Between the Summit and the Sea: Central Veracruz in the Nineteenth Century

Alexander Craig, a journalist in Lennoxville, Quebec, was a professor of
Political Science at the University of Western Ontario.

Mexico is going to come more and more into our consciousness, with the
ongoing negotiations for the North American Free Trade Area. When
Mexico’s President Salinas visited Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto in
April of 1991, Canadians realized they had a lot to learn about his
country. Siemens’s book gives an idea of the history and character of
one of our partners-to-be’s major regions.

Siemens, an experienced geographer at the University of British
Columbia, gives us a highly original perspective. Travellers used to
enter Mexico by Veracruz, and he surveys this area in detail—the
coast, the tropical lowlands, and the land up to the central
tableland—through the eyes of many of these people, from Alexander von
Humboldt on.

One of the classic studies of life in nineteenth-century Mexico was
written by Frances Calderon de la Barca, a young Scotswoman who married
the first Spanish envoy. Interest in the country was so high at the time
that—according to a source in Britain in the 1820s—“anyone with
recent new information on Mexico was besieged and had to publish in
self-defence.”

There is much of value and interest here, supplemented by a good
reference section and index, and some useful illustrations. The
author’s detailed table of contents may appear old-fashioned, but it
is decidedly handy. Among other things, Siemens shows how religious and
racial tensions and incomprehension between the visitors and the visited
were born and nourished, so that the two parties failed to really
understand each other. This book will go some way toward encouraging the
opposite.