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

This review examines Ecos de la revolución, a volume coordinated by Ana Lucía Álvarez Gutiérrez and Kevin Simon Delgado, which brings together eleven contributions by emerging scholars on the socialist armed movement in 1970s Mexico. The book is structured around three thematic axes: political subjectivities and radicalization, trajectories of politico-military organizations, and the relationship between press, film, and clandestinity. The review highlights the work’s value as a historiographical intervention committed to recovering silenced memories, as well as its editorial decision to foreground emerging voices. Nonetheless, it also notes certain limitations, such as uneven theoretical articulation, limited engagement with Latin American and English-language historiography, and a tendency toward institutional insularity. The use of previously unpublished sources and the project’s collaborative, horizontal approach are particularly noteworthy. Despite its methodological heterogeneity, the volume marks a significant contribution to a relatively unexplored field in Mexican historiography and lays the groundwork for future comparative studies on insurgency and political violence in Latin America.

Book review

Boor review

This article presents a discourse analysis of the confessions made by individuals accused of infanticide, abortion, and infant abandonment in Yucatán between 1870 and 1906. The objective is to examine how women and men handled their confessions – whether they admitted the facts, denied them, or constructed their innocence through justifications. The study employs Critical Discourse Analysis tools, focusing on the pragmatic level by reviewing the enunciation context and the outcomes expressed in the judicial sentences. Fourteen cases were analyzed, encompassing three crimes that historiography has recognized as closely related within a semantic field concerning the conception of sexuality and motherhood during the study period. The findings highlight the function of confessions during the oral stage of legal proceedings, where defendants presented their accounts before authorities and defended their involvement in the alleged crimes. These statements, along with judicial interpretations, defense arguments, and expert reports, contributed to the construction of the legal discourse on motherhood, paternity, and the legitimacy of children in 19th-century Yucatán.

This article aims to reconstruct in detail the final hours of Francisco I. Madero in the city of San Luis Potosí, and to explain how his escape was planned, who was involved, and in which specific locations within the capital the events took place, in the immediate context preceding the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. This qualitative study is based on previously unpublished documents donated on May 16, 2022, by the Alvarado Mascorro family to the Historical Archive of the State of San Luis Potosí “Lic. Antonio Rocha” – identified as the “Jesús Mascorro Collection.” Through the analysis of primary sources – particularly the memoirs of railway worker Jesús Mascorro Cancino and his brothers – this article offers a meticulous reconstruction of this episode from a local perspective. Such an approach allows for an understanding of how a pivotal moment in national history emerged from local, everyday actions. It is worth noting that this is the first time these documents have been subject to academic scrutiny, providing an original and detailed account of the events.

This article aims to reconstruct the political activity of Propuesta Republicana (pro) in the Province of Buenos Aires between 2005 and 2015 – a period that spans its first participation in this arena of electoral competition through to its victory that enabled it to assume provincial government. Drawing on observation of electoral processes and the speeches of its principal leaders, the article offers an analysis of the distinct temporalities traversed by the party. For the study of this cycle, I propose an approach that seeks to associate and classify electoral tendencies and discursive continuities into temporal groupings, thereby identifying their degrees of durability – elements that can contribute to recognizing and delimiting the sedimentation of right-wing political currents in the process of constructing electoral offerings attractive to voters. The temporalities identified allow me to group voices, actions, confrontations and objectives in relation to the contexts that produced them. At the same time, to temporalize is to identify inflection points and relevant milestones for observing the historical singularities of events. The result of the analysis is the identification of three phases: expansion and competitive construction (2005–2011), (self-)marginalization and retrenchment (2011–2013), and integration with the victory of María Eugenia Vidal (2013–2015).

The establishment of Mexico’s centralist political-administrative model, in force since the First Central Republic, relied in part on the office of the departmental governor. Under general legislation, these officials were appointed by the president and held a statutory term of eight years. Yet the prevailing instability prevented any of them from completing a full constitutional term. Only in jurisdictions such as Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, Sinaloa, Aguascalientes, Jalisco, and Michoacán, owing to their specific dynamics, did governors serve at least half of the prescribed time. The core of the article develops a case study of the departmental governor of Michoacán, José Ignacio Álvarez, who, despite the civil war that dominated this district, remained in office for more than five years. The working hypothesis to explain this exceptional outcome is that the local political elite prioritized the fight against the federalist uprising, which unfolded between 1837 and 1841, over factional infighting. The study is grounded in the analysis of documentary sources – particularly military correspondence – and in a renewed review of the existing bibliography on the subject.

This article examines three separatist attempts that took place in 1870 in Jalisco’s canton of Lagos: the proclamation of the short lived State of Moreno, the project to establish a State of the Centre, and the petition for the annexation of the town of La Encarnación to the state of Aguascalientes. Because none of these initiatives succeeded, historiography has paid little attention to explaining why the participating town councils sought to create new political centers or to join existing ones. Through a comparative analysis of acts of adhesion, the regional press and legislative debates, the study reconstructs the links and interactions forged by these peripheral municipal corporations with the authorities of neighboring states. The separatist attempts articulate a direct critique of the measures adopted by Governor Antonio Gómez Cuervo to maintain order and security across the vast territory of Jalisco and, above all, demonstrate that separation functioned as a local resource to circumvent the weaknesses of the institutional framework during the political conjuncture of 1870.

Resenha

Poliomyelitis had a significant impact on Mexican society in the mid-20th century, affecting family, social, and medical life across the country. In this context, the present study analyzes a set of cartoons published in El Sol de Guadalajara between 1955 and 1962, aiming to examine how the disease was represented and perceived by the public. Through an iconographic approach, it is argued that these cartoons not only reflected social concern about the disease but also contributed to public awareness and the promotion of preventive measures, particularly childhood vaccination. It is further contended that editorial cartoons functioned as a communication tool that, through humor and critique, made the health issue visible and fostered public debate. Finally, it is concluded that these visual representations played a key role in shaping how Jalisco's society understood poliomyelitis and adopted strategies for its prevention.