Nowadays, everyone is used to the huge territory of United Sates, but in the 19th century, everyone blamed the 11 times president Antonio López de Santa Ana; he did many mistakes while his mandate, he lost not only his real leg, but a war, and almost more than half of the Mexican territory back then. Therefore isn’t it ironic what a leg means for one or other country? On the one hand; to the U.S citizens it means the wining territory and their clever strategy to always get what they want, on the other hand; it means defeat for Mexicans, the rooted feeling that the north neighbor is manipulating our country and most importantly: the lack of unity. It is important to remember that even nowadays there are enormous boundaries in México, not only economic ones, but ideological, political and the regionalism is on fire. In that case, we could say that the present Mexico is extremely alike to the old Mexico. Religion remains important to some sectors of the society, such as being part of a political party, and feel identified with your region.

I truly believe that there were real and genuine “caudillos” but Santa wasn’t the accurate description of that concept. This term was very popular not only in Mexico, but in the entire Latin America. They were the idealized heroes: the ones who fought for their ideas, their people and always wanted to solve and improve the “awful situations”. Caudillos might have misled their societies. There’s this abysmal difference between what people were supposed to do and what they actually did. E.g.: “I obey, but do not comply” which describes perfectly the attitude towards the political regime of that time. While I read this part of the “Cause of all national disasters” I reminded the “Casta Painting”, which had a similar “name” for one of the “races” (NoTeEntiendo), the one that means I don’t understand you. So, I just concluded, that somehow, this was a way to keep on resisting the Imperial power, even though many Latin American countries have already achieve their independence, they still had some negative instant response to everything that had to do with the empowerment of the high social classes.

Heading to South America, it is Esteban Echeverría, the Argentinian writer who represents Latin America with his words. “El Matadero” which I consider a revolutionary text that critiques and exposes Juan Manuel Rosas Federalism in Argentina back in that time. It is obvious why this text represents the Latin America people’s unconformities.