Mexico through 1945 - 2001

Introduction

Mexico is the most populous Spanish-speaking country in the world and the second most-populous country in Latin America after Portuguese-speaking Brazil. Highly developed cultures, including the Olmec, Maya, Toltec, and Aztec, existed long before Spain conquered Mexico in 1521. Mexico was a Spanish colony for 300 years until 1821 when it formally achieved independence (Thomas, Pp. 38).

Mexico is endowed with substantial natural resources, and is a major oil producer and exporter. The Mexican economy is highly dependent on exports to the United States, which account for about 90 percent of its total exports. Mexico has undergone a profound economic transformation since the mid-1990s as a result of economic liberalization and its joining the North American Free Trade Agreement (a free trade bloc with the U.S. and Canada also known as NAFTA). There has been rapid and impressive progress in building a modern, diversified economy, improving infrastructure, and tackling poverty. Today, the country enjoys a more open economic and political system and is more integrated with the world economy.

Discussion

Geographical proximity to the United States has been and will always be a factor with which Mexico contends. In the nineteenth century, the ambiguous shared border meant that United States expansionists set their sights on Mexico. The exceptionalism and outright bigotry of the U.S. provided reasons to expand not just west but south, as the campaign for frontier domestication included the eventual absorption of Mexico's northern half in 1848. Mexico has also been a pawn in the imperial hopes of others. To be sure, Napoleon III's invasion and occupation of Mexico during the American Civil War was not accidental; it was meant to counterbalance U.S. dominance in the region and to send a clear, threatening message from nearby (Powell, Pp. 98).

Proximity has also shaped Mexico's marketplace. The ease with which U.S. investors traveled to Mexico in the late nineteenth century set the terms for a kind of economic interdependence that continues today, especially since the neoliberal opening in the late 1980s and the introduction of commercial arrangements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Mexico is second to Canada as the most important trade partner of the United States, while the United States serves as the predominant marketplace for Mexican exports, consuming more than 89 percent by 2000. In addition to economic interdependence, a shared border has shaped diplomatic agendas on both sides, creating policy concerns unique to Mexico and the United States such as border regulation, immigration legislation, worker programs, water rights, and enforcement strategies to fight the drug war. This closeness has produced a rich transnational history of intercultural fluidity and exchange which, in no small way, has provided opportunities for everyday forms of diplomacy, whereby students, workers, fronterizos, artists, tourists, and civic groups—not just diplomats and border patrol officers—mediate relations between the two countries (Alan, Pp. 144).

The nature and timing of the 1910 Revolution also sets it apart from the rest of the region, while its aftermath came to dominate much of the nation's ...