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5. Reversals of Fortune: Revolutionary Veracruz and Porfirian Nostalgia
- University of Texas Press
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Mexico has been a slave-pen, a torture-chamber, a treasure-house, and a slaughter-house. g. l. morrill, The devil in Mexico (1917) Vera Cruz! How shall we describe it? A queer old place, strange as any in the world, and yet on our own continent! helen J. sAnborn, a winTer in cenTral aMerica and Mexico (1886) [I]t is but a short step, when design doesn’t conform to desire, from fantasy to terror. greg grAndin, eMPire’s workshoP During the PorfiriAto, American travelers optimistically predicted that Mexico’s marvelous progress and stable relationship with the United States would continue forever. Porfirio Díaz was aging rapidly in the final decade of his rule, however, and some timidly wondered what would happen when the man who seemed to have singlehandedly modernized Mexico could no longer rule. W. E. Carson, for one, predicted that Mexican stability would flourish because of the threat of American interventionism, as we saw in Chapter Two. Carson, like countless others in the United States, saw the continuation of the regime in Porfirio Díaz Jr. or the dictator’s nephew Félix Díaz, who had risen to the rank of general. Regardless of whom they saw as the rightful heir to the regime, American writers and other observers firmly believed that the Porfiriato would outlast its namesake. Even after John Kenneth Turner published his famous articles exposing the dark underbelly of Porfirian law and order, making it clear that revolution was fomenting in the north, many American writers continued to chamchAPter 5 reversAls of fortune: revolutionAry verAcruz And PorfiriAn nostAlgiA 180 AmericAns in the treAsure house pion the elderly Díaz and to downplay any possibility of social and economic upheaval. Well into the second decade of the 1900s, when some Americans began to question the unraveling regime, the majority of travelers painted a business-as-usual portrait of Mexico. In June of 1910, one traveler named Irvin von Keck reported in an American magazine: The longer we extend our stay in Mexico and the more that we travel within its romantic cities the firmer we become persuaded that Mexico is a country which has before it a future as brilliant as it is certain . Had we believed all these articles recently published by a certain class of magazines and newspapers, describing Mexico as dark as they would do Russia, we are most agreeably surprised in finding just the contrary. We find no signs of slavery or mistreatment wherever we may go for investigation. Everybody seems to live happily and contentedly.1 Von Keck undoubtedly turned a blind eye to the great social and economic disparities created as side effects of Porfirian “progress,” but his description speaks to the fact that many Americans wanted to see a Mexico where everyone lived happily and contentedly despite recent reports to the contrary. The opening phrase of this excerpt—“the longer we extend our stay”—is also telling, as it applied to Americans in general . By the time his article appeared in West Coast Magazine, the American colonies in Mexico were larger than ever. Despite this rosy description of Mexican stability, the Porfirian regime would finally collapse within a few months of the fabulous— and costly—national celebrations of the centennial of Mexican independence . Two American writers with dramatically opposed political views played surprisingly important roles in Díaz’s undoing. John Kenneth Turner, a socialist muckraker, first traveled to Mexico in 1908 after interviewing Mexican political prisoners at the Los Angeles County Jail. His dispatches from Mexico, in which he presented a scathing view of political corruption and state violence under Díaz, appeared in American newspapers and magazines in late 1909 and 1910 and were compiled and published as Barbarous Mexico the following year. Turner’s writings, some of which closely resemble travelogue writing, focused on what he called debt slavery in Mexico, arguing that cronyism between Díaz and American capitalists and government officials had created the conditions in which millions of Mexicans lived [18.213.110.162] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:02 GMT) reversAls of fortune 181 in bondage, tied to their debts like slaves. Turner revealed Díaz’s merciless policies against the Yaqui, one particularly dramatic example of what the author called “The Diaz System” of statecraft. He did not, however, let the U.S. political and business elite off the hook, claiming that the United States had come to dominate the entire Mexican economy and political system...