WHY ARE MEXICO AND THE UNITED STATES SO DIFFERENT‪?‬

Thomas Wheaton’s translation of the Mexican historian Dr. Angela Moyano Pahissa’s México y Estados Unidos: orígenes de una relación, 1819-1861, asks the essential question framed in the English translation’s title, Why are Mexicans and Americans so different? In seeking an answer to that question, Angela Moyano gives us a superlative historical narrative of the complex cultural, diplomatic and military conflicts involving the ever shifting border separating Mexico from the United States before the American Civil War. Such a translation is urgently needed, not only because of the recurrent tensions between the United States and Mexico in the twenty-first century but because the history is written from a Mexican perspective, a perspective of which few people in the United States are aware.