History

de transporte ferroviario en nuestro país, es innegable que muchos de los lastres que padecieron los ferrocarriles en México hasta su reprivatización en la década de 1990, se fueron deteriorando desde entonces. El valioso aporte que el autor ha hecho con este libro a la comprensión de la problemática ferroviaria de nuestro país, sugiriendo nuevas hipótesis que nos ayuden a explicar las causas de su declive, ampliando el horizonte de los estudios sobre los trabajadores ferrocarrileros e introduciendo a la tecnología como una variable significativa, abre nuevos espacios para la investigación de este fascinante medio de transporte, a la cual todavía le faltan muchas estaciones por recorrer.

Oil revolutionized the world. In just over one century, the resource created an energy regime that changed transportation systems, war technologies, agricultural production, state politics, and, ultimately, the global climate. Petroleum is an American fable too. Highrisk investment, technological and scientific innovation, fierce competition, boom-andbust cycles, outsized personalities, environmental degradation, and the expansionist impulse all feature in the drama of American oil since the mid-nineteenth century. But oil is also a local story. In Mexico, the Huasteca, a region of northern Veracruz, underwent the first oil boom in the country's history between 1910 and 1921. The experience meant encounters and clashes-not all of them well documented-with social actors. The lion's share of historiographical coverage goes to the oil companies and state officials, with oil workers gaining attention more recently. Missing from the academic gaze are the responses of indigenous people as they lived the oil experience. They are not altogether absent from the historical record, to be sure, but they do not speak for themselves. Information about them comes from observers who, for the most part, were sympathetic to them but also saw them as victims. A careful reading of the evidence, however, reveals a more complex picture. Encounters between oilmen and indigenous families ran the gamut from seemingly benign interactions to deceitful transactions and outright violence. Moreover, there is no question that by 1921 the indigenous world had been impoverished and transformed beyond recognition, while the oil companies reaped profits and power locally and abroad. Yet wealth did not protect the oilmen from unpredictable politics, and the role of the indigenous lived experience played in that plot. Therein lies the twist in the Mexican oil tale. 1 The Mexican Revolution began in 1910, one decade into oil production in the Huasteca, rupturing lines of authority and opening up for debate the logic of oil development. In 1920 the military phase of the revolution ended and reconstruction began. During the following year the oil industry went bust, leading to a new official discourse

Northern Veracruz has experienced dramatic transformations in its landscape over the longue durée. Geological forces shaped it into the northernmost tropical rain forest in the Americas. Paleolithic humans appeared as early as 7600 BCE and tinkered with it, exploiting it for their own survival for thousands of years. Their ecological footprint was light enough until the communities grew and adopted agriculture. At that point, around 2500 BCE, the landscape of the Huasteca Veracruzana became more humanized, but the survival of the rain forest was not at risk, even when the rst towns formed in the rst centuries of the Common Era. Urbanization and civilization were highly localized, collapsing for reasons not well understood. The rain forest thus endured to confront Spanish colonialism in the 1500s. Changes in the land were uneven under the Spanish, however, and the rain forest outlasted colonial rule as well as the turmoil of nineteenth-century national politics. Transformation came in the twentieth century, as a result of oil extraction. Under the oil barons, the Huasteca experienced the full impact of capitalism and industrialization. Between 1900 and 1940, the oil industry eliminated the rain forest, leaving the Huasteca open to further environmental change. In the aftermath of oil, the landscape shifted to grasslands and monocrop agriculture. Oil remained present but largely in disguise: as petrochemical inputs to force poor soils to sustain citrus production and cattle ranching.

Before there was Mexico, there was oil. Millennia of organic matter that collapsed and liquefied into fossil fuel rested deep underground and underwater along the half-moon territorial formation that 19th-century geographers named the Mexican Gulf. Hidden by the lush tropical rainforests, marshes, and mangroves that occupied the landscape from the Pánuco River on the border between modern day Tamaulipas and Veracruz and the Bay of Campeche on the South, the oil seeped to the surface in small ponds, sometimes blackening the waters of streams and lagoons from Tabasco to the Huasteca. The human communities who inhabited that part of the globe thousands of years later knew about and utilized nature's oozing sticky black tar.

At a conference held at Stony Brook University in December 2007, "Dangerous Trade: Histories of Industrial Hazard across a Globalizing World," participants endorsed a Code of Sustainable Practice in Occupational and Environmental Health and Safety for Corporations. The Code outlines practices that would ensure corporations enact the highest health and environmentally protective measures in all the locations in which they operate. Corporations should observe international guidelines on occupational exposure to air contaminants, plant safety, air and water pollutant releases, hazardous waste disposal practices, remediation of polluted sites, public disclosure of toxic releases, product hazard labeling, sale of products for specific uses, storage and transport of toxic intermediates and products, corporate safety and health auditing, and corporate environmental auditing. Protective measures in all locations should be consonant with the most protective measures applied anywher...

Mexican oil workers remembered the night ofMarch 18,1938, as sheer euphoria, hearing President Lizaro Cirdenas decree the nationalization of the petroleum industry over the radio. Given the men's twenty-year battle against American and British companies, their joy was warranted. Expectations for the future ran high. But to what degree was the promise of nationalization fulfilled? Why is Petrdleos Mexicanos (pemex) being re-privatized now? Why is the Sindicato de los Trabajadores del Petrdleo de la Republica Mexicana (stprm) a synonym for corruption in the Mexican mind? The Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) framed nationalization, but as the state shifted priorities from social justice to economic growth in the 1940s, pemex followed suit. Labour peace in the oil sector was achieved through a state-union partnership. Thus pemex, the economy and the union grew in unison and produced the Mexican economic "miracle" ofthe 1960s and 1970s. The stprm thenbecame, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, "the largest and wealthiest union in Latin America" (Miller 1989a). But the vagaries ofthe global oil economy coupled with heavy borrowing in the international banking market led to the crash ofthe Mexican economy in 1982. At that moment, a new breed ofpolitician, the neo-liberal, rose to prominence to confront the crisis with an agenda ofopening Mexico's economy to foreign capital and privatizing all state-owned companies, including pemex. To do that, however, the state had to reduce the stprm to subservience. The process began in the 1980s, but the results are not final yet. The struggle over the fate of pemex continues.

Salur-., €c}iW, o\Z I ow ~ VoM'V.-.131 Histories Myrna Santiago Extracting Histories: Mining, Workers, and Environment "Can we live without mining?" asks a colleague ntviewing this text on the last two centuries of mineral extraction in l.atin America. Mining and oil companies, foreign and domestic, are convinced we cannot and have ushered a new rush in petroleum, minerals, and metals-the building blocks of modem soeiely. Ttie "boom" is the latest reincarnation of a colonial era business that intensified with industrialization in the nineteenth century. The continuities in the practice are as striking as the breaks are remarkable. The technologies of extraction have changed dramatically. Yet in keeping with historical trends, the industry has provoked Intense social eonllict due to its im pact on nature, workers' bodies, and local communiiies-the elements that prompted my colleague's question. Let us examine, ilien. the history of mining and oil in contem porary l.atin America to understand his concern and answer his query. Gold and silver, what sixtccnih-ceniury Europeans considered "specie," are the pre cursors of contemporary Latin American mining, for three hundred years, mining fu eled colonialism, nourishing Europe's rise to global prominence and Chinese imperial coffers. Testament to the richness of Latin America's subsoil is the extravagant display of silver and gold in European and Latin American colonial churches that astonish