In the Shadow of the Giant: The Americanization of Modern Mexico

10. The Southernmost City in Texas: Monterrey, Nuevo Le

It hits you almost as soon as you leave the glittering terminal of Monterrey’s international airport. First come the hotel signs with names so familiar to the American business traveler: Hampton Inn, The Courtyard, Best Western, Fairfield Inn. As you drive around Monterrey, the same restaurant and store logos that line American interstate highways dot the cityscape— Bennigan’s, Applebee’s, Office Depot, Chili’s, Tony Roma’s. With a hefty dose of irony and a dollop of verisimilitude, the capital of Mexico’s Nuevo León state is sometimes called the southernmost city in Texas. Where else in Mexico would you find a major avenue in the heart of a city’s downtown named after George Washington? In spirit as well as geography, Monterrey is closer to Houston than to Mexico City. Its rise as a manufacturing giant dates back to the opening of the first major railroad to the Texas border, and for more than 150 years Monterrey’s prosperity has been intimately tied to the steady integration of northern Mexico into the U.S. economy. The city’s inhabitants live and work to the rhythms of a Sunbelt metropolis, and its upper-middle-class families like to spend their vacations on South Padre Island along the Texas Gulf Coast. The ultimate role model for regiomontanos, as the natives of Monterrey are called, is the self-made captain of industry. Its richest suburb evokes the palatial homes and swank boutiques of Beverly Hills and La Jolla, and Monterrey’s upper crust is thoroughly steeped in 183 c h a p t e r 1 0
The Southernmost City in Texas monterrey, nuevo león Ch010.qxd 11/27/08 2:00 PM Page 183 American culture and attitudes. “There is a kind of American way of life that has been introduced through the vision, habits, and daily routines of this elite,” says Abraham Nuncio, a historian and journalist from the town of Texcoco, outside Mexico City, who moved to Monterrey in the mid1970s . “They know the history of the United States better than the history of Mexico, they express themselves better in English than in Spanish. . . . Monterrey is perhaps the most Americanized city in the entire country, including even those on the border.”1 A two-hour drive from the Texas border, Monterrey’s extensive ties to the United States were a direct result of the Mexican War. At the stroke of a pen, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war in 1848, brought the town of 20,000 people within striking distance of what would eventually become the world’s richest economy. The outbreak of the American Civil War ushered in the city’s first bona fide economic boom, as cotton planters in the southern United States re-routed their merchandise through northeastern Mexico to skirt the federal blockade of the Confederacy’s seaports. The dawn of the railroad age in northern Mexico heralded an industrial boom that would make Monterrey the nation’s steel-making capital and attract large flows of American capital. The city’s elites were among the first Mexican families to send their children to American universities. The constant contact with American entrepreneurs , technicians, missionaries, and adventurers has left its mark on the metropolis of four million people—and if Mexico City lies at the heart of the country’s Hispano-indigenous past and present, then Monterrey surely sits on the cutting edge of its Americanizing future. High-Fives and Flip-Flops The inroads of Americanization are most evident among Monterrey’s young people. On a midsummer evening in 2004, dozens of soccer fans were drinking beer in a bar at the Sheraton Ambassador Hotel as they watched a game between the city’s top clubs, Tigres and Monterrey, on huge TV screens. Each time their favorite team scored a goal, the youths 184 in the shadow of the giant Ch010.qxd 11/27/08 2:00 PM Page 184 exchanged high-fives in the time-honored tradition of American sports bars. Two days later I visited the flagship campus of the Monterrey Institute for Technological and Higher Studies (ITESM). Founded in 1943 with seed money from the city’s top captains of industry to churn out future generations of engineers, managers, and accountants for the private sector, the “Tec” caters primarily to the sons and daughters of the city’s well-to-do families. On the Saturday...