A five-part series developed and taught by Dr. Michael M. Brescia, Curator of Ethnohistory and Professor of History
Detail of Diego Rivera’s mural, "History of Mexico," painted on the stairwell of the National Palace in Mexico City.
When
Wednesdays, April 23, 30, May 7, 14, 21, 2025
9:30-11:30 AM (with a break at the halfway point)
In person in ASM Room 309 (limited space) or on Zoom
The nineteenth century was a transformative time for Mexico. It began the century as Spain’s most prized New World colony and ended it as an independent nation in the throes of modernization and the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. Between its independence from Spain in 1821 and Díaz’s consolidation of power in 1876, Mexico experienced four foreign invasions, political chaos, economic doldrums, a series of constitutional crises, and growing social inequities. To capture the historical sensibilities of this time, we turn to the fascinating life stories of individuals and the historical contexts from which they emerged. Biography remains a favorite genre of nonfiction for bibliophiles and the general public alike. Compelling life stories transport readers to strange and familiar places, introduce historical context, and can promote empathy and a deeper understanding of seemingly disparate lived experiences. The history of nineteenth-century Mexico is no exception, of course, as it provides us with a series of interconnected lives and cultural experiences filtered through the disparities of power that fashioned Mexican society in the wake of independence and the violence and bloodshed that accompanied the forging of a new nation.
Session 1 – Seeing Mexico through the Eyes of Foreign Travelers in Early Post-Independence Mexico
A compelling way to understand change and continuity in the Mexican historical experience is to “see and experience” Mexico by walking in the shoes of foreign travelers. Frances Calderón de la Barca Inglis, known as Fanny, was the Scottish wife of Spain’s first ambassador to an independent Mexico; she was an avid writer whose fifty-four letters sent to friends and family were, in effect, missives of “thick description” of daily life in the cities, towns, and villages of Mexico in the years following its independence from Spain. John Lloyd Stephens was an American explorer and writer who spent time in southern Mexico and Central America detailing, with the expert support of the English illustrator, Frederick Catherwood, and countless Indigenous laborers, the pre-Columbian pyramids and monuments that were slowly being taken back by the rainforest and jungle. No understanding of early national Mexico is complete (or robust) without peering through Fanny’s and Stephens’s “foreign traveler lens.”
Session 2 – Pickled in Brine: Santa Anna’s Leg and Mexico as Political Farce
The rise of Antonio López de Santa Anna, as the caudillo or strongman of Mexico in the late 1820s and 1830s, made manifest the political and social issues that were left unresolved following Mexican independence. Regionalism, federalism vs. centralism, republicanism vs. monarchism, and anti-clerical vs. pro-clerical forces battered the young nation and made it difficult for political maturity and economic stability to take hold. The Mexican presidency became a revolving door, for example, with Santa Anna rotating in and out of office on eleven different occasions between 1833 and 1855. During this same period, Mexicans had to deal with Spain’s attempt to take back its former colony, the French Pastry War, two secessionist movements, and the U.S. invasion of 1846-1848, which resulted in Mexico losing half of its national territory. Santa Anna would lose a leg during one of those military conflicts; it symbolized the cultural politics behind his efforts to mobilize the masses.
Session 3 – Indigenous Mexico and the Presidency at Mid-Century
Benito Juárez remains Mexico’s only Indigenous person ever to occupy the presidency. Born in the southern state of Oaxaca during the last years of Spanish colonial rule, Juárez received a Catholic education and almost became a priest. Law and politics became his vocation, however, and he rose through the civil and political bureaucracies rather quickly, even becoming governor of Oaxaca during the American invasion and occupation. Juárez represented the tensions within the Mexican Enlightenment that dated back to the previous century: how to reconcile democracy, individual rights, and economic development in light of profound colonial legacies such as the cultural authority and economic power of the Catholic Church, the influence of large-landowners, and the constant struggles of Mexico’s Indigenous peoples to meet their basic subsistence needs.
Session 4 – Liberty, Order, Progress, and the Social Costs of Modernization
As one of the heroes of the Cinco de Mayo battle against the second French invasion, Porfirio Díaz leveraged his military accolades and cultural bona fides to become president of Mexico in 1876. Despite taking office under the political banner of “effective suffrage, no reelection,” Díaz effectively occupied the presidency until the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. During his dictatorship—known as the Porfiriato—he consolidated political power by relying on the military and creating a rural police force, but he also implemented economic and fiscal policies that attracted massive sums of foreign investment, which transformed Mexico’s transportation and communication networks and boosted mining and oil production, not to mention the agricultural and ranching sectors. The social costs of Díaz’s modernization program were steep, however. A rapidly growing economic divide between the Porfirian elite and the masses produced stark inequalities that stoked resentment, especially among the rural working poor.
Session 5 – A Mystic Bridges the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands in the Fin de Siècle
The seeds of social revolution were cast by multiple actors across Mexico’s urban and rural divide. Teresita Urrea, a mestiza from Sonora—the northern Mexican state that borders Arizona—attracted rural and urban peoples alike due to her healing powers and mysticism. She soon earned the ire of the Mexican Church and the Porfirian state for her activities. When a stubborn drought and local instability upset the political structures governing the northern states of Chihuahua and Sonora, the Díaz regime intervened and sent troops to put down the growing rebellion. Teresita’s exile to the United States allowed anti-Díaz activists on both sides of the international border to use her popularity to combat the Porfiriato’s anti-democratic governance and pro-foreign investment economic policies. Teresita’s life becomes a metaphor for understanding the fluidity of the U.S.-Mexico border, an economic and cultural ebb and flow that continues well into the twenty-first century.
$200 in person (includes campus parking, coffee and light snacks)
$150 on Zoom
Amount paid over $120 is a tax-deductible gift.
Register now by contacting Darlene Lizarraga at 520-626-8381 or dfl@arizona.edu.
About Your Instructor
Dr. Michael Brescia is the Curator of Ethnohistory in the Arizona State Museum and has faculty affiliations with the Department of History, the James E. Rogers College of Law, the Center for Latin American Studies, the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies, the Southwest Center, and the National Center for Interpretation, at the University of Arizona. He teaches a wide-range of courses, such as Mexican history, Comparative History of North America, World History, Southwest Land and Society, and historical research methods. Michael is the co-author of two books that examine the broader historical forces that have shaped our continent from precolumbian times to the present: the fourth edition of Mexico and the United States: Ambivalent Vistas (with W. Dirk Raat, University of Georgia Press, 2010), and North America: An Introduction (with John C. Super, University of Toronto Press, 2009). In addition to his books, Michael's research has appeared in a variety of scholarly journals, including the Colonial Latin American Historical Review, Western Legal History, The Public Historian, and Journal of the Southwest, among others. He has served as lead curator of three museum exhibitions: the award-winning Many Mexicos: Vistas de la Frontera, Intimacy of Faith: Retablos and Ex-Votos from Mexico, and The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, as well as smaller exhibits that display and interpret a discrete number of objects, including Law and Continuity in Early Independent Mexico (Special Collections, Daniel F. Cracchiolo Law Library, University of Arizona), and Curator’s Choice: La religiosa en soledad [The Nun in Solitude] (Arizona State Museum). Michael’s research has been supported over the years by several external funding agencies, including, for example, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, Southwestern Mission Research Center (SMRC), and the Arizona Historical Records Advisory Board. He also has been a Fulbright Scholar in Mexico and Canada, a Visiting Research Fellow in the T.C. Beirne School of Law at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, a Visiting Professor and Researcher at El Colegio de San Luis, A.C., in the city of San Luis Potosí, Mexico, and, in 2015, he held the Los Angeles Corral of Westerners Research Fellowship in the Autry Museum of the American West (L.A., Calif.).