ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a quotation: "The burden of Mexico's tale of complaint was, in brief, that the United States carried away from Mexico little but raw materials and semi-manufactured goods, making large profits in the subsequent stages of manufacture and commerce. In the earliest phase of modernization, the critical problems are likely to be political and military. The nation, even if formally independent, lacks internal cohesion. It has achieved statehood but neither a pervasive sense of nationhood nor an efficient, centralized structure of administration. It is vulnerable to external military and political pressure and internal factional and regional schisms. Mexico, for more than a decade, has been moving beyond the import-substitution for consumers' goods and absorbing efficiently the technologies of metalworking, chemicals, and electronics, but it has a considerable distance to go. Mexico faces special problems in the long osmotic border areas, including the problem of salinity in the Colorado River Basin.
