The Mexican American Border A History

[Music] in arizona's southern county of santa cruz you will find the city of nogales at first glance an average american city with a population of slightly over twenty thousand most of these are families of which the median income lies at almost thirty thousand dollars a year the average age is thirty four and despite the many problems of the american health care system the population is healthy there's a low child mortality rate cost of health insurance is low compared to the american average and residents of nogales are healthier than the american average unemployment lies at seven percent 29 percent of the population have a high school degree 35 percent have college degrees and 32 percent have not finished high school the majority of the educated population is younger than 44 and education levels are steadily increasing by generation what makes nogales stand out in the american average is that the median income is half of the american average and that poverty rates are twice as high as the american average with a population in poverty of 30 percent with this nogales lies beneath the arizona average but still does considerably better than many towns in other u.s states most working people are employed in construction retail and transportation founding a business in nogales is easy and can be done without having to pay bribes or fear of being unnecessarily obstructed by the government or organized crime the city in fact provides a handy guide for all the steps required on its homepage intent to attract more business several of the residents founded businesses and bigger american corporations settled offshoots in the city the crime rate is low violent crimes are rare some crimes are non-existent and overall the crime rates of nogales despite occasional brief increases are lower than the state average and the national average the people of nogales also have a say in the political matters of their community state and country they elect a mayor and a city council that is accountable to them and can be legally removed for transgressions or electorally removed should there be disapproval the same can be said of their state senator elected through the second senate district the governor and the federal representatives they are part of the third congressional district of arizona with an elected congressman accountable to them as well as a senator all in all political representatives tasked with providing the basic infrastructure and services a community need to prosper who will be voted out if they fail at that task nogales is by all standards just another average american city with average americans living their average american lives but there is one thing which makes this place very special take a walk from the mcdonald's down crawford street take the right down arrow boulevard and you might end up at the la roja bar which is in nogales in the state of sonora in mexico nogales used to be one town founded by a cattle rancher family in 1841. ten years later the americans bought large parts of desert borderlands from mexico and the line drawn by that gatson purchase split the town in two the average median income in dis nogales is ten thousand dollars a third of that just a few feet away the percentage of people with college degrees lies at eighteen percent the majority of the population don't even have high school education educational standards are so low that there is a local phenomenon of residents signing their children up in high schools in the other nogales resulting in a daily walk to school across the border for many kids housing conditions are bad some people live in shacks that lack basic commodities and infrastructure in large parts of the town drinking water is contaminated by sewage garbage and occasionally by industrial discharge the child mortality rate is high there's a considerably lower average lifespan and life expectancy roads highways sewers and other basic infrastructure are barely maintained and constantly broken many residents are forced to scramble together and build their own basic infrastructure such as access to water electricity or sewage systems by themselves as both the federal and local government fail to provide basic services the crime rate is high there are between two to three murders a week three to four kidnappings a week many local businesses are fronts run by organized crime using public transportation or taxis is an invitation to getting robbed calling the police for help might result in a considerable weight due to the police being understaffed throughout the state due to targeted assassinations of police officers who refuse to take bribes by organized crime resulting in fewer people being willing to take such a life-threatening job to top all that of saying that the police has a corruption problem is putting it mildly the state in general is known to have one of the highest rates of domestic violence and violence against women in the country the current governor of the state was elected after her predecessor fled into the underground due to a massive manhunt and international investigation for bribery extortion racketeering and corruption she is a member of the pri a corrupt party that in collaboration with oligarchs and organized crime ruled mexico as a one-party state for almost a century her predecessor ran for a party promising to end that corruption but that party turned out to be just as corrupt and if you want to open a business in nogales you will have to bribe either the local corrupt politician criminal gang dirty cop or even all three of them for that privilege and they might still choose to rob you anyway and with all of this combined keep in mind that nogales on average has a lower crime rate lower police corruption higher average education and higher standard of living than the mexican average ironically the only thing better in the mexican nogales compared to the american nagalas is the quality of healthcare as the thousands of annual american healthcare tourists can probably attest to [Music] so why are the two nogales so different what is it that makes these two places that are only a few feet apart so vastly separate in everything else well why are some places poor and some places wealthy this is a question that many have even more different answers to and nogales is a great place to find an answer it isn't geography or climate as the geographic determinist may claim because both nogales share the same geography and climate it is not big business capitalism or socialism as both cities have the same class structure and market system it isn't ethnicity culture religion demographics or some dumber people may even claim race because both nogales and majority catholic share similar demographics and the population of the american nogales is 95 of what americans call latinos when you boil everything down to basics there is in the end only one single thing separating the two nogales a border this is a story about the creation of state and economic institutions the failure of these institutions and how the legacy of failed institutions impact your life when christopher columbus landed in what he thought was india but what we now know was espanola he encountered the native peoples of the arawak returning to spain he reported to the king that the arawak are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it when you ask for something they have they never say no to the contrary they offer to share with everyone columbus came from a europe of war and conquest in which the idea of sharing is caring didn't make much sense so he concluded in his report to the king that if he got enough money to sail there again he would return with as much gold as they want and as many slaves as they ask and hereby the tone was set for the first mode of operation for the first spanish colonists in the americas sail over there enslave the natives bring these slaves home and sell them however upon returning to the caribbean this plan didn't work of the 500 enslaved arawak that he tried to return to spain 200 died and the remaining were so weak they could not be sold for the fortunes that he had promised so he had to make good on the second promise of bringing the gold and created the second mode of operation for colonists he returned to chichau in what is now haiti enslaved all the arawak he could find and forced them to dig in hastily built mines in the mountains for any scrap of gold dust that they could find the task made no economic ethical or even just basic sense there was barely any gold in hispaniola yet the spaniards would brutally punish the arawak for not finding any of the gold that didn't even exist in the first place the result was rebellion massacre and genocide within two years of the 250 000 arawak half were dead columbus fell out of grace with the crown but the conquistadors had learned the new blueprint for what they would do in the spanish caribbean instead of digging for gold that didn't exist they enslaved the natives and forced them to grow sugar and coffee on caribbean plantations starting in 1515. however with this they encountered a new problem by 1550 when of the 250 000 arawak only 500 were left they kept dying the brutality and indignity of the slave plantations and the extreme disruptions to their lives killed them so they had to be replaced at cost through slaves kidnapped and shipped in from africa by the portuguese the third mode of operating a colony was thereby born slave plantations with imported slaves from africa it would spread throughout the spanish caribbean and be copied throughout british french dutch and portuguese colonies throughout the region but as the spanish ventured further into the americas they found another mode of operating a colony a means of building a society that would fundamentally shape much of latin american social economic and political structures to this very day in 1519 hanan cortes ventured into the highlands of mexico and found something that the spaniards had been looking for for a very long time a settled civilization the aztecs did not only have a state taxation system division of labor bureaucracy and empire they had a state structure with castes from king to clergy to warrior to peasants that formed the foundation for the institutions of their state to function and that state was a feudal state with an unquestionable set of god kings who were in their power absolute and unchallengeable here cortes would do what had worked in feudal europe for centuries before if he wanted to conquer king kill the king take his throne seize control of the state now you are the king and the state is yours the aztec emperor montezuma was kidnapped and murdered cortes took his place installed himself as the new absolute ruler and acquired the wealth of the state as well as the absolute power of its feudal institutions and although these conquistadors did not become kings in name they created a class of colonial elites that pretty much had the power of absolute kings by taking over from the previous kings and acquiring the authority of their state institutions the wider system throughout the spanish americas became known as the encomienda which means commission the conquistadors conquered the people and then these people and the land were assigned as an encomienda to the individual conquistadors who then owned the land and the people on it within a feudal structure this structure remained in place until the 1820s and was further expanded through the import of african slaves and spanish settlers an additional development within spanish-american society was the development of the kachike which comes from the arawak word kasekwa meaning tribal chief kachikwe today is more associated with the term small tyrant it was used to describe subordinate native american chieftains who entered spanish society to retain their social status these kachikwis would then similar to conquistador's rule as small tyrants over stretches of land and the people within it to exploit them for their own benefits and for the spanish crown as a result society was expanded not just in numbers but in structure by lacasta when european settlers arrived the conquistadors developed into a social elite that didn't wish to share its power the result was a class and racially mixed feudal social hierarchy nobles born in spain stood at the top followed by nobles born in the new world followed by poor whites born in spain followed by poor whites born in the americas followed by people of mixed race followed by india's followed by freed slaves and at the bottom lay the slaves a rigid authoritarian and strictly hierarchical society with stipulations in place that limited any social mobility this socio-economic structure would remain in place throughout the spanish americas for centuries and to some extent still to this very day the fundamental purpose of it would remain to enrich the motherland of spain only raw materials were produced in plantations and mines brought to the harbours to be exported to spain where they would be used to manufacture products that were shipped back to be sold to the colonies thereby creating an economic system of dependencies there was no economic specialization plurality into other sectors or further innovation worse still it disconnected and disintegrated the spanish colonies economically before the spaniards there had been an indigenous trade network stretching almost the entire continent with the arrival of the spanish the colonies didn't trade amongst themselves creating even further dependency on outsiders making spanish america an economy dependent on foreign markets for its produce and raw materials and since the owners of the plantations and mines were spanish nobles often born and raised in spain and detached from this land and its people it started a sort of economic custom of foreign ownership of the economic structures of the region a business culture in which these elites who were the owners of economic assets acted with impunity and complete disregard for those who they considered to be beneath them and almost foreign even though they were in their land they would control these populations with draconian punishments with a foreign spanish army forbidding the ownership of firearms and banning free movement and commas laws which were enforced through the iron fist of one of the most powerful entities in human history the spanish empire this situation also raised an increasing resentment amongst the wealthy elites despite all the benefits they had these only produced raw materials had to sell to spain could not trade with outsiders and could not expand into and develop other economic sectors with their raw materials we will see where this would lead to later meanwhile in europe there was a lot of envy and spite for getting a head start the spanish and portuguese had gotten the best parts of the new world the most valuable slave plantation economies of cuba and hispaniola had gone to the spanish as well as the silver mines of potosi the portuguese seized control of the atlantic slave trade and the french english and dutch were left with scraps for their own slave plantations consequently their early efforts focused around seizing the enormous profits of the caribbean slave economies for themselves through piracy against the spanish grabbing whatever was left in the caribbean and taking spanish slave plantations by force the lands in north america were left untouched for almost a century early spanish settlers quickly realized that the output of plantations in the north were only an eighth of the output in the caribbean the north was seen as inhospitable uneconomical and wild but it was the only thing left to grab so by the 1600s the english tried and failed at roanoke so they tried again in 1607 sent by the virginia company these settlers landed in the lands of the poor hattan in what we now know as virginia and founded the place called jamestown in popular history these early colonists are described as utopian settlers who wish to build and farm a new society and that is simply not true the colonists had arrived with weapons and goldsmiths intent to do as cortes and pizarro had done kidnap the indian king seized control of his kingdom and melt down the gold however when they invited the indian king wahahun sunakok to an english crowning ceremony at which they had intended to kidnap him his response literally was i shall not take such bait he then enforced the blockade of jamestown the colonists had hoped that the indians would actually feed them after they had killed and replaced their king as cortes had done with the aztecs so they had not brought anyone who knew how to grow crops cure meat or even how to hunt or fish so they starved including all the goldsmiths and resorted to cannibalism indian societies of north america were different from those in the south and central america the population density in pre-colonial america was lower in the north and the peoples were organized in semi-nomadic and loosely connected confederations there were not the masses of people to enslave farms and plantations to conquer goals to steel silver to mine and sugar to grow as in the south but above all there were no state structures and institutions to take over the indians of north america by and large lived in stateless societies the spanish model of colonization simply couldn't work here james smith a mercenary captain on the governing council of jamestown realized first that the south american colonial model would not work here he wrote to the virginia company to send gardeners farmers fishermen and artisans and since the virginia company had made no profits in the colony's two years of existence they decided to implement a radical change the colony would no longer be run by a council instead it would be run by an all-powerful governor who implemented a forced labor system amongst european colonists and imported penal labor the laws of the colony known as the laws divine moral and martial punished with death the leaving of the colony the mingling with indians and the theft of food it also punished with theft the sale and trading of any commodities and produce made by the colonists amongst themselves or to anyone except the virginia company the virginia company couldn't enslave and exploit the indians so it tried to exploit colonists in barracks with assigned food rations and with governor ordered work details they were to grow produce hunt for pelts and produce timber which they would hand over to the company governor to be shipped back and sold for company profit however this also didn't work who the virginia company sent to be forced labor were people who were no longer welcome in england sometimes just pickpockets and drunkards picked from the rabble of 1600s london people who had little respect for the authority of the english state let alone some english company and in this place the english monarchy had even less authority the imported labourers simply started running away beyond company control into the virginia frontier they built their own farms their own outposts their own trade networks and they formed their own militias instead of laborers they became settlers unlike spain neither england nor the virginia company had the means to enforce their order so the tried and tested colonial order of forced labor under colonial elite collapsed the virginia company needed a different approach which they enacted in 1619 they noticed that settlers working their own land produced more and worked harder than forced labor so from now on the virginia company imported people as settlers and not as forced labourers to sign a contract according to which in exchange for years spent in indentured servitude every settler was given 50 acres of land by the company and 50 acres more for every family member a settler would bring a general assembly was introduced the members of which were voted on by every land-owning man which functioned as a counterweight to the company governor the settlers could still only sell their products and produce to the virginia company but the company and by that extent the crown could not simply force their will upon the colonists they had to govern through negotiation concession and ultimately pragmatism though virginia would largely remain feudal the governance structure that developed was one dependent on cooperation with the masses in 1632 the crown tried itself without the company when king charles the first gifted 10 million acres of land around the chesapeake bay to cecilus calvert the second baron of baltimore who founded a town at the bay and named his lands maryland after the king's wife they intended to create a society of plots of land owned by nobles shaped after the english aristocracy with surface to work and serve and just as in virginia it all failed there was so much land that if you didn't like being a surf in the lands you were assigned to you could just move to other land and lord baltimore didn't have the means to evict settlers from the enormous 10 million acres of land he claimed to own baltimore had to provide incentives for settlers such as a saiyan government therefore an assembly was introduced in maryland which voted to become a colony of the king thereby removing lord baltimore of all power in baltimore in new england a different type of settler arrived english puritans who specifically came to build a new utopian society detached from all the legal and state frameworks of the society they left behind a kingdom of god in which religious norms and communal values when forced to keep peace in the virtuous and very intolerant society trade with any english companies was a secondary issue to them what mattered to them was the construction of their new and self-sufficient society their communal values had priority over not just individual liberties but also the values and laws of the english crown and these settlers would resist attempts of total control over them by england more than any other colonists in pennsylvania delaware and the surrounding midlands quakers mennonites and other protestant minorities of england germany poland and scandinavia settled to build a pacifist society of self-sufficient small farmers people who wanted to be left alone and to themselves with as little interference by any authority in the south english caribbean slave plantation owners expanded into the carolinas and georgia for more land for more plantations to import more slaves into these settlers saw themselves as the descendants of norman english aristocracy which they weren't and they would build a brutal slave society on a foundation of cruelty and profit these settlers may have professed loyalty to britain but their main loyalty first and foremost was to their bottom line they implemented their own brutal social system built upon controlling a slave society with ruthless violence systematic oppression and cruelty and they would resist anyone who challenged that socio-economic framework while the appellations were settled by scottish presbyterians from the scottish borderlands and highlands a people organized in clan and family structures who couldn't give any less of a dam about what an english crown that they had spent centuries rebelling against told them to do they purposefully sought out the hard-to-reach borderlands of the colonies in the appalachian mountains and forests to be as far away as possible from any english authority and to live their lives as they saw fit the social and economic structures that developed were entirely different from those in south america spanish-american society was dominated by an aristocracy ruling over serfs spanish colonies didn't trade with each other and only exported to and imported from spain and that spain enforced its rule through blunt military force in the english north american colonies the colonies traded with each other specialized and even started manufacturing themselves built their own cultural social and economic structures which were increasingly independent from britain a society of land owners developed who had an ever increasing say in how they were governed instead of being exploited by lords these landlords imported slaves to exploit themselves or worked the land themselves for themselves which is a story deserving of its own video and far distant britain could only maintain sovereignty and rule over these colonies for negotiation and concession and as it would soon find out not through brutal force two very different social structures started to develop in the new world and as much as some know nothing english with very posh english accents may tell you that american society developed out of old english customs and traditions of monarchy the reality is that it by and large evolved out of a rebellion against these things but how did these societies develop so differently and why does it matter while the english colonies started taking shape a civil war raged in england and during its chaos an englishman called thomas hobbes wrote a book about what he believed a state should be called leviathan from which we know that he would have disapproved of what was happening in the english colonies and would have preferred what happened in the spanish americas the leviathan is an enormous biblical sea monster before which all human efforts to resist and fight are futile and in hobbes mind this is what the ideal state ought to resemble a powerful force of nature resistance against which was to be futile if all bowed before and contributed to the establishment of a powerful state that state would in return secure the well-being of all who were part of it that through a collective effort a collective good and security could be assured and also above all hold at bay what hobbs saw as the only alternative to the leviathan anarchy and statelessness whereas hops put it war and described as continual fear and anger of violent death and the life of a man solitary poor nasty brutish and short the actual terror of anarchy or stateless societies or or whatever you wish to call it according to hobbes however does not come from a continuous violence of masses of all against all but consisteth not in actual fighting but in the non-disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary and a lack of structure to provide the passions that incline men to peace are fear of death desire of such things as a necessity to commedious living and a hope that their industry will obtain them statelessness in hobbes view could neither provide security for one's safety nor the security and stability for industry labor and commerce to exist and prosper what hobbes proposed instead was a commonwealth state or great leviathan a collective good and order that all would render themselves under its authority and would bring prosperity and security to all hobbes however was wrong the great leviathan state and the whose authority all shall render themselves turned out to be amongst one of the most horrific monsters ever to be inflicted upon mankind order within itself is no granter for a universal common good a powerful state with an efficient bureaucracy can just as well use that bureaucracy to create lists of people to be deported into death camps to facilitate depriving a region of basic food supplies and thereby intentionally starve millions or create a society of surveillance and mass policing in which nobody is safe from the leviathan itself power is in itself not an inherent good neither is being a state an inherent good let alone are these guarantors of social and economic success a society of laws is only worth as much as its laws are worth and the leviathan that was the spanish empire provided little prosperity or economic success for its population or security but more importantly hobbes was wrong about stateless societies stateless societies can exist and provide both the security and stability for people to prosper and live the first communities of humans probably started out as family structures amongst hunter-gatherers these would then band together with other families to form bands when those bands settled during the agricultural revolution they stopped travelling vast stretches of land stayed put in one place developed myths and religions around the landmarks and personalities of the place invented stories in both identifying and religious terms to explain their own existence developed unique cultural expressions and through this formed into tribes in these settled tribes the self-sufficiency of the hunter-gatherer was abandoned a segmented social structure developed in which each and every one was dependent upon the other and each segment of society was a replica of another segment the fabric that holds these societies together is family and social norms traditions and religions such societies are frequently romanticized as anarchist utopias as places of freedom solidarity and individualism places in which terms such as prosperity are meaningless as all prosper together with the group were alone through themselves and their own labor but are they the new world colonies of england where societies removed from the authority of the english state societies of norms traditions and religion and what were these norms traditions and religious dictates puritan new england was a deeply intolerant society a place where quakers had their noses cut open ears sliced off and the face branded with the letter h for heretic so they could be easily identified if they dare return to their community a place where communal judges handed out the death penalty for adultery blasphemy idolatry and sodomy a place where captain thomas campbell was put in the stocks because after returning from a three-year voyage he had publicly kissed his wife in virginia the norms and dictates were those of the landed gentry and transplant aristocracy a place where the punishment for insulting such an aristocrat was to receive 50 beatings by 20 men have your tongue drilled through a fine worth 10 years of a farmer's income followed by being banned for life from virginia in the mountains of appalachia the norms that dictated life were those of family clans feuding and fighting over scraps of land and livestock with maimings killings and subsequent retaliatory actions in a cycle of continuous self-propelling violence and in the deep south the social norms dictated that the black man was a sub-human that the black woman had no right to defend herself against the violations of her body by a white master that it was the white man who has to be both the owner superior and master of all black men because it has always been that way because the bible says so and because that is simply the norm and tradition of the white man's civilization a place where it was the norm that the cruel and horrendous fate befell black men unfortunate enough to be accused of even just looking at a white woman the wrong way a stateless society is a society of social norms and or a society of god it therefore can be and is more than likely a society in which the most fanatical dictate what these norms are be it in the name of king jesus or under sharia it can also be a tyranny of cousins in which arbitrary notions of family honour frame your life's purpose and limitations it can be a society in which what the norms are is dictated by the whip hand and the bloodhound in short a society in which what the norms are is dictated by those with the bigger guns and it can be the society of the tribal chief whose whims and neuroses dictate everyone's life therefore a stateless society can be every bit as tyrannical as horrendous and as cruel as any leviathan a society of fanatics violence and slave owners that requires every bit of obedience while watching you may have started thinking over how this is almost a metaphor for interactions on social media where rules are vaguely defined and the resulting norms are dictated by those who can scream for cancelling the loudest or is it the other way around that social media companies are domineering dangerous leviathans in whom we invest too much trust and please if you do hang on to that metaphor because what i present here is not a binary state and stateless entities are known to coexist to cooperate but also to compete with each other the story of the united states is the story of a loose confederation of semi-stateless entities that struggled over centuries to unify and evolve from being societies of norms into a singular society of laws a leviathan if you will but a leviathan in competition conflict and cooperation with its internal disparate groups of semi-stateless entities of norms however more relevant for us is the story of the spanish empire and the americas which as this video will show is the story of a collapsing leviathan our common high school history curriculum teaches us that the first europeans to settle north america were those pioneers and pilgrims who landed in virginia and new england the framing of that story is within itself not true but more importantly it is overall factually not true in the first decades of the 1500s spanish conquistadors had explored the plains of kansas trekked up the colorado river and through the grand canyon sailed up the coast of nova scotia mapped the pacific coast from california through oregon to british columbia and ascended the smoky mountains of tennessee a century before french dutch and english settlers even arrived on the eastern coastlines of north america in 1565 the spanish founded saint augustine in florida which is the oldest european town in the united states the oldest building within the continental united states is the governor's palace in santa fe built by the spanish in 1610 the oldest building within the borders of the united states is the san juan cathedral in puerto rico built in 1521. from 1560 onward the spaniards pushed north of monterey to found santa fe and taos in new mexico pushed east to found nagadoches and pushed west to the bay of san francisco the claims laid to the lands of north america were vast you will find the occasional spanish enclave lasting to this very day such as in colorado and new mexico communities who still practice old medieval spanish customs such as symbolically crucifying a member of the community during lent communities that define themselves not as mexican but as spanish-american older than mexican-american communities and the mexican identity itself and fiercely defensive and protective of their 500 year old spanish heritage but spanish culture north of zakatecas developed differently from the rest of the colony mexico or new spain as it was known then was the crown jewel of the spanish empire it produced two-thirds of the empire's revenue it was the most populous as well as the richest part of the empire it was the administrative center of all of central america northern south america and the spanish caribbean which created a strong governmental structure in its capital silver mines as well as large sectors of agriculture and ranching created an economy and class of wealthy merchants which built a society that was wealthier than any other spanish colony english colony french colony and by the 1700s even wealthier than the spanish homeland itself this wealth was hardly surprising if you look at the wealth of the pre-colonial americas it is also the natives who lived in this stretch of land who were the wealthiest the spanish took over that society expanded it and prospered from it but to the north of zacharus the environment climate geography and society changes the sierra madre mountains which push out into fertile plateaus in the south in the north stretch out into the dry mexican highlands known as the capiral surrounded by dry lands and the north american desert these lands are dry with few rainfalls during the summer the complete opposite of the lush tropical climate zones and jungles of southern mexico mexico is a north-south divided country in geography but also in society southern and central mexico's native populations were settled city-state civilizations such as the aztecs but go north and the arid land made this type of settlement and social organization difficult here live the guar hiltekan and the apaches semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer peoples who had adapted their society perfectly to the land they lived in and along the colorado river you found the pueblo a settled peoples who lived in towns and villages of up to five-story high buildings growing peach groves and trading in textiles also fiercely independent when spain arrived it was easier to take over the state structures of the south then take the north especially the apaches and pueblo resisted fiercely these were not people who could simply be subjugated and assimilated through conquest and the usurpation of their leaderships they lived in these vast lands which include the modern day states of texas colorado new mexico arizona sonora chiguawa and guajilla and forget the modern borders see this as a geographic landscape shaped by dry plains plateaus deserts and occasional rivers a rough land that required a rough and specialized society to live in the aztecs may have been a society of laws clergy nobles serfs taxes and bureaucracy but those who lived here were society of norms traditions families and autonomy and the spaniards chewed that teeth out on them when the story of the indian is told our modern perception is dominated by a narrative of tragedy that ignores their perseverance at victories and victories there were many don't know that in the wars between natives and settlers the spaniards were defeated in these lands in 1680 after the spanish colonial authorities burnt pueblo shamans on the stake for heresy and resisting the catholic faith the pueblo assembled an army and kicked the spanish army out of santa fe and new mexico the spanish army may have been a modern and terrifying entity on the battlefields of europe but here in these vast borderlands facing grier tactics by an enemy who knew the land like their back pocket they were hopelessly outmatched especially the apaches would not leave the spanish even a bit of respite burning mines and ranches alike the apaches in fact would keep fighting for centuries against the spaniards mexicans texans confederates and americans alike and be the last native indians to surrender in 1924. the authority of the spanish state never really established itself here and it never really stood the chance in the first place so what developed in its stead here in the north was very different the spanish called native people genthesin razon meaning people without reason but unlike other colonial powers the spanish believed that they could be turned into gentederason and here in the north they would try with a different mode of colonization after the first one had failed for this purpose the spanish established missions usually run by jesuit catholic priests the indians would be confined to these missions where they would have to convert to catholicism work in tanneries mines workshops stables or kilns and speak spanish only under the threat of severe punishment the native indians would be called neophytes during their time in the mission and the plan was for the priests to civilize and turn them into god-fearing catholics loyal to spain and then release them however the priests who ran these missions made considerable profit with their unpaid workforce which consequently provided an incentive to never actually declare any of the indians brutalized in the missions to be civilized 18 such missions existed in new mexico 20 in texas 8 in arizona and 21 in alta california and french explorers who visited such a mission described them as everything reminded us of a caribbean slave colony we mentioned this in pain because the resemblance is so perfect that we saw men and women loaded with irons others in stocks and at length the noise of the strokes of a whip struck our ears these missions would form the modern towns of tucson san antonio san diego and san francisco the natives in essence were slaves many consequently ran away many more died under the brutish conditions and the spaniards had to import more spanish settlers to continue operations consequently this new mode of colonization also failed these spanish settlers were supposed to live under the same strict rules and regulations as were in place throughout colonial spain spanish settlers in texas were forbidden from trading their goods with other colonial states even other spanish colonies like cuba or california or to even ship them from their own gulf coast instead they were supposed to ship their cattle hides down cobbled roads to mexico city from which they were then sold back to spain a restrictive and highly regulated economic model intent on stifling any economic self-sufficiency that could rival that of the spanish crown but it increasingly didn't work spanish settlers simply left those towns built their own ranches and farms and up here in the north the spanish state was simply not strong enough to stop them these independent and self-sufficient ranchers tracked along the gulf coast into the french colony of louisiana to trade their cattle and leather with the french merchants of new orleans they would even sell them along the coast to british and dutch traders in open defiance of the spanish state and its laws against local independent commerce just as with the english companies in virginia and english aristocrats in the chesapeake bay the colonial mode of operation of conquest subjugation and forced labor simply didn't work in the northern fringes of new spain from texas to california [Music] the spanish had to provide incentives for the cooperation of their subjects they did so by offering payment in exchange for labor in mines and workshops this created a wage-based labor economy that spread south from the north and gradually started replacing the feudal economic order of serfs and their masters in the south this created an increasingly wealthy class of merchants while in the north separate political orders and social structures started to evolve in the absence of the spanish state people started organizing in disparate communal structures usually with the wealthiest member of the community being at the top that person usually the owner of the largest ranch or mine would become the benefactor of the community organize festivities provide charity and settle disputes the term used to describe and address these individuals became patron a divide started to develop between a south with its densely populated core the seats of the government and center of administration and the north on the periphery its society more decentralized and self-sufficient a divide that in many ways continues to this day and is frequently ignored by outsiders a society of peoples who were distant from the bishops governors and tax collectors of southern new spain and spain itself where people married without the approval of catholic ceremony or priest where different decentralized religious practices evolved distant from catholic doctrine a society that became majority white spanish settlers in contrast to the large mystery population in the south a society with a deep distrust of centralized state structures authority and government in which the family and its values and traditions mattered more the north would significantly shape mexican but also american society this is the place where the wild west as we know it in popular culture was actually born and not in the united states it was here where the first cowboys called vaqueros led cattle herds on trails to markets both south and north their language permeated across cultures to be found within spanish loanwords in the english language into which they were adopted when american settlers started moving west a hundred years later and encountered them lato la riata chaparradas rodeo vaquero the americans merely adopted the frontier mexico was born in it molded by it it didn't leave the frontier until it became annexed [Music] it is really hard to tell why revolutions happen even more so retrospectively most people who claim to know are motivated by their own desired outcomes for one there is never such a thing as just one reason a tunisian fruit vendor may set himself a blaze in protest but the reason this incident became a spark that lit a revolution had been decades of economic mismanagement corruption police brutality state repression a political leadership that was both out of touch and arrogant a disaffected youth unemployment foreign education the free spreading of information through the internet and the list goes on the same is very much true here i could spend an hour talking about why the spanish colony of new spain became mexico but i won't i am pointing this out though because i don't want you to believe that the reasons i list in this short video are the only ones when spain built its american empire its first and foremost interest was gold and silver and that is what it got out of the colonies later it would add sugar and tobacco to the list of imports from its colonies in the caribbean but everything else was mostly left behind economies around other products from leather to meat to wood to all the other basic commodities and raw materials that you can think of consequently started to develop and it was those economies that contributed to a substantial growth of wealth in the colony of new spain to such an extent in fact that new spain eventually became wealthier than spain itself and that was eyed with increasing envy by spain when the bourbons became kings in the 1700s started implementing taxes and regulations to get its own share of that cake it sent companies such as the gebusquan trading company to the new world to seize control of these independently evolving markets this is when the first murmurs and desires for independence began in the spanish americas from argentina to peru colombia to mexico the wealthy class of traders and the newly formed social elites didn't like giving up control over their revenue unlike in the british americas enlightenment values and philosophies didn't play as much of a role in the american autonomy struggles most revolutionaries were part of social elites elites who wish to first and foremost keep their social status and power and their conflict with spain originated from that desire one thing is certain the spark that lit the fuse to revolution happened here in europe when napoleon invaded and occupied spain spain then allied itself with napoleon this resulted in a british brocade of spanish trade on the oceans which severely hurt the bottom line of the spanish-american elites and consequently angered them adding to that the pro-napoleonic spanish government favored the abolition of slavery and end to indentured servitude the tunes of liberty that were sung by france and consequently in a spain allied with france were something that deeply worried the spanish-american elites in 1805 the british sank both the french and spanish fleets in trafalgar greatly diminishing spanish naval power and subsequently its ability to connect and to police its american colonies then in 1806 the british invaded the rio de plata in modern day uruguay and argentina where they were defeated not by a spanish but local armies and militias that event showed the spanish americans that they were capable of building an efficient and well-commanded military force by themselves without the spanish and that they were even capable of defeating a powerful nation then spain had enough of france rebelled and sided with britain against napoleon which ironically brought an additional crack in the relationship between it and its spanish colonies because suddenly spain ended its century-old trade embargo with britain spanish-american ports opened for british ships and british cities opened for spanish-american goods and the profits kept piling up as a result as a result of that the merchants and elites of the spanish americas started asking questions over why this embargo had been in place in the first place if it would return at the end of the war and how much more they could make if they had sovereignty over their own trade policies as colonies or maybe as sovereign states the napoleonic war in spain or peninsular war was an exceptionally savage cruel and brutal war a conflict that left a million dead and the spanish nation in smoldering ruins the treasury was empty and the nation was in debt the administration and power of the spanish state had collapsed the once so mighty and feared spanish army had been humbled and crushed by the french the war had in the end been won by gurillas and a british expedition of scottish and irish troops spain was left weak wounded broke and battered and in this moment of weakness the spanish restricted trade with britain again angering the elites of the spanish americas and then decided to squeeze even more out of their colonies which angered them even more adding to that the post-war spanish government formed the parliament called the cortes and demanded the introduction of a parliament in a constitutional monarchy with an end to all special privileges an end to slavery and the abolition of all special privileges in a feudal society something that was unacceptable to the colonial elites it would however be untrue to frame the revolution that followed as a revolution of colonial elites only spain intended to restrict the power of the catholic church in new spain forcing spanish bishops upon the people while local american priests swelled in the lower ranks amongst the poor who increasingly preached against the power of the spanish crown in religious affairs in the americas throughout the lower classes spain had exiled the jesuits from its colonies who ran most of the educational institutions thereby attempting to seize control of new spain's educational institutions and in the north are people and society who had already much autonomy and who became increasingly known as the northerners and who didn't like being told what to do by mexico city in the first place wanted to be told even less by a far away madrid that now sought out to gain control over their lives the revolution that broke out in 1810 is a complex and fascinating story one which would burst the frames of this video and which i hope we shall instead cover in a video about mexican history specifically one day in the future what you need to know for this video is that it was an incredibly savage war a war of burning towns pillaged lands and massacres the 11 year long war for mexican independence was more brutal and vicious than any of the other american wars for independence it left half a million people dead which is almost as much as the victims of all other american wars for independence combined the spanish were desperate to not let go of one of their most important if not the most important colony in the americas and consequently fought this war with an attitude of either achieving total victory or burning the country to the ground which as they increasingly lost they increasingly did the mexico that was born out of this in 1821 was not a republic but an empire a monarchy governed by the former colonial elites who saw themselves as the legitimate rulers of an enormous empire stretching from the bay of san francisco to the jungles of panama but this was also a mexico that was weak in ruins broken unstable and absolutely not in any position to enforce any of these claims the people living in those lands as well as outside would take advantage of that the newly independent grand colombia persuaded panama to join its federation and when the former spanish provinces of central america declared themselves independent as the federal republic of central america mexico invaded and occupied the place but could never really establish full control over it within two years of independence the mexican monarchy collapsed a republic was born and central america became the central american republic again which however itself was just as unstable and eventually fell apart as outsiders took advantage of it but that is a story that deserves its own video eventually the newly independent mexican republic was ruled by a succession of mediocre and increasingly less qualified sets of authoritarian generals veterans of the war of independence and by and large interested in maintaining their own wealth and power politics in mexico as well as how political power in mexico was exercised and perceived developed very differently from the united states in the newly formed united states politicians were increasingly beholden to their electorate as public servants in contrast to that politics in the mexican republics of the 1800s which were in the end mostly military juntas and dictatorships was about securing your own power and interests an elitist club reserved for society's elites to squeeze what they could out of the country the economic structures that developed out of this were also vastly different in the united states the economic structure that developed was an inclusive and open one a capitalist system in which anyone could open business and do business on their own terms the economic structure of mexico when exclusionary capitalism and its institutions reserved for a select few people at the top of society you went into mexican politics as a wealthy man to secure your assets and not for the good of the community or country mexico became the kind of country where the governor of a state happened to also own the largest mining complex in the state his uncle owned the largest ranch estates of the state his brother was appointed the chief justice of the state his cousin was appointed the state chief of police and his business partners became the various ministers of the state a kleptocratic state structure where personal interests of ruling elites mattered the most the legacy of which to large extent continues in modern mexico to this day mexico in many parts still is a country where people go into politics not to serve their communities and country but to enrich themselves not very different from the kachikwas of the colonial era in fact many of these powerful men were and are a direct inheritance of that system and there was one part of mexico in particular where this type of government system was increasingly unpopular the north the northerners didn't like being told by spain what to do they didn't like being told by colonial elites what to do and they now didn't like being told what to do but a new powerful elites of mexico city the natenos lived for most self-sufficiently in their communities of ranchers and farmers stretching from california to sonora to texas they had a way of life that had evolved throughout the last centuries that they wished to keep and during the first decades of mexican independence the powers to be in mexico city also ignored and neglected them the sparsely populated lands of california were attempted to be used as a mexican prison colony when california governors requested funds and materials to improve the few cobblestone roads that existed mexico cities sent them boatloads of convicts and kidnapped southern mexicans to build those however since california had not the resources to control and manage such these penal laborers tended to break free roam the lands plunder existing towns and then settle out of reach of mexican authorities this prison labor system had developed in southern mexico where when the state ran out of funds for infrastructure such as roads the government just used the army to kidnap thousands of innocent mexicans and force them to build those projects a system which was continued by mexican governments way up into the early 20th century despite the chaos of the first decades of independence the mexican state had still inherited the powerful colonial government institutions of the spanish empire and could therefore still enforce this in the south but in the north just as with the english prison colony system in virginia it simply didn't work the best example of how destabilized kleptocratic and broken mexican governance was in the first 50 years of its existence is by following the career of santa anna santa anna was the son of a colonial official and soldier in the spanish army in new spain when the spanish started losing the war of mexican independence he switched sides and helped establish the mexican monarchy he became president of mexico in 1833 but after a few days handed the presidency over to gomes farias who was supposed to be acting president while real power remained with santa anna freyas however was only president for two weeks after which the presidency came back to santa ana who again remained president for less than a month and then returned the presidency to gomez faria the two men continued this continual exchange of the office of president for two years which they did as part of schemes to enrich themselves by 1835 the scheme fell apart and the different son of a colonial official and member of mexico city's elites miguel baragan became president however santa anna didn't quit and became president again in 1839 1841 1844 1847 and 1853 in total he was president of mexico 11 separate times during his terms he was exiled from mexico five different times presided over economic kleptocracy over substantial losses in territory and two disastrous military defeats in total between 1824 and 1867 mexico had 52 presidents none of them were elected all were members of the country's business and military elites all ruled through military juntas and all spent their time and power preoccupied with trying to enrich themselves and their friends at the expense of the rest of the country over this period of time mexico lost control over large parts of the country the once powerful government administrations of the spanish empire started to fall apart the ability of the state to enforce the law decreased taxes could no longer be efficiently collected corruption was rampant how and what laws were enforced was arbitrary and dependent on who you were and what your social status was within this society separatist movements emerged in texas and outer california that successfully split off and several more emerged in sonora bayer california yucatan and along the rio grande the resulting revolutions uprisings rebellions and civil wars without counting wars with outsiders killed more mexicans than american deaths in all american wars combined and left much of mexico in ruins as the government sent out armies to brutally crush and burn all descent in simple terms this was a mess a complete disaster a disaster that continued almost throughout the entire history of mexico throughout the 19th century made worse by a french invasion and occupation from 1861 to 1867 which further destabilized the country and eroded the institutions of the state the mexican republic to emerge out of the ashes of the war with france was even less capable of holding it all together the economy was by and large owned by the elites who created this mess with no room for growth or innovation or even just economic participation in entrepreneurship by individual citizens mexico is in the end lucky to even still exist as a nation-state after the 19th century that it experienced and that it didn't just fall apart completely and was absorbed by outside forces that is not to say that those outside forces didn't try [Music] the 1800s were a century of american expansion collectively known under the term manifest destiny a 19th century socio-political movement originating in new england its main claim being that the united states had an obligation to expand across the entire north american continent to spread its way of life and social structure we associate this term mainly with the time period of the 1840s when starting from new england more and more american settlers pushed westward to settle the mexican-american war took place as well as the american annexations of mexican territory north of the rio grande and the american wars with natives flared up as the u.s government enforced the program of ethnic cleansing however i find this to oversimplify the story of american expansion westward when the story of manifest destiny is told in particular in popular history it is often done in a way that can make people think this was the one big and only expansion of territory by the americans or that american territory didn't expand before or that american expansionism only came from new england and that is simply not true from the first moment of settlers arriving on the coastlines of north america there had been expansions westward the british had even banned further expansion to keep treaties with the cherokee but after the british were gone there was nothing holding the americans back after the founding of the first settlements there were 11 big internal expansions through migrations by settlers into frontier countries in north america one of the first was appalachia when britain exported scots and scottish penal labor into the new world these didn't like sticking around the predominantly english colonies so they ran off into the then hard to reach frontier of the appalachian mountains founding their own settlements towns and social structures that would become the modern day states of west virginia kentucky and tennessee as soon as the british were gone there were three big migrations westward between 1780 and 1840. from new england settlers pushed westward from upstate new york along the great lakes bringing with them their social structures in attempts to expand their way of life and society westward ships carrying these settlers along the great lakes had names like the mayflower of the west and they would chase away the iroquois to found new settlements along northern pennsylvania northern ohio northern indiana and northern illinois northern wisconsin and basically the entire state of michigan you can see when new england is settled in places like the ohio valley by the names given to these towns that often resemble the names of towns in massachusetts connecticut and new york or even old world england itself like bristol danbury fairfield greenwich gilford hartford litchfield new haven new london or new walk fourth the earliest european settlers of appalachia tended to live in small farms and drive the herds of pigs sheep and cattle from field to field until the soil had been depleted then they abandoned that farm moved to the next patch of land and started over again starting in the 1800s these appellations started to quickly expand westward from the mountains into the ohio valley and down the mississippi valley they spread and settled in the south in northern georgia northern alabama and northern mississippi north into southern ohio southern indiana and southern illinois and west into iowa missouri kansas arkansas and by the 1840s into northern texas natives be they cherokee chickasaw or whoever the appalachians encountered were driven off to make way creating a large cultural sphere of states whose inhabitants some today just call redneck theft from 1810 onward europe was a tinderbox of constantly flaring revolutionary flames one place where these fires kept flaring up over and over again was germany however all revolutions that flared up in germany failed including the big one in 1848 with absolute monarchy ever deeply entrenching itself in germany tens of thousands of disillusioned germans from prussia to poland to the rhineland bavaria czechia and austria packed and left for america starting in the 1820s and they were encouraged to do so by german governments glad to rid themselves of potential troublemakers these germans would usually migrate east of philadelphia throughout western pennsylvania and central ohio indiana michigan illinois minnesota and wisconsin they brought with them their social structure of semi-independent small family-owned farms and family businesses and created the cultural framework for what became the midwest you can see the impact these first three westward migrations had in modern politics to this day the coastlines of the great lakes mainly settled by people from new england tend to vote democratic the southern parts mainly settled by appalachians tend to vote republican and the parts settled by germans can vote both ways and are would make these places swing in elections sixth by the 1810s the slave lords of the south ran into a problem they had ran out of land to expand their plantations new england politicians had constantly blocked any attempt by southern states to expand slavery westward but by the 1820s they gained the political power to expand west and by 1829 had a president in the white house who was sympathetic to their cause the cherokee creek and choctaw were driven off their lands with the not so subtly named indian removal act to make way for southern slave plantations in georgia alabama florida and mississippi and when these plantation owners expanded into louisiana they encountered and were disgusted by the local colonial french towns where over 50 percent of all blacks were free where free black frenchmen could rise to a high social status and where interracial marriages had never been illegal and were widely practiced so they forced their way of life upon them from this point onward what we see here with this southern westward expansion is that westward expansion not only meant the removal of native indians but also the removal and forcing yourself upon other colonial european societies with this southern expansion we reached the 1840s when popular history many claimed that the era of manifest destiny began as he clearly saw the push west had happened more than half a century before even under british colonial rule and more importantly i left out the first expansions of settlements one that is often ignored overlooked or forgotten in the story of north america the spanish and later mexican push north the spanish settlers who settled from california to texas and founded a distinctive culture decades before american expansions 1776 is widely remembered as the year the american revolution began but we should not forget that 1776 is also the same year that the spanish founded san francisco here lies probably one of the main reasons why the year 1840 is so significant to what americans call manifest destiny because it collided with someone else's destiny of course previous expansions had collided with the destinies of many peoples cherokee iroquois creek chocta and many more are people defined as savage and unworthy of the land they lived upon by those who came to take it away from them but west of oklahoma and the seibein river there now was another european nation and culture a nation that had expanded north had itself taken land from the apaches guajiltykan pueblo navajo a nation that saw it as its own manifest destiny to go north and to expand build and prosper as a society expanding westward now meant clashing with another european state society and with a different vision of society it would no longer just be a drive to grab and take from peoples considered inferior but a contest with a state over which one was more worthy or strong enough to take these lands in many ways a common theme of imperialism during that era when britain challenged the mughals for rule over india and france challenged the ottomans for rule over north africa at the same time conflict between mexico and america over these lands would mean an imperial war of expansion however there is also an additional reason why 1840 stands out to us and that has to do with the internal politics of both these places at the time in the united states the two predominant political forces at the time were those of the new england north with its midwest ally and the south with its appalachian ally fighting over the one preeminent political issue of the time slavery it was not just new england that expanded west but also the south and they did so for the same reason to form free states and slave states to have more states than the other to dominate over the other to either abolish slavery or reinforce and expand slavery a political confrontation that eventually blew up into a full-blown civil war here in the context of this internal political conflict and encountering mexico is where the 9th and 10th big migration waves came into the picture in the north people from the midwest and new england migrated into oregon and california intending to build a new england of the west coast the native chinook people of oregon when first encountering white people started calling them bostoners because so many settlers came from boston the names of their settlements such as salem named after a town of the same name in massachusetts or portland named after a town of the same name in maine clearly show how these first american settlers in oregon and california were from new england however in california there were unclaimed land and needed a justification for violating the spanish and later mexican claims which the protestant new englanders did by declaring the migrations there as a war against the popish catholic tyranny of spain and to bring the true virtuous protestant faith to these lands early american settlers in california converted to catholicism and adopted mexican citizenship but as the decades rolled on more and more new england settlers brought with them a refusal to adopt any such thing they started building public schools and protestant churches they lived in disobedience of the already weak state authority of the californian state and as the years went by more and more openly claimed that california ought to be part of the united states and at the same time in texas southerners started to arrive with slaves to turn it into a slave [Music] state [Music] as the large landowners bankers generals and mine owners kept bickering and scheming over the power and riches of the country in mexico city and the authority of the state increasingly started to decline the two places it lost the most control over were alta california and texas the nortenos increasingly lived their lives by themselves and gave less and less of a dam about what those bickering fools in mexico city told them to do especially after caravans with supplies stopped being sent north from mexico city what was sent north by mexico city was often counterproductive to asserting control such as penal laborers who kept escaping laws that discriminated religious minorities and groups such as the franciscans ordering them expelled from the country which the governor of alta california refused to enforce and which couldn't really be enforced in texas where government authority didn't have much of a reach anymore mexican soldiers who were sent to texas and california to secure it for mexico city often stopped getting paid by mexico city and even stopped receiving basic supplies and rations which resulted in entire companies deserting an entire battalions marauding through the lands sacking and pillaging missions churches ranches and towns to top all that off mexico city passed a law that required a minimum annual income bracket for politicians congressmen had to have an annual income of at least 1 500 pesos to run for office that's an annual income of 160 000 in today's money and governors needed to earn at least 2 000 pesos a year to run for office which is an annual income of 220 000 in today's money this law secured the power of the wealthy elite in mexico city eliminated any public participation in politics and ensured the country would remain an authoritarian oligarchy but in the north this law turned into an outright farce because not a single person living in the lands stretching from the bay of san francisco to the texas coastline earned enough money to be a governor congressman mayor or even just a district deputy in the north nobody obeyed this law people in fact stopped obeying most of mexico city's laws mexico city and mexico by and large started being seen as a nuisance and an obstruction in the lives of the nortenos tejano ranchers illegally drove their herds of cattle and fine bred horses across the border into markets in louisiana californios smuggled and sold their cow hides illegally in markets on the us frontier trading with foreigners was illegal but nobody cared and as the governor of california mariano chico noted necessity makes illicit what is not listed by law without it californians would not exist as he had to admit that without breaking mexico city's ridiculous laws the economy and society of california would collapse into itself texas in particular increasingly slipped out of mexico's control besides the fact that the apaches didn't take kindly to anyone texas became increasingly pulled out of integration with mexico internal integration is the extent to which a state entity can exert control over a region through infrastructure administration law and trade if you are a country the extent to which you control that country is dependent upon how well you can access each part of this country how much you can enforce your laws over these lands and how well trade internally can be facilitated the nortenos of texas increasingly traded with the americans the road networks of the region had already been completely neglected resulting in the roads and paths leading from texas into louisiana being better developed than those leading to mexico city louisiana also had the nice big juicy port of new orleans for which nortenas could not only sell their products into the wider world but could also access american markets through the vast mississippi shipping lanes and he also didn't have to bribe any oligarchs to do business in the united states texas gradually started to slip into an increasingly american economic sphere of influence americans also increasingly moved into texas by 1823 three thousand of them lived there illegally about as much as the not taino population and the government in mexico city saw that as a good thing moses and stephen austin a father and son team had bought large land grants from the mexican government right after independence built a ranch and over decades learned spanish acquired citizenship and encouraged other americans to do as they had mexico city believed that this would be the standard for american migration into texas they encouraged americans to move to texas placed laws in effect that would demand of them to convert to catholicism and expected that these american settlers would help tame the nortenos and the apaches and thereby restore control over texas for mexico city they were however wrong and this is also where myths started to be created when you read popular history about what happened next there are two versions of the story the first is that a group of brave pioneering anglo-americans liberated texas for themselves the other is that devious white anglo-americans stole texas from its mexican inhabitants both narratives are wrong one more wrong than the other one is more self-limiting both oversimplify what happened there are two main groups of american settlers who came to texas appalachian hill and mountain people who settled in northern texas to build small self-sufficient communities within which they wanted to be as far away from new england and the south as well as their governments laws and regulations as possible and southerners who settled along the texas coastline who wanted to expand their slave plantations for profit and create a new slave state to expand the political power in their rivalry with new england however the majority of settlers were southerners these groups encountered and became neighbours of the north tennos but rather than deeper tying the nortenos into mexico the americans and nortenas found increasingly more common ground they both couldn't stand the authoritarianism and attempts by mexico city to control their lives nortenos increasingly wished to liberate themselves from mexico city's tyranny the southerners were by and large failed slave plantation owners running away from creditors and debt collectors from louisiana to south carolina they didn't bother learning spanish certainly didn't convert to catholicism and imported slaves in violation of mexico city's abolition of slavery people like hayden edwards when he was reminded of mexico's ban on slavery declared himself independent in the republic of fredonia where he legalized slavery the mexican army deported him back to louisiana however the tide could not be stopped and so in 1830 mexico banned immigration but americans kept coming and nathanos supported them as it brought the markets with which they were trading closer to them americans started outnumbering nortenos by ten to one but both groups were not in conflict but unified in opposition and open defiance against mexico city the mexican perspective here especially of the tejanos is often overlooked the conflict between the north and south kept boiling and all it would take for it to blow up was a spark which came in 1833 when santa anna became president of mexico again in 1833 he wanted to ensure that he would not be removed from power again so he suspended the mexican constitution sent all his opponents into exile abroad and seized complete power of all mexican government institutions almost instantly this led to rebellions all across mexico in quahila texas new mexico and out of california california went so far as to declare independence threatening to remain such until the mexican constitution had been restored pueblo indians in new mexico rose up in revolt took santa fe killed the governor and declared a mestizo buffalo hunter to be the new governor santa anna spent the first two years of this new presidency marching through northern mexico with an army crushing one rebellion after another with increasing brutality tejanos angered by the move into absolute dictatorship the previous decades of neglect and authoritarianism and by santa ana's increasing brutality had enough they demanded at first for tejas to become a separate state from guajilla but to still remain part of mexico but support for that increasingly dissipated and leading nortenos such as juan seguin a friend of stephen austin and lorenzo de zavala joined forces with separatist american settlers to demand complete independence from mexico at the battle of the alamo 12 tejanos were amongst 200 fighting for an independent texas lorenzo de savala would become the first vice president of texas juan seguin would lead tejano rebels at the battle of san giaquinto the deciding battle that secured texan independence and administered the burial of the dead after it but it was already during the war where a myth started to be created southern newspapers reported on this war as a conflict between white anglo-americans in a war against an inferior mixed hispanic race and their tyranny stephen austin called the war a war of barbarism and despotic principles waged by the mongrel spanish indian and negro race against civilization and the anglo-american race all of it lies through and through tejanos had risen up side by side with american settlers as texans primarily against santa ana's dictatorship and when the revolution was over the northerners who had rebelled against mexico city were betrayed southerners flooded into texas to build new slave plantations along the coast and the nortenos who had lived there were dispossessed and driven off the lands juan seguin who was elected the mayor of san antonio in an independent texas was sent into exile after a rabble of southern newcomers accused him of being a mexican spy he returned years later after being proven innocent to discover in anger how texas had been turned into a racially segregated society with the nortenos restricted to the lands along the rio grande and where none of them could hope to achieve any political representation or power within this new state at every hour of the day and night my countrymen ran to me for protection against the assaults or exaction of those adventurers sometimes by persuasion i prevailed on them to desist sometimes also force had to be resorted to how could i have done otherwise could i leave them defenseless exposed to the assaults by foreigners who were on the pretext that they were mexicans treated them worse than brutes a powerful myth was born from these events which became accepted historical fact for almost a century a tale of brave southern pioneers who settled the land and freed it from latin despotism a tale that removed the story of the norteno completely and perplexingly as we changed the way we tell history in the mid-twentieth century a new countermiff that called itself progressive was born but was just as mythical a tale of devious southern slave owners who stole the lands of mexicans a half-truth but still therefore only half true and half a lie a tale that casts the nortenos as victims but doesn't acknowledge their participation in the rebellion and their dreams and hopes for freedom and therefore falsely frames and omits the story of how those hopes and dreams were betrayed and crushed the nathanos remained in the united states from texas to california juan seguin upon returning to texas would become one of the first community organizers and leaders of tijus within the united states in 1855 in the galveston weekly newspaper we find the first written record of a lynching of mexicans 11 tejanos the murder described and justified mockingly with the words the whole race of mexicans here is becoming a useless commodity becoming cheap dog cheap 11 mexicans it is stated have been found along the nooses in a hanged condition better so than to be left on the ground for the howling lobbos to tear to pieces and then howl the more for the red that burns his inside raw lynchings of tejanas continued up to the early 1900s the land they had owned was grabbed not by small american settlers as in the west but by large southern plantation owners from virginia to south carolina georgia and mississippi in southern texas 1.3 million acres of land were acquired by only 13 southern planters the land had previously been owned by 360 tejanos mostly small farmers and ranchers these were driven off their lands and coerced into signing over their property under the threat of violence the stillman king and kennedy ranches were such properties which were acquired through coercion fraud and threats of violence by americans if you were a wealthy takana rancher you were also driven off your land unless you had a daughter and could find an american settler willing to marry her the mcallen and young ranchers in southern texas were acquired by american settlers that way this disrupted but also weirdly reinforced the nuteno social structure with a patron at the center in a way the fundamental social structure remained the same mexican texas had been a place of loose federal government control in which communities gathered and organized around the wealthiest member of the community the patron and american texas also became a place of loose federal government control in which communities gathered and organized around the wealthiest members of the community b day cattle barons oil barons or today's tech barons in 1941 a certain lyndon b johnson ran for the senate in texas and won 90 percent of the votes in the southern counties of texas he had won those votes not by campaigning but by calling george parr also known as the duke of duval county and making him promises that in return got him the votes the same counties had given 95 of the vote to johnson's rival and the governor's race the year before in 1948 when johnson ran for the senate seat again he again called george parr and received 99 of the votes in that county these notorious elections are the result of a development within texas and tejano culture of the american annexations in northern mexico that continued previous hierarchical structures tejanos lived in the united states but they were exempt from political powers and economic institutions they rebelled at first such as in 1859 when juan cuatina led a rebellion against texan authorities but the rebellion was crushed tejanos who demanded equality were declared bandits by the state government hunted down killed or even lynched tejanos therefore retreated into their own communities with their families and churches to be by themselves for themselves under their own norms and traditions usually again under patron right after the 1970s if you ran for political office in texas like lyndon johnson and wanted what became in the american colloquial known as the hispanic vote you didn't campaign for it but had a phone call with the patron however this segregation dispossession and consequent isolation that extended beyond texas to mexican-american communities up to california also had a different effect mexican-americans organized around their communities they took care of each other helped each other built socioeconomic institutions of their own took care of each other through family and church and as a community separated and disenfranchised learned to rely upon others within their own community to organize together there is a good reason for when desegregation finally came why mexican-american communities were able to organize efficiently run labor unions organize political action communities and gain and achieve political representation faster than many other historically disenfranchised minority communities within the united states despite all hardships that they endured there was a perseverance and strength that they found within community structures it wasn't until the opening of american society desegregation and the integration of the political process that the nortenos re-emerged back into the general public as well as the cultural and political stage it wasn't until recent years that texan historians began to seriously and honestly examine their true history juan seguin the hero of the battle of zanjaquinto may not have his name in the wikipedia article of that battle yet but public buildings across texas are increasingly named after him and the state library and archive was named after lorenzo de savala the stories of the texan tennis or tejanos raise interesting questions about the state and history of texas in particular they rebelled to be free from the tyranny and despotism of a mexican dictatorship and were then betrayed by those who wanted to keep slaves so are tejanos maybe even more texan than those who rebelled to keep slaves they have been around longer than the american settlers by four centuries some of them being the descendants of settlers who came a hundred years before the first english settled in virginia the only ones who predate them are the apaches the history of the tejanos californios and the nortenos of arizona new mexico colorado and nevada also are in general one of the most interesting chapters in the history of what we call manifest destiny the story of manifest destiny frequently is told in context of americans taking land from native indians which is true but often overlooks the important chapter of the land stolen from mexicans after a betrayal we should not forget that the latinos rebelled against mexico from koahila to texas to sonora to bayer california arizona new mexico and california that many of them wish to overthrow santa ana or even to secede from mexico itself and form something new when mexicans are reminded of the alamo by some rather uneducated americans it is worth pointing out that mexicans were amongst the rebels at the alamo that the cultural narrative often found in popular history of americans and mexicans destined to be enemies is actually untrue and that they may have more in common than you may think at first to tell that story one will have to immerse oneself into the mexican and nontener perspective of the history of these states and ask those questions questions and answers that we might examine closer in a future video what matters for us here is that the nutenos formed a cultural parcel of the united states not completely mexican as they were separated from that are molded over centuries into the american socio-political cultural framework but not fully part of the anglo-majority cultural set in america as they shared a culture with not tenors across the border but they also differ from last century's mexican migrants and culture a lot especially from those that came from southern mexico they show us one thing predominantly that when you boil it down to basics there is rarely such a thing as a cultural border borders are drawn by states by governments by government institutions and not by cultures and when this border was drawn it fell into a time of extreme political friction post tax and independence mexico was even a greater shambles inspired by the texas example more rebellions arose all across the nintendo lands in declarations of independence the republic of rio grande the republic of bayer california the republic of sonora and even down south in the republic of yucatan after santa ana refused to make peace with texas that had by now bankrupted itself and with new england and the midwest settlers inciting rebellion in california the united states seized the opportunity and after winning a decisive victory annexed large parts of northern mexico moving the border to where it now divides nogales and follows the flow of the rio grande however the united states stopped short from annexing sonora quahila and bayer california even though they could have and even though american mercenaries were involved in the rebellions there because fundamentally this annexation was the result of a compromise this chapter in the history book is one of those what if chapters the americans could have drawn the border further south they could have annexed all the rebelling republics and the modern united states would have extended all the way down the sierra madre mountains maps from that era show how this was in fact even considered instead they didn't and the remaining rebellions were crushed the reason for this lies within the preeminent internal political conflict of the united states at the time the conflict between the slave states south and the free states of new england opposition to the mexican-american war and its annexations came from new england [Music] who believes that a score of victories over mexico the annexation of half our provinces will give us more liberty a purer morality a more prosperous industry than we have now murder cannot be hidden from god by a few flimsy rags called banners awake and arrest the work of butchery where it shall be too late to preserve your souls from the guilt of wholesale slaughter ask the prominent massachusetts abolitionist and newspaper owner horace greeley and the massachusetts state senate voted to condemn the mexican-american war as a war against freedom against humanity against justice with a triple objective of extending slavery or obtaining the control of the free states and that was in the end true the president at the time james polk was a southerner whose political loyalties lied with the southern states southern states that had long called for this war mississippi senator john quitman had called for an invasion of mexico when mexico abolished slavery to prevent the establishing of a negro and mongrel empire southern legislators and representatives had long yearned to expand slavery in what they called the golden circle which by 1854 became an organization called the knights of the golden circle a precursor to a certain other organization beginning with the letter k they advocated for an annexation of the entire mexican gulf coast right down to yucatan enslaving its non-white inhabitants and to then go to war with spain to annex cuba and hispaniola all of which should become new slave states filled with slave plantations to expand and create a slave empire along the gulf of mexico a golden circle of slave states stretching all around the gulf of mexico hence the name in 1854 when spain abolished slavery the louisiana state senate passed a motion that condemning the abolition of slavery in spanish cuba and the sacrifices of the white race the seven states made no secret of the fact that they wish to expand so they could expand slavery new england feared this and was terrified by the idea it would double the slave states in the united states and consequently the amount of slave state representatives in senate congress and electoral votes slave state legislators would have dominated the united states government consequently the free states had a staunch opposition to any and all annexation of any mexican lands however this was a little bit hypocritical new england also expanded west and eventually into mexican lands to gain more free states and hence political power over the slave states at the same time california was increasingly settled by people from the midwest in the east and from new england along the coast although those two groups had not much in common they both deplored and despised slavery and california would also provide access to the pacific which the slave states could also benefit from there are two things however that made californian settlement different from texas settlements despite what some californians may tell you there really wasn't much of a californian independence movement or revolution california's separation from mexico was almost completely driven by the united states federal government who immediately annexed it when the opportunity came the other fact is that the new englanders and midwesterners who migrated there didn't manage to fully transplant their sociopolitical framework upon california as southern planters did in texas within years of annexation gold rushes attracted hundreds of thousands of migrants from chile to argentina to germany sweden and ireland japan korea and china turkey jamaica and india the population of california became incredibly diverse where no one cultural group could dominate over all others and the way society was run had to accommodate for all the influx of immigrants also generated capital that fueled industrial development in sectors such as railroads steel manufacturing farming shipping and more in new england political culture the well-being of the community had priority over the well-being of the individual as it had developed out of puritan english culture but in california the influx of migrants and the growth of industry through migrant groups as well as the input of more cultures resulted in individual freedoms taking a more prominent position on the stage as common values community values in california tended to be centered around groups of communities and churches be they mexican-american farmer communities japanese farmers argentinian miners irish and american harbour workers or chinese railroad workers california politically aligned itself with new england but sociopolitically developed very differently racial segregation as implemented in texas was attempted but less rigorously enforced and eventually collapsed mexican culture and catholicism persevered to mix and mold with english culture and the various new arrivals into something unique and new while the latinos of texas remained mostly as they were the tejanos were segregated and consequently preserved much of their communal structures and contrasted that the californios participated within the socio-political framework of the american society that formed they helped reshaped it throughout the coming century but also themselves became a lot more american california in the end became a mixed patchwork of cultures mixed together in a pioneer society with no dominant cultural group it needed to build a political structure that appealed to all it became the place you went to start a new life not just if you were american but from anywhere in the world a place more tolerant than most other parts of the country which would therefore in its own regard significantly shape the united states and while the three states worked on bringing california into the union strategically the three states also came to agree to an annexation of texas as a slave state as part of a compromise texas to them seemed worthless a scrap of desert with some parts where weird black liquids that stank of sulfur pierced through the sand so nothing too valuable but as a desert perfect as a protective buffer zone to protect louisiana and its new orleans port which as the mouth of the mississippi river was the achilles heel of the 19th century american economy with annexation an invader would have to take the long difficult march through a hostile desert filled with apaches and angry southerners to get there and unlike mexico the united states had another advantage that contributed to these annexations happening for centuries spaniards and mexicans had struggled with the difficult geography of the chaparral attempts to enforce their state structures upon the region had failed miserably the spanish state had not the means to do so and the mexican state which had inherited much of its political and economic structures from spain was too weak to do so either but for the americans and their state structure that had developed from the 1600s onward which allowed for a more decentralized government structure it was more possible the geography of the capital was and still is to this very day difficult for any society and state to control but the institutions of the states that had developed in the united states made it easier for her to do so than for mexico this together with the expansions driven by manifest destiny and the drive by free states and slave states to expand their political power in the end would form the basis for political compromise between those two rival factions within the us government california would be annexed as a future free state and to get access to the pacific and texas as a future slave state that protected louisiana as a strategic buffer the border that today separates mexico from the united states was not drawn by culture language geography religion ethnicity or even just as conquest spoils of war it was drawn as a compromise between two rival political camps in an attempt to prevent a civil war a civil war that in the end happened anyway [Music] throughout the first two chapters of this series we focused on one thing i attempted to show you how the founding structures of the united states and mexico were different and consequently resulted in the evolution of two very different political structures on the north american east coast a gradual but ever increasing attitude of rebellion autonomous community structures financial self-interest and separatism came to shape the political structures of the united states while in the plateau of mexico and most of latin america the spanish empire successfully established a state and social structures of a feudal society that existed in the spanish motherland that europeans sought to replicate european feudalism in the americas and where they succeeded a feudal social structure with all its legacies came to be however those carefully watching might have encountered a flaw within the case i am building that being if feudal structures leave legacies that create broken political institutions then why are the state institutions of europe not as broken as those of mexico the answer to that is exactly why the mexican state is in its current state destruction and decline destruction is not exactly something that we would associate with stability or the establishment of a stable political and social order more with the kind of environment that produces and thereby allows stateless entities to shape and take control however it is chaos war destruction and decline that ultimately shaped the modern political institutions of europe the feudal political order of europe started being challenged in 1789 and 1803 and even though it was reestablished in 1815 by the feudal powers it kept getting challenged over and over and over again the existent political powers eventually dragged europe into an apocalyptic catastrophe which caused the collapse of most old european political structures the result of this collapse was a volatile landscape of political instability from which a political force emerged which completely burned down any remnants of old european political power structures the europe of 1945 was a europe that needed to be rebuilt not just physically by rebuilding destroyed infrastructure cities towns and industry but also in governance and state structure the political structures were reinvented and ironically it would be american republican political structures the ones that were birthed out of rejecting european feudal structures which would lead the leading role in rebuilding how europe does politics what was born from this were more stable open accountable just and free political structures states that provided a level playing field for commerce and the development of open political discourse and public sovereignty but there is an exception in europe a state untouched by the apocalyptic events that rendered europe to ashes a state that remained outside of the consequent rethinking and rebuilding of europe a state that gives you an idea of what happened to mexico because its recent political developments have been somewhat similar to mexico spain spain went through all the political turmoil that the rest of europe experienced but it stayed out of the final apocalypse instead opting for its own smaller apocalypse a war won by the forces of old europe who then proceeded to try and create a weird romanticized nostalgic yet modernized vision of an old spain however with none of the charm a disregard for culture brutal totalitarianism and economy dependent on a wealthy class that almost resembled 19th century european aristocrats and deep institutional corruption this disheveled tumor on the spanish history book eventually collapsed into itself but the structures of this spanish state the way governance used to be done within it still partially remain and haunt spain to this very day in corruption lack of public accountability regional instability nepotism and calamitous economic decisions resulting from backdoor deals something that is colloquially known in europe as the ghost of franco the diarrhea that you get if you drink tap water in mexico is colloquially known as montezuma's revenge a somewhat superstitious and funny name invoking the ghost of the long gone aztec emperor returning to haunt those who now inhabit his lands but in a way it is true the failure of the mexican state to provide even basic sanitation systems for large parts of the country's water supply network is the result of a legacy of centuries of corrupt practices and failed states you could call it the ghost of santa ana the ghost of diaz or the ghost of the pri what it however shares with the ghost of franco is that mexico just as spain never underwent a period of restructuring its state and completely abandoning the old corrupt outdated and inefficient ways the first rebellion of the mexican warfare independence was the hidalgo revolt an uprising of disenfranchised peasants led by a priest primarily not against spain but against the tyranny of the colonial elites the colonial elites crushed the revolt only to then fight for independence against spain because spain wanted to cut down on their ability to rule as small tyrants mexico was left in ruins but it was the tyrants who rebuilt the new independent mexico but mexico also had other chances it had more cataclysmic events that left the country in ruins and could have resulted in a rebuilding and rethinking of the mexican state into a less corrupt more democratic and just entity the end of the mexican-american war the reform was the end of the french occupation and the revolution in 1910 but it blew all of these chances every time it ended up being the forces of old who dictated that the future was the past let's return to where we were while the americans were annexing texas and california the europeans were licking their wounds after decades of revolutions and wars they had also lost considerable revenue from the loss of colonies in the americas the new world that they had intended and used as a cash cow was increasingly slipping out of their fingers and when the mexican republic refused to pay debts to the french and spanish it seemed like a perfect opportunity to reassert and rebuild influence over the americas since mexico was also a weak state that had just come out of a costly war it seemed like a perfect target the french invaded mexico and placed an austrian monarch on the throne of a state with a god-awful and complicated flag to draw the french were supported in this endeavor by all major european powers who wished to rebuild a european sphere of influence over the americas again however what the europeans overlooked was that if the mexican state had difficulty running mexico well what made them think that they could somehow do it additionally very few actually wanted the european overlords back there were some supporters of the mexican monarchy especially amongst the mexican elite but other than that only the confederacy and the dying brazilian monarchy supported this french puppet monarchy the republican-mexican army fought hard throughout the land and even though the french managed to occupy many major cities they got bogged down in the geria war in the countryside and could just as those who preceded them never establish any control over the north whether nothenos had zero interest in being told by the french what to do in fact the capital of mexico during the occupation was there in ciudad juarez the americans were also furious they even considered entering the war on the side of mexico to kick the french out but were preoccupied with their own war which didn't prevent them from providing aid and encouraging american volunteers to go south and fight the french which several thousand did in the end france lost which mexicans commemorate to this day on cinco de mayo the anniversary of the first major defeat of the french five years before the war ended this is a chapter unjustly underrepresented in modern history curriculum it is an important turning point this marked the final end of european geopolitical and colonial ambitions in the americas more than just a mexican victory it can be seen as a victory for the entire family of american nations to have the right to determine their own future and destiny without european interference are making it very clear at the time that the borders of european imperialism ended on the coastlines of the two american continents the first cinco de mayo celebrations by the way were held in california years before the war was over by americans in solidarity with mexico and collecting donations and volunteers to send south to mexican republican forces europe and the end of the war went back home and then proceeded to take its frustrations out on africa and themselves what they had left in mexico was devastation but also a newfound optimism relations with the united states had been eased out and past conflict settled in diplomatic agreement the two nations agreed to friendship and cooperation as american aid was sent to help rebuild the mexican economy it was at this point that history could have gone a different way that the state structures of mexico could have been rebuilt differently but that didn't happen instead what happened was the perfiriato named after porphyrio diaz a hero of the war against france who became president in 1884. diaz rebuilt the mexican economy by expropriating vast amounts of land seizing it from mostly poor mestizo peasants in the south and handing it over to large landowners this had a substantial impact on this sector of the mexican economy throughout various often hard to access regions of mexico small family farms had established themselves over the centuries self-sufficient farmers who mainly produced for their own needs sharecroppers who provided for themselves and paid to local authorities taxes and shares of the harvest or tenant farmers who paid to a large landlord for the privilege irrespective of which type of farm and if they had owned their land or not these small family farms were disbanded and the new owners of these lands created plantation economies hennequin plantations that produced fibers for rope sorghum to be used as cattle field coffee for a global demand that exploded during the late 19th century and sugarcane to produce sugar or rum and foodstuffs what all of these crops had in common was that they cannot be produced as a family crop these highly labor-intensive crops require the kind of substantial investment capital and labor that a small family farm cannot bring up these plantations were also part of a global economy and most of its products were to be sold into the foreign markets of an increasingly global and industrialized economy the vast majority of these plantations were created in the south as jungle plantations meaning jungles eroded to use the fertile soils and hot climate for multiple annual harvests however there's a rough lesson to be learned by anyone who invests into these types of jungle plantations and ranches a lesson that west african countries and central american countries learned the hard way and the lesson that brazil should have learned in the 19th century but under its current leadership seems to be determined to learn again jungles are not random depositories of nutrition jungles are fragile self-sustaining ecosystems ecosystems working in a constant cycle of recyclement rotting trees and dead leaves constantly fertilize the wealth in the fauna that itself furthers the continuous rainfall road the jungle and you destroy that cycle when building your ranch or plantation on the remaining fertile soil you are bound to get some years of very rich results but with the cycle broken you will run out of nutritious soil and eventually you will have to spend an enormous amount of the profits made into fertilizer consequently jungle plantations end up becoming a cycle within themselves a self-sustaining poverty institution that keeps entire segments of populations trapped in low-income low-skill yet labor-intensive jobs with little innovation from the gold coast to the jungles of central america the only way you can continuously run the jungle plantation and still rake in massive profits is by continually roading more jungle or by having unpaid labor with the institution of slavery caribbean plantations racked in gigantic profit margins and to ensure enormous profits deers went by similar means this possessed small farmers mostly mestizo ended up working for close to nothing or nothing as indentured servants dead laborers penal laborers or sometimes even just kidnapped and forced to work in a new industrialized but still exploitative plantation industry the low point of this economic practice came when diaz forcibly dispossessed the native yaqui people who had lived largely untouched in the northern state of sonora not only did they have their lands taken but almost the entire people around 8 000 of them were deported to the southern state of yucatan and forced to work as slaves on plantations in a supposedly civilizing forced labor system eerily similar to that of the spanish missions built two centuries before this started a gradual change in the prosperity and balance of wealth of the nation the south became dominated by rich plantations which gave the illusion of the average wealth rising throughout the south but in reality the south started becoming poorer and poorer due to the massive population of impoverished farm laborers that worked these plantations it is argued by some that the profiliario made mexico wealthier due to an increase in gdp but as this policy and others clearly show it made mexico poorer as gdp can increase while the wealth and average living standards of average citizens does not or even declines diaz also handed out these plantations as monopolies to his close allies and friends in the mexico city business and political elite additionally he handed out large monopolies in mining and other economic sectors to his political allies the new industrial mexico would mainly produce raw materials for foreign industrial markets it meant that mexico would spend the industrial revolution serving those who actually underwent that economic revolution rather than revolutionizing its own economy licenses for banks were also monopolized and handed out to the political allies and friends of diaz with long lasting and very damaging effects on the mexican economy banks and the capital that they provide are essential for any economy to grow and for innovations to receive the backing required to be sold and produced however because the banks were in the hands of a small elitist group they ended up serving a completely different purpose the owners of the economic monopolies ended up borrowing from the banks that they owned themselves they controlled interest rates ensuring their own wealth while bankrupting those who came up as competition the mexican banking sector became intertwined within the politics of the country as a tool of unelected politicians to secure their own power and wealth and a weapon to destroy those who challenge them and to keep this new status quo going by 1910 there were only 40 banks in mexico many of which were controlled by political allies and friends of diaz ensuring a monopoly and capital that only they had and could grant access to to take part in a global industrialized economy also takes access to foreign markets therefore diaz ended the restrictions on trade with foreign countries and in foreign markets so his new economy could export its raw materials to a booming foreign set of industries however not only were the owners of the monopolies the only ones who really produced anything for this global economy they were also the only ones given exclusive trading licenses to conduct this trade in terms of laws and accountability just as previous presidents diaz had not been elected but seized power through force and fraud he had the ability to change laws that his heart's content to pardon or just outright legalize the cronyisms of his allies and himself in particular through the use of a law called recursive amparo this law based in the mexican constitution and originating in 1857 means appeal for protection and essentially provides the basis for an individual to argue that certain laws don't apply to them because those laws may violate their constitutional rights even though the constitution might not even explicitly or implicitly protect what they claim to be a right as a right this is confusing how it was introduced in mexico as a supposed protection for individuals against the state and copied throughout many latin american countries but throughout latin america but especially in mexico and colombia this law ended up being used by corrupt politicians and gangsters alike to escape prosecution and investigation through obfuscating the legal process with obscure arguments over obscure rights supposedly violated when their activities and persons were being investigated in short crooked business corruption and criminal activity in mexico by state officials and wealthy elites through this not only ended up being stayed sanctioned but legally protected compare this to the economic developments taking place throughout the united states at the same time the american banking sector was born into scandal and fraud established just like in mexico by politicians in collaboration with the wealthy to enrich themselves however a substantial difference to mexico is that politicians involved in such scandals got voted out engaging in this type of corruption became increasingly risky as an american civil society expanded and developed banking was also not monopolized banks were created by private firms and persons throughout the country without approval by the state in 1818 there were 338 banks in the united states by 1910 there were 27 000 expanding both capital and its availability to average americans if you wanted a loan to start a business in the united states you could get that loan very easily and this availability of capital would do wonders for the american industrial revolution if you had an innovation and needed the capital to build the capacity to produce and sell your product you could do so the reasons for this are found in the patent law system of english law in 1623 the english parliament passed a patent act which stripped the english king of the power to grant royal patents and monopolies grounded in english law was now the ability for people to be granted patents by public representatives laws that also shaped american laws and remained within american laws long after independence unlike in mexico you didn't need to plead with the state to be granted the privilege of doing business you had that right and you could additionally demand from your government to protect your rights from being violated by others if you had an idea you could patent that idea at a low cost and then sell that patent to some other corporation or company to receive more capital to then continue creating more patents for more innovations to then use your capital to build and expand your business in the united states the existing socio-economic and political structures meant that it could fully not just as a state and society but through the efforts of its citizens participate in the industrial revolution and drive it onward into eventually becoming its leading nation the only exception in the united states was a place developing into a similar economic direction as mexico at the time which was the south where despite the abolition of slavery a black population was held in indentured servitude where they despite developing some of their own economic infrastructure by and large remained an underclass in a corrupt elitist society and where innovation and economic development struggled to take hold until very recently in contrast to the united states in mexico the socio-economic and political structures of colonial spain that were adapted into a republic now adapted again to find space within the industrial revolution and to continue however as the elites of mexico city prospered and schemed discontent amongst average mexican citizens started to increasingly boil beneath the surface and would eventually blow up into a full-blown revolution in the city of nogales sonora you will find that the largest employers are american companies and you will find those in the maculadora manufacturing industry park within its premises there are u.s companies that produce anything from musical instruments to hospital clothing to suitcases to sunglasses to garage doors this practice of american business moving into mexico to acquire its cheap labor started over a hundred years ago and nogales neighboring county of canania is one of the first places where that began canadia has some of the richest copper ore deposits in the region today these mines are owned by the state-owned mining corporation grupo mexico and by the richest man in mexico and formerly richest man in the world the billionaire carlos slim however that is not how mining started here the industrial monopoly economy of mexico the dias had established was unable to tap many resources of the country the monopoly owners were preoccupied with their own little parcels of the economy and since mexican capital was restricted within the oligarchy and not widely available many economic sectors were neglected the result was an economic underdevelopment of many parts of the country that the elites just simply didn't care about and one of these places was the north however american prospectors bankers and entrepreneurs could take credits and loans from banks in the united states where capital was available to everyone to then buy the licenses from the mexican government this angered sections of the mexican public who would have preferred to do so themselves having access to american industry meant that these americans began building textile and other industries in central mexico as well while the mexican oligarchs didn't bother and just kept sitting on their established plantations by 1900 over 90 percent of all industry in mexico was owned by foreigners and 70 percent of these foreigners were americans the ultimate result of the porfiriato was one that replicated itself in many latin american countries the corrupt rule of caudelio oligarchs who limited the economic freedoms of their citizens with exclusionary economic institutions resulted in foreigners with foreign capital and foreign machinery and foreign innovations taking over large swaths of national economies that the kleptocratic local governments were too incompetent to develop or just disinterested in while the general public could do nothing but watch the legacies of this precarious socio-economic development reverberate throughout latin america to this very day one of the american entrepreneurs was william green a wisconsin rancher who had the capital and american credit that decades of decentralized and open economic development had made available in the united states with that capital which was inaccessible to the overwhelming majority of mexicans within their own exclusionary mexican economy he was able to buy a grant from the mexican government in 1899 to open copper mines in canania due to the corruption of the mexican state he was also able to bribe himself into extraordinary positions of power green throughout his career had spent a substantial time doing business in the american frontier even murdering a man in tombstone arizona he wasn't the type of person who liked government oversight and was therefore able within the isolated and often lawless lands of northern mexico to build almost his own little fiefdom around the town of canania just like the patrons however the resentment amongst the local montana population that he hired started to spread when he imported american miners who earned five pesos a day for the same work that earned the mexican worker only two pesos a day meanwhile in central mexico a crisis in the textile industry caused a third of its workers to lose their jobs this resulted in strikes and the consequent brutal crackdown by the mexican military which gained increasing popularity for the opposition politician francisco matero in panic diaz suspended the already fraudulent elections and had mandarin exiled to the united states this became the starting shot of the mexican revolution of 1910 and the consequent civil war the mexican revolution is unique it is an extremely complex and a very convoluted story of betrayals and political maneuvering but it has always had a special place in the hearts and minds of many historians but also especially in the hearts and minds of revolutionaries the reason for this is that revolutions are often romanticized as uprisings of the impoverished and poor but that is largely a romantic myth in reality the vast majority of revolutions were led by educated middle and upper class peoples often revolutions happen to preserve a status quo and not to abolish it but not so here the mexican revolution is an exception to what is largely a romantic myth the mexican revolution of 1910 genuinely was a spontaneous uprising of the disenfranchised and impoverished masses against those who had exploited them it was also the first revolution of the 20th century followed by the chinese revolution and the russian revolution within it you will find the themes of all revolutions of the 20th century rebellion against oppressive government against economic exploitation and against foreign influence and invaders and the struggle for social reform and justice revolutionary mexico was also the first 20th century society to engage in revolutionary social experimentation from nationalism to anarchism to socialism indigenous liberation to liberal democracy it had famous and charismatic leaders such as emiliano zapata and his zapatistas who fought for indigenous lands to be taken from large landowners and made communal land again pancho villa who although pragmatic mainly fought for what he saw as a struggle of the mexican working class to have their land returned and francisco madero who wanted a legalist liberal democracy with land returned to peasants as their private property and one of the main reasons why the popular romantic image of this revolution endures to this very day is that unlike most other 20th century revolutions this revolution succeeded and technically it is still with us the bay yang republic is gone the spanish republic is but a nostalgic memory the soviet union is no more but the mexican republic it still stands the revolution first flared up in the north with striking miners and instantly spread south to plantation laborers sensing the danger to themselves in this situation the cowdelius participated in this initial uprising and a new government was put in place under francisco madeiro however that government kept the power structures of the previous government and even some of the same people it negotiated land reform but did so tacitly at best handing out largely worthless scraps of desert to plantation laborers the land reform also included a scam that redistributed large swaths of land to already wealthy landowners this worked because the government promised to return land that was illegally seized during the rule of deers however very little land was technically illegally seized since diaz had just legalized the land seizures of his allies and business partners additionally the government didn't reform and kept the hated mexican army the mexican army had come to be one of the most hated institutions of the country ruthlessly used as a brutal and blunt tool to crush civil discontent brutalize the public and dispossess farmers by seizing their lands so revolution flared up again or more precisely several revolutions counter revolutions and more a rebellion in the north that sought to overthrow the government the government crushed that rebellion but what the government could not get control over were the zapatistas and the anarchists there's a good reason for this the issue of land land reform was and to an extent still is one of the most important and divisive political issues in mexico and large parts of latin america in the united states land had often been handed out for free to settlers over the centuries and property ownership became common and widespread in mexico land had been owned by a transplant spanish aristocracy a social structure reinforced by post-colonial oligarchs and then by the perfiriato millions of acres of farmland were in the hands of an extremely small minority while millions of small peasants lived in poverty without property the resolution of this inequality would be the main economic and political challenge mexico faced throughout the 20th century and to a degree still today the zapatistas offered a solution to the disenfranchised peasantry communal land ownership in collective farms farmland had been owned communally by native american communities before the and the zapatistas demanded a return to that system and that was a very attractive proposition to the largely mestizo and horribly disenfranchised and exploited mexican peasantry who joined the zapatistas and mass while the government was able to crush initial counter-revolutionary uprisings by army officers and members of the old elite it was unable to find and implement any meaningful solutions for the issues that had caused the revolution in the first place it had negotiated an alliance with the socialists and the anarchists but those started to openly mock the weak government and its ineffectiveness the zapatistas started forming their communal farms rebelled and seized control of the country's sugar plantations and the richest state morelos and the socialists went on strikes in cities while the government increasingly started falling apart madero was an idealist a man with good intentions he wanted to establish american democracy in mexico he dreamt of a mexico that would become a free republic with the same standard of living and socio-political structure and constitutional liberties as the united states but ideals alone cannot build a functioning state or reform a society his idealism blinded him and his government to the fundamental flaws and realities of the mexican state they had inherited the united states was a country of small property owners government accountability separation of powers and an independent judiciary with freely available capital none of these institutions existed in mexico building an american-style republic on the disheveled monstrosity that was the porfiriato was simply an impossibility what madero didn't realize was that the entire socio-economic order of the porfiriato was doomed to failure at the root cause of the revolution itself it would have to go for any change to even be possible throughout the revolution american industrialists had fled mexico and when madero started negotiating with socialist workers in the cities the us ambassador conspired with a nephew of diaz to organize a coup that ended with the assassination of madero and the end of the first revolutionary government the new counter-revolutionary regime led by victoriano huerta immediately marched south to try and crush the zapatistas and failed miserably the counter-revolutionary regime got bogged down in an unwinnable guria war in the rugged mountains and jungles of the south the army engaged in a vicious scorched earth campaign burning towns and villages and conducting mass executions and massacres on its way south it also massacred the liberal government of senator the result of this indiscriminate brutality in particular since it was often directed against civilians and people who were not even sabatistas was that thousands went to join the zapatistas and while failing in the south in the north the nail in the coffin of the regime came to rise a loose set of rebels revolutionaries anarchists socialists smugglers cowboys deserted soldiers lumberjacks small farmers and many more stretching from sonora to chicago to kuahila united and led by the famous pancho villa within a year day seized control of the north west managed to build a functioning war economy redistributed land and even established a central bank to finance their reforms and even though the united states supported the regime the army of panchavilla just bought modern american military equipment not from the american government but from american companies remington colt and dupont in el paso and austin they even bought fuel from texas oil barons with little to no resistance the army of pancho villa known as the division del norte ended up being better equipped than the government at the most effective fighting force of the revolution it became especially known for its cavalry cowboys and horseback packed with bandoliers and modern mauser rifles who quickly and efficiently caused havoc among enemy forces in 1914 that army marched south and took zaratechus with that panchavilla controlled much of the north with the exception of the northeast which was controlled by different rebels and the governor carranza and general obregon who had been loyal to madero and therefore rebelled against huetta as constitutionalists the huatta regime was now boxed in between pancho villa carranza and the zapatistas but this is where someone else moved into the picture the army of panchavilla had committed several atrocious war crimes such as mass executions of surrendered soldiers and in the far north it started to increasingly lose control along the border banned the trees started to increase but not significantly enough to actually harm the united states but as an excuse it was enough for them under the pretense of intervening against banditry the american army started to intervene in 1914 the actual intention was to guide the revolution into a government in their favor and to secure the mexican assets of american industrialists the americans landed in veracruz and occupied it but the occupation ended up being a disaster mexican civilians started shooting at the americans the american navy consequently bombarded the city indiscriminately and eventually had to pull out although the americans would conduct several incursions into northern mexico they had to increasingly come to terms with the fact that they would not be guiding the outcome of this revolution the main effect the intervention had in the end was that the zapatistas constitutionalists and the army of pancho villa formed an alliance against the regime and shortly after pancho villa inflicted a crushing defeat against the hue the government at the battle of torreon after which the mexican army an institution that was feared and hated by the mexican people basically fell apart querter resigned and fled to the united states where he was imprisoned and probably murdered and this started a rush on the capital and obrigan was the first to arrive the constitutionalists promised concessions to factory workers and the freedom for all workers to organize in labor unions while pancho villa and zapata launched an appeal to the rural peasants at this point in the revolution with all counter-revolutionary forces defeated or in shambles the conflict that arose was between left-wing forces the constitutionalist labour movement of the progressive socialist general operagon and the more conservative carranza controlled the cities the zapatistas and the army of pancho villa with the anarchist farming communes and demands for land reform held power in the countryside the americans were shocked by what they perceived as widespread radicalism they offered support to the constitutionalists in return for american control of mexican oil and were angrily rebuffed they finally realized at this point that a regime that continued the perfiriation status quo was impossible and would only lead to more uprisings so they begrudgingly decided to throw their support behind the constitutionalists who although they demanded massive redistribution of land and wealth at least wanted such redistributed as private property the constitutionalists announced an enormous land reform package every single mexican was eligible for the program and would essentially divide up the large majority of mexican farmland among the poor peasantry as private property pancho villa and zapata who had advocated for collectivized communal farms were outraged and called on their supporters to revolt but they gravely underestimated their opponents within weeks the constitutionalists recruited amongst the workers of the cities what became known as the red battalions soldiers sworn to establish a socialist workers republic ready and eager to face the zapatistas in battle the first world war had drawn in the help of german military advisors for the constitutionalists who as a result employed the tactics of barbed wire funneling enemies into machine gun nests tactics that were at the same time being used across the ocean in the fields of flanders pancho villa's famous cavalry was torn up by machine guns and barbed wire just as the english cavalry had been torn up in belgium the constitutionalist army took the north but the revolution which had by this point turned into a civil war grinded out into a brutal gurilla war however the constitutional army was by no means a united force it was a large coalition of socialist workers middle class citizens and the upper classes who had begrudgingly thrown their weight in with the constitutionalists out of pragmatism they disagreed on what the economy and society of the new mexico should be many among the upper classes also demanded a limitation on democracy many of the workers had aspirations of ending the industrial economic order and returning to a pre-industrial but socialist artisan economy others dreamt of carrying the revolution out of mexico into the united states and launched a global revolution of industrial workers some were even urban anarchist syndicalists demanding the organization of cities into worker syndicates many came together in the kaza movement a labor union movement that was set on the course of confrontation with the other elements of the constitutionalist movement by 1916 that confrontation came with nationwide strikes the government reacted by implementing martial law and disbanding the red battalions the constitutionalist movement was again weakened while in the south sabata declared the abolition of private property to rally more peasants to the anarchist cause and then the north pancho villa rebuilt his strength for a final showdown of the constitutionalists in sonora the americans wanted villa to lose so they moved artillery into sonora which helped the constitutionalists win pancho villa consequently decided to invade the united states the first and so far last invasion of america since the war of 1812. he raided and briefly occupied parts of new mexico and then retreated back across the border and this is where the americans made a big mistake they invaded northern mexico in pursuit of pancho villa and that together with villa's previous daring raid across the border elevated pancho villa to a status of national hero in mexico the guy who took the fight to the gringos the constitutionalist government had to embarrassingly declare defensive line against the americans which the american army blundered into and lost a fight the americans realized far too late that pancho villa had just baited them into mexico so he could kick them around on his own home turf and elevate his own national status as a defender from foreign invaders the americans had to retreat out of mexico empty-handed all they had accomplished were pro-villa uprisings that helped panchavilla re-establish power over large parts of the north in this situation the constitutional president carranza gave in to the demands by the progressive general obregon to write a new mexican constitution it enshrined the shorelines frontiers and natural resources of mexico as non-violatable property of the people as a community personified through the state and shrining thereby interlaw national industries and a clear boundary that the americans could not cross a democratic system under a centralized government a right to universal free education to healthcare to the formation of labor unions a right to rural communities to own their local land and a right to strike this constitution the most progressive at the time would form the foundation for an enormous transformation of the mexican economy and society and would undo the economic order of the pofferyato it settled the internal disputes of the constitutionalist movement but the civil war was not yet over it grinded on into a long protracted slog of a gerea war and counter-insurgency warfare between the warring camps but as it slogged on over the years the reforms of the constitutionalist government took hold land was redistributed a national oil industry created that in turn created jobs and provided funds for public services as life improved the zapatistas and pancho villa started losing more and more support in 1920 carranza made the mistake of having emilio zapata assassinated it led to the collapse of the armed resistance of the zapatistas but made him a martyr for future revolutionaries in the north pancho villa's forces started to act with increasing brutality not just against the government but against civilians panchavilla ended up being seen as nothing but abandoned and was widely hated carranza though slacked behind in agricultural reform and the redistribution of land to appease his wealthier supporters in the mexican elite so by 1920 his once ally the progressive socialist obregon staged a coup and had him murdered obregon then made peace with pancho villa in exchange for a large hacienda the revolutionary in the end ended up as a plantation owner like the very people he had once rebelled against at the end of this game of thrones-esque series of events that would make a great tv series or video game one of the few occasions where a history book reads like a shakespeare play or a thriller alvero obregon was the last man standing elected president in 1920 and began a project of building a leftist mexican republic the republic born from this revolution was a famously leftist and often romanticized republic the republic that gave trotsky refuge redistributed land condemned and opposed nazi germany before anyone else did and sent weapons at volunteers to help the spanish republic in its war against fascism in its initial years it was very decentralized and many social reforms came through the efforts of state governments the governments of veracruz michokarthan yucatan japas and other states encouraged the creation of agrarian leagues and farmer labour unions which came together as the national peasant league the government of yucatan also was the first to introduce women suffrage legalized divorce and encouraged the election of women into office resulting in the founding of the national feminist league and the government of tabasco implemented radical cultural reforms to cut down on the power of the catholic church of a society and economy separating church and state for the first time in 1924 obregon could not run for president again and plutarco calles became president five years later founding the partido revolo scenario institutional or party of the institutionalized revolution this political party would have an enormous impact on mexico and resulted in mexico going a decidedly separate path from other latin american states remember how the mexican army had fallen apart after its defeat to pancho villa the mexican army would be rebuilt after the revolution but under the pri government became a different institution it was stripped of any political powers or influence and placed in its entirety under civilian control this may be normal where you live but it is very special in a latin american context in no other latin american country did that process take place until very recently armies remained political institutions of power from chile to argentina to venezuela to colombia to guatemala and in these countries their armies would abuse that political power to severely traumatize and harm their societies and mexico avoided these traumas of military dictatorship civilian control over the army is probably the biggest and most important accomplishment of the pri additionally all these decentralized movements and institutions that had sprung up across the country to advance social progress were united under national umbrella organizations the intention behind this was to turn the revolution into a state and continue it a national bank was founded that provided credit for impoverished farm owners to take over the old haciendas and plantations to build massive collectively owned cooperative farms nationalizations across the country created national industries a welfare state was established to provide free healthcare and other services education which had been declared a constitutional right was made widely available to all for free all of it was managed by a centralized state under the pri mobile teachers an enormous program of building schools throughout even the hardest to reach corners of the country the end of illiteracy the building of hospitals in all corners of the country the emancipation of women jobs housing and so much more the economic structures of the pofferyato were completely dismantled post-revolutionary mexico was one of the most advanced societies of its time in many of its social reforms and programs it was even decades ahead of other countries this however inevitably leads to one question what went wrong the americans did not undermine this new state even though they may have initially wanted to during the first world war a request by germany to mexico to join the war against america and annex its former territory further fueled american distrust of mexico even though mexico declined the german proposal i was well in no position to even fight any war against america because you know it was kind of fighting itself already fear-mongering politicians in washington rambled about soviet mexico and when mexico nationalized its oil industry even demanded military intervention to overturn the republic during the revolution relations between the two had severely deteriorated a once unguarded border was now tightly guarded and patrolled the popular image of mexico and the american imagination changed drastically mexicans started to be depicted and seen as devious gangsters bandits and dangerous political radicals but over time the americans came to terms with their neighbors by the 1930s american politicians even advocated for copying some mexican educational reforms the poffiriato may have also been dead but let us ask this how much different truly was this new republic the new mexico was a state controlled by a centralized government which had enormous control over the economy the pri and its institutions came to dominate many aspects of people's lives if you wanted a farm job you had to be part of the farm laborers union wanted a job in the judiciary might it be best to be a party member jobs and prospects with engineering mining and many other sectors became also a tightly controlled domain of an enormous state apparatus controlled by the pri mexico became a one-party state political upheaval and pluralism got choked out by that state apparatus not through force not through censorship oppression or brutality but for institutions through bureaucracy the pri created a system in which political participation was meant to be conducted through the institutions of the pri party-controlled institutions that became the state but rather than forming political discourse a process vital for the advancement of reform change in power and the resolution of political conflict and disagreement it merely created a process of scheming for positions of power within a single party system many political movements emerged to oppose the pri but neither had access to these large institutions and therefore all of them failed or became subsumed by the pri much of the legal framework of pre-revolutionary mexico had simply been adopted by the pri and continued and in many ways the political structures were very similar there were no more sugar barons and enormous plantation owners like in the porfiriato but you had a lot of bureaucrats who controlled large economic and social institutions the ability to do business in mexico was no longer dependent upon the approval of a sugar baron like in the pofferyato but it was still dependent on the approval of a state bureaucrat the ability to engage in politics was no longer dependent of the approval of a cardelia like under the perfiriato but it now was dependent on the approval of the pri if you were a mexican farmer during the 1920s your life was probably better than that of an american farmer throughout the 1920s the economy of small farmers in the united states collapsed many of them migrated into california the small farms were bought up by corporate farms who brought in their tractors and mechanized agriculture to transform american agriculture into a billion dollar mass production industry during that time john steinbeck described the new mechanized american farm laborer in that book you should have read in high school if you are american but let's be honest you probably didn't read it he loved the land no more than the bank loved the land he could admire the tractor its machined surfaces its surge of power the roar of detonating cylinders but it was not his tractor behind the tractor rolled the shining discs cutting the earth with blades not plowing but surgery pushing the cut earth to the right where the second row cut it and pushed it to the left slicing blades shining polished by the cut earth and pulled behind the discs the harrows combing with iron teeth so that the little clods broke up and the earth lay smooth but behind the harrows the long cedars twelve curved iron peens erected in foundry orgasms set by gears raping methodically raping without passion the driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will proud of the tractor he did not own or love proud of the power he could not control and when that crop grew and was harvested no man had crumbled a hot clawed in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips no man had touched the seed or lusted for the growth men ate what they had not raised had no connection with the bread the land bore under iron and under iron gradually died for it was not loved or hated it had no prayers or curses in contrast the mexican farmer received land or became part of a cooperative farm he joined a farmer's union that guaranteed his wages he received access to healthcare and education he learned to read and write he received a roof over his head he no longer had to worry over how to provide for his family in fact he could rest assured that his children may be the first in his family to go to college the economic reforms combined with social reforms made the lives of average mexicans a lot easier comfortable and prosperous but as clear-cut as these contrasts may be mexico actually took an enormous step backward creative destruction is an economic concept described by the austrian economist joseph schumpeter it describes the process by which capital and the means of production are continually destroyed by creative forces of capital to create new capital and new means of production the industries that evolved around the caring and feeding of horses were destroyed by the car but generated new industries around the maintenance of the car champion was a marxist he believed that creative destruction was a force that would eventually lead to the collapse of capitalism that of course did not happen nevertheless the simple observation holds true that innovation drives the creation and reinvigoration of new economic sectors at the expense of old as such it became widely accepted as a concept among more serious economists the death of the american small farm was a process of creative destruction industrialized agriculture with its tractors and machines produced more at less of a cost the small american farmer died the big american farmer lived there are no more smiths producing horseshoes for horses to plow the fields of oklahoma but there are engineers maintaining the tractors that do this process was not dictated by governments but came to be through a process of free competition within the market system of the united states a process that did not exist in mexico during the perfiriato the plantation owners had not bothered innovating because they sat comfortably in an unchallenged position of wealth and power with no competition and now in pri mexico the cooperative farmer had no need to innovate and no need to upscale or improve the means of production throughout mexico in fact the system of nationalized economic sectors stifled entrepreneurship and innovation mexican engineers didn't innovate cars consumer goods fridges food preservatives electric ovens home heating systems radios tvs or any of the other things that american open economies produced in the coming decades it stagnated it produced raw materials and foodstuffs for foreign and domestic markets just as the perferiato had and by the 1940s the system of governance established started to show what would become one of its biggest weaknesses and ultimately cause its demise smaller private hacienda earners started receiving ever increasing grants american corporations received land grants land redistribution to small farmers dropped by 50 in 1943. mexican industrialists created business associations tied within and connected to the pri as mentioned before the political process of dialogue discussion public participation and reform had been replaced by scheming within the state apparatus of the pri the political and economic power structure consequently remained closed off to public participation where once there were mining oligarchs with political power there now were bureaucrats in a national oil industry with political power where once there were industrial monopolists there now was a state business federation the general public could themselves only participate in politics or business through the pri the economic structure of mexico therefore remained exclusionary and the political system also remained exclusionary in many ways the socio-political structures of colonial spain that had adapted into an independent mexico and then adapted into an industrialized mexico now continued within a socialist republic [Music] in 1947 the mexican economist daniel cosio villegas wrote and published a scathing attack against the mexican state in his words the revolution had exterminated an entire generation of men and entire groups and institutions it completely wiped out the army and the perferian bureaucracy it ended with the strongest and richest class the large and medium-sized farmers thus disappearing all the upper bourgeoisie and much of the small many of the best sources of national wealth transportation the sugar industry all livestock and more languish to the very brink of extinction even large professional groups university teachers for example saw their ranks so diminished that their cadres properly ceased to exist the revolution in short created an enormous wealth vacuum and indeed the social and economic hierarchy carved out for almost half a century to him the revolution had been driven by socialism liberalism and nationalism but the revolution had failed to find a compromise between rival political forces to bring them to a table and establish a means of governance that gave a voice to all instead these forces ended up in a civil war against each other all the revolution had done in the end was destroy it had burnt the old mexico to cinders but not created any compromise or any institutions in its place that could sufficiently address the issues that had plagued the country since its inception the revolution had destroyed the dictatorship but it had not created a democracy the revolution had destroyed the large landowners cardelias and their enormous plantations and haciendas but it had not created a framework for an efficient agriculture and economy in its stead the revolution had failed to alleviate inequality and poverty it had failed to even create political participation by the public to him the mexican congress was also one of the most suffocating institutions that existed in it just as the caudilios before them there was no debate in this house even though it was now a chamber of a republic no discourse no exchange of opinions no debates no discussions no wrestling over votes no public representation no nothing the pri representatives met up sworn off and then schemed within the structures of a one-party state for villegas this state was doomed if the pri would not radically change course the state it had built would merely repeat the old habits and mistakes of the failed states that had preceded it but villegas was ignored because the 1940s brought an economic boom however not through the efforts or innovations of mexicans but due to the entanglements of its neighbor the second world war had created a huge labor shortage throughout the united states additionally many other allied nations relied heavily on the labor force of latin american nations to produce for the war effort mexican laborers began migrating back and forth across the border to work on farms and in factories a process that in a way continues to this very day the mexican government at the time believed that the only way to modernize the mexican economy was through foreign investment and innovation it consequently opened the country and its cheap labor force increasingly for foreign companies what however is in retrospect frequently overlooked is how incredibly corrupt the mexican government at the time was and continued to be miguel aleman valgus the 53rd president amassed a fortune during his time in office that a public servant should have never been able to acquire it was also valdes who shaped and cemented the political institutions of mexico for the latter half of the 20th century he bribed political opponents into not challenging him he bribed party officials to remain loyal to him he created a system of patronage and loyalty through appointments grants for his wealthy friends in business a bribery that spread through and was copied throughout many institutions of the state and economy government corruption in any way shape and form is always poison to any state or economy if you have to pay bribes to remain in business it creates an unfair system of advantage that renders the wider economy uncompetitive and stifles innovation small businesses start dying off and i eventually barely even started up as the pofferyato showed us it also invited exceeding foreign business and political influence and it also does nothing to share the fruits of any economic growth among the wider population valdes also ended the secularization process of the republic permitting the catholic church to regain much of its pre-revolutionary influence he subtly limited the power of the labor unions to have them subdued under the control of the party and state bureaucrats who were able to strip them of powers when in need of appeasing private interests and most cynical of all he instituted a subtle system of state repression when we think of state repression the images we conjure up are often those of tanks rolling over people a secret police whisking people away to dark unknown dungeons or camps where those the state deems undesirable are exterminated this to an extent was what state oppression looked like in many latin american military dictatorships but the system of state repression implemented in pri mexico was far more insidious and subtle people critical of the government like narcisso basils were just put on the state's surveillance harassed and their career and job prospects ruined they were barred from public life had defamatory articles published about them and were simply gradually discredited and unpersoned besides the beginning of mexican migrant labor into the united states during the 1940s there would be another very significant development along the border one that would have disastrous consequences but had its origins not in mexico but in the united states where during the 1920s the americans prohibited the production sale and consumption of alcohol and opium throughout the hills of sinaloa mexican farmers had always grown poppies for local production of morphine for medical use the wife of a petty mexican crook and mariana smuggler by the name of ignacia yasso sees this as an opportunity and like her husband she quickly discovered the enormous economic potential of the region she organized the massacre of the chinese gangsters that ran the morphium trade in the region and started buying cineloan opium which she had manufactured into heroin for further sale the base of her operation was the small border town of ciudad juarez where she would become known as la nacha whatever the americans who were going through a socio-political phase of moral puritanism criminalized and banned she ended up providing cedar juarez became stuffed with bars distilleries brothels and opium dents which americans could access by simply crossing the border from el paso texas this is where a story that would deeply hurt injure and traumatize mexico began through murdering competitors and building alliances she ended up building an empire of bars brothels opium dents heroin labs and smuggling roots for liquor heroin cocaine mariana and women that stretched across the border earning her the nickname queen of the border in 1930 business exploded when she bribed and murdered her way into becoming the main supplier of marijuana for americans and by the 1940s the main supplier of hemp for rope production to the united states armed forces she cemented her power by another means that would end up becoming a local practice she simply bribed mexican government officials to ignore her criminal network her network wouldn't end until american pressure forced her arrest after the second world war and after that she became largely forgotten she doesn't even have her own wikipedia entry and many don't even know that the first of the notorious mexican drug cartels was founded by a woman her organization would divide up into the cartels of juarez sonora and sinaloa and the way that northern mexican society had been structured furthered this socio-economic development since the days of the first spanish communities of settlers the north had been tough to govern and to assert the authority of the state over these communities of majority white hispanics became self-sufficient autonomous and independent with governance mostly being local and organized around the wealthiest member of the community the patron when you boil everything down to basics a criminal organization is an out-of-state and non-state actor an entity of its own norms and customs outside of the society of law that can exist either in competition leeching off or in cooperation with state entities it is therefore not surprising that when the illegal drug trade emerged at the beginning of the 20th century with the criminalization of narcotics that it was out of state and non-state entities that took over that market from the tribes of northern burma to the hill people of afghanistan to the goons and gangs that had controlled italian cities to the semi-autonomous patrons who had power over the hard-to-reach and neglected parts of colombia and mexico being a stateless entity doesn't make you a narco-trafficker however having the convenience of the location and economic structure does borders are when you boil it down mostly not natural things only a few countries have natural borders most borders represent the limitations of a social construct namely the economy of scale the extent to which a society and its institutions can reach and exert its authority this means that cross-border interaction be it in form of commerce to culture to marriages will always and have always been a thing show me abordan i will show you a population overlap walk through vienna and you will notice how many people speak hungarian and when an economy of scale exerts restrictions and limitations on trade and commerce the primary beneficiary of such are those who border that economy of scale something not available in place a can be made available by place b even if illegal in place a the simplistic sounding solution of just ban what is desired because of reason x often causes more harm than it does any good you also don't have to use this obvious example of the mexican-american war on drugs to show why this is white clay a town of 14 people in the state of nebraska going through white clay is highway 87 which leads to south dakota and into pine ridge or more precisely the pine ridge indian reservation owned by the oglala lakota the pine ridge reservation has been plagued with widespread alcoholism due to the widespread poverty and limited means of the community they could not provide extensive services for rehabilitation and the kind of healthcare institutions that would help people with addiction problems therefore prohibition of alcohol was enacted across the community instead but in white clay which is outside of pinewood and the state of south dakota alcohol remained legal the result was that this community with a population of 14 ended up having half a dozen liquor stores selling millions of cans and bottles of booze and beer to lakota indians often on foot trekked down highway 87 from pinewood into white clay to buy alcohol and then drunk while drinking staggered back into pinewood on highway 87. this infamously resulted in this small stretch of highway having the highest numbers of fatalities in vehicular to person traffic accidents across the united states white clay sucked the lifeblood out of the lakota people until the state of nebraska shut it down by refusing to renew the white clay liquor licenses two economies of scale where one took advantage of the other one community became rich at the cost of the other which wallowed further into poverty and despair the rigorous prohibition enforced especially on drugs would end up being something that the cartels of northern mexico would take advantage of the united states border patrol was initially founded in 1924 to try and clamp down on the smuggling of alcohol across the mexican border a task at which it failed meanwhile immigration into the united states increased as tens of thousands of mexican laborers came to work on farms and other industries some of those stayed in the united states even after the war but those with the most significant impact for mexico itself were those who returned with capital and skills that they had acquired during their stay in the united states and a different sociopolitical shift also impacted the united states internally mexican americans and latinos in general within the united states started to re-emerge in the wider cultural and political framework the historian juan gonzalez divides this process up into four periods the integration period from 1950 to 1964 when mexican-americans started increasingly participating within the politics of the united states as voters this was particularly pushed by the large mexican community of california and texas and it had its greatest triumph in 1960 when kennedy was elected with 85 percent of the mexican-american vote making it very clear that mexican-americans were now part and parcel of american electoral politics the radical nationalist period from 1965 to 1974 when latinos in america organized in political radical protest movements such as the brown berets and took part in the wider protest movements of the civil rights movement and the anti-vietnam war movement less concerned with integration in the political process and appearing to be respectable to the anglo-majority population it helped reshape and determine a distinctive latino culture and identity within the united states its greatest legacies are mexican-american common legal defense funds labor unions such as the one led by cesar chavez and voting rights activism groups which leads us into the voting rights period from 1975 to 1984. at the end of the nixon era the involvement in radical and revolutionary movements amongst mexican americans sharply declined instead a generation of young latino lawyers and political activists started using the institutions founded by radicals to tie more latinos into the american political process through voter registration legal defense funds political campaigns running for office and acquiring institutional and electoral power within the united states a process which increased with the anti-immigration policies under nixon to protect mexican americans from deportation and discrimination these efforts were extremely successful and led to the third force period from 1985 to today the american presidential senate and congressional elections of 1984 1986 1988 and 1990 are often overlooked but incredibly important in the development of the current american political framework during the presidential elections reagan was consistently re-elected as democratic voters lost an increasing share of white anglo-voters but at the same time the share of latino and african-american voters kept continuously chewing away at those gains additionally more and more latino and african-american senators and members of congress started to get elected by the early 1990s the latino minority of the united states had firmly established themselves as an important political force with institutional and electoral power within the united states it made it close to impossible to win elections in states like california texas new york new mexico florida and arizona without appealing to latino voters or some extensive gerrymandering latinos became the third force in american electoral politics of the white americans and african americans by the year 2000 and 2004 the republican president george bush had to launch both his election and re-election efforts with an appeal to latina voters to succeed which includes the last time a republican won the popular vote the living standards of mexican-americans started to rise prominent political leaders emerged the united states increasingly became a place where citizens of mexican ancestry could build a life a community and prosper the california investment banker dan pena was one of the first wealthy mexican american businessmen to emerge from this socio-economic development but the story of dan penner as well as the stories of other successful and wealthy mexican americans be they hollywood actors businessmen innovators social media influencers and more or other upper-middle-class mexican-americans be they lawyers scientists doctors engineers small business owners and more they also tell us a different story there are a hundred thousand wealthy mexican-americans in the united states with an annual income of more than fifty thousand dollars this means that there are more wealthy mexican americans than there are wealthy mexicans if you lived in nogales sonora from 1950 to the year 2000 you were able to watch nogales arizona and notice a gradual process in which the standard of living and average wealth of mexican americans increased while mexicans became poorer the improvement of mexican-american living standards coincided with a deterioration of the mexican living conditions between 1950 and 1952 the mexican state had cracked down with riot police against strikes by city taxi drivers student protests and protests by indigenous peoples against the kleptocracy of the mexican state where once the army was used as a tool of repression an increasingly corrupt police force was now used to clamp down against those who protested the state or the economic interests of an ever smaller group of wealthy mexicans well connected within the one party system the pri won 98 percent of all mayoral elections between 1940 and 1980 it won all post-war gubernatorial elections until the 1990s one of the most brazen examples of how complete and all-encompassing and authoritarian the pri state had become was when dr salvador nava ran for the office of mir in san luis potosi in 1958. his election rallies were marred by violence and agitators the pri forged the election results and sent the mexican army to beat up students who had protested those results a general strike occurred that forced the pri to acknowledge the real election results but when nava ran for governor in 1961 the pri cracked down hard hundreds of supporters and campaign activists ended up in jail charged with dubious crimes with dubious evidence under dubious circumstances nava was arrested and tortured by the police and in the end the election results were simply forged again throughout the world many praised mexico as latin america's only functioning democracy but at least by 1954 the mexican revolutionary republic was at best a sham democracy it was members of the pri who became the governors of states the heads of police and the executives of large state industries and those members of the pri came to increasingly resemble the cow delias that they claimed to replace if you wanted to do private business and get concessions for such you increasingly needed to bribe your local pri boss for the privilege if you were a very rich businessman you sought out the friendship and alliance of powerful pri members to secure those interests through bribery state industry sectors and factories opened up in parts of the country not because they were in any way economically viable but because they were agreed to be built in a certain location through some backdoor deal made between the businessman or the federal government and the governor of the location to secure alliances and favors amongst an increasingly sealed off and inaccessible political and economic elite foreign influence increasingly returned into the mexican economy although the law demanded that 51 of any business in mexico had to be owned by mexicans numerous loopholes were created to bypass this so american capital could bring industry to mexico the pri was never able to envision or provide structures that gave ordinary mexicans the ability to do business even the economic booms of the 40s 50s and 60s were largely carried on the backs of mexican migrant laborers in the united states and the american capital that they brought with them back to mexico through their wages but the pri instead of reforming which would have meant decreasing their power and giving average mexicans more power and the ability to do business the pri merely backed increasing american investment in mexico hoping that the americans would develop industrialize and modernize mexico that however did not happen whatever wages the increasing american presence paid out to average mexican workers those were not able to effectively use their capital in their own ventures as much of it went lost in an increasingly corrupt state if you had an idea an innovation or an education that would have allowed you to open a business doing so was exceedingly difficult you had to sift through the enormous bureaucracy that the pri had created in the end it became just easier and consequently the custom to find the right friends or to bribe your way into business or just leave for the united states that consequently stifled innovation economic modernisation and concentrated economic power and capital even more within an increasingly small elite even worse the gangsters who ran the ever-growing illegal drug trade made backroom deals with the ministry of the interior to keep the drug trade running organized criminal groups started taking control over many hard-to-reach parts of the country and large parts of the north through protection rackets they stifled most locals from engaging in economic activity and dominated much of the local society the mexican government claimed to be fighting a war against drugs since the 1970s but in reality right up to the year 2000 it only pretended to be fighting the drug cartels in reality some of the most highest ranking government officials right up into the interior ministry had deals with the various drug cartels allowing them to do business and take control over parts of the country in exchange for a fee to the ministry this would be catastrophic for mexico the pi effectively surrendered sovereignty over parts of the country to organized crime in exchange for cash starting in the 1950s and mexico is still struggling to regain control over these regions to this very day as much as the new state may have professed progress and social justice through its reforms and appearance at its core the institutions of the state remained outdated broken and favorable for the establishment of a corrupt oligarchy the state tried to brandish an image of progress through mass events such as hosting the olympics and two world cups but one only had to peek beneath the glittering facade to see the true monster when african-american athletes protested racial segregation at the mexico city olympics the pri state used a law that enabled the deportation of foreigners for ensuring demographic stability to swiftly deport them to the united states the mexico world cup was marred by protests by working class mexicans against the enormous costs which were brutally cracked down upon by the state state industries did not fare much better just as previous oligarchs had secured their interests in their mining and plantation sectors the pri executives who came to run the national oil and mining companies schemed with the central government to keep control power and profit of their institutions the new cooperative aido farms were excellent for those who worked on them growing corn for mainly domestic markets it meant that receiving a job on such meant generational security and income however these farms limited in markets to mexico where through the fact that they were cut off from wider global markets they became increasingly uncompetitive the farmers didn't innovate didn't try to improve their work system they found the standard by which to work and supply the domestic market and stuck by it this made these farms extremely vulnerable within the state-owned industries executive positions and often even other jobs were increasingly not handed out on the basis of skill and achievement but on the basis of who your friends family and their connections were some services though worked better than others even though the state structures remained broken the mexican institute for social security established in 1959 has been plagued by many corruption scandals but it is the reason why when you cross the border from one nogales into the other nogales that the healthcare in mexican nogales is better than the healthcare in american nogales however the reason why nothing else functions in nogales as it should is the mexican state that the pri created that state was powerful in its institutions but built to limit that power within the hands of the pri it furthered corruption embezzlement and negligence a phony leviathan that increasingly started to lose control over decades corrupt governors corrupt police chiefs and gangsters increasingly seized control over parts of the country and were allowed to do so under the protective shield of the pri mexico again became the kind of state where the governor of estate had a brother who became the police chief of the state his uncle ran the mining complex of the state and his son-in-law became the head of the local cooperative farm even though that son-in-law didn't even know what farming was the pri was less of a democratic party and more of a pr campaign a pr campaign that managed to successfully create an illusion of democracy separation of powers and individual rights and liberties it could be right-wing it could be left-wing it could be populist it could be elitist it could be whatever it needed to present itself to be to the mexican public and the wider world it became mexico's politics party the party of all politics and therefore no politics during the 1950s it branded itself as a socialist party then as the party of business in the late 50s the anti-corruption party in the 60s the people's party in the 70s the neo-liberal free market party in the 1980s and sometimes it presented itself as everything at once a complete cluster fudge of contradictory policies in a massive pr campaign meant to hide just how self-serving and incompetent a den of corrupt bureaucrats the pri actually was a state with very limited space for citizens to politically participate or change anything that engaged in brutal massacres of protesters and the violent suppression of native american communities a place where journalists lived in danger and where corrupt officials and gangsters acted in complete impunity and yet the pri state remained widely praised and acknowledged around the world as a supposed beacon of democracy for latin america then the facade collapsed with the trend of increasingly open global and free markets growing internationally during the 1980s the pri jumped on boards to increasingly present itself as the party of business and global markets in mexico the problem though was that the pri was everything except that it was a party built around securing the assets of a select few at the expense of excluding the masses from economic and political participation it was the pri which would take mexico into that modern global era through nafta a free trade agreement between the united states canada and mexico and because it was the pri with its flaws and problems mexico became part of a global economy with those flaws and problems carlos slim is one of the richest men in the world he used to be the richest and is as of now still the richest man in mexico and latin america how did he get there jeff bezos and bill gates are amongst the richest men in america they got their wealth by innovating and selling something a means to buy products easily through an online service and a computer operating system as disliked as the super rich may be by some the truth of the matter and bottom line is that the united states provides a level playing field and economic structure where anyone who has an innovation with enough potential can fully exploit the potential of that innovation for their own financial benefit patent laws anti-monopoly regulations and co provide the means to build and prosper in private industry in contrast carlos slim didn't invent anything he made his fortunes when the pri rebranded as a free market party and started privatizing mexico's national industries when the pri conducted its privatizations it didn't put the state-owned companies up for sale to the public but sold the shares mostly to cronies crooks politicians and executives close to the government in backroom deals sometimes the same crooked executives who had run these sectors as public officials ended up owning them privately in many cases the means and ways public companies became private is dubious at best carlos slim bought up a majority of shares in the mexican telecom but the deal he made to get those shares is curious to say the least he didn't buy the shares with any capital instead he made a weird deal in which he ended up owning the majority shares and by that extent the telecommunications networks of mexico while the profits made by the shares would gradually over years pay the original selling price of the shares while the company grew in value one can only imagine the greasy pools climbed the background deals made for this arrangement to have even been made possible in the first place a transaction that in the united states would almost certainly be considered as illegal but nonetheless this is how carlos slim ended up owning the mexican telecom which he expanded into a total monopoly over phone providers in mexico when the internet burst onto the stage he further expanded his economic power then he moved business into central america and monopolized phone and internet providers there and right now he is expanding all across latin america attempting to be the sole phone provider of an entire continent and cultural lingual sphere of the planet encompassing 650 million people in 20 countries he managed to shut down investigations into his dealings by invoking the recurs of the amparo old laws that had somehow made it into the law books of the new revolutionary mexican republic of the pri and into the new mexico of the globalized economy complete control over an entire sector of the economy as a monopoly protected by law with close ties and allies in the nation's ruling elite almost like a sugar baron of old only far more powerful carlos slim attempted to expand his empire in the united states by similar tactics with which he built his latin american empire he violated various anti-monopoly laws in doing so was taken to an american court where he tried to invoke a recursive amparo only to find no such thing existed in the united states and was fined 300 million dollars the way one does business in the united states simply doesn't work in mexico and the way one does business in mexico simply doesn't work in the united states the way this was made possible was through the pri rather than opening up the mexican economy through the nafta agreement many within the political and economic elite of mexico saw nafta as an opportunity for an enormous cash-in they opened mexico to international business but they didn't open the mexican economy for ordinary mexicans instead dividing it up as spoils amongst themselves the socio-economic structure of colonial spain which had evolved to adapt into an independent mexican oligarchy and then had again adapted to fit and be part of an industrialized mexican state and then evolved again to adapt into being part of the socialist mexican republic evolved yet again to adapt into being part of a modern globalized neoliberal mexico the consequences for ordinary mexicans were disastrous one of the first things to happen with the opening of nafta was that american agriculture which throughout the last century had modernized and mechanized into a large-scale production industrial complex flooded mexico with cheap produce causing the bankruptcy of small farmers and the farming collectives and cooperatives the now redundant mexican farmers in return flooded across the border to work in whatever capacity they could throughout the united states it may have dawned on you by now that the mexican nogales never even really stood a chance that centuries of neglect and corruption led to this current state but it is important to remind yourself that it didn't have to be like this the opening of global markets around the world during the early 1990s created middle classes and wealth it created industry education and innovation in many places throughout the world but in particular in post-soviet eastern europe so why did it work in europe and not in mexico where you can see why by looking at the biggest loser of the eastward expansion of the european market hungary the clue being that hungary is the most corrupt and kleptocratic of eastern european countries in mexico the existing industries were divided up amongst oligarchs rather than creating new industries there was no innovation and no capital or security for the creation of new industry by entrepreneurs thereby creating no new jobs american competition ruined sectors of the mexican economy resulting in more unemployment whatever american investment came south tended to mostly sink into the pockets of the elites that had divided the mexican economy up amongst themselves or it just disappeared in a swamp of corruption and mismanagement rather than create skills expertise and innovation from which an economy could be built those who gained skills and education often packed and left for the border because they saw no opportunity to live or profit from their skills and education in mexico in hungary any european investment disappeared into the pockets of kleptocratic and corrupt politicians or into their useless vanity projects like enormous stadiums and if you are a european viewer you probably notice the increasing number of hungarian doctors nurses scientists and engineers working throughout europe who came here after finding that there was no future in hungary for them even with their skills and education during the 1990s the increasing productivity and inflow of capital was seen as a sign of growth and increasing wealth but mexico in the end just became a great example again for how a country's gdp could grow without the country actually becoming any wealthier as that wealth accumulated almost entirely around the singular circle of people who had no interest in creating the kind of institutions that would help the wider mexican public accumulate capital or create capital a small business and political elite who had monopolized capital and industry for whom it made sense to open to america and get american money but who stubbornly refused to open mexico to mexicans so they could have the opportunity to prosper since that would turn those ordinary mexicans into competitors and challenges to their power and wealth mexico's economic and political institutions were stuck in a previous century in no way shape or form was it able to compete or even just take part in a free market with the united states or canada yet in a rush motivated out of a mix of idealism and greed a group of people ignored that signed mexico into nafta impoverished average mexicans and we now live with the consequences [Music] four years before nafta the turn of the decade had been a year of enormous optimism the decade the tyranny seemed to end communism collapsed into itself in eastern europe and the last fascist dictatorships of latin america fell apart some proclaimed that the end of history had finally arrived in mexico long praised as a beacon of light and democracy for the latin american world a conference was held invited were the leading intellectuals of the world to discuss what seemed to be a bright and free and democratic future for latin america mexico a country often praised as latin america's leader in democracy was deliberately chosen to host for this reason and amongst the many guests was the peruvian novelist vargas yossa who took the podium spoke and caused a scandal i hope not to appear as unpleasant in saying what i have to say i don't believe mexico can be separated from the tradition of latin american dictatorships i believe that mexico whose current democratization i'm amongst the first welcome as all of us who believe in democracy with nuances fits firmly into this tradition as a compromising factor mexico is the perfect dictatorship the perfect dictatorship is not communism the perfect dictatorship is not the soviet union it is not fidel castro the perfect dictatorship is mexico because it is the disguised dictatorship it has one of the key factors of a dictatorship the persistence not of a man but of a party and a party that is unchangeable i do not believe that in all of latin america there has ever been a system of dictatorship that is so efficiently recruited amongst the intellectual community and bribed them in such a subtle way it is a sui generous dictatorship which many throughout latin america attempted to copy the mexican dictatorship is what every single latin american dictatorship that i can remember attempted to be the pri almost reflecting the written words by daniel corsio of villegas half a century before this today somewhat forgotten speech caused considerable controversy leading intellectuals such as the novelist gabriel garcia marquez had embraced mexico and the pri not as perfect but as something that latin america should strive to copy for a brighter and better future in the end though vargas was proven completely right the cracks in the pri facade had started to show long before in 1985 a massive earthquake flattened large parts of mexico city and the pri government completely failed at providing relief to those in need all the bankrupted farmers all the unemployment the increasing callousness with which the elites of the pri didn't even bother hiding their corruption at one point it was simply enough in 1988 the mexican presidential elections were so obviously fraudulent that it could barely be hidden anymore and with nafta it all got worse everything we talked about the dirty backroom deals the corruption the state repression and violence all of it gradually came to light and in the year 2000 in what many historians consider to be the first fair and honest elections in mexican history the pri lost the presidency for the first time ending almost 80 years of pri rule with new leaders in power it was for the first time fully exposed to the public just how rotten to the cordy state truly was and the result was chaos much of the corruption was exposed even worse it was revealed to the public that the pri had a secret deal with the drug cartels and had only pretended to fight them with the new government no longer backing the cartel deal the mexican drug were flared up into the barbaric and brutal confrontation between the state and the cartels an almost total collapse of most state institutions in particular in regions where the pri had deals with the cartel the shredding of any remaining trust that the mexican public may have once had in the institutions of the state a collapse in economic and state cohesion and what separates this from the united states is a border [Music] today there exists two completely different economic institutions in the two naganas and between the united states and mexico in general and an incredible economic disparity this is best illustrated by looking at the famous graphs displaying distribution of wealth these in politics are frequently used to show that one percent of the population supposedly earns 90 of the american wealth but there is far more to it than simply that there's a difference between wealth and income when we divide the american population up into quintiles we receive a highest quintile with 52 percent of the national wealth an upper quintile with 23 percent amid quintile with 14 of the wealth a second to bottom quintile with eight percent of the wealth and a bottom quintile with only three percent of the wealth of note is that the top five percent within the highest quintile which owns 23 percent of the wealth what matters the most in any wealth distribution statistic however are the bottom percent those who have an annual income of under 10 000 or under 35 000 what one should keep an eye out for rather than just the top percent is how much that bottom percentage of the population increases and chews away on the middle percentages the bottom percentage is a far more important number than the top percentage a small top percentage is a sign of inequality but a large and growing bottom percentage is a sign of a collapsing society overall the stats show that the united states is a very unequal society with a poverty problem that it ought to concern itself more with but still a society with a middle class however society with decreasing upward social mobility nonetheless that social mobility still exists and must be protected now let's take a look at the mexican wealth distribution there isn't even a top 1 in mexico it's a top 0.0003 percent basically two dozen mexican families own 90 percent of mexico's wealth carlos slims empire alone accounts for almost 10 of mexico's gdp there's a 20 high income class while an enormous 42 percent of the population live in poverty however these 42 percent are people that the mexican state defines as moderately poor meaning that they can still afford basic commodities like drinking water food and the refrigerator they would be considered poor by american standards but by mexican standards they are defined as a sort of upper poor because six percent of the mexican population live in extreme poverty which is defined as a living condition under constant food insecurity meaning can barely afford to eat on a daily basis the mexican-american border is a place of one of the starkest contrasts in the world it is comparable to the borders between haiti and the dominican republic poland and belarus or iraq and kuwait in few places in the world will you find such an enormous difference in wealth and political structure separated merely with a line in the sand and what even is a border in the first place we answered a lot of questions in this video so far we showed how one nogales became too nogales and we explained why one legalist is in a much worse situation than the other we detailed the long journey the two countries took to arrive at the place where they are so close yet still so distant but what we didn't talk about so far is why nogales is not improving to be more like nogales and what may be done to change nogales into being more like nogales for many americans a priority in their political discourse is to keep nogales out on the way from nogales and by that extent the rest of the country but how do you secure a border how do you keep a society that resides on the other side of the border out the first border wall along the mexican-american border came to be as a result of the vietnam war during that war the americans used large flat steel plates that could be placed on grass plains to be used as temporary airfields after the war there was no more use for them so nixon started and reagan continued lining them up along the mexican border but those steel plates were not built for this they started rasting through and were stolen by mexicans who sold them as scrap metal yes that is not a joke border security outside of partisan politics mudslinging in geopolitical conversations are more a source of involuntary comedy than anything else the croatians for example in what they probably thought of as a very smart move mined their border with serbia however when the border rivers flooded they washed those mines into croatian towns and villages the arab gulf states spent billions on a high-tech border fence of razor wire traps and motion sensors along the saudi-iraqi border to keep the poor arabs away from the rich arabs however the rich arabs seem to have forgotten that they live in a desert with shifting sand tunes that attach to structures and consequently buried the multi-billion dollars worth of fence so if you are a viewer wondering what will happen to the recently built segments of wall along the mexican-american border well basically you just need to wait for the price of scrap metal to go up again it's even built in nice steel rails easy to just cut down with a blowtorch and transport to any scrap metal dealer south of nogales for mexicans the border ball is just free at the border but why do these ridiculous failures keep happening why do states keep making the same border mistakes over and over again because we think of borders in wrong terms namely in military terms in military terms the united states has great borders invade from the west and you are forced to cross the world's largest ocean the next best staging and support ground is still a six hour flight from the united states invade from the east and you will have to cross the second largest ocean in the world with no staging ground anywhere in that ocean invade from the north and you will have to undergo the logistical challenge of crossing the great lakes or go through the mid and far west where the americans can just do a russia retreat burn the earth and wait for the winter to freeze you invade from the south and you will have to march through miles of deserts with inhabitants known to be hostile to outsiders only to have to then cross the rockies or get stuck in the midwest and freeze again or end up in a swamp with inhabitants known to be hostile to outsiders in military terms these are great borders that protect the american industrial and infrastructure core but what makes borders great in a military sense doesn't always make them great in a migration control sense britain has crappy military borders namely with staging grounds for potential invasion being very close to fight off any potential invader britain has therefore always needed to be ahead in numbers and technology in its air force but especially in its navy bully all those who are building a larger navy and dominate the seas in reverse though britain's borders are militarily also great for invasion by the british as an island staging ground britain can conduct military interventions easily across european coastlines and beyond however from a non-military point of view britain's borders and the borders of all island nations are great in limiting and controlling immigration technically island nations are capable of controlling any and all immigration more than any other country with land borders the reason we often overlook this is again a distorted view of immigration namely that it is framed as an invasion however there are fundamental differences between an invading army and a migration of people an invading army needs a logistical backing of fuel food munitions spare parts and other supplies building such a long extended supply chain across desert swamp or flat terrain over several miles long is extraordinarily difficult while also having to ensure fighting conditions for the invading troops building it up on a staging place not far from where you intend to invade and only having to cross ocean is however not as difficult migrants however do not need military logistics and planning migrants come in small units of families groups or individuals they require and only have access to the logistics of traveling families groups and individuals what might be a tough challenge to an invading army requires merely the logistics of provisions and sleeping bags for a migrant group after overcoming that challenge the migrant also simply melts into society rather than having to enforce their order through occupation upon it this is why trekking across the sierra madre is far easier for a small group of migrants than it would be for an invading army and why crossing the english channel is far more difficult for a group of migrants than it would be for an invading army a war might be a great means of protecting yourself from a second century war band of highland celts but a wall will not work to keep migrants out something the american government learned by the early 2000s and as the former head of u.s homeland security janet napolitano put it show me a 50-foot high wall and i will show you a 51-foot long ladder additionally a wall along that border is simply a geographic legal and financial impossibility the border is 3145 kilometers or 2 000 miles long that's the length of the communist iron curtain excluding the soviet finnish border maintenance of the central european iron curtain contributed substantially to bankrupting eastern bloc states and unlike europe the u.s mexican border doesn't run through construction-friendly flat grasslands like the berlin wall did it runs through mountains deserts and rivers often miles from any settlements that could function as guard outposts occasionally on terrain that a wall can't even be physically built on the rugged outcrops of the mexican plateau and the sierra mater de occidental and also the marshlands of the rio grande which both mexico and the united states agreed in 1970 to be environmentally protected lands across the border drainage of these marches and swamps to build a wall would be an unparalleled ecological disaster in short if americans would listen to geographers there would be no more demands for a border wall as they would know that the wall is literally a physical impossibility alas few people listen to geographers the wall is also a financial impossibility or at the very least a heavy burden you can't just build a wall and hope the mexicans won't climb over it or more likely just steal it to sell for scrap metal no you will have to guard it you will have to hire government employed security details with vehicles and the required training the required legal backing and building infrastructure to guard such a vast wall not to mention that the estimates of the costs of the wall alone for building it lie at 40 billion dollars the bush administration was the first to realize this it realized that the most efficient means of border security was to instead arrest migrants after they crossed the border and reached the towns they tried to settle in the logistics of merely seeking out migrants during the process as they try to melt into society is far more cost efficient than most border security measures involving walls and patrols and since the 2000s this has consequently been the preferred mechanism of migration control however there is also a fundamental problem in itself with the idea of border separation borders are almost never clear-cut limits between languages cultures and ethnic groups compare border maps with language and ethnic maps and you will almost always see overlap and this is even more the case here than anywhere else you can't just draw a line and assume that cultures on both sides will not mingle trade and mix a bottom line is that hispanic culture is part of the united states there are hispanic populations that have been in the united states since the 1500s nutenor culture in particular has been around for a very long time mexican migrant populations also vary significantly in culture those that arrived between the 1940s and 1960s are mostly mexican not tenants who themselves settled into and became part of nathano cultures in the united states while mexican migrants who arrived throughout the 1990s and 2000s are often southern mexicans that settled in urban centers such as los angeles new york and chicago and formed a new hispanic mexican-american urban culture that is also in itself very different from urban hispanic puerto rican culture in new york or urban cuban culture in miami politically mexican-american populations also do not form a unified entity anymore urban populations tend to vote democratic while not tenors tend to vote republican but as you have probably realized throughout the last hour of this video you can't simply separate american and mexican culture the two evolved separately but still together as much as some of them may dislike the other or be separated from the other they can't ignore the fact that they still are tied together as said before they may be distant in some ways yet they are still so close the assumption the clear line of cultural separation exists is simply mistaken and we so far didn't even mention the fact that a wall would cut right through the lands of the tohono or dawahem who already made it clear that they would oppose a wall on their sovereign land in economic terms the impossibility of this becomes even more obvious when you look at the shared economic zones one of the main reasons why the idea of a tightly controlled border is so ridiculous in the state of texas alone you will find several car manufacturing plants which tech some politicians will claim are there because texas is so business friendly that's true but it's not because of texas in particular but because of the texas border the so-called texas mexico automotive supercluster region stretches from north texas to san luis potosi and is one of the largest economic cooperative zones in the world established in 2008 it includes 27 car manufacturing plants 230 suppliers 15 research concerts 21 airports 19 ports five railroads several major international corporations from seven countries stretching across one american and four mexican states and in total employs 17 million people this is one of the most developed and well-functioning economic zones in the world and it is very one-sided in how it functions the production of heavy equipment heavy equipment parts and automotive parts happens almost completely in mexico from where these are shipped into texas for further assembly in automotive commercial speciality and military vehicles there's a cross-dependence here that goes both ways there are about 5 million jobs in the united states economy which are dependent on trade with mexico the total value of this to the united states lies at 548.7 billion dollars with texas california michigan and illinois getting the largest share of the pie but the pie overall being fairly evenly shared amongst states no matter if they are red states blue state contested state southern state northern state midwest state or western state the least dependent state is hawaii with only 11 million dollars worth and 24 000 jobs dependent on trade with mexico what the united states exports to mexico is diverse and ranges from oklahoma chemicals washington apples mississippi poultry wyoming liquid propane minnesota soy virginia pork massachusetts computer parts south carolina tires montana lumber and oregon potatoes the portfolio of what the united states exports to mexico is thirty percent machines and machine parts eight percent chemicals sixteen percent petroleum and raw materials ten percent vehicle and vehicle parts eight percent metals nine percent plastic and polymer materials two percent agricultural produce and overall very balanced and evenly spread out across the various sectors of the us economy in total us exports to mexico make up 16 percent of overall exports let's compare this though to mexico mexican exports to the united states have a total value of 340 billion slightly more than half the value of american exports to mexico however make up a majority 77 of mexico's foreign exports 82 percent if you add america's hat the vast majority of those exports are machine parts worth 136 billion at 40 percent of exports and vehicle parts at a value of 95 billion at 28 of exports the first specialized sector to export in numbers are medical devices that make up only five percent of exports and mexican food exports that make up three point five percent which however make up sixty percent of mexico's overall food exports and of those food exports 33 are beer 13 are liquor 11 are baked goods 6 percent of sugar and 8 are sodas and fruit juices while mexico itself imports vegetables from the united states meaning mexican migrant farm laborers literally illegally cross the border to earn money by working on vegetable farms to then upon returning to mexico spent that money buying the very products that they earned their wages harvesting it is hard to pin down how many mexican jobs are dependent on mexican exports to the united states but the number must be in the tens of millions a table comparing percentage changes in professionally educated mexican workers between 1992 and 2010 will show you that although education levels have grown amongst professionals they have not grown substantially and mostly only between four percent to 15 percent this means that despite the opening of trade between the two the main benefactor is still the united states but one of the most crucial numbers in all of this is 350 million that is the number of legal border crossings yes legal with work or tourist visas the single most cross-border in human history which goes to underline even more that the means of regulating and limiting the flow of people money and goods is extremely limited these are market forces that in total have a value of up to a trillion dollars as one particular market shows it is often completely impossible to reign in on the simple laws of supply and demand many measures of limitation often end up being counterproductive guarding the border more heavily ironically had the effect of there being more illegal residents within the united states that is because in particular farm and construction laborers frequently overstay their work visa this is merely an inherent part of the work process itself farming seasons as well as construction plans can often extend over periods of time that are longer than expected or anticipated a construction boss or farmer may ask labourers to stay on for additional weeks or even months who consequently overstay their visas this means however that from then on they reside in the united states illegally which makes returning to mexico harder as they can no longer cross the border back without being registered or arrested as an illegal and thereby cancelling out the prospect of a future legal return consequently when the border is strictly guarded migrant laborers inside the united states often simply choose to stay to earn more than risk being legally barred from returning these immigration measures have created weird social phenomena within the united states such as a decline in armed robberies of liquor stores now you may ask how that is connected to mexican migrant labor well it has to do with financial regulations and something called dark numbers someone designated as an illegal cannot open a bank account in the united states or by any other means transfer money back to mexico a result of this is that migrant laborers especially those without visas often hold on to their earnings in cash a migrant laborer can hold up to ten thousand dollars of cash on himself after half a year of work in the united states and at some point criminals in the united states noticed that if they rob a migrant they can get more money than by robbing a liquor store at less risk the migrant doesn't have the legal means to defend himself and the migrant cannot call the police since he would risk getting deported this resulted in something called a dark number a dark number is when the actual number in a statistic is expected to be larger than officially declared a well-known example of a dark number is domestic violence where official numbers are always higher than actual incidents because many incidents are not reported in the specific case of robberies committed against migrant laborers it is possible for this to happen because of what is called a legal vacuum such an environment is not the war which hobbes wrote about in leviathan it is when within a functioning state with a legal system through political neglect and legal uncertainty spaces and environments are created in which laws do not apply or cannot be enforced a labor migrant designated and illegal by law falls into such a legal vacuum by being unable to access any legal protections or rights the law creates communities which by their very existence are outside of the law and as awful as all of this sounds this is a sustainable and not an unsustainable status quo you will never see business owners who hire mexican migrant labor face legal consequences for doing so the state of texas may have a lot of politicians who deal in loud anti-immigration and anti-migrant labor rhetoric but those same politicians will then openly promote the state itself as a location to business owners with brochures that detail the economic structure built on the vicinity and access to cheap labor in sociocultural and political terms the wall is more of a symbol of the vicious partisan political divisions within the united states then of what separates america from mexico there's no agreement within the united states on how to confront an existing problem there only is an agreement upon the fact that there is a problem the united states the largest accumulation of wealth in human history borders an impoverished country with a semi-failed state and throughout the last century this has created a status quo in which cheap labor and basic materials cross the border in exchange for consumer goods in a way the truth of the matter is that this status quo has in many ways shapes and forms existed since the spanish empire mexican economic institutions were built around the enriching of a small elite through shipping its resources abroad and neglecting domestic development as well as limiting the political freedoms of the mexican public and in whatever direction the sometimes vicious partisan political debate within the us may be going be it for a closed border with strict immigration laws or more open border with easy routes to citizenship neither ever challenged the root cause of the problem the remnants and legacy of failed political and economic institutions in mexico itself the troubling truth is that the united states policies proposed towards mexico by both parties have been policies that would further a continuation of the status quo a stricter closed border immigration approach will very simply not stop the market forces created by the disparity of wealth mexicans will keep coming as long as they are poor and as long as they see no future in mexico and as long as their state remains dysfunctional no wall will change that and without changing the cause of the wealth disparity between mexico and the united states an open border immigration policy would continuously siphon mexico's most valuable visas out of it namely its people without changing why mexicans leave mexico in the first place basically turning the united states into a parasitic entity profiteering out of mexico's misery let's go to another continent for an example of how borders can be managed differently the southern half of the border between sweden and finland is shaped by the river torn at its southernmost tip where the river flows into the baltic lie the finnish city of tornier and the swedish city of haparanda happaranda was just a fishing village 200 years ago and right across the river in finland was tornia which already was a city at that time sweden which at the time ruled finland decided to join the napoleonic wars against russia and lost as a consequence they had to give up finland to russia and with it the city of toronto sweden however wanted a major city at the ton into the baltic so it consequently decided to build happaranda into a city today these two are twin cities separated just by a river that happens to be a border like all borders there's cultural overlap in finland northern finland is populated by a swedish minority and many regions are bilingual in sweden the north has a finnish minority and regions are bilingual the administrations of torno and heparanda are aware of this and therefore decided to engage in a unique cooperative governance both cities are in official languages of administration culture and commerce bilingual in finnish and swedish but also to share costs in infrastructure and services such as public baths sewage system management schools water management waste disposal recycling police ambulance and fire emergency services and a common tourism information and guideboard the cities even share two common logos and names tuanyo heparanda and this corporation and sharing and services saves both cities a lot of work and money to be invested elsewhere so how come that nogales doesn't work with nogales why is there no nogales nogales technically speaking this is done within the united states itself with minneapolis and saint paul across minnesota and wisconsin along the american border with canada you will find numerous examples of cross-border cooperation mainly done by towns irrespective of their state and federal government in particular along the border between alaska and british columbia where some alaskan towns are so isolated they depend on cooperation with their canadian neighbours for commerce or even just basic supplies and schools but as you probably guessed canada is also not a failed state or poor and to a degree this type of cooperation already happens in mexico just very one-sided the destitute state of the mexican schooling system results in many mexican border communities signing their children up for high schools in the united states many in border communities seek out employment across the border this is cooperation however on an unofficial level because on an official level the simple fact remains that local mexican governments and authorities remain too corrupt and incompetent to facilitate any such thing additionally mexico the united states and canada has so far been unable to negotiate and agree on a common immigration and visa agreement you may or may not know for example that the republican party has frequently stated that any such agreement would require all countries to adopt mexican immigration laws as a common standard that may confuse you as to why republicans would want mexican immigration laws and well it's because mexico has the strictest immigration laws in all of the americas being in mexico illegally can be punished with up to 10 years in prison and even more astounding mexican immigration law states that it is the duty of the state to protect the demographic balance of the nation yes this means that you could technically be deported from mexico for being black attempts to find agreements in cooperation between the three countries have so far simply not borne any fruit the irony of this however is that if these three could cooperate in matters of border security the common border would be much easier to protect namely the mexican border with guatemala which is only 500 miles long more compact and runs through terrain that is more easily guarded and this is where we reach a weird point because despite there not being a structured official agreement on cooperation in laws services and infrastructure measures towards such happen anyway the americans are aware that most migrants coming to the united states increasingly come from central america and increasingly pay the mexicans to guard their southern border more strictly there's also another social and economic development that is overlooked when the mexican-american border is presented it is often presented from the american perspective on the american side and predominantly what is shown are the demographic changes along the border within the us there's even conspiracy talk about how mexicans are supposedly gradually taking over the southern united states to turn it into mexico and reclaim it but this is very misleading american borderlands from texas to california are firmly integrated within the us states and the wider united states they are a firm part of the us legal economic cultural political and social framework you get a far better insight when you look at the u.s mexican border on the mexican side in particular when you look at the maps of roads and highways for decades mexican governments neglected northern mexico resulting in highways and other infrastructure being sub-par or at the very least badly connected to the center of administration within mexico city mexico's economy of scale doesn't fully reach over northern mexico however when you look closer you will notice that the existing highways and roads of northern mexico are better tied into the united states highway system than they are into mexico because despite the lack of agreements in cooperation the economic forces at play are gradually developing northern mexico into an american sphere of influence nogales is better tied into tucson than it is into mexico city baja california is better integrated into california than into the rest of mexico and for all intents and purposes austin texas may as well be the capital of northern mexico the often repeated conspiracy of a mexican takeover of the southern united states is not only untrue the opposite is the case northern mexico disconnected from the mexican centers of authority and administration left to itself is increasingly becoming more american as mexico disintegrates america integrates what mexico increasingly loses control over not for government action but through commerce and culture there's not much tying northern mexico into southern mexico culturally they now have more in common with the mexican americans north of the border the american state also provides a larger market and more services than southern mexico i'm due to the continuing integration into the american economy northern mexico is now three times wealthier than the mexican average if the mexican government were to introduce protective legislation against increasing american economic influence it would face considerable backlash from northern mexico as the economist juan enriquez pointed out the northern states of mexico would much rather prefer a european union-style relationship with the united states than being deeper tied into mexico city and other historians have pointed out that it is far more likely for the mexican states of baja california nuevo leon gila chihuahua and sonora to break away and form their own independent country should the mexican state further disintegrate or to even join the united states as much as it may seem from an american perspective that american border states are becoming more mexican the often overlooked but very obvious reality is that america is the more powerful and influential entity and that the exact opposite is in fact happening northern mexico is becoming more american a large part in this process is done by something called trans-re-immigration this is when immigrant communities retain a strong connection to their place of origin and consequently import social cultural and political structures from the country they emigrated to back to the country of origin an example is how portuguese migrant laborers to france from the 1950s to 1970s took part and learned from french labor unions how to politically organize and participate within the political structures of the french republic these portuguese migrant laborers kept ties into or even returned to their portuguese homeland where they used what they had learned in france to help them overthrow the fascist salazar regime and established a modern portuguese republic similarly many mexican immigrants and migrant laborers import cultural and economic structures from the united states back into mexico although many draw parallels between how texas became part of the united states through american migration to texas and conclude that mexican immigration is leading to a slow reverse reconquista of sorts the reality is in fact the opposite remember how texas gradually became part of the united states just how during the 1840s mexican texas was economically and for infrastructure better integrated into the united states than into the rest of mexico sonora bayer california and guajilla are today better integrated in infrastructure into the united states than into the rest of mexico you may chuckle out or not even be aware of the occasional article written by mexican journalists arguing to have places like baja california become part of american california and form a massive superstate dominating the pacific coastline but the truth is as ridiculous as it may sound the more destabilized the mexican state becomes the less it can manage to integrate its regions into a mexican economy of scale and the more american influence integrates northern mexico into the united states and so the more likely it actually becomes [Music] when americans discuss the issue of the southern border they do so very one-sidedly they never take a moment to look at mexico itself and ask why this is an issue in the first place you can turn on fox news and hear someone ramble about the supposedly impending mestizopocalypse or msnbc about how the border should be completely open bottom line remains that all solution proposed in the american political circus are still quite insufficient neither challenge the status quo but only suggests solutions that prolong and in either financial or electoral ways profit from the status quo the status quo being a fundamentally broken socio-political system and an economic dependency americans in their culture war-dominated politics very rarely have serious discussions on how to resolve the issues that caused their border problems in the first place many americans don't even know how significant the year 2000 was for mexico when the pri state collapsed and that the current violence and disorder is the result of a collapsed state structure that mexico itself has for the past 20 years been undergoing a process of asking itself where it should go now what solutions it should try to take to improve the lives of mexicans that multi-party democracy is something new to mexico barely a generation old mexican democracy is only 20 years old and should be protected as much as possible since 2000 mexicans for the first time have the ability to determine the path their country takes themselves rather than having it dictated to them by an unelected authoritarian elite so what would resolve the issue at hand for the root cause of the problem to be addressed the open and democratic political institutions in mexico being gradually built after the year 2000 must be strengthened public accountability and an independent judiciary being chief amongst them the ability for mexicans to openly and impactfully take part in the political process and laws that apply equally to all the old ways of doing things in which elitist cliques formed to enrich themselves while holding the rest of the country down must be removed in their entirety the mexican state must provide the freedom for its citizens to participate in the economy on their own terms within a level playing field without obstruction and to make the innovations and labor count for themselves furthering a mexican economy that can provide for mexicans would mean supporting mexican business and entrepreneurship by mexicans in mexico the state must be made to provide law and order and security for all the war on drugs must come to an end for the stranglehold the cartels hold on large parts of the country to be finally broken and addressing these issues is more urgent than you may think at first if the trends in chinese wages are going to continue as they do right now then mexican labor might soon be cheaper than chinese labor all those factories making phones and other consumer goods for american markets might soon be cheaper to operate in mexico within a decade in fact by 2030 your phone might be made in mexico and when that happens it will be important to know who this benefits will it help create a stable mexican middle class as mexican entrepreneurs will run these factories and mexican labourers will have the guaranteed security to work live and prosper from their own labor or will such an industry be run by a kleptocratic oligarchy again resulting in the socio-economic structures of colonial spain which adapted into an independent oligarchy then adapted into an industrialized dictatorship then adapted into a socialist republic and then adapted into a neo-liberal market economy to then adapt again to continue into the 21st century ultimately the answer to this will have to come from mexicans themselves but for americans it might be time to adjust their political culture to stop framing mexico as either an immigration threat or immigration benefit and to start debating what kind of neighbours they want to be and what role they want to play in the continuing democratization of mexico you

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Id: 7XPS70r25oY

Length: 244min 40sec (14680 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 10 2021