Few issues more relevant and more misunderstood than the phenomenon of the 35 million Mexicans and Mexican decedents living in the United States. Historically they have been ignored and even despised by Mexico and U.S. elites and its mainstream media – “the subject is not journalistically sexy”. However, the issue of Mexican migration to “the other side” over time has played a central role in shaping the social fabric of both countries.
To begin with, many of these “migrants” never really move at all, because their ancestors never crossed the border, but the border crossed them. The US invasion of 1846-47, which caused the loss of half the Mexican territory, displaced the dividing line between the two countries, but did not erase Mexico’s deep cultural roots in large regions of the Southwest U.S.
Today, in the run-up to the Trump era and its attempt to Make America White again, the isolationist and xenophobic threats of its new president come up against a much greater obstacle than its much-publicized wall, the demographic reality of his own country, where over 55 million people of Hispanic origin make up the most dynamic segment of their economy and that, whatever happens with the massive deportations of Mexicans, in a few years will represent a third of the total population of the United States.
The fact that Mexican migration wave is the third or fourth most important in the history of a nation created by immigrants is already a historical fact impossible to reverse. As happened in the 19th century against German, Irish, Jewish or Italian immigrants, today the favorite sport of the powerful is to channel social frustration into a permanent anger against the Mexicans. They are the “bad men”, the “criminals”, the “rapists”.
That is the northern part of this story. South of the border, a certain sense, the challenge is even greater.
Because of their peasant roots, with a strong indigenous ingredient, Mexican migrants have traditionally been ignored by the ruling elites and even the great economic actors of Mexico.
Of course, behind that distance we can see the racism that also exists in Mexico. But the fundamental fact is that, as an economic force and labor market and entrepreneurship, Northern Mexico (from Laredo and Tijuana up) has surpassed southern Mexico, especially its elites.
Today, when together with the rest of Latino immigrants, Latino immigrants represent an annual consumer market of more than 1.5 trillion dollars, Mexican migrants are subject to media attention and politics in Mexico. In his name millions of pesos are spent on advertising campaigns transmitted in Mexico, offering them, in the U.S. elementary services that, almost always, are reduced to the promise that, when they seek consular support, this time their telephone calls will be pick.
Now, when the highly-Americanized middle and upper Mexican classes perceive a threat to their consumption patterns, when the power elite themselves see the project of economic modernization at risk as the rest of the world is known as globalization and in Mexico they are identified with the famous Nafta, is when it has been opened the historic opportunity of a re-connection between Mexicans from both sides of the wall.
Because, in Borges’s words, “we are not united by love but by fright”, Trump’s nightmare is likely to open our eyes and both for conscience and for convenience, the opportunity to make real that slogan that President Vicente Fox Launched at the time and so many mockery generated due his saying that together, the Mexicans here with the Mexicans there, represented an enormous economic and social force of 120 million people.
Circumstantial facts, such as the collapse of its audiences in Mexico that forced Televisa to a virtual fusion of its contents with Univision, surely will also help to consolidate a narrative of Mexico as a nation that goes beyond its borders.
