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Paul Gillingham, "Mexico: A 500-Year History" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2025)
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Announcer
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Stephen Houseman
Hello and welcome back to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Stephen Houseman. To hear more interviews like this one, subscribe to my channel, New Books in the American West. For today's episode, I'm speaking with Paul Gillingham. Dr. Gillingham is a professor of history at Northwestern University, and today we're going to be discussing his newest book, Mexico A 500 Year History, which came out with the Atlantic Monthly Press pretty recently, just last year, in 2025. Welcome to the New Books Network, Paul, good to have you here today.
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Paul Gillingham
Thanks very much, Steve. Good to be back.
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Stephen Houseman
Let's start, as we always do on the show, by just hearing a little bit about who you are as a scholar and as a writer and as a person. So I'm curious about what is your background, and in particular, I'd love to hear how you got interested in history in the first place. Right.
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Paul Gillingham
Well, starting in no particular order, I got interested in history in part because of my grandfather who had done history at Oxford and was a really enthusiastic amateur historian. And so from early on, I had the idea that, you know, history was not just an extension of literature, but also intrinsically fascinating. And I was fortunate. I could study it at university in Britain. And while I was there, I discovered that I really want to specialize in the history of Mexico. And there are a couple of reasons for that. In some ways, you change the story depending on who you're talking to and what stage of the evening it is. But one of them was that my mother went around Mexico in the early 60s, and so that was probably the coolest thing she ever did. And I thought, okay, that's aspirational. Wouldn't mind doing something like that. And then secondly, at Oxford, I was lucky. I met a historian called Alan Knight, who was the smartest but also the funniest historian I had met to date and remains much the same. And I could take history with him for one semester and nobody but him looking at the Mexican Revolution. And this absolutely fascinated me. And I was very lucky. Although this sounds strange because at the end of that, I was supposed to do my exams and go off into the the world and do whatever. And I had an epileptic fit and burnt my back very badly, which meant that I had to postpone exams. And my college said to me, look, we're worried you might just sort of wander off and drop out. And I said, they said, look, we'll give you money to go to Mexico and write an undergraduate honors thesis just to make sure to which the only reply I can come up with is, well, thank you very much. And so I went, did an undergraduate honors thesis on the strange story of a rancher who forged the grave of the last Aztec emperor, as one does know, to get ahead in life, and was six months in Mexico researching that. And then that went on rather a long time later to be my first book.
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Stephen Houseman
That's a wonderful story. So let me just to be clear, was that the first time you had been to Mexico, was that six month stint to do your undergraduate research?
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Paul Gillingham
No, I'd been once before in 1994, which was of course a very interesting year in Mexico. This extraordinarily successful single party state began falling to pieces at extraordinary speed. And the most obvious manifestation of that was an indigenous rebellion in the south in Chiapas, the Zapatista rebellion. And I thought that that was absolutely gripping, as many people on the left did at the time. And so I went there and to Chiapas for a few weeks and that was the first time I was ever in Mexico.
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Stephen Houseman
So I'm curious also, what brought you to the topic of this book? I guess what I'm asking is what sort of was the impetus for writing, you know, a, you know, I have it on my desk here, a rather large 700 page kind of synthetic history of Mexico itself.
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Paul Gillingham
Well, that's an extremely good question because it's a profoundly sort of hubristic endeavor. No, And I think that's why there wasn't any equivalent beforehand. But history always based to some extent the sort of pressures of the moment. The zeitgeist as this was 2017 when I decided to do this, and of course a presidential candidate had called Mexicans, quote, criminals, rapists and murderers. And I thought that was extremely obnoxious. And I'd quite like to write a book about all the extraordinary facets of an extraordinary country as a sort of tacit rebuttal to that. I realized that there was no way that it was ever going to get read by the man in question. But that was really the, that was the inspiration in some ways.
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Stephen Houseman
And along those same lines, whenever I talk to an author of a sweeping kind of synthetic work such as this, I'm a historian that's still working on my little dinky, very niche first book right now. And so I'm very fascinated by books like this that cover such a wide chronological span of time and cover so much. How do you even do this? I always like to ask a little bit about what the process is like when approaching a large topic with A broad chronology like. Like this. Where does someone even begin?
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Paul Gillingham
That's a superb question. Should start off by wishing you the very best of luck with the appalling experience of writing a book. No, well, having thought I would like to write this, I sort of talked myself into feeling positive about it by saying, look, from your first book you're good on Mexican history up until about 1530, and then from your PhD and subsequent work, you're good from about 1880 onwards. So in reality, all you need to do is fill in sort of 250 years in between and you'll be fine. And so with that, I started off by obviously drawing up a reading list of everything I didn't know about the colony, which was more or less everything. And it was an absolute delight because I quickly realized that the colonial literature in Spanish and in English was spectacularly good. As you'll probably know, it's a delight to move outside your field. It's sort of like intellectual tourism. It's like starting all over again. And that's profoundly exciting. And for the first two years, I had the excuse to myself, I was supposed to hand this book in, by the way, in 2021, which was insanity. The first two years it was really about learning the colony and the approach the book was always going to be. Take the best of the Spanish language and English language literature, and then combine that with some deep dives in archives or in printed primary sources to really explore what I thought were the key stories. And the entire structure of the book is a baselat. So you'll have one chapter which is broadly narrative, and then two chapters where I choose what I think are the two most important phenomena for the given period and then explore those. And to do that I had to get into primary sources. And that was, as it always is, an absolute delight. I mean, for the viceroyalty, nearly three centuries of Spanish rule, you have this absolute jewel of baroque culture, but this extraordinary first great melting pot. And all this is the first time in the world's history that you've got Asians, West Africans, Europeans and American indigenous people all bumping up against each other. And this is extraordinary, extraordinarily good. And the writing around it, not just the secondary sources, but what Spanish Mexican writers left behind, is fantastic. And so that's how I started. And it was deeply enjoyable. It was obsessive. As you know, all historians know these things are of necessary obsessive. So I go to the beach and read chronicles from 16th century and 17th century Mexico City, convincing myself, you know, this is Combining business and pleasure. And then from that started writing because time was ticking and enjoyed it hugely. And then came to independence and looked at the clock and realized I was really supposed to have hand the book in. And at that stage things got slightly hair raising and were for the next three years. I found the 19th century at the beginning baffling, at the end slightly less baffling, but still not entirely clear to me. And then of course, as you'll know, it's actually very difficult to talk simply about your own specialization. And so once I hit 1880 and I was supposed to know a bit more about what was going on from my previous work, I was looking at the plethora of possible stories to tell, what the really big themes as opposed to minutia were. And the end of the book, those last hundred years, it just got progressively more and more difficult. And so in the end it was this experience where you say, okay, I will now never ever write another book. But as you also know, that happens. And then another interesting idea, gripping idea comes along. You're starting, okay, well, maybe I will after all. So it was, it took far longer than it was supposed to. Twice as long as. As time went on, the pressure of time grew greater and the sort of intellectual tourism and discovery and delight of looking at the first 300 years were sort of in the past, literally. And it was a strange mixture of trying to give this overall, yet deeply partial explanation of Mexico's history with the numerous rabbit holes which opened up. And I think that one of the charms but dangers of being historian is precisely rabbit holes. You come across something and you wander off from where you thought you were going in archive X or book. Yes. And it just gets more and more interesting. And you think, okay, a certain amount of wandering, I think is really good for any historian, but the clock is ticking and you should sooner or later stop the wandering and go back towards the highway.
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Stephen Houseman
Well, let's get into the story that you tell in this book. And I gotta say, Paul, we have something of an unenviable task here today because, you know, New Books Network interviews, they tend to run about an hour or so. And there's a lot of history in this book for us to cover here in just about an hour. So obviously we're going to be leaving things out and anyone listening to this should know that there's a lot of history packed into this book. So this is not even the tip of the tip of the iceberg that we're going to be touching here. So with all that in mind, let's start at what you in the book point to as the beginning of the history of Mexico as a country and as a people, which is the early 16th century, specifically 1511. Tell us the significance of that year, that date in particular, and maybe kind of expand outwards from there and tell us a bit about Mexico's beginnings.
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Paul Gillingham
Right. Well, it's in some ways very rude to start the history of Mexico in 1511 with first contact with Europeans, because it can be taken as sort of glossing over several thousand years of extremely sophisticated urban cultures. The reason I chose 1511 and first contact is that I think Mexico is absolutely defined as a modern country by the hybridity of this first global encounter between people from all corners of the world, brackets except Australia, because no one knew it existed at the time. And when you look at it that way, 1511 is the starting point because it's the first contact. And so first contact, which starts when a small caravel traveling between the Caribbean islands gets blown off course and shipwrecked on a reef called Scorpion Reef, about 70 miles northwest of Cozumel. And the survivors, 17 of them, get into a small boat. They've got very little water and food. They're pushed rather than moved deliberately by winds and currents to the coast of Yucatan. By the time they get there, there's very few left. The kumaya of Chetumal capture them, sacrifice a couple, and the only people left from this shipwreck are two individuals, a sailor called Gonzalo Guerrero and a priest called Jerolymo Aguilar. They're both taken into Maya society, and their stories diverge radically because Aguilar never assimilates. He becomes a slave. He learned very primitive Maya. He spends his days, at least so he says, reading a prayer book. And how he kept that, I'm not sure. So I think that could be one of the many myths that people make up subsequently. So Aguilar is a slave. Guerrero, on the other hand, very much integrates into Maya society. He marries the cacique, the chieftain's daughter, and rise in the ranks to become the war leader of the people of Chetumal. And he encourages them for the rest of his life, 20 years, to fight against the Europeans, principally the Spanish, saying that if they take a foothold here, you are finished. And so it's sort of a Kevin Costner Dances With Wolves moment. It's extremely moving. And he has three children with this Maya bride, and as they are intrinsically hybrid, the offspring of a Maya noblewoman and a fairly poor Spanish sailor, If you see Mexico as being defined by its hybridity, these people you can see really as the first Mexicans.
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Stephen Houseman
So what happens next in this story then? How does the place that becomes Mexico, how is it conquered by the Spanish? And I mean, maybe even a better question to ask is, you know, is a totalizing word like conquered? Is that even really an accurate way for describing the history of this place in the 16th and 17th centuries?
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Paul Gillingham
Very good question. Simple answer. No, it's not. What happens next is the better known story of the arrival of a Spanish expedition with hernan Cortes in 1519. And this progression from the coast up to the central plateau, which ends in 1521 with the capture of the amount the Aztec, they're called Mexica. They called themselves the Mexica capital, Tenochtitlan, which in the future is going to be Mexico City. As the traditional story is very much of heroic individualism. Speaking in terms of the American west, this won't be the first time that the story of rugged individualism is seen as being very much more than an American story. And rather like rugged individualism in the American story, the rugged individualism of Cortes is actually largely mythical because it's not his band of a few hundred Spaniards who actually win the war for Tenortitlan. It's hundreds of thousands of indigenous warriors. And the reason that they actually join up with Cortes is a purely anti imperial campaign. They see the Spanish as being sort of along the lines of useful mercenaries. And so what used to be called the conquest is actually, it's an indigenous civil war. And in its outcome, sure, the Spanish have taken over with their key allies, the Tlaxcalans, Tenochtitlan, Mexico City. But while they send out expeditions in all directions, looking for new cities to conquer, looking for above all the gold, that obsesses them, they're really incapable of holding down, settling and holding down large swathes of the country. And so for the next 150 years, for most people in what's now modern Mexico, very little changes. And you can't really talk about the Spanish phrase is an inconclusive conquest, conquista inconclusiva. And that's accurate for centuries. And you get some holdouts like the people of the state of Nayarid, who are still an independent kingdom towards the end of Spanish rule in the late 18th century.
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Stephen Houseman
So obviously this is going to be too big a question to really summarize in any real way. But just to kind of keep the story moving forward a bit, how might one characterize Mexico under Spanish rule? What is this place like in terms of culture and in terms of politics and maybe to push things to be a little bit more specific, what are some of the imperial policies or actions that are eventually going to lead to Mexican independence in the early 19th century?
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Paul Gillingham
Okay, grief, now that is a long question. Let's set aside a couple of hours and catch up with this afterwards. So we've got two questions there, and one is the sort of roots of independence, and the other is how on earth do the Spanish manage to rule for nearly three centuries? And the key is that they are very hands off. And this is in part a chosen policy and in part imposed upon them by the difficulty of ruling a vast country from 6,000 miles away in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. And so when Spanish rule is successful, it focuses with laser like precision on two things. One is the extraction of silver, and the other is just keeping the lid on and preserving basic peace. How? Basically by leaving people alone. And so it's actually Mexican autonomy, which is a key characteristic of Spanish rule, and they don't even use the term colony. This is reflected officially by the fact that Mexico's a viceroyalty. That puts it institutionally on a key with other Spanish holdings in Europe, like Aragon, like southern Italy. What it means is that it's far more of a partner than a sort of subject territory. And it gets to the stage where there's actually, shortly before independence in 1783, the Conde Deranda, or Spanish. Yeah, how would you put it? The colonial minister equivalent says, look, why don't we make Mexico a semi autonomous kingdom run by a Bourbon prince? In that you get summed up the really hands off nature of Spanish rule. And this takes us to how did it all end then? And the classic version says that you get a lurch towards sort of enlightened despotism fashionable in the 18th century, that the Spanish take up and that manages to alienate and provoke independence. And you do get a more muscular state in the second half of the 18th century. And it does interfere more with some of the basic structures of Mexican life. They crank up taxes, finally they launch an assault on the Catholic Church. Neither of these are sort of guaranteed to generate popularity. And so the old story was the independence. The war, which starts in 1810, is a natural consequence of increasingly authoritarian rule. The difficulty with that is that it doesn't really stack up causally. Why? Well, because one of the key moments in that story is supposed to be the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 under a particularly nasty piece of work, Jose Galvez, who is there as sort of is officially Vitador, visitor, sort of nebulous powers. Functionally, he's fairly dictatorial and he launches a nasty counterinsurgency to back up the expulsion of the Jesuits. And the Jesuits expelling them is difficult to overstate. What a blunder this is. Why? Well, because the Jesuits, first of all, they're central to education in Mexico, educating the elites, they're central to providing a sort of social safety net for the poor. They're completely embedded in the economy, they're some of the largest lenders. And then there's basic questions of faith. Jesuits are extremely effective at inculcating and maintaining the Catholic faith. And so evicting them summarily in 1767 is rightly seen as being disastrously wrong headed and going completely against the successful hands off approach of earlier generations. But to draw a line between what happens in 1767 and an independence war starting in 1810 is tenuous. This is a subsequent nationalist version. In fact, if you look at the late Bourbon period, it defines the Bourbon period because this French rooted dynasty takes over the Spanish Empire in the early 18th century. If you look at the details of the late Bourbon period, it's a far more ambiguous story. They're successful in controlling Mexico, in extracting far more taxes, they have relatively, I was going to say relatively little violence to deal with. That's a slight overstatement. That is an increase in regional small rebellions. But there is nothing that would threaten ever to really evict them and end the Spanish vice regal rule. And one incident really sums up how successful the Bourbons are all the way till the end. And it is the global vaccination program that the Spanish empire launches in 1804, and which is the subject of a terrific monograph by my colleague Paul Ramirez. I'm not promoting it though, because it's a plug for a colleague, but rather because this really changed the way I saw the end of the Spanish Empire. Because if you take the old story of sort of inevitable collapse, it is completely undermined by the success of this first global vaccination campaign against smallpox. What the bourbons do in 1804 is they fund this expedition which is successful in vaccinating people across Mexico against smallpox and reduce its incidents hugely. And it's conducted in a very hegemonic way in that they involve the Church, the Church with whom they're supposed to be at loggerheads. They bring them together in this campaign, they involve local leaders. It is a real epitome of clever joined up policy making. And we've lived in our own times where we're still living through and the realization that persuading human beings to accept vaccination is actually rather difficult. The Bourbons pull it off between 1804 and 1805. And so clearly they're not wholly delegitimized. Clearly they still have quite a lot of support. And the question that is obvious there was, well, how on earth then do you explain independence? And you explain it very simply that you can't have an empire without an imperial center. And the Napoleonic wars remove that imperial center. They start off by basically embargoing trade. The silver ships cease to go, basic communications break down. Finally they find out that Napoleon has taken over Spain, captured King Ferdinand, replaced him with his own brother, and suddenly the foundation of Spanish imperial rule is no longer there. And so what you're looking at is a power vacuum into which various actors move. And the most salient of them, of course, is going to be Miguel Hidalgo, the priest who starts the independence wars. He's filling a power vacuum. He's not the epitome of sort of 60 years of pent up Griev. And so in some ways you could also almost say that independence, it's not contingent, but it's very much contingent upon European events, not American events.
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- [27:08]
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- [27:17]
Paul Gillingham
Let's do this.
- [27:18]
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- [27:22]
Paul Gillingham
Hey, you weren't listening to me.
- [27:24]
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- [27:28]
Paul Gillingham
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- [27:32]
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Stephen Houseman
The years after the mid 19th century, it's a pretty tumultuous time for, for this new nation, for, for Mexico. So what do the 20 years after independence look like? And after the war with the United states in the 1840s, what are the, the kind of social and political fallout from that conflict in particular?
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Paul Gillingham
Well, the 20 years after independence are such a complex and mixed story because again, the Aspects which have been traditionally emphasized are extreme political instability, bankruptcy, and a disintegrating imperial, post colonial, if you want state. And yes, Mexico is bankrupt. The economy, one of the world's greatest before 1810, is never rebuilt, and constitutions and presidents come and go with shocking frequency. There's two buts there. The first but is this coexists with, and in part correlates with this extraordinary sort of democratic surge which comes after 1821, in which at the local level you get villages, small towns seizing the opportunity to form their own municipios, so their own autonomous political units. It's rather like the classic image of New England times, these fiercely democratic, firstly, autonomous societies. And Mexicans grab those chances. And there is an explosion of formation of municipios in the 1810s and 20s. And these are run by elected governments. These are really profoundly democratic. The procedures, the elections, they're extremely competitive. And if you are looking at it from a 20th century point of view, rough and ready. But this is where you step back, as I try and do over and over and over again in the book, and say, well, what was going on elsewhere at the time? And of course in the state's elections are, as your listeners will know probably in more detail than me, elections are bloody rigged. In the UK, elections are only actually relevant for about 80% of the country. The other 20% are corruptly just handed out as patronage. And so the fact that in Mexico you get violent, rough and ready, flawed elections doesn't stop them from being profoundly representative contests. And so this is one side taking the lens back from the national to the regional and local level. You can see everything after 1821 as being this real explosion of participation, participatory government. That's 1, 2. Though, moving back up to the national level, there are so many reasons to tell this as a story of a series of catastrophes. But again, in context, if you look at the other great postcolonial super states, they all fragment very quickly. And I'm thinking specifically about obviously great Colombia, United Provinces of Rio Plata, and these comparable postcolonial superstates which fall to peace in short order and Mexico doesn't. And even comparing it to, say, British India over a century later, there isn't that extremely violent incision. As soon as you get independence, Mexico, despite everything, actually endures. And so this is why that particular junk is called freedom and devastation. You have an economy which will never recover. You have extraordinary national level instability, but at the same time you have these clear aspirations to a federal republic. The First Mexican republic is modeled on that of the US with one key exception, which is that black and indigenous people are also full citizens who can also vote. And in fact, in 1829, Mexicans elect the first black president in the Americas. All of this gives you a far more realistic and complicated story than just focusing on governments rising and falling with extraordinary frequency, with an economy that never recovers and with a lack of access to international credit. Because this is seen as being what we would call a failed state. When it's endurance and the level of representative politics that I have when you think, well, actually this really is not against all odds, not a failed state. The other characteristic though is that Mexico is very much caught between empires from the 1810s through until the late 1860s. And so you have a country which economically never recovers, which is under pressure from predatory British, French, Spanish and of course American empires. This is rather depressing. But again, we come down to the surprise that Mexico does endure at this point. People say, well, actually does it? Because it loses half its territory to the United States in 1848 after Mexican American War. That half the territory, which giant triangle stretches from Oregon to Texas to California, nearly a million square miles, commemorated in Mexican nationalist thought as half the national territory. Well, it was half the future territory, but at the time, really it was a no man's land and if it was owned by anybody, it was the indigenous societies of, of the plains and of California and further northwards. No one really in a meaningful way had extended Spanish and subsequently Mexican rule up there. But if 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo doesn't really alter what's already there, except for a few hundred thousand Mexican subjects who are north of what's going to be the new border, who are largely dispossessed and driven out. What really counts though in 1848 is that this peace treaty is signed February 2, 1848. And this is nine days after the discovery of gold just outside San Francisco. And so this is where you can see a counterfactual, where were that billed Mexican, it would have acted as it did for the early United States, which does two things. First of all, it's this magnet drawing hundreds of thousands, later millions across the country and sort of accelerating jump starting Even settlement, that's 1 and 2. It would have paid off the entire Mexican national debt within two years and given Mexico the funds it would have needed to follow the plans that were there for industrialization, for entry from position of power into a global economy. And so with that treaty that quote, half the national territory it's not so much a sort of Mexican past or present which is being lost, but is very much a Mexican future.
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Stephen Houseman
Yeah, As I teach more and more in my classes, I teach focus in as years go on and I teach it more and I do more reading and everything. 1848 feels like such a hinge point for really the entire Western hemisphere. And you know, this moment that the historian Eliot west calls the great coincidence of these two events, the treaty and the discovery of gold in California, happening in the quick succession, it really does feel like this kind of this sliding doors moment in Mexican and American history.
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Paul Gillingham
Oh, absolutely. In part because one of the main obstacles to Mexican development from the mid-1820s to the 1880s is a lack of sovereign credit. Mexico needed credit to rebuild above all the silver industry that had placed it at the center of the world's economy. Once a mine is flooded or mine works destroyed, rebuilding them is profoundly capital intensive. But Mexico, as with the other Latin American republics, is actually quite successful in accessing credit for the first few years after independence. But you then get the stock market crash which begins in London, which is down mainly to British financier's mixture of incompetence and crookedness. And this means that all of Latin America defaults very much against their will. Mexico towards the end, is actually volunteering to service Colombia's debt as well as its own, and it fails. And so the default, which starts with Barclays in London, spreads to the Latin American republics and Mexico and keeps them out of the sovereign credit market for three generations.
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Stephen Houseman
Part four of this book, which covers the late 19th century into the kind of first couple decades of the 20th century, you give it the title Hedonism and Revolution, which makes it sound like a pretty, let's just say interesting time, if nothing else. And I'm curious why you chose these two themes of hedonism and revolution. What are some particularly salient and illustrative examples of these themes in this period in Mexican history?
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Paul Gillingham
One of my friends said, are you sure you're not writing about the 1960s? I said, no, no. This is very much sort of 1880 to 1910, this period where Mexico re enters and the international debt market where is stable and draws large amounts of foreign investment. This is where you get this sudden explosion of Western consumer capitalism. And basically it's fun to be middle class Mexican at this time. Give examples in what the Mexico City calls. In the provinces outside Mexico City, every major town is getting an opera house or a theater or both, and trams and electrical lighting, which changes nightlife Forever. There are hobbies, sports. This is where Mexican baseball becomes really popular. Enthusiasm. And above all though, you go to Mexico City. And Mexico City is just an extraordinarily fun place to be at this period. As long as you're not poor. And fun in what way? Well, roller skating becomes a huge trend, incredibly fashionable to the extent where it's first of all promoted by the state as being jolly healthy and the rest. And then it becomes where roller skates are actually endangered pedestrians. So the Mexico City police chief bans roller skating on pavements. You've got the bicycle craze suddenly, the freedom for both men and women. And this is seen also as being fairly racy, that, you know, men and women can paddle off together. Who knows where to do, who knows what that explodes. Then you have outdoor sports, etc. You have concerts. And I think the really surprising thing for non specialists is to say the epitome of this, the modern department store. Because in 1891, a department store called El Palacio de Hiero opened in Mexico City. It still exists today. It's five stories. It's Palacio de Hiero because it's made of steel. It's got escalators inside, it's got consumer goods from most of the known world. The display windows are electrically lit and that people can browse at night. And the sort of people who don't really have the money to go inside can enjoy secondhand literal window shopping. And this is hedonism writ large. This is consumer capitalism really at its finest. The revolution piece is the flip side of that, that this is extremely unequal development. This is a good time to be middle class or above in cities. This is not such a good time to be middle class or below in cities. Worst of all in the countryside. And this is where you get an extraordinary concentration of the main resource, which is land in the hands of large landowners. Hacendados you get associate that the rise of local bossism, castiquismo, to actually enable this, a controversial process through violence to go ahead. You get not just dispossession, but as people are pushed away from land and into mass workers field hands, they lose sort of job security. And so a bad harvest will drive up the cost of food. And they no longer grow their own food, they have to buy it. They may be unable to do so. They may have to become migrant laborers, as many do. What happens then? They go from mountains to the plantations, sugar, tomatoes in the lowlands. And they get tropical fevers like malaria, yellow fever. They die young and there's A good reason that so many people from the revolutionary era are actually next door to orphans. They lose their parents, their fathers, very young, because rural life in this period under the dictator Porfirio Dias is increasingly untenable. And this is where you get the seeds of the peasant revolution. Like most revolutions, the Mexican one contains many. A large one is the peasant revolution epitomized by people like Emiliano Zapata. Then you've got the northern revolutions of more freewheeling entrepreneurial types, cowboys, bandits, muleteers, etc. Who suffer from this same political concentration of political and economic power. Stories from that, the one which all subsequent revolutionary historians will give you, and so I will too, is a village called Tomochi in the sierra of chihuahua, where in 1891 they launch a rebellion and are wiped out. The entire village, after six months of siege, is raised, burnt to the ground. It's biblical. Every man is shot. I think male survivors overall are something like 10 boys and two adolescents. And that is taken as being the absolute epitome, the revolutionary horror story now turning things on their head. That's in 1891, when the revolution is in 1910. And so you have to see that as what it was, which was a major exception to what were otherwise two decades until early 20th century of a successful balancing act in the countryside. But then in the end, you get people reacting to the aging Porfirian dictatorship the way the people of Domotic did to the young Porfirian dictatorship. And you get one of the very few historic demonstrations of a successful sort of Foucault revolution. This idea that all you need is a small committed band of revolutionaries up in the Sierra somewhere. This is Che Guevara's theory of revolution. And you can launch a sort of groundswell that's pretty much failed most places in the world, but it does work in Mexico. You get all these local revolts, they come together quite quickly, they aggregate into revolutionary armies which topple Porfiro Dias. And so this is why I call this hedonism and revolution. It is an extraordinary combination of extremes in terms of human experience.
- [45:20]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [45:42]
Paul Gillingham
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- [45:48]
Stephen Houseman
See full terms@mintmobile.com so from this point then, what is the road to us today in the early 21st century? How do we get from the post revolutionary era and the period of Cardenas and social revolution to today's Mexico? What are some of the themes and the trends and the policies that have characterized Mexican history since kind of the mid 20th century?
- [46:12]
Paul Gillingham
Okay, at this point I think I break into singing the Beatles. The Long and Winding Road. That is an extremely good and multipart question. The revolution is in reality really a bit like the conquest, a series of civil wars. But the armed revolution which lasts from 1910 to 1920 has a lasting century long legacy. And what is it? Well, first of all, written into the sort of political DNA of 20th century Mexico comes this necessity to talk, at least revolution. And this is codified in the 1917 Constitution, which for a year until the Bolsheviks produced their own, is the world's most progressive. What does it say? Well, it says there's common ownership of land, of subsoil resources, AKA minerals, oil. It says that women should have equal pay, maternity leave, there should be an eight hour working day, there should be workers comp equivalent. And this is extraordinary broad ranging. And it says land should be restored to the people who work it. That doesn't happen. Very little of that happens for 15 years. And Mexico stands out. It is one of the world's great revolutions by any definition. What's exceptionally about it is you get the overthrow of the old order, you get the revolutionary ideas, language, legislation, and then it's all made good after a really 15 year lag, as you say, with the assumption of Lazarus Carnas to The presidency in 1934 has a six year rule, as all others do, 1934-40. And this is when all these quasi dormant provisions of the constitution and of revolutionary political culture actually are expressed. How? Well, the largest one is a massive land reform. Land is taken from large owners as the constitution provided and redistributed amongst the people who work happens. The resulting communal ownership is called the ejidos. And there are two forms. One is where the workers who are called ejida parrios, get individual plots. They can cultivate broadly what they like. A lot of them choose the classic traditional peasant trifecta of corn, squash, beans. Or you get the form of a sort of industrial farming, whereby a plantation, a monoculture, be it sugar, is suddenly handed over formally to the people who work it. But in real sort of lived experience, what changes. They've got a central boss who tells them what to grow. They don't have choice. They turn up, they work in the fields and they get a slightly bit of shake in terms of their pay. And there's not so much difference there. But in principle, over half of Mexico's land is handed out in ajidos in these six years. And this land reform, which is the ultimate goal of any peasant revolution, is unprecedented. It's unequaled in mainland Americas. And the only real comparative is Cuba. Of course, as you get the land reform, which had been a key revolutionary go goal, you also then get major labor reform in that all these provisions for a really dignified and decent worker's life are realized. And so unions are given immense power by a provision whereby they can strike. And if they do not reach an agreement with their employers, then the government can step in. And when the government steps in, what to do, it imposes a pro worker settlement. And so the living standards of Mexico's workers at the same time go up steeply. Then there is the realization of the sort of social and cultural rhetoric of the revolution. This is supposed to be not just giving out land, but rewiring the way Mexicans conceive of themselves of what a good life is. It's supposed to be the replacement of the church by healthy outdoor sports. And quite often you can still see these concrete slab basketball courts across Mexico, which are supposed to draw people away from church services on Sunday. You get really impressive sort of micro development. Key examples are community cornmeal mills. This is really not abstruse at all. If you're a woman running a family who is used to getting up at 4am to start grinding corn to make the day's tortillas for the family of seven, eight or nine, a community corn mill takes away two hours of that labor. And so if there's a great interview, an anthropologist in the 70s, what did gardenism mean to you? And she says, well, extra two hours sleep in the morning, things like that, or community sewing machines, or anti alcohol campaigns which fail dismally. All of this is this attempt, what's called cultural cardenismo, to remake the New Mexican. And this is still a gendered society, the new Mexican man. And then last but not least, something which is also unprecedented in the Americas at the time, which is the expropriation of oil. And Mexico is one of the world's greatest producers. The oil companies are British and American. And they are told In 1938, in no answer, certain terms that their days in the sun literally are over, and that the oil industry is now Mexican owned. So this is the social revolution happening in those six years. It lags. And it also is radical enough to where not just centrist and right wing politicians, but Carnes himself realize that they have to install a more centrist pro business. If you want party. And this is where the classic chronology you have the revolution 1910 to 1940. And then you get this retrenchment from 1940 onwards, and you get the foundation of a sort of mixed economy with a healthy capitalist component. And you get the maturing of this extraordinary exceptional, using the technical term, one party state, run by this stage by the Partido revolutionario institutional, the PRI. And the PRI endures from 1946, when it's officially founded, until 2000. And when I say endures, I mean endures in the presidency. And for most of that period it has fairly unchecked control over national politics. The predecessor is quite extraordinary in that it is a one party state, which at the end of the day will rely on repression. There's this hidden repression in the countryside of armies. There's a garrison, one in every five municipios has a garrison. And out of sight, out of mind, soldiers maintain order. But a less spoken legacy of the revolution is the imperative which all elites share to avoid popular revolt. And this is a gene which is exceptionally powerful. And it means for most of the rest of the century you have an ongoing permanent bargaining procedure. That key concept of historians in the 90s, like Gil Joseph, it's been heavily qualified since then. But fundamentally that concept of negotiation is absolutely key in explaining 1940 to about 2000. Because just like colonial, or rather vice regal rulers, the rulers of the pre realized that just keeping the lid on through all, all peaceful means possible is the best policy. What does that translate into politically? It translates into two things and one is the sidestepping of the dictatorships, mostly military, which come to characterize just about every other country at one stage or another. In Latin America, Mexico never has a military dictatorship. It never really has a one person dictatorship. Whether it's a dictatorship or at all, is something which has been passed endlessly. What they have instead are punctual elections. And every six years a president leaves office peacefully, something else we might aspire to, and is replaced by a different and their own leader inside the prix. Further down, it gets more and more democratic in that local people, effectively, if they care, elect one of their own. They might have to do it by going through the sort of dance of being pristas belonging to the pri. If they are saddled with the equivalent of a carpetbagger or a local villain, they will quite often successfully rebel through very structured protest. It's more rioting and get that person removed. And so even though it doesn't look like representative politics, or at least like the epitome of democracy, actually what comes out the other end of this extraordinary political sausage factory is really quite reasonable and representative local government. And here Ben Smith has written a fantastic article where he got the sort of personnel files of a couple of hundred of mayors from the mid-60s. And basically they were the sort of middle class worthies who get elected in democracies all over the world to be mayors and town councillors, etc. They're ranchers, they're small businessmen, they're quite often them teachers, local functionaries, recognizable and generally competent and acceptable people, people. And it is representative. And so because of this, the pri, which looks like this monolithic one party state, is actually nothing like that. And joining the PRI so that you can influence local politics, it's the functional equivalent of registering for the vote in say, Britain or the us. And that and the promise that even if revolutionary sort of redistribution of wealth never quite got to you, it has got to someone somewhere else is powerful enough to where Mexico is extremely resilient through the sort of horrors of the 20th century and the Cold War. The final end game is when the flexibility, the social services, the revolutionary rhetoric all break down in the 1980s and 90s and you get this long goodbye from the single party state. And it's thanks to that sort of long goodbye that I actually ended up specializing in politics of this period, the origins and mature life of the pri. Because as it fell to pieces when I lived there in the 90s, no one could quite work out how such an enduring state, which for all its flaws was resilient and in many ways competent, was suddenly falling apart in a farcical fashion. And the entire sort of inspiration for my doctorate, which is very different from the first book, came from actually a hungover breakfast with a friend of mine at the Feria de Hua Mantla, really enjoyable Feria in Tlascala, a small state to the east of Mexico City. And he sat there sort of feeling fragile over breakfast, and in a desperate attempt to make conversation, he turns to me, his friend Giovanni Alloy, and says something along the lines of so Paul, what do you do? And I say, well, I'm a historian, I'm studying the bones of the last Aztec emperor. And he looks at me with this infinite weariness and says, they seriously pay you for that? And I was very proud, you know, sort of 20 something. And said, well, yes, actually they do. There's another pause. And with infinite weariness he said, pendejos, which Spanish speaking listeners will recognize. A rough translation would be, I think dickheads is quite a good one. And he went on and said, why are you wasting your time on this when you could be looking at how on earth this used to work? Because I don't understand it. I don't think anybody else does. Look at the chaos we're in, look at the incompetent scandals, etc. And I sat there and thought, you know, Giovanni, you're really onto something. And so that became the sort of twin mystery. One was how on earth it worked so long and in terms of results finally so well. And then how on earth was all of that lost and it fall to pieces? And so that's the final stage is this sort of mannerly retreat from a single party state which ends with the right wing opposition, the Partido Azion Nacional Christian Democrats, winning the presidential election in2020. And that's when my book is supposed to stop for a couple of reasons. One is that doing contemporary history, which is more recent than 30 years, for reasons of documents, people's discretion etc is very difficult. That was one. Two is this is a really clear story, which three set up one of the basic points of my book, which is I want to take the way people think of Mexico now, after nearly two decades of the war on drugs as being intrinsically violent, unstable, politically disastrous, and say, look, this isn't a sort of distillation of long term patterns of Mexican history. It's actually a profound rupture. And that's how the book ends, is with precisely not contemporary history, but a more sort of policy based look at the drugs war and the fact that Mexico actually since 2006, when it started, with a really tragic irony, it's a democracy which isn't really defined by elections, it's defined by the war on drugs.
- [62:19]
Stephen Houseman
So we've covered a lot of ground here today. And as we start to approach the end of our conversation, before I ask my kind of traditional last couple wrap up questions, I just want to ask one more slightly large question. This one from a more historiographical bent than a purely historical one. You know, this is. We're recording today's episode under the auspices of the American West Channel on the New Books Network, but we've mostly not been talking about US history at all. You know, I think there's just one mention of the United States, a couple here and there, especially talking about the 19th century. But you know, this is a book about Mexican history first and foremost. So I'm wondering then, Paul, what you think this book and the history that you tell in this book in Mexican history broadly, what do you think it has to say to a scholar like myself, someone who positions himself as a historian of the American West? What can the historian of the, of the US west learn about their own area of study by understanding the history of Mexico? Mexico?
- [63:17]
Paul Gillingham
I know that's a very good question. I think first of all, the general point which I try to make throughout the book, that yes, Mexico is idiosyncratic in the cliched phrase, but really the common themes of Mexican history with what used to be called Western history in terms of not just the US but Western Europe really has been underexplored. And so over and over again I try and go back to the common themes of Mexican, American and British history. And I think that can range from this real hunger for and realization of participatory politics, what political scientists called polyarchy, which I hope I've displayed, is far stronger in Mexico than generally believed through to a question of sort of imperial control policy, etc. So I think over and over again, bringing out these common themes and trying to really change the way people think. I mean, violence is the key point that I want to come back to. There is this preconception that Mexico is bizarrely, exceptionally long term violent. As a European, I find that really extraordinary to believe. When I look at the last seven centuries of European history, most of which are spent in really enthusiastic fratricide. And I find it extraordinary. Just before I signed up a contract for this book in 2015, the European Union sort of awarded itself the Nobel Peace Prize. And why? Well, because for 70 years they hadn't slaughtered each other. And this really stood out as being quite amazing once you take that context or in the US you look at the extraordinary violence of every progressive politician after 1945 being assassinated. Basically JFK, RFK, MLK, Harvey Milk. Again, Mexican violence doesn't seem too exceptional. And so not just for the west, but in general terms, I'd like to try and persuade people to recast their images of Mexican history in terms of the commonalities with their own metropoles, be they us, be they Britain, be they European. In secondly, I want to really look at the prehistory of the US West. I think that the hollowness of Spanish rule, the size of it, but the hollowness is something which really it was worth bringing out. And maybe I've. I think that the historiography of the US west is really quite aware of it. I think that. But from a Mexican side it can still be emphasized again, similarly, the sort of contingent nature of the gold rush I think is very important. I want a Mexican perspective of what it meant from a Mexican side. Looking at these phenomena which your fields have explored, why and how Mexicans make places like El Paso, San Antonio, from small towns into big cities. Why is it that LA County, Harris county and, and Chicago have this extraordinary concentration of Mexicans there? I wanted Mexico centered explanations and I think that many historians of the US West, I think here of my colleague Gerry Caliver, have done a good job exploring both sides and the links between Mexican and American development in the West. Something I think less brought out perhaps is the history of migration from a Mexican perspective. I'm thinking particularly of a recent book by Alberto Garcia, because the braceros, the government sponsored workers who between 1942 and 1964, 4.2 million of them travel from Mexico up to the US and really are the labor that fuels so much expansion of the American West. I'm not sure that the historiography of the west really captures the motivation and the means by which they come there and who braceros are back home, home. And it's an extraordinary mixture of the entrepreneurial, the aspirational people fight for these permits and the politically marginalized. And so you get a lot of people who are from the Catholic right, opposition from generally the center west of Mexico coming north to work. And it's at that point you should say, well, hold on, why is it that they should be taken as an intrinsically Democratic party constituency? These are social conservatives, entrepreneurs. These people really should actually be voting Republican. Why is it, what is it about the US west which takes them and helps turn them into a sort of collective constituency for the Democrats? So I think understanding slightly more about the Mexican view of the U.S. west and the forces which drive it is something I hope might be useful from this book.
- [69:26]
Stephen Houseman
And then finally, Paul, for my last question. I know that this is a rather large book that you just finished that's been out for less than a year at this point. So it's maybe a bit of a silly question, but I also know historians and think that probably it's not as silly as it might seem. I'm curious what you are working on now. Do you have a next project in mind or any projects that you see coming down the pike that you're interested in giving a quick plug to here.
- [69:51]
Paul Gillingham
Yes, thanks for asking. You're absolutely right. You finish a book and think, never again. And then a couple of months later you're thinking, well, actually maybe. And what I'm working on now is a prehistory of money laundering. We normally think of that and sort of global placement whitewashing of illicit money as being linked the 60s onwards, global financial system, drugs, et cetera. But in fact, money laundering really takes off as we would understand it in the 1920s. The prohibition era is obvious. And what's less obvious is the important role of stolen Mexican silver in this story. And so this all came from an archive in the Foreign Office in Britain and the Board of Trade. And I came across a letter from a director of the world's greatest bullion dealers, Johnson Matthey. And it was written to a friend of his in the Foreign Office and it said, I've just heard of a steamer which has arrived in the Channel Islands with it bringing £5 million worth of Mexican government silver. Unfortunately, without clear title, we'd been offered it at cents on the dollar. What do you think we should do? And the Foreign Office, the representation government says, well, I think that you might see if it really exists for starters. And they say, oh no, I've seen it. I've actually seen this silver load. Well, okay, my first piece of advice is don't tell the Mexican government, as I want to know is where that silver came from. And I think it came because of chronology. We can trace it to the 1929 Escobar Rebellion. I would like to reconstruct the trail by which it goes from a couple of blown up banks north to Juarez, then across. And we've got FBI files which traces as well to New York, then across the Atlantic. It would be wonderful to find out where it went after this. Johnson Matthey consideration of a bid, that might be a pipe dream, but what I know can be done is to trace how it gets to that point. And using that as a way to talk about the history of money laundering, I think would both, I would hope, educate and entertain. It would certainly be great fun to write.
- [72:35]
Stephen Houseman
I gotta say, when I asked that question, I did not expect your answer to be money laundering. That sounds like a great book.
- [72:41]
Paul Gillingham
Thank you. I'll let you know what it's like when I've got some of it actually on paper.
- [72:47]
Stephen Houseman
Dr. Paul Gillingham is a professor of history at Northwestern University. His new book is a 500 year history, which came out with the Atlantic Monthly press last year in 2025. Thank you so much for talking with me today, Paul.
- [73:00]
Paul Gillingham
Thanks, Steve. It was a genuine pleasure.