9 - Mexico: Restored republic and Porfiriato, 1867–1910

Summary

In 1958 Daniel Cosío Villegas, one of Mexico’s greatest historians whose special field was the history of Mexico from 1867 to 1910, stated that, quite apart from the period of the Restored Republic (1867–76), nearly 2,000 books and pamphlets had been written on the Porfirian period (1876–1910) alone. Yet, with a number of significant exceptions, the most important works on this period of Mexican history have appeared since the 1950s. The secondary literature on the period 1867–1910, and especially on the Porfiriato, is assessed in Daniel Cosío Villegas, ‘El Porfiriato: Su historiografía o arte histórico’, in Extremos de América (Mexico, D.F., 1949), 113–82; John Womack, Jr., ‘Mexican political historiography, 1959–1969’, in Investigaciones contemporáneas sobre historia de México (Mexico, D.F., and Austin, Tex., 1971); Enrique Florescano, Elpoder y la lucha por el poder en la historiografía mexicana (Mexico, D.F., 1980); and Thomas Benjamin and Marcial Ocasio-Meléndez, ‘Organizing the memory of modern Mexico: Porfirian historiography in perspective, 1880s-1980s’, HAHR, 64/2 (1984), 323–64. The most important, most comprehensive work on the whole period from 1867 to 1910 is the monumental Historia moderna de México (Mexico, D.F., 1958–72), a huge thirteen-volume collective work edited and partly written by Daniel Cosio Villegas. It was written in the 1950s and 1960s under Cosío’s direction by a team of historians who collected every available piece of evidence in Mexican, North American and European archives, and examined all aspects of life in Mexico, embracing political, economic and social as well as intellectual history.