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The purpose of this work is to present a detailed and comprehensive study of the development of the major Mexican railways from their beginnings down to the year 1911. The choice of this subject was conditioned by the awareness that no such work existed and the hope that such a work, besides its intrinsic interest, would prove a useful basis for a study of the wider implications of the development of railways on Mexico's economic and social life. Such a study is beyond my resources in time, material and experience, and so I have confined myself to describing the concessions, construction and operation of the railways themselves. There is no detailed general history of the Mexican railways available in English. Such works as exist deal with one specific aspect of the railways or give a very superficial outline of the overall development, or else approach the subject purely from the viewpoint of the foreign investor. The amount of material, both primary and secondary, available in Spanish is, of course, much larger, but the only historical work which is both detailed and comprehensive is the series of chapters on the railways written by Sr. Francisco Caldeón for Daniel Cosío Villegas's monumental "Historia moderna de México". These chapters contain a wealth of information and I here acknowledge the great debt which I owe them in the preparation of this thesis. However, Sr. Calderón deals with all the railways in chronological periods which makes it difficult to follow the development of individual undertakings. Therefore, I have attempted to discuss the railways as entities and, for the purposes of this thesis, I have selected the pioneering F. C. Mexicano and the four major companies which were consolidated in 1908 to form the basis of the Ferro-carriles Nacionales de México. These represent the main railways built prior to the Revolution. Thus, after a brief introduction to 19th-century Mexico, the first chapter describes the protracted building of the F. C. Mexicano line to Veracruz and its subsequent development. The second chapter relates the battle for the concessions and the construction and operation of the lines to the U. S. border, the F. C. Central, F. C. Nacional and F. C. Internacional, whilst the third chapter deals with the building of the F. C. Interaceánico line to Veracruz and some of the problems faced by the railways. The fourth chapter describes the formation of the Ferro-carriles Nacionales de México and, finally, the conclusion summarizes and sums up the preceding chapters. There then follow a bibliography and an appendix containing tables and graphs relating to the railways under consideration. Where primary materials have not been available to me, I have relied heavily on Sr. Calderón's work, as mentioned above, cross-checking and supplementing it, where possible, from other sources. Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the dates and figures given but the usual reservations regarding Latin American statistics must be made here also; many potentially useful statistics have had to be discarded because one source fails to correspond with another (and sometimes they conflict with themselves!) All the railways, being American or British-owned, had titles both in English and Spanish, but for the sake of consistency, only the Spanish names have been used in the text of this work. Similarly, all distances have been given in kilometres (1 km. = 0.62137 or approximately 5/8 mile) but to avoid excessively complicated exchange calculations, bearing in mind the fluctuating exchange rates, I have left money sums in the currencies in which they have come to me. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

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Between 1950 and 1970 television emerged as one of the most important forms of mass communication in Mexico. An analysis of television news scripts and film clips located at the Televisa (the nation’s largest television network) Archives in Mexico City exposed tensions and traditions in television news. The tensions reveal conflicts between: the government and media producers; modernity and the desire to create traditions and maintain those already invented; elite controllers of the media and popular viewers; a male dominated business and female news producers and viewers; an elite (mostly white) group of media moguls and a poor mestizo and indigenous viewers; and the United States and Mexico in the midst of the Cold War. In contrast to the trend in scholarship on Mexican television, this dissertation demonstrates that media executives such as Emilio Azcárrraga Milmo and high ranking government officials within the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) maintained close connections, but the two groups did not always walk in lock-step. Analysis of newscast scripts and film clips located at Televisa’s (Mexico’s largest network) Archive reveal a more complex picture, which shows there were several and sometimes competing visions for the country's future. Examining the first twenty years of television news in Mexico City, the author focuses on production, content, and interpretations of the news. The dissertation finds evidence to prove that news producers and writers formed tele-traditions that influenced news production, content, and interpretation well into the 1980s. Unprecedented access to Televisa Archives allowed the author to ask and answer questions, that to date scholars have not treated, such as, what makes Mexican television news Mexican? The dissertation is grounded in a theoretical framework called hybridity of framing, which combines the concepts of cultural hybridity and news framing. The dissertation concludes that although news producers and writers attempted to frame events in certain ways, viewers often interpreted the news differently.

The Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) rose up in Mexico’s southeastern state of Chiapas on January 1, 1994. The Zapatistas’ process of consolidating territorial autonomy and stance of radical refusal are a challenge and threat to the Mexican state and neoliberal governance practices. At the center of that autonomy process are changes in gender equity and gendered relations of power that are crucial to the gains of the project. This multi-sited ethnography of that process takes place in a zone of contact where local practices and struggles for indigenous rights, autonomy, and women’s rights meet with solidarity and opposition. My dissertation follows two strategic lines of inquiry. First, women’s bodies have been central to both nation building and to alternative forms of nationalism and tradition. In Mexico, indigenous women have been the raw material of these projects. The EZLN included questions of gender and women’s equity from the beginning of the movement. This contrasts with other social movements of the past few decades in Latin America, and with the conventional wisdom that it is necessary to elide gender contestations and challenges to patriarchy in order to make gains as a movement. I argue that the overall struggle has not in fact been undermined, but strengthened. I examine the extent to which Zapatista women have forged new subjectivities (affirming both gender equality and collective cultural difference) in defiance of local patriarchal control, gendered state violence, and of discourses that characterize them as victims of their culture. Second, I argue that the analysis of these changes in gendered relations of power reveals how the Zapatista autonomy project is integrating difference without reverting to previous models of belonging premised on assimilation or the recognition of difference solely at the individual level. The EZLN rejected a solution based on ethnic citizenship in favor of indigenous autonomy and collective rights; their autonomous governance offers important insights into state power and its effects, and into strategies and alternatives to inclusion in the neoliberal project. / text

Since its independence, the Latin America has been prone to unstable and military dominated politics. Mexico, however, has proven to be an exception. The purpose of this dissertation, therefore, is to explain Mexico's stability and civilian dominated polity. The dissertation draws upon personal interviews with Mexican and American military officers, Mexican military documents and secondary sources. From these sources four foci, professionalization, social background of military and civilian leaders, civilian political behavior, and extranational influences, appeared to offer the greatest amount of explanation for the Mexican case. Professionalization's impact appears to result from the low level of political efficacy generated by the Mexican military educational system and the inculcation of values encouraging loyalty to civilian institutions. The social background of Mexican officers appears to support the values and norms common to the military institution, including those conducive to civilian domination. The social disparity between the more humble family background of most officers and the higher family social background of civilian politicians also appears to be a factor. The civilians political party system appears to be critical. In a multiparty system, like Brazil, multiple civilian opposition groups, through co-optation, generate corresponding military support groups. Civilian opposition groups with military backing therefore will always be present and represent a potential threat. In a single party dominant system, like Mexico, though, military identification will always be with the government, rather than an opposition political group. Finally, the influences of the United States and Soviet Union do have an impact on Mexican civil-military relations. However, rather than the super powers' manipulating the Mexican military and causing coups supportive of super power foreign policy objectives, Mexico appears to use the super powers' resources and images to stabilize civil-military relations. The importance of this dissertation is that it offers explanations for the difference in behavior between the stable, civilian dominated Mexican model, and the military dominated models found throughout most of the Latin American region. The dissertation also presents new interpretations regarding the relationships between professionalization and political efficacy, and social background and social efficacy.

This study examines elite discourse about crime and criminality in modern Mexico. This discourse was intimately connected to discussions of citizenship (and thus inclusion in the Mexican nation-state) which became increasingly important after Independence from Spain in 1821. Elites recognized that a broad, egalitarian definition of citizenship was a potent source of legitimation for a nation in the throes of self-definition. To these discussions of citizenship, discourse about crime and criminality added an effective counterpoint, identifying individuals and groups within the new nation that merited exclusion. Specifically, this study examines the emerging discourses of criminology and penology which attempted to bring a rational, even scientific approach to the long-standing problem of crime. These "liberal" discourses (and the criminal justice system they inspired) eschewed the overtly racist and classist legal legacy of Mexico's colonial past. However, despite their egalitarian pretensions, criminology and penology often rearticulated colonial social distinctions, first by covertly embedding traditional biases in a contradictory liberal rhetoric and later by legitimizing these prejudices with evolutionary science. Ultimately, little changed in post-Independence Mexican social relations: the poor, the indio, the mestizo continued to be excluded from participation in mainstream society, not because they were legally segregated as in the colonial period but because of their supposed criminality. Even Mexico's great social revolution generated few effective changes. Like their predecessors, revolutionary elites attempted to exploit the legitimizing potential of the criminal justice system but again without significantly redefining its basic clientele. The socially-marginal continued to pose a threat to public order and economic progress; thus they continued to be excluded from public life. Within this larger context, specific chapters also function as independent essays: chapter one examines the racist and classist subtexts embedded in post-Enlightenment, "classic" criminology; chapter two, the role of evolutionary science in legitimizing these subtexts; chapter three, the use of popular literary techniques in the construction of "scientific" criminology; chapter four, the place of prison reform in Mexican political discourse; and chapter five, the role of penal code reform in political legitimation.

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