The Annexation of Mexico.

• Author: Landau, Saul

The Annexation of Mexico by John Ross Common Courage Press. 345 pages. $19.95

I braked to a stop to wait in the line of cars returning to California from Tijuana. A group of brown-skinned children approached the car, begging for money, selling Chiclets, giggling, speaking an Indian language.

I asked a teenaged girl, dressed in stained indigenous garb, where she came from.

"Mixteco," she said. "We're from Valle Verde, Guerrero." In broken English, she said I'd have to pay her a dollar if I wanted to take her picture. Then she laughed. She held a plastic bag over her face to prevent me from photographing her.

"This is a TV camera," I explained. "You could be a TV star."

In Spanish, she replied: "That will cost you two dollars."

We both laughed, and then two U.S. border cops on bikes shooed the girl and her friends away.

I flashed to John Ross's latest book, The Annexation of Mexico, and his story about Clinton, a new-born Tojalabal boy in a Chiapas Indian village. Clinton's parents named him not in honor of the President of the United States but because they had heard the word on the radio and it sounded like Tojalabal. This Clinton has only a 60 percent chance of living to age five.

In my rearview mirror, I see the Mixteco kids begging at other car windows. For Ross, this anecdote would be one more small piece of the long story of annexation. If the word confuses you, Ross offers his own thesaurus: "Conquest, expansionism, incursion, intervention, invasion, investment, integration, imposition, occupation. Absorption, alignment, subjugation, dependency, colonialism, globalization, enslavement, extermination, annihilation, obliteration, and genocide." Since the nineteenth century, these words have described the great shadow looming over Mexico: relations with the United States.

Ross has lived in Mexico for decades, and he identifies with the popular struggles. He wrote one of the first accounts of the Zapatista revolt, Rebellion From the Roots: Indian Uprising in Chiapas. Now it is a delight to come upon Ross's Annexation of Mexico--especially after reading traditional histories of Mexico.

For instance, Enrique Krauze's recent Mexico: A Biography of Power offers laborious portraits of the "great men" who made Mexican history. He depicts the eleven-time president of Mexico, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, as an enigmatic figure who had to make difficult decisions during the 1848 war. Ross, on the other hand, dismisses Santa Anna as a "paranoiac...