Border Crossings

ED: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts.

BRIAN: Welcome to the show, I’m Brian Balogh.

BRIAN DELAY: I’m Ed Ayers.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. In the summer of 1857, bullets began to fly on the outskirts of San Antonio, Texas. In a series of ambushes, Anglo men on horseback would assault Mexican traders hauling freight on ox carts. Some of the attackers wore masks, others blackened their faces. They carried guns, and sometimes you used them– and not just for warning shots.

LARRY KNIGHT: One man was shot point-blank in the chest.

BRIAN: This is Larry Knight, an historian at Texas A&M University in Kingsville. He says the ambushes were not an attempt to steal the cart men’s cargo. This was the opening salvo in a turf war.

PETER: Here’s the background. The Mexican cart men had a monopoly on hauling freight in Texas. Anglo Teamsters wanted to be on the action, and they were willing to shed blood to snuff out the competition. By September 1857, they were murdering cart men.

But since the rural counties where the attacks happened were mostly Anglo, county officials refused to crack down on the attackers.

LARRY KNIGHT: Nobody is going to go after them. Not a justice of the peace, not a sheriff, not a marshal. As far as they’re concerned, all of these Mexicans should be killed, run out of the state. So there’s no sympathy for the Mexican corpsmen who are being killed.

BRIAN: In San Antonio it was a different story. People there saw the cart men as an economic lifeline.

LARRY KNIGHT: They were bringing in clothing, they were bringing just, almost anything that you used on a daily basis of life, it would be brought in by the cart men. So San Antonio was quite dependent upon this trade for survival.

PETER: They began calling the ambition the Cart War. City politicians visited the attack sites to pressure locals to do something. They wrote outraged letters to the Governor of Texas. Even the US Secretary of State got involved.

LARRY KNIGHT: They finally were able to convince the Governor to raise a militia unit. The  militia unit then begins to escort the cart trains. And then the thing just ends, seemingly quietly.

BRIAN: But when it came to pay the bill for the militia, well, not everyone was on board. The Texas legislature convened to debate the issue. And the big question was–

LARRY KNIGHT: Why are we protecting Mexicans with Texas dollars?

PETER: Opposition was particularly fierce in Goliad County, the site of several attacks. Goliad also happened to be the place where, 20 years earlier, the Mexican army had gunned down hundreds of Anglo troops during the Texas fight for independence. For many, it was a harsh irony.

LARRY KNIGHT: And so the representatives from Goliad said, basically, in modern parlance, are you kidding me? We’re going to protect Mexicans who slaughtered Fannin and his men back in 1836? That’s unconscionable.

BRIAN: But here’s the thing. Most of the people these Anglos called Mexican were actually US citizens. Many of the cart men had been born in Texas, back when it was part of Mexico. And when Texas joined the US in 1848, everyone living there automatically got US citizenship.

PETER: Take Antonio Delgado, one of the cart men who was murdered during the Cart War. He was well known in San Antonio as a veteran of the US Army. He had even fought under Andrew Jackson.

LARRY KNIGHT: He stood up for liberty. He stood up for liberty as a Mexican fighting for independence, stood up with the Americans fighting against the British in the War of 1812, stood up for Texas in its war for independence against Mexico. What proves you love liberty more than putting your life on the line– in three separate wars?

BRIAN: So when people from Goliad resisted using tax dollars to protect Mexicans, state legislators from San Antonio basically said, what are you talking about? These guys are American patriots, and not to mention–

LARRY KNIGHT: These are United States citizens.

PETER: Long story short, the militia was funded and the attacks stopped.

BRIAN: But the spat over who counted as American reflected a broader reality about mid 19th century Texas. There were few clear lines between us and them, between Mexican and American. Farmers, who lived in the same spot for 50 years, had been Spanish, then Mexican, then Texan, then American, all without moving an inch. Today, it’s easy to think of the border as a straightforward dividing line. But for most of our history there’s has been nothing straightforward about it.

ED: So this week on BackStory, we’re asking how the flow of people and ideas across the border has shaped the US/Mexican relationship. The two countries have been neighbors, rivals, enemies, and now, close trading partners. So how have these two nations defined themselves in relation to each other? How was that relationship changed over time? And what does US history look like when seen from Mexico?

PETER: In the spirit of NAFTA, we begin the show today with a trade story. It ends with a major shift in Mexican economic policy, but it starts with an American scientist on a quest.

BRIAN: Here’s to setup. In the early 20th century, hormone therapy was the next big thing in US medical research. Hormones were marketed as cure-alls for everything from diabetes to eczema to psychosis. But hormones were hard to come by. So scientists who wanted to do research had to get creative.

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: They knew that in male urine you could find minute quantities of testosterone. So they said, where can we find a lot of male urine?

PETER: That’s Gabriela Soto Laveaga, historian at UC Santa Barbara.

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: They set up these huge vats outside of bars, where men would urinate. And then they would take these vats to pharmaceutical companies, where they extract these very small amounts of hormones.

ED: An American chemist named Russell Marker wanted to find a better way. He knew that plants like yams and yucas naturally created a molecule similar to another key hormone, progesterone. He figured that if he could find a plant with just the right chemical qualities, he could guarantee a supply progesterone.

BRIAN: So in the 1930s, Marker set out on a quest to find that perfect plant. He traveled across the US, visiting state after state after state. But nothing quite worked. Laveaga says that, eventually, Marker just lost hope.

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: And he gives up in Texas. And he’s staying at the home of a botanist. And he picks up this random book, and in it is a picture of a giant Mexican yam. So he continues this rather wild goose chase– this is 1941, in the midst of the war– and takes a train down to Mexico City– not speaking Spanish, not knowing where we Vera Cruz, the Southeastern Mexican state where this root was found, where that was located– and somehow, makes it to the state of Vera Cruz.

BRIAN: Doesn’t sound promising. What happens?

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: He manages to very astutely– he goes to the local little Five & Dime shop owner. And he says that he’s looking for these gigantic yams that are grown somewhere around there. The shop owner, not speaking English, but tells him that he understands, and for him to come back the next day.

[CHUCKLING]

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: And Russell Marker goes back the next day, and sure enough, this shop owner has two samples of these giant yams waiting for him.

BRIAN: Just, by the way, how big are these yams?

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: About 125 pounds.

BRIAN: Oh, my goodness!

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: Yeah, so he takes them back to a makeshift laboratory, and he manages to synthesize more progesterone than had ever been discovered up until that point in humankind’s history.

BRIAN: Wow!

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: So he’s in Mexico City and he flips open the phone book and he says– I didn’t know Spanish, but I knew the word laboratory and I knew the word hormone. So I was looking for both of those words. And he finds a laboratory called Laboratorios Hormona, which fortunately for Marker was hormone laboratory. And he takes his discovery there. And they are astounded.

BRIAN: So what kind of deal did he cut with this laboratory?

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: The business end of the laboratory, a man named Emerico Somlo, and the chemist, whose name was Dr. Lehmann, they immediately recognized that there’s a lot of profit to be made. And just in terms, not only profit, but just the scientific advancement that can happen with Russell Markers discovery is immense.

So they say, why don’t you three of us, Somlo, Lehmann, and Marker, begin a company? And we’ll call it Syntex. And Syntex is emerging a synthesis in Mexico. And Syntex would eventually become one of the most profitable, if not the most profitable, transnational pharmaceutical company of the Western hemisphere.

BRIAN: OK. Let’s pause here and recap what happens over the next 20 years. In 1951, scientists working for Syntex, in Mexico City, made an amazing discovery. They created the very first oral contraceptive, the birth control pill. After that, hormones became an even bigger business. All fueled by those amazing Mexican yams.

PETER: Over the next few decades, lots of other companies got into the game. Many were based in the US. They would buy barbasco from Mexican peasants, export it, and synthesize their drugs in American labs. It seemed like a stable set up.

BRIAN: Until, in 1970, a populist named Luis Echeverria was elected President of Mexico. Echeverria had big plans to improve the country’s health and education systems. But to put those plans into action, his government needed money. And that took the form of foreign aid. And that’s where Laveaga picks up the story.

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: And Mexico, at the time, turns to the World Bank. And the World Bank says, well one of the problems that you have in your country is over population. And this is where the Mexican government steps in. And one of the adviser said, well, you know, we should, as a nation, look into developing a Mexican oral contraceptive pill. So the Presidential advising team goes and they start to do research. And lo and behold, not only do they have it, but Mexico was the first one to bring it to market.

BRIAN: So let me just try to keep track, here.

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: Sure.

BRIAN: Mexico is being pressured to reduce its population. It says, all right, we’ll do a study on population control. And as a result of that, discovers that birth control pills really originate in Mexico from the barbasco yam?

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: Yes.

BRIAN: So what does Echeverria do about this?

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: So he realizes that those who are picking the yams are hundreds of thousands of Mexican peasants. So he realizes the voting potential. And he also realizes the amount of money that could come into the Mexican state’s coffers if they could control the steroid/hormone industry trade. And he decides to create a company called Proquivemex.

And basically, it will be the negotiator between transnational pharmaceutical companies and peasants, in order to increase what is being paid to peasants. And at the same time, be producing patent medications. The problem is that transnational pharmaceutical companies were quite savvy when they established themselves in Mexico. And Echevarria falsely calculated that their hands were tied. And I say falsely calculated, because had this happened in the 1950s, when by barbasco was the only known source of steroid hormones, then maybe transnational pharmaceutical companies would have yielded.

But by the 1970s, transnational pharmaceutical companies have started to look to other natural raw material, such as soy and heniken, because they know that the political winds are changing in Mexico. And as any savvy business person will do, you don’t put all your eggs in one basket. And Echeverria doesn’t understand this. He’s come late to the barbasco game.

BRIAN: So explain to me how the Proquivemex story fit into the larger context of Mexico’s economy in the 1970s.

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: So in the 1970s, Echeverria’s policies were really devoted for redistributing Mexico’s wealth. And to do that the government thought that it needed to create a series of Mexican companies that covered everything from bicycle production, rubber production, and, of course, Proquivemex. There were over 1,000 of these companies.

And the idea was that this was a solution. This was the way that the Mexican government would become independent, would industrialized in a Mexican way. But as you consume, when you’re investing a lot of money but many of these companies are like Proquivemex facing, really, insurmountable obstacles, when it comes to business, they’re floundering. And the government is spending more and more money on them.

So in 1982, Mexico will have an economic crisis. And in part, it is because of this overspending. But also this borrowing to cover all this spending. And this forces the administration to really rethink their economic outlook. And a lot of this is to begin to privatize many of these government owned companies. It sells off petrochemicals and other raw materials, some basic goods, into private sector companies. Whereas, before they were part of the public sector.

BRIAN: So that the Proquivemex story was really symbolic of a much larger trend, in Mexico?

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: Absolutely. Absolutely.

BRIAN: Do you see this period in the 1980s as a prelude to what eventually will become NAFTA?

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: Yeah. I think that Mexico’s protectionist strategies, up until that point, had been about protecting raw material, had been about protecting Mexican industry. And there’s a real shift that we see in the 1980s. And we really see that with Proquivemex, an industry that just a mere decade earlier had been touted as this really important industry that was going to develop Mexico and move it into the modern economic world. And 10 years later, it’s being dismantled, because those economic practices did not work. And something new has to be tried.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BRIAN: Gabriela Soto Laveaga is a historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She’s the author of Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill.

ED: It’s time for a short break, but don’t go away. When we back, an Indian tribe plays king-maker in a conflict between the US and Mexico.

PETER: You’re listening to BackStory and we’ll be back in a minute. We’re back with BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh. Today on the show, the long and tangled history of US/Mexican relations.

PETER: Our next story focuses on the US, Mexico, and a critical third party, the Comanche tribe. In the early 19th century, the Comanches controlled a vast tract of land stretching across what’s now the Southwestern US. At the time it was recognized Mexican territory.

BRIAN: Initially, the Mexicans and Indians maintained a wary peace. But by the 1830s, Mexican Comanche relations had soured. Raiding parties of Indian men began attacking isolated haciendas, towns, sometimes even cities.

ED: The violence intensified throughout the 1830s and 1840s, devastating the region. UC Berkeley historian, Brian Delay has studied this crisis. When I sat down with him, recently, I asked, where  did the beleaguered Mexicans turn for help?

BRIAN DELAY: Well, that was the million dollar question. And so across Northern Mexico, whether you’re a rancher, or you’re the sort of the head of a hacienda, or you’re a local official, or you’re state authority, you’re desperately looking for some superior who’s going to provide you with weapons, with money, with men, with some kind of an army force that’s going to be able to march into Indian territory and convince them not to launch these raids.

And Mexico, in the 1830s and 1840s, was just entering a profound political crisis and found itself completely incapable of dealing with this widespread, complex problem in any kind of substantial way. And so throughout the 1830s and 1840s, as the violence across the north spreads and becomes more severe and more economically and politically consequential, people are constantly sending letters to the central government saying, you’ve got to help us. You’ve got to find a way to deal with this. This is a national problem.

And they felt sympathetic, to a certain extent. But they basically replied and said, look, this is, effectively, a crime wave. And once we have our house in order, we’ll try to help you with it. But right now, there’s nothing that we can do to address this problem.

ED: Now we all know that the world history pivots around the chronology of American history. And so I can’t help but notice that you talk about the 1830s and 1840s as if this is all happening without the United States making everything happen. So I’m a little puzzled. You’ve already described a really complicated situation. But complicate it even more by inserting the United States into this.

BRIAN DELAY: By the middle of the 1840s, both sides, both Mexicans looking towards United States, and the United States looking towards Mexico, had come to use the Indians in between them as kind of lenses that they could look through, and look at each other through. And they were quite useful that way, because they revealed precisely what they wanted to see.

So for Mexico, by the middle of the 1840s, Mexicans– at very high levels– came to believe that these Indian raids, which were growing worse and worse every year, and really to become the peak in 1845, couldn’t be the consequence of Indian decisions. Indians were simply too disorganized, too primitive to do such damage to a modern nation state. So there must be some more significant force behind them.

And understandably, they came to believe that it was the Texans, and most especially the United States, that was actively manipulating these people into launching these devastating raids in advance of a planned invasion. That wasn’t true. But that’s what the Mexicans came to believe and to say to each other. And then, on the side of the Americans, what they’re seeing is this appalling, terrible disaster unfolding. And it’s fascinating to them, partly because it seems to be the exact mirror image of what has been happening in the United States, right?

ED: Right. Right.

BRIAN DELAY: I mean, after all they had just pretty much concluded this major campaign to force all the native people east of the Mississippi west of the Mississippi.

ED: Right.

BRIAN DELAY: And the reverse is happening in Mexico.

BRIAN: ED: They’re sort of letting civilization down, right? I mean, they’re not doing their part.

BRIAN DELAY: They are blowing it for the civilization team. Exactly. So that really, I think, in a very powerful way, shapes what Americans think about Mexico. And ultimately, it shapes the way they think about Mexico’s rights to this a vast territory.

ED: So tell me about the actual waging of the war and the presence of the Comanche in that war.

BRIAN DELAY: So when the United States invaded Mexico, it was already a moment when Indian violence, not only with Comanches, but Apaches and Navajos, as well, had become worse and more widespread than it had been in a generation. And that only accelerates during the war, itself. And so Mexicans are literally fighting two wars at one time.

ED: Wow.

BRIAN DELAY: And the American forces and the American commanders knew this very well. They had been paying close attention to this 10 years of sort of looking at Northern Mexico and marveling at the crisis that’s happening there. And so they shrewdly planned to use this to their advantage. So President Polk and his generals talk deeply about this. And they go down to Northern Mexico with instructions, things that they’re going to say to Mexicans that they find there.

And so American commanders are going into Northern Mexico and telling them, we know that your government has completely abandon you over the last decade. And we’re going to change that. And we’re going to help protect you against Indians. And we’re going to save your wives and your children, who are being held captive by these Indians, so long as you don’t turn against us.

So they’re using it rhetorically, but they’re also, of course, relying on this very practical level. Hoping, correctly as it turned out, that the huge majority of Northern Mexicans would feel, not an imposition to wage an insurgent war against the occupying force, or swell the Mexican army. And in effect, to drive back the American advance.

ED: So as you know, the United States wins this big victory. They have the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago, in which they get all this territory from Mexico. Well, how do we make sense of this?

BRIAN DELAY: So the war ends in this astonishing way, that we don’t really think about it as astonishing, anymore. We’ve naturalized it in this country. But the fact that Mexico was compelled to surrender half of its national territory is just an amazing outcome to this war. And the fact the Republican government, the first big Republican government, and the one that many other states in the hemisphere look to as a model, is going to attack a weaker country, invade it and compel it to surrender half its national territory, I think, requires more explanation than we usually give it.

And it seems to me that the key factor there was this widespread sense that there really was no injury to Northern Mexico in taking this territory. In fact, it would be a benefit to Northern Mexico, because the Americans would stop the Indians from attacking and stealing women and children and killing people below the river.

And Polk makes a speech to Congress, wherein he makes plain this idea that, this really isn’t even doing Mexico any damage. On the contrary, we’re going to be doing Mexico a favor. So here’s what he says. He says, “It would be a blessing to all these northern states to have their citizens protected against the Indians by the power of the United States. At this moment, many Mexicans, principally females and children, are in captivity among them.

If New Mexico we’re held and governed by the United States, we could effectually prevent these tribes from committing such outrages. And compel them to release these captives and restore them to their families and friends.” And I think that kind of captures the argument.

ED: Can you tell us about the treaty?

BRIAN DELAY: The treaty that ended the war had a clause that was all about this. It was Article 11 of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago that bound the United States to prevent Indians living north of the new border from raiding south into Mexico. And it also bound the Americans to redeem any captives that they come to know were being held by Indians living north of the border. But that’s not what happens.

Immediately following the war, raids only increase. And they steadily increase during the late 1840s and early 1850s. And the American government and the American army found it to be completely impossible to police this massive, massive expanse, and to stop Indians from raiding into Mexico. And when the violence only gets worse, and these large landholders, especially, suffer major losses, in terms of animals that were destroyed or killed, and people that had been killed and kidnapped, they began talking about remedies.

And happily, lawyers from New York City arrive and begin organizing these aggrieved property holders. And telling them that the United States is bound by international treaty to prevent these things are happening, nonetheless, that they are entitled to compensation. And so in the face of threatened lawsuits, immense lawsuits for tens of millions of dollars for Mexican landowners in the south, the American government leans on Mexico to free them from the obligations of Article 11 in a treaty that it concluded with Mexico in 1853 and ’54, called the Gadsden Purchase, which acquired a strip of land in what’s now southern Arizona and New Mexico for the United States. And relieved the United States of any obligation Article 11.

ED: You know, it’s interesting the way American history is usually taught, Mexico just seems kind of just sitting there waiting for us to go into a war with it. The Indians are usually saved for the new West part, after Christmas break, and Reconstruction, right?

BRIAN DELAY: That’s right.

ED: And so, Brian, it sounds to me as if you’re saying that it’s actually relationships among Mexicans and Indians and Anglo settlers, is actually more germane in the actual beginning of the war. Would that be a fair statement?

BRIAN DELAY: I definitely think that– I completely agree with what you said about our perceptions in the way we narrate this event. And I think the great symptom of that way of thinking, you know, the way the thing says, Mexico really doesn’t matter. It’s just waiting. And the Indians, we can wait until after fall break to get to those guys.

ED: Right.

BRIAN DELAY: I think the great symptom of that is Manifest Destiny. That we have spent so much intellectual energy– and we spend enough time with our students talking about this thing called Manifest Destiny, because we fundamentally believe that what Americans thought about themselves was a lot more important than what was actually happening in these places. And who lived there, and what they were up to.

But the place, itself– Indians and relationships between Indians and Mexicans, and the fundamental weakness of the Mexican government, that was far more important to determining why the war started and why it into the way that it did.

ED: Brian Delay is a historian at the University of California, at Berkeley. He’s the author of War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the US-Mexican War.

ED: So guys, help me map this really interesting story about the Comanches and the Mexicans onto the big story, that we kind of have an idea about– about Mexican, American relations. How does this all fit together?

PETER: Well, and I like the use of the word map, because we are talking about a map. A map in which we don’t have a clearly defined border. We have a vast region in which there is no effective state authority. And it really was Indian country. And they set the terms of play. So it’s a vacuum of effective authority that create the conditions for warfare, for violent conflict.

BRIAN: So Peter, I concede that. But I’m going to make a, at least, a small case for this state. Perhaps the jurisdiction is not there, but both states play a crucial role on one issue. And that is the issue of slavery.

PETER: Yep.

BRIAN: It seems that we’re ignoring the fact that Mexico outlaws slavery. And that there are many among southern states within the United States, who want to extend slavery into this Mexican territory. Am I wrong about that, Ed?

ED: No, you’re exactly right, Brian. And that’s one reason the Mexican War is so volatile in the United States. Because Southerners are saying, yeah, let’s go to war with Mexico. And the people in the North are saying, what? We don’t need Mexico. And if we do, it’s just going to engorge slavery. So it becomes really one of the things that disrupts the politics of the nation state that does exist. And then, in the Civil War that grows as a result of that destabilization, Peter, ironically, the great difference between Mexico and the United States is resolved.

Once the United States abolishes slavery, then that sharp boundary between the two, on that issue, is resolved.

BRIAN: And, Ed, let’s think about how invisible the boundaries between the South and the North, within the United States, become after the issue of slavery is resolved. Well, that same concept can be applied to the international boundary.

PETER: Um, hm. Good point.

BRIAN: That boundary is crucial. It settles the slavery issue between the United States and Mexico. But ironically, because that big issue is settled, the border kind of recedes. We have a regular, steady flow of both Mexicans and Americans back and forth between Mexico for more than 100 years. It’s punctuated, on occasion, by scares, by crack-downs on Mexican immigrants, by a reaction to 9/11. But the default position is a virtually invisible border with a very natural flow of commerce back and forth, except for those exceptional moments.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BRIAN: It’s time for another short break. When we get back, why some 19th century Americans compared President Ulysses Grant to a Mexican dictator.

PETER: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a minute.

BRIAN: This is BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. Today on the show, we take on the history of Mexican-US relations. And we’ve reached the point in the show where we turn to listeners who have reached out to us about this week’s topic. We’ve got Beth on the line, from Salt Lake City. Hey, Beth, welcome to BackStory.

BETH: Hi. Thank you.

PETER: Hey, great to have you. So what’s up today? You’ve got something to ask us about Mexican-American relations.

BETH: Yes. I was wondering about the instances where, like, the border between the United States and Mexico kind of goes through the middle of the community, specifically, Nogales, Arizona, or places like that. And I’m just curious how did that happened, number one? And how does that shape the communities and the people that live there?

PETER: Well, it can make life very difficult, for starters. One thing that the leads to divisions, of course, is that where people cross the border there’s a lot of business that attends that. So populations grow on border towns. But sometimes, borders do cut through existing communities. And they did that along the Mexican border.

BRIAN: I think the larger framework, though, here, Beth, is that it’s actually quite natural. And you put your finger on this. It’s quite natural for there to be a flow back and forth between these two countries. In fact, it’s the very conception of the border that, it’s really quite an artificial thing. And historically speaking, it’s been wide open. And that’s the natural thing– for people to move back and forth.

And what drives them back and forth? Well, family ties, trade, we’ve talked about. But the economic fates of both nations is a real driver for people back and forth. And they’ve, for much of American and Mexican history, they’ve been allowed to do that quite freely.

PETER: Though, I think, it’s also true, Brian, that customs does establish offices along the border– the Canadian border, the Mexican border. The state makes an appearance. And the state does so, because it needs to control the flow of goods and population. And so it doesn’t do so efficiently. And there’s no reason to do it until the modern period when these issues about maintaining the wall against the flood of immigration.

What I think is remarkable about American demographic history, American population, is that we celebrate the kind of tide of settlement that moves across the Anglo frontiers, as if it were natural. But when people try to cross into America, all of a sudden that’s a terrible thing, because it’s the wrong people who are spreading across the land.

ED: You know, one thing that you can guarantee are going to be different, on different sides of a border, are laws. Is just by nature of a different entity with a different history. And a crucial element on this was that Mexico stood for freedom. And so, you see these fascinating accounts of African American slaves trying to make it into Mexico, because they could find refuge there. So it’s the exact opposite. Now this is the very beginning. This is 18 teens, ’20s, and ’30s.

PETER: Right.

ED: Because Mexico is anti-slavery, before the United States is.

BETH: That’s interesting. I’ve never thought about slavery in that context before. Maybe it’s because I’m, kind of, from the Southwest. And that’s just not something that we think about as much. So that’s an interesting point. I’ve  never thought  about that before.

PETER: Right, and it show us– it says that borders matter, states matter, because legal institutions are going to determine how people live and what they can do and whether they’re free to move. And of course, a slave has a boundary right around him or her, can’t move anywhere legally.

BETH: Right.

ED: It’s interesting, isn’t it, Beth, though that is not really the story that Americans tell about themselves. Is that, expanding American reach actually was expanding the reach of slavery that Mexico– which we see as a struggling, which was a struggling state, was trying to create this liberal change. So it kind of turns history wrong side out from the American perspective. So I tell you, I don’t think there’s many borders around this question, Beth. I think you’ve–

PETER: Yeah, it’s  boundless.

BETH: Indeed.

PETER: Thanks for calling.

BETH: All right, thank you.

BRIAN: Thanks a lot, Beth.

ED: Thank you, Beth.

PETER: Bye.

BETH: All right.

PETER: Today, we have not one, but two calls from Utah. It’s Susan on the line from Salt Lake City. Hey, Susan, welcome to the show.

SUSAN: Thank you.

PETER: We’re talking about Mexican-American relations. You got a question for us?

SUSAN: Yes, I do. My question is, when is the US going to start educating students regarding the real history between the US and Mexico? Starting with the fact that a good portion of the US was part of Mexico.

PETER: Right. And when is that going to get through to American school children, and, therefore, to American public opinion. Susan wants to know. And we’re on unfamiliar ground when we talk about the future. But we know the past. Where’s it going, guys?

ED: Well, I think what the past shows is that, when any population becomes powerful, it can actually shape the way that its history is told. And so we can think about the sudden, so-called, discovery of African American history, after the Civil Rights Movement. And then think about the discovery of women’s history, after the Feminist Movement.

I think that one of the first things that under-represented populations do is make sure that they are actually represented in the history of the nation. So I will make the bold prediction that in the next 10 to 15 years there will be a major recasting of American history.

PETER: We’re going to do better. But it’s pretty hard not to do better, isn’t it? Susan, what’s your sense of where we are right now?

SUSAN: Well, I live in Utah, and  I grew up in Utah. And as we know, as you and I know, Utah was part of Mexico, all of it. And when I grew up, we did  not learn that. We learned that Utah history began on the 24th of July, in 1847, when the Mormon pioneers came to Utah. And if there was anything that happened before then, it certainly was nothing of value. And the people who were here before that we’re not of value, either.

PETER: Yeah. Well, I think you’ve identified what the great master narrative of American history has been. And it’s an East-West movement. It’s not just Mormons, it’s the whole country. It’s Manifest Destiny, as John L O’Sullivan coined it, in the Democratic Review in the 1840s. It’s what America had to be to fulfill itself, was to move westward. But isn’t there a big change, however, in the way people in Utah are thinking about the world?

SUSAN: Yeah. Things are changing. My daughter is half Mexican, and I made sure she grew up speaking Spanish, because I didn’t want her to feel a sense of not belonging here, in Utah, and a sense of not belonging in Mexico. So I’ve really had to work hard to keep her connected with Mexico culture and speaking Spanish. And it’s worked.

But there are so many kids that are in that situation. Salt Lake City elementary schools are now 55% so-called minority, 42% Hispanic. Of that, 75% is of Mexican heritage. So it has to change. And it is changing. And that’s why I started a nonprofit to use art as a way to help kids connect with their Latino heritage, and to show the overall community the beauty of Latino heritage.

PETER: And Susan, the kind of history that I think you’re encouraging with your nonprofit and with your efforts, is telling personal stories. But there’s also the big idea about what America is. And I think a key word in understanding how we can rethink it, is “frontier.” What is a frontier? Is it a place where European settlers discover their genius for democracy? That’s the so-called Turner Thesis, Frederick Jackson Turner, going back 1893, which is another great narrative of American history.

Or is a frontier a contested line between two empires or nation states? Or is frontier actually a much more extensive border land that includes a wide array of people sorting their lives out in a shared space? And when you think of a frontiers as a place where really interesting and important things happen, because of the interactions of different peoples and cultures, then you’re going to have a reason to take other people’s stories seriously, because they’re a part of your story.

ED: And part of that is understanding that the frontier is not just a piece of time, but it’s a perpetually recreated situation, right? So, Susan, I think what you’re talking about is living on a new kind of culture frontier. And you’re kind of a pioneer who is, sort of, forging a new language that people can talk to each other.

PETER: And thanks for provoking this discussion.

BRIAN: Thank you, Susan.

SUSAN: Thank you, for listening.

PETER: Throughout most of this show, we’ve focused on how the US and Mexico have defined themselves against each other. But our final story, today, is about a time when Americans saw the US as very similar to Mexico, in some alarming ways.

BRIAN: In the 1860s, both the United States and Mexico faced serious political crises. In the US, southern secession had sparked a civil war. In Mexico, a European invasion led to the installation of a French-backed emperor.

ED: By 1867, the Mexican Liberal Party had managed to reinstate Republican government. But their control was shaky. In some parts of the country, warlords had much more authority than a government did.

PETER: Meanwhile, Republican politicians in the US were struggling to control the defeated South. These Republicans noticed Mexico’s warlord problem, and thought it looked disturbingly familiar.

GREG DOWNS: And so they make very direct analogies, to say that our Ku Klux Klan leaders are exactly the same as these Mexican warlords who are plaguing the liberal government there.

ED: This is Greg Downs, a historian at the City University of New York. He says that the Republicans who were worried about postwar instability in the US started using a new word, Mexicanization. They said that white Southern resistance to federal control was, quote, “Mexicanizing the US.”

BRIAN: Democrats, meanwhile, looked to Mexico and drew a different conclusion. They pointed out the threat of dictatorship– too much federal power, not too little. And all their worst fears were confirmed when Republican Ulysses S Grant, former Commander of the US Army, was elected president, in 1868.

GREG DOWNS: And quickly, Grant emerges in democratic discourse as a United States Santa Ana, referring to this Mexican leader who had been multiple times president and general, who’s, sort of, lurking in the shadows throughout much of these 1860s crises. You know, available and eager to come back, to march back as a dictator. And so it’s a military takeover of the civil government.

BRIAN: And so they have, the Democrats, have the actual reconstruction legislation pretty assertive control by the central government in the United States. That’s what they have in mind.

GREG DOWNS: That’s correct.

BRIAN: And also, the actual military occupation of the South during Reconstruction.

GREG DOWNS: That’s correct. Absolutely.

BRIAN: So you have these two very conflicting uses of Mexicanization.

GREG DOWNS: And then bespeak how tumultuous the post Civil War period was in the United States. Both ideas had a certain resonance. To us, we’d take for granted that the United States wasn’t going to enter into a series of escalating civil wars. But it’s exactly this fear that both Republicans and Democrats are speaking about. And they’re using Mexico to raise the possibility that a republic good disintegrated into a multitude of civil wars. So they have a common condition. And they’re creating exactly opposite diagnoses.

BRIAN: So Mexicanization becomes the language that the Republican and Democratic parties use to battle out one of their central differences, that’s national power versus states’ rights.

GREG DOWNS: That’s right. And if you want to hear something that truly shows you how strange– that reminds you how strange language works– in the midst of this, something else hits American newspapers, which is that, in Mexico, right? You know the thing about referring to Mexico, all the time and their language, is that Mexico is, itself, a place with its own history and its own present change.

And in the midst of this, in December 1876, Porfirio Diaz, who will become the central figure of the next 50 years– almost 50, 40 years of Mexican history– overthrows his rival, Lerdo de Tejada, and asserts his control over the Mexican government. And amazingly, the way that American newspapers refer to this, is Mexico has been Mexicanized.

[LAUGHTER]

GREG DOWNS: In retrospect, it’s clear that the American newspapers exactly misunderstood Diaz. Because what actually emerges out of Diaz’s rule of Mexico, is the opposite, in what we would look back now and say an excess of stabilization. That Diaz moves toward a single party state. He not only eliminates ongoing civil wars and peripheral fights against the center, but he eliminates a great deal of politics, itself.

BRIAN: But wouldn’t that correspond to one of the two meanings of Mexicanization?

GREG DOWNS: That’s exactly right. Yeah. That they haven’t connected. They imagine that Diaz is overthrowing Lerdo de Tejada, and there’ll be another one coming.

BRIAN: So the newspapers, they are using Mexicanization in the Republican way.

GREG DOWNS: That’s right.

BRIAN: That it’s a never ending series of one revolution after another. But in fact, as I recall, Diaz remains president for something like 35 or 40 years. In fact, the history of it was the way the Democrats were using Mexicanization. Meaning, there’s going to be this rule from the center and it’s going to stifle local initiative.

GREG DOWNS: That’s right. So during the ’70s, any time when there’s a disputed election in Maine– I mean, in Maine, of all places– where they say, look how far we’ve come. Even New Englanders are being Mexicanized. It’s not just the South. When there’s discussion of the overthrow of the last Reconstruction government, Mexicanization has kind of become the default go-to word to say why your opponents are behaving illegitimately. And that ends in the early 1880s, especially in the aftermath of the assassination of Garfield.

Because immediately, once he’s assassinated, Mexicanization is used to describe it all the time, right? Assassination is the way that Mexicanization happens. Over time, as Garfield takes a long time to die, and as the presumption becomes that he was killed, not by a conspiracy, but by a lone individual, he becomes this rallying point, of a cross-partisan rallying point. And Mexicanization fades in its usage, over the 1880s and 1890s, until it becomes–

BRIAN: And as this settlement begins to take hold, the South kind of begins to implement Jim Crow. And really does assert states’ rights. Yet the nation remains whole. There are not civil wars.

GREG DOWNS: That’s right. One of the ironies of this is that, at the moment they give up on comparing the United States to Mexico, the countries are actually taking quite similar paths. There’s a difference in degree. But if we look at with the benefit of hindsight, what you see is that both countries emerge out of periods of civil wars, with a fear that the problem that caused the Civil War was essentially democracy. And so the growth of an anti-democratic push-back as a way of stabilizing, of stopping civil wars.

For the Poririoto, that became through the creation of a one party state. And then, eventually, of a, basically, permanent president. The United States retains the two parties to date on a national level, but moves toward a one party state in the South. And quickly, over the ’80s, and then especially over the ’90s and early 1900s, toward the restriction of who can participate in politics. So on the largest level, the participation of African American men in the South is dramatically restricted in disfranchisement.

BRIAN: So just to pause there, you’re talking about the rise of Jim Crow legislation in the South?

GREG DOWNS: That’s right.

BRIAN: And in the North?

GREG DOWNS: You can see the restrictions that are put on immigrant voting. So that one of the leading scholars of national voting calls it a national disfranchisement campaign. And that the overall voting in presidential elections drops by about a third over the early 1900s. And so we face this irony, which is, that the United States and Mexico, in some ways, are continuing to follow similar democratic paths. And yet, at exactly that same moment, the United States is losing its sense that it’s like Mexico.

That because of the persistence of the two party system, the United States starts to see Mexico as a military dictatorship, and the United States as this flourishing democracy, even as democracy is dying.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BRIAN: Greg Downs is a historian at the City College of New York, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. We’ll link to his article, “The Mexicanization of American Politics” on our website, backstoryradio.org.

BRIAN: And we have a letter here written by a Colorado newspaper editor, dated September 4, 1936. Ed, why don’t you read it for us.

ED: Gentleman, two weeks ago, a sex mad degenerate, named Lee Fernandez, brutally attacked a young Alamosa girl. He was convicted of assault with intent to rape and sentenced to 10 to 14 years in the state penitentiary. Police officers here know definitely that Fernandez was under the influence of marijuana.

PETER: This letter was addressed to the US Bureau of Narcotics. A few months later, the Bureau submitted it as evidence to Congress, which was considering a new measure that would essentially outlaw marijuana. Now, a lot of congressman at this time had never heard of marijuana. But with stories like this on the table, they didn’t need much convincing. In August 1937, that law was soundly approved.

BRIAN: Today, a lot of people blame the head of the Narcotics Bureau, a guy named Harry Anslinger, for whipping up the marijuana panic of the 1930s and for forcing this legislation through. But while Anslinger may have trafficked in reefer madness, he didn’t invent it nor did those newspaper editors who fed him their stories. Nope, this panic had gotten its start decades earlier. And it began, of all places, in Mexico.

ISAAC CAMPOS: Let me give you an example.

BRIAN: This is Isaac Campos, an historian who’s written about early Mexican attitudes towards drugs.

ISAAC CAMPOS: There’s a newspaper article that– I’d have to look it up here to see. Look at the footnote here. I can’t remember them all.

BRIAN: Short term memory loss there, Isaac?

ISAAC CAMPOS: Yeah, well, that’s what happens when you study too much marijuana. So this article comes from a Mexico City newspaper called El Pais and was published in 1909. And this was absolutely typical for how marijuana was described in the late 19th and early 20th century Mexico.

Yesterday on Chapultepec Avenue, around 6:00 in the afternoon, there occurred a major scandal. The cause of the disorder was a cocky, tough guy, who was stoned, thanks to the influence of marijuana, and who insulted all the passers by. Two gendarmes attempted to reduce him to order, and he attacked them with his knife, causing them significant injuries.

The scandal then took on colossal proportions, for it became very difficult to disarm the marijuano. When they finally reduced him to order, they confined him to a cell, it being necessary to hold him down with a straitjacket.

BRIAN: These kind of stories had been appearing for decades in the Mexican press. But around the turn of the 20th century, they start trickling north.

ISAAC CAMPOS: You could think of it as like an ideological acid rain that starts arriving in the United States, very gradually, in the 1890s, and begins to build the foundation of these ideas that we would eventually call reefer madness, in the United States, and create this idea that marijuana was the most dangerous of all drugs, a drug that caused madness and violence and therefore had to be prohibited.

BRIAN: In 1920, the new, revolutionary government in Mexico did just that. It passed a law prohibiting the use of marijuana, beating the Americans to the punch by 17 years.

PETER: This past November, voters in Colorado and Washington approved measures legalizing the recreational use of marijuana. In his first remarks on the news, Colorado’s governor made a joke about the munchies. And if all this seems like a radical shift from those early days of reefer madness, well, it’s hardly the first time the image of a drug has undergone such a major overhaul.

BRIAN: So today on the show, we’re going to trace some of these overhauls here in America. We’ve got stories about the changing face of opium, cocaine, heroin, even Valium. But first, let’s return to marijuana, because one of the most surprising things about what happened after its prohibition in Mexico was that people just didn’t seem to care.

ISAAC CAMPOS: There isn’t, as far as I know, a single newspaper article that references it.

BRIAN: Really?

ISAAC CAMPOS: There’s not one newspaper article, even in the proceedings. So if you read the minutes of the meetings leading up to this ban, there’s almost no debate about it. And this shows you one critical part of this story, which is that marijuana was not particularly, widely used in Mexico. It was only used in prisons and soldiers barracks, for the most part. And furthermore, it was used in these environments that were extremely violent in themselves. So it seemed quite reasonable that people in a prison would smoke this drug, that was thought to be extremely powerful and cause madness, and then go on violent rampages. Nobody really questioned that, because it just seemed logical.

BRIAN: Today, at least based on my viewing of Cheech and Chong movies, the associations with marijuana are kind of mellowness, the munchies, perhaps a little bit of laziness. It’s, in fact, often contrasted with the sometimes violent, aggressive behavior that’s something like alcohol leads to.

ISAAC CAMPOS: Yeah.

BRIAN: Are we talking about the same drug, here, Isaac?

ISAAC CAMPOS: Yes, we’re absolutely talking about the same drug. And this is the critical question that was at the center of my research. How could it be that marijuana was so overwhelmingly associated with these effects, 100 years ago, that today are now just laughed at?

A critical part of this story, and something that not enough people, I think, recognize, is that the effects that drugs have on us are dictated not simply by the pharmacology of the drug but also by something else that we generally refer to a set and setting. So that is by the psychology of the user and the setting of the drug use.

The simple way to think about this is what you think is going to happen when you take a drug is critical to what happens when you take a drug. And so it’s not that marijuana makes you violent, but in an environment where the stereotyped behavior related to this drug is to lash out against people nearby violently, it’s seems quite likely to me that, in fact, there were violent incidents that were related to marijuana.

Again, not because it necessarily makes you violent, but when you take set and setting and connect that to the drug itself, you wind up with these kinds of outcomes. There’s actually no laboratory evidence that suggests, today, for example, that marijuana makes you lazy, either. But everybody has that stereotype. And it’s quite likely that people smoke marijuana because they see this kind of romantic thing to become this sort of burned-out stoner. But there’s nothing about marijuana that should make you a burned out stoner, except for our culture, which suggests that’s what should happen.

BRIAN: How does your story change our understanding of the war against drugs, today?

ISAAC CAMPOS: Well, I think one thing that people have to recognize is that Mexico has long been an extremely anti-drug country. There’s a kind of stereotype out there that suggests that it’s the United States that’s the puritanical, anti-drug country, and that it forces its views on the rest of the world.

But in fact, it was Mexicans who showed people in the United States, really, how to despise marijuana. So Mexico consistently comes out against drug reform in the United States. Just recently, with these two new laws, in Colorado and Washington, representatives of the new President of Mexico came out, right afterward, and said that Mexico opposed these policies.

When California was looking to legalize marijuana, three or four years ago, whenever that was, 2008 or 2009, Mexico came out and complained that this was the United States shirking its drug war duties. In the 1970s, when many states were decriminalize marijuana, Mexico came out and complained and said that Mexico would no longer fight the war on heroin if the United States didn’t uphold its responsibilities fighting marijuana.

This is not simply an elite, diplomatic game. This is something that fits right into a much longer history in Mexico of drug prohibitionism and ideas about drugs. So that has contributed critically to the development of these prohibitionist policies and contributed to the anchoring of these prohibitionist policies that have now produced anywhere between 60 and 100,000 deaths in Mexico over the last six years.

BRIAN: Isaac, thank you so much for joining us on BackStory.

ISAAC CAMPOS: Well, thank you. It was my pleasure.

BRIAN: Isaac Campos is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati. He’s the author of Homegrown, Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs.

BRIAN: 20 years ago, the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed into law. Ross Perot famously predicted a giant sucking sound of American jobs heading to Mexico. This wasn’t the first time Americans invoked Mexico as dire warning. During Reconstruction, newspapers claimed that violence in the American South was turning the US into a second Mexico.

GREG DOWNS: Well, they make very direct analogies to say that Ku Klux Klan leaders are exactly the same as these Mexican warlords who are plaguing the liberal government.

BRIAN: But if some have worried about the Mexicanization of America, others have warned against American paternalism.

BRIAN DELAY: And so American commanders are going in the Northern Mexico and telling them, we know that your government has completely abandoned over the last decade. And we’re going to change that. And we’re going to help protect against Indians. And we’re going to save your wives and your children, who being held captive by these Indians.

BRIAN: Today on BackStory, the History of the US-Mexican Relationship.

PETER: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

ED: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts.

BRIAN: Welcome to the show, I’m Brian Balogh.

BRIAN DELAY: I’m Ed Ayers.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. In the summer of 1857, bullets began to fly on the outskirts of San Antonio, Texas. In a series of ambushes, Anglo men on horseback would assault Mexican traders hauling freight on ox carts. Some of the attackers wore masks, others blackened their faces. They carried guns, and sometimes you used them– and not just for warning shots.

LARRY KNIGHT: One man was shot point-blank in the chest.

BRIAN: This is Larry Knight, an historian at Texas A&M University in Kingsville. He says the ambushes were not an attempt to steal the cart men’s cargo. This was the opening salvo in a turf war.

PETER: Here’s the background. The Mexican cart men had a monopoly on hauling freight in Texas. Anglo Teamsters wanted to be on the action, and they were willing to shed blood to snuff out the competition. By September 1857, they were murdering cart men.

But since the rural counties where the attacks happened were mostly Anglo, county officials refused to crack down on the attackers.

LARRY KNIGHT: Nobody is going to go after them. Not a justice of the peace, not a sheriff, not a marshal. As far as they’re concerned, all of these Mexicans should be killed, run out of the state. So there’s no sympathy for the Mexican corpsmen who are being killed.

BRIAN: In San Antonio it was a different story. People there saw the cart men as an economic lifeline.

LARRY KNIGHT: They were bringing in clothing, they were bringing just, almost anything that you used on a daily basis of life, it would be brought in by the cart men. So San Antonio was quite dependent upon this trade for survival.

PETER: They began calling the ambition the Cart War. City politicians visited the attack sites to pressure locals to do something. They wrote outraged letters to the Governor of Texas. Even the US Secretary of State got involved.

LARRY KNIGHT: They finally were able to convince the Governor to raise a militia unit. The  militia unit then begins to escort the cart trains. And then the thing just ends, seemingly quietly.

BRIAN: But when it came to pay the bill for the militia, well, not everyone was on board. The Texas legislature convened to debate the issue. And the big question was–

LARRY KNIGHT: Why are we protecting Mexicans with Texas dollars?

PETER: Opposition was particularly fierce in Goliad County, the site of several attacks. Goliad also happened to be the place where, 20 years earlier, the Mexican army had gunned down hundreds of Anglo troops during the Texas fight for independence. For many, it was a harsh irony.

LARRY KNIGHT: And so the representatives from Goliad said, basically, in modern parlance, are you kidding me? We’re going to protect Mexicans who slaughtered Fannin and his men back in 1836? That’s unconscionable.

BRIAN: But here’s the thing. Most of the people these Anglos called Mexican were actually US citizens. Many of the cart men had been born in Texas, back when it was part of Mexico. And when Texas joined the US in 1848, everyone living there automatically got US citizenship.

PETER: Take Antonio Delgado, one of the cart men who was murdered during the Cart War. He was well known in San Antonio as a veteran of the US Army. He had even fought under Andrew Jackson.

LARRY KNIGHT: He stood up for liberty. He stood up for liberty as a Mexican fighting for independence, stood up with the Americans fighting against the British in the War of 1812, stood up for Texas in its war for independence against Mexico. What proves you love liberty more than putting your life on the line– in three separate wars?

BRIAN: So when people from Goliad resisted using tax dollars to protect Mexicans, state legislators from San Antonio basically said, what are you talking about? These guys are American patriots, and not to mention–

LARRY KNIGHT: These are United States citizens.

PETER: Long story short, the militia was funded and the attacks stopped.

BRIAN: But the spat over who counted as American reflected a broader reality about mid 19th century Texas. There were few clear lines between us and them, between Mexican and American. Farmers, who lived in the same spot for 50 years, had been Spanish, then Mexican, then Texan, then American, all without moving an inch. Today, it’s easy to think of the border as a straightforward dividing line. But for most of our history there’s has been nothing straightforward about it.

ED: So this week on BackStory, we’re asking how the flow of people and ideas across the border has shaped the US/Mexican relationship. The two countries have been neighbors, rivals, enemies, and now, close trading partners. So how have these two nations defined themselves in relation to each other? How was that relationship changed over time? And what does US history look like when seen from Mexico?

PETER: In the spirit of NAFTA, we begin the show today with a trade story. It ends with a major shift in Mexican economic policy, but it starts with an American scientist on a quest.

BRIAN: Here’s to setup. In the early 20th century, hormone therapy was the next big thing in US medical research. Hormones were marketed as cure-alls for everything from diabetes to eczema to psychosis. But hormones were hard to come by. So scientists who wanted to do research had to get creative.

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: They knew that in male urine you could find minute quantities of testosterone. So they said, where can we find a lot of male urine?

PETER: That’s Gabriela Soto Laveaga, historian at UC Santa Barbara.

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: They set up these huge vats outside of bars, where men would urinate. And then they would take these vats to pharmaceutical companies, where they extract these very small amounts of hormones.

ED: An American chemist named Russell Marker wanted to find a better way. He knew that plants like yams and yucas naturally created a molecule similar to another key hormone, progesterone. He figured that if he could find a plant with just the right chemical qualities, he could guarantee a supply progesterone.

BRIAN: So in the 1930s, Marker set out on a quest to find that perfect plant. He traveled across the US, visiting state after state after state. But nothing quite worked. Laveaga says that, eventually, Marker just lost hope.

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: And he gives up in Texas. And he’s staying at the home of a botanist. And he picks up this random book, and in it is a picture of a giant Mexican yam. So he continues this rather wild goose chase– this is 1941, in the midst of the war– and takes a train down to Mexico City– not speaking Spanish, not knowing where we Vera Cruz, the Southeastern Mexican state where this root was found, where that was located– and somehow, makes it to the state of Vera Cruz.

BRIAN: Doesn’t sound promising. What happens?

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: He manages to very astutely– he goes to the local little Five & Dime shop owner. And he says that he’s looking for these gigantic yams that are grown somewhere around there. The shop owner, not speaking English, but tells him that he understands, and for him to come back the next day.

[CHUCKLING]

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: And Russell Marker goes back the next day, and sure enough, this shop owner has two samples of these giant yams waiting for him.

BRIAN: Just, by the way, how big are these yams?

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: About 125 pounds.

BRIAN: Oh, my goodness!

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: Yeah, so he takes them back to a makeshift laboratory, and he manages to synthesize more progesterone than had ever been discovered up until that point in humankind’s history.

BRIAN: Wow!

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: So he’s in Mexico City and he flips open the phone book and he says– I didn’t know Spanish, but I knew the word laboratory and I knew the word hormone. So I was looking for both of those words. And he finds a laboratory called Laboratorios Hormona, which fortunately for Marker was hormone laboratory. And he takes his discovery there. And they are astounded.

BRIAN: So what kind of deal did he cut with this laboratory?

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: The business end of the laboratory, a man named Emerico Somlo, and the chemist, whose name was Dr. Lehmann, they immediately recognized that there’s a lot of profit to be made. And just in terms, not only profit, but just the scientific advancement that can happen with Russell Markers discovery is immense.

So they say, why don’t you three of us, Somlo, Lehmann, and Marker, begin a company? And we’ll call it Syntex. And Syntex is emerging a synthesis in Mexico. And Syntex would eventually become one of the most profitable, if not the most profitable, transnational pharmaceutical company of the Western hemisphere.

BRIAN: OK. Let’s pause here and recap what happens over the next 20 years. In 1951, scientists working for Syntex, in Mexico City, made an amazing discovery. They created the very first oral contraceptive, the birth control pill. After that, hormones became an even bigger business. All fueled by those amazing Mexican yams.

PETER: Over the next few decades, lots of other companies got into the game. Many were based in the US. They would buy barbasco from Mexican peasants, export it, and synthesize their drugs in American labs. It seemed like a stable set up.

BRIAN: Until, in 1970, a populist named Luis Echeverria was elected President of Mexico. Echeverria had big plans to improve the country’s health and education systems. But to put those plans into action, his government needed money. And that took the form of foreign aid. And that’s where Laveaga picks up the story.

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: And Mexico, at the time, turns to the World Bank. And the World Bank says, well one of the problems that you have in your country is over population. And this is where the Mexican government steps in. And one of the adviser said, well, you know, we should, as a nation, look into developing a Mexican oral contraceptive pill. So the Presidential advising team goes and they start to do research. And lo and behold, not only do they have it, but Mexico was the first one to bring it to market.

BRIAN: So let me just try to keep track, here.

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: Sure.

BRIAN: Mexico is being pressured to reduce its population. It says, all right, we’ll do a study on population control. And as a result of that, discovers that birth control pills really originate in Mexico from the barbasco yam?

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: Yes.

BRIAN: So what does Echeverria do about this?

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: So he realizes that those who are picking the yams are hundreds of thousands of Mexican peasants. So he realizes the voting potential. And he also realizes the amount of money that could come into the Mexican state’s coffers if they could control the steroid/hormone industry trade. And he decides to create a company called Proquivemex.

And basically, it will be the negotiator between transnational pharmaceutical companies and peasants, in order to increase what is being paid to peasants. And at the same time, be producing patent medications. The problem is that transnational pharmaceutical companies were quite savvy when they established themselves in Mexico. And Echevarria falsely calculated that their hands were tied. And I say falsely calculated, because had this happened in the 1950s, when by barbasco was the only known source of steroid hormones, then maybe transnational pharmaceutical companies would have yielded.

But by the 1970s, transnational pharmaceutical companies have started to look to other natural raw material, such as soy and heniken, because they know that the political winds are changing in Mexico. And as any savvy business person will do, you don’t put all your eggs in one basket. And Echeverria doesn’t understand this. He’s come late to the barbasco game.

BRIAN: So explain to me how the Proquivemex story fit into the larger context of Mexico’s economy in the 1970s.

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: So in the 1970s, Echeverria’s policies were really devoted for redistributing Mexico’s wealth. And to do that the government thought that it needed to create a series of Mexican companies that covered everything from bicycle production, rubber production, and, of course, Proquivemex. There were over 1,000 of these companies.

And the idea was that this was a solution. This was the way that the Mexican government would become independent, would industrialized in a Mexican way. But as you consume, when you’re investing a lot of money but many of these companies are like Proquivemex facing, really, insurmountable obstacles, when it comes to business, they’re floundering. And the government is spending more and more money on them.

So in 1982, Mexico will have an economic crisis. And in part, it is because of this overspending. But also this borrowing to cover all this spending. And this forces the administration to really rethink their economic outlook. And a lot of this is to begin to privatize many of these government owned companies. It sells off petrochemicals and other raw materials, some basic goods, into private sector companies. Whereas, before they were part of the public sector.

BRIAN: So that the Proquivemex story was really symbolic of a much larger trend, in Mexico?

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: Absolutely. Absolutely.

BRIAN: Do you see this period in the 1980s as a prelude to what eventually will become NAFTA?

GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA: Yeah. I think that Mexico’s protectionist strategies, up until that point, had been about protecting raw material, had been about protecting Mexican industry. And there’s a real shift that we see in the 1980s. And we really see that with Proquivemex, an industry that just a mere decade earlier had been touted as this really important industry that was going to develop Mexico and move it into the modern economic world. And 10 years later, it’s being dismantled, because those economic practices did not work. And something new has to be tried.

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BRIAN: Gabriela Soto Laveaga is a historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She’s the author of Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill.

ED: It’s time for a short break, but don’t go away. When we back, an Indian tribe plays king-maker in a conflict between the US and Mexico.

PETER: You’re listening to BackStory and we’ll be back in a minute. We’re back with BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh. Today on the show, the long and tangled history of US/Mexican relations.

PETER: Our next story focuses on the US, Mexico, and a critical third party, the Comanche tribe. In the early 19th century, the Comanches controlled a vast tract of land stretching across what’s now the Southwestern US. At the time it was recognized Mexican territory.

BRIAN: Initially, the Mexicans and Indians maintained a wary peace. But by the 1830s, Mexican Comanche relations had soured. Raiding parties of Indian men began attacking isolated haciendas, towns, sometimes even cities.

ED: The violence intensified throughout the 1830s and 1840s, devastating the region. UC Berkeley historian, Brian Delay has studied this crisis. When I sat down with him, recently, I asked, where  did the beleaguered Mexicans turn for help?

BRIAN DELAY: Well, that was the million dollar question. And so across Northern Mexico, whether you’re a rancher, or you’re the sort of the head of a hacienda, or you’re a local official, or you’re state authority, you’re desperately looking for some superior who’s going to provide you with weapons, with money, with men, with some kind of an army force that’s going to be able to march into Indian territory and convince them not to launch these raids.

And Mexico, in the 1830s and 1840s, was just entering a profound political crisis and found itself completely incapable of dealing with this widespread, complex problem in any kind of substantial way. And so throughout the 1830s and 1840s, as the violence across the north spreads and becomes more severe and more economically and politically consequential, people are constantly sending letters to the central government saying, you’ve got to help us. You’ve got to find a way to deal with this. This is a national problem.

And they felt sympathetic, to a certain extent. But they basically replied and said, look, this is, effectively, a crime wave. And once we have our house in order, we’ll try to help you with it. But right now, there’s nothing that we can do to address this problem.

ED: Now we all know that the world history pivots around the chronology of American history. And so I can’t help but notice that you talk about the 1830s and 1840s as if this is all happening without the United States making everything happen. So I’m a little puzzled. You’ve already described a really complicated situation. But complicate it even more by inserting the United States into this.

BRIAN DELAY: By the middle of the 1840s, both sides, both Mexicans looking towards United States, and the United States looking towards Mexico, had come to use the Indians in between them as kind of lenses that they could look through, and look at each other through. And they were quite useful that way, because they revealed precisely what they wanted to see.

So for Mexico, by the middle of the 1840s, Mexicans– at very high levels– came to believe that these Indian raids, which were growing worse and worse every year, and really to become the peak in 1845, couldn’t be the consequence of Indian decisions. Indians were simply too disorganized, too primitive to do such damage to a modern nation state. So there must be some more significant force behind them.

And understandably, they came to believe that it was the Texans, and most especially the United States, that was actively manipulating these people into launching these devastating raids in advance of a planned invasion. That wasn’t true. But that’s what the Mexicans came to believe and to say to each other. And then, on the side of the Americans, what they’re seeing is this appalling, terrible disaster unfolding. And it’s fascinating to them, partly because it seems to be the exact mirror image of what has been happening in the United States, right?

ED: Right. Right.

BRIAN DELAY: I mean, after all they had just pretty much concluded this major campaign to force all the native people east of the Mississippi west of the Mississippi.

ED: Right.

BRIAN DELAY: And the reverse is happening in Mexico.

BRIAN: ED: They’re sort of letting civilization down, right? I mean, they’re not doing their part.

BRIAN DELAY: They are blowing it for the civilization team. Exactly. So that really, I think, in a very powerful way, shapes what Americans think about Mexico. And ultimately, it shapes the way they think about Mexico’s rights to this a vast territory.

ED: So tell me about the actual waging of the war and the presence of the Comanche in that war.

BRIAN DELAY: So when the United States invaded Mexico, it was already a moment when Indian violence, not only with Comanches, but Apaches and Navajos, as well, had become worse and more widespread than it had been in a generation. And that only accelerates during the war, itself. And so Mexicans are literally fighting two wars at one time.

ED: Wow.

BRIAN DELAY: And the American forces and the American commanders knew this very well. They had been paying close attention to this 10 years of sort of looking at Northern Mexico and marveling at the crisis that’s happening there. And so they shrewdly planned to use this to their advantage. So President Polk and his generals talk deeply about this. And they go down to Northern Mexico with instructions, things that they’re going to say to Mexicans that they find there.

And so American commanders are going into Northern Mexico and telling them, we know that your government has completely abandon you over the last decade. And we’re going to change that. And we’re going to help protect you against Indians. And we’re going to save your wives and your children, who are being held captive by these Indians, so long as you don’t turn against us.

So they’re using it rhetorically, but they’re also, of course, relying on this very practical level. Hoping, correctly as it turned out, that the huge majority of Northern Mexicans would feel, not an imposition to wage an insurgent war against the occupying force, or swell the Mexican army. And in effect, to drive back the American advance.

ED: So as you know, the United States wins this big victory. They have the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago, in which they get all this territory from Mexico. Well, how do we make sense of this?

BRIAN DELAY: So the war ends in this astonishing way, that we don’t really think about it as astonishing, anymore. We’ve naturalized it in this country. But the fact that Mexico was compelled to surrender half of its national territory is just an amazing outcome to this war. And the fact the Republican government, the first big Republican government, and the one that many other states in the hemisphere look to as a model, is going to attack a weaker country, invade it and compel it to surrender half its national territory, I think, requires more explanation than we usually give it.

And it seems to me that the key factor there was this widespread sense that there really was no injury to Northern Mexico in taking this territory. In fact, it would be a benefit to Northern Mexico, because the Americans would stop the Indians from attacking and stealing women and children and killing people below the river.

And Polk makes a speech to Congress, wherein he makes plain this idea that, this really isn’t even doing Mexico any damage. On the contrary, we’re going to be doing Mexico a favor. So here’s what he says. He says, “It would be a blessing to all these northern states to have their citizens protected against the Indians by the power of the United States. At this moment, many Mexicans, principally females and children, are in captivity among them.

If New Mexico we’re held and governed by the United States, we could effectually prevent these tribes from committing such outrages. And compel them to release these captives and restore them to their families and friends.” And I think that kind of captures the argument.

ED: Can you tell us about the treaty?

BRIAN DELAY: The treaty that ended the war had a clause that was all about this. It was Article 11 of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago that bound the United States to prevent Indians living north of the new border from raiding south into Mexico. And it also bound the Americans to redeem any captives that they come to know were being held by Indians living north of the border. But that’s not what happens.

Immediately following the war, raids only increase. And they steadily increase during the late 1840s and early 1850s. And the American government and the American army found it to be completely impossible to police this massive, massive expanse, and to stop Indians from raiding into Mexico. And when the violence only gets worse, and these large landholders, especially, suffer major losses, in terms of animals that were destroyed or killed, and people that had been killed and kidnapped, they began talking about remedies.

And happily, lawyers from New York City arrive and begin organizing these aggrieved property holders. And telling them that the United States is bound by international treaty to prevent these things are happening, nonetheless, that they are entitled to compensation. And so in the face of threatened lawsuits, immense lawsuits for tens of millions of dollars for Mexican landowners in the south, the American government leans on Mexico to free them from the obligations of Article 11 in a treaty that it concluded with Mexico in 1853 and ’54, called the Gadsden Purchase, which acquired a strip of land in what’s now southern Arizona and New Mexico for the United States. And relieved the United States of any obligation Article 11.

ED: You know, it’s interesting the way American history is usually taught, Mexico just seems kind of just sitting there waiting for us to go into a war with it. The Indians are usually saved for the new West part, after Christmas break, and Reconstruction, right?

BRIAN DELAY: That’s right.

ED: And so, Brian, it sounds to me as if you’re saying that it’s actually relationships among Mexicans and Indians and Anglo settlers, is actually more germane in the actual beginning of the war. Would that be a fair statement?

BRIAN DELAY: I definitely think that– I completely agree with what you said about our perceptions in the way we narrate this event. And I think the great symptom of that way of thinking, you know, the way the thing says, Mexico really doesn’t matter. It’s just waiting. And the Indians, we can wait until after fall break to get to those guys.

ED: Right.

BRIAN DELAY: I think the great symptom of that is Manifest Destiny. That we have spent so much intellectual energy– and we spend enough time with our students talking about this thing called Manifest Destiny, because we fundamentally believe that what Americans thought about themselves was a lot more important than what was actually happening in these places. And who lived there, and what they were up to.

But the place, itself– Indians and relationships between Indians and Mexicans, and the fundamental weakness of the Mexican government, that was far more important to determining why the war started and why it into the way that it did.

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ED: Brian Delay is a historian at the University of California, at Berkeley. He’s the author of War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the US-Mexican War. So guys, help me map this really interesting story about the Comanches and the Mexicans onto the big story, that we kind of have an idea about– about Mexican, American relations. How does this all fit together?

PETER: Well, and I like the use of the word map, because we are talking about a map. A map in which we don’t have a clearly defined border. We have a vast region in which there is no effective state authority. And it really was Indian country. And they set the terms of play. So it’s a vacuum of effective authority that create the conditions for warfare, for violent conflict.

BRIAN: So Peter, I concede that. But I’m going to make a, at least, a small case for this state. Perhaps the jurisdiction is not there, but both states play a crucial role on one issue. And that is the issue of slavery.

PETER: Yep.

BRIAN: It seems that we’re ignoring the fact that Mexico outlaws slavery. And that there are many among southern states within the United States, who want to extend slavery into this Mexican territory. Am I wrong about that, Ed?

ED: No, you’re exactly right, Brian. And that’s one reason the Mexican War is so volatile in the United States. Because Southerners are saying, yeah, let’s go to war with Mexico. And the people in the North are saying, what? We don’t need Mexico. And if we do, it’s just going to engorge slavery. So it becomes really one of the things that disrupts the politics of the nation state that does exist. And then, in the Civil War that grows as a result of that destabilization, Peter, ironically, the great difference between Mexico and the United States is resolved.

Once the United States abolishes slavery, then that sharp boundary between the two, on that issue, is resolved.

BRIAN: And, Ed, let’s think about how invisible the boundaries between the South and the North, within the United States, become after the issue of slavery is resolved. Well, that same concept can be applied to the international boundary.

PETER: Um, hm. Good point.

BRIAN: That boundary is crucial. It settles the slavery issue between the United States and Mexico. But ironically, because that big issue is settled, the border kind of recedes. We have a regular, steady flow of both Mexicans and Americans back and forth between Mexico for more than 100 years. It’s punctuated, on occasion, by scares, by crack-downs on Mexican immigrants, by a reaction to 9/11. But the default position is a virtually invisible border with a very natural flow of commerce back and forth, except for those exceptional moments.

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BRIAN: It’s time for another short break. When we get back, why some 19th century Americans compared President Ulysses Grant to a Mexican dictator.

PETER: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a minute.

BRIAN: This is BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. Today on the show, we take on the history of Mexican-US relations. And we’ve reached the point in the show where we turn to listeners who have reached out to us about this week’s topic. We’ve got Beth on the line, from Salt Lake City. Hey, Beth, welcome to BackStory.

BETH: Hi. Thank you.

PETER: Hey, great to have you. So what’s up today? You’ve got something to ask us about Mexican-American relations.

BETH: Yes. I was wondering about the instances where, like, the border between the United States and Mexico kind of goes through the middle of the community, specifically, Nogales, Arizona, or places like that. And I’m just curious how did that happened, number one? And how does that shape the communities and the people that live there?

PETER: Well, it can make life very difficult, for starters. One thing that the leads to divisions, of course, is that where people cross the border there’s a lot of business that attends that. So populations grow on border towns. But sometimes, borders do cut through existing communities. And they did that along the Mexican border.

BRIAN: I think the larger framework, though, here, Beth, is that it’s actually quite natural. And you put your finger on this. It’s quite natural for there to be a flow back and forth between these two countries. In fact, it’s the very conception of the border that, it’s really quite an artificial thing. And historically speaking, it’s been wide open. And that’s the natural thing– for people to move back and forth.

And what drives them back and forth? Well, family ties, trade, we’ve talked about. But the economic fates of both nations is a real driver for people back and forth. And they’ve, for much of American and Mexican history, they’ve been allowed to do that quite freely.

PETER: Though, I think, it’s also true, Brian, that customs does establish offices along the border– the Canadian border, the Mexican border. The state makes an appearance. And the state does so, because it needs to control the flow of goods and population. And so it doesn’t do so efficiently. And there’s no reason to do it until the modern period when these issues about maintaining the wall against the flood of immigration.

What I think is remarkable about American demographic history, American population, is that we celebrate the kind of tide of settlement that moves across the Anglo frontiers, as if it were natural. But when people try to cross into America, all of a sudden that’s a terrible thing, because it’s the wrong people who are spreading across the land.

ED: You know, one thing that you can guarantee are going to be different, on different sides of a border, are laws. Is just by nature of a different entity with a different history. And a crucial element on this was that Mexico stood for freedom. And so, you see these fascinating accounts of African American slaves trying to make it into Mexico, because they could find refuge there. So it’s the exact opposite. Now this is the very beginning. This is 18 teens, ’20s, and ’30s.

PETER: Right.

ED: Because Mexico is anti-slavery, before the United States is.

BETH: That’s interesting. I’ve never thought about slavery in that context before. Maybe it’s because I’m, kind of, from the Southwest. And that’s just not something that we think about as much. So that’s an interesting point. I’ve  never thought  about that before.

PETER: Right, and it show us– it says that borders matter, states matter, because legal institutions are going to determine how people live and what they can do and whether they’re free to move. And of course, a slave has a boundary right around him or her, can’t move anywhere legally.

BETH: Right.

ED: It’s interesting, isn’t it, Beth, though that is not really the story that Americans tell about themselves. Is that, expanding American reach actually was expanding the reach of slavery that Mexico– which we see as a struggling, which was a struggling state, was trying to create this liberal change. So it kind of turns history wrong side out from the American perspective. So I tell you, I don’t think there’s many borders around this question, Beth. I think you’ve–

PETER: Yeah, it’s  boundless.

BETH: Indeed.

PETER: Thanks for calling.

BETH: All right, thank you.

BRIAN: Thanks a lot, Beth.

ED: Thank you, Beth.

PETER: Bye.

BETH: All right.

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PETER: Today, we have not one, but two calls from Utah. It’s Susan on the line from Salt Lake City. Hey, Susan, welcome to the show.

SUSAN: Thank you.

PETER: We’re talking about Mexican-American relations. You got a question for us?

SUSAN: Yes, I do. My question is, when is the US going to start educating students regarding the real history between the US and Mexico? Starting with the fact that a good portion of the US was part of Mexico.

PETER: Right. And when is that going to get through to American school children, and, therefore, to American public opinion. Susan wants to know. And we’re on unfamiliar ground when we talk about the future. But we know the past. Where’s it going, guys?

ED: Well, I think what the past shows is that, when any population becomes powerful, it can actually shape the way that its history is told. And so we can think about the sudden, so-called, discovery of African American history, after the Civil Rights Movement. And then think about the discovery of women’s history, after the Feminist Movement.

I think that one of the first things that under-represented populations do is make sure that they are actually represented in the history of the nation. So I will make the bold prediction that in the next 10 to 15 years there will be a major recasting of American history.

PETER: We’re going to do better. But it’s pretty hard not to do better, isn’t it? Susan, what’s your sense of where we are right now?

SUSAN: Well, I live in Utah, and  I grew up in Utah. And as we know, as you and I know, Utah was part of Mexico, all of it. And when I grew up, we did  not learn that. We learned that Utah history began on the 24th of July, in 1847, when the Mormon pioneers came to Utah. And if there was anything that happened before then, it certainly was nothing of value. And the people who were here before that we’re not of value, either.

PETER: Yeah. Well, I think you’ve identified what the great master narrative of American history has been. And it’s an East-West movement. It’s not just Mormons, it’s the whole country. It’s Manifest Destiny, as John L O’Sullivan coined it, in the Democratic Review in the 1840s. It’s what America had to be to fulfill itself, was to move westward. But isn’t there a big change, however, in the way people in Utah are thinking about the world?

SUSAN: Yeah. Things are changing. My daughter is half Mexican, and I made sure she grew up speaking Spanish, because I didn’t want her to feel a sense of not belonging here, in Utah, and a sense of not belonging in Mexico. So I’ve really had to work hard to keep her connected with Mexico culture and speaking Spanish. And it’s worked.

But there are so many kids that are in that situation. Salt Lake City elementary schools are now 55% so-called minority, 42% Hispanic. Of that, 75% is of Mexican heritage. So it has to change. And it is changing. And that’s why I started a nonprofit to use art as a way to help kids connect with their Latino heritage, and to show the overall community the beauty of Latino heritage.

PETER: And Susan, the kind of history that I think you’re encouraging with your nonprofit and with your efforts, is telling personal stories. But there’s also the big idea about what America is. And I think a key word in understanding how we can rethink it, is “frontier.” What is a frontier? Is it a place where European settlers discover their genius for democracy? That’s the so-called Turner Thesis, Frederick Jackson Turner, going back 1893, which is another great narrative of American history.

Or is a frontier a contested line between two empires or nation states? Or is frontier actually a much more extensive border land that includes a wide array of people sorting their lives out in a shared space? And when you think of a frontiers as a place where really interesting and important things happen, because of the interactions of different peoples and cultures, then you’re going to have a reason to take other people’s stories seriously, because they’re a part of your story.

ED: And part of that is understanding that the frontier is not just a piece of time, but it’s a perpetually recreated situation, right? So, Susan, I think what you’re talking about is living on a new kind of culture frontier. And you’re kind of a pioneer who is, sort of, forging a new language that people can talk to each other.

PETER: And thanks for provoking this discussion.

BRIAN: Thank you, Susan.

SUSAN: Thank you, for listening.

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PETER: Throughout most of this show, we’ve focused on how the US and Mexico have defined themselves against each other. But our final story, today, is about a time when Americans saw the US as very similar to Mexico, in some alarming ways.

BRIAN: In the 1860s, both the United States and Mexico faced serious political crises. In the US, southern secession had sparked a civil war. In Mexico, a European invasion led to the installation of a French-backed emperor.

ED: By 1867, the Mexican Liberal Party had managed to reinstate Republican government. But their control was shaky. In some parts of the country, warlords had much more authority than a government did.

PETER: Meanwhile, Republican politicians in the US were struggling to control the defeated South. These Republicans noticed Mexico’s warlord problem, and thought it looked disturbingly familiar.

GREG DOWNS: And so they make very direct analogies, to say that our Ku Klux Klan leaders are exactly the same as these Mexican warlords who are plaguing the liberal government there.

ED: This is Greg Downs, a historian at the City University of New York. He says that the Republicans who were worried about postwar instability in the US started using a new word, Mexicanization. They said that white Southern resistance to federal control was, quote, “Mexicanizing the US.”

BRIAN: Democrats, meanwhile, looked to Mexico and drew a different conclusion. They pointed out the threat of dictatorship– too much federal power, not too little. And all their worst fears were confirmed when Republican Ulysses S Grant, former Commander of the US Army, was elected president, in 1868.

GREG DOWNS: And quickly, Grant emerges in democratic discourse as a United States Santa Ana, referring to this Mexican leader who had been multiple times president and general, who’s, sort of, lurking in the shadows throughout much of these 1860s crises. You know, available and eager to come back, to march back as a dictator. And so it’s a military takeover of the civil government.

BRIAN: And so they have, the Democrats, have the actual reconstruction legislation pretty assertive control by the central government in the United States. That’s what they have in mind.

GREG DOWNS: That’s correct.

BRIAN: And also, the actual military occupation of the South during Reconstruction.

GREG DOWNS: That’s correct. Absolutely.

BRIAN: So you have these two very conflicting uses of Mexicanization.

GREG DOWNS: And then bespeak how tumultuous the post Civil War period was in the United States. Both ideas had a certain resonance. To us, we’d take for granted that the United States wasn’t going to enter into a series of escalating civil wars. But it’s exactly this fear that both Republicans and Democrats are speaking about. And they’re using Mexico to raise the possibility that a republic good disintegrated into a multitude of civil wars. So they have a common condition. And they’re creating exactly opposite diagnoses.

BRIAN: So Mexicanization becomes the language that the Republican and Democratic parties use to battle out one of their central differences, that’s national power versus states’ rights.

GREG DOWNS: That’s right. And if you want to hear something that truly shows you how strange– that reminds you how strange language works– in the midst of this, something else hits American newspapers, which is that, in Mexico, right? You know the thing about referring to Mexico, all the time and their language, is that Mexico is, itself, a place with its own history and its own present change.

And in the midst of this, in December 1876, Porfirio Diaz, who will become the central figure of the next 50 years– almost 50, 40 years of Mexican history– overthrows his rival, Lerdo de Tejada, and asserts his control over the Mexican government. And amazingly, the way that American newspapers refer to this, is Mexico has been Mexicanized.

[LAUGHTER]

GREG DOWNS: In retrospect, it’s clear that the American newspapers exactly misunderstood Diaz. Because what actually emerges out of Diaz’s rule of Mexico, is the opposite, in what we would look back now and say an excess of stabilization. That Diaz moves toward a single party state. He not only eliminates ongoing civil wars and peripheral fights against the center, but he eliminates a great deal of politics, itself.

BRIAN: But wouldn’t that correspond to one of the two meanings of Mexicanization?

GREG DOWNS: That’s exactly right. Yeah. That they haven’t connected. They imagine that Diaz is overthrowing Lerdo de Tejada, and there’ll be another one coming.

BRIAN: So the newspapers, they are using Mexicanization in the Republican way.

GREG DOWNS: That’s right.

BRIAN: That it’s a never ending series of one revolution after another. But in fact, as I recall, Diaz remains president for something like 35 or 40 years. In fact, the history of it was the way the Democrats were using Mexicanization. Meaning, there’s going to be this rule from the center and it’s going to stifle local initiative.

GREG DOWNS: That’s right. So during the ’70s, any time when there’s a disputed election in Maine– I mean, in Maine, of all places– where they say, look how far we’ve come. Even New Englanders are being Mexicanized. It’s not just the South. When there’s discussion of the overthrow of the last Reconstruction government, Mexicanization has kind of become the default go-to word to say why your opponents are behaving illegitimately. And that ends in the early 1880s, especially in the aftermath of the assassination of Garfield.

Because immediately, once he’s assassinated, Mexicanization is used to describe it all the time, right? Assassination is the way that Mexicanization happens. Over time, as Garfield takes a long time to die, and as the presumption becomes that he was killed, not by a conspiracy, but by a lone individual, he becomes this rallying point, of a cross-partisan rallying point. And Mexicanization fades in its usage, over the 1880s and 1890s, until it becomes–

BRIAN: And as this settlement begins to take hold, the South kind of begins to implement Jim Crow. And really does assert states’ rights. Yet the nation remains whole. There are not civil wars.

GREG DOWNS: That’s right. One of the ironies of this is that, at the moment they give up on comparing the United States to Mexico, the countries are actually taking quite similar paths. There’s a difference in degree. But if we look at with the benefit of hindsight, what you see is that both countries emerge out of periods of civil wars, with a fear that the problem that caused the Civil War was essentially democracy. And so the growth of an anti-democratic push-back as a way of stabilizing, of stopping civil wars.

For the Poririoto, that became through the creation of a one party state. And then, eventually, of a, basically, permanent president. The United States retains the two parties to date on a national level, but moves toward a one party state in the South. And quickly, over the ’80s, and then especially over the ’90s and early 1900s, toward the restriction of who can participate in politics. So on the largest level, the participation of African American men in the South is dramatically restricted in disfranchisement.

BRIAN: So just to pause there, you’re talking about the rise of Jim Crow legislation in the South?

GREG DOWNS: That’s right.

BRIAN: And in the North?

GREG DOWNS: You can see the restrictions that are put on immigrant voting. So that one of the leading scholars of national voting calls it a national disfranchisement campaign. And that the overall voting in presidential elections drops by about a third over the early 1900s. And so we face this irony, which is, that the United States and Mexico, in some ways, are continuing to follow similar democratic paths. And yet, at exactly that same moment, the United States is losing its sense that it’s like Mexico.

That because of the persistence of the two party system, the United States starts to see Mexico as a military dictatorship, and the United States as this flourishing democracy, even as democracy is dying.

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BRIAN: Greg Downs is a historian at the City College of New York, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. We’ll link to his article, “The Mexicanization of American Politics” on our website, backstoryradio.org.

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BRIAN: That’s going to do it for us, today. But we’ve got plenty of extras online, including the story of how Mexican fears about marijuana helped to transform US drug policy in the 1930s. You can hear that story at backstoryradio.org.

PETER: As always, you can find a lot of other BackStory goodies on our Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr pages. Our handle is BackStory Radio. Don’t be a stranger.

ED: BackStory is produced by Tony Field, Jess Engebretson, Nina Earnest, Andrew Parsons, and Jessie Dukes. Emily Charnock is our research and web coordinator. And Jamal Millner is our engineer. Our intern is Abe Shenk. BackStory’s executive producer is Andrew Wyndham.

BRIAN: Major support for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. Additional support is provided by Weinstein Properties and History Channel, history made every day.

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JESS ENGEBRETSON: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Peter Onuf is Professor of History Emeritus at UVA and Senior Research Fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is President and Professor of History at the University of Richmond. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

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