On September 16, 1810, the priest of a small town near Guanajuato summoned his followers to revolt against the colonial government of Spain. This incident is conventionally regarded as the opening of the long war that eventually brought independence to Mexico in 1821.
National histories are usually shot through with myth, and Mexico’s perhaps more than most. The uprising of September 16 rapidly ended in tragic failure, brutally suppressed by royalist troops. Independence arrived a decade later only after the government back in Madrid adopted reforms too liberal for the liking of the victorious counter-revolutionary elite in Mexico. The local upper class then switched sides, establishing Mexico as an authoritarian Catholic empire under the most successful of the generals who had defeated the insurgents of 1810.
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| Happy Independence Day, Mexico |
Paradoxes like that run through Mexican history, and into Mexico’s present.
Is modern Mexico a successful or unsuccessful country?
Success: Net migration to the United States has slowed and even reversed. Between 2009 and 2014, more Mexicans returned home from the United States than left Mexico for the United States.
Unsuccessful: While Mexico is not a poor country, Mexicans remain poor people. Nearly half the population lives below Mexico’s poverty line. Even middle-income Mexican families spend more than 40 percent of their incomes on food, beverages, and tobacco, about the same proportion as American families on average spent on similar goods in 1900. Barely one-third of adults aged 25-64 have completed high school; even literacy is not universal.
Unsuccessful: Mexican politicians may now be elected, but extrajudicial killings and disappearances are terrifyingly common. There are many places where the line between local authorities and criminal gangs is blurry, to the extent it exists at all. 103 journalists were murdered and 25 disappeared between 2000 and late 2015. Some 90 percent of crimes against journalists go unpunished.
Most countries that experience large-scale emigration perceive it as a huge problem. When Sweden sent almost one-fifth of its people to the United States before the First World War, the Swedish state saw a national crisis. It convened a commission to investigate the population loss and recommend ways to persuade Swedes to stay at home. The modern Swedish welfare state had its origins in the commission’s researches.
Mexico has seen no such effort. To the contrary, Mexican authorities have actively encouraged out-migration as a substitute for the jobs and opportunities they cannot provide at home. In the 1986 words of Doris Meissner, who would serve as director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service under President Bill Clinton, Mexico’s “government declines to discuss bilateral approaches [to control immigration], supposedly to avoid impinging on U.S. sovereignty. Spanning at least a decade, a succession of migration consultative mechanisms, technical information exchange groups and joint committees has failed to produce cracks in that armor. Mexico's Realpolitik is to perpetuate the status quo. The migration safety valve compensates for widespread underemployment more fully and efficiently than any other system within reach.” American leaders have also often quietly fretted that more effective immigration controls on the U.S. side of the border could plunge Mexico into revolutionary upheaval.
Revolution looks less likely in Mexico today than it did even a generation ago. Mexico is an aging country. The median age in Mexico, already 28, will reach 42 by 2050. The worst threat for the future of the country is less upheaval than lost opportunity. As the world moves from industrial economy to knowledge economy, the transition from poor to rich seems to be getting more difficult. What South Korea and Chile did, China and Mexico seem increasingly unlikely to do. Mexicans are emigrating less, not so much because they are finding more opportunity at home—but because they face more difficulty getting ahead in an American economy that demands more skills and higher qualifications.
Independence is a concept that has resonated powerfully in Mexico since 1810. “Poor Mexico: so far from God, so close to the United States” is a national witticism based on hard experience. But the independence most relevant to modern Mexico on this September 16 is not independence from another country, but from the mistakes of the past and the callous aloofness of its leadership class.(ON)