Tragedy and triumph: a 500-year history of Mexico

From the chaos of the Spanish conquest and the humiliation of military defeat to the United States to the disruption of the Revolution, Mexican history is often viewed through the lens of trauma and violence. Yet, as Paul Gillingham explains in this episode of the History Extra podcast, this was also one of the earliest democracies in the world, one in which indigenous people enjoyed rights unthinkable in the United States. In conversation with Spencer Mizzen, Paul discusses One Nation's extraordinary history. Paul, at the very beginning of your new book, you introduce us to what you describe as the first Mexicans. Just to start, who were these people and what was it that defined them as the first Mexicans?

That's a controversial story, of course, because as soon as you say that Mexicans actually don't exist until first contact with Europeans, people at the back of the classroom can put their hands up and say, excuse me, that's unbelievably racist. The first Mexicans, if you say Mexicans are people who inhabit this vast territory in North America, obviously go back more or less the Bering Strait, so we're talking 10,000 years. But Mexico as a label for a place doesn't really come into existence until late in the 16th century, and Mexico more than anything else is defined by this extraordinary coexistence and fusion of peoples from across the world. And Mexico is the first place where that happens.

And until first contact with Europeans, that's just not there. So Mexico is really fundamentally a global society. And this is where you start off in 1511 saying, okay, Mexicans are what happens when you take Europeans. and indigenous peoples, and then in very short order, Asians and West Africans, and you put them all in this country and you see what happens next. And you described the Spanish arrival in the Americas as a meeting of two long separated worlds, one that had virtually no contact for thousands of years.

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