Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

200 years on, a time for reflection

According to some, Mexico's bicentennial is a time for reflection.

On 200th birthday, Mexico battered but not broken

As Mexico limps into the bicentennial of its 1810 independence uprising, it is battered and full of self-questioning, but with more openness and debate than perhaps at any other time in its history.

The bicentennial marks the 1810 uprising led by Catholic priest Miguel Hidalgo, who gathered a band of Indians and farmers under the banner of the dark-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe. He was caught and executed soon afterward, but by 1821 the movement he started ousted the Spanish, a feat Mexicans celebrate Sept. 15-16.

"A bicentennial should inspire and generate hope, and this one hasn't," notes longtime environmental and consumer activist Alejandro Calvillo. "It comes at a time of deep crisis."…

A Pew Research Center poll released in August shows 79 percent of Mexicans are dissatisfied with the country's direction…

For most of its 200 years, Mexico was dominated by three institutions, whose buildings loomed over hundreds of town squares: the church, the city hall and the house of the most prominent family.

The church - whose falling number of priests can hardly serve their flocks anymore - now strives to be relevant in a country where most still list themselves as nominally Catholic, but hardly ever attend mass anymore…

Other aspects of life are changing; today, a Mexican town square is likely to hold an Internet cafe, a money exchange for migrant remittances, and a store selling plastic Chinese sandals instead of leather huaraches.

The family remains a bulwark, albeit one that is often split by mass migration. But the enormous, close-knit Mexican family may be a thing of the past; Mexico's birth rate has fallen from about 7 children per woman in the late 1960s to 2.1 today.

Upper-middle class Mexicans today are firmly implanted in the developed world, with iPhones, modern apartments, high education levels and small families…

Today, Mexico has strong civic movements on issues like crime, human rights and environmental protection that didn't exist 25 years ago. And despite suffering the most severe recession since the 1930s in 2009, the country has sound government finances and growing accountability. There is also now a truly independent Supreme Court.

Yet a few rich still hold the reigns of the country's highly-concentrated economy, where one or two firms dominate key sectors like television, telephones, cement, and food distribution. Half of the country's 107 million people live in poverty…

In the meantime, social activists are trying change Mexico in various ways. Mothers whose children disappeared in counterinsurgency or police campaigns have taken to washing the Mexican flag in a tub of water outside the steps of the country's Supreme Court in the weeks leading up to the bicentennial. They say the flag has been stained with blood and needs to be cleaned.

A quasi-military group, the Pentatlon Deportivo, believes military-style discipline, personal development and an ardent, nationalist love of Mexico are the cures for the country's ills. In Mexico City, teenage Pentatlon recruits jog down the tree-lined main boulevard…

Others… are trying to organize consumers to pressure the country's powerful, highly-monopolized business sector, with campaigns to stop big corporations from selling junk food in schools in Mexico, where children simultaneously suffer from malnutrition and one of the world's highest obesity rates.

And some are trying to use the courts to introduce class-action lawsuits taking on big business. But activism can only do so much; for example, antiquated labor laws make union organizing nearly impossible, and wealth and power often prevail in Mexico's bureaucratic, opaque court system…

Today, Mexicans are looking less to the government than ever before; they have largely tired of the official version of what it means to be Mexican.