Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City (Diana J. Montaño, 2021)

Diana J. Montaño’s Electrifying Mexico is a cultural and social history of electrification in the Mexican capital between 1880 and 1960. She adopts a user-centered approach to place ordinary people at the center of the story of electrification, showing how technological diffusion was a contested and multi-directional process. Incorporating histories of technology, gender, race, class, law, and labor—as well as a creative and varied source base—Montaño reconstructs electrification from the bottom-up and offers several methodological contributions for energy historians to build on.