The Blood Contingent : The Military and the Making of Modern Mexico, 1876–1911

This innovative social and cultural history explores the daily lives of the lowest echelons in president Porfirio Díaz’s army through the decades leading up to the 1910 Revolution. The author shows how life in the barracks—not just combat and drill but also leisure, vice, and intimacy—reveals the basic power relations that made Mexico into a modern society. The Porfirian regime sought to control and direct violence, to impose scientific hygiene and patriotic zeal, and to build an army to rival that of the European powers. The barracks community enacted these objectives in times of war or peace, but never perfectly, and never as expected. The fault lines within the process of creating the ideal army echoed the challenges of constructing an ideal society. This insightful history of life, love, and war in turn-of-the-century Mexico sheds useful light on the troubled state of the Mexican military more than a century later. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Stephen B. Neufeld is an associate professor of history at California State University, Fullerton. In addition to publishing a number of essays on Mexican military history, his most recent work is as coeditor and contributor for Mexico in Verse: A History of Music, Rhyme, and Power. "In the pursuit of the modern, the armed forces served as instrument, model, and metaphor for national progress. I examine in this book how the military experience, as representative of the process, failed or fulfilled aspects of the broad national transition towards hegemony and sovereignty. This is the first work combining personnel records and military literature with cultural sources to address the setting of military life for soldiers and their families rather than politics or officers. In connection with nation formation and identity, this book moves away from studies of the army as an institution to broaden understandings of inculcations and the limits and fault lines of building Mexico as a nation. More social and cultural in historical outlook, I examine the creation of political cultures rooted in or derived from the personal experiences of the lower ranks. In doing so, the book removes some of the privileged view that official narratives emphasize in order to explain the making of a bureaucratic institution from the bottom up, and to more clearly describe how this process both encouraged the development of nationalism and limited it in important ways. In this fashion I build on the works of scholars whose focus has centered more on officers, education, and political conflicts"--Introduction Winner of the 2018 LASA Bryce Wood Book Award Winner of the 2018 Thomas McGann Award from the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies This innovative social and cultural history explores the daily lives of the lowest echelons in president Porfirio Daz's army through the decades leading up to the 1910 Revolution. The author shows how life in the barracks--not just combat and drill but also leisure, vice, and intimacy--reveals the basic power relations that made Mexico into a modern society. The Porfirian regime sought to control and direct violence, to impose scientific hygiene and patriotic zeal, and to build an army to rival that of the European powers. The barracks community enacted these objectives in times of war or peace, but never perfectly, and never as expected. The fault lines within the process of creating the ideal army echoed the challenges of constructing an ideal society. This insightful history of life, love, and war in turn-of-the-century Mexico sheds useful light on the troubled state of the Mexican military more than a century later. "This innovative social and cultural history explores the daily lives of the lowest echelons in president Porfirio Díaz's army through the decades leading up to the 1910 Revolution. The author shows how life in the barracks--not just combat and drill but also leisure, vice, and intimacy--reveals the basic power relations that made Mexico into a modern society. The Porfirian regime sought to control and direct violence, to impose scientific hygiene and patriotic zeal, and to build an army to rival that of the European powers. The barracks community enacted these objectives in times of war or peace, but never perfectly, and never as expected. The fault lines within the process of creating the ideal army echoed the challenges of constructing an ideal society. This insightful history of life, love, and war in turn-of-the-century Mexico sheds useful light on the troubled state of the Mexican military more than a century later." -- Publisher's description "This innovative social and cultural history explores the daily lives of the lowest echelons in president Porfirio Díaz's army through the decades leading up to the 1910 Revolution. The author shows how life in the barracks--not just combat and drill but also leisure, vice, and intimacy--reveals the basic power relations that made Mexico into a modern society. The Porfirian regime sought to control and direct violence, to impose scientific hygiene and patriotic zeal, and to build an army to rival that of the European powers. The barracks community enacted these objectives in times of war or peace, but never perfectly, and never as expected. The fault lines within the process of creating the ideal army echoed the challenges of constructing an ideal society. This insightful history of life, love, and war in turn-of-the-century Mexico sheds useful light on the troubled state of the Mexican military more than a century later."--Page 4 de la couverture

This innovative social and cultural history explores the daily lives of the lowest echelons in president Porfirio Díaz’s army through the decades leading up to the 1910 Revolution. The author shows how life in the barracks—not just combat and drill but also leisure, vice, and intimacy—reveals the basic power relations that made Mexico into a modern society. The Porfirian regime sought to control and direct violence, to impose scientific hygiene and patriotic zeal, and to build an army to rival that of the European powers. The barracks community enacted these objectives in times of war or peace, but never perfectly, and never as expected. The fault lines within the process of creating the ideal army echoed the challenges of constructing an ideal society. This insightful history of life, love, and war in turn-of-the-century Mexico sheds useful light on the troubled state of the Mexican military more than a century later.

Front Cover Title Page Copyright Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Breaking Ranks: The Army’s Place in Making Mexico 1: Recruiting the Servants of the Nation 2: Sculpting a Modern Soldier through Drill and Ritual 3: Women of the Troop: Religion, Sex, and Family on the Rough Barracks Patio 4: The Traditional Education of a Modern Gentleman-Officer: The Next Generation of Sword and Pen 5: The Touch of Venus: Gendered Bodies and Hygienic Barracks 6: The Disordered Life of Drugs, Drinks, and Songs in the Barracks 7: The Lieutenant’s Sally from Chapultepec: Junior Officers Deploying into Nation 8: Hatred in Their Mother’s Milk: Savage, Semisavage, and Civilized Discourses of Nation Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index Back Cover