Judas At The Jockey Club Analysis

During the years of 1876 to 1911, Porfirian Mexico launched into a period of modernization. In William Beezley’s work Judas at the Jockey Club, he addresses how this modernization initiated both social and economic tension between the small percentage of elites and impoverished masses and resulted in cultural resistance. According to Beezley, Mexico was bewitched under what he describes as “Porfirian persuasion,” and under this ideology the state was determined to establish ideas of efficiency and progress. The basis of these ideals came from the influences of the United States and Europe. Diaz and his small band of elites were captivated with foreign influence and wanted to install as many of their ideas like, “leisure and ritual” as possible into every aspect of Mexican society. But more importantly, Diaz and his confidantes used European ideals as a vehicle to adjust and even …show more content…
And a main method for them was what Beezley describes as “balance mechanisms.” For example, a decrease in population results in increased amount of food available, therefore more people will join the community until it achieved the same amount of deprivation to reach equilibrium (Beezley, 77). This lifestyle for rural Mexicans alongside the pressure from the upper classes to change their way of living is how social tension emerged in Mexico. Traditionalists’ were set in their ways and their reasoning behind their mindset was the fact that poverty was difficult enough as it is, and they did not want to compound this hardship with the frustration of vain efforts to change these conditions (Beezley, 77). They rejected changed because they had learned to cope with their reality. The only recreation they needed was a fiesta that strengthened family bonds and connected rural society, they did not need Western ideals of “leisure and ritual,” which infuriated the