In humanizing the Mexican elite, José Galindo tells his readers that his goal is to “theorize, analyze, and explain, from an academic point of view, the origin of these types of people who shared the same background as me” (ix). This book is about immigrants who traveled to Mexico over the past century-plus to become elite. Specifically, Galindo looks at a group of French immigrants from the Barcelonette region of France. This allows him to study the strategies, “some common and some individual, that French entrepreneurs used in Mexico” (x). Galindo applies some of his findings about strategies and social networks to other successful migrant groups, particularly Eastern European Jews and Lebanese and Syrian immigrants.

Using social network analysis to process data from archives and interviews, he uncovers a new interpretation of “the final stages of the Barcelonnette migration” and reveals links between businessmen and politicians that contributed to the development of crony capitalism (3). The book simultaneously studies nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexican corruption through the Díaz regime, the Mexican Revolution, the “Mexican miracle,” ISI, and neoliberalism. Occasionally, Galindo intervenes in general Mexican historiography, arguing against John Womack, for example, that the Revolution scarcely changed the economy.

The first chapter details the history of Barcelonette immigration in the early decades of the nineteenth century, noting that most of the region's migrants began as small-scale merchants, craftsmen, and seamstresses. Owing largely to their status as Europeans and Catholics, they made major gains in capitalist accumulation in the 1870s, when they began establishing retail houses and textile companies and investing in banking and railroad infrastructure. The second chapter delves into the process by which Barcelonettes acquired wealth and expanded their influence. In this chapter, Galindo resuscitates “crony capitalism,” a term coined about 40 years ago that began to receive scholarly attention in the 1990s. It is an economic system “in which success in business depends primarily on the relationships among the “power elite.” In Mexico, Galindo specifies, this elite is “composed of economic, political, military, and social actors with the capacity to consistently and substantially affect a great variety of national and regional issues” (56).

Many members of this elite lost power during the Mexican Revolution, but not the Jean family, whose experience underscores why Galindo devotes the third chapter to them, stressing the importance of examining the different strategies of individual groups of entrepreneurs in specific economic sectors. The first Jean came over in the 1880s and worked on a ranch before moving to Mexico City for employment at the dry-goods store of another French family. Adrian Jean became a partner in that firm and soon started several textile partnerships with recent Jean arrivals. Chapter 4 looks at the impact of changes in the later twentieth century on Barcelonette families. Galindo stresses the importance of the Jean family's strategy of networking socially while remaining economically independent from their peers, as well as their willingness to diversify into fields that other Franco-Mexicans were not involved in, like real estate. As textile mills faltered in the wake of World War II, the Jean family continued to thrive because of their real estate holdings, banking interests, and social connections to such powerful families as the Azcárragas, founders of the major media company Televisa.

The final chapter is an ominous reflection on corruption. Although widespread public concern about corruption helped elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador (“AMLO”) as president in 2018, according to Galindo, AMLO will likely use his own networks of entrepreneurs to preserve his regime. Ultimately, Galindo argues that crony capitalism is necessary everywhere for the development of capitalism, and continues to exist in varying degrees in most places. In Mexico, it has withstood major pendulum swings from protectionism to neoliberalism. Because a nation's institutions determine its ability to resist the influence of government-business alliances, Mexico, he thinks, is likely to need outside reinforcement. Given the history of foreign intervention in Latin American nation, I wonder if that is a wise recommendation.

Galindo has produced an important book that successfully marries the sociological insights of entrepreneurial studies with the economic and political history of Mexico. Although he does not engage explicitly with the “new history of capitalism,” his scholarship contributes to this field, clearly illustrating one of its “varieties.” There are helpful tables and charts throughout that detail business and political links, family activities, capital investments, and industry changes, and a global map of corruption. Readers will finish this book with a better understanding of modern Mexico and the development of capitalism.