La Isla Bonita

(continued)

By Dean Borok

And now that Cozumelenos, as they refer to themselves, are racing along the information superhighway with the rest of us, with 100 television stations and Internet cafes on every block (not to mention the ubiquitous cell phones that they have seized upon with the voracious fury of a ravenous octopus), the people on this once-isolated backwater are every bit as sophisticated as the most jaded denizen of Mexico City or New York. Since Magpie and I had neglected to bring along a radio, we more or less left the TV on in our room full-time for background noise.

Mexican television is pretty good. There are a lot of music video stations featuring the whole gamut of popular music ranging from norteno music, which is updated mariachi played by hard guys dressed in vaquero suits and sombreros, to latin hip-hop. There are plenty of movie channels, most featuring dubbed-over American films, but also with plenty of vintage black-and-white Mexican westerns and romantic comedies. You have the choice of watching CNN en espanol, which is broadcast live from Atlanta, but with really cool, elegant latin announcers sporting sharp haircuts and modern suits. There are always soccer matches featuring the best teams of Europe and Latin America. And for hard-core political junkies, there is a public access station that shows parliamentary debates from the Chamber of Deputies in Mexico City, which was a real eye-opener!

The hands-down star of Mexican political commentary for our week in Mexico was undeniably Venezuelan president Hugo "Chavez, who is not passing up any opportunity to project himself throughout Latin America. He was on CNN two or three times every hour all week, and he had a lot to say about Mexico's ruling party, the PAN, calling them lap dogs of George Bush and the Americans. Since this was an election year for Mexico, the PAN deputies in congress were highly exercised about what they consider Chavez' interference in the country's internal politics in favor of the left-wing candidate, Obrador, the mayor of Mexico City.

Magpie and I watched a legislative session where the deputies were debating a PAN motion to investigate Chavez and statements by the Venezuelan ambassador to Mexico to determine whether they constituted Venezuelan interference in Mexican domestic politics. It was a raucous debate, the Mexican sense of political decorum not extending to restrained behavior by elected officials. The speakers all started their speeches softly and politely, with reasoned dignity, and then built up to a crescendo of denunciations and accusations, sort of like Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, to the accompaniment of shouts, jeers, whistles and points of order by the assembled dignitaries. Everybody was playing to the home audience, and they knew what their constituents expected of them — something spicy!

The motion to investigate Chavez passed, but later that day, when the Venezuelan strongman appeared on the screen, as though in response, he sang a song by the fantastically popular Spanish singer Rocio Durcal, a kind of singing Simone Signoret, who had died earlier that day. Later on, the Venezuelan government announced that it was increasing housing subsidies for all its low-income citizens.

What effect all this was having on Mexican voters I cannot say. But the other big story of the week, the massive demonstrations taking place in the States by undocumented Mexican workers protesting the imminent immigration legislation by the U.S. Congress, aroused plenty of emotions and indignation. Every Mexican knows somebody working in the U.S., so the issue has an emotional aspect as least as strong in Mexico as it does in the U.S.

This issue has many conflicting aspects to it. Nobody wants to raise the point that those regions of the U.S. that have been most impacted by Mexican immigration are areas that were historically Mexican territory for many centuries before they were annexed to the U.S. as a result of the Mexican War of 1845, a war that was described by many commentators of the day, including no less an authority than Ulysses S. Grant, who participated in it, as an abomination and a blatant land grab. This area, stretching from Texas to Northern California, was the richest part of Mexico, so on one level you could say that the Mexican people still retain the residual sentiment that they have some indefinable rights in that region.

Another aspect of the situation is that NAFTA, unlike the European Union, made no provision for movement of people across borders to compensate for the inevitable dislocations and contradictions that would result as a consequence of free trade. This glaring omission has unfortunate racial overtones to it, the Americans and Canadians wanting access to the not inconsequential Mexican market and cheap labor pool without having to accept the possibility that Mexico might come to them.

Anyone who takes the trouble to read the classified section of Mexican newspapers, where jobs are advertised as paying one hundred fifty dollars a MONTH, knows that trans-border migration is inevitable. The problem is that this influx of cheap labor is depressing wages in the U.S., where American employers are happy to pay these substandard wages and no benefits for work for which they would otherwise have to competitively bid.

It should be noted that Mexico takes the integrity of its own borders very seriously, maintaining a large standing army, navy and air force, and has long pursued a policy of forcibly repatriating illegal immigrants back to their poorer neighboring countries to the south.