Anna Rose Alexander's book is a thoughtful and fascinating exploration of how fear, urbanization, class, and modernization intertwined in the flames of Mexico City in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on the period covering the rule of Benito Juárez in the 1860s to the end of the Porfirio Díaz administration in 1910, Alexander examines the consequences of fire catastrophes, the people who attempted to solve fire-related problems, and the technologies that these people invented and incorporated. She argues that, “fire hazards offer a way to look at broader processes found in rapidly modernizing cities. They demonstrate how space is made and remade according to political and social agendas, how public services and technology get distributed unequally, and how the competing economic and political interests of private and public interest groups are reconciled with the collective necessity to create a safe environment” (14). She concludes that people were safest from the threat of fire when communities and private interests collaborated responsibly.
City of Fire is a strong contribution to the growing body of works that consider connections between society, environment, and technology. It compliments Myrna I. Santiago's The Ecology of Oil, Edward Beatty's Technology and the Search for Progress in Modern Mexico, Araceli Tinajero and J. Brian Freeman's collection on Technology and Culture in Twentieth-Century Mexico, and Michael Matthew's The Civilizing Machine. As with Matthew's work, the influence of William H. Beezley, Alexander's PhD advisor, is present in the strong cultural elements and the emphasis on the Porfirian era. Alexander, however, goes beyond the limits of a cultural study to delve into a myriad of sub-fields currently emerging within Latin American history.
To tackle this variety, Alexander organizes the book thematically in seven chapters. The first chapters take a broad approach, and the later ones narrow to the personal level. She writes about culture, regulation, the creation of fire brigades, engineers, inventors, insurance providers, and medical treatment for burn victims. Each chapter works as a stand-alone essay; they are woven together mainly by the topic of fire itself, and a running discussion of social inequality.
This approach will likely meet with a mixed reaction. In some ways it is a strength. It allows Alexander to delve into different genres of history—cultural, technological, economic, political, and medical—while hashing out the multitude of ways Mexico City residents and fire interacted. The thematic approach does, however, stall the flow of the work as it progresses. Her monograph explodes with a sizzling introduction—Alexander writes some delicious hooks—but the fire starts to cool toward the end, where the chapters feel a little more forced into place by a need to expand the story.
A number of entertaining and enlightening parts of the book stand out: the stories about fearful, gossipy residents and incompetent firefighters, combined with illustrations by José Guadalupe Posada; the idealistic and sometimes profit-driven local inventors who create a grand variety of devices for dealing with fire; the tragic pain and death faced by fire victims; and the rise of engineers, who sometimes reinforced social inequalities and at other times fought for a more equitable distribution of technology and security.
The stand-out theme throughout the book is the inequitable character of modernization in Mexico, a well-documented fact, but one that is sometimes over-generalized. Alexander's discussion is a bit more nuanced. She notes that modernization campaigns often privileged the wealthy, but she also points out that most people supported efforts relating to fire protection. She argues that many engineers appealed for equity, “a major deviation from the Porfirian mindset” (153). But perhaps, instead of a deviation, compassion might be something scholars have simply overlooked.
Maybe historians have overplayed the “Porfirian persuasions” of positivism and social Darwinism while downplaying more charitable aspects of progressivism and basic humanity. Yet, some members of the growing professional class promoted optimistic visions of a happier and more equitable Mexico, ideals they carried into the Mexican Revolution.
