Historyscopa de Mexico™ |
By T.L. Winslow (TLW), the Historyscoper™ |
© Copyright by T.L. Winslow. All Rights Reserved. |
Original Pub. Date: 2009. Last Update: June 26, 2018. |
Here's a pequeña Historyscopa de Mexico (Mejico) for Mexico history ignoramuses. Yes, that means you.
In 9 C.E. Germanic (Cherusci) chief Arminius (Hermann) (OG "army man") (-17 to 21), who served in the Roman army from 1-6 C.E., obtained Roman citizenship and a knowledge of Roman military tactics, and returned home in 7 C.E. to find his people being oppressed by haughty Roman gov. (legate) Publius Quinctilius Varus (b. -46) gets pissed-off and organizes a revolt, leading Gorgeous W. Bush, er, Varus and his three legions (20K men) into a trap, where his unarmored warriors outthink, outwit, outlast and massacre them in the Battle of Teutoburg (Teutoburger) Forest (Wald) in modern-day Kalkriese near Cologne in modern-day North Rhine-Westphalia, West Germany, N of Colonia Agrippina and Mainz; the news causes panic in Italy, and Augustus goes apeshit, wandering around his palace for months crying "Varus, give me back my legions", and begins to decline into an old fart, ordering the Rhine River to become the permanent border between the Romans and the Germans, while Tiberius is transferred to the Rhine frontier to try and plug the dyke; all hopes of a new N frontier for the Roman Empire are abandoned, and the Romans go permanently on the defensive, creating a permanent division between N and S Europe, allowing the Germans to develop a strong nat. consciousness and breed hordes of Roman killers on their own timetable to exploit the fatal mistake of lack of noive that ultimately dooms the supposedly merciless Romans, who fall in 476 C.E. This fatal decision outlasted the Roman Empire, forever splitting Europe into the German-speaking north and the Latin-speaking south, which was a big reason for the Protestant Reformation, and even carried over into America; people still can't overcome it today.
For untold centuries America was populated by brown-red aborigines, who were like kids playing in a candy store until their number came up and they were invaded by mean serious greedy madass genocidal militaristic white Roman Catholics from Spain and Portugal, who found them still in the Stone Age while they had the latest advanced military technology. Don't ask me why they were so backward, since anthropologists later claimed that they had been in the Americas as long or longer than the whites had been in Europe, but there's no way I'm going for the Joseph Smith Jr. (1805-40) divinely-inspired Mormon theory that traces them back to the Lost Tribes of the Jews circa 700 B.C.E., and claims they started out white but were cursed by God with dark skin and ignorance to punish them for rejecting lily white Jesus and going pagan. (Smith looked like Elvis and had the same appetite for hotel keys attached to panties, so his motives were suspect, sorry.) Plus it helped that these filthy world-traveling wick-dipping Spanish buggers brought with them a host of horrible European diseases that their New World immune systems had no defense for, causing whole countrysides to be wiped out every time a Spaniard took a shit in a river. Hence, though few in number, the white invaders soon conquered vast stretches of territory populated by millions, developing the attitude that New World peoples are an inferior race that God wants them to wipe out and/or convert to the True Faith, and is all part of white man's ultimate god Progress, show it around, show it in town, show it to people, this is something funky, guard yourself from identity theft. No wonder they loved the title of Conquistador, it was a mission from God like the Blues Brothers, insure yourself with Geico, State Farm, Allstate or 21st dot com, you're in safe hands with White is Right.
Speaking of backward, why did Europe take so long to discover the New World? Answer: the Roman Catholic Church, which totally controlled all people's minds, and claimed to have a pipeline to God, thus couldn't be questioned when their learned ignoramus theologians thumped their Bibles and pronounced the world to be flat, with a horrible edge surrounded by giant sea monsters and whirpools leading straight to Hell, one pair of khaki shorts ain't going to happen, the perfect pair of jeans, priceless, win a trip not.
On July 4, 1054 Chinese astronomers note a "guest star" in the constellation Taurus, the star Zeta Thauri in the Crab Nebula (later known as a source of gamma rays); it is visible in daylight for 23 days and at night for two years; American aborigines see it, along with Arab astronomers, but no European records it - maybe this is a sign that a new country will be born on July 4 halfway to China in America, which will never be ruled by the ever-split Church?
In 1347-50 the Black Death (Bubonic Plague) wiped out a third or half of all the people and animals in Europe, including the Catholic hierarchy, after which the survivors (those lucky enough to have natural immunity or wealthy enough to sit it out in isolated villas like in Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron) found a new Europe, where labor shortages soon caused wage freezes followed by labor movements, and a lot of poor downtrodden peasants suddenly arrived in the big city with sacks full of loot from the homes of dead rich people, expecting to be called sir and maam, leading to questioning of all authority, while the intelligentsia finally had their suspicions confirmed that the Church (which lamely tried to blame the plague on the Jews, having them burned in wells etc., until they realized the Jews were getting it too) was a giant fraud and had no more pipeline to God than my big toe, and began to engage in historyscoping to trace the Church back to its roots. Guess what, after chucking the Lives of the Catholic Saints as B.S., they soon discovered a giant (how many giants is that?) coverup of the ancient pagan (hence Devil-worshipping, as in excommunication happens) Roman and Greek worlds, along with their advanced mathematics and science, which the Church pooh-poohed as too worldly and not winning any points toward the salvation of one's soul, the world is a test anyway, fuggedaboutit and pass the cannoli. Since there was nowhere else to get their hands on ancient manuscripts than the infidel Muslim Moors in Spain and other infidel Muslims in the Mediterranean (which was a Muslim lake for centuries), they flirted with infidelity and even agnosticism or atheism, becoming Freethinkers and Rationalists, at the risk of excommunication, confiscation and death, putting on a dangerous double act to survive. Big Science took its first infant steps, how did they know they'd open the Pandora's Box with the A-bomb and genetic engineering, so let's recap, what are you waiting for, call Saracen for the latest Euclid, Archimedes, Eratosthenes, Aristotle or Plato. This underground movement, which attracted the cream of the most courageous brain men and had to fight the retro Catholic hierarchy every step of the way, coming at them on all intellectual fronts, artistic, philosophical, and literary as well as scientific while braving burning at the stake, it was sick and sad at the same time, became known as the (ta-da) Renaissance, the first reality show on European TV.
Meanwhile the big secular-military power in Europe was the Holy Roman Empire, run by Germany and Austria, while the Italian-based popes who ran the mental empire played tug-of-war with them. The HRE reached its peak of grate wealth and powah in 1452, when 37-y.-o. German Hapsburg King Frederick III, archduke of Austria, duke of Styria, Carinthia and Carniola, and king of Rome after many years of kissing his butt was finally crowned HRE Frederick (Friedrich) III (1415-93) by Pope #209 (since 1447) Nicholas V (Tommaso Parentucelli) (1397-1455) (two nickels make a dime?), a humanist bibliophile who founded the Vatican Library and hired scholars to translate Greek and Roman manuscripts, and began improving Rome's streets, water supply, etc., to make it magnificent and impress the little people and discourage any more pesky antipopes from even thinking about it, ordering Constantine's 4th cent. Basilica replaced with St. Peter's Basilica, which took 20 more popes to complete (until 1784), the immense loot from the New World making it one of them millionaire mansions that is never quite finished until the stock market crash, imagine the lakes of Indio blood shed to pay for it. Freddy III was crowned HRE three days after marrying 18-y.-o. infanta Eleanor (Leonor) of Portugal (1434-67), whose large dowry paid off his debts and cemented his grate wealth and powah, and he became the last HRE crowned in Rome by the pope. His motto was the anagram "AEIOU", "Austria Est Imperare Orbi Universo", meaning Austria is the Ruler of the World (It is Austria's Destiny to Rule the World), which he had inscribed on all his possessions and his 22-inch biceps :) Too bad, 40 years later Columbus discovered the New World, and the Austrians didn't get any, causing Western Europe to pass them by, their big biceps shrinking to toothpicks like a shrunken balloon, and by the 20th cent. they were down to a cute little tourist trap with the Von Trapps and Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti-Do. No wonder their #1 guy Ahnuld (Arnold) Schwarzenegger emigrated (legally - he's one of the Blonde German Master Race, no passport check needed) to the U.S. to become the #1 Hollywood star then marry into the Kennedy clan so he could become a sperm bank and found the Austrian empire in America at long last, watch them Terminator factories, what year was that supposed to happen? But I'm disgressing, so I'll get back to the history of Mexico.
It all really started in 1453 C.E., when the Ottoman Muslims after hundreds of yearly attempts finally captured the eastern Christian outpost stronghold of Constantinople, freaking the entire Christian world and leading to perversions and flukes like Vlad Dracula the Impaler, causing the Portuguese under Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460) to accelerate their search for escape routes to the south, having already discovered the Azores (1432) and West Africa (1433) after they broke down and stooped to use the infidel Muslim astrolabe then made their own technological leap of a 3-masted vessel that allowed them to finally navigate in open waters around 1420. In 1441 the lucky Portuguese discovered cocoa puff African blacks, which they immediately recognized as two-legged animals that would be useful as slaves, setting up Elmina Castle in Ghana in 1482, which became the world's #1 slave-trading post, it's as big as a horse, ask me about it sometime, gag. In 1486 they finally rounded the Cape of Good Hope, allowing them to go east and reach India and China. Meanwhile on June 18, 1452 after requests by Portuguese king (1438-81) Afonso V the African (1431-81), Pope Nicholas V issued the bull Dum Diversas, authorizing him to conquer and subdue diverse dumb African Saracens and pagans, and consign them to indefinite slavery, launching the West African slave trade. Too bad, on Jan. 8, 1455, after getting over the shock of the 1453 Ottoman Muslim capture and rape of Constantinople, and wanting to bless the adventurous but devout Portuguese and Spanish with global holy mojo, Nicholas V finally decided to take off the gloves and issued the bigger bull Romanus Pontifex, creating the Roman Catholic Doctrine of Discovery, with the soundbyte "We bestow suitable favors and special graces on those Catholic kings and princes... athletes and intrepid champions of the Christian faith... to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and ... to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate ... possessions and goods, and to convert them to ... their use and profit." Not that I mind it when it comes to horrible Muslims, but when it ends up being used to enslave people just for not having white skin, it stinks.
But when it comes to the New World, it all started in 1492 C.E. when up-and-coming "Los Reyes Catolicos" (the Catholic Kings) Ferdinand II (1452-1516) and Isabella I (1451-1504) of Aragon and Castile finally finished the Catholic Reconquista, kicking the last Muslim butt out of Spain (which the Allah Akbars had invaded back in 711 C.E., talk about persistence), deciding to expel all 250K pesky Jews from Spain too for good measure, when they were suddenly approached by mysterious Italian-Portuguese-who-knows-what Ben Cristobal Kingsley Colon, AKA Christopher Columbus (1451-1506), who had already been told to fuck off in 1483 by Portuguese king Joao (John) II the Perfect (1455-95), and who seemed to know that if they just went west far enough, there'd be an escape route for the Jews, who had long found a safe haven from the horrible mean Christians in Muslim Spain, where they had been free to work up to grand vizier and live the good life as high-paid physicians and moneylending usurers gorging on kosher Valencia oranges, and now had nowhere to go except to Africa, where the Christians might invade at any moment, and no way to stay unless they liked to be basted with oranges. In other words, he was probably a secret Jew, a front man like Ben Kingsley (1943-) in the 1993 Steven Spielberg flick "Schindler's List", or maybe a Christian Jewish sympathizer like Oskar Schindler (1908-74) himself. No, this isn't yet more proof that the New Worlders are the Lost Tribes of the Hebes and he had their original map, since he based his data on an ancient Greek map by brain man Eratosthenes of Cyrene (-276 to -194) that he got from the Muslims, which had been mistranslated to shrink 25K mi. (the true circumference of the Earth, as Big E had measured from Sun angles in Egypt) to 3K mi., making him believe that since in past times Jews would flee the persecution of Christians by going 2K mi. east to India, they should be able to find a 1K mi. shortcut to the west, and bypass all them Muslims that were in control of the Mediterranean to boot, never mind how he kept his men from throwing him overboard as he doctored his log books to make it look like they were going awfully slow but land was just over the next horizon, like something more adventurous to do this summer, go Australian. His cover story to the Catholic Kings was that after reaching the east coast of Cathay or India he would work his way to some emperor or maharaja and bring back a boatload of rare spices, which were in high demand in an era of no refrigeration, and would not only pay for the trip but finance yet another Crusade to the Holy Land to kick infidel Muslim butt for Dear Lord Christ, who somehow had let them lose all them other Crusades dating back to 1095 C.E. because they weren't worthy enough yet. Ferdinand didn't buy it, but Isabella did, and so you can credit America's discovery to a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple a la James Gaius Watt (1938-), whose portrait bears a striking resemblance to Julius Caesar's uncle Gaius Marius (-157 to -86). Too bad, Columbus was accompanied by holier-than-thou Roman Catholic priests experienced in using all the tools, who worked with him and Spanish soldiers to kill, rape, torture, and enslave the aborigines, which they found natural after discovering them chomping on human flesh, which is why they called the new sea the Caribbean, after the ferocious man-eating Caribe (Carib) tribe (Spanish for cannibal).
Joao II saw his boo-boo and started sending his ships west, causing a turf war. Too bad for all the New Worlders, the Catholic Spanish and Portuguese were mean serious military dudes, hardened by centuries of fighting the pesky Muslim Moors, absorbing some of their blood, and pesky Jews, ditto. But even worse, they both had a longstanding illegal alien problem with the Wandering Jews, many of whom feigned conversion to Catholicism to stay, while secretly practising Judaism and killing Christian infants to use their blood for matzoh (not really - that was called the Jewish libel), causing them to be called Marranos (Spanish for swine), for whom in 1478 the Spanish instituted the horrible Spanish Inquisition (followed by Portugal in 1497), where they tortured you until you confessed, and burned you if you didn't, confiscating all your property either way, and cancelling all them loans they gave you, we have news for you, this is the best time of year to buy a horse. And when they got their hooks on the cannibalistic Devil-worshipping devil-red Indians of east India, who had hordes of gold and mines full of silver just waiting to steal, the illegal-aliens-but-what-are-you-gonna-do-about-it Spanish pulled out the stops of cruelty and horror, enslaving Indios of all tribes and treating them like shit, while outlawing all religions other than the True Faith, causing having non-white skin or not speaking Spanish to become a badge of inferiority, inculcating a prejudice that sadly persists to this day, with seemingly every Mexican claiming not to be Indio but Spanish, even if they got maybe a fraction of a drop of it in their veins in their imagination, even though the Roman Catholic Church actually encouraged intermarriage, officially pronouncing a person with even one drop of white to be white, which later become a major problem with the German and Norman-descended English, who not only rejected the Catholic Church, but twisted the Bible they thumped to officially pronounce a person with even one drop of non-white to be non-white, which later proved that Elvis was black and was trying to seduce their white wimmin with Devil Music. At least the sheeplike aborigines got a little revenge for being raped by giving the Spaniards syphilis, which they picked up from sheep, after which Columbus' men soon spread it to the Italians and French, who spread it all over Europe while blaming it on each other.
In 1492 the pop. of the American Continent (North and South America) was 15M-100M, including 7M-45M in South America, 7M-30M in Mexico and the Caribbean islands, and 1M-18M in the U.S. and Canada. They spoke 1K+ languages, and were organized into 500+ tribes, ranging from the Inca in Peru, the Arawakan-speaking tribes around the Caribbean Sea, incl. the Taino (AKA Lucayans in the Bahamas) in the West Indies and Fla., the Mayans in Central America (Mesoamerica), the Aztecs in Mexico, ruled by emperor Ahuizotl (-1502), the Zapotecs in the Oaxaca Valley of SE Mexico, the Chichimeca tribes in the Gran Chichimeca plateau in NC Mexico, the Cumbia, Panteca and Coixcas in Cihuatlan (modern-day Zihuatanejo) in SW Mexico, the S Athabaskan-speaking Navajo (Navaho) ("great fields [of Tewa]"), Apache, and Quechan (Yuma) (pr. kwuh-tsan) in the SW U.S., the Lakota Sioux (Teton) ("adder", "enemy") and their enemies the Crow (Apsaaalooke) (Absaroka), the Tanoan-speaking Kiowas ("grizzly bear") on the Great American Plains, the Shoshone, Flathead (Salish) (the people"), Bannock, Ute, Arapahoe (Arapaho), Blackfoot, Dakota E of Detroit, Mich., and Sioux-speaking Mandan around the Missouri River; the Algonquian-speaking tribes in North America (known for the birch-bark canoe, and the tomahawk, from the Algonqian words "cutting utensil"), incl. the potlach-loving Kwakiutl in SW Canada, the Algonquian-speaking Anishinabe, Cheyenne (Suhtai) (Sutaio) (Tsitsistas) of the Great Plains, Anishinaabe (Algonquian)-speaking Chippewa (Ojibwe) (Ojibwa) around Lake Superior, Delaware (Lenape), ("real men") along the Delaware River, Iroquois-speaking Erie around Lake Erie, Sac (Sauk) and Fox around Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, Iroquois-speaking Huron (Wyandot) (Wendat), Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) ("people of the long house"), Iroquoian-speaking Tuscarora ("hemp gatherers") (Va.-N.C.), Algonquian-speaking Kickapoo ("stands here and there") (C and S Wisc.), Iroquois-speaking Mohawk ("people of the flint place") in the Mohawk Valley of upstate N.Y., Algonquian-speaking Narragansett ("on a small cape") in Rhode Island, Ottawa (Odawa) ("traders") on the Ottawa River in Ontario and Quebec, Alongquian-speaking Shawnee (AKA Savannah Indians), Iroquoian-speaking Susquehannock (Conestoga), and Wampanoag (Wopanaak) (Massasoit) ("eastern people") in E North America, the Athabascans, Eskimo (Inuit) ("eaters of raw flesh") ("the people"), Aleut (Unangan) (islands off the Alaskan Peninsula), Haida, and Tlingit in N Canada and Alaska; the Bella Coola (Nuxalk) in British Columbia (known for a religion with two heavens and two hells, and a female creator called Qama'itsa); in SE North America the 7-clan Iroquoian-speaking Cherokees of the Allegheny and Appalachian mountains in N.C., S.C., Tenn., Ga. and Ala., the Muskogean-speaking Creeks (Muskogee) (Muscogee) of Ala. and Ga. (#2 most powerful tribe S of New York after the Cherokees), the chickee-building Seminoles in Fla. (offshoot of the Creeks), the Yamasees, Chocktaws (Choctaws), Chickasaws, Natchez, and Houmas; the Siouan-speaking Yuchis (Uchees) (Euchees), and Catawbas ("people of the river"). Turn around now and find someplace else to get your medicine? Afraid not. Grab your bag and book now at Southwest dot com.
The Ultimate Thank God It's Friday? On Oct. 12, 1492 (Oct. 22 Gregorian) (Fri.) (2:00 a.m.) (after 36 days and 2.6K mi.), Pinta's crow's nest sailor Rodrigo de Triana (Juan Rodrigo Bermejo) (1469-?) does guess what, you guessed it, sights land (and later gets so pissed-off at not being given a reward that he moves to Africa and converts to Islam?), and Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) and his crew anchor at San Salvador (Sp. "Holy Savior") (Watlings) Island (called Guanahani by the aborigines) in the Bahamas just N of the Tropic of Cancer, at 23.5 deg. N 75 deg. W (the log books say 24 deg. N 75.5 deg. W) (named after pious pirate Watling, who forbade pillaging on Sundays, the residents renaming it San Salvador in 1926 to claim it as the place of Columbus' first landfall after 434 years of controversy, but it is never conclusively decided, with Cat Island and Samana Cay proposed), and Columbus dresses in full admiral's regalia to take possession of the new land in the name of Ferdinand and Isabella; having never seen a ship, the natives don't see them until a shaman convinces them that they're real, after which they greet Columbus with warm hospitality, causing him to write "They willingly traded everything they owned... They do not bear arms... They would make fine servants... They could easily be made Christians... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want"; after the natives present them with tobacco leaves, which they discard, they sail SW through the Great Bahama Bank, landing on Cuba on Oct. 17, thinking it is the Chinese continent, searching in vain for the magnificent cities described by Marco Polo; on Oct. 20 Columbus writes "I shall set sail for another very large island which I believe to be Cipango, according to the indications I receive from the Indians on board", which proves to be Hispaniola, and he finally lands on Haiti on Dec. 5. On Nov. 3 after invading France to punish it for supporting Perkin Warbeck, Henry VII of England forces them to agree to the Peace (Treaty) of Etaples (Étaples) (official end of the Hundred Years' War), in which France expels Warbeck and pays England an indemnity of £159K. In Nov. a gift of tobacco leaves from the Arawaks (Aruacans) is kept this time after Santa Maria crewman Rodrigo de Jerez learns to smoke from the natives, and brings back the habit to his hometown of Ayamonte, causing his wife to denounce him as a man who "swallows fire, exhales smoke, and is surely possessed by the devil", after which he is imprisoned by the Spanish Inquisition for seven years, by which time the super-addictive habit of smoking has caught on. On Dec. 21 (St. Thomas' Day) Columbus discovers Port St. Thomas in Haiti, and on Dec. 22 he has his first meeting with Marien chief (cacique) Guacanagaric (Guacanagarix) (Guacanagari), who allows him to found the settlement of La Navidad; too bad, the settlers are killed by a rival tribe before Columbus returns on his 2nd voyage. On Dec. 24 (Dec. 15 Old Style) Columbus writes in his journal that he is very impressed by the aborigines, who are of "pleasing appearance with fine features and medium height with muscular bodies", adding, "A better race there cannot be, and both the people and the lands are in such quantity that I know not how to write it... All here have a loving manner and gentle speech". On Dec. 25 the Santa Maria sinks off Hispaniola (La Espanola) (Haiti); it was first shot with a cannonball by Columbus' flagship to disable it on Caracol Beach, and rechristened Ft. Natividad, housing the men Columbus left behind until the natives attacked and burned it?; he left the men behind to force Isabella into financing a 2nd voyage?; her overseers, the fleet's master at arms, comptroller, and secy. were left behind to avoid being contradicted when he told Isabella he had discovered India? - she had to leave to give birth to Santa Claus? On Dec. 26 Columbus writes in his journal that he had been hoping to find gold "in so great quantity that the Sovereigns within three years would undertake and prepare to go and conquer the Holy Places [Holy Land]"; chickens and rats are introduced to America; smallpox is also introduced to native Ams. as a get-unwell card by 1518; Jews are also introduced next year, with Portuguese Jews settling in St. Thomas Island, later becoming the first large plantation owners, running sugar factories with 3K African slaves; too bad, when the new discovery doesn't fulfill the original mission of furnishing a route to India and China, desperation sets in, causing the need to milk the New World for plunder and profit to take over, resulting in a mean cold systematic mass murder machine that goes on for cents. and reduces the native pop. to almost nil; Columbus hangs natives 13 at a time in honor of Christ and the 12 Apostles?
On May 4, 1493 (June 28 Gregorian) Pope #215 (since 1492) Alexander VI (1431-1503) (Rodrigo Borgia, a Catalan Spaniard from Valencia, father of boy toy Lucrezia Borgia, whose mistress since 1489, 18-y.-o. Giulia Farnese, known for long golden hair reaching to the floor was dubbed La Bella and the Bride of Christ, and of whom it was said "Ten papacies wouldn't have sufficed to satisfy all his cousins" as he handed out lucrative posts to them) settled the turf war, issuing the bull Inter Cetera Divina, dividing the New World between Portugal and Spain along a N-S line 100 leagues W of the Cape Verde islands, giving Portugal Africa and the E side of South America, but since they didn't realize yet that most of South America lies way E of North America, Spain ended up with most of the New World in both North and South America.
In 1501 the Spanish (Castilian) crown authorized the horrible African slave trade under its monopoly, giving permission to Flemish, German, Dutch, Genoan and Portuguese merchants to engage in it, and in 1502 the first African slaves in America arrived in the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo (modern-day Dominican Republic) (guess who ran the Inquisition, the Dominicans), ordered by newly-appointed (1502-9) Hispaniola gov. Nicolas de Ovando y Caceres (Nicolás de Ovando y Cáceres) (1460-1518), who in 1503 began distributing enslaved aborigines to encomiendas (Spanish-run fiefdoms of Indian slaves) to work the gold mines in Santo Domingo, which became the model for all them pesky New World savages, his own hyper-cruelty reducing the pop. of the West Indies aborigines from 500K in 1492 to 60K in 1507, pardon me while I vomit. No wonder the haughty Spanish (who prefer to just be called proud) love to dance that Flamenco dance - they are practicing grinding some helpless Indio or African face into the floor while the crowd claps and cheers and swigs Sangria, you had to be there, but we all had a face fiesta.
In 1507 the name "America" was first used by German cleric-cartographer Martin Waldseemueller (Waldseemüller) (1470-1520) of the Monastery of Saint-Die-des-Vosges in Lorraine, France in his Cosmographiae Introductio in honor of Amerigo Vespucci; it contains a world map titled Universalis Cosmographia incl. the first depiction of the Western Hemisphere, showing America as an island surrounded by water, and saying "It is fitting that this fourth part of the world, inasmuch as Americus discovered it, be called Amerige, or let us say, land of Americi, that is, America"; the depiction of a body of water to the W of America before the discovery of the Pacific Ocean remains a modern mystery; on Apr. 30, 2007 (500th anniv.) it is officially given to the U.S. by German chancellor Angela Merkel.
Before the Spanish took it over, Mexico was run by the Aztec Empire of 7M-30M people, known as the Nazis of the New World for their cruel bloody religious sacrifices to feathered serpent creator god Quetzalcoatl. Luckily, the initial Spanish invasion stopped near Cuba, and stalled for years, during which time (1499-1502) Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci (1451-1512) led a Spanish expedition that went south and discovered South America, including Brazil (named after Brazil wood, which yields red die for papal robes) and Venezuela (named after Venice because it was filled with houses built over the water), after which he ended up getting America named for him, thousands want your vote but only one will win, you decide who's number one.
On Apr. 8, 1518 Spanish conquistador Juan de Grijalva (1490-1527) sailed from Havana to Yucatan, first observed cigarette smoking, then discovered Mexico, and named it New Spain. To thank them for not smoking, on Dec. 18 the Spanish started a smallpox epidemic among the aborigines in Santo Domingo, which soon spread to Yucatan, Mexico, and Peru, ultimately killing 20M (50%-90% of the indigenous pop.), and clearing the way for smoke-free Euros. To make a long story short, Trick or Treat, after landing in the Yucatan Peninsula in Feb. 1519 in 11 ships, with 500 men, 13 horses, and a few cannons, then taking Veracruz in July 1519, and marching to the main Aztec city of Tenochititlan (built on swampland on the W side of shallow Lake Texcoco, which was connected to four other lakes), ambitious greedy Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes (Hernán Cortés) (1485-1547) lucked out bigtime and was mistaken for Quetzalcoatl (some lost Viking stumbled ashore in remote antiquity and Mel Gibson hasn't filmed it yet?), and warmly welcomed by emperor (since 1502) Montezuma (Moctezuma) II (1480-1520). After dealing treacherously with his people, while Montezume kept licking his ass, causing them to finally stone the bum and expel the man-god, Cortes regrouped and gained reinforcements from local hostile tribes, and on Aug. 13, 1521 defeated the Aztecs after 80 days of starving the 250K pop. (a tactic unknown in their history?), reducing them to eating lizards and grass, capturing 800 women and children foraging at night for food, then taking the city street by street until the Aztecs, reeling from starvation, white man's measles and smallpox made their last stand at the stacked pyramid of Tlatelolco, sister city of Tenochtitlan to the north.
So in 1521 the Aztec Empire ended (7M-30M people torpedoed by a few hundred Satanists, er, Saints, er, Spaniards?), and the Spanish Empire in America began with the forceful seizure of Mexico by Spanish illegal aliens, who turned it into the cupcake colony of New Spain (until 1821), with Cortes as viceroy #1. The capital of Mexico City was founded on the razed ruins of Tenochititlan after the lake was filled-in by Aztec slaves. Within 50 years the Aztec pop. was down to 3M, just imagine, a baby in the house not.
Of course the Aztecs didn't control all of Mexico. King (since 1487) Cosijoeza (-1529) of the nearby Zapotecs in SE Mexico heard of the Spanish V and decided to lay low to avoid the same fate, allying with the Mixtecs (Mixteca) in modern-day Oaxaca, Guerrero and Puebla, but that didn't stop the Spic-and-Spanish from attacking them next year, and subduing them by 1527, their Zapotec bat god and Mixtec jaguar god proving impotent against Spanish cannon, firesticks, and biological warfare.
The Mayans in the dense jungles of Yucatan Peninsula were a tougher nut to crack, who wants a poisoned dart in their butt, with Francisco de Montejo y Alverez (1479-1553) starting the process in 1526 on the east coast at the fortresses of Tulum and Chetumal, and being driven back, then trying again in 1530 from the west in Tabasco, only to be driven out in 1535, after which his son Francisco de Montejo El Mozo (the Son) (1502-65) took up where his daddy left off, conquering Yucatan in 1546 after founding the cities of Campeche and Merida. Later, the downtrodden but proud Mayas tried for a comeback in 1847 during the U.S.-Mexico War, only to be driven back to a corner in 1848, where they held out until they were starved out in 1901, hello, who is this, an obscene phone call?
Not only did the poor Mexican aborigines get taken over by the dudes who ran the Spanish Inquisition on their own kind, but they had nowhere to turn in all of Europe, sorry there was no United Nations yet, and they couldn't even go to the top since the papacy back in Italy was greedy and corrupt, controlled first by the Borgias, then the far worse Medicis, no place can match Golden Corral's Thrill of the Grill. In 1520 the pope was #218 (since 1513) Leo X (Giovanni de' Medici) (1475-1521), whose nepotism, luxury and corruption, including the sale of indulgences (not-so-free passes out of Purgatory) to pay for the rebuilding of St. Peter's Basilica triggered off German monk Martin Luther (1483-1546) to ramp up the Protestant Revolt in Germany, which later spread to Switzerland, Sweden, England and Scotland, the Blonde Countries, perhaps becoming the origin of white supremacy, as a Bible-thumping anti-papal holier-than-thou religious movement that easily grew to regard dark-haired olive-skinned greasy Wops and Spics as racially as well as religiously inferior, don't even mention Africans, Arabs, Chinese, and American aborigines, they ain't even people. Leo X was followed in 1523 by Pope #220 Clement VII (Giulio de' Medici) (1478-1534), a fellow Medici, who made the mistake of going against the Spanish to ally with France in 1525, ending up in Rome being sacked in 1527, after which he had to pay 400K ducats ransom to get out of prison, how many lakes of Indio blood did that cost?
In 1530 Juan de la Barrera of Seville, Spain began transporting African slaves directly from Africa to the New World, bypassing Europe, starting a stampede; a significant percentage were Muslim, but they had to convert to Christianity or face death; the African slave trade will eventually bring 10M slaves to America.
Pope Clement VII was finally poisoned with a Death Cap mushroom, after which in 1534 the Indios lucked out with Pope #221 Paul III (Alessandro Farnese) (1468-1549) (who fathered children before becoming pope), who on May 29, 1537 issued the bull Sublimus Dei, declaring that American native "savages", "being truly men, are apt to receive Christian faith", and "are not to be reduced to slavery", with automatic excommunication for violators, although the Spanish were still under orders to convert them to Catholicism, and if they won't accept it that makes them enemies of Christ hence okay to enslave. Guess the next part. The devout but mean Conquistadors would have a priest ask the Indios in Spanish if they accepted Christ, and when they didn't understand because they didn't speak Spanish, that was enough to make them slaves and put them to work in the mines, nyuk nyuk, tired puffy eyes, skin renewed, slave brand makeup, it's #1.
In July 1587 after John White (1540-93) (half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh) visits the North Carolina area and returns with shocking but cool, twisted-to-Euro-prejudices paintings of the half-naked but partly civilized and hence useful Indians (hence kinda a little bit white?), he leads a party of 116 English settlers (90 men, 17 women, 9 children) and lands on Roanoke Island off the N.C. coast; on Aug. 18 Virginia Dare is born to Gov. John White's daughter Ellinor and Ananias Dare, becoming the first white European child born in the Am. colonies (don't think Heidi Klum and Seal?); wasting no time to make the place liveable, the colonists brew their own ale from corn; on Aug. 27 Gov. White leaves for England with a skeleton crew of 15 to seek help and supplies, leaving instructions that if the colonists are forced to leave in his absence they should inscribe their destination in a "conspicuous place"; too bad, the war between England and Spain keeps him from returning until 1590; the paintings start out circulating in the hands of the elite only, but eventually get made into prints which circulate in Europe for two cents., forming their main impression of Am. Indians; meanwhile white men's diseases (smallpox, typhus, measles) begin their genocidal effect on the defenseless pop.
Pope Clement VII also made the epic mistake of playing pitty-pat with King Henry VIII (1491-1547) of England, author of the hit song Green Grows the Holly, who arrogantly abandoned the Roman Catholic Church to start his own Protestant church in 1533 with himself as pope so he could divorce childless Catherine of Aragon (1485-1536) (daughter of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, who started it all by financing Christopher Columbus back in 1492, which ended up in making Spain the #1 country of Europe after all that loot poured in, while England remained a backward island of third world illiterates who lived by piracy of Spanish ships, and had little to give them their dignity besides lighter complexions and hair colors, giving them ideas, beyond whacko, that's the clinical term) and marry fertile pretty-duckied Anne Boleyn (1501-36), mother of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603), leading to a giant attempt by the Spanish to invade England and burn all Protestants at the stake, which ended in the disastrous destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1588 because of a sudden storm just as they were closing in, after which feelings where permanently hardened between these two former happy allies, leading to not only a culture war but a racial war that disgraced the New World as well as the Old after the English decided that White is Right and refused to intermarry with American aborigines or Africans, while the Spanish did it with gusto, causing a 500-year Much to Do About Nothing that is now a major problem holding them both back from permanent reconciliation. The English even put up their English language and its champion William Shakespeare (1564-1616) against the Spanish language and its champion Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), and as the centuries grinded on, the English got the upper hand because of their superior navy, which allowed them to systematically expand their empire worldwide, while Spain's, which was mainly in the New World, stayed stagnant. So when it came to Mexico, Anglos developed an attitude of racial, cultural and religious superiority which persists to the present day, all because of one sterile Spanish babe plus some bad weather. Funny, but if I'm Henry the Eighth I Am had a son by Catherine of There and Gone, all English monarchs would have been half-Spanish, England would have stayed Catholic, Spain and England might have permanently united and even megamerged, leading to North America being an Anglo-Hispanic-African Spanish-speaking Catholic country today. So it must have been God at work messing up her tubes and playing with the wind in order to stir up 500 years of stupid senseless Hell, verdad? Or the Devil. Ask Mel Gibson, the Jews start all the wars, right, hence maybe they're behind it all somehow, perhaps Catherine's doctor was a Jew who slipped her some poison, and some Jewish rabbis conjured up a storm to keep England their safe haven from the Spanish Inquisition, check back with me after I consult Shirley MacLaine, she was there.
Actually, as a historyscoper I trace the real problem between the U.S. and Mexico today way back to 9 C.E., when the arrogant ever-expanding Roman Empire finally got its butt kicked bigtime by the blonde hairy barbarian Germans at the Battle of Teutoburg (Teutoburger) Forest (Wald) in modern-day Kalkriese, near Cologne in modern-day North Rhine-Westphalia, West Germany, N of Colonia Agrippina and Mainz, where Germanic (Cherusci) chief Arminius (Hermann) ("army man") (-17 to 21), who served in the Roman army from 1-6 C.E., obtained Roman citizenship and a knowledge of Roman military tactics, and returned home in 7 C.E. to find his people being oppressed by haughty Roman gov. (legate) Publius Quinctilius Varus (b. -46), pissing him off and causing him to organize a revolt, led Roman legate Gorgeous W. Bush, er, Varus and his three legions (20K men) into a trap, where his unarmored warriors outthinked, outwitted, outlasted and massacred them. The news caused panic in Italy, and Roman emperor #1 (-27 to 14) Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (Octavian) (Gaius Octavius Thurinus) (AKA Augustus) (-63 to 14) went apeshit, wandering around his palace for months crying "Varus, give me back my legions", beginning a steep decline into a senile old fart, ordering the Rhine River to be permanently established as the border between the Romans and the Germans, abandoning all their big plans for swallowing Germania up as a new Roman province where they could commit genocide like they did with everybody else. After this the Romans started building limes, a chain of walls and forts connected by roads and manned by permanent dukes (Latin for powerful men), creating a permanent division between north and south Europe, allowing the Germans to develop a strong national consciousness and breed like rabbits and invade on their own timetable, the fatal mistake of lack of noive ultimately dooming the supposedly merciless Romans, who fell in 476 C.E., setting civilization back 500 years with the Dark Ages. So, a thousand years later, all blonde Germanic peoples considered themselves God's chosen, and considered black-haired olive-skinned Italians, Spanish, and Portuguese as nothing but Roman bastard trash, along with their Romance culture and languages, and the Protestant thingie gave them their winning formula that rocketed them to #1 in the World of White. Funny, if it hadn't been for stupid Varus, Arminius might have not have set up the trap, Germany might have been absorbed into the Roman Empire like they did Gaul and Britain, and we'd still be speaking Latin and there'd be no Shakespeare or U.S. of A. Ask Mel how the Jews arranged that.
Back in Mexico, the cruel Conquistadors fed several Aztecs (mainly the orphans of never-say-die pagans) to the missionaries, who brought them up Catholic while their recalcitrant relatives were murdered or worked to death, after which they were systematically kept in ignorance of their horrible past and indoctrinated in the simple humble Catholic faith, check out them white pajamas and long dresses with the Shell No-Pest Strips underneath, with each church becoming their Disneyland of lily white saints that they could pray to in heaven, bypassing their cruel white overlords in their minds, works for me, pop in more of your paycheck. But to really hook the millions of holdouts they needed a personal visit from heaven, so in Dec. 1531 the lily white Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to Juan Diego on a hill in Tepeyac NW of Mexico City, giving him a bunch of fresh roses along with an image of herself on tilma (cactus cloth) which never decays, and which convinced the local bishop to build her a church, and most of the remaining Aztecs to eventually convert to Roman Catholic Christianity. Having to hide out in the mountains or jungles and be hunted like animals unless they showed up in church on Sunday and accepted third-class status under the mental overlordship of the Church, the military overlordship of the soldiers, and the cultural overlordship of way-out-of-their-reach no-illegal-aliens-allowed Spain also helped, have you ever suffered a blackout or loss of memory, thanks for your country and your souls, Aztec suckahs, did I make you feel second best, girl I'm sorry I tried, you were always on my mind, the one they most depended on is the one they fear the most, please call or go online now and join the ASpiCA, chuckle.
On Sept. 8, 1546 the rich silver mines of Zacatecas were discovered, becoming the #2 silver mines in the Spanish New World after those in Potosi, Bolivia, which were discovered in 1544. Indos were forced to slave under inhuman conditions to make the Conquistadors and their Spanish aristocracy rich. Not that the Chichimeca aborigines took it lying down, the Chichimeca War lasting until the end of the cent. To this day Mexico is the #1 silver producing nation on Earth.
Meanwhile in 1542 Portuguese navigator Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo (1499-1543) discovered California, landing at modern-day San Diego; too bad, the area was so remote that nothing was done to colonize it. In 1579 English explorer and freebooter Sir Francis Drake (1543-96) was chased by the Spaniards up the coast of California, hoping to escape by the fabled Northwest Passage, and landed at Laguna Beach (Drake's Bay) near modern-day San Francisco, where the local aborigines mistook the fair English for gods and offered them their entire country, which he accepted, leaving a metal plate announcing the new English country of New Albion (N Calif.) "by the grace of God and in the name of her majesty Queen Elizabeth of England". Luck be a lady tonight, stick with me baby I'm a fellow you can win with, in 1936 San Fran store clerk Beryle Shinn discovered the plate while hunting pheasant, and it ended up on display at the U. of Calif. Of course, the Spanish pooh-poohed Drake's claims, and claimed all of California for themselves, although maybe Portugal should be given San Diego for equity, ask the pope, oh yes, he already decided that question, and Cabrillo was working for the Spanish anyway.
The race heated up when the Spanish-hating long-haired hippie protester English began colonizing North America starting with Jamestown in 1607, where they imported their first African slaves and got their first taste of black sugar, maybe liking it too much, and soon devising a legal con game to turn them into property, after all, God himself color-coded them for inferiority, right, so massuh can work them black bucks to make him rich while he visits the cabin of the black wimmen whenever he wants to breed up his stock, we're rethinking the whole all-you-can-eat concept. Hence they not only started the future U.S. out as WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant), but slave-owning and white supremacist. The Puritans made their entrance in Plymouth Colony, Mass. in 1620, and Boston, Mass. in 1630, their purer-than-thou Bible-thumping principles keeping them at arm's length from their too-Catholic Anglican countrymen and later making them into abolitionists, although after Charles Darwin made them second-guessers, the Bible didn't stand in the way of their eager slaughter of fellow whites in the 1861-5 U.S. Civil War. Their rivals the flash-in-the-pan Jew-friendly Dutch founded New Amsterdam in 1625, starting a war with them, which ended with Britain claiming New Amsterdam in 1674 and changing its name to Jew York, the Jew capital of the world, AKA New York, no more need to hide it now, let's flaunt it on The View. Meanwhile the Roman Catholic French made their move in Canada, Florida, and Louisiana, but finally ended up squeezed into Quebec watching reruns of Julia Child, while the Protestant Huguenot French, never mind, I'm getting off the subject.
Originally the British colonies were all bunched around Boston and New York, but as they kept exterminating and cheating aborigines out of their land, don't ask why my surname is Winslow, they slowly expanded west and south. The French and Indian War of 1754-63 (the French and desperate remaining Indians vs. the British) resulted in a British V and the Feb. 10, 1763 Treaty of Paris, causing the French to cede Louisiana east of the Mighty Mississippi River except Orleans Island. "Half a continent... changed hands at the scratch of a pen." (Francis Parkman)
Finally, in 1776, surprise, the independent-minded British colonists rebelled against the British mad king George III (1738-1820), and became the United States of America, promulgating the revolutionary U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, causing a worldwide reaction at the very idea that the divine right of kings concept might be full of crap, and that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and even more shocking that all men are created equal, launching a fever all over Europe and America to break off from other monarchies and set up American-style republics. Too bad, the copycat 1789-99 French Revolution was spoiled by the 1793-4 Reign of Terror and the rise of wannabe world emperor Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), but that didn't discourage others.
The American Revolution was a new beginning for humanity, the greatest breakthrough in human liberty since ancient Greece, making the U.S. Da (don't say Great White) Hope of Da World ever since. No Mel, it wasn't a Jewish plot, or if so, they must have made up with the ancient pagan Greeks who liked to exercise naked with their uncircumcised dongs swinging like your Celt ancestors, how'd you get so rich? Some of the great Founding Fathers included George Washington (1732-99), Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), James Madison (1751-1836), John Adams (1735-1826), Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804), Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), and Thomas Paine (1737-1809). Where did the U.S. Founding Fathers get their great ideas? Answer: they were historyscopers. Back then they didn't have the Internet like TLW, so access to historical materials was limited to the wealthy, and only those with great gobs of leisure time could absorb it all, so there these white English dudes were, hanging out in the libraries and studies in their mansions while their slaves supported them. No wonder they had an ambivalent attitude toward slavery, knowing that it was wrong but also not wanting to have to get a day job, but hedging their bets by laying the groundwork for racial equality on paper, while playing it safe and leaving the matter to posterity. Benjamin Franklin was an exception, a self-made man, so no surprise that he finally made peace with his conscience and denounced slavery just before he croaked of ripe old age. Thomas Paine was a radical Freethinker who saw the French Revolution firsthand, and was always living off the income from his sensational writings, so of course he was the most vehement in denouncing slavery, knowing that they'd consider all his ideas kooky but cool enough to read in the loo. They were all ahead of their time, and the rest of the world is still catching up to their sound ideas. The result was that the U.S. began to slowly divide between pro and anti slavery forces, with the pros having the upper hand initially, loving to point to the fact that Founding Fathers Washington and Jefferson owned slaves, and that the Bible tells slaves to obey their massuhs, while infidel Paine was against the Bible and slavery both, so that settled it. Never mind Jefferson's notorious dipping of brown sugar babe Sarah "Sally" Hemings (1773-1835), crack the bottle of Chardonnay. Back to Mexico.
Back to my historyscoper habit. The real reason that the U.S. became the world's shining hope when it came to the horrible Gordian's Knot of racism is that they were sitting right on top of the proof that racism was crap. How so? You see, all throughout the Dark Ages, it all made perfect sense. The Earth was flat, the Mediterranean ("center of the Earth") Sea was the center of the Earth, and obviously north is like up, meaning that as you went north you progressed from the dark-haired Romans to the blonde-haired Germans, and even blonder (pubic hair maybe, ask the Swedish Bikini Team?) Norse, to the frozen North, which must be on the way to Heaven somehow, while as you went south, you ended up in lands filled with swarthy Arabs, followed by African negroes, and it also got hotter and hotter, so obviously that was the direction to Hell, so much for Islam, clearly the Holy Land was on the center line so God knew where to put the Promised Land and Christ landed in the right place. Of course if you went too far west, you'd drop off the edge, where there had to be no people of any color. Okay, when the New World was discovered, they already figured out that the world was round and had a whole new third dimension, but mistook it for India, and the retros must have decided that red skin means closer to the setting Sun or some other B.S. But by 1776 all Euros knew that there is no center (on the surface), no up or down, to the Earth, that there are freezing poles at both ends, although maybe there were some super beings living in them underground, and Jefferson et al. knew about Tom Paine's painful dissection of the Bible into superstitious error-filled rubbish and decided that a lot of it was B.S., hence the old medieval racism didn't make sense any more than the divine right of kings or slavery, despite all the wrongs committed in their names. So, sitting calmly an ocean away from the white Euro homeland, and not being told what to think by a hierarchy of prelates or royalty, them wise historyscoping U.S. Founding Fathers finally put it together, all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator not their rulers with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happyness like Will Smith, tada. Now what are we gonna do about it? That's a political question, and will take time, of course, pass the punch bowl Mammie. And this was long before thinkers like Darwin and Marx. They might have even agreed that ultimately all of humanity must be equal in all ways and share and share alike all material possessions a la John Lennon, it's just a matter of how best to go about it and the time schedule, even the bad guys have rights, no dictatorship of the proletariat or mass murders please.
Speaking of freezing cold, to head-off Russian plans for colonization from Alaska, starting in 1769 the Spanish began building a system of presidios (military forts) and Franciscan missions in Sunny California, starting with the presidio of San Diego, which became "the birthplace of California", and Mission San Diego de Alcala, founded on July 16, 1769 by Franciscan Father Miguel Jose "Junipero" Serra y Ferrer (1713-84) as the first of 21 Catholic missions built over the next 50 years in California, becoming the start of El Camino Real (the Royal Road) from San Diego to San Francisco, with each mission spaced one day's journey apart, which served as an Indian Roman Catholic conversion factory as well as an agricultural estate. The super California climate produced early crops of grapes, oranges and olives, ask me if I care, there were no surfing or blonde bikini beach babes or hot rods or drive-ins yet. Imagine if the Russkies had taken over the Spanish holdings in California and moved their serfs in, then taken all of America, that would have been messed-up.
Since distant Spanish California not only didn't attract too many settlers, but back then the population didn't grow so fast because of so many diseases, plus the Californios had their differences with the Mexican govt., the white supremacist U.S. saw its chance of taking all the land to the Pacific Ocean, and started by purchasing the west side of the Mississippi River all the way to the Rocky Mts. in the Apr. 30, 1803 Louisiana Purchase, 100M acres for $15M (15 cents an acre). That left Spain with Florida, and Mexico (which included the territory west of the Rockies) blocking the gringo path to the Pacific Ocean. Not wasting any time, Pres. Jefferson tried to get Congress to give him $2M to buy Florida from Spain in 1806, and when that didn't work, on Sept. 26, 1810 a group of white illegal alien Yankees proclaimed the Republic of West Florida, the first lone star republic, after which on Oct. 27 Pres. Madison ordered its annexation into the Lousiana Territory, starting a war with Spain. In Apr. 1813 U.S. maj. gen. James Wilkinson (1757-1825) seized Mot Bay in Spanish territory, and occupied Mobile, Ala. On Feb. 22, 1819 knowing that it was a paper tiger in Florida, Spanish minister Luis de Onis y Gonzalez-Vara (1762-1827) proved to be a cream puff and signed the Adams-Onis Treaty in Washington, D.C., ceding all of Florida to the U.S. in return for U.S. assumption of private American claims against Spain up to $5M, extending the western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase along the Sabine River, Red River, and Arkansas River, and from the source of the Arkansas River N to the 42nd parallel and then W to the Pacific Ocean coast, also surrendering its claims to the Pacific Northwest and leaving the U.S. to fight it out with Britain and Russia, which as we know resulted in the U.S. getting its hands on Oregon and Washington state. All this time the real owners of the land (the aborigines) were considered by all white parties to the transactions to be non-persons, mere nuisances, while any white with any Injun blood in him was called a half-breed traitor to his race and viewed as a savage unfit to marry their lily white wimmen and pollute their lily white blood, much less have political rights or powah.
Meanwhile down in Mexico they saw their chance, and on Sept. 16, 1810 after almost 300 years of Spanish oppression, during which the races were mixed up and nobody knew whose side he was supposed to be on anymore, Spanish priest Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla (1753-1811) declared Mexican independence from Spain in the tiny town of Dolores in Guanajuato. Too bad, he was captured, then executed by firing squad in Chihuahua on July 31, 1811, but his example made him the father of his country as he inspired insurgents led by Indio-Spanish-African mestizo gen. Vicente Ramon Guerrero Saldana (Vicente Ramón Guerrero Saldaña) (1782-1831) to take up the cause, and after many hard years of the Mexican War of Independence, (1810-21) the Spanish finally gave up and recognized Mexican independence on Aug. 24, 1821 under the Feb. 24 Plan de Iguala (Plan of the Three Guarantees) (Plan Trigarante), ending the Spanish colony of New Spain (founded 1521), with a new white-green-red flag symbolizing "religion, independence and union", meaning an established Roman Catholic Church (white), an independent monarchic govt. with liberal constitution (green), and unity of native American and Euro citizens (red for Castile), showing that the Spaniards will be considered more equal than the indigenous browns, since that's what you get when you mix red and green?
Too bad, their former enemy gen. Augustin (Agustín) de Iturbide (Agustin Cosme Damian de Iturbide y Aramburu) (1783-1824), whose flip-flopping caused the independence decided that he was so white and handsome that he proclaimed himself emperor, causing a revolt led by Guererro in 1823 that established the United Mexican States, complete with a U.S.-wannabe republican constitution, with Guadalupe Victoria (José Miguel Ramón Adaucto Fernández y Félix) (1786-1843) (who renamed himself after Victory and Our Lady of Guadalupe) as pres. #1 of Mexico from Oct. 10, 1824 to Apr. 1, 1829, who went on to abolish slavery in 1829, after which Guerrero became pres. #2 in 1829.
If at this point the WASPs in El Norte had considered Mexicans to be white like them, they might have congratulated them for throwing off Spain, and gotten over that 1588 thingie and the language problemo and found a way to unite their countries peacefully, think how far ahead they would be today, but since a large percentage of Mexicans had Indio and/or African blood in their veins, this was dumped in the toilet, and the spirit of race war took over, with the gringos the pitiless racist aggressors and the Mexicans the helpless black (don't say white) sheep who can only win via sheer numbers, Remember the Alamo pffft. So it became a numbers game, with the gringos off their nut, I need a stun gun. Cheat sheet: the population of Mexico at this point was about 6M, growing to 7.5M by 1848, 10M by 1880, and 15M by 1910, vs. 10M (2x), 25M (3x), 50M (5x), and 92M (6x) for the population of the U.S.
Instead of trying to megamerge with Mexico, the gringos, watching all the former Spanish colonies in what was later called Latin America (Mexico, Central America, South America) breaking free, and listening to the British whisper in their ears, decided to flex their white supremacist muscles on the world stage with the Monroe Doctrine of Dec. 2, 1823, proclaimed by U.S. president #5 (1817-25) James Monroe (1758-1831), which announced that any further efforts by any Euro govts. to colonize or interfere with any states in the Western Hemisphere would bring U.S. intervention, and also that the U.S. would not interfere with existing Euro colonies or meddle in their internal affairs, with the U.S. becoming the New World's Great White Father whether anybody else liked it or not. Knowing now how their promises to non-whites were expendable, maybe they had secret ideas of somehow exterminating or expelling everybody in the New World and expanding the White is Right U.S. from pole to pole, who knows, but if so, it was a fantasy they were nowhere near capable of pulling off since it would have drawn in not only Spain but Britain, Russia, and other major powers against them. No, to expand the U.S. back then sans genocide meant accepting everybody else's existence, and it was like April was the cruelest month every month with them white supremasses. But they could try squeezing Mexico out of its territory chunk by chunk after filling it with fifth column WASP gringos first.
Then in 1830 U.S. pres. #7 (1829-37) Andrew "Andy" Jackson (1767-1845) pushed through the U.S. Indian Removal Act, which he signed on May 26, allowing the U.S. to legally force American Indian tribes to vacate and move west, the legal part being that they will receive a payment to paper it over in the so-called nation of laws. It was all based on the 1823 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Johnson v. M'Intosh that Indians don't own their own lands anyway, but are just occupying them, gag. How does that work? It's a long-term lease, subject to being terminated at will by Uncle Sham with a sheriff accompanied by army troops, but they do pay you for breaking the lease early? So there went the Choctaws of Mississippi in 1830, the Cherokees of Georgia in 1835, and the Seminoles of Florida in 1842, taking their bags full of $20 Jackson dollars with them on their trails of tears, weep weep, by the way, flour is a million dollars a pound. With this precedent laid down, Indio-filled Mexico was definitely put on the hit list, although them pesky white Spanish complicated things a bit, give them time to scratch their heads.
So, the U.S. might have promised to the world powers not to interfere with Mexico, but that didn't mean that private gringos couldn't do it on their own, nyuk nyuk. Mexico's abolition of slavery in 1829 didn't set well with white slave-owning should-I-say-illegal U.S. immigrants, who loved to violate the 1808 U.S. Law Prohibiting Importation of African Slaves so they could make big bucks in Louisiana and other slave states, and finally decided to rebel and secede as the Republic of Texas in 1836, with Sam Houston (1793-1863) as pres. #1 from Oct. 22, 1836 to Dec. 10, 1838, wham bam thank you maam. Its Lone Star Flag (a white star, get it?) symbolized the only non-beaner state of Mexico, all 269K sq. mi. of it, and, as such, too good to pay taxes to the Mexican govt. or obey its laws and constitution. The Battle of the Alamo on Feb. 23-Mar. 6, 1836 was a big defeat for the Texicans, including David Stern "Davy" Crockett (1786-1836), giant-knife-wielding slave smuggler James "Jim" Bowie (1796-1836), et al., but the news supposedly spurred their fellow white-is-right rebels into a final victory over the Mexican beaners, led by gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna (1794-1876), after which it was celebrated as a somehow superhuman feat just to lose, which, since they were all white supremacist n-word haters, might be considered prophetic. In his later years, exiled gen. Santa Anna introduced chicle chewing gum (an old Aztec favorite) to Yankee Thomas Adams of Staten Island, N.Y., who commercialized it, putting it on sale in drug stores in Feb. 1871 at 1 cent apiece, going on in 1889 to form the Am. Chicle Co., which by 1929 had $60M sales, and $140M in 1942. Too bad, Mexican and Guatemalan chicleros began adulterating their product, causing artificial chicle to replace it by the 1960s.
On Aug. 14, 1834 Yankee gringo Richard Henry Dana Jr. (1815-82) sailed on the brig Pilgrim to Mexican California, witnessing the hide and tallow trade, and returning in Sept. 1836 on the Alert after witnessing a flogging aboard the Pilgrim that pissed him off, after which in 1840 he published the bestseller Two Years Before the Mast, turning gringos on to California as a great place to steal after Texas, so big surprise, in 1841 the U.S. Preemption Act legalized gringo squatting on lands in the American West, and the Great Migration began, the first wave of wagons crossing the Missouri River headed for Calif. and Oregon along the I-can't-help-myself Oregon Trail, led by missionary Marcus Whitman from Ft. Hall in E Idaho. In 1843 John Charles Fremont (1813-90) crossed the Rocky Mts. to Oregon, then down the eastern slopes of the Sierras into the Central Valley of Calif., scoping it out for Yankee gringos waiting for da news back east. In 1842 Swiss immigrant John August Sutter (1804-80), who arrived via Oregon, Hawaii and Alaska in California's remote Central Valley in July, 1839, then persuaded the Mexican govt. to give him a 48K-acre land grant on the American River near its junction with the Sacramento River (modern-day Sacramento), built a fort called New Helvetia (Sutter's Fort) with 18-ft.-high walls, living like a feudal baron while entertaining illegal gringo immigrants arriving over the 1841 California Trail through the Sierra Mts. In 1843 gringo mountain man James "Jim" Bridger (1804-81) built Ft. Bridger, a W Wyo. trading post which became a main stop on the Oregon, Calif. and Mormon Trails, a 6-mo., 2K-mi. trek starting each spring along the Oregon Trail from Independence, Mo. along the North Platte River into Wyo., through South Pass down to Ft. Bridger, down the Snake River to the Columbia River, then to Ft. Vancouver in the Williamette Valley, after which some branched off from the Snake River down the Calif. Trail across the Sierra Nevada to Calif., which now exceeded 1K annual "overlanders" in ox-drawn, canvas-covered "prairie schooners". Before the railroad supplanted it, 80K-200K made the trek. Migrants were warned to bring 75 lbs. of bacon and 200 lbs. of flour for each adult to last them for the journey, forget cholesterol or health risks, this is survival of the fittest. Horace Greeley wrote in the New York Daily Tribune that the migrants displayed "an aspect of insanity", while the Brits claimed that the trek would prove impossible, and that they "might as well undertake to go to the Moon". Cholera, accidents, snakes and Indians eventually killed 20K, with half of the deaths occurring before reaching Ft. Laramie, and by 1850 there up to four graves per mi. in "America's longest graveyard". At South Pass, Wyo. at 7,412 ft. the trail climbs 1K ft. in 5 mi., and most wagons had to be lightened by shucking almost everything not essential, creating a giant treasure pile. The Oregon Trail became the only trail along which cattle were driven both west and east after Oregon turned into cattle country in the 1870s and 1880s.
On May 7, 1843 the first Japanese immigrants arrived in the U.S. in New York City, and U.S. pres. #10 (1841-5) John Tyler (1790-1862) prophesied that the not-yet-U.S. Pacific coast will be used to open up increased markets for the U.S. in China and Japan. I'm sure he said markets not immigrants to the whites-only U.S., hidden valley ranch, makes Japanese vegetables delectable. Also in 1843, the Hawaiian govt. began privatizing land in their country depleted of people by foreign diseases, giving foreign-owned plantations a free hand to monopolize agriculture and import indentured laborers from China, Japan and other Asian countries in an attempt to mix more "hardy" genes into the Hawaiian pop., giving them a base from which to emigrate to the Am. West coast. The Hakka women have big feet, the Punti women small feet, it's all there in James A. Michener's 1959 bestselling novel "Hawaii", let the freak flag fly haha.
Meanwhile, after the U.S. defied Mexican warnings and annexed rebel Texas (Tejas) in 1845, the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846-8 began when Mexico refused to accept the annexation and rattled its swords, giving the white supremacist Yankees under U.S. pres. #11 (1845-9) James Knox Polk (1794-1849) the excuse to steal their whole territory after making up an imaginary provocation about which line in the desert vastnesses of Texas was the boundary, then after claiming that Mexican troops were on the wrong side, invading all of Mexico with everything they had under gen. (later pres. #12 in 1849-50) Zachary Taylor (1784-1850), culminating in the U.S. Marines taking the fabled Halls of Montezuma in Mexico City, then forcing the Mexican govt. at gunpoint not only to accept gringo Texas as no longer their top-of-the-gas state on line Toot, but to sell them half their territory (525K sq. mi.) (incl. California, Arizona, and New Mexico - the old Aztec homeland of Aztlan) for a measly $15M (about $300M in today's dollars, enough to buy a major league sports team) in the grossly one-sided dirty-deal Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of Feb. 2, 1848 (that's right, a town near Mexico City named after the Virgin of Guadalupe and Father Hidalgo), which established the Rio Grande River as the U.S.-Mexico border and created a de facto apartheid, leaving sawed-off Mexico eternally doomed to subsistence agriculture, dependence on the U.S., and border lawlessness, not to mention a permanent underclass status. The bitter experience caused the Mexican govt. to encourage colonization of N Mexico to prevent another gringo land grab, resulting in a second major population center outside Mexico City, all nursing a simmering list of grudges. Pres. Polk uttered the soundbyte: "There will be added to the United States an immense empire, the value of which twenty years hence it would be difficult to calculate". Yes, the U.S. pres. admitted that his nation was now an empire. To which Mexican pres. (1876-1911) Porforio Diaz later added "Alas, poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States."
Too bad, the sawed-off Mexico should have never been its own country, because it has three strikes against it geographically. It just plain doesn't have the natural advantages of El Norte or South America, with only small chunks of land on the east coast that are useful for more than subsistence agriculture, separated by deserts and mountains, and it has no useful river transport system, plus a lot of the land is desert or jungle. El Norte, on the other hand, is blessed with the world's largest contiguous mass of arable land in the Midwest, plus the greatest maritime transport system in the world, with the Mississippi River plus great harbors in New York Bay, Chesapeake Bay, and San Francisco Bay covered in whipped cream, not to mention the great Intercoastal Waterway on the east coast and going around to Texas. The result is a giant crop-growing breadbasket no other country on Earth can match, which always insures that the U.S. economy is more recession-proof than anywhere else, as everything else builds on top of it, and actually has nothing to do with whites being superior to anybody, other than superior at stealing the land from the original Indians because they could pull the trigger faster than the Indians could shoot an arrow. Now the gringos decided to seal the Mexicans in a tin can in a cold cruel calculated effort at naked apartheid if not genocide, what are you having for dinner tonight, not you again.
Not that they didn't think long and hard about taking it all. After forcing Mexico to its knees and before making them sign on the dotted line, some Yankee gringos toyed with the All Mexico Movement, a plan to annex all of Mexico by force, probably without paying a dime, along with expelling the Spanish, they had the power, but they soon dumped it because of pure naked white supremacist racism, back in the days when there were no PC police to worry about. His desire to back them up if they decided to do it actually caused Pres. Polk to grumble about the 1848 treaty, but White is Right won out over common sense that said that absorbing all that territory would make the U.S. a world island far more able to defend itself from overseas invaders, and that accepting the Mexican people as equals now would heal all wounds and be a new beginning. No, those were the days, my friend, when racial hate would never end. In the words of South Carolina Sen. John Caldwell Calhoun (1782-1850) (U.S. vice-pres. #7 in 1825-31): "[W]e have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race — the free white race. To incorporate Mexico would be the very first instance of the kind of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes." In other words, too many of them pesky Indios to exterminate or herd into reservations like in El Norte, plus they weren't naked pagans anymore but devout Catholics, hence they might end up marrying your WASP son or daughter and turn them into puppets of the Vatican. Besides, all colored people are inherently lazy and dishonest, and just one drop is all it takes to ruin a whole family tree. As Yankee John O'Sullivan put it: "There is no growth in Hispanic America... How would it kick the beam against the simple, solid weight of the two hundred and fifty, or three hundred millions - and American millions - destined to gather beneath the flutter of the stripes and stars, in the fast hastening year of the Lord 1945?" So U.S. policy was fixed: seal and forget, and screw Manifest Destiny when it comes to beanerland, pffft. Lucky they hadn't invented gasoline and diesel engines yet and it was no fun crossing the huge deserts along a lot of the border on foot, and at least only good swimmers could handle the Rio Grande, and when they arrived they'd have er, wet backs to give them away, as if they could afford to go to Berlitz and learn English to blend in, ha ha a double whammy on them bean breaths, all that would have to wait until the next century at least, which a lot of Bible-thumping gringos thought would be preempted by the return of Lily White Christ anyway, never mind what they would have told him when they found he wasn't so lily white.
In 1846 the St. Patrick's (San Patricio) Battalion, under Capt. John O'Reilly was formed out of Irish immigrants and some German Catholics who switch to the Mexican side after months of proselytizing by Mexican Catholic priests as they sit on the Rio Grande facing the Mexican army; they first used the slogan "Erin Go Bragh" on their banner, establishing the modern spelling; their singing of a version of Henry VIII's song "Green Grows the Holly" and/or shouting the slogan in battle caused Mexicans to adopt the word "gringo" (a cognate of "griego", Greek, as in "it's Greek to me") for Yankees; after the war ended in a V for the Yankees, they were executed for treason; the word went into the Mexican vernacular when they saw them marching in captured Mexico City in Sept. 1847?
The U.S. was at a historic crossroads, namely, genocide of all non-whites, or sanity. Having won the All Mexico battle, Calhoun went on to preach white racial purity and the enslavement of blacks until he got what he wanted, secession of the Whiter Than Crisco Confederate States of America, followed by what he didn't want, the horrible U.S. Civil War of 1861-5, where whites slaughtered whites while the blacks and browns watched and stepped up their family sizes, and Irish flooded into New York so they could act as extras in a Martin Scorsese movie.
Did I mention future U.S. savior Abraham Lincoln (1809-65) yet? He actually got his start in politics in Illinois in December, 1847 as a U.S. Congressman spending his term trying to stop the U.S.-Mexico War, claiming that the U.S. was the aggressor for invading Mexico, and introducing Spot Resolutions calling on Pres. Polk to name the spot where American blood had been shed on U.S. soil first, causing him to be called a traitor by the white supremacist slave-owners who dominated Congress back then, after which he got even in spades when he presided over the Union V over the Southern Confederate Johnny Rebs and freed the slaves, the black slaves, sandwiching the Southern whites between them and the browns in devastation while the rest of the U.S. boomed.
It was either during this war or the 1836 Texican War that Mexican soldiers heard some Yankees singing Henry VIII's hit tune "Green Grow the Hollies" around the campfire and reported back that they were singing their anthem, causing them to be called gringos, and after 160 years the grudges caused by the 1848 Apartheid still festered between the beaners and gringos, causing extremists on both sides to take a loud boisterous position clamoring for sick violent apocalyptic programs, including the Minutemen on the gringo side, and the Mexica (Aztlan) Movement on the beaner side. Will calm reason win in the end, or will the nihilists rock and roll us all to the Stone Age? Never fear, TLW's here, so stay tuned. But I'm jumping ahead, so I'll get back to the timeline.
Talk about lucky timing, on Jan. 24, 1848 a gold nugget was discovered by Sutter's partner James Wilson Marshall (1810-85) in the tailrace of Sutter's Sawmill in Coloma on the Trinity River in the foothills of the Sierras in N Calif. 30 mi. from Sutter's Fort on the South Fork of the American River (of course the U.S. negotiators in Guadalupe-Hidalgo feigned ignorance of it), and in May the California Gold Rush began (ends 1854) after a publicity stunt was staged by Sutter's Fort store owner Samuel Brannan (1819-89), a Mormon elder hoping to make a fortune outfitting gold seekers in San Francisco, causing most of the town's 800 residents to head for the gold fields within a few days, and causing Brannan to become the first millionaire of the gold rush. On Aug. 19 the New York Herald reported the discovery, turning on the 500K pop. crowded in too small a space and plagued by horse manure, wild dogs and pigs and drunks from cheap whiskey, and after several lucky early miners made sizeable fortunes fast and easy, the news fed "gold fever", and on Dec. 5 Pres. Polk confirmed the discovery in his Fourth Annual Message, complete with an oyster tin full of gold, starting a nationwide and later a worldwide stampede known as the Forty-Niners, ruining Sutter's land grant with claim jumping, while gold fever was further pumped up by newspaper stories about gold nuggets lining the streets and gold dust so easy to harvest that one could coat oneself with sticky stuff and roll down a hill to collect it. By 1859 300K rushed in, 100K+ stayed, and 28.4M troy oz. of gold at $18.89 an oz. worth $536M was removed. Of course, diehard white supremacists saw the easy riches that God saved only for gringos as proof that the American West was God's promised land for the English-speaking WASP race, further hardening anti-beaner discrimination, sorry Mexican govt. losers, no refunds, pardon me while I vomit again.
During the California Gold Rush Days a new breed of illegal immigrants began arriving, starting on Feb. 2, 1848 when the first Chinese immigrants arrived in San Francisco Bay in the Eagle one week after the Gold Rush started, adding to the seven already there. Aptly-named Ah Toy (1828-1928) became the 2nd Chinese woman to arrive in San Francisco, setting up a brothel in an alley off Clay St., where the fact that she was tall and had lily-bound feet caused block-long lines of horny white men after each ship docked, not all fats are sugar and calories. A man later sent a letter from Hong Kong claiming that she was his wife and requesting her return, but she went to court and a judge granted her leave to stay. She then returned to court to complain of customers paying the 1 oz. fee with brass filings instead of gold, pointing out several in the audience as culprits, but the judge ruled insufficient evidence when she couldn't explain what the services rendered were, giving him the lame explanation "to gaze on the lovely Ah Toy". Obviously enough paid with real gold, because within a year she imported five additional Chinese "soiled doves" and moved to a fancier house on Pike St. just off Clay St., then disappeared in 1859, after which in 1926 an obituary in a San Fran newspaper said that she married a wealthy Chinese man and vended clams at Alviso.
In 1850 the U.S. admitted the state of California, allowing the Spanish landowning families to grandfather in, with the help of Zorro, proving that the two cultures are not necessarily incompatible after all as long as the gringos get all the gold.
On Jan. 6, 1853 a conservative revolt in Mexico ousted pres. (since 1853) Mariano Arista, who fled to exile in Portugal; supreme court pres. Juan Bautista Ceballos (1811-59) became provisional pres., and asked for and received special powers denied to Arista, then shut down the congress on Jan. 19 and called for a constitutional convention, but they fought back, and the Mexico City garrison removed Ceballos and on Feb. 8 installed Gen. Manuel Maria Lombardini (1802-53), hero of the 1847 Battle of La Angostura, while Ceballos returned to the supreme court; on Apr. 20 Santa Anna returned from exile in Jamaica and resumed the presidency, making him the cmdr. of the Mexico City garrison, and he died happy on Dec. 2.
On Dec. 30, 1853 to make a southern transcontinental railroad route possible through the new coast-to-coast English-speaking whites-only homeland, the U.S. bought 30M acres (29,670 sq. mi.) in New Mexico (S of the Gila River) and S Ariz. from Mexico for $10M via the Gadsden Purchase, negotiated by U.S. minister to Mexico (1853-4) James Gadsden (1788-1858) (grandson of U.S. founding father Christopher Gadsden, aide-de-camp to Gen. Andy Jackson in 1818, and pres. of the Louisville, Cincinnati and Charleston Railroad, AKA the South Carolina Railroad in 1842). The purchase was ratified on Apr. 29, 1854, becoming the last addition to the U.S. lower 48 states. Too bad, the U.S. now had to absorb 100K Mexican citizens via annexation, who were routinely discriminated against, of course, creating a permanent brown-skinned Spanish-speaking underclass. By 1890 75K more arrived, mainly to do low-paid manual labor. From this point on the U.S. was just playing a delaying game with Mexico, trying to keep them down, with no clue what to do when their pop. rose so high they couldn't support themselves anymore on their sawed-off territory.
Meanwhile back in Mexico, the aborigines were finally getting their act together. On Jan. 1, 1861 after defeating Hispanic conservatives in military engagements in 1860, Benito Pablo Juarez (1806-72) entered Mexico City, then on June 15 was elected by Congress as pres. of the Mexican Repub. for a 6-year term, becoming the first (only?) full-blooded Indio pres. In July, 1861 after seeing how the conservatives had emptied the national treasury, he announced a 2-year moratorium on all debt payments, adding to the ethnic Spanish-dominated Congress' distrust of him, and on Oct. 13 the Convention of London was signed by Britain, France and Spain to force the new Mexican govt. to fulfill the previous regime's obligations, and in Dec. all three landed troops in Vera Cruz, ignoring the U.S. Monroe Doctrine because they knew it couldn't be enforced during the U.S. Civil War, and Juarez caved in, reaching a settlement with the British and Spanish, causing them to withdraw, while the French under emperor (1851-70) Napoleon III (1808-73) remained, with designs of a new French American White is Right empire to keep them pesky Indios and blacks down, probably with designs of getting Aztlan back one day, while allying with the Confederates in Texas to serve as a barrier to keep the Yankee gringos and their Monroe Doctrine at bay. Of course, they hoped that the Confederates would win the U.S. Civil War and keep black slavery, yes, Mexico was the soft underbelly of the U.S. and now they saw their chance.
Cue the music. On May 5, 1862 (Monday) in one of the great God-doesn't-make-garbage underdog comebacks, an army of 2K-4K Mexican nationalists loyal to Benito Juarez (many of them Indio peasants with farm implements and antiquated rifles), led by Gen. Ignacio Zaragoza (1829-62) defeated an army of 3.5K Mexican and 4.5K French soldiers loyal to Napoleon III led by French Gen. Lorenz at the Battle of Puebla (Cinco de Mayo) 100 mi. E of Mexico City. Too bad, Zaragoza died of typhoid fever on Sept. 8, but the big V kept the French from aiding the Confederates in Texas, helping the Union win the U.S. Civil War as Juarez watched the Yankees' backs. Typical of their white supremacist hangups, the Yankees didn't seize the day and megamerge with Mexico and plan to mix the pops. right then and there, and afterward gringo-Americans never considered it a holiday worth celebrating like the Mexicans and Mexican-Americans did. Instead it eventually becoming a sore point with hardcore white supremacists in the late 20th cent. and early 21st cents., who saw the millions of "illegal aliens" moving in waving that green-white-red flag in Los Angeles or some other U.S. city in former Mexican territory and sent the pigs to harass them, keep your hands where I can see them please, I'm taking you downtown for hanging a car deodorizer from the rear-view mirror of your lowrider and obstructing vision.
But the French were tenacious, and on June 7, 1863 they captured Mexico City, causing Benito Juarez to move his capital to the north and continue resistance, and on July 10 the Spanish republic was dissolved along with its constitution and laws against slavery, and a new Catholic empire was proclaimed, with the crown offered by lily white French emperor Napoleon III to lily white Austrian erzherzog (archduke) Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph (1832-67), son of Holy Roman Emperor Franz Josef (a consolation prize for the AEIOU grudge?), known as an accomplished scientist, who became Maximilian I, the last emperor of Mexico, sitting on the Cactus Throne as the Cactus Emperor, with his lilly white wife Carlotta (Charlotte of Belgium) (1840-1927) as empress, showing his true colors by inviting Confederates to migrate to Mexico along with their slaves. The U.S. (Union) govt. of course didn't like it, and after they won the U.S. Civil War they reinstated the Monroe Doctrine and told the French troops to leave, we're all out of spicy, supplying Juarez's republican troops until they did, after which Maximilian I made the mistake of hanging around too long and getting hung on June 19, 1867, after which Viva Juarez was reelected as pres. of Mexico, staying in office until he died of apoplexy in 1872, going down as Mexico's #1 all-time hero, the great chance of megamerging with the U.S. lost for over 100 years as the hordes of new Irish and Eastern Europeans flooding in via New York City and the brand-new Statue of Liberty were just as or even more racist than the British descendants.
On Mar. 3, 1875 the U.S. Page Act of 1875 was passed, sponsored by U.S. Rep. (R-Calif.) (1873-83) Horace Francis Page (1883-90), becoming the first restrictive federal immigration law, barring entry of "undesirables" incl. Chinese, Japanese, and "Mongolian" contract (forced) (coolie) laborers, along with felons and prostitutes to the White Is Right U.S., imposing a $2K fine and one year prison sentence for anyone who tried to bring a person from China, Japan or any Asian country to the United States "without their free and voluntary consent, for the purpose of holding them to a term of service"; too bad, only the ban on female Asians was heavily enforced.
Mexico now secure from French takeover, on Nov. 29, 1876 mestizo gen. Porfirio Diaz (1830-1915) (who lost the 1867 election to Juarez, staged an unsuccessful revolt in 1871, and now had his ducks in a row) became pres. of Mexico (until May 25, 1911), presiding as a dictator over the 34-year Porfiriato, during which his regime developed a rule by the elite and middle class Spanish, who rode on the backs of the Indio peasant masses in the countryside while trying in vain to modernize and catch up to the gringos in El Norte, who smugly continued the 1848 Apartheid. Diaz is known for the immortal soundbyte "Alas, poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States", grab your bag, it's on.
Meanwhile the U.S. continued the 1848 Apartheid, but after ahem, gaining all that mainly empty territory from Mexico they needed mucho non-beaner immigrants, so about the time of the U.S. Civil War they opened up New York Harbor to Southern and Eastern Euros, fuck old fart Emperor Augustus, any Euro is better than an Indio. On May 6, 1882 the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act banned the importation of Chinese laborers to the U.S. for 10 years, since "the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory thereof"; too bad, it had the side-effect of altering the legal definition of U.S. citizenship, creating the concept of illegal alien, leading to passports; it wasn't repealed until Dec. 17, 1943 - here comes what right down Santa Claus lane? Meanwhile the Statue of Liberty (AKA Liberty Enlightening the World) was presented by the people of France to the U.S., and dedicated on Oct. 28, 1886 on Liberty Island in New York Harbor by U.S. pres. #22 and #24 (1885-9, 1893-7) Stephen Grover Cleveland (1837-1908), complete with a bronze plaque bearing the poem The New Colossus by Jewish-Am. (Portuguese Sephardic immigrant ancestors) Emma Lazarus (1849-87) to tell non-beaners and non-Africans that they're welcome, kind of, don't worry, nothing gay going on here. Too bad, now that there was too much publicity some govt. bureaucrats soon decided the tank was full, after which Ellis Island was opened on Jan. 1, 1892 (until Nov. 12, 1954) to quarantine them and find excuses to slow down or even shove them on the next boat back, while leaving the Statue of Liberty up as a kind of Victorian Joker long before Heath Ledger.
Meanwhile back in Europe on Feb. 1, 1848 London Tribune reporter (managing ed. Richard Henry Dana Jr. - a coincidence or did he never mention his California days, just living in a backyard for 18 years?) Karl Marx (1818-83) and Friedrich Engels (1820-95) pub. The Manifesto of the Communist Party in London as a broadside for the coming 1848 Year of Revolutions in Europe, with those still who thought that Socialism could be implemented bloodlessly labelled as "utopian socialists", and containing the immortal soundbyte "When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class". Too bad, when the little revvies all fizzled the document was withdrawn, rewritten, then published 20+ years later in 1872 as The Communist Manifesto, sometimes the truth has to be repeated twice so here it is. Too bad, since Marx was an Eastern Euro Jew, and some of them new Eastern Euro immigrants (especially the Jewish ones) started preaching it in the streets of New York City, threatening to spread it all over, the WASP establishment in the U.S. automatically saw red, having no problems in systematically destroying every ground principle of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights to eradicate the mongrel Backyard of Hell scourge, starting with the Red Scare of 1917-20.
On May 31, 1894 back in Anglo-Saxon U.S., Harvard U. grads Prescott Farnsworth Hall (1868-1921), Charles Warren (1868-1954), Robert DeCourcy Ward (1867-1931) et al. founded the Immigration Restriction League in Boston, Mass. to exclude immigrants from S and E Europe (Ireland, Italy, and Germany) for inferior "racial qualities" that are threatening their way of life incl. high wage scale; after introducing a bill to Congress on Apr. 8, 1918 to place numerical limits on immigration, it disbanded after Hall's 1921 death.
We've reached the 20th century As a historyscoper I appreciate that half of all of known human history happened in this century, so events began accelerating, hang on.
In 1910 things began to break in Mexico with the 1910 Mexican Revolution (ended 1920), led by orphan-turned-bandit Francisco "Pancho" Villa (1878-1923), which toppled old fart Diaz for Francisco Ignacio Madero (1873-1913), who became pres. from May 25, 1911 until Feb. 18, 1913, when turncoat army CIC Gen. Victoriano Huerta (1854-1916), backed by U.S. ambassador Henry Lane Wilson (1859-1932) arrested him along with his vice-pres, and assumed control of the govt., then had Madero and the vice-pres. assassinated by his soldiers while awaiting trial on treason charges. Never fear, Speedy Gonzalez and Slowpoke Rodriguez, er, mestizos Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata Salazar (1879-1919) joined Coahuila gov. (since 1911) Venustiano Carranza Garza (1859-1920) (the "first chief" of the revolutionary Constitutionalists) in the fight against Huerta and his Yankee puppetmasters. The owners of the Cuauhtemoc (Cuauhtémoc) Moctezuma Brewery in Monterrey (founded 1890) backed Huerta, causing his rival Carranza to seize the brewery and chase them to Tex., after which they only returned with the intervention of U.S. and Russian diplomats, going on to become a virtual beer monopoly, producing Dos Equis, Carta Blanca, Tecate and other brands, finally being bought by Dutch giant Heineken Internat. in 2010. Coincidentally, wild card Yankee The Devil's Dictionary humorist writer Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (d. 1913/4) mysteriously disappeared in Chihuahua during all that confusion while trying to join up with Villa's army.
I love tortillas, I love them dearly, but there's no torillas, there's only bread? On Apr. 9 1914 the Tampico Affair saw the Mexican govt. of Pres. Huerta arrest nine U.S. Marines for 1.5 hours for entering a prohibited zone in Tampico for supplies, causing U.S. Adm. Mayo to demand a 21-gun salute to the U.S. flag, which Huerta refused, causing Pres. Wilson to send the U.S. fleet to Tampico, and U.S. Marines on Apr. 21 to occupy the port of Veracruz; Huerta then broke off relations with the U.S., but South Am. states mediated, and on Nov. 23 the Marines evacuated; USMC officer Smedley Darlington Butler (1881-1940), "the Fighting Quaker", "Old Gimlet Eye" received the Medal of Honor for Veracruz, then received another one in WWII and rises to the rank of Maj. Gen., later writing the book War Is a Racket; anti-U.S. riots break out in Mexico, threatening war; on May 18-July 2 the ABC Conference of the ABC Powers (Argentina, Brazil, Chile) at Niagara Falls in Ontario, Canada failed because of Wilson's insistence on Huerta's ouster; on July 5 Huerta was reelected, then resigned on July 15 after the U.S. refused to recognize him, fleeing to Spain and averting war, after which on Aug. 15 Mexico City was captured by the Constitutionalist army, led by Gen. Alvaro Obregon (1880-1928). In Aug. Venustiano Carranza assumed executive power, and the U.S. recognized his govt., but after he failed to institute agrarian reform Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata refused to recognize him, organizing a mass movement in N Mexico against him, installing Eulalio Martin Gutierrez Ortiz (1881-1939) as pres. on Nov. 6 (until Jan. 16, 1915), and plunging Mexico into yet another civil war, giving Carranza a Nov. 10 deadline to resign, then capturing Mexico City in Dec. At this point Carranza got wise, announcing a far-reaching social reform program promising expropriation of large landholdings in favor of Indio villages, and won popular support for his Constitutionalist movement. Meanwhile Villa, Zapata and Gutierrez proved inept at politics and foreign relations, causing isolation, see that Hollyweird flick "Viva Zapata!" starring what's his name Godfather guy, and real Mexican actor Anthony Quinn (1915-2001), who was born in Chihuahua at the height of the ruckus.
On Jan. 17, 1915 Gutierrez was deposed, and on Jan. 27 Gen. Obregon recaptured Mexico City and restored pres. Venustiano Carranza. Meanwhile Carranza's forces under Gen. Salvador Alvarado Rubio (1880-1924) invaded Merida, Yucatan and deposed gov. Abel Ortiz Argumedo, then liberated the workers from debt peonage, helping them form unions. Too bad, on Apr. 6-15, 1915 Pancho Villa's 22K-man army was badly defeated at the Battle of Celaya by the 15K troops of Gen. Obregon using U.S. know-how (from WWI) and arms incl. 13 big field guns, killing 5.8K, wounding 5K, and capturing 6.5K, with his own losses amounting to 695 KIA and 641 wounded, and on Oct. 19 the U.S. and several Latin American states recognized Carranza as pres., followed by Britain on Nov. 16.
On Mar. 9, 1916 after being defeated in the civil war by the Carranza's troops (aided by the U.S.), turning his men into outlaws and pissing him off against gringos, Pancho Villa, gen. of the revolutionary Div. del Norte (who claimed he was seeking revenge against an arms trader?) invaded the U.S. with 485 men and raided Columbus, N.M., killing 19 gringos and burning the town. Wasting no time, on Mar. 15 6K U.S. forces led by brig. gen. John Joseph "Black Jack" Pershing (1860-1948) (with aide Lt. George Patton) began chasing him back into Mexico. Finding access to Mexican railroads denied, they began riding Harley motorcycles (becoming the first U.S. mechanized military op.?), while their air force of eight Jennies tagged along for a mo. until they got destroyed. Villa suffered a serious leg wound from his own troops two weeks after the hunt began, but managed to elude the estupido gringos, and in June Pershing tried to provoke a hostile confrontation with Carranza's forces to give him an excuse to take over all of Mexico, causing Carranza to protest violation of Mexican territory and authorize resistance, resulting in the June 21 Battle of Carrizal, but Washington caught wind of it and ordered Pershing's troops to idle in an encampment for several months. The gringos finally withdrew on Feb. 5, 1917 after their differences were settled by arbitration. At the beginning of the expedition the U.S. Army captured several Mexican soldiers, sent them to New Mexico without extradition, and got them railroaded for murder in Deming, N.M. and hanged. A second group was acquitted and deported. That didn't stop Mexican inhabitants of Columbus from being retaliated against by the local gringos, ai chihuahua the grudges are building up.
On Jan. 31, 1917 Mexico adopted the 1917 Mexican Constitution, superseding the 1857 constitution, and promulgated it on Feb. 5, ending the Mexican Rev. of 1910. The new constitution established an 8-hour workday, minimum wage, and the right to strike; peasants are permitted to recover seized lands. Church power and property rights are curtailed, and free secular mandatory public education instituted. Foreigners (especially Yankee gringos) are denied the right to own land except under special situations. On Mar. 11 Venustiano Carranza was elected pres. for a 4-year term with reelection barred (until May 21, 1920). Too bad, he proved to be old skool, ignoring the constitution and repressing rural resistance while solidifying power. Meanwhile the part about restricting foreign interests who sought to own the land under Mexicans' feet caused a Yankee conspiracy against him. Do you know who invented the electric washing machine? It was a Jewish man named Goldenberg from New Joisey in the 1880s.
Meanwhile on Jan. 19, 1917 German foreign minister Dr. Arthur Zimmermann (1864-1940) sent the Zimmermann (Zimmerman) Note, a coded telegram to German minister Heinrich von Eckardt in Mexico City to work for an alliance with Mexico and Japan directed against the U.S. "just in case" the U.S. enters the war, promising them "generous financial support" to help them "reconquer" Tex., Ariz., and N.M., promising to "make war together, make peace together". After the Brits intercepted and decoded it and made it public on Feb. 24, U.S. Dem. pres. #28 (1913-21) Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) got hopping mad at Germany, speeding U.S. entry into WWI on Apr. 6. At least the U.S. soon forgot about poor little Mexico, allowing it to do what it liked, but the episode did show that overseas nations tend to think of Mexico as the soft underbelly of the U.S.
On Feb. 4, 1917 over Pres. Woodrow Wilson's veto the U.S. passed the U.S. Immigration Act of 1917, AKA the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, creating an Asiatic Barred Zone consisting of most of E Asia and the Pacific Islands, and ballooning the list of "undesirables" banned from legally entering the U.S., including gays, lesbians, bisexuals, "mentally or physically defective", etc. Of course, this automatically excluded most Mexicans, but it took until 1928 for the U.S. to get antsy enough to actually order their consulate to bar them from even applying.
On Feb. 19, 1918 Mexico declared its oil an inalienable national resource, nationalizing it, and levying a tax on oil lands and contracts, requiring titles to oil lands to be turned into concessions, causing U.S. and British companies to protest and seek to undermine the govt. At this point yearly U.S. oil production was 443M barrels, Mexican 163M barrels, and Russian 25M barrels. Now the Yankees might have had second thoughts about not annexing Mexico in 1848, hmmm?
On Apr. 9, 1920 Mexican gens. Alvaro Obregon (1880-1928) (former chickpea farmer) and Plutarco Elias Calles (1877-1945) united against Pres. Carranza, accusing him of attempting to dictate his successor, and winning popular support for their "Revindicating Revolution". Meanwhile an alliance of Sonoran gens. from N Mexico led by Sonoran gov. Felipe Adolfo de la Huerta Marcor (1882-1955), proclaimed the Plan de Agua Prieta, signed in a curio shop near the border. On May 8 Gen. Obregon captured Mexico City, causing Carranza to flee to the state of Puebla. On May 21 after Obregon captured cities on the east coast, Carranza was assassinated on Obregon's orders, and Huerta became Mexican pres. #38 on June 1-Nov. 30, ending the civil war after 1M died and many thousands fled to the U.S. et al. On July 27 Pancho Villa surrendered, and was given a retirement estate to put him out to pasture. On Dec. 1 Obregon became pres. #39 of Mexico (until Nov. 30, 1924).
On June 20, 1920 the New York Times first used the term "wetback", meaning a Mexican who swims the Rio Grande River to illegally enter Tex.
In 1922 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Japanese are not eligible for naturalization because they are not "free white persons" under the 1790 naturalization law, and not "persons of African descent" under the 1870 law.
On June 2, 1924 the U.S. Indian Citizenship (Snyder) Act was signed by U.S. Repub. pres. #20 (1923-9) John Calvin Coolidge Jr. (1872-1933), granting full U.S. citizenship to all indigenous peoples ("domestic dependent nations") of the U.S., and snubbing Mexicans bigtime. Too rub it in in advance, on June 1, 1924 the U.S. Immigration Act was passed, establishing the U.S. Immigration Service under the Dept. of Labor, relieving mounted Immigrations and Customs inspectors along the U.S. borders so that they could man official ports of entry. Until then the only excludable aliens were Orientals or "Celestials", who liked to come in at Fairbanks, Alaska by the San Pedro River, but now the floods of Mexicans fleeing the violence in cruddy corrupt Mexico caused their white supremacists buds to bloom, and Uncle Sam was game. The U.S. Border Patrol, organized by Wisc.-born Clifford Alan Perkins, with the motto "Honor First" started out with 600 men, and now got to nab Mexicans on a govt. salary, but in practice they spent most of their time catching rumrunners, beginning the 10-year Volstead Wild West Show, getting in a gunfight every 17 days in the El Paso district alone, and losing five men in their first two years in gunfights. After the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 it was tamed down.
In 1923 Adolfo de la Huerta began a revolt, but was crushed in 1924, and on Dec. 1, 1924 Plutarco Elias Calles (1877-1945) became pres. #40 of Mexico (until Nov. 30, 1928), beginning a decade of direct and indirect authoritarian rule called the Maximato.
On July 4, 1924 Caesar Cardini (1896-1956) of scam-city bordertown Tijuana, Mexico invented Caesar Salad (Romaine lettuce, Parmesan cheese, 2-min. eggs, olive oil, Worcestershire sauce et al.), making Caesar's Restaurant popular with Hollywood stars; in 1926 his brother Alex adds anchovies; it was really invented in 1903 by Italian cook Giacomo Junia of Chicago, Ill. at the New York Cafe, who named it after Julius Caesar? - the English version is Richard the Lettuce Heart?
One good thing. In the 1920s the Mexican Mural Renaissance began (ended 1960), led by the "big three muralists" Diego Rivera (1886-1957), Jose Clemente Orozco (1883-1949), and JDavid (Jose de Jesus) Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974), producing works of social realism after studying art at the San Carlos Academy in Mexico City (founded 1781). So Mexico began developing its own art sans all that Catholic Disneyland-in-every-church B.S. that used to hypnotize Indios. In fact, many if not most of the intelligentsia not only chucked Catholicism but became godless Communism. Too bad, this only made it easier for the rabidly anti-Commie U.S. Yankee govt. to justify stopping the U.S.-Mexico border up.
So, now we're well into the 20th Century, when godless Communism was infesting all third world countries including Mexico, with the Vatican championing no-holds-barred anti-Communism, perhaps causing it to be a little too friendly with them Nasty Nazis. On July 31, 1926 after the govt. of Plutarco Calles undertook anticlerical reforms, the archbishop of Mexico suspended religious services and declared a strike against the state, inciting devout Catholics (Cristeros) to take up arms against the govt. under the slogan "Viva Cristo Rey" in the Cristero Revolt (War), spreading to a dozen provinces. In Feb. 1927 the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico publicly repudiated the Mexican Constitution of 1917, causing the govt. on Feb. 11 to nationalize Church property, begin closing Church schools, and deport foreign priests, monks and nuns. Calles then crushed the Catholics with an iron hand, capturing and executing most of the leaders by the end of 1927, and won the war by 1929. Meanwhile most of the clergy sat it out in the homes of wealthy families, chomping Caesar Salad. On June 21, 1929 the Mexican govt. reached a compromise agreement with the Church allowing them to resume Masses but keeping the laws restricting religions unchanged. Of course the pesky Cristeros were not included in the negotiations, although 70K died in the 3-year Cristero Revolt. The restrictions were not lifted until 1992.
Back to the pesky U.S. oil companies. In 1927 J.P. Morgan and Co. atty. (since 1914) Dwight Whitney Morrow (1873-1931) (father of Charles Lindbergh's wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh) was appointed U.S. ambassador to Mexico (until 1930), working to remove all Mexican laws inimical to U.S. oil rights, causing the Calles-Morrow Agreement between the U.S. and Mexico to reaffirm the concessions of the U.S. oil companies under a new Mexican constitution.
On July 1, 1928 Alvaro Obregon (b. 1880) was reelected pres. of Mexico, after which he was assassinated on July 17 in a Mexico City restaurant by devout Catholic Cristero Jose de Leon Toral (1900-29) (who was executed on Feb. 9, 1929), becoming the 4th revolutionary Mexican leader to be assassinated (Zapata, Carranza, Villa). Strongman Gen. Plutarco Calles then appointed puppet Emilio Portes Gil (1890-1978) as provisional pres. (until 1930). By now Mexico had fallen impossibly behind the U.S. in development and standard of living, becoming an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy as the white supremacists' ghosts bore fruit in generations of downtrodden disadvantaged brown-skinned victims just across a river from the Numero Uno nation on Earth, something's wrong, no, nothing is wrong, I promise, nothing is wrong, it's normal for cardiac patients to experience a certain level of depression and frustration. No surprise, in Aug. 1928 the U.S. govt. ordered Mexico to "deny entry visas to most Mexican applicants and enforce for the first time against Mexicans the provisions of the 1917 Immigration Act denying entrance to the illiterate. The authorities also began demanding the eight dollar head tax called for in the 1917 legislation." (Joseph Nevins) Then in 1929 the Mexican Repatriation began of forced emigration of 500K Mexicans by 1939, no due process of law needed, the victors write the history books, and this got zero ink.
Meanwhile in Aug. 1928 19-y.-o. Texas-born Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-73) took a $125 a mo. job as a teacher at Welhausen School in Cotulla, Tex. (60 mi. from the Mexican border) to help him graduate from Southwest Texas State Teachers College, and took over the 5th-7th grades, insisting that the dirt-poor mostly Hispanic students speak English, and organizing an athletic program. In Oct. he wrote his mother asking for 200 packages of toothpaste for them, after which he rose to U.S. pres. #36 (1963-9) after the assassination of U.S. pres. #35 (1963-3) John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy (1917-63), and plunged the U.S. into the big boondoggle Vietnam War while simultaneously trying to fund the Great Society without raising taxes. Maybe he was writing mother again? Meanwhile on Oct. 12, 1928 Mexico celebrated its first Day of the Race (La Raza), meaning mestizos or mixed Hispanic-Indio, with a dose of African. Later on Oct. 12, 1946 Mexican pres. Jose Vasconcelos declared mestizos to be the "cosmic race".
On Dec. 17, 1928 U.S. undersecy. of state (Mormon) Joshua Reuben Clark Jr. (1871-1961) wrote the Clark Memorandum on the Monroe Doctrine, repudiating the idea that the U.S. can arbitrarily use force in Latin Am. except when Euro countries are involved, which was not pub. until 1930 when he was made U.S. ambassador to Mexico (until 1933).
On Aug. 11, 1929 the extensive Fortes Gil Labor Code was promulgated in Mexico, providing for an 8-hour work day, 6-day work week, mininum wage, right to strike, compulsory insurance, etc. Meanwhile, now that they aren't needed by the U.S. with the Depression setting in, 500K Mexican laborers are deported between 1929 and 1935, many in cattle cars. Call it a coincidence, but the term "apartheid" was coined in 1929 also, and in Mexico the PRI Party was founded, monopolizing politics until the year 2000.
On Feb. 5, 1930 after an assassination attempt early in his campaign last year, Pascual Ortiz Rubio (1877-1963), candidate of the new National Revolution Party (which later becomes the PRI) defeated Jose Vasconcelos of the Anti-Reelection Party and became pres. of Mexico (until 1932), with Gen. Calles remaining the real strongman.
In 1931 because they didn't need them during the Great Depression, the U.S. Repatriation Program shipped 2M "temporary" workers back to Mexico. Too bad, 1M had been born in the U.S, and the U.S. Senate doesn't apologize until 2005. In 1933 after the repeal of Prohibition, the U.S. Immigration Service was renamed the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and a review board of eggheads from Princeton and Yale was established to tame down its Wild West image, firing many inspectors for giving cowboy answers to exams, and mandating that they could no longer draw their weapons until fired upon, causing protests. With far fewer smugglers to go after, they went back to rounding up work-seeking Hispanics, killing diseased Mexican livestock, and cleaning the border like magic until the 1970s, when marijuana and cocaine smugglers put them back into the biz they loved, and the title of Border Patrol Inspector was changed to Border Patrol Agent to seem cool like Bond, yee-haw.
On June 19, 1934 the U.S. Silver Purchase Act was passed, nationalizing domestic silver stocks and requiring the U.S. Treasury to stabilize the price at $1.2929 an ounce. Too bad, the real market value was 45 cents, and the new law caused speculators to drive the price up to 81 cents, destroying the currency systems of Mexico and China. In 1939 the Congress was allowed to set a price for domestic silver, and it picked 71 cents. Luckily, WWII caused a silver shortage, driving the price up for real, causing the U.S. Green Act to be passed in 1943, allowing industries to buy silver from the treasury at the price originally paid for it. After another worldwide shortage, the Silver Purchase Act was repealed in 1963. Meanwhile on July 2, 1934 Calles' man, humble-born rev. gen. and Michoacan gov. (1928-32) Lazaro Cardenas (Lázaro Cárdenas) del Rio (1895-1970) was elected pres. of Mexico for a 6-year term, and was sworn in on Dec. 1, but soon turned on Calles, regarding him as too conservative and corrupt, his first act in office being to cut his pres. salary in half to become popular, followed by ending capital punishment, which in Mexico was by firing squad. This put Mexico ahead of (or behind, depending on your point of view) the U.S., which on June 17, 1932 passed the U.S. Little Lindbergh Law, giving the death penalty for kidnapping across state lines for ransom with bodily harm, not necessarily murder. Too bad, states got too eager, passing their own versions providing a death penalty for kidnapping with bodily harm within state borders, allowing corrupt prosecutors to railroad almost anybody up to the greatest golfer on Earth until the U.S. Supreme Court stopped it in the 1970s.
In 1935 Pres. Lazaro Cardenas forced Gen. Calles and dozens of his corrupt associates into exile after a decade in power, and began giving out 49M acres of land to peasants on the ejido (communal) basis while establishing a national bank to provide them with credit. He continued the policy of excluding the Church from politics and nationalizing its property, and put the foreign-owned oil companies next on his hit list.
On Feb. 26-29, 1936 a national unification congress in Mexico called by the unions created the Communist-backed Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) under Vicente Lombardo Toledano (1894-1968), which supported Pres. Cardenas in an accelerated reform program, and had over 1M members by 1938. Meanwhile workers went on strike against foreign-owned companies, seeking to get a piece of the "excessive profits", and on Nov. 23 Mexico passed an expropriation law empowering the govt. to seize private property for "public or social welfare", esp. if it was owned by U.S. and foreign corporations; meanwhile Cardenas exiled Calles and began a vigorous program of socialization of industry and agriculture. Not that this leftist dictatorship stuff was anything new, since it was going on in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Italy and the U.S. at the same time in Depression-ravaged planet Earth. On June 23, 1937 the national railways in Mexico were taken over by the workers. On Nov. 1, 1937 the Mexican govt. nationalized the subsoil rights of Standard Oil and other oil companies, and after the Industrial Arbitration Board ruled in favor of the workers, the U.S., British and Dutch-owned oil companies appealed to the Mexican Supreme Court, and lost on Mar. 1, 1938, and after they refused to raise the wages for Mexican employees, on Mar. 18 the Mexican govt. nationalized the oil companies to the tune of $450M, creating the Mexican govt. monopoly company Pemex (Petroleos Mexicanos), causing massive pro-govt. demonstrations in Mexico, while pissing the U.S. and British govts. off huge. On Mar. 27 the U.S. discontinued Mexican silver purchases, while the British govt. suspended diplomatic relations, and on July 21 the U.S. proposed arbitration of its claims, asking $200M, but the final compromise was only $24M, about enough to buy a sports team?
On Aug. 2, 1937 the U.S. Marihuana Tax Act was passed, opening the way to the criminalization of marijuana. A large part of the rationale for it was that subhuman brown-skinned Mexicans use it to lower the morals of our white wimmin, and you can guess the rest, we're absolutely worth it. Not the real rationale, the coverstory set up by newspaperman William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951), who along with the Du Pont family and Andrew Mellon wanted to destroy the hemp industry in the U.S. to make way for their tree-based paper industry, go visit the NORML Web site.
On Aug. 21, 1940 Mexico made world headlines when exiled Soviet Communism founding father Leon Trotsky (b. 1879) was brutally murdered in his home with an icepick at the orders of his enemy Stalin in Coyoacan ("place of the coyotes") in S Mexico City by Spanish assassin Ramon Mercader (1914-78), who spent time in prison then became a Soviet and Cuban hero with free drinks at every bar.
In Aug. 1942 the Bracero (Sp. "strong arm") Program was created by the U.S. to permit importation of temporary contract laborers. Of course, the paperwork required by this program caused employers to skirt it, causing the U.S. at first to legally incorporate them into the program after they arrived, then turn around and deport 1M by the early 1950s. The program was terminated in 1964.
Meanwhile, back in El Norte, Fritos, the first successful commercial corn chips began to be marketed in 1942 by a small Texas company, with a recipe for "Frito Chili Pie" on the back, causing chili con carne and once-disdained "Mexican food" to finally become popular in the U.S., spawning a Mexican restaurant boom after WWII, and becoming the first nail in the coffin of the 1848 Apartheid, since it got lame to call Mexicans beaners when you were busy doing your own farting. On Feb. 20, 1943 a volcano erupted in a cornfield, burying the village of Paricutin, Mexico in Michoacan state, building a magnificent cone called El Monstruo by the Tarascan Indians, which explodes every 6 sec., pointing out to gringo schoolchildren ever since how backward and rural Mexico still was, who wants to annex that? On June 3-7, 1943 white racism against Mexican-Americans sparked the Zoot Suit Riots by U.S. Navy personnel in Los Angeles, Calif., followed by more riots around the country; the zoot suit, consisting of a "killer-diller coat with a drape shape, reet pleats and shoulders padded like a lunatic's cell" (Malcolm X) (wide-legged, tight-cuffed pegged tramas or trousers, and long carlango coat, plus a felt hat with long tapa, tanda or feather, worn with a long key chain and a ducktail haircut) became the garb for jitterbugging U.S. hepcats, including Mexicans, gringos, and blacks, becoming another nail in the coffin.
On Dec. 1, 1946 Miguel Aleman Valdes (Alemán Valdés) (1902-83) became the first non-military pres. of Mexico (until Nov. 30, 1952), going on to construct large public works, reform schools, and extend social security coverage, launching the Mexican Miracle that caused the economy to grow fast until recession and inflation killed it in the early 1970s. The metro area of Monterrey in NE Mexico grew into the best area to live, where people were the most contented, in case you asked, while Mexico City grew into a giant overpopulated human anthill that set records all the time, all of them bad.
Too bad, the Red Scare, which started in the U.S. after the 1917 Russian Revolution, hardened after WWII into the McCarthy Era, led by U.S. Repub. Wisc. Sen. Joseph McCarthy (1908-57) and the 1945-75 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), turning on the former U.S. ally Russia and systematically persecuting or intimidating anybody remotely suspected of Communist ties. Since all Mexicans would probably qualify as Commies to Irish Roman Catholic Joe McC., the 1848 Apartheid was not even questioned, breeding like rabbits jokes here.
Talk about not helping. In June, 1948 Marxist artist Diego Rivera's mural A Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park was unveiled in the dining room of the Hotel del Prado in Mexico City; too bad, when the priest who was supposed to bless it, Archbishop L.M. Martinez spied the words "God does not exist" in the mural, he refused to bless it, and later a mob of youths crashed in and scraped the words off with a knife. Finally an anonymous priest did the blessing, and the slogan was not reinstated for nine years.
Speaking of Mexicans breeding like rabbits, on Oct. 15, 1951 the progestin Norethindrone (norethisterone), an artifical substitute for progesterone that is key to the creation of an oral contraceptive pill was synthesized by Austrian-born chemist Carl Djerassi (1923-) of the U.S., Luis Ernesto Miramontes (1925-2004) of Mexico, and George (Gyorgy) Rosenkranz (1916-) of Hungary at Syntex in Mexico City, and on May 9, 1960 the U.S. Food and Drug Admin. (FDA) approved the contraceptive Enovid (Enavid), AKA the birth control pill, developed by Carl Djerassi of G.D. Searle & Co. of Chicago for American birth control (really negative eugenics, to keep the poor and therefore inferior from outbreeding the good guys?) advocate Margaret Higgins Sanger (1879-1966) and funded by heiress Katharine Dexter McCormick (1875-1967), saying that it has proved 100% effective in a 4-year test by 1.5K women. The cost was only $10-$11 per mo. for 20 pills, and for the first time in history women were liberated to have sex without fear of pregnancy, causing a run on pharmacies by non-Catholics and Catholics alike, despite the prohibition of birth control pills for Roman Catholics by Vatican II in 1962-5. By 1961 500K women were using it, and 10M by 1973.
On June 27, 1952 the U.S. McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act, passed over Pres. Truman's veto eliminates race as a bar to immigration and naturalization in the U.S., and sets a quota for Japan at a whopping 185 immigrants per year, while permitting Mexicans to be admitted under the bracero (day worker) program, which is repealed in 1964; Puerto Rican immigration has no legal restriction; the act establishes deportable and excludable offenses, and establishes family and employment-based preferences. In 1953 women in Mexico were granted the vote. On May 3, 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Pete Hernandez v. State of Texas that Mexican-Americans and other racial groups beyond "white" and "negro" in the U.S. have equal protection under the 14th Amendment, and that he had a right to have fellow Mexican-Americans on his jury, which Texas had been denying for over 25 years by claiming that they were white, just not as white as non-Mexican-American whites, showing that the U.S. govt. was cleaning up its racial act step by step.
But sometimes it took one step forward and two steps back. On June 17, 1954 during the administration of U.S. pres. #34 (1953-61) Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969), Operation Wetback (from the 1948 term "wetback" for a Mexican who crashes the U.S.-Mexico border by swimming the Rio Grande River) by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was launched, deporting 3M illegal immigrants from the SW U.S. back to Mexico, until it went too far and began profiling Mexican-American U.S. citizens, causing it to be cancelled.
On Dec. 1, 1958 Adolfo Lopez Mateos (1909-69) became pres. of Mexico (until Nov. 30, 1964), going on to promote education and museums while nationalizing the electric companies. Meanwhile in nearby Cuba in 1959, Fidel Castro (1926-), staged a Commie takeover after using Mexico as a hangout, after which Mexico got in the position of being allies with Cuba and the U.S. at the same time. On Feb. 18, 1960 the Latin American Free Trade Assoc. (LAFTA) was founded by Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay, while on Dec. 13 the Central American Common Market was founded by El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua; Costa Rica joined in July 1962.
In early 1959 Mexican-American rocker Ritchie Valens (1941-59) scored a crossover hit with La Bamba, showing that the younger generation could overcome their parents' racism with rock & roll. Too bad, he died in a plane crash on Feb. 3, 1959, "the Day the Music Died", along with Charles Hardin "Buddy" Holly (1936-59) and J.P. (Jape) "The Big Bopper" Richardson (1930-59). Holly left Puerto Rico-born widow Maria Elena Holly (nee Santiago) (1935-), and Valens' girlfriend Donna Ludwig already kicked off, showing that gringo-Hispanic intermarriage was already okay for rockers back then too. Too bad for WASP supremacists, the ultimate macho male gringo Hollywood icon John "the Duke" Wayne (Frances Marion) (1907-79) liked to marry Hispanic women too, all three of his wives were Latinas, and he wasn't English like he put on, but Irish. Yes, I've historically linked Holly with everything from Henry VIII to gringos to the Day the Music Died, that's why I'm Da Historyscoper.
In the early 1960s the U.S. folk music movement began hammering at racial and other injustices, and Joan Baez (1941-) was right up there at the forefront, giving the lie to white supremacists who were calling Mexicans inferior. The fact that her daddy was top physicist Albert Baez (1912-2007) who co-invented the X-ray microscope helped. Joan and her daddy were Quakers not Roman Catholics. In 1966 Carlos Santana (1947-) formed the band Santana in San Francisco, making Latin music popular in the U.S. In 1973 the rock band Journey was formed in San Fran with former members of Santana.
In 1960 the hit Hollywood movie The Magnificent Seven came out, ripping off the 1954 Japanese flick "The Seven Samurai" by Akira Kurosawa, and romanticizing Mexicans as honest devout humble peasants who are plagued by a tiny minority of criminal banditos, but can easily work across the border with gringo knights in shining armor to save themselves, never mind how the language problemo magically disppeared. Still, it left the masses of Yankee gringos with a warm fuzzy feeling about their southern neighbors. Star Eli Wallach (1915-), who played the bandit leader Calvera was actually a Brooklyn-born Jew, we'll ask the old man, he'll know.
In 1962 former U.S. Marine Glenn William Bell Jr. (1923-2010) founded the first Taco Bell fast food Mexican restaurant in Downey, Calif., selling his first franchise to a former L.A. policeman in 1964 and spreading from there, reaching 868 restaurants before selling out to PepsiCo in 1978 for $125M - I thought Bell stood for a real bell? With a force like this, no gringo could avoid the lure of Mexican food, setting the stage for a future U.S.-Mexico Megamerge every time a gringo crunched down on some tacos or farted after eating some green burritos, ole, I like to say salsa. Okay, the original recipes were gringoized, going light on the spiciness. In Sept. 1997 the Taco Bell Dog (Chihuahua) (1994-2009) (real name Gidget) became a hit in Taco Bell ads, uttering soundbytes incl. "Long live Gorditas" and "Drop the chalupa!" Never mind that they were successfully sued for $30.1M for stealing the idea from two men from Michigan. On Apr. 1, 1996 Taco Bell announced that it had bought the famous gringo Liberty Bell. April Fool's!
In the Who-Killed-Kennedy Year 1963 Shell Oil Co. introduced the bright yellow fly-killing Shell No-Pest Strip, containing DDVP (Vapona). Too bad, the toxicity combined with carcinogenic potential caused it to be withdrawn from the U.S. market in 1979, but it continued to be marketed in Mexico until ?, making it the butt of endless racist jokes about Mexican women, yes, I already made one. There's some deep historical message here about international oil companies and the white supremacist remnant in the U.S., maybe it has something to do with the Bush family, check back with me at my next Texas BBQ, bring plenty of approved fly repellent.
Meanwhile the U.S. civil rights movement, led by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-68) scored V after V in the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in the passage of the 1964 U.S. Civil Rights Act, signed by Pres. Lyndon Baines Johnson on July 2. Title VII barred discrimination in employment on the basis of "race, color, religion, sex or national origin", and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to take complaints, investigate, and impose penalties, so in theory the white supremacist era in the U.S. was officially kaput. Too bad, a large percentage of whites were still overtly or secretly racist, but at least their federal govt. had set a ceiling on their ambitions, causing them to start living in the er, past, while dragging their heels about accepting the existence of other racial and ethnic groups in their former whites-only homeland, call it a carrot and stick approach. White flight to the suburbs began, while the diehard white supremacists began concentrating on stopping non-white immigration so that at least the numerical preponderance was preserved, and that's where it stands to this day, a kind of Bury Your Head in the Sand, Here Come the Huns, and Circle the Wagons mentality, and since no one can see the future, I'll have to check back with ya on how it turned out, hopefully sans horrible racial wars and other mistakes made in other parts of the world, and with sweet calm reason and tolerance prevailing as the really valuable heritage of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights are preserved no matter who moves in, click eHarmony dot com.
On Dec. 1, 1964 Gustavo Diaz Ordaz (1911-79) of the PRI succeeded Adolfo Lopez Mateos as pres. of Mexico (until Nov. 30, 1970), stinking himself up with corruption and repression, as Mexico ends up being controlled by a handful of maybe a dozen and a half fatcats with cozy govt. monopolies who sap the wealth from the masses, including telecommunications magnate Carlos Slim Helu (Helú) (1941-) (son of a Lebanese Marionite Catholic immigrant father), who by 2007 was worth more than Bill Gates, while the Mexican per capita GDP was only 25% of the U.S.
Speaking of Taco Bell, at least the Malthusian prophets of doom were set back in 1964 by the work of Norman Ernest Borlaug (1914-) in developing new strains of wheat with dwarfing genes and fertilizer, which caused China to have its best grain harvest since 1957 with 1.282B bushels, and India to have its best grain harvest also, bringing in 89M tons of rice and 11M tons of wheat, after which India's wheat harvest increased from 10M to 17M tons by 1968, doubling by 1970. Borlaug's Internat. Rice Research Inst. in the Philippines launched the Green Revolution, which soon scored a big success in Mexico with the Internat. Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in 1966, followed by ditto in Asia, and by 1972 tens of millions of acres were under cultivation. Coincidentally or not, in 1965 Tequila, Mexico's national drink (named after the town of Tequila in Jalisco) began rising in popularity in the U.S., climbing 1,500% in the 1970s, showing gringos that they have more in common with beaners than just Mexican food and Caesar Salad.
On May 18, 1967 after police fired on teachers and parents demonstrating in Atoyac, Mexico, killing 18+, Mexican schoolteacher Lucio Cabanas (Cabañas) Barrientos (1938-74) began a guerrilla campaign in Atoyac de Alvarez, W of Acapulco in Guerrero state, causing the govt. to respond with widespread repression, killing or disappearing hundreds of civilians, becoming known as the Dirty War. In 2006 outgoing pres. Vicente Fox published an 800-page Report on the Dirty War, admitting to 700 executions without trial. Meanwhile on June 17, 1967 marijuana (Mary Jane) (Mary Warner) (Boo) smuggling over the U.S.-Mexican border officially began when U.S. border inspectors Thomas Lawrence Newton Jr. (b. 1941) and George Frederick Azrak (b. 1945) stopped a truck loaded with it on Highway 79 near Oak Grove, Calif., were captured, taken to a mountain cabin near Temecula, and shot in the head, after which in 1969 U.S. pres. #37 (1969-74) Richard "Tricky Dicky" "King Richard" Milhous Nixon (1913-94) authorized Project Intercept to inspect every vehicle crossing the San Ysidro-Tijuana border with the U.S. and Mexico in the hope of pressuring the govt. of Gustavo Diaz Ordaz to expand Mexican drug enforcement, in vain, as the policia went on the take, and the U.S. drug demand zoomed while decriminalization efforts were stifled.
On Oct. 2, 1968 the Tlatelolco Massacre saw riot police and federal troops take on impoverished university students protesting an army takeover of the National U. and the money lavished over the upcoming 1968 Mexico City Summer Olympics (scheduled to start in 10 days) in the inner-city neighborhood of Tlatelolco in the Plaza of the Three Cultures (Plaza de las Tres Culturas) under the orders of pres. Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, who claimed the protest was instigated by leftist writer Octavio Paz (1914-98) and his writer wife Elena Garro (1916-98), causing her to flee into exile for the next 20+ years. On Ordaz' orders, at least 10 plainclothes snipers on rooftops of the surrounding Tlatelolco housing complex opened fire with machine guns on tens of thousands of students, becoming the worst govt. massacre since the 1910 Mexican Rev. Officials initially report 29 dead, then later raised the figure to 37, while a U.S. diplomat says "nearly 200" were killed, and others counted as many as 700 bodies. Either way, 2K were beaten and jailed, some for over two years, police ransacked the office of a magazine publishing dramatic photos of the events, and the massacre crystallized a generation of future leaders. Super-cool Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci (1929-2006) was shot three times, dragged down stairs by her hair and left for dead by the Mexican pigs, after which she exposed the massacre despite govt. denials. Years later, after taking on illegal Mexican immigrants and Muslims, she uttered the soundbyte "I don't love the Mexicans. If you hold a gun and say, 'Choose who is worse between the Muslims and the Mexicans', I have a moment of hesitation, then I choose the Muslims, because they have broken my balls."
On Mar. 27-31, 1969 (Palm Sunday) Mexican-American boxer-turned-activist Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales (1928-2005), leader of the Crusade for Justice convened the first National Chicano Liberation Youth Conference in his hometown of Denver, Colo., and later published El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan for the Chicanos (La Raza de Bronze), causing the formation of the Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan (M.E.Ch.A.) (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan), which gringo critics claim is a breeding ground for separatists wishing to stage a reconquista (reconquest) of the SW U.S. and set up the retro muscle-pump nation of Aztlan. So what if it is? Everybody's entitled to their pipe dreams, not just white supremacists, eh homes ese?
In a seminal moment for U.S.-Mexico relations, on Aug. 20, 1970 (Thursday) Pres. Richard Nixon visited Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, meeting with Mexican pres. Gustavo Diaz Ordaz and uttering the soundbyte "We share a 2,000-mile common border, one of the longest in the world. That border we can say today is not a wall that divides us, but a bridge of friendship which unites us". He also noted "the little donkeys along the street on either side of the road", telling Ordaz, "Your welcoming us with a few donkeys shows that this is a completely bipartisan trip". Too bad, the Watergate Tapes later revealed Nixon uttering the soundbyte: "The Mexicans are a different cup of tea. They have a heritage. At the present time they steal, they're dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life. They don't live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like."
Too bad, despite birth control pills having been around for a decade, and the Mexican govt. instituting a family-planning program in 1974, which dropped the average number of children per woman from 6+ in 1965 to 2.9 in 1999, just as the Mexican Miracle went kaput in the early 1970s, Mexico began a baby boom, doubling its 50M pop. by the end of the cent., causing all previous attempts at solving its economic and social problemos to slide into the toilet, and new approaches to have to be developed, culminating in TLW's Megamerge Dissolution Solution of Apr. 28, 2009, plug plug.
On July 5, 1970 after riding a wave of anger by citizens in NW Mexico over the misappropriation and salinization of the water from the Colorado River by the U.S., PRI candidate Luis Echeverria Alvarez (Álvarez) (1922-) (interior secy. who was head of internal security during the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre, and enraged Pres. Ordaz by calling for a moment of silence to remember the victims) was elected pres. of Mexico, being sworn in on Dec. 1 (until Nov. 30, 1976), going on to promise to reach out to youth, and engaging in populist reforms including nationalization of the mining and electrical industries, redistribution of private land in Sinaloa and Sonora to peasants, condemning Zionism and opposing U.S. "expansionism", supporting Chilean pres. Salvador Allende, allowing the PLO to open an office in Mexico City, and creating a commission to destroy Mexico's remaining forests to create farmland. He also put limits on foreign investment, and expanded Mexico's territorial limit to 200 mi.
Too bad, in May, 1971 student demonstrators decided to test Echeverria by shutting down the Autonomous U. of Nuevo Leon in Monterrey after a new law reduced its autonomy, causing Nuevo Leon gov. Eduardo Elizondo to call in police, pissing them off, but Echeverria intervened and annuled the law and forced Elizondo to resign, after which on June 10 the Corpus Christi Massacre saw 10K leftist students demonstrating in Mexico City in support of Nuevo Leon attacked by busloads of govt.-backed thugs in civilian clothing armed with clubs and chains, who killed 25 and wounded 150+, causing a backlash against Echeverria, who staged a coverup, not being charged until July 2004. Meanwhile having pissed off the right with his actions, and then alienated the left by refusing to prosecute the perps of the Corpus Christi Massacre, his tenure as presidente became kaput, which didn't stop him from continuing to run the corrupto asqueroso Mexican govt. behind the scenes as the Shadow Shepherd.
In 1971 Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Hughes Galeano (1940-) published Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, detailing the ugly last five cents. of Euro and U.S. exploitation of Latin America. Banned in Uruguay and Chile, it was made world famous when Venezuelan pres. Hugo Chavez handed a copy to Pres. Barack Obama at the 5th Americas Summit in Trinidad on Apr. 17, 2009. "The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing. Our part of the world, known today as Latin America, was precocious: it has specialized in losing ever since those remote times when Renaissance Europeans ventured across the ocean and buried their teeth in the throats of the Indian civilization. Centuries passed, and Latin America perfected its role." (opening) "Our region still works as a menial laborer. It continues to exist at the service of others' needs, as a source of oil and iron, of copper and meat, of fruit and coffee, the raw materials and foods destined for rich countries which profit more from consuming them than Latin America does from producing them." "Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others."
Meanwhile in the 1970s the comedy duo of Cheech and Chong became popular in the U.S., symbolically uniting the U.S., Mexico, and Canada via the younger hippie free-love pot-smoking generation. Cheech Marin (b. 1946) came from East L.A. and was Mexican-American, while Tommy Chong (b. 1938) came from Canada, with a Chinese descent father and Scots-Irish descent mother. Voila, the future?
On June 30, 1975 the U.S. Supreme Court rules 9-0 in U.S. vs. Brignoni-Ponce that the Fourth Amendment allows a roving patrol of the U.S. border to stop vehicles and question occupants about citizenship and immigration status when the occupants appear to be of alien (Mexican) ancestry only combined with other "articulable facts".
On Dec. 1, 1976 Jose Lopez Portillo (1920-2004) of the PRI succeeded Echeverria as pres. of Mexico (until Nov. 30, 1982), becoming the last nationalist pres., hopefully forever. After him the presidentes were U.S.-educated free trade advocates, although Echeverria wielded power behind the throne with the PRI, secret police and drug cartels, his brother-in-law "Don" Ruben Zuno Arce being convicted in Calif. in 1992 and given a life sentence for running the Guadalajara drug cartel and murdering a U.S. federal agent in 1985.
In 1977 U.S. Dem. pres. #39 (1977-81) James Earl "Jimmy" Carter Jr. (1924-) proposed legislation to raise the immigration quota for Mexicans and set up a process for legalization of immigrants already living in the U.S.; Congress rebuffed him, but helped him set up the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy, chaired by Lawrence Howard Fuchs (1927-2013) of Brandeis U., which helped draft Reagan's 1986 legislation.
When problems get set in their ways, TLW loves a paradigm change to break the logjam. In 1979 Bolivian immigrant Jaime Escalante (1930-) began teaching Calculus to supposedly inferior field worker material Mexican-American students at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, Calif., struggling with lack of support and the Latino culture that defensively dissed anything associated with gringos. In 1981 14 of his 15 students passed the Advanced Placement Calculus Test, followed by 18 in 1982, whereupon instead of congratulating them the gringo-run Educational Testing Service hassled them, accusing them of cheating, after which 14 of them retook the test and 12 passed, shutting them up bigtime, ask your doctor if Flomax is right for you. The 1988 film Stand and Deliver starring Edward James Olmos (1947-) inspired millions of Mexican-Americans to get into math and science and find out for themselves that those subjects are colorblind, and hopefully one day the Mexican-American culture will demand that all 20-somethings be able to take a derivative of and integrate a decent equation to be considered cool.
On July 4, 1982 Calculus-enabled economist Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado (1934-2012) of the PRI was elected pres. of Mexico (until 1988). To palliate massive opposition, several local opposition candidates were permitted to win local elections. He was sworn in on Dec. 1 after outgoing pres. Portillo announced the nationalization of 59 Mexican banks (who owed foreign creditors over $80B) in Sept., and the IMF negotiated a "rescue loan package" coupled with a public austerity program. Hurtado began prosecuting a number of Portillo's appointees, incl. PEMEX founder-dir. (friend of the U.S. Bush family) Jorge Diaz Serrrano, who was convicted of embezzling $58M. Meanwhile the Mexican economy continued to tank, causing real wages to fall 40% by 1985 and the foreign debt to grow to over $100B, causing ever-more Mexicans to illegally cross the border into the U.S. to find work, originally planning on returning then deciding to stay permanently because they didn't want to live under the corrupt Mexican govt.
On Nov. 6, 1986 U.S. Repub. pres. #40 (1981-9) Ronald "Dutch" Wilson Reagan (1911-2004) ("the Great Communicator") signed the 1986 U.S. Immigration Reform and Control Act, with the soundbyte: "Future generations of Americans will be thankful for our efforts to humanely regain control of our borders and thereby preserve the value of one of the most sacred possession of our people, American citizenship", granting amnesty to 2.7M Mexican immigrants who entered illegally before Jan. 1, 1982, while providing for sanctions against employers knowingly hiring them, and increasing funding for the INS, whose Border Patrol was described as one of the most effective law enforcement agencies in U.S. history, becoming the first major bipartisan amnesty. Applicants for amnesty were required to take English and civics classes. After extended families were permitted to immigrate in 1990, 11M+ actually received amnesty, all of which only encouraged more immigration, and by 2008 there were 12M-20M new illegals clamoring for a new amnesty, probably thinking that 20 years later ditto could happen, ad infinitum.
On July 6-13, 1988 Harvard-trained economist Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1948-) of the PRI was elected pres. of Mexico (until 1994) with 50.1% of the vote. Opponents claim he stole the election from ex-PRI official Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano (Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano) (1934-), founder of the National Democratic Front (FDN). After being sworn in on Dec. 1, Gortari embarked on a Reagan-style privatization program for Mexico's 600 state-owned industries, and liberalized trade, causing the growth of maquiladoras, foreign-owned sweatshop plants in N Mexico paying low wages, which by the end of the decade employed 500K mostly female workers in 1.7K firms. What's the worst thing about your checkbook? That's easy. It has a zero balance and I never have any checks.
In 1990 Congress set up the f--cked up U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, with former Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy chmn. Dr. Lawrence H. Fuchs as co-chmn; it went on to recommend stronger policing of employers, and urge top priority for skilled workers and immediate family members, letting the border sieve problem ride.
In the 1990s the Los Zetas (named after a Mexican radio code for high-ranking army officers) drug cartel is formed from deserters from a special forces unit of the Mexican army by the Gulf Cartel based in Matamoros, Mexico, which defeats the Sinaloa Cartel from the Pacific Coast, after which they split and battle for control, killing 60K in 2006-2013.
On Nov. 17, 1993 the U.S. House of Reps. passed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), followed by the U.S. Senate on Nov. 20, pooh-poohing fears that U.S. jobs would go to Mexico with even greater fears that unless Mexico's economy improves more illegal immigrants would come to the U.S., and on Dec. 8 U.S. pres. #42 (1993-2001) William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton (1946-) signed it into law, and it went into effect on Jan. 1, 1994.
On Jan. 1, 1994 the Zapatista Uprising in Mexico began, led by the anti-NAFTA Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN), bringing the names Chiapas (a largely Indio state in S Mexico) and pipe-smoking, calabash (ski mask)-wearing EZLN leader Subcommandante Marcos to world prominence as they seized four towns and declared war against the federales like in the days of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Badges? We don't need no stinkin' badges. On Mar. 2, 1994 the EZLN accepted a tentative reform pact with the Mexican govt. of Carlos Salinas de Gortari after he promised amnesty, but on June 16 they flip-floped and rejected the agreement, citing refusal to discuss wider democratic reforms, but continued to observe the ceasefire. Too bad, on Mar. 23 Mexican PRI pres. candidate ("the JFK of Mexico") Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta (b. 1950) was assassinated in Tijuana by what the govt. called a lone gunman (a mechanic) after he had promised to reform corruption and shut down the drug cartels, who now had a blank check. A govt. investigation cleared itself of conspiracy, proving that it was a conspiracy, with inside govt. help, these are the stories we get to share on YouTube. On June 28, 1995 the Aguas Blancas Massacre saw Mexican police ambush and massacre 17 unarmed campesinas in Guerrero, Mexico while en route to a protest march in Atoyac de Alvarez, then try to frame then on being armed.
Meanwhile with all non-corrupt opponents out of the way, on Aug. 21, 1994 Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon (1951-) of the PRI was elected pres. of Mexico by a comfortable majority, and was sworn in on guess Dec. 1 (until Nov. 30, 2000). The PRI had now enjoyed an unbroken hold on power since 1929, but its percentage reached a record low this year, although observers claimed no visible election fraud. Too bad, Zedillo committed the "December Mistake" of reversing Salinas' tight currency control, and on Dec. 20 the 1994 Mexican Peso Crisis occurred as the peso fell 20% and $5B left the country in 48 hours, causing the economy to tank, after which 2M farmers left their land, and poverty rose from 45% to 50% of the entire pop., forcing 3.3M children under age 14 to go to work. The peso crisis spread southward to Brazil, becoming known as the Tequila Effect. On Jan. 31, 1995 Pres. Clinton bypassed Congress and used his emergency authority to arrange a $50B loan package ($20B from the U.S.) to help the ailing Mexican economy. Meanwhile the number of Mexican billionaires rose to 24 at the end of Salinas' term from only two at the start, gracias presidente Reagan.
On Mar. 31, 1995 Tejana crossover singing star Selena (b. 1971) was shot in the back and murdered by Yolanda Saldivar (1960-), pres. of her fan club in Corpus Christi, Tex. during an argument where Selena accused her of embezzlement and fired her. Saldivar was sentenced to life in prison. On Apr. 12, 1995 Tex. gov. George W. Bush declared her birthday "Selena Day" in Tex. Meanwhile the U.S. was changing demographically and politically, with the percentage of whites slipping, even when Hispanics were included, and on Sept. 30, 1996 after the Republicans suckered the Democrats by combining it with a legal immigration bill, then ditching that part, Pres. Clinton signed the U.S. Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, beefing up border enforcement and deportation, containing Section 287(g), authorizing the federal govt. to enter into agreements with state and local law enforcement to perform immigration law enforcement, which was greatly expanded during the Republican George W. Bush admin., rounding up 130K between 2006-9. After 9/11 (2002) the name of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was tastefully changed to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), when I really feel terrible I go to the mall and get busted; too bad, on May 29 the IRS issues a regulation treating illegal aliens as legal and refusing to provide info. on them to other govt. agencies.
In 1997 Gustavo De La Vina (1939-2007) became the first Mexican-Am. U.S. Border Patrol chief (until 2004), going on to create the Border Safety Initiative to warn would-be illegal immigrants of the dangers of border crossings.
As the year 2000 arrived the pop. of Mexico reached 97.5M. Since 1991 11.3M immigrants entered the U.S. legally, but they were accompanied by 8.4M illegal immigrants, after which the number of new illegal immigrants averaged 800K a year in 2000-2004 and 500K a year in 2005-2008. After 9/11 (2001) the destination changed away from Calif., N.Y. and N.Y. to Ga., Ore., Colo., N.C. and Iowa. Many inner city public libraries switched to books in Spanish. On Mar. 12, 2000 infallible non-Italian (Polish) Pope #265 John Paul II (1920-2005) apologized for the Spanish Inquisition and all that past 2K years of violent jazz.
In Apr. 2000 the Gen. Law on Pop. is enacted in Mexico, making illegal immigration a felony, with fascist treatment of even naturalized citizens; did I say that the Mexican govt. has to go, it really has to go?
Meanwhile on July 2, 2000 6'7" cowboy-boot-loving former Coca-Cola exec Vicente Fox Quesada (1942-) of the National Action Party (PAN) was elected pres. of Mexico after defeating PRI candidate Francisco Labastida Ochoa Magana (AKA Memo) (1942-) by a landslide, becoming the first defeat for the ruling PRI Party since 1929, although PAN failed to win a majority in the chamber of deputies or senate. On guess Dec. 1 he was sworn in (until Nov. 30, 2006), becoming the first peaceful transfer of power in Mexico's history, and the largest internal transformation since the 1910 Mexican Revolution. He did it even though PAN's link to the Roman Catholic Church and his 1996 proposal to privatize the state oil monopoly Pemex made him a lot of enemies.
Too bad, hardcore white supremacists began seeing er, red, and organizing to stop immigration from Mexico at all costs, equating them with the Huns, and pretending to get pissed off at their speaking Spanish rather than English, often confusing Spanish with some Native American language, when it actually goes back to 11th cent. Spain, and started out as a mixture of Latin, Arabic, and Gothic, at a time when the haughty French-speaking Normans were lording it over German Saxons in England and morphing their German into English. Like virtually all Americans who came out of the U.S. education system, the xenophobes were history ignoramuses, and mixed up the 500-year-old England vs. Spain thingie with the equally old white-vs.-red/brown thingie in a shameful mess of mental crap that luckily was never bought by very many. My favorite quote is the following nugget of mental pig slop: "As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?" — John H. Tanton (1934-), 1979 founder of FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform). Too bad, TLW's home state of Colo. took the lead in xenophobia, with U.S. Repub. Rep. (1999-2009) Thomas Gerard "Tom" Tancredo (1945-) stinking it up with vehement anti-immigrant rhetoric, incl. that the U.S. must reject "the siren song of multiculturalism". (Not that he wasn't right-on when it came to Islam, proposing in July 2006 that the U.S. might defeat it by bombing Mecca, which might work since praying five times a day to a big radioactive hole in the sand might give them a clue that Allah's dead :). Too bad, the gringo big brains came out mainly on the wrong (xeno) side, incl. Colo. Dem. gov. (1975-87) Richard Douglas "Dick" Lamm (1935-) (AKA Gov. Doom and Gloom), who issued all kinds of doom and gloom soundbytes about multiculturalism and bilingualism "destroying America". (TLW hates to admit it, but in 1969-70 he actually lived across the alley from Lamm in Denver, Colo., but was too young to actually meet him although he knew TLW's mother as the "dog lady" since we had three dogs. :) Another great try was WASP historian Victor Davis Hanson (1953-), who published the 2003 book Mexifornia: A State of Becoming, decrying the millions of Mexicans choosing to live in Sunny Calif. rather than corrupt Mexico or the freezing cold U.S. Northeast, and blowing the flugelhorn on the horrible Huns again, but at least realizing that Mexico's cruddy corrupt govt. is behind many of the problems. Too bad, none of the big gringo brains ever put two and two and got four, because they tried to subtract two from two and get zero, as in zero more immigrants from Mexico, and kept thinking of the U.S.-Mexico border as a unidirectional sieve like back in the days of the Romans and Germans sans an old fart emperor to screw things up permanently - no, they wanted to be the old fart emperor :).
On Aug. 1, 2001 the DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act is first introduced in the U.S. Senate; it passes in ?.
On Mar. 7, 2006 a Pew Hispanic Center Report came out, claiming that the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. had grown to 11.5M-12M, with about 7.2M undocumented workers, or about 5% of the workforce, and that increased security had backfired by making it harder for them to return to Mexico; 6.2M of the illegals came from Mexico, 2.5M from Latin America, 1.5M from Asia, 0.6M from Europe or Canada, and 0.4M from Africa or other. On Apr. 10, 2006 2M illegal immigrants and supporters came out of the shadows and declared May 1 a Nat. Day of Action for Immigrant Justice AKA the Great Am. Boycott (El Gran Paro Estadounidense), staging mass rallies throughout the U.S., incl. 125K in New York City, 100K in Phoenix, Ariz., and 50K in Atlanta, Ga. This time, wising up, the wannabe Americans no longer waved Mexican flags but tried the more PC U.S. flags; the New York rally contained Koreans and other nationalities. Meanwhile the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C. pub. a Report on Rounding Up Illegal Aliens, claiming it would cost $215B over five years to round them up and ship them back (20K each - I guess they each get their own car to drive home in?). On May 15, 2006 U.S. pres. #43 (2001-9) George Walker "Dubya" Bush (1946-) addressed the nation from the Oval Office on Immigration Reform, and acknowledged that the U.S. "has not been in complete control of its borders", and must be "shut to illegal immigrants, as well as criminals, drug dealers, and terrorists", then announced a $50B plan to increase the number of border patrol officers, construct $7.6B 2K-mi. hi-tech fences from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, and deploy 6K National Guard members by July 1 to support the Border Patrol at $962M a year. He then announced a "temporary work program", with a new ID card for every legal foreign worker with biometric technology, but with no plan for deporting workers who overstay their visas. The coyotes (smugglers) immediately jumped their asking price from $2K to $3K, up from $300 in 1994. Too bad, the U.S. began to seal itself up, just like the ancient Roman Empire did before the pesky Goths, Germans and Huns destroyed it. Virtually nobody mentioned dissolving the cruddy Mexican govt. once and for all and annexing Mexico to the U.S., opening rather than closing the ever-lawless U.S.-Mexico border to keep the U.S. dream of the Shining City on a Hill AKA the Emerald City of Oz alive. Meanwhile in Apr. 2006 Nuestro Himno, a Spanish language version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" debuted on U.S. Spanish-speaking TV and radio, causing a backlash, to which Puerto Rican immigrant singer Jose Feliciano (Jose Montserrate Feliciano Garcia) (1945-) (who got into trouble at the 1968 World Series for tinkering with it) uttered the soundbyte "I know Mexico would be pissed-off if we took the Mexican national anthem and did it in English".
On July 2, 2006 pres. elections in Mexico created a deadlock between pro-free-market pro-U.S. Felipe Calderon Hinojosa (1963-) of the ruling National Action Party, and leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (1953-), each with 36%, with Roberto Madrazo Pintado (1952-) of the yesterday's news PRI lagging with 19%. After much baksheesh, er, recounting, the winner was declared to be Calderon by 0.56% (35.89% to 35.33%) (a margin of 233,831 of 41.6M votes cast) on July 6. Too bad, on July 16 (Sun.) hundreds of thousands of protesters in Mexico City demanded a recount for Obrador, charging rampant fraud, but Calderon was finally seated securely (until ?), which is no surprise, since Obrador's supporters were mainly in the poor S states, while Calderon's were in the more affluent N and NW states near guess what. Too bad, Calderon's admin. failed to solve any of Mexico's problems, and indeed, they got worse, and in Dec. 2008 the U.S. Dept. of Defense published a 2009 Defense Assessment that claimed that Mexico was on the verge of becoming a "failed state" like Pakistan, becoming big news in early 2009, along with the Mexican Drug War, which caused vicious violence and thousands of murders near the U.S. border, combined with massive govt. corruption as the drug lords bought officials wholesale with some of their $25B-$100B a year in drug sales to eager U.S. buyers, who are never called "illegals" no matter how much they scoff at drug laws, while honest hard-working Mexicans are constantly called "illegal aliens" by the vociferous hardcore white supremacists to silence debate.
On Oct. 26, 2006 after the Repub.-dominated U.S. House of Reps approved it (incl. 64 Dems., incl. Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton), plus 80 of 100 U.S. senators, Pres. Bush signed an election-pleaser law approving a 700-mi. border wall (fence) with Mexico's 2,100-mi. border, covering most of Ariz. and parts of Calif., N.M., and Tex.; too bad, the Dem.-controlled Congress amended it to allow DHS officials unlimited discretion, and by 2016 only 35.6 mi. of fencing had been set up.
As if on cue, on Apr. 24, 2009 the World Health Org. (WHO) convened an emergency meeting after reports of a deadly outbreak of 800+ "influenza-like" cases in Mexico caused by a new strain of swine flu combined with bird flu and human flu from a U.S.-company-owned pig farm near Veracruz that killed 16-60 late in the flu season, incl. some young strong victims, stirring fears of a super pandemic to beat all pandemics like in 1919. Maria Adela Gutierrez (b. 1969), who died Apr. 13 in Oaxaca became the first known Mexican swine flu victim. On Apr. 26 after 20 cases were confirmed in the U.S., the U.S. govt. declared the 2009 Mexican (North American) H1N1 Swine Flu Outbreak a public health emergency. On Apr. 27 the first U.S. death was a 23-mo. infant in Houston, Tex., which was officially confirmed on Apr. 29. After the flu spread worldwide but proved less virulent than expected, Mexico City lifted its office building and market closures after five days, with the death toll at only 42. On Aug. 9-10 the 4th Annual North American Leader's (Three Amigos) Summit in Guadalajara, Mexico was attended by Mexican pres. Felipe Calderon, Canadian PM (since 2006) Stephen Joseph Harper (1959-), and U.S. pres. #44 (since 2009) Barack Hussein Obama II (1961-), who discussed the H1N1 virus problem and trade issues, stirring fears of a horrible secret North American Union run by world bankers with the goal of turning everybody into their milk cows. Too bad, in 2009 elections the PRI regained a majority of seats in the Mexican congress for the first time since 2000, as for the first time Mexicans began returning from the repression-racked U.S. to Mexico, and the Obama admin. reneged on its promise to push immigration reform incl. another general amnesty through Congress in 2009, delaying it until 2010. Meanwhile the people of Mexico don't have many pesos or jobs, so they concentrate on making the Guinness Book of World Records, with the world's largest twister board, cheesecake, Thriller dance, mariachi band, most simultaneous chess games, most people kissing simultaneously, et al. On Apr. 28, 2009 T.L. Winslow (TLW) (1953-) of Denver, Colo., AKA "the Historyscoper" (tm), who is not a politician but a thinker, decided to release on the Internet his astoundingly brilliant Megamerge Dissolution Solution proposal to finally end the whole U.S.-Mexico problem tracing back to the 1848 Apartheid and the stubborn continuance of white supremacist policies even after white supremacy became kaput by having the U.S. Congress officially invite the Mexican people to dissolve their irredeemably corrupt govt. along with their failed country, and join the U.S. as the "51st state" (10+ states) sans racism, plugging the former sawed-off country into the Bliss to allow the populations to mix and Mexico to finally be developed to the same level as the rest of the U.S., creating a model for the world. All that stands in its way is ignorance of history, residual racism and white supremacy, plus Anglophile and anti-Catholic B.S., and the need for politicians on both sides of the border to adopt and champion it. Red, white, green plus red, white, blue equals red, white, and blue with the gringo-imposed apartheid ended :)
In 2010-11 the influx of Mexicans over the U.S. border slowed and more began returning because of the failing U.S. economy. Either that, or they wanted to celebrate the Mexican Double Anniv. in 2010, which was greased by plenty of money they sent back home.
On June 15, 2012 after the DREAM Act fails to pass in Congress, Pres. Obama announces the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
On July 7, 2012 Enrique Pena (Peña) Nieto (1966) of the ever-corrupt PRI was elected, and on Dec. 12 he became pres. #57 of Mexico (until ?), causing protests.
On June 27, 2013 the U.S. Senate by a 68-32 desk vote (incl. all 54 Dems. and 14 Repubs.) passed the 1.2K-page omnibus Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013 (S.744), pushed by Nev. Dem. Sen. Harry Reid, passing it to the Repub.-controlled House, with Ariz. Repub. Sen. John McCain uttering the soundbyte: "Shouldn't we give them the same chance that we've given wave after wave of immigrants?"; meanwhile House Speaker John A. Boehner utters the soundbyte that the bill is "dead on arrival", adding "The House is not going to take up and vote on whatever the Senate passes", calling it too weak on border security, pointing to the failure of the 1986 Reagan amnesty, even though McCain said on June 25 that the Senate bill's Corker-Hoeven Amendment would transform the U.S.-Mexico border into "the most militarized border since the fall of the Berlin Wall".
On Nov. 20, 2014 Pres. Obama issued an executive order for "deferred action", which would allow 45% of illegal immigrants in the U.S. to legally stay and work, taking the heat off 5M illegal immigrants but not granting them amnesty, pissing-off Repubs., who are looking for any excuse to impeach him for overreaching; on Dec. 16 U.S. federal judge Arthur J. Schwab finds it unconstitutional, overstepping lawful pres. authority.
Check back with me later and I'll finish the story, hopefully on a high note.