Mexico In Focus 2nd Edition: A Guide to the People, Politics and Culture (Latin America In Focus) - Softcover

Ross, John; Gransden, Gregory

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1899365508 ISBN 13: 9781899365500

Publisher: Latin America Bureau, 2002

Synopsis

Mexico is a land torn between Latin America and the US, between its Indian and revolutionary past and the modern trappings of skyscrapers, cell phones, and factories. It is also one of the biggest tourist destinations in Latin America for the UK market. Mexico is now the key country in Latin American debates about trade integration, neo-liberalism, and the fight of indigenous people for autonomy and self-governance, best characterised by the Zapatista movement. A new updated edition of Mexico in Focus gives the insider's view - the 'story the guidebooks don't tell you' - in accessible, lively and accurate prose. It offers a fresh and contemporary perspective on the Zapatista rebellion and indigenous issues, as well as the July 2000 election of Vicente Fox, the "cowboy president" whose controversial policy suggestions have included free movement of labour and unrestricted immigration within NAFTA and the legalisation of drugs. This completely rewritten and updated text also touches on the economy, the new relationship under George W Bush, literature and culture, as well as a completely new section on Mexican popular culture forms and music, including telenovelas, comic books, and "lucha libre", or popular wrestling. Mexico in Focus is published complete with new illustrations, updated maps and facts and figures, and an extended Where to Go and What to See Section - expert tips on how to get the most out of your visit.

About this title

About the Authors

John Ross is based in Mexico City and is the author of Rebellion from the Roots: Indian Uprising in Chiapas (Common Courage Press, 1994) which won an American Book Award, and The War Against Oblivion-Zapatista Chronicles 1994-2000 (Common Courage Press,2000). His journalism appears regularly in L.A. Weekly and Noticias Aliadas (Lima).

Gregory Gransden is a Canadian journalist and filmmaker who lived in Mexico City for several years and is still a regular visitor there. A graduate of the Columbia University School of Journalism and the American Film Institute, he is currently working on a book and documentary series on Mexican popular culture.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Mexico In Focus

A Guide to the People, Politics and Culture

By John Ross

Practical Action Publishing

Copyright © 2018 John Ross
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-899365-50-0

Contents

Introduction, 4, 
1 The Land, 6, 
Borders, 6, 
The North, 9, 
Central Mexico, 11, 
Mexico's South, 12, 
The Capital, 14, 
2 People and their History, 18, 
¡Viva Mexico!, 18, 
Indigenous Mexico, 20, 
From the Ruins, 22, 
Conquest and Colony, 25, 
Liberators, Presidents, Emperors, and Dictators, 28, 
The Mexican Revolution, 31, 
3 Society, 36, 
Institutionalizing the Revolution, 36, 
The PRI: The Limits of Longevity, 38, 
The American-Style Presidency, 40, 
Political Opposition in Mexico, 41, 
The Political Parties, 46, 
Keeping the Peace, 49, 
The Criminal Police, 56, 
The Dysfunctional Courts, 57, 
"So Far from God", 58, 
Farm and Factory, 62, 
Old-Style Unions Persevere, 64, 
4 Economy, 67, 
Mexican Miracles, Booms and Busts, 67, 
NAFTA and the New World Order, 69, 
Engines of the Economy, 72, 
5 Art and Culture, 78, 
High and Low Art, 78, 
Urban Pop Culture, 80, 
The Word, 83, 
"So Close to the United States", 87, 
Where to Go, What to See, 89, 
Further Reading and Selected Weblinks, 93, 
Facts and Figures, 96, 

CHAPTER 1

THE LAND

Borders

Under cover of darkness, undocumented workers slip into the river water and strike out for the other side. The scene is repeated every night on both Mexico's southern and northern borders.

The southern border with Guatemala and Belize snakes through the sparsely populated jungles and swamps of Chiapas, Tabasco, and Quintana Roo. By contrast, the 1,964-mile northern frontier is heavily patrolled by US immigration agents. Mexico's northern border constitutes the longest – and perhaps the only – land border between the first and the third world.

These two frontiers define a geopolitical quandary that dogs Mexican history. Is it the northernmost nation of Latin America or the most southern outpost of the North American mainland?

The busiest crossings on the southern border are along the Suchiate River, south of Tapachula, Chiapas. While long lines of trucks queue up at Tecun Uman, Guatemalans and other Central Americans illegally cross the river on inflated tire inner tubes. Some are escaping tyranny farther south (but Chinese and east Indians utilize this jumping off point too). Many are economic refugees seeking a better life farther north. Some will stay in Mexico but most will try to continue north into the United States. About 400,000 legal and undocumented Central Americans live in Mexico, 45 percent of them Guatemalan, including 50,000 contract coffee pickers and a diminishing population of recognized political refugees.

Undocumented workers from the south move carefully through Mexico. Immigration and police agents are notorious for extorting pay-offs as the newcomers pass through highway checkpoints and big city bus terminals.

An unwritten agreement forged between former presidents George Bush and Carlos Salinas to shut down Mexico as a conduit for Central Americans heading toward the US, resulted in a crackdown by Mexico's own Immigration Service – over I 00,000 Central Americans are now returned from Mexico to their countries of origin each year.

As Central Americans travel from border to border, they join a great stream of Mexicans seeking to reach el otro lado (the other side). Mexicans have been going north to make their fortune or escape political persecution since California and Texas were part of their country (they were gobbled up by the US in 1848).

The number of Mexicans heading for el norte peaks whenever political and economic upheaval troubles the republic. Mexican-American (chicano) communities in the US southwest were established by refugees fleeing the 1910-1917 revolution; the 1982 debt crisis is thought to have pushed a million Mexican citizens into the United States. By 2001, some 3 million of the 8.5 million Mexican-born people living in the United States are illegal residents.

The presence of the US Border Patrol (Ia migra) makes the northern border a flashpoint between the two countries. Since 1994, when the Clinton administration launched Operation Gatekeeper to staunch the flow, parts of the border have been marked by steel fences, lights, and ground sensors. But the main effect of Clinton's beefed-up border surveillance has been to re-direct the flow of migrants through less settled and thus more dangerous crossing points, where they are more vulnerable to death from exposure.

In 2000, the migra made 1.6 million apprehensions – many would-be border jumpers were apprehended several times, often aided by coyotes (smugglers). Once dominated by small-time operators who worked independently, migrant smuggling has become a multi-billion dollar industry dominated by large, well-organized crime syndicates – rather like the drug business – using the tools of high technology and an infrastructure that includes drop houses where immigrants can be kept against their will until they pay off smugglers' fees. Increasingly, non-Mexicans are also using the Mexican border to enter the United States illegally. Thousands of Russians, Syrians, Chinese, and Poles are among those apprehended by the migra every year.

Mexicologists characterize the flow of undocumented workers into the US as a "safety valve" that permits Mexico to prevent the social frustrations of young Mexicans unable to find work from becoming a volatile challenge to their government. For decades of PRI rule, the Mexican government turned a blind eye to their plight – the deaths of migrants from drowning, exposure, and vigilante attacks on the US border; the harassment and extortion of returning migrants by corrupt Mexican border officials; and the high transaction costs paid by migrants sending home remittances to their families in Mexico, worth $8 billion a year. Indeed, these paisanos (countrymen) were often stigmatized by the Mexican state for supposed lack of patriotism for having left their homeland.

In contrast, the Fox government has actively courted the Mexican diaspora, promising them dual citizenship and setting up the country's first cabinet-level agency to represent their interests, the Office for Migrants Living Abroad. One of its most controversial proposals is to provide a survival kit- known informally as a cajita feliz, or "happy meal" – to each illegal migrant, in order to reduce the risk of death from exposure and thirst.

Anti-Mexican sentiment ebbed and flowed on the US side of the border in accordance with the need for low-wage Mexican labor. Mexicans were deported from California during the 1930s depression but were welcomed back in the 1940s to replace US workers who had gone off to war. The 1990s saw a resurgence of anti-Mexican feeling, reaching a zenith with the 1994 campaign for Proposition 187, the anti-illegal-immigrant ballot initiative in California.

But the election of George W. Bush in 2000 brought into office a strongly pro-Mexico US leader who had befriended Fox when both were still state governors. Even conservative Republicans in Congress were rushing to embrace the new Mexican president, promising initiatives to open the border to a freer flow of guest workers to the United States and a partial amnesty for illegals already there.

But Mexico's borders are not just escape hatches into the US for impoverished indocumentados. A cornucopia of goods, both legal and contraband, thunders across the border crossings. Since NAFTA was signed in 1994, Mexico-US trade has grown by 20 percent a year, reaching $248 billion worth of merchandise and services in 2000 – most of it passing by rail and road over the well-worn infrastructure of the northern border.

One major source of this movement are the maquiladoras or foreign-owned assembly plants that line the Mexican side. The maquiladoras are magnets for the underemployed from all over Mexico, especially the impoverished central and southern states. The surge of export-driven economic growth since NAFTA has created labor shortages and rising wages in parts of northern and central Mexico, forcing newer factories to locate in the poorer southern states of Yucatan, Guerrero, and Chiapas.

The North

With its enormous expanses of desert, grazing lands, grain fields, sky, and central cordillera, the north of Mexico could swallow up entire Latin American nations.

The seven states that comprise the north – Baja California North and South, Sonora, Durango, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas – stretch over half the Mexican map (Chihuahua is the largest state in the Mexican union).

The narrow, industrialized strip of the border marks the region's northern rim, concentrating the population around Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, Nuevo Laredo, and Matamoros. These once forgotten outposts, located thousands of miles from the capital of the country, were built up in the 1930s by President Lázaro Cardenas to fortify Mexican nationalism in a region where US influences are strong.

Today, 75 percent of the population of the north lives in towns and cities. The magnet cities along the northern frontier, besieged by migrants from the south, are straining at the seams. A lack of infrastructure and unenforced environmental regulations have resulted in groundwater contamination, dangerous pollution levels in border rivers, and deteriorating air quality. In Tijuana and other border hotspots, armies of pickers descend daily upon municipal garbage dumps to scratch out a living. Sprawling, unpaved shantytowns without basic services like sewers and running water bring the third world to the doorstep of the first.

Although an environmental accord attached to NAFTA promises a cleanup, by the second year of the treaty's life, few projects had yet been funded by the NAFTA-created North American Development Bank. Nonetheless, the concept of the border as an integrated bio-region, the responsibility for which is jointly shared by the US and Mexico, has taken root all along this northernmost fringe of the nation.

The desert is the region's most distinguishing feature. The Sonora desert extends into Arizona and the high Chihuahua desert spreads north into New Mexico and Texas. The eastern and western arms of the central cordillera march south down Mexico's spine, shaping sierras (mountain ranges) and deep gorges such as Copper Canyon, even deeper than the US Grand Canyon. The world's eighth largest copper pit is gouged from the earth at Cananea in Sonora. But it is manufacturing, not natural resources, that is increasingly the linchpin of the northern economy.

Wealth in the Mexican North is never very far from the surface of the land. The once-dense forests of the Tarahumara sierra (Chihuahua-Durango) have been thinned by timber interests – the Hearst family publishing fortune was nurtured by Tarahumara concessions, ceded by the dictator Porfirio Díaz.

The wealth of the region has fostered immense fortunes, nowhere more than in Monterrey, Mexico's third largest city (3.5 million). With its shining skyscrapers and modernistic museums, Monterrey has as much in common with the petrolopolises of Texas as it does with the capital of its own country. The Monterrey Group, the city's elite bankers and industrialists, exemplified by the Garza Sada dynasty (breweries, chemicals, glass) are major players in Mexico's economy.

The North is often viewed as a separate nation and the region's indigenous origins underscore this separateness. Most northern Indian cultures are grouped together under the Chichimeca rubric and are more closely related to Native American cultures of the US southwest than the predominant Nahuatl speakers of central Mexico. Ironically the Aztecs, who built their capital in the center of the country, had their origin in the Chichimeca culture of the north-central coastal state of Nayarit.

The European conquest of the north was never complete. The Yaquis of the Sonora desert fought on into the 20th century – Porfirio Díaz shipped thousands of captured Indian rebels south to the Yucatán jungles in 1907 in an effort to break their resistance.

The rebellious spirit of the northern frontier has not been limited to Indian uprisings. The 191 0 revolution began in the north under the guiding hand of Francisco Madero. Doroteo Arango, also known as Francisco ("Pancho") Villa, the revolutionary leader from Chihuahua championed in the US by the journalist John Reed, was called "the Centaur of the North."

Despite its legacy as the cradle of revolution, political opposition in the North has most recently taken a conservative tilt: for over fifteen years, the right-of-center National Action Party (PAN) has challenged the PRI in regional elections, winning control of many state-houses and municipalities.

Central Mexico

Each year on the (usually rainy) evening of September 15, the plaza of Dolores Hidalgo, a sleepy town in the foothills of central Guanajuato, is thronged with revelers awaiting el Grito – the re-enactment of the cry of independence uttered by the rebel priest Miguel Hidalgo on this night in 1810. The cry began Mexico's war of liberation from the Spanish Crown.

It seems appropriate that the struggle for independence began in the geographical heartland of Mexico. Central Mexico is the region most pictured on postcards and in travel magazines. To the outside world, the region's colonial churches, rolling cornfields, picturesque peasants, and traditional fiestas typify Mexico.

Dolores Hidalgo is set in the Bajío ("lowlands"), a fertile swathe cutting across the states of Querétaro, Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Michoacán, that has fed the ravenous capital of the country farther south for a millennium. Now, farming in the Bajío is increasingly mechanized, as US and British (Grand Metropolitan) corporations harvest very un-Mexican crops like Miguel Hidalgo, as depicted by muralist Jose Orozco, Government Palace, Guadalajara broccoli and Brussels sprouts for export. The central-northern Pacific-coast state of Sinaloa has long been a key supplier of winter vegetables, notably tomatoes, to the United States.

Regional rivalries in central Mexico are strong. Jalisco, with its flower-filled capital of Guadalajara, the nation's second largest city (5 million), dominates the west. A conservative Catholic bastion, paradoxically famed for its mariachi music and beautiful women, the city has been beset by intense drug activity in recent years, a suspected factor in the slaying of the Cardinal of Guadalajara in May 1993.

Traditional Catholicism pervades the region and illuminates its history. The Cristiada (1925-29), pitted Catholic zealots against Mexico's revolutionary army in Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Michoacán.

Central Mexico is dotted with patriotic shrines like Dolores Hidalgo. Mexico's first constitution (1814) was promulgated in Apatzingán, Michoacán, and the revolutionary 1917 constitution that reigns today was drawn up in the city of Querétaro.

The provincial cities of central Mexico contain some of the fastest growing urban populations in the country. Shrinking plot sizes and the decapitalization of the agricultural sector have forced many to abandon their farms and ejidos (land held in common distributed under the land reform program). Michoacán and Ja1isco in the west and Zacatecas to the east are traditional feeder states, sending their young men – and, increasingly, their young women – as migrants to the US. Whole communities of émigrés from these states have been created in California and Texas. Gómez Farias, a small eastern Michoacán town, has sent undocumented workers to the northern California agricultural center of Watsonville for over a century, according to investigations carried out at the Colegio de Michoacán.

Economically and politically, central Mexico is tied tightly to the capital, which is high above in the volcano-studded high plateau of the altiplano, from which power has historically radiated. Under the snow-capped peaks of Popocatepetl, straddling the states of Mexico and Puebla, ancient civilizations flourished. At the far northeastern end of the valley, the Toltecs ruled what is now Tula, Hidalgo, and the great pyramids of Teotihuacan in Mexico state were power centers at the time of Christ. The Aztec empire flourished at Tenochtitlan in the midst of the lake-covered valley, on an island that is now called Mexico City.

Mexico's South

The 1994 uprising of the rebel Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Chiapas near the Guatemalan border focused fresh attention on Mexico's resource-rich but impoverished south. In several key respects, the rebels were emblematic of the region: they were mostly Mayan Indians whose ancestors ruled the still highly indigenous southeast and they took the name of Emiliano Zapata, "The Liberator of the South," a national icon recognized as the most incorruptible leader of the Mexican Revolution.

From 1910 to 1919, Zapata rode through the states of Morelos, Guerrero, and Puebla, south of Mexico City, fighting to recover the land of Nahua villagers from the creole hacienda (estate) owners. Rebellion is still endemic in this Nahuatl-speaking triad.

Descending from the fertile volcanic plateau of Morelos, Guerrero is bordered by the western Sierra Madre. As in much of the south, class contrasts in Guerrero are as startling as the topography: the pricey resort of Acapulco shares the same state as La Montana, demographically the poorest indigenous area in the nation.

Next door, Oaxaca is an equally mountainous – and even more Indian state. Nine distinct ethnic groupings, enclosed by jagged sierras, range from the Mixtecs or "Cloud People" clustered around Huahuapan de León, to, on the isthmus at Tehuantepec and Juchitán, the coastal Zapotecs, a unique matriarchal culture in which women are the vanguard of commercial and social activity.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Latin America Bureau
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1899365508
• ISBN 13: 9781899365500
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 102