Frontera Santa

El Sol de Toluca reports today that the number of Mexicans able to return to Mexico for Semana Santa is WAY down this year - almost 50%.

El retorno de paisanos en esta temporada vacacional podría caer hasta en un 50%, debido a que les sale muy caro volver a pagarles a los "polleros" para ingresar nuevamente a Estados Unidos, afirmó Alfredo Castañeda, líder de la Unión de Productores Agropecuarios Mexiquenses.

Family friendly and effective, no? Anyway, teaching the Progressive Era this week in class and ran across Teddy Roosevelt's policy on the border. The four border agents that patrolled the border (from San Diego to South Texas) were ordered to keep out Syrians, Greeks, Japanese, and Chinese. Theodore Roosevelt declared the border: “Closed to all but Citizens of Mexico.” Texas students were outraged - I think especially so now that Glenn Beck has given the go ahead to hate TR.

Don't Touch the "Tradiciones y Costumbres"

Catholics living on the edge of Toluca in San Cristóbal Huichochitlán are upset. It seems that somebody has been missing their history lessons on the Catholic Church in Mexico, and the priest in the area tried to mess with the customs and traditions of the congregation: He wanted to appoint his own fiscales and sacristanes. To put it in twenty-first century terms: Doh!

El Sol de Toluca has been covering the story since December, and it looked like the conflict might be coming to an end at the start of January. However, the priest with the backing of the bishop of Toluca has closed the church and moved to another chapel entirely.

So who cares? Well, aside from the folks in San Cristóbal Huichochitlán, this a great reminder of why the population of Mexico has a tradition of being Catholic and anti-clerical. In his EXCELLENT Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. (Stanford University Press, 1996), William B. Taylor looks at the delicate relationship between parishioners and priests as they jockey for power and control of resources and influence at the community level. There are a couple of things that will get a priest "rode out of town," and messing with the selection of lay positions is one of them. Acting as a fiscal or sacristan is not only a route to prestige in the community, access to funds and resources, and a way of participating in the sacred, but it also gives communities a sense of control of their worship that is so dominated by a heirarchical religion. In other words, you're screwing with their cosmos, man. By taking the final step of shutting down the very place of worship the Madre Iglesia is delivering a brutal slap to the community. I'll be curious to see how this plays out.

A final note, El Sol de Toluca refers to the Catholics involved as "congregants" while La Jornada says it got a letter from Otomies in San Cristobal. It looks like the congregations is trying to go after the church for violating the traditions and customs (quoting La Jornada) "sustentadas en la Constitución, en tratados internacionales y documentos episcopales."

You Fire 16 Teachers And Whadya' Get...

... another day older and with a new teacher's union in the state of Mexico.

Back in 2006/07 teachers in EdoMex tried to organize a new teacher's union called Sindicato Unificado de Maestros y Académicos del Estado de México (SUMAEM). For their trouble scores of teachers were harassed and 16 of the organizers were fired. Now the education supervisory panel in Cholula, Puebla has reinstated the teachers and they are back at work with the added bonus that an EdoMex reconciliation panel has forced the Secretary of Education to recognize the new 900-strong union. See the Sol de Toluca story.

While Mexico's teacher's certainly need unions that are not co-opted by the parties, looking at the SUMAEM site doesn't seem to hold out much hope. The organization seems to be dripping with functionaries, and despite the snazzy web site and incredibly long fight song (here), there seems to be little in the way of specifics and documents offered by the group. Same himno, second verse, a whole lot longer, and probably just as poorly administered as many other Mexican labor unions.

For more, see here.

Monumental Destruction

This week the Giraffes of Toluca died. Not the ones out at Zocango park, but the monument located on the road to DF called the Puerta Tolotzin that looked like the African animal. And, as Sol de Toluca reports, there wasn't an ounce of complaint about the removal, either. I had mentioned earlier that a bicentennial tower might be put up there, but that project seems on hold. Alexander Naime, however, gets props here for the best quote of the week in my book:

Toluca es una ciudad que se construye al capricho de quienes gobiernan y muy lejos de los intereses de los ciudadanos, muy lejos de su historia, muy lejos de los símbolos prácticamente borrados de la memoria colectiva.

I guess I can cut those three weeks out of my Mexico course that are post-1940 and just have the students read a translated version of that sentence.

One of the things I certainly appreciate about Mexico is the Roman near-madness for public monuments. The great Minerva and Arch in Guadalajara that illustrated the split personality of that city, the outlandish and striking revolutionary of Acatlan, the penitentes of Taxco, and of course, almost every square inch of DF. Public monuments give us a Mexico that simultaneously deigns to offer citizens a higher concept of community life while at times betraying that desire by covering for the lack of real improvements through lumps of brass and stone. My favorite monuments, however, are by far the glorietas. These islands of imposed and manufactured history are awash in a sea of racing modernization, but they are now so much part of the landscape and community that their original meaning is wrested from hands of their builders to become places of navigation, protest, hope, or resistance. So, while I appreciated Alexander Naime's complaint on the absence of a powerful monument outside of Toluca, perhaps he has missed what the "jirafas" of Tolotzin or the other monuments have meant to those not consumed with them as ideas of grand public art.

Mex Mont, or Really Good Beef for those Tacos

Bozeman (MT) Daily Chronicle had a nice (in some ways) article on the presence of Mexican labor in the resort town of Big Sky and in the Bozeman area in general. I was struck by a couple of things.

1) When the author asks why hispanics are not coming to Montana in large numbers, the fall-back answer is "the weather." I'm not sure what sort of magic happens between the winters of Denver and the winters in Bozeman, but it certainly isn't anything that makes Montana winters more brutal. The real story here is jobs, and recognition that Mexicans won't move to where there are no jobs is key to understanding immigration. If it was about weather, Toluca would be depopulated, as would most places in the high sierra from EdoMex to Chihuahua.

2) The similarities that the migrants described when talking about Montana compared to Mexico: beautiful mountains, small towns, farms and ranches, and that rural "lifestyle" that dominates the area. That is perhaps why I like western and south eastern Mexico State so much.

3) The emphasis on the rejection of the presence of Mexicans. This rejection, I would very much be willing to bet, is one not only based in competition for jobs, but also with the indigenous appearance. Montana is an interesting place racially. Never segregated for African Americans, it is a brutally racist place for Native Americans. Indigenous in appearance, Migrants from central and southern Mexico are most certainly running into that same wall. In all fairness, however, as a Montana-born person living in exile in Texas , people from anywhere ***cough cough California*** are generally not welcomed.

4) The "uninviting" nature of the state based on the ability of the ICE folks to enforce laws. I would aver that there is more going on to ICE effectiveness in Montana than just a lower population. ICE can apparently do their job without fences and internal checkpoints.

And finally, I was blown away how yesterday many of the Montana news sources made a big deal out of the busting of 6 Mexicans tied to Pharmaceuticos Collins, a company in GDL supplying chemicals for (wait for it).... meth. Again, we have a local example of how the consumption of drugs in the far-flung corners of the United States ties this nation to drug cartels and it is doubtful we will ever start taking drug uses seriously as a health issue.

Out with Tollotzin and the Revolution, in with the Torre

Mexico is building a tower to celebrate Independence - the state of Mexico, that is. While Mexico City's massive Torre Bicentenario is like a far-left historian's interpretation of the Revolution (a great idea but poorly executed and mired in "irregularity" and controversy), Toluca is going ahead with its own Torre Bicentenario. It will be on the highway coming into Toluca from DF and will replace the Puerta Tollotzin. Though Torre, I would think, might be an exageration - it looks like a really tall Car and Driver award.

Puerta Tollotzin is an interesting (and I think very striking sculpture from the air) modernist portrayal of pre-contact deity. What struck me was the interesting way all of this is done. Puerta Tollotzin was the product of a contest in which the UNAM architecture faculty won the design. Modernity meets indigenous Mexico as portrayed by Mexico City - any historic parallels, Bueller? To continue the rhyming, we see the planned replacement of the monument by a tower designed by local architects and that looks more at independence, not at the Revolution.

Hunger Strike in Toluca

Just before Christmas I pointed out the the city government in Toluca had "cleansed" the portales area of the centro of the "ambulantes" that sell their goods in that area. It seems that since last week these same merchants have established a sit in and hunger strike in front of the municipal palace. According to Sol de Toluca, they are calling on the Bishop of Toluca to shame the mayor into giving them their stalls in the portales back. Some of those "ambulantes" have been selling there for over twenty years.

Like most things, the heavy labor people are going to get all the press this week with their gas strike. The little pedllers - themselves taking a beating as they sell on the buses and at intersections to truckers, passangers, etc., are not going to get a glance on the national stage. Perhaps one of the most civilized things about Mexico is the human contact of the peddler to the home or the pedestrian. It simultaneously reminds you of the position of the hard working people in difficult economic conditions while tying you to them in a social exchange - unlike treating with the checker at Gigante. Somehow the attack on the peddlers of the portales seems like an assault on the civility of Mexico itself.

Feeling Porfirian in Toluca, or Holiday Greetings from The Man

I know it is a little industrial, but Toluca is one of my favorite Mexican cities. It just feels honest, you know, like Omaha or Fargo ... it just has the feel of a place that's not trying to be Cozumel or DF or something.


I was a little bummed to see in Sol de Toluca that the portales, the lovely shopping area in the center of town under went a Porfirio Diaz style cleansing of the semi-mobile merchants that fill the portales around the holidays (day of the dead there is great fun - no Oaxaca, but again, it ain't trying to be). Women, kids, handicapped - the police even used some teargas in the day-long expulsion of the vendors to get the place "cleansed" for Christmas Eve. Zounds.