Mexico: A Short History

Anyone desiring to understand Mexico will benefit from acquiring at least a nodding acquaintance with Mexican history. Contemporary Mexican writers observe that Mexico's past is not dead; the many levels of Mexican history remain active forces today. 

Mesoamerica 

Mesoamerica is one of seven places on our planet—along with China, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Indus Valley, Nigera and Peru—where human culture managed the great transformation from pre-urban society to urban society, that is, to civilization.

Mexico's unforgiving geography and the need of early peoples to secure plentiful harvests of life-sustaining maís (corn) gave rise to a worldview focused on the solar cycle (birth-death-rebirth) and the need to maintain equilibrio (balance, harmony) between the world of humans and the naturaleza (natural-spiritual world).

A number of important city-states located in different parts of Mexico arose between 1000 BCE and 1500 C.E. Mesoamerican history and culture thus predates the arrival of the Spanish in 1519 by close to three-thousand years.

Spanish Colonial Culture

Spanish medieval culture was imposed on the Mesoamerican cultures in Nueva España (Mexico) by Spanish soldiers brandishing swords and Spanish Catholic missionaries carrying the cross. In its New World colony, the Spanish crown saw a ready supply of the gold and silver it desperately needed to finance its Empire.

Cortés claimed land in the name of the Spanish crown, which assigned use-rights to reward soldiers in its army. The intent of these military men was to duplicate in Nueva España the luxurious, even decadent life styles enjoyed by their parents and older brothers in Spain.

The Spanish crown endorsed a formal caste system that kept the people divided from one another and fostered sub-cultures rather than a national identity:

• Peninsulares (Spanish born in Spain) had both economic and political rights (they could hold office and serve in the military); 
• Criollos (Spanish born in Mexico) had economic but not political rights (they could neither hold office nor serve in the military); 
• Mestizos (Spanish fathers, indigenous mothers) had neither economic nor political rights; 
• Indigenous peoples had no rights at all. 

The purpose of the caste system was to forestall the development of any source of independent power in Nueva España—a policy that stymied political development, most notably it prevented the Spanish colony from developing experience with, and competence in, self-government.

Struggle for Nationhood (1810-1910)

The end of the War for Independence from Spain (1810-1821) was the beginning of a century of civil strife. Conservatives, who favored establishment of a monarchy, and Liberals, who favored populist, representative government, struggled to gain control over a fledgling country that lacked practical experience in self-governance, including basic ideas of compromise and rule of law.  

Conservatives favored:

• retaining the Catholic Church as the state religion with its power and wealth intact; 
• maintaining the large properties held by a few landowners; and a 
• centralized government controlled by a monarch or a strong president. 

Liberals favored:

• divesting the Catholic Church of its protected status and its property; 
• breaking up large landholdings and distributing land to the landless majority of mestizos and indigenous peoples; and 
• establishing a decentralized, federal, democratic republic modeled on the United States.

In the countryside, these struggles played out as battles between caudillos (regional Spanish strongmen) and caciques (regional indigenous political bosses) seeking to control territory, political process and, ultimately, the country.

Wikipedia's list of Mexican Heads of State for the 19th century shows the forms of government put in place by one or another political faction in the wake of Independence from Spain. Political weakness was a major factor in three foreign intervenciones into (invasions of) the Mexican homeland:

• France, 1838-1839, called The Pastry War because of the demands of a French chef for damages to his shop during the widespread civil disorder that plagued the early years of the Mexican Republic;
• United States, 1846-1848 (known in the U.S. as the Mexican-American War), after which Mexico 'ceded' half its land to the United States; and 
• France, 1862, undertaken ostensibly because Mexico had failed to pay its foreign debts; however, Mexican Conservatives backed this second French Intervention, which resulted in the installation of Maximilian I as Emperor of the Second Mexican Empire. 

Conservatives gained the upper hand on two occasions, during which they attempted to establish a Mexican Empire:

• Agustín I, September 1821-March 1823 (Agustín de Iturbide); and 
• Maximilian I, 1864-1867 (Austrian, House of Hapsburg, installed after the French invasion in 1862).

Mexico also had a dictator, Porfirio Díaz who, once elected president, held onto the office for thirty-four years. His tenure, known as the Porfiriato, was marked by internal stability, modernization and economic growth derived principally from foreign investment. Stability and growth, however, was achieved through violent repression and exclusion of most Mexicans from economic opportunity and power—injustices that triggered the Mexican Revolution, which broke out in 1910.

• Porfirio Díaz, 1876-1911. 

Mexican Revolution (1910-1920's)

The Mexican Revolution was not a coherent political movement under a unified leadership. Instead, it was a bitter fight between the landed elites and the masses in an ongoing political dynamic that continued to pit Conservatives (landed elites in favor of strong central government) against Liberals (populists in favor of representative government).

Like the chaotic struggles of Mexican caudillos in the 19th century, the Revolution was a sequence of struggles between a number of individual men seeking power—each with different political goals and backed by different segments of the population.

Understanding the Mexican Revolution involves getting acquainted with the key players. Some are familiar: Emiliano Zapata and Francisco ("Pancho") Villa. Others are less so: Francisco Madero and Venustiano Carranza.

A second look at Wikipedia's list of Mexican Heads of State for the 20th century shows the turnover of presidents as revolution convulsed the Mexican Republic. To this day, many Mexicans will say, "The Revolution was never completed."

Mexico under PRI (1930 -2000) 

Eventually, the struggle was resolved by President Plutarco Elías Calles, who successfully substituted party rule for the struggles of individual strong men. He, however, remained the strong man behind the presidency until the election of President Lázaro Cárdenas who, once elected, made clear his independence.

Arguably, Cárdenas is Mexico's most beloved president. Nonetheless, one-party rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) established by Calles delivered stability without democracy to Mexico for 70 years.

Global Mexico (1990-present) 

Economic and political crises in the 1980's and '90's opened Mexico to democracy and the global economy. NAFTA (1994) has had a profound impact on Mexico and her people—with very mixed results.