Mexico: Why a Few Are Rich and the People Poor

2. El Mexicano

17 TWO El Mexicano i To comprehend from first to last how Mexican underdevelopment came to be, we must turn back the pages of time. By doing so, to cite F. Scott Fitzgerald, the American novelist, we will be borne back into the past. Only then can we begin to make out the raison d’être for the Mexican failure, not that Mexicans are solely responsible for their circumstance. Western Europe and, most assuredly, the United States have played leading roles in Mexico’s story. That said, Mexican underdevelopment has two fathers, though one, the Spaniard, must bear the brunt of the responsibility. Most Mexicans are, racially speaking, descendents of pre-Columbians and Spaniards, referred to as mestizos. The Spaniards, say some anthropologists, had stumbled upon an “archaic” civilization, living in an earlier evolutionary stage. When they met, the two “races” represented totally dissimilar cultures and modes of interpreting human existence.1 Nonetheless, they shared certain singularities, being autocratic societies, to cite one example, but Spanish individualism, which 18 e l m e x i c a n o verged on anachronistic behavior, overwhelmed the pre-Columbians. Mestizaje, the blending of the two peoples, was the human material the nation builders had on hand, and sad to say, it never jelled as a coherent whole.2 Most of us have been taught that European cultures stood head and shoulders above the indigenous ones of pre-Hispanic America. That is an ethnocentric view that stems from our European heritage and cultural preferences. Europe had mechanical superiority, but in artistic sensibilities, in social and ethical values, as well as political organization , the amazing cultures of the New World stood on a par with that of Europe. As other writers have pointed out, millions of Indians, as the Europeans came to call them, were killed to “prove that Europeans were more civilized.” i i This story of Mexico begins to unfold long before Hernán Cortés and his intrepid band of Spaniards overwhelmed Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztecs. The Aztecs were only one of many diverse Indian groups— the Mayas, Tarascans, and Otomi among them—which the Spaniards encountered when they arrived in the “New World.” Mexico was built on the ruins of the Aztec Empire, which, we are told, had under its wings a million and a half people in the Valley of Mexico and, probably, some 20 million more in provinces under its jurisdiction. This was a precapitalist society, one where a hierarchical, tribute-paying system held sway.3 The Aztecs had made the transition from barbarism to a complex urban society at a time when that step had been taken only in the Middle East, and probably in China and Peru.4 This ancient world was by no means homogeneous, but was torn apart by idiomatic, political, and military differences, where some societies prevailed over others and where cultures succeeded each other, the newer ones imposing themselves on the earlier ones. These were old civilizations. During the Classic Era, the years from approximately 300 b.c. to about a.d. 900, labeled the golden age of the e l m e x i c a n o 19 pre-Hispanic world by archeologists, the greatest of these civilizations was that of the Maya. The Maya had occupied the lands of Yucatán, Campeche, Tabasco, eastern Chiapas, and Quintana Roo, but their predominance had waned by the time the Spaniards arrived. These sites had lain abandoned for centuries until John L. Stephens’s marvelous account, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, written in the 1840s, rescued them from oblivion. According to some scholars, Mayan glyphs are one of only three writing systems to have been invented independently, the other two being Sumerian cuneiform in ancient Mesopotamia and Chinese.5 In the Libros de Chilam Balam, the Maya left for posterity their version of history. The heyday of Maya culture coincides with the fall of the Roman Empire.6 Its demise can probably be laid at the foot of a society with a high population growth rate that had outrun its food supply. Its collapse made Thomas Malthus a prophet.7 i i i The Aztec kingdom, which the Spaniards made the base of their colony, unlike that of the Maya, was very much alive when Cortés landed on the shores of Veracruz in 1519. The Central Plateau had sheltered vigorous civilizations, that...