David Sowell, Medicine on the Periphery: Public Health in the Yucatán, Mexico, 1870–1960 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), pp. xxii + 207, £54.95, hb.
Marylander in New Iberia, which happens to be in Louisiana. Even the Lacandones, about as echt locals as you can get, one might think, turn out to be comparatively recent products of intermarriage between Yucatán Maya and Caribs. Yet from early on there was, Rugeley argues, a regional identity that centred on environment, isolation, patriarchy and recalcitrance, and by independence many people saw themselves as Tabascans. There were some cultural specificities, such as counting agricultural produce in base five, but above all there was a pronounced dislike of central meddlers like Bourbon tax collectors. Like more literal serranos – northerners, Afghans or Scots Highlanders – these regional populations enjoyed the landscapes to do something about it. Water made the plains that cover most of the state fertile yet untrustworthy, the communities fragmented by painfully slow communications, and while this kept the province poor it also kept it independent. Inside regional politics it also meant that a few tens of men constituted an appreciable force for destabilisation, if not for rule. This, combined with the wealth to be had from tropical commodities, above all cacao, gave ample raw material for the nineteenth century’s recurrent civil wars, vendettas between planters, merchants and federal commanders. Amid the unintentional nihilism there were not that many lasting winners, but there were numerous, notable losers, including Commodore Matthew Perry, driven out by yellow fever, malaria and guerrillas in what Rugeley calls the ‘war of a thousand puddles’ (p. ). This is regional history at its finest. It is strongly environmentally-inflected, and there is a strong sense of place from the ethno-historical outset, which is in the preconquest era, and a chronological sweep which roots the nineteenth century firmly in the colonial formation of cacao economy and society. The accounts of the ensuing wars – centralists against federalists, federalists against federalists, liberals against conservatives, Tabascans against all comers – do not lose sight of the structural, but do not waste the best of the particular, from the outré sex lives of the Maldonado cacao barons to the tax evasion strategies of the poorest, such as secret burials to avoid paying death dues to the priest. (This clearly worked, as one year the village of Teapa could muster only a jar of peaches in syrup as tithes for the bishop in Mérida.) Analytical summaries interspersed throughout the text point out the relevance of detail to interpretation: thus while the Tabascan story reinforces the fragility of the independent state and national identity, it also waters down the identification of federalism with popular mobilisation advanced by Michael Ducey (in A Nation of Villages, University of Arizona Press, ) and Peter Guardino (Peasants, Politics and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, Stanford University Press, ), among others. The state’s is a story for which there is relatively paltry material; as Rugeley points out, any paper that did not make it out of the state by the s was doomed. As he also points out, though, stories of imperial spoilers make for terrific reading, and in his hands they do just that.