El pequeño intervencionista: Ayuntamiento, empresarios y regulación del mercado telefónico en la Ciudad de México, 1881–1915 [The small interventionist: City hall, businessmen and the regulation of the telephone market in Mexico City, 1881–1915] by Víctor Cuchí Espada (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• El pequeño intervencionista: Ayuntamiento, empresarios y regulación del mercado telefónico en la Ciudad de México, 1881–1915 [The small interventionist: City hall, businessmen and the regulation of the telephone market in Mexico City, 1881–1915] by Víctor Cuchí Espada
• Gisela Mateos (bio)

El pequeño intervencionista: Ayuntamiento, empresarios y regulación del mercado telefónico en la Ciudad de México, 1881–1915 [The small interventionist: City hall, businessmen and the regulation of the telephone market in Mexico City, 1881–1915] By Víctor Cuchí Espada. Mexico City: Palabra de Clío, 2023. Pp. 284.

El pequeño intervencionista is a meticulous study of the economic and social conditions that opened, and in some cases closed, the incorporation of telephones. While the book is not immersed in the historiographical discussions of the history of technology, it is the first scholarly book that digs into the history of telephony in Mexico. It is an economic history of the new Mexican telecommunications market and its agreements and disagreements with the political regime, as well as the tortuous and winding roads to regulations. The author addresses how the telephone is a technology that required several political, social, economic, and technical [End Page 691] gears, which transformed it into an essential tool for exercising power as well as citizenship. The documentary sources consulted are mainly from archives in Mexico, which, although it allows for a careful analysis of the national case, leaves out the possibility of a transnational history in which foreign companies played a fundamental role in the distribution, management, and expertise of telephones. However, the market in Mexico was incipient and with no regulations at all. The book consists of four parts that focus on how the telephone arrived in Mexico and how the telephone market and telephonic services became regulated in Mexico City. Most of this story takes place during the Porfiriato (1876–1911) and the first five years of the Mexican Revolution (1910–20). In the period covered in the book, 1881–1915, the Mexican state was being built and providing its institutions with new regulatory instruments.

In the first section, the author analyzes how the business class strengthened itself through its relations with influential people in the government, taking advantage of the possibilities of doing business in the country. This situation encouraged the creation of monopolies, and it was precisely in this environment that the Compañía Telefónica Mexicana was created as a private company with capital from foreign investors. The patents for the telephone sets were in the hands of foreign companies and none of the parts were built and assembled in Mexico, since the patents did not allow them to be built outside the United States and Sweden. Telephones were imported from Western Electric and were first used by companies to control the internal movement of goods and to synchronize commercial activities.

In sections 2 and 3, the story centers on the role of the City Hall in Mexico City in developing services for citizens and for urban life. The telephone spread from being an individualized service to becoming a complex network. For this to happen, it was necessary to create a legal framework in which the rights and obligations of the telephone services were established. It was precisely these services that gave the City Hall one of its legitimations as a regulator and controller of the urban space of the capital and the welfare of the growing middle class. One example was the process of creating regulations to ensure that the telephone lines ceased to be built using poles and aerial wires, because the general public and the Municipality thought that these disfigured the urban landscape. The new regulations resulted in underground telephone line infrastructures, but also a new and larger administrative machinery.

The last section deals with how telephony had to be encouraged, disciplined, and ordered, allowing the state, which was becoming increasingly centralized, to regulate and control the construction, provision, and economic benefits of public services. As a technology that of course belongs to the techno-political realm, the telephone, in turn, helped to discipline the state and its growing tentacles for controlling the vast Mexican...