The Annexation of Mexico.

The Annexation of Mexico by John Ross Common Courage Press. 345 pages. $19.95

I braked to a stop to wait in the line of cars returning to California from Tijuana. A group of brown-skinned children approached the car, begging for money, selling Chiclets, giggling, speaking an Indian language.

I asked a teenaged girl, dressed in stained indigenous garb, where she came from.

"Mixteco," she said. "We're from Valle Verde, Guerrero." In broken English, she said I'd have to pay her a dollar if I wanted to take her picture. Then she laughed. She held a plastic bag over her face to prevent me from photographing her.

"This is a TV camera," I explained. "You could be a TV star."

In Spanish, she replied: "That will cost you two dollars."

We both laughed, and then two U.S. border cops on bikes shooed the girl and her friends away.

I flashed to John Ross's latest book, The Annexation of Mexico, and his story about Clinton, a new-born Tojalabal boy in a Chiapas Indian village. Clinton's parents named him not in honor of the President of the United States but because they had heard the word on the radio and it sounded like Tojalabal. This Clinton has only a 60 percent chance of living to age five.

In my rearview mirror, I see the Mixteco kids begging at other car windows. For Ross, this anecdote would be one more small piece of the long story of annexation. If the word confuses you, Ross offers his own thesaurus: "Conquest, expansionism, incursion, intervention, invasion, investment, integration, imposition, occupation. Absorption, alignment, subjugation, dependency, colonialism, globalization, enslavement, extermination, annihilation, obliteration, and genocide." Since the nineteenth century, these words have described the great shadow looming over Mexico: relations with the United States.

Ross has lived in Mexico for decades, and he identifies with the popular struggles. He wrote one of the first accounts of the Zapatista revolt, Rebellion From the Roots: Indian Uprising in Chiapas. Now it is a delight to come upon Ross's Annexation of Mexico--especially after reading traditional histories of Mexico.

For instance, Enrique Krauze's recent Mexico: A Biography of Power offers laborious portraits of the "great men" who made Mexican history. He depicts the eleven-time president of Mexico, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, as an enigmatic figure who had to make difficult decisions during the 1848 war. Ross, on the other hand, dismisses Santa Anna as a "paranoiac, supremely self-centered Veracruzano," whom the U.S. paid "$10 million to throw the war." For Ross, "the Mexican war was only a pit stop for the American juggernaut as it smashed its way from ocean to ocean to complete the nation's `manifest destiny.'" Ross says Porfirio Diaz, who was president of Mexico in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, "understood the dangers of having a ten-million ton U.S. gorilla sitting on his northern border: the axiom `Poor Mexico, so close to the United States and so far from God' may be the dictator's most lasting contribution to Mexican nationalist thought."

Ross takes readers through the years of the Mexican revolution, which he calls "a U.S. nightmare." President Wilson's advisers advocated "armed intervention to reinforce the United States' global position, strengthen control of the Panama canal, and safeguard the oil flow from Mexico," he notes

So, in 1914, "after nine months of foreplay, Woodrow Wilson chose the historic route for penetration," Ross writes. "Following in the footsteps of Cortez, Napoleon, and Scott's army, 4,000 troops were put ashore down the coast at Vera Cruz."

In 1916, General Pershing was ordered to hunt down the elusive Pancho Villa, who "would play Woodrow Wilson like a conjunto [combo] sawing through a corrido [ballad] in a border cantina [bar]."

Ross describes visiting an old woman in Columbus, New Mexico, who remembered how Villa had set fire to the town. Having exaggerated the event in her own mind, she still waits for Villa to return and "finish the job." "Look over there," she tells Ross. "I see those Mexicans come walking past here everyday and I lock my front gate." She believes, says Ross, that "any one of them could be Pancho Villa."

As a reporter/historian/social-psychologist, Ross fills the book with such anecdotes, dotting the pages with prose illustrations of imperial relationships. Take his unique view of the 1930s, which he labels "invasion to investment." He argues that presidents Lazaro Cardenas and Franklin Roosevelt enlisted Mexico in "the campaign to vaccinate the Western Hemisphere against the Red Virus."

History serves as a necessary background to understanding contemporary U.S.-Mexican relations. In stead of asking the abstract and thus misleading question, "What's good for Mexico?" Ross wants to know what's good for Mexico's poor working majority. Here is his iconoclastic view of the drug trade: "Rather than a curse, the U.S. appetite for drugs has been a blessing for many Mexicans." And, in case anyone felt like celebrating the bust of some drug launderers, Ross explains that "whole economic sectors are maintained by laundered drug money--the construction industry might have succumbed to the great 1994-1996 recession if not for the narcodollars washed through it."

On immigration and the border, Ross again illuminates in lucid, blunt language. "The border is an annexed land but just who is annexing is never clear. Both sides in this geographically ordained marriage invade each other's territory in massive numbers." Mexicans are everywhere in the United States, and U.S. tourists continue to flood Mexico, along with U.S. capital and shopping malls.

Ross warns of the "foreboding wall, a militarized migra [border patrol] and a fistful of harsh new laws that shout, `Stop right there!' and `Go back to where you came from.'" He compares the border to a "seesaw, with the U.S. side up and the Mexican slice permanently sitting on the ground, dragged down by the sheer weight of the population and the commerce that fills its streets."

I'm a friend of Ross's, and in the midst of writing this review, I received a staccato e-mail from him. "Back in Mex City where the air is lethal and the banks are busting. The Gov. of Morelos finally resigned and the last Tepotzlan prisoners [indigenous peasants arrested for protesting the building of a golf course on their sacred land] may now be released. The Zaps [Zapatistas] are wearing T-shirts that read Todos Somos Italianos [We're all Italians]." This refers to the Italian human-rights activists recently deported by the Mexican government. And it echoes the 1994 Zapatista rally in Mexico City, attended by hundreds of thousands of Mexicans who chanted, "We're all Marcos," the charismatic Zapatista leader.

Ross's irreverent and deeply working-class wit makes for a highly readable and enjoyable plunge into the dynamics of Mexico's "culture of struggle and resistance."

He knows that Mexicans will resist from Chiapas to Juarez, from Los Angeles to the wheat fields of Kansas, where they have been "pushed out of their patria by the neoliberal policies" of their own government.

Saul Landau is the Hugh O. La Bounty Chair of Interdisciplinary Applied Knowledge at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. He has just begun a new film on the U.S.-Mexico border.