Sabina Berman: Mexico and Those 'Poor' Mexican-Americans Sabina Berman - Proceso
go to original August 12, 2013

MEXICO CITY - We Mexicans are interested in history. We study the country's history throughout our fifteen years of schooling. Our cities abound with monuments portraying historical heroes, and politicians pose with the portrait of a hero behind them. The future interests us less.

A useful anthropological interpretation attributes our lack of interest in the future to a defect caused by Catholicism. Three centuries of obligatory faith in the Almighty accustomed us to suspend our desire in order to channel it into the heavens. We don't imagine the future, much less plan for it, and even less do we construct it: on our knees we wait for it, and it usually befalls us like a fatality.

The interpretation may be true. Now that in the United States the future of our Mexican-American brothers is discussed daily in the public space, Mexico has responded with silence. A scandalous silence.

President Peña Nieto has not said a peep about it. Only when there was talk of building on our border the longest and highest militarized wall in history, did Secretary [of Foreign Affairs, José Antonio] Meade raise his voice in the Senate, and what he said was brief and insufficient: There are better ideas.

Read the rest at Mexico Voices

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