Mexico: Kartographer Katie
Hi everyone! I’m Katie, and I’m obsessed with geography. While I embrace my Southern family roots in North Carolina, I’ve always had a travel bug and have an immense appreciation for history, politics, and culture. I’ve lived in Charlotte, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Edinburgh, and most recently (pandemic) New York City, and have traveled to 30+ countries on 4 continents so far.
My intended audience is people who have a Eurocentric, United States worldview. Whether we like it or not, we sit in positions of power as citizens of a country with hegemonic dominance. This perpetuates self-importance— and accompanying naivety — in the narrative we create about the world around us. Precisely because of this, we often do not grapple with considerations of indigenous issues, Western extractive power structures, and other aspects of the present-day diplomatic status quo of other countries while we enjoy our travels and leisure.
While I do want these blog posts to be fun and interesting (traveling is fun, and I’ll hopefully convince you that maps are cool!), my ultimate goal is for them to inform, inspire, and spark critical thinking about what maps — and the places and people behind them — tell us about power structures and how we can be more unifying and empathic in our understanding of the world around us.
- Please note that these posts are in no way meant to be exhaustive, comprehensive histories and overviews — if I held myself to those standards, I could never do these places justice. They are also not intended to highlight what scholars consider to be the most important issues — I am NOT an expert to attempt to make those sorts of calls. These posts are merely “starter packs” to further research, and I’ve done my best to link credit where credit is due for further exploration.
Table of Contents:
Why it matters— Contradicting U.S. perceptions of Mexico, cultural appropriation, economic interdependence
Indigenous history — Olmecs, Mayans, and Aztecs (and many, many more…)
Power structures — Spanish colonialism, U.S. land grab, unstable democratic structures, cartels and non-democratic local government dominance
Today — Border wall, immigration, tourism
Why it matters
To the American eye, Mexico conjures up mixed images of beauty, conflict, and cultural tensions. Mexico plays an integral role in American culture, leisure, sociology, and politics. Our close relationship with the country creates various levels of admiration, appropriation, misinformation, and prejudice towards their people and lands.
Mexico’s food for us is a divine culinary experience, from the tacos we enjoy on street corners with freshly shaven al pastor to the enchiladas we scarf down at a beach resort to the mole we taste at a fine dining premise. Their alcohols are some of the most ubiquitous contents of our celebratory drinks, from tequila shots to various fruity, salty cocktails and smoky mezcal we enjoy with cigars and an old deck of cards.
Mexican beaches are highly sought after, with Cabo San Lucas and Cancun filling to the brim every spring break and summer, honeymooners basking on the white sands of Puerto Vallarta and Playa del Carmen.
Adventurous travelers visit the anthropological sites in and around Mexico City, the ruins and jungle hikes in the Yucatan Peninsula, and the “authentic” native experiences and voluntourism of Oaxaca.
Beyond leisure, Mexico plays an integral role in the supply chain of countless consumer goods, from sugar to “American-made” cars to medical devices.
And yet we often use “Mexican” as a racial slur to fling at service workers for “taking our jobs” in the jobs none of us would willingly take, to the English language learner in the classroom out of impatience for not being at the same baseline as those more privileged, and the crimes we single out at the border to justify our despicable treatment of undocumented immigrants.
We also see some of the darkest reflections of ourselves on the backs of burdened northern Mexican territories. Teenagers snort up cocaine in white suburban basements that ravaged through a brutal, bloody supply chain from Colombia and trafficked into the United States via Mexican drug cartels. Southern California partyers venture through Tijuana and Rosarito for cheap substance and sexual thrills.
We would be remiss not to recognize that the land in what is now Mexico was a vibrant epicenter of ancient civilization, where we saw the earliest writing systems, calendar systems, trade, architecture, and sophisticated religious practices far before European colonists.
It is important to acknowledge the brutality of Spanish colonialism, which created a racist, classist hierarchy of people and attempted to wipe out thousands of years of history. It is critical to acknowledge how hard of a fight Mexicans put on to attain their independence and preserve their ancient cultures. We must learn how difficult of a journey it has been in the years to follow as a modern political state with contrasting political ideologies and leadership almost constantly in revolt. We must understand that a destabilized, decentralized authority gave way to Mexican drug cartels when countries like the U.S. generated the demand (and further consolidated it due to our interventions that stunted other drug suppliers in Central and South America).
Most importantly for these purposes, though, is to recognize how much land we stole from Mexico in the Mexican-American war. Beyond ideological tensions we feel towards Mexico and constructed dehumanization complexes we practice in our everyday prejudices, we have physical evidence of theft of some of their most fertile land totaling nearly 50% of their territory — and it’s often barely a blip in American history textbooks.
Let’s give Mexico the space to take back some of this forgotten narrative.
Indigenous history
From the Olmecs to the Aztecs, Mexico has a rich history of ancient civilization. Mexico saw the rise and fall of several key empires long before European arrival, from the Olmecs to the Mayans to the Aztecs. Mexico and broader Mesoamerica contributed to human organized development and advancements like writing, trade, burials, and art. It is thought their advancements in human sophistication run as New World counterparts to those happening in the Middle East and Mediterranean that are often more well-known in Eurocentric history narratives.
The Olmecs were the earliest known Mesoamerican civilization (2500–400 B.C.E.). They occupied the tropical lowlands of the modern-day Mexican states of Veracruz and Tabasco. They are known for their stone figurines which can be found in far-off lands from their central hub, as well as rubber which they extracted from trees — in fact, the Aztec translation for them was “rubber people” (Map Archive). Their extensive iconography suggests they did a considerable amount of trade at the time, and their writing system which emerged as early as 900 B.C.E. may be the earliest known writing system in the Western hemisphere.
The civilizations that succeeded the Olmecs included Mayans, Toltec, Zapotec, Mixtech, and Mayans again. The Mayan civilization was a great empire whose sphere of influence spread across the Yucatan Peninsula. Mayans excelled at hieroglyphic writing, calendar making, and mathematics (Britannica).
The Aztecs were the most powerful Native American empire upon the arrival of Spanish colonists. Hernan Cortes landed on the gulf coast in 1519 and exchanged gifts with Aztec leaders. Although the Aztecs hugely outnumbered Cortes, the Europeans overtook the Aztecs with far more sophisticated military capacity, which included horses, guns and cannons (Scholastic). Beyond that, biological warfare killed off Aztecs in the form of diseases for which Aztecs had no immunity. In 1521, the Aztec capital city Tenochtitlan fell to the Spaniards and the rest of Mexico followed shortly thereafter.
Power structures
From Spanish colonialism to the Mexican Republic
For 300 years, Mexico had been ruled as a Spanish colony called New Spain. The colony’s wealth lay in its silver mines and agriculture. The Indians taught the Spanish how to cultivate corn, tomatoes, and cacao (from which chocolate is made), crops unknown in Europe. The Spanish, in turn, introduced sugarcane, wheat and rice, and large-scale cattle and sheep raising.
The class system was distinctly racist and pervasive. Wealthy landowners who arrived from Spain controlled the vast majority of the wealth. Criollos, or Spaniards born into the colonies, were at best given small government positions. The mestizos of mixed Spanish and Native American descent were subjugated to various service positions, and Native Americans were often enslaved.
In 1808, Spanish power over its colonies significantly weakened when Napoleon of France invaded Spain and placed his brother on the Spanish throne. Inspired by this vulnerability of far-off leadership, priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costillo spearheaded the first wave of the Mexican Independence movement. September 16, 1810 is the independence date commemorated by Mexicans, as Hidalgo’s army put up a valiant effort with mostly mestizos and Native Americans.
However, the journey to full independence would actually take much longer. After several waves of failed revolts, a Spanish royalist officer named Colonel Augustan de Iturbide switched sides, forcing Spain into signing the Treaty of Cordoba in 1821, finalizing Mexico’s long-awaited independence from Spain.
Mexican Independence: A Tumultuous Journey
Mexico’s journey to independence would prove to be a difficult one; even today, its political tensions and struggles to keep its drug trade under control can be attributed to frequently changing leadership and lack of centralized authority. Conflicts between conservatives and liberals weakened and divided the country. The conservatives supported a strong national government and sought to maintain their traditional privileges; the liberals advocated decentralized rule, sharply diminished church influence, and broad social reforms.
Mexico to present
Beyond domestic disputes, Mexico would see international domination further undermine its sovereignty. In 1848, the United States took nearly 50% of Mexico’s land in the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo.
Today
Mexico today has 32 federal entities further divided by municipalities. (Geology.com). While immigration has been a hot topic for decades, the 2016 presidential campaign added fuel to the fire with Trump’s “build the wall” campaign. As of October 19, 2020, 371 miles of the new border wall system had been constructed under supervision of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Even more disturbing is continued evidence of separation of families at the border, as well as appalling conditions — truly, cages — in which children wait in detention.
In California, conditions continue to worsen for Mexican and other Latin American farmers due to the pandemic and multitude of California wildfires. In cities like New York, new protections continue to be enacted to grant undocumented persons basic human rights, such as being able to report sexual assault in the workplace. The 2020 Netflix documentary, Immigration Nation, shed light on the heartbreaking plight and immense distress of undocumented immigrants, with one man pounding his head against the wall in distress after being taken from his home with a warrant for his deportation.
And yet Mexico continues to be a popular tourist spot among U.S. citizens, with numbers growing 25% from 25 million to over 32 million between 2014 and 2019. We love their beaches, their food, their alcohol, their drugs. We admire then as fiercely as we judge them. Here’s to more openness, understanding, honesty, and nonjudgment with our brother country with whom — for better or for worse — we are geographically and culturally interconnected.
I’ll finish this piece with a quote from the late Anthony Bourdain (full piece here):
Mexico. Our brother from another mother. A country, with whom, like it or not, we are inexorably, deeply involved, in a close but often uncomfortable embrace. Look at it. It’s beautiful. It has some of the most ravishingly beautiful beaches on earth. Mountains, desert, jungle. Beautiful colonial architecture, a tragic, elegant, violent, ludicrous, heroic, lamentable, heartbreaking history. Mexican wine country rivals Tuscany for gorgeousness. Its archeological sites — the remnants of great empires, unrivaled anywhere. And as much as we think we know and love it, we have barely scratched the surface of what Mexican food really is. It is NOT melted cheese over a tortilla chip. It is not simple, or easy. It is not simply ‘bro food’ halftime. It is in fact, old– older even than the great cuisines of Europe and often deeply complex, refined, subtle, and sophisticated. A true mole sauce, for instance, can take DAYS to make, a balance of freshly (always fresh) ingredients, painstakingly prepared by hand. It could be, should be, one of the most exciting cuisines on the planet. If we paid attention. The old school cooks of Oaxaca make some of the more difficult to make and nuanced sauces in gastronomy. And some of the new generation, many of whom have trained in the kitchens of America and Europe have returned home to take Mexican food to new and thrilling new heights
It’s a country I feel particularly attached to and grateful for. In nearly 30 years of cooking professionally, just about every time I walked into a new kitchen, it was a Mexican guy who looked after me, had my back, showed me what was what, was there — and on the case — when the cooks more like me, with backgrounds like mine — ran away to go skiing or surfing — or simply “flaked.” I have been fortunate to track where some of those cooks come from, to go back home with them. To small towns populated mostly by women — where in the evening, families gather at the town’s phone kiosk, waiting for calls from their husbands, sons and brothers who have left to work in our kitchens in the cities of the North. I have been fortunate enough to see where that affinity for cooking comes from, to experience moms and grandmothers preparing many delicious things, with pride and real love, passing that food made by hand, passed from their hands to mine.
In years of making television in Mexico, it’s one of the places we, as a crew, are happiest when the day’s work is over. We’ll gather round a street stall and order soft tacos with fresh, bright, delicious tasting salsas — drink cold Mexican beer, sip smoky mezcals, listen with moist eyes to sentimental songs from street musicians. We will look around and remark, for the hundredth time, what an extraordinary place this is.
