El Sink-Oh de May-Oh

One Spring day, many years ago, I was approached by a group of Chicanos who asked me if I would be interested in helping put together a celebration of Mexican independence. I replied that I probably would but that it seemed a little early to be planning for an event in late summer.

“What?” came a the vaguely hostile reply.
“Well, independence day is in September”
“No it isn’t!”
“Yes it, is.”
“No it’s not. It’s on the Cinco de Mayo, when Mexico freed herself from the French.”

Volare! Cantare! and passa da pizza! It was inevitable. From wherever they come, emigrés soon loose living contact with their native culture so that their ethnic consciousness becomes embodied in mythical kitsch. It was inevitable that Chicano-Americans, who could barely manage a halting patois of Spanish and whose formal knowledge of Mexico was derived from the imbecility mills of U.S. schooling mixed up with whatever their parents dimly remembered, would concoct a faux independence celebration that would in the end be nothing more than a hodge-podge of every conceivable folkloric stereotype -- a sort of revelry in Azteco-Mariachi-Margarita-Kahloism. It was the despair of Jose Clemente Orozco.

xicano high school students being taught their roots

(lagranmadretenochtitlan.blogspot.com)

[the greatmothertenochtitlan ]

But for all that -- and for all the disgust it causes with cultural and historical purists -- there is something entirely appropriate in the Cinco de Mayo celebrations, albeit in a sadly ironic way. For the battle reflects the historically inevitable bastardization of Mexican identity and culture ensuing upon the victory of a faction which sought to wrest Mexico from its Catholic roots and enlist the country into an alien capitalist orbit. To see how this was so requires several pasos atrás to the waning days of the Spanish Empire, when the Conde de Aranda warned King Charles the III of Spain to beware the upstart nation on the North Atlantic shores.

The Prophet

“Las colonias americanas han quedado independientes; este es mi dolor y recelo”

[The American Colonies are independent; this is my fear and dismay]

Dictamen al Rey sobre la Independencia de las Colonias Ingleses (1783)

Aranda had seen it coming. Spain and England had been at war over the Americas at least since Cromwell’s “liberating” invasion of Jamaica in 1650. Understanding that claims of right are buttressed by facts on the ground, Spain began a desperate programme to populate its northwestern territories west of the Mississippi, founding San Antonio in 1731, Los Angeles in 1769 and San Francisco in 1776. But the demographics were not on Spain’s side and, even before the Empire collapsed, the outcome was acknowledged in the Treaty of San Lorenzo, (1795), pursuant to which the border between the Spain and the United States was fixed at the middle of the Mississippi River. This required the withdrawal of Spanish forts on the eastern shore thus giving the Anglo-Americans the inestimable right to trade up and down that great commercial waterway, at least in one lane. Aranda had no illusions.

“Esta República federal ha nacido pigmea -- This federal republic was born a pygmy... but there will come a day when it will be a giant, and a terrible colosus in these lands.... The liberty of religion and the ease of establishing settlements under the new form of government will call forth laborers and artisans from all nations, because men go where they think fortune will smile.... Thus aggrandized, we should foresee that this Anglo-American power will cast its eyes on Florida, from whence it will seek to penetrate and dominate Mexico which we will not be able to defend from this distance....”

Aranda understood that the concept of a unitary Empire stretching from the Phillipines to Peru to Sicily was simply untenable. It embraced too much, with too many differences and -- in a curious paradox -- facts on the ground were moving faster than the ability of the government to keep up with them on the ground. A pirate Yankee trader could get to Tampico and back before the news got to Madrid and back. To make matters worse, the colonial-mercantilist system put in place by Carlos III’s predecessors had alienated the criollos (i.e. new world Spaniards), had stifled trade and reduced state revenues. Worst of all it had stifled local enterprises and the fomentation of native Spanish American capital.

But Aranda also understood that facts on the ground are shaped and cultivated by legal formalities. He therefore proposed the establishment of a Spanish Commonwealth comprised of three American monarchies in Mexico, Peru, and Argentina which would be united by custom, marriage and treaty with Spain. The kings of each of the monarchies were to be drawn from the Borbón line and were to maintain consanguinous relations.

"As concerns commerce, this should be carried forth on the basis of complete reciprocity [i.e. hispanic free trade]. The Four Nations should consider themselves united by the strictest and closest, offensive and defensive alliances for their mutual preservation and prosperity. .... The three sovereign American Kingdoms shall enter into whatever treaties among themselves they deem convenient, but each of them shall enter into commercial alliances with Spain and France to the absolute and perpetual exclusion of England."

Only a commonwealth, reinvigorated by protectionist free trade and animated by an hispanic self interest could prevent and Anglo and/or American takeover of the hemisphere.

Alas, it was not to be. Aranda’s proposals were met with blockheaded skepticism. The French Revolution infused the Spanish Monarchy with fear of all innovation and the Napoleonic usurpation of the Borbon throne forced Spain into the cruel irony of an alliance with England.

But that was not the end of the story or of Aranda’s dream. The Bonapartist takeover of Spain provoked the criollos in Hispanic America, in accordance with well established Spanish precedents, to convoke Juntas para Guardar el Reino -- Councils to Preserve the Realm. The idea was simple enough. Were the monarch temporarily incapacitated for some reason, his powers would devolve upon the local communities as custodians of primordial sovereignty. Borbon legitimists throughout Spanish America convoked juntas which now ruled in the name of the deposed Ferdinand VII. Thus, in a curious twist of happenstance, Aranda’s plan for Three Kingdoms, took life in the form of (mainly) Three Juntas, a fact that is still evidenced today in the pale blue and white Borbon colours of the Guatemalan, Nicaraguan and Argentine flags.

Not surprisingly, the regrettable necessity of having to guard the kingdom, gave the legitimist juntas a golden opportunity to change it, as they saw fit, and legitimacy became a banner fluttering over many sins. Thus, to the embarrassment of a certain species of nationalist, Mexican “independence” (from Bonapartism, supposedly) was proclaimed in 1810 by a renegade priest, leading a mob of mestizos, in the name of the Blessed Virgin and Ferdinand VII. The insurrection was opposed and defeated by Junta forces guarding the kingdom in the name of that same monarch, who was invited (and declined) to come and rule from Mexico. Even England got into the act, sending a naval squadron to Argentina to “protect” her, in the name of Ferdinand, against Napoleon -- although the Argentines let it be known in fiery terms that they could protect the kingdom themselves.

Whereas, the Mexican junta was largely comprised of more or less pro- Spanish conservatives, the Argentine junta was comprised of political liberals in alliance with their ideological counterparts in Spain. It is sometimes said that ensuing upon independence the various nations of Spanish America descended into a long internecine war between liberals and conservatives. In fact, what is called “independence” was itself a long war and terribly bloody war between conservatives and liberals in the Hispanic world as a whole. Understanding the nature of this partisan divide is critical to grasping the historical essence of Ibero-American history and the symbolic significance of Cinco de Mayo. ["Liberal ="]

The Divide

Very generally, it can be said that the Ibero American world was divided between “Liberals” and “Conservatives” -- although the latter term did not become current until about 1840. The conservatives were drawn primarily from the landholding and clerical classes whereas the liberals were drawn from the professional, small merchant and tradesman class. In the Americas, the conservatives tended to be almost exclusively white criollos, whereas the liberal party included mixed blood mestizos as well. Conservatives looked to Spain for inspiration. They were traditionalists, Catholic and supporters of ecclesiastical privilege. Liberals had drunk from the trough of the French Revolution and sought the establishment of a secular state, the removal of all juridical class distinctions and free trade.

In the hispanic world, though, religiosity has never equated with willful ignorance and both parties believed in technological and scientific progress and the practical modernization of society. Aranda himself had been a “liberal” in that he espoused the ideals of the French Enlightement (as distinct from those of the French Revolution). He too sought the overall modernization of Spanish life and the limitations on ecclesiastical power, including the expulsion of Jesuits from Spanish domains. “Liberals” in this social and scientific sense were called afrancesados, even if they were opposed the Bonapartist usurpation of the Spanish Borbon throne. ( The Secret Meaning of Roccoco )

A criollo couple (18th cent)

More recent historical analyses are of the view that there were in fact four proto-parties consisting of radical and moderate conservatives and liberals. The radical or “pure” liberals were not Jacobins but rather philo-Americans who wanted an uncompromised capitalist political-economy following the U.S. model. The “ultra” conservatives while they may have accepted the fact of independence wanted an uncompromising return to the domestic and ecclesiastical policies of the pre-Borbon, 17th century Hapsburgs.

Even these added gradations cannot always account for the phenomena. Thus, while it is true that the conservatives sought to maintain the establishment of the Catholic Church to the absolute exclusion of all other cultos, so too did the mestizo priest, Morelos, who was otherwise a radical Jacobin and who was ultimately executed by his conservative co-religionists.

What tends to get lost in these distinctions is the divide between capital and country. Both liberals and conservatives were drawn mainly from the ranks of Spanish criollos. It was a white-man’s argument with which the Indian had little to do. Conservatives tended to be absentee hacendados, deriving rents and incomes from their estates but living in the capital where they were “plugged into” the charmed circle of official privilege and Spain’s global mercantilism. Liberals, on the other hand, were heavily drawn from the provincial elite, who lived on their estates and who were typically constrained to selling their produce in the regional economy.

In Mexico at least, this divide acquired formal political expression in the polemic between federalism and centralized government. It was a no-brainer, that the liberal provincial elite would hanker after autonomy whereas the capitalinos would seek to maintain unitary control in some form or another. This divide between inner and outer elites was a recurring theme in Mexican history and would erupt again exactly 100 years later in the 1910 Revolution.

A criollo-mestizo family (18th cent)

The distinction between capital and country also alerts to the inaccuracy of saying that liberals and conservatives were divided over the issue of “free trade”. As a resource producing country, everyone in Mexico wanted “trade” -- the question was with whom. The mercantilist system put in place by the Borbon monarchs in 1730 was opposed by almost everyone except the grand merchants of Seville, who held a monopolistic stranglehold over American trade, and haughty Peninsular Spaniards (gachupines) who arrived in New World to “administer” the spoils. Conservatives wanted a liberalization of this peninsular trade and certainly did not object to trade with and among the other Spanish colonies. Liberals certainly favored free, internal colonial trade but also wanted free trade with the Northern Pygmy. Both parties understood the implications of pygmy independence. But whereas conservatives feared the U.S. threat, liberals welcomed it. [FN 3 Sub Ecclesiastical Issues ]

In substantial measure, centrists adopted Aranda’s scheme, of liberalized trade, technological modernisation and administrative reform under the aegis of a strong, unifying government in tandem with an established Catholic Church. Federalists, on the other hand, wanted local government, free trade outside the hispanic orbit and that degree of social modernization that cut the Church out from any active role in public life. At bottom, the question of Mexican identity broke over the issue of the Church and the role of Catholicism in life. The liberals carried the banner of the Enlightenment over into religious matters, the conservatives did not.

A prosperous Indian woman (18th)

[ FN 4 An Abundance of Pearls ]

From the conservative perspective, liberalism was not only apostasy but treason as well. This was hardly fanciful. Today, the cause of “federalism” tends to be decked out in the happy, colourful streamers of grass roots popular sovereignty, Indigenism and the full-deck of democratic multicultural blather. But what federalism really stood for was provincial oligarchies and caudillos.

The waning and ultimate collapse of Spanish imperial power left the Gulf, the Caribbean and even the Pacific open to nefarious roving English and American pirate-traders ever ready to cut deals with the sovereign “local authorities” and if necessary to promote secession From the conservative perspective “federalism” was simply a project for anarchy and the dismemberment of the country. History bitterly bore them out.

The Demise

S.M., etc. Ferdinando VII -- by Goya

[the last Borbon king of Mexico]

By any reasonable measure the Borbon Reforms (1767-1795) ought to have succeeded. They rationalized production, streamlined administration, and moderately curbed ecclesiastical power (1767). Shortly before Aranda wrote his Dictamen, Charles III liberalized economic policy so as to allow free trade among the colonies and to remove political and military discriminations against criollos. (1778) In Mexico they improved transportation, introduced the metric system and founded technological and scientific universities (1792). They established academies of arts and inaugurated a program of public education for the Indians in order to incorporate them into the larger socio-economy. It was all the Napoleonic system before Napoleon. And it was all for naught. Napoleon himself made sure of that.

Tres de Mayo by Goya
(French suppression of Spanish Resistance 1808)

The Bonapartist invasion of Spain precipitated the Peninsular War, which in Spain is known as the War of (Their) Independence. As in the colonies, the geo-political conflict was a correlative to domestic civil war. In 1812, the Spanish Cortes, taking refuge in Cadiz and acting as Guardian of the Kingdom, promulgated a new liberal constitution in the name of Ferdinand VII. The constitution was a pure and classical distillation of French liberalism. This pleased the Junta in Argentina but caused consternation among Mexican and Peninsular conservatives. Restored at last in 1814, Ferdinand not only abrogated the constitution but cast aside even his predecessors' reforms seeking strength in absolutism and reaction.

In Mexico, the restoration brought a furious repression of all dissent and after most of its leaders were executed the liberal cause was left for dead. But Ferdinand’s reaction knew no bounds. When he revoked even criollo rights all but the most reactionary conservatives themselves rose in revolt.

Their leader, Agustín Iturbide, put together a tri-partite political platform that united liberals and conservatives against the now restored legitimate monarch. In 1821, the Spanish Viceroy, Juan O’Donojú, arrived with orders to put down the coalition Junta. Seeing that Ferdinand had lost all support and that Spain had in fact ceased to rule, he joined it. That same year, Ferdinand sent a squadron to Argentina to put down a liberal insurrection. On arriving the squadron joined the revolt. The Empire had collapsed.

Iturbide’s platform, while guaranteeing certain liberal demands, was moderately conservative. In accord with Aranda’s plan, it envisioned a Borbon scion assuming the throne of a Mexican constitutional monarchy. But as no Borbon would come, Itrubide had himself declared emperor. And now reasonableness new beginning descened into farce.

In 1824, at the instance of Santa Ana, Iturbide was overthrown and a Republic was declared, incorporating the non-monarchical provisions of the Cadiz Constitution of 1812. Ten years later, in 1834 the Liberals passed the first Reform Law, taking over administration of clerical lands and secularizing education. This provoked a conservative counter-coup which ousted the liberal leaders and amended the constitution so as to reinstate Chruch prerogatives, and reduce the “sovereign” federal states to departments under centralized authority. In reaction (1836) “liberal” Texas and the state of Yucatan seceeded. Taken prisoner aboard an American man of war, Santa Ana recognized Texan independence.

In 1841, the ultra conservatives together with Santa Ana, effected a coup against the moderate conservative government and instituted (1843) a centralized dictatorship a la Ferdinand. Three years later, the liberals arose in revolt in collaboration with Santa Ana [sic] who now turned to meet the U.S. invader. The conservative city of Puebla, gateway to the Valley of Mexico City, welcomed the invading U.S. forces. who went on to take the capital.

Siege of the Military College at Chapultepec

The conduct of Mexico’s political class was squalid, incompetent and shameful. National honor was vindicated only by the Military Academy’s boy cadets who threw themselves from the parapets of Chapultepec Castle against the advancing U.S. Marines. To this day it is they who are revered for sacrifice against the foreign foe.

But the devastating loss of more than half of its territory led Mexico into the politics of recrimination. In 1847 a moderate liberal government assumed power. It was replaced by a conservative one (again headed by Santa Ana) in 1852, which was overthrown by a “pure” liberal one in 1857, which now promulgated a new constitution cut entirely from Philadelphia cloth. The new government also promulgated the Second Reform Laws which confiscated all Church lands, secularized education (again) and dis-established the Catholic Church. From “golpes” (coups), the country now descended into guerra (war). [ FN 5 The Source of Telenovelas?]

The Reform War waged for three years, and on the liberal side was headed by Benito Juarez, a Zapotec Indian from Oaxaca who has ever since been lionized as Mexico’s Abraham Lincoln, the Liberator of his country, and the Benemerito de la Patria.

What his gushing admirers (which includes most of the Mexican political establishment since 1872) omit to note is that in order to gain American diplomatic and political support, Juarez, signed the McLane Ocampo Treaty (1859) which sold a perpetual right of transit, free of any charge, across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec to the United States for 4 million dollars. But why stop there? The treaty also granted the United States and its citizens rights of passage from Nogales to Mazatlán, from Mazatlan to Tampico on the Gulf, and across Sonora to Guaymas. Not only that, Mexican troops were obliged to assist in the enforcement of U.S. rights. And not only that, but Mexico agreed to reciprocal tariffs with the U.S. and bound itself not to give any other “party” similar rights.

Nueva España & Mexico 1795 to 1859

[ click to enlarge ]

It was simply Aranda in reverse. Instead of excluding English trade, Mexico was incorporated into the American orbit; instead of allied sovereignty, Mexico was subsumed under a patina of independence. Such was Juarez’s hatred of the Church that he was willing to sell Mexico into economic peonage to a colossus who retained criss-crossing corridor rights across a supposedly sovereign nation. FN 6 [ Liberal Notions of Patriotism ]

With his four million dollars, Juarez succeeded in capturing Mexico City in 1860. Once in power, he precipitated a crisis with England, France and Spain by unilaterally declaring a moratorium on debts owed to those countries. The creditor nations retaliated by occupying Mexican gulf ports and by demanding the right to collect impost and duties in payment of their debts. Somewhat chastened, Juarez now negotiated the Treaty of Soledad pursuant to which the Spanish and the English withdrew their forces. France would not. The stage was now set for the Cinco de Mayo. (1862)

The Second Empire

Under the pretext of collecting a debt, French forces under the disdainful General Lorencez, advanced from Veracruz toward Mexico City. On the 5th of May, six thousand French were met outside Puebla by four thousand men of Liberal Army of the East, who fortified themselves in the hillock forts of Loreto and Guadalupe and from which position they repulsed the French attack. The French retreated. The Mexicans pursued. The pursuit was contained at Orizaba. Reinforcement arrived, the French occupied ports along the Gulf from whence they launched a second drive on Mexico City, which they ultimately entered and occupied a year later in May 1863. Juarez fled to the United States.

There can be no question, as the liberals claim, that Napoleon III sought to establish a client state in Mexico. The terms he ultimately imposed on the country guaranteed a long term debt, not unlike the reparations France imposed on Germany some 60 years later. But what the liberals shamelessly ignore is that Juarez had already sold the country out to the Americans.

In fact, why should Napoleon be blamed at all? Anyone with a brain not besotted by liberal propaganda could see that Mexico was up for grabs. The United States had stolen more than half its territory and was now carving up the rest with the aid of what could only be called a Quisling government. Carpe diem! Why shouldn’t France seize the moment and beat the U.S. to the punch?

But it is equally true, as the liberals are wont to ignore, that Mexican conservatives saw their own advantage in Napoleon’s designs. Conservative forces assisted the French. One battalion was led by a former conservative president -- later captured and shot by the liberals for alleged treason. Liberal propaganda recites that, upon occupying Mexico City, the French commander convoked a Junta which proclaimed a Catholic Empire and offered the crown to Maximilian, Archduke of Austria. What is omitted is that there were conservatives who wanted to do precisely that and were happy for the French support. In fact the conservatives had made overtures to Maximilian as far back as 1859 and since Maximilian and his wife, Carlotta, were childless, it was stipulated in the treaty that upon their demise, the throne would pass to Iturbide’s heirs. In politics all parties act out of perceived self-interest, and Mexican conservatives saw in Maximillian a chance to put a semblance of Aranda’s plan into effect.

But Mexican history is nothing if not overloaded with cruel and even grotesque ironies. In the event, Maximilian proved to be one of Europe’s new breed of liberal monarchs. Picking up where the Borbons had left off, he established technical and popular trade schools, brought gas lighting to the city and started projects to improve the country’s dismal roads. No one could object. However, politically, he favored a constitutional monarchy and enacted laws abolishing child labor, land peonage, and promulgating universal male suffrage. As if this weren’t liberal enough, he refused to revoke the Reform Laws, leaving in place the separation of Church and State and the disestablishment of the Catholic Church.

With idiotic genius, Maximilian managed to loose the support of his conservative base without winning gratitude or adherence from the liberals. Seeing his domestic support whither and more greatly preoccupied by threats on the Rhine, Napoleon withdrew his troops. In 1867, Mexican conservative forces still loyal to Maximilian engaged the liberals at Querétaro and were defeated. Maximilian was captured. Juarez reentered the capital and turning a deaf ear to entreaties from around the world, had Maximilian shot. He then refused for over a year to return the corpse to a grieving Carlotta; and when he did, it was rotten. Carlotta went mad.

The Execution of Maximillian by Ecouard Monet

(with Goya in mind)

Liberalism and Post Liberalism

Maximilian shot, the Second Empire came to an end and Juarez assumed the presidency, inheriting a country he himself had done much to devastate and bankrupt. The French creditors gloriously driven out, U.S. creditors now came a-knocking. Mexico could hardly pay, and Juarez negotiated a 10 year moratorium on US loans during which Mexico began a policy of conceding infrastructural control to American corporations in lieu of cash payments. Chief among these concession was the Veracruz-Mexico City railroad which ran through confiscated Indian lands. Juarez became increasingly vindictive and despotic, alienating his own supporters and slumping at his desk in 1872.

He was succeeded by another liberal, Lerdo de Tejada, who suddenly woke up to the Faustian Bargain the liberals had made. In an enfeebled echo of Aranda, Tejada cancelled the railroad concession, remarking “better a desert between strength and weakness.”

Of course, Tejada did not truly believe that Mexico could insulate itself from the U.S. economy, but he wanted a more balanced distribution of foreign investment on better terms and, wonder to behold , made overtures to French investors!

The United States would not hear of it. First National City Bank, called in its loans and with the stroke of a pen, bankrupted the Mexican Government. Tejada fled to New York, (where he died an impoverished exile), as Porfirio Diaz, the new hero of the hour, left his “friends” in New York (the Stillmans, Taylors, Whitneys and Morgans) and assembled his liberating army in Brownsville.

A typical "post-revolution" view of Diaz

During Diaz’s 30 year liberal dictatorship, U.S. companies took over 100 percent of Mexico’s infrastructure and 100 percent of copper, mining and oil. They acquired 70 percent of the country’s coastlines and frontiers, 28 percent of the surface area, and 70 percent of all incorporated businesses. Private corporate armies suppressed worker revolts. Next to this ecclesiastical holdings were a pittance.

In 1910, it dawned on Diaz that perhaps he had gone too far. He refused to grant additional concessions demanded by American corporations and began trade negotiations with Japan. Of a sudden, a new democratic hero, Francisco Madero, (backed by Texas bankers) appeared on northern shore of the Rio Grande. Diaz was toppled and Mexico descended once again into civil war, this time between rival liberal factions, workers and Indians.

The upshot of the decade long revolution was that Mexico recovered a degree of control over her own economic destiny. In addition to some modest social democratic and pro-indigenous agrarian reforms, Mexico regained national control of its resources and infrastructure. Henceforth, by law, Mexican investors had to own a 51% stake in corporations. Although the post-revolutionary regime -- most commonly known as the PRI -- deluged the country with Red rhetoric and introduced needed social changes, Mexico’s political-economy remained fundamentally liberal and inextricably tied to the United States. (FN 7 The Myths of Murals )

“To he who hath, more shall be given...”

History had proved Aranda's genius. He foresaw the demographic and economic threat posed by Anglo-America to Ibero-America. He understood the advantages enjoyed by the United States by virtue of its liberal economy and form of government. He understood, equally well, that for this colossus to be withstood, the Spanish Empire had to both decentralize and cohere; to modernize its political-economy and streamline administration while maintaining its cultural and religious identity. La Fe as the core and bedrock of Spanish Civilization was a prime directive established in 1492 and was the one thing Aranda accepted as a given.

Aranda's prescription for a protective commonwealth was, in fact, the “plan” actually pursued by the Anglo-Americans. Despite political independence, boastful yankee brouha and francophone Jeffersonian conceits, the nascent United States developed its industry and commerce under the protection of the Royal Navy and through 1945 its ruling class remained socio-culturally allied with Britain. The United States was not part of the British Commonwealth, but the “special relationship” served just as well.

But to grasp the wisdom of Aranda’s statesmanship is to understand the no-exit in which Hispanic America was trapped. Aranda had seen the ages but his vision had to be seized at a moment.

The conservative plan to restore the Mexican Empire was doomed to failure because Aranda’s plan stood as a whole or it did not stand at all. By 1860, the cause of hispanidad was hardly served by a Mexico tied to France and an Argentina tied to England and a Central America encroached on by the United States. The same logic in fact applied to the First Mexican Empire. Napoleon's invasion of Spain had dealt the Empire a mortal blow. Only the greatest of world statesmen could have bound the wounds and carried out the geo-political surgery required to establish a Tetrarchic Commonwealth. Alas, the Spanish throne was sat on by one of history's great world imbeciles.

Grasping the historical problem Aranda faced also reveals the bankruptcy (literally) of the liberal program. More concise than De Tocqueville, Aranda had meditated on the phenomena of American democracy. He understood that precisely because the United States had forsworn any cultural cohesion (“the new form of government will call forth laborers and artisans from all nations”) it had dedicated itself exclusively and fanatically to the pursuit of commerce as its national purpose and ultimate good.

The fatal defect of the hispanic republics was that they lacked national sources of capital. This deficiency was primarily due to Spain’s mercantilist colonial policies which had relegated the colonies to producers of raw materials. Aranda agreed with the liberals that inter-colonial free trade was essential to the development of an hispanic entrepreneurial class. Charles III was convinced and in 1778 removed many of the political and mercantile restrictions that had seemed so logical in 1730.

It was almost too late. The two worlds stood like gladiators with inverse advantages. The United States was little more than a wilderness, which was its defect and promise. Ibero-America had the infrastructure and "routes" but also the social and cultural constraints of 300 years civilization. It all provided for a game royal of historical "what ifs".

But what was was Bonapart. During a critical 50 year period from approximately 1790 to 1840, while the “pygmy” nation was busy laying the foundations of its own internal commerce from which there was little distraction save the slaughter of Indians, Hispanic-America stagnated in the toils of European revolutions, wars and recession. By 1821, there was virtually no chance of catching up, even if Mexico had not been brought to ruin by a ten-year revolution. As with individuals, once a nation falls into debt it can never accumulate capital and will loose what wealth and freedom it has.

The propaganda advantage of liberalism (enjoyed to this very day) is that textually it sounds simply like an individual's advocacy of an ideology -- the belief in a political/economic system jointly and severally shared by free-thinking men. And so presidents Bush and Uribe can stand together on the same dais blabbering about their “shared democratic values.” But contextually taking into account Ibero-America's historical and economic realities, the ideology was simply the linguistic cover for surrender. People in Hispanic-America actually understand this.

True Bunk

With the fall of the Second Empire, the liberals set about remaking Mexico in their image - poltically, economically, culturally and theologically. Mexico would become officially secular and actually dependent on the Colossus of the North.

More than any other battle in history, the Cinco de Mayo changed absolutely nothing. It merely indicated that after getting their butts kicked from the Alamo to Chapultepec, Mexicans could actually win a conventional battle, at least from defensible positions. Other than assuaging a wounded machismo, the Cinco de Mayo has a purely symbolic significance standing for the triumph of the liberal faction -- no more no less.

Given what hast been said about the evanescence of historical moments, it could be said that what was really "at issue" at the Battle of the Cinco de Mayo was simply choice of masters: either Mexico would align hereself along a Madrid-Paris axis or along an axis from San Antonio to the First National City Bank.

The liberals would have it that the battle was a manifestation the national will to repulse the dastardly foreigner who dared profane sacred soil with his tread, as per the national anthem. Can anything more baldfaced and brazen be imagined than heaping encomiums of praise on Juarez for repulsing “the foreigner” and vindicating Mexican independence?

The only way the liberals can escape the disaster of their policies is by introducing a species of schizophrenia into Mexican political thought, lionizing Juarez as the great national liberator against the evil French, while scapegoating Porfirio Diaz for carrying out Juarez's liberal policies to their logical and intended conclusion.

One of the reasons the Cinco de Mayo was never very loudly celebrated in Mexico was the embarassing fact the general who led the final repulse against the French was... uh... uh.....uh...... Porfirio Diaz. himself. Even schizophrenics have a hard time exalting and excoriating the same goat. [FN-8 An Oyster Not Worth Swallowing ]

In tandem with their ejection theory, the liberals would also have it that the triumph of their cause represented the coalescing of a national identity. This is the same “Mexican Awareness” mantra that got trucked out after the 1910 Revolution and it would seem that every time a catastrophe befalls the country, Mexicans “discover their identity”. In all events, it is true bunk.

It was bunk because, apart from Indo-Iberian Catholicism there was no national identity. At the social and cultural level that was what the entire dispute was about. But the bunk became true because what the liberal regimes did -- both before and after the 1910 Revolution -- was to confabulate a cultural hodge-podge tailored to reflect their ideology and notion of what mexican-ness ought to be like. The results were both ludicrous and injurious.

The liberal concept of “identity” was premised, first, on the propagation of a fantasy and near freakish indigenism. Although acknowledgement of Mexico’s indigenous past was an important of component of serious liberal investigation, at the popular political level the liberals simply peddled a ridiculous Rousseauian romanticism which glossed over that what the Indian wanted economically (his ejidal collective village life) was irreconcilable with a free market agrarian policy and that what the Indian most believed (The Virign and all the saints) was irreconcilable with Enlightenment secularism.

Indian as served up for the Porfirian elite

Although post-revolutionary liberal propaganda excoriated Diaz for being a white wannabe, it was his regime that cultivated the image of a europeanized indigenism as the foundation of Mexican identity. This identity was inter-woven with a xenophobic ethic of “rejecting the hateful foreigner.” Thus, at the same time Porfirio Diaz was reconquering the Yucatan Maya and handing over Indian lands to corporations and hacendados, he erected on Mexico’s grand boulevard, the Paseo de la Reforma, a monumental statute to Cuahutemoc -- the last Aztec king and First Anti-Foreign Freedom Fighter. In this way, the liberals massaged Juarez’s geopolitical policy into a false reflection of “nativism” and by the same token created an Indian “identity” that was inherently xenophobic and hostile to “the other”.

This game continued under the PRI. Fifty yeasrs later, while Rivera was painting brilliant murals depicting the syphilitic, sadistic perfidy of the Conquerors, the post-revolutionary regime was forcing the Maya to learn Spanish, destroying Indian churches during the Cristero Wars, and teaching the Indian that beer and Coca Cola were better than his traditional pulque all the while prohibiting campesinos from appearing on the Paseo de la Reforma in their traditional white cotton clothes. No less than Diaz, the PRI was intent on creating a modern industrial state and the Indian for his own good had to go along.

Aztecs as dished out to the masses.

It is hardly surprising that since the indigenous "core" of Mexican identity consisted in the rejections of the interloping "other" the Porfirian and PRI regimes would disdain and outright refused to acknowledge Mexico’s Spanish roots, as if language, music, colonial cities, horses, cattle just sort of happened. Under the PRI’s post revolutionary curriculum 300 years of Spanish Mexico was simply written out of the books: Once there were Aztecs who had a great empire with magnificent temples. Then came the cruel and vicious Spaniards who heartlessly tortured and slaughtered the Mexicans and destroyed everything. The avaricious and arrogant gachupin plundered Mexico for 300 years. Then came Hidalgo and Morelos who threw out the Spaniards, and Juarez who threw out the invading French and Madero who overthrow the corrupt and oppressive Diaz, and then came the PRI. Rejoice!

The disastrous result of such “identity politics” was that it wrest the Indian from his own socio-theological roots and taught the mestizo to hate one half of who really was. Instead of creating a a frank and true identity, it perpetuated an amnesia.

Chica-Chicana Connecting with Her Inner Aztec

A putative Mexican identity erected on such a foundation could only be a hodgepodge of arbitary predilections and tastes. The resultant cultural cocktail was the despair of Jose Clemente Orozco, who at least tried to capture the depths of Indian reality:

“We Mexicans are primarily guilty for having fomented and confected the ridiculous myth of the charro and the equally absurd China Poblana as symbols of so called ‘mexicanism’ ... Why elect the most obsolete and ridiculous attributes of one class and impose them on the entire country?”

Pedro Infante Connecting with Your Inner Ear

Why indeed? Perhaps for much the same reasons that the United States created the equally ridiculous myths of the cowboy and the Southern Belle. After all, liberalism, which is devoted to commerce, has to come up with something. The motif was cheery, uncontroversial and easily marketable. [FN-9 Sounding Depths ]

Worst of all the liberals’ cultural confection was anti-catholic. To say as much seems ludicrous to readers in a country founded on religious pluralism within a secular state. But what Mexico most decidedly is, was founded on the fusion of Indian beliefs and practices with Spanish Catholicism. Whether one likes it or not, that is a perduring historical and social fact.

It was the Church that enabled the perpetuation of Indian economies, social realities, practices and beliefs under a Euro-Christian cover, such as the Maya offerings of floral crowns (seen above right). This did not always benefit the Indian. It did not very well equip him to be a participant in the larger global economy taken over by liberals. But it is a lie to deny that, for the most part, this is what the Indian wanted. The liberals would wrest the Indian away for his tierras, his sacred places, his gods and, yes, his superstitions, to turn him into what -- a happy beer drinking Voltarian sceptic on some assembly line or oil rig? [FN-10 Caveat Against Reverse Romanticism ]

No one disputes that to the extent there is something distinctly “Mexican” it consists in the syncretism of the Iberian (Castillian, Catalan, Galcian, Valencian, Basque) with the Indian (Aztec, Tlaxacalan, Mayan, Zapotec, Mixtec, Chontal....etc.) From what has been said, it is obvious that this fusion did not occur at the level of political economy. The criollos couldn’t agree on a platform, the Indian “republics” sought to be left alone and the mestizo could take his pick.

But conqueror and conquered always end up fusing at the level of primordial domesticity. The borrowing of fruits, the introduction of animals, the teaching of a technique, the exchange of appreciations and affections. These things provide the non-ideological stuff of life where true culture is usually born. The liberals (Porfirian and PRI) recognized this on the biological and material level. But they did their best to concoct a mestizo in which "the other" part of the mix somehow got forgotten. Most emphatically, they refused to acknowledge that these primordial domestic realities, as they invariably do, incorporated and aligned themselves around religious practices in the “town house”. Everyone wants rain, everyone wants fertility; everyone is suppliant when things go bad and grateful when they go well. The syncretism that is “Mexican” coalesced around hearth and altar. Indo-Catholicism is at the core of Mexican identity and provided the one space where radically different peoples could meet with a semblance of commonality.

It is for this reason that the supposedly típico construct of Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul is utterly false. The one thing not to be found in Kahlo’s domestic design is a Crucifix or image of La Virgen which would absolutely and without question be found in those homes Kahlo purports to synthesize into a style.

Tambalagumba 17th Century Christmas Canticle

by Gutierrez Padilla blending Arabesque sesquiálteras

with Indigenous huapangos

Of course, in truth, there is no such thing as a Mexican culture any more than there is a Spanish, a French or a German culture. In all of these lands, there is a kaleidoscope of inter-connected and varying hearth and altar practices that revolve around some perceptibly common core. The notion of "identifying" an identity is somewhat misbegotten from the start. If Orozco was disgusted by the PRI's cultural "confection" it was because it was such a small and simplistic part of a fascinating abundance of of local varietal customs, sweeping through the Spanish Rennaisance and back to the Amer-Indian stone age.

Nahua Church Decoration & Mixtec Tree of Life Candelabra

There is nothing wrong with the brassy hilarity of charros, mariachis, and the Mexican Hat Dance except that the show is a piece of the whole from which the true life blood has been sucked out and embalmed with a pseudo mestizo fluid.

Indian dance mimicking Aging Spanish Charros
(note the parody jinete "zorro"hat)

For all that, the "bunk" is honest in the sense that it truly does reflect the victory of the liberal agenda. The folk-identity they created gets propagated at home and exported abroad at the same time as Mexico is deluged with commercio-cultural imports from the United States. In both directions the well-spring is a cycle of commerce that has created its own realtity .

To be sure, it would be absurd to pretend that what I have called "domestic" life exists a priori unsullied by "commerce" Quite the contrary. Spain did not come to Mexico looking to establish cultural exchanges. The difference is a question of scale and grounding. The use value and exchange value decisions that underlay Ibero-Indian syncretism were incremental and took place at an individual or communal (ie,"domestic") level. There was room for was room acceptance, rejection, modification and adaptation -- and this was reflected in virtually all the cultural produce of the Colonial period. The commercio-cultural cycle that underlies the "Cinco de Mayo Identity" is cultural manipulation that crowds out that domestic and democratic process.

But all is not hopeless. As the French socio-economic historian, Ferdinand Braudel, pointed out, "commerce" is carried out at different levels. Beneath the "official" commerce that is public, regulated, and taxed, there is always a "sub-official" economy. Indeed, much of Mexico's synchretism (although by no means all) too place precisely at the "sub-imperial" communal and hacendado levels. Today beneath the ostensibly popular Cinco de Mayo / Mariachi / Margarita level other at times illegal cultural processes are at work.

These processes are not the stuff of erudition, but they are the stuff of ordinary people making ordinary decisions and engaging in simple exchanges. It is the stuff of taco-trucks (Norteño but not Southern Mexican) selling carnitas (Mexican) , burritos (not Mexican) and cheddar cheese tacos (half Mexican); and it is Americans protesting a city council's decision to outlaw "our" taco-trucks. It is Mexican builders seamlessly moving from building in cement and stone to wood framing and those same workers in their off hours bringing futbol to towns in Northern California. From Narco-corridos, to Tex-Mex, to Banda, Spanglish and Santa Muerte, a new cultural mestizaje is slowly taking form.

What seems to me important is not that it is vulgar; for emergent cultures are almost always "vulgar", as was once even French. What is important is that it is taking place at all, because the ongoing influx from and contact with Mexico acts as an antidote to the cultural taxidermy that accompanied European immigration. And it is this, in the end, that saves Sink-Oh de May-Oh from itself.

I asked a Mexican gym buddy, if he celebrated the Cinco de Mayo. He smiled and let out that hint of a shy chuckle Mexicans do. Pues tu sabes, no lo celebramos, but we went because the Americans invited us.

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