A Concise History of Mexico

Pg Mexico became independent of metropolitan Spain in 1821 not as a republic but as the Mexican Empire, a monarchy which extended at least nominally from Panama in the south to Oregon in the north…The Mexican silver peso or dollar was based on the peso and the two currencies retained parity until the mid nineteenth century…In 1821, it did not seem inevitable that the Mexican empire would lose a large part of its territory and after 1848 be surpassed and increasingly dwarfed by the USA

Pg 50 Canoes proved to be 40x more effective than individual humans with respect not to their speed but to the amount that could be carried

Pg 62 Cortes was particularly fortunate in securing the assistance of the captive Indian woman, Malintzin, who spoke Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec Empire. Malintzin, know to Spanish at the time as Dona Marina, became the symbolic Mexican figure of “La Malinche:, who, guilty by association, handed over the Indian world to the European conquerors…From this name comes the discredited action, “Malinchismo”, which signifies the betrayal of Mexican integrity and values to foreigners

Pg 75 From the mid 17th century onwards the incorporation of Spanish verbs, idioms, syntax and sounds into Nahuatl spread rapidly through large scale individual contact…the Nahua peoples adopted from the Spanish what they saw as useful for their own survival

Pg 113 Mexico between 1836 and 1853 was stripped of half the territory inherited from the colonial viceroyalty by an expansionist USA, and was subjected to the armed intervention of France, then regarded as Europe’s principal military power, between 1862 and 1867…The decline of mexico was relative to the rise of the USA as a continental power in the period of 1800 to 1870

Pg 134 the Guadalupe tradition symbolized a specific Mexican religious identity, which had developed from the mid 17th century. The religious dimension revealed a millennarian purpose of putting the world right by sudden act of collective violence directed against those held responsible for the wrongs afflicting society

Pg 155 “The Mexican War” represented the highest death rate in any war fought by the United States in its history up to the present time. The war understandably had considerable impact within the United States, especially since the Republican Party (Abraham Lincoln), strongly opposed it primarily on the grounds that it worked entirely in the southern interest

Pg 237 The effects of the Wall Street Crash of Oct 24 1929 were increasingly felt in Mexico from July 1930. Serious recession already affected Mexico’s 3 main export commodities, oil silver and copper. Since Mexico didnt depend on any one commodity and already had a reasonable diversified economy, the impact of the Great Depression was not as severe as in other Latin Americna countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Peru or Cuba

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