Paul Gillingham on Why Mexico Stays Together

Hey listeners, this is Dallas, one of the producers of Conversations with Tyler.

On April 14, join Tyler at the 92nd Street Y in New York City for a live taping of Conversations

with Tyler featuring Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist and Craig Newmark philanthropies.

Tyler and Craig will discuss trust, cybersecurity, and the building blocks of resilient civic institutions

in the digital age, along with plenty more, I'm sure.

The tickets are selling quickly, so be sure to grab yours before they're gone.

You can find the link to buy tickets at the top of the show notes.

Hope to see you there.

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University,

bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems.

Learn more at mercatis.org.

For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links,

visit ConversationsWith Tyler.com.

Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler.

Today I'm chatting with Paul Gillingham.

He has a new book out, Mexico, a 500-year history.

It is in my view the single best introduction to the history of Mexico

and will be one of the best nonfiction books of this year, 2026.

Paul, welcome.

Thank you very much for those kind words and it's a privilege to be here.

Thanks for the invitation.

Now after independence in 1821, why did not the rest of Mexico fragment?

The way Central America did a few years later,

where it splits off from the Mexican Empire?

Like what determines the line?

What sticks together with Mexico and what does not?

That's a very good question because it's one of the things that really makes Mexico

stand out in that period, those histories, is that it's during independence,

the rest of the Americas, you get a series of superstates.

And so you get Gran Colombia, which is most of the Andes,

and going across what's now Venezuela,

you get the United Provinces of the Rio Plate.

And these are huge and very difficult to conceive of superstates

and they fail within a decade.

And elsewhere you look at other postcolonial states

thinking particularly of India,

when there are a couple of years you fragmented and failed.

Mexico doesn't.

Mexico actually stands up with the exceptions you put of Central America,

which is formally part of it, in fact, that leaves within short order.

And so it's only as a question of what Alvaro and the re-ag calls

the miracle that Mexico exists.

And to explain it as a paradox, to make a triad it,

I think that there is a common theme in Mexican history,

which runs across most of those five centuries,

which is a remarkable degree of hands-off government.

It's imposed.

Mexico has a lot of mountains.

It's very difficult to rule from a central, any central pole.

And so savvy governments, or governments with no choice,

which are quite often the same thing, are very hands-off.

Federalism is built into Mexico's soul.

And I think that's one of the reasons from early on,

Mexico actually outpunches the rest of the Americas

in terms of sticking together as a territorial unit.

Now, as you know, in the early 19th century,

there are rebellions in Yucatan, the cast wars.

But Yucatan does not split off from Mexico.

What keeps that together?

Yucatan has always felt itself to be a different country, effectively.

And that runs through to the present.

You can see the cultural reasons, obviously,

and the Maya and the other great sophisticated urban culture

of the 16th century and before.

And so it makes sense that they should feel themselves

very different from the rest of what becomes Mexico.

And in fact, it comes through in small, but revealing ways.

And back in the 20th century, people find themselves

being asked whether they want a Yucatan beer or a foreign beer.

And a foreign beer being anything in Mexico

outside Yucatan.

Why doesn't Yucatan leave?

I think that it came extremely close.

And in fact, there's a moment in the 1840s

when Mexico and Texas form an alliance.

And Texas is chartering warships out to Yucatan

to try and prevent any naval incursions.

Why on earth does Yucatan stay?

I think it's because of the absence of an alternative capital

because Yucatan is profoundly racially divided.

It's one of the, I think, few places in Mexico

where you could say that really is a fairly stark racial divide.

And you have a plantocracy.

Some ways like the US South for the Civil War,

you've got a relatively small white plantocracy

centered in Merida.

They have no interest whatsoever in leading an independent struggle.

And while the Maya achieve an underestimated level

of sophistication as a state, it's still not

the point where you would get for more than a couple of years

to really joined up, independent movement,

spanning all races, all areas, and the entire peninsula.

Now, more recently, Mexico has a reputation

for being very violent, but Yucatan is especially peaceful.

There are years where it's had a lower murder rate,

I think, than Finland.

What, why is that part of the country

after this chaotic beginning, after independence,

recently so peaceful and so safe?

Again, a good question.

And it is, I think, explains broader patterns

of drugs and violence in Mexican history.

The first is that foreigners in Mexico have carte blanche,

or were in colonial time, people of Fuero.

Foreigners are untouchable.

And because much of Yucatan, the Yucatan economy

centers on tourism, the Riviera Maya, Cosmela, et cetera,

there's an awful lot in these key populated coastal strips

of foreigners, killing them as bad business.

Stability is better for business, anywhere.

In Yucatan, there's more of an imperative for that,

so that's one.

And the other is that it is ceased being

what it used to be, which is a major transit

and transshipment route.

And so, when I proposed to my wife on a beach

in Quintana de Rue, we could go out at 8am,

next to Tulum, when Tulum was a small dusty town,

we could go out twice a day, we would see small planes

coming up from Central America.

And we knew perfectly well as they headed north

out through Quintana de Rue, that this was a drugs run.

As a transshipment route, it has been far surpassed,

and so that other great reason for violence is absent.

Why did the central government even create

the state of Quintana Rue, how did you mention it?

Oh, that's an extremely good question.

Quintana Rue is very much its own country,

and in fact, in the cast wars, which you mentioned,

there's a very strong east-west divide on the peninsula,

and the east is where the Maya rebels

really survive the most.

And so I think that it's an attempt

to sort of administratively corral

the more unstable, difficult to rule parts of the country.

Using Yucatan, your point made as a country,

it's an attempt corral, and so, okay,

we can send armies in there, we can try and prevent contagion.

And the idea you can do that by drawing a line on the map

is obviously profoundly optimistic.

It's more terrain settlement,

which keeps Quintana de Rue really different

from the rest of the peninsula.

But it worked, right?

Can it be said to work when any sort of political project?

Can it be said to have worked

when there are very few people there in the beginning?

And Quintana Rue is historically really low population.

Most of the Yucatan was concentrated closer to Wards,

Merilla, and that west coast.

And Quintana Rue really takes off because of mass tourism.

And that's because of state intervention.

Relatively recently, Gankun was a village

until the late 60s or early 70s.

Before a perforio deas, why is there so little attention

to infrastructure in Mexico?

Because the money's not there.

But how does he get the money?

What accounts for the change?

What accounts to change is, first of all,

the final achievement of independence.

And formally in the history books, 1821,

the Spanish leave, Mexico's independent,

and new stage starts.

And that's not actually true.

And just in terms of the Spanish leaving,

well, they don't.

They maintain a garrison on the key fortress

in the main port, controlling the entrance to Mexico

from the Atlantic, the port of Veracruz.

The Spanish stay there till 1829, controlling it.

They don't really leave.

Within two years and finally leaving,

you have a French invasion.

Failed one, grant, but still an invasion.

Still that instability.

Then you get obviously American invasions.

Then you get a civil war.

Then you get, I'm sure we'll go into this in a minute.

My point is that it's not till 1867

when the Mexican independence forces take

a European imposed emperor and shoot him.

Well, she's not done.

You don't shoot emperors in global history.

The Mexicans do.

And this is a clear declaration of independence.

And it's an end to other empires' pretensions.

And it's the beginning of stabilization

led by a brilliantly gifted.

And this is what I was always never used.

But a brilliantly gifted politician, Portfidio Diaz,

who benefits from this being a time of a global boom

when the rest of the world, the industrial world,

craves Mexican resources.

And Diaz is very savvy to ride that into a new era

where Mexico becomes the epitome of a successful

what used to be called developing nation.

And it's with that that you get the infrastructure.

And you have Diaz, you have Guardes,

the other very important 19th century leader.

And they're both from the state of Oaxaca.

Is that coincidence?

It's only two data points.

Or does that tell us something?

That is such a good question,

because it is something which really stands out

to add data points to that.

At one stage under Diaz,

there are two sides of the congressmen

who are actually effectively from Oaxaca.

And while congress is sort of a rubber stump,

nevertheless tells you something.

And I think this goes back,

this is the culmination of a very long-term trend

of Oaxaca political savvy and relative independence.

So Oaxaca and yours are good at politics,

and they are very politically engaged.

If you want to make huge leaps,

you say, well, that goes back to the conquest,

the 16th century, where Spanish rules

flows around them, or why?

Because people living mountains tend to be quite good at war

and quite prickly.

And the Oaxaca and yours epitomize this.

And so outside the main value,

Oaxaca stays largely independent and very decentralized.

And so it's a question of,

it's almost like New England democracy,

it's firstly independent, it's more cities, counties.

And every time Oaxaca gets a chance,

it sees it to really push for autonomy and political power.

And you really see this to wrap up this rather

time-general explanation,

the direct downcester comes with independence,

where suddenly towns are allowed to declare themselves counties

with their own governments, their own elections,

very competitive ones.

And Oaxaca does it to an extraordinary extent.

Every village in Oaxaca says, we are now a county,

it's almost like Swiss cantons,

it's this extraordinary democratic urge,

and that trains people to be good at politics.

And you think that helps the count for why, to this day,

Oaxaca stayed so interesting to visit

because there's so much local autonomy.

I love that. And I would say, in part,

because one of the traditional tourist attractions

of Mexico is precisely indigenous culture.

And because of this autonomy Oaxaca is preserved,

you know, a multitude, very strong indigenous cultures.

And I think, yes, I'd add to that that it's comparatively safe,

a key consideration.

But that's a recent thing.

Tourism in Oaxaca goes back a long time.

I think it's also because you have

this stunning colonial city.

And Oaxaca city is really beautiful.

And we have in the US nothing at all,

or Canada, we've got nothing like that.

Finally, and I actually believe this.

Mexican cuisine is very, very diverse.

People think Mexican cooking,

backers, well, yes, but.

And Oaxaca cooking is really a superb cuisine.

One of the best. I would say Oaxaca and Yucateco.

Quisines, head and shoulders above the rest of Mexico.

And so I don't know how much that draws.

Well, I do, actually, there's quite a lot of sort of

culinary tourism, which tends to be rich tourism

in Oaxaca these days.

And so I think that's another draw.

It's extraordinary, in fact, how many people have realized that

over the last 15 or so years,

and forms these sort of expatriate, almost colonies in Oaxaca.

It's a fantastic place to live.

A mere two weeks ago, I was eating

barbacoa in Tlacolula.

Have you ever been there?

I have not, but I'm starting to resent

this story already, and you haven't told it, Tyler.

Go on, do tell.

Well, there's a fantastic church in town.

I would guess it's, I don't know, 20, 25 minutes

outside of the main city.

So it's easy to get there.

You just take a cab ride.

We asked our cab driver, Taxista, you know,

where's the best barbeque in a nearby Pueblo?

And that's where he took us, was unbelievable.

First of all, very good strategy.

And the best meal I had in Yucatan

by a country mile was about half an hour outside Merida.

And it was the same thing.

Ask a local taxi driver, come on.

If you want a really good meal, why would you go?

And he said, ah, it's a bit of a drive.

And he said, OK, I can see a perverse incentive

going my question.

But when you end up in a sort of small warehouse,

really in the middle of nowhere,

stuffed full of Mexican people with the most incredible deer,

you think, OK, you know, I actually think this was,

this was a fair, a fair reflection.

I envy you that meal.

20 minutes out of a Mexican town

is such a good recipe for finding the best food.

20 minutes, 30 minutes, I'm not sure why,

or just the outskirts.

Yeah, I think that's actually,

that's actually quite true.

And maybe there's a book in this, Tyler.

I'm not going to write it,

but there's an book in this sociologically

explain the significance and quality of restaurants.

20 minutes outside, major towns in Mexico.

If I could ask you while you're there,

what did you think of Monte Alban?

It's a little boring for me.

I've been there twice.

I didn't go there a third time.

The other ruins I much prefer.

And yeah, it's fine.

It's funny.

I say that to people and they go,

this is, this is heresy.

But yeah, frankly, given the plethora

of archeological sites,

and they say, I eat Monte Alban,

combines is the most boring,

large one, by a country mile.

It's extraordinary.

So I'm so glad that you're that endorsed them.

I hope there aren't too many more again,

your listeners to this particular podcast, though.

You know, there's that small tomb you can see.

What's it called?

Is it Sachila?

Is the city or the Pueblo?

It's again, like 30 minutes outside of Wahaka City,

I think we had some great food there.

And just to see that once, I'll protect you,

where you walk down the steps

and you have it all to yourself.

To me, is better than Monte Alban was.

And that's just one thing in a field.

That's the way Koba used to be.

Yucatan and such calco in Moraylos,

which they've really,

and I'm glad about this.

They've really expanded in the last 20 years.

The day, the tourism potential.

So they should have, because it's stunning.

Now, if we look to the early 20th century,

it seems there's some number of key leaders

from the state of Coahuila.

Is that coincidence?

No.

There's Madero, there's Coranza.

Why does that happen?

Oh, Coahuila is one of the states

which benefits enormously from this global boom

of the turn of the century,

which translates into the US drawing investments

and resources in a sort of unprecedented way.

I think that it's taking half

of British global investment at that time.

And resources are desperately needed.

The obvious thing in Coahuila is copper, copper mines.

But on the border in Coahuila has a geography

which stretches everything from arid mining territory

through to really, really rich irrigated lands.

And so it's wealthy.

It's next to US.

You get a class of big land owners

who are very diversified, very cosmopolitan.

So Madero was educated in part in Paris,

in part in Berkeley.

And they look southwards and think

this is a slightly slurotic dictatorship.

We can do better.

This is a big, very general question.

But after World War II,

Mexico avoids military rule

and they avoid civil war.

Unlike many parts of the Americas,

what's your account of that?

Well, my account of that, first of all,

that's a major paradox which really

lay behind the subject of my doctorate and my last book.

How do you account for the fact

that Mexico has a revolution, first of all,

one of the great revolutions,

which lays down radical prescriptions for equality,

which are then produced by one

of the most unequal economies in the Americas.

So you've got talking the revolution,

you've got massive enduring inequality.

And yet you have this, as you point out,

abnormal peace.

Going back to 1929,

with regular elections, like clockwork,

every six years,

every six years there's a peaceful transfer of power,

there is never any,

even imagination of a January the sixth moment there.

And to make another comparison,

there's, after 1929, no assassination,

whereas obviously here, JFK, RFK, MLK,

almost alphabet soup of assassination

of leaders, progressive leaders.

As you look at this and try and make it add up,

it's extremely difficult.

And I think it's in part

because the inequality misses some of the benefits

for the rapidly growing urban populations,

and which range from superb dirt cheap subsidized cinema

to low housing with two health care,

Mexican health care, given its income band,

is very, very good.

So just looking at any coefficients

for either income or wealth,

doesn't tell the entire story

of what Mexicans get out of the revolution.

And the final thing is precisely those elections.

Because this is one party state,

and the elections are rigged.

No question.

All the way until the last decade,

really, the national elections are rigged.

But the local ones are not.

Well, yes, they are, actually.

But any group of people who feel strong enough,

like they were Hakenius,

not about their local autonomy,

about ruling themselves,

can make enough of a fuss about it

that through the mechanism of election,

backed up by riot,

they can actually get their people in.

And so there is this unconventional,

but effective route to popular representation,

which a time outpunches the British,

because in the British system,

candidates just get imposed from the party.

The party says,

local candidate X will run for election in sorry,

and that's it, democracy's finished.

Mexicans don't like that.

And I think that's something that helps temper

this radical inequality in qualitative terms,

this apparent national sort of,

what the people call soft dictatorship.

And then the final piece,

and I'm sorry this answer goes on,

but this is just a central paradox,

which political scientists and historians

have struggled to understand for decades.

And I think we're finally getting a handle on it.

The final piece is the immense war-wearingness

caused by a revolution that kills one in 10 Mexicans.

And the education that gives leaders,

all the way to the fifties,

in the absolute pragmatic imperative,

whatever you do keep the lid on,

whatever needs doing,

if it's repression, then,

but generally, conciliation works better.

And this extremely complex equation,

I think, is what keeps the army out of politics,

what keeps relative peace and relative buy-in

to this unequal single party state.

There's nothing like it,

Mexico really is idiosyncratic in this,

and it's extraordinary,

and you can see complicated recipe.

And right before World War II,

the Cardenas regime redistributes

a lot of the cultivatable land.

How does that fit into your story?

That fits into my story in,

it's always good to say a work in Trinity.

So I'm going to say in three ways,

but then reserve the right to say a fourth.

And the first is that one of the key reasons

the Mexican Revolution is land.

Mexico is a strongly rural country

with strong traditions of this autonomy,

small freeholding or collective land owning

in indigenous areas.

And the Porto Firiato sees a revolution in this,

extraordinary concentration of land.

This entails, obviously,

dispossession of the peasantry.

This is one of the key things

that leads people like Emiliano Zapata to rebel.

And so you have this sort of pent up demand for land

from millions of families.

That's one, two, it largely for many fails

because they get land,

but they get land on the condition

that say they continue factory farming.

No, so everyone's going to grow sugar,

everyone's going to grow wheat,

not quite a Soviet coral cods,

but you don't have, the peasant doesn't have autonomy,

which they want quite often to plant whatever they want.

Right?

This is in many ways a failure from that point of view.

But there's always a psychological payoff

that they have got land.

And then in more straightforward terms,

this is one the reason that Mexico's healthcare system

are really nuts and bolts, level works.

It's because every communal farm that's a hedel they're called

has a medical office.

And so even though in the sort of apparent terms

of giving Mexico's rural population

a new level of wealth, autonomy,

it doesn't work particularly well.

It brings a certain pride,

it brings a certain independence,

it brings good healthcare,

there are all these less tangible benefits.

There's nothing like it in the Americas

and one of the key reasons I think that again,

the countryside stays largely quiescent

while it is stripped of resources

in the 60 years after Carlos leaves office.

Hasn't the a hedo system held Mexico back?

Because without that system,

many more people would sell their land to outsiders,

move to the cities,

just have much higher real wages.

For instance, as you see in China.

Well, you do get massive urbanization

and it's people being pushed out of the countryside

by a deliberate transfer of resources.

What do I mean by that?

I mean that food prices are capped.

And so the really key one,

maze its prices kept artificially low.

This means that you can have an urban

and especially industrializing workforce on the cheap.

You can have really low wages,

you can have quite low cost.

In Mexico, recently high quality industrialization,

it all comes at the expense of the countryside.

And so does the a hedo change that?

No, not really.

Also the a hedo is used for precisely

the sort of commercial farming,

which generates the sort of profits, economies of scale

that, you know, as sort of a command economy

or China might actually achieve.

And it's some instances that's not just run by the government,

but it's run by the government

as a sort of almost shell company or front

for the major foreign corporations.

And the key example is from the US,

Anges and Clayton, one of the giants

in food production, cotton, et cetera.

They are through the Mexican government

instructing a hedo exactly what to grow.

So in the end functionally,

most of the difference

and the pressure on the countryside

and the attraction of the city

means that you're going to get this sort of Chinese style

and level of urbanization irrespective of the agrarian reform.

Has Mexico worried too much about land

and not enough about human capital?

No, I didn't think so.

But say you look at Lebanese migrants, right?

They don't obsess over accumulating land.

They have high human capital.

They've done very, very well under the same regime.

You could say that the same about the Lebanese globally.

I mean, you want the great diaspora merchants.

You think Armenia, you think I'm Lebanon.

And so I think they bring that.

I don't think, I mean, you know,

look at how much land there is in Lebanon.

The Bakar Valley is tiny.

You can drive up and down it in about three hours

if you're feeling quite brave on any given day.

And so I don't think your absolute right land

is not a Lebanese aim.

In Mexico, as a very strongly peasant economy,

peasant society until 1960s, really,

I want what every peasant sort of globally

wants before you get rapid economic change,

which is what they call subsistence autonomy.

And what does that mean?

I want the guarantee that I can grow enough food

to get my family through the next harvest cycle.

And you can see the logic to that.

That's actually a more conservative and stable economic structure

than relying on commercial food purchase

when your own income is low and unstable.

What I'm trying to say is it makes very good sense.

Does the cargo system, which is common in Mexican preblows,

does it make any sense?

Is it sustainable?

Yeah, I think it is talking about human capital.

I think that the cargo system actually,

through its distribution of social capital,

brings a lot of talented people

to actually make the strange swap.

I mean, the cargo system whereby you and an indigenous zone

assume political office with absolutely zero payoff

and at quite considerable cost in terms of cash and time,

it makes sense because it brings

the sort of brightest and best into office over and over again.

This is when it works.

This is a very broad generalization.

The only real downside is a gerontocracy.

And when you look around, our political system

is quite clear that gerontocracy isn't limited

to societies which work the cargo system.

But say I'm a leader at Commissario.

I have to pay for part of the fireworks, part of the beer.

Isn't my incentive as a talented person

to minimize local state capacity,

rather than really having everything develop?

Oh, no, that's a good question.

I would say no, actually, and that generally,

cargo holders work as intermediaries with the state

in the 20th century.

And so by investing in fireworks,

buying a share in a bull for a fiesta

and buying some bull care or whatever your local hooch is,

and not just maintaining stability,

but doing it in part by bread and circuses

gives a level of control and local nuts

and bolts of knowledge which the central government then uses

as part of this basic quest for stability

and with stability going all the way back to Port Ferriato

comes sort of development.

And I think that this is a fast generalization.

The cargo system has great flaws,

but the reason it endures it also has great strengths.

But a lot of these villages, they seem quite dysfunctional.

It seems not uncommon for say half of the grown men

to be alcoholics, right?

There's a major problem with imbalance.

The men leave, the women have to stay.

They're abandoned or they can't marry

or there's no one to support the kid.

Wouldn't the central government do better

actually destroying a minimize involvement in the villages?

Sorry, I don't understand the last part of that question.

When you say minimizing involvement,

do you mean just stepping back

and letting villages get on with whatever they're

that sort of collective goals are?

I didn't quite understand.

Well, the village itself can make it hard to migrate

because you cannot in isolated fashion

sell your land to an outsider, right?

Someone's willing to bid for it,

but the whole village in essence has a veto

and whether you can sell your land.

Wages are much higher outside the village.

Alcoholism is lower outside the villages typically.

So should the villages be subsidized

or in essence should moving to the cities be subsidized

in terms of the net effect of policy?

I think that villages should be subsidized

and Mexican policy makers have realized that

for a long time and done so.

And I think that land is no longer the question.

Most people in villages, this depends very much where you go,

but the reason half the men aren't there

is precisely because they have migrated to work,

whether it be migrating to cities,

whether it be migrating to the north,

and remittances are a key source.

They are the lifeline for many villages.

And that's the way it's been a familiar century.

And you get a certain amount of sort of small scale cultivation

as always of May's tomato squash, chillies, et cetera,

your full sort of nutrient package.

That's a small portion of what people

are actually doing in villages.

And that's increasingly uneconomic

on a sort of market local level.

And this is why you get this out migration

that you talk about.

It's not just male.

It's also women ever since they set up Makiladoras.

There's been huge outflow of the more entrepreneurial

to these factories on the border, tax free zones

to assemble US components.

Alcoholism what remains the really economic stress

with this huge out migration of young people,

express itself as it does in a lot of people

with drinking, with what's interesting though

is not with drugs.

Alcohol is this very strong constant.

I mean, speaking as a Brit,

speak about other people's alcohol consumption

is slightly hypocritical and I'm not going to really go there.

But it is interesting that historically,

well, Mexico is a hard drinking society.

And we're going back to the colony now.

Let's say I look at India,

country with a lot of problems.

India typically grows between four to eight percent a year,

depending which numbers you believe.

Mexico is lucky to grow at two percent a year.

What accounts for the difference?

Like where is Mexico failing?

Oh, I think Mexicans would see that as extraordinary success

because Mexicans had the greatest demographic transition

in history, you know, the way you get population growth

and you know, any species is basically an S-shaped curve

in the right sort of right environment.

And Mexico had this exceptionally steep curve

and its population in 1910 and 2000 increases 700%.

And that is steeper than anywhere in the world.

That's speed.

And what's that mean?

It means that you come to the 70s

and just as population control starts to be a global concern.

Mexico has this very joined up state.

It's impoverished, but it's pretty joined up

and takes a look at what they see as being a problem,

which is population growth,

putting too much strain on state infrastructure,

social services.

And okay, so we need to control that ASAP.

And they put together this non-coestive campaign

and like India, India identifies the same problem.

I'm talking about per capita income growth though.

So India gets a lot richer over a year.

I thought you had population growth now.

Okay, maybe we can go back to that

because that also fascinates me.

Per capita income growth.

Again, I think does an extremely good question.

I think the Mexico has a overall

impressive medium-term GDP growth.

And so at the end of the 60s,

it's the 27th largest economy in the globe.

Right now it's the 13th.

The question becomes really income distribution.

So I think that if you look at it not in question

of a few years or maybe a decade,

but over a longer term,

a Mexican income growth has been impressive.

This isn't all down to hard work or smart policy.

It's down to the great advantage

of being next door to the world's largest market, no?

But what it does mean is that you have maybe not

the sort of extremely accelerated economic growth

of right now in India, but post-nafter,

you actually do get quite a lot of quite fast

sort of take off almost speed of growth.

So maybe it's just that Mexico has actually gone

a stage beyond India is if you want to play and catch up.

That's me thinking on my feet, what do you think?

I think human capital is by far the biggest problem

and then the slow rate at which small informal businesses

are willing to enter the more heavily regulated sector

is a real bottleneck.

But Mexico has a lot of human capital.

One of the reasons that this population control works

is because you get far more people going through

those critical first three years of primary school.

Ideally, everyone goes through high school,

not but that's just not a global reality.

And the key metric is how many people

you're getting through three years of school

which teach you to read, write and do rudimentary maths.

And Mexico's record on that is far better

than most middle income comparatives.

There's a really good study.

It says especially women, far more get those first three years

than precisely actually in India, Kenya and Egypt.

We're looking now at this phase of take

off I'm talking about of the 70s and 80s.

And so I think the human capital there's really there.

A lot of Latin America has above average years of schooling

for their income level, but pretty low test scores,

pretty low performance at the top.

Just for instance, that English,

even getting by in conversation in Mexico

seems to be only about 7%.

That to me is remarkably low,

especially given how many of them migrate

or wish to migrate.

And I think education has failed Mexico.

Even though people, yeah, they show up at the building,

the teachers often aren't good, sometimes in the preblows,

they're not even there.

I think that Mexicans would absolutely agree with you

and I would beg to differ, part differ.

The first thing I'd say is that since forever a key skill

in migrating has precisely been English acquisition.

And again, this is kind of global.

No, I mean, you get this everywhere.

There's this realization and migration select

the most entrepreneurial, the most dynamic generally.

And so this sector goes to the US either preps beforehand

or else learns very quickly here.

It's one of the reasons that they're economically

so successful back in Mexico.

7% speaking English, do you think my global comparatives

that's low?

For a neighbor, it's very, very low.

And what percent of the Mexican population

has lived in the US at some point?

Right? It's got to be at least 10%, probably higher.

So that to me is stunningly low.

I'd say that probably is part due to the urban rural divide

and Mexico's population is now overwhelmingly urban.

It tips in 1960 for the first time

there's more city dwellers than country dwellers.

There is a chasm between education in the countryside

and education in the city.

So I would be interested in those numbers

if you disaggregated them down to towns of,

I would say, 4,000 plus and saw how that broke down

because my bet would be that you would have far higher,

globally comparative or even beyond rates in the cities,

which as you say, it would make sense.

You think, well, hold on a minute, you've got a country

which invests by comparative's relatively well in education.

You're enabled to the US, where's, you know, where's the English?

Good questions.

I would disaggregate the data before I'm taking home the idea

that there is a massive failure

in that specific sector of the education system.

To return to population, why is the Mexican total fertility rate

now below that of the United States?

Much poorer country, right?

One thinks of Latin America as having high fertility,

but it doesn't anymore.

What's happened there?

This again is the product really of two things,

which we've already been covering.

And one is this really joined up noncoessive population

control of the 70s and 80s, which was a global model.

I'm Mexico hosted the global conference on this,

I think twice or three times,

it got a prize from the UN.

And how could it do this compared the rest of Latin America?

Two things.

First of all, by keeping Catholicism out of political life,

more than almost anywhere else.

And so, whereas you have priests

in vain against the evils of contraception

again across most other Latin American societies,

the revolution and the 19th century before it

meant that Mexico has a unique degree

of separation of church and state.

As the church just doesn't say anything,

as the government goes about aggressively pushing

the pill, condoms, et cetera.

Now, at this stage, the obvious question was,

okay, we'll hold on, so the church doesn't say anything,

but on a micro level, inside families,

conservative people used to until the 70s,

the total fertility rate was nearly seven per family.

And traditionally, having children, especially male children,

is a symbol of success.

And economically, it used to be useful

to have the spare hands now.

So what changes, a micro level, goes back to education.

Women who are educated have far more autonomy

to say yes to contraception.

And you see this really clearly in rates of uptake

of the pill, which in the 60s goes to the roof

as soon as it's available.

And we've got surveys from hospital to people are there,

do you take the pill yes or no?

Yes, you do.

And even in really conservative societies,

there's a village which has been very studied,

it's wonderful, called San Jose de García

in the Highlands of Halisco.

And there, we've got this really good quality

sort of a micro study.

I wouldn't just say yes, actually,

we don't want to have 6.7 children,

thank you very much.

And so we will use contraception,

and sorry to the men, you're just going to have to like that.

And why is that that globally correlates

to primary education?

And women's primary education,

how many women for all the floors

are getting through the doors for those first three years?

By the end of the 60s, it's 73%.

Again, go global to what was then

a band of middle-income countries.

There's nothing like it.

Now most historians of Mexico, they're not British,

and you are.

Where are you from in Britain?

And how do you think that's shaped?

How do you read Mexican history?

I think there's a small group of, well I know

there's a small group of British historians

and they're rather good at what they do.

My own story is actually not wholly British

because I grew up in Ireland in the Southwest

in a county called Cork.

And I was actually thinking, I was supposed to-

That's the accent you have, by the way,

so I was confused when you said you were ready to talk.

Yeah, they're a strange mix, isn't it?

Just with an Irish accent.

Well, yeah, you've got a good ear.

It's sort of a hybrid.

Growing up in Cork, I was supposed to give a talk

last month at the university there

and I was thinking, you know, what can I say

to link the two up?

And Treesis, what I've been talking about

this fierce local independence, local pride identity.

This is so Cork.

I mean, Cork sees itself.

And so I thought, oh no, totally.

And land, as you say, and hardship Cork

is one of the centres of the great hunger,

the great famine of the 19th century.

So there's that, but then I was educating Britain

and I was lucky enough to come across

the smartest historian I'd ever met.

A historian of the revolution called Alan Knight.

And I was deciding what I wanted to do

with my sort of intellectual life.

I met this person and thought, okay, that's what I'd like to do.

And thanks to the Oxford system,

I could spend one semester into just working with him

just on the Mexican revolution

and that changed everything.

And then there's a flip answer,

which is Mexico's weather is a lot better than England's.

Now, when it comes to crime and violence,

why is the state of Guerrero traditionally so tough,

so violent, so difficult?

Is it just mountains?

Is it something else, low-state capacity?

Ethnic groups that are there?

Guerrero is a place which is very dear to me.

I'm actually from my doctorate,

really tried to dive deep into two states

and Guerrero was one of them.

So I went to villages, I meant it's of that level work

in various places.

And in part, yes, it's geographic determinism.

It's mountains.

But then you say, well, hold on,

let's hear him out and it runs all the way up

into the Rockies.

Can you tell us a bit more?

And I think it's because of a long tradition

of the drive for political independence exacerbated

in its intensity by a large Afro-Mex population

on the coast who distinctly conscious

that they have been discriminated against

who are good at violence.

I think it's because Guerrero is next door,

or it's relatively close to Mexico City.

And so it's threatening to Mexico City

in the way, say, Sonora or Yucatan isn't so much.

And so when some fairly oppressive conditions,

you can imagine, land monopolization,

political thuggery, et cetera, combined in a state

with people who really are very keen on independence

and are relatively close to city,

the answer is this sort of reinforcing cycle

of repression, opposition, repression.

And that's what you've seen in Guerrero going back

really on and off across two centuries

of Mexican independence,

but specifically intensified from Portoferriato onwards.

And what's forgotten sometimes is really interesting

is that there's three families

which really run the Guerrero coast

and one of them is actually American.

It's usually successful, major landowners.

And so you think of Guerrero as being slightly remote, et cetera.

It's also got the major port Vaca Polco.

It's extremely dynamic.

It's multi-ethnic.

There's a lot of competition.

And there's a long history of, again,

this desire to be left alone.

What's your favorite part of Guerrero?

Ah, if you drive north at what's called the Costa Grande,

so you go to Vaca Polco, you turn right

and you go up what's called the Costa Grande

and you get tourist towns, Iwanejo, Estapa.

And after about four hours of driving,

you get to a place called Saladita

and which is basically a restaurant with a surf break.

And that and the village just about next door

called Troncones.

I spent a lot of very, very happy time there

when I was a kid.

So that's my favorite part.

Did you spend any time in the Rio Valsas villages?

No, I didn't.

There was a couple of reasons.

And one of the key ones was that region

was perceived as being extremely dangerous

while I was there.

And so there were horror stories

like the Egyptian consul took a wrong turn

instead of going along the coast,

went up into that area and was sort of killed

and dismembered, completely breaking the rule

that foreigners are untouchable.

And so now I didn't and I wouldn't put it

at the top of parts of Guerrero.

I would like to explore at length either.

Why have you been there?

Yeah, I've spent a lot of time there.

They're very beautiful.

I used to go there to buy amates and pottery.

The road in can be tricky,

but they're very safe once you get there.

And which period are we talking about with that?

I was mostly there in the 90s and early 2000s

which was safer than today.

You and me both, yeah.

But then they were completely safe.

No problems whatsoever.

I think one of that was the roadway.

That was one of the roads like the Costa Grande

where you were told, okay,

between basically dawn and dusk.

It's not too bad as I sort of roll the dice,

but from dusk to dawn that would be foolish to travel.

Like of a guardrail would worry me as much as anything.

But for a noidal speaking villages,

it's the best place to go in Mexico, I think, that I know of.

There and I would say the Northern Sierra of Puebla

is also strong concentrations.

But it was that just for the off the beaten track fascination

or was there a specific reason which took you there?

I ended up writing a book about it,

but mostly for art collecting.

And you know, one comes to have friends in these places

as I'm sure you have two.

And you want to visit them and they regard you

as a kind of family or compadre, whatever you'd call it.

Well, I'm glad I wasn't more rude about it

than I was already.

Well, it's a tough place.

You're living standard once you arrive is extremely low.

Yeah.

The place I spent longest in is a village in the North

called Ijkatiopa, about hour and a half drive,

at least back then, out of Tasko where a lot of people

go in this sort of silver city.

Ijkatiopa was about 1,500 people,

then really very poor and one cafe on the main square

and virtually very, very little else.

I ended up like a feeble foreigner

going with a little camping stove

and many, many cans of Campbell's soup

and tuna fish and saltines.

Yeah, that's those parts of the countryside.

Then you had endemic threats to your stomach.

Now, 30 years ago, I would not have thought,

did not think that Mishua Khan would end up so violent.

And yet it has.

What's the story in that state?

First of all, me neither.

The story in that state is a combination

of production and transshipment.

For transshipment, you've got the post of Lazarus Karnas,

which is a huge port.

There is a total white elephant.

It was bought in the sub built in the 70s

as a way of sort of honoring the great revolutionary leader

Karnas.

It was not connected ever to anything really.

So you've got this fantastic infrastructure

from both coastal, but also trans-Pacific trade.

So it's a very good place to bring in precursors

and fentanyl more recently, precursors for meth.

Oh.

So that's parts of the transshipment.

It's also that whole Pacific coast, obviously,

is a major transshipment zone.

There's also the production and methamphetamine is large

recently, but in the highlands also heroin,

and it's not a poppy and marijuana.

You've got the avocado industry.

Huge prize for extortion, which is increasingly

many drug trading organizations,

principal or major part of the portfolio

and avocado farmers and lime farmers are great to extort.

And then finally, we come back to my favorite themes,

mountains.

It is quite easy to hide things like meth labs

and it's quite easy to kill soldiers

who come looking for you.

Michoacan is sort of made for guerrilla warfare.

This combination of a place where you can produce

a lot of excellent illicit goods.

You can transship them and you can kill

and state actors who come after you

and make Michoacan this recentre of violence.

The final piece is overall these resources.

It's been a front line over different cartels

shifting over the last 20 years as cartels come and go,

but it's never had that single organization dominance

which makes places safe.

Now, when your model of how Mexico is evolving,

as you know, Monterey is quite a wealthy part of Mexico

and it's growing 20 years from now,

will that just be safe and normal?

Or is it still going to be in this in between state

where you have to worry what,

row your on, are you too close to the border?

Or will it just all be fine because of the wealth?

Well, already Monterey is one of the places

where I would feel really quite safe.

Not in town, but out of town, right?

You have to ask questions.

No, well, yeah, but yeah,

no, everly on the state.

It's also not sort of, it's not front line.

These things as you should have implied,

shift rapidly and so until quite recently,

Kolyma Pacific coastal state was really quite tranquil.

It's now the most violent state in Mexico

until two years ago, Sena Loa,

because it was controlled by a single drug trading organization,

the Sena Loa Cartel,

was also counterintuitively really quite safe.

It's not anymore because that's in town,

Sena Loa, look at that.

Monterey, I think it's very bad business

to have a war over drugs in somewhere

which doesn't grow them,

somewhere which isn't important to transshipment

and somewhere where there are such fantastic possibilities

of extortion, middle and small income businesses.

And so I would already be quite happy around the way we're on

and I would predict,

because of those structural factors,

nothing to grow, little to try the ship,

that it will and wealthy point out,

it will continue, continue thus.

And in 20 years,

I would hope with an even greater sense of security

in the countryside around it.

Now, the recent judicial reforms,

which spilled over into the more recent administration,

a lot of outsiders said,

well, that's taking away the independence

of the Mexican judiciary.

Do you agree or how bad is it or does it not matter much?

Or what's your sense?

I think it matters greatly.

I always found it strange, the idea of electing

any sort of judicial official,

and say when I moved the US,

I thought, well, hold on, you do what?

The idea of electing judges is a really poor idea,

I think, in Mexico,

because of the interest of local drug trading organisations

in having sympathetic judges,

and it's a lot lower cost to get them elected

than to threaten them.

Judges are people who it's generally a bad idea to kill.

State doesn't like it.

Happens really regularly,

but still quite a high risk strategy

as opposed to just having them in your pocket.

And while electoral turnout across Mexico is admirably high,

I'm remarkable.

Judicial elections have just been the glaring exception to that.

I think turnout was 13%.

And I think that in itself is a condemnation

of the whole project.

And so while recognising flaws in longstanding flaws

in the Mexican judicial system,

this is, I think, a disastrous reform.

Why'd they do it then?

They did it, I think, because of a desire

to get the current dominant party, Morena,

really further dug into regional power

by having sympathetic judiciary.

I think that Morena's local and regional activists

were very keen on it.

I think it was philosophical populism,

as well, from the Amelow government.

And I think it was absolutely...

It's one of the most unfortunate things

I've seen come out of Mexican politics in the last decade.

For our last segment, just some rapid fire

questions about Mexico.

What's your favourite Mexican movie?

Ooh.

I'm going to say Winterlight,

but you're a viewer, mate, ever.

Anything with Maria Felix in it.

Name one.

Donia Barbara.

Superb.

I'd also say, though, more recently,

Itumama tambien.

That's a great film.

It's difficult to stop laughing at.

And three burials of Melquiades Estrada, I like very much.

I think that's the black dark humor there

is profoundly Mexican.

I think that's one of the reasons why

that the British can really appreciate Mexico

is we've got a similarly dark sense of humour.

Howard Stern was famously rude about Mexican music.

What in it do you like best?

I like the fact that they do superb girly pop.

That's a terrible thing, right?

But they have really good from the last 20 years.

Women singers who are extremely intelligent,

tuneful, dynamic, varied.

I'm thinking specifically of Julieta Benegas

and Natalia Lafogad.

The latter, and this is in my book,

I'm Rote, a song back in the year 2000,

which is a hilarious reflection.

I assist as pregnancy, the state of the world,

and called the First Lady of Mexico, a racist worm.

This is music which, you know, it's thought provoking

and tuneful.

And so I like that.

I think it's a, at its best, it's a very clever music.

And what for me is it's worst with apologises

to everybody who likes Alastaira's,

then Norte, Norteño music, I cannot stand recorded.

But if you've ever heard it live in a night spot,

suddenly the polkas, the wheezing,

the songs which sort of a mix conversion of gangster rap,

you think, actually, yeah, this is quite good,

I was an MC another couple of years ago,

and I'm this boy with a sort of a masked guy

with an M16 on the door,

and three Norteño bands inside, and it was fabulous.

So, you know, even my least favourite has some legs to it.

It can be very good fun and very evictive.

What's the great classic Mexican novel?

Oh, has to be la muerte de artémiocruz,

the death of artémiocruz.

Pedro Partermo, for me,

are even savage detectives, I know Bologna's from Chile,

but to me it's a Mexican novel.

Totally, and I'm glad you say that

because savage detectives is very much

a sort of insiders novel of Mexico.

I mean, the mockery of the UNAM,

and specifically its faculty,

its faculty of law and philosophy,

is just so spot on,

and yet, in part, because it is so close

to what I study to the mystery of the origins

of the one party state and the pre.

And in part, also, I think it's one of the first Mexican novels

I read, and things you read,

or things you listen to between the ages of 14 and 18,

they mark you and stay with you fairly or aren't fairly.

And why are artémiocruz, as your pick?

Artémiocruz, because of the real human complexity of it,

so it's the story of a young revolutionary

who manages through violence, luck, business, smarts,

extortion to move from being very poor beginnings,

to being a major Mexican mogul.

The story skips between his life in sort of decadent old age,

and he's made it, but in a classic sort of the hollowness

of wealth, and he's made it, but in human terms,

he's totally emptied, and then the beginning,

the story if he got there,

and I find it so moving, so tragic,

and so deeply evictive of the Mexico I read about,

the Mexico I study.

I say, if I'd read it 10 years later, who knows?

And if I'd read it last year,

I might actually be ranking below

and the recent novels of Alvaro Enrique,

who two novels really stick out.

One is like a modern artémiocruz,

it's called Dicency Dicencia,

which anybody who sort of likes Mexican humor,

likes Mexico City, will just get.

And the other is your empires have been dreams in English,

which is a retelling of the conquest

as this glorified heist by a bunch of fortunate thugs,

which I think most historians would agree with,

and has some twists in it, which are stunning.

And Alvaro, of course, has the advantage of,

he actually reads quite a lot of history,

so when he writes history, the details are there,

and you find yourself nodding out, yeah, yeah,

can believe that.

As a recline, it's a big fan of the conquest book.

I think, well, it did very well,

and I can see why it was clever, complex,

it was provocative, and it had a killer twist to it,

was not to like.

Let's say an educated person comes to you,

they live in the United States,

and they have two weeks to spend,

and they want to learn Mexico,

but put aside Mexico City and put aside the ruins.

They want to learn Mexico, Mexico proper.

Where do you send them?

What's the ideal Mexico trip?

Okay, I think ideal in terms of educational,

not necessarily, but it should be fun and interesting too, right?

Okay, so I would send them across the board

in California and Tijuana.

I would then tell them to fly to,

I think, probably Zacatecas,

because the sort of brocks blend of Mexico,

it's not captured anywhere with the same intensity.

I mean, this was the center of the sort of financial,

they're the wealth producing world.

They had the biggest mind in the world and the colony.

That translated into this, absolutely.

Just, it's beyond words, architecture, it's stunning.

You get buildings, there's a sky at style

called the Churriguez Square.

Every inch is carved with extraordinary detail.

So I think Tijuana, Zacatecas,

and from Zacatecas, I'd go to a town called Aguascalientes.

And I would make sure to go there during the annual Feria,

which is notable for two things,

apart from the fact that it's a great weeklong party,

and one is you get some of the best bullfights in Mexico,

and two is this is one of the very few times

when gambling is legal, temporarily there.

When you combine that, again, it's a pretty colonial town,

and I'd make sure I'm going to see that symphony orchestra,

which is superb, Argentine conductor.

From Aguascalientes, I think I take a plane

and go to, I'm trying to do maths now,

three days in each place.

So I had nine days, two more cities.

I would go to Halapa in Veracruz,

precisely because it's particularly unturisted

for its quality as a city,

and their surroundings are beautiful sort of...

Temperature climate.

And then the final one is really climbing things in.

I'd hope to have a private jet on this or else a driver.

I would go to San Cristóbal, Las Casas,

the colonial capital of Japan.

Great trip.

Last two questions.

First, what's the best Mexican restaurant

in or near Chicago?

In or near Chicago, I'm not sure

for the simple reason my family's actually based in New York.

And so when I go out for dinner,

it's usually a new year.

In or near New York then.

So, oh, now that's great.

So I just found a place.

Is it a parallel or where?

No, it's downtown.

It's called Santo Loco.

And it's Takeria, which is exceptional.

And in case you find that to be inverse snobbery,

I would say that underneath the Takeria,

there's a hidden quite smart restaurant.

There's almost a sort of speakeasy restaurant.

Both of them are superb.

And I intend spending a lot of time in both

of them.

So that's my answer for New York.

Get to Santo Loco and have there two of that.

You have to try two.

One is their mushroom taco, which is a revelation.

And the other is their carnitas.

For the last question, just to plug your book again,

Mexico, the 500-year history,

everyone should buy and read it.

Finally, what will you do next?

I'm writing a book, which is a prehistory of money laundering.

And it's based on a document I found

in the British Foreign Office,

which is a query from a director

of the great Boolean dealers, Johnson Matthew.

And it says, I've just been in touch

with a person on a steamship,

lying off in the Channel Islands,

who has five million pounds worth

of illicit government, Mexican government silver on board.

I'd like to buy it pennies on the pound.

What would your advice be?

And the first bit of advice is check

that the silver actually exists

and don't tell the Mexican government.

I would like to know what happened next at that end,

because I think I know at the Mexican end

where it came from,

and how it got onto the ship in New York Harbor.

So I'm hoping to reconstruct,

using Mexican, American, there's FBI involvement,

and British archives, as much as I can

the path of this silver.

In this decade, the first great decade

of money laundering, which is in 1920s.

Paul Gilligan, thank you very much.

Tyler's gonna pleasure thank you for the invitation.

Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler.

You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,

or your favorite podcast app.

If you like this podcast,

please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review.

This helps other listeners find the show.

On Twitter, I'm at Tyler Cowan,

and the show is at Cowan Convos.

Until next time, please keep listening and learning.

You