The history of sport in Latin America has become well established, and widely accepted, as an academic discipline over the last couple of decades. During this time a number of monographs have made strong contributions to new appreciations of the region, or of individual countries, usually through the optic of football as the continent's most popular sport. In Mexico, where boxing (and baseball) can claim equal levels of popular affection and acclaim among certain sectors or geographic regions, it is to be expected that pugilism should provide similar opportunities for examining key issues in the nation's history; more surprising – and all the more welcome – is that Stephen Allen's A History of Boxing in Mexico should offer the first book-length treatment of the sport. As with other successful sports histories, Allen's monograph combines detailed facts from the sporting realm with exploration of a theme, or in this case three themes, and of how boxing enables us to understand the ways in which masculinity, modernity and nationalism converged in Mexico through the middle decades of the twentieth century.

Organised into six main chapters, plus an Introduction and Conclusion, Allen focuses on the period between the 1930s and the early 1980s through a series of case studies of outstanding boxers whose careers spanned this timeframe. Chapter 1 serves to provide a historical overview of a range of topics up to 1940, including: urbanisation in Mexico City and Los Angeles; sport and national imagery in Mexico; and boxing in Mexico, California and beyond. As is implicit here, this study addresses an important aspect of Mexican masculinity and nationalism alike by considering such issues in the context of the country's northern ‘other’. The breadth of material covered offers a rich contextualisation of the book's subject, although its range at times results in a diffusion of focus beyond the central themes in play.

Chapter 2 considers the archetypal rise and fall of Rodolfo Casanova in the first ‘Golden Age’ of Mexican boxing during the 1930s, though the claim that his story ‘became the basis of the classic rise and fall of the world-class boxer’ (p. 52) may be stretching the case. As with the remaining chapters, this one provides a fairly extensive biography of the chapter's protagonist, drawing extensively on archival material and on cultural representations of the boxer in question. In this case, the production of the film Campeón sin corona (1945) drew heavily on Casanova's trajectory in the ring to play its part in the construction of Mexican masculinity aligned to a post-Revolution, pro-PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) model of nationalism; indeed, boxers consistently used their public profiles to express support for the president of the time. To explore these notions, Allen engages with a number of authors, from Mexico and beyond, to provide a balanced and well-informed consideration.

Chapter 3 focuses on the career of bantamweight world champion Raúl Macías (b. 1934), one of many champions who grew up in the working-class Mexico City barrio of Tepito. After devoting considerable space to exploring life in Tepito by way of contextualisation, Allen might have gone on to develop the connections between the fights that many boys and men experienced there and boxing as practised by Macías and others. Such linkages would appear worthy of consideration when discussions of the importance of bodily discipline and emotional self-control in the construction of Mexican masculinity figure repeatedly elsewhere.

The final three chapters examine the central issues of masculinity and nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s through the figures of Mexican world champions Vicente Saldívar, Rubén Olivares and (Cuban-born) José ‘Mantequilla’ [‘Butter’] Nápoles, respectively. Against the background of factors as diverse as the sexual revolution of the 1960s, changes in the global regulation and governance of boxing, the Tlatelolco massacre (1968) and the rise in access to broadcast media among the public, the concentration on a single time period across these three chapters allows Allen to build up a comprehensive picture of how boxers engaged with – and contributed to – the social (and economic) changes taking place at the time. This second ‘Golden Age’ of Mexican boxing, with matches often staged in Los Angeles as a result of close co-operation between boxing authorities and promoters across the US border, allows for discussion of how the ‘swinging sixties’, especially in California, impacted on models of Mexican masculinity and Mexican nationalism. The final chapter, devoted to José Nápoles, provides an added racial dimension to the debates around Mexican masculinity and nationalism as the Afro-Cuban émigré was variously hailed and rejected as a model of both.

The work closes with a brief concluding chapter that deftly draws together the death in August 1982 of world champion Salvador Sánchez and President López Portillo's letter of default to Mexico's creditors. For Allen, this marks the end of the country's dream of entering the First World and of Mexico City's ambition to be the international focal point for the country's boxers. Unfortunately, the decades since this time are covered by only the briefest of mentions in the Conclusion, and factors such as the impact that the re-emergence of women's boxing had on models of modernity, masculinity and nationalism remain entirely unexplored.

A History of Boxing in Mexico, then, successfully brings the practice into the sport history spotlight and provides a wealth of material from the 1940s through to the 1970s, deployed to good effect in examining some key issues in Mexico's history. All of this is achieved through exhaustive archival work in Mexico City, Jalisco and California, complemented by interviews and cultural production (films, short stories and songs) about Mexican boxers, resulting in the work boasting the most extensive bibliography available on the topic. At times, however, the discussion of this array of largely untapped sources would have benefitted from a further analytical edge, which tends to fade as lengthy summaries of articles, interviews and films about boxing at times take over the narrative. There is also a tendency to draw on a letter from a single fan (or an article from a single boxing commentator) as illustration or evidence of broad points without considering the role of the printed media, with their own agendas, as filters in the representation of public views. Nonetheless, the fact that much of this material is coming to light for the first time in an academic context makes the level of detail with which it is covered worthwhile in its own right. The text itself is very well prepared and written with considerable clarity, notwithstanding the occasional typo in English and some issues with Spanish that give us President Carlos Salinas de Gatori [Gortari] (p. 199) and variously Carlos Monsiváis, Monsivaís (p. 187) and Monsíváis (p. 53). A series of 14 illustrations, including photographs and cartoons of the protagonists, add to the sense of a work carefully and thoughtfully crafted. Stephen Allen has produced a study that will stand as the key point of reference for those interested in Mexican boxing during the twentieth century, while also providing excellent material for those keen to understand how one of the Mexico's most popular sports has contributed to several of the country's most enduring social issues.