Mexico, 1848-1853

Los Años Olvidados

Pedro Santoni, Will Fowler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781134844715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Historians have paid scant attention to the five years that span from the conclusion early in 1848 of Mexico's disastrous conflict with the United States to the final return to power in April 1853 of General Antonio López de Santa Anna. This volume presents a more thorough understanding of this pivotal time, and the issues and experiences that then affected Mexicans. It sheds light on how elite politics, church-state relations, institutional affairs, and peasant revolts played a crucial role in Mexico's long-term historical development, and also explores topics like marriage and everyday life, and the public trials and executions staged in the aftermath of the war with the U.S.

1 Setting the Scene

The History and Historiography of Post-War Mexico, 1848–1853

Will Fowler and Pedro Santoni

Until recently, the political, social, and economic turmoil that afflicted early republican Mexico (1824–1855) rendered that epoch incomprehensible as well as inaccessible to specialists and general readers alike. As two scholars put it, the conventional image of those times remained synonymous with the “chaotic age of [General Antonio López de] Santa Anna… [and] its endless sagas of opera bouffe caudillos, foreign intervention, and caste warfare.”¹ In the 1980s, however, historians of Mexico began to reexamine the three decades that followed the country’s independence from Spain in 1821, and their findings have helped dispel the aforesaid stereotype. Scholars have since elaborated a more precise categorization of nineteenth-century political factions and their positions on the issues of the day, shed new light on the comportment of institutions like Congress and the Catholic Church, demonstrated the agency of subaltern actors like peasants and urban dwellers, revealed Santa Anna as more than a power-hungry, opportunistic, and corrupt leader, and shown that the nation’s frequent pronunciamientos (often translated as revolts) were not just barracks rebellions, but rather an instrument that allowed various historical actors and groups to draft lists of grievances in order to negotiate for political change.²

Despite renewed interest in Mexico’s history between the 1820s and the 1850s, academics have paid scant attention to the period that spans from the conclusion early in 1848 of that republic’s disastrous conflict with the United States to the final return to power in April 1853 of the much-maligned Santa Anna. These five years remain woefully understudied. Compared to other regimes and epochs, like the presidencies of Santa Anna and Benito Juárez, or the mid-nineteenth-century Liberal Revolution known as the Reforma (1855–1876), historians have shown little interest in the policies, and efforts at reform, of the governments headed by moderado (as the moderate liberal political bloc was known) Generals José Joaquín de Herrera and Mariano Arista. And yet the 1848–1853 years, which we are calling the años olvidados (forgotten years),³ were a crucial time in Mexican history—not only in their own right—but also because they exemplify how many problems that prevented the country’s leaders from establishing a viable nation-state gave way, in the wake of war with the U.S., to a marked radicalization and polarization of politics, and a discernable rise in agrarian unrest and violence.

This introductory essay, therefore, aims to make clear how the 1848–1853 period played a key role in drawing the battle lines of the Reforma by contextualizing the chapters in this volume in three ways. First, it provides a discussion of the existing historiography, concentrating on what one may learn from those works that have engaged with the 1848–1853 years while exploring the reasons why the period has received so little attention to date. Second, the introduction offers a concise overview of the Herrera and Arista administrations so that readers can appreciate the chronology of events, as well as the overarching issues that inform the case studies contained in the book. Finally, the chapter explores the relevance of the main themes that defined these años olvidados, with special reference to the reverberations of the 1848 European revolutions, and to Mexico’s own historical trajectory from independence to the rise to power of General Porfirio Díaz in 1876. In this way the essay highlights how important these years were in informing and influencing the events of the next two decades.

The Historiography of Post-War Mexico

Much has been written about the history of Mexico’s war of independence (1810–1821) and of the different governments that held power in the twenty-six years that followed, sometimes almost immediately after the given events had taken place. Individuals like the prolific politician and journalist Carlos María de Bustamante provided a running commentary that relived and historicized the era in the numerous volumes he published between 1822 and 1847.⁴ In a similar vein, aging protagonists of the early national period like conservative patriarch Lucas Alamán, as well as santanistas (as Santa Anna’s supporters were known) José María Tornel and Juan Suárez y Navarro, looked back in anger at the decades that followed independence in the cluster of historical accounts that started to proliferate after 1849.⁵ Santa Anna’s 1853–1855 dictatorship, in particular the Revolution of Ayutla that brought it to an end, was likewise recounted in 1856 by Spanish eyewitness Anselmo de la Portilla,⁶ while the ensuing Reforma period with its civil war (1857–1861) and French Intervention (1862–1867) was discussed by both Miguel Galindo y Galindo and José María Vigil.⁷

In stark contrast, Mexican intellectuals who lived between 1848 and 1853 did not write elaborate accounts of what transpired at that time. Squeezed in between the traumatic U.S.–Mexican War that preceded them, and the two decades of bloodshed and civil conflict that came after, pundits overlooked— if not forgot—these five years. What happened in Mexico between the departure of U.S. forces in the late spring of 1848 and Santa Anna’s sixth and last presidency, became, in a way, both figuratively and literally, but a few lines in subsequent general histories of nineteenth-century Mexico. The post-war years are largely lost in the concise Historia de México, which the Mexican government published and distributed free of charge across all educational establishments as part of the bicentenary of independence celebrations in 2010. There Josefina Zoraida Vázquez’ chapter about the early national period (which ends in 1848) has but one paragraph that mentions the Caste War in Yucatán, the polarization of politics, the formation of the Conservative party in 1849, Herrera’s achievement in completing his term in office and Arista’s failure to emulate his predecessor, as well as a brief subsequent reference to the $15 million war indemnity that the U.S. paid to Mexico. Meanwhile, Andrés Lira’s contribution on the Reforma does not pay any attention to the años olvidados as it begins in 1853.⁸

Five Mexican history textbooks, some of which are commonly used today in university classrooms across the U.S., also reflect the prevalence of this narrow, myopic vision. First published in 1979, and currently in its eleventh revised edition, the ever-popular The Course of Mexican History still offers insubstantial coverage of the 1848–1853 period. It disregards the Herrera and Arista presidencies, and fails to effectively contextualize the two specific events from that time it does refer to—the publication of Alamán’s five-volume Historia de Méjico, and the outbreak of the indigenous revolt in Yucatán. Everyday Life and Politics in Nineteenth Century Mexico: Men, Women, and War (2000) contains only two short paragraphs on the post-war context, one on the rebellion in the Sierra Gorda (a region in central Mexico that borders several states including Guanajuato, Querétaro, and San Luis Potosí), and another on the conflict in Yucatán, before going on to discuss the Reforma. The pertinent chapters of The Oxford History of Mexico (2010), an edited text with twenty-one chapters, all but ignore the años olvidados; the article about the U.S.–Mexican War penned by Vázquez ends in 1848 while Paul Vanderwood’s contribution on the Reforma takes up the narrative in 1853. Mexico in World History, published in 2011, skims through the post-war years in less than two pages that focus almost exclusively on the ideological divide between political factions. Finally, the chronological discussion of the post-independence era in The Essential History of Mexico: From Pre-Conquest to Present (2016) devotes but two paragraphs (approximately 120 words) to the 1848–1853 era; in contrast, Santa Anna’s 1853–1855 regime merits seven paragraphs, and roughly 300 words.⁹

Monographs that examine the años olvidados, or segments thereof, as an intrinsic unit of analysis are far and few in between. The first book to closely scrutinize these years was Moisés González Navarro’s Anatomía del poder en México, 1848–1853, which remains an important contribution to our understanding of this period. In this volume, first published in 1977, the author highlighted several key issues that then came to the fore, including the increase of independent Indian raids in northern Mexico and indigenous rebellions generally, the drought of 1849–1850, and the profound sense of disillusion which had replaced the hopes for a prosperous future that many Mexicans harbored at the time of independence. Anatomía del poder also enhanced our grasp of Mexico’s mid-nineteenth-century social history, with chapters on demography, population trends, land tenure, and early attempts at industrialization and their consequences. The author’s focus, however, is not without problems. Not so much concerned with the events of 1848–1853 or with the governments that then ruled and the policies they put forward, González Navarro’s preoccupation was more sociological. He sought to understand the society that made it possible for Santa Anna to make it back to the presidential chair in 1853 given that five years earlier he had left the country resoundingly defeated, if not in disgrace, and accused of secretly having pocketed a fair share of U.S. dollars in exchange for losing the 1846–1848 war on purpose. González Navarro dedicated over a third of the monograph to the plot to bring back Santa Anna and his actual return, and thus failed to give much attention to the 1850 presidential election or the actual day-to-day politics of Herrera’s and Arista’s administrations. Notwithstanding these oversights, his view that “the period 1848–1853 has been studied relatively little […] because Mexican historiography has been interested in other topics” still holds true today.¹⁰

Aside from Anatomía del poder, only one other book focuses exclusively on the post-war years. Written fourteen years after Gónzalez Navarro’s monograph, Salvador Rueda Smithers’ El diablo de Semana Santa: El discurso político y el orden social en la ciudad de México en 1850 offers a suggestive window into the apprehensions that kept middle-class Mexico City dwellers awake at night during the year that marked the half-century. Relying heavily on the newspapers, speeches, and pamphlets that then circulated in the Mexican capital, the author analyzes the concerns that those publications featured: Matters of crime and punishment, news of indigenous uprisings, the scandal surrounding the gruesome assassination of the prominent politician and former diplomat Juan de Dios Cañedo, and the devastation caused by the 1850 cholera epidemic. While El diablo provides a fascinating window into how fear featured as a prominent theme throughout 1850, it does not engage with the entire period that concerns us.¹¹

Michael P. Costeloe also deeply probed into the años olvidados. In the mid-1990s, following the publication of his books on the First Federal Republic (1824–1835) and the Central Republic (1835–1846), Costeloe began to research the Restored Federal Republic (1846–1853)—which stretches from the reinstatement of the 1824 federal constitution in August 1846 to the cessation of that charter in April 1853—with a view to completing a trilogy on independent Mexico. He then wrote several seminal articles and book chapters that offer much insight into various episodes or events that took place between 1848 and 1853. Costeloe tackled the response of contemporaries t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Setting the Scene: The History and Historiography of Post-War Mexico, 1848–1853
• 2 The Will of the People: Representaciones and Political Riots in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Mexico City
• 3 Winds of a Coming Storm: The Failure of Vatican Diplomacy and the Rise of an Intransigent Leadership in the Mexican Church
• 4 “The Powerful Element That Would Certainly Have Saved Us”: Debating the Revitalization of the National Guard in Post-War Mexico
• 5 The Sierra Gorda Pronunciamientos of 1848–1849 and the Origins of Popular Conservatism in Mexico
• 6 To Whom We Now Turn: The Problem of Leadership in Southeastern Mexico’s Age of Transition, 1848–1855
• 7 Violence, Collaboration, and Population Movements: The New United States–Mexico Border, 1848–1853
• 8 Truth and Reconciliation in Front of the Firing Squad: Trials and Executions in Post-War Mexico
• 9 “Looking for Virtuous Citizens by the Lamp of Diogenes”: Governance, Moral Regulation, and Hegemony in Guanajuato, 1849–1853
• Contributors
• Index