Today Mexico is celebrating el Día de la Revolución (Revolution Day). It commemorates the beginning of the bloody revolution that quickly drove dictator/president Porfirio Díaz from his 31-year long reign. A November 22, 1910 headline in the Palestine [Texas] Daily Herald proclaimed, “Revolution Is Now On In Mexico: The Real Thing is Reported Under Way in State of Chihuahua, Mexico.” However, the civil war raged on for ten years, as various factions battled for power and the peasantry fought for, in the words of Emiliano Zapata, ¡Tierra y libertad! (Land and liberty!) It is estimated to have cost 1.9 to 3.5 million lives.
At least here in Oaxaca, 20 de noviembre is not celebrated with as much pomp, circumstance, and military hardware as September 16th, Independence Day. However, there were school floats…
The Government Palace was decked out in green, white, and red and the Governor, along with other dignitaries, presided from its balcony.
As always, the bomberos (firefighters) received much applause as they passed by the crowds gathered along the parade route.
Not so much love given to these guys from the Agencia Estatal de Investigaciones, an agency of Oaxaca’s Attorney General’s office.
And then there was this gal, directly across from the Government Palace…
Octavio Paz writes in The Labyrinth of Solitude, “The Revolution began as a demand for truth and honesty in the government…. Gradually the movement found and defined itself, in the midst of battle and later when in power. Its lack of a set program gave it popular authenticity and originality. This fact accounts for both its greatness and its weaknesses.” [p. 136, Grove Pr. 1985]
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They ARE different
Posted in Culture, Economics, Education, Politics, Protests, tagged education, educational reforms, graffiti, Mexico, Oaxaca, photographs, photos, political commentary, protests, street art, Teachers union, United States legislation, wall art on October 11, 2013| 13 Comments »
Expats and Mexicans alike, are watching in amazement at the nonsense (as in, making NO sense) taking place in the hallowed halls of Washington DC. And, since many of the expats are retired, we are holding our collective breath over the possibility social security checks will not be forthcoming in November and a tanking stock market that flushes our nest eggs away. Of course, Mexico is in the middle of its own mess, “educational reforms” and economic proposals that will hurt Mexico’s working class and rural populations the most.
Wall in Oaxaca city.
In a New York Times article two days ago, Carlos Puig explains the reality of the material conditions that have forced the teachers of Oaxaca to take the drastic action of abandoning their classrooms to lead massive and extremely disruptive protests in Mexico City against the “No Child Left Behind” style reforms that the Peña Nieto led government has proposed and passed. (Read a critique of the US education “reform” by Diane Ravitch, former “No Child Left Behind” proponent, here.)
Oaxaca is 500 kilometers from Mexico City, yet the real distance is much bigger. The state’s G.N.P. per capita is one-quarter the average for the country. Oaxaca ranks second-to-last among all states in infrastructure. More than half its population lives in towns of fewer than 2,500 people.
Being a teacher in Oaxaca means sometimes having to travel for an entire day to reach your school in a tiny community, teach for three days — to children of all grades — and travel back home for the weekend. It means having to deal with children who speak more than 20 different dialects.
Being a teacher in Oaxaca means operating in a different universe — and under different rules.
Banner hanging in front of a school in Oaxaca city
However, as in the USA, the incomprehensible words coming out of the mouths of the 1% and their elected representatives are mind-boggling in their obliviousness to the adverse consequences their behavior and policies cause. And, we scratch our heads in amazement… McClatchy journalist, Tim Johnson, has repeatedly blogged about the exceedingly “bad” behavior exhibited by Mexico City’s rich and powerful directed at those they consider “below” them — most recently, Las Ladies, episode 7. And, just last week in Oaxaca, most were aghast to read that an indigenous woman, in the advanced stage of labor, was turned away from a hospital and forced to give birth on the hospital lawn.
Daniel Goleman had a revealing piece in the New York Times a few days ago that helps explain where this lack of empathy the ruling elite exhibit, that results in callous social policy, comes from. He explains in Rich People Just Care Less that, by necessity, “the poor, compared with the wealthy, have keenly attuned interpersonal attention in all directions…” And that, “A growing body of recent research shows that people with the most social power pay scant attention to those with little such power” and, “In politics, readily dismissing inconvenient people can easily extend to dismissing inconvenient truths about them.”
Okay, now we know why the rich care less, so what are we going to do about it?
Part of a mural on Niños Heroes in Oaxaca city.
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