The rumblings of independence first stirred Mexico in 1810. A century later, in 1910, the country was engulfed in the Mexican Revolution. In the century between these events, Mexico declined politically and economically from its status as the most prosperous and important colony of the Spanish Empire. It lost most of its national territory as Central American provinces broke away and as the United States expanded westward and captured, purchased, or otherwise wrangled away Mexico’s northern lands.

Mexicans experienced political stabilization and economic growth again in the second half of the nineteenth century when liberal leaders, especially the dictator Porfirio Díaz (r. 1876–1910), imposed order and attracted foreign investment. But as Díaz himself is said to have remarked, “Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.”1 The United States pursued territorial expansion under the doctrine of manifest destiny, by which the United States would absorb all the territory spanning from its original Atlantic states to the Pacific Ocean. In the process, the United States took over lands belonging to Indian nations and to Mexico (Map 27.1). And as the United States grew economically, investors from the United States drove railroad construction and land speculation in Mexico that stripped lands away from peasants, who rose up in the 1910 revolution.

Mexico’s woes after independence resulted mainly from the inability of its political leaders to establish a consensus about how to govern the new nation. The general who led the war against Spain, Agustín de Iturbide, proclaimed himself emperor in 1822. When he was deposed a year later, the country’s southern provinces broke away, forming the new nations of Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Costa Rica. For the next three decades, power in Mexico rested in the hands of regional caudillos and local bosses. The presidency changed hands frequently as rival factions competed against each other.

By contrast, the United States established a clearer vision of government, a vision embodied in the 1789 Constitution. Deep differences of opinion remained over questions such as the power of the federal government relative to state governments, which played out in debates about the future of slavery and of westward expansion. These differences created regional tensions that lasted throughout the early nineteenth century and culminated in the Civil War (1861–1865).

Economically, the United States remained integrated into the expanding and industrializing British Empire. But the United States faced deepening regional differences: in the first half of the nineteenth century the North’s economy and population grew faster than the South’s, and the North became the center of immigration, banking, and industrialization. In the South slavery and tenant farming kept much of the population at the economic margins and weakened internal markets. Slavery also inhibited immigration, because immigrants avoided settling in areas where they had to compete for work with unfree labor.

The dichotomy between the economies of the U.S. North and South repeated itself in the difference between the economies of the United States and Latin America. The Spanish imperial economy imploded. Latin American economies were organized around the export of agricultural and mineral commodities like sugar and silver, not around internal markets as in the United States, and these export economies were disrupted by the independence process.

The fate of the major silver mine in Mexico illustrates the challenges presented by independence. La Valenciana in central Mexico was the most productive silver mine in the world. The machinery required to keep the mine functioning was destroyed during the wars of independence (1810–1821) and the mine ceased operation. Neither private investors nor the new government had the capital necessary to reactivate the mine after independence. Without the private profits, wages, and taxation that mining produced, Mexico’s economy withered and its credit networks collapsed.

Thus, after independence, Mexico entered a vicious cycle: without capital and economic activity, tax revenues evaporated, public administration disintegrated, and the national government became unmanageable. In turn, the lack of political stability drove investors away.

Politically and economically weakened after independence, Mexico was vulnerable to expansionist pressure from the United States. At independence, Mexico’s northern territories included much of what is today the U.S. Southwest and West. These northern territories attracted the interest of U.S. politicians, settlers, and land speculators. In the 1820s settlers from the U.S. South petitioned the Mexican government for land grants in the province of Texas, in return for which they would adopt Mexican citizenship. The U.S. government encouraged these settlers to declare the independence of Texas in 1836.

After Texas and Florida became U.S. states in 1845, President James Polk expanded its westward border, precipitating the Mexican-American War (1845–1847). In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), that followed Mexican defeat, Mexico ceded half its territory, including California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Utah, to the United States.