Making an Urban Public

Masterful appropriately describes Christina Jiménez’s historical analysis of Morelia from 1879 to 1932. Without resort to methodological jargon or theoretical claims, the author writes judicially about the creation of a liberal moral economy that included the right to petition and receive an answer and investigates the meaning (in different words) of the urban patria chica with its own imagined community.

Making an Urban Public presents a striking and original interpretation of Mexican urban history. Christina Jiménez challenges traditional narratives that foreground resistance and disempowerment. She provides a sweeping new vision of a contentious political sphere in which city dwellers’ increasingly pointed demands for urban services helped them to find a political voice in turn-of-the century Mexico.

Jiménez’s insightful approach is enhanced by her superb writing style.

Making an Urban Public brings attention to the ways that ordinary people experienced modernization and attempted to shape the organization of urban space. . . . She shows that nonelite citizens of Morelia, despite attempts from above to exclude them, enthusiastically participated in urban political culture and creatively deployed various rhetorical strategies to pursue their right to the city.