Georg Leidenberger's study of public transportation and political culture in Mexico City opens with a necessary nod to Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera's Novela del tranvía (1882) and Luis Buñuel's film La ilusión viaja en tranvía (1954). Both of these celebrated cronistas, although separated by well over a half century, used the streetcar as a vehicle for understanding the changing character of life in the city. Leidenberger, in much the same way, takes his readers on a journey around the capital as he tells a story about streetcars, infrastructure, and the business of transportation that is just as much the story of the contentious social and political negotiations that grew up around them.

The book is divided into three sections that together trace the history of the Mexico City's urban rail network in broadly chronological fashion, from its birth in the 1850s through its slow death in the aftermath of World War II. The first section examines the construction and consolidation of an urban railway system in the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. During these years, a variety of new transport technologies appeared, including steam-powered trains, mule-drawn streetcars, and electric trolleys. Following an initial period of technological experimentation and competition, a unified and electrified railway network (organized as the Mexican Tramway Company) emerged in the first decade of the twentieth century, fully integrated with the main supplier of electricity in the Valley of Mexico, the Mexican Light & Power Company. During these years, as the urban railways became ever more central to the functioning of the capital and the lives of its residents, spirited public debates developed over the safety of passengers and pedestrians, as well as aesthetic concerns regarding the growing tangle of electrical wires, posts, and rails.

In the second section, the book heads into the politics of urban transportation in the Revolution and its aftermath. Here Leidenberger employs Jürgen Habermas's notion of the “public sphere” in order to capture the contentious interactions between the emerging revolutionary state on the one hand and the growing number of new social actors on the other. The streetcar, Leidenberger suggests, functioned as an important space around which state-society negotiation took place in Mexico City. Not only had the streetcar emerged as the basic mode of transportation in the metropolis by this point, but it had also become an important space around which residents debated everything from labor and consumer rights to the actions of foreign capital and administrators. Chapters 4 and 5 extend many of these observations through detailed studies of the many streetcar worker strikes that rocked the capital in the 1910s and 1920s, and the impact of growing competition from urban buses. Chapter 6 examines the nationalization of the urban rail network (begun in 1935 and concluded in 1947), which was encouraged in no small part by the declining quality of streetcar services due to recurrent labor problems and poor maintenance, among other things.

The third section studies the postwar decline of the streetcar system and offers some final considerations on transportation, urbanization, and politics in Mexico City. Leidenberger argues here that the slow but unambiguous decline of the streetcar system was the result of a convergence of political and ideological forces that ended up leaving the urban rail network largely disconnected from an increasingly complex public transport system that would come to include buses, trolley-buses, and an underground Metro, in addition to taxis and private automobiles.

La historia viaja en tranvía is a welcome contribution to the growing scholarship on urban history in Latin America, as well as the history of transportation, infrastructure, and mobility in the region. The inclusion of numerous photographs, drawings, cartoons, diagrams, and maps, as well as new historical statistics, adds to Leidenberger's analysis and makes this book quite useful for scholars working on the history of Mexico City, as well as those working on the history of transportation in other parts of the world. One hopes it will be translated into English in the near future.