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I began to know something of Mexico in the late 1980s when Murray Rossant, then director of the Twentieth Century Fund (now known as the Century Foundation), asked me to write a study of what I thought should be the United States' policy with Mexico. I traveled all over that country for the first time and wrote a report of which I was inordinately proud. My key suggestion was that American cities should adopt and cultivate a Mexican town of comparable size to their own. The foundation chose not to publish this masterpiece (as I supposed it) largely because my charming sponsor in that institution, Rossant, had died but also because I think the text praised Carlos Salinas de Gortari, then president of Mexico, as an innovating modernizer.
Yet on this matter I think I was right. After all, had Salinas not radically changed the relation of Mexico with the Catholic Church, moving for a reconciliation between the government and the latter after decades of official anti-clericalism dating from the revolution? Had not his trade agreements with the United States transformed the relationship of Mexico with its powerful neighbor? Did not Salinas' arrest of the oil trade unionist La Quina mean the beginning of a more orthodox, less corrupt trade union movement? And surely Salinas' privatization program was as promising as anything proposed at that time by Margaret Thatcher.
But the ancillary benefits of my travels in Mexico were enormous: I came to be very friendly with a host of clever and imaginative Mexicans, and they remain very close friends to this day. I also realized that William Prescott's splendid "History of the Conquest of Mexico" had been published 150 years before and was calling out for replacement. This led to a complete transformation in my intellectual life and a switch of attention from the 20th to the 16th century and to a book on Cortes' conquest that even Mexicans seemed to like.
When I was traveling in Mexico in 1988 and 1989, the PRI, the extraordinary official political party that had been in power under one name or another since the 1920s, still seemed able to maintain its authority without too much difficulty. Elections, for example, were won (including, it now seems, by...