As the title in English suggests, this book maps how a boy from rural Tennessee ran-away with his fiancée, Mary, to become one of the most influential and richest people in Mexico. Paxman argues that William Oscar Jenkins (1878–1963), the grandson of the “founding father of Lutheranism” in Tennessee (14), was the personification of the Protestant work ethic, reaching the top echelon of the Mexican business elite while living austerely. Financial and political success, however, took a great toll on his family life. Only one daughter raised a stable family of her own. The other children were arguably unhappy; unable to stay in long-term relationships; and addicted to alcohol, narcotics, or both. Mary died alone surrounded by the grandeur of a Beverley Hills mansion.

Jenkins was somewhat out of step with his contemporaries. He never became a Mexican national and thus continued to pay taxes as a U.S. citizen; yet, he did not repatriate profits—instead he reinvested all his proceeds into his adopted country. Finally, his inheritance went entirely to a charitable organization named after his late wife, an institutional format that was a novelty for post-revolutionary Mexico.

Paxman follows a strict chronology to investigate Jenkins’s life and what he calls Jenkins’s “four fortunes”: textiles, real estate, cinemas, and banking. Alongside this chronology, and as the title in Spanish suggests (En busca del señor Jenking; dinero, poder y gringofobia en México), Paxman also documents Mexicans’ love of U.S. foreign investments and their gringofobia (hate of their northern neighbors). The latter is framed by Paxman’s second main theme, namely, an exploration of the links between business elites and political power during the first half of the twentieth century.

Paxman’s early career as a journalist helps him to deliver well-written, enjoyable prose in the English version. Unfortunately, the Spanish version is plagued with literal translations, such as barones ladrones for “robber barons”—a concept and group of men for which, admittedly, there is no equivalent in Mexico or Latin America. The frequency and diversity of these literal translations and multiple typos have a negative impact on the main story, which is a shame as the Spanish version, published and distributed by a subsidiary of Penguin Books, is clearly aimed at the wide, nonspecialist audience usually targeted by Penguin.^{Footnote 1}

Biographies are rare as a genre in the business history of Latin America. Published biographies of businessmen (I cannot recall any of a businesswoman) are often the remit of the popular press, or the result of delusions of “grandeur” and megalomania. Research that builds on the systematic collection and analysis of evidence of a business personality is a rare and seldom-explored research category.^{Footnote 2}

Paxman’s research on Jenkins was long in the making and quite challenging, given that Jenkins was a very private man who never gave interviews or responded to vilification in the print media. Paxman solved the puzzle through surviving personal correspondence between Jenkins and Mary, contemporaneous newspaper articles, land registry records, and some eighty direct and telephone interviews in Mexico and the United States with Jenkins’s surviving daughter and grandson, other family members, academics, politicians, business people, former employees, staff at the charity, and descendants of many of these people, all who had direct dealings with Jenkins. As a result, Paxman offers a professional take on the biography of a businessman while raising the bar in an otherwise neglected and perhaps unappreciated approach to business history in general and of Latin America in particular.

As mentioned, Jenkins’s life story is told in strict chronology. One is left wondering why it was not repackaged around the “four fortunes,” as I will take the liberty to do here. The narrative begins with Jenkins’s early life in Tennessee; his years at Vanderbilt University; his elopement with Mary to San Antonio, Texas; and their move to Mexico. Jenkins was twenty-three years old when he landed his first job in Mexico. According to one source, this was as a mechanic earning $0.50 a day in an English-owned railroad company based in Mexico’s northern city of Monterrey (today, about an hour’s drive south of the Texas border). He did not linger long, as “sometime in 1902 he switched to the Monterrey Iron Foundry and Manufacturing Company, the city’s eighth-largest private employer” (48). These were nomadic times for Jenkins and money was very tight. There is little evidence to account for all this period, but while Jenkins changed jobs (including working for a mine, apparently in Zacatecas), it seems the family remained mostly in Monterrey, where Mary gave birth to Elizabeth, the first of five children, in 1903. In 1905 or 1906, Jenkins moved into textiles, and relocated his family south to Puebla, a city and state in central Mexico (today, about a two-hour southeast drive from Mexico City).

Mining, textiles, and foreign direct investment were all hallmarks of the Belle Époque, and Mexico was no different. It is not surprising then that his first fortune came in manufacturing of socks and stockings through entrepreneurial acumen, superior technology (administrative methods, machinery), and access to financial capital (such as family loans, including Mary’s inheritance).

Here I depart from Paxman’s account of early Mexican industrialization. He seems to overemphasize the role of Spaniards and existence of a business elite class that asserted influence over political powers from the 1880s to the 1920s. If a business elite class existed at that time, it was probably toothless in terms of political power. As Paxman admits later in the book, Mexico remained an agrarian nation well after World War II. Instead, Paxman could have provided greater detail as to how, why, and when Mexican elites embraced capitalism, the institutions that supported it, and the role of foreign investment and foreigners in this process.

Jenkins’s second fortune, this one in real estate, resulted first from financing and then from collecting on the collateral of loans from cash-strapped landowners during and immediately after the Mexican Revolution, in the 1910s and 1920s, respectively. This again fits an expected pattern (and again contradicts the idea of a well-formed Mexican business elite in the 1890s and 1900s). From the early days of the conquest up to the 1930s, capital in Latin America, and in Mexico in particular, was invested in agricultural real estate. Whether latifundista (large owner) or small farmers, this was a model geared not for the market but for self-consumption, with a handful of activities involved in exports (such as silver and natural dyes). Here, as in other parts of the story, Paxman’s argument would have benefited from clarification based on quantitative analysis, of which there is a dearth throughout the book.

There is an imbalance in the great levels of detail, granularity, and depth in recounting the first fortunes in textiles and real estate as compared to the latter fortunes in banking and cinema. This does not preclude Paxman from providing a rich narrative of the transformation of Mexico’s economic model from a land of self-sustained farmers and miners to an industrial, urban country in which some of the most productive, arable, and pastoral lands were run as proper agribusinesses. Paxman makes the point, although not strongly enough, that not everyone in the elite class made this transition. This is a shame, as it would have made for an interesting comparison in the epilogue, where he could have then discussed the apparent inability of Mexican elites to adapt to a new economic regime in the 1920s and 1930s, and again in the crisis years of the 1980s and 1990s (a period when less than a handful of the members of the elite business class and their companies of the 1970s survived to see the new millennium).

Paxman follows the tried-and-true approach in recounting Mexican political history by neatly mapping to the tenure of presidential administrations. There was a glimpse of an alternative and innovative approach when he compared the left-wing Cardenistas with the pro-business and right-wing Alemanistas. More could have been done to explore whether business fortunes were subject to the six-year political cycles or deeply rooted institutions that bent in different directions according to which way the wind was blowing. It might well be that during Jenkins’s lifetime, Mexican businesses developed their roots, and at this early point they could do nothing to resist political masters. Nevertheless, the eventual consolidation of a true business elite class saw it actively influencing government policy by the end of Jenkins’s life. Then again, my point is that Paxman failed to clarify the emergence of capitalism in Mexico, its evolution during the first half of the twentieth century, and how these processes overlapped (or did not) with the rags-to-riches transformation of a poor immigrant into a business tycoon.

Paxman’s contribution is perhaps at his strongest and most innovative when recounting the formation of the third fortune in cinema and the fourth fortune in banking. Paxman argues these two developed almost hand in hand, and that these fortunes benefited from a rapidly growing urban population. Paxman also recounts the working relationship with Manuel Espinosa Yglesias, initially Jenkins’s protégé, then partner, and eventually chairman of his charitable foundation. Thanks to Jenkins, Espinosa Yglesias became both a cinema and banking mogul.

Given the lack of personal records, the best Paxman can tell us about Jenkins’s life-long motivation to amass a huge fortune builds on Jenkins being belittled, first by Mary’s family and then by Puebla’s elites. Admittedly, while it is unlikely that evidence will emerge to probe Jenkins’s mind or character, Paxman’s repeating this view often enough makes the argument sound hollow.

In this literature field, knowledge of business and management history in mid-twentieth-century Mexico is wanting, and Paxman’s book is definitely a contribution that touches on an otherwise neglected genre and industry sectors. I have successfully used selected chapters of this story in my teaching, and I invite others to do the same.