Confrontation with the United States is so central to Mexican history there\u2019s an institution dedicated to the trauma. It\u2019s called the Museum of Interventions.<\/p>\n
Remember the Alamo? They do here \u2014 as the prelude to a string of defeats, invasions and territorial losses that left Mexico wounded and diminished, its national identity forged by grievance.<\/p>\n
The museum is housed in a former convent where Mexican troops were overrun by U.S. soldiers in the 1847 Battle of Churubusco. And for most of the three decades since the museum opened, its faded battle flags seemed like the stuff of buried history, an anachronism in an age of galloping North American Free Trade Agreement integration.<\/p>\n
But President Trump\u2019s wall-building, great-again nationalism is reviving the old Mexican version, too. His characterization of tougher border enforcement and immigration raids as \u201ca military operation\u201d hit the nerve that runs through this legacy, undermining his aides\u2019 trip to Mexico City this week and the message that relations with the United States remain strong.<\/p>\n
Instead, the public outrage at Trump has sunk those relations to their lowest point in decades. It has inspired a campaign to boycott U.S. chains such as Starbucks and buy \u201cMade in Mexico\u201d products. Protesters marched in a dozen cities this month, carrying grotesque effigies of the American president. And Trump\u2019s taunts have buoyed the poll numbers of 2018 presidential contender Andr\u00e9s Manuel L\u00f3pez Obrador, the left-wing populist Mexicans see as the figure most likely to fight back.<\/p>\n
For Mexicans, the problem is not merely the wall. They know their country is poorer, more violent and less law-abiding than the United States. If Trump had announced plans for tougher border security, many Mexicans would have understood, even as they criticized him.<\/p>\n
But when they hear Trump boasting he will make Mexico pay for the wall, and the wild cheering in response, they recognize an unmistakable attempt to humiliate them. It is American nationalism at Mexico\u2019s expense, and it stings in a deep, atavistic way, like a childhood bully coming back to beat you up again.
\n\u201cI\u2019m proud of Mexico, and I love my country,\u201d said Sergio Pacheco, 56, a mechanic who works for American Airlines. \u201cHe can have his wall if he\u2019ll give us our territory back.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pacheco was touring the Museum of Interventions for the first time. There were giant 1840s maps showing Mexico\u2019s borders reaching into the Pacific Northwest.<\/p>\n
President James K. Polk wanted that land. Mexico wasn\u2019t selling, and fighting broke out. The United States declared war in 1846.<\/p>\n
U.S. troops sailed down from New Orleans a year later, then marched up the old conquistadors\u2019 trail and brought Mexico to its knees. They stayed a year, forcing the country to sign away half its territory.<\/p>\n
Later came the occupation of Veracruz by the U.S. Navy in 1914, and the 1916 invasion by thousands of U.S. soldiers chasing Francisco \u201cPancho\u201d Villa, the prototypical \u201cbad hombre,\u201d who had raided the border town of Columbus, N.M.<\/p>\n
The result of these encounters, according to Mexican historian Lorenzo Meyer, is that the two countries developed vastly different forms of nationalism. Mexico\u2019s is a \u201cdefensive\u201d one, he said, steeped in a sense of injustice and indignity, unlike the more belligerent northern version, of American exceptionalism and militarized Manifest Destiny.<\/p>\n
Pacheco never thought about this history much. But the diplomatic clashes of the past few weeks have left him \u201cshocked.\u201d He is a fan of American music and movies and the Super Bowl. For most of his lifetime, the two countries have been steadily growing closer.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve always looked up to the United States,\u201d he said. \u201cNow, after all this time, we\u2019re realizing that you don\u2019t really like us.\u201d<\/p>\n
New reality
\nPresident Enrique Pe\u00f1a Nieto has mostly tried to accommodate the new reality, challenging Trump\u2019s proposals in restrained, diplomatic language. He has offered a more forceful response only when he felt he had no choice, such as when he canceled a trip to Washington after Trump tweeted that the Mexican leader should stay home if he wouldn\u2019t pay for the wall.
\nMexicans, too, are divided about what to do. This month, protesters held two marches in the capital. Both were anti-Trump, but one was also a demonstration against the deeply unpopular Pe\u00f1a Nieto, whom organizers view as a Trump-enabler. Others, including tycoon Carlos Slim, are calling on Mexicans to close ranks behind their president, because the country is under attack.<\/p>\n
An irony of the spat with Pe\u00f1a Nieto is that he has already paid a steep political cost for enacting controversial energy changes favored by American companies. He has opened Mexican oil and gas development to greater foreign investment, but that has only led to higher prices for angry Mexican consumers and lower poll numbers for him.<\/p>\n
The last time the country was so open to U.S. investment, during the Gilded Age dictatorship of Gen. Porfirio Diaz, Mexican resentment of the government boiled over into revolution. The country eventually adopted steep tariffs that limited trade for decades.<\/p>\n
Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas nationalized the holdings of Standard Oil and other foreign companies in 1938, infuriating the firms but delighting Mexicans. In a show of patriotism, thousands of Mexican women came to a central square in Mexico City offering money, wedding rings and livestock to pay the companies back.<\/p>\n
\u201cI grew up in a country where you were taught in obligatory history textbooks that the United States was the enemy, the country that stole half our land and the country of the \u2018Ugly American,\u2019 \u201d said Denise Dresser, a prominent Mexican political scientist whose father was a U.S. citizen.<\/p>\n
She helped organize the march this month that was also against Pe\u00f1a Nieto and his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled the country from 1929 to 2000 and cast itself as the heroic defender of Mexican dignity.<\/p>\n
Mexico was a relatively closed, insular society for most of those years, but as more and more Mexicans came into contact with the world through television and mass migration to the United States, nationalism was transformed.
\nMexican workers returning home also broke down the old divisions. \u201cThey brought back a view of the United States as a tolerant, upwardly mobile place, and began to demand rights back home that they saw in the United States,\u201d Dresser said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat created a virtuous cycle, and a new sense of identity constructed not in opposition to the U.S., but in favor of North America,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
But in Trump\u2019s taunts many Mexicans hear confirmation of their deep-seated suspicion that Americans still don\u2019t value and respect them.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s comments are forcing a re-examination of Mexico\u2019s relationship with the United States, from its intricate commercial and industrial ties to deepening cooperation with U.S. law enforcement. New legislation in Mexico\u2019s senate would halt imports of American corn, which have grown from $390 million to $2.4 billion annually since the advent of NAFTA, in 1994.<\/p>\n
NAFTA is not the natural, default setting of U.S.-Mexico relations. It is an attempt to transcend the mistrust and bitterness of the past.<\/p>\n
The agreement took an aspirational view of U.S.-Mexico ties. It recognized the two countries were significantly different. But it treated Mexico essentially as an equal partner, along with Canada, in creating a prosperous, democratic and collaborative place called \u201cNorth America,\u201d quieting the skeptics who insisted Mexico didn\u2019t belong there.<\/p>\n
Since NAFTA took effect, annual U.S.-Mexico commerce has increased from $80 billion to $550 billion. And as trade barriers fell, Mexico\u2019s defensive nationalism did, too.<\/p>\n
But as American factory jobs moved south, NAFTA dealt a blow to the latent notions of U.S. nationalism built on postwar-era industrial pride.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s \u201cAmerica First\u201d worldview restores the idea of industrial products as vessels of patriotism. But it has left Mexicans baffled by the claim their country is taking advantage of the United States through NAFTA. Mexican workers earn a small fraction of what their American counterparts make, and the trade partnership is overwhelmingly driven by U.S.-based Fortune 500 companies. Mexican cities have filled with U.S. chain stores and restaurants, not the other way around.
\nIn the chants of \u201cBuild the Wall!,\u201d Antonio Garza, a former U.S. ambassador to Mexico, sees the return of the \u201canimal spirits\u201d that once soured relations between the two countries. But Garza, who served from 2002 to 2009 under President George W. Bush and now works as an attorney in Mexico City, said he\u2019s seen something different in the resurgent nationalism on Mexico\u2019s streets.<\/p>\n
This time, it has a singular focus. \u201cIt\u2019s directed at Trump,\u201d he said, \u201cnot the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Confrontation with the United States is so central to Mexican history there\u2019s an institution dedicated to the trauma. It\u2019s called the Museum of Interventions. Remember the Alamo? They do here \u2014 as the prelude to a string of defeats, invasions and territorial losses that left Mexico wounded and diminished, its national identity forged by grievance. The museum is housed in… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=608"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":612,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608\/revisions\/612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}