Review of Mexico in Transition by Byron Crites

Book Reviews
activist who moved to Brownsville, Texas in 1877 at age eighteen. Garza embraced
revolution both to re-empower Mexicans in Texas and to overthrow the Díaz regime.
This ‘ revolution ’ began in September 1891 and included multiple unsuccessful military
forays from Texas into Mexico. Although armed actions lingered into 1893, Garza
fl ed into exile in early 1892. Increasingly fancying himself as a Latin American revolutionary
leader, he went from Cuba to the Bahamas to Costa Rica, meeting his death
in a failed liberal revolt in Colombia in 1895.
Research for this work includes extensive use of private, state and federal archives
in both Mexico and the USA. Two individuals worthy of mention used to tell this story
are Garza himself and his most dogged military adversary, US Army Captain John G.
Bourke. Bourke leaves for the record several published journal articles and an insightful
diary, while Garza offers an unfi nished autobiography and many newspaper articles.
Allowing people to speak for themselves creates the obvious pitfall of selective
recounting and positive self-portrayal. This Young admits repeatedly and he does a
commendable job of reading between the lines and using other sources to separate
truth from puffery.
The writings left behind by Garza and Bourke leads to one of the many themes of
this book that extend beyond Garza and South Texas – the importance of the press.
As an experienced journalist, Garza recognised from beginning to end the value of the
press as propaganda, especially in infl uencing the reading elite on both sides of the border
and even internationally. The Garzistas proved talented at articulate public speaking,
publishing their own newspapers, and writing books. While these efforts abounded
and circulated widely during Garza ’ s time, few of the smaller Spanish-language
border newspapers survive today and Garzista versions of events were ultimately suppressed
and overshadowed by offi cial US and Mexican government positions. Corridos
[ballads] and stories told by the less literate participants have all but disappeared today.
This, according to Young, is one reason why the Garza revolution remains obscure
to historians.
Young also uses these two antagonists, Garza and Bourke, to illustrate a larger
phenomenon cresting on both sides of the border at the end of the nineteenth century:
socioeconomic transformation. Based on US imperialism, this process had been occurring
since before the Mexican-American War, creating the conditions for the long
history of confl ict and violence caused by encroaching Anglos. By 1890, however,
border Mexicans and Tejanos were getting squeezed from both sides of the line and
their degradation now loomed complete and irreversible. The Porfi rian regime turned
to foreign capitalists to commercialise agriculture, develop mines, and build railroads.
In the name of ‘ progress ’ , elite and common Mexicans not only lost land, but political
freedom and democracy to ‘ central-government interference in a region that had been
relatively isolated and semiautonomous for its entire history ’ (p. 7). While land certainly
represented the major issue of contention by those that constituted the rank and
fi le of border armed rebellions, Garza found equally offensive press censorship, electoral
fraud, corruption, selling-out to foreigners, violation of liberal principles, and
outright terrorism by the Mexican regime.
Bourke, on the other hand, portrays the divergent side of the ideological battle.
Bourke not only viewed the role of the US military as bringing peace to a rebellious
© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 Society for Latin American Studies
136 Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 26, No. 1