Mexico
The North American Hispanic republic; subject of Quigley's national-character essay
Also known as: Mexico
The North American Hispanic republic — subject of Quigley's national-character essay Mexican National Character and Circum-Mediterranean Personality Structure (T&H 21).
Quigley's Framing
Mexico is, for Quigley, the closest and best-documented case of Latin American civilizational pattern. His national-character essay argues that the Mexican personality type — honor-coded, familistic, fatalistic, suspicious of impersonal institutions — is best understood as a transplant of the older circum-Mediterranean personality structure into a new geographic and demographic setting. The argument doubles as a critique of mid-century American area-studies work that treated Mexican political behavior as a function of poverty or race rather than of inherited culture.
Strategic Role
In T&H Mexico appears chiefly as a long border problem for the United States — the 1846–1848 war, the Maximilian episode, the Wilson-era interventions during the Revolution, the inter-war oil expropriation, and the wartime alignment. Post-war Mexico is treated as the most stable of the major Latin American states, in part because the PRI's one-party system absorbed and channeled exactly the patrimonial-political energies the national-character essay describes.
Cited in
- mexican-national-character Quigley
The Mexican personality type is best understood as a transplant of the circum-Mediterranean personality structure.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 21 Quigley
Mexico is the closest and best-documented case of the Latin American civilizational pattern.