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| When I used to teach U.S./ Mexican relations at the University of Minnesota, there was always a student who would brush his or her hand in the air dismissively and pronounce, sometimes with a smirk, other times with a look of genuine concern and frustration: “Why don’t the Mexicans care for their own people? Why do Mexicans put up with so much corruption?”
In response I would acknowledge that Mexican history is indeed rife with examples of government corruption. I would then embark on a semester-long project to erase two areas of ignorance, common to so many of us educated in the United States.
1. Ignorance of the United States. The comments assume that Mexican corruption and inequality make it a society apart; that its history can not be compared to that of one’s own, in this case, the United States. There is a racist assumption here: that what is wrong with Mexico is cultural. But mostly there is a profound ignorance of U.S. history. As we make our way through the semester and through the decades, comparing and contrasting the U.S. and Mexican experiences, the parallels are astonishing. From the U.S.-Mexican War when both governments were motivated by a desire to conquer indigenous groups and both woefully mistreated their conscripts, to the Bush/Fox administration under which privatization is the watchword, and electoral victory at any cost is the practice.
Overlaying these parallels is a consistent tale of robbery. The United States government, in cahoots with big business, steals Mexican land, oil, food, and workers, impoverishing the Mexican majority, depleting resources for generations to come, while a tiny Mexican elite holds the door open and shares in the profits. One hundred and sixty years ago Mexico lost half its territory to the United States. Today Halliburton and other oil interests wait eagerly for the new president, Felipe Calderon, to fulfill his promise to privatize PEMEX, Mexico’s state-owned oil company, cutting the heart out of Mexico’s economic sovereignty.
2. Ignorance of Mexican social movements. The student’s remarks also reveal a common false assumption about the Mexican people; that they are docile, willing to put up with ever greater amounts of corruption. It has to do with conflating the Mexican government with Mexican people, and with a misunderstanding of how in Mexico, as in the rest of the world, class interests usually trump national ones. Then there is our basic ignorance of the remarkable history of Mexican resistance. Not that we have learned much about U.S. resistance either. When we study both together we can see that here too, there are historical parallels. At the end of the 19th century U.S. workers and farmers rebelled against railroads conglomerates, many of whom were the same companies and individuals that gained control of Mexican mines and agriculture, inspiring Mexicans to engage in revolution. In the 1930s, U.S. workers, farmers, farm workers, students, and veterans engaged in mass protests and Mexican workers, peasants, and students took over takeovers of mines, universities, and plantations in response to the Great Depression. Likewise, in the late 1960s, huge demonstrations against U.S. imperialism occurred in both nations.
However, there is no denying a general difference of degree: The people in the U.S. protest; Mexicans revolt. While students in the United States might be able to stage a one-day sit-in to protest a tuition increase, or effort to break a union on campus, in Mexico, teachers, students, and workers shut down the national university (UNAM) for months at a time on a regular basis, to protest wage decreases, tuition increases, or efforts to curtail academic freedom.
Today, as Mexico faces a fraudulent election, the losing candidate, Lopez Obrador, is promising to create a parallel government. If that sounds unlikely to those of us who grew up in the United States, it is because we have no experience with that level of political action. We can hardly imagine Al Gore or John Kerry making such a declaration. The Democratic Party is too invested in the status quo to risk unleashing such a social movement in the U.S.. In Mexico, however, there is a long tradition of parallel governing structures, erected when the powers that be are unresponsive to the demands of the people.
According to the Associated Press (August 29, 2006), Lopez Obrador likes to see himself as the modern-day Benito Juárez, who ran a parallel government during the French occupation of Mexico in the 1860s. There are many other precedents, however. During the colonial period up until the eve of the revolution in 1910, regional indigenous political structures existed parallel to the official colonial and post-colonial government. Emiliano Zapata himself was one of those local leaders whose power was legitimized by his ability to address the demands of his people. During the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) there were no less than four parallel governments at one point. And of course the Zapatistas in Chiapas have been operating since 1994 within their own regional autonomous governing structure.
As I write, what began as a teachers’ strike in Oaxaca has become a regional revolt. The coalition of teachers, students, indigenous groups, and others has wrested control of the region from the official government. Now there is talk of throwing their support behind Lopez Obrador’s “legitimate government.”
Why is the soil so much more fertile for grassroots democracy in Mexico? I can’t tell you for sure, but I don’t believe it has anything to do with superior ethnic or cultural ways. Rather it has to do with the hundreds of years of Spanish colonialism and U.S. imperialism that have left Mexicans with less to lose and more to win when they unite and fight. We, the ordinary people in the United States, have always been in an awkward in-between position. We are oppressed by multinational corporations who lower our wages to increase their profits, yet at the same time we profit from sweatshop conditions in places like Mexico that provide us with lower consumer prices, and Mexican workers who cross borders and provide cheap labor that lowers the cost of food and services in the United States.
Understanding the complex economic relationship between Mexico and the U.S. without blaming Mexican workers (for leaving home to seek better-paying work) is a huge challenge. Instead of feeling threatened by Mexican immigrants, U.S. workers would be better served by analyzing the commonalities they have with the Mexican working class. If racism was not part of the equation, Mexican and U.S. workers working together would prove a formidable bloc to the globalized corporate structure that defines so much suffering and exploitation in North and South America. |
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