All About Mentoring Spring 2011 - SUNY Empire State College

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residences, built by people from the D.F.
(the Federal District, Mexico City), complete
with high walls, lawns and swimming
pools. But they were independent units.
The housing developments of 2010 were
on a different scale entirely. The more
modest, older ones consisted of attached
houses, sometimes very small ones. From
the heights of El Tenayo, they reminded me
more of Mexican graveyards than housing
developments. The newer developments,
very much under construction this summer,
were on a much grander scale, covering
many acres and surrounded by high walls
that could stretch for hundreds of yards.
The scale had changed, but the pattern was
familiar: lands that had for generations
been devoted to food production were
transformed into vacation retreats, complete
with all of the amenities. And local people,
who had once farmed the land, were
allowed through the guarded entrances only
if they had a job to do.
So Mexico’s population continues to grow,
increasing pressure on every resource and
government service, but the fact that the
pace of growth has sharply declined is very
important, and heartening. Why this change
has occurred has, inevitably, prompted much
speculation. The most convincing analysis
I’ve encountered involves the changing
roles of women. Back in the ’70s, Mexico
was a bastion of “machismo.” Women,
especially poor women, had very little say
in most matters, including family planning.
Women, again especially poor and rural
ones, tended to marry early and bear many
children. The expectation was that some
would die, others would move away, and
the parents saw those who remained both
as contributors to the family income and
as their only source of security in old age.
In the intervening years, several things had
changed. Women’s access to education had
improved. Many worked outside the home.
Access to birth control information and
methods had dramatically improved. And
the age of women at marriage had increased.
I’m sure that the impact of these changes
varies by class and region, but it seems clear
that important changes have occurred.
Transformation of the
Mexican Economy
In the mid-1970s, Mexico was at the
end of what some think of as its golden
age. The economy had been growing at a
respectable rate since World War II. The
peso was at 12.5 to the dollar, where it had
been for years, and public confidence in the
Partido Revolucionario Institucional’s (PRI)
stewardship of the economy was pretty high.
This didn’t mean that everybody was happy.
Income distribution was grossly inequitable,
and some other countries were growing at
a much faster rate, but the PRI economists
were accomplishing their own goals: the rich
were, after all, getting richer. Beginning in
the 1980s, all of that changed, abruptly and
radically. A boom related to the promise of
oil revenues and easy access to international
capital led to a catastrophic collapse in the
early ’80s as oil prices fell and interest rates
climbed. This left Mexico nearly bankrupt,
with the greatest burden falling on workers
and the newly emergent middle class. Neoliberals
within the PRI then took over,
driving the divestiture of the government’s
industrial and other investments, and
eventually the adoption of the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Economic nationalism was abruptly replaced
by internationalism. Mexicans were assured
that international investment would flow
into the country, creating new jobs and
lowering the price of consumer goods
while increasing their quality. Mexico’s
economy would be integrated with those of
Canada and the U.S., incomes would rise
and inequalities would fade away. Along
the way, tariffs would be lowered and then
eliminated, borders would open to the free
exchange of goods, and Mexican industries
would be strengthened through healthy
competition. Mexico had, in short, bought
into the Washington consensus.
What actually happened is a long and
complicated story. Here are a few snapshots:
Investments did flow in, but the vast
majority went to North American
subsidiaries and virtually none went
to small, local enterprises (Juan Carlos
Moreno-Brid and Jaime Ros explore this in
detail.) New technology flowed in, too, but
was employed largely in assembly plants
where products were promptly re-exported
with minimal local impact, save through
the creation of some low-wage, low security
assembly-line jobs. What did radically
change in Mexico was access to North
American retailers, most notably fast food
joints and retailers like Walmart. Wealthier
Mexicans gained easy access to North
American consumer goods. Poorer Mexicans
benefitted from greater competition,
especially in the form of imported (and
heavily subsidized) U.S. corn. The very
wealthiest of Mexicans also benefitted, as
did their colleagues in Russia, from the
opportunities presented by privatization.
Carlos Slim, one of the world’s wealthiest
men, got a huge boost when he bought up
Mexico’s cell phone services, replacing a
public monopoly with a private one. The
national economy did not achieve “takeoff.”
The promise of integration with the
“Colossus of the North” did not extend to
people. And the PRI government lost the last
shreds of its credibility as a manager of
the economy.
Walmart is there … but
its local competitors are
as big – and as offensive.
When we left Mexico in 1975, I took a look
around the Yautepec open-air market and
wondered if it would still be there when I
returned. There were, at that time, a few
grocery stores in Mexico, and I wondered
whether the North Americanization of
the Mexican food system would put the
public markets out of business. That hasn’t
happened. What you see in Mexico today
are two systems existing in parallel. In
both Cuernavaca and Yautepec, the local
public markets are alive and well. They
look much the way they did when I left:
full of great smells and colors, populated by
local vendors selling meat and vegetables
that have never experienced the inside of a
refrigerator, and visited by local people who
appreciate the social as much as the practical
aspects of buying food. But now a fully
articulated parallel system exists, complete
with parking lots, air conditioning, and the
suny empire state college • all about mentoring • issue 39 • spring 2011