Judas At The Jocky Club

6 Pages 1553 Words

Judas at the Jockey Club
William H. Beezley compares the ordinary every day lives of Mexicans. This compares with E. Bradford Burns in his informative book The Poverty of Progress in that Burns speaks of the degree of beneficence that modernization had upon nineteenth-century Latin America. Each author takes into account sports to recreation, from work to jobs, and from ceremonies to celebrations in order to illustrate the extent to which the two main culture groups of Mexican society, los de arriba (the elite) and los de abajo (the underclass) live their very separate lives. Beezley states that the social, political and economic factors are considered as an argument that this period can be seen as the basis for modern Mexico. Burns believed that because progress benefited the elite minority it crippled the folk majority, thus modernization was a pitfall for Latin America. Judas at the Jockey Club supplies an accurate view of a struggling and developing Mexico throughout the Porfirian era up to the year 1910. (Judas at the Jockey Club, The Poverty of Progress)
Beezley’s research was exceptionally far-reaching, but organized to perfection. He used an impressive amount of different information to successfully cover the cultural separations and defined differences of the two social divisions in the nation of Mexico around the turn of the 20th century. The author uses over one hundred different sources to inform the reader that there is much more to Mexican life than seen by the naked eye. However, the author could have supported his views on the lower class with a further in-depth focus as he did so with the upper class. Overall, his research and argument was well written. He captures local Mexican views and standpoints of both the upper and lower classes and created a division that would make a reader, with any or little previous knowledge of Latin American study, understand with the greatest of ease. In comparison The Poverty of Pro...