By Fred Reed for the Saker Blog
American notions of Mexico are often decades out of date or just wrong. Nativists suffering from what appears to be minor mental unbalance sometimes refer to it as a Third World hellhole, which is silly. The country has problems, corruption, organized crime, uneven distribution of wealth. The bureaucracy can be maddening. The cartels engage in intramural massacres. Things are uneven: In remote areas roads have sometimes crumbled to the point that cars need to proceed at two miles an hour, while elsewhere first-rate modern highways punch through horrific mountainous terrain. Yet all in all, Mexico is reasonably prosperous, modern and, in most things competent. It is not Japan or South Korea, not a technological leader and never will be, but hellhole it ain’t.
Among outdated ideas is that the Mexican population is exploding. It is not. The CIA World Factbook puts total births per woman in Mexico at 2.17, .07 above replacement, and mother’s mean age at first birth, as 21.3. In the Fifties, the birth rate was astronomical. Now, no. Why the change?
An anecdotal explanation for the drop in fertility: When I came to Mexico twenty years ago, I met Lupita, a pretty and very Indian woman, from a family of eleven (!) siblings. She had two children. The son is now a lawyer, the daughter a doctor. Why only two children, I asked. She said she could have two, raise them well, and live in a nice house, or have a dozen and live in a shack, and said that if I tried having a baby, I wouldn’t want ten more. I might add that Lupita and her American husband founded a successful elder-care service, with Lupita handling the facility and routine nursing with hubby managing patient relations.
A broader explanation for the drop in fertility and a great many other things in Mexico is that the country is becoming middle class, loosely defined as having a house, job, husband or wife, refrigerator, and children in school. The middle class all around the world has low crime, small families, and values education.
Health in Mexico is generally good. The Fact Book puts life expectancy at birth in Mexico at 76.9 years. America: 77 years. These figures do not suggest a disease-ridden hellhole.
Another belief common in America is that Mexicans would all move to the US if they could. No. In the past the reason for emigrating northward was money, nothing else. American culture is seldom attractive to Mexicans. As the economy has improved, emigration has dropped, with impoverished Central Americans now going north.
Mexico is not a technological backwater. Landline telephones, cellphones, and WIFI work. Mexican airlines have good safety records, train their pilots, maintain high-bypass turbofans and avionics. In Guadalajara, a medical center, I have twice had eye surgery with good results, an MRI, for $150, and various instrument-heavy procedures. The poor, rural, and uninsured have less access to medical care, but this is also true in America, where many do not go to doctors because of cost.
Racialists in America believe that Mexicans lack the intelligence to run a technologically modern society. This is silly, especially given that they are doing it, but enough people believe it to make it worth examining. A little thought reveals that any visible technical service requires a long chain of tech-savvy upstream support requiring many competent people. Consider banks, which are everywhere. Banks contain people who understand currency transactions, intermediate banks, accounting, and such, and sit at computers maintained and networked within the bank by somebody the bank itself linked to corporate, probably in Mexico City, by wide-area engineers and systems programmers, all talking to each other on a telephony net involving thousands of cell towers and hierarchical switching centers run by alpha-geeks and software wizards. Similar chains could be adduced for other fields.
The Mexican government, while not at East Asian standards, does most things fairly well. For example, when Mexico started vaccinating for covid, the first vaccination was a badly organized goat rope, though everybody eventually got the injection. Months later, the second was a walk-in, the third much later well organized. To get the certification needed to fly, you enter your CURP, the Mexican social-security number, at a governmental site, and the document appears moments later by email. None of this is astonishing, being routine in modern countries. Which is my point.
Education? The World Factbook puts literacy at 95 percent, ahead of America (Ed. Dept. Baltimore.) The country is heavy on universities. For example, there is UNAM, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma e México, in Mexico City with 350,000 students. The Technológica de Monterrey, the premier technological school, has campuses in 38 cities.
In Guadalajara there are:
La Universidad de Guadalajara. La Universidad Marista. La Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara. ITESO (Jesuit, the sciences, 11,000 students).
OK, I was going to make an exhaustive list of universities in Guad, but decided it would take too long. Herewith a list for any interested.
I can’t judge these schools on quality, but they are at least reasonably good. At the two I have experience of, the Universidad Marista where my stepdaughter Natalia did her undergraduate, and the Universidad de Guadalajara, where she earned her Master’s, the kids dressed casually but neatly. They seemed to see a connection between learning law, engineering, or medicine and making a living. The vapid immaturity of American universities is not there.
A few years back, at a fiesta de quinceañera, a coming-out party for girls reaching fifteen years, I met a young woman who had popped high on her math PAA (Prueba de Aptitud Académica, the Mexican SATs, and was going to study robotic engineering. Again, I cannot judge quality and do not even know which university she planned to attend. However, tests of math aptitude, girls in engineering, and robotics do not well fit the American nativist notions of primitivism.
(For what it’s worth, the PAA consists of three parts. First, reading complex passages and making inferences from them; second, math; third, English, this part being elementary. Sample question: La recta con ecuación y – 1 = 5(x – 1) contiene el punto (0, p). ¿Cuál es el valor de p? “The plot of y – 1 = 5(x – 1) contains the point (0, p). What is the value of p?”)
In the US, though it seems to be dying, there is the idea that Mexican society is machista and oppresses girls and women. This is nonsense. Mexican feminists, who know more about it than I do, tell of residual prejudice, as do American feminists, and Violeta reports that among the Indians of the south this can be serious. Yet half of the Mexican congress is female (US, 27 percent). Since these are elected positions, with universal suffrage at eighteen years and older, the population cannot be Talibanic.
While I do not have statistics on higher education, the two universities with which I am familiar are littered with girls. Dentistry and medicine, to include specialties, are, to my personal knowledge, heavily female. Again, I am no student of the matter, but things seem to be at about the First World average. Saudi Arabia it isn’t.
I feel foolish pointing out as if displaying an exotic animal that Guadalajara, a large city, has the things that one expects in a large city. Yet so many racialists have such curious ideas about Mexico that I do it anyway: Guad has 88 bookstores (of which I know perhaps six, all good) and other regions keep up. This astonishes conservative friends who visit.
Poverty exists, some of it ugly, and should not be lightly overlooked. While (says the World Fact Book) per capita GDP is at $17,900, distribution is highly unequal, as increasingly is the case in America. “Middle class” in Mexico would in the US be called lower middle-class. Much of the economy is informal, with people washing cars in parking lots for a living, or windshields at stoplights. Not good. On the other hand, Mexico does not have America’s sprawling homeless camps on urban sidewalks but (here I am guessing) Mexico’s closer familial bonds may account for this.
The narcos are as bad as you have heard, and probably worse. They have been out of control as long as I have been here. Given the amount of money involved, there probably is no solution. Americans, in their tens of millions eager for drugs, provide the market and furnish the narcos with weaponry. Latin America, certainly including Mexico, provides the drugs. On both sides of the border, banks want the laundered money, or launder it themselves. Politicians want the bribes. DEA, FBI, and so on want the jobs. The drug trade is an integral part of the world economy, like Walmart, and isn’t going to go away.
The internet is pervasive. In the first month of 2021, there were 92 million active users, 88 million mobile users, in a population of 131 million. The social media seem as much a plague here as anywhere else. People peer at smartphones as much as anywhere.
Here I speculate but I think the Net has worked a massive transformation in Mexico. As mentioned, it is, as we used to say, all over hell and half of Georgia. Coverage is good in populated regions. Bars and the like have screens, often several. The net is a big deal.
When I came through Ajijic almost forty years ago, towns around about were backwaters barely with newspapers and a.m. radio as the only link with the larger world. Today Mexico’s teenagers, as bright and curious and larcenous as everybody else’s, are aware of the whole world. They listen to music from Memphis and Mongolia, almost live on Facebook, watch movies and soap operas from China and Japan (these are available with Spanish subtitles), and use VPNs to (I love the phrase) “espofear los servidores,” spoof the servers, to get streaming content free. For adults, major countries have news services online in Spanish. When people who once would have been called rednecks, or gente muy ranchera, have access to the net, they will use it. It makes for a different world. This morning, for example, in La Jornada, I read a Spanish translation of Noam Chomsky’s thoughts on the Ukraine. This sort of thing is normal now.
Finally, large numbers of Americans live here happily. While estimates vary, Business Insider puts the number at 1.5 million. Why? Perhaps they just like Third World hellholes. Otherwise there are reasons positive and negative. On one hand, living is easy here, somewhat cheaper than in America, with year-round good weather in many parts, friendly people, with most conveniences, shopping and so on available. On the other hand, Mexico does not have the intense anger that eats America, nor the Knockout Game, race riots, and burning cities that have become routine NOB (north of the border, as we say here). No wars. No Biden. No Trump. No wokeness.
You could do worse.
Fred Reed:
“American notions of Mexico are often decades out of date or just wrong.”
Yes, Mexico was always beautiful (as is the USA).
Attended school – U of Mexico. Lived in Cuernavaca (with a family that operated a tortilleria).
Met Siqueiros, as he left prison. Also met Lini de Vries, (who served as a Nurse for the Spanish Republic). Toured Rivera/Kahlo’s home & Trotsky’s, a few streets away. Took my wife & children there, many years later. My favorite town is Vera Cruz.
Mexico has served as a place of sanctuary for many political refugees.
Es la tierra de Zapata y Villa, y El Plan de Ayala.
Thank you for this. I travelled extensively through Mexico in the mid-70s and early-80s. If I ever leave California, it’s the one place where I would want to live.
Sounds dreamy.
Since the 2007 Financial Crash, Net emigration (legal and not-so-legal) Mexico-USA has been slightly (barely) negative.
I have lived in Playa del Carmen for almost 4 years now. Got my residency and I am not looking back. Getting all my dental work done here at a fraction of the cost in the USA. I tell my friends back in the USA to come for a dental vacation. You can actually take a vacation here and get your dental work done for less than you could just getting the dental work done in the USA. Tequila and tacos baby.
In order for the US to MAGA it will be necessary to deport millions of illegal immigrants. The Democrats are placing these people in swing districts in order to register them to vote illegally and then use their info on fraudulent mail in ballots. Many people think some immigrants are fine but places like CA have been totally changed demographically and are now subject to endemic vote fraud and the resulting Marxist social policy. Now that Mexico has become a middle income country then is it not time to return if you are an illegal immigrant?
“A broader explanation for the drop in fertility and a great many other things….”
Drop in fertility IS NOT a great thing. It is the best way to misery. Is the way chosen by europe. They died alone and Lupita’s sons will suffer the same Mexico was a catholic country, the very first thanks to God, the blessed Virgyn Mary and the sword of Spain. Now, as the rest of hispanic america, is a desert whose portrait is Lupita’s family.
> They died alone
only if there’s no concept of family, even a nuclear family
in the USA and the cold Northern Europe it is all about me only (unlike Southern Europe)
MX is more like southern europe and more. there’s a sense of giving and sharing and being with people
that togetherness and giving does not exist in USA and NEurope. that’s the problem
there’s a term for it: family values
I am Argentinian but I spent half of my life in Switzerland. The main difference I can see after living 30 years in each of these two countries, besides the family values, is that in cultures south of the Rio Grande (and I include Mediterranean cultures as well) people “live and let the others live”, in Germanic/Anglo cultures (and I live in German speaking Switzerland) is exactly the opposite. You have the Goverment breathing “behind you” (controlling you, “respirandote en la nuca”, we say in Spanish). ….and not only the goverment, your neihgbours as well who more often than not, are more worried about what you do with your life….and forget to live their own lives.
Only part that I do not like about this article is that after 20 years living in Mexico, Fred still uses the word America to refer to the US. Sad he did not learn the difference between these two words yet.
I see this quite insulting, (at least for me and I suppose for many others Latinamericans)
If you paid attention and you have been following Andrei for a while, and I have been following him for many years (in fact, from the old blog) I NEVER in all these years saw him referrring to the US as America. Probably because he spent some time in my home country.
“Only part that I do not like about this article is that after 20 years living in Mexico, Fred still uses the word America to refer to the US.”
Absolutely. I noticed that as well.
America is not the name of a country.
IMO all inhabitants of the Americas are Americans.
BTW, the official name of Mexico is United Mexican States.
Fred is writing for a north american readership, and that’s how they refer to themselves. The other constructions sound artificial and forced up there, tho’ wokesters -¿como Ud.? – may ultimately end up distorting the vernacular. In spite of how Andrei may or may not write -and I should point out that his English syntax though good, is not native- —as Mark Twain, a quintessentially “Amercan” writer once pointed out,”There is nothing so annoying as a good example”
Feminism was an import to Mexico and Latin American societies. They would never have accepted cultural marxism of such (whatever the “wave”) if it was not imposed from above by the comprador elites. All their “machismo” ranting is just a word play to keep the funds coming in to the NGOs who orchestrate the implementation. For example, in Honduras, the State Department and the EU demanded that the “sovereign” nation of Honduras ammend the electoral system to automatically include 50% women on the ballot. “Qualification? Doesn’t matter. Just sexual anatomy is sufficient. Such 50% quota laws were already being put in place by the comprador elites and middle class squires in the private sector.
In all Latin America, you have “Womyn Cities” propping up all over the place the comprador elites impose under instructions of cultural marxist NGOs and Soros money. Basically, a means to create clientele base, voting or money wise.
People think that the Bolivarians and such leftist groups are the danger to Latin American societies. Fact of the matter, the Comprador elites they claim to seek to get rid of have been the ones in all Latin America that has imposed the former and new wave of feminism as well as LGBT. Everything their Global elite masters want and do, they will imitate and comply. Wokeness is not just a Leftist Latin American thing (thy have their dupes, clearly, but the leadership accepts it partially because it is the “thing” to do, and see it as a MEANS to an end to get power. They’d care less about wokness quite frankly. They are quite pragmatic over it). It a a religion among the middle classes in Latin America who follow what their comprador elite betters impose through their government policies. It is an END in itself.
Hope this enlightens many.
I quote this:
“The narcos are as bad as you have heard, and probably worse. They have been out of control as long as I have been here. Given the amount of money involved, there probably is no solution. Americans, in their tens of millions eager for drugs, provide the market and furnish the narcos with weaponry. Latin America, certainly including Mexico, provides the drugs. On both sides of the border, banks want the laundered money, or launder it themselves. Politicians want the bribes. DEA, FBI, and so on want the jobs. The drug trade is an integral part of the world economy, like Walmart, and isn’t going to go away.”
Well said.
A very interesting piece overall. Thanks.
I live in Mexico as well and can attest to the description of Mexico and its situation.
It is not perfect but its soul is intact.
It will be interesting to see if in time it aligns with Zone B
As long as AMLO is around and people like him run the direction of the country.
I started reading and was surprised that you said that we will never be a technological leader.. you have a limited view of technology and of my country. But perhaps you should not make more technology because you are killing the planet with it and still think that we will save the planet with more technology.
Plant a tree
I sincerely wish Russia good luck! Since I don’t think City of London/WEF with their attack dog, the USA, will just accept it.
Well, and if you now interpolate a little bit, you see the same problem between “the West” and …. Russia …or China … or the rest of the world.
It’s a “systemic”, historical …and it’s a problem of “the West”.
“Race riots, and burning cites” ?
Please don’t write anymore articles like these. There are enough foreigners here in Mexico already, I am one of them. Articles like these only encourage more. Keep Mexico for the Mexicans I’ve seen the damage done when too many Americans move into a place
You’re right. Great weather, great scenery and mountains, great beaches, warm water, fertile soil and enough water in most places (except in Baja california)
If USA left this country alone, it would be heaven on earth
Infact USA would swap its lands for MX lands
Apologies for use of the word Americans I should have said Gringos
Most people’s images of foreign countries are formed by Hollywood movies and TV shows, The mexican revolution in early XXth century has many movies. I think many Americans image of Mexico is formed by these movies. There is also Machete, As Pres. Coolidge said ” from American newspapers one would think that Central and South America consists of nothing but coups, revolutions. earthquakes. and volcanoes”.
My wish is that Mexico will hold natural off Latin America including another states from there.
You guys just keep up with your independence & national identity. Will be hard ,but TRAY it’s worth
What a wonderful description of Mexico, and very informative. I love Mexicans, as I do most good people of the world. However, I do not wish to live among USA & Canadian ex-pats. They have become one and the same. The pretence is finished.
No, I seek freedom in my older age, and want to live where thousands of years
of culture exist, with running water, toilet, gas, internet from the east and no devilish cold, as in Canada. One simple human being among people who I respect, free from the police state which is Zion West.
Thanks for your observations. It does appear that Mexico is doing a good job of educating their people. In the US not so much. According to Dept. of Education statistics, there are 130,000,000 adults that read at a sixth grade level or below. To say that USians are being dumbed-down as their educational system fails spectacularly, would be an understatement.
“The country has problems, corruption, organized crime, uneven distribution of wealth”.
The USA, you mean, Fred?
Go, Mexico!
He could be talking also about Argentina.
Three Nobel Prize winners studied at the UBA (University of Buenos Aires): Bernardo Houssay, Luis Federico Leloir and César Milstein.
Dr. Houssay and Dr. Leloir developed their work in Argentina, Dr. Milstein in the United Kingdom.
There is a legendary story that tells that a young Leloir, in 1920, invented the Salsa Golf (a mixture of mayonnaise and ketchup). It wasn´t Heinz.
Perhaps, Andrei knows this story. LOL
If anybody is curious:
p = 4/5
I went to Mexico right before the whole Covid thing. I have to say I was quite dissappointed. I expected a vibrant, yet modern, culture, instead it was like being in the USA. In particular Guadalajara. Starbucks after Starbucks. However, some of the old areas were nice. And the small towns still have a distinct feel to it, though the country is apparently being filled up with this Oxy supermaket chain (or whatever it is called). So it’s not completely lost yet, the small towns are nice. I feel really humanity is about to lose everything, culture, pride. The same thing happened here in Norway decades ago, starting in the 1980s. Maybe I am exaggerating. Mexico still has a rich food culture, beautiful nature, Mexico City seemed interesting. But while people are looking another way, or it maybe seem like a lost cause by now, the world is become more and more Americanized. Internet has made this go faster. But yes, I think this is considered a lost cause and something people talked about decades ago now. Russia, China has also lost much of their soul by now. I wish I could travel back to a time where people had more dignity. Smart phones are the opposite of dignity.