Mexico and World War II

World War II had a significant impact on the trajectory of postrevolutionary Mexican development. Pressure from the United States for collaboration in defense efforts and the ambivalence of the Mexican public toward an active role in the conflict posed challenges. Yet the crisis atmosphere created by the war allowed the country’s leaders to insist upon a policy of national unity. The Ávila Camacho administration was thus able to maintain a broad political coalition as it took Mexico formally into the war on the side of the Allies in 1942 and then gradually expanded the scope of the country’s participation in the conflict. Wartime conditions prompted Mexico to expand its capacities and make new demands on citizens; they served as well to accelerate the professionalization and depoliticization of the armed forces. In economic terms, the war disrupted trade with Europe but spurred US demand for the strategic outputs of Mexican mines and farms and Mexican labor. The unavailability of previously imported goods provided an impetus for a process of industrialization that would continue into the postwar period, but many workers saw their living standards fall as wartime inflation eroded their real wages. Mexico emerged from the war with a claim to regional leadership, much-improved relations with Washington, a rapidly growing industrial sector, and a political landscape considerably more stable and consolidated than it had been in the two decades immediately following the Mexican Revolution.

The US–Mexican War

Usually thought of as a two-year-long conflict between the United States and Mexico, the US–Mexican War (1846–1848) represents the culmination of a much longer struggle over the control of what became the American Southwest. Years before Mexico declared its independence, early citizens of the United States resolved to seize Spain’s North American possessions. Devastated by a decade of revolt, Mexico lacked the unity needed to halt American efforts to acquire land at its expense. The US–Mexican War revealed an important divide among Mexicans over the issue of federalism. In the end, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo defined the modern political boundary between the two nations. Far from bringing peace to either nation, though, the war generated internal strife for both the United States and Mexico. The historic conflict still affects the relationship between the two nations.

Romanticism in Mexico

During the nineteenth century, romanticism became central to how Mexicans engaged in practices of self-definition. Romanticism in Mexico was an intellectual and artistic movement that was at once autonomous and connected to transcultural influences. As evidenced by the works of historians and literary scholars, as well as novelists, politicians, poets, and antiquarians from the period, romanticism was gendered in terms of women’s participation and representation, and in themes such as love, family, virtue, domesticity, and eroticism. Women were critical to the transmission of romanticism in quotidian practices of attending theater and opera, hosting salons, and instilling appreciation for poetry and the natural world in their families and their communities. Romanticism also exercised a profound influence on how Mexicans thought about ethnicity, race, and nationalism. In their quest for a unique national identity, Mexican intellectuals looked to the indigenous past and celebrated mestizaje as the foundation of Mexico’s cultural patrimony, even as they persisted in exclusionary practices toward their indigenous and casta compatriots. Romanticism offers a fruitful area to reevaluate well-studied themes of Mexican history, particularly its complex relationship with nationalism, modernization, gender, and the politics of ethnicity and race.

Juárez, Maximilian, and the French Occupation of Mexico

A tumultuous period in Mexican history began with the Reform Movement of President Benito Juárez, followed by the French invasion and installation of Maximillian as emperor, the defeat of his troops by the liberal army, and the restoration of the Mexican Republic in 1877. Although most of the basic facts of these events are not in dispute, the narrowness of the lens used to examine them is. Some data have been systematically ignored by national historians, and there are also contradictory interpretations of the published historical data. One common reflection on this period is the depiction of Maximilian as liberal whom some argue contributed in a positive way to Mexico. However, some Mexican scholars dispute this. The other widely held belief is that Benito Juárez can be credited with the restoration of the republic and the betterment of the working poor and indigenous. Although criticism of Juárez is uncommon in official circles, where he is idolized, some Mexican scholars are more skeptical of these claims. The missing or generally ignored data concern the contribution of the United States to the defeat of the French and Austrian armies, which is not mentioned in any survey texts and is minimized in most articles. The fuller inclusion of these data coupled with a closer look at the contributions and failures of both the Maximilian and Juárez regimes provides a clearer picture of the epoch and generates new insights.

The Mexican Revolution

Beginning in 1930, Frank Tannenbaum pioneered what came to be known as a populist (or post-revisionist) interpretation of the Mexican Revolution, arguing that the mass mobilization of the revolutionary decade (1910–1920) forced state builders and intellectuals to find a place in political life for the poor and indigenous of the periphery. Although not a wholesale reversal of the “effects of the Conquest” that Tannenbaum claimed it to be, this “new attitude toward the Indian” represented a national (if unevenly experienced) cultural revolution. More mosaic than monolith, this Revolution was not imposed by a unified state but negotiated in the conflict between high and low politics.The call for democratic restoration through armed revolution liberated a multitude of disparate political groups that had previously been controlled through the political system, particularly the rural masses, and brought them into the political sphere in distinctly undemocratic terms, through violent direct action. Rather than a unified movement with a clearly defined political program, popular mobilization during the revolutionary decade (1910–1920)—characterized by localized and disparate revolts only nominally bound to a national program—represented a cultural awakening and a broad, collective demand for class and often ethnic inclusion. The collapse of the state in 1914 forced revolutionary state-builders to recognize this demand and negotiate pacts with collectively organized and identified local and regional groups of rebels. In so doing, the revolutionary state constructed a national imaginary capable of integrated Mexico’s indigenous heritage.

The Early Republic and Santa Anna

When Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, it inherited a declining silver economy, and an ever-expanding northern neighbor that already had begun its industrial revolution with an abundance of immigrants eager to seize the future. Mexico struggled to stay independent. When Spanish troops invaded in 1829 and in 1838 when French sailors seized the wealthy port of Veracruz, General Antonio López de Santa Anna defeated them and became a national hero even though he lost part of his leg battling the French. He could not defeat, however, the better-equipped volunteers from the north. By the conclusion of the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) and a subsequent land sale, Mexico had lost 55 percent of the territory it had possessed in the 1820s. Internally, Mexico limped along with an underfunded treasury and enormous debts. Although Santa Anna was the most successful of all Mexico’s generals, he was not the only one eager for power and glory. Generals and politicians wanted Mexico to protect the Church and the army as the colony had, or construct a more secular government with Church funds and a variety of state militias. Of course, women benefitted little from any of this. Until railroads were built in the 1880s, Mexico continued as a democratic republic funded by moneylenders risking their fortunes to support the government and perhaps make huge profits for themselves.

Myth and Reality of the Mexican Miracle, 1946–1982

In the decades after World War II, from the start of the Cold War to the Latin American debt crisis of 1982, Mexico’s authoritarian government, dominated by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI), made industrialization its top priority. The shift toward a manufacturing-based economy produced robust economic growth, rapid urbanization, and an array of structural changes.Simultaneously, the revolutionary efforts of the 1920s and 1930s to improve the material conditions of blue-collar workers and the rural poor were suspended or even reversed. Industrial growth took priority over increasing workers’ wages; modernist residential districts in the capital city took priority over collective ejidos in the countryside; universities took priority over rural schoolhouses; and a consumerist culture took priority over revolutionary cultural nationalism.Throughout the 1960s, many foreign and domestic observers agreed that the nation served as a model of Third World development: state-led capitalism, which combined industrial protectionism, resource nationalization, social expenditure, and foreign investment, had created an economic miracle and avoided political extremism in favor of stability. After the massacre of protesting students in the capital just days before the 1968 Olympic games, however, scholarly assessments soured. Subsequently, more evidence of political violence, media manipulation, and official corruption surfaced, leading to a crisis of political legitimacy. These sentiments were aggravated by mounting public debt, severe inequality, growing inflation, and periodic balance-of-payments crises, culminating in the region-wide collapse of 1982. The onset of a new reality, commonly called the neoliberal era, exposed the myths of the miracle as it drew to a close.

Religion and Revolution, Mexico: 1910–1940

Catholics in Mexico had a complex, often-contentious relationship with the factions of the Revolution’s armed phase (1910–1920), the postrevolutionary state, and the state’s popular base. Revolutionary anticlericalism erupted in three waves (1914–1917, 1925–1928, and 1932–1938) and was expressed in ways ranging from iconoclasm to scientism. At the same time, there were diverse Catholic responses to revolutionary anticlericalism, including armed resistance in the first (1926–1929) and second (1932–1938) Cristero Wars, attendance strikes against federal schooling, collaboration with some state actors, and widespread electoral participation. Catholic ideology and organizations undermined key elements of postrevolutionary state formation—not just socialist education but also the formation of labor unions, land grants, and social reforms. The Church–state dialectical relationship reshaped Mexican Catholicism and encouraged alternative religious expressions such as spiritualism, Protestantism, and the separatist Catholicism of the Iglesia Católica Apostólica Mexicana (ICAM). Even after President Lázaro Cárdenas curbed direct attacks on the Church and religious sensibilities in the mid-1930s, Catholic ideology and lay organizations sustained their opposition to the postrevolutionary state in much of Mexico. The decline in open Church–state conflicts (especially violent ones) in the late 1930s indicated an uneasy truce rather than widespread legitimization of the postrevolutionary state in the eyes of Catholics.

Social and Ecological Impacts of Conquest and Colonization in New Spain

Throughout continental New Spain—both the Mesoamerican heartland and the arid regions later conquered by the United States—colonization brought environmental changes through the social and political regimes that it deployed. Indigenous demographic decline, exotic organisms, mining, and relations of property and production in agriculture and pastoralism affected socioecosystems and transformed landscapes over time. Beyond the individual and aggregate impacts of biological invasions or the fact of newcomers’ presence, key research questions are how, through whom, and with what technological packages and logics the changes penetrated and became imbricated in preexisting socioecologies following the conquest.Hispanic appropriation of Amerindian landesque capital between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries might be compared to that of Christian colonists of Iberia as they took Muslim productive and urban landscapes between the twelfth and sixteenth: it allowed Spanish settlers to seize the opportunity when it came to extracting and generating wealth from newfound lands. This wealth was sustained by a pluriethnic peasantry whose persistence paradoxically also hindered the complete capitalist transformation of relations of property, production, and exchange of nature. The landscapes that resulted were not just variously Hispanized but also variously wrested from local, subsistence, communal control, indigenous or otherwise.

The Porfirian Years (1876–1911)

During the Porfirian years (1876–1911), Mexico experienced tremendous economic development, material progress, and urban expansion. Those years represented a crucial period in Mexico’s transition to a modern nation. The era’s namesake, dictator Porfirio Díaz, steered the country toward the trappings of modernity through the establishment of internal political peace, a delicate balancing act as the regime often and increasingly relied on repression to accomplish its vision. The so-called pax porfiriana, rather than being a period of omnipotent control that cemented social and political stability, operated through a complex network of negotiation at the international, national, state, and local levels. The regime cajoled, coerced, or conceded to a wide range of groups that included foreign investors, political bosses, wealthy landowners, Church leaders, peasant communities, workers’ organizations, and the press. Policymakers, whose modernizing agenda was often challenged on multiple fronts, implemented a piecemeal progress. They navigated a nation at different levels of regional development and with diverse social and political landscapes, each with their own practices and problems. The result was a program of rapid modernization wrought with ambiguities and contradictions that reveal an improbably fragile regime. Its longevity stands as a testament to Díaz’s statecraft and political acumen.