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Podcast Host Spencer Mizzen (4:21)

From the chaos of the Spanish conquest and the humiliation of military defeat to the United States to the disruption of the revolution, Mexican history is often viewed through the lens of trauma and violence. Yet as Paul Gillingham explains in this episode of the History Extra podcast, this was also one of the earliest democracies in the world, one in which indigenous people enjoyed rights unthinkable in the United States. In conversation with Spencer Mizzen, Paul discusses One nation's extraordinary history Paul, at the.

Interviewer Anna (4:53)

Very beginning of your new book, you introduce us to what you describe as the first Mexicans. Just to start who were these people and what was it that defined them.

Paul Gillingham (5:08)

As the first Mexicans that's a controversial story, of course, because as soon as you say that Mexicans actually don't exist until first contact with Europeans, people at the back of the classroom can put their hands up and say, excuse me, that's unbelievably racist. The first Mexicans, if you say Mexicans are people who inhabit this vast territory in North America, obviously go back more or less to the best bearing straight. So we're talking 10,000 years. But Mexico as a label for a place doesn't really come into existence until late in the 16th century. And Mexico, more than anything else, is defined by this extraordinary coexistence and fusion of peoples from across the world. And Mexico is the first place why that happens. And until first contact with Europeans, that's just not there. So Mexico is really fundamentally a global society. And this is why you start off in 1511 saying, okay, Mexicans are what happens when you take Europeans and indigenous peoples and then in very short order, Asians and West Africans, and you put them all in this country and you see what happens next.

Interviewer Anna (6:27)

And you described the Spanish arrival in the Americas as a meeting of two long, separated worlds, one that had virtually no contact for thousands of years. In fact, I think you're right that perhaps as few as 10 species had made it across the Atlantic before the Spanish. However, you also point out that there were striking similarities between the two peoples who first encountered one another in the early 16th century. I mean, what were those similarities?

Paul Gillingham (7:00)

Well, humanity's come up with a relatively narrow range of options in its sort of dropdown menu of how to organize a society. And one of them, of course, is empire. One successful metropole taking over an increasing, expanding range of societies, initially quite similar and then stretching off as distance increases into culturally, linguistically, biologically more distant cultures. And so both Spain and what we call the Aztecs, they themselves call the Mexica. They are both empires, and they're both very young empires. And in fact, the chronological similarities are startling. And so Spain is not really starting its imperial journey until 1492. That's when the Spanish take over, the Castilians take over, the last Muslim city on the Iberian Peninsula, Granada. And that's when, of course, Columbus crosses the ocean blue. And you start this leap into global empire. And across the ocean, the Aztecs are doing exactly the same like everybody else. They say that they're the chosen people, what people in the US Call Manifest Destiny, that they'd been there forever. But actually they were a bunch of mercenaries, Arav, rapidly politically climbing, very good warriors. And they had only really consolidated their power in the central valley of Mexico a generation before the Europeans. And they're still fighting very local wars at the same time as they push their frontiers hundreds of miles in each direction. And so you've got these two very young empires. They're both based on this myth of manifest Destiny. They are the people. They both have a useful system of beliefs which center around warrior saints. And so the Spanish have Santiago St. James and the Mexica have Huitzilo Pochli, who have led them to their predestined end, ruling a large multi ethnic empire. And so they are startlingly similar and even down to their neighbors. So both the Spanish and the Mexica use the word barbarians for some of their neighbors. If you're Spanish, it's obviously North Africa. Berber is above all. If you're Mexica, it's the people called Chichimeca, literally barbarians, who are nomads. As the land gets drier going north out of central Mexico and in the other way, both have unconquerable sophisticated cultures next door. And so you get the city states of the Maya in the south and southeast of today's Mexico. And if you're Spanish, of course, a bit like if you're British for large chunks, the early modern period, there's always the French and you just can't really get rid of them. This is Spain's problem. The French are to Spanish what the Maya are to the Mexica.

Interviewer Anna (10:13)

And so the first Spanish to arrive in the New World in what is now Mexico, was their intention always to settle? Did they always intend to stay there?

Paul Gillingham (10:23)

Anna, that's a very good question. The first ones who arrive are more smash and grab merchants and they are obsessed, to almost disturbing, as in or disturbed extent with gold. Europe has a major shortage of gold and silver. These are the best currencies you can get. And so the Spanish are looking for gold. And their ideal is they want to get a lot of gold, they want to go home, and they want to set themselves up as aristocrats. I think that you can compare them a bit in British terms to nabobs in 18th century Indian subcontinent. The initial idea is get rich quick, go home. But then people settle down in part because of imperatives you have to be there, and in part because it turns out you can't get rich quick. The gold is an illusion. And so you need to put in the work. And you combine that with this Spanish ethos as well, of sit down, set up towns, and you've got this cultural as well as sort of political imperative to go around the Caribbean and then the mainland actually forming towns. And that's what they do.

Interviewer Anna (11:42)

Now, you make this really interesting observation. You write that in its first centuries, Mexico was more profoundly globally hybrid than anywhere else in the prior history of the world. What do you mean by that? Why was that the case?

Paul Gillingham (11:58)

Well, you'd had this divorce between Western and eastern hemispheres, which. Which meant that quite literally, you had never before had a combination in the sort of north south axis of indigenous peoples with Europeans and then West Africans whose presence in Mexico is historically vastly underestimated. And tens of thousands came at one point in the 16th century, there were more West Africans than Europeans in Mexico. And then you even had a smaller volume of Asian slaves coming from the Philippines and the Indian subcontinent. And it's never been possible for there to be that sort of confluence. And so there's the possibility. Then there's also the draw of Mexico as the real. Within a century, it's becoming the center of the global economy. You have an obvious drive towards precious metals because they are fantastic, they're durable, they're high value, low volume. Gold and silver make great coinage, but there's an absence of both in Europe. So when you get this sudden mining boom in Mexico and Peru, you've got the material to increase over three centuries the world's money supply by 500%. And the entire modern economic system is unthinkable without that.

Interviewer Anna (13:26)

And how did that change the country? How did that shape Mexico over the decades that followed?

Paul Gillingham (13:31)

It's a Mexican standard, but this is a paradoxical country. And so it is. And so a great paradox is that Mexicans do not actually get substantially richer from this silver bonanza, which sustainably changes the world economy. Why? Well, the silver goes straight from the sort of pithead to Mexico City, and then from Mexico City downhill to Veracruz and across the Atlantic. It just doesn't stick on route. And so you've got a very small number of miners and muvul merchants, people who mine generally, they're always sort of. It's more speculative, but selling things to people who mine. Next time you make a major discovery of gold, Spencer, straightaway go into the business of selling stuff to other people. And so those are people who get wealthy. The main effect of silver in Mexico is actually to expand the frontiers because people are continuously looking for the next strike. And so they set off in wagon trains that they call flotillas for the reason that the metaphor is good. Going across the great deserts of the north is like setting across the ocean, it's very high risk. And instead of the pirates of the ocean, you've got the remaining nomadic societies who understandably, do not think much of Europeans. And so the prospect of silver and gold, and this is just like in the US in the 1850s, draws people further up. And then there's what economists call backward linkages, whereby people get to say they start in somewhere like Zacatecas de silver Capital. They push north towards a city called Parral in Chihuahua. They find a small bit of silver in their wake, though. People are not just bringing in luxury goods, but they're setting up cattle farms, they're starting to grow, when they can, wheat, because they need supply, this sort of vanguard. And this happens in all directions. And so silver doesn't make Mexicans richer, but it makes the emerging country larger.

Interviewer Anna (15:44)

And what about Mexico City? How did that change in the century after the Spanish arrived? Because when they got there, it was already one of the biggest cities in the world, was it not?

Paul Gillingham (15:53)

Oh, it was starting with absolute destruction. You think of our equivalents, the London fire of the 17th century, the Chicago Fire of the early 20th century. After immense human suffering, you have a chance to rebuild from scratch. And this is exactly what the Europeans do. They utterly lay waste the city of hundreds of thousands. And you have to imagine them as being yokels. You know, really, the Spanish have never been to the great cities of the world. A couple have maybe been to Venice. They come from small towns, Cortes comes from a small town. And suddenly they've got one of the most sophisticated cities in the world, and they break it. And after that, with the sort of megalomania that any good urban planning really demands, they decide, instead of leaving behind these sort of smoking ruins, the tens of thousands of stinking dead bodies, they'll clean up, they'll rebuild. And just like us, cities especially, they can build from scratch. And so they lay out a grid system. They are at the absolute forefront of city development to the extent that Europeans start copying them, because it's eminently rational. Grid system is easier than sort of higgledy piggledy medieval roads. And they're also inspired by the indigenous peoples.

Interviewer Anna (17:15)

They.

Paul Gillingham (17:15)

Oh, hold on. So you can actually lay out a city with that sort of level of forethought and sophistication. The Mexica had public toilets, for example, which puts them a long way ahead of most of our contemporary cities. And so they're inspired by that. They start from scratch and they remake a world which within 150 years is the closest equivalent you can get to modern New York.

Podcast Host Spencer Mizzen (17:44)

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Interviewer Anna (20:27)

What about Mexico's relationship with the United states in the 19th century? How did the loss of half of its territory to the US Sort of shape Mexican identity and its sense of destiny and also its prosperity?

Paul Gillingham (20:44)

So, as you say, half of what was formerly Mexico, which stretched from Oregon in this giant triangle to Texas and then down to Guatemala, it is a territory which is directly inherited from the colonial period. It is twice the size of modern Mexico. And Mexican nationalists quickly coined the phrase we lost half the national territory. This isn't really true for the simple reason that no one really owns the territory much above Southern California. It's indigenous peoples. And so it wasn't so much what was already there as what would be there that Mexico lost. And the Main 1 is eight days after Mexico signs this disastrous treaty, giving up half of their former territory, the San Francisco gold rush happens. And within two years, the gold production from San Francisco would have paid off the entire Mexican national debt and subsequently would have provided the seed capital to do precisely what the US did, which is again, draw people north, found settlements, fund industrialization. Mexico had all these plans for national banks, development banks for industrialization which never happened because the capital wasn't there. And you can see this alternative reality, it takes a bit of imagination, but there was this vast bonanza out there which eight days after they signed away that territory is discovered. So you've got national identity, you've got a loss of territory, you've got really a loss of the future.

Interviewer Anna (22:28)

So it's a real sliding doors moment. Why did the Mexicans agree to sign away that territory? What was their motivations for doing that?

Paul Gillingham (22:35)

At that point, they just lost their Mexican American War, which was formally over Texas, but was really about the US Expanding across the continent. And when they signed that treaty, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the US had occupied all of the north and center, and Mexico City and the rest of the country was defenseless in at least terms of having a national government that could push back. Now, the reason the Americans don't go further is because there's an awful lot of mountains in Mexico. And like anywhere else in the world, people who live in mountains tend to be good at war and don't like other people treading on their turf. And already the Americans have found out that they are going to win a short war because they're richer. They have a navy which can cut off gun imports, it can cut off any sort of trade. They've got lighter and better cannon, so they can actually outmaneuver the Mexican armies. But they know very well they should not be staying there. And so Mexico has to sign it off because their national state is destroyed. The US signs it off because the further sighted people realize they've got about as much as they'll ever get. One of the poignant stories is the US negotiator is racked in a wonderful sort of Protestant way, is racked by guilt at what he's doing, and actually tries to sabotage the peace deal he's negotiating so that Mexico gets More what's.

Interviewer Anna (24:12)

Part of your motivation for writing this book? To kind of challenge prevailing views of Mexican history. That history is often seen through the lens of violence, the tragedy of race, and more recently, drug wars. But as you point out in the book, this is also a country that has witnessed a raft of progressive social policies, one in which indigenous peoples enjoyed rights unthinkable in the US and where emancipation arrived earlier than it did in America. Were you keen to project get this view of Mexico when you're writing the book?

Paul Gillingham (24:45)

Absolutely. And rather than take the current disastrous drug wars, the immigration crises, and sort of project back an echoing centuries of negative views of both people inside and outside Mexico, I prefer to see the last 20 years as very much a rupture. This is not a culmination of historical patterns in any way. This is basic economic driven civil war over drugs, previous patterns. As you point out, Mexican politics is progressive to an exceptional extent. More Mexicans can vote in the early 19th century than Americans or than British people. Why? Well, because they've enfranchised black people. And you get from the beginning, the Spanish approach to race is far more tolerant and sophisticated and closer to ours, our own, than that of sort of Anglo populations. And so there's this acceptance that in this extraordinary hybrid society, it's not just inevitable that you have people traveling across racial boundaries, but it's actually good and right. Not always, as with any history, you can't get too misty eyed about any of it. The Spanish, some of them would have actually liked to have a racially ordered society, but it was never going to happen. And at large chunks of it, they didn't see why it should really. And so you get people called mestizos who are the children of Spanish and indigenous parents. We have this extraordinary array of different new combinations of cultures and they are tolerated in relative terms from the very beginning. And so when you get independence, you already have the roots of what we would call quite progressive attitudes to race, to democracy, this is one of the earliest democracies in the world and it doesn't work very well. It doesn't work because of the poverty of the state, the sheer difficulty of ruling a huge territory with an awful lot of mountains in it and dry bits and rainforest. But the aspiration is there. And this is what gives you the first black president in the Americas in 1829. It's what gives you the only indigenous president in the Americas, well, in North America in 1856. And it gives us the first woman president in North America in 2024. And this grows out of traditions of both progressive philosophy, but also local communities who believe very strongly in representation. They believe they should be able to choose their own leaders. And it doesn't always work that way. And there's a tension between a national power, which is quite often quite authoritarian, and then this powerful, centuries old belief that people should elect their own representatives.

Interviewer Anna (28:01)

Let's talk about Porfirio Diaz. He ruled Mexico for almost 40 years from the 1870s. And this was a period, I guess, that brought both modernization and repression. How did this period shape Mexico as it entered the 20th century?

Paul Gillingham (28:21)

Well, Porfirio Dias, as you say, is a dictator for 30 years and is in the right time and the right place. He is a brilliantly gifted general, he's a brilliantly gifted politician, and he rules a country with vast natural resources just as the third great globalization happens. And so you have in the 1880s through till 1914, the sort of acceleration that in our lifetimes we saw in the 90s and noughts, this boom in global trade. And Diaz is there, next door to the world's fastest growing economy, controlling the materials that they need. An obvious one is copper. You need electrical wiring, suddenly Mexico has it. You need oil. Suddenly, beginning of the 20th century, this transition into oil, Mexico has it. And the list goes on and on and on. If your great granny left your family a mahogany dining table, well, that's Mexican, right? And so it goes from consumer goods through to heavy industry. And Diaz has the wit, first of all, to realize that Mexico has a very fine line to tread vis a vis the United States in allowing US investment in selling things to the US and he's brilliantly successful at trying to balance that. And so the Brits get the oil and the railway building, the Americans get the mines, the French finance. And on the basis of that, Diaz manages to resolve the century long problem of there's no credit for expansion. Diaz is obsessed with repairing this idea of Mexico as being unreliable. And so you've got this huge propaganda initiative to push Mexico's wealth, but also the sophistication with which it's being managed. And over and over again, he'll say, and look, we've got bond rates down to 4.5%. And Diaz's tragedy is he doesn't die early enough. When you take over Britain, Spencer, and rule as a successful dictator, make sure you die while you're ahead of the game and before you become a little bit too old and out of touch with things on the street.

Interviewer Anna (30:44)

I'll bear that in mind when I launch my coup next week.

Paul Gillingham (30:48)

Excellent.

Interviewer Anna (30:49)

And one more heavy hitter I want to mention from your book is Francisco Villa, who's a key figure in the Mexican revolution of the second decade of the 20th century. Now, he's a pretty controversial figure, isn't he? I mean, what's your take on him?

Paul Gillingham (31:04)

Villa is absolutely fascinating in, among other things, how divisive he is. And he's divisive at the time, politically. Why? Because he articulates the aspirations of an awful lot of people in the north of Mexico who have been disenfranchised. And Villa has the real great Spanish phrase don de gente, which is like charisma, the gift of getting people to like you. And so he's very media savvy, and he projects what is his true character, which is hard riding, straight talking, supporting the everyman against the corrupt wealthy from the big city. And he sort of puts his money where his mouth is. He is a brilliant guerrilla leader, but he also turns into a very handy leader of conventional armies, and he redistributes wealth. And there's this entire very positive side of Villa. And then there's the Villa, who is popularly described as being sort of borderline sociopathic. This extremely sort of performative violence, the hanging or shooting of hundreds of people at a go for TV cameras, well, newsreel cameras. The person who ends up, as his military fortunes fade, actually terrorizing the communities who backed him. And so there's both the reality of this man, who is either dangerous or inspirational, depending in part on what clothes you wear, how you speak and where you come from, and how people after his death saw him. And like with so many historical figures, how you see him depends where you are culturally, politically, etc. I just finish by saying you really get this summed up in the Mexico City subway system, where you've got a line where all the station names are after the great and good. The great rebels. No? Then they come to where you should have Francisco Villa, he should be next to the other great popular rebel, Emilio Zapata. And clearly people sort of cleared their throat and thought, hmm, and they ended up naming that station after his troops, the Northern Division.

Interviewer Anna (33:17)

What surprised you most during your research for this book? How did it change your understanding of Mexico's history?

Paul Gillingham (33:27)

What amazed me, I suppose, was the progressive nature of the Spanish Empire. And I think in part because of my initial ignorance, I was trained as a modernist, but in part because historians for the last 20 years keep bringing up a completely different version of history from what used to be called the Black Legend, the Leanda Negra, of sort of fanatical, ruthless, borderline, genocidal Spanish rule, to one where indigenous peoples were very carefully protected, they had their own court systems, their property rights were respected. To where you had against the idea that the empire was extraordinarily stratified in a sort of authoritarian way by race. You had key people in Mexican history coming from all races. And I think it was when I started thinking, hold on, this isn't just the center of the global economy, but this is in some ways one of the centers of progressive thought. I didn't see that coming.

Interviewer Anna (34:40)

So where do you think these more traditional negative portrayals of the Spanish Empire have come from?

Paul Gillingham (34:46)

You've got rivalry with the British and the Dutch, which only really takes off in the 17th century. They're upstart empires at that stage. Spain is the equivalent of the US in terms of its power projection. Protestant propaganda has to take the horror stories which exist and then magnify them and then add this very Protestant sort of moral judgment that these are sort of feckless, ruthless, cruel, very different people, very European sort of fratricidal punch up, which is being played out on a global scale. And of course the Americans, as the United States inherits this idea and then applies it to the next two centuries of independent Mexico. It's divorced from historical reality, but it's a really good story.

Interviewer Anna (35:43)

Finally, Paul, how do Mexicans themselves look back at their history today? Do you find it's largely with a sense of pride?

Paul Gillingham (35:53)

It's very much mixed emotions. And on one hand you do have pride in some of the historical phenomena that I'm talking about. On the other hand, the sort of black legend of the Spanish colony told for nationalist reasons has really stuck. There's this sense which again is very, in some ways imported from outside of Mexican second class global citizens, which doesn't reflect reality whatsoever. It's a sort of cultural product. So you've got that on one side and then on the other side, you've got a more historically accurate appreciation of the sort of phenomena I'm talking about. I wrote a different book than I would for a Mexican audience. For a Mexican audience, I would have gone further into the historical causes of angst, despair. I wrote this book mainly for a British and American audience. And I think that if you had to go all the way back, the story I've written is closer to the way I believe things actually were. I believe that Mexico has suffered from being a sort of exotic tourist locale. You know, look at these indigenous peoples with their weaving. Isn't this fascinating? Aren't they different and what. Yes, they very much are. But Mexico also shares an awful lot of some of the more progressive aspects of the countries whom we think of as sort of democracies par excellence.

Podcast Host Spencer Mizzen (37:39)

That was Paul Gillingham speaking to Spencer Mizzen. Paul is professor of Latin American history at Northwestern University, and his new book, A History, chronicles a nation's evolution across five centuries.

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