Everyday Costs of Warmaking: The Juntas Patrioticas and the War with the United States

When war broke out with the United States in 1846, the national government in Mexico was hard pressed to know from whence the resources to fight would come. Heavily indebted at home and abroad, Mexico had existed in a state of near sovereign bankruptcy for more than two decades. When the United States Navy blockaded its major ports, the customs revenue, the principal source of public finance, was lost. As much out of desperation as anything else, the Mexican federal government called upon virtually every part of the republic to provide resources for the war. This effort, known as the Juntas Patrioticas, has left an intriguing record of the ways in which Mexico’s people, from simple peasants to major public officials, provided resources. Using previously neglected and largely unknown archival sources, I will reconstruct a picture of how even the smallest villages paid—sometimes in labor, or in kind, or by providing draught animals. Occasionally, there were even small cash “donations.” From these documents I hope to paint a picture of the banality of national impoverishment: of the myriad ways in which repeated civil upheavals in the early nineteenth century had produced a mostly stagnating economy. There is little need for grand theory here: the documents may not speak for themselves, but they illustrating the debilitating burdens of fighting on an impoverished, rural people.