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Transnationalizing North American History

Transnationalizing the Nation-Building History of Mexico from the XVIIIth to the XXth century

Annick Lempérière

Résumés

Le principal obstacle au développement d’une histoire « connectée » et « transnationale » du Mexique avec son voisin du nord réside dans le nationalisme et l’anti-américanisme qui, pour des raisons historiques mais aussi politiques et idéologiques, caractérisent l’historiographie mexicaine tout comme l’identité collective. Cependant, la densité des interactions entre Mexicains et Nord-américains dans presque tous les domaines de leur vie collective – économie, culture, politique… – au cours des 19e et 20e siècles ouvre de nombreuses pistes historiographiques.

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Texte intégral

1Few histories have been so constantly and intimately interconnected as those of Mexico and the United States. Their common past can be said to begin at the time of the Seven Years War, when the North-American territories were still part of both Atlantic British and Spanish empires. This mutual history continued through proclamations of independence, accompanied by a variety of modalities including cultural, political and economic issues. During the 1820-1840 period the geographic neighborhood shared by both nations whose respective boundaries were still unsettled furthered the coexistence of settlers from very diverse origins on the Texan and New-Mexican lands they were developing and exploiting side-by-side. Later, during the second half of 20th century, demographic growth and migration continually favored the interactions between Mexican and US societies, as well as the mobility of capital and the circulation of ideas and cultural or technological artifacts.

  • 1 In 1992, a new version of the official textbooks of history used in the Mexican schools triggered o (...)
  • 2 Mauricio Tenorio, « De encuentros y desencuentros: la escritura de la historia en Estados Unidos. E (...)

2That Mexico is a North-American country is no longer only a geographic fact, but also a geopolitical reality since 1994. When the NAFTA agreement came into force on January 1, 1994, Mexico was, culturally speaking, still a Latin American country and enjoyed a political, diplomatic and even moral leading role in South America. Nowadays, many Mexican intellectuals and social scientists, and foreign observers as well, record that Mexican leadership is giving way to that of Brazil. One major consequence of this new situation is that Mexico is going through a critical redefinition of its national identity. In fact, the only option for Mexico seems to be the enforcement of its economic and political integration into North America, and since 2000 its governments have aligned themselves with Washington policy. But that alignment has by no means gone with the decline of what had been a strong component of national identity, ie the grassroots as well as intellectual and cultural anti-Americanism that have characterized not only the whole historical development of Mexico as a nation since the end of 19th century, but also the way its history has been written.1 Nor does Mexico possess by itself the capital of knowledge and expertise that would help to balance the asymmetry of its economic partnership with its northern neighbor. As cruelly summarized by Mauricio Tenorio, "la acrítica devoción por el conocimiento que viene del norte, desentona con el desconocimiento de la historia de Estados Unidos, y de cómo se escribe". 2

  • 3 David Thelen, "Rethinking History and the Nation-State: Mexico and the United States", The Journal (...)
  • 4 Prasenjit Duara, "Transnationalism and the Challenge to National Histories", in Thomas Bender (ed.) (...)

3Indeed, until the end of the twentieth century, "self-enclosing historiographical traditions (…) emphasized national identity and difference when a different historiography might have emphasized similarities or borderlands or common North American themes."3 In Mexican as well as US North-America and in many other Western countries, the historiographers served the nation-building process and contributed to the production of quite distinctive collective identities.4 So, my first point will attend to the specific historiographical concern about Mexican national identity.

The historiographical challenge.

  • 5 "Democracy in Mexico - the Complex Roles of the United States: A Conversation with Sergio Aguayo", (...)
  • 6 One of the best Mexican historians of the 20th century, Daniel Cosío Villegas (1898-1976), who foun (...)
  • 7 The US expansionnism has been essentialized by Mexican historiography and myth. According to this e (...)
  • 8 Even the "linguistic turn" or the postcolonial theory as represented by Edward Said are able to fue (...)

4One of the main limits placed upon the development of Mexican-US interconnected narratives lies in the easily offended nationalism which still characterizes Mexican historiography, not to mention the US historiographical shortcomings I would not be able to discuss here. To say that Mexicans "stopped studying the United States"5 after the war of 1846-1848 may be an exaggeration. But actually, anti-Americanism does remain a component part of Mexican collective and individual identity. Thus, although Mexican universities developed history departments in the last five decades, the study of North American history is not much practiced in Mexico. Moreover, few Mexican historians believe that it would be useful to know more about US history to gain a better knowledge of their own national history.6 The feelings of wounded patriotism and injured nationalism, the notion of "lost territories" associated with rooted convictions about the "US expansionism"7 mingle inextricably with the historians’ practices and make it very difficult to cool down the nationalistic passions.8 Since 1994, Historia Mexicana, a 4-issues-a-year journal from the prestigious Center of Historical Studies at the Colegio de México, has published less than twenty research articles dealing with a straight US-Mexican concern. Among them, a special and innovative issue about the "Mexican War" (or, as the Mexican called it, the "Texas War") and one about Mexican attitudes and public opinion regarding the Spanish-US War of 1898.

  • 9 Prasenjit Duara, op. cit.
  • 10 Enrique Rajchenberg & Catherine Héau-Lambert, "El septentrión mexicano entre el destino manifiesto (...)
  • 11 Quoted by Enrique Rajchenberg & Catherine Héau-Lambert, Ibid.
  • 12 According to the treaty, Mexico would have sold the perpetual right of transit to the Isthmus of Te (...)
  • 13 Miguel Angel Gonzáles Quiroga, "Nuevo León durante la independencia de Texas, 1835-1836", Historia (...)

5Mexican as well as US historiographies used to take for granted that the feeling of injured nationalism and the national aversion against the United States were the immediate aftermath of 1846-1848 War. Therefore, 1848 as conceived as a turning point of Mexican national history is intimately associated with the territorial issue. In this sense, the Mexican case offers an archetypical version of a "national time-space" able to produce identity.9 The conviction that the territorial meaning of Mexican patriotism had always coincided with the political and jurisdictional territory of the 1821 independent nation belongs to Mexican national myth dating to the last quarter of the 19th century. 10 According to this myth, the "lost territories" have always been an intimate component part of national identity. Quite obviously however, this is not in accordance with the historical reality at all. The disillusioned cry of the essayist Mariano Otero in 1847 : "In Mexico there is not and could not have been any national spirit, because there is no nation",11 is not the result of the traumatic defeat but the crude revelation of a fact : "There is no nation". The sudden awareness of Mexicans’ lack of concern for their own national destiny and territorial integrity was the real injury provoked by the 1848 defeat. This lack of coincidence between patriotic feelings and territorial boundaries helps explain why, two decades later, some Mexican Liberals were so opportunistic when they conceded huge territorial advantages to the US government, for example the so-called Mac Lane-Ocampo Treaty (1859),12 which was never ratified by the US Senate. At the time of the Texas War of 1835 the northern border states, particularly Nuevo León, were more worried by the renewed belligerence of the Indians and their rivalries with their own neighboring states than by the likely loss of Texas.13

  • 14 Andrés Reséndez Fuentes , "Guerra e identidad nacional", Historia Mexicana, XLVII, n° 2, 1997, pp.  (...)
  • 15 Jorge L. Lizardi Pollock, "Imaginar el 98: iconografía mexicana de la guerra hispano-cubano-estadou (...)

6As far as using the conflict as a "window" onto the various failures of Mexican nation-building since Independence, historians are now able to present a more balanced vision of the first decades of relationship between Mexico and the USA, and a more faithful appreciation about how virtual the national consciousness remained at the time of the "Mexican War". As underlined by Andrés Reséndez Fuentes : "Esto hizo de la guerra de 1847 no tanto un conflicto entre dos naciones, sino una complicada red de relaciones entre un ejército invasor y varios grupos sociales que no necesariamente querían resistir."14 The Yucatan Peninsula, in southeastern Mexico, is another example of the extreme secessionist inclination of some states of the "United States of Mexico", as the southern republic used to be called. In fact, from the geographic and economic point of view the Peninsula was part of the Caribbean space and depended more upon New Orleans and Cuba than upon Mexico City and the rest of the country for its food supplies and commercial exchange. As soon as the Texas war began in 1846, the authorities of Yucatan declared the secession of the state and sent a special chargé d’affaires to Washington responsible for negotiating the neutrality of Yucatan and seeking the protection of the US Navy against the Mexican government. Still at the end of the century, when Mexico seemed to have overcome its political divisions, the Spanish-US war of 1898 revealed again the various and antagonistic identities of the nation, torn apart by contradictory allegiances. 15

  • 16 See the JAH issue, op.cit.; Adelman, Jeremy and Stephen Aron, "From Borderlands to Borders: Empires (...)

7Because I am French I have been spared the nationalistic teachings which shape Mexican and US subjectivities through education, political slogans and cultural institutions. So my own reflexive position regarding Mexican nation-building and the history of its connections with the United States is fairly comfortable. Obviously I am not speaking as a Mexican citizen but rather as a dispassionate Mexicanist historian. Certainly, I am also indebted to the criticism concerning the nationalistic mental framework of historians and to the most recent proposals of "entangled" approaches and transnational narratives.16 More generally, the fact that more and more historians live and work outside their own countries, or that many of them turn their intellectual interests away from their own national histories much more frequently than had ever been the case in the past two centuries, is undoubtedly favorable to transnational history’s increasing appeal. Historians’ subjective position (what we might call their "exteriority") regarding their subject matter provides them with the moral and intellectual advantages of “the-impartial-spectator” position. Indeed, most of the historians I have referred to above are not of Mexican origin or, when they are, they practice their historiographical skills in US universities. Such a position is especially useful concerning the US-Mexican historical interconnections.

Mexican-US interconnections as transnational issues

8The Mexican-US interconnections constitute a wide-ranging field which does not concern only governments and politics in each country, but grassroots matters as well. However, this field remains poorly explored by the historiographical literature. So, as my second point I will discuss briefly what sort of distinctive interconnected situations stood out during the common past of Mexico and the United States, and what are the historiographical deficiencies we have to challenge regarding these issues.

  • 17 Rafe Blaufard, "AHR Forum: The Western Question: the Geopolitics of Latin Américan Independence", T (...)
  • 18 Annick Lempérière, Entre Dieu et le roi, la République. Mexico XVIe-XVIIIe siècles, Paris, Les Bell (...)

9The first type of interconnection would be geopolitics during international and internal conflict. The "Western question" set up during the Hispanic American wars of Independence as described by Rafe Blaufard 17 might be considered from the widest point of view of Atlantic Revolutions Era. Few remember today that troops from New Spain actually took part in the American War of Independence. Although the event was a peripheral one in the global military and political process, it had significant consequences in the way the Spanish Crown addressed its colonial subjects’ concerns. It compelled the Madrid government to take care regarding the emergent public opinion in New Spain and to think cautiously about how to make acceptable its fiscal and administrative reform policy. 18

  • 19 José de Onis, Los Estados Unidos vistos por escritores hispanoamericanos, Madrid, Ediciones Cultura (...)

10After conflict about legitimacy and liberal revolution broke out in the Spanish empire in 1810 and fragmented it during the following decade, the political and military processes which resulted in independences ran parallel with a crucial "war of words" whose centers were situated in the whole of Euro-America. For some New-Spanish insurgent publicists, Philadelphia, together with Cadiz and London, was one of the favorite places to publish the anti-Spanish pamphlets they intended for their compatriots and Hispanic American public opinion.19

  • 20 José de Onis, op. cit.

11The acknowledged existence of a triangular relationship between Spanish Mexico, the United States and Western Europe had been a typical geopolitical feature during the old-fashioned empires era. But it did not disappear immediately after the emergence of nations as exclusive frameworks for politics, citizenship and cultural identities. On the contrary, the renewed imperialism of Great Britain and France ; the growing but still uncertain power of the United States ; and above all the persistent weakness of the Mexican nation-state contributed to multiply these kinds of entangled and asymmetric relations throughout the nineteenth century. There is some evidence that the continuation of intersected antagonisms between the United States, Great Britain and Spain had direct implications for the internal political life of Mexico during the 1820s.20

12Later, the 1857-1867 decade which saw the endemic Mexican civil war leading to the British-French-Spanish naval intervention and the establishment of a new Habsburg Empire in Mexico with the complicity of Napoleonic France, was also contemporaneous with the US Civil War. This coincidence opened the way to a set of reciprocal alliances and combined interests between the Mexican Liberals and the Yankees on the one hand and the Mexican Conservatives and the Confederates on the other hand. This period has usually been approached from the classic perspective of bilateral diplomatic history or of patriotic and nationalistic historiography. But to take into account a range of social forces wider than merely diplomatic and political actors and to enlighten the part national public opinion and grassroots attitudes took in the global conflict, this period deserves to be reconsidered in the light of the transnational approach and intersected narratives.

  • 21 Regarding the connections between Mexican radicals and the United States in the 1900s, see François (...)

13Moreover, US territory was frequently employed as a sanctuary by Mexican politicians and activists owing to the chronically unsettled political life south of the border. During the nineteenth century the Liberals used to take refuge temporarily in the neighboring country either in times of civil war or in order to escape from repression when considered as radical opponents. During the 1910-1920 Revolution, insurgent factions of all sorts took advantage of geographic contiguity for easily buying weapons, with or without the US government support. However, apart from some few exceptions21 the existing historiography is very sparse about the consequences this special relationship has had on subjective identities or ideologies and political mobilization.

14The US refugee issue leads directly to the second type of entangled situation, regarding the territorial question. As most know, the North American territory was in dispute throughout the eighteenth century : first among the Spanish, French and British Empires ; then between Spain and the United States ; and ultimately between the United States and nascent Mexico. The definition of the border as a political and jurisdictional boundary did not put an end to the human interactions which had characterized frontier life since the end of the eighteenth century.

  • 22 Matias Romero, Mexico and the United States, 1898, p. 116.
  • 23 José Marti, the Cuban revolutionary who was then a journalist in New York, reported in 1886 about i (...)

15On the contrary, from the last third of the nineteenth century onward, the economy of the Mexican northern states grew rapidly thanks to the symbiosis established with the US economy. As observed in 1898 by a keen expert of both Mexico and the United States, the diplomat Matias Romero, "our [railway] lines [are] in fact extensions of the United States railway system." 22 I shall not belabor this well known economic dimension of the Mexican-US shared history, except for emphasizing the fact that the hugeness of US material interests in Mexico did not only involve US technological and capital input, but the physical presence of many American citizens on Mexican territory who were working in the US firms side-by-side with Mexican workers and employees. This situation was the cause of a great number of labor conflicts and, above all, of the emergence of a grassroots anti-Americanism which exploded during the 1910 Revolution. It also provoked local border tensions whose doubtful gravity was greatly exaggerated by the national newspapers of both sides,23 as well as major disputes and lengthy asymmetric negotiations and give-and-take between both governments after the Revolution.

16From the middle of the twentieth century onward, although the economic asymmetry between the United States and Mexico seems to have been growing exponentially, the south-to-north rewards have been more and more double-edged. From policy-making and electoral politics to American everyday life and US identity, the massive Mexican (and Central American) migrations to the northern side of the border have involved a very broad spectrum of cultural, political and social processes that receive the close scrutiny of social scientists but seem to discourage historians - Mexican and US alike.

  • 24 Annick Lempérière, Georges Lomné, Frédéric Martinez, Denis Rolland, L’Amérique latine et les modèle (...)

17As a matter of fact, the third and last sort of interconnected historical situation I would like to consider concerns the reciprocal cultural transfers, translations and transpositions which are inextricable from human flows and interconnections, whether they affect individuals from the elite social strata or the larger population. French Latin Americanist historiography has recently emphasized the sustained cultural interchange between Europe (mainly France and Great Britain) and Latin America since Independence. 24 But by paying little attention to the cultural relationship the independent Hispanic Americans established with the northern Republic, this historiography revealed its Eurocentrism or at least its European roots.

18However, the truth is that this history remains almost entirely to be written, especially from the Mexican point of view. Although the "American model" (that is, federalism, political freedom and civil rights, educational achievement and entrepreneurial culture) was a major reference for the Mexican Liberals throughout most of the nineteenth century, a socio-cultural history of this relationship is still lacking. I am not speaking about the traditional history of ideas but rather thinking about how to explore the purposes and processes of those Mexican individuals and those Mexican groups who sought to introduce some fragments of the political, legal or moral US model into their own country.

  • 25 Rafael Rojas, « Los amigos cubanos de Juárez », Istor, n° 33, 2008, pp. 42-57.
  • 26 Andrés Reséndez Fuentes , « Guerra e identidad nacional », op. cit., p. 415.
  • 27 Lorenzo de Zavala, Viaje a los Estados Unidos, Paris, 1833.
  • 28 James D. Cockcroft, Precursores intelectuales de la revolución (1910-1913), Mexico, Siglo XXI, 1971
  • 29 Pablo Yankelevich, « Explotadores, truhanes, agitadores y negros. Deportaciones y restricciones a e (...)

19Moreover, surprisingly enough, it would be possible to write a revised history of Mexican radicalism considering the contacts and interactions between Mexican exiles and other Hispanic American refugees on the US territory25 or between Mexican and US radicals as well. When Mexican federalists were removed from the government in 1835 they took refuge in Texas and New Orleans where they were campaigning for annexation side-by-side with Cuban partisans of the same alternative for their own homeland.26 A prominent politician during the 1820s, admirer of US institutions and liberties and granted land concessions in Texas by the government of Texas-Coahuila, Lorenzo de Zavala is extremely representative of those Mexicans who were convinced that the best future for Northern Mexico was to separate from the southern part of the republic and welcome European immigrants as the quickest way to be through with the colonial heritage of Indian backwardness and Catholic obscurantism.27 Later, at the beginning of the 20th century, when the young radical Liberals (Flores Magón brothers and others) fled to the USA, they got in touch with the IWW activists of Missouri and transformed their own democratic ideology into a true anarchism.28 This is a well-known history, but Mexican historiography does not emphasize the part played by the IWW US radicals (as draft dodgers who took refuge in Mexico to escape being sent to Europe during World War I)29 in the foundation of the Mexican Communist Party. In fact, Barry Carr who has most studied these issues, is an Australian historian. Conversely, anti-imperialism (mainly anti-US) has constituted an inexhaustible political resource for Mexican trade unionism and leftist movements throughout the 20th century.

  • 30 As suggested by Jesus Velasco, "Reading Mexico, Understanding the United States: American Transnati (...)
  • 31 For instance, Matthew A. Redinger, American Catholics and the Mexican Revolution, 1924-1936, Notre (...)

20At the same time, our knowledge about the two-way flow of intellectuals, artists and writers during the twentieth century remains disappointingly limited. 30 Regarding public opinion and mental attitudes, pioneer works about the North American view of Latin America may show the way for more transnational approaches.31 Regarding this sort of historiographical agenda, however, Mexican historians are still even more reluctant than their US counterparts.

21In conclusion, I would say that interconnected history raises several issues. First, the construction of subjective and collective identities. Second, the formation of public opinion in each country and the evolving consolidation of reciprocal impressions and mutual knowledge. Third, the transfer of political or cultural models. Fourth, the weaving together of antagonistic vs reciprocal economic interests. And, finally, the impact these processes could have on policy-making and political action. For over a century, the Mexican-US history has been characterized by an intimate relationship which has been denied or caricaturized by reciprocal misunderstanding and prejudice. Historians, above all the Mexicans and many Mexicanists as well, contributed to the perpetuation of this situation in the past. They could have nowadays a better agenda : the inquiry about the discrete modalities of the relationship which has not existed only between antagonistic national interests, but between Mexicans and Americans.

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Notes

1 In 1992, a new version of the official textbooks of history used in the Mexican schools triggered off a furious debate, mainly because of the euphemized and moderate version of Mexican-US past relationship they proposed ; see José Antonio Aguilar, « Las batallas por la historia en México y Estados Unidos », Istor, enero 2001, p. 52- 84.

2 Mauricio Tenorio, « De encuentros y desencuentros: la escritura de la historia en Estados Unidos. Ensayo de una visión forastera », Historia Mexicana, XLVI, n° 4, 1996, p. 889-925 (903).

3 David Thelen, "Rethinking History and the Nation-State: Mexico and the United States", The Journal of American History, vol. 86, No. 2, Rethinking History and the Nation-State: Mexico and the United States as a Case Study: a Special Issue (sept. 1999), pp. 438-452 (p. 443).

4 Prasenjit Duara, "Transnationalism and the Challenge to National Histories", in Thomas Bender (ed.), Rethinking American History in a Global Age, 2002, p. 25-46.

5 "Democracy in Mexico - the Complex Roles of the United States: A Conversation with Sergio Aguayo", The Journal of American History, vol. 86, No. 2, op. cit., pp. 456-466 (p. 459); referring to his own experience as a Mexican student in the United States, Aguayo declares: "To understand the connections between the United States and Mexico, I was forced to rethink Mexican nationalism and the role played by the United States in Mexican history." ( ibid, p. 457).

6 One of the best Mexican historians of the 20th century, Daniel Cosío Villegas (1898-1976), who founded the "Colegio de México" and ran it for years, tried hard to promote the study and writing of North American history among his students, almost without any success. One of his closest followers, the historian Josefina Vázquez (Colegio de México), promoted the creation of a US Studies Center at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México during the Sixties; the Center was closed soon after due to bureaucratic decisions and budget cuts; see Tenorio, "De encuentros y desencuentros … », op. cit., p. 892.

7 The US expansionnism has been essentialized by Mexican historiography and myth. According to this essentialization, it has been formulated as a collective aim without any kind of dissent, doubt or vacillation, since the beginning of US history. Consider, for instance, the Secuencia issue Num.48, sept-dic de 2000, "México-Estados Unidos: Hacia una nueva historia diplomática".

8 Even the "linguistic turn" or the postcolonial theory as represented by Edward Said are able to fuel the anti-American passion; see Pedro L. San Miguel, "La representación del atraso: México en la historiografía estadounidense", Historia Mexicana, LIII, n° 3, 2004, p. 745-796.

9 Prasenjit Duara, op. cit.

10 Enrique Rajchenberg & Catherine Héau-Lambert, "El septentrión mexicano entre el destino manifiesto y el imaginario territorial", Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 11:1, July 2005, pp. 1-39.

11 Quoted by Enrique Rajchenberg & Catherine Héau-Lambert, Ibid.

12 According to the treaty, Mexico would have sold the perpetual right of transit to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec to the U.S. for $4 million, no to mention a similar right to two other parts of the northernborder territories.

13 Miguel Angel Gonzáles Quiroga, "Nuevo León durante la independencia de Texas, 1835-1836", Historia Mexicana, n° 2, 2006, pp. 427-470.

14 Andrés Reséndez Fuentes , "Guerra e identidad nacional", Historia Mexicana, XLVII, n° 2, 1997, pp. 411-439 (413).

15 Jorge L. Lizardi Pollock, "Imaginar el 98: iconografía mexicana de la guerra hispano-cubano-estadounidense", Historia Mexicana, XLVIII, n° 2, 1998, p. 321-341.

16 See the JAH issue, op.cit.; Adelman, Jeremy and Stephen Aron, "From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History", The American Historical Review 104.3 (1999); and The American Historical Review, vol. 112, n° 3, juin 2007, "AHR Forum: Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery".

17 Rafe Blaufard, "AHR Forum: The Western Question: the Geopolitics of Latin Américan Independence", The American Historical Review, Vol 112, N° 3 (june 2007), <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/112.3/blaufarb.html> (19 Jan. 2010).

18 Annick Lempérière, Entre Dieu et le roi, la République. Mexico XVIe-XVIIIe siècles, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2004, pp. 285-291.

19 José de Onis, Los Estados Unidos vistos por escritores hispanoamericanos, Madrid, Ediciones Cultura hispánica, 1956 ; Francois-Xavier Guerra, « “Voces del pueblo”. Redes de comunicación y orígenes de la opinión en el mundo hispánico (1808-1814) », Revista de Indias, vol. LXII, n° 225, mayo-agosto 2002, pp. 357-384.

20 José de Onis, op. cit.

21 Regarding the connections between Mexican radicals and the United States in the 1900s, see François-Xavier Guerra, Le Mexique de l’ancien régime à la révolution, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne-L’Harmattan, 1985, vol. 2.

22 Matias Romero, Mexico and the United States, 1898, p. 116.

23 José Marti, the Cuban revolutionary who was then a journalist in New York, reported in 1886 about incidents of this sort and the echo they had in the US newspapers, José Marti, Obras Completas, 11, En los Estados Unidos. Escenas norteamericanas, III, 1886-1888, La Habana, Editorial nacional de Cuba, 1963, p. 48.

24 Annick Lempérière, Georges Lomné, Frédéric Martinez, Denis Rolland, L’Amérique latine et les modèles européens, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1998 ; from then on, the authors renounced to use the term "model" as too ethnocentric and adopted the notion of "reciprocal cultural transfers".

25 Rafael Rojas, « Los amigos cubanos de Juárez », Istor, n° 33, 2008, pp. 42-57.

26 Andrés Reséndez Fuentes , « Guerra e identidad nacional », op. cit., p. 415.

27 Lorenzo de Zavala, Viaje a los Estados Unidos, Paris, 1833.

28 James D. Cockcroft, Precursores intelectuales de la revolución (1910-1913), Mexico, Siglo XXI, 1971.

29 Pablo Yankelevich, « Explotadores, truhanes, agitadores y negros. Deportaciones y restricciones a estadounidenses en el México revolucionario », Historia Mexicana, LVII, n° 4, 2008, 1155-1199 (1175ss).

30 As suggested by Jesus Velasco, "Reading Mexico, Understanding the United States: American Transnational Intellectuals in the 1920s and 1990s", The Journal of American History, op. cit., pp. 641-667; James Oles, South of the border (catalog).

31 For instance, Matthew A. Redinger, American Catholics and the Mexican Revolution, 1924-1936, Notre Dame, Ind., University of Notre Dame, 2005.

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Annick Lempérière, « Transnationalizing the Nation-Building History of Mexico from the XVIIIth to the XXth century »Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos [En ligne], Débats, mis en ligne le 13 juin 2017, consulté le 19 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/59401 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/nuevomundo.59401

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