DALLAS — Mexican President Vicente Fox worries greatly about the welfare of Mexican immigrants in the United States. You can’t blame the guy. Looking north has got to be easier than rolling back centuries-old prejudices and alleviating the plight of indigenous people in his own country.
A few weeks ago, in a triumphant two-day swing through California, Fox reassured Mexicans and Mexican-Americans that Mother Mexico has not forgotten them. Meanwhile, deep in the mother’s belly, representatives of the Zapatista guerrillas, led by their masked spokesman Subcomandante Marcos, were embarked on a solemn, two-week march to Mexico City to make sure that they too are remembered.
The Zapatistas took up arms in 1994 in Chiapas state in southern Mexico to protest 500 years of racism and impoverishment of the country’s dark-skinned Indian population. With his ski mask, his pipe and his machine gun at the ready, Marcos became a darling of the U.S. elite, jawing with American journalists and hosting American filmmaker Oliver Stone at his jungle hideaway.
But then, in 1997, a different sort of revolutionary appeared on the Mexican stage, entering from the right. As the presidential candidate of the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, Vicente Fox set out to do with a media-savvy political campaign what Marcos and the Zapatistas had failed to do with machine guns — rattle the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
Once Fox broke the PRI’s grip on the presidency, to the jubilation of the Mexican people, the victory left Marcos unsure of his place in the natural order. Would the crew from “60 Minutes” and the Hollywood types still make the muddy trek to hold court with the masked rebel?
For his part, Fox loves holding court with Mexican immigrants in the United States. Throughout his California visit, the Mexican president was mobbed by thousands of well-wishers who brought gifts and wept at the very thought that the man who ended the 71-year reign of the PRI could bring a new beginning to a proud country. Homesick immigrants told reporters that if Fox could bring opportunity and equality to a nation that has, in the last century, experienced little of either, they would happily return to their homeland.
That would suit some Americans just fine. After the release of census data showing the population of illegal immigrants in the United States to be twice as large as it was thought to be, some terrified inhabitants of this “nation of immigrants” began to speak louder about an invasion across our southern border.
Others are ready to crawl in a bunker. Now that Mexican immigrants have found their way to the historically black-and-white Deep South, the city council of Marietta, Ga., thought it necessary recently to pass a law punishing Mexican day laborers who gather on streets waiting for work. Apparently that makes more sense to council members than punishing the Americans who offer work to the immigrants.
Now that the Hispanic population of Des Moines has grown by more than 160 percent in the last decade, the Iowa Senate thought it wise to approve English-only legislation. Concerned that preserving cultural differences might undermine unity, the senators somehow thought a piece of divisive legislation was the way to go.
And since bunkers come equipped with phone lines, expect members of Congress to continue to get angry calls from constituents demanding that lawmakers either stop the invasion or, at least, begin to deny government assistance to immigrants.
Fox is pushing in exactly the opposite direction, demanding that U.S. officials provide millions of people who should be his responsibility with everything from medical care to college tuition.
Back in Mexico City, the Zapatistas made demands of their own, lobbying the Mexican Congress to approve a bill that would protect the rights of the indigenous. Fox supports the measure, having told Congress that Mexico’s Indians have long been “exploited, humiliated, robbed, and discriminated against.” But members of Fox’s own party aren’t convinced. Zapatistas ended up making their pitch to a half-empty chamber after most of the PAN delegates stormed out. In the end, Marcos and the rebels went back into the jungle.
It is easy to applaud Fox’s admirable concern for the poor, desperate and dark-skinned immigrants who fled Mexico for greater opportunity in the United States. Now if he could only direct more of that concern to the poor, desperate and dark-skinned in his own backyard.
