Changes

Humboldt’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, discussed themes of race, gender and ethnicity in the Spanish colony, and drew the attention of European governments and businessmen to the region. Paternalistic in tone, Humboldt depicted an “unequal struggle between nations far advanced in arts and others in the very lowest degree of civilization.” His sympathy for the “unfortunate race of Aztec”, that he perceived to be in a “state of degradation”, is evident in his account. Humboldt sought a model that would reconcile the poverty of the indigenous people with the evidence of their pre-conquest social, political, and scientific accomplishments. In his effort to remove blame from indigenous people for their “degradation”, Humboldt urges readers not to judge them from their “miserable remains.”<ref> Buchenau, <I>Mexico Otherwise</I>, Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2005, pg 20.</ref> Yet, as Buchenau argues, this laid the foundation for the “essentialist discourse” that obscured the variety of the inhabitants of New Spain, and subsequently Mexico, “under single categories such as ‘Mexican’ or ‘Indian.'”<ref> Buchenau, pg 3.</ref>

The year after Mexico achieved independence, Poinsett came to the country as the appointed emissary on a special mission for President Monroe.<ref>Buchenau, 29.</ref> Traveling as both an explorer and agent, Poinsett’s accounts of this journey display a naturalist’s interest in botany, a statesman’s ideas of republican-style government, and an imperialist’s eye for detail. The two accounts he wrote about his 1822 trip to Mexico parallel each other, they both documented the same expedition, but appealed to different audiences.<ref>Poinsett, Joel, <I>Notes on Mexico</I>, New York; London: Praeger, 1969, pg 119</ref> <I>Notes on Mexico</I> was patterned after other popular travel accounts of the era, mixing a description of Mexican landscape with observations of the people and customs Poinsett encountered. Very different in perspective than the idealistic accounts of Commerson, or the Romantic investigations of Chamisso, Poinsett identified with the Mexican Creoles, whose “good natural talents”distinguished them from the indigenous population and their “indolence…blind submission… (and)…abject misery.”<ref>Poinsett, 120.</ref> He used evidence of beggars in Mexico City as evidence of Mexico’s intermediate level of civilization, beyond subsistence existence, and able to provide charity to a vagrant population. <ref>Poinsett, 203.</ref> Poinsett included an historical sketch of the country, lauding the astronomy, architecture, and technological innovations accomplished by the indigenous people before Spanish conquest, and rued the circumstances that exterminated the indigenous priests and left only the lower classes and “oppressed and degraded people alone to represent the former Mexican.”<ref>Poinsett, 248.</ref>