Judas at the Jockey Club: And Other Episodes of Porfirian Mexico

Profilo Diaz was the dictator in charge before the Mexican Revolution and the structure of society was clearly coming apart at the seams when he was in power. Beezley does an excellent job of showing how the society was coming apart through various aspects of the culture including religious festivals and life at the Jockey Club. The book is very well written but if you do not know what is happening in Mexico during the Profirian period than this will be a hard book to follow. For those who know a lot about Mexico this is a must read.

This is one of the books I recommend most frequently when people ask for fun stuff to read, in English, about Mexico. And I frequently assign it to students in intro-level history classes. I'm not entirely convinced by the chapter on rural life, but the book as a whole belongs among the best histories of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century period in Latin America. Dang! Now what will I assign my students? Bring this back into print, please!

This is a book that deserves to be more widely known. It is a serious historical treatise about culture, social life and customs during the Porfiriato regime of Mexico (1875-1910)- but don't let the academic theme frighten you. Judas at the Jockey Club is an excellent and fascinating read that considers topics like "why and how horse-racing came to Mexico", "why and how baseball became popular", "why cricket faded from popularity", and "what bicycles have to do with politics". Serious scholarship should all be this much fun.