Paul Gillingham on Why Mexico Stays Together

Buy tickets https://www.92ny.org/event/conversations-with-tyler-craig-newmark for the live Conversations with Tyler recording with Craig Newmark at 92NY! Tyler calls Paul Gillingham's new book, Mexico: A 500-Year History, the single best introduction to the country's past—and one of the best nonfiction books of 2026. Paul brings both an outsider's eye and ground-level knowledge to Mexican history, having grown up in Cork — a place he'd argue gave him an instinctive feel for fierce local autonomy and land hunger —earning his doctorate on the Mexican Revolution under Alan Knight at Oxford, and doing his fieldwork in the pueblos of Guerrero. He and Tyler range across five centuries of Mexican history, from why Mexico held together after independence when every other post-colonial superstate collapsed, to why Yucatán is now one of the safest places on earth, what two leaders from Oaxaca tell us about Mexican politics, how Mexico avoided the military coups that plagued the rest of Latin America, what Cárdenas's land reform actually achieved versus what it promised, whether the ejido system held Mexico back, why Mexico worried too much about land and not enough about human capital, how Mexico's fertility rate fell below America's, why Guerrero has been violent for two centuries, why the new judicial reforms are a disaster, where to find the best food in Mexico and Manhattan, what a cache of illicit Mexican silver sitting on a ship in the English Channel has to do with his next book, and more. Read a full transcript https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/paul-gillingham/ enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full vi https://youtu.be/8JDH6Y_hi1Qdeo https://youtu.be/AaeXt_ocDKY on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel. Recorded February 27th, 2026. Other ways to connect Follow us on X https://twitter.com/cowenconvos and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cowenconvos/?hl=en Follow Tyler https://twitter.com/tylercowen on X Sign up for our newsletter https://mercatus.tfaforms.net/5060931 Join our Discord https://discord.gg/JAVWP7vTxt Email us: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here https://www.mercatus.org/podcasts. Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:30 - Post-Independence Mexico 00:05:18 - Peace in Yucatán 00:6:54 - Quintana Roo 00:08:24 - Mexican Infrastructure 00:10:26 - Oaxaca 00:13:54 - Great Food Outside Cities 00:16:39 - Leaders from Coahuila 00:17:50 - Military Rule and Civil War in Mexico 00:21:47 - The Cárdenas Regime 00:24:03 - The Ejido System 00:25:49 - Human Capital 00:40:59 - Doing Mexican History as a Brit 00:42:43 - Guerrero 00:48:37 - Michoacán Violence 00:50:44 - Monterrey 00:52:40 - Judicial Reforms 00:54:44 - The Best Mexican Film, Music, and Novel 00:59:42 - The Best Trip Around Mexico 01:04:05 - Outro

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Hey listeners, this is Dallas, one of the producers of Conversations with Tyler. On April 14th, join Tyler at the 92nd Street Y in New York City for a live taping of Conversations with Tyler, featuring Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist and Craig Newmark Philanthropies. Tyler and Craig will discuss trust, cybersecurity, and the building blocks of resilient civic institutions in the digital age, along with plenty more, I'm sure. Tickets are selling quickly, so be sure to grab yours before they're gone. You can find the link to buy tickets at the top of the show notes. Hope to see you there.

• 0:41Tyler Cowen?

  Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com.

• 1:03Tyler Cowen?

  Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today, I'm chatting with Paul Gillingham. He has a new book out, Mexico: A 500 Year History. It is, in my view, the single best introduction to the history of Mexico and will be one of the best nonfiction books of this year, 2026. Paul, welcome.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  Thank you very much for those kind words, and it's a privilege to be here. Thanks for the invitation.

• 1:30Tyler Cowen?

  Now, after independence in 1821, why did not the rest of Mexico fragment the way Central America did a few years later, where it splits off from the Mexican Empire? What determines the line? What sticks together with Mexico and what does not?

• 1:46Speaker 02

  That's a very good question, because it's one of the things that really makes Mexico stand out in that period, those histories, is that after independence, the rest of the Americas, you get a series of superstates. And so you get Gran Colombia, which is most of the Andes, and going across what's now Venezuela. You get the United Provinces of the Rio Plate. And these are huge, very difficult to conceive of, superstates, and they fail within a decade.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  And elsewhere, you look at other post-colonial states, thinking particularly of India, within a couple of years, you fragmented and failed. Mexico doesn't. Mexico actually stands up, with the exceptions you put, of Central America, which is formally part of it in fact, but leaves within short order. And so it's one of these questions, what Alvaro Henrique calls "the miracle that Mexico exists". And to explain it is a paradox, to make a try at it, I think that there is a common theme in Mexican history, which runs across most of those five centuries, which is a remarkable degree of hands-off government. It's imposed. Mexico has a lot of mountains, it's very difficult to rule

• 3:00Speaker 02

  from a central, any central pole. And so savvy governments, or governments with no choice, which are quite often same thing, are very hands-off. Federalism is built into Mexico's soul, and I think that's one of the reasons, from early on, Mexico actually outpunches the rest of Americas in terms of sticking together as a territorial unit.

• 3:24Tyler Cowen?

  Now, as you know, in the early 19th century, there are rebellions in Yucatan, the caste wars, but Yucatan does not split off from Mexico. What keeps that together?

• 3:34Speaker 02

  Yucatan has always felt itself to be a different country, effectively, and that runs through to the present. You can see the cultural reasons, obviously, and the Maya and the other great sophisticated urban culture of the 16th century and before. And so it makes sense that they should feel themselves very different from the rest of what becomes Mexico. And in fact, it comes through in small but revealing ways, and back in the 20th century, people find themselves being asked whether they want a Yucatan beer or a foreign beer. And a foreign beer being anything in Mexico outside Yucatan. Why doesn't Yucatan leave? I think that it came extremely close, and in fact, there's a moment in the

• 4:17Speaker 02

  1840s, when Mexico and Texas form an alliance, and Texas is chartering warships out to Yucatan to try and prevent any naval incursions. Why on earth does Yucatan stay? I think it's because of the... Absence of an alternative capital, because Yucatan is profoundly racially divided. It's one of the, I think, few places in Mexico where you could say that really is a fairly stark racial divide. And you have a plantocracy, in some ways like the US South before the civil war. You've got a relatively small white plantocracy centred in Merida. They have no interest whatsoever in leading an independent struggle.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  And while the Maya achieve an underestimated level of sophistication as a state, it's still not at the point where you would get for more than a couple of years a really joined up independence movement spanning all races, all areas and the entire peninsula.

• 5:18Tyler Cowen?

  Now, more recently, Mexico has a reputation for being very violent, but Yucatan is especially peaceful. There are years where it's had a lower murder rate, I think, than Finland. Why is that part of the country, after this chaotic beginning after independence, recently so peaceful and so safe?

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Again, a good question, and it is, I think, explains broader patterns of drugs and violence in Mexican history. The first is that foreigners in Mexico have carte blanche, or what in colonial times people called fuero, foreigners are untouchable. And because much of Yucatan, the Yucatan economy centres on tourism, the Riviera Maya, Cozumel, et cetera, there's an awful lot in these key populated coastal strips of foreigners. Killing them is bad business. Stability is better for business anywhere. In Yucatan, there's more of an imperative for that, so that's one.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  And the other is that it has ceased being what it used to be, which is a major transip- and transshipment route. And so when I proposed to my wife on a beach in Quintana Roo, we could go out at 8am next to Tulum, when Tulum was a small dusty town. We could go out and twice a day we would see small planes coming up from Central America. And we knew perfectly well, as they headed north up through Quintana Roo, that this was a drugs run. As a transshipment route, it has been far surpassed. And so that other great reason for violence is absent.

• 6:54Tyler Cowen?

  Why did the central government even create the state of Quintana Roo, now that you mention it?

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Oh, that's an extremely good question. Quintana Roo is very much its own country. And in fact, in the caste wars, which you mentioned, there's a very strong east-west divide on the peninsula. And the east is where the Maya rebels really survive the most. And so I think that it's an attempt to administratively corral the more unstable, difficult-to-rule parts of the country, using Yucatan, your point made, as a country. It's an attempt to corral them and say, OK, we can send armies in there. We can try and prevent contagion. And the idea you can do that by drawing a line on the map is obviously profoundly optimistic. It's more terrain settlement,

• 7:43Speaker 02

  which keeps Quintana Roo really different from the rest of the peninsula.

• 7:47Tyler Cowen?

  But it worked, right?

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Can it be said to work when any sort of political project, can it be said to have worked when there are very few people there in the beginning? And Quintana Roo is historically really low population. Most of the Yucatan was concentrated closer towards Merida and that west coast. And Quintana Roo really takes off because of mass tourism. And that's because of state intervention. Relatively recently, Cancun was a village until the late 60s, early 70s.

• 8:24Tyler Cowen?

  Before Profiado Diaz, why is there so little attention to infrastructure in Mexico?

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Because the money's not there.

• 8:31Tyler Cowen?

  But how does he get the money? What accounts for the change?

• 8:34Speaker 02

  What accounts for the change is, first of all, the final achievement of independence. And, you know, formerly, in the history books, 1821, the Spanish leave, Mexico's independent, and new stage starts. And that's not actually true. And just in terms of the Spanish leaving, well, they don't. They maintain a garrison on the key fortress in the main port, controlling the entrance.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  To Mexico from the Atlantic, the Puerto Veracruz. The Spanish stay there till 1829, controlling it. They don't really leave. Within two years of them finally leaving, you have a French invasion, a failed one, ground, but still an invasion, still that instability. Then you get obviously American invasions, then you get a civil war, then you get, I'm sure we'll go into this in a minute. My point is that it's not till 1867, when the Mexican independence forces take a European imposed emperor and shoot him, which is not done. You don't shoot emperors in, you know, global history. The Mexicans do. And this is a clear declaration of independence.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  And it's an end to other empires' pretensions. And it's the beginning of stabilization, led by a brilliantly gifted, and this is a word I would almost never use, but a brilliantly gifted politician, Porfirio Diaz, who benefits from this being a time of a global boom, when the rest of the world, the industrial world, craves Mexican resources. And Diaz is very savvy to ride that into a new era where Mexico becomes the epitome of a successful, what used to be called, developing nation. And it's with that that you get the infrastructure.

• 10:26Tyler Cowen?

  And you have Diaz, you have Juarez, the other very important 19th century leader, and they're both from the state of Oaxaca. Is that coincidence? It's only two data points? Or does that tell us something?

• 10:37Speaker 02

  That is such a good question, because it is something which really stands out. To add data points to that, at one stage under Diaz, somewhere at two thirds of the congressmen are actually effectively from Oaxaca. And while Congress is sort of a rubber stamp, nevertheless, tells you something. And I think this goes back, this is the culmination of a very long-term trend of Oaxacan political savvy and relative independence. So our Oaxaqueños are good at politics, and they are very politically engaged. If you want to make huge... Huge leaps, you say, ah, well, that goes back to this, the conquest, the 16th century, where Spanish rule sort of flows around them. Well, why? Because people who live in mountains

• 11:23Speaker 02

  tend to be quite good at war and quite prickly, and the Oaxacanos epitomize this. And so outside the main valley, Oaxaca stays largely independent and very decentralized. And so it's a question of, it's almost like New England democracy is firstly independent, small cities, counties. And every time Oaxaca gets a chance, it seizes it to really push for autonomy and political power. And you really see this, to wrap up this rather tangential explanation, the direct ancestor comes with independence, where suddenly towns are allowed to declare themselves counties with their own governments, their own elections, very competitive ones.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  And Oaxaca does it to an extraordinary extent. Every village in Oaxaca says, we are now a county. It's almost like Swiss cantons. It's this extraordinary democratic urge. And that trains people to be good at politics.

• 12:18Tyler Cowen?

  And do you think that helps account for why to this day, Oaxaca State is so interesting to visit because there's so much local autonomy?

• 12:25Speaker 02

  I love that. And I would say in part because one of the traditional tourist attractions of Mexico is precisely indigenous culture. And because of this autonomy, Oaxaca has preserved, you know, a multitude of very strong indigenous cultures. Um, I think, yes, that, um, I'd add to that, that it's comparatively safe, a key consideration. But that's a recent thing. Tourism in Oaxaca goes back a long time. I think it's also because you have this stunning colonial city. And Oaxaca City is really beautiful. And we have in the US, nothing at all, or can have, we've got nothing like that. Finally, and.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  I actually believe this. Mexican cuisine is very, very diverse. People think Mexican cooking tacos. Well, yes, but and Oaxacan cooking is really a superb cuisine. One of the best, I would say Oaxacan and Yucateco cuisines. Head and shoulders above the rest of Mexico. And so I don't know how much that draws. Well, I do actually, there's quite a lot of sort of culinary tourism, which tends to be rich tourism in Oaxaca these days. And so I think that's another draw. It's extraordinary, in fact, how many people have realised that over the last fifteen or so years and forms these sort of expatriate almost colonies in Oaxaca. It's a fantastic place to live.

• 13:54Tyler Cowen?

  A mere two weeks ago, I was eating barbacoa in Tlacolula. Have you ever been there?

• 13:59Speaker 02

  I have not, but I'm starting to resent this story already. And you haven't told it, Tyler. Go on, do tell.

• 14:05Tyler Cowen?

  Well, there's a fantastic church in town. I would guess it's, I don't know, twenty, twenty five minutes outside of the main city. So it's easy to get there. You just take a cab ride. We asked our cab driver, taxi store, you know, where's the best barbecue in a nearby pueblo? And that's where he took us, was unbelievable.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  First of all, very good strategy. And the best meal I had in Yucatan by country mile was about half an hour outside Merida. And it was the same thing. Ask a local taxi driver, come on, if you want a really good meal, where would you go? And he said, ah, it's a bit of a drive. And you say, okay, I can see perverse incentive in my question. But when you end up in a sort of small warehouse, really in the middle of nowhere, stuffed full of Mexican people with the most incredible deer. You think, okay, you know, I actually think this was, this was a fair, a fair reflection. I envy you that meal.

• 14:58Tyler Cowen?

  Twenty minutes out of a Mexican town is such a good recipe for finding the best food. Twenty minutes, thirty minutes, I'm not sure why, or just the outskirts.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's actually, that's actually quite true. And maybe there's a book in this, Tyler. I'm not going to write it, but there's a book in this. Sociologically explain the significance and quality of restaurants twenty minutes outside major towns in Mexico. If I could ask you while you're there, what did you think of Monte Albano?

• 15:28Tyler Cowen?

  It's a little boring for me. I've been there twice. I didn't go there a third time. The other ruins I much prefer. And yeah, it's fine.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  It's funny. I say that to young people and they go, this is, this is heresy. But yeah, frankly, given the plethora of archaeological sites, I think Monte Albano combines is the most boring, large one by a country mile. It's extraordinary. So I'm so glad that endorsed, I hope there aren't too many Oaxacaan your listeners to this particular podcast there.

• 16:01Tyler Cowen?

  You know, there's that small tomb you can see. What's it called? Is it Zaca Chila? It's the city or the pueblo. It's again, like 30 minutes outside of Oaxaca City, I think. We had some great food there. And just to see that one sapo tech tomb where you walk down the steps and you have it all to yourself, to me is, is better than Monte Albano was. And that's just one thing in a field.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  That's the way Coba used to be, Yucatan and Sochcalco in Morelos, which they've really, and I'm glad about this, they've really expanded in the last 20 years. The dig, the tourism potential. So they should have, because it's stunning.

• 16:39Tyler Cowen?

  Now, if we look to the early 20th century, it seems there's some number of key leaders from the state of Coahuila. Is that coincidence?

• 16:47Speaker 02

  No.

• 16:48Tyler Cowen?

  There's Madero, there's Carranza. Why does that happen?

• 16:51Speaker 02

  Coahuila is one of the states which benefits enormously from this global boom of the turn of the century, which translates into the US drawing investments and resources in a sort of unprecedented way. I think that it's taking half of British global investment at that time. And resources are desperately needed. The obvious thing in Coahuila is copper, copper mines. But on the border in Coahuila has a geography which stretches everything from arid mining territory through to really, really rich irrigated lands.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  And so it's wealthy, it's next to the US. You get a class of big landowners who are very diversified, very cosmopolitan. So Madero was educated in part in Paris, in part in Berkeley. And they look southwards and think this is a slightly sclerotic dictatorship. We can, we can do better.

• 17:50Tyler Cowen?

  This is a big, very general question, but after World War Two, Mexico avoids military rule and they avoid civil war, unlike many parts of the Americas. What's your account of that?

• 18:04Speaker 02

  Well, my account of that, first of all, that's a major paradox, which really lay behind the subject of my doctorate and my last book. How do you account for the fact that Mexico has revolution, first of all, one of the great revolutions, which lays down radical prescriptions for equality, which are then traduced by one of the most unequal economies in the Americas? So you've got talking revolution, you've got massive enduring inequality, and yet you have this, as you point out, abnormal peace, going back to 1929, with regular elections like clockwork, every six years.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  Every six years, there's a peaceful transfer of power. There is never any even imagination of a January the 6th moment there. And to make another comparison, there's after 1929, no assassination. Whereas obviously here, JFK, RFK, MLK, this is almost alphabet soup of assassination of leaders, progressive leaders. As you look at this and try and make it add up, it's extremely difficult. And I think it's in part because the inequality misses some of the benefits for the rapidly growing urban populations, which range from superb, dirt-cheap subsidized cinema to low housing, to healthcare.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  Mexican healthcare, given its income band, is very, very good. So just looking at Gini coefficients for either income or wealth doesn't tell the entire story of what Mexicans get out of the revolution. And the final thing is precisely those elections, because this is a one-party state and the elections are rigged. No question, all the way until the last decade, really, the national elections are rigged. But the local ones are not. Well, yes, they are actually. But any group of people who feel strongly enough, like, say, Oaxacanios, about their local autonomy, about ruling themselves, can make enough of a fuss about it that through the mechanism of election,

• 20:16Speaker 02

  backed up by riot, they can actually get their people in. And so there is this unconventional but effective route to popular representation, which at times outpunches the British, because in the British system, candidates just get imposed from the party. The party says, "Local candidate X will run for election in Surrey, and that's it, democracy's finished." Mexico's not like that, and I think that's something that helps temper this radical inequality in qualitative terms, this apparent national, what the people call the "soft dictatorship." And then the final piece, and I'm sorry this answer goes on, but this is just a central paradox which political scientists and historians

• 20:59Speaker 02

  have struggled to understand for decades, and I think we're finally getting a handle on it. The final piece is the immense war weariness caused by a revolution that kills one in 10 Mexicans, and the education that gives leaders all the way to the 50s in the absolute pragmatic imperative, "Whatever you do, keep the lid on. Whatever needs doing, if it's repression, then..." But generally, conciliation works better. And this extremely complex equation, I think, is what keeps the army out of politics, what keeps relative peace and relative buy-in to this unequal, single-party state. There's nothing like it. Mexico really is idiosyncratic in this,

• 21:44Speaker 02

  and it's extraordinary, as you can see, complicated recipe.

• 21:47Tyler Cowen?

  And right before World War II, the Cardenas regime redistributes a lot of the cultivatable land. How does that fit into your story?

• 21:54Speaker 02

  That fits into my story in "It's Always Good to Say a Work in Trinity." So I'm going to say in three ways, but then reserve the right to say a fourth. And the first is- That one of the key reasons the Mexican Revolution is land. Mexico is a strongly rural country with strong traditions of this autonomy, small free holding or collective landowning in indigenous areas. And the porteriato sees a revolution in this extraordinary concentration of land. This entails obviously dispossession of the peasantry. This is one of the key things that leads people like Emiliano Zapata to rebel. And so you have this sort of pent up demand for land for millions of families.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  That's one. Two, it largely for many fails because they get land, but they get land on the condition that say they continue factory farming. Now, so everyone's going to grow sugar, everyone's going to grow wheat. Not quite a Soviet Kolchots, but you don't have, the peasant doesn't have autonomy, which they want quite often to plant whatever they want, right? This is in many ways a failure from their point of view. But there's always the psychological payoff that they have got land. And then in more straightforward terms, this is one of the reasons that Mexico's healthcare system would really nuts and bolts level works. It's because every communal farm, a hedda they're called, has a medical office.

• 23:24Speaker 02

  And so even though in the sort of apparent terms of giving Mexico's rural population a new level of wealth, autonomy, it doesn't work particularly well. It brings a certain pride, it brings a certain independence, it brings good healthcare. There are all these less tangible benefits. There's nothing like it in the Americas. And one of the key reasons, I think, that again, the countryside stays largely quiescent.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  While it is stripped of resources in the sixty years after Garnas leaves office.

• 24:03Tyler Cowen?

  Hasn't the ajido system held Mexico back? Because without that system, many more people would sell their land to outsiders, move to the cities, just have much higher real wages. For instance, as you see in China.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  Well, you do get massive urbanisation and it's people being pushed out of the countryside by a deliberate transfer of resources. What do I mean by that? I mean that food prices are capped. And so the really key one may is its prices kept artificially low. This means that you can have an urban and especially industrialising workforce on the cheap. You can have really low wages, you can have quite low cost. And in Mexico, reasonably high quality industrialisation, it all comes at the expense of the countryside. And so, does the ajido change that? No, not really. Also, the ajido is used for precisely the sort of commercial farming,

• 25:00Speaker 02

  which generates the sort of profits, economies of scale, that, you know, a sort of a command economy or China might actually achieve. And in some instances, that's not just run by the government, but it's run by the government as a sort of almost shell company or front for the major foreign corporations. And the key example is from the US, Anderson Clayton, one of the giants in food production, cotton, etc. They are, through the Mexican government, instructing ajidos exactly what to grow. So in the end, functionally, what's the difference? And the pressure on the countryside and the attraction of the city

• 25:41Speaker 02

  means that you're going to get this sort of Chinese style and level of urbanisation, irrespective of the agrarian reform.

• 25:49Tyler Cowen?

  Has Mexico worried too much about land and not enough about human capital?

• 25:53Speaker 02

  No, I don't think so.

• 25:54Tyler Cowen?

  But say you look at Lebanese migrants, right? They don't obsess over accumulating land. They have high human capital. They've done very, very well under the same regime.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  You could say that the same about the Lebanese globally. I mean, you want the great diaspora merchants. You think Armenia, you think Lebanon. And so I think they bring that. I don't think, I mean, you know, look at how much land there is in Lebanon. The Bakar Valley is tiny. You can drive up and down it in about three hours if you're feeling quite brave on any given day. And so I don't think you're absolutely right. Land is not a Lebanese aim. In Mexico, as a very strongly peasant economy, peasant society until 1960s, really. I want what every peasant globally wants before you get rapid economic change, which is what they call subsistence autonomy.

• 26:49Speaker 02

  What does that mean? I want the guarantee that I can grow enough food to get my family through the next harvest cycle. And you can see the logic to that. That's actually a more conservative and stable economic structure than relying on commercial food purchase when your own income is low and unstable. What I'm trying to say is it makes very good sense.

• 27:12Tyler Cowen?

  Does the cargo system, which is common in Mexican pueblos, does it make any sense? Is it sustainable?

• 27:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it is. Talking about human capital, I think that the cargo system actually, through its distribution of social capital, brings a lot of talented people to actually make the strange swap. I mean, the cargo system whereby you and an indigenous zone assume political office with absolutely zero payoff and at quite considerable cost in terms of cash and time. It makes sense because it brings the brightest and best into office over and over again. This is when it works. And this is a very broad generalization. The only real downside is a gerontocracy.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  And when you look around our political system, it's quite clear that gerontocracy isn't limited to societies which work the cargo system.

• 28:12Tyler Cowen?

  But say I'm a leader, commissario, I have to pay for part of the fireworks, part of the beer. Isn't my incentive as a talented person to minimize local state capacity rather than really having everything developed?

• 28:25Speaker 02

  Oh, no, that's a good question. I would say no, actually, and that generally cargo holders work as intermediaries with the state in the 20th century. And so by investing in fireworks, buying a share in a bull for a fiesta, and buying some pulque, whatever your local hooch is, and not just maintaining some stability, but doing it in part by bread and circuses, gives a level of control and local nuts and bolts of knowledge, which the central government then uses as part of this basic quest for stability. And with stability going all the way back to Porfiriato comes sort of development.

• 29:09Speaker 02

  And I think that this is a vast generalization. The cargo system has great flaws, but the reason it endures is it also has great strengths.

• 29:18Tyler Cowen?

  But a lot of these villages, they seem quite dysfunctional. It seems not uncommon for, say, half of the grown men to be alcoholics, right? There's a major problem with imbalance. The men leave, the women have to stay, they're abandoned, or they can't marry, or there's no one to support the kid. Wouldn't the central government do better, actually just trying to minimize involvement in the villages?

• 29:41Speaker 02

  Sorry, I don't understand the last part of that question. When you say minimizing involvement, do you mean just stepping back and letting villages get on with whatever their collective goals are? I didn't quite understand.

• 29:55Tyler Cowen?

  Well, the village itself can make it hard to migrate, because you cannot, in isolated fashion, sell your land to an outsider, right? Someone's willing to bid for it, but the whole village, in essence, has a veto on whether you can sell your land. Wages are much higher outside the village, alcoholism is lower outside the villages typically. So should the villages be subsidized, or in essence, should moving to the cities be subsidized, in terms of the net effect of policy?

• 30:22Speaker 02

  I think that villages should be subsidised and Mexican policymakers have realised that for a long time and done so. And I think that land is no longer the question. Most people in villages, most, this depends very much where you go, but the reason half the men aren't there is precisely because they have migrated to work, whether it be migrating to cities, whether it be migrating to the north. And remittances are a key source, they are the lifeline for many villages. And that's the way it's been for nearly a century. And you get a certain amount of sort of small scale cultivation, as always, of maize, tomatoes,

• 31:01Speaker 02

  squash, chilies, et cetera, your full sort of nutrient package. That's a small portion of what people are actually doing in villages. And that's increasingly uneconomic on a sort of market local level. And this is why you get this outmigration that you talk about. It's not just male, it's also women, ever since they set up maquiladoras, there's been huge outflow, the more entrepreneurial, to these factories on the border, tax-free zones to assemble US components. Alcoholism, what remains, the real economic stress with this huge outmigration of young people, expresses itself, as it does in a lot of people, with

• 31:46Speaker 02

  drinking, with, what's interesting though is not with drugs. Alcohol is this very strong constant, I mean, you know, speaking as a Brit, speaking about other people's alcohol consumption is slightly hypocritical and I'm not going to really go there. But it is interesting that historically, while Mexico is a hard-drinking society, and we're going back to the colony now.

• 32:08Tyler Cowen?

  Say I look at India, a country with a lot of problems. India typically grows between four to eight percent a year, depending which numbers you believe. Mexico is lucky to grow at two percent a year. What accounts for the difference? Like, where is Mexico failing?

• 32:24Speaker 02

  Oh, I think Mexicans would see that as extraordinary success because Mexicans had the greatest demographic transition in history. You know, the way you get population growth and, you know, any species is basically an S-shaped curve in the right sort of right environment. And Mexico had this exceptionally steep curve and its population in 1910 and 2000 increases 700%.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  And that is steeper than anywhere in the world, that's speed. What's that mean? It means that you come to the seventies and just as population control starts to be a global concern, Mexico has this very joined up state. It's impoverished, but it's pretty joined up and takes a look at what they see as being a problem, which is population growth, putting too much strain on state infrastructure, social services. And okay, so we need to control that ASAP. And they put together this non-coercive campaign, unlike India. India identifies the same problem.

• 33:29Tyler Cowen?

  I'm talking about per capita income growth, though. So India gets a lot richer every year.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  Oh, sorry. I thought you meant population growth.

• 33:35Tyler Cowen?

  No.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  Okay, maybe we can go back to that because that also fascinates me. Per capita income growth, again, I think, hmm, that's an extremely good question. I think that Mexico has a overall impressive medium term GDP growth. And so at the end of the sixties, it's the 27th largest economy in the globe. Right now, it's the 13th. The question becomes really income distribution. So I think that if you look at it not in question of a few years or maybe a decade, but over a longer term, Mexican economic growth has been impressive. This isn't all down to hard work or smart policy.

• 34:18Speaker 02

  It's down to the great advantage of being next door to the world's largest market. No. But what it does mean is that you have maybe not the sort of extremely accelerated economic growth of right now in India, but post NAFTA, you actually do get quite a lot of quite fast sort of take off, almost, speed of growth. So maybe it's just that Mexico has actually gone a stage beyond India. India is, if you want, playing catch up. That's me thinking on my feet. What do you think?

• 34:49Tyler Cowen?

  I think human capital is by far the biggest problem. And then the slow rate at which small informal businesses are willing to enter the more heavily regulated sector is a real bottleneck.

• 35:00Speaker 02

  Has a lot of human capital. One of the reasons that this population control works is because you get far more people going through those critical first three years of primary school. Ideally, everyone goes through high school now, but that's just not a global reality. And the key metric is how many people you're getting through three years of school, which teach you to read, write and do rudimentary maths. And Mexico's record on that is far better than most middle income comparatives. There's a really good study. Says especially women, far more get those first three years than precisely actually in India, Kenya and Egypt. And we're looking now at this phase of takeoff I'm talking about of the seventies and eighties. And so I think the human capital there is really there.

• 35:45Tyler Cowen?

  A lot of Latin America has above average years of schooling for their income level, but pretty low test scores, pretty low performance at the top. Just for instance, that English even getting by in conversation in Mexico seems to be only about seven percent. That to me is remarkably low, especially given how many of them migrate or wish to migrate. And I think education has failed Mexico, even though people, yeah, they show up at the building. The teachers often aren't good. Sometimes in the pueblos, they're not even there.

• 36:16Speaker 02

  I think that Mexicans would absolutely agree with you and I would beg to differ. Part differ. The first thing I'd say is that since forever, a key skill in migrating has precisely been English acquisition. And again, this is kind of global. No, I mean, you get this everywhere. There's this realization. And migration selects the most entrepreneurial, the most dynamic generally. And so these, this sector goes to the US either preps beforehand or else learns very quickly here. It's one of the reasons that they're economically so successful. Back in Mexico, seven percent speaking English.

• 37:00Speaker 02

  Do you think by global comparatives, that's low?

• 37:03Tyler Cowen?

  For a neighbor, it's very, very low. And what percent of the Mexican population has lived in the US at some point, right? It's got to be at least 10%, probably higher. So that to me is stunningly low.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  I'd say that probably is part due to the urban rural divide. And Mexico's population is now overwhelmingly urban. It tips in 1960 for the first time. There's more city dwellers than country dwellers. There is a chasm between education in the countryside and education in the city. So I would be interested in those numbers if you disaggregated them down to towns of, I would say, 4,000 plus and saw how that broke down. Because my bet would be that you would have far higher globally comparative or even beyond rates in the cities, which, as you say, would make sense. You think, well, hold on a minute. You've got a country which invests by comparatives relatively well in education.

• 38:00Speaker 02

  You're a neighbor to the US. Where's, you know, where's the English? Good question. As I say, I would disaggregate the data before taking home the idea that there is a massive failure in that specific sector of the education system.

• 38:15Tyler Cowen?

  To return to population, why is the Mexican total fertility rate now below that of the United States? Much poorer country, right? One thinks of Latin America as having high fertility, but it doesn't anymore. What's happened there?

• 38:28Speaker 02

  This again is the product really of two things, which we've already been covering. And one is this really joined up non-coercive population control of the 70s and 80s, which was a global model. And Mexico hosted the global conference on this, I think, twice or three times. It got a prize from the UN. And how could it do this compared to the rest of Latin America? Two things. First of all, by keeping Catholicism out of political life.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  More than almost anywhere else. And so whereas you have priests inveighing against the evils of contraception, again, across most other Latin American societies, the revolution and the 19th century before it meant that Mexico has a unique degree of separation of church and state. As the church just doesn't say anything, as the government goes about aggressively pushing the pill, condoms, et cetera. Now, at this stage, the obvious question was, okay, well, hold on. So the church doesn't say anything. But on a micro level, inside families, conservative people used to, until the seventies, the total fertility rate was nearly seven per family. And, you know, traditionally, having children, especially male children, is a symbol of success. And, you know, economically,

• 39:45Speaker 02

  it used to be useful to have the spare hands and all. So what changes at a micro level goes back to education. Women who are educated have far more autonomy to say yes to contraception. And you see this really clearly in rates of uptake of the pill, which in the sixties goes through the roof as soon as it's available. And we've got surveys from hospitals, you know, people are there, do you take the pill? Yes or no? Yes, you do. And even in really conservative societies, there's a village which has been very studied, it's wonderful, called San Jose de Gracia, in the highlands of Jalisco. And there, we've got this really good qualitative sort of micro study. I wouldn't just say, yes, actually, we don't want to

• 40:30Speaker 02

  have 6.7 children, thank you very much. And so we will use contraception. And, sorry to the men, you're just going to have to like that. And why is that? That globally correlates to primary education and women's primary education. How many women, for all the flaws, are getting through the doors for those first three years? By the end of the sixties, it's 73%. Again, go global to what was then a band of middle income countries? There's nothing like it.

• 40:59Tyler Cowen?

  Now, most historians of Mexico, they're not British, and you are. Where were you from in Britain? And how do you think that's shaped how you read Mexican history?

• 41:08Speaker 02

  I think there's a small group of, well, I know there's a small group of British historians and, you know, they're rather, they're rather good at what they do. My own story is actually not wholly British because I grew up in Ireland, in the southwest, in a county called Cork. And I was actually thinking I was supposed to-

• 41:27Tyler Cowen?

  That's the accent you have, by the way. So I was confused when you said you were British.

• 41:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it's a strange mix, isn't it?

• 41:32Tyler Cowen?

  But this fellow has an Irish accent.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, you've got, you've got a good ear. It's sort of a hybrid. Growing up in Cork, I was supposed to give a talk last month at the university there. And I was thinking, you know, what can I say to link the two up? And truth is, what I've been talking about, this fierce local independence, local pride, identity, this is so Cork. I mean, Cork sees itself.

• 41:59Tyler Cowen?

  Absolutely.

• 42:00Speaker 02

  And so I think that-

• 42:00Tyler Cowen?

  And also-

• 42:01Speaker 02

  Oh, no, totally. And land, as you say, and hardship. Cork is one of the centers of the great hunger, the great famine of the 19th century. So there's that. But then I was educated in Britain and I was lucky enough to come across the smartest historian I had ever met, a historian of the revolution called Alan Knight. And I was deciding what I want to do with my sort of intellectual life. I met this person and thought, okay, that's what I'd like to do. And thanks to the Oxford system, I could spend one semester entire just working with him, just on the Mexican revolution, and that changed everything. And then there's a flip answer, which is Mexico's weather is a lot better than England's.

• 42:43Tyler Cowen?

  Now, when it comes to crime and violence, why is the state of Guerrero traditionally so tough, so violent, so difficult? Is it just mountains? Is it something else? Low state capacity? Ethnic groups that are there?

• 42:56Speaker 02

  Guerrero is a place which is very dear to me. I actually, for my doctorate, really tried to dive deep into two states and Guerrero was one of them. So I went to villages and did sort of that level work in various places. And in part, yes, it's geographic determinism, it's mountains. But then you say, well, hold on, the Sierra Madre runs all the way up into the Rockies. Can you tell us a bit more? And I think it's because of a long tradition of the drive for political independence, exacerbated in its intensity.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  By a large Afro-Mexican population on the coast, who distinctly conscious that they have been discriminated against, who are good at violence. I think it's because Guerrero is next door, or it's relatively close to Mexico City. And so it's threatening to Mexico City in the way, say, Sonora or Yucatan isn't so much. And so when some fairly oppressive conditions, you can imagine them, land monopolization, political thuggery, et cetera, combined in a state with people who really are very keen on independence and are relatively close to city.

• 44:18Speaker 02

  The answer is this sort of reinforcing cycle of repression, opposition, repression. And that's what you've seen in Guerrero, going back really on and off across two centuries of Mexican independence, but specifically intensified from Porfirio to onwards. And what's forgotten sometimes, really interesting, is that those three families which really run the Guerrero coast, and one of them is actually American, a hugely successful, major landowner. And so you think of Guerrero as being, you know, slightly remote, et cetera. It's also got the major port of Acapulco. It's extremely dynamic, it's multi-ethnic, there's a lot of competition,

• 45:02Speaker 02

  and there's a long history of, again, this desire to be left alone.

• 45:08Tyler Cowen?

  What's your favorite part of Guerrero?

• 45:10Speaker 02

  Ah, if you drive north at what's called the Costa Grande. So you go to Acapulco, you turn right, you go up what's called the Costa Grande, and you get to tourist towns, Iguatnejo, Iztapa. And after about four hours of driving, you get to a place called Saladita, and which is basically a restaurant with a surf break. And that and the village just about next door called Troncones. I spent a lot of very, very happy time there when I was a kid. So that's my favorite part.

• 45:47Tyler Cowen?

  Did you spend any time in the Rio Basas villages?

• 45:50Speaker 02

  No, I didn't. There was a couple of reasons. And one of the key ones was that region was perceived as being extremely dangerous while I was there. And so there were horror stories like the Egyptian consul took a wrong turn. Instead of going along the coast, went up into that area and was sort of killed and dismembered. And completely breaking the rule that foreigners are untouchable. And so, no, I didn't. And I wouldn't put it at the top of parts of Guerrero. I would like to explore at length either. Why, have you been there?

• 46:28Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah, I've spent a lot of time there. They're very beautiful. I used to go there to buy amates and pottery. The road in can be tricky, but they're very safe once you get there.

• 46:36Speaker 02

  And which period are we talking about with that?

• 46:38Tyler Cowen?

  I was mostly there in the nineties and early two thousands, which was safer than today.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  You and me both, yeah.

• 46:45Tyler Cowen?

  But then they were completely safe, no problems whatsoever.

• 46:48Speaker 02

  I think one of that was the roadway. That was one of the roads, like the Costa Grande, where you were told, okay, between basically dawn and dusk. It's not too bad as a sort of roll of the dice, but from dusk to dawn, that would be foolish to travel.

• 47:04Tyler Cowen?

  Lack of a guardrail would worry me as much as anything.

• 47:09Tyler Cowen?

  But for Nahuatl speaking villages, it's the best place to go in Mexico, I think, that I know of.

• 47:14Speaker 02

  There and I would say the northern Sierra of Puebla is also strong concentrations. But yeah, was that just for the off the beaten track fascination? Or was there a specific reason which took you there?

• 47:30Tyler Cowen?

  I ended up writing a book about it, but mostly for art collecting. And you know, one comes to have friends in these places, as I'm sure you have too. And you want to visit them and they regard you as a kind of family or compadre, whatever you'd call it.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  Well, I'm glad I wasn't more rude about it than I was already.

• 47:47Tyler Cowen?

  Well, it's a tough place. Your living standard, once you arrive, is extremely low.

• 47:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. The place I spent longest in is a village in the north called Ijcatiopan, about hour and a half drive, at least back then, out of Tascos, where a lot of people go, this Silver City. Ijcatiopan was about 1,500 people then, really very poor, and one café on the main square and virtually very, very little else. I ended up like a feeble foreigner, going with a little camping stove and many, many cans of Campbell's soup and tuna fish and saltines. Yeah, that's... Those parts of the countryside then, you had endemic threats to your stomach.

• 48:37Tyler Cowen?

  Now, 30 years ago, I would not have thought, did not think, that Michoacan would end up so violent. And yet it has. What's the story in that state?

• 48:45Speaker 02

  First of all, me neither. The story in that state is a combination of production and transshipment. For transshipment, you've got the port of Lazarocarnas, which is a huge port. There is a total white elephant. It was built in the 70s as a way of honoring the great revolutionary leader, Carnas. It was not connected ever to anything, really. So you've got this fantastic infrastructure for both coastal, but also transpacific trade. So it's a very good place to begin precursors and fentanyl more recently, precursors for meth. So that's part of transgression, the transshipment. It's also that whole Pacific coast, obviously, is a major transshipment zone.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  There's also the production. And methamphetamine is large recently, but in the Highlands also. Heroin and the sort of poppy and marijuana. You've got the avocado industry, huge prize for extortion, which is increasingly many drug trading organisations' principal or major part of their portfolio. And avocado farmers and lime farmers are great to extort. And then finally, we come back to my favourite themes, mountains. It is quite easy to hide things like meth labs, and it's quite easy to kill soldiers who come looking for you.

• 50:12Speaker 02

  Michoacan is sort of made for guerrilla warfare. It's this combination of a place where you can produce a lot of excellent illicit goods. You can transship them and you can kill state actors who come after you and make Michoacan this re-centre of violence. The final piece is, overall, these resources, it's been a frontline over different cartels, shifting over the last 20 years as cartels come and go, but it's never had that single organisation dominance, which makes places safe.

• 50:45Tyler Cowen?

  Now, in your model of how Mexico is evolving, as you know, Monterrey is quite a wealthy part of Mexico, and it's growing. 20 years from now, will that just be safe and normal? Or is it still going to be in this in-between state where you have to worry what road you're on? Are you too close to the border? Or will it just all be fine because of the wealth?

• 51:02Speaker 02

  Well, already Monterrey is one of the places where I would feel really quite, quite safe.

• 51:08Tyler Cowen?

  Oh, in town, but out of town, right? You have to ask questions.

• 51:11Speaker 02

  No, yeah, but yeah, Nuevo Leon, the state, it's also not sort of, it's not frontline. These things, as you sort of imply, shift rapidly. And so, until quite recently, Colima...

• 51:29Speaker 02

  Pacific coastal state was really quite tranquil. It's now the most violent state in Mexico. Until two years ago, Sinaloa, because it was controlled by a single drug trading organisation, the Sinaloa cartel, was also counterintuitively really quite safe. It's not anymore because there's entirely seen war there. Monterrey. I think it's very bad business to have a war over drugs in somewhere which doesn't grow them, somewhere which isn't important to transshipment, and somewhere where there are such fantastic

• 52:08Speaker 02

  possibilities of extortion, middle and small income businesses. And so I would already be quite happy around Nuevo León, and I would predict, because of those structural factors, nothing to grow, little to transship, that it will, and wealthy point out, it will continue, continue thus. And in 20 years, I would hope with an even greater sense of security in the countryside around it.

• 52:40Tyler Cowen?

  Now, the recent judicial reforms, which spilled over into the more recent administration, a lot of outsiders said, well, that's taking away the independence of the Mexican judiciary. Do you agree? Or how bad is it? Or does it not matter much? What's your sense?

• 52:54Speaker 02

  I think it matters greatly. I always found it strange, the idea of electing any sort of judicial official. And so when I moved to the US, I thought, well, hold on, you do what? The idea of electing judges is a really poor idea, I think, in Mexico, because of the interest of local drug trading organisations in having sympathetic judges. And it's a lot lower cost to get them elected than to threaten them. Judges are people who it's generally a bad idea to kill. The state doesn't like it. Happens really regularly, but still quite a high risk strategy, as opposed to just having them in your pocket.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  And while electoral turnout across Mexico is admirably high and remarkable, judicial elections have just been the glaring exception to that. I think turnout was thirteen percent. And I think that in itself is a condemnation of the whole project. And so while recognizing flaws in longstanding flaws in the Mexican judicial system, this is, I think, a disastrous reform.

• 54:07Tyler Cowen?

  Why'd they do it then?

• 54:08Speaker 02

  They did it, I think, because of a desire to get the current dominant party Morena really further dug into regional power by having sympathetic judiciary. I think that Morena's local and regional activists were very keen on it. I think it was philosophical populism as well from the AMLO government. And I think it was absolutely, it's one of the most unfortunate things I've seen come out of Mexican politics in the last decade.

• 54:44Tyler Cowen?

  For our last segment, just some rapid fire questions about Mexico. What's your favorite Mexican movie?

• 54:51Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 54:53Tyler Cowen?

  I'm gonna say Winterlight, but your view may differ.

• 54:57Speaker 02

  Anything with Maria Felix in it.

• 55:00Tyler Cowen?

  Name one.

• 55:00Speaker 02

  Tonya Barbera, superb. I'd also say, though, more recently, Y Tu Mama Tambien.

• 55:07Tyler Cowen?

  That's a great film.

• 55:08Speaker 02

  It's it's difficult to stop laughing at.

• 55:11Tyler Cowen?

  And Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada I like very much.

• 55:14Speaker 02

  I think that's the black, dark humor there is profoundly Mexican. I think that's one of the reasons why that the British can really appreciate Mexico is we've got a similarly dark sense of humor.

• 55:26Tyler Cowen?

  Now, Howard Stern was famously rude about Mexican music. What in it do you like best?

• 55:31Speaker 02

  I like the fact that they do superb girly pop. That's terrible, I'm right, but they have really good from the last twenty years women singers who are extremely intelligent, tuneful, dynamic, varied. I'm thinking specifically of Julieta. And Natalia Lafourcade, the latter, and this is in my book, wrote a song back in the year 2000, which is a hilarious reflection on her sister's pregnancy, the state of the world, and called the first lady of Mexico a racist worm. This is music which, you know, it's thought provoking and tuneful. And so I like that. I think it's at its best, it's

• 56:12Speaker 02

  a very clever music. And what for me is its worst, with apologizes to everybody who likes Allos Tigres del Norte. Norteño music, I cannot stand recorded. But if you've ever heard it live, in a night spot, suddenly the polkas, the wheezing, the songs which sort of makes conversion of gangster rap, you think, actually, yeah, this is, this is quite good. I was in Encinalda a couple of years ago, and I'm in this bar with a sort of masked guy with a, with an M16 on the door, and three Norteño bands inside, and it was fabulous. So, you know, even my least favorite has, has some legs to it. It's, it can be very good fun and very evocative.

• 56:57Tyler Cowen?

  What's the great classic Mexican novel?

• 56:59Speaker 02

  Ah, has to be La Muerte de Artemio Cruz, The Death of Artemio Cruz.

• 57:03Tyler Cowen?

  Pedro Pardermo, for me, or even Savage Detectives. I know Bolaños from Chile, but to me, it's a Mexican novel.

• 57:10Speaker 02

  Totally. And I'm glad you say that, because Savage Detectives is very much a sort of insider's novel of Mexico. I mean, the mockery of the UNAM, and specifically its faculty, its faculty of law and philosophy, is just so spot on. And yet, in part because it is so close to what I study, which is the mystery of the origins of the one party state and the PRI. And in part also, I think it's one of the first Mexican novels I read. And things you read or things you listen to between the ages of 14 and 18, they mark you and stay with you fairly or unfairly.

• 57:47Tyler Cowen?

  And why Artemio Cruz as your pick?

• 57:49Speaker 02

  Artemio Cruz because of the real human complexity of it. So it's the story of a young revolutionary who manages through violence, luck, business smarts, extortion to move from being a very, from very poor beginnings to being a major Mexican mogul. The, the story skips between his life in sort of decadent old age and he's made it, but in a classic sort of the hollowness of wealth down. He's made it, but in human terms, he's totally emptied. And then the beginning, the story of he got there.

• 58:26Speaker 02

  And I find it so moving, so, so tragic and so deeply evocative of the Mexico I read about, the Mexico I study. I say, if I'd read it 10 years later, who knows? And if I'd read it last year, I might actually be ranking it below the recent novels of Alvaro Enrique, who two novels really stick out. One is like a modern muerte de Artemio Cruz. It's called Decency, Decencia, which anybody who sort of likes Mexican humor, likes Mexico City will just get. And the other is Your Empires Have Been Dreams in English, which is a retelling of

• 59:08Speaker 02

  The Conquest as this glorified heist by a bunch of fortunate thugs, which I think most historians would agree with and has some twists in it, which are stunning. And Alvaro, of course, has the advantage of, he actually reads quite a lot of history. So when he writes history, the details are there and you find yourself nodding, oh yeah, yeah, can believe that.

• 59:28Tyler Cowen?

  Ezra Klein is a big fan of The Conquest book.

• 59:31Speaker 02

  I think, well, it did very well and, and I can see why. It was clever, complex, it was provocative and it had a killer twist to it. What's not to like?

• 59:42Tyler Cowen?

  Let's say an educated person comes to you, they live in the United States and they have two weeks to spend and they want to learn Mexico, but put aside Mexico City and put aside the ruins. They want to learn Mexico, Mexico proper. Where do you send them? What's the ideal Mexico trip?

• 59:57Speaker 02

  Okay, I'm thinking ideally in terms of educational, not necessarily.

• 1:00:01Tyler Cowen?

  Yes, but it should be fun and interesting too, right?

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  Okay, so I would send them across the border in California in Tijuana. I would then tell them to fly to, I think, probably Zacatecas, because the sort of Baroque splendor of Mexico is not captured anywhere with the same intensity. I mean, this was the center of the sort of financial, the wealth-producing world. It had the biggest mine in the world under the colony. That translated into this absolutely, just, it's beyond words, architecture. It's stunning. You get buildings, there's a style called the Chirigaresque, where every inch is carved with extraordinary detail. So I think Tijuana, Zacatecas. And from Zacatecas, I'd go to a town called Aguascalientes.

• 1:00:47Speaker 02

  And I would make sure to go there during the annual feria, which is notable for two things, apart from the fact that it's a great week-long party. And one is you get some of the best bullfights in Mexico. And two is, this is one of the very few times when gambling is legal temporarily there. When you combine that, again, it's a pretty colonial town. And I'd make sure and go and see the symphony orchestra, which is superb, Argentine conductor. From Aguascalientes, I think I'd take a plane and go to, I'm trying to do maths now, three days in each place. So nine days, two more cities. I would go to Jalapa in Veracruz, precisely because it's particularly un-touristed

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  for its quality as a city and the surroundings are beautiful, sort of, um, temperate climate. And then the final one is really cramming things in. I'd hope to have a private jet on this or else a driver. I would go to San Cristobal Las Casas, the colonial capital of Chiapas.

• 1:01:50Tyler Cowen?

  Great trip. Last two questions. First, what's the best Mexican restaurant in or near Chicago?

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  In or near Chicago, I'm not sure for the simple reason my family's actually based in New York. And so when I go out for dinner, it's usually in New York.

• 1:02:03Tyler Cowen?

  In or near New York then?

• 1:02:05Speaker 02

  So, oh, now, that's great, because I just found a place.

• 1:02:07Tyler Cowen?

  East Harlem or where?

• 1:02:08Speaker 02

  No, it's downtown. It's called Santo Loco. And it's a taqueria, which is exceptional. And in case you find that to be inverse snobbery, I would say that underneath the taqueria, there's a hidden, quite smart restaurant. It was almost a sort of speakeasy restaurant. Both of them are superb, and I intend spending a lot of time in both of them. So that's my answer for New York. Get to Santo Loco and have their two of that. You have to try two. One is their mushroom taco, which is a revelation. And the other is their carnitas.

• 1:02:44Tyler Cowen?

  For the last question, just to plug your book again, Mexico, the 500 Year History. Everyone should buy and read it. Finally, what will you do next?

• 1:02:52Speaker 02

  I'm writing a book, which is a prehistory of money laundering. And it's based on a document I found in the British Foreign Office, which is a query from a director of the great bullion dealers, Johnson, Mathie. And it says, I've just been in touch with a person on a steamship, lying off in the Channel Islands, who has five million pounds' worth of illicit government, Mexican government silver on board. I'd like to buy it pennies on the pound. And what would your advice be? And the first bit of advice is, check that the silver actually exists, and don't tell the Mexican government.

• 1:03:35Speaker 02

  I would like to know what happened next at that end, because I think I know at the Mexican end where it came from, and how it got onto the ship in New York Harbor. So I'm hoping to reconstruct, using Mexican, American, there's FBI involvement, and British archives, as much as I can, the path of this silver in this decade, the first great decade of money laundering, which is the 1920s.

• 1:04:00Tyler Cowen?

  Paul Gillingham, thank you very much.

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  Tyler, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for the invitation.

• 1:04:06Tyler Cowen?

  Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowan and the show is @CowanConvos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.