|
WHO WANTS THIS JOB? President Vicente Fox told Texas businessmen visiting Mexico, "There is no doubt that Mexican men and women - full of dignity, willpower and a capacity for work - are doing the work that not even blacks want to do in the United States." How does one explain the President's widely condemned gaffe? On one level, the comment exposed Fox's roots in an elite that delights in racial stereotypes. Scan Mexican television and see wealthy white owners of the hacienda waited upon by Indios, blacks and mulattos. The shows are titillation for masses financed by rich hacendados who keep copious records of their Caucasian roots, - for Fox these include an immigrant Irishman in Cincinnati. Fox's was talking to Texans, who he may have assumed spouted racial stereotypes all the time, as with George W. Bush's advise on social security to a group of African Americans, "another interesting idea... is a personal savings account...which can't be used to be on the lottery, or a dice game, or the track." Fox may have intended only to acknowledge Mexican "dignity” and talked too long. He is in political trouble at home. His free market policies have driven a few million citizens North, immigration reform efforts have failed, and his party took a p.r. whipping when it tried a shady legal maneuver to disqualify the leading left candidate for next year's presidential election, Manuel Lopez Obrador. The million plus protesters in the street "for democracy" forced the legal ploy to be dropped. In Mexico, “race” is rarely discussed, but talk is plentiful about "the Indigenous nations" who maintain their cultures and fail to assimilate into the mainstream. Silence on race leads to ignorant remarks when the topic does arise, according to anecdotal evidence. Exchange student Jemeelah Muhammad told her Mexico City professor she was African American and he responded, "You can't be a black, you're pretty." Padre Glyn Jemmott, a native of Trinidad introduced himself at his new Costa Chica parrish, and a man said, "You can't be a priest. Black's don’t do important work.” The pity of it is that Mexico has an admirable civil rights history, all-be-it one in which the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Ward Connelly arrived simultaneously. Demands to end slavery and the caste system were loud and clear in the 1810-1821 Mexican war for independence. In 1821 the Black Indian commander in chief for Mexico, Vicente Guerrero, demanded an equality clause in the peace plan of Iguala. It read, “All inhabitants...be they Europeans, Africans or Indians, are free to pursue all livelihoods restricted only by their merits and virtues." In the spirit of this clause Guerrero later became president. The elite got its due, however, in a law passed in 1822. It prohibited mention of race in any government document, or in the records of the parish church. After President Guerrero abolished slavery in 1829, "class not race" became what counted in Mexican politics. The standard Mexican history texts, that President Fox might have perused for a response to his remarks, detail on struggles of peasants vs. landlords, and workers vs. capitalists, but have little on race. There is, however, “Afro-Mestizo Studies,” a field devised in the 1980s to highlight how blacks blended in while the Indians didn’t, i.e. how blacks became “Mexico’s model minority,” quiped Charles Henry of the U.C. Berkeley Black Studies Department. The biggest volume in this field is "La Presencia Africana en Mexico.” It has no mention of Guerrero, or other militants with an African heritage, Father Morelos, President Cardenas, Diego Rivera, etc. Blacks have only a “presence.” In the US even Booker T. Washington went "Up From Slavery.” The President was asked by Rev. Al Sharpton for an apology for the questioned statement. Fox said that he “regretted” the wording,but he held off on a formal apology, while LA REFORMA daily in his capital, ran a cartoon of Fox, in black face, saying “What more can I do to show I’m not a racist.” Perhaps the Mexican chief found an apology difficult out of fear that he wouldn’t know how to make amends except to say,“Mexicans will take jobs blacks have refused to take since slavery was abolished.”
|