Evolving Tale of Two Neighbors

It was all hugs and Latin-style backslapping on the South Lawn of the White House when Vicente Fox came to visit his friend George Bush. But it wasn’t always this way.

The history of U.S.-Mexican relations over the last century has been fraught with political conflict and even an armed invasion or two--including the last land incursion by a foreign force into the United States, by revolutionary leader Pancho Villa into New Mexico in 1916.

As recently as the 1980s, Mexican governments were bitterly contesting U.S. policy in Central America and trying to challenge U.S. economic dominance in the Western Hemisphere.

Only since the election of President Bush--that’s George Bush, the father--and his Mexican counterpart, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, in 1988 has the U.S.-Mexican relationship graduated to one of cooperation and slowly emerging trust.

That 13-year process culminated in the ceremony Wednesday in which George W. Bush, framed by a Mexican flag and standing beside Fox, proclaimed, “The United States has no more important relationship in the world than the one we have with Mexico.”

Just how huge a change that reflects would be instantly apparent to any Mexican schooled in the history of American interference in Mexican affairs.

The United States did, after all, capture half of Mexico within a few short years: Texas, which seceded from Mexico in 1836, was annexed in 1845, and Mexico turned over modern-day California, Arizona, Nevada and Utah, and parts of New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming, as part of the 1848 treaty ending the Mexican-American War.

American troops captured Mexico City during that war. They went in again after the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, occupying the port of Veracruz in 1914 to block supplies from reaching would-be dictator Victoriano Huerta. That intervention helped boost opposition leader Venustiano Carranza to power, and he went on to consolidate a nominally democratic system in the 1917 constitution.

But not before revolutionary leader Francisco “Pancho” Villa invaded U.S. soil, at least for a few hours. He killed 16 U.S. citizens in the Mexican town of Santa Isabel in 1916, and then attacked Columbus, N.M.

The Cold War brought renewed U.S.-Mexican tension as the governments of Presidents Luis Echeverria and Jose Lopez Portillo tried to exercise leadership in the developing world, opposing U.S. intervention in Central American civil wars and U.S. policy on Cuba.

Throughout the Cold War, “Mexican policymakers emphasized the problems of having a superpower as a neighbor, failing to recognize the potential advantages of having access to the world’s largest market,” wrote Harvard professor Jorge I. Dominguez and Mexican professor Rafael Fernandez de Castro in a new book, “The United States and Mexico: Between Partnership and Conflict.”

Dominguez and Fernandez contend that the inaugurations of the elder Bush and Salinas proved to be the catalyst for a cooperative relationship, built on shared economic interests. Mexico had been burned badly in economic crises in the 1980s, and Salinas recognized that he had to open up his country’s protected economy.

The U.S. and Mexico began negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement in June 1990, and the pact took effect in 1994. It helped Mexico survive another crisis in 1995 as exports soared, offsetting fallen production at home. From there, cooperation mushroomed.

Robert A. Pastor, a Mexico expert at Emory University in Atlanta, said that through most of the 20th century, “Mexicans feared that too close an embrace by the United States would unduly influence their internal affairs. . . . [And] Mexico’s identity was, to a great degree, defined by its nationalism, and its nationalism was defined by its independence from the United States. So most Mexican governments would like a certain dimension of antagonism to prove to their people that they are defending their interests.”

But Pastor said the steadily growing immigration of Mexicans to the United States played a central role in changing Mexican perceptions, enabling the shift in policy from confrontation to cooperation.

“Mexicans had changed their view of Americans because every community now has relatives in the U.S.,” Pastor said. “This is absolutely key. Now they see their face in America. America is no longer so foreign.”

On Capitol Hill, Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) is among those who are hailing the change in tone in Mexican-American relations.

“This is the first time since I’ve been a senator that we have a president of Mexico that is not bad-mouthing America. He’s talking about America as a friend, as a partner, instead of complaining about their problems as if we caused them.”

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Times staff writer Janet Hook contributed to this report.