Columns

Not long ago a large group of leading Mexican scholars, educators, and cultural analysts assembled by the nation’s Colegio de Mexico published a report on “the nations most pressing issues.” Among these at that time was the fact that the number of books read per capita in Mexico was less than one per year. This year the subject was doleful enough to prompt Mexican author David Toscana to write about “The country that stopped reading.” He asked: “How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back some one who is basically illiterate.”

When Fray Martin de Valencia, tireless organizer of the Franciscan effort to educate the survivors of Hernan Cortes’ destruction of Tenochtitlan, died on the wharf of Ayatzingo, August 31, 1534, the “indians” of the Aztec Empire lost a valuable ally, though many didn’t know who he was. Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, was in ruins, and there was a slightest pause in the Spanish Catholic Church’s first religious order to answer Cortes’ request for a group of friars to convert the people whose civilization he was in the process of destroying.

On August 31, 1534, Spanish evangelist, writer and revered Franciscan leader in New Spain, Father Martin de Valencia, collapsed on the wharf at Ayatzingo, and died. August 9, 2013, Mexican students here returned to school. There’s a gnarled connection between the two.

Late in her fifteenth year, when it was noticeable that Concha Rosales was beginning to get her growth, she saw the man she called tio slap the woman she believed to be her aunt hard enough to knock the woman down. Concha threw herself in front of her tia and got hit too. Her uncle swore at her for getting in the way, making him strike her, too. But Concha had grabbed a split piece of log and stood in front of Chela Rosales with that hefty piece of kindling raised, ready to hit back. The man, Guicho Rosales, was astonished: This strange girl that everyone in the Rosales extended family had taken in was threatening him with a guage limb large enough that he was surprised Concha could heft it. And just because he’d hit his wife. Guicho didn’t consider such a thing any of Concha’s business, except as a warning.

With the release Friday, August 9, of one of the “founders” of Mexico’s first drug cartel, and a rather leisurely government response to this failure of good sense and common logic, a hefty slice of the media, both here and abroad, are suggesting that it appears as if the “bad old days” of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) are returning with the fresh presidency (December 2012) of Enrique Peña Nieto.

“Friedman Gets Lost South of the Border” announced a headline from Center for Economic and Policy Research think tank February 23. In recent days, someone has been well-meaningly scattering around the internet a boosterish piece by New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman concerning Monterrey, Mexico, which contains enough spillover to, by implication, paint a picture of Mexico in general. Among others, I was surprised to receive it in July since it had appeared in the Times in February. In quick-time it was pretty well eviscerated, its innards exposed to the light of wider points of view, its bones well picked and scattered. This was accomplished in good part by Mexican analysts, academics and journalists. plus the foreign media and other experienced long-time observers of Mexico. That experience has given such folks practiced savvy in recognizing mascaraed-and-rouged public relations puffery — the flatulence of political, and board-room chest thumping and wool-gathering. (The NYT maintains a Mexico City bureau whose reporters quite consistently display quick-take skills regarding pertinent history and whose excavation of present leads is profitable. It appears the Friedman Monterrey encounter might have benefited from their input.)