‘Mexico: A History’ and ‘A Brief History of Violence in Mexico’ review

‘The history of any country is full of caveats and unknowns, and Mexico’s are unusually full of history.’ Thus concludes one of the best recent area studies of Mexico, covering half a millennium, from Aztec domination via three centuries of Spanish imperialism to revolution and independence. Paul Gillingham writes as engagingly as the celebrated Mexican columnist Armando Fuentes Aguirre (‘Catón’), but with the rigour of Hugh Thomas’ Cuba or John Lynch’s Bolívar. By contrast, eschewing conventional chronology, Pablo Piccato focuses on Mexico’s 20th century, finding violence ‘everywhere’. He sees Mexican history through a binary of oppressor/oppressed, and offers insights informed by sociology, criminology, and political science.

Both books are written with anglophone readers in mind. Comparisons are frequently drawn to the United States (and sometimes to Britain), and both prologue the contemporary ‘black legend’ view of Mexico as a source of narco violence. Both historians stress Mexico’s unequal relationship with its northern neighbour, with good reason. As the vice president of a US thinktank commented in a foreword to a book on American ambassadors to Mexico in 2013: ‘Few relationships, if any, matter more to the United States than Mexico … although it is a relationship fraught with historical conflict, significant economic disparities, and a persistent cultural divide.’ The varying paternalism and abuse handed down by Washington has, in turn, been meted out by the Mexican elites towards the country’s people. As Piccato put it in a recent interview: ‘The [Mexican] state has never had the legitimate monopoly on the use of force. Violence can be used by many actors, non-state ones, with a certain degree of legitimacy.’ Thus Mexico has been uniquely prone to polycratic and regionalised power structures which have both oppressed and emancipated populations themselves divided by caste and class. Despite this, the country has developed a powerful and internationally recognisable national culture.

Gillingham begins with a survey of the 14th-century rise of the Aztec Empire in the Mexica valley. Hernán Cortes’ destruction of the four-million-strong empire in the 1520s owed as much to the spread of Old World disease as to the Toledo steel, arquebuses, and horse-drawn wheels of his fellow conquistadores. Above all, as Henry Kamen explained in his then-controversial Spain’s Road to World Empire (2002), the foreign invaders mobilised help from subject nations, especially the Tlaxcala, to overthrow the Aztecs. The Spaniards attempted to sanctify their bloody conquest. They exaggerated the Aztec ‘flower war’ practice of human sacrifice and flaunted the evangelisation of this New World. But the reality of death and exploitation collided with early human rights criticism in Spain’s ‘Valladolid Debate’ (1550-51), as well as the sectarian ‘Black Legend’ advanced by Protestant imperialist powers.

For more than two centuries outnumbered whites occupied the summit of the West’s first racially hierarchised society, sometimes on the make with an eye to returning across the Atlantic, but more often settling and intermarrying (including via concubinage) in ‘New Spanish’ society. This patrilineal empire offered great wealth in cochineal and silver but very little intellectual opportunity beyond the all-encompassing Catholic Church. That pre-independence Mexico’s most formidable intellect, Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-95), was both a nun and a poet reveals the unscientific yet culturally rich Habsburg Leitkultur.

During the 18th century Spain’s Bourbon dynasty launched a kind of ‘Second Conquest’ to extract yet more wealth. But most colonial life continued with negligible contact with a Spanish Crown that was both distant and mediated via the peculiarly monarchised Catholic Church. ‘Loyal’ revolts against unpopular Spanish bureaucrats would nonetheless invoke the name of the king. On 16 September 1810 the priest Miguel Hidalgo (born in New Spain in 1753) proclaimed his ‘Cry of Grievances’ (‘Grito de Dolores’), a condemnation of the Spanish Viceroy’s government, unleashing a process which was both the last in a long line of ‘loyal’ rebellions and the start of the war for Mexican independence. In central Mexico, Hidalgo’s ally, Ignacio Allende, organised a disciplined army, comprising a demographically diverse group of Indian, mestizo, and Black recruits who were won over by appeals to religion and Hidalgo’s promise to end slavery. A mix of racial discrimination, tax grievances, and long-standing disputes over land fostered in Hidalgo’s insurrection a brutality which exceeded previous rural revolts.

Perceptions of Mexico’s independence – won in 1821 – were, until the second half of the 20th century, warped by binary distinctions between supposed traitors and heroes, as well as a ‘bronze history’ which revered great military and political leaders. Royalists were assumed to be Spaniards and the people who comprised the ethnic mix of a vassal empire who were disproportionately led by criollos (American-born whites). Heroines were celebrated only as temporary helpmates to husbands, fathers, and brothers. The complex, engaging account offered in Gillingham’s book stresses the role of subalterns and thus furthers the correction of earlier ‘bronze history’ for the benefit of anglophone readers.

The violence seen in the 1810s, in the years before independence, and in the 1910s, as Mexico descended into revolution, followed similar patterns. Whereas insurgents could not occupy cities, incumbents could not dominate the countryside. Mexico’s pedestalisation of insurgents set the country apart from South American independence movements: that Mexico City’s longest thoroughfare was, in the 20th century, renamed ‘Avenida de los Insurgentes’ suggests the persistence of a radical identity that remains absent from order-loving Buenos Aires or Brasilia. (Ironically, Mexico’s lionisation of rural revolt is exceeded only by the former motherland Spain, on account of its own struggle against Napoleon.) It also gave criminality and wrongdoing an allure that has persisted until the present day. As Piccato explains, a ‘democratization of violence’ during the Mexican Revolution (1910-20) swept aside deference to elites while invoking such traditional icons as the Virgin of Guadalupe or Father Hidalgo. Independence also brought optimism and opportunities. Independent Mexico welcomed British loans and mining investments in 1824. For a generation the world’s soft hegemon dominated Mexico’s fledgling foreign affairs, even after the first of many defaults on loan repayments occurred in 1827. Eventually the exasperated British lost interest in the unstable country and abandoned it to the territorial ambitions of the US.

Gillingham treats the independence era – the 1820s to the 1840s – favourably. Mexico abolished slavery in 1829, retaining it only in Texas as a sop to Anglo landowners. Relatively harmonious race relations struck contemporaries as a world away from the US. In 1828 Britain’s first diplomat to Mexico described how centuries of exploitation had ‘drawn together all the natives of Mexico, whether of Spanish or Indian extraction; and has even led the former … to speak of the atrocities of their own ancestors as committed by Spain against their countrymen’. Throughout the rest of the century Mexico remained a haven for escaped slaves along with the waves of adventurers and filibusterers who chipped away at the bankrupt state’s finance and territory. In other ways the scars of empire remained. Independent Mexico barely ranked as ‘postcolonial’ because the marginalised situation of the majority indigenous population continued throughout the 19th century. The ‘imagined communities’ described by Benedict Anderson, whereby groups of people who never meet one another nonetheless feel connected by governments and institutions, better describes the nation-building of the ‘Global North’ than unstable Mexico. It required the authoritarian (and xenophilic) regime of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911) to expand the economy faster than population growth, thereby creating class and caste conflicts which would explode into the nationalistic revolution of 1910-20.

Díaz yielded to the Revolution by resigning his presidency in May 1911. It was fitting that he did so while enjoying the hospitality of British investors as he plotted his exile in Spain. Violence, including killing, was government-sanctioned during the martial law that was a recurrent feature of the Revolution. Depressingly, Piccato finds that atrocity was often the outcome, regardless of the motives. Unhappy conscripts forced into Revolutionary armies were as prone to killing civilians as much as brigands and criminals. Piccato’s chapter on ‘religious violence’ addresses the ‘Cristero War’, a 1926-29 revolt against federal anti-clericalism. But in arguing that a reactionary Catholic Church waged holy war against a progressive state, Piccato overlooks the fact that not all Catholic violence was religious, and not all religious violence was Catholic. The emphasis on patriarchal violence is well handled in respect of gender non-conforming victims. But Piccato overlooks the demands made by patriarchy on everyone. A strong case, for example, has been made for the Cristero War being driven by women. The ‘cowboys for Christ’ may have been their menfolk, but it was the wives, fiancées, and mothers who demanded they fight in defence of a de facto feminised Church.

Both books conclude with a discussion of post-revolutionary Mexican history, where both historians reveal the murky reality beyond the reified ‘perfect dictatorship’ of the Partido Institucional Revolucionario (1940-2000). In places, references to the US seem excessive; Gillingham for example devotes 20-odd pages to US involvement in Mexico’s drugs war (latent since the 1970s, active since 2006). A large country with an expanding middle class disproportionately concentrated in cities with little concerted drugs violence, readers ought to be reminded that there are, indeed, many Mexicos.

• Mexico: A History
  Paul Gillingham
  Allen Lane, 752pp, £45
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

• A Brief History of Violence in Mexico
  Pablo Piccato, translated by Quentin Pope
  University of North Carolina Press, 240pp, £24.99
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Mark Lawrence is a Senior Lecturer in Military History at the University of Kent and the author of British Relations with Mexico since the Colonial Era (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).