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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | May 2005 
Jackson: Fox Remark Opened Up Dialogue
 Ginger Thompson - New York Times
| | Jackson cited Tuesday's election of Antonio Villaraigosa as mayor of Los Angeles as an example of blacks and Latinos working together. The black vote helped Villaraigosa become the first Hispanic to win a mayoral election in Los Angeles in more than a century. |
Five days after President Vicente Fox provoked a storm of outrage in the United States by saying that Mexican migrants do work that "not even blacks want to do," the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson said in a visit to Mexico on Wednesday that he welcomed the remarks, in a backhand sort of way.
"President Fox has opened a door," Jackson said in an interview. "Just like the bus driver who put Rosa Parks off the bus. He opened a door for us to talk about the system of denial." By that Jackson seemed to mean that Fox's statement, which he characterized as "offensive" and "inaccurate," would force Mexico to give African-Americans a place in its negotiations with the United States on issues of immigration, trade, education and health care.
"In late years, we have been locked out of these conversations," said Jackson, who was here at the invitation of Fox. "It's been only President Bush and President Fox."
Perhaps the greatest denial, however, has been here in Mexico, where there is usually very little public examination of race, much less racism. Here, too, Fox seems to have opened a door, and this week the country seems engrossed by it.
Mexicans typically pride themselves on being a colorblind society of mixed-race people, part Spanish, part Indian, and everyone equal. Slavery was abolished here decades before it was in the United States. Mexico never adopted anything like Jim Crow laws, and thousands of AfricanAmericans moved south of the border to escape segregation.
But some commentators said that Fox inadvertently exposed the disturbing reality beneath the facade and forced Mexico to take a more honest look in the mirror. The truth, said many observers on the radio and in newspaper columns this week, is that Fox's comments were not uncommon among Mexicans. They would hardly raise an eyebrow at dinner tables and cocktail parties.
A columnist for the Mexico City daily Reforma, Guadalupe Loaeza, wrote Tuesday that Fox's remarks reflected what she called an "involuntarily" racist attitude. "He was educated like millions of Mexicans, conscious of having been born white, and that it makes him very different from those who are born with dark skin."
Audiences here still get a laugh from performers in black face, or newspaper cartoons that show Africans drawn more like apes.
Mexico's 10 million Indians are not only last in almost every social indicator, including levels of literacy, infant mortality, employment and access to basic services. They still appear on television mostly as maids and gardeners.
Descendants of the African slaves who landed on Mexico's Gulf and Pacific coasts have been all but forgotten by governments and scholars alike.
This week, for the first time in recent history, the Mexican government published the results of a survey on the broader topic of discrimination. Josefina Vásquez Mota, the minister of social development, called the findings a "crude, painful and startling" picture of Mexican reality.
Vásquez said that some 40 percent of the people surveyed said they would not want to live next to an Indian community. Nearly one out of three considered it normal that women do not earn as much as men. More than 20 percent said that women were less able than men to fill important jobs. And one out of four said they believed that women were raped because they provoked men.
There was some hopeful news in the survey. It showed, for example, that eight of 10 Mexicans felt that eliminating discrimination was as important as ending poverty.
"We have before us," Vásquez said, "a photograph of a society moving between the remnants of authoritarianism and intolerance and, on the other side, a new culture that is more inclusive and tolerant."
The poet Benito Taibo said he found confusing contradictions in Mexico's attitudes about class and race while working recently on a television series about Mexico's exile communities. Since the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1917, he said, this country has welcomed wave after wave of exiles, including Spaniards, Jews, Chileans and, most recently, Indians from Guatemala.
More than 80,000 Indians settled in southern Mexico, Taibo said, with the full support of the Mexican government.
"We gave them refuge," Taibo said, "and we still have not given refuge to our own Indians. They live in a kind of undeclared apartheid. Our Indians remain invisible."
And then, referring to the 1994 Indian rebellion in the southern state of Chiapas, he added, "When our Indians try to make themselves seen, we kill them."
Jennifer Clement, also a poet and author, wrote one of the only Mexican novels whose protagonist is a maid. To write the book, Clement interviewed at least 30 Mexican maids, and she recalled that they often connected their skin color to their lot in life.
Clement remembered finding lemons in the maids' depressing service quarters. The women, she said, rubbed cut lemons on their skin to try to lighten their complexion.
When asked whether she thought Mexico was a racist country, Clement recited the opening line of her novel. It is her own interpretation of the voice of the average maid.
"I am darker, much darker than the rest, and so they call me 'Fly.'" |
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