Not The News: Typecasting

If voice and content choice mean anything, the following three paragraphs tell much about why the world's contempt is aimed not just at the Bush administration but also at American voters for refusing to take seriously their role in enabling their government to do what it does.

The text is from the introduction to the current U.S. politics issue from Inside Mexico, a free monthly written by, for, and for the most part about Americans living or visiting Mexico:

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"At T minus 14 months, elbows are flying and campaigning is red hot! It's all good for political junkies who can't get enough of John McCain's freefall, Hillary Clinton's cleavage or Mitt Romney explaining that what he said wasn't really what he said.

"Race, religion, gender and family histories are big. Democrats may choose a woman, an African-American or a Mexican-American, the bona-fide chilango Bill Richardson, while Republicans mull a Mormon or multiple divorcees.

"Believe us, it doesn't get any better than this. It's been decades since a U.S. presidential race has been so wide open, unpredictable and fetchingly cast. It's a racy, page-turner of a campaign and Inside Mexico is watching every cliffhanger, climax and anti-climax for you."

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I've read teasers less cheeky in tone for Playboy's anniversary issues. Hey, it's voting season. Let's party!

Seeing it all as gossipy entertainment is, of course, the media norm, including in Mexico. On request, I submitted to Inside Mexico a short essay mentioning that point, among others. The piece was apparently too weak in the cleavage department to make it into their U.S. politics issue, so I reproduce it here:

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What We Talk About When We Talk About U.S. Presidential Candidates
BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT

You hear it said, and not always in jest, that the world at large should be eligible to vote in U.S. presidential elections. It’s the world at large, after all, that feels the effects — for better or worse.

Nobody understands those effects better than Mexicans. Their economy is in lockstep with their northern neighbor. About 10 million of them live in that neighbor’s territory — some legally, some not so legally, all at the mercy of the U.S. political winds. And, lest we forget, a history of southward-directed U.S. transgressions is fresh in the Mexican mind.

So Mexico clearly has a stake in who becomes the next U.S. president.

And now here comes the 2008 vote. Given its unprecedented relevance for Mexico, Mexican citizens on both sides of the border will be involved as never before, scrutinizing the candidates’ positions, analyzing policy proposals’ implications for Mexico, and influencing their much-coveted ethnic brethren, the Mexican-American voters.

What's interesting about the paragraph you just read is that almost none of it is true. It seems true. Maybe it should be true. And it will undoubtedly be presented as true by a breathless Mexican media.

But if you talk to pollsters — that is, folks who actually measure how the population thinks rather than cling to set assumptions about it — you get a different picture. The average Mexican citizen, like the average citizen anywhere, has enough to think about without dissecting the details of another nation’s political battles.

That same average citizen can also be forgiven for believing that from Mexico’s point of view, it won't matter much who wins.

“There's a fatalism at work but it’s a sophisticated fatalism,” says Dan Lund, president of the Mund Americas public opinion research firm in Mexico City. “It’s not a bad way to look at the world.”

Roy Campos, president of Consulta Mitofsky and probably Mexico's most prominent polling professional, puts it more concretely. “They don't know or care what a Democrat or a Republican is,” he says. “The United States is the United States, period.”

Which is not to say there’ll be no buzz here around the contest. Televisa and TV Azteca, the network duopoly whose programming is seen in both countries, will make sure there is. A national election campaign — here or there — is big-time television. It’s the World Cup and Miss Universe combined, and it lasts for a year. It’s going to get milked for all it’s worth.

“The stake that Mexico may have in the election will get overhyped and abused by Televisa and TV Azteca, especially by the anchors, with their pompous superficiality,” Lund says.

Thus the U.S. election will be seen here as one big TV show. That means character over content, type over policies. “Hillary or Obama will be very attractive to the Mexican media, but it will have nothing to do with their positions on anything,” Campos says. “One’s a woman, one’s a man of color, and that will be the story.”

Academics, print columnists and the chattering classes on late-night television will inject some substance. But they’re not widely read or heard, except by each other. And many tend to fall into the trap of overplaying the personal.

“When Bush won in 2000 it was viewed here as historically important because of his supposed closeness to Mexico, based on his having a Mexican sister-in-law," Campos says. “Personal things were given more importance than actual policies.”

A more recent example: In the critical weekly Proceso, the usually brilliant writer/director/journalist Sabina Berman characterized the U.S. Congress’s failure to pass the immigration reform bill as “like saying [they] don't give a damn about 12 million illegal immigrants.”

Alas, too many don’t. But the bill’s fate was actually sealed by liberal Democrats who considered it too punitive. In other words, it failed because a significant segment does indeed give a damn.

In Berman's piece, though, as in so many others, the struggles of a divided nation trying to come to grips with an out-of-control situation are ignored in favor of the standby applause line: “They don't like us.”

While we’re on the subject, a U.S. candidate’s immigration stance may not be the deciding factor in his or her popularity in Mexico. Obviously, a candidate who opposes walling the border and supports legalization will be looked on more kindly here, but that won’t be the end-all and be-all.

“Immigration is not a make-or-break issue at the popular level in Mexico,” Lund says, referring to its impact on how the U.S. presidential candidates are judged. “The media will paint it that way, but calling it that is to fall into the most superficial of arguments.”

Insofar as it tilts at all, Mexico has historically tilted toward the Democrats — a case of a country that was once social-democratic leaning toward a party that was once social-democratic. The rise of the market-minded National Action Party, with its ideological ties to the Republicans, changes the picture, and you can expect PAN politicians to back (tacitly, of course) the GOP candidate. But that’s not the same thing as saying that those who voted for Calderón will prefer a Giulani or a McCain. It doesn’t work that way.

If there’s a unifying issue influencing Mexico’s perception of U.S. candidates, it is war and peace. In general, Mexicans, like most of the world, are genuinely horrified at the Bush administration’s military adventurism. They are also loyal to their nation's historic policy of non-intervention. “My reading of Mexican public opinion is that this is a society that is against war,” Lund says.

For the most part, however, Mexicans will approach the U.S. election as a spectator sport — exciting and important, but ultimately somebody else’s ballgame. “Once the candidates are known next year, I’m going to do a survey asking people to name each one’s party," Campos says. "And they’re not going to know.”

Now, if you're an American bewildered by Campos’s prediction, take the following quiz:

1. What's the name of the Canadian prime minister? 2. What's his party affiliation? 3. Who did he defeat in the last election?

How’d you do?

Random Readings Redux: Dismissed

A year and a half after its publication in Spanish, an English version of "Mexican Messiah" is scheduled for release this month. It's by George Grayson, the American "Mexicologist" who studies this country from afar. The original came out in the spring of 2006, by which time the issue in the presidential election was not which of the three major candidates the voters would ultimately prefer, but whether enough supporters of Andrés Manuel López Obrador would be scared away from voting for him. As it turned out, enough (barely) were.

Grayson's role in fomenting the fear was a minor one, if any contribution can be considered minor in an election decided by half a percentage point. The major threats invented by the fearmongers were Hugo Chávez-envy, latent authoriarianism, potential violence and a general, miscellaneous "danger" lurking within the candidate. Grayson, along with Mexican historian Enrique Krauze, created the complementary "Messiah" scare, essentially branding López Obrador with a Christ complex.

Grayson and Krauze's Messiah ploy was no more or less insidious than the other anti-AMLO scare tactics, but it alone had a decidedly ivory tower tone to it. It asked us to accept that supporters of the other candidates were acting with free will, while AMLO's core following was being duped by a charlatan. If the major business organizations supported Calderón, they were acting intelligently in their own best interest. If the poor supported AMLO, they were falling for a Messiah. Oh, those colorful, innocent poor people!

I reviewed the Spanish-language version of "Mexican Messiah" on May 14, 2006:

Mesías Mexicano
By George Grayson
Grijalbo (2006)

REVIEWED BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT
The Herald Mexico


It’s been said that Andrés Manuel López Obrador has allowed himself to be defined by his enemies. That’s surely true, and to his detriment. How else could his presidential hopes have come down to whether he’s “another Lula or another Chávez,” as though the question were remotely legitimate?

But it’s not just his rivals who create an AMLO that suits their purpose. Somewhere along the way the PRD candidate has become fair game for whatever defining character note that anybody, enemy or not, chooses to aim in his direction. Thus we can be told on the same day, sometimes by the same person, that he’s a manipulative demagogue and a naïve idealist. That he’s a throwback to the past and a harbinger of Mexico’s future. A bewildered rube and a shrewd pragmatist. A radical reformer and an enemy of reform. An advocate for the poor and a tool of capitalism. A fascist and a communist. A populist and a Keynesian. The nation’s hope and the nation’s peril.

One reason for the free-for-all is that AMLO is so atypical of today’s Mexican politicians. He doesn’t talk like the others, think like the others, campaign like the others, or even live like the others. Since he doesn’t fit any familiar mold, people assign him a mold from the past, or create a new one for him.

George Grayson’s contribution to the “What is López Obrador, Really?” sweepstakes is explicit in the title of his new book. While agreeing with other definers that AMLO’s approach includes populism, nationalism, leftism and corporativism, Grayson contends that the PRD candidate “is in fact a political Messiah.”

What does that mean? It means, according to Grayson, that López Obrador operates with the “conviction that he incarnates a project of redemption.” What project is that? It’s the project of “a savior ready to rescue the humble masses from the lying politicians and the neoliberal schemes that favor the rich.”

If you detect a not-so-subtle irony in those descriptions, you’re onto something. Grayson’s presentation of AMLO’s ideas is an extended exercise in the skillful weaving of accurate paraphrase with a mocking tone. If his intent is to steer the reader — without ever really saying so directly — toward the notion that this candidate may not deserve to be taken entirely seriously, then it’s a successful technique.

Grayson’s critical biography had been eagerly awaited (at least by me) as a potential corrective to the ever-expanding line-up of love-him-or-hate-him AMLO books piling up at Sanborn’s. Grayson, a professor of government at William & Mary College in Virginia, is considered one of the foremost U.S. authorities on Mexican politics and society, and has been for many decades. That puts him in a position to deliver what we’ve needed — a well-researched, fact-filled, fully footnoted, thoroughly indexed biography in English of the most consequential and least understood human being in Mexico today.

Now we have it, except for the “in English” part. “Mesías Mexicano” has only been published in the Spanish translation. That’s too bad, since monolingual Anglophones bored with “fiery leftist” and “populist” as handy AMLO definitions are denied an alternative mask for him — “Messiah.”

The author insists that he’s using the label “in a descriptive mode, not a pejorative one.” I don’t believe that for a second, and I doubt I’m really meant to. Calling a candidate for president a “Messiah” is not a neutral observation. Since nobody can really be a Messiah, promoting yourself as one — or in this case having somebody else do it for you — has to mean that you’re either a manipulator, a fraud, terminally naive or simply deluded.

Grayson’s task, then, is to justify the pejorative label, and he goes about it with vigor. For example, AMLO’s mission to rescue the people from the current economic strategy is, we’re told, comparable to Jesus’ role as spiritual liberator. Also, López Obrador lives frugally, “as Christ did.” AMLO “has imitated Jesus’ practices of speaking in parables.” In fact, his campaign motto — “The poor come first, for everybody’s benefit” — is a “modern interpretation” of Luke 6:20, “Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God.”

We also learn that the influence on AMLO by the speeches of salient figures in Mexican history — Morelos, Juárez, Madero — is “very similar to how the prophets guided Jesus.”

Right about here, the reader recalls his or her freshman composition teacher warning of metaphors stretched past the breaking point. But Professor Grayson is just warming up. We get seven more applications of the AMLO-Messiah analogy, scattered broadly across the credibility spectrum. And all this is just in the introduction. Then they continue throughout the book, with even the chapter titles staying on theme (“A Child is Born in Tabasco,” “Savior or Crucifier”).

You got to hand it to the good professor. I don’t think the plenary session at a Baptist preachers' convention could come up with as many biblical references as Grayson does in the context of a thoroughly secular politician’s life story. But rather than bolstering the thesis that AMLO is running a messianic campaign, the cumulative effect of so much gratuitous scripture strains the author’s credibility, not to mention the reader’s patience.

The problem is more than just overkill. Much of the book suffers from a terminal case of dismissiveness. A candidate running on an anti-poverty platform will always be accused of irresponsible populism (and now of messianic tendencies) by “realistic” critics who, remembering the Perons of the past, reflexively associate promotion of the poor's interests with pandering to the poor's vulnerabilities. But is it entirely out of the question that López Obrador’s expressed priority of government intervention to lift the poor is not a ploy to tap into the electorate’s spiritual unconscious but a well-thought-out political proposal he considers appropriate for a nation whose every problem can be traced to poverty and economic inequality? Can’t his platform be discussed on its own terms?

Grayson does dedicate the last three chapters to policy discussion, which mostly consists of setting up AMLO’s proposals (mercifully reduced from 50 to 11, and of course called “commandments” and presented in “Thou Shalt Not” language) like bowling pins to be knocked down. Fair enough. He’s certainly not the only observer who has doubts about this candidate’s character, and who considers his proposals to be mostly unworkable. Besides, by now the reader knows where the author is coming from.

For the record, “Mesías Mexicano” isn’t just another AMLO-phobic tract. It is, after all, a critical biography, and the patient, forgiving reader will come out of it with a much better idea of who Andrés Manuel López Obrador is, as well as what George Grayson thinks of him. I especially liked the early chapter on AMLO’s boyhood and family history.

Readers will appreciate the several charts and timelines that clarify some of the more Byzantine topics of Mexican politics, such as the background of the desafuero and the PRD’s internal factions. Relatively speaking, this book is no less detached than any of the other AMLO bios out there, all of which seem to be either hagiographies or diatribes. The research, detail and sourcing in this one give it an advantage. You just have to sort the information from the attitude.

If you’re still in the mood for metaphors, you can think of Dr. Grayson’s work as a pretty decent cut of steak with a half-quart of ketchup poured over it. The ketchup, unfortunately, is what the author seems to care about most, and it's what he means to smear the candidate with.

Not the News: Show Time

I recently finished a short piece that may or may not run in an upcoming issue of Inside Mexico, the English-language monthly. It looks at how the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign will play out here in Mexico.

In researching the article, I spoke to several media and public opinion professionals who offered some counterintuitive observations on how U.S. elections are traditionally viewed here and how this one is likely to be seen.

But one unanimous prediction was hardly surprising: The candidates will be portrayed in the media — and seen by most people — as types, as stock characters, as soap opera role players.

That's already happening, and not only on commercial television. I'm thinking of a piece by the serious journalist Martín Moreno, in the August issue of Nexos, a higher-than-the-usual-brow monthly.

In what he calls "a tale emerged from the African darkness," Moreno pens a brief introduction to Barack Obama, "the black senator who wants to be president." (The assumption is that not many Mexicans have heard of the man, which is not far from the truth, according to the pollsters.)

How many times do the words "black" and "Africa" appear in the brief article? More than two dozen. How many times is a Barack Obama political position mentioned? None.

Ah, but there's more. Standing in the way of the "black man with the face of a child," we learn, is "the beautiful, talented and astute Hillary Clinton."

Memo to central casting: Great work!

This storyboarded take on the candidates will be standard fare on Televisa and TV Azteca next year, but Nexos reminds us that the pointyheads too will tend to subordinate stances to types.

Yes, it's noteworthy that the two likeliest Democratic candidates are a woman and a man of color (though two standard-issue white men -- the underrated John Edwards and the belatedly appreciated Al Gore -- could shift the scenario suddenly). And it's true that come this time next year, the coded racist or sexist (as the case may be) attacks coming out of the Republican camp will be as galling in their ruthlessness as they'll be impressive in their creativity.

But race and gender are subtexts in the Democratic pre-campaign. Obama is not the "black candidate" that Nexos makes him out to be. In fact, it's still an open question if he'll get the majority of the black vote in the primaries.

Ask a typical American to define Barack Obama in one word and the answer won't be, "He's black." It will be, "He's different." Ask them to sum up Clinton and you won't get, "She's a woman." You'll get, "She's Hillary."

The differences between Obama and Clinton have nothing to do with birth circumstances, and everything to do with what most Mexicans have indicated they care about.

Obama, for example, was anti-war when anti-war wasn't cool. Clinton supported the war from the outset, turning against it only when public opinion told her to. Even now she doesn't question the morality of that blatant aggression, only its failure.

Clinton called Obama naive for ruling out a nuclear attack against Al Qaeda. Obama, generously, didn't call her a monster for not ruling it out.

Clinton jumped all over Obama for proposing to tone down the absurd, self-defeating sanctions against Cuba, and for making the reasonable suggestion that the United States should try talking with its adversaries. To Clinton, moving away from policies that haven't worked for half a century shows inexperience.

Should the media choose to inform instead of entertain, Mexicans might become aware that there is a candidate next door who basically agrees with their criticism of the United States and wants to change things accordingly.

As author and Georgetown history professor Michael Kazin put it recently, "Only an Obama victory will show the world that Americans have rejected the arrogant, inept policies that destroyed the broad support the U.S. received after the attacks of 9/11"

One would think that that's what Mexicans and Americans both want. But is it good television?

Arts & Minds: Turandot, Big-Time

On the eve of its 100th anniversary, the Teatro Colón of Buenos Aires packed up tons of equipment and scenery, several hundred performers and a swarm of technicians, and deposited the entire load in Mexico City's Auditorio Nacional for a four-day run of Turandot, beginning tonight.

No small feat, even for one of the world's great opera houses. In fact everything about this production of Puccini's gorgeously gloomy posthumous tragedy, originally performed in an outdoor stadium last fall (Argentina's spring), is outsized. That includes the cavernous auditorium itself, big enough to hold several Bellas Artes theaters. Intimacy will necessarily yield to spectacle.

The singers, for example, will have to be miked, but that’s an impurity that doesn't seem to bother those involved with the production. "The demand on the singers is exactly the same," says artistic director Marcelo Lombardero. "They'll be singing just as if they were in a theater."

It's the sound technicians, not the singers, who have the most work to do. One task is getting the words heard in the back rows without overdoing the amplification. "We have to find the level that's most like the natural human voice," Lombardero says. "It's not going to be the same as it would be for Iron Maiden."

For José Luis Duval, the Guanajuato-born tenor with the lead male role, being miked is the least of the performers' problems. "We're doing four Turandots in four days, so we need to stay healthy and rested," he says. "Most of us came up from sea-level cities in Argentina and Italy to Mexico City, with its contamination and altitude. That's a much bigger challenge than two little cords pinned on our clothes."

The cast and crew is mostly Argentinean, but the two leads are not. Duval is Mexican, and soprano Cynthia Makris, who plays the Chinese princess Turandot, is American. So is musical director Stefan Lano, who has been with the Teatro Colón for 15 years, as a guest conductor and then musical director. He's also working in Mexico on a project of Argentine Criollo music to be performed at Bellas Artes later in the year.

Lano has conducted for the San Francisco Opera and the New York Met, but he's just as happy working in Latin America, thank you. "They're not quite as judgmental, not quite as prejudicial," he says. "In the United States I've had agents telling me I need to let my hair grow so my image would be more like a conductor."

That would be a shame. Lano keeps what's left of his hair cropped down to near-nothing, and with his sharp-featured long face and unignorable glasses, he's a younger version of Paul's grandfather in Hard Day's Night, if Paul's grandfather could conduct Wozzeck, Salomé, Bomarzo and Jonny Spielt Auf.

Lano isn't a big fan of the simultaneous translation from Italian into Spanish that will be seen on a video screen during the Turandot performances, but accepts its appeal to the public. "I'd prefer it if the whole world were polyglot," he says. "Musicians generally have an ear for languages, and I pride myself on speaking many languages poorly."

Truth is, Lano's Spanish is very good — confident and fluid, with Argentine coloring and a hint of the Boston Brahmin. He's put it to good use.

"I walk around Mexico City a lot and talk to people, and they are just lovely," he says. "From what you read in the U.S. press or the sound bites you hear on MSNBC or CNN, you'd never believe there's a country of such high culture across the border."

Given the Teatro Colón's track record, I can comfortably recommend this Turandot, sight unseen, for those who live in Mexico City or will be visiting in the next several days. The performances on Thursday, Friday and Saturday are not sold out as of this writing, and there's talk of a fifth date on Sunday if the demand is there. Tickets are available at the usual places — Mix-Up, Liverpool, the Auditorio Nacional box office, and Ticketmaster (55 5325 9000 or www.ticketmaster.com).

Capital Account: Full speed ahead

The Ebrard administration's recent "Green Consultation," which arranged for Mexico City residents to vote on 10 city proposals for improving the environment, has been criticized as a window-dressing exercise aimed only at manufacturing support for projects already roaring down the tracks.

To which the only reasonable response is — so what if it was?

The news value here is that a Mexico City mayor is finally trying to do something about the capital's unlivable condition. None of the previous city administrations, including recent PRD governments, paid much attention to the environment, beyond mouthing the obligatory homages and presiding over feel-good events. Ebrard is actually changing priorities, and trying new approaches.

But even the baby steps he's proposing will face opposition from the Calderón administration, which still has purse string and limited administrative powers over the Federal District. The feds are already blocking a debt-restructuring plan that would finance a laundry list of proposed D.F. reforms, as the PAN continues the same strategy it used during the D.F. mayor vote in 2006 — painting the PRD as fiscally irresponsible in its management of the capital.

The sniffiness between Marcelo Ebrard and Felipe Calderón would exist under any conditions. The PAN doesn't want to go on forever ceding the DF vote to the PRD, and will naturally do its best to prevent its rival from getting credit for governing well.

But fertilizing the ill will is Ebrard's refusal to publicly recognize Calderón as president, even declining to appear with him or have their picture taken together. As the world knows, most of the PRD and its supporters are convinced that Calderón's 2006 victory was tainted, to put it mildly. Ebrard, unlike fellow PRD governors in Zacatecas, Michoacán and other states, has stuck to the strategy of denying Calderón's legitimacy. He has the local popularity to get away with it.

In a practical sense, the issue is silly. Other than missed photo-ops, nothing official is done differently as a result of Ebrard not "recognizing" Calderón, whatever that means. It's a statement of principle, a posture. It has no procedural effect.

But the Calderón administration’s capacity to undermine Ebrard's environmental reforms, or any other project for that matter, is very real. Given the palpable antagonism, Ebrard can be forgiven his little dog and pony show in the form of a "Green Consultation." Whatever helps get the job done . . .

Predictably, seven of the 10 ideas got 90+ percent approval from the "voters." One proposal, to make it official policy to target transportation funds toward mass transit (Metro, Metrobus, bus system) rather than automobiles, fell just short at 88 percent approval.

The 90+ percenters were:

* Replacing all existing microbuses with newer and more efficient vehicles.

* Requiring all new buildings to include green spaces with trees on the rooftops.

* Obligating all taxis to use clean alternative fuels or hybrid cars.

* Upping the penalty for building illegally in protected areas or destroying forest land.

* Restricting the routes and hours of large cargo trucks passing through the city.

* Constructing 500 absorption wells to capture and treat rainwater that would otherwise be lost among the sewage runoff.

* Overhauling the garbage collection system by creating a central authority.

It should come as no surprise that the two proposals that went over poorly were the only two that would demand personal sacrifices. One would require all vehicles not to circulate one Saturday each month. The other would make school bus use obligatory for public school students. Those two ideas received 74 percent and 66 percent approval ratings respectively. Given the stacked nature of the poll, that victory margin amounts to a defeat.

Commentary: School for Scandal

There are lots of losers coming out of last week's Baja California gubernatorial election.

One is the foreign press, who can no longer punch up their prose courtesy of a billionaire gambling tycoon with questionable ties, an apparent history of exotic-animal smuggling, an unmistakable stench of corruption, and a penchant for quaffing liquid blends of animal members, rattlesnakes, scorpions and other protein sources.

Another is Jorge Hank Rhon himself, scion of a once-feared political clan whose patriarch, the late Carlos Hank González, famously summarized seven decades of PRI rule with the immortal words: "A politician who is poor is a poor politician." Jorge Hank managed to ride his own wealth, abundant connections and intimidating presence to the top of Tijuana's municipal government, but fell a full 7 percentage points short of the Baja California governorship on August 5.

A third loser is Roberto Madrazo, the Godfather-voiced PRI dinosaur whose personal political career ended on July 2, 2006 with his party's disastrous election performance. Madrazo was singularly responsible for the calamity, first as party head and then as presidential candidate. Now even a behind-the-scenes role seems out of his reach, given that his gallo, Jorge Hank, with whom the fatherless Madrazo literally grew up, has gone down.

Even before the 2006 debacle, Madrazo had promoted Jorge's brother Carlos Hank for the PRI candidacy in the 2005 State of Mexico governor's race. He struck out there as well when outgoing governor Arturo Montiel managed to secure the nomination for his protégé Enrique Peña Nieto. Thanks to an embarrassingly incompetent campaign by PAN candidate Rubén Mendoza Ayala, and an unseemly personal smearing of the PRD's Yeidckol Palevnsky, Peña Nieto won handily. His name frequently comes up now as a likely presidential candidate in 2012, an election that the PRI, despite everything, may be in a very good position to win.

Yet another loser: The good people of Baja California, who were subjected to another idea-free farce of an election. Hank used his residual control of the Tijuana police department to prevent PAN get-out-the-voters from operating in that largest of BC cities, while the PAN, in the words of one prominent public opinion analyst, waged a campaign that "was heavy-handed enough to have possibly crossed some electoral law lines."

Governor-elect José Guadalupe Osuna Millán was also able to use the preferred PAN technique of emphasizing security and his rival's threat to it. Unlike the Calderón 2006 presidential campaign, however, he didn't have to resort to lies about his opponent in order to stoke the fear. All he had to do was let Hank be Hank.

The big winner? No contest. It's Elba Esther Gordillo, the Dragon Lady of caricatures and head of the huge teachers union who recently had herself appointed leader for life (or, as later "clarified" under pressure, until 2012, whichever comes first). After splitting from the PRI over a nasty feud with Madrazo, Gordillo threw her weight behind Calderón in 2006. Given his miniscule margin of victory, hers was no small contribution, and she hasn't been shy about calling in her chits with the new president ever since.

Gordillo worked behind the scenes for Osuna in Baja California, inspired perhaps not just by her new pro-PAN leanings but also by another chance to hurt Madrazo, via Hank. In the final days of the campaign, when it looked likely that Osuna would win, Gordillo flexed her muscles and went off on Calderón's education secretary, Josefina Vázquez Mota. "Josefina doesn't know anything about education," Gordillo told El Universal. "The only one who knows is me."

That sounded for all the world like an open challenge, implying that Gordillo expects to be Calderón's top education adviser, officially or unofficially. The irony behind the gambit is that the quality of Mexican public education is notoriously poor not because of finances (per capita education spending in Mexico is well above the Latin American average) but precisely because of the attitude of the union-controlled teachers.

"Time and again they oppose new textbooks, different content, program changes, or pedagogic innovations," writes Sara Sefchovich, an author and sociologist. "The union and the bureaucracy are the principal obstacle to improving education in this country."

Elba Esther's bold, unelected claim to power doesn't make Calderón look good. It's one thing for him to be seen as beholden to the nation's big business interests; he is, after all, ideologically pledged to support them. But to appear in thrall to an openly manipulative union boss is retro at best, and threatens to confirm many of the accusations of Calderón's political enemies. The president would do well to tell Gordillo where to get off, but don't count on it happening. For my money Vázquez Mota herself is more likely to do it than he is.

Arts & Minds: Unreal Catorce

José Cruz has been writing and singing powerfully subtle lyrics for the group Real de Catorce for more than two decades, setting them to music at once familiar for its bluesiness yet strikingly original. He's a co-equal member of the latter-day triumvirate of exceptionally talented Mexican urban poets who deliver their goods from a blues base, a folk tradition, and a rock 'n' roll soul. The other two are Jaime López (who at age fiftysomething seems to be exploring ever more fruitful territory, sounding better than ever in the process), and Rodrigo González (who died tragically in the 1985 earthquake).

But something is wrong. It was evident a year ago when Real de Catorce opened a Mexico City Jazz Festival evening at the Metropolitan Theater for Buddy Guy, one of the last remaining electric blues masters from the old school. Cruz looked distracted, didn't sing well, and never really connected with the crowd. Worse, the current bassist and lead guitarist (the line-up behind Cruz, save for drummer Fernando Abrego, has shifted over the years) hopped around and rockstar-postured like the commercial pop band Real de Catorce had spent 22 years not being. Guitarist Julio Zea took over much of the between-song banter in embarrassing "Hello, Mexico City! We love you!" style. (To be fair, he didn't actually use that cliché, only appropriated its spirit. But he did go out of his way to praise the corporate sponsor of the event, something Cruz would never do.)

It turns out Cruz, at age 52, has multiple sclerosis. He appears in a wheelchair in recent newspaper photos (of which there are not many, since Real de Catorce has always performed below the mainstream media radar). It also turns out that Cruz and the band parted ways not long after that ill fated May 2006 concert, and far from amicably. Cruz now refers to his former musicians as "my ex-friends" and the band members themselves have posted on the Real de Catorce web site (from which Cruz has been banned) a lengthy manifesto accusing him of manipulative behavior, among many other things.

The situation is sad, for Cruz and his loved ones personally, and for the rest of us musically. A 22-year-run of exceptional music that most of the world was never aware of appears to be at an end. Cruz has made some solo appearances, and he's also authored a book of poetry (the translated title would be "From the Alcohol Texts"). But what kind of new career he can put together in his condition is unclear.

Incredibly, the other band members have taken over the name Real de Catorce, and promote themselves as such. This is not unlike Clarence Clemons, Max Weinberg and the rest of the E Street Band separating from the Boss and calling themselves "Bruce Springsteen." Real de Catorce is José Cruz and vice versa. Zea, Abrego and bassist Neftalí López Nava have every right to carry on, and they'll no doubt put together something very good. But they need to do the right thing by forging their own identity and coming up with their own name. How about Real de Quince?

Meanwhile, Cruz and the cumulative membership of Real de Catorce have left us about a dozen CDs, some more compelling than others, but all superb. For the uninitiated, I suggest finding Voces Interiores (1992) as your introduction, for no better reason than it's my personal favorite. It includes "Pago mi renta con un poco de blues," a talking blues with an unexpected chorus, which along with "Azul" (a mournful slow blues with the honor of being the first cut on the first, self-named 1987 album) is the closest thing Real de Catorce ever had to a hit.

Between Us: The (very) local News

Extended vacations energize, they say, returning you to the real world with a renewed sense of purpose. But it's a rough transition for journalist-types. Spend a few weeks focusing on flora and fauna, music and painting, roads and sidewalks, people and places, and somehow making sense of the vagaries of the political class and the media that feeds off it doesn't feel like such a noble pursuit. But somebody has to do it, so onward. Starting with . . .

WHO'LL GET IT? We've all been assuming that the new incarnation of The News, as of now slated for a September resurrection, will serve readers of English across the nation. All indications, though, point to a strictly Mexico City circulation. Remember, the new News won't have Novedades to piggyback on for distribution. But the non-national availability, if that turns out to be the case, may also reflect a business bias I've heard often over the years. The bias, essentially, is that bringing a capital-based English-language paper to the provinces is a waste of time and effort. San Miguel residents, the thinking goes, are bohemians who don't buy much. Anglophones in Oaxaca are a bunch of hippies who buy even less. Expats in Ajijic and Lake Chapala are isolationists who don't want to read about current events, and those in Los Cabos or Cancún might as well be living on Jupiter. That this thinking is neither true nor wise can be confirmed by actually talking to people. But that's not usually a priority with the bottom-line types . . .

SPEAKING OF ENGLISH. A recent Mitofsky poll tells us that 9% of Mexicans speak a second language, which in 86% of the cases is English. That translates to more than 8 million additional potential readers of a quality English-language newspaper in Mexico, should one ever emerge. (French, by the way, is second, spoken by 2% of the 9% who have two languages, which doesn't work out to be a heck of a lot of people.) Of those who speak English as a second language, 4% say they speak or read it well, and 7% "regular." Even those low figures may be inflated, since they depend on the word of the subjects. People tend to exaggerate their proficiency in languages other than their own. "I speak a little English" or, from the other side, "I speak a little Spanish," is akin to "The check is in the mail" on the accuracy meter, unless you interpret "a little" much more literally than the speaker wants you to. The poll seems to define second language as something other than Spanish. Thus the word "Náhuatl" doesn't turn up in a search of the study document. But we know there are hundreds of thousands of speakers of indigenous languages who also speak Spanish — as a second language.

Random Readings Redux: Bulldozing

Still on vacation, but here's a ditty from last year that might help you win a few bar bets. For example, which country -- Mexico or the United States -- has a higher percentage of illegals living in the other? And which is more intolerant of foreigners working within its boundaries?

Almanaque México-Estados Unidos
By Sergio Aguayo Quezada
Fondo de Cultura Económica (2005)

A U.S.-Mexico almanac that sets a few records straight
BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT

As almanacs go, Sergio Aguayo’s one-man effort runs a few hundred agate-type pages behind the CIA World Fact Book, and falls as many witticisms shy of Poor Richard’s. 

But as a corrective to the ignorance-driven nonsense that dominates so much casual conversation about the United States and Mexico, “Almanaque México Estados Unidos” is nothing short of heroic. Aguayo has put together 310 pages of facts and data about both countries, much of it presented in comparative terms and all of it communicated in an easy-to-follow format.

Its aim is noble: a better cross-border understanding.

Readers of this almanac (and, yes, you really can “read” this one, the cumulative effect of the binational information serving as something like a story arc with character development) will find themselves not just learning what they didn’t know, but also unlearning what they thought they knew.

To wit: Mexico can claim two Nobel Prizes — Octavio Paz in 1990 for literature. And the other? No, it’s not Mario Molina for chemistry in 1995; he accepted the award with his U.S. passport, Aguayo tells us on page 15. In 1982, Alfonso García Robles won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on nuclear disarmament.

The longest river in Mexico, it turns out, is also one of the longest in the United States — the Rio Bravo/Grande (pg. 12). And in the United States? The Missouri, at 4,087 kilometers. (Admit it, you thought it was the Mississippi. So did I.)

Aguayo, a weekly EL UNIVERSAL columnist and frequent television commentator, teaches foreign relations at Mexico City’s Colegio de México. As a prominent pro-democracy activist in the 1990s, he was one of the first to see the merits in accepting the solidarity of U.S. and other foreign non-governmental organizations, at a time when they were still mostly seen as buttinskis. He is, most agree, one of the good guys.

Hence this book. Aguayo begins his introduction with a banal truism — “The relationship between Mexico and the United States has a vital importance for both countries” — and follows up with an understatement: “In spite of that, myths and stereotypes proliferate that must be fought with reliable facts.”

I’m not sure that facts alone will get the job done; they seldom seem to get in the way of a confirmed bigot or know-it-all. But they’re a good starting point, and Aguayo seems to have selected many of his facts for their ability to upset apple carts.

An early section of the almanac consists of polling information on Mexican and U.S. attitudes about themselves and each other. While national newspapers here tell us that the United States is populated almost exclusively of xenophobes who resent the presence of Mexican workers in their country, the information on page 22 of the almanac tells us something else.

While 80 percent of Mexicans believe that scarce Mexican jobs should go to nationals rather than immigrants, less than half (49 percent) of Americans believe that. As Aguayo puts it in one of the short explanatory commentaries he scatters throughout the book, “In Mexico, anti-foreigner sentiment imbues society with intolerance. Americans, on the other hand, are more open to diversity.”

Stereotypes are bulldozed down by facts throughout the book.

Example: Mexico spends not that much less on education as a percentage of GDP as does the United States (5.9 to 7.3) though with considerably inferior results, as Aguayo points out (pg. 263). Another example: The two populations place virtually equal importance on the family with 95 percent of Americans saying it’s “very important” compared to 97 percent of Mexicans (pg. 31).

Aguayo also sees stereotype-busting in what he calls “surprising” figures revealing much more emphasis on the importance of hard work in Mexico than in the United States (pg. 33). “These numbers go against the myth of the Mexican with his sombrero and serape dozing as he leans against a nopal cactus,” he writes.

Actually, that particular stereotype strikes me as too outdated to need busting. In the United States, at least, all but the most off-the-wall extremists seem to recognize the Mexican’s capacity for hard work.

More revealing to me was the data on attitudes toward work itself. Workers in both countries care most about good pay, but it’s only the U.S. side of the ledger that ranks high in importance such job aspects as potential for “achievement” and “interesting work.” Demanding a rewarding, self-fulfilling job, it seems, is a luxury of the richer nations.

Some of the revelations are curious. The percentage of Mexicans who “profess a religion” is higher than the percentage of Mexicans who consider themselves religious (pg. 34), which probably tells us something about the power of a dominant, even if unofficial, Church. And speaking of religion, in the Voltaire-lived-in-vain category we find that a full three quarters of folks in both countries believe there’s a hell. And they’re not referring to the Periférico in the early evening.

The sections on the economies, the militaries, and education are studies in inequality. The Harvard University library, for example, has more than three times the volumes as the top 10 Mexican higher education institutions combined. But it’s worth knowing that the collection at Aguayo’s Colegio de Mexico, a relatively small public university, has one of the best collections in Latin America, with 780,000 volumes (pg. 267).

Shall we talk about the difference in military spending? No need to, but we can assume this is an area where Mexico is proud to lag far behind.

Some of the eye-popping differences between the two nations are less related to the well-known economic disparity. Child-raising is one. In the U.S. independence is considered desirable in children, but not in Mexico (pg. 36). Mexicans, however, value obedience in their children twice as much as Americans. (This is a good time to point out, though Aguayo doesn’t, that this kind of poll information by nature homogenizes varying points of view. Don’t hold anybody in either country to what surveys say they think.)

A shocking instance of cross-border inequality is the prison population. In 2000, there were 633 U.S. citizens in Mexican jails. At about the same time, there were more than 34,000 Mexicans in U.S. jails. Even given the 10-1 difference in immigrant population, that proportion is out of whack by some 600 percent. What’s going on? Here I wish Aguayo’s commentary were expanded. The relatively tiny number of U.S. prisoners in Mexico is due, he writes, “to the efforts that Washington makes to bring its citizens home to carry out their sentences in U.S. prisons.” I can’t help thinking there’s more to the disparity than that.

Any hope of clearing up the ongoing mystery of exactly (or even approximately) how many U.S. citizens live in Mexico is dashed on page 188. “The number is unknown,” Aguayo writes bluntly. We get a U.S. State Department figure of 1,036,300 U.S. citizens “in” Mexico in 2002. INEGI, the Mexican government’s statistics bureau, puts the number at 342,000. But the National Migration Institute issues only a few hundred declarations of landed immigrant status to Americans each year.

The implication is all too obvious. “(U.S. citizens) stay here to live without obtaining the migratory status called for by Mexican laws,” writes Aguayo. “In other words, we’re looking at undocumented U.S. citizens living in Mexico.”

Keep that little tidbit handy for your next discussion of the “crisis” of illegal immigrants.

The almanac isn’t available in English, but even if your Spanish is limited you’ll get plenty out of it. Most of the book consists of names and numbers anyway. Plus you get so much contact information — phone numbers, e-mail addresses and web sites for hundreds of government and non-government organizations in both countries — that it’s worth the 250 or so pesos for the instant rolodex alone.

Not The News: Counting crows

Andrés Manuel López Obrador attracted "hundreds of thousands" to the capital's Zócalo Sunday to mark the first anniversary of the disputed 2006 presidential election.

Or perhaps he only attracted "more than 100,000." Or maybe just "80,000." Or was it "tens of thousands"?

Depends on who's counting. The estimates above are from the Associated Press, La Jornada, New York Times and Reuters, respectively.

Which is right? I've covered dozens of these things, and my best conclusion is that nobody has ever had the slightest idea how many people are there.

I recognize three crowd sizes. A rally either a) fills the Zócalo, b) doesn't fill the Zócalo, or c) overfills the Zócalo, flooding the side streets.

Sometimes, though, the figures do tell you something. I'm thinking of the anti-desafuero event in 2005. Federal District (i.e. PRD) cops put the total at 1.3 million. The feds (i.e. PAN) officially said something like 130,000.

Other than the futility of counting, what did Sunday's event reveal?

It revealed that López Obrador wants to "make sure voters don't forget the election" (Chicago Tribune). It revealed that he is seeking to "reinvigorate his flagging anti-establishment movement" (New York Times). Or it revealed that he is trying "to light (a) fire under (his) movement" (AP).

Those could be three ways of saying the same thing. But Reuters, one of the more consistently AMLO-phobic foreign news services during the campaign, had a different take.

Under the headline "A year after defeat, Mexican leftist fades away," Reuters interprets the rally as indicating that AMLO was "reduced to political artifact Sunday." We know this, the Reuters writer tells us, because "ordinary Mexicans say the leftist former indigenous rights activist has dropped off the political map."

That would come as a surprise to the "one quarter of the population" from which "his movement draws support" (AP). But the press — including the Mexican press — pays attention to celebrity, not disaffected human beings, and especally not disaffected human beings who apparently are not "ordinary."

As news judgment has it, AMLO's no longer hot. President Calderón, on the other hand, has a 65 percent approval rating. Pretty much all the English-language papers pointed out that fab fact as part of their take on Sunday's story as an AMLO-vs-Calderón popularity contest.

None mentioned that a 65 percent approval rating for a Mexican president doesn't mean much. If memory serves, a typical approval rating used to be 100 percent.

Even Vicente Fox, a failed president if there ever was one, consistently polled 65 percent or higher — even during the last pathetic twitches of his sexenio last August.

And come to think of it, how many people came to Calderón's celebration Sunday of his big victory’s first birthday? Here all agree on the attendance figure — zero. Neither the president nor the PAN dared hold one.

But if the story from Sunday really is AMLO's reduction in rank to something less than a deuteragonist, as most of the press chose to play it, then it becomes interesting that in a non-national-election year a non-candidate who holds no office not of his own invention can fill the main square of the capital. Not bad for a has-been.

Could Al Gore have attracted tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands) to any rally a year after his 2000 election defeat? He'd have been grateful if Tipper showed up, even though he had a stronger case than López Obrador — or at least a more widely accepted one — for having been robbed of the presidency.

AMLO isn't in the headlines because he isn't the president, no matter what he calls himself. He can't use the army to boost his ratings, or rush through pre-ordained pension legislation before the affected workers know what's going on.

You can call him an artifact. You can be turned off by his tactics. You can join a lot of PRD supporters who'd like to see the party take a different approach. But the part of Mexico that he represents — or used to represent, if you prefer — isn't going away.

The real story Sunday was about them, not him. Problem is, unless they block a street somewhere, they're under-covered news.

Random Readings Redux: Faux fiesta

Here's a review that ran well over a year ago in the Herald Mexico. It deals with how Americans perceive Mexico and Mexicans. Much of the way the two populations see each other is demonstrably misguided, of course, but much of the false perception is not just the result of ignorance but also the heritage of consciously constructed myths. This is a look at how the newly installed Anglo leaders of Los Angeles re-created the city's Mexican past (more often called the Spanish past) in order to prevent Mexicans and their descendants from having a role in the city's future.


Whitewashed Adobe:
The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of its Mexican Past
By WIlliam Deverell
University of California Press (2004)

Romanced to Death
BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT

That U.S. expansionism in the 1840s cost Mexico half its territory is something Mexican commentators need no coaxing to bring up. Outsiders, in fact, are struck by how often they do bring it up. Regrettable as the Treaty of Guadalupe obviously was from the Mexican point of view, why the need to repeatedly remind the world of it more than a century and a half later?

“Whitewashed Adobe,” California historian William Deverell’s relentless examination of Mexicans’ fate under U.S. rule, suggests some answers. The book details how, starting in the post-war 1850s, the new Anglo-Los Angeles elite socially engineered the conquered Mexican population right out of the city’s future.

What we also see, however, is how the strategies for doing that — especially the one-two punch of discrimination and romanticization — allowed the dominant society to effectively freeze Mexicans in time and space. Such “cultural cryogenics” (Deverell’s phrase) made it easy to ascribe to all Mexicans general character traits, and Deverell’s list of the historical stereotypes sounds as up-to-date as a weather report: “childlike, simple, quick to anger, close to nature, primitive, hard-working, lazy, superstitious, possibly criminal.”

In other words, relegating the Mexican population in California to a colorful, sleepy “Spanish” past not only marginalized the longtime area inhabitants as the rest of Los Angeles grew, but also created what Deverell calls “an Anglo cultural stance toward Mexicans.” That harmful stance persists today, complicating L.A.’s transition to a multicultural metropolis. It also continues to trouble U.S-Mexico interactions.

Most Mexicans today understand on one level or another that Americans’ self-serving vision of them — the ongoing “cultural stance” — is in a large part an inheritance of the U.S.-Mexican war and its aftermath. So one explanation of the still burning obsession with the consequences of that war might be that it’s still doing damage.

Another explanation is that the U.S.-Mexico war didn’t end with the takeover of California and other former Mexican lands in 1848. Though Anglo settlers in the past had acknowledged and even adopted the ways of the old Californios, once in charge they would have none of it. Eliminating Mexican rule was not the whole battle. Mexican influence, Mexican culture, and as far as possible the Mexican presence itself, all had to go too.

Terror and violence were the initial methods of choice. The Mexican-American war morphed into a war against Mexican-Americans. “The bloody 1850s sent Los Angeles spinning with such ethnic hatred that it has yet to fully recover,” Deverell tells us. The strategy, combined with Anglo in-migration, worked well. L.A.’s population went from 80 percent Mexican to 20 percent in one generation.

After the newly arrived railroads converted Los Angeles into an 1880s boomtown, the city boosters turned to subtler tactics for keeping ethnic Mexicans down while simultaneously disguising southern California’s violent recent past. They chose obliteration through appropriation, a clever plan that has colored U.S. perceptions of ethnic Mexicans for more than a century. It was the remaking of a Mexican past that the book’s subtitle alludes to, and Deverell’s penetrating analysis of the phenomenon is what makes “Whitewashed Adobe” so fascinating for anybody who cares about the overlapping story of Mexico and California.

Essentially, the Mexican presence was turned into a historical pageant, a nostalgic fiction drenched in the romance of missions, rodeos, dances and festivals. The notion was wildly popular among the city’s transplanted residents; it gave them an unthreatening regional identity free of any effect on their day-to-day lives.

At the same time, it allowed the elite to contrast Anglo progress with pleasant but sleepy Spanish and Mexican periods. With things Mexican safely relegated to a long-gone past, flesh and blood Mexicans were now relics, virtual non-entities assigned to unsanitary barrios near the flood-prone Los Angeles River and to low-wage manual labor.

Deverell explains developments not through generalities but by looking into specific manifestations of the whitewashing of the region’s Mexican-ness. Two fascinating examples — the “typical” La Fiesta de Los Angeles in the 1890s and the quaint, sentimental Mission Play starting in 1912 — are described in intricate detail, perhaps too much detail for many readers. But we get the picture: “From the vantage of a century later, La Fiesta looks like the party white Los Angeles threw to celebrate the triumph of Manifest Destiny in the Far West.”

Deverell isn’t of the school that requires history to read like a novel. He has a point to make, and he eschews entertainment in favor of countless contemporary source citations to bring it home. But he does have a deft touch for passing along, without comment, particularly telling quotes by the beneficiaries of the whitewashing.

In a chapter on the L.A. area’s biggest brickyard, where the all-Mexican and Mexican-American workforce was confined to company housing and starvation wages, Deverell quotes a newspaper reporter attending the annual brickyard Christmas party for the workers’ children: “To see those merry-faced, brown-skinned youngsters carrying off their treasures ... is to get a new light on the melting pot of America.”

“Whitewashed Adobe” stops at the onset of World War II, after which the stirrings of Chicano political activism began to change the equation. But the U.S. “cultural stance” continues, played out on a broader, NAFTA-era stage.

As I read “Whitewashed Adobe,” I kept thinking about two movies. Mexican director Paul Leduc’s subtle and political biopic of Frida Kahlo screened for the Motion Picture Academy of America as a Best Foreign Picture hopeful in 1985. The huge theater nearly emptied by the time it was half over.

In contrast, some two decades later, the Hollywood version was a box-office success. The Mexican movie was infinitely better, not to mention more accurate. But the Hollywood movie delivered the Mexico that plays best stateside: bright colors, romance and pretty people speaking in charmingly accented English. It reflected a U.S. cultural stance 150 years in the making.

Commentary: Lay, government, lay

With religious leaders feeling their oats and a pro-Church party in power, the push for injecting religion into government isn't letting up. The following lightly abridged opinion piece could have been written yesterday, but it appeared in the Herald Mexico on February 19, 2006. At the time, Vicente Fox was president and Carlos Abascal was Interior (Gobernación) secretary. Abascal, along with Fox and lame-duck PAN party leader Manuel Espino, is still a key figure in the PAN's religious-right faction.

Have Faith, Will Govern
BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT

Not many of social and cultural critic Carlos Monsiváis’s observations over the decades have had more impact than his January 31 warning about new fissures in Mexico’s already-cracked wall between church and state. Red flags about this have been going up with increasing frequency since Vicente Fox and the National Action Party (PAN) re-introduced religion as a governing posture, if not tool. But Monsivais’s speech marked a turning point in the escalating battle.

One reason Monsiváis’s own red flag is getting more attention than others’ is because it was raised rather unexpectedly as the major theme of his acceptance speech after receiving one of the few literary prizes he hadn’t already claimed, the National Award for Literature. What’s more, the speech was delivered at Los Pinos during a gala awards ceremony attended by President Fox himself (who showed his own knack for barbed rejoinders by closing the festivities with, “God bless you”).

Another reason is that Monsiváis named names. The name he spent the most time on was none other then Carlos Abascal, the former labor secretary whom Fox selected to close out the sexenio as Interior (Gobernación) Secretary after Santiago Creel resigned to run for president.

Monsiváis indicted Abascal not so much based on his (and many other panistas’) activism on specific issues like the morning-after pill, but on his more far-reaching philosophical statements that reveal a decidedly theological approach to organizing the state.


Monsiváis also has cited Abascal’s contributing role in his father’s 1997 book skewering Benito Juárez as the original cause of such atrocities as civil marriage, tolerance of protestant sects, and the advent of public lay schools (or in the senior Abascal’s words, the “terrorism” of “atheist education”).

In his Los Pinos speech, Monsiváis focused on Abascal’s statement a few days earlier at something called the World Ethical Forum. Abascal’s words, translated: “It is necessary to reclaim ... religion as the space for promoting the link between the human being and his transcendent destiny, in order to give meaning to the ethical values that comprise his daily life.”

Not without good reason, Monsiváis finds it disturbing that a high government official considers it “necessary” to promote religion as the basis for deciding what’s ethically appropriate. Of course, many people do base their ethical judgments exclusively on religion, or think they do. But they’re not in charge of the internal policies of a constitutionally secular government. Abascal is.

Abascal’s substantive defense was that he was misunderstood: “What I said is that in the ethical formation of its citizens, it’s important for the state to turn to all its sources of strength — the family, the schools, business, political leaders, and the churches.” In interviews, the secretary stressed that he had no intention of undermining the nation’s traditional church-state separation, and that indeed he’d done plenty to ensure that the clergy stays out of politics.

Monsiváis wasn’t buying it. “He cites what he didn’t say to respond to criticism of what he did say,” he said. “What he said is that only religion gives meaning to ethical values.”

Abascal’s political defense was less conciliatory: “I respect those fundamentalists who accuse me of fundamentalism.”

The implication was that Monsiváis, in criticizing Abascal, was being intolerant — if not of religion itself, then of those who hold views about it differing from his. The Catholic Church leadership, in one of its publications, quickly backed up Abascal, accusing Monsiváis of “trying to lock the clergy back in the cloister.”

Monsiváis clearly meant no such thing, but the counterattack was still an effective move, right out of the Karl Rove playbook. Turn the tables on your opponent by attacking his strength with a catchy soundbite. It doesn’t matter if the accusation is ludicrous, such as putting a “fundamentalist” label on a defender of religious freedom. What matters is changing the terms of the debate.

But Monsiváis seems to be less interested in winning small political battles as he is in re-energizing respect for what a secular state really means. It’s not a mere negative, the absence of religious establishment. Rather, it’s a positive statement of a people’s commitment to free inquiry, individual rights, religious freedom, and democratic government.

In his acceptance speech, Monsiváis paid homage to that commitment, and those from previous generations who “bequeathed us their faith in reason, their exercise of freedom of expression and belief, their extraordinary creative powers, their love of culture, art and science, and their humanistic and democratic impulses.”

Some wonder if Monsiváis and others aren’t overreacting. Mexico’s laicismo wasn’t decreed by founding fathers; it was fought for over several bloody decades. That high price helped establish it all the more firmly in Mexico’s political tradition, and it’s doubtful that a minority of politicians could succeed it toppling it.

Perhaps. But turn on CNN. The world is hardly racing in the right direction. And here in Mexico there’s no doubt that some people in high places see no harm and much benefit in squeezing religion into the halls of government. That, Monsiváis is saying, is a threat, even if they ultimately fail.

For Mexico to advance, secular government can’t just survive. It needs to thrive.

Between Us: What's The News?

Here's most of an ad that's been running stateside:

"The News, an English language daily based in Mexico City is relaunching
this year. We are looking for editors and reporters to join us in this
exciting new venture. Editors need a minimum of five years experience,
reporters at least three years. Knowledge and interest in Mexico is a
decided advantage. Fluency in Spanish is preferred. InDesign knowledge a
plus."

People involved with this "exciting new venture" (or who want to be involved) have been effecting a self-important secrecy about the project, as though it were the local equivalent of the Manhattan Project. So there's a lot of unconfirmed hearsay floating around. But the ad tells us a few things:

1. There will be an English-language daily in Mexico sometime this year, barring a last-minute pullout.

2. It will be a re-incarnation of The News, the bland tabloid that the O'Farrill family published for more than 50 years through 2002.

3. Management is recruiting outside the country, asking for more experienced journalists than the old News usually hired.

4. Management considers knowledge of Mexico to be an "advantage" rather than a necessity, and Spanish fluency is "preferred" rather than required.

5. Whoever writes their ads needs some work on hyphen and comma use, as well as noun-verb number agreement.

We don't know yet whether the new News will be like the old News. That will depend on the publication's approach to some variables. Such as:

Independence: A conservative slant is the prerogative of the publisher and isn't necessarily a quality-killer. But the old News was so compromised by its pro-government bias that its credibility was close to non-existent.

Quality: There's no polite way to put it — the old News was a porquería, a very amateurish endeavor. Gross mistakes were common, and a lot of the locally produced copy made very little sense. Will the new News give us what we deserve?

Professionalism: Experienced journalists rarely worked at the old News, unless their experience was entirely at the News itself. The career journalists who slipped in were watched closely as potential troublemakers, and prevented from having an impact on the product itself.

Mission: Since the paper will surely not have a staff large enough to cover "all" the news, it should decide what it will focus on. If it does, it will be a rarity among such publications here. That's because most English-language efforts have chosen -- or been forced — to fill up their pages with whatever they could get their hands on. They’ve had no journalistic purpose other than to be in English.

(An exception is the monthly Inside Mexico, which knows exactly what it wants to do: serve as a sort of house organ for the English-language "community" by emphasizing service articles and people pieces. They do a pretty good job, but that approach isn't substantive enough for a daily newspaper.)

The old News had no criteria for what to put in the paper, but lots for what to leave out — controversy, opposition viewpoints, intelligent comment. Which leads us to the final variable:

Intelligence level: For some reason, there's an assumption among media heavies that English speakers, because they are less well-versed about Mexican society, need to read at the level of six-year-olds. Newspapers by definition are published for the common reader, but the common Anglophone reader in Mexico is not necessarily the boob that these publishers think.

The leader in this department is not a written publication but the radio program Living in Mexico. I'm an admirer of Ana María Salazar and I'm glad there's a news and commentary program available in English. But I'm telling you, the show is so dumbed down I feel like I'm listening to Barney the Dinosaur.

The Herald Mexico was far from perfect in this regard, especially in the entertainment and culture section, but it condescended considerably less than its predecessors. So maybe things are moving in the right direction. Will the new News treats us like intelligent, curious adults?

Or perhaps more to the point, will it be capable of doing that?

You can ask them yourself. The contact address is: publicrelations@thenews.com.mx

Let me know if you get an answer.

Rumblings: Abort mission

José Luis Soberanes, the national human rights czar for most of the PAN era, has officially crossed the line from "controversial" to "embattled."

He seems to like it that way.

His samurai mentality should be an asset for a National Human Rights Commission president. The job description, after all, is to advise government officials when their actions violate somebody or everybody's human rights. Since government officials seldom appreciate this kind of advice, the ombudsman (as the position is often called) has to be ready to rumble on occasion.

Soberanes can get down with the best of them.

In recent weeks he's torn off letters blasting anyone who dares to criticize him in print — including Carlos Monsiváis and (through an underling) the UNAM law professor John Ackerman. Earlier, he scolded former top federal cop Eduardo Medina Mora for ignoring his recommendations.

He also invited the growing chorus of critics to "pull up a chair and get comfortable" because he never, ever, is going to resign.

But here's what's noteworthy about the fighting side of José Luis Soberanes: With some exceptions, such as the now forgotten Medina Mora incident, his offensive has not been aimed at the usual target of a federal human rights president, i.e. the federal government. Instead, he's been going after the critics of the Calderón administration and of the military that Calderón commands.

It's gotten to the point where non-government human rights groups, the major opposition party (the PRD), and a host of commentators such as Monsiváis and Ackerman are convinced that Soberanes is doing the government's bidding — exactly the opposite of what the head of the supposedly autonomous CNDH is supposed to do.

"He has placed himself at the service of Calderón," said UNAM political science professor emeritus Octavio Rodríguez Araujo. "He has usurped functions that don't correspond to him."

Even early in his tenure Soberanes showed signs of, shall we say, an unorthodox set of priorities. Once he claimed that secular public schools violated the human rights of children by denying them religious instruction. The statement was baffling, but it served to clarify where he stands on the church-state divide and why some legislators tried to make his alleged Opus Dei membership an issue at his confirmation hearing.

Critics base their current concern mostly on two recent actions. In April, Soberanes issued an opinion that soldiers had not raped an elderly indigenous woman in the Veracruz mountains as she had claimed with her dying words.

It's not unusual for an ombudsman to find that a human rights violation had not taken place. But it is unusual for him to exhume a body to oversee a second autopsy that conveniently fails to find the semen traces that the first autopsy did find, and then inform the president, before issuing any report, that the victim had died of gastritis.

Anyone inclined to believe that the CNDH was helping Calderón protect the military now had more reason to believe it.
More unsettling for the nation's political stability in the coming months was Soberanes' move to challenge the Federal District's recently liberalized abortion law before the Supreme Court. The court will hear the case. That guarantees, regardless of the outcome, a full future schedule of highly emotional political battles carried out in all kinds of venues, including the streets.

Soberanes had no business getting involved with the DF abortion law. That was essentially confirmed by a recent Supreme Court finding that the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), and by extension all autonomous quasi-governmental bodies, including the CNDH, have no authority to challenge legislation before the Supreme Court.

But Soberanes' action has served its purpose by framing the abortion issue as a human rights concern -- not women's rights to control their bodies but the "human rights" of the "product of conception."
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court challenge will be led by the other plaintiff, the federal Attorney General. That person is none other than Eduardo Medina Mora.

Why are Calderón and the PAN bothering with the abortion fight? Part of it is ideological. Most panistas are staunchly pro-Church and maybe even genuinely anti-abortion. They don't want to see the liberalization trend spread outside the PRD-controlled DF.

But the real reason, as usual, is politics. Though most capital residents support a woman's right to choose, the nation as a whole is pretty much split 50-50. But those who would deny a woman that right to choose feel stronger about the issue than pro-choice voters. With the PRI now in the pro-choice camp, the PAN is in a position to own that hard-line 50 percent.

For the PRD, Soberanes's behavior confirms their contention that the nation's institutions have been compromised. From their point of view, the 2006 presidential election exposed the post-2003 IFE and the Electoral Tribunal as accomplices in a plot to keep them out of Los Pinos, now and forever. Now the CNDH is helping a PAN effort to prevent the PRD from enacting reforms even where they do slip into office.

You can accept or deny the validity of that thinking. But it exists, and it's worrisome. An opposition that feels it has no recourse but the streets will take to the streets.

That's what we're all trying to avoid, isn't it?

Commentary: Consider it an insult

Porrúa, a major Mexican publisher, and the Tampico city government is releasing a compilation of works by poets and short story writers who have won the Efraín Huerta National Literature Prize during the 25 years of that prestigious award's existence.

One of the featured prize-winners is Sergio Witz, a Campeche poet who was at the center of a revealing little episode two years ago. Here, from the Oct. 23, 2005 Herald Mexico, is an opinion piece about what was going down at the time.

Insult a Symbol, Go to Jail
BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT

At the fantasy level, there's something to be said for selective punishment of certain poets. Anyone who's been trapped at an aggressively discordant poetry slam, or tricked into sitting through a bottom-numbing reading by some self-indulgent misanthrope falsely billed as an emerging talent, can imagine appropriate sentences.

But what's happening to a Campeche literature professor named Sergio Hernán Witz Rodríguez is no fantasy. He's on trial for writing a poem. Witz, who really is a legitimate, published poet, is in trouble because his piece “Invitación (La patria entre mierda)” is accused of “insulting national symbols.”

The particular national symbol Witz has supposedly insulted is the granddaddy of all national symbols — the flag. The actual insult involves a reference to mingling said symbol with human liquid waste matter.

Now, urine-soaking has achieved something close to cliché status in artistic circles. In recent years, artists have given saviors, fetuses, sharks and assorted body parts the pee treatment, and the worst they've suffered for it has been the scorn of the self-righteous and perhaps some pulled funding.

Witz, on the other hand, is looking at six months to four years of hard time just for putting the idea in writing.

That's because his literary wet-flag contest allegedly violates Article 191 of the federal penal code, which prohibits any insult (ultraje) to the flag or its insignia, “in word or in deed.” The law's actually quite clear: Insult the flag, go to jail.

What's less clear is how such a law can stay on the books when the Mexican Constitution explicitly guarantees freedom of speech. Article 6 states unequivocally, “The manifestation of ideas will not be the object of any judicial or administrative inquiry ...” And the opening sentence of Article 7 leaves no doubt: “The liberty to write and publish about any matter is inviolable.” The only limits are a respect for individuals' private lives, and for public morality and peace.

The inconsistency between the free speech ideals of the Constitution and the seemingly outmoded restrictions of Article 191 is what brought the matter to the Supreme Court earlier this month. Witz was seeking an amparo, meaning in this case that he wanted the charges against him dropped on Constitutional free speech grounds. The case gave the court an opportunity to strengthen freedom of expression in Mexico — something the Fox administration has often bragged about doing — and at the same time excise rules about insults from the law books and put them into the etiquette books where they belong.

But the five-justice panel saw things differently. By a 3-2 vote they upheld the law, re-established its limits on free speech, and sent Witz back to Campeche to face trial. To get around the free speech issue, the majority cited, among other things, a clause in another article giving lawmakers the faculty to regulate the use of national symbols.

That and some other excerpts from the majority opinion reveal a lot about persistent Mexican priorities. We are told that the work “doesn't just injure the flag, but the nation itself.” Also, an insult like this one to the flag “affects the security and stability of our nation.”

As a poet, Witz must harbor mixed emotions about the hubbub. On the negative side, every commentator, pro or con, has gone out of their way to pronounce the poem a bad one; it's even been officially designated a “pseudo-poem” in court texts. That's gotta hurt.

On the other hand, one of the leading minds of Mexican jurisprudence, Justice Olga Sánchez Cordero, ascribes to Witz's modest poetic effort the capacity to destabilize the entire country. How many poets can claim to write so powerfully?

Legal justifications aside, the ruling seems more political than anything else. The three majority justices clearly came down on the side of nationalism in its perceived struggle to survive against “international” ideas like freedom of expression and global engagement. Mexico's peculiar brand of ultra-defensive nationalism is less a manifestation of the national character than a manufactured creation of post-Revolution thinkers who saw a political use for it. But whatever needs it may have served in the 20th century, it's seen by many to be a liability today.

Judging from published quotes, challenging reflexive nationalism (as opposed to sincere love of country) was precisely the purpose of Witz's poem. As poets do, he used bold imagery to make his case. How well he pulled it off is beside the point. How “insulting” his text may be is also beside the point. What matters is that the force of the law is being used to punish him for commenting on a pressing social topic of our day — the role of nationalism and nationalistic symbols.

That's about as clear a case of repressing speech as one can imagine, yet Witz's plight hasn't caused much of a stir. PEN, the writer's guild, wrote a letter supporting his cause, and commentators such as José Antonio Crespo in El Universal and Enrique Canales in Reforma have pointed out the absurdity of the proceedings.

But many journalists remember not-so-distant times when writing negative information about sitting politicians was dangerous to one's career, if not one's health. To them, apparently, a rarely enforced written law like Article 191 is nothing compared to former unwritten laws that were enforced harshly.

The man in the street isn't too worked up about the issue either. Most Mexicans, like most citizens of any country, don't like having their flag insulted, and protecting others' right to do so is not a high priority for them. Those who should be pointing out the necessity of defending unpopular speech — that is, politicians — don't see much of an upside to it right now. The case for tolerance doesn't fit well in a 30-second TV spot, but 30 seconds is just long enough to get yourself branded as a proponent of flag-insulting.

Meanwhile, the hamster-wheel hopelessness of the issue is dizzying. How can the desirability of revering national symbols be debated if the negative side of the argument is illegal?

The take-home lesson here is that commitment to a noble ideal requires more courage than many people are willing to invest — not just in Mexico but around the world. As always, supporting free expression in theory is easier than defending a specific application of it. Sergio Witz is an unlikely martyr who never asked for the job.

Random Readings Redux: Mexico mod

Rubén Gallo is a sharp and original academic observer of current developments in Mexican art and literature. This review of his book "Mexican Modernity" appeared in The Herald Mexico in 2006.

Mexican Modernity:
The Avant Garde and the Technological Revolution
By Rubén Gallo
The MIT Press (2005)


BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT
Mexico can do something most countries cannot, which is date its passage into modernity to a specific year. By 1920, the civil war had calmed and the new revolutionary leaders were eager to justify their existence by moving the nation into the 20th century — a few decades behind schedule, to be sure, but with dispatch and considerable success.

“Whereas Mexico City in 1920 was a sleepy town pockmarked by the repeated assaults of rifle-wielding caudillos,” Princeton Latin American literature professor Rubén Gallo reminds us, “by 1940 it had become a bustling metropolis full of contrasts.”

But the noun in the title of Gallo’s engrossing and eye-opening “Mexican Modernity” has little to do with government programs or population growth. It refers to the artistic revolutions and social shifts that marked the first half of the last century in much of the world. It is the modernity of James Joyce and Henry Ford, Walter Benjamin and Pablo Picasso.

Gallo’s thesis is that this modernity grabbed ahold of Mexico in the 1920s, and changed the way Mexicans saw the world around them. The rise of avant-garde sensibilities took place not just in conjunction with the belated arrival of machine-age technology, but because of it. It wasn’t an abstraction or a leisurely evolution, but a revolution carried out with the aid of five specific and surprising (to the uninitiated reader) technological advances.

How surprising? Consider:

The conditioned response to a requested list of factors influencing the Mexican character usually might include the corn plant, the mask, the Conquest, the Virgin and the family. But according to Gallo, those folkloric standbys were modified, if not replaced, by the circa 1920 advent of the camera, the typewriter, the radio, the large stadium, and ... cement. Yes, cement.

The towering art world figure in the first half of the 20th century was, of course, Diego Rivera. His role in Mexican Modernity is as an early and prominent advocate of technology as liberation, both artistic and social. In Gallo’s book, we meet up with Rivera not in Coyoacán or the Alameda, but in Detroit, where he impressed the entire industry there with his knowledge of auto mechanics and production.

Rivera’s work was the mirror image of the government’s simultaneous commitment to a forward-looking physical progress and a backward-looking makeover of the national identity. His murals celebrated new machines, but the tools he used to create them — fresco painting, for the most part — were no different than the previous century’s.

The camera, however, offered an entirely new way of representing the world. Photography was hardly novel in 1920, just more widely available to the masses. As an artistic medium it was still largely unexploited.

True, there were prominent “artistic” photographers in Mexico City during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and the Revolution that followed. Many of them, such as transplanted Germans Hugo Brehme and Wilhelm Kahlo, were widely admired (though the latter’s place in art history would be eclipsed by his painter daughter, Frida). But these photographers, who specialized in portraiture, used the camera to produce works that looked like paintings, and paintings from the previous century at that.

This was intentional. Mexican portrait painters were almost ashamed of the camera’s automatic reproduction of whatever it was pointed at. They chose instead to manipulate the photographic image to resemble painting. The muralist David Álfaro Siqueiros scoffed at these pictorialist photos as “falsifications of primitive Italians.”

It took two foreigners to open up photography’s modernist possibilities in Mexico. The first, U.S. photographer Edward Weston, was already a legend when he arrived in Mexico City in 1923. He brought with him a commitment to exploiting the camera’s mechanical nature rather than concealing it. Weston and his camera let Mexico see itself with new eyes, so to speak.

Still, Weston was the opposite of Rivera in that he used a modern medium (the camera) to depict pre-modern Mexican themes (the rural and the traditional). Technology, in Weston’s view, was “spoiling” Mexico. He was neither the first nor last American who would prefer to deny Mexicans their modernity in the interest of his own aesthetic preferences.

It fell to another transplanted foreigner — the Italian-born Tina Modotti, a disciple of Weston — to marry the modern artistic medium with modern subject matter. Essentially, Modotti spent the 1920s wandering around Mexico City taking pictures of the technological wonders of the age, including telephone lines and industrial complexes, typewriters and radios, stadiums and concrete government buildings.

Gallo makes a case for Modotti as the mother of Mexican modernism. She was certainly the first to follow the Soviet critic Aleksandr Rodchenko’s dictum that “only the camera is capable of reflecting contemporary life.” Modotti and her camera could show us unexpected beauty in a mesh of telephone wires shot from below, injecting the scene with a sense of possibility.

Gallo takes us through his line-up of the tools of Mexican modernism chapter by chapter. The typewriter, like the camera, was not new in 1920, but still mostly limited to the office workplace. Authors and poets were slow to adopt the Oliver, Remington or Underwood as a tool of the trade. As late as the 1970s, Carlos Fuentes could tell an interviewer that he wrote standing up in front of a drafting table, putting pen to paper.

Still, Gallo assures us that the advent of mechanical writing changed Mexican writing permanently, without offering much in the way of example. He does deliver an anecdote exposing the inevitability of typewritten manuscripts. Mariano Azuela, an anti-modernist, had written into his great novel of the Revolution, “Los de abajo” (The Underdogs), a scene in which a band of revolutionaries literally, as well as symbolically, smash a looted Oliver to pieces. But to finish his novel on time, Azuela had to cross to El Paso and type it out on a borrowed Oliver.

Commercial radio came to Mexico in the 1920s with much fanfare, and plenty of direct involvement by modernist artists. Indeed, the first Mexico City radio station was launched by a literary magazine called “El Universal Ilustrado,” which published work by experimental writers and artists, including Modotti.

The first words spoken on the inaugural program were by the avant-garde poet Manuel Maples Arce. From that moment on, texts abounded that were either about radio, meant to be read on the radio, or influenced by radio.

And then there's cement. Cement, a known adhesive since antiquity, is simply rock mixed with water. But cement in its modern form of reinforced concrete not only changed Mexico physically but also provided it with a new architectural language. And unlike cameras, typewriters and radios, cement was everywhere to be seen in the 1920s, its endless forms duly recorded by Modotti.

Today we see the excesses and ill use of concrete as a visual blight. But as it flourished in 1920s Mexico City, the shape-shifting possibilities of this “magic powder” turned Mexico City into a mecca of functionalism — the form-follows-function school of architecture.

The post-Modotti camera loved cement as well. A young lensman named Manuel Álvarez Bravo, later considered Mexico’s greatest photographer, made his name with studies of cement, including the now-famous “Tríptico cemento” that juxtaposes a pile of loose cement with a concrete wall.

Reinforced concrete also made possible the large stadiums that the revolutionary government began to build in the 1920s. Bullrings had been around, but they were nothing like the massive new complexes designed to hold tens of thousands of people.

As he does throughout the book, Gallo helps us think about familiar objects in new ways, a modernist undertaking if there ever was one. “The monumental stadium gave rise to a most unusual form of representation,” he writes, “(which were) mass spectacles performed by thousands of bodies lined up in geometrical formations.” As always, Modotti was there to record these geometrical formations for us, though without the bodies.

One of the “mass spectacles” that took place in concrete arenas was the inauguration of new presidents. Four of them (Calles, Portes Gil, Ortíz Rubio and Cárdenas) received the presidential sash in the National Stadium between its completion in 1924 and the year 1934. The stadium held 60,000 souls, a sixth of Mexico City’s population when it was conceived by Education Secretary José Vasconcelos in 1921.

It was demolished in 1950. “Today all that remains of Vasconcelos’s National Stadium is a statue of a javelin thrower that stands, alone and out of context, on a corner across from the Multifamiliar Juárez,” Gallo tells us. “Almost no one remembers the stadium, and Colonia Roma’s residents often wonder why the streets around the housing complex are shaped like a giant horseshoe.”

"Mexican Modernity" is an unexpected pleasure to read (and to look at, with its generous collection of photographs and illustrations). Gallo necessarily writes in the language of the art critic, but his prose is snoot-free, friendly, and never tedious.

For many, Gallo’s book will be a salutary corrective to their exclusively folkloric view of Mexican art and society. For everybody, it will be a memorable tour through territory at once familiar and unknown, led by an able and knowledgeable guide.

Commentary: Latino culture? What's that?

Bear with us for a few more days of summer re-runs, in late spring no less. My guess is that most Mexicalpan visitors missed these Herald Mexico pieces the first time around. Today's encore presentation, still fresh as the day it was published (January 22, 2006), deals with a subject that won't be going away anytime soon.

Latino Culture? What’s That?
BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT

One of the first things Ana said when we finally firmed up the decision to move ourselves and the kids back home to beautiful downtown Naucalpan after an ill-advised three-year stint stateside was the following: “It’ll be nice to be a Mexican again instead of a ‘Lah-teen-uh,’ whatever that is.”

I’ve never been either, but I understood her frustration. Being assigned to an ethnic category not of your choosing (Latina) at the expense of your natural self-identity (Mexican) must cloy by degrees of magnitude progressing over the years from mildly disconcerting to grating.

The notion of a brand of human beings named Latinos is a U.S. invention of necessity. Just as African-Americans or Asian-Americans face unique problems as participants in a pan-ethnic U.S. society, so do those U.S. residents of Latin American descent or of recent Latin American residence. It certainly made political sense for common victims of a certain style of historical discrimination to unite their efforts, even if all they have in common are two major languages and a hemisphere of origin.

“Latin-American-American” being an unwieldy term mixing two meanings of the word “American,” the “Latino,” aka “Hispanic,” was born. The terms are geographically challenged. Italians, even those from Latium, don’t count as Latinos in this sense of the word, nor do the Spanish qualify as “Hispanic,” though they're often confused as such. Strictly speaking, the words make no literal sense as used.

Not only that, the creation of an impossibly broad ethnic category like Latino has had a backfire effect, creating for some an even more impossibly broad category. As the political scientist and former Latin Americanist for Jimmy Carter’s National Security Council Robert Pastor once pointed out, this strange partitioning trend “has melted together ethnic groups like Poles, Jews, Irish and sometimes even blacks into a new undifferentiated mass called ‘Anglos.’”

I thought of this recently when some market-manufactured Mexican starlet (I forget which one; all those midriffs start looking the same after a while) mentioned Lenny Kravitz as her favorite “Anglo” musician, a tag that might surprise the African-American singer/guitarist.

The other day I received an e-mail from a reader commenting on my interpretation of Mexican politics “from an Anglo point of view.” I took it as a compliment, but I wonder how my Irish and Scottish ancestors would feel about their distant descendant being assigned to a tribe they fought for centuries.

But the etymological fuzziness isn’t the real problem. After all, English uses plenty of geographically ambiguous terms — “Indian” and the aforementioned “American” come to mind — but we seldom have trouble understanding them correctly in context. If “Latino” is used basically to mean Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking (or descendants of same) and “Anglo” means everybody else, then so be it. As already pointed out, it’s often politically useful to divide the U.S. population that way.
It’s also a marketing gold mine.

Where we run into problems is when the Latino label is used either too specifically (that is, to homogenize individuals) or too widely (beyond the U.S. border). There is debate among Chicanos and Mexicans in the United States about the appropriateness of terms like Latino or Hispanic, both vis-à-vis each other and in absolute terms.

Some object to the Eurocentrism of the labels, which leaves no room for the indigenous element. “Mexican! Not Hispanic. Not Latino. Stop the cultural castration,” read a storefront sign several years ago at the East Los Angeles office of an organization called Mexica Movement. It may still be there.

But even granting (perhaps too generously) that Indian blood is assumed in the term Latino, it’s still troubling to hear the word applied instead of Mexican, when the person in question is indeed Mexican. It’s the tyranny of the facile generalization. “Latino,” in fact, seems to be turning into just one more manifestation of the outdated and never-valid U.S. perception that Americans of Northern European descent are somehow the norm . . . and then there’s everybody else, available to be grouped according to their relationship with the norm. (Remember the term “World Music?” Same thinking.)

It never occurs to some Americans, then, that most Mexicans don’t think of themselves as Latinos. Sure, they recognize their bond with the rest of Latin America, but they certainly don’t think of themselves as essentially the same as Brazilians or Argentines or Dominicans. A Mexican looks out his window, he sees Mexicans, not Latinos.

The strategic value of the Latino cause in the United States has long been eclipsed by the Latino consumer category promoted by those who see riches in diluting the popular culture of each individual nation and selling the resulting gruel to the “Latino market.” And trust me, they’re not thinking much about Pedro Infante or Real de Catorce (the band or the place). They’re loading up the sappy soap operas, the schlock variety shows and the flavor-of-the-month pre-fab pop stars that have nothing to do with any Mexican or even “Latino,” tradition.

Forgotten is the rich Mexican popular culture that spawned a golden age of film and a canon of popular songs to rival any output on Earth, and is still multiplying today, under the radar. In its place is the dumbed-down pablum churned out by an amoral clique of greedy bottom-feeders with hegemonic control of the entertainment media on both sides of the border.

But no matter, it’s all “Latino culture” now. That’s how the marketeers define it, so that’s what it is. “Latino” may just end up superseding “Mexican,” even in Mexico.