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Rick López, Robert Weis. Bakers and Basques: A Social History of Bread in Mexico., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 3, June 2013, Pages 906–907, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.3.906
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Unlike previous studies of Basque immigrants in Latin America, which tend toward hagiographic prosopography, Robert Weis's book analyzes the social, political, and economic relationships that bound Basque bakers not just to one another, but also to the workers, consumers, competitors, and political institutions around them in Mexico City. In Weis's account, they emerge as market innovators who helped expand consumer access to bread, but who also became a regressive force in labor relations and in the development of competitive capitalism. Weis's account of bread in Mexico City from the colonial era through the 1930s shines as a case study of the rise of a form of economic patronage and monopoly capitalism that continues to plague Mexico.
The book opens with an analysis of colonial-era regulations that were supposed to create a stable system in which a large number of medium-sized producers met the demands of the Mexico City consumers for low priced bread of predictable quality. In the late colonial era, after a group of Spanish elite had manipulated the guild system so as to dominate the bread market, and amid growing concerns about the effects of the insurgency, the government stepped back from its regulatory role to see if market forces might do a better job of creating competition and preventing scarcity. After independence from Spain in 1821 the new government embraced this free market model. Weis affirms the interpretation of the early nineteenth century as an era of “war, riots, and instability” but adds that it also was a period of opportunity for the small-scale entrepreneurs who replaced monopolists in the provision of internal markets such as bread (p. 29).
