The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

by Greg Grandin

By the time of Roosevelt’s election, the various factions that made up the Mexican Revolution—which was fought to overcome this history of oppression—had consolidated into a stable government that, in 1917, put into place the world’s first social-democratic constitution, guaranteeing citizens the right to receive education, health care, and decent wages and to organize unions. Mexico’s president Lázaro Cárdenas, upon his election in 1934, accelerated a program of economic reforms, including land reform. By the time he left office in 1940, Cárdenas had distributed close to forty-five million acres (many expropriated from U.S. companies) to 810,000 families. This redistribution included restoring a good part of the Yaqui homeland as a single indigenous ejido, a land grant to be held, worked, and governed collectively (Cárdenas’s actions would have been the equivalent of FDR restoring to the Cherokees their original Georgia lands, or returning western Tennessee to the Creeks). Mexico also nationalized a significant amount of U.S.-held property, including that of Standard Oil.