Registered: Oct 2001
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"Put in proper perspective, Mexico was still a nation struggling to emerge from centuries of colonialism under a backward empire. Mordern Mexico began with the Spanish conquest and the bloody diffusion of Hispanic civilization. A Mexican nation began only with the twentieth-century revolution, which was both forward and backward-looking. The nation of the twenty-first century would be partly the creation of that revolution, partly the result of a newer diffusion of culture fostered by a new custodianship, which turned toward American and European financial and industrial systems. THe changes of the twentieth century rivalled the changes wrought by Spanish swords. Both destroyed old worlds that had outlived their usefulness, but without freeing Mexicans completely from the past of thrusting them fully into the brave new world.

Mexican history, like all human history, is a succession of racial and cultural waves breaking over ancient lands. Each era makes its own glories and horrors, both out of necessity and circumstance. The tragedy of Mexican history is that Mexicans, more than many other peoples, could never escape their past. They came burdened into the twentieth century, and would go burdened into the next; problems the Porfiriato could not solve remained unsolved. The hundred million Mexicans who could inhabit the 2000s were already inexorably shaped, from Chapultepec to Chiapas.

Mexico and Mexicans in their emergence had little effect on the greater world. Their struggles were parochial - yet there was and is a universal element in Mexican history from which every people might learn. HTe past is not frozen in stone monuments or buried with old bones and artifacts. It lives on in each new generation."


I've spent longer readin this book than I normally would have. Partly that was because of reading several other books during the semester for Native American Lit, and also just because this turned out to be a very interesting and well-written history of a country that I was largely ignorant despite my proximity to it growing up.

Fehrenbach wrote the definitive history of Texas, called Lone Star, that I read last year and enjoyed very much as well. He is rather dry and to the point in his style of writing, but he is very perceptive of human nature and the circumstances that flow together in the current of human events, and he maintains a flow of events in his narrative that kept me interested for the duration.

Thumbs up.

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Registered: Nov 2001
Location: Rio de los Brazos de Dios
Posts: 3876

I don't think that Fehrenbach ever wrote a bad book. His books
"Comanchee" and "Lone Star" are super as is this one Mug has just finished.

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