Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War (review)

John Mason Hart locates the origin of globalization in the entry of Americans and their capital into Mexico. Porfirian Mexico was the laboratory where "American elites tested a variety of approaches they have since used to extend their power and influence around the globe" (p. 5). In effect, the global capitalist culture embodied in NAFTA, the WTO, and the IMF is a neo-Porfirian hegemony emanating from an imperial United States. As in Revolutionary Mexico, Hart gets the big picture mostly right, even if he gets the occasional detail wrong.

Over half of the book deals with the Restored Republic, the Porfiriato, and the Epic Revolution—the same ground Hart trod in Revolutionary Mexico. Hart attributes America's entry primarily to push factors, specifically "the growing economic strength, technological sophistication, and population of the United States," pretty much writing off the critical role of Mexican planners (p. 45). Hart recognizes the preeminence of railroads in la invasión pacífica, but his major service is in calling attention to the bankers who created institutions that "gave direction and coordination to this flow of U.S. investment [and] deepened the intermixing of American and Mexican businessmen" (p. 73). Notable is the International Banking Corporation that served "as a conduit for U.S. investments" by employing "strategies [anticipating those] of such multinational institutions as the Import-Export Bank, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund" (pp. 91, 100).

With American capital came colonists. In addition to absentee investors, Hart estimates three thousand American boomers, sooners, and settlers immigrated yearly to Mexico. There, the new owners were caught up in long-standing local disputes over land and water at least as frequently as in ones initiated by their arrival, a subtle point Hart makes clear. He also defends his interpretation of the revolution as a "nationalist backlash" against American dominance, and his property-by-property account of attacks, seizures, and interventions on yanqui properties constitutes an extended refutation of Alan Knight's contention that the revolution was not particularly anti-American (p. 271).

In the 1920s, Mexico's revolutionary government sought to square the circle by reconciling its economic nationalism with demands for compensation from dispossessed American banks, petroleum companies, and property owners. At the same time, there filtered into Mexico a different sort of yanqui—artists, intellectuals, and bohemians sympathetic to the revolution—whose published accounts restored Americans' positive perspective on Mexico at the same time that expropriations of American properties peaked under President Lázaro Cárdenas. Thus Hart finds that, although American investment had withered to 300 million by 1940, "the two countries would merge even more intimately than before" in "cooperation and accommodation" (p. 399).

Hart disconcertingly omits the years from 1950 through the 1970s, save a few paragraphs on the Cuban Missile Crisis, popular culture, and the origin of Mexico's debt crisis. Mexico, he explains, was a "minor consideration" for Washington during the cold war and Vietnam War (p. 458). But in the 1980s, "neo-liberal economics and the War of Drugs" again focused Washington's attention on Mexico (p. 432). American capital and businesses returned to Mexico in the form of McDonalds and maquiladoras, oil prices collapsed, and the national debt ballooned, creating a long-term crisis that led the last three PRI presidents to undo the revolution's state-centered economy and produce the current neo-Porfirian system. Washington's response was NAFTA, initiated by "the American elite to stabilize a large and potentially chaotic neighbor caught in a state of rapid population growth and economic stagnation" (p. 438). But NAFTA did not reduce Mexican poverty or instability—instead, quite the reverse: real wages fell and a neo-Zapatista insurgency emerged in opposition. Hart outlines how drugs replaced oil as the major source of...