Blog Post #7: Week 7

In this week's reading, I extremely enjoyed Creelman's account of Porfirio Diaz. It was a refreshing outlook on a man I have studied in many other classes in my time here at UBC. In this blog post, I want to shine a light on the correlation between this week's title (The Export Boom) and the week's reading. Thus, I took a deep dive into Porfirio Diaz's foreign policy and diplomacy during his tenure.

At first, I thought we studied Porfirio Diaz in this week because from what I have read, anti-porfirista historiography has argued that in Diaz's drive to obtain international recognition and, above all, to secure the foreign investment which its economic policy required to fuel economic development, his regime betrayed the interests of the nation, throwing its arms open to rapacious foreign entrepreneurs who exploited the country's resources. Mexico's political and economic sovereignty was, it is argued, seriously abused in the process. Thus, I thought the correlation lied somewhere around this interpretation.

But then I started investigating why Porfirio developed the international relations agenda he had, and I found that Mexico had a difficult beginning to its development as a nation. Namely, during the first 50 years of its life as an independent nation, there had been a number of serious external threats to Mexican sovereignty. Post-colonial retribution - from Spain in 1829 - and neo-colonial ambition - from the USA in 1847-48 and France between 1862 and 1867 - these had all threatened Mexico's survival as an independent nation and had made nineteenth-century governments acutely aware of the external threats to national self-determination. This explains partially why liberal policy in Mexico after 1855 linked diplomatic recognition with the development of economic links to outside nations.

Thus, I now understand why late-nineteenth-century liberals of the Reforma and Porfiriato were therefore faced with the difficult task of protecting national sovereignty. Furthermore, I comprehend why they concurrently opened up national frontiers to foreign capital, investment, and colonization. This is due to one main reason: they saw these goals as complementary rather than contradictory.