At long last, a dispassionate, balanced biography of Antonio López de Santa Anna is available that is informed by the last thirty years of historiographical advances in nineteenth century Mexican history. Santa Anna of Mexico, written by Will Fowler, one of the leading Anglophone interpreters of nineteenth century Mexico, provides the reader with a new perspective that chips away at the barnacles of the Black Legend that for over 150 years have encrusted the "leader all Mexicans (and Texans) love to hate."
Faced with internal division as a result of provinces not yet fully integrated and external adversaries that lusted after territory and markets, Mexico's journey toward forging nation would be prolonged, painful and problematic. In Fowler's hands, Santa Anna emerges as a man of his time when Mexico was making this painful journey of trying to define herself as a nation and create a hegemonic state that could govern and at the same time defend its territorial integrity. Consequently, it was a time of experimentation or as Fowler states a time for varying proposals. During this "Age of Proposals", (for a detailed look at this era, see Fowler's Mexico in the Age of Proposals) Santa Anna was one of many struggling to find ways of assimilating heterogeneous cultures and integrating legitimate claims from Mexico's far-flung provinces under a suitable governing framework before they could construct a hegemonic state, construct (imagine) a unified social identity and truly forge a nation-state.
According to Fowler, Santa Anna was "not the power-crazed megalomaniac his critics made him out to be" and did not aspire to having absolute power. Instead, he was consistent in his popular nationalism with an anti-politics and anti-party stance, in which he tried to play the role of an arbitrator between the ever-disputing political elite. Santa Anna also emerges as a patriotic, courageous, albeit impetuous military man who loved his country and whose "personal corruption and alleged lack of principle differed little from that of many other successful generals and politicians."
A professor of Texas history once lectured that one cannot understand Texas history without understanding Mexican history. For those Texas historians who want to understand the events of the 1834 closure of congress, a congress that only had six days left in its legislative calendar, Fowler states that "[a]lthough Santa Anna was the elected president (1833-1836), he did not actually serve as president for more than a few months, making a mockery of the accusations that he was a tyrant or that he was personally responsible for the eventual change to centralism." What Santa Anna did do after the closure of congress was take emergency powers to dismantle the radical anti-clerical reforms that were adversely agitating the republic. But, Vicente Guerrero had already set a precedence of taking emergency powers during his presidency. Historians of Texas should heed that advice and enrich their understanding of the events of 1832-1836 by incorporating this excellent study as well as other recent works written by Mexican scholars into their studies instead of resorting to the dictator-tyrant typology that up to the present so many have done.
Fowler's judgment in the end is that Santa Anna "does not deserve to carry the full blame for everything that went wrong in Mexico following independence. His story, with all the contradictions, confusion, and pain that it entailed was one that reflected the traumas Mexico had to endure during the early national period to become a modern nation-state."
Combining a seventeen-year long research into the politics of independent Mexico and primary materials from municipal, state, regional and national (including the heretofore difficult to access military) archives, Fowler presents an excellent, scholarly yet accessible one-volume study of this much disparaged Mexican. This book is one of the essential studies to understanding what eminent Mexican historian, Josefina Vásquez, has termed, "los años olividados."
