A Quick Update

Just a quick update on things.

Towards the end of a grueling job search, Arkansas State University (ASU) offered me a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of History, which I happily accepted. My family and I will be moving to Jonesboro, Arkansas, July 15th. I will be teaching Mexican, Latin American, and world history.

                                                                  

Obtaining this position will allow me to further expand my research on Modesto C. Rolland, providing access to a regular salary, research funds, and a scholarly community conducive to producing quality work. ASU is also working on building a sister institution in Querétaro, which when completed, should allow even more opportunities for me to teach and research in Mexico.

I am currently revising my dissertation on early radio, the Revolution, and the Mexican state for publication. I plan to submit my book proposal within the next couple months. Although only a small part of the overall project, I do discuss Rolland's work as a communications officer for Venustiano Carranza and Rolland's work as president of the Central Mexican Radio League.

I am also going to start the first draft of the first chapter of the Rolland book this month. I am tentatively titling it "Child of the Porfiriato." I want to explore the time from Modesto's birth until the beginning of the Revolution. In addition to Modesto's life, which will be the main thread of this chapter and the entire book, I want to focus on the context that surrounded him, that is the Porfirio Diaz administration, life and development in the Baja California territories during the late 1800s and Mexico City in the early 1900s, education, engineering, and the expansion of Mexican nationalism and political unrest.

On another note, I know the Rolland family recently had another gathering in Mexico. Many of them toured the Plaza de Torros, which Modesto built in the 1940s. Modesto's grandchildren, Jorge Rolland and Deana Wicks, have dug up a number of documents and photographs of their grandfather's work on the stadium and of the designs for the Ciudad de los Deportes, which the stadium was a part of.

                                              

Construction at the Ciudad de los Deportes

 

 

Saludos,

Dr. Justin Castro

Modesto Rolland photo, c. 1920

 

 

Modesto C. Rolland, circa 1920

My wife, Angela Castro, touched the image up in Photoshop.

 Photo courtesy of Jorge Rolland.

 

 

--Justin Castro

"Conferencia sobre construcciones de cemento armado," El Imparcial, 5 dic. 1909, 12.

An article on a class on reinofrced concrete that Modesto C. Rolland gave at the Escuela Nacional de Ingenieros in 1909. Rolland was an early promoter and innovator of reinforced concrete in Mexico.

 

--Justin Castro

Tehuantepec Panel at the Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies Conference

I was recetly informed that the panel I put together for the 2013 Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies Conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, was accepted. Its title is "Business, Science, and Development in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, 1850-1950."


ABSTRACT:

Our panel explores the intersection of business, science, and engineering in the development of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and the sates of Veracruz and Tabasco from the years immediately following the Mexican-American War to the beginning of the “Mexican Miracle.”  Two of the presentations specifically look at transportation projects across the isthmus, addressing their ultimate failures and what the undertakings say about the participating businesses, engineers, and governments. The third panelist will discuss the interplay between archeologists, ornithologists, and oil geologists in the region during the 1930s and 1940s, exploring how different scientists interacted and influenced each other’s fields while shaping Mexico’s petroleum and tourism industry.  All of the panelists will discuss development in the region, the influence of foreigners—especially Americans—and modernization, providing insightful research on the region, and nineteenth and twentieth-century Mexico.

 

Nicolas E. Gordon

University of Oklahoma

From the Crescent City to Jaguar Hill: New Orleans’s Interest in the Tehuantepec

National Railroad, 1849 - 1853

Though a small number scholars of various historiographic schools have explored the history of the Tehuantepec transit route during the nineteenth century, most have done little beyond constructing a basic narrative of the events and none have made a considerable effort at analyzing the reasons for the repeated failure of the project. Despite significant interest expressed in the route at various times by the U. S. Congress, leading engineers, and transportation magnates, the ultimate triumph of the Panama Canal has led some scholars to simply dismiss the Tehuantepec project as being neither economically or engineeringly feasible. Others, looking beyond this simplistic analysis have concluded that the project’s ultimate failure lay in the diplomatic and political strife between the United States and Mexico.  However, a sustained look at the available documentation reveals a more complicated story. While diplomacy and politics clearly played a role in the outcome of the Tehuantepec National Railway , the reasons for its ultimate failure lay not in lack of engineering skill or solely at the hands of governmental officials, but in the organization and operations of the various companies involved.  For my talk, I will explore these themes as they relate to The Tehuantepec Company of New Orleans, which attempted to construct a road and railway across the isthmus during the early 1850s.

 

 

J. Justin Castro

University of Oklahoma

Modesto C. Rolland, the Mexican Revolution, and Development of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec

            My presentation explores transportation development across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec under the leadership of engineer Modesto C. Rolland, 1921-1952. The desire to build a transisthmian trade route in the region had been a recurrent goal of governments inside and outside of Mexico since the colonial era. The famed British engineer Sir Weetman Pearson put the finishing touches on the Tehuantepec Railway and its connecting ports in 1907, and trade across the isthmus reached an all-time high in 1913. However, the developmental designs for Tehuantepec during the subsequent revolutionary and post-revolutionary eras have received considerably less scholarly attention, perhaps because trade declined and new plans largely failed. However, Rolland’s life and work in the region provide important insights into state schemes for modernization, economic growth, and foreign relations policy during and after the Mexican Revolution.     

 

Robert Kett

University of California—Irvine

Stone, Feathers, Crude: On the Scientific Constitution of Southern Mexico

This paper explores the connections between three concurrent scientific projects in Veracruz and Tabasco in the 1930s and 40s - one archaeological, one biological, the other geological.  As part of Smithsonian Institution and National Geographic Society excavations in what would come to be known as the Olmec heartland, ornithologists were invited to collect specimens in a little-examined region of Middle America. This paper discusses how an attempt to define the archaeological culture of the Olmec, Mesoamerica’s cultura madre, also provided a site for natural scientific engagements with the region. While following their respective cultural and natural investigations in southern Mexico, archaeologists and ornithologists came into contact with another emergent scientific project in the region – the extractive efforts of oil geologists and prospectors. The presence of all of these scientists in southern Mexico was facilitated by similar historical circumstances, and the co-presence of these projects took on further importance as investigators from disparate disciplines exchanged supplies, materials and knowledge about the region. These projects planted the seeds of the petroleum refining and cultural and biological tourism industries that now dominate this region while propagating persistent imageries of the region and its resources. The complicated scientific ecology that characterized mid-twentieth century southern Mexico raises a number of important questions about scientific practices, their relations to each other, and their role in constituting the sites of their interventions, offering insights relevant to the time, place, and interaction among scientist and their work.

     The conference is the first week in April. I have just started writing the paper, and I am still working out the details. I will be sure to let everyone know how it goes.


    On a different note, I turned in the first draft of my doctoral dissertation--"Wireless: Radio, Revolution, and the Mexican State, 1897-1938." I will defend it, and hopefully, graduate this May.

Saludos,
Justin Castro

Rolland and Tehuantepec

Friends,

     I am finally returning my attentions back to the Modesto Rolland project.  First thing on the list: Tehuantepec.  And I am excited! Rolland had been involved in developing the isthmus since his days working for Salvador Alvarado in Yucatán in the mid and late 1910s, when he proposed building a link between the two regions to facilitate transportation and trade.  Subsequently, he moved on to head the Free Ports system and a project to rehabilitate and improve the overland ship railway that connected the ports of Salina Cruz and Coatzacoalcos (side note: Coatzacoalcos is the place, according to myth, where the god Quetzalcoatl left from and promised to return to).  I chose to start with this topic because a colleague of mine works on the involvement of U.S., specifically New Orleans, capitalists in the development of Tehuantepec.  We decided to form a panel looking at the history of transportation across the isthmus for the upcoming Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies conference, which will be in early April in Santa Fe, New Mexico.


Amigos:

Finalmente voy a devolver mis atenciones hacia el proyecto de Modesto Rolland.  Lo primero en la lista: Tehuantepec.  ¡Y estoy muy listo para comenzar !  Rolland había participado en el desarrollo del istmo desde sus días trabajando para Salvador Alvarado en Yucatán en los años de mediados y finales de 1910, cuando él propuso de construir una vínculo entre las dos regiones para facilitar el transporte y el comercio.  Posteriormente, se traslada para encabezar el sistema de Puertos Libres y un proyecto de rehabilitar y mejorar el ferrocarril de barco por tierra que conecta los puertos de Salina Cruz y Coatzacoalcos (nota de lado: Coatzacoalcos es el lugar, según el mito, donde Quetzalcoatl se marchó de y prometió volver a).  Decidí comenzar con este tema porque un colega mío trabaja en la participación de capitalistas de los Estados Unidos, específicamente de Nueva Orleans, en el desarrollo de Tehuantepec.  Decidimos formar un panel que mira la historia de transporte a través del istmo para la conferencia del Rocky Mountain Council of Latin American Studies, que será a principios de abril en Santa Fe, New México.
                                 
J. Justin Castro
Doctoral Candidate, Latin American History
University of Oklahoma
(405) 795 6532
jcastro@ou.edu

Update

Hello everybody,

I have not been able to do a whole lot new in regards to my project on Modesto C. Rolland. I have been busy finishing my doctoral thesis, which I will defend in February. I have been cataloging all the source materials I have on Rolland, and organizing them for writing in the near future.

I know that Jorge Rolland has made some headway in finding new contacts and sources about Modesto's parents and childhood in Baja California. 

I will be working on a new presentation on Modesto Rolland for the upcoming Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies conference, which will be held in Santa Fe in April 2013. The panel that I have in mind is going to discuss engineers in early twentieth-centry Latin America, and I am thinking about focusing the project on either Rolland's work with Mexico's "free port" system or, more likely, on his work on further developing the Isthmus of Tehuantepec 

This summer 2013 I will be on a panel about early radio in Latin America at the Latin American Studies Association, which will be held in Washington, DC. While there I am going to comb over the US National Archives for new source materials on Modesto Rolland. I am almost positive that there will be a number of useful records. I have also found some materials in U.S. congressional records that discuss Rolland's work on behalf of General Salvador Alvarado during the events leading up the Agua Prieta Revolt in 1920 when Alvarado was contemplating running for president. 

I am also working with colleagues to further explore the regional archives in Mexico. I know there are some materials in Yucatán and that there are likely others undiscovered in Baja California. Likewise, there is more to be found in Texas and New York. 

Thanks for your continued interest in our research and the life of Modesto C. Rolland. 

Muchos Saludos,

Justin Castro

Doctoral Candidate, Latin American History

University of Oklahoma

                                                                   * * * * *

Hola a todos:

No he sido capaz de trabajar mucho en mi proyecto de la vida de Modesto C. Rolland. He estado ocupado terminando mi tesis doctoral, que defenderé en febrero. He estado catalogando todos los materiales que tengo sobre Rolland, y organización de ellos para escribir en el futuro próximo.

Sé que Jorge Rolland ha hecho un poco de progreso en el descubrimiento de nuevos contactos y fuentes sobre padres de Modesto e infancia en Baja California.

Trabajaré en una nueva presentación de Modesto Rolland para el próximo conferencia del Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies que será en Santa Fe en abril de 2013. El panel que tengo en mente va a hablar sobre ingenieros en el siglo veinte en América Latina, y pienso que el enfoque del proyecto sera el trabajo de Rolland con los 'puertos libres'  de México o, y más probablemente, en su trabajo del desarrollo del Istmo de Tehuantepec

Este verano 2013 estaré en un panel sobre la radio temprana en América Latina en la conferencia de la Latin American Studies Association, que será sostenida en Washington, DC. Mientras allí voy a investigar en los U.S. National Archives para nuevos materiales de Modesto Rolland. Soy casi seguro que habrá varios documentos útiles. También he encontrado algunos materiales en diarios de sesiones del Congreso del Estado Unidos que hablan del trabajo de Rolland en su ayuda del General Salvador Alvarado durante los acontecimientos que conducen a Agua Prieta Revolt en 1920 cuando Alvarado se proponía presentarse como candidato presidencial.

También trabajo con colegas para explorar adelante los archivos regionales en México. Sé que hay algunos materiales en Yucatán y que hay otros probables no descubiertos en Baja California. Igualmente, existe más ser encontrado en Texas y Nueva York.

Gracias por su interés continuado a nuestra investigación y la vida de Modesto C. Rolland.

Muchos Saludos,

Justin Castro

Doctoral Candidate, Latin American History

University of Oklahoma

Hi Folks/Hola amigos,

It has been a while since I have posted anything new on the blog, so I thought I would catch everyone up on some of my more current research.

I am currently writing the last chapter of my doctoral dissertation on wireless communications in Mexico, 1899-1934. If all goes as planned, I will be defending in spring 2013.  Although the dissertation is not about Rolland, I do discuss his work with radio during the 1910s and 1920s. But this project, and preparing for the first classes that I will teach on the history of modern Mexico at the University of Oklahoma, have kept me from giving my full attention to further investigating Rolland.

That said, I have managed to gather more sources, and I have been organizing what documents I have, so that I can start writing a full-length book on the life and times of Modesto C. Rolland as soon as I finish the first draft of my dissertation. In other words, I plan on getting started this fall. I have already acquired a tremendous amount of primary and secondary materials for the project, but I plan on making one more trip to Mexico in the near future in order to follow up on a few new leads on source materials in Baja California, Mexico City, and Michoacan.  I also would like to look in the U.S. National Archives and in El Paso newspaper collections.


For those interested, here are a few sources that I have recently looked at:

“Importancia de la mexicanización del personal técnico en las Líneas Nacionales,” Mexico Nuevo, 3 Jul. 1909, 3.

“Por las escuelas,” El Diario 12 Aug. 1909, 7.

“Conferencias de ingeniería,” El Tiempo, 15 Oct. 1909, 3.

Rolland, Modesto C. “A Trial by Socialism in Mexico: What the Mexicans are Fighting For,” Forum (July 1916): 79-90.

Rolland, Modesto C. “Why Mexico is Neutral.” The Public 20, no. 999 (25 May 1917): 509-10.

Rolland, Modesto C. “Petroleum in Mexico.” The International Socialist Review 17, no. 3 (September 1917): 149-53.

Rolland, Modesto C. “Introducción,” in Apuntes sobre tarifas de transporte y transmisión: En busca de un sistema coordinador de Ferrocarriles y Camiones. México, DF: “Avante,” 1938, 1.

Jordan, David Starr. The Days of a Naturalist, Teacher, and Minor Prophet of Democracy, Volume 2, 1900-1921. New York: World Book Company, 1922.

Klich, Lynda. “Estridentópolis: Achieving a Post-Revolutionary Utopia in Jalapa.” DAPA 26 (2012): 106-131.

Anderson, Mark Cronlund. Pancho Villa’s Revolution by Headlines. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001.

Carranza, Luis E. Architecture as Revolution: Episodes in the History of Modern Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010.

Dorsey, Florence. Road to the Sea: The Story of James B. Eads. New York: Rinehart & Company, 1947.

Tibol, Raquel. Frida Kahlo: An Open Life. Translated by Elinor Randall. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.

All of these sources mention, or were written by, Modesto C. Rolland.

As I get the project underway I will make a greater effort to keep everyone informed of my progress.

Thanks for your continued interest! 

Saludos,

J. Justin Castro