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

Conclusion: An Invaded Country

Few Mexican cities can boast a central plaza matching the beauty and elegance of Puebla’s main square. The zócalo is dominated by the city’s seventeenth-century cathedral and its 225-feet-high towers, the tallest of any church in the republic. On the opposite side of the plaza sits the Municipal Palace, an imposing, belle époque edifice that stands as a monument to the architectural fashions of the Porfiriato era. The square features a central fountain and has retained the trees and flower beds that were once a trademark of its namesake in Mexico City before it was reduced to a featureless slab of concrete. At night, the floodlit facades of the buildings overlooking the zócalo further enhance the physical beauty of the setting. But the ground-level arcades of these buildings also harbor some of the best-known brands of the globe-spanning U.S. fast-food industry. Burger King, McDonald’s, Carl’s Jr., and Domino’s Pizza all do a thriving trade among the crowds who stroll through the city’s downtown, and just off the plaza a Kentucky Fried Chicken branch offers competitively priced alternatives to the burger-weary passerby. These totems of the American way of life look painfully out of place in a handsome city center that has been designated a world heritage site by UNESCO, but Puebla’s teenagers don’t seem to mind. When school lets out on weekday afternoons, they take over the sidewalk tables outside these fast food outlets, and you can 235 c o n c l u s i o n
An Invaded Country Conclusion.qxd 11/27/08 2:04 PM Page 235 pick out the sons and daughters of the city’s middle class from the baseball caps and Converse All Star sneakers they sport. At no point in my extensive travels through Mexico have I seen a starker contrast between the country’s Catholic, heavily Spanish-flavored past and its increasingly Americanized present and future than in the heart of Puebla. The writer Carlos Monsiváis memorably described the uppermiddle -class residents of Mexico City’s exclusive neighborhoods as the first generation of Americans to be born in Mexico, and these young poblanos look and act like their spiritual offspring. Later that evening, I sat down with a twenty-four-year-old liberal arts student at the Autonomous University of Puebla named Mary Carmen Méndez. Unlike most of her peers, Méndez has a frame of reference that transcends the North American continent: she lived in Spain until the age of thirteen and still affects the trademark lisp of Mexico’s so-called madre patría (mother nation). And on account of that background, her own left-wing politics, and possibly her English-language first name, Méndez seemed more conscious of the Americanizing influences washing over the country than most Mexicans of her generation. “I’ve acquired the American sense of humor, and I laugh more when I’m watching an American sitcom than when I watch a Mexican comedy,” said Méndez.“Nearly all the movies we see come from over there. There’s a tendency [now in Mexico] to work longer hours, and the employee who spends more hours in the office is considered to have a greater commitment to the company. I feel slightly invaded, but it would seem there’s no way of stopping this.”1 “Almost a Part of the United States” Invaded. That single word best captures what is happening to Mexico in the twenty-first century. In varying degrees American fashion, food, phrases, status symbols, social diseases, department stores, tourists, pensioners, religious denominations, and belief in the gospel of free trade have all established firm footholds inside today’s Mexico. The Americanization is especially pronounced in the cities and among the 236 in the shadow of the giant Conclusion.qxd 11/27/08 2:04 PM Page 236 country’s middle and upper middle classes. Modern Mexico resembles a de facto economic colony of the United States, where a leftist governor proudly proclaims her state to be ‘binational,’ the biggest employer in the private sector is Wal-Mart, the biggest bank is owned by Citigroup, and the heir to the country’s largest broadcasting empire dispatches his wife to San Diego to bear their first child. It is a country where a large and almost unseemly percentage of the population...