El Petroleo es Nuestro: A History of Oil in Mexico Brandon Seale

Porfirio Diaz, Standard Oil, Weetman Pearson (El Aguila), Edward Doheny (La Huasteca), and gushers! Suggested reading: Jonathan C. Brown, "Oil and Revolution in Mexico." Link here: http://tinyurl.com/zvermpa 

The oil companies withdraw from Mexican society as Revolution ravages the country. As Post-Revolutionary governments reassert control over the country, they go to battle with the oil companies over the validity of their holdings and soon find allies in the incipient Oilworkers Movement.Suggested reading: Mariano Azuela, "Los De Abajo: Novela De La Revolución Mexicana."Link here: http://tinyurl.com/hoxltbd

On March 18, 1938, Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas expropriated the properties of the American, English, and Dutch oil companies operating in Mexico. Was this the ideological act of a political radical? Or a calculated piece of realpolitik that united the Mexican business class with the socialist labor movement to forge the coalition that would rule Mexico for the next sixty years?Suggested reading: Jonathan C. Brown and Alan Knight, "The Mexican Petroleum Industry in the Twentieth Century."

Antonio J. Bermudez assumes the Directorship of PEMEX and makes it the animal we have come to know and love. PEMEX truly becomes an oil company, making critical downstream investments and finally surpassing pre-Expropriation activity. But hints at her future struggles appear even as the great Petrolera achieves her first successes.Suggested reading: Antonio J. Bermúdez, "Doce Años al Servicio de la Industria Petrolera Mexicana, 1947-1958."

In this episode, we struggle to make sense of PEMEX's adolescent period. Great measures - such as the formation of the Instituto Mexicano de Petroleo - are taken which will yield fantastic results a decade later. But disturbing patterns begin to emerge as other Mexican institutions come to rely on PEMEX's spectacular wealth to advance their own agendas.

We're back to gushers and glory here with the great oil finds of the 1970's: Reforma, Cantarell, and Ku-Maloob-Zaap. And we're talking about the closest thing PEMEX has to an American-style, larger-than-life oil personality: Jorge Diaz Serrano.Suggested viewing on YouTube: Jose Agustin's "Tragicomedia Mexicana."Link here: http://tinyurl.com/zssjyun