The Murmur of Bees

Mexico saw dramatic change in the 1920s as the industrial revolution made great advances in available technology. While many of these developments had already impacted more urbanized areas, mechanization was just taking hold in the agricultural state of Nuevo León. In the novel, Francisco Senior is the first landholder in the Linares area to have a tractor. Technological advancement made its way into the homes of the privileged too, as evident in Beatriz’s massive Singer sewing machine and in Francisco’s including internal plumbing and partial electricity in designing their new home in Monterrey. The advent of telephones in personal dwellings, as Beatriz notes in the novel, was on the horizon. The agrarian reform movement, coupled with the industrialization of cities like Monterrey, drew an increasing number of the landowner class into urban areas and commercial businesses, and away from agriculture—a drift that in the novel eventually draws Francisco Junior away from agriculture.

Beatriz wonders why such dramatic advances haven’t made life any less worrisome. Cultural foment, changing laws, and multiple military groups resulted in pervasive uncertainty and nostalgia for the simpler decades of the past. That nostalgia, however, exists only among landowners and other upper-class citizens like the Morales family. The dramatic developments of the age offer little change for the lower-class worker, apart from engendering animosity at the great gap between the classes and a desire for greater equality.