Mark Overmyer-Velázquez's book is a welcome addition to the list of publications already examining Oaxaca City in the colonial period and the late twentieth century, though neither of the major urban texts for these periods is cited. It is a frustrating aspect of Overmyer's research that, while he juxtaposes tradition and modernity and interprets the Díaz regime as the vehicle of change – hardly an original view – he virtually ignores the periods before and after the Porfiriato (1876–1911), and largely neglects the close and enduring interrelationship between the city and the encircling valles centrales of Oaxaca in the period on which he is focusing.
Visions of the Emerald City fits into the recent trend among historians to revive an interest in Porfirio Díaz and his dictatorial attempt to modernise Mexico at the end of the nineteenth century. This was achieved by opening up the post-colonial state to international (largely US and UK) capital. The Porfirian project, of course, chimes with Mexico's recent experience of structural adjustment, the abandonment of protectionism, and its membership of the North American Free Trade Area; and this provides a partial explanation for the renewed fascination with Porfirio Díaz, a Oaxaca City native, former Governor of the state of Oaxaca and, for 35 years, dictator of Mexico. That there was a close continuing connection between Díaz and Oaxaca is well-known.
But Overmyer overstates the transformational aspects of the Porfirian regime in Oaxaca City, since economic change focused on mines and plantations rather than on urban areas, and the arid rural environment was rarely fit for more than Indian subsistence. Indeed, Overmyer's research shows that the Oaxacan mining boom of the 1890s was short-lived, and that prostitution – one of his leading themes – was in decline as more women left than entered the city's sex trade after 1907. Only the railway from Mexico City (opened 1892), the fin de siècle city-centre buildings, notably the theatre-casino and the handsome northern suburban extension created around 1900, were to persist throughout most of the twentieth century.
The book opens with an account of the way in which members of the Oaxaca City council interacted with state officials and Mexican and foreign capitalists to create an elite vision of modernity and hegemony. Intermarriage between the local elite and European and US newcomers to cement business connections is dwelt upon in interesting detail, but the social and political roles of the estate proprietors – fortified by land purchases after the Reform – and themselves often resident in Oaxaca City for at least part of the year, is ignored by the author.
Chapter two examines the relationship between race and class. Oaxaca was deemed by the Porfiriato to be a Spanish-speaking, white-mestizo city; the centre, around the zócalo, was the elite residential area; and surveillance by the police was used to confine the popular classes (largely Indian by race) to peripheral areas such as El Marquesado. Overmyer argues that ‘city administrators introduced new legislation, policing, mapping and urban expansion to establish a visual order and rationalise the city in the positivist and nationalist spirit of the times’ (p. 14). Yet not one of the late nineteenth-century maps to which he alludes is reproduced, and it is impossible to identify from the book the public gardens that were laid out and the precise locations of the suburban developments that were undertaken. The map of the city (p. 5) has no date, but appears to represent the urban morphology at the beginning of the Porfiriato.
The most interesting material in the book, in my opinion, is in chapter three, which examines the renewed presence of the Catholic Church in Oaxaca after years of anti-clerical repression in the mid-nineteenth century. Drawing on a wide range of documents, including church bulletins, newspapers and the personal correspondence of Archbishop Eulogio Gillow, the chapter explores the critical relationship between church and political leaders – most significantly the close collaboration between Gillow and Díaz. In particular, the author demonstrates how the establishment of the Catholic Workers' Circle of Oaxaca fitted into an elite design of modernity for workers – hinged on the subordination of labour.
The two final substantive chapters focus on the commercial sex trade, presumably because it exemplifies the elite's attempt to categorise and sanitise ‘the other’. In chapter four Overmyer shows how the city government of Oaxaca developed the image of the ‘proper’ man and woman, in order to control the ‘dangerous sexualities’ of prostitutes and to locate brothels outside a square delimiting the elite residential area, thus preserving the ‘decency’ of the (upper-class) family. There are, incidentally, no data available on the clients.
Chapter five shifts the emphasis to the ways city officials and female sex workers used photographs in registries of prostitution to harness dominant notions of modernity to their own ends. Two aspects of this chapter are particularly intriguing: the scale of the influx of Spanish-speaking foreign – often white – prostitutes for the high-class brothels set up in the mining boom; and the refusal of officialdom to give local prostitutes their appropriate racial or linguistic tag – Indian or Zapotec – in preference for colour labels ranging from dark to light. I remain unconvinced, however, of the need to reproduce tens of photographs of prostitutes – and several of manual labourers – in the book and on the cover, at the expense of the historic city maps.
Despite some reservations discussed above, the book is skilful in showing how the tiny elite and upper-middle class in Oaxaca City participated in the Porfirian project of state modernisation – for their own benefit – and marginalised, disparaged and attempted to control all those who fell outside the small circle of privilege.
