Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Reseña sobre Elisa Speckman Guerra. En tela de juicio. Justicia penal, homicidios célebres y opinión pública (México, siglo XX). México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas/Tirant lo Blanch (Historia del Derecho en América Latina), 2020.

This article comprises a comparative analysis of Mexico’s diplomacy regarding the Spanish Civil War in the League of Nations and the Pan-American Union. It is aimed to show that Mexico's strategies in both forums were complementary and had the same objective: to defend the Spanish Republic.

This article analyzes the historiography of the Mexican diplomatic performance in the League of Nations (LoN). Studies covering the three following issues are presented: the exclusion and inclusion of Mexico at the LoN from 1919 to 1931, Mexico’s gradual collaboration with technical organisations during the 1920s, and its active participation in face of international problems such as invasions and armed conflicts during the 1930s. While during the twentieth century little attention was paid to these issues, this article shows that a substantial corpus of studies regarding the Mexican positioning in face of these international problems has emerged in the current century, particularly about the defence of the Spanish Republic.

Unlike Mexico's complex relationship with the League of Nations, Mexico's dealings with the International Labour Organization (ILO) and its permanent civil service (the International Labour Office, BIT) have gone almost unnoticed in studies about the international interwar Geneva and the role of this Latin American champion in it. This article pays special attention to Mexico’s participation in the famous centennial tripartite labor organization and its performance in Labor Conferences, without ignoring the complicated backgrounds and its fragile organizing process.

This article aims to explain the shape of the labor and agrarian movement as a political force in Chiapas in the 1929-1936 period. The corporate model background and the relations between labor and agrarian movements and local and central political powers are described. Labor contracts, letters, official written communications, circular letters, and government reports, as well as journalistic editorials and news are analyzed. The conditions that supported the proletarian sectors embedment in the Mexican government project are also analyzed.

This article is a comparative analysis of the Mexican and Spanish policies in the League of Nations between 1931 and 1933. Through sometimes coinciding and sometimes divergent strategies, both countries tried to reinforce in Geneva the fragile pillars that supported the building of collective security as it began to crumble. The comparative analysis of the Mexican Maximato and the Spanish Bienio Reformista policies in face of the invasion of Manchuria, the Conference on Disarmament and the Geneva mediation in the inter-American conflicts, helps us to understand the defensive positions of both regimes regarding the then changing international scenario. It also allows us to identify both States foreign policies coincidences and divergences, as well as to show the mutual interest of two ideologically akin political regimes in setting up stable international cooperation.

George Ruxton was a member of a group of foreign travelers who went to Mexico after its independence, and wrote notes that were not free of prejudice towards the inhabitants. His observations, however, give us a valuable look of the Mexican situation during the first independent years and the Mexican War. Thanks to recently found documents, we are able to draft an unpublished biography. For this reason, we offer the reader a translation of “Obituary Notice of Lieutenant George Augustus Frederick Ruxton” by Richard King, in which this author's major biographical data are exposed.

Between 1940 and 1945, the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation ceased to function because of the vicissitudes of the Second World War. In this situation, the American countries proposed to move the institute’s seat from Paris to Havana, where the International Center was officially founded but its operation never materialized. By using the correspondence of the Mexican intellectual and diplomat Alfonso Reyes, the article shows the changing positions within the Latin American bloc, between those defending an American proposal (an independent institute) and those clinging to the earlier universalist view (a SDN-dependent institute). Knowledge of this situation created by the war helps us to understand the reactivation of the complex balance between Latin America, Europe and the United States.

Reseña sobre Rebeca Villalobos Álvarez. El culto a Juárez. La construcción retórica del héroe (1872-1976). México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras/Grano de Sal, 2020.

The present work exposes the specific economic development of El Mezquital district, south Durango, Mexico, compared to the rest of the state districts at the end of the Porfiriato. An overview of the land property structure, agriculture, livestock and demography according to occupational categories is presented. The governmental efforts to create an imaginary of El Mezquital as a territory full of forest and mineral wealth, as well as inhospitable physical and social geography, are emphasized. Inhospitability discouraged exploration and economic investment in the district, while keeping safe Tepehuano common property during the peak period of land sale and purchase. Until now, Durango’s historiography has focused the big economic centers of the state, so relegating El Mezquital precisely because of its lower economic importance. This article argues the importance of knowing and understanding the social, economic and geographical traits that conditioned the economy of this district at the end of the nineteenth century. Official reports by several government agents and press notes count for most of the primary sources here used.