Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Nevertheless, East Coast elites display relatively little interest in Mexico. The actual daily
challenges, incidents, and business and cultural interactions between Mexico and the bor-
der states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas are geographically distant from
the concerns of East Coast elites: which, instead, focus on the wider world and on Amer-
ica's place in it. Truly, Mexico registers far less in the elite imagination than does Israel or
China, or India even. Yet Mexico could affect America's destiny more than any of those
countries. Mexico, together with the United States and Canada, comprises the most crucial
of the continental satellites hovering around Mackinder's World-Island.
In the Valley of Mexico once stood the great lake holding the two Aztec Venices of Tenoch-
titlán and Tlatelolco: here now stands Mexico City. This is the Nile valley of the New
World, “the matrix of civilization” for both North and South America, in the words of his-
torian Henry Bamford Parkes, from where the cultivation of maize spread over the two
continents. Lying midway between the Atlantic and Pacific, and joining along with Central
America the two continental landmasses of the Western Hemisphere, the Valley of Mexico
and the country that has grown out of it form one of the earth's great civilizational cores.
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Yet Mexico, unlike Egypt, exhibits no geographical unity. Two great mountain ranges,
the Sierra Madre Occidental and the Sierra Madre Oriental, lie on either side of a rugged
central plateau. Then there are other, cross-cutting mountain ranges, mainly in the south:
the Sierra Madre del Sur, the Sierra Madre de Oaxaca, and so on. Mexico is so mountainous
that if it were flattened it would be the size of Asia. The Yucatán Peninsula and Baja Cali-
fornia are both essentially separate from the rest of Mexico, which is itself infernally di-
vided. This is the context to understand northern Mexico's ongoing, undeclared, substan-
tially unreported, and undeniable unification with the Southwestern United States, and con-
sequent separation from the rest of Mexico.
Northern Mexico's population has more than doubled since the North American Free
Trade Agreement was signed in 1994. The U.S. dollar is now a common unit of exchange
as far south as Culiacán, halfway to Mexico City. Northern Mexico is responsible for 87
percent of all
maquiladora
(duty-free) manufacturing and 85 percent of all U.S.-Mexico
trade. The northeastern Mexican city of Monterrey, one of the country's largest, is in-
timately connected with the Texas banking, manufacturing, and energy industries. David
Danelo, a former U.S. Marine now working for U.S. Customs, who has studied northern
Mexico extensively, and has traveled throughout all six Mexican border states, told me
he has yet to meet a person there with more than one degree of separation from the Un-
ited States. As he told me, “Northern Mexico retains a sense of cultural polarity; fron-
tier
norteños
see themselves as the antithesis of Mexico City's [city slicker]
chilangos
.”
Still, northern Mexico contains its own geographical divisions. The lowlands and desert
in Sonora in the west are generally stable; the Rio Grande basin in the east is the most
