The Imagined Underworld: Sex, Crime, and Vice in Porfirian Mexico City (review)
To his credit, the McCreery persisted in the face of such historical inertia. Even if little changed, a great deal can be learned from studying this frontier society as it struggled to sustain itself "on the edge of the modern world" (p. 1). Acknowledging that his contribution may lie more in describing that society than defending a thesis, McCreery elucidates much that has remained indistinct about the settlement of Brazil's vast interior. His discussion of agriculture helps clarify, for instance, the predicaments of agregados, omnipresent free dependants who lived on large holdings throughout rural Brazil. His examination of ranching offers intriguing discoveries about the endless search for salt, the struggle against pests and predators, the activities of rustlers, and the ravages of parasites. A chapter devoted to land provides a meticulous analysis of the effects of the Land Law of 1850, which established new regulations governing public lands, squatting, surveying, and titling to secure ownership. Scholarship on this crucial law has emphasized coastal export zones, where its passage transformed land into a commodity, further concentrating it in the hands of the wealthy. McCreery demonstrates that Goias ranching elites, who depended on the ill-defined ranges over which their cattle grazed, balked at the law's imposition, effectively resisting state intervention that threatened their power. Personal influence and local custom rather than formal legislation continued to regulate land tenure long after the law came into effect. If this outcome seems applicable to many other regions, it is because McCreery's important contribution is to have deepened our understanding of one portion of a vast swathe of both post-independence Brazil and Hispanic America, a "forgotten frontier" as more than one scholar has described such zones, where state consolidation and market capitalism remained a distant reality.