Life in a Gilded Cage
 Carol Rosenberg - McClatchy Newspapers
| | In a pastoral area of Mexico City, riding instructor Antinea puts her pupil Orly, 14, and her mare, Luna, through their paces at a private riding school. (Marice Cohn Band/Mcclatchy Tribune) |
A 30-something mother in blue jeans cradles her baby in her arms while shopping for toys in a posh department store. She’s shadowed by a bodyguard with suit, tie and earphone, tending the baby’s stroller.
Or consider the Maymon sisters. Among Mexico’s best girl golfers, they go to a private school, have skied in Vail, Colo., and have spent weekends on the finest greens in the Americas.
“It’s fun. You make great friends,” said Maria, 13, who with Giovana, 11, has competed at the Publix Junior Golf Classic in Doral, Fla.
A peek behind the walls and into the gated communities of the nation’s elite, here in Mexico City, offers a look at children leading a rarefied life of exclusive schools and gloriously manicured country clubs, weekend homes and far-flung travel.
This is a nation where 11 percent of the population controls 88 percent of the wealth, according to Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics.
And the children inside that world have lives of prosperity and promise: served by nannies and chauffeurs, cruising shopping malls with drivers doubling as bodyguards, crashing club scenes or party-hopping in private homes.
Except for the omnipresent specter of kidnapping, they lead Latin America’s version of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” After-school hours are filled with special programs, in private places: dance class, swimming, chess.
But for the wealthy across this city and in other posh pockets of Latin America, raising kids also requires a level of security that, critics argue, spawns a life of isolation and alienation — young people cut off from swaths of their own culture, watching too much TV, in the care of nannies.
“They don’t go to the park. They don’t go out. They order in and the maids bring to their rooms. I think it is a lost generation,” declares Guadalupe Loaeza, a writer and intellectual who has for years ruffled elite sensibilities.
Cut off from poorer pockets of society, she says, affluent Mexican children “live in a golden cage, they live in a prison.”
Now, she says, she has detected spiraling eating disorders and drug abuse at earlier ages among the elites — a sign, she says, of their social alienation.
It all comes down to security in a nation where wealthy parents see kidnapping as the No. 1 threat to their children.
The parents’ fear is so great that the surnames of children and parents in this article, with rare exception, have been left out to protect against kidnapper profiling.
“I’m not really worried about it — but my parents are,” said Diego, 19, son of an insurance executive.
One of his friends was kidnapped two months ago, he said, held for two weeks, and then freed for a sum of cash he does not know. His uncle, he said, was held for 12 hours and released for “big money.”
Adds Claudia, 44, whose three kids shuttle among a private Jewish school, sports and exclusive riding stables where her 14-year-old daughter Orly trains five times a week on her mare, Luna:
“We are the lucky part of Mexico, very lucky.”
Yet her children “don’t know what it means to be independent. They live in a small bubble, very protected,” she said. |
Vallarta Weddings
Editorials | Issues | December 2006 
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