In this his fourth book on the subject, Harold Dana Sims presents the history of a set of legislative enactments by which the first Mexican republic attempted to expel the Spaniards who remained in the country after independence. The approach is mainly descriptive. Most of the topic’s inherent interest is soon suffocated by a relentless litany of the laws, decrees, orders, and circulars that issued from various federal and state governments. There are so many of these laws, and they are so contradictory, that the attempt to recite all of them becomes self-defeating. Compared to the previous three books, the only new material here seems to relate to the period after 1831, which accounts for about forty-six pages of the text and is a subsidiary set of issues anyway. Though it is the first of the books in English, the introductory student will be unable to cope with the unclear chronology and excessive detail.
While Sims asserts that the expulsion of the gachupines was the primary social issue of the first republic, the passions, ideological conflicts, and economic struggles underlying it, though frequently mentioned, are never allowed to take center stage as they should. The attempt to relate most of the major political changes of the first republic to the expulsions is not well established either. A link there no doubt was, but Sims chooses to imply it rather than to expand on it.
Was the question of the Spaniards really the foremost social issue of the first republic? What about all the other great issues of the day? Why did this early attempt to clarify the national identity result in ugly xenophobia? How does the Mexican experience compare to that of other Latin American countries? Were there not other good reasons besides Mexico’s anti-Spanish enactments that led Spain to pick that country for attempted reconquest? The issue of the expulsions, which exposed every wound left from the struggle for independence, provides a fine opportunity for an investigation of what the first republic was really all about. This book avoids that opportunity.
Particularly in the context of Mexico, where so many gachupines had joined independence and where official compassion for them had reigned, the victory of fear and loathing is more than an upwelling of nativist sentiment against the old elite. It is also a kind of political and psychological pathology. The implications for the first decades of independence and beyond are historically troubling. The reader feels great sympathy for the angst of the Mexicans (do the people of any new state really like their former colonial masters?), hut while Sims deserves credit for revealing to us that it happened, he leaves us unclear about what it meant.
