The postrevolutionary reconstruction of the Mexican government did not easily or immediately reach all corners of the country. At every level, political intermediaries negotiated, resisted, appropriated, or ignored the dictates of the central government. National policy reverberated through Mexico’s local and political networks in countless different ways and resulted in a myriad of regional arrangements. It is this process of diffusion, politicking, and conflict that Benjamin T. Smith examines in Pistoleros and Popular Movements. Oaxaca’s urban social movements and the tension between federal, state, and local governments illuminate the multivalent contradictions, fragmentations, and crises of the state-building effort at the regional level. A better understanding of these local transformations yields a more realistic overall view of the national project of state building. Smith places Oaxaca within this larger framework of postrevolutionary Mexico by comparing the region to other states and linking local politics to state and national developments. Drawing on an impressive range of regional case studies, this volume is a comprehensive and engaging study of postrevolutionary Oaxaca’s role in the formation of modern Mexico.

Pistoleros and Popular Movements: The Politics of State Formation in Postrevolutionary Oaxaca (The Mexican Experience)

History

Smith, Benjamin T.

Americas

University Of Nebraska Press

The Roots of Conservatism is the first attempt to ask why over the past two centuries so many Mexican peasants have opted to ally with conservative groups rather than their radical counterparts. Blending socioeconomic history, cultural analysis, and political narrative, Smith's study begins with the late Bourbon period and moves through the early republic, the mid-nineteenth-century Reforma, the Porfiriato, and the Revolution, when the Mixtecs rejected Zapatista offers of land distribution, ending with the armed religious uprising known as the "last Cristiada," a desperate Cold War bid to rid the region of impious "communist" governance. In recounting this long tradition of regional conservatism, Smith emphasizes the influence of religious belief, church ritual, and lay-clerical relations both on social relations and on political affiliation. He posits that many Mexican peasants embraced provincial conservatism, a variant of elite or metropolitan conservatism, which not only comprised ideas on property, hierarchy, and the state, but also the overwhelming import of the church to maintaining this system.

The Roots of Conservatism in Mexico: Catholicism, Society, and Politics in the Mixteca Baja, 1750-1962

University of New Mexico Press

The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade

Product Description 
A myth-busting, 100-year history of the Mexican drug trade that reveals how an industry founded by farmers and village healers became dominated by cartels and kingpins. 
The Mexican drug trade has inspired prejudiced narratives of a war between north and south, white and brown; between noble cops and vicious kingpins, corrupt politicians and powerful cartels. In this first comprehensive history of the trade, historian Benjamin T. Smith tells the real story of how and why this one-peaceful industry turned violent. He uncovers its origins and explains how this illicit business essentially built modern Mexico, affecting everything from agriculture to medicine to economics―and the country’s all-important relationship with the United States. 
Drawing on unprecedented archival research; leaked DEA, Mexican law enforcement, and cartel documents; and dozens of harrowing interviews, Smith tells a thrilling story brimming with vivid characters―from Ignacia “La Nacha” Jasso, “queen pin” of Ciudad Juárez, to Dr. Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra, the crusading physician who argued that marijuana was harmless and tried to decriminalize morphine, to Harry Anslinger, the Machiavellian founder of the American Federal Bureau of Narcotics, who drummed up racist drug panics to increase his budget. Smith also profiles everyday agricultural workers, whose stories reveal both the economic benefits and the human cost of the trade. 
The Dope contains many surprising conclusions about drug use and the failure of drug enforcement, all backed by new research and data. Smith explains the complicated dynamics that drive the current drug war violence, probes the U.S.-backed policies that have inflamed the carnage, and explores corruption on both sides of the border. A dark morality tale about the American hunger for intoxication and the necessities of human survival, The Dope is essential for understanding the violence in the drug war and how decades-old myths shape Mexico in the American imagination today. 50 illustrations 
 Review 
"[A] prodigious overview…a century-long chronicle crammed with as much violence and mayhem as a Don Winslow border novel." 
 ― 
Anthony DePalma, New York Times Book Review\n"[A] magisterial and immensely readable new history of the Mexican drug trade. ... Drawing on a decade of research, Smith traces the roots of Mexico’s multiple drug wars from indigenous remedy to the solace of soldiers during the 1910-20 revolution, to the present day. His pacy narrative is true crime at its historical best, replete with all the larger-than-life characters and thrills and spills of a Netflix narco drama. … 
The Dope is gripping and revealing." 
 ― 
Jude Webber, Financial Times\n" 
The Dope offers an expansive and compulsively readable popular history that successfully upends more than a century of false rhetoric, shattering the most insidious and persistent myths about Mexico’s drug trade. By revisiting bygone drug panics and the dawn of narcotics criminalization, Smith reveals how today’s staggering cartel violence is rooted in militarized policing, US meddling, and the state’s unending thirst for power and wealth. A vital corrective." 
 ― 
Francisco Cantú, author of The Line Becomes a River\n"With the skills of a fine historian and the verve of a true storyteller, Benjamin T. Smith unearths the twisted roots of the catastrophic drug war. A fascinating, surreal, and tragic tale." 
 ― 
Ioan Grillo, author of Blood Gun Money and El Narco\n"A roiling, rambunctious trek through all that created the modern Mexican drug trade―populated by Cadillacs and barbarians, godfathers and presidents, border dope queens and 
chatuma kings, and, lining the way, a tawdry cavalcade of Mexican federal officials. Forget ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán. This book makes clear that the pioneers who forged the trafficking industry were employed in the Mexican government. Really great stuff, really great reading." 
 ― 
Sam Quinones, author of Dreamland\n"Benjamin T. Sm

W.W.Norton&Company

A myth-busting, 100-year history of the Mexican drug trade that reveals how an industry founded by farmers and village healers became dominated by cartels and kingpins. 
The Mexican drug trade has inspired prejudiced narratives of a war between north and south, white and brown; between noble cops and vicious kingpins, corrupt politicians and powerful cartels. In this first comprehensive history of the trade, historian Benjamin T. Smith tells the real story of how and why this one-peaceful industry turned violent. He uncovers its origins and explains how this illicit business essentially built modern Mexico, affecting everything from agriculture to medicine to economics―and the country’s all-important relationship with the United States. 
Drawing on unprecedented archival research; leaked DEA, Mexican law enforcement, and cartel documents; and dozens of harrowing interviews, Smith tells a thrilling story brimming with vivid characters―from Ignacia “La Nacha” Jasso, “queen pin” of Ciudad Juárez, to Dr. Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra, the crusading physician who argued that marijuana was harmless and tried to decriminalize morphine, to Harry Anslinger, the Machiavellian founder of the American Federal Bureau of Narcotics, who drummed up racist drug panics to increase his budget. Smith also profiles everyday agricultural workers, whose stories reveal both the economic benefits and the human cost of the trade. 
The Dope contains many surprising conclusions about drug use and the failure of drug enforcement, all backed by new research and data. Smith explains the complicated dynamics that drive the current drug war violence, probes the U.S.-backed policies that have inflamed the carnage, and explores corruption on both sides of the border. A dark morality tale about the American hunger for intoxication and the necessities of human survival, The Dope is essential for understanding the violence in the drug war and how decades-old myths shape Mexico in the American imagination today. 50 illustrations

Mexico today is one of the most dangerous places in the world to report the news, and Mexicans have taken to the street to defend freedom of expression. As Benjamin T. Smith demonstrates in this history of the press and civil society, the cycle of violent repression and protest over journalism is nothing new. He traces it back to the growth in newspaper production and reading publics between 1940 and 1976, when a national thirst for tabloids, crime sheets, and magazines reached far beyond the middle class.As Mexicans began to view local and national events through the prism of journalism, everyday politics changed radically. Even while lauding the liberty of the press, the state developed an arsenal of methods to control what was printed, including sophisticated spin and misdirection techniques, covert financial payments, and campaigns of threats, imprisonment, beatings, and even murder. The press was also pressured by media monopolists tacking between government demands and public expectations to maximize profits, and by coalitions of ordinary citizens demanding that local newspapers publicize stories of corruption, incompetence, and state violence. Since the Cold War, both in Mexico City and in the provinces, a robust radical journalism has posed challenges to government forces.

The Mexican Press and Civil Society, 1940-1976: Stories from the Newsroom, Stories from the Street

Literature & Fiction

Humor & Satire

Univ of North Carolina Pr

The Mexican Press and Civil Society, 1940–1976: Stories from the Newsroom, Stories from the Street

The University of North Carolina Press

Ebury Press

Discover the secret history behind the headlines.\nThe Mexican drug wars have inspired countless articles, TV shows and movies. From Breaking Bad to Sicario, El Chapo’s escapes to Trump’s tirades, this is a story we think we know. But there’s a hidden history to the biggest story of the twenty-first century.\nThe Dope exposes how an illicit industry that started with farmers, families and healers came to be dominated by cartels, kingpins and corruption. Benjamin T Smith traces an unforgettable cast of characters from the early twentieth century to the modern day, whose actions came to influence Mexico as we now know it. There’s Enrique Fernández, the borderlands trafficker who became Mexico’s first major narco and one of the first victims of the war on drugs; Eduardo ‘Lalo’ Fernández, Mexico’s most prominent heroin chemist and first major cocaine importer; Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra, the brilliant doctor and Marxist who tried (and failed) to decriminalize Mexico’s drugs; and Harry Anslinger, the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics whose sensationalist strategies paved the way for U.S. interference and the extraordinary levels of violence in Mexico today.\nThe Dope is the epic saga of how violence and corruption came to plague modern Mexico, and the first book to make sense of the political and economic big picture of the Mexican drug wars.

The humble potato - a changer of worlds, a feeder of nations and a small round tuber that grows underground - in this collection of short stories it's all these things and more. What if the potato was the key to divining the future, or the home of a malevolent spirit? What if nations went to war over a field of potatoes, if political careers could be made and cast aside on the outcome of a single year's crop? In this collection of stories the potato is the star. You may think it's a joke, but we take this chip off the old block very seriously indeed.

Potatoes

McHugh, Jessica

Sylvester, Matthew

Wright, Dana

Pitman, Marion

Fung, Rebecca

Baker, Matthew Scott

Cochrane, J M

Trevena, Angeline

Short Stories & Anthologies

KnightWatch Press

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Books by Smith, Benjamin T.