Mexico: Why a Few Are Rich and the People Poor

3. The Legacy

33 THREE The Legacy i Adam Smith, the classical economist, called the discovery of America one of the “most important events in the history of mankind.” America’s significance, he went on to say, lay not in its mines of silver and gold but in the new and inexhaustible market for European goods.1 That surely came to be the accepted opinion in most of Western Europe, then on the threshold of the Industrial Revolution. From that “discovery” emerged a New Spain, the ancestral mother of Mexico, a colony for three centuries, a hundred years longer than its independence. Those long centuries of Spanish hegemony set Mexico’s contours. Those of us who seek to know its people, their singularity, the country’s economic and political travails, no matter how modified by subsequent happenings, must start with a contemplative look at the colonial era, else we misinterpret and distort the warp and woof of Mexico. 34 t h e l e g a c y Adam Smith’s version of the fabled “discovery” of the New World was most certainly not shared by the inhabitants of ancient Anáhuac, who lived to bewail the heralded discovery of the New World. Whatever apologists for the Spanish Conquest may say, it spelled doomsday for the conquered, pitting Indians against meddlesome Europeans. As Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, author of México profundo, lamented, Spain set about the “destruction of the pre-Hispanic civilizations with no other goal than its own interests.”2 Of the once heavily populated Anáhuac of 14 to 25 million, now baptized Nueva España, by 1640 just 1.3 million survived, in one of the most catastrophic demographic disasters to befall humankind. The upshot of three centuries of diabolical colonial rule was the emergence of a dysfunctional society. To start with, the conquerors put down Indian resistance with savage cruelty, raising, not for the first time, the question of who were the “savages”andwhothe“civilized.”ThatdisasterbeganwhenChristopher Columbus stepped ashore in the New World. Despite his much ballyhooed “discovery,” Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand had the admiral returned to Spain in chains because of his cruelty on the islands of the Caribbean.3 The Spaniards, who came upon a religious fiesta in the great temple of Tenochtitlán, cut off the arms of a drummer, then his head, watched it roll across the floor, then attacked the celebrants, stabbing and spearing them.4 To justify their predatory behavior, the Europeans called up the blithering idiocy of white supremacy, nonsense that has plagued mankind ever since. The Spaniards rationalized the plunder of the ancients in terms of their race and religion that, supposedly, conferred on them a supremacy cast in stone. All of us, however, have a common origin. Our ancestors, whether white, yellow, black, or brown, came out of Africa thousands of years ago, and as they spread across the face of the earth they intermingled, creating a variety of genetic interrelationships. The myth of race is an insidious fiction concocted to justify exploitation and imperial adventures. European types, whether blonds or redheads, blue-eyed or not, gave birth to none of the early civilizations.5 The Aztecs had reason for worry. On the eve of the Conquest, terrible omens telling of dangers ahead had beset them: strange comets belching t h e l e g a c y 35 fire raced through the heavens, while a macehual from the shores of Veracruz reported seeing “towers or mountains floating on the sea, carrying strange beings, with long beards and hair hanging down to the ears.” The Aztecs did not yet know it, but their universe was about to go up in smoke. From then on, Miguel de Cervantes would write, they could “expect nothing but labor for their pains.” Or, to quote Bartolomé de las Casas, one of the few friars who chose to speak up for the conquered , the Spaniards “laid so heavy and grievous a yoke of servitude on them that the condition of beasts was much more tolerable.”6 For the conquerors, the New World opened doors not only to plunder, the enslavement of natives, and the rape of helpless females, but also to a hidalgo’s way of life, but on a bigger and more lavish scale. If the rich of New Spain could have hired others to die for them, the poor could have made a wonderful living. As Cervantes...