City on Fire

Rather than treating technology such as fire-fighting equipment as an extrinsic factor whose arrival in Mexico was responsible for creating historical change, Alexander shows that municipal authorities and experts imported the technologies they found most valuable, ignored those practices and devices they had no use for, and invented those they could not find elsewhere. Her exemplary discussion to the interplay of domestic and foreign knowledge points the way to a practice-based approach to technology--one that suggests that, in matters of life and death, efficacy tends to trump national and conceptual boundaries.

The author's important study of fire in the burgeoning nineteenth-century metropolis of Mexico City offers a fascinating, interdisciplinary perspective on issues relating to environment, geography, economics, politics, medicine, and culture. City on Fire brings to light the many ways a key social concern was confronted at a critical time in history.

This monograph is not only the first book to focus on the role of fire in the modernization of Mexico City, it's also the best examination yet of the evolution of early fire protection anywhere in urban Latin America. Anna Alexander skillfully integrates urban history with histories of science, technology, and the built environment.

Flames leap off almost every page of Anna Alexander's powerfully written book as, in it, fire becomes an historical actor in its own right. Simultaneously a history of fear, the rise of experts and regulation, technological change, and the urban environment, City on Fire charts the rise of an industrial fire regime as it holds in tension the privatization of responsibility and the public intervention generated to confront it.

An engagingly written account of how an array actors including doctors, engineers, film projectionists, match factory owners, insurance agents, and firefighters responded to the presence of fire as an element of everyday life in a capital city. Alexander provides surprising insights into the relationship between fear, social class, emerging capitalism, and the creation of urban space.

Alexander's poignant capturing of the devastation caused by fire and the fear residents experienced effectively conveys how persistent and seemingly insoluble disaster resulted in the adoption of new technologies and policies that shaped modernizing cities of the nineteenth century in Mexico and beyond. A compelling and engaging book.

Alexander delivers a fascinating study of the effects that fires had on Mexico City during the second half of the nineteenth century. She shows how daily disasters shaped socio-political struggles over modernity, including whose property was prioritized for protection, fire-fighting technologies, insurance, and innovations in burn-trauma medicine.

Alexander's short tome is an important introduction to some of the new hazards that industrialization and urbanization brought to large cities like Mexico' capital and bring the Latin American city into the growing field of environmental history.

Alexander makes two especially important contributions to the historiography of Mexico: an original examination of the technological advances to fight fires and an analysis of the methods that doctors used to cure burns. . . . Alexander uses patent requests and shows how Mexican inventors created innovative devices and adapted others to fit local needs. . . . In the case of medicine, Alexander reminds us that centuries-old indigenous knowledge of plants, especially the matarique, were often appropriated by the established medical profession without acknowledging indigenous wisdom and practices.