MEXICAN CARICATURE AND THE POLITICS OF POPULAR CULTURE

Paul Rich

Guillermo De Los Reyes

Professors of International Relations and History, University of the Americas, Puebla, Mexico

The genius of popular culture studies is that sometimes they provide a flash of insight which narrower approaches never do. Such is the case with what can be called, with a Sherlock Holmes flourish, the affair of the sombreoed dozer. It illustrates how the ordinary can exemplify a complex historical sequence.

To understand the thesis advanced here about the sombreoed dozer motif, it should be mentioned that Mexico is governed by the oldest incumbent political party or oligarchy in the world, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional or PRI. The PRI is not a party in the American sense, but more of a family firm and social insurance scheme. It has successfully packed the ballot boxes of Mexico for more than sixty years. For some it has been "of doubtful theoretical democratic validity", and for others "a magnificent instrument for peaceful executive change". Currently its role is under intense scrutiny because Mexico, after the euphoria of the North American Free Trade Agreement signing, suddenly stumbled in an economic and political black hole with the devaluation crisis of December 1994. After delivering the goods for many years in the sense of stability and order, the PRI is beginning to look to its Washington patrons like a possible liability rather than ally.

Inflation, unemployment, the collapse of businesses and banks, and guerilla warfare are some of the cavalry of the Apocalypse that the veneration of one-party authoritarianism has produced. Former President Carlos Salinas, the hero of the Nafta agreements, has fallen from grace, and his successor looks less and less likely to last for six years. Memories of the new President Ernesto Zedillo's 1994 election promises to provide for the "well-being for your family", and his advertisements of himself as a leader who "knows how to do it" have acquired an ironic taste.

A grave crisis for Mexico was precipitated by currency devaluation in December 1994, deepened by the North American Trade Agreement. "The devaluation will surely result in a major surge of inflation," writes Robert Bartley, the editor of the Wall Street Journal, "which will offset any imagined trade advantages to a lower exchange rate. The combination of inflation and recession will throw the government budget into chaos. The economic turmoil, especially the devastation of the nascent middle class, will in turn produce political turmoil. Much of the hard-won progress of the last 12 years will be reversed."

Why has this come about? During the lobbying which preceded ratification of Nafta, Salinas and other Mexican leaders took pains to claim that the accords had nothing to do with political or cultural concerns. Nafta was misrepresented to the Mexican public as being entirely about economics. That was undoubtedly a wise course of action in terms of placating national vanity, but only the naive would think that Nafta was simply a tariff accord or that economic reform would have no reference to cultural values. Do work habits have nothing to do with culture? Does productivity have nothing to do with culture? Can a free market exist in a country which is not free? Does freedom have nothing to do with culture? Questions of culture - questions of popular culture - are increasingly on the minds of most Mexicans.

The discussion in the United States about Nafta irritated rather than informed Mexicans, especially when they heard strident criticisms of their society from Ross Perot. They had a chance to see American democracy at work in all its vulgarity and frankness. The outcome of the vote on the treaty was doubtful until the final days, and remarks about Mexico were humiliating. In the Mexican Senate the debate was far shorter and far more constrained, and the outcome was never in doubt.

Mexicans wondered at the American lack of manners. Why couldn't an American president silence debate and push through a bill? Why did he allow such humiliating criticism of Mexico? That was not as humiliating as subsequent events,in which the world was treated to the spectacle of an indecisive Mexican president forced to beg for a handout from Washington..

This was the more regretable because an important aspect to Nafta was that it was going to change Mexico's image in the world community. Mexicans have long felt that North Americans believed that "south-of-the-border people are basically poor, backward, lazy, unresourceful, and dishonest." The words often used include lethargic, apathetic, petty, prideful, egotistic, inefficient. Five hundred years, it has been said, have been devoted to underdeveloping.

Certainly a stereotypical Mexican has become firmly part of the world's political mythology, just as have the figures of Uncle Sam and John Bull - easily invoked by a few strokes of the cartoonist's brush. The Mexican image has evolved in a distinctive way and therein lies an insight into Mexico's problems.

The great political cartoonist Thomas Nast portrayed a vicious and dangerous Mexican in the pages of Harper's Weekly in the 1880s with a cutlass in one hand and a pistol in the other. His Mexican was hardly a complimentary figure, but Nast's Mexican had vitality. So did subsequent representations by other artists. Mexico often appeared as an unsavory member of the family of nations (and which nation does not) , but the cartoonists generally conceded with their drawings (see accompanying illustrations) that the country's population had energy and vivre. While the sombrero acquired importance as a way for political satirists to identify Mexicans and Latin Americans, it is important to note that Mexicans usually were portrayed, even if unfavorably, as a kinetic people. In a 1915 cartoon, the rest of Latin America was represented as a cheerful and docile, helping Uncle Sam constrain an irate Mexican who had stood up to the U.S.A. and lost his sombrero, his gun, and his temper. In a 1916 cartoon the rest of Latin America has acquired progressive "Western" clothes and submitted to Uncle Sam's control, but Mexico retains its independence and assertiveness.

Critical portrayals of Mexico and Latin America can be recognized as being in the category of the normal political vendetta that has long been part of editorial commentary. All nations have their images thus manipulated and despoiled, and learn to live with the criticism and even chuckle at it. The Statue of Liberty holds a Coca Cola bottle instead of a torch. The Russian bear acquires a grimace. What is disquieting is that with the consolidation of one-party control in the late 1920s after the Mexican Revolution, the portrait of the Mexican changes to one unusual in political representation, oscitant and weary.

While the Mexicans depicted in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before the coming to power of PRI are shown as alert and alive if pesky, after the PRI assumed control the image in the American and European media changes markedly. With the rise of PRI came the sombreoed dozer, the Mexican slumped on the ground in a perpetual siesta, a sombrero shutting him out from the world. He is not by any means representative of all Mexicans, but he became a widely accepted symbol.

Is he just lazy? Or is there another interpretation, that thanks to the tyranny of a one-party system he quite simply has given up. His feistiness is gone. He is apolitical, an unwilling symbol of what the PRI has done to the country. This alienated figure is an altogether different image from earlier caricatures of Mexico, and different from those of an evil Uncle Sam or conniving John Bull who is criticized not for listless indifference but for mischiefmaking.

The sombreoed dozer should be a profoundly troublesome figure to everyone who cares about Mexico. He is indifferent to issues, resigned to his fate at the hands of the PRI octopus. Whatever else can be said about such a portrayal, it is not of a country where entrepreneurship and initiative are highly esteemed. It is not of a country which inspires the confidence of investors . The image, if unchanged, signals disaster for a Mexico entering into Nafta, and into the competition from Canada and United States that Nafta is introducing.

There are those who believe that it is possible to have economic change without cultural change, but Nafta without cultural change is a recipe for misery. Confidence and capital go together. Without either, Mexican businesses will have no opportunity to enter the American markets that Nafta supposedly opens to them. Nafta only works if Mexico becomes an open society with the vibrancy and innovation that comes with such openness. The image of the sombreoed dozer encapsulates the problem.

Professor Berkley A. Spencer in a paper for the Kennedy Center for International Studies at Brigham Young University asserts that "...there is a core set of values common throughout the 'Hispanic' sector of Latin America. These values - with their resulting worldview and social structure - are, for the most part, a direct legacy of the Spanish conquest." One might wonder about a culture which still takes as its bench mark for behavior the events of sixteenth-century marauders; surely Americans see little relevance to current management styles in the eighteenth-century activities of General Burgoyne or the British Grenadiers.

Spencer, who lived in Latin America for sixteen years, considers the legacy of personalismo, and remarks, "To get things done, who you know is much more important than what you know." He quotes the work of Ricardo Carbajal, who believes that personalismo will be put ahead of "laws, schedules, and contracts." To observers who are sensitive to the effects of culture on politics, the crisis is a product of the Mexican refusal to face just how powerful an influence is the PRI. Mexican television confirms this: night after night on prime time the President and party hacks cut ribbons and make speeches to rows of department store dummies who have been bussed to the site of a road or a new government office building. The television screen confirms that from personalismo comes caudallismo, the Mexican weakness for authoritarianism.

Spencer describes the ubiquitous bribery and patronage in this way, "Those who are properly connected with the reigning party circumvent this bureaucratic legal nightmare [of obeying the law] through personal connections and a never-ending system of mutual favors and obligations...[which] curtails the genius and entrepreneurship of its citizens, [and] makes it next to impossible for Latin American nations to compete effectively in the international market - even with those items for which they have a natural competitive advantage." He adds, "...it should be fairly clear how Latin American culture and social structure impinge upon development or upon improvement in the quality of life in Latin America...The root cause of Latin America's underdevelopment lies in the nature of Latin American society and culture: highly stratified, elitist, authoritarian, personalistic, mercantilistic, and protectionists, it rewards some groups at the expense of others."

When the sombreoed dozer is compared with the more active Mexican cartoon figures of earlier years, it becomes evident just such how stultifying a dictatorship can be, no matter how outwardly benign. Roberto Salinas-León, editorial columnist for the Mexico Daily News, writes:

In the past, the failure to attain stable and sustainable growth has been blamed on external factors: the price of the oil, the foreign debt, the "sacadolares," the 1985 earthquake, the ratification of NAFTA, and others yet. This is part and parcel of the culture of self-deception which has earned Mexico the dubious reputation as a society where saving face is more important than telling the truth. The return of confidence will remain idle unless we come the terms with the truth, unless we acknowledge the damage of constant self-deception. This requires, above all, a recognition that progress and prosperity do not depend on the fate of forces beyond our control, but rather on the proper internal conditions that govern a free and prosperous society.

The consequences of Mexico's long sleep are that Nafta may contribute to the liquidation of the Mexican middle class rather than to its enrichment. Their government is unable to provide them with an environment in which they can survive economically against American and Canadian competition. Even worse, the poor, who are at least 45 per cent of the population, are seeing cooking oil, eggs and milk become luxuries. Its destiny, unless its political culture changes quickly, will be to provide cheap lettuce pickers and dishwashers for American society. The long reign of the sombreoed dozer as a national symbol illustrates how the artifacts and ephemeral of popular culture can crystalize and encapsulate such a complex situation.

Paul Rich is Titular Professor of International Relations and History at the University of the Americas, Puebla, Mexico and Fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Guillermo De Los Reyes is Professor of International Relations and History at the University of the Americas and Professor of Sociology at Cuauhtemoc University, Puebla.

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