Thread by @tomaspueyo

Why is Mexico so mountainous, and yet so populous?!
Why is it poorer than the US?
How was that influenced by Spanish colonization?
Why is Mexico the way it is today?

A thread 🧵

Ok what are those lights in the south, Mexico?
Isn't it impossible to have a big population in the smack middle of the mountains?

Mexico: Hold my beer

Mountains have 2 things: elevation and slope.

Slope is bad: it makes cultivating crops impossible because water runs. It makes movement hard, so both communication and trade suffer.

But elevation per se is not that bad.
These cities are in flat, high plateaus

Because they're encircled by mountains, water flows from there to the plateau, is trapped, and stays there, making the land super fertile and trade within the basin cheap (water transport is 10x cheaper than land transport)

This is why Tenochtitlan was on a lake in the middle of mountains

And it's also why Veracruz, the main Mexican port in the Caribbean and the only one for nearly 400 years, is where it is

It's the closest point on the sea to Mexico City.
It also happens that land has the highest slope going into the sea at that point, which makes it as deep a port as you can get in the Mexican coast.

Shallow seas? Good for beaches, bad for trade—and surf.

And having a port on the Caribbean, close to Mexico City, was important because otherwise... How were you meant to get to Spain your plundered silver?

The biggest mines of silver were in the Zacatecas region. Spaniards organized mining there, transport to Mexico City, and from there to Veracruz.

Because of the mountains, though, they had to do that entire trip... by mule! For centuries, there were no roads & no carriages tho

There was a Camino Real from the US all the way to Mexico. But the only section that mattered to Spaniards was between the Zacatecas silver mines and CDMX. That's why you can tell from space the path between these cities, littered with developed cities.

You can also see development btw CDMX and Acapulco, and btw CDMX and Veracruz.

The 1st was to get the goods from Philippines (another Spanish colony) to CDMX.

The 2nd was to get all these goods to the Caribbean to be shipped to Spain.

Because all that trade was with mules through mountains, it was expensive. Only goods that paid a lot per kg were worth transporting. Eg silver & gold from MX, silks & porcelains from Philippines...

Not food though.

So Mexico had no plantations

All the food produced locally stayed locally, which fed a growing population.

But expensive trade meant only local trade.

Lots of food + little trade --> poor, populous country

Also, less slavery than in the Caribbean. And since the country was populous, when labor was needed, local labor could be found.

And that's why many Caribbean countries have lots of black ppl, but not Mexico.

Meanwhile, the North of Mexico is super dry, both because of its latitude and the mountains. The latitude is a Horse Latitude, where there's little wind to carry moisture to the continent.

unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/a-space-craf…

So much less development there.

(You can actually tell the border between Mexico and the US from space close to the Caribbean coast. It's that line of light on the right.)

In the early 1800s, Spain (and Europe) was ensnared in wars, nationalism had grown in all America, and came with Enlightenment ideas such as self-determination and human rights. That's why in a few decades nearly all of America declared its independence.

But as one superpower wanes, another appears: the US

The US has a huge asset: the Mississippi Basin. Super fertile, great cheap transport... The best piece of land on the Earth

It wants all of that basin, and it wants it unthreatened.
But it had 3 pbms.

1: France controls the basin in 1800!
Easy: buy it from them as soon as you can, during the Napoleonic Wars

2: Mexico is awfully close to New Orleans. What if they decide to attack? The US would lose the ability to trade the goods outside of the Mississippi basin! What do you do?

Easy: get a buffer. Send settlers there, then foster a revolution, then annex that area.

Texas

It has the side effect of getting 2 more senators for a slavery state. Nice move, Democrats.

And since we're at war with Mexico, and we're 10 times richer because our land is so much better, why not get all that land to the West, all the way to the Pacific?

California, New Mexico... You know, all these places with Spanish names in them.

Thank you very much

3: It needs to control the mouth of the Caribbean. That is, Florida and Cuba.

That's why it tries to buy Cuba a few times, and failing that, goes to war in 1898 and ends up controlling it for decades.

And all of that, in broad strokes, is why Mexico is the way it is today!

All the details, and much more, in this week's article.
unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/a-brief-hist…

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