All About Mentoring Spring 2011 - SUNY Empire State College

61
a devoted reader of the left-leaning yet
very respected weekly Proceso, and of the
daily La Jornada. I picked up additional
works recommended by friends, and
family members coming for visits provided
deliveries from Amazon. Life was good! (I’ve
appended a partial bibliography.)
My daily life quickly fell into a pattern. I
was up by 5:30 a.m. and read for a couple
of hours. At least twice a week, I spent
a day “in the field,” either in Yautepec
or Cuernavaca, with an occasional trip
to Mexico, D.F. (the Federal District …
capital). In Yautepec, I retraced walks I had
taken 35 years earlier, covering many of the
nooks and crannies of the municipality. I
took pictures, talked to people, and recorded
observations on a digital recorder. I was
interested in changes that had occurred in
the sugar industry, which had been the heart
of Yautepec’s economy, and the spread of
weekend residences, something that was
just getting started during the ’70s. It wasn’t
that Yautepec was, in any particular sense,
representative of Mexico. The state of
Morelos was substantially better off than all
of its neighbors to the south, and radically
different from the country’s northern states,
where population density was low and
farms could be huge. Yautepec is blessed
with substantial irrigated land and easy
access to urban markets and jobs. It is in
no sense “average,” but it is the place I had
gotten to know pretty well, and I wanted to
get to know it again, at least to the extent I
could in a few brief visits.
During that first month, my home life could
fairly be characterized as monastic. I hadn’t
developed any acquaintances that might
absorb spare hours, and I had lots to read
and think about. In the mornings, when it
was still quite cool, I read on the building’s
flat roof, with a view of Mt. Popocatepetl
off to the east, and much of Cuernavaca
to the west and north. In the middle of
the day my first-floor apartment was cool
enough, and my dining room table doubled
as a desk. Meals were simply prepared on a
two-burner gas stove, and I treated myself
to restaurant meals a couple of evenings a
week. Even that fell into a pattern. Pazole
at El Barco once a week, Sopa de ajo con
dos jeuvos at the Vienese maybe once
every couple of weeks, and perhaps a pizza
occasionally at the Marco Polo, sitting on
the second-floor balcony across from the
cathedral. I know what you’re thinking …
life was hard.
For me, the most amazing part of these
early weeks was: I was doing exactly what
I wanted to do. The books I read were the
ones I wanted and needed to read. The
trips I took were to places I wanted to go.
My writing focused on what I was reading,
seeing and thinking about. I was doing
what I had set out to do: making sense of a
place that had been on the margins of my
consciousness for more than 30 years. It was
only then that I began fully to appreciate
the “down side” of working at Empire
State College. I had devoted a career to
responding to the needs and interests of
students. I’d loved doing it, and as a result,
my education was broadened in many
unanticipated ways. I’d developed interests
and even some expertise in adult learning,
in environmental history, in U.S. foreign
policy – all in an effort to anticipate and
respond to my students’ needs. In doing
that, I had willingly sacrificed my currency
in modern Mexican history. In 20 years of
mentoring, I can’t recall a single student
request to study modern Mexico.
The first part of this essay (the second
section will be included in All About
Mentoring fall 2011) briefly explores some
of the changes I encountered and ponders
their implications. I want to emphasize that
I left Mexico in early July 2010 realizing
that I had only scratched the surface. I
also want to express my deep gratitude to
Charlie Goff, director of the Cemanahuac
Educational Community for his friendship
and willingness to share his deep knowledge
of Mexico.
Basic Dimensions of Mexico’s
Change: 1975-2010 Population
In the early 1970s, Mexico’s population
was growing at a rate close to 3.5 percent.
During the intervening years, that rate had
dropped dramatically. By 2010, the U.N.
estimated that its growth rate was closer
to 1 percent. Still, the national population
more than doubled, from 48.2 million in
1970 to 103.3 million in 2005 (INEGI,
Banco de Informacion Economica 1999
cited in Moreno-Brid and Ros, p. 262).
And within the state of Morelos, similarly
dramatic growth had occurred. Its
population had been around 600,000 in
1970. By 2000, it had reached 1.6 million.
The municipality of Yautepec had more
than tripled in size over the same period,
from almost 27,000 to around 84,000.
(These figures are taken from the decennial
censuses of the state, 1970-2000.) The visual
impact of Morelos’s growth is greatest when
you begin to descend into the state on the
highway that connects it to Mexico City.
On that early February morning, I was
stunned to see that the plain where
Cuernavaca used to be nestled in the upperright-hand
corner was now a sea of lights.
This impression was confirmed on my trips
to Yautepec. Where miles of fields had once
separated Cuernavaca “proper” from its
surrounding towns, urban development was
virtually pervasive.
Yautepec, when I lived there, was essentially
a small town. You could get a full view of it
from atop “El Tenayo,” a steep hill within
the city and just south of the Rio Yautepec.
The most striking changes in 2010 involved
the city’s spread toward the west, in the
direction of Cuernavaca. The land there
was not irrigated. It had, in fact, constituted
the village’s original communal land, rocky
and planted in corn or reserved for grazing.
This year, it was quite evident that housing
spread for at least a half mile west of its
previous boundary. A similar pattern was
evident south of El Tenayo. Indeed, in that
direction, two modest and treeless hills just
east of what had been the valley’s major
hacienda, Atlihuayan, were fully developed.
As I walked those hills, a couple stopped me
to try to sell me a plot of land. They assured
me that piped water was plentiful and
electrical service was uninterrupted. And
housing plots were cheap! A couple they
introduced me to invited me into their very
attractive home, with fantastic views of the
surrounding valleys. The man had retired on
the advice of his doctors a few years earlier,
and they had moved to Yautepec from the
Valley of Mexico because the air was clean
and the weather warm. When I walked
these hills in 1974, they were nothing but
scrub. The only inhabitants I encountered
were goats.
Housing developments constituted another
new feature. These had simply not existed
in 1975. There were certainly weekend
suny empire state college • all about mentoring • issue 39 • spring 2011