MEXICO

Superb history of a nation that deserves far more recognition on the international stage than it receives.

“Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.” So lamented Porfirio Díaz, the Mexican leader who “reelected himself seven times” while demanding strict term limits for any political figure other than himself. Yet, as Northwestern University historian Gillingham notes, Díaz was an agent of his own downfall, having eventually run afoul of “two of the elemental forces in Mexican political culture: the goal of representative local government, and the hatred of caciques who impeded it.” Gillingham notes that Mexico has always seen a strong revolutionary streak, from one of the very first Spanish arrivals, Gonzalo Guerrero, who was shipwrecked on the coast in 1511 and soon helped lead an anti-Spanish rebellion among the Maya people who took him in. The Spanish who followed were conquistadors and entrepreneurs, power players all, but also, preeminently, they were settlers, “coming to the New World to found towns and stay” and, in time, forging a people who represented “the world’s greatest melting pot,” with Europeans, Africans, Asians, and Indigenous peoples all contributing to the mix. Granted, to get there, the Spanish killed an awful lot of people; as Gillingham notes, one priest described the effects of an epidemic among the Native peoples, who “died in heaps, like bedbugs.” Violence has also been a strong presence in Mexico—and the author does a great service to confront head-on the near-military dictatorship that flourished in the late 1960s and 1970s, when, just as in Argentina and Chile, leftists were massacred: “Between 1974 and 1980 the army began disappearing people by throwing them out of airplanes over the Pacific.” Still, as Gillingham also notes, Mexico is in many ways more democratic today than its northern neighbor, thanks to the efforts of “the peoples who made the first truly global society.”

Essential, lively reading for anyone wishing to understand Mexico and contemporary geopolitics alike.