090505-FN10/ Caveat Against Reverse Romanticism

I do not mean to engage in reverse-romanticism. The Church often passed from benefactor to oppressor; and its historical role is at best equivocal. But so too the Liberals and it is necessary to undraw the false line in the sand the liberals have drawn. From approximately 1930 to 1980, the PRI did pursue an agrarian policy of parcelling out lands and protecting ejidal rights; but that was only after the Porfiriato all but pursued a policy of confiscating Indian lands. Moreover Juarez's land reforms -- which allowed the Indian to alienate his land ("freely sell" it) resulted only in the Indian being alienated from his land by mostly foreign investors.

Although a more complete discussion of the Church's role is beyond the present outline, it should be noted that it is somewhat inaccurate to speak of "the" Church as if it was a monolithic institution. It was not, anymore than criollos. Generally speaking the hierarchy was reactionary, whereas the lower orders were more sympthetic towards and protective of the communities they served. Hidalgo and Morelos, the instigators of the 1810 Revolution, were both liberals and priests, just as today a faction within the Church advocates Liberation Theology. In Mexico and Ibero-America there are no straight lines, and it is best to cultivate an enjoyment of paradox.

The point I wish to make here, is primarily "cultural". Modern Western man makes a distinction between "economy" and "religion". The Indian does not. Land, the production on it, the society around it and the gods under and above it, are all part of a seamless moral whole. The Church was attuned to this "indigenous" cosmology because it embodied a familiar wholistic approach present in feudalism and classical Greek "economic" thought. It was only liberalism that wrested economic activity from its moral moorings -- or perhaps more accurately said, turned economic activity into a moral good in itself.

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090505-FN7/Porfiriato

FN 7 As currently served up, Mexican history is a collection of murals and myths, chief among them the fable that the 1910 Revolution was, at bottom, a rising up of the peasantry and popular classes. In fact, at its core, the Revolution was a squabble between liberal factions, in which the peasantry and popular classes participated peripherally. It goes without saying, that upon the fall of the Second Empire, the conservatives did not retreat into historical monasticism but sought survival within the liberal regime. Conversely, Diaz, retreated de facto from strict and radical application of the Reform Laws. Most importantly, Diaz became a centralist -- and he did so because anyone who undesrtands anything about the true nature of Mexico understands that its governance has always demanded the finessed hand of a coopting and coordinating centralism. Thus, while geo-politically Mexico became tied to the United States, domestically, the Porfirian regime became moderately conservative. But centralization brought with it the old envy and hostility between capitolene innies and provincials outies, which once again played itself out in 1910. The difference between 1910 and 1810 was that this time both rural Indians and urban workers were able to play off liberal factions so as to wrest political and economic concessions. This was by no means an insignificant achievement, albeit not quite the brilliant uprisings of Orozco’s and Rivera’s murals.
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090505-FN2/TheSecretMeaningOfRoccoco

The Borbons, who had assumed the crown in the aftermath of the War of Spanish Succession, (1703) had from the outset pursued a policy of administrative and economic modernization pursuant to the latest most scientific, mercantalist French theories (1730). Under the Hapsburgs, the Church had actually been a parallel government and there were utopian elements in the Church that aspired to theocratize society. The Borbons saw the role of the Church as being that of a State prop and used the Inquisition to enforce political conformity and cleanse the Church of her more radical elements (1750-1767). In Mexico, Borbon mercantalism and anti-clericism were resisted by Hapsburgian legitimists. The dirth of neo-classical architecture in Mexico and the prevalence of the demodée Churrigueresque Baroque was one cultural manifestation of this resistance.

090505-FN1/Liberal Means

For the U.S. reader, it is necessary to note that the term "liberal" is here used in its correct historical and ideological signification. It does not refer to so-called "progressives" or pseudo social democrats or cognized group activists, although (as shall be seen) the liberal movement in Mexico did in fact end up propagandinzing a trashy and trite species of politcal correctness.
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090505-FN8/ Capturing the Deep

La Casa Blanca

Orozco was one of the PRI's cadre of Marxist muralists, and his communist brush was far more aggressive than Rivera's. But notwithstanding his atheism, he was not blind to what writers later called el Mexico profundo. This is not the Mexico of beyond imbecilic "indian validation" but refers to the indigenous as it came to be in dynamic contact with the iberian. Rivera's depiction of the Indian, lovely as it was, bordered on the cartoonish or sentimental, Orozco's "Casa Blanca" captured something deeper and truer.

Entierro (funeral) by Alvarez

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090505-FN4/An Abundance of Pearls

The reader -- especially one acquainted with Rivera's murals, may wonder if this painting really depicts an Indian woman. It does, notwithstanding the moderate europeanizing of the features. What gets overlooked in officialist and popular histories is how extravagantly wealthy Mexico was in the 17th and 18th centuries. Cromwellian spies (yes indeed!) reported that there was so much wealth even tradesmen had hats studded with pearls. Contemporaneous accounts of Sunday promenades along the Mexico City's canals by crillos, mestizos and Indians alike paint a picture of a brilliant society at ease with itself. This is not to say that corruption, oppression, inequities and conflicts did not exist, it is simply to note that there was more to the picture than has been painted. This painting depicts an Indian woman who was prosperously integrated into urban life.
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090505-FN3/Economic&Ecclesiastical

Economic interests also underlay the parties’ positions with respect to the Church, although the complexity of this topic is beyond present purposes. It is probably fair to say that liberals had more reasons to resent and envy the Church’s vast holdings. That said, the conflict between liberals and conservatives over the Reform Law was at bottom a dispute over rival socio-cultural concepts.

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090505-FN7/An Oyster Not Worth Swallowing

Since age 17, it has been my view that fundamentally the post Revolutionary regime simply continued the Porfirian regimen under a different guise, and that both regimes were liberal capitalist according to the manner of their times. This conclusion was actually a no-brainer since it was obvious just by looking at things.

But no-brainerism is the foundation of the post-revolutionary regime's history. The official oyster, swallowed whole by politically correct American academics and socio-activists, is that Diaz was a conservative, racist dictator who oppressed the country for 30 years until The Revolution kicked him out and, returning to the Wisdom of Juarez, inaugurated a new revolutionary era of leftist social democracy.... This too is utter nonsense. The PRI can be credited with modernizing the country in a variety of both superficial and important ways but many of these changes were already in the works and as for those that weren't it is likely that over time a regime uninterrupted by revolution would have gotten around to making many of the same changes.

The Porfirian regime was in fact very progressive, which is why it was admired around the world. It's modernisation was not simply a matter of gas-lamps, railroads and post-offices, but included fomenting arts and science and sending to France for the latest positivist educational theories -- intiatives that were continued and broadened by the PRI. As a classically capitalist regime, the Porfiriatio had little use for the Indian except as a laborer. But the dirty little secret is that the PRI also had little use for the Indian except as a laborer incorporated into the brave new world or as an object d'art for muralists. Whereas as the Porfiriato left the Indian to his gods, the PRI sought to save him from them.

It is indisputable that the PRI did establish social-democratic entitlements, which is to say that it struck the same bargain with the syndicalist movements that Germany and France had. As part of the "tri-partite" bargain of 1920, the PRI also acknowledged (and to a debated extent enforced) Indian land rights, something Diaz himself would not have done.

The differences between the the pre- and post- Revolution regimes were simply matters of historical inevitablity. All of which is to say that "on" the Cinco de Mayo, Mexico irrevocably adopted the via liberale.

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090505-FN6/LiberalNotionsOfPatriotism

The treaty negotiations which ended he Mexican-American War, had at first proposed that the US-Mexico border run from Mazatlan to Tampico; so that Juarez was quite willing to give to the Americans what they had lost at the table.

In fact the United States had not really lost anything. Upon Scott's entry into Mexico City, the U.S. initially entertained notions of taking over the whole country. It retreated from that idea (1) on account of the administrative and linguistic difficulties entailed in taking over an established government (broken down as it may have been) and (2) for fear of incorporating a large mestizo and indigneous population which it could hardly enslave and which would therefore be free (as new citizens) to walk the streets of Charleston, Philadelphia and Boston. Tempting as the fruit was, the pear was too prickly.

In the intervening decade, the Colossal Pygmy reconsidered. Could not the same result be achieved by constricting troublesmome Spaniards and Indians in a Bantustan constricted between corridors? There weren't that many people of any kind in the ore-rich northern expanses and getting the Mexicans themselves to enforce "corridor rights" ingeniously solved the only administration the U.S. was really interested in.

American historians are compulsively eager to see -- and liberal Mexicans are quick to allege -- that the conservative loathing of Juarez was racial prejudice. That is nothing but PC cant and blather. One of the Conservative's leading generals, who was later shot at Maximilian's side, was:

Gral. Thomás Mejía

On both sides of wherever the border may life, the liberal attempt to foist racist petards on history and to indoctrinate others with their own psychotic racial obsessions is one of the things I find truly enfuriating. It is cut from the same cloth as the Black Legend -- another monstruous calumny instigated by Cromwell and served up to justify the English attack on Catholicism and Empire.
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090505-FN5/SourceOfTelenovelas

This thumb-nail summary cannot do justice to the convoluted intrigues of the period, which make one think that Mexican telenovelas have their roots in history. But neither can this summary do justice to the men themselves. All parties have their simpletons and scoundrels, but the distressing fact is that the ranks of conservatives and liberals alike contained erudite and intelligent scientists, scholars, poets, jurists. Both the conservative Almazán and the liberal Bustamante (later president) wrote definitive histories of Mexico, albeit from their differning perspectives. Perhaps history has it's roots in novelas -- after all Quixote's sallied forth, we are told, from too much reading.
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