The Blood Contingent
The Blood Contingent
The Military and the Making of Modern Mexico, 1876–1911
Winner of the 2018 LASA Bryce Wood Book Award
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.
In addition to illuminating popular politics, he [Stephen Neufeld] offers the first cultural and social history of the Porfirian military, foregrounding the gendered and racialized experiences of nation-state formation.
Innovative.
Neufeld gives the text a powerful structure that dissects the army’s social and cultural history.
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.
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Breaking Ranks: The Army’s Place in Making Mexico
Chapter One. Recruiting the Servants of the Nation
Chapter Two. Sculpting a Modern Soldier through Drill and Ritual
Chapter Three. Women of the Troop: Religion, Sex, and Family on the Rough Barracks Patio
Chapter Four. The Traditional Education of a Modern Gentleman-Officer: The Next Generation of Sword and Pen
Chapter Five. The Touch of Venus: Gendered Bodies and Hygienic Barracks
Chapter Six. The Disordered Life of Drugs, Drinks, and Songs in the Barracks
Chapter Seven. The Lieutenant’s Sally from Chapultepec: Junior Officers Deploying into Nation
Chapter Eight. Hatred in Their Mother’s Milk: Savage, Semisavage, and Civilized Discourses of Nation
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
