Travel and Transport in Mexico

Abstract

In his 1950 study, Mexico: The Struggle for Peace and Bread, historian Frank Tannenbaum remarked that “physical geography could not have been better designed to isolate Mexico from the world and Mexicans from one another.” He recognized, like others before him, that the difficulty of travel by foot, water, or wheel across the country’s troublesome landscape was an unavoidable element of its history. Its distinctive topography of endless mountains but few navigable rivers had functioned, in some sense, as a historical actor in the larger story of Mexico. In the mid-19th century, Lucas Alamán had recognized as much when he lamented that nature had denied the country “all means of interior communication,” while three centuries before that, conquistador Hernán Cortés reportedly apprised Emperor Charles V of the geography of his new dominion by presenting him with a crumpled piece of paper. Over the last half-millennium, however, technological innovation, use, and adaptation radically altered how humans moved in and through the Mexican landscape. New modes of movement—from railway travel to human flight—were incorporated into a mosaic of older practices of mobility. Along the way, these material transformations were entangled with changing economic, political, and cultural ideas that left their own imprint on the history of travel and transportation.

Pensar las infraestructuras en Latinoamérica

“…Este argumento no es original ni novedoso (De Greiff, Herazo y Soto, 2020). El atraso de algunas regiones en Francia y México ha sido atribuido a las inclementes condiciones topográficas (Bird, 1954;Freeman y Guajardo Soto, 2018). Incluso el trabajo sobre la electrificación en Alemania, Reino Unido y Estados Unidos de Thomas Hughes -texto fundacional de la historia social de los sistemas tecnológicos a gran escala-señala que los "estilos" de sistemas regionales dependen de "factores no tecnológicos", donde "la geografía es el más evidentemente influyente" (Hughes, 1993, p. 405).…”