Rick Riordan's Reviews > Mexico: A 500-Year History

A fascinating panorama of Mexico's history from the fall of the Aztec Empire to modern day. Mexican history seemed like a glaring hole in my knowledge base, especially since I grew up in Texas and lived a great deal of my life so close to the border. In the U.S., we learn about Mexico as a tangent of our own history, if we learn about it at all, but reversing the focus and seeing the U.S., and the rest of the world, from the Mexican perspective, was a real eye-opener for me.

Some take-aways: Mexico has always been a difficult place to rule and an even more difficult place to unify, from the days of indigenous rule through the Spanish vice-regency, right up to today. There has always been strong local resistance to centralized rule, whether that rule came from Spain or Mexico City. The saying obedezco pero no cumplo, “I obey but I won’t do it," sums up the dynamic well.

I also enjoyed the medieval Spanish oath to the kings which Gillingham shares, which is about as far from the divine right of kings as you can imagine: "We who are as good as you swear to you who are no better than we, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided that you observe all our liberties and laws; but if not, not."

And of course, the Mexican saying that I knew before now takes on a whole new meaning: Del dicho al hecho hay mucho trecho, between word and fact there’s a big gap. Mexico may be one thing in theory, or on paper, but it is many other things in reality.

It was also, as Gillingham says, the first truly global society, in that it drew people from everywhere -- Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas -- to create a crossroads of cultures unlike anything that had been seen before. It could also represent, for some people at some times, a "more inclusive version of the American dream."

Racism was of course present. The author points out that "viceregal Spain invented racial classification on supposedly scientific grounds, the first society to do so in history. From the sixteenth century on, Iberians spoke of raza, race, as the sum of inherited characteristics transmitted through blood, semen, and breast milk, and deployed it to determine where the Crown’s subjects should live, what jobs they could hold, what law codes they had to follow, and even what clothes they could wear," and yet these theories rarely survived contact with realities on the ground. Patrias chicas, little local homelands, were always more important than the idea on nationhood, and locals found ways to govern themselves even when the federal government was apathetic or downright hostile.

For example, says Gillingham:

"In Nohcacab, Yucatán, (where they) still enjoyed the vote, they would line up on election day to deposit ballots for whomever they were instructed to vote for and then go home and secretly, democratically, elect parallel and more real governments. Getting rid of those authentic governments
was difficult; it required a military force that the centralists didn’t possess; moreover, these were the powers that actually got important things done."

Despite its length and breadth, this volume was not a difficult read for me. Gillingham spices up the narrative with colorful vignettes of historical characters -- not just the powerful and famous, but the downtrodden and marginalized. One of my favorites was Catalina de Erauso, "who in the early seventeenth century escaped her Dominican convent, exchanged her habit for a man’s clothes, fought for the king on the Chilean frontier, murdered a man in Peru, got off in exchange for rejoining a convent, and ended up as a muleteer—a suitably difficult, hard-nosed, entrepreneurial job—in Mexico. She was rare because we know about her—she left behind something of an autobiography—and because she allegedly got a dispensation from the Pope to continue cross-dressing." This was a good reminder to me that history has always been full of the entire spectrum of human identities -- even those the mainstream tries to erase.

We see what we want to see. Bartolomé de las Casas, an early advocate for better treatment of the indigenous peoples, said in the 1500s: “When a man greatly desires something and fixes it firmly in his mind it is a wonder how all that he sees and hears, at every step, seems to confirm it." This could have been written about our media landscape today.

From Mexico's point of view, the U.S. does not look so much like a shining example of liberty. Europe doesn't look very good either. Gillingham makes a strong case many of the criticisms people level at Mexico -- constant violence, governmental dysfunction and corruption -- are no worse than in the States in many ways, and considering all the forms of imperialism and colonialism to which Mexico has been subjugated over five centuries, it is remarkable that it has survived and in some ways thrived. Perfect? Absolutely not. But its problems are not unique, nor are they so much worse than those in the U.S. when you consider how the U.S. looks from the Mexican point of view.

Anyway, this is a great survey of Mexican history and I'm glad I read it. If you are interested in learning world history from a too-often neglected perspective, or just interested in learning more about this beautiful multifaceted country, I would recommend it!