Visions of the emerald city [electronic resource] : Politics, culture, and alternative modernities in Oaxaca City, Mexico, 1877--1920.

9780493878768

2002

1 online resource (326 p.)

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This dissertation explores a critical feature of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexican history: how elites and subalterns in the country's developing secondary cities constructed and experienced the processes of modernity. It focuses on one of those urban centers, Oaxaca City, capital of the southern state of Oaxaca, during the reign of President Porfirio Diaz. This was a time of rapid industrial expansion and political stability achieved through a combination of patronage politics, juridical manipulation, and outright force. This study shows how the forces of modernity reached well beyond the national metropolis to interact with local conditions in unique ways. Like other secondary cities in Latin America during this period, Oaxaca City was the locus of modernity for the majority of the region's population. Connecting the periphery to the center, provincial capitals like Oaxaca City were showcases for Diaz's modernizing and state building projects. The class, gender, race, religion, and sexuality of the capital's inhabitants interacted with national and international interests to shape the politics and culture of the state capital. For example, through the use of photographic registries and petitions to the city council, female prostitutes appropriated elements of the city's regulatory apparatus to improve their economic status and establish themselves as "decent and modern citizens." Administrators organized city spaces along class and racial lines and church officials wrestled with their own notions of modernity to promote the city's artisans. Throughout the dissertation the social roots of urban reform is reconstructed in detail. In particular, the critical yet understudied roles of the Catholic Church and prostitution in turn-of-the-century Mexico is examined. A regional study that addresses important themes in Mexican studies, this dissertation contributes to recent scholarship that has begun to fill the gap in the historical literature on Oaxaca.

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English

July 12, 2011

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2002.

Yale University.