In the Shadow of the Giant: The Americanization of Modern Mexico

3. Looking Northward

The ambivalence that Mexicans harbor toward the United States is a familiar cliché. But when you think about it, the mere fact that Mexicans have mixed emotions about their American neighbors, as opposed to the unadulterated hatred that most Palestinians feel toward Israel, is remarkable by itself. Some might argue that, with the passage of time, the Palestinians will one day come around to a more nuanced view of their neighbors. As a journalist who has worked in the Middle East, I rather doubt it. There are in any case other corners of the planet where the wounds inflicted by conflicts predate the U.S.-Mexican War by centuries, yet the mutual animosities remain as fierce as ever. Witness the case of Serbia and the ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo, where differences over land and culture go back to the Middle Ages. In the case of Mexico, however, attitudes toward the United States have swung back and forth violently throughout the country’s nearly 200 years of national sovereignty—and in the new century, the positive elements in the love-hate prism show signs of gaining new ascendancy. Prevailing views of the United States were by and large favorable when Mexico finally won its independence from Spain in 1821 after a bloody rebellion that lasted over a decade. The profound influence that America’s Founding Fathers exerted over their Mexican counterparts could be readily seen in the fledgling nation’s first constitution of 1824. From its federalist framework and the formal separation of powers among the executive, 63 c h a p t e r 3
Looking Northward Ch003.qxd 11/27/08 1:52 PM Page 63 legislative, and judicial branches to its very name, the Federal Constitution of the United Mexican States, Mexico’s first magna carta bore the unmistakable imprint of U.S. political values. Its authors were mostly self-styled liberals who wanted to adopt their American neighbors’ decentralized system of government and separation of church and state and actively opposed the designs of their conservative countrymen to concentrate power in the hands of a reconstituted monarchy. “In the main, liberals of the . . . era were mesmerized by the ideal society to the north, and by the spectacular material progress of the United States under republican federal institutions,” wrote the historian Charles A. Hale. “They talked openly of imitating the United States in reforming Mexico.”1 Yet even at that very early juncture, years before the government of President Andrew Jackson would quietly encourage American settlers in Texas to secede from Mexico and Washington’s duplicity would be magnified by President James Polk’s deliberate provocation of the Mexican War in 1846, a leading liberal thinker like José María Luis Mora had misgivings about taking the American model too far. “For [the liberals], the United States could serve as a model for goals but not for methods,” noted Hale. “The two societies and their respective histories were too different. . . . Mora’s problem was how to modernize a traditional Hispanic society without Americanizing it and thereby sacrificing its national identity. The problem is yet to be solved.”2 An Ardent Admirer of the United States One of Mora’s liberal colleagues entertained no such reservations about embracing the American model. In many ways Lorenzo de Zavala was the first Americanized Mexican in history, and his seemingly boundless admiration for the United States ultimately led him to side with Mexico’s enemies. A native of the Yucatán Peninsula, de Zavala was one of the principal drafters and signatories of Mexico’s 1824 constitution, and he held a series of prominent posts under the country’s first two liberal presidents, Guadalupe Victoria and Vicente Guerrero. De Zavala left Mexico in 1830 64 in the shadow of the giant Ch003.qxd 11/27/08 1:52 PM Page 64 after a conservative coup toppled the Guerrero government in which he was serving as treasury secretary, and during a two-year exile he took a New York native named Emily West as his second wife. In 1834 he was serving as Mexico’s minister to France when President Antonio López de Santa Anna disbanded the congress and gave himself dictatorial powers. That prompted de Zavala to resign his diplomatic post in protest and move from Paris to New York City. De Zavala eventually resettled in Texas, where he owned land and which at the time formed part...