Casey Marina Lurtz, From the Grounds Up: Building an Export Economy in Southern Mexico (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2019).

In From the Grounds Up, Casey Marina Lurtz traces the making of an export economy in the Soconusco region in Southern Mexico at the turn of the twentieth century—a convoluted, unsteady process that does not easily fit into standard narratives of modernization in Latin America. She argues that this was not an elite-driven transformation of an empty space, but a complex set of interactions between local villagers, laborers, small-time merchants, investors and jefes políticos, bureaucrats and diplomats. Loosely based on a neoinstitutional analytical framework, the book intertwines economic, political, labor, and land histories in the region from 1870 to 1920 to trace the shifting practices and ideas that made the export boom possible. 

From the Grounds Up delves into the obstacles, challenges, and efforts to connect the Soconusco with global markets. It was not a straight-forward process. Just like the politics of pronunciamientos and popular participation was spreading across the country, Lurtz explores how the diffusion of liberal policies and ideas was resisted and encouraged at the same time among both elites and popular groups. While bureaucrats at the national level like Matías Romero tried their best to make a stable export economy out of the region, local jefes políticos like Escobar violently refused to keep their local power. The entanglement of these conflicts with disputes over the sovereignty of the land and a blurry border with Guatemala, the regulation of land and labor, and the administration of violence, makes the story of the Soconusco an illustrative case to explore Mexico’s state-building processes—and a story worth telling.

Drawing from an extensive array of sources, memoirs, local and national archives, correspondence, accounting documents, census data, maps, government reports, the book carefully crafts a cogent narrative of how an export economy was built—and how far it is from looking like a top-down, neatly planned process. Yet the book reproduces a common trope when explaining development in Latin America. Besides the sloppy generalizations regarding the subcontinent that appear frequently throughout the text, like most of the new economic historians, From the Grounds Up explains historical change as a product of “institutions” at work, as defined in Douglas North’s classic Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (1990). Drawing from North, Lurtz defines them as “humanly devised constraints that include both formal (laws, regulations, property regimes, constitutions) and informal (taboos, social norms, customs) limitations on political, economic, and social interactions and relationships” (p. 180, n. 11). The presence/absence of these institutions drives economic outcomes.

While this broad definition might seem useful for historical explanation, it poses the problem of what came first—if institutions brought development or was it the other way around. The most notable example of this approach, such as Acemoglu and Robinson’s Why Nations Fail (cited by Lurtz), explains the divergence in economic development between the West and other regions with the presence or absence of liberal institutions: property rights, economic freedom, political representation. But it remains unclear if it was economic development that brought them in the first place—when historians zoom into local histories, these grand explanations usually fall apart and the concept of Latin America as a homogeneous region begins to blur.

Lurtz does not make this argument as forcefully, yet the framework remains. Writing history in terms of “obstacles” and “absences” obscures more than it reveals: it yields a teleological approach that explains local outcomes as products of ideas and practices yet to come. And the approach, of course, entails a politics—a linear projection of history where some countries are “behind” others, a projection when some nations simply fail.