Geography and Beyond

This morning, Ian was looking at the globe, and he suddenly asked me, "Daddy, why is Mexico so little?"

I had never thought of that question before, but I quickly jumped to the simplest, most naive answer: North America gets very narrow, as you move south, going from a big, wide content to something more like a sinewy isthmus. But then I gave it some more thought; why was the Mexican frontier at its current locations? Then I started speculating about how the Spaniards divided up the territory into possibly rather arbitrary viceroyalties; if they hadn't decided that Cortes-ville ended here and Pizarro-dale picked up there, then Mexico might have extended further south.

Then suddenly I remembered... Oh yeah - the northern border... Mexico is really as small as it is because of "Manifest Destiny" - kind of the Operation Enduring Desert Freedom of a past age. Ian was rather surprised to discover that California, Arizona, "New" Mexico and Texas are all basically stolen goods. And yet, if he hadn't raised that unusually simple question, I would have stayed in my happy historical amnesia of assuming that the "American" southwest was always full of Bakersfields and Flagstaffs and Houstons.

(February 28, 2011)