The Annexation of Mexico: From the Aztecs to the IMF, by John Ross, 1998, Common Courage Press, Box 702, Monroe, Maine 04951, USA. A mix of old and new history written with a sense of humor seasoned with anecdotes, all attributed to his sources, Ross's account reads with the ease and fascination of a well-written novel. And he's no starry-eyed idealist oblivious to faults among indigenous conquerors, as the following illustrates:

474 years later, on the eve of the annual commemoration of the fall of Tenochtitlan --an event that brings hordes of Aztec revivalist troupes to the Zocalo of Mexico City-- the irreverent Luis Gonzalez de la Alba added a devastating postscript in his weekly La Jornada column: "The fall and destruction of Tenochtitlan which we celebrate [sic] tomorrow was the result of a popular and multitudinous uprising of all the nations between Veracruz and this city, against the fierce repression of the Aztec Empire. By 1521, the Aztecs had inflicted humiliation upon its subject peoples with a ferocity never achieved by the Nazis . . ." -La Jornada, August 12, 1996. -p.11

      Another taste of his flavor is the following:

Several years ago when I visited Columbus, New Mexico, memories of Villa's raid on this quiet border outpost were fast fading. Most of the residents were snow bunnies who had fled to southern New Mexico to escape winters in the frozen north. The curator of the cluttered Pancho Villa Museum was himself a native of Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, from which he had been driven by the 1979 near-meltdown at the local nuclear power plant.

But one resident who remembered the incident quite clearly was the former postmistress, Margaret Epps, then in her late 70s. What the old woman remembered best were the flames shooting from the burning storefronts as she trotted towards town in her father's milk wagon. "It was awful. There were bodies in the street," she gasped in the kind of mechanical horror that folks who have been telling the same story most of their long lives affect. "That Pancho Villa was a bad man!" -p.75

Barbarous Mexico,

Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas, by George A. Collier with Elizabeth Lowery Quaratiello, 1994, The Institute for Food and Development Policy, 398 60th St, Oakland, California 94618, USA. tel: 510-654-4400, (distribution by Subterranean Co., Box 160, 265 South 5th St, Monroe, Oregon 97456, USA. tel: 800-274-7826).

      Of course I need to do a lot more work on this page if it is to be useful. (But haven't between July 29, 2001 and January 14, 2004!)