Mexico and the United States: Ambivalent Vistas

3. Up and Down from Colonialism

46 3 Up and Down from Colonialism Since the uprising of Hidalgo, and more especially since independence , Mexico has been perennially agitated by revolutions, and the Mint had declined considerably. Instead of finding that immense quantity of gold and silver which used to arrive from every direction, today one only finds copper in that place where, according to Baron Humboldt, there was minted in fifteen days a larger amount of precious metals than could have been extracted from all the mines of Europe put together, and from which has emerged a total of 2 billion hard piastres. Jean Louis Berlandier, Journey to Mexico (ca. 1825) The productivity gap that exists between Mexico and the United States today dates from the late colonial era and the early years of the national period, roughly between 1770 and 1870. From its colonial base, the economy of the United States “took off,” while the Mexican economy slowed and then spiraled downward after 1770. In effect, the United States went up from colonialism, while Mexico went down. To grasp the differences between the overdeveloped United States and the underdeveloped Mexico of today, it is necessary to understand this heritage.1 The differences between New Spain and English North America were partly the result of ecology and climate. The historian Clarence Haring divided the European colonies of the Americas into two groups: farm colonies and exploitation colonies. The former were generally established in temperate zones and produced commodities similar to those of Europe. Immigration to these colonies tended to come from the middle classes at home: small farmers, artisans, and the like. Those who were not middle class, such as indentured servants, became, if they survived, sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and smallholders.2 47 Up and Down from Colonialism The so-called exploitation colonies were usually settled in the tropics and produced and exported staple articles such as sugar, cotton, indigo, and gold (and in the highlands of Mexico and Peru, silver). Labor was usually compulsory, and since immigrants were not attracted to an area of servile workers, a community of landlords and serfs developed . Obviously, under Haring’s scheme, the northern colonies of English North America were farm colonies, while New Spain (and the U.S. South for that matter) was an exploitation colony.3 Timing, as well as place, conditioned the differences between the two societies. Colonial Mexico was born of a different order and time than Anglo-America. Mexico City was founded by Hernán Cortés in 1521, a hundred years before William Bradford led the pilgrims to Plymouth on their historic voyage in the Mayflower. New Spain was an older fragment of Europe, a quasi-feudalistic and traditional society quite unlike the bourgeois and liberal republic that emerged in North America. From Old Spain the late medieval and early Renaissance worlds were carried outward by conquerors and colonizers to the West Indies, followed by what became New Spain on the mainland.4 The epic of Spain in Mexico began before the Reformation and developed in part as a reaction to Protestantism. An absolutist Spanish state imposed a religious, linguistic, and political unity upon the diversity of pre-Columbian Mexico. This patrimonial state fostered a cult of hierarchy in government and religion. In terms of the worldeconomy , New Spain’s relationship to the core would always be through the semiperipheral area of Spain, an economic satellite of western Europe after 1600 (unlike English North America with its direct ties to the central commercial zone of Europe).5 In the Spanish Indies, colonization occurred precisely when the power of the Castilian Cortes (parliament) was declining. It was in Castile that the king had the most success in undermining any institutional opposition to royal absolutism. The conquistadores represented the Castilian king, not parliament (in fact, the Cortes never developed in colonial Mexico). The conquerors, because of the medieval tradition of reconquista (reconquest), had the aristocratic ethos of military ad- 48 mexico and the united states venturers, the Catholic faith of crusaders, and the sensibilities of civil servants. Even the merchants, craftspeople, and professionals took their place in a social system in which values were determined by that earlier generation of encomenderos, friars, and public servants.6 The exploration and early development of Mexico came in the sixteenth century when the Mediterranean region with its Italian citystates was the world-economy. It is important to know that Aragón and other provinces of Mediterranean...