Life goes on
Randal C. Archibold and Damian Cave (New York Times) and the rest of the mainstream media seem to be FINALLY catching on to what everyone in Mexico has been saying in years… yes, there is violence — horrifying violence — surrounding the narcotics export and arms import trade, and yes, violence has escalated exponentially during the Calderón Administration (or… because of the Calderón Administration?), but Mexicans are not living in some sort of “failed state”, nor have they turned into shell-shocked zombies:
Francisco Umberta, alarmed by the latest in a string of unimaginably gory crimes linked to Mexico’s drug war, dealt with it by heading out on a date. A half-hour drive from where the torsos were discovered, he stood in line on Monday near a crowded Chili’s restaurant, waiting to buy movie tickets for “The Avengers.”
“Of course it is all scary,” he said of the massacre, which sadly set no record for carnage here, “but what are you going to do?” He had heard about the bodies on the radio shortly after they were discovered on Sunday, but said the regional soccer playoffs drew more public attention. “It’s not like we’re all paralyzed,” said Mr. Umberta, 31, an office clerk. ¨We still need to live while they do what they do.”
Although Archibold and Cave strive mightily to make comparisons to Iraq or other states recently bombed by the foreign powers into “failure” (whatever the Hell that is) and grope for some kind of pyschological explanation for Mexicans failing to live down to U.S.-reported paranoia and basically came up with a “failed rationale”.
Since it seems to be foreigners who are most invested in spreading the meme of “failure”, I suppose it’s only fitting that it’s a foreigner with the best explanation of why this just isn’t so. From Paul McCartney’s free concert on Mexico City’s Zocalo Wednesday night:
Losing my religion?
When it comes to faith versus science, faith still wins out in Mexico, although science is gaining. A poll of public perception of science and technology showed that 59 percent of Mexicans put their trust in faith rather than science, down from the 70 percent who opted for faith when the question was asked back in 2009. (El Informador, Guadaljara)
The “more science guys” say about what you’d expect them to say. René Asomoza, director of the Center for Research and Advanced Studies (Cinvestav, for its acronym in Spanish) at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN), says that prayers and ritual cleansings only shows that Mexicans “continue to think ancestrally”.
“It means we do not have a high level of literacy. People can not distinguish between resources that can help solve their problems and those who do not do anything. It is the result of a low-quality education. Overall, I think that scientists have done a poor job of explaining what people are doing wrong. “
On the other hand, Arturo Menchaca of the Mexican Academy of Science blames the way science is taught… as it were “science fiction”.
If our education is poor, our science education is even worse. People are just not aware of the impact science has in their everyday life when it’s an undeniable fact that the increased life expectancy of Mexicans is a result of research and technological development, and not the result of miracles.
Finding a large portion of the population rejects basic science in favor of cherished beliefs isn’t unique to Mexico: 78 percent of people in the United States believe in creationism in some form or another, and the U.S. is notorious for created anti-scientific “controversies”. Take climate change. A possibly outdated poll has 38 percent of U.S. residents still claiming the climate isn’t changing. And that in a much more literate, science and technology aware society.
Here, evolution is just accepted, and while there may be some disagreements on how to deal with climate change, no one denies its existence. Oh, sure, some would try to ameliorate it through faith or ritual, but that’s not so much anti-science as it is concern with what scientists do… 55.6 percent of the Mexicans polled said that scientists had the potential to do harm to the country. I don’t think much about it, but knowing that scientists can fashion weapons of mass destruction probably would have me answering the question of whether scientists can do harm to the country with a “yes,” too. I think most people would… even the well educated, secular sorts who’d never buy a lottery ticket or light a candle to a saint.
Not that buying a lottery ticket, or lighting a candle, or sacrificing a white chicken and reading the entrails is completely rational, but it is human. What I think bothers the scientists is that the people aren’t them… something human in itself.
Science education should be better in this country, and more research and development no doubt would be a good thing. But polls like this just set up a false dichotomy between modernity and tradition: the cause of most of the civil wars (especially the Cristero War) in Mexico for the last 150 years.
Not all bimbos are Anglo blondes
Latino Rebels on the largest baked good company in the United States —
Suck it, nativists. The Reconquista has already happened and it started at your local bakery aisle. Unless of course, you don’t eat bread, pizza or doughnuts. Which would be so unAmerican we would shudder at the thought.
Grupo Bimbo, the Mexican conglomerate, that in the United States and Canada owns, among others:
- Arnold/Oroweat – Producer of loaf bread primarily sold throughout the United States.
- Bimbo – Producing cakes and bread. Bimbo breads and cakes are found in major United States cities with large Mexican and Mexican-American populations.
- Boboli – Producer of ready-made pizza crusts.
- Brownberry – Producer of loaf bread primarily sold throughout the United States.
- EarthGrains – Producer of loaf bread primarily sold throughout the United States.
- Entenmann’s – Pastry baker in the United States.
- Francisco – Producer of bread and rolls
- Freihofer’s – Producer of bread and cakes most commonly found in upstate New York.
- Marinela – Producer of Mexican cookies.
- Mrs. Baird’s – A leading bakery primarily present in Texas and surrounding states.
- Sara Lee
- Stroehmann’s – With Oroweat above, a producer of loaf bread in the United States.
- Thomas’ – Producer of English muffins and bagels.
- Tía Rosa – Producer of home-style bread, pastry, and tortillas.
A couple of old queens dis each other
¡Ai carumba… faith and begorra! Greetings to the Irish Politics forum readers that are pouring in here (or, all 30 or so of you, but that’s quite a few to what one of your readers called “an obscure Mexican website”). While focused mostly on Mexico (and not quite unknown within the small field of English-language Latin American cultural/historical/political sites), The MexFiles occasionally (admittedly usually only on 17 March) mention Ireland: besides the importance in our history of various Irish-Mexicans, the two cultures have similarities — agrarian, Catholic nations overshadowed by large English-speaking Protestant neighbor which appropriated about a third of our respective territory — that sometimes make analogies worth exploring.
While the Malvinas and Gibraltar are rather peripheral to my usual concerns, I’ve been considering, as my next book, a study of the beliefs and attitudes of English speaking writers towards Mexico. My thesis is that these are an extension of the “black legend” that painted the Spanish particularly loathsome colonial rulers compared to the English. The “Black Legend” appears to be rooted in the struggles and ambitions (and unhappy alliances) between the royal families of what were in the late 16th century “emerging superpowers”. I was rather amused to read in The Guardian an article that to my mind shows that 16th century family drama is still having its effects today.
It’s something of a side issue (more a footnote) that English-language commentary on Peronism (and Eva Peron) is an example of the modern manifestation of the “black legend”… portraying the Perons as fascists (they supported Mussolini, but mostly because he was anti-British) which sought to economically liberate Argentina from British corporate dominance… or, as it’s known in our part of the world, “neo-colonialism”.
Ill-will between the British and the Spanish goes back to Henry VIII’s unhappy marriage to Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter, Catherine of Aragon, but it seems any place they can find a rock (or a couple of rocks) near some Spanish-speaking country, you’ll find a little corner that is — against all common sense — not quite forever England.
Those guys really know how to hold a grudge. While Britain had no problem dumping Hong Kong and didn’t make any pretense that they were at all concerned with the democratic rights or anything else of the people left behind, it wasn’t as if Mao and the gang had much to do with the British Royal Family.
The Malvinas, of course, were inherited by Argentina from Spain. I don’t think the British concern for the fate of 3000 some residents has as much to do with democracy or oil or anything really… other that the fact that when the Perons finally got tired of the British treating their country as a colony (and one needs to remember that the often repeated shibboleth that Argentina was the wealthiest country in the world in the early 20th century conveniently overlooks that the money was in the hands of British residents, not Argentine citizens, who got squat for the most part), Eva just didn’t take the British monarchy very seriously.
And Gibraltar?… what better way to rub it in that, after occupying the place just because the heirs of Ferdinand and Isabella preferred their French relations to their pro-British German ones when it came time to replace the worn-out Hapsburg line on the throne in 1700, than to hang onto an otherwise anachronistic fortress on the Iberian Peninsula?
Eva Peron is long dead, and Cristiana Fernandez is be unlikely to be invited, but it seems Queen Elizabeth of England is having a big “do” coming up and is inviting the entire family. Although her cousin, Queen Sophia of Spain had made a big “do” herself by saying she wouldn’t go.
Seems that even though Sophia is Prince Philip’s first cousin (and they’re both Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburgs (though Philip for some reason changed his name to Montbatten-Windsor), and the family ties to the Trastámaras and Tudors are pretty tenuous after 500 years, Royals are not like you and I. Besides being even more inbred than your average hillbilly clan, they have a lot more practice with family feuds. And they really know how to hold a grudge:
And, of course, they´re a couple of old queens… nasty by definition:
They’re part of a scene, where being nice is a radical act… They’re negative queens, they’re negative queens. *
*Apologies to Pansy Division.
Thanks, but no thanks
AMLO was here in Mazatlán, speaking at the bullring (which sounds like the opening for a good joke, maybe more apropos for one of the other candidates). Noroeste — owned by the dissident PAN Clouthier family — made mention, more than once that the candidate was quite late. I wasn’t there, but happened by at the end of the speech, and the place was packed. So, it’s not like people just left early or anything.
One interesting thing AMLO mentioned, and which the local press picked up on, was that the candidate specifically turned down any offer of help from Sinaloan governor, Mario Vásquez Lopéz (MALOVA), who is — in theory — heading a PAN/PRD fusion administration.
While the right-left coalition was popular with many in the PRD leadership and did win in several states, here in Sinaloa, the results have been less than satisfactory for the left. MALOVA himself was a PRI militant and office holder, who switched his party affiliation to PAN at the last possible minute to qualify as the fusion ticket gubernatorial candidate. Although the new administration is arguably less overtly crooked than previous PRI administrations, the left has been frozen out of state administration. No one from PRD holds any significant posts at the state or municipal executive level. Here in Mazatlán (where the Municipal President on the fusion ticket was a former PAN municipal president), the administration has lurched strongly to the right, especially in social policy, basically forgetting they were in partnership with the left-wing parties. The sense among the left seems to be that the fusion ticket was a huge tactical error.
MALOVA probably still owes some favors to the leftists, and the best he can do is promise not to support PAN’s Josefina Vásquez Mota, and it would be the kiss of death for his future within the new party to support Enrique Peña Nieto. But, not supporting AMLO seems to be AMLO’s decision. The presidential candidate was one of those on the left strongly opposing a fusion ticket in Sinaloa and his instincts may have been right.
Unkindest cut of all
Via Guerilla Communicacional México comes this photo of an attack on an anti-Peña Nieto protester. What the Guerillas picked up is that the attackers all have military haircuts… and one is in a police uniform. Admittedly, a corte militar could just be a fad among Peña Nieto supporters, or this particular bunch of guys just happens to all favor the same barber with a limited repertoire. … but I don’t believe that either.
Don’t classify me, read me. I’m a writer, not a genre.
Reed Johnson’s fine obituary in the Los Angeles Times memorialized Fuentes as:
The prolific author of more than 20 books, including novels, short story collections, essays and often-scolding commentaries, Fuentes was among those most responsible for raising the profile of the hemisphere’s Spanish-language literature in the second half of the 20th century, following decades in which it had languished in the shadow of better-known European and U.S. modernists.
The Mexican writer, as far as most of the outside world goes, Fuentes was born in Panama, educated in the United States and lived for much of his life in England. He was attacked by the Mexican right (especially Enrique Krauze) on the bizarre count of being too elegant and dapper to be a true leftist, and by the left for packaging a stereotyped Mexico:
… depicting […] a mythological and stereotypical image of Mexico as a neocolonial, violent and corrupt country, an image […] believed was designed to appeal to Fuentes’ growing numbers of U.S. and European readers.
On the other hand, Fuentes — who supported Vicente Fox in 2000, was supporting AMLO in this year’s election. and was once branded a “reconquistador” by the lunatics at Fox News (for once giving a learned talk on Mexican cultural influence on the United States) and Vicente Fox’s one-time Secretary of Labor, the ultra-Catholic (and ex-Fascist) Carlos Abascal, launched a personal crusade against Fuentes for daring to write a classic of young adult literature:
Abascal attacked Carlos Fuentes’ Aura, a novel of teenage angst, and a juvenile classic in Spanish literature — demanding the novel be withdrawn from Mexican schools (and getting his daughter’s private school Spanish teacher fired) because — well — there’s a crucifix on the bedroom wall where two kids have sex (er… actually, in the imagination of a teenage boy. And, being Mexican teenager, he thinks about sex in terms of Mexican bedrooms … where very likely there will be a crucifix).
Fuentes enjoyed spending the unexpected jump in his royalties for Aura (which, despite what Reed Johnson says, is not “surrealistic” any more than Henry James’ Turn of the Screw or William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” … both of which are creepy and twisted, but firmly rooted in the physical realities of this world) as he did spending the money he made over his long and successful career.
Certainly, there were tragedies. Two of his children died young, and his first marriage ended in divorce. He tried sometimes to live up to his public image as a Mexican caballero: his claims of affairs with French actresses never being taken particularly seriously and his often aloof public demeanor, coupled with his ironic vision of his country — often written while he was a safe distance away — make him one of those maddening men of letters impossible to classify. Novelist, fabulist, political commentator, scholar and scold. There are, as Leslie Bird Simpson famously wrote “many Mexicos” all of which are equally valid and all of which exist simultaneously in one place. There were many public intellectuals existing simultaneously in the one Mexican who was Carlos Fuentes Macías.
Take that , Fake Umberto Eco!
A twit claiming to be Italian novelist Umberto Eco tried to start a tweet of a death foretold.
Adios, a este triste puto…
Nobody writes off el Gabo.
Or something like that.
Talk about spin!
From Guanabee:
… last week Enrique [Peña Nieto] … gave some face at Mexico’s Ibero university, completely BOMBED and, had he stayed an extra five minutes in the campus, would have probably been lynched or stoned to death.
Of course a collective, obvious, and resounding GET THE FUCK OUT isn’t what Peña’s party took away from their candidate’s appearance at Ibero. PRI’s well-known twisted scheming is presenting the incident like a generic, mildly positive informercial:
The audience scenes may have been filmed at Ibero, but not at Peña Nieto’s speech. The young fellow in the purple shirt is Paris Piñera, a Peña Nieto campaign worker (and a student at an altogether different university). As of this writing, the youtube posting of this video garnered had 752 “likes” and 17,903 “dislikes” from 263,895 viewers.
The Ibero incident maybe hasn’t sunk in with all voters, but it certainly has raised a storm among the “wired” voters. All over the Mexican internet, but not much reported in the “mainstream” press, there are calls for an “informational march” in cities throughout the Republic next Saturday .
Billed as a “Marcha anti-Peña” or “Marcha anti-EPN”, the anonymous organizers (and more than one website appears to be from the “Anonymous” on-line collective) claims not to favor any of the other candidates, but only to be against the PRI front-runner. Several of the on-line (but off camera or disguised) spokes-people specifically say they are not supporting PRD, although it’s obvious from the comments on the several sites that the supporters are more likely to reject “PRIAN” (PRI and PAN) than the other main party.
While I haven’t heard specific denials that this is something organized by PANAL, I haven’t seen any pro-Quadri mention in the comments.
(End of the world) party-pooper
Dang, and I wanted to dis’ all the fools who were gonna show up for the big event … still, pretty cool.
Popocatépetl tonight
YIKES!
Revolt of the preppies
Enrique Peña Nieto had been avoiding, evading and making various excuses for not speaking to the students at Universidad Iberoamericana. The general consensus was that Peña Nieto, having muffed a softball question about his own reading habits (apparently he doesn’t read much), his handlers did not want him facing a literate audience… not that the literati are going to back him anyway, but one assumes students generally read. Especially Ibero students.
Ibero is not normally considered anti-establishment, or unfriendly territory for PRI candidates. The Jesuit-run institution counts several of the more prominent conservatives among its alumni (including Josefina Vásquez Mota), and has never been a hotbed of student unrest. In 1968, the year of student protests world-wide and especially in Mexico (and even more especially in Mexico City) it was notable mostly for not having much of anything go on and accepting the status quo. If Ibero students did show up at student protests in that era, it was a rare enough event to be noted.
So, while it’s no surprise that Peña Nieto might expect a less-than-friendly audience, the reception he received was unexpected — crowds yelling “¡Fuera! ¡Fuera!” (Get out! Get out!) and hecklers demanding answers to his role in the Atenco “civil unrest” and other repressive and questionable activities during his tenure as State of Mexico governor, as well as his ties to Carlos Salinas. Peña Nieto had to hide in a bathroom for around 20 minutes before he was hustled out the back door of the auditorium.
You would think the PRI candidate and his handlers would just say “well, that didn’t go well” and move on. But then, that’s not the PRI way.
First up was the “outside agitator” defense. Party spokesman Eduardo Sanchez is trying to sell the line that the protesters didn’t “fit the exact profile” of Ibero students. Meaning… one supposes… they didn’t act like docile preppies and show proper deference. In other words, they acted like normal students.
Universidad Iberoamericano is located on the upscale outskirts of Santa Fé in Mexico City… an exclusive neighborhood of office parks and upscale housing. The corporate office parks out there have their own buses for their support staff (the foreign-owned companies seemed to assume that, like the United States, secretaries and clerks and janitors had cars) … and there’s no metro running out there. There is a bus, but you need to transfer at Chapultepec and it’s extremely crowded during the course of the day with just ordinary workers and household staff and shoppers. Add too that access to the campus was restricted to Ibero students and staff and the credentialed media.
The OEM chain of papers (El Sol, La Prensa, etc… for better or worse, the most widely read papers in Mexico) are trying a different approach, claiming Peña Nieto’s appearance was a “success”, and a strike against the PRD, which — of course — PRI and Televisa wants to blame for the Jesuit university students doing what students are supposed to do: question authority.
How this will change the dynamic of the election, I don’t pretend to know. Student protests against Peña Nieto are spreading (the clip is a protest in Saltillo, put down with violence),, but I do note that even in the possibly skewed Milenio daily poll, Peña Nieto is starting to drop in the “if the election was today, who would you vote for” category, which doesn’t include undecided voters and may not accurately reflect the voting population, as there is no good way to gauge voter sentiment among groups that get most of their information from the internet, or who don’t have land lines, or simply give the name of the party to which they normally owe allegiance. I DO know I am hearing from PRI militants (what in the U.S. would just be called party activists) who are reconsidering their choice, usually looking more at AMLO than at Vasquez Mota.
I suspect the “mainstream press” (both here and abroad) anointment of Peña Nieto as the next president of Mexico, and the assumption that the next administration would be pretty much the same as the last couple of administrations, was highly premature.
A lot can happen in the next month and a half, and I suspect a lot WILL happen.
mexfiles.net 