By: Peter Frankopan, professor of world history at the University of Oxford
Translation: Telegrafi.com
For centuries, writes Paul Gillingham, Mexico was “the greatest melting pot in the world.” Indeed, he adds, it was in some ways its center—“the crossroads of an empire that at its height stretched from Sicily to southern China and from the Netherlands to West Africa.” History of Mexico [Mexico: A History], a magnificent book, takes us from the Spanish conquests in the early 16th century to what the author describes as three new Mexican empires: “One of local crime bosses, one of American drug warlords and their soft-spoken politicians, and one of American drug users.”
16th century
We begin with Gonzalo Guerrero, a Spanish man who was shipwrecked about 70 miles north of the Yucatan Peninsula in 1511. He assimilated into the native population, received customary markings and tattoos, and married into a Mayan family. Their three children, Gillingham says, “may be considered the first Mexicans”—that is, products of the deep interbreeding that would follow encounters between Europe and the Americas.
The Spanish conquest of Central America was long, brutal, and irregular. But, says Gillingham, “it was not the Spanish but the indigenous peoples of central Mexico who destroyed the Mexican Empire”; rather, it fell in the early 1520s to indigenous peoples who had been oppressed by the Mexica, or Aztecs. Thus, at the time, the first waves of the Spanish were not so much conquerors as participants in a “savage civil war.”
Conquest of the Aztec EmpirePhoto: Prisma/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Some of the newcomers were ambitious. “I came here to get rich,” Cortés boasted, “not to work the land like a peasant.” The Spaniards did a great deal of work, pushing others to do the hard work; yet the Mexico they created was a land of contrasts and continuities.
It was a place of dramatic change that included the arrival of Spaniards, enslaved West Africans, and (later) Asians; ecological transformation as forests were cut down and lands cleared for livestock brought from Europe; and demographic change. Violence, disease, famine, and hard labor had a tremendous impact on indigenous populations, whose numbers plummeted in what is known as the “mass extinction.” And, of course, there was the introduction of Christianity, which Gillingham describes as an “ideological revolution” that used a “carrot and stick approach to life and the afterlife.”
Construction of Mexico City, 16th centuryPhoto: Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images
Finding a way through the material, Gillingham reveals, is not always easy. The Spaniards who ruled Mexico “had a penchant for melodrama”; they also had “strong reasons to exaggerate the hardships they faced” and to give false descriptions of the massacres they committed.
However, under Spanish rule, little changed. There were few technological advances, except for the importation of horses—which were unknown in the Americas. For the most part, “communication remained a matter of mules and sails.” The composition of the labor force remained a mix of free urban laborers, partly bonded agricultural laborers, and slaves—along with a “free peasantry that survived in the remaining ancestral villages.”
17th century
During the 16th and 17th centuries, Mexico assumed a central role - as a connecting point between Madrid and Spain's possessions not only in the Americas but also in Asia. Silver from Zacatecas and Guanajuato financed the colonization of new regions and the construction of magnificent colonial cities such as Oaxaca, Puebla, and Mexico City (built on the site of the old city of Tenochtitlan).
This new world was characterized by inequality, not least through the system encomienda: Spanish settlers had rights over native populations who were tied to the land in what became a form of forced labor.
There were, at least, many bright spots. We learn about Juana Inés de la Cruz, a Hieronymite nun who lived in the second half of the 17th century: she turned her cell into a study and the convent's common room into a reading room.
Nun Juana Inés de la CruzPhoto: DeAgostini/Getty Images
She wrote plays, songs, sonnets, and theological essays, while also writing works in Navajo, the language of the Aztecs. She was part of a rich constellation of pioneers who turned Mexico into the intellectual center of the Spanish empire—home to printing presses and universities. Simply put, wrote a 17th-century chronicler, Mexico City was “the greatest city in the world.”
19th century
However, from the mid-18th century onwards, the Mexican authorities' efforts to promote modernization and eliminate dissent took on increasingly brutal forms. In the 1760s, extraordinary violence was inflicted on anyone who dared to show what José de Gálvez called “impudent resistance,” with executions, public beatings, and the razing of the villages of some rebels. Not surprisingly, this led to regular uprisings and revolts and, in turn, to a greater determination to centralize control.
José de Gálvez was a Spanish colonial administrator and inspector general of New Spain from 1764 to 72.
The turning point came not from within Mexico, but from without. In 1808, Napoleon invaded Spain and forced Ferdinand VII to abdicate. Suddenly, Gillingham writes, this left Mexico as “the center of a global Spanish empire without a Spanish emperor.”
Miguel Hidalgo, a renowned theologian who had also translated Molière’s Tartuffe from French, seized the moment by leading a revolt that united miners, artisans, and peasants in a movement that was as much against the elite as it was against colonialism. Unfortunately, it ended badly for Hidalgo, as well as for José María Morelos, who took up his flag to demand complete independence from Spain. Both were executed.
Mexico finally seceded in 1821, but the uprisings that led to it lasted more than a decade and had a devastating cost to the population. The violence, combined with typhus, yellow fever, and famine, led to the deaths of up to one in ten Mexicans between 1810 and 21. It also helped weaken Mexico’s economy. Before the wars for independence, Mexicans were wealthier than the global average; afterward, they were “significantly poorer.”
The fledgling state was fragile and chaotic. In the first 35 years after independence, the leadership changed 48 times. Vicente Guerrero, the first black president in the Americas, lasted only eight months and was assassinated shortly after leaving office. The exception was those with strong survival instincts. Between 1833 and 1855, Antonio López de Santa Anna was declared president 11 times.
Antonio López de Santa AnnaPhoto: Universal History Archive/Getty Images
The 19th and 20th centuries were a history of two steps forward and one step back. There was a disastrous war with the United States in 1846-48, which ended with the loss of almost half of Mexico's national territory. (By then, Mexico controlled, or claimed, most of what is now California, Texas, and Arizona.) This trauma, etched in the national memory, exposed the weakness of a young republic and deepened the political divide between liberals who sought reform and modernization, and conservatives who clung to privilege, centralized rule, and autocratic instincts.
Power in Mexico fluctuated wildly from one side to the other. The Liberal Constitution of 1857 marked a major advance toward secular government, free speech, and property rights. Conservatives opposed it, and civil war broke out. The Liberals had just won when the French invaded in 1862 and installed Maximilian of Habsburg at the head of a short-lived Mexican Empire. Then, in 1867, when Napoleon III withdrew his forces—a huge drain on France’s resources—Maximilian was promptly overthrown and executed.
20th century
Under dictator Porfirio Díaz, who ruled from 1876 to 1911, Mexico seemed to be heading, at last, toward stability and development: railroads connected distant provinces, exports flourished, and new cities embodied industrial modernity. But this progress was achieved, again, through exclusion and repression. Political control was tightened, land was concentrated in fewer hands, and indigenous and rural communities were dispossessed. Economic modernization enriched a narrow elite. As Gillingham notes, in the 1910 presidential election, Díaz secured 98 percent of the vote—“ridiculously incredible and completely unnecessary.”
Dictator Porfirio DíazPhoto: Apic/Bridgeman via Getty Images
And, once again, the pendulum swung. Rebels like Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa became icons of popular justice, fighting under the slogan “Land and Liberty.” Launching a revolution, they successfully overthrew Díaz and his supporters, albeit at an incredible cost: more than a million people died, the economy was severely damaged, and new elites emerged to reap the benefits of change.
Among those who benefited were members of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), a group that would hold the presidency uninterrupted from 1929 to 2000. The PRI brought stability and much-needed reforms to land ownership and public education; they promoted art, films, and songs that uplifted the Mexican people while controlling them. And by the mid-20th century, Gillingham writes, Mexico had become a rising economic giant, with an educated urban population and increasingly connected to the world. However, economic crises in the 1970s and 1980s exposed the limits of state-led growth.
Mexico City in 1952Photo: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
From the 1990s onwards, Mexico's fortunes became intertwined with those of its northern neighbor. Migration to the United States, initially limited to seasonal work, increased dramatically; this practice sustained millions of families through remittances but also emptied the countryside of its population. The growth of the drug trade, again closely linked to American recreational habits, helped develop the networks of a vast and violent industry that blurred the boundaries between state and cartel.
21st century
Today, Mexico is at a crossroads. It is a country transformed by urbanization — two-thirds of Mexicans live in cities — and by a middle class that has expanded even as inequality has remained persistent. Crime and insecurity remain deep-seated challenges: Gillingham compares the long war on cartels to the American intervention in Vietnam, “where commanders measured success by the number of troops killed.”
The country is also deeply integrated into North American supply chains, from cars to electronics, and now, in the 2020s, is benefiting from the repatriation of US industry from other countries.
However, this interdependence exposes it to the vagaries of American politics. Relations with Washington oscillate between partnership and clash; Donald Trump's threats on migration and tariffs make clear how vulnerable Mexico is to decisions made in the White House - thousands of miles away.
Yet, as Gillingham concludes, Mexico’s history has not been one of despair but of resilience. Since the arrival of the first Europeans, it has been characterized by resistance, creativity, and cultural dynamism. Some of the traditional approaches to Mexico, Gillingham says, are “romantic, flattering; some of them condescending; many of them harmful and historically inaccurate.” This brilliant account does well to remind us that the best history is about fact, not fiction. /Telegraph/
