Bankruptcy and political inexperience were shaky foundations on which to construct a new state over an immense territory without effective communications and a heterogeneous, badly distributed population.
Josefina Vazquez, 2000195
The English settlers in North America brought with them the ideals of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. By the time of their arrival, the power of the British monarchy had been limited, a robust private sector flourished, and the religious monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church had been broken. Mexico lacked these influences since the Spanish settled New Spain earlier and then closed it to new ideas.196
The United States was relatively homogenous in the early nineteenth century as a result of the English having eliminated or pushed aside the indigenous population and then created small farms. After independence, townships organized and funded basic public education. In contrast, the Spanish superimposed themselves on the existing Indian population. After independence, the small Creole population maintained its privileges, denying power to the vast majority and refusing to finance a broad-based educational system.197
The differences between Mexico and the United States at independence reflect more their economic foundations than any grand colonial design. Given New Spain’s endowment of precious metals, fertile tropical land, and a sedentary indigenous population, the Spanish constructed the highly inegalitarian society that Humboldt commented on. In contrast, in British North America, the colonizers found neither precious metals, nor a subordinate labor source comparable to the Mesoamericans, nor land suitable for crops such as sugar, best produced on plantations. This resulted in a society where land ownership was more equitable. The examples of Jamaica and the British Caribbean islands, where harsh slave regimes prevailed, indicates that what shaped New World colonies was not an abstract colonial model but the nature of the colony’s economy.198
Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes commented on the differences between Mexico and the United States:
We did not acquire freedom of speech, freedom of belief, freedom of enterprise as our birthright, as you did. We had to fight desperately for them. The complexity of the cultural struggles underlying our political and economic struggles has to do with unresolved tensions, sometimes as old as the conflict between pantheism and monotheism, or as the rift between tradition and modernity. This is our cultural baggage, both heavy and rich.199
World History
