Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

More signs of Mexico's middle class

Damien Cave reports to The New York Times about more signs of a growing middle class in Mexico. Are those also signs of political change?

In the Middle of Mexico, a Middle Class Is Rising

A decade ago, Ivan Zamora, 23, might have already left for the United States. Instead, he graduated in May from a gleaming new university [in Guanajuato], then moved on to an engineering internship at one of the many multinational companies just beyond the campus gates…

“There’s just a lot more opportunity to study and to succeed,” Mr. Zamora said at the factory, surrounded by robots, steel, glass and young technicians…

Education. More sophisticated work. Higher pay… Here, in a mostly poor state long known as one of the country’s main sources of illegal immigrants to the United States, a new Mexico has begun to emerge…

This is a Mexico far different from the popular American conception: it is neither the grinding, low-skilled assembly work at maquiladoras… nor the ugliness of drug cartels. But the question many experts and officials are asking is whether Mexico as a whole can keep up with the rising demand for educated labor — and overcome concerns about crime and corruption — to propel its 112 million people into the club of developed nations.

Mauricio Martínez, 29, an engineer at the Italian tiremaker Pirelli… said he and his wife, Mariana, still saw their trip to Prague after his training in Romania as a fairy tale.

“I’m a small-town guy,” he said one day after work, in his kitchen with a beer. “But there I was; an Italian company from Milan hired a small-town guy from Mexico.”

He said he now makes $2,250 a month ($27,000 a year), far more than at his old job at a tow-truck company and roughly double the median household income nationwide…

And as is common in other countries with an expanding middle class, such as Brazil, their economic rise has led to demands for better government.

When someone recently stole Mrs. Martínez’s cellphone, she said she went straight to the police over the objections of her father, who warned her nothing would be done. “He was right,” she said. “But next time it happens, I want my complaint to be there. I’m trying to make a living here, and I want a legal life.”…

Many young, middle-class Mexicans are coming to similar realizations, propelled by 13 years of democracy and the Internet. But their ranks are small…. many foreign employers say that skilled employees are harder to find and keep, while the mass of Mexican workers do not measure up to what many companies need.

Only 36 percent of Mexicans between 25 and 64 have earned the equivalent of a high school degree, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development…

But on a smaller scale in Guanajuato, individual success is creating a sense of possibility [that]… pervades the polytechnic, where students in pristine industrial labs, like Javier Eduardo Luna Zapata, 24, have begun to dream of more than work at an auto plant.

He and a few classmates won a prestigious design award this year for a scanner that would check airport runways for debris. “We want to start a company,” he said, displaying a video of the project on his cellphone. “We’re going to look for investors when we graduate.”

His classmates, representing a new generation of Mexicans — mostly geeks in jeans carrying smartphones — all nodded with approval.