In Mexico City on 27 September 1842, a man was delivering an unusual eulogy. Fixing his eyes on what he called ‘the mutilated remains of an illustrious leader of independence’, the speaker was so moved that he felt he must ‘shed ardent tears over the remains of the hero’ before him. The occasion, however, was not quite as sad as he made out. For the hero, Antonio López de Santa Anna, a general and many times president of Mexico, was listening to the speech. What was being buried, for the second time, was a leg the general had lost in battle years earlier. Santa Anna was attached to his leg, even if it was no longer attached to him. Now president, he had organised for it to be disinterred, brought to Mexico City in a glass case like a holy relic and then reburied with pomp and ceremony beneath a lavish monument. Two years later, after a revolt toppled Santa Anna from power, the leg was exhumed again and dragged through the streets while people shouted, ‘Kill the lame bastard!’ and ‘Death to the cripple!’ Less than two years after that, in 1846, Santa Anna was president once more, charged with defending Mexico against US invasion. He was not up to the task, and soon the Stars and Stripes was unfurled over the magnificent central square in the capital city. The occupying US troops left only after Mexico was forced to sign away half its national territory, including present-day California.

In the Anglophone world, Santa Anna, his storied leg and defeat to the United States have often been seized upon to portray Mexican history as picaresque, turbulent, incomprehensible – the nation a failed state, its failure all the more apparent when viewed against the ‘success’ of its northern neighbour. Yet in his magisterial book Mexico: A History, Paul Gillingham brilliantly rebuts these and many other stereotypes. Even in the tumultuous decades after Mexican independence in 1821 – between that year and 1855, the national executive changed hands forty-eight times – elections mattered, local democracy flourished and Mexico produced some of the most progressive constitutions in the world. In the 19th century, Mexico had the first black and later the first indigenous president in North America. 

Gillingham vividly details the tragedies of Mexican history as well as the more uplifting moments. He begins just before the conquest of Mexico by Hernán Cortés and its incorporation into the Spanish Empire from 1519, pointing out that it was not the Spanish who defeated the Aztecs, but the indigenous peoples of central Mexico in alliance with the Machiavellian chancer Cortés and his small band of conquistadors. This was not so much foreign conquest as civil war. More deadly than Spanish steel and horses were European diseases. The suffering was astonishing, the number of deaths unknowable; Gillingham estimates that the population of central Mexico may have collapsed by 75 per cent in less than a century.

What came afterwards, though, was also extraordinary. Gillingham argues that New Spain became the world’s first global society, in which indigenous peoples met Europeans, West African slaves and ‘half-forgotten Asians’ who arrived as servants and ‘melted into local societies’. By the standards of the time, New Spain was relatively tolerant, with the Christianisation of indigenous peoples haphazard and syncretic in outcome. If Gillingham documents the occasional psychopathic priest who thought torture the quickest way to ensure the salvation of lost souls – one insisted on hanging his flock by their wrists, attaching rocks to their feet and splashing them with hot wax – he shows that the Spanish imperial footprint was usually not heavy. For many indigenous people, those who survived at any rate, daily rhythms remained unchanged for decades, sometimes centuries. Spanish viceroys complained that their letters were never read in Madrid, let alone answered; the Inquisition in New Spain did not even have a copy of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the book that listed banned books. Far from the tyranny painted in the black legend of Spanish colonialism, New Spain became the centre of a vibrant global empire spanning the Philippines in the east and Europe in the west. Mexico City was one of the great imperial capitals while Washington remained a swamp. The Spanish colony was a viable society which worked well enough, for enough people, to endure fairly peacefully for nearly 300 years.

The War of Independence was another human tragedy. It lasted from 1810 to 1821, and the casualties were colossal: Gillingham estimates that one in ten Mexicans died. Although the country was politically free, the economy collapsed and the following decades were marked by rebellions, US occupation and civil war. In 1862, the French launched another foreign invasion, one that aimed at replacing the constitutional president, Benito Juárez, with an unconstitutional monarch, the Habsburg Ferdinand Maximilian. Yet the indigenous Juárez, born in a dilapidated village in Oaxaca, triumphed. He forced the French to withdraw and Maximilian, born into imperial splendour in Vienna, was executed. The symbolism of the moment spoke for itself; Gillingham calls it ‘Mexico’s real declaration of independence’. Perhaps. It did not, however, lead to political freedom. General Porfirio Díaz may have fought against Maximilian’s monarchical dictatorship, but he proved more relaxed about a republican one. In what became known as the Porfiriato, Díaz ruled Mexico from 1876 to 1910, at which point the Mexican Revolution broke out. Gillingham deftly navigates through its complex politics, radical movements and salutatory violence. 

Out of the violence emerged what Gillingham calls ‘one of the world’s great social revolutions’, the redistribution of land under President Lázaro Cárdenas. Unlike the so-called American Revolution, which merely replaced one political elite with another, Gillingham sees Mexican agrarian reform as the ‘only real American revolution’. If the economic gains were tangible, however, political ones were absent: the
Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) turned Mexico into a one-party state. Yet there were successes. Stability in the face of population growth was a feat in itself. From 1900 to 2000, the Mexican population grew from 13.6 million to over 100 million. ‘Not even China went through such a dramatic revolution in its demography,’ notes Gillingham. Moreover, in contrast to much of Latin America, Mexico did not succumb to military dictatorship. ‘Good Heavens no,’ quipped one opposition politician when asked if he wanted a system that was not rigged, ‘that would mean shooting and violence at every election!’ 

There was shooting, however. Among other state atrocities, Gillingham movingly details the notorious 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, in which pro-democracy student protesters were gunned down in Mexico City by security forces. But it was their economics and political incompetence, rather than protest, that saw the PRI self-immolate towards the end of the 20th century. Gillingham entertainingly charts this gradual, farcical decline – one PRI presidential candidate’s unintentionally mafioso slogan ‘For your family’s wellbeing’ is an especial highlight. 

The book’s final chapter explores the disastrous war on drugs. Perhaps at no other time has the adage ‘Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States’ been truer. In spite of its relatively low level of domestic drug consumption, Mexico became the primary supplier for the gluttonous demand of its northern neighbour. US policy made the situation worse. Mexico initially treated drugs as a medical problem, not one of law and order. But successive US presidents insisted that drugs were a Mexican law enforcement problem and this proved counterproductive. If Mexico was not a failed state when President Felipe Calderón declared a ‘war on drugs’ in 2006, then it is certainly now failing in its most basic duty, to protect the lives of its citizens. With hundreds of thousands dead or disappeared and no end in sight, the war on drugs has been a catastrophic failure. 

For all that, Gillingham ends on an uplifting note. Mexican history, he concludes, could be written as a tragedy of race and violence. However, he argues that, when compared to the United States or Europe, Mexico does not seem so exceptional. The dehumanising racism north of the border is largely absent from Mexico’s past; the Napoleonic as well as the two world wars put Mexican violence into context. Gillingham’s history – full of rich detail based on deep scholarship – bears out this conclusion. He has set a new standard for histories of Mexico, compellingly charting the centuries in all their fascinating glory.