Victorianism Without Victoria: On Mexican Steampunk

Others were foreign-policy disasters such as the war against the United States in 1846 and 1848. The first war was driven first by the separation of Texas. Later, he led the campaign which ended in the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which ceded the territories later known as California, Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico and parts of Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma to the United States for a ridiculously small amount of $15 million dollars, though the amount of land was more than half of Mexican territory.

The Battle of Buena Vista in 1847

Following these wars and the overthrow of Santa Anna, the Mexican Magna Carta was rewritten, thus beginning a period of political reforms that lead to the success of the federalist state led by President Benito Juarez. The re-founded Republic is threatened again, however; this time by the French invasion and the creation of the Second Mexican Empire, which tried to set up Maximilian of Hapsburg as Emperor of Mexico.

It is during the Franco-Mexican War that granted Mexico its only major military victory in the nineteenth century. On May 5, 1862, Mexican forces clashed with French troops on the outskirts of Puebla, under the command of the General Ignacio Zaragoza. They managed to defeat the invaders.

From that victory, the people of Mexico were filled with a renewed spirit in their resistance against the invaders. Guerrillas were constantly undermining the French army, and the change in the European political scene allowed Mexico to be triumphant in the War of French Intervention in 1867.

Unfortunately, the weakened Mexican state suffered under a new military and political movements afterwards, which led to the creation of the dictatorship of the General Porfirio Diaz from 1876 to 1910. Ironically, this time period also ended up being the peak time of Mexican economic growth and technological development.

Interestingly, it is this point in history that many Mexicans use as basis for its aesthetics and steampunk characters. This later time period that we know of as the Mexican Revolution in the early twentieth century also acted like a late call to join the spirit of technological renovation and industrialization that had been held by the European powers. The Mexicans of the late nineteenth century conceived many elements of progress and technological heritage from the French, who were a major presence in the country’s development during this century. Both the fashion and lifestyle, cuisine, style of education, politics, economics, and technology came from the French style.

From this period the phenomenon of Mexican historical revisionism for steampunk can be established. In the world of parallel realities, Mexican steampunk can be drawn from their experiences of the Old West for their own use, taking advantage of the weakness of political boundaries during America’s colonization of the Far West.

Mexican steampunk history can create new independent states or territories which are formed by parts of lost territories. In Mexican steampunk, technology can not only reinvent the fashion of the time, but also reinvent the story, allowing the rewriting of history and political boundaries. In this view of retrofuturism, Mexico is more glorious than it was, and its economic and military power is more on par with their indomitable spirit. The attitudes of resistance in the era that are evident in the Mexican retro-futurism can breathe new life into the idea of “what if the world had been different?”

The Battle Of Puebla

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