Another Reason To Drink Stolichnaya
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Instead, it hearkens to a time which the population of Mexico may feel was more ideal. ~Absolut
The ad depicting Mexico in its pre-1836 state, even including Texas, with the tagline “In an Absolut world,” has naturally caused some hostile reaction. If their marketing people thought that appealing to either Mexican nostalgia or irredentism was a good way to sell vodka, they probably ought to have considered that Americans would take a dim view of the same.
This reminds me of a recent discussion I was having about Greece and FYROM. Someone said that Westerners probably find Balkan disputes about names and ancient territorial claims to be “petty.” This is probably true, but it is mostly a function of not understanding the history behind the controversy. Had Greeks not waged the Macedonian Struggle in one form or another for the better part of seventy years, the dispute over what to call the former Yugoslav republic would probably have been resolved, but because of the explicitly irredentist and separatist aspects of “Macedonian” identity over the last century it is very difficult for many Greeks to accept Skopje’s claim to the name. In that conversation, I noted that we have our own controversies about “merely” symbolic things as well. Of course, people tend to call them “merely” symbolic when the symbols belong to someone else and they don’t understand the significance of the symbols, especially not at a visceral level.
You don’t even need to think that the reconquista is underway to find the ad offensive. Of course, if the people living in what was then northern Mexico had anything to say about it in the 1830s they were only too eager to break away from Mexico, and not just in Texas. They didn’t think being part of Mexico, at least the Mexico of Santa Anna, was ideal and essentially put up no resistance when our armies arrived. The people who think 1830s Mexico was ideal tend to be people who never had to live in it.
Filed under: politics, strong drink
8 Responses to “Another Reason To Drink Stolichnaya”
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Say what you will about the Mexican-American war, but Texas broke away far and square as a Republic, and joined the US more or less on their own free will.
Even not as an immigration hardliner, the whole thing does kinda upset me. Even for all its flaws, would you rather live under the American regime – or the Mexican regime?
Absolutely. No pun intended.
A little insecure, are we? I don’t see the problem with it since “for some people” it indeed would be an ideal world. It is a commercial for an alcoholic drink, for goodness’s sake.
Don’t much care either way about the borders of the Southwest one way or the other – whether Chihuahua and Sonora were American states or California and Arizona were back under Mexican rule. For me, a map of such an “ideal world” would have mean’t that Constantinople wouldn’t have fallen on May 29, 1453 or the Invincible Armada would have been invicible. Or Ungern Von Sternberg’s descendents would rule today a pan-Buddhist/Orthodox Mongol Empire.
I’d say with a million mestizo Mexican columnists coming here illegally ever year, insecurity is exactly what any sane American should feel. These ignorant peasants working in our car washes and landscaping companies are not themselves that political. But their kids, after hearing about US complicity in the Holocaust, endemic racism, and other half-truths in public schools will be truly problematic. Just look at the way so many Mexicans behaved during the LA Riots: criminally and similarly to poor urban blacks.
There’s some evidence that Mexican gangs are targeting blacks in certain neighborhoods.
It might be an ideal world “for some people.” My point about 1830s Mexico was that it is a strange thing to choose as an ideal time *especially* if you’re Mexican.
Your point is correct, Daniel. 1830s Mexico was a mess. Arguably, if Mexico had held to the Constitution of 1824, Texas would not have seceded–or at least not until much later. And the ONLY reason we got away with it at all was that provinces all over Mexico were seething and in revolt. That said, Texas stopped at the Nueces River and never extended to the Rio Grande, either in theory or in practice, despite claims made by the Repulic of Texas. And of course, the US was able to make good on a claim that Texas was never strong enough to do, precipitating the Mexican War. I can say this as a 7-generation Texan.
Thanks for the comment, Terry. The Rio Arriba revolt in northern New Mexico followed hard on the heels of Texan independence and was a backlash against the same centralist policies that drove the Texans into rebellion. You’ll get no argument from me about Texan boundaries. They also had the audacity to lay claim to Albuquerque and half of what is New Mexico, so they could be pretty imaginative in their mapmaking.