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Have you seen the mask of Zorro films? If so can give me the historical context of the films? (19th century Mexico)

I don’t remember them so well, I had to consult TV tropes to remember what was going on, aside from Antonio Banderas looking hot.

Part of what nowadays is the south-south of the USA used to belong to Mexico on the early 19th century: California, Texas, New Mexico (And I guess Nevada too?). I think that the story starts on the year 1821, when Mexico finally won the war of Independence, because Don Rafael says something about “now the Spaniards are gone, so I will stop being El Zorro”. Yep, the story occurs on California as far as I remember. So they all had to suffer with us… and with Central-America (Mexico was HUUUUUUUUGE at the moment of our independence)

The entire 19th century was a century of civil wars, intern conflicts and a lot of problems with other nations (The XX century was in no way better but at least we didn’t had that much of problems with foreing nations, aside from Pancho Villa invading the USA). Really, when I had to do a timeline of Mexico’s story between 1800-1899, it was almost a year-for-year thing. There was two important parties trying to take the presidency, the Liberal Party and the Conservatives. Both of them tried to take the other group out of power via sabotage, wars, “plans” (proclamations against the president in office at the moment). But they always agreed on one thing: Santa Anna was the best dude to be on office (until he put his butt on the chair, then he wasn’t).

So this Santa Anna dude was a hero from the war of Independence and was pretty much able to keep calmed the conservatives and liberals, unless someone didn’t wanted to see people taking turns at the chair like if it was the bathroom (but until they got the chair themselves, well, they didn’t wanted to leave). Until the Texas thing, we didn’t wanted to let them go, we won at El Alamo but the USA army came here and… well, we lost, all of those states were lost because the dude sold them all to the USA. There’s a controversy about if he sold the territory (which was more than half our territory) because of money or trying to avoid more bloodshed for the mexicans.Then he was exiled, but since bad herbs don’t die, came back again, tried to become a dictador, a civil war ensued, yadda yadda, exiled again, came back after his nemesis, Benito Juarez died, and… died here, but impoverished.Oh yeah, and Santa Anna lost a leg on a battle and made the leg to get military honors and a funeral (The legend says that La cucaracha was made to mock him “The cockroach, the cockrach/ can’t walk anymore/ because he didn’t have anymore/ one of it’s legs”)

As you can get, this lack of stability really took a toll on the economy of the country. Which means that we got a lot of invasions because we didn’t paid our debts. One of the funniest was the called “War of the Cakes”, because a french baker living on Mexico said that on one of the battles someone stole his cakes and wanted the governament to pay for them. The gov said “hell nah, we don’t even have to pay the salaries of our own workes, do you think we have to pay for cakes?”.So France came here. I don’t remember if we paid or not.Years after France, Spain and England came again because we weren’t paying again and well, tried to negociate and while England and Spain accepted the terms, France wanted a colony, some conservatives wanted a king from Europe to take the wheel of this nation… and that’s how we became an empire for like 3 years with an austrian nobleman Maximiliano of Habsburg, as our king. It was funny because the conservative party wanted him to reign “on the catholic values” but the man was more liberal than the mexican liberal party and even wanted Benito Juarez (who was president until Max’s butt appeared) to be part of his gabinet.So the conservatives retired their support, then France retired their support because Napoleon III was in trouble and… Max was taken as a prisioner and shot.

After Juarez got the presidency back, things started to get somewhat better. Then Porfirio Diaz came and refused to leave the chair, but since he actually gave some peace to Mexico, the economy finally started to have some stability.

But that’s where I don’t get the timeline of El Zorro movies. If Elena was -if I remember-, 18 years old when her father is training Alejandro, the year is 1838 then of course Santa Anna was on office (again), and in the second movie I remember they said something about making California another republic (and it seems to be on the years of the American invasion)… it’s like, 1858, so it’s actually TWENTY years after the events of the first movie.

Anyway, for more information, there’s this amazing channel by the mexican youtubers Bully Magnets (some of their videos have subs on english, their fandom is doing their best to translate every video). They’re not exactly experts but my friends on history major say that they’re mostly accurate.

#local mexican answers questions about her country #El zorro #Bully Magnets