After England began what came to be known as the First Industrial Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, industrial technology quickly diffused throughout the nations of the North Atlantic. Within fifty years of the first rumblings of British industrialisation, the factory system had spread to Western Europe and the United States. Latin America, however, lagged behind. It was not until the twentieth century that manufacturing came to lead the economies of Latin America and that agrarian societies were transformed into industrial societies.

This article seeks to understand this long lag in Latin American industrialisation through an analysis of the experience of Mexico during the period 1830–1940. The purpose of the paper is to look at the obstacles that prevented self-sustaining industrialisation from taking place in Mexico, as well as to assess the results of the industrialisation that did occur.

The basic argument advanced is that two different types of constraints prevailed during different periods of Mexico's industrialisation. During the period from 1830 to 1880 the obstacles to industrialisation were largely external to firms: insecure property rights, low per capita income growth resulting from pre-capitalist agricultural organisation, and the lack of a national market (caused by inefficient transport, banditry and internal tariffs) all served as a brake on Mexico's industrial development. During the period 1880–1910 the obstacles to industrialisation were largely internal to firms. These factors included the inability to realise scale economies, high fixed capital costs and low labour productivity. During the period from 1910 to 1930 these internal constraints combined with new external constraints – including the Revolution of 1910–17, the political uncertainty of the post-revolutionary period and the onset of the Great Depression – which further slowed the rate of industrial growth.

The documented history of Mexican sugar in the twentieth century begins with the introduction of vacuum-pan technology between 1880 and 1910, subsequently chronicling the progressive expansion and concentration of the industry, and the creeping State intervention which eventually resulted in the nationalisation of most private sugar mills during the 1960s and 1970s.1 Small-scale, labour-intensive rural trapiches producing panela (an unrefined form of semi-crystalline sugar) have largely been left out of this history, despite the fact that trapiches were often predecessors to modern sugar mills and in many areas survived displacement by them. Surveying Oaxaca's Isthmus of Tehuantepec region in 1940, for example, Ybarra recorded three industrialised mills and 37 small, motorised, panela- producing trapiches.2 In 1947, according to Aragón Calvo and Vargas Comargo, panela accounted for an estimated 25% of Mexican sugar production overall, and consumption of panela exceeded that of refined sugar in the states of Veracruz and Guerrero.3Panela continues to be produced and consumed in Mexico today — albeit in reduced quantities. In Panama, Colombia, India and other nations, panela (or the local equivalent) is an even more important sugar source than in Mexico.4

Nationally the labour-intensive panela industry pales into insignificance next to the modern sugar sector. However, in particular regions and communities, as I shall attempt to demonstrate, it has been an important source of employment and capital, providing rural dwellers with their first experience of disciplined factory work and numerous small entrepreneurs with profits that were invested back into the communities to expand control over local land and businesses.

Recent literature on Latin American political economy appears to echo work of the 1960s and 1970s emphasising technical expertise in government. Sikkink and Geddes, for example, suggest that the role of technical experts and professionalisation of the bureaucracy explain Brazil's relative economic successes in the 1960s.1 Conaghan, Malloy and Abugattas focus on the role of technocrats in economic policy—making in the Central Andes.2 Following seminal work by Camp and Smith, Hernández Rodríguez presents the latest data on the role of technocrats in the Mexican political elite.3 To a large extent, this recent literature on technocrats in Latin America fails to address one of the main issues debated in the earlier literature: the political consequences of increasingly technocratic government. A second problem with recent work is that, when it does address causal issues, it tends to follow the functionalist logic of earlier literature. Using data on Mexican political elites, this article develops a new typology which carefully differentiates the new technobureaucratic elite from other elite groups. The aim is to shed new light on the debate over the implications of increasing technocratisation. Secondly, this study of the rise of a new elite emphasises the role of institutional changes within the government bureaucracy in addition to the state's functional response to changes in its politico—economic environment. This article begins with a brief discussion of earlier general — and Mexico—specific — literature on technocrats.

Some analysts of technocracy in the 1960s and 1970s saw technocrats as apolitical specialists whose growing role in society heralded ‘an end to ideology’ and increased efficiency in government.4

‘By studying political parties we imply that the party is a meaningful unit of analysis. Yet we go above the party as a unit, for we also study the party system. By the same token we can go below the party as a unit and study, thereby, the party subunits.’1 This statement by Giovanni Sartori, while published in 1976, might well have been a beacon for budding stasiologists of the early 1960s — certainly for those with a particular interest in Latin America. Following upon such Western European—orientated classics as the works of Maurice Duverger, Sigmund Neumann and Alfred Diamant,2 there seemed genuine intellectual impetus to produce significant scholarship on the parties of what were then customarily termed either the developing or the ‘non—western’ polities. For Latin America, the time appeared ripe for conceptual progress. To be sure, there was justification in remarking that the study of parties in the region was relatively new, while ‘methodo—logical accomplishments have been primitive’.3 Yet this condition was presumably transitory.

In the years to follow there were more serious exploratory efforts, and in time a modest number of case—studies began appearing.4 When the cyclical alternation of democratic and dictatorial regimes began to swing toward the latter by the early 1970s, however, scholarly interest dropped off. More generally, stasiological research went into decline.5 For students of Latin America, only the recent trend toward democratisation has stimulated a revival of interest in parties, campaigns and elections.6 Thus Lorenzo Meyer, for instance, described parties as institutions necessary ‘to channel the energies of social movements, labour unions, and other antiauthoritarian forces present at the beginning of the re—emergence of civil society’.7

Brazilian specialists have long recognised the importance of the 1960 presidential elections, which set in motion a process that culminated in a 21—year military dictatorship. Only in 1989 did Brazilians witness once again the direct election of a president. Nonetheless, scholarly literature on this event is sparse and often tends toward the ahistorical view that the election of Jânio Quadros in 1960 was part of an inexorable process. Almost entirely ignored are the reasons why Brazil's largest political party, the Partido Social Democrático or PSD, nominated for president a weak candidate, Marshal of the Brazilian Army Henrique Teixeira Lott.1

Clearly, Lott himself was not part of a praetorian guard that imposed his candidacy. Indeed, the Marshal was a reluctant candidate, who offered to withdraw in October 1959 in favour of a ‘national unity candidate’.2 In my view Lott's nomination had much more to do with a complex series of manoeuvres carried out by Brazil's president Juscelino Kubitschek (1956–61) than with his own actions. For Kubitschek, the political parties and presidential aspirants in 1960 were merely pawns in his highly personalistic vision of the political process. Constitutionally barred from seeking immediate re—election, Kubitschek initially manoeuvred to induce his party, the PSD, not to run its own presidential candidate. When this effort failed, he displayed, at the very least, ambivalence regarding the fate of the party's candidate.

An analysis of Kubitschek's actions and motivations presents methodological challenges to the historian. Historians traditionally rely heavily on written documentation to support their analysis of actions and motivations.

Beginning with Brazil's origins as a nation, and continuing to the present, the relationship between race and politics in that country has been a close and integral one. Portuguese state policy made black slavery the very foundation of Brazil's social and economic order during three centuries of colonial rule. That foundation remained in place even after independence, with the paradoxical result that Brazil became ‘the last Christian country to abolish slavery, and the first to declare itself a racial democracy’. Indeed, perhaps nowhere is the connection between race and politics in Brazil more evident than in the concept of ‘racial democracy’, which characterises race relations in that country in explicitly political terminology.

This article explores some of the connections between race and politics in Brazil by examining four moments in the history of black political mobilisation in that country. Geographically, it focuses on the south-eastern state of São Paulo, which by the time of emancipation, in 1888, housed the third-largest slave population in Brazil (after neighbouring Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro), and which has formed a centre of black political action from the 1880s through to the present. Chronologically, it focuses on: the struggle for the final abolition of slavery in the 1880s; the rise and fall of the Frente Negra Brasileira in the 1930s; the black organisations of the Second Republic; and the most recent wave of black protest, from the mid-1970s to 1988.

The purpose of such an exercise is twofold. First, placing these moments of black mobilisation in a century-long time-frame makes it possible for us to see them not as isolated episodes, but as chapters in a long-term, ongoing history of black protest and struggle in Brazil.

Introduction: the Repudiation of the Centenário

13 May 1988 was the 100th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Brazil. In honour of that date, various official celebrations and commemorations of the centenário, organised by the Brazilian government, church groups and cultural organisations, took place throughout the country, even including a speech by President José Sarney.

This celebration of the emancipation was not, however, universal. Many Afro—Brazilian groups staged actions and marches, issued denunciations and organised cultural events repudiating the ‘farce of abolition’. These were unprecedented efforts to draw national and international attention to the extensive racial inequality and discrimination which Brazilian blacks – by far the largest concentration of people of African descent in any country in the western hemisphere – continue to confront. Particular interventions had such titles as ‘100 Years of Lies’, ‘One Hundred Years Without Abolition’, ‘March for the Real Liberation of the Race’, ‘Symbolic Burial of the 13th of May’, ‘March in Protest of the Farce of Abolition’, and ‘Discommemoration (Descomemoraçāo) of the Centenary of Abolition’.1 The repudiation of the centenário suggests that Brazilian racial dynamics, traditionally quiescent, are emerging with the rest of society from the extended twilight of military dictatorship. Racial conflict and mobilisation, long almost entirely absent from the Brazilian scene, are reappearing. New racial patterns and processes – political, cultural, economic, social and psychological – are emerging, while racial inequalities of course continue as well. How much do we know about race in contemporary Brazil? How effectively does the extensive literature explain the present situation?