Beyond Borders E-Book

Timothy J. Henderson

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 331

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Beyond Borders: A History of Mexican Migration to the United States details the origins and evolution of the movement of people from Mexico into the United States from the first significant flow across the border at the turn of the twentieth century up to the present day.

• Considers the issues from the perspectives of both the United States and Mexico
• Offers a reasoned assessment of the factors that drive Mexican immigration, explains why so many of the policies enacted in Washington have only worsened the problem, and suggests what policy options might prove more effective
• Argues that the problem of Mexican immigration can only be solved if Mexico and the United States work together to reduce the disequilibrium that propels Mexican immigrants to the United States

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Table of Contents

Half title page

Series page

Title page

Copyright page

List of Figures

Series Editor’s Preface

Acknowledgments

Epigraphs

Introduction

1 Beginnings

How the Border Came to Be

The Great Transformation: Mexico

The Great Transformation: The Southwestern United States

The Mexican Revolution

The United States, ca. 1910–1930: Xenophobia and Employment

2 Restriction, Depression, and Deportation

The Restriction Debate and the Immigration Act of 1924

Depression and Deportation in the 1930s

The Fate of the Repatriates

Labor Unrest

3 The Bracero Era

Unbalanced Development in the 1940s

Managing Migration: The Bracero Program

High Tensions and “Operation Wetback”

4 Illegal Immigration and Response

Crisis in Mexico

After the Bracero Program

Opening Wide the Gates: The Immigration Reforms of 1986 and 1990

5 Free Trade and Homeland Security

The North American Free Trade Agreement

Resurgent Nativism in the United States

The Impact of NAFTA

Mexican Immigration in the National Security Era

Epilogue and Conclusion

Further Reading

Index

Beyond Borders

Viewpoints/Puntos de Vista

Themes and Interpretations in Latin American History

Series editor: Jürgen Buchenau

The books in this series will introduce students to the most significant themes and topics in Latin American history. They represent a novel approach to designing supplementary texts for this growing market. Intended as supplementary textbooks, the books will also discuss the ways in which historians have interpreted these themes and topics, thus demonstrating to students that our understanding of our past is constantly changing, through the emergence of new sources, methodologies, and historical theories. Unlike monographs, the books in this series will be broad in scope and written in a style accessible to undergraduates.

Published

A History of the Cuban Revolution

Aviva Chomsky

Bartolomé de las Casas and the Conquest of the Americas

Lawrence A. Clayton

Beyond Borders: A History of Mexican Migration to the United States

Timothy J. Henderson

In preparation

The Last Caudillo: Alvaro Obregón and the Mexican Revolution

Jürgen Buchenau

The Haitian Revolution, 1791–1804

Jeremy Popkin

Creoles vs. Peninsulars in Colonial Spanish America

Mark Burkholder

Dictatorship in South America

Jerry Davila

Mexico Since 1940: The Unscripted Revolution

Stephen E. Lewis

This edition first published 2011

© Timothy J. Henderson

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Henderson, Timothy J.

 Beyond borders : a history of Mexican migration to the United States / Timothy J. Henderson.

p. cm.

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-1-4051-9429-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4051-9430-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4443-9495-5 (ebk) 1. United States--Emigration and immigration--History. 2. Mexico--Emigration and immigration--History. 3. Mexicans--United States--History. 4. United States--Relations--Mexico. 5. Mexico--Relations--United States. I. Title.

 JV6895.M48H46 2010

 304.8’73072--dc22

2010038164

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

List of Figures

1.1 Map of Mexico and the sending region.

2.1 In the early 1930s, Mexican farm workers engaged in a series of strikes aimed at improving their wages and working conditions. Here farm workers gather at the strike headquarters during the 1933 cotton strike at Corcoran, California, to demand the right to organize and bargain collectively. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

3.1 Aspiring braceros vie for contracts in Mexico City, 1945. Archivo General de la Nación, Fondo Hermanos Mayo.

3.2 During the 1950s the United States allowed undocumented Mexican workers to set one foot on Mexican soil in order to “re-enter” the country legally with a bracero contract. The process was known as “drying out the wetbacks.” Photo by Loomis Dean/Time Life Pictures/ Getty Images.

3.3 Many Mexicans who were unable to get bracero contracts entered the United States illegally. In this photo from 1950, undocumented workers gather at Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, waiting for a chance to cross. Archivo General de la Nación, Fondo Hermanos Mayo.

5.1 The past two decades have witnessed a ferocious backlash against illegal immigration. Former Congressman Tom Tancredo, a leader of the anti-immigrant forces, addresses a rally while Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist looks on. Washington, DC, February 2006. © Stephen Voss Photography.

Series Editor’s Preface

Each book in the “Viewpoints/Puntos de Vista” series introduces students to a significant theme or topic in Latin American history. In an age in which student and faculty interest in the developing world increasingly challenges the old focus on the history of Europe and North America, Latin American history has assumed an increasingly prominent position in undergraduate curricula.

Some of these books discuss the ways in which historians have interpreted these themes and topics, thus demonstrating that our understanding of our past is constantly changing, through the emergence of new sources, methodologies, and historical theories. Others offer an introduction to a particular theme by means of a case study or biography in a manner easily understood by the contemporary, non-specialist reader. Yet others give an overview of a major theme that might serve as the foundation of an upper-level course.

What is common to all of these books is their goal of historical synthesis by drawing on the insights of generations of scholarship on the most enduring and fascinating issues in Latin American history, and through the use of primary sources as appropriate. Each book is written by a specialist in Latin American history who is concerned with undergraduate teaching, yet who has also made his or her mark as a first-rate scholar.

The books in this series can be used in a variety of ways, recognizing the differences in teaching conditions at small liberal arts colleges, large public universities, and research-oriented institutions with doctoral programs. Faculty have particular needs depending on whether they teach large lectures with discussion sections, small lecture or discussion- oriented classes, or large lectures with no discussion sections, and whether they teach on a semester or trimester system. The format adopted for this series fits all of these different parameters.

In this third volume in the “Viewpoints/Puntos de Vista” series, Timothy Henderson analyzes the history of Mexican immigration into the United States from its origins to the present day. This pattern of immigration is unique in that the territory of the United States includes half of what was once Mexico. Hence, successive waves of immigrants built on a base of approximately 100,000 Mexicans included in the borders of the United States pursuant to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. As a result, the US–Mexican border region has long enjoyed a bicultural flavor, and Mexican influences in the US Southwest have always been strong.

Henderson’s book looks at the factors on both sides of the border that have transplanted millions of Mexicans across that border and into a nation that now boasts a population of Mexican immigrants and US citizens of Mexican descent that is approaching 25 million. Almost 7 million are undocumented immigrants, often described as “illegal aliens” in US media. These undocumented Mexicans – almost 60 percent of all undocumented immigrants in the United States – are at the center of a passionate and emotionally charged debate. Henderson’s work gives the reader a profound historical sense of how the Mexican population in the United States has evolved over time, and how this population has helped define the United States, Mexico, and the relationship between these two neighboring nations.

Jurgen Buchenau

University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Acknowledgments

This book does not claim to contribute original research. It owes a tremendous debt to the historians and journalists who have done exhaustive research over the years and published their findings. The ones I have relied on most are listed under “Further Reading.” My profound thanks to all those authors, and I trust it is understood that any errors of fact or interpretation are my own.

Thanks to the inter-library loan folks at Auburn University Montgomery, and to my colleagues in the History Department. I am, as always, grateful to my wife, Karren Pell, for proofreading and offering advice on the manuscript, vastly improving the book in the process. Thanks also to two anonymous readers for Wiley-Blackwell, who read the manuscript with great care and contributed many valuable suggestions. My thanks also to Peter Coveney at Wiley-Blackwell, to editorial assistant Galen Smith, and to series editor (and friend of long standing) Jurgen Buchenau.

Migration is a failure of roots. Displaced men are ecological victims. Between them and the sustaining earth a wedge has been driven. Eviction by droughts or dispossession by landlords, the impoverishment of the soil or conquest by arms – nature and man, separately or together, lay down the choice: move or die. Those who are able to break away do so, leaving a hostile world behind to face an uncertain one ahead.

Ernesto Galarza, Merchants of Labor

To be hungry is human. To have papers or not to have papers is inhuman. It is against nature’s laws. That’s the point. There is a good reason for being the way he is. The state cannot make use of human beings. It would cease to exist. Human beings only make trouble. Men cut out of cardboard do not make trouble. Yesser. Excuse me, I mean: yes, sir.

B. Traven, The Death Ship

Introduction

Among the hundreds of thousands of people who cross surrep­titiously into the United States each year, Mexicans enjoy the distinction of being the only ones whose nationality is mentioned by name in official documents. All the rest, no matter where in the world they hail from, are lumped into the unglamorous category of “Other Than Mexicans,” or “OTMs” in Border Patrol parlance.

The reason is obvious: Mexicans make up about 93 percent of those surreptitious border crossers. Anyone picking up this book is surely well aware that migration from Mexico is, and has long been, a “hot button issue.” Immigration in general has always been irresistible to demagogues, for it involves, or is perceived to involve, vital matters such as race and ethnicity, nationality, national security, language, culture, economics, health, law, and community. Those whose personal or political interests are served by igniting fear and hatred have always found immigrants to be convenient targets. Anti-immigrant activists condemn immigrants as strangers among us, inscrutable “others” invading our safe, comfortable, homogeneous spaces, burdening budgets, spreading crime and disease, refusing to learn “our language” or to practice “our ways.”

Mexicans are merely the latest immigrants to receive such treatment, but they are by no means alone. In a letter dated 1753, no less a figure than Benjamin Franklin vented against German immigrants to Pennsylvania, calling them “ignorant,” “stupid,” “swarthy,” and a threat to American culture and freedom. Similar scorn has, throughout American history, been heaped upon the Irish, Italians, Spaniards, Jews, Catholics, Slavs, Asians, Africans, Muslims – that is, virtually every group of people that has alighted on these shores in numbers large enough to get themselves noticed. American history is punctuated with “nativist” movements, that is, movements that seek to privilege the interests of the native born over those of immigrants. A great irony of American life is that each generation of nativists are themselves likely the descendants of immigrants, who may have been reviled by unwelcoming citizens in an earlier day.

Immigrants from Mexico share many similarities with other immigrants. Mexicans migrate to the United States for roughly the same reasons as other immigrants: they might wish to join family members, have a lust for adventure, or need to escape something in their home country; but mostly they need jobs, which are scarce back home. Also, even though critics are fond of accusing Mexicans of refusing to assimilate to American culture, this same accusation has been made about every immigrant group at some point in history (one of Ben Franklin’s chief complaints about the Germans, for instance, was that they refused to learn English). Studies have shown repeatedly that, all things being equal, Mexicans fully integrate into American society within two or three generations, which is identical to the integration rate for other immigrant groups.

But, in fact, all things are not equal. Immigration from Mexico differs from other immigration in several crucial ways. For one thing, a large portion of the United States once belonged to Mexico, and that portion was taken from Mexico in a war that even a patriot like Ulysses S. Grant described as “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”1 At the end of that war, there were as many as 100,000 Mexicans living in the US Southwest, and this at a time when the overall population of that region was sparse. Mexican culture, as well as vigorous cross-border ties, has remained very much alive there. Although Mexican Americans were frequently victims of discrimination and violence, they have nevertheless been a part of American culture for more than a century and a half. The primordial relationship that Mexicans enjoy with the Southwest has allowed nationalistic Mexicans and Mexican Americans to claim that region as a sort of ancestral homeland, thus incurring the wrath of nativists. Parts of the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s, for example, took to referring to the southwestern United States as “Aztlán,” after the mythical homeland of the Aztecs. Some more radical elements postulated remaking the region into a new Mexican homeland, giving rise to persistent nativist charges that a conspiracy is afoot to “reconquer” that territory. Recently, nativist rage was provoked when a popular norteño band, Los Tigres del Norte, scored a hit with a song that briefly rehearsed the history of the US–Mexican War and concluded with the lyrics, “If you count the centuries, although it pains our neighbors, we are more American than all of the gringos.” And in 2008 the Absolut vodka company was obliged to apologize for wounding American sensibilities with its ad depicting Mexico with its pre-1848 borders.

Mexican immigration is larger and more sustained than other immigrations. Although European immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was proportionately larger, substantial immigration from Mexico has gone on for about a century, and since the 1940s it has roughly doubled in every decade. Mexicans in the United States have congregated in such numbers that they have little incentive to assimilate to American culture. They can speak, eat, worship, and be entertained in the United States as if they were in Mexico. The Mexican economy in the United States is roughly the same size as the economy of Mexico.

But perhaps the most important difference between migration from Mexico and migration from other parts of the world is that so much of Mexican immigration has been categorized as “illegal.” The taint of illegality has tended to keep a large portion of the Mexican population of the United States in the shadows, and it has slowed the integration of Mexicans to US culture. A conundrum has thus arisen, wherein American society criticizes Mexicans for failing to assimilate while simultaneously making it extraordinarily difficult for them to assimilate.

Nativist groups often portray Mexican immigrants as swarthy, impoverished hordes determined to partake of American prosperity, and they warn that tolerating such encroachments will lead ultimately to the impoverishment of the entire nation. This perspective ignores the considerable body of research – perhaps not definitive, but persuasive – making the case that Mexican workers have contributed far more to the American economy than they have taken away. It also ignores the topic of this book, namely, the history of Mexican immigration to the United States.

Illegal – and much legal – immigration from Mexico is a creature of American capitalism. Mexicans first began trekking northward because growers and other employers in the southwestern United States wanted easy and reliable access to cheap, expendable labor, and they were willing to do whatever it might take to hold on to a workforce that was both ample and poorly paid. In creating and maintaining that workforce, employers have frequently broken the law, or used their influence to have the law written to suit their needs and interests. In the early twentieth century, for example, when the migratory trend was still in its infancy, employers used Mexican labor contractors to lure Mexicans northward with offers of work, even though contract labor arrangements of this sort were illegal. During the 1940s, when the United States and Mexico had in place a program to bring Mexican guest workers into the United States to fill temporary agricultural jobs, many employers violated the law by employing both legal and illegal Mexican labor. Sometimes they even encouraged their legal workers to go back to Mexico and return to the United States illegally. They did this because the guest worker program guaranteed minimum wages and protections to braceros (as those guest workers were called). Illegal immigrants, by contrast, had no rights and no recourse. They could be underpaid or – in the case of some bottom-feeding employers – not paid at all. Many employers were quite frank in expressing their strong preference for illegal workers. Even when the US Congress passed a law in the 1950s declaring it a crime to “transport or harbor” an illegal immigrant, powerful interests saw to it that employing an illegal immigrant remained perfectly legal. And even today, when employing undocumented workers is technically illegal, employers run little risk.

Politicians have done their bit to maintain illegal flows. In the mid-1960s, Congress rewrote American immigration law. Prior to that rewriting, the nations of the world were assigned immigration quotas based on the racist assumptions of men who had reformed the immigration laws back in 1924. The 1965 law, in the name of fairness, assigned equal quotas to all of the nations of the earth, not taking into account the obvious fact that demand for visas was bound to be higher in some countries than in others. Suggestions that some exception should be made for “contiguous countries” – i.e., Canada and Mexico – were ignored. Moreover, preference was given for family reunification and for certain job skills that were deemed useful to the US economy. Later reforms only compounded these problems, meaning that for most ordinary Mexicans nowadays it is virtually impossible to migrate legally to the United States. And yet the lack of jobs in Mexico and the availability of jobs in the United States have made immigration practically inevitable and most likely unstoppable. Certainly, walls and fences – the latest craze – have proved ineffective and counterproductive.

According to the most commonly cited estimate, today there are roughly 12 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, and about 60 percent of them are Mexicans. Attitudes toward these immigrants are varied. At one extreme are the seething xenophobes who would like to rid the country of foreigners once and for all. At another pole are those who insist that illegal immigration from Mexico is not really a problem, or that the problem is greatly exaggerated. After all, this argument runs, Mexicans only take jobs that Americans will not do; they help the economy by keeping down prices of food, restaurants, and hotels; the low wages they are paid help to keep some businesses in the United States that would otherwise relocate overseas; and most of them pay taxes and contribute to social security, while collecting few public services.

Although many who argue along these latter lines are well meaning, downplaying the evils of illegal immigration is unhelpful. Although there is ample and compelling evidence that undocumented immigrants are far less of a burden on American society than is often claimed – that is, that they do not compete for jobs, drive down wages, and use social services to such a great extent – that misses the point.2 Surely society will always require low-paid work in many sectors of the economy, but there is no requirement that that work always be done by ethnic minorities. Maintaining such a large proportion of the Mexican population of the United States in an “illegal” status has a number of pernicious effects. It tends to reinforce the link between immigration and crime in the minds of many Americans, and hence places all Mexicans, whether in the country legally or illegally, at a disadvantage. It also impedes many Mexicans from following the course taken by earlier generations of immigrants, that is, settling down and working their way up in society. For the largest part of the history of Mexican immigration to the United States, migration was circular: Mexicans assumed that their sojourn in the United States would be temporary, so there was little incentive to put down roots. That has changed drastically since the immigration reform of 1986 and the tremendous buildup of border enforcement in the 1990s and early 2000s, which have persuaded more Mexicans to remain in the United States for the long haul, even if illegally. But the taint of illegality means that many Mexican immigrants are permanently stuck at the entry level, unable to work their way up through the proverbial ranks, afraid to join unions that might help to better their lot, unable to get health insurance or other social benefits, and with little incentive or opportunity to get an education – in general, unable to become fully integrated into American society on a basis of equality.3 Maintaining a large, ethnically distinct population to do society’s menial labor is hardly a sign of social health. And critics of illegal immigration have a good point when they note that, in a society that prides itself on its basis in the rule of law, tolerating widespread violation of the law by both immigrants and their employers is problematic.

Without a doubt, the strangest and most troubling feature of debates on Mexican immigration is the tendency to ignore Mexico, or to take Mexico into account only to lambaste it as a source of contagion. The overwhelming majority of books on Mexican immigration treat the issue as if it were an exclusively American problem – a problem that can eventually be solved if only we hit upon the right formula of tweaks and fixes. Cooperative solutions are seldom contemplated, though, to be sure, Mexico has not always proved an enthusiastic collaborator. Mexican leaders have traditionally viewed migration with great ambivalence. On the one hand, the money that emigrants send home has long been vital to Mexico’s economy, and migration benefits Mexico in the sense that it is able to export a large part of its unemployment problem – about 10 percent of all Mexicans currently reside in the United States – and thus mitigate social unrest. On the other hand, Mexico’s dependence on emigration to the United States has been deeply humiliating, a constant and poignant reminder of the nation’s failure to realize the promises of its epic revolution of the early twentieth century. The “safety valve” effect of emigration has also probably been a factor enabling Mexican leaders to put off making reforms that are desperately needed. In the end, neither the United States nor Mexico really benefits from the prevailing situation.

It is often said that immigration involves both push and pull factors, and although that formulation has come in for some provocative criticism of late,4 it nevertheless probably corresponds to the perception of most immigrants: they see themselves pushed by joblessness, violence, and poverty in their homeland, and pulled by the promise of relatively high-paying jobs on the other side of the border. To treat the matter as an exclusively American phenomenon – something that has wrongfully been inflicted upon the American people by a malignant and incomprehensible world beyond its borders – is to overlook the most important part of the equation. Trying to understand Mexican immigration without understanding something about Mexico is rather like trying to predict the weather with nothing but a weathervane, a thermometer, and a rain gauge. The only hope of resolving the problem is through real binational cooperation.

This book looks at Mexican migration from both sides of the border and over the course of the phenomenon’s entire history. It seeks to explain the developments in the Mexican economy and society that have driven Mexicans to pull up stakes, most of them reluctantly, to undertake the hazardous journey north; and the ever-changing reception they have been accorded upon arrival on the other side of the border.

Notes

1Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Vol. 1 (New York: Charles L. Webster, 1885), 53.

2 Studies of such matters are plentiful and the debate is ongoing, but a good place to start is Carol M. Swain, ed., Debating Immigration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For an interesting and provocative attempts to debunk some myths, see also Eduardo Porter, “Cost of Illegal Immigration May Be Less Than Meets the Eye,” New York Times, April 16, 2006; Jason L. Riley, Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders (New York: Penguin, 2008); and Aviva Chomsky, “They Take Our Jobs!” and 20 Other Myths About Immigration (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007).

3 Noah Pickus and Peter Skerry argue that the image of undocumented Mexicans “living in the shadows” is overdrawn, since many have obtained driver’s licenses, joined unions, and some 10 percent own their own homes. But even according to their figures, nearly 60 percent lack health insurance and, if 10 percent own homes, presumably 90 percent do not. “Good Neighbors and Good Citizens: Beyond the Legal–Illegal Immigration Debate,” in Swain, Debating Immigration, 95–113.

4 See Gilbert G. González and Raul Fernández, “Empire and the Origins of Twentieth-Century Migration from Mexico to the United States,” Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 71, No. 1 (February 2002), 19–57, which argues that migration was spurred by American economic imperialism, so to view the push and pull as two distinct factors is to create a “false dichotomy.”

1

Beginnings

1848–1920

Mexicans began migrating to the United States in significant numbers in the early twentieth century, a time when both Mexico and the American Southwest were undergoing dramatic transformations. Although the character of Mexican migration to the United States has changed profoundly over the course of a century, the forces that drew Mexicans northward have remained essentially the same: Mexicans were enticed by American employers who offered them work for better wages than they could earn in Mexico; and they were propelled to leave by violence, poverty, and lack of opportunity in their homeland.

By the end of the second decade of the twentieth century, several enduring patterns had been established. American employers actively recruited Mexican workers when they were needed, but took no responsibility for them when the need decreased. Mexicans, who migrated from the neighboring country and could relatively easily be sent home, were an employer’s dream: Mexicans were cheap and expendable, and, so long as labor unions or the US government did not interfere, they had little recourse to defend their rights and improve their lot. When the US economy slowed and jobs became scarce, Mexicans made handy scapegoats. The pattern of migration that developed was circular: Mexicans came and went, with relatively few choosing to settle permanently in the United States and assimilate to American culture.

American capital, lured to Mexico by the enticements of cheap labor and raw materials, came to dominate the Mexican economy. That domination was an important factor retarding Mexico’s economic development, for the chief lures attracting capital to Mexico have remained constant: cheap labor and resources. Mexico’s leaders have added to the problem by making unwise choices with depressing regularity.

This chapter traces the beginnings of these enduring patterns.

How the Border Came to Be

In a sense, the first Mexicans to reside in the United States managed the remarkable feat of migrating without ever leaving home. Instead, the border of their country migrated to the south and west, landing them in a new and alien nation, one in which they quickly came to comprise a small and frequently persecuted minority. Their numbers are usually estimated between 80,000 and 100,000.

Understanding how and why that border readjustment came to pass requires at least a brief recounting of some deep history. From even before their respective foundings as colonies of European powers, Mexico and the United States developed very differently, and the differences tended overwhelmingly to favor the United States as the world entered into the “modern” era. Mexico – particularly its southern and central regions – was home to the populous and highly advanced indigenous civilizations of the Aztecs, Mayas, and a number of smaller groups. The Spaniards who arrived to conquer and colonize Mexico in 1519 found it neither possible nor desirable to eradicate or relocate such large numbers of Indians – although they did manage to kill off appalling numbers with a combination of over-exploitation and imported diseases – so they sought accommodations. Indians were cast in the role of peasants and workers, the lowest rung in what soon became a complex racial hierarchy. Indians were joined by Africans and persons of mixed race, known generically as “castes.” By the time the Spanish colony came to an end in 1821, Mexico’s population consisted of roughly 60 percent Indians, 22 percent castes, and 18 percent whites. Most Indians and castes were poor and illiterate; many could not speak or understand Spanish, which white elites insisted was the national tongue; and a long legacy of discrimination and exploitation, together with the practical impossibility of rising up the social ladder no matter how hard they worked, tended to give them a rather pessimistic worldview. White people, meanwhile, had a near monopoly on literacy, owned most of the wealth, and held virtually all of the political power. In short, Mexico’s racial and class makeup was more complex than that of the United States, meaning ultimately that Mexico was forced to confront challenges that the United States was not obliged to face.

Race and class were not the only obstacles to Mexico’s smooth entry into the modern world. A wealthy Catholic Church that wielded much political power and which had no intention of tolerating competing belief systems; a formidably rugged geography that made transportation and communication exceedingly difficult; a tendency for its people to fragment into isolated regional cultures; a long history of government by kings who claimed absolute power; and an economy that for three centuries had been a state monopoly that was obsessively focused on a single pursuit, the mining of silver: all of these factors combined to make Mexico’s early years as a nation uncommonly difficult. Those years were characterized by extremes of penury and political turmoil, even while the United States grew in population and power, increasingly insisting that its “manifest destiny” was to control the North American continent in its entirety.

The United States, by contrast, was the spawn of Great Britain, the world’s pioneer industrial nation. Great Britain was the world’s greatest producing and trading nation in the late eighteenth century, and the seat of a vast and lucrative empire. It permitted its North American colonies far greater economic and political freedom than Spain allowed its dependencies, so the United States entered its independent life with experience of free trade and representative democracy – an enormous advantage in the modern world. The United States also enjoyed an abundant supply of labor, both free and enslaved, while Mexico, severely depleted by a bloody ten-year war for independence, saw its population stagnate throughout most of the nineteenth century.

Mexico’s weakness attracted US aggression. When Mexican leaders found that few of their citizens were willing or able to move north to populate the frontier regions that abutted the United States – the territory that is now the US Southwest – they overcame certain misgivings and invited Anglo-Americans from the United States to colonize the territory known as Texas. Most of the colonists who took Mexico up on its offer had no intention of abiding by Mexican law, and Texas soon emerged as a grave problem for the Mexican state. In 1836 the Texans rebelled and claimed their independence. Ten years later, the United States annexed Texas, a move that precipitated the US–Mexican War of 1846–1848. The United States won that war convincingly. According to the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war, the United States paid Mexico $15 million in exchange for more than half of its territory, including the states of California, Utah, and Nevada, most of Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado, and a sliver of Wyoming. In 1853, when the United States persuaded Mexico to part with an additional 30,000 square mile chunk of land on it northwest border for a railroad right of way, the border assumed the essential shape it retains to this day: that is, a 2,000-mile-long line that follows the Rio Grande (or Rio Bravo, as it is known to Mexicans) northward and westward from Brownsville, at the southern tip of Texas, to El Paso, then sets out due west through burning deserts and craggy scrubland till it ends in the Pacific Ocean.

The Great Transformation: Mexico

Substantial flows of migrants from Mexico to the United States began with dramatic transformations that took place in both countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Mexico’s case the transformations were wrought by a civil war that brought to power a generation of ambitious folks who subscribed to the ideology of liberalism, and who tried to set Mexico on a firm course toward “modernity.” In the process they helped to bring misery and dislocation to vast numbers of their countrymen.

Between 1858 and 1861, Mexicans fought a civil war known as the War of the Reform. In that war, two political persuasions that had been locked in a death match since 1821 had it out once and for all. After two years of the bloodiest fighting Mexico had seen in the four tumultuous decades of its existence, the liberals triumphed decisively over the conservatives. Those liberals thereupon set out to change just about every aspect of Mexican reality. They championed the impartial rule of law; civil liberties, including freedom of religion; free enterprise and free trade; greater social equality; representative government; and compulsory public education. Above all else, the liberals believed in the promise of the individual, and they lamented how the colonial centuries had, in their view, inculcated in the majority of Mexicans a disposition toward dependence and communalism. Much of Mexico’s land was owned by the Roman Catholic Church, a corporate entity that, in the liberal view, was an absolute obstacle to the efficiency and profitability that only private enterprise could bring. For the same reason, the liberals decried the communal ownership of land by Indian villages, which had been the tradition since before the conquistadors arrived. They passed a law, known as the Lerdo Law, in 1856, which prohibited the ownership of real estate by “corporations.” The church was thus obliged to auction off all of its land except that used in day-to-day operations, and Indian villages were forced to convert their ejidos (as communal village lands were called) into individually owned plots. The liberals hoped in this manner to make agriculture a fully commercial enterprise that would enlarge the food supply, provide goods for foreign exchange, and increase revenues accruing to the state, all of which would underwrite a transition to industrialism and modernity. For a variety of reasons, the law’s results were disappointing to say the least, but it is undeniable that it brought about a major change in the Mexican countryside, one that brought capitalism to rural Mexico – capitalism of the most rapacious and unforgiving kind.

The leader who sent these changes into high gear was General Porfirio Díaz, who seized power in a military rebellion in 1876. Although his rebellion was guided by the slogan “Effective suffrage and no reelection,” Díaz went on to hold sway as Mexico’s dictator for the next 35 years. Once in power, he adopted a new slogan: “Order and Progress.” This slogan was inspired by a philosophy known as Positivism, which was championed by the French thinker Auguste Comte. “Order,” for those who subscribed to Positivism, meant an end to democratic politics, which Mexico’s history tended to suggest were inevitably disorderly and divisive. The leading architects of the Porfirian system styled themselves científicos – not scientists, exactly, but “men of science.” They believed that governing should be done by experts, men who knew what was best for society – what, that is, would best ensure “progress” – and who would not have to answer to “the people.” Porfirio Díaz, for them, was the necessary man of his time, a man who enjoyed nearly universal admiration (at least for a while) and who had the skills to keep the nation from descending into anarchy.

The second part of the científicos’ formula – “progress” – meant an ambitious program of commercializing Mexican agriculture to make it productive and profitable in the hope it would underwrite the development of industry. The problem lay in the fact that Mexico, in the late nineteenth century, was a poor country, with relatively few well-heeled entrepreneurs willing and able to invest in the target areas: building railroads, founding banks, revitalizing ports, pioneering new crops, exploring for new minerals, drilling for oil, and building new factories. Such capital, the científicos reasoned, would have to be imported from abroad, and it would have to be wooed to Mexico with generous concessions – tax breaks, rights of way, land grants, and cheap labor.

To ensure the latter enticement – cheap labor – the Díaz government outlawed labor unions and gave employers carte blanche to behave as callously as they wished. Repression of labor during the Porfiriato – as the period of Díaz’s dictatorship is known – was notorious. One of the more famous accounts, journalist John Kenneth Turner’s aptly titled Barbarous Mexico