Mexico’s Hope: An Encounter with History

With guerrilla insurgencies, drug and corruption scandals at the very top, and growing ferment over NAFTA, Mexico is moving at bullet speed to the world’s centre stage. This social history details the epic drama behind the crises that promise to transform politics in the Americas. The encounter between Europe and Mexico’s ancient civilizations is traced forward to the colonial legacy and the uneven development of Mexican capitalism and its authoritarian-technocratic state. Archival materials cast light on the U.S. intervention that helped defeat the revolution of 1920. This work describes the rapid industrialization after 1940 and analyzes the repeated upheavals that followed against the PRI, the world’s longest-lasting ruling party. Utilizing field research, Cockcroft examines the PRI’s disintegration; the rise of the nacro-state alliance ; the spread of maquiladora border sweatshops and other symptoms of free trade ; the 1994-1995 collapse of the peso; the Zapatista uprising; and rising tensions in the military, the Church, and U.S.-Mexico relations. As its detail shifts in the political wind, the study finds both pain and hope in Mexico’s present encounter with history.