Work in Progress

When Charles I asked Hernan Cortes what Mexico looked like, the conquistador picked up a sheet of paper and crumpled it into a ball. Then, opening his hand, he let the paper unfold in his palm. “It’s like this, Sire.” It was a dramatic gesture to describe the country’s topography, a mountainous and largely arid landscape that has for centuries contributed to the social ills of its people.

Vicente Fox, newly elected Mexican president and spokesman for the conservative National Action Party, inherits a country as crumpled as that paper by unemployment, want and inequality, where the rich are blind to the sufferings of the poor and where the poor, landless and jobless, flee across the northern border or rush to the cities. A man who began his life as a laborer in the early 1940s is asked to make do on a pension, if he’s lucky enough to have one, of about $100 a month. On one day he and his wife dine on eggs and beans, on the next they go without breakfast and on the third they have just coffee.

Nearly three-fourths of the population live in poverty, and the numbers multiply daily. A century ago, Mexico had fewer than 15 million inhabitants; today there are 100 million, thanks to a mixture of poverty, medicine and Catholic dogma. Modern man, of course, has tempered the harsh reality that Cortes described, building dams and irrigating lands, but he has mistakenly planted crops largely to export. Thus Mexicans import corn and beans, the staples of their diet, more now than ever before.

How did Mexico, once the crown jewel of the Spanish empire, come to be a country beset by byzantine ills? Its problems are old, rooted in the departure of Spanish rule in the early 19th century and in the ensuing chaos faced by a country unprepared for self-rule or for the challenge posed by a multiethnic population. The 21 contributors to “The Oxford History of Mexico,” edited by Michael C. Meyer and William H. Beezely, probe this country’s long and tumultuous experience, from the pre-colonial glories of the ancients to our day.

This is a vast undertaking. The Mexican drama antedates Cortes, who arrived in 1521, by centuries; he stumbled on ancient civilizations whose apogee was from 150 BC to AD 900. The Aztecs, whom he subdued, were latecomers. Next came three centuries of colonial rule, a New Spain of majestic cathedrals, rural haciendas and urban metropolises built on the ashes of the old. The republic we know today, with its theater of tragic heroes, clerical conflicts, revolutions, muralist art and literary booms, dates from 1821.

What is missing from “The Oxford History of Mexico” is a central theme that could explain how Mexico arrived at its bleak present day. That flaw may be because the writing of history does not lend itself easily to a team effort: It is not a laboratory science. At its best, it is a well-told story about the past that embodies an argument in the drama of its narrative. Too often some historians act as the guardians of knowledge mostly irrelevant to today’s concerns, frowning on accounts written to support positions on modern issues. Nor does it help when editors fall prey to historical simplifications, as Meyer and Beezely have done, when they quote Enrique Krauze, a Mexican historian, who claims that Cortes and Moctezuma “created a new nationality at the instant they met,” when in fact it has taken four centuries to forge a nationality and the process is not complete: Witness the 12 million Indians who live on Mexican society’s periphery. Nor are all Mexicans convinced that their culture is a blend of Indian and Spanish because basic institutions--language, religion, laws and the urban setting--are essentially Spanish, as Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, anthropologist and author of “Mexico Profundo,” is quoted in one of the book’s essays.

The pre-Columbian and colonial antecedents of Mexico are deftly done in “The Oxford History of Mexico,” although perhaps the writers are too kind to the Spaniards. Cortes and his ilk conquered a world of Maya, Mixtecs, Tarascans and Zapotecs, all highly civilized; the Aztecs were just one of many. It was a conquest by the sword and the cross, as monks joined the conquistadores to save heathen souls for the Catholic Church. No more exploitative than other European conquerors, the Spaniards, nonetheless, ruled with an iron hand, relegating Indians to the bottom of the barrel.

Not surprisingly, Indian resistance to colonialism surfaced early, some of it bordering on class conflict, not merely racial strife, writes contributor Robert W. Patch--a welcome hypothesis. The Indians, as the Spaniards baptized them, frequently displayed deep-rooted hostility to their masters, a logical result of their enslavement and the loss of their lands and water. The horrendous decline of the Indian population, from an estimated 15 million to 25 million people in central Mexico in 1521 to just over 1 million by the early 17th century, testifies that the Spaniards were hardly benevolent, though smallpox, measles and diphtheria, not the sword, were largely responsible.

An essay by Elinor G. K. Melville on disease and ecology adds another dimension to the conquest. What, she asks, made possible the subjugation of the many by the few? Was it simply the result of catastrophic epidemics? She suggests that the “ecological process underlying the replacement of the indigenous landscape by European-like landscapes, as well as the replacement of the indigenous people by Europeans and Africans, constituted a biological conquest.” The result was “ecological imperialism.” The Spaniards altered the “ecological processes that sustained this world of plants and humans.”

Negative aspects aside, the colony of Spain had a viable economy, producing everything needed for subsistence, able to import luxury items in exchange for bullion and, in this manner, achieved a “measurable degree of economic independence.” That, however, did not keep it in the Spanish fold. A rigid class structure, made worse by population growth, put added pressure on the land; that, as well as rising inflation, exacerbated colonial problems, spurring Mexican independence.

Only lightly explored, however, is the psychological impact of the conquest on both Indian and mestizo, the offspring of conqueror and victim. Unlike the English colonists who settled New England, few Spanish families braved the Atlantic crossings. At its peak during the 16th century, women made up just 28% of Spanish migration to the New World. Instead, Spanish men bedded Indian women to sire mestizos, today’s Mexicans. This hybrid was centuries in the making before reaching psychological maturity; the males, especially, were haunted by the specter of personal insecurity, a theme that has fascinated Mexican intellectuals since the publication of “El perequillo sarniento” in 1815, a novel that explored the Creole’s (Mexican-born Spaniard) psyche. As Mexican scholars point out, more likely than not mestizo males grew up in fatherless homes, left in the care of their Indian mothers, who epitomized the defeated of the conquest.

That acknowledged, there are fresh insights on culture and society, some on women. Asuncion Lavrin, one of the contributors, explores the importance of virginity in New Spain’s macho and racist society, in which women of dark skin were discriminated against, and its relation to class and race. The brown poor might lose their virginity outside of marriage but women of the upper class employed it to reinforce their status. Still, by 1800, Lavrin argues, some women were apparently winning “more responsibility for their actions.”

Yet no matter how flexible colonial society may have been, as many authors assert, the truth is that an autocratic, hierarchical system based rigidly on race and caste left Mexicans unprepared for self-rule. How else to explain the political turmoil of the early republic? The writings on the colonial era fail to make this clear.

The essays on the 19th century in “The Oxford History of Mexico” do not alter dramatically accepted interpretations, although one looks favorably on Agustin de Iturbide, the discredited, opportunistic royalist commander who, by becoming a turncoat, ousted the Spaniards and became Mexico’s first ruler. He stayed in office less than a year, before being replaced by a panoply of petty generals.

At mid-century Benito Juarez, the Indian who became president of his country, emerges a hero, the upholder of liberal ideals, capitalism in reality, including the separation of church and state, and defender of the patria against Napoleon’s soldiers. Then appears a chapter on the 30-year dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, a hero of the wars against the French who, under the banner of Order and Progress, deprived campesinos of their lands, kept nascent labor under his thumb and opened the gates to foreign investment, all in an effort to “modernize” Mexico. Porfirio, like Juarez and his liberals, dreamed of a Mexico in the mold of Adam Smith, mestizo or white but certainly not Indian.

With old colonial problems, some exacerbated by Republican misdeeds, left unresolved, Mexico was ripe for the Revolution of 1910 which, according to the editors, was “one of the great 20th-century social revolutions,” though John Hart, a noted scholar of the revolution, concedes that its leadership, as exemplified by Venustiano Carranza and Alvaro Obregon, was hardly radical; they espoused “reform that respected private property.” The editors go on to argue that Mexico’s revolution survived because it lacked the “theoretical straitjacket” that limited experimentation in the Soviet Union. The truth is that it lingered on more as myth than as reality, given the conservative nature of Mexico’s rulers and the sorry state of millions of Mexicans.

After 1917, the year of the constitution, the country experienced no radical change, as the essays in this book suggest. During this post-revolutionary era, Mexico’s rulers espoused capitalist goals; not until 1935, when Lazaro Cardenas became president, were the promises of 1917 revived, only to be shelved soon after, as an essay by John W. Sherman on the much-ballyhooed “Mexican Miracle” of the ‘50s and ‘60s makes obvious.

Were the heralded achievements of the revolution, accepted as fact by one and all authors, more lyrical than real? Whatever the answer, Mexico was once again on the path toward “unbridled capitalist development,” the hoary formula of Juarez and Diaz. Social Darwinism was alive and well. Wealth “would now trickle down and social harmony inevitably follow.” Mexican rulers had discarded the ideals of the revolution, agrarian reform and labor rights. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, wielded political power in an alliance with bankers, business barons and the hacendados of export agriculture. The revolution, lamented Daniel Cosio Villegas, dean of Mexican historians, was dead.

Yes, there were gains, as Sherman points out: the foundations of Mexican industrialization; highways built as well as big dams, especially as the “green revolution” took hold; and the gross national product climbed upward. Still, inequality grew by leaps and bounds, as the few had more and the poor less and less. Toadies of the PRI took control of labor unions, while tourist havens catering to Americans began to appear on the communal lands (ejidos) of campesinos. Corruption in business and government ran rampant.

Eventually, there came to be a “perfect dictatorship,” as Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist, once said. The ambitious sold their souls--co-opted by the PRI-istas; those who stood by their principles felt the garrote, the big stick of the lackeys who obeyed the political bosses. Nonetheless, the “Mexican Miracle,” so admired by American pundits, took a pratfall in the early ‘70s.

“The Oxford History of Mexico” ends with an essay on the media and popular culture which, according to the essay’s author, Anne Rubenstein, pulled Mexicans “willy-nilly into an international culture [American, in my opinion] with new styles and new ways to behave.” One came across Maya women offering bottles of Coca Cola to the Virgin, while folk dances choreographed by mestizos passed for indigenous ones. A craze for comic books sprang up, there were fictionalized versions of true-life stories, while soap operas captured hours of radio and television time. Painters of trendy abstract art rejected mural art, with one of them, Jose Luis Cuevas, denouncing it as the cortina de nopal (cactus curtain) because, he alleged, it tries to keep out other schools of art.

That is all to the good, but a new diva, the global economy, appeared on the national stage in 1982, given life by NAFTA in 1993, the darling of Mexico’s neoliberal technocrats. This is Maquilamex, as playwrights in Mexicali dubbed it, a land of assembly plants, mostly offshoots of American multinationals, which cover the landscape from Tijuana to Matamoros and wrap their tentacles around the entire republic.

Using young and cheap female labor to assemble everything from computers and television sets to door hinges, the maquilas change towns, turning Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez into urban metropolises. With urban growth come slums, as ugly as anywhere in Mexico, where families huddle in shacks of discarded lumber and rusty tin on the outskirts of cities. Meanwhile, gangs of narcotraficantes, smugglers of cocaine, marijuana and heroin into the United States, make border cities a no-man’s-land where murder is almost a daily occurrence and buy off PRI-istas, police and the military. Yes, cultural studies are important, but one wishes that at least some of these issues had been addressed by the contributors of this large and uneven volume.