Paul Gillingham on Why Mexico Stays Together

About this episode

Tyler interviews Paul Gillingham about his book on Mexican history and various aspects of Mexico's political and social landscape.

Buy tickets for the live Conversations with Tyler recording with Craig Newmark at 92NY! Tyler calls Paul Gillingham's new book, Mexico: A 500-Year History , the single best introduction to the country's past—and one of the best nonfiction books of 2026. Paul brings both an outsider's eye and ground-level knowledge to Mexican history, having grown up in Cork — a place he'd argue gave him an instinctive feel for fierce local autonomy and land hunger —earning his doctorate on the Mexican Revolution under Alan Knight at Oxford, and doing his fieldwork in the pueblos of Guerrero. He and Tyler range across five centuries of Mexican history, from why Mexico held together after independence when every other post-colonial superstate collapsed, to why Yucatán is now one of the safest places on earth, what two leaders from Oaxaca tell us about Mexican politics, how Mexico avoided the military coups that plagued the rest of Latin America, what Cárdenas's land reform actually achieved versus what it promised, whether the ejido system held Mexico back, why Mexico worried too much about land and not enough about human capital, how Mexico's fertility rate fell below America's, why Guerrero has…

People in this episode

Host: Tyler

Guest: Paul Gillingham

Topics covered

• Mexican history
• politics
• land reform
• cultural autonomy
• safety in Yucatán
• judicial reforms
• historical analysis

Keywords

• Mexico
• history
• politics
• land reform
• Cárdenas
• Yucatán
• Guerrero
• judicial reforms
• safety
• autonomy

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Mexico: A 500-Year History

Places: Mexico, Cork, Guerrero, Yucatán, Latin America, Manhattan, English Channel

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