress and modernity as well as with the identity of many urbanites. Chapter 3 examines electric tramway accidents as a window into popular attitudes and perceptions regarding a new technology at the turn of the twentieth century. Even though the chapter offers grim fun, the revelations are not entirely surprising. Poor people bore the brunt of technological change, and Mexico City authorities largely dismissed such accidents as the inevitable price of progress.
Methodologically creative, Chapter 4 uses court records to bring home the book's contention that ordinary people shaped electrification, looking at how they “stole” power to serve their own needs, much to the chagrin of city authorities and the Canadian-based company that monopolized the sector. The book's last section tackles the middle decades of the twentieth century, when electricity had become a fact of life for the vast majority of Mexico City residents. The link between electric appliances and views on middle-class female domesticity during the 1930s and 1940s is the subject of Chapter 5. Chapter 6, this reader's favorite, examines the crucial and overlooked role of labor in the 1960 nationalization of the electric industry.
Electrifying Mexico is very well-written and avoids the pitfalls of jargon-heavy cultural history. The book also successfully employs the tools of cultural history to capture Mexico City residents' everyday experience of electrification and untangle the cultural practices and meanings they attached to its use. With its emphasis on the agency of local actors in shaping electrification, the book represents an outstanding contribution and a corrective to scholarship on technology and energy sometimes characterized by an Olympian view of history. As with any other historical approach, cultural history has its own disadvantages, and the book's focus on cultural matters sometimes comes at a cost. Given the book's initial promise to tackle both the physical and cultural aspects of electrification, the book could have said more about electricity generation during the roughly 80 years under study. Especially considering that during this period Mexico City's electric industry shifted from water to fossil fuels as its primary source of energy production. (This relative lack of attention to energy generation and sources is illustrated by the confusion of coal and charcoal on p. 169.) It would have been interesting to see the author tease out connections between the symbolic elements of the electriscape and some of these critical physical dimensions to electrification. That being said, the book deserves ample praise for its elegant writing, meticulous research, the original use of sources, and as the first (as far as this reader knows) cultural history of electrification in Mexico.
