Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City

2022 Alfred B. Thomas Book Award, Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies (SECOLAS) 2022 Bolton-Johnson Prize, Conference on Latin American History (CLAH) 2022 Best Book in Non-North American Urban History, Urban History Association (Co-winner) 2023 Honorable Mention, Best Book in the Humanities, Latin American Studies Association Mexico Section 2023 Turriano Book Prize, International Committee for the History of Technology Many visitors to Mexico City’s 1886 Electricity Exposition were amazed by their experience of the event, which included magnetic devices, electronic printers, and a banquet of light. It was both technological spectacle and political messaging, for speeches at the event lauded President Porfirio Díaz and bound such progress to his vision of a modern order. Diana J. Montaño explores the role of electricity in Mexico’s economic and political evolution, as the coal-deficient country pioneered large-scale hydroelectricity and sought to face the world as a scientifically enlightened “empire of peace.” She is especially concerned with electrification at the social level. Ordinary electricity users were also agents and sites of change. Montaño documents inventions and adaptations that served local needs while fostering new ideas of time and space, body and self, the national and the foreign. Electricity also colored issues of gender, race, and class in ways specific to Mexico. Complicating historical discourses in which Latin Americans merely use technologies developed elsewhere, Electrifying Mexico emphasizes a particular national culture of scientific progress and its contributions to a uniquely Mexican modernist political subjectivity.