About

Casey Marina Lurtz, PhD, is a historian of modern Latin America and an associate professor in the History Department at Johns Hopkins University. Her research explores how rural people understood, encountered, and shaped the world beyond their horizons and the landscapes beneath their feet, with a primary focus on Latin America. She investigates the connections that stretched across oceans and how even remote locations became part of a globalized world. Her 2019 book, From the Grounds Up: Building an Export Economy in Southern Mexico, published by Stanford University Press, examines the development of southern Mexico's coffee economy to explain how engagement with global markets was shaped by resilient local political and social structures. This work also addresses the history of global migrations and localized international commerce involving Mexican and foreign planters, merchants, and politicians. The book has been reviewed in several academic journals including The Americas, Business History Review, and Environmental History. Lurtz's current book project, tentatively titled Projecting Prosperity: Striving for a State in Nineteenth Century Mexico, is a history of Mexico’s national administrative formation from independence through the Mexican Revolution. This project highlights how individuals working beyond electoral politics understood and imagined the state, focusing on the pursuit of institutional stability rather than political tumult. Additionally, she is engaged in a longer-term project called From Enlightenment to Development: The Idea of Economic Growth in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, which examines ideas of development, or fomento, in Latin America’s post-Independence era. This project seeks to understand how Latin American politicians, intellectuals, and producers thought about progress and economic growth rather than focusing on narratives of decline. Dr. Lurtz teaches courses related to Latin America, Mexico, commodities and the history of capitalism, migration, and development. She earned her Ph.D. with distinction in Latin American History from the University of Chicago in 2014. Her academic career includes fellowships from prestigious institutions such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, the Harvard Academy for International & Area Studies, the Harvard-Newcomen Fellowship in Business History at Harvard Business School, and the UC San Diego Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Computer Science
• Political economy
• Archaeology
• Business
• Finance
• Public administration
• Ethnology
• Economic history
• History
• Geography

Selected publications

• Challenging Abstraction

  The American Historical Review · 2025-03-01 · 1 citations

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  Abstract Working with never-published agricultural data collected for Mexico’s pavilion at the 1900 Paris Exposition, this article argues that manuscript and published statistics represent a space to see state making as a multisided, ongoing process. Whereas historians have largely looked at statistics from the perspective of the state, highlighting bureaucrats’ projections of desired realities and political projects, here I show how local enumerators’ investment in statistical undertakings asserted space for conversations and arguments about the nature and composition of the political or economic whole being represented. I present a methodology for working with historical statistics that takes aberrations, anomalies, and unruly data as signposts to be followed rather than errors to be corrected. In doing so, I argue for seeing not only the frustrated yet durable aspirations of statesmen but also the ways those beyond the central state reforged, reinforced, and remade representations of their homes through engagement with and investment in statistical practices.

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• Joan Flores-Villalobos. <i>The Silver Women: How Black Women’s Labor Made the Panama Canal</i>.

  The American Historical Review · 2024-06-01

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  Journal Article Joan Flores-Villalobos. The Silver Women: How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal. Get access Joan Flores-Villalobos. The Silver Women: How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023. Pp. 296. Cloth $39.95. Casey Marina Lurtz Casey Marina Lurtz Johns Hopkins University, US Email: lurtz@jhu.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 2, June 2024, Pages 799–800, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae116 Published: 13 June 2024

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• :<i>Technocratic Visions: Engineers, Technology, and Society in Mexico</i>

  Isis · 2023-12-02

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• A C<scp>onfounded</scp> S<scp>tatistic</scp>: Turn-of-the-Century Mexican Agriculture in Incommensurable Terms

  Américas · 2023 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Abstract In 1899, municipal officials throughout Mexico sent tables of agricultural statistics to Mexico City to assist in the preparation of a special publication for the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition, where the Mexican government hoped it would impress the world with Mexico's modernity and potential. Though the activity was nothing new, the ways in which municipal officials provided the requested information confounded the national project of both understanding and representing the Mexican countryside. The statistics were never published. This article serves as an introduction to a new dataset and collection of maps built from transcriptions of the manuscript tables. It also demonstrates that regular participation in statistical undertakings served as a means for provincial Mexicans to complicate and confound the process of state consolidation. Here I see, rather than refusal or rebellion, ready participation in state knowledge projects as another way in which those beyond Mexico City managed their relationships with President Porfirio Díaz's technocratic government. Engaging with conceptions of governmentality on one side and data management on the other, I use the 1899 agricultural statistics to highlight how unruly participation in data collection frustrated the practice's centralizing and standardizing project.

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• <i>Fueling Mexico: Energy and Environment, 1850–1950</i> by Germán Vergara

  The Journal of Interdisciplinary History · 2022-01-01

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  Vergara’s new book bypasses the usual thoroughfares and signposts of Mexican national history. The Tuxtepec Rebellion, the Mexican Revolution, and Lázaro Cardenas’ oil expropriation are noticed only at a distance, background rather than destination on this tour of the country’s changing energy regimes. Instead, technological innovation, the exploitation and exhaustion of fuel reserves, and the consolidation of new infrastructure provide Vergara’s mile markers and pitstops. By drawing on scholarship from energy economists and the growing field of energy humanities, Fueling Mexico highlights the environmental and geological constraints that shaped Mexican political and economic possibilities as well as the political processes that determined how those constraints were understood and managed. The repeated political decision to tie Mexico’s future to fossil fuels undergirded both the nation’s economic expansion and the social and environmental unsustainability that accompanied it.Vergara’s recalibrated chronology highlights the 1880s and the 1920s as the pivotal moments in Mexico’s energy transitions—eras that also represent key moments in the consolidation of the national government, first under President Porfirio Díaz and then under what would become the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. Vergara investigates the political and economic decisions that pushed the country toward fossil-fuel dependence rather than toward one party rule. First, a useful introductory chapter about the solar-energy regime lays out key concepts related to energy economics and outlines the constraints of relying solely on power from humans, animals, plants, wind, and water. Vergara’s picture of the region to 1850 is not static; it clearly shows the increased pressures created by dependence on food energy and muscle power.Chapters 2 and 3 illustrate how that system, especially its reliance on burning wood for steam engines, was in crisis by 1880. The subsequent turn to coal as a solution paved the way for later engagement with oil. Anxieties about deforestation alongside the industrializing examples of countries in the North Atlantic pushed Mexican technocrats and businessmen to adopt coal as a power source, despite its scarcity and expense. Unlike the United States, Britain, and Germany, Mexico had little in the way of coal deposits, and Chapters 4 and 5 make clear that a confluence of technological innovation abroad and infrastructure investments at home quickly moved the country from solid to liquid forms of fuel. Vergara’s discussions of oil revolve around the public and private investments that facilitated its uptake, often accompanied by the uptake of natural gas. By the time Cárdenas nationalized the industry in 1938, oil was already the nation’s primary fuel. Nationalization, then, was an important cultural moment, but it did little to change Mexico’s energy regime. In Vergara’s telling, the economic miracle that followed was possible only because the state and the companies that it charged with expanding pipelines and electricity plants could build on the work of their predecessors. Because of its reliance on fossil fuels, that miracle also made possible the rapid growth of informal cities dependent on cars and trucks to move people and goods without regard for environmental consequences.Fueling Mexico skillfully brings together histories of science, infrastructure, politics, and the environment to show how energy regimes underlay many of the hallmarks of Mexico’s trajectory from 1850 to 1950. Understanding access to energy from both a geological and political perspective helps Vergara to explain the divergence between poor states like Oaxaca and wealthy cities like Monterrey, as well as that between Mexico and other nations. Although natural-resource endowments undergird much of the text, Vergara is generally careful to avoid deterministic arguments in favor of illuminating the decisions of capitalists, technocrats, and politicians. Veragara, however, does not always indicate whether other options were viable. The global comparisons in Vergara’s conclusion do not necessarily provide better outcomes. The words of Tonatiúh Gutiérrez Olguín, a mid-twentieth-century polymath, well describe the trap that the drive for first progress and then development can lay: “One cannot meet a need that always continues to grow” (218).

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• Desde las raíces. Actores locales y la creación de una economía de exportación en el sur de México

  Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Centro de Investigaciones Multidisciplinarias sobre Chiapas y la Frontera Sur eBooks · 2022-01-01

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  Desde las raíces utiliza el desarrollo de la economía cafetalera del sur de México para explicar cómo el compromiso con los mercados globales fue moldeado por estructuras sociales y políticas locales resilientes. Al proyectar una idea de liberalismo económico popular, el libro analiza cómo los habitantes del Soconusco, los trabajadores y los políticos de poca monta aprovecharon y remodelaron el conjunto de herramientas de la política económica liberal para asegurar y promover sus propios intereses. El estudio involucra también la historia de la migración global y proporciona una imagen del comercio internacional localizado en manos de plantadores, comerciantes y políticos mexicanos y extranjeros.

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• Enlightenment Science and Nature - The Science of Useful Nature in Central America: Landscapes, Networks and Practical Enlightenment, 1784–1838. By Sophie Brockmann. Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xiv, 267. Figures. Acknowledgments. Notes on translations and names. List of abbreviations and acronyms. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. $99.99 cloth.

  The Americas A Quarterly Review of Latin American History · 2021-12-27

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  Enlightenment Science and Nature - The Science of Useful Nature in Central America: Landscapes, Networks and Practical Enlightenment, 1784–1838. By Sophie Brockmann. Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xiv, 267. Figures. Acknowledgments. Notes on translations and names. List of abbreviations and acronyms. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. $99.99 cloth. - Volume 79 Issue 1

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• Matters of Justice: Pueblos, the Judiciary, and Agrarian Reform in Revolutionary Mexico

  Hispanic American Historical Review · 2021 · 1 citations

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  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Political economy

  The ejido, as idea and reality, has been well covered textually. Essayists reporting on the Mexican Revolution, politicians taking up that revolution's mantle, and scholars examining its seeming neoliberal end have cemented the ejido as central to the history of Mexico's past century. Helga Baitenmann's painstaking new book makes clear that, despite this, we continue to misunderstand key aspects of the twentieth-century ejido's creation.Baitenmann returns to the originary land reform documents of the 1910s and their nineteenth-century precursors to illustrate the unintentional emergence of the communal, government-granted mode of land tenure and management that we understand as the modern ejido. In her introduction and throughout chapters that move from the nineteenth century through the 1920s, Baitenmann contextualizes past scholarly arguments about the ejido's origin and nature as products of accreted political mythmaking. She then uses the legal cases, petitions, and administrative paperwork that proliferated as villagers across Mexico took up each new land reform law to illuminate how the long-standing scholarly distinction between restitution and dotación had little salience for actors at the time. Expedience rather than creating patronage relationships or dependence on a still nascent revolutionary state motivated the turn to land grants and their management by administrative bodies separate from local constitutionally structured governments.Throughout the book, Baitenmann compares Zapatista and Constitutionalist proposals and laws to illuminate the commonalities and conflicts between them. While the Zapatistas aimed to remake social relations and the Constitutionalists remained far more specific in their goals, both pushed primarily for restitution of pueblo lands lost to haciendas. Yet, as Baitenmann makes clear, the burden of proof embedded in a judicial process that borrowed its norms from nineteenth-century law made restitution an often-untenable mechanism for villages to acquire or reacquire land. Even with the creation of a separate agrarian tribunal system under the president's oversight, a violation of the separation of powers that the postrevolutionary Supreme Court accepted for reasons of public benefit, restitution remained time-consuming and impossible for many. Instead, dotación became a temporary fix. The temporary nature of this solution was understood by all, with the eventual goal being privatized, unalienable smallholdings. Yet the legislation anticipated in the procedural documents and court cases examined by Baitenmann never emerged. Instead, the distribution and management mechanisms that villagers, agronomists, and politicians deployed in an ad hoc manner became the norms of twentieth-century Mexican land reform.Baitenmann in no way neglects how politics and corruption shaped this outcome. One of the many strengths of her book is its emphasis on how land policy was shaped as much by conflicts between and within villages as by land seizures by hacendados, the traditional focus of land reform scholarship. Because of their burden of proof requirements, both nineteenth-century and revolutionary restitution laws often revealed irreconcilable overlapping claims between villages, and villagers primarily interacted with the judiciary in attempting to resolve disputes with their neighbors. By focusing on legal matters, Baitenmann also addresses how, even if the Constitutionalist land reform law of January 1915 ultimately guided redistribution, Zapatista and other grassroots approaches shaped its implementation. By exerting pressure on political actors at all levels via all the administrative and judicial tools at their disposal, villagers made clear that their demands for land access could not be ignored. Presidents and the Supreme Court responded by redefining public utility, needed for government expropriation, to include social rights. This permitted the executive to overstep the constitution, deny hacendados access to the amparo rulings that had previously protected their property, and increasingly prioritize equity of access for all Mexicans.This book is tightly focused on the legal and procedural activities that created land reform during and immediately after the Mexican Revolution. Baitenmann makes clear the importance of this early period and the need to take seriously judicial processes that others have dismissed as corrupt, biased, or inaccessible to villagers. The book assumes the readers' considerable knowledge of and investment in debates over Mexican land reform, and its insights will likely take time to penetrate general historical narratives. To that end, Baitenmann could have more explicitly discussed how her findings about early land reform projects revise our understanding of their later application. That, though, is a small critique of a book that demonstrates the importance of rolling back political and historical mythmaking in order to recognize the agency, knowledge, and innovation of actors at all levels. While Matters of Justice challenges our understanding of essential elements of the Mexican Revolution's social project, it does so by emphasizing that all parties saw the need for some degree of real social revolution.

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• Codifying Credit: Everyday Contracting and the Spread of the Civil Code in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

  Law and History Review · 2021 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Between the 1870s and the 1910s, municipal court officials in southernmost Mexico recorded contracts regarding small debts and credits in what they labeled libros de conocimientos. While only very rarely citing Mexico's new civil codes of the 1870s and 1880s, the contracts contained in these registers regularly engaged with the kinds of agreements, guarantees, and enforcement mechanisms laid out in the code. They also capture an active, if still elusive, quotidian credit market for the far from well-to-do. This article uses these registers to trace the creation and evolution of Mexico's civil code from the periphery of the country rather than its center. By looking at the ways farmers, smalltime merchants, housewives, and laborers made use of its forms and norms, we can see how liberal economic policy permeated society through use. The determination of everyday people to make good on the protections and possibilities of liberalized fiscal policy cemented that policy in everyday practice.

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• 3 From Bullets to Bureaucracy

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020-09-15

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