Jungle Laboratories

Candance’s assessment that “more questions may come into the reader’s mind than answers” is accurate; although, I disagree on why.  Rather than this work being focused on the commodity, it is more focused on the people.  Mostly this means the campesinos, but sometimes she goes of on a tangent to investigate someone who she believes has not been appropriately treated in other works.  The result is that the subject and tone of Jungle Laboratories is one of historiographical justice.

A flaw in many histories is ignoring context, and this is more common in social histories.  Someone claiming that the author did not want to write about economics often defends theses gaps, as if economies somehow existed outside of social interactions.  Social works of the 1970 and 1980s were often criticized for ignoring politics, and since then social historians have been able to achieve a balance.

Laveaga seems at least a bit aware of this, in most chapters she attempts to provide some background information, but often this is limited or unclear.  When discussing Luis Echeverría, she waxes about his efforts to fulfill the Mexican Revolution, as if Echeverría was actually some sort of insurgent, rather than a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party.  Laveaga mentions several instances of corruption and graft, but the larger picture is that the Institutional Revolutionary Party used those methods to retain its control over Mexico for decades.  Electoral fraud and massive spending sprees every presidential cycle, usually triggered the devaluations that James noted, were just as much part of Echeverría’s administration as his predecessors.

Just as Laveaga contrasts Echeverría with those in his party, she also tried to differentiate him from his hand picked successor.  She describes him as “José López Portillo, an ardent supporter of transnational capital as a means to bring development to Mexico” (164) Although it might be better to describe him as the candidate who won with a ludicrous one hundred percent of the vote and nationalized the Mexico’s banking sector.  The experience of the Echeverría years may have been different for the people of Veracruz and Oaxaca, but that does not make their experience representative, nor does it mean that their tale is somehow above the filth of politics during the heyday of the Institutional Revolutionary Party.  At best, this leaves Jungle Laboratories with a vague context, and at worse an uncritical account of Mexico in the twentieth century.  Since Laveaga is using Barbasco to investigate the lives of the campesino, this is a substantial disappointment.