Janus and the Northern Colossus: Perceptions of the United States in the Building of the Mexican Nation

Francisco Valdés-Ugalde

The United States are the denial of what we were in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, and of what, since the nineteenth century, many among us would prefer us to be.	1
—Octavio Paz, 1976
Introduction
In 1811 the founding father of independent Mexico, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, fled the country after the defeat of the insurgent army at Puente de Calderón. He and his fellow military men moved northward to Saltillo and then to Texas to protect themselves from the royal troops. For them it was the beginning of the end; many officers had been apprehended, and their chances of recovery were diminishing. Nearly forty years later, Lucas Alamán referred to this episode in his Historia de México:	2
it was Mexicans' general opinion at the beginning of the revolution, and it continued to be for many years to come, until sad deceiving events changed this conviction, that the United States of America were the natural ally of their country, and that in them Mexicans would find the firmest support and the most sincere and disinterested of friends, and therefore it was there, of course, where Hidalgo tried to seek help.1
Luis de Onís, the Spanish ambassador to the United States, witnessed the afflictions of Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara, Hidalgo's envoy to Washington. Gutiérrez de Lara contacted American authorities to ask that they support the Mexican cause against Spain. In the context of rivalries between the United States and Spain over Cuba and other issues, James Monroe, the secretary of state at that time, had conceived a plan to support the Mexican revolutionaries. Hidalgo's envoy recorded it in his diary as an offer by the United States to help the revolutionaries on the condition that they adopt a constitution similar to that of the United States. Monroe ventured to tell Gutiérrez de Lara that this would pave the way for annexation of Mexico by the American federation. Eventually, the secretary of state suggested, similar procedures in the rest of the Americas would result in the creation of the most powerful entity ever built.2	3
As the historian Enrique González Pedrero put it: "all historians coincide in the offended reaction of Gutiérrez de Lara who, after listening to such a proposition wrote in his diary, 'Holy Mary, please help me and free me of these people.' A nice beginning for Mexico's independent diplomacy with the United States."3	4
In April 1812 de Onís reported to the viceroy Venegas about American designs on New Spain: "This government intends nothing less than fixing its limits from the mouth of the Bravo river of the North [Rio Grande], following its course up to the thirty-first degree, drawing from there a straight line to the Pacific Ocean, gaining control of the provinces of New Santander, Coahuila, New Mexico and part of New Vizcaya and Sonora."4 These calculations were not far from what happened later: the independence of Texas and the annexation of the Mexican northern territories.	. . .