‘Mexico’ Makes Ambitious Historical Trek

For an English-language TV audience that is eager to understand Mexican history, there is hardly a brief, authoritative film available. Attempting to fill this void, Jupiter Entertainment produced a four-part series on Mexico that will be shown on the History Channel starting tonight. Although the film “Mexico” is a serious attempt to deal with a difficult subject, almost any attempt to try to synthesize the history of a country that dates as far back as 20,000 BC in the course of four hours is doomed to failure.

Nevertheless, the film is a brave endeavor to take the audience on a trip through Mexican history and covers most of the incidents that have shaped it. It is a good guide for beginners, albeit it places an excessive emphasis on the bloody, violent and disruptive incidents that have taken place in Mexico’s history, relegating the good deeds almost to oblivion.

When and how, one wonders, did the Mexicans find the time to build those magnificent public buildings that are found almost anywhere in the republic while they were shooting at each other? Evidently, the length of the subject matter made the producers pick and choose the episodes of Mexican history that fitted their story, and often the choices they made were unfortunate. They ignore, for instance, an entire historical period when the series jumps from the conquest to independence, leaving almost unmentioned the close to 300 years that encompassed the viceroyalty. The colonial era is a cruel time during which the Christianization and Hispanization of the Indians becomes a matter of state. But during this time there are also people such as Pedro Jose de Marquez, an enlightened Jesuit, who writes, “True philosophy does not recognize that any man has less ability because he was born white or black or because he was educated in the poles or the tropics.”

Another serious problem is the way in which historical periods are divided. In a futile attempt to make Mexican history comprehensible to an American audience, the film cuts through the historical flow arbitrarily, and excessively links Mexican history to the, presumably, more familiar history of America.

Consider, for example, the title and subject of the second installment, “From Independence to the Alamo.” In Mexican history, that same era is more aptly described as the period of formation of the Mexican nation. The epoch does include an interlude with Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, a catastrophic leader whose uninterrupted siesta caused Mexico the loss of Texas, among other things. But the battle of the Alamo is not a historic benchmark. Santa Anna does not define the period that runs from 1810 to the Porfirio Diaz dictatorship in the 1870s, as the Enlightenment, the Reform and the Restored Republic do.

The best part of the series is the first chapter. The treatment of the pre-Hispanic period and the conquest is accurate, the footage is interesting and the period is well covered for a TV series. The last part of the series, which deals with the contemporary scene, is extremely weak. There is, for instance, a scene in which President Manuel Avila Camacho, who ruled from 1940 to 1946, is seen presiding over a military parade from the balcony of the National Palace, while the narrator describes events related to the student movement in 1968.

The North American Free Trade Agreement, signed by Mexico, the United States and Canada in 1993, is mentioned as a good sign for the future of Mexico. But there is no mention of the fundamental social, political and economic changes that have taken place in Mexico in the last decade. The series is at its best when historians explain or interpret a historical fact on camera. Especially accurate are the remarks of Michael C. Meyer, but, in general, they all make interesting and knowledgeable comments. Less fortunate is the narrative and even less the voice-over impersonations of historical characters.

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“Mexico,” a four-part documentary, airs today through Thursday at 10 p.m. on the History Channel.