Mexico in Transition
Fall 2001 | Volume I, Number 1
Table of Contents
Editor’s Letter →
by June Carolyn Erlick
Introductory Essay
Mexico in a Nutshell
English + Español
What is Mexico? To avoid regurgitating a page from the dictionary or digging myself into a chavinistic hole, I’ll offer some impressions: Mexico is, among other things…
Comings and Goings
Mexico’s Transition Reporters’ Eyeview
Mexico’s transition from an authoritarian system with a king-like president to today’s raucous democracy was a creeping, generational change that lasted many years. In our book, a history of…
Air Quality in Mexico City
Flying into Mexico City, one cannot help but note its heavy air pollution. Mexico City suffers from air pollution as severe as in any major city in the world. Now, with the Project for the Design of an…
Democracy and Social Reform
What’s New about the “New” Mexico
On July 2, 2000, Mexican voters brought to an end seven decades of one-party authoritarian rule. Just over a year later, Mexico continues to feel the repercussions of this momentous victory…
On Observing Elections and Magistrates’ Faces
Where votes were traded just last year for brand new bicycles and sewing machines, the 2001 offering price in Yucatán State’s May gubernatorial election was rumored to be a pitcher of beer…
Mexico and the United States
In less than a decade, Mexico and the United States have outgrown the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA. Mexican president Vicente Fox would like to move on to something…
Mexican Philanthropy Breaking New Ground
In a variety of ways, more than 3,000 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) throughout Mexico are serving communities. Some provide technical and financial support for community…
The Mexican Congress
Congress has become a principal player in Mexican politics. In 1997, for the first time in its modern history, Mexico experienced a divided government, in which the president’s party the…
Indigenous Law does not make Indigenous Right
If Mexico’s widely hailed democratic transition is to be successful, it must serve as a framework for the resolution of the social and political conflict that has pitted the Zapatista National…
Fiscal Reform in Mexico
Twenty five years ago, Mexico had a dream: to fund ambitious State-led industrialization through the use of external debt and its vast oil export revenues and join the ranks of rich, developed…
Education Reform in Mexico
Because the Secretariat of Public Education is, more than any other public building, an edifice of the people, the theme of its decoration could not be other than the life of this same people. So…
The 2000 National Elections in Mexico
The protagonist of Mexico’s political transition has been the voter. Acting collectively, voters shaped the peculiar character and duration of this transition. Unlike in Spain, Brazil, or Chile, no…
The Mexican Intellectual
English + Español
One thing Mexico has in abundance is intellectuals. It nurtures some of the world’s great writers, poets, musicians, painters, and historians. The historical reviews ofEnrique Krauze, the short…
Mexican Immigration
The View from Los Angeles
In 1999, on returning home to LA after four years at Harvard and in the Boston area,I ascended to the city of Angels for the annual gala dinner of the premier civil rights firm: the Mexican American…
The View from Texas
The elections of President George W. Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox have created an unprecedented opportunity along the 2000-mile-long U.S.-Mexico border. Since the inception of…
The View from New York
More than 600,000 people from Puebla, Mexico, call greater New York home. Poblanos as those from Puebla are called make up an immigrant population about half the size of Boston. They…
The View From New England
The Mexican diaspora has reached New England. Mexicans living in the region today include many types of migrants, long-term and temporary, documented and undocumented. The…
Dos Países, Un Futuro
Las elecciones del Presidente George W. Bush y el Presidente de México Vicente Fox han creado una oportunidad sin precedentes a lo largo de las 2,000 millas de la frontera EUA…
Mexican Immigration
The future of the United States will be in no small measure linked to the fortunes of a heterogeneous blend of relatively recent arrivals from Asia, the Caribbean, and, above all, Latin America first and foremost Mexicans.
Mexico at the Movies
A New Golden Age for the Silver Screen
Mexican movies are terrible, don’t watch them, the taxi driver told me when I first arrived in Mexico City last summer. Mexican movies are terrible, and also tasteless, reaffirmed my Spanish…
More than Popcorn Mexico’s Cinemex
Miguel Angel Davila loves movies. Yet, ever since the ’93 Harvard Business School graduate returned to Mexico, he almost never watches them at least not in movie theatres…
The Harvard Factor: From Pyramids to Salamanders
Mexican Amphibians
Mexico truly is a biological hotspot. What is mostly unappreciated, however, even by many professional biologists, is that much of the biological diversity of Mexico remains undocumented…
Investigations of the Royal Palace of Teotihuacan
In February of 1999, Linda Manzanilla Naim , from Mexico’s National Autonomous University and Leonardo López Luján, INAH, invited William Fash, chair of Harvard University’s Anthropology…
Fundacion Mexico en Harvard
Edgar Kelly Garcia, a ’98 graduate of Harvard Business School, is busy wiring schools in his native state of Sinaloa, Mexico. After graduating from HBS, he founded an Internet company to…
Tec de Monterrey
Thirty years ago, when Rafael Garza’s father studied at Mexico’s Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, all courses were taken in a traditional classroom setting and…
Updates: Harvard’s Latin@ Community
Updates: Harvard’s Latin@ Community
As a recent Harvard College graduate and active Latin@ student leader, one would think that an article on “the history of the Latin@ community at Harvard” would be a breeze. However, as I…
Views from the Barrio
What Significance Hath Reform?
The smell of steaming corn and fresh ripe fruit wafts past the endless rows of used automobile tires, new CD players, and stylish blue jeans. Mexicans from far and wide shop in this sprawling…
Mexican Machos and Hombres
These young men were my neighbors during the time of my ethnographic fieldwork on changing male identities in Santo Domingo. What it means to be men and women has changed…