ONE |
Ramblings on |
Let me spell out why I believe Mexico is underdeveloped. But first, permit me to digress just a bit. Some pundits, fixated on the banal details of human idiosyncrasies, tend to think that we are the authors of our own fate, but life is surely more complicated. To that truism I can only say amen. I know that the millions of rich, and often arrogant, residents of this planet are the perfect historical refutation that the meek shall inherit the earth. Just the same, I do not believe that only the poor will pass through the eye of a needle on their way to salvation. So how to explain why inhabitants of certain countries, specifically the United States and Western Europe, and now Japan, are wealthy, while others, peripheral countries such as Mexico, are poor? I leave the first question to others far more knowledgeable; I can try to explain only Mexico’s plight.
One apocryphal story portrays Mexico as a beggar sitting on a cornucopia of plenty. Mexico may be a beggar, but it is hardly well heeled, rich in neither rainfall nor land for the plow and harrow. Across the centuries, Mexicans have not lived high on the hog; instead poverty and sundry inequities have plagued Mexico, and not just because Mexicans wasted resources. Even presidents of the Republic, not always known for their candor, have conceded that their country is no Garden of Eden. José López Portillo, a leader prone to extravagant displays of emotions but at times speaking brutal truths, asserted time and time again in his gigantic autobiography, Mis tiempos, that Mexico “es un país subdesarrollado” (is an underdeveloped country).1 True, that aphorism is complicated, and is as hotly debated in Mexico now as it was when López Portillo’s tome was published. Underdevelopment—or, as some Mexicans, made skittish and fearful by what they refuse to acknowledge, claim is a “distorted economy”—has long been a controversial topic of study for economists, historians, poets, and writers. A popular descriptor favored by mainstream economists is “developing nation,” which sounds more palatable, implying that it is only a question of time before Mexico will reach the promised land, that is, join the circle of the rich.
What exactly is underdevelopment, that pernicious malady I have ascribed to Mexico? Definitions abound, but what all of them have in common is that, more than anything else, an underdeveloped country is poor. Poverty is widespread and chronic, not some temporary misfortune. It has always been there. The lost, the damned, and the dispossessed live in poverty, and have always done so. That, unfortunately, describes Mexico to a T.
But underdevelopment is a complex illness. Underdevelopment means an extremely unequal distribution of wealth and income. A few are very rich; millions are very poor. Mexico, according to one United Nations report, ranks near the top of the list of countries with the most glaring inequalities of wealth and income. These inequalities take on territorial dimensions: the south is poorest, and the north, comparatively speaking, the richest. In the countryside, except for a favored few, Mexicans are poor, while Indians, constituting perhaps 12 percent of the Republic’s inhabitants, are wretchedly poor. At the top of the list of the poorest regions stands Chiapas, where 76 percent of the inhabitants, largely Indian, are as poor as the proverbial church mouse. In Santiago del Pinar, one of its Indian communities, according to a United Nations report, lamentable conditions resemble those of villages in the Congo of Africa. Not far behind come the states of Guerrero, Oaxaca, Tabasco, and Veracruz, where, with Chiapas, nearly 19 million Mexicans live. In contrast, in Baja California, Nuevo León, Distrito Federal, Coahuila, and Chihuahua, only minorities struggle to obtain their canasta alimentaria (basic needs). In Baja California, to give an example, only 9.2 percent of the people are poor. But, before we jump to the conclusion that all is well there, bear in mind that 78 percent of urban dwellers across the country know poverty.2
At the other extreme one finds the wealthy. One Mexican, Carlos Slim, the telephone magnate, is one of the richest men in the world, and a dozen or so Mexicans lag not far behind him. Slim’s bankroll totals almost 7 percent of the country’s output of goods and services, one out of every fourteen dollars Mexicans earn. Every twenty-four hours of every month of every year, his income grows at the rate of 27 million dollars, yet one out of five Mexicans survives on just two dollars a day. Like the legendary King Midas, Slim turns everything he touches to gold. A fastidious collector of art, he takes special pleasure in two sculptures by Auguste Rodin he owns that grace the Museo Soumaya in Mexico City, which he helps fund. Slim also collects old editions, particularly those dealing with Mexican history.3 Inequality, which Slim symbolizes, is found in many important areas, such as schooling, health care, housing, and child care. Equality of opportunity simply does not exist.
Narciso Bassols, a respected economist, insists that underdevelopment refers to a country that is not just poor but bereft of the technology required for economic growth.4 As López Portillo pointed out, one distressing aspect of the malady, given the usually adverse commercial picture, is the inability to develop local resources for lack of funds.5 One sure sign of underdevelopment is the flight of campesinos from the countryside to the city, a seemingly irreversible tide in Mexico.6 Those who leave behind their small plots of land, when they have them, seldom, if ever, find the road back to the village.
But poverty implies more than simply the absence of material things. Poverty breeds alienation, an internalized feeling of deprivation and hopelessness, at times even feelings of inferiority, a belief that improving one’s life lies beyond human capacity. One is born poor and will die poor.7 It is psychological, as Fidel Castro, a flamboyant apostle of social change, acknowledged. People, he explained, who for centuries lived “without the hope and the resources and the education that make optimism possible, feel paralyzed by the challenges before them, the tasks required to build a nation.”8 The psychological aspects of poverty, he avowed, can be just as important as the material. It is the “filosofía de que no se puede,” the belief that nothing can be done.
Underdevelopment is a historical phenomenon; it has deep roots in the past. Much time has gone by and much water has flowed under the bridge since underdevelopment first took root in Mexico. It is a logical result of a special historical circumstance not shared by the nations of the First World, the industrialized, technically advanced countries of Western Europe, the United States, and Japan. André Gunder Frank, the political economist, noted perceptively that neither the past nor the present of these countries resembles in any important aspect the past of the underdeveloped countries.9 Underdevelopment rises out of a unique historical process; it is not simply backwardness in relation to the First World, writes Héctor Guillén Romo, but a structural characteristic that blocks economic growth.10 For Alfonso Aguilar Monteverde, the factors that determine the “backwardness” of countries are not simply random. They did not just happen, nor are they merely skin deep; they are linchpins of the socioeconomic structure.11 As the economist Paul Baran knew, the historical forces that shaped the “fate of the backward world still exercise a powerful impact” on today’s conditions. Forms change, intensities differ, but “their origin and direction [remain] unaltered.”12 Given Mexico’s colonial heritage, the results of a European conquest, and the failure of mother Spain to join the modern European world, the inevitable result was a Mexico on the periphery. But even had Spain not lagged behind, as the example of British India reminds us, the heart of the matter is the colonial relationship, not the nature of the mother country. It was a relationship of unequals, of dependency, with Mexico the tail of the dog.
How did this unequal relationship come about? History tells us that it evolved over centuries. It began, undoubtedly, with the Industrial Revolution, although some scholars argue that its foundations were laid earlier, between 1450 and 1640, when the European feudal mode of production transformed itself gradually into a capitalist economy.13 No matter what the truth, by 1500, England, France, and the Low Countries had shed most of their serfs, their lands farmed largely by yeomen and free tenants. England’s enclosure, the shift from the open fields of small farmers to the large fenced-in holdings of wealthy landlords, led to the commercialization of agriculture and abundant wool for textile mills. The use of the water wheel for power to grind corn, shape metal tools, and spin yards of woolen and cotton cloth began in England and spread to Western Europe, where nature had endowed the land with rivers and streams.14 The English, nonetheless, cannot take credit for the water wheel, which came from the hill country of Mesopotamia, where its use languished for lack of water.15 Meanwhile, the ocean harbors of England made water transport an inexpensive method for shipping textiles and iron goods to far-off lands, as well as obtaining raw materials.
Yet, before we jump to the conclusion that English ingenuity fueled the Industrial Revolution, it is well to keep in mind that Providence had a hand in the process. England led because of its bountiful deposits of coal, which eventually replaced water as the principal source of power.16 British coal and the steam engine stood on the cutting edge of industrialization. Surely, without coal England’s industrialization would not have occurred as it did and certainly not at that early time. The basic change occurred when machines replaced animal power. None of this happened overnight, but over a century or more, with England leading the way between 1770 and 1870.17 During this era, James Watt invented an engine whose fuel efficiency was good enough to make the use of steam profitable; capital from the colonial trade, in turn, helped finance Watt’s invention. New technology brought about a transformation in production methods, in the process cementing a growing asymmetry between England (and later France), the industrial core, and the laggards on the periphery.
But coal alone does not explain the giant strides of the English Industrial Revolution. History records that in 1492 Christopher Columbus, an Italian sea captain sailing under the royal Spanish flag, discovered what Europeans baptized the Americas. With their colonies, Spain and Portugal would eventually control much of the “New World.” England, however, did not lag far behind, winning a colonial foothold in the Caribbean and on the North American continent. The chance discovery of the Americas proved a boon to England’s nascent industry, for without the colonies, its own and those of Spain and Portugal, England faced an ecological hurdle with scant chance of an internal solution. To move beyond eighteenth-century levels of production and consumption, England, and Western Europe, needed a new trading partner, and the New World offered it. Its lands gave England a haven for its surplus populations, while its resources and markets helped England, as well as Europe, move beyond its ecological boundaries. Raw materials, markets for manufactured goods, and abundant cheap labor, whether Indians or their misbegotten offspring, stood at the beck and call of English farmers, merchants, and manufacturers.
The silver and, to a lesser extent, gold from the mines of New Spain and Peru, which because of the foolishness of Spaniards ended up in foreign coffers, opened the way for England to expand its imports of raw materials and food as well as fatten its share of New World markets. Cheap cotton from colonial Brazil and the southern English colonies transformed Manchester into a textile manufacturing giant. A goodly share of this prosperity came on the backs of African slaves, from the sweat and tears of the cotton and sugar plantations of the Caribbean colonies and the American South. The labor of these slaves, as well as that of the Indians of Mexico and their mestizo descendants, financed the capitalization of Western Europe’s industrial empires. Later, the new republics of Hispanic America played a similar role for British merchants and manufacturers. These satellite economies were structured such that, instead of working for local needs, their systems of production and distribution mainly served their dominant metropolises. European control of markets, exports, and raw materials partly explains the underdevelopment of Mexico and the rest of Latin America, a relationship that Pierre Jaffee calls the “pillage of the Third World.”18
We live in a capitalist world, as Immanuel M. Wallerstein, a world-systems theorist, reminds us, one that took shape as an expansionist European economy in the sixteenth century and three centuries later embraced the entire world.19 Why then, if this is so, have some countries, such as Mexico, failed to enjoy development similar to that of other capitalist countries? Steps on the highway of capitalist modernization, as it is known, have been slow or absent. It is a good question, but there are good answers too. We must not forget that history never stands still; time changes nearly everything. What was possible in the past may no longer be possible today. The former colonies, now largely dependent economies, confront an entirely different situation than that faced by Western Europe in the age of discovery and colonization. The easy acquisition of capital is no longer possible. Dependent economies live in a world run by industrialized nations, owners of investment capital blessed with advanced technology and markets for the primary products of peripheral exporters. Capitalism has created a core of wealthy nations and, on their periphery, poor or moderately poor countries, among them Mexico, as Latin American economists under the tutelage of Raúl Prebisch, the Argentine political sage, have stated time and time again.
From its inception, according to Samir Amin, whose essays on Third World economies are legendary, capitalism has been a polarizing system of dominant cores and dominated peripheries, one developed, dominant, and independent, and the other subordinate, dependent, and underdeveloped, serving the needs of the other.20 Economic development and underdevelopment, as Frank observed, are the opposite sides of the same coin. Or to cite Wallerstein, capitalism makes for a world of inequality: “In order to develop it needed the connivance of an international economy.”21 European plundering of the colonial world gave birth to the chasm that stands between core countries and peripheral ones, a relationship that endures. The incorporation of former colonies into expanding world capitalism reinforced their dependency, or, as some say, their underdevelopment. The nature of capitalism, after all, rests on the exploitation of resources, both national and international, and, to cite Fernand Braudel, opportunities.22 Whatever its nationality, capitalism relies on legal or de facto monopolies, devised and controlled by powerful interests. Benefits seldom trickle down to the poorest of society. When searching for the roots of underdevelopment, we must understand the origins of capitalism: Europe’s brigandage opened the chasm that separates core countries from peripheral ones.
Underdeveloped countries, furthermore, do not simply dwell at an earlier point on the road taken by modern industrial states, but remain entrapped in a subservient role in a world capitalist economy. At the dawn of capitalism, Westerners shaped and subordinated the economies of the peripheral world. Starting with the maritime discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the mother of colonial commerce and the origin of early capital accumulation, the Europeans took it upon themselves, frequently in acts of piracy, to take what they coveted from primitive peoples unable to defend themselves. For colonials, there followed three centuries of living off exports and using the profits to buy manufactured goods, largely from English merchants.
Given these origins, Mexican society, as we shall see, found it virtually impossible to develop in an autonomous fashion. It is nonsensical to expect the historically exploited to march in tune with European phases of development. Today, the underdeveloped countries, or to use current jargon, the “developing nations,” exist in a world dominated by rich nations, as well as subservient elites. As López Portillo wrote, the powerful seldom assume “responsibility for the ills of the economic system they have imposed on the world, let alone admit blame, but judge normal the negative results.”23 Yet the ills of the underdeveloped countries, he went on, are but different aspects of what is essentially a global problem.
Imperialism, wrote the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, has not allowed “us to achieve historical normality”;24 Mexican society displays abnormal contours. The ruling classes, he argued, had no other mission than to collaborate as associates of foreigners. Similarly, the local landed class, the most powerful, wanted an economy that maximized profits for their exports, opposed all restrictions on them, and demanded access to cheap goods from the industrial West. Foreign merchants posed no danger to them, whatever the damage to nascent industrialists, who might want duties levied on imports. Thus, the local burguesía (bourgeoisie) had disjointed goals. A national burguesía ready to battle for national interests did not exist, as Paz recognized.25 The structure of world capitalism did not allow for the rise of a truly national burguesía leading the way out of dependency. Economic growth with social justice cannot be achieved without demolishing the “capitalist network of dominance and dependence.”26 Only when ties to the core countries are weakened—as they were for Mexico during World War II, when imports of goods from the United States were virtually cut off—can the dependent countries achieve a degree of autonomous development. Recently, only two countries, Taiwan and South Korea, have made the transition from agricultural societies to technologically advanced industrial ones, thanks partly to the Cold War and the American strategy of erecting barriers against China and the USSR.
How to fix this malaise of underdevelopment? Clearly, no one has come up with an easy answer. It is a baffling jawbreaker, as the literature on it amply bears out. An old theme, the study of the whys of economic growth, dates, at least, from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), a cornerstone of classical economics read avidly by early Mexican planners. Smith asked why some nations galloped ahead while others lagged behind. By serving their self-interest, he pontificated, individuals, as if led by an “invisible hand,” bestowed benefits on the entire society.” The interest of a country, in its commercial relations with foreign nations,” he wrote, “is like that of a merchant with regards to the different people he deals with, to buy as cheap and to sell as dear as possible.” Needed for this system to perform well was “perfect freedom of trade, . . . to sell dear, when . . . markets are thus fulfilled with the greatest number of buyers.” He upheld three principles: “life, liberty and the pursuit of property.”27 Ironically, at no time did Smith use the term laissez-faire, and he supported some limitations on free trade. But his gospel of competition fosters selfishness and greed. Today his disciples belong to the neoliberal school of economics, which, with the exception of Cuba, dominated the last decades of the twentieth century in Latin America.
David Ricardo, another English classical economist, equally convinced that market forces—akin to the laws of gravity—regulated a capitalist economy, won public acclaim in Mexico with his doctrine of comparative advantage. In Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1821), he argued that nations should specialize in what they did best. His example was the trade between England, a textile manufacturer, and Portugal, a producer of port wine. He based his theory on an international division of labor: each country producing the goods in which it had the greatest relative advantage. That logic would lead Portugal to concentrate on wine production and sale and England on cloth manufacture, with the resulting trade between them generating maximum benefits for both. An advocate of free trade, Ricardo impugned the mercantile practice of protecting home producers.28 That made sense for the English because their country had become the world’s major manufacturing center, able to outsell rivals and profit from free trade. By accepting this principle, countries on the periphery that lacked an industrial base doomed themselves to be suppliers of raw materials and grains. The lesson? Not everyone profits equally from comparative advantage, because some activities are more lucrative than others, as Portugal learned to its sorrow.
Other theorists of that age saw unchecked population growth as the roadblock, an interpretation known as the Malthusian theory, which postulates that a country can outrun its food supply and undermine its standard of living. Keep population in check; that was Malthus’s tonic. Yet in most of the industrialized nations, mortality rates began to decline only late in the eighteenth century.29 While high rates of population growth can hamper economic development, a truth Mexican leaders recognized tardily, low incomes, and not demographic explosions, are the primary reasons for poverty. All the same, balanced demographic growth will not, by itself, open the door to economic development, as the contemporary Mexican situation illustrates.30 With a population growth rate of about 1 percent, Mexico is still underdeveloped, while poverty grows by leaps and bounds.
By the late Victorian Age, the subject of development had lost its appeal, revived briefly by the writings of Karl Marx, an acerbic critic of capitalism. Then, early in the twentieth century, the German Max Weber, with his monumental The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–5), injected new life into the subject. His interpretation, a deeply religious and ideological one, became the cultural explanation for economic development. For Weber, values and attitudes transcended everything else.31 The Protestant ethic, which according to its apostles, enshrined hard work, thrift, and honesty in business practices, put the blame on supposedly anticapitalist Catholic dogmas that hampered business activity by condemning usury and glorifying the virtue of poverty. Weber held aloft Calvinist Puritans who preached the doctrine of predestination, by which only a select number of human beings were destined for heavenly salvation. To find proof of that salvation, Calvinists had to demonstrate it through visible signs of earthly prosperity; and woe to those who squandered profits on pleasure rather than reinvesting them in order to fully demonstrate their adherence to God’s will. Earthly success led to heavenly success.32 Weber placed the blame for the misfortunes of peripheral societies on their traditional beliefs and practices.
Weber’s thesis has countless adherents, but questions abound; not all scholars embrace the German’s views. First of all, how does one explain the industrial success of Japan and China, hardly Protestant societies, and that of several Catholic countries, Italy, for instance? A fundamental question dogs Weber’s deceptive logic. Do ideas, practices, and values of a society emerge out of thin air? Does not history reveal that people had first to eat to survive, and that to do so they gathered berries and killed wild beasts and then justified what they did? Over the ages, men and women have rationalized their beliefs to square with what they must do. Religious attitudes most surely sprang from earthly reality, largely from fear of death and the hope for salvation in an afterlife. The Industrial Revolution brought about certain beliefs and attitudes, as the Englishman R. Harry Tawny asserted; capitalism arose when secular attitudes supplanted religious dogmas.33 Weber, moreover, was a myopic historian. He forgot, as Fernand Braudel writes, that northern Europe had supplanted the place earlier occupied by the capitalist centers of the Mediterranean region, hardly a Protestant fortress. The sixteenth century simply witnessed the triumph of northern centers of power over older ones: Amsterdam copied Venice as London then copied Amsterdam, neither one coming up with much new technology or any fresh principles of business management.34
Weber, nonetheless, was not entirely wrong. Economic development, or the lack of it, may respond partly to attitudes, values, and ideas. Fatalistic views of life, not uncommon in poor Mexican communities, do not provide fertile soil for a belief that a better life can be achieved with political and economic change. For people who say that fate preordains who they are and how they live, it is difficult, if not impossible, to adopt new ways of doing things. I remember Manuel Gamio, the Mexican anthropologist, telling me how difficult it was to get the Otomí Indians of Hidalgo to make tortillas, their daily bread, out of soybeans and not corn, even though, in his opinion, it was a better crop for that desert region and a better food. Still, if men and women are to be motivated to change so as to better their way of life, they must know that the goal is attainable.
In the 1950s, in the wake of the Marshall Plan for war-torn Europe, an outburst of interest in development took shape, mainly offspring of the talents of anthropologists, sociologists, and economists, disciples of “modernization” theories, scholars who wanted to patch up damage done previously to “backward” societies by “fixing” things. Modifying ways of life, so it was proclaimed, could open wide the doors to progress and a better life. It was simply necessary to transform a society’s habits by introducing new techniques and ideas.35 Panaceas abounded: one, a popular remedy, urged a change of religious practices (i.e., turn Protestant); others called for schools or roads or health clinics, or replacement of the wooden plow with a steel one, which digs deeper furrows and improves both irrigation and crops. People in traditional societies, it was alleged, placed less value on work, looking upon it as simply a means to survival, not something one did to get ahead. The men and women of these communities were often fatalistic, rarely motivated to adopt new attitudes and ways of doing things. Ancient habits were deeply embedded practices that persisted across generations.36 The “experts” advised Mexico to welcome the salvation that came with the foreigners’ know-how, including modern organizational and technological skills, ideas, and values, and, of course, foreign capital, all meant to rid countries, to cite the wisdom of Jorge Carrión, a Mexican psychiatrist, of their backwardness, poverty, hunger, and exploitation.37
Mexican scholars’ response to these theorists came promptly. Patterns and ways of doing things adopted from Western nations could turn out to be obstacles to progress in a poor country. To be of benefit, education must fit local needs. That, too, could be said of modern technology. Its transfer carried hidden dangers: forms that replaced traditional ones in one sector of a society might just as likely produce stagnation in others.38 While England built factories and found jobs for its rapidly growing population by relying on the appropriate technology, today’s was much more capital-intensive and less dependent on human labor.39 Mexico, however, like other poor countries, had an abundance of labor but a shortage of capital and skills. Reliance on foreign models resulted in distorted growth and unemployment. Countries that adopted the capital-intensive model risked concentrating available capital in a small modern sector, while leaving the rest of the economy lagging behind. As Jesús Silva Herzog warned, Mexican economists should not adopt exotic blueprints—theories elaborated by economists in New York, London, and Paris—without careful study, lest they cause irreparable harm.40
One critic of imitation, the philosopher Samuel Ramos, made headlines with his book Perfil del hombre y la cultura en México, a controversial study conducted in the 1930s, an age that sought to define the Mexican soul. “I limit myself,” Ramos wrote, “to pointing out how readily ideas and theories imported from Europe are acted on in Mexico without any criticism whatsoever.” So long as this continues, he went on, “we will be vulnerable to strange ideas which, having nothing to do with our needs, and deform eventually our national character” and, as a consequence, retard the “development of domestic potentialities.” The Mexican fascination with foreign cultures signaled a “spiritual flight from their own land.” Culture was a cloister in which men and women who disdained native realities took refuge so as to ignore them. From this erroneous attitude, he went on, Mexico’s “self-denigration” arose, with devastating impact on its historical orientation.41 Years later, Octavio Paz would add that “we have done very little thinking on our own account; most of our ideas have been borrowed from the United States or Europe.”42 An economist or sociologist from a peripheral country who accepted with ufana pedantería (overweening pompousness) word for word the wisdom of foreign tutors, wrote Jesús Silva Herzog, resembled the toady who grovels before his master.43 When Mexicans endeavored to take on North American ways, explained the psychiatrist Jorge Carrión, they behaved as pochos (Mexican Americans), men and women who, having lost their psychological bearings, rush to imitate North Americans, to speak English, see American films and disparage Mexican ones, and scorn native ways and customs.44
Mexicans, so this argument went, must keep in mind the primary needs and aspirations of their people. The “models of development that the West offers us today,” insisted Paz, “are compendiums of horror.”45 To cite Arturo Escobar, these models of development simply replicate the standards of Western nations, success or failure measured by their yardstick. In Western anthropological literature, Escobar charged, especially that of Americans, “there is an almost total absence of any reference to American imperial intervention as a factor affecting the theoretical discussion.”46 As Joan Robinson asserted, by detaching the economic aspects of human life from its political and social setting, Western teaching obfuscated rather than shed light on the nature of the problem.47 Slavish imitation overlooked the historical experience of the underdeveloped country, and that of the world historical process, which helped make these countries underdeveloped, as Claudio Véliz, a Chilean economist, recognized.48
Psychiatrists tell us that history had a powerful hand in shaping the character of Mexicans, so it behooves us who want to understand them to carefully scrutinize their past, because it is seldom absent. As Paz admonished, “blood drips from all their [Mexican] wounds, even the most ancient.”49 Mexican traditionalism, though under attack, has been one constant of the national character, shaped by circumstances that prevailed early on. The controversial theme of the Mexican inferiority complex, at times vehemently denied, might be explained, added Paz, at least partly by the “reserve with which Mexicans face other people, and by the unpredictable violence with which their repressed emotions break through their mask of impassivity.”50 The Mexican is not inferior, argued Ramos, but “feels inferior,” the result partly of measuring himself by the scale of Western European values, a malady as old as Independence.51
So how to explain the “underdevelopment” of Mexico? Well, I certainly cannot put that controversy to bed. The more I study the underdevelopment of Mexico, the more I am convinced that there is no solution, certainly not a simple one. It took five centuries for Mexico to become a distorted, dependent, dysfunctional society, and it will take a miracle to undo this legacy. The world we know today would have to change drastically, to return, if you will, to an earlier one, where the haves were less powerful, and the economic and social configurations that took five hundred years to evolve did not yet exist. That would be, to state again and again, a miracle. Mexico is condemned to be what it is unless the burguesía, ever the lap dog of the omnipotent Yankee, underwent a metamorphosis, akin to that of the rascally Scrooge of Dickens’s Christmas Carol.
I am, after all, a historian, an expert, if I am permitted to use that term, only on one aspect of this baffling subject. I must rely on the research of others. I can only offer an interpretation, analyzing along the way Mexican racism and other social and psychological ills that exacerbate the all-powerful economic one. Not to do so strips the nuts and bolts from reality. Since colonial days, Mexico has had an economy built around the exports of metals and other primary goods. This activity, from the beginning, has been controlled largely by capital from abroad. Mexico has an export-oriented economy largely of primary goods, a semicolonial one. Underdevelopment afflicts a country that does not simply depend on the exports of what the land offers but also relies on a single market, the United States in the case of Mexico. That market decides the volume and character of the purchases and sets prices. In that manner, Americans dictate the nature of Mexico’s subservient economy.
This formula spells economic domination. It is the legacy of colonialism, when the Western powers saw the peripheral world as a source of cheap raw materials and food as well as a market for their manufactures. Raúl Prebisch, who broke with the teachings of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, argued that core nations, in a regime of free international exchange, profited more than peripheral ones because the terms of trade favored them. Poor countries had to sell more of their primary products in order to buy the same value of finished goods. From this lopsided relationship arose balance-of-payment problems, since income received for exports either fluctuated or more usually fell, while the cost of imports stayed steady or rose.
Yet economics alone, overwhelming as they are, cannot fully explain Mexico’s underdevelopment. So we come full circle: ideas and beliefs have roles to play in this tragic drama. The attitude of dependency, asserts the psychiatrist Carrión, “reveals itself in the Mexican’s psyche,” in an “emotional resignation towards future events, and so the Mexican adopts attitudes voiced not merely in words, not just in verbal expressions of dependency . . . but in the economic sphere.”52 Few Mexicans truly believe that their country will eventually join the industrial societies of the core nations. As Alan Riding noted perceptively in Distant Neighbors, “the disasters that befall Mexicans are not major disappointments, because they are considered unavoidable.” Just “tough luck,” or to cite a Mexican saying, “ni modo” (that’s how it is).
Theories and interpretations aside, let us push on with the story of how Mexico became this underdeveloped country.