Trump actions boosting Mexican nationalism

mexico city» Confrontation with the United States is so central to Mexican history, there’s an institution dedicated to the trauma. It’s called the Museum of Interventions.

Remember the Alamo? They do here — as the prelude to a string of defeats, invasions and territorial losses that left Mexico wounded and diminished, its national identity forged by grievance.

The museum is housed in a former convent where Mexican troops were overrun by U.S. soldiers in the 1847 Battle of Churubusco. And for most of the three decades since the museum opened, its faded battle flags seemed like the stuff of buried history, an anachronism in an age of North American Free Trade Agreement integration.

But President Donald Trump’s wall-building, great-again nationalism is reviving the old Mexican version too. His characterization of tougher border enforcement and immigration raids as “a military operation” hit the nerve that runs through this legacy, undermining his aides’ trip to Mexico City this month and the message that relations with the United States remain strong.

Instead, the public outrage at Trump has sunk those relations to their lowest point in decades. It has inspired a campaign to boycott U.S. chains such as Starbucks and buy “Made in Mexico” products. Protesters marched in a dozen cities this month, carrying grotesque effigies of the American president. And Trump’s taunts have buoyed the poll numbers of 2018 presidential contender Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the left-wing populist Mexicans see as the figure most likely to fight back.

For Mexicans, the problem is not merely the wall. They know their country is poorer, more violent and less law-abiding than the United States. If Trump had announced plans for tougher border security, many Mexicans would have understood, even as they criticized him.

But when they hear Trump boasting he will make Mexico pay for the wall, and the wild cheering in response, they interpret it as an unmistakable attempt to humiliate them. It is American nationalism at Mexico’s expense, and it stings in a deep, atavistic way, like a childhood bully coming back to beat you up again.

“I’m proud of Mexico, and I love my country,” said Sergio Pacheco, 56, a mechanic who works for American Airlines. “He can have his wall if he’ll give us our territory back.”

Pacheco was touring the Museum of Interventions for the first time. There were giant 1840s maps showing Mexico’s borders reaching into the Pacific Northwest.

President James K. Polk wanted that land. Mexico wasn’t selling, and fighting broke out. The United States declared war in 1846.

U.S. troops sailed down from New Orleans a year later, then marched up the old conquistadors’ trail and brought Mexico to its knees.

They stayed a year, forcing the country to sign away half its territory.