The Paradox of Post-Independence Mexican Liberalism: José María Luis Mora and the assimilation of indigenous communities in the early nineteenth century

In this thesis I examine how European liberalism was adapted by José María Luis Mora, the most prominent Mexican liberal criollo intellectual during Mexico's nation-building process, who paradoxically articulated liberal ideas with racial and class categories using them to justify the deprivation of indigenous communities' legal status and the privatization of their land. The case Mora and other post-independence liberal criollo thinkers is as a clear example of how liberal ideals were implemented through preexisting colonial racial categorization and employed for primitive accumulation, political dispossession and racial capitalist reform after independence. Thus, the purpose of this analysis is to explore the paradox within Mora's liberalism: liberatory anticolonial ideals produced an oppressive outcome regarding indigenous communities. More generally, the case of Mexican liberalism and the indigenous communities can provide valuable insights about the limitations of the European liberal model for post-colonial environments with cultural heterogeneity.