For the middle decades of the twentieth century the US businessman William Jenkins was the most unpopular man in Mexico. This was some going. As Mexican politicians forgot the redistributive pledges of the Revolution, helped fill the coffers of compliant entrepreneurs and let other sectors of the population fall deeper into poverty, there was plenty of resentment to go round. But Jenkins topped the lot. Rumours of faked kidnappings, bloody hotlands killings and cash for influence combined to create a ‘black legend’ of the puritanical capitalist. His sugar plantation was a ‘hell on Mexican soil’ (p. 341); his shady manoeuvers in the movie industry enough to fill a black book.
Yet, as Andrew Paxman demonstrates in this entertaining and elegantly written work, such claims were at best overstated. At worst they were the product of a state-generated ‘gringophobia’ designed to appease, if not actually reward, the country's leftists.
Paxman's study takes the form of a classic biography. We start with Jenkins’ early years as the ambitious son of a Tennessee schoolteacher. He then moved down to Mexico to try to make his fortune and ended up in Puebla, where he used cheap local cotton and new manufacturing technology to dominate the country's hosiery market and make his first million. He rode out the rough years of the Revolution and actually increased his fortune. Paxman argues that, like the Jewish and Lebanese immigrants of the same era, he combined risk-taking with market savvy.
He also moved into farming and real estate, taking advantage of landowner bankruptcies to buy up the grand sugar plantation of Atencingo. Here he and his Spanish mayordomo (steward) managed to stave off peasant demands for land distribution through a blend of back-room deals and brute force. Crucial to the survival and growth of this business empire was Puebla's most prominent political family – the Ávila Camachos. Maximino, the oldest brother, served as governor of the state during the conflictive Lázaro Cárdenas years. He helped protect Jenkins’ properties as well as shepherding him towards the lucrative cinema industry. Though Maximino died in 1945, his family members, business allies and friends propped up Jenkins well into the following decade. By the 1950s, Jenkins held a virtual monopoly of Mexico's booming cinema theatres. It was only with the presidency of Adolfo López Mateos and the resurgence of the Mexican Left that Jenkins was forced to give up his dominance.
Even the bare bones of the story make for a gripping read. But in Paxman's expert hands the unexpected story of how a southern farm boy became a revolutionary and nationalist Mexico's biggest cinema owner also provides a wonderful lens for understanding many of the processes and contradictions of the country's post-revolutionary era. There are thought-provoking discussions of the similarities between the US South and the Mexican rural world, the role of cinema in a modernising society and the place of caudillos in revolutionary Mexico.
Yet Paxman's principal argument – that business formed what he terms the ‘forgotten pillar’ of the Mexican state, and that there was a ‘symbiotic imperative’ between government officials and capitalists (p. 6) – also runs through and shapes the text. It is a provocative claim, which seeks to go beyond standard tales of personal enrichment and mutual corruption and examine the socially stabilising power of capitalism in post-revolutionary Mexico. At times it works extremely well. Viewing Jenkins not as a Porfirian hangover but rather an uppity challenger of Puebla's staid Catholic elites helps explain his rather unexpected appeal. Seeing the Mexican cinema industry not as an expression of nostalgic nationalism but as an alliance of money-making and soft entertainment illuminates why officials allowed Jenkins to hold control for so long.
Where this idea is rather more difficult to defend is in the countryside, where Paxman's clear sympathy for his subject sometimes obscures the paranoia and violent disdain that clearly influenced Jenkins and other landowners during the Cárdenista period. Here, confronted with Dolores Campos, wife of one dead agrarista (supporter of land reform) and mother of another, Jenkins looks rather like the caricature of white male privilege, every bit the naked profiteer.
Finally, it is worth flagging up Paxman's writing style, which is probably the most revelatory aspect of the book. Academic English-language books on Latin America have long suffered a distinct lack of elegance or panache. At best they are written in a rather dry, perfunctionary style; at worst they are penned in a high-baroque manner, layered with dense verbiage and all but impenetrable for the uninitiated. There are many reasons – the influence of ‘capital T’ theory, the cultural turn, and the continuing social, intellectual and financial isolation of US academia. But the fact remains: books on Latin America don't sell, in part because they are badly written.
Here Paxman's work really bucks the trend. Like the very best history stylists, he does not simply make a series of well-reasoned arguments but also takes time to paint pictures of the worlds through which Jenkins moved. The post-Civil War South, revolutionary Puebla and the country clubs of the haute bourgeoisie are also described with an acuteness and vividness that brings them to life. For a 400-page history book, it is that great rarity: a pleasure to read.
