Waugh ventured briefly into Mexico in 1939 to write about life there under the Leftist government of President Lázaro Cárdenas. The recent expropriation of British and American owned oil companies, which triggered Britain’s suspension of diplomatic relations, was only one of the subjects under Waugh’s critical lens. With brilliant rhetorical skill, he makes contentious, and at times chauvinistic, arguments for the merits of Spanish imperial rule over the “lawlessness” of Mexican independence, the beneficence of Catholicism over indigenous “paganism,” and the economic progress of the Porfirato over the “corrupted” ideals of the revolution.
This is a polemical book that reveals as much about the author as the country he visited; it is witty, judgmental, arrogant, consistent with his conservative credo and quite fascinating.