Thread: Vicente Fox Blesses the Americanization of Mexico

This is from 2000.......says quite a lot!
{Thanx to a friend of ALIPAC}

Vicente Fox Blesses the Americanization of Mexico
By Gregory Rodriguez
Irvine Senior Fellow

Los Angeles Times
December 10, 2000


Even before his historic election to Mexico's presidency in July, Vicente Fox startled U.S. observers when he vowed to govern on behalf of 118 million Mexicans--the 100 million in his country and the nearly 18 million of Mexican descent in the United States. Not surprisingly, the promise, along with Fox's vision of a more open U.S.-Mexico border, heightened anxieties that Mexican immigration poses a threat to U.S. national integrity. Fearful that Fox's transnational talk might spark anti-immigrant feelings and call Mexican Americans' political loyalties into question, some prominent Latino advocates and academics criticized Fox's rhetoric as ill-conceived. Yet, broadening the definition of "Mexican" is more likely to advance the Americanization of Mexico than it is to give Mexico greater clout in the United States.

For decades, Mexico disowned its migrants as renegades who had turned tail on their country and culture. They were "pochos" (watered-down Mexicans) who had cashed in their souls for material possessions. Although Mexico benefited from the escape valve that allowed it to lose large numbers of unemployed and underemployed citizens, the migrants were glaring symbols of their homeland's failures. Although Mexico usually condescended to its kin north of the border, it would occasionally intervene on their behalf whenever it appeared that their mistreatment harmed Mexico's national pride.

Only when Mexican Americans began advancing politically and economically did Mexico begin to take a sympathetic view of its diaspora. Beginning in the late 1970s, then intensifying under President Carlos Salinas de Gortari in the late 1980s, Mexico developed a two-pronged public-relations strategy to capitalize on Mexican American progress. To reach U.S.-born Mexican Americans, Mexico courted Latino organizations and granted heritage awards to accomplished Mexican Americans. To appeal to Mexican-born immigrants, Mexican consulates strengthened their community-outreach efforts and encouraged newcomers in the U.S. to demand their rights. In so doing, Mexico aimed to nurture sympathetic views toward itself among the growing Latino American electorate and to urge migrants to keep sending money back home.

Estimated at $ 8 billion annually, the remittances Mexican immigrants send home have reshaped the popular image of Mexican Americans in Mexico. In many villages, U.S.-based immigrants have gained social and political influence by virtue of their financial generosity. In his inaugural speech Dec. 1, Fox referred to them as "our beloved migrants, our heroic migrants." As did his predecessors, Fox pledged that Mexican consulates will become "the best allies of immigrants' rights."

But last month, in what was perhaps an attempt to clarify the controversial notion of a transnational Mexican nation, Fox went farther than any previous Mexican official in validating not only the dreams but also the political loyalties of U.S.-born and naturalized Mexican Americans.

In 1997, the Mexican government passed a law allowing migrants who become naturalized U.S. citizens to retain their Mexican nationality. Responding to the enormous increase in U.S. citizenship applications by immigrants, Mexico wanted to preserve these migrants' connection to their homeland by proclaiming that U.S. citizenship would no longer be considered cultural treason. But in a November speech to the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Fox took this argument to the next level when he encouraged long-time Mexican immigrants to become U.S. citizens.

In other words, the Fox administration sees self-interest in Mexican immigrants becoming productive and loyal citizens of the United States. "Mine will be the first Mexican administration to sincerely honor the ties that bind people of Mexican descent to the United States," said Fox. "We have no desire to interfere in the powerful processes that tie Mexican immigrants to this country." While saying he hoped Mexican Americans would not forget their heritage, Fox acknowledged that immigrants "want to dream the American dream and wake up as citizens."

Last Sunday, in his first official act at the president's compound, Fox honored 200 Mexican emigrants and U.S.-born Mexican Americans, offering them up as shining examples of what Mexicans can achieve, given the right opportunities in their homeland. "We want your spirit to be contagious," he said. In Fox's Mexico, Americanized Mexicans are not traitors but models to be emulated.

In expanding the definition of "Mexican" to embrace Mexican Americans, Fox has validated American influence in Mexican life. For the longest time, Mexico considered the colossus to the north its greatest burden. As the adage goes, "Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States." But Fox, the former Coca-Cola Co. executive, is refashioning the image of the U.S. in Mexico. He has asserted that his country's proximity to the largest economy in the world is a "strategic advantage." Under Fox, Mexico will seek even closer ties with the United States.

What this means is that when Mexican migrants leave their homeland for the U.S., they will no longer be joining the enemy. Narrowing the cultural divide between North and South will facilitate their transition to American life. To be sure, Mexican immigration will continue to alter the cultural landscape of Southern California and the Southwest. But it will follow the patterns of other minority groups who affected regional cultures in the U.S, like the Jews in New York, the Irish in Massachusetts, the Germans in Wisconsin and the Scandinavians in Minnesota. Foods, customs, linguistic and phenotypic traits once considered "foreign" gradually become part and parcel of broader regional culture. Nonetheless, the Americanized Mexican diaspora is much more likely to continue wielding greater economic and cultural influence on Mexico than Mexico will on Mexican Americans.

Despite its best public-relations efforts, Mexico still has an uphill battle to keep its emigrants and their children engaged in homeland affairs. The 1992 Latino National Political Survey, the largest opinion poll of its kind, revealed that Mexican Americans and Anglo Americans hold similarly positive attitudes toward the United States. The same survey found that while they generally look fondly on Mexico, few Mexican Americans follow Mexican political events closely. Furthermore, few naturalized Mexican immigrants have taken advantage of the option to reclaim their Mexican nationality. In all the romantic talk about erasing borders, we forget that the United States is the most culturally and economically influential country in history and that, for all intents and purposes, globalization is a euphemism for Americanization.

Yet, Fox's new attitude toward Mexican Americans promises to resurrect old fears that an ascendant Latino population is harboring separatist ambitions. Most recently, Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington predicted that Mexican demographic expansion could "possibly reverse" 19th-century U.S. territorial gains. But what he and other critics fail to understand is that Mexican Americans are using their newfound assertiveness to insinuate themselves deeper into the American mainstream, not to distance themselves from it.

from it. In his speech to MALDEF, Fox properly recognized that the Mexican American agenda is not the same as the Mexican agenda, and that their two perspectives are forged by vastly different political, economic and social factors. What he did not say is that, over time, Mexican Americans also become culturally distinct from their cousins south of the border. In his inaugural address, Fox declared that Mexico needs its lost emigrants. The problem for Mexico, however, is that she needs them more than they need her.

© Copyright: 2000 Los Angeles Times
http://www.newamerica.net/index.cfm?pg=article&DocID=30

I'm sorry but I wish Fox and that Juan Hernandez would get choked on a large taco!

Thank you very much. You made me laugh out loud and that is rare these days.