Mexico: Culture and Public Education

The article translated below calls for some historical and cultural context. My insightful Spanish teacher once commented, "First you have to learn how to read the Spanish, then how to read between the lines." These introductory remarks are intended to help you read between the lines of Hermann Bellinghausen's culture-rich article.

The headline itself—Culture and Education—refers to the quite recent passage of congressional legislation granting secretariat status to the National Council for Culture and Arts (Conaculta). Initially established in 1988 as a decentralized agency of the Secretariat of Public Education (SEP), Conaculta was put in charge of the nation's museums and monuments, promoting and protecting the arts (visual, plastic, theatrical, musical, dance, architectural, literary, televisual and cinematographic), and managing the national archives. The new Secretariat of Culture is the 'easy divorce' mentioned in the article.

The ongoing struggle between the government and the so-called "dissident wing of the teachers' union" alluded to in the article is yet one more example of a stubborn fracture between the country's political and cultural elite (los de arriba, those from above) and everyone else (los de abajo, those from below; most especially the rural underclass served by the 'dissident' teachers).

Next is the controversial 2013 Education Reform regarded by many observers as the government's attempt to regain control over the teaching ranks rather than as a reflection of official desire to implement a reform of teaching methods or a reform of the country's notoriously poor infrastructure in public schools, especially those in rural, often indigenous remote areas.  

The article's historical references aren't chronological, but thematic. Historical context, however, relies on chronology, so here's the short version starting from Mexico's Independence from Spain, confirmed September 16, 1821:

• Reform Era 1855-1876: Attempting to recover from the more than a decade-long struggle (1810-1821) for independence, the fledgling country was nonetheless strongly divided between two broad groups: Liberals and Conservatives. 

Conservatives favored a strong centralized government, with many wanting a European-style monarchy. They also favored protecting many institutions inherited from the colonial period, including tax and legal exemptions for the Catholic Church and the military. 

Liberals favored establishment of a federalist republic based on ideas coming out of the European Enlightenment, with limits put on Church and military privileges. Until the end of the Reform period (1876, when Porfirio Díaz was elected President), Mexico’s history was dominated by these two factions vying for control and fighting against foreign incursions at the same time; i.e., Mexican-American War, 1846-47; French Intervention (aka Maximillian Affair), 1861-67.

• Maximilian: Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph (born 1832, Vienna, Austria; died 1867, near Querétaro, Mexico), archduke of Austria and emperor of Mexico from 1864 to 1867, when he was executed. Maximilian's naive liberalism proved unequal to the international intrigues that had put him on the throne and to the brutal struggles within Mexico that led to his execution.

• Benito Juárez (born 1806, in a Zapotec pueblo in Oaxaca; died 1872, Mexico City), national hero, President of Mexico (1861–72) and the country's only indigenous (Zapotec) President. For three years (1864–67), Juárez fought against foreign [French] occupation under the emperor Maximilian and sought constitutional reforms to create a democratic federal republic. Juárez's followers are known as Juaristas.

• Porfirio Díaz (1830-1915), President of Mexico (1876-1911). The thirty-year period of Díaz's reign is known as the Porfiriato. A controversial figure in Mexican history, Díaz commands villain status among the revolutionaries who overthrew him, but he is something of a capitalist hero in the business community. The Porfiriato was marked by significant internal stability (known as the "paz porfiriana"), modernization and national economic growth—due in part to heavy investment in mining and railways by U.S. and British business. Porfiriano refers to features that resemble Porfirio.

Díaz's regime, however, grew unpopular due to civil repression and political stagnation. His economic policies helped a few wealthy estate-owners acquire huge areas of land, but they left rural campesinos (small, indigenous and mestizo farmers) unable to make a living. The resulting job shortage and depressingly low wages for the Mexican peasantry was a direct, precipitating cause of the Mexican Revolution.

• Bola, (lit. ball) was a popular 19th century term used to evoke popular, unorganized uprisings; hence, 'la Bola de 1910' is an indirect reference to the rabble-rousing 1910 outbreak of the Mexican Revolution that would convulse Mexico until 1917, with scattered uprisings continuing into the 1930s.

• Lázaro Cárdenas (born 1895; died 1970), general in the Mexican Revolution and an able statesman, President of Mexico 1934-1940, Cárdenas is perhaps best known for nationalizing the oil industry in 1938 and creating the government oil monopoly, Pemex. 

Early on, Cárdenas distanced himself from his presidential predecessor, establishing legitimacy and power in his own right. His administration overhauled the agrarian reform of the agricultural sector begun by the Mexican Revolution, created ejidos—lands owned and worked collectively by peasants; and strengthened the system of Public Education. Notably, Lázaro Cárdenas surrendered complete power to his successor at the end of his presidential term in 1940.

Two cultural references complete this introduction:

• 'The' Mexican Epic Novel. Mariano Azuela, Los de Abajo (1915), The Underdogs  [available in transl.], is based on the author's experiences as an Army doctor during the Revolution. Los de Abajo is regarded by many as the quintessential Mexican epic novel or, as historian José Luis Martínez explains:

“The novel of the Revolution had its roots in the appearance at the end of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century of such works as: La bola (1887) by Emilio Rabasa; La parcela, The [Indigenous Farmer's Tiny] Plot (1898) by José López Portillo y Rojas, and Federico Gamboa's theater piece, The Serf's Revenge (transl.), La venganza de la gleba (1905)."

• Silvestre Revueltas (born 1899, Durango; died 1940, Mexico City) was a Mexican composer of classical music, a violinist and a conductor.

La Jornada: Hermann Bellinghausen*

Invoking culture with your mouth full is an old nineteenth-century habit that, in a manner of speaking, always presents Conservative (realistic, imperial, Porfiriano[1]) and Liberal sides. From the beginning, the Liberal side encouraged the idea that the young Nation deserved to be instructed, enlightened, educated. Works of creation and thought were undertaken with that perspective in mind. Members of the nineteenth century Liberal or Juarista[2] generation took on the role of being the Nation's teachers in a broad and profound sense.

This Liberal generation sought to put knowledge into circulation through creation, chronicles and pedagogy. When Guillermo Prieto [poet, 1818-1897], Ignacio Manuel Altamirano [lawyer, teacher, journalist, essayist, politician, 1834-1893], Ignacio Ramírez [writer, poet, journalist, lawyer, atheist, and political libertarian, 1818-1879], even Vicente Riva Palacio [liberal politician and intellectual, 1832-1896], invoked knowledge—they were thinking not of the Athenians but of the Mexicans, for the benighted commoners that they were.

Battered by the disorder accompanying Independence from Spain [1810-1821], the neoclassical tradition recomposed itself in schools and private salons, directing their tastes and aspirations toward Europe, namely France, seeking acceptance in the longed for royal courts .... The Hapsburgs had settled in Austria, and good for them.

There were those who dreamed of "restoring them" here and brought Maximilian[3], the first neocolonial experiment in what the 21st century now seems to be achieving—even though petty tyrants and managers are deemed good enough for the current globalism. These "restorers"—for descriptive purposes, let's brand them Conservative (they always consider themselves "modernizers")—often have neither any clear idea of who "the pueblo" [refers both to the people and their village] are, nor do the people awaken in Conservatives any interest greater than as folkloric ornamentation.

The Liberals had a stereotyped and general, but nonetheless generous, idea. Inspired by the egalitarianism of the revolutions in France and the United States, they nurtured the ideal of making us all equal. Mid-nineteenth Mexico remained overwhelmingly indigenous. Where it wasn't, it was dominated by a mestizaje [mixed heritage, mestizo] that descended mainly from the indigenous side, either for being rural or for belonging to the nascent working class that for practical reasons Karl Marx began studying in England. It all had to do with one thing: Mexicans. Plurality, multiculturalism and diversity were not fashionable concepts.

With the positivists, "scientists" and generals influenced by the Porfiriato, education and culture were concentrated in the male minority that could choose to attend Preparatory [High] School. Although by the end of the 19th century, the Catholic Church was at a low point, what it or the State didn't teach wasn't taught by anyone. The ideals of the Reforma[4] became accustomed to academicism, modernist manners and decadent bohemianism.

La Bola de 1910[5] disrupted the prolonged siesta. Moreover, to the dismay of the (more rancid than ever) aristocracy, it brought to the forefront the ignorant, the uneducated, the rabble.

But they [the people] were noticed by a new generation of painters, writers, thinkers, lawyers, composers and educators who not only noticed them, they joined or led them. Guided by the steady, intelligent hand of José Vasconcelos [Secretary of Public Education, 1921-24], they threw out the culture in order to educate the nation. This time the people came: their history was The History. 

The murals of Diego Rivera [Mexican Muralists[6]] and the epic fiction[7] coincided with [post-Revolution] labor laws and land reform. Education and culture, together, became a crusade that during the Cárdenas[8] era would be heroic, with background music by Revueltas[9]. And what did the Right do with the teachers? It turned a deaf ear to them.

Independent of the progressive corruption, decadence and institutionalization that hollowed out and emptied this "popular" discourse of any meaning, government rhetoric was nonetheless nourished by this Mexico of the redeemable masses and, in fact, held on to it well into the 1970s.

Beyond the inertia, however, education was culture, and culture, didactic or not, was education—at least in the regulations. Free textbooks were an established fact. From the office [Secretary of Public Education] occupied by José Vasconcelos [1921-24] and, later, by Jaime Torres Bodet [1943-46], they continued administering not just bilingual elementary education and literacy, but the fine arts as well with publishing projects, historical and archaeological conservation, museums, ethnological research. The two faces of Janus that the country was not able to separate.

There followed a deviant period (today's so-called neoliberal cycle, still underway) where the elite cultural sphere obtained niches of power and well-being, guaranteed their creative freedoms and economic solvency, with passports necessary for the market of prestige. Meanwhile, education itself—in the minds of its administrators, public education—is thrown in the garbage heap. The education priority passed into private hands, extremely conservative and wealthy. (It is appropriate to recognize the role of public universities in resisting full dismantlement.)

The easy divorce that the neoliberal State has finally imposed between education and culture[9] rounds off the distance from high culture, corporatized by the soft path, with what relates to the eternally educable masses who [they say] are better off with a new TV [Mexico is currently switching to digital TV and the government is providing free TVs to those on welfare programs] and a bag of cookies than with a book.

When the bottom falls out of the long, but fragile dream of fairs, festivals, awards, scholarships, complete works and retrospective exhibits, the Culture will come around to bumping up once again against the stubborn people, those dark-skinned and bedraggled hicks.

What do they think? Sometimes the people think, believe, organize and educate themselves in autonomy. It comes from below, the same as their original roots. This is less likely to evaporate into the air. Spanish original

*Hermann Bellinghausen (born Mexico City, 1953) obtained his medical degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He has been a contributor to the Mexican weekly magazines En Solidaridad [In Solidarity] and Mundo Médico [Medical World]. As editorialist and correspondent, he covers the state of Chiapas and the activities of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) for La Jornada.

Footnotes:

[1] Porfiriano: Reference to Porfirio Díaz (1830-1915), President of Mexico (1876-1911). The thirty-year period of Díaz's reign is known as the Porfiriato. A controversial figure in Mexican history, Díaz holds villain status among the revolutionaries who overthrew him, but he is something of a capitalist hero in the business community. The Porfiriato was marked by significant internal stability (known as the "paz porfiriana"), modernization and national economic growth—due in part to heavy investment in mining and railways by U.S. and British business.

The Díaz regime grew unpopular, however, due to civil repression and political stagnation. His economic policies helped a few wealthy estate-owning hacendados acquire huge areas of land, but they left rural campesinos (small, indigenous and mestizo farmers) unable to make a living. The resulting shortage of jobs and depressingly low wages for the Mexican peasantry was a direct, precipitating cause of the Mexican Revolution. 

[2] Juarista: Followers of Benito Juárez (born 1806, in a Zapotec pueblo in Oaxaca; died 1872, Mexico City), national hero, president of Mexico (1861–72) and the country's only indigenous (Zapotec) president. For three years (1864–67), Juárez fought against foreign occupation under the emperor Maximilian and sought constitutional reforms to create a democratic federal republic. 

[3] Maximilian: Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph (born 1832, Vienna, Austria; died 1867, near Querétaro), archduke of Austria and emperor of Mexico from 1864 to 1867, when he was executed. Maximilian's naive liberalism proved unequal to the international intrigues that had put him on the throne and to the brutal struggles within Mexico that led to his execution.  

[4] Reform Era 1855-1876: Attempting to recover from more than a decade (1810-1821) spent fighting for its Independence from Spain, the fledgling country was nonetheless strongly divided between two broad groups: Liberals and Conservatives. 

Conservatives favored a strong centralized government, with many wanting a European-style monarch. They also favored protecting many institutions inherited from the colonial period, including tax and legal exemptions for the Catholic Church and the military. 

Liberals favored establishment of a federalist republic based on ideas coming out of the European Enlightenment, with limits put on Church and military privileges. Until the end of the Reform period (1876; with Porfirio Díaz's election), Mexico’s history was dominated by these two factions vying for control and fighting against foreign incursions at the same time; i.e., Mexican-American War, 1846-47; French Intervention, 1861-67.

[5] Bola, (lit. ball) was a popular 19th century term used to evoke popular, unorganized uprisings; hence, 'la Bola de 1910' is an indirect reference to the rabble-rousing outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 that would convulse Mexico until 1917, with scattered uprisings continuing until 1920.

[6] Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros are the three great Mexican Muralists.

[7] 'The' Mexican Epic Novel. Mariano Azuela's Los de Abajo (1915), The Underdogs  [available in transl.], is regarded by many Mexicans as the quintessential Mexican epic novel. It is based on the author's experiences as an Army physician during the Revolution. Historian José Luis Martínez explains:

“The novel of the Revolution had its roots in the appearance at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century of such works as: La bola (1887) by Emilio Rabasa; La parcela, The [Indigenous Farmer's Tiny] Plot (1898) by José López Portillo y Rojas, and Federico Gamboa's theater piece, The Serf's Revenge (transl.), La venganza de la gleba (1905)." 

One other novel deserve mentions: Carlos Fuentes' The Death of Artemio Cruz (La muerte de Artemio Cruz, 1962), is today "widely regarded as a seminal work of modern Spanish American literature". The novel begins with the titular protagonist on his deathbed; the story of Cruz's life is then filled in by flashbacks. Cruz is a former soldier of the Mexican Revolution who has become wealthy and powerful through "violence, blackmail, bribery, and brutal exploitation of the workers". The novel explores the corrupting effects of power and criticizes the distortion of the revolutionaries' original aims through "class domination, Americanization, financial corruption, and failure of land reform".

[8] Lázaro Cárdenas (born 1895; died 1970), general in the Mexican Revolution and an able statesman. President of Mexico from 1934 to 1940, Cárdenas is perhaps best known for nationalizing the oil industry in 1938 and creating the government oil monopoly, Pemex. 

Early in his presidency, Cárdenas distanced himself from his predecessor (forcing him into exile) and establishing legitimacy and power in his own right. Overhauling the agrarian reform of the agricultural sector begun by the Mexican Revolution, the Cárdenas administration created ejidos—lands owned and worked collectively by peasants; and strengthened the Public Education system. Notably, Lázaro Cárdenas surrendered complete power to his successor at the end of his presidential term in 1940.

[9] Silvestre Revueltas (born 1899, Durango; died 1940, Mexico City) was a Mexican composer of classical music, a violinist and a conductor.

For more on Bellinghausen's last point—"Sometimes the people think, believe, organize and educate themselves in autonomy"—see Green Shoots.

Reflections on Culture Shock in Mexico City

This post is the last of four that describe what has been involved in renewing the rental contract on our apartment, a condo. At the first renewal, our landlady, the condo's owner, shocked us by giving her own arbitrary interpretation of the contract's terms. Earlier posts describe the events as objectively as possible (see Still Curious? after this post). 

This post describes our subjective experience with an aspect of Mexican society we had previously encountered in only the most tangential way. Although I wrote it last year, I dragged my feet in publishing it. Unsure about its message, I asked a trusted Mexican friend to read it. His response was reassuring: it is a fair description of this facet of Mexican society.

Reassured on that front, I still hesitated to publish. The story seemed 'unfinished'; it lacked an ending. In the last month of the contract, under the law, the owner could notify us of her desire for us to vacate the apartment, but the initiative was hers. As the final month came up, we waited quietly. Nothing. No contact whatsoever. None.

With two weeks to go, we sent an email to our attorney asking him what our next action should be. In the email, Reed relayed what he calculated to be the new rent based on the annual inflation rate as specified in the contract.

The attorney contacted the owner, who after some delay, finally responded. Accepting without comment Reed's calculation of the new rent, her only request was that since she has been having problems proving to the government the source of the rental income, she is asking that instead of making cash deposits to her bank account, we write a check and deposit it into her account. 

We were also asked to sign the new contract in person, which meant a trip to the office of the company that writes rental contracts and underwrites rent insurance for landlords (in case we fail to pay). After the meeting, I wrote an Update to describe the meeting. You'll find it at the end of this long-delayed Post.

We feel comfortable in Mexico. We have developed enjoyable daily routines and have begun to reach out to ordinary Mexicans by participating in a workshop on Reading and Writing at the Coyoacán Culture Center.

But none of this seemed to matter when we received the owner's email response to our message informing her of our intent to remain in the apartment. We know full well that most landlords are not like ours, but it seems important to tell this story as a way of fostering understanding about an aspect of Mexican society often hidden from view and rarely discussed.

Culture Shock

First defined in 1958, culture shock is the disorientation a person may feel when experiencing an unfamiliar way of life due to immigration or visit to a new country, or to a move between social environments. In the United States, I experienced a certain culture shock when as a young adult, I moved from the breezy informal style that characterizes California to the East Coast, where a far more formal culture prevails.

We are just completing our fourth year of living in Mexico—three years in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, and one year in Mexico City. In Pátzcuaro, our Mexican friends were middle-class professionals and small shopkeepers. Slowly, we are making friends in Mexico City—once again, among middle-class students and professionals in our workshop at the Culture Center and our local shopkeepers.

A scant month ago, we would have placed ourselves in the Adjustment phase of culture shock:

• Honeymoon phase, where everything is seen in a romantic, rosy light;  
• Negotiation phase, where initial excitement gives way to unpleasant feelings of frustration and even anger as one continues to experience unfavorable events that may be perceived as strange and offensive to one's cultural attitude. Cultural anxieties arise not only from unfamiliar ways of performing basic daily routines, but of almost-constant communications challenges—language, including culture-specific body language signals, linguistic nuances and faux pas, conversation tone and customs;
• Adjustment phase, where one grows accustomed to the new culture and develops routines based on knowing what to expect in most situations; the host country no longer feels all that new as events and situations become increasingly "normal". As problem-solving skills for dealing with the culture develop, one begins to accept the culture's ways with a positive attitude. As the culture makes more and more sense, negative cultural reactions and responses diminish;
• Mastery phase, where one participates fully and comfortably in the host culture. Mastery does not mean total conversion; expats often keep many traits from their earlier culture, such as accents and languages. It is often referred to as the stage of biculturalism.

Although it seems unlikely that we might become bicultural at our age, it does seem to us that the longer we live in Mexico, the more genuinely accepting we become of cultural differences. A comment by a British philosopher and his wife interviewed on the occasion of their Golden Wedding Anniversary is equally applicable to culture shock:

"If you live long enough, you even come to enjoy each other's foibles."

So that's where we thought we were when our rental contract came up for renewal. Our sense of "adjustment" lasted until the condo's owner sent us an email asking for a 10% rent increase—more than double the 4.3% increased allowed under the contract (rent increases are pegged to Mexico's inflation rate).

We replied in writing that it was our understanding that the annual increase is subject to the terms of the contract, copying the applicable clause from the rental contract. Her reply put us into culture shock:

"The amount specified in the contract is the minimum the rent can be raised."

From our Northern European point of view, she was saying that her signature meant nothing; the contract was meaningless; she was in control of the annual rental increase. Feeling that we had just fallen down Alice's Rabbit Hole, we contacted a lawyer. See Jenny's post, Civil Society, Rule of Law and Personalismo in Jenny's Neighborhood.

Culture Shock 101

We have read a lot about los de arriba (the Haves) in Mexico, its moneyed elite class. We have visited Polanco and seen the opulence, but it has seemed far removed from our lives here in Coyoacán. An expat friend from Pátzcuaro told us about a neighbor who had steered her to a reliable woman for household help. Both  the woman and her husband have been very helpful. My friend pays her what seems fair.

The neighbor woman, who claims she is a granddaughter of one of Mexico's former presidents, asked my friend point-blank what she is paying for household help. When she learned, she hit the roof:

"Do you realize what you are doing to me? You don't realize that the point is to get as much work as possible out of these people and pay them as little as possible."

Gulp. This sheds new light on a remark the apartment owner made when she called me. When I asked her to call our lawyer and discuss the issue with him, she asked me,

"Why are you calling a lawyer? You are my inquilinos, tenants." 

When I thought about her remark later, I couldn't help thinking, "It wouldn't be much different if she'd said, 'You are my peons...on my hacienda." She was saying, in effect, "I own you; I define reality; you do as I say."

When I told Reed, he protested,

"We are not her anything. We are renters mutually bound with her in her role as owner under a signed contract." As our lawyer put it, "As a renter, you have rights and obligations, and so does the owner."

At the end of the earlier Jenny's post, we wondered how she would respond. When we met with the lawyer, we found out that she had insulted him by asking, in a blatant attempt at intimidation, "Joven, young man, how old are you?" Refusing to rise to the bait, his answer was,

"I am young, but fortunately, the law is clear, and I am old enough to know what it says."

The owner called Doña Carlota, the building's administrator and told her that we are groseros, rude people, because we had consulted a lawyer. Carlota was magnificent. She pushed back, saying,

"They are not groseros; they are good people. They came to me because they were worried about your response, and I sent them to the lawyer."

We are in Mexico, which means we were not surprised to learn that the story has yet another layer. Intuitively, I have intentionally developed a good relationship with Carlota, who now told us that the previous tenant had left without paying the rent for several months. Furious, the owner approached Carlota and informed her that part of the money the tenant had paid the building for her parking spot was rightfully hers.

Clearly stung by the episode, Carlota told me, "I had to write her a check from the building's funds." So on another level, our struggle with the owner was, in Carlota's book, payback time.

The owner lives in Cuernavaca, a small city about ninety minutes away from Mexico City. Many of Mexico City's wealthy elite have weekend homes in Cuernavaca, which makes me wonder about her own status.

When we met her a year ago to sign the rental contract, we thought her very well put together. Given her poised self-assurance, we guessed that she was a professional—physician, lawyer, possibly a businessperson. Now we suspect that she may be de arriba, from above.

After the signing, Reed laughingly commented,

"This could have been the closing on a house; it was that formal!"

Little did we know! By asking us to sign a renewal contract, she was binding us to an obligation to pay the full year's rent, whether or not we continued to inhabit the apartment. With her current actions she is, in effect, telling us,

"You are legally bound by the contract, but I am not."

We have neither the owner's address nor her telephone number; her nephew's wife, introduced to us as a lawyer, fronts for her. Last fall I called the lawyer-niece to report that the toilet bowl was leaking water all over the floor and had to be replaced. She explained, "The tenant is responsible for all repairs in the apartment," which is not what the contract says.

Under the contract, infrastructure repairs are the owner's responsibility. Repairs or improvements "for the tenant's convenience" are the tenant's responsibility. Fortunately, I had respectfully hit the roof:

"I am seventy years old, and I have never paid for infrastructure repairs in a rental apartment!" 

The end result was that we split the repair cost fifty-fifty. Given all that's happened since, I feel proud of having successfully extracted fifty percent from her!

Culture Shock 102

Symptoms of culture shock include feelings of helplessness, irritability, anger, withdrawal, fatalistic thoughts, and sleep disruptions. I can relate to these symptoms, but I am also thinking of los de abajo, those from below, Mexico's Have-nots, who historically have been truly powerless.

A Purhépecha friend in Michoacán once told me about the company store still in place on the former hacienda where many of her friends live and work. Theirs is a no-win situation. I can't help thinking about the famously fatalistic mindset of many Mexicans: Is it rooted in this helplessness before arbitrary authoritarianism?

The owner's sense of entitlement ("you are my tenants") to get what she wants is coupled with her willingness simply to ignore the law in order to get it. Her attitude rings a bell. In an earlier post, I wrote,

To be absolutely clear, the social and political structure of Nueva España—authoritarian, hierarchical and often arbitrary—was designed to protect and preserve the Spanish ruling elite. The common people (los de abajo, those below, the Have-nots) had no choice but to defer to the demands and whims of anyone with any kind of official authority.

Her attitude is infuriating precisely because it cannot be challenged within her frame of reference. This no-win situation engenders feelings of helplessness if one intends to remain in the relationship (like us), or if there is no other option (those living on the former hacienda). At the time, the only option we saw was to walk away from the apartment. It seemed to us that the psychological price of remaining was too high.

Unfortunately, walking away is not an option for most of Mexico's Have-nots. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that it has not been an option in the past, because today there are signs that many of los de abajo, the Have-nots, are claiming their appropriate status as free agents. It must be noted that the price they pay for claiming their free agency can be very high.

Predictably, our decision not to give in to the owner's attempted manipulation has infuriated her: "How dare you defy me by going against my will?"

Through our lawyer, we communicated our intent to comply fully with the terms of the contract by depositing the legal increase directly into the owner's bank account. We have subsequently learned that the owner has accepted the legal increase, and we are now waiting for the new rental contract. On August 1, we deposited the rent plus the legal increase into the owner's bank account.

Postscript

When we met with our lawyer to sign the new rental contract, he observed:

"The owner was ignorant of her rights and responsibilities under successive contracts, such as rental agreements."

His comment is interesting because it speaks directly to the observation of the legal expert who wrote recently in a Mexican newspaper:

"The Mexican citizenry has a weak commitment to 'legality'. The citizenry has a tendency to see the law as a space for negotiation rather than as a framework of obligations with which one must comply."

I shared this comment with a wise Mexican friend much experienced in the practical aspects of Mexican legal practice, and I asked her, "Is this how the condo's owner sees the issue?"

"I agree fully with the author of the paragraph...that the majority of Mexico's people do not see the law as a set of rights and obligations, but as something that can be adjusted to their own needs or simply not even taken into account, if one has sufficient influence or economic power.

"And yes, effectively, that is the position of the owner of the condo."

Teasing out cultural meanings in Mexico often seems like trying to do a 5,000 piece puzzle without the picture on the box top! It often means making connections between comments and observations made by many different people. In this case, I recall Sandra's offhand comment about the owner,

"She believes that you are foreigners alone in Mexico...without support."

Vulnerable and hence fair game because we seemed to her to be alone, defenseless. Given this legal context, it is encouraging that our lawyer sees his role as one of raising awareness among his fellow countrymen and women about the legal 'rules of the game'.

So it is our hope that we have succeeded in establishing a precedent. We hope that next year's renewal process will be routine. We hope that our record of consistent on-time rental payments, coupled with our care of her property, will persuade the owner over the course of the next year that we are in fact the buenos inquilinos, good tenants, that she initially judged us to be. Time will tell.

Update: August 7, 2013

We just returned from signing the new contract. It proved to be the case that the on-time appearance of rent payments in her bank account, plus our care of her property appear to have persuaded her that we are, in fact, buenos inquilinos. In fact, she said as much, as did the rental contract/insurance company representative.

Interestingly, in her review of the new contract, the landlady noticed that it indicated we had paid a one-month security, when in fact we had made a two-month security deposit. She also discovered an error in the amount of the maintenance fee.

Our attorney was late. While the administrator was having the errors in the contract corrected, the landlady made several disparaging comments about how difficult it is to deal with our lawyer. She observed that since the rental contract is now quite routine, perhaps it isn't necessary for us to have an attorney. Reed responded diplomatically, saying that since we struggle with the language, it's advisable for us to have a lawyer.

By the time the attorney arrived, the errors had been corrected, and we were in the process of signing the contracts. The day ended well.

Still Curious?

A light-hearted, even humorous article comparing U.S. and Mexican attitudes toward rule of law appeared recently in the Mexican newspaper La Jornada. Legal "Fines" as a Teaching Tool was written by a Mexican anthropologist and academic who lived in California for some months while he taught at UCLA.

Other Jenny's posts dealing with the general theme of the rule of law:

• Renewing Rent Contract 1: Civil Society, Rule of Law and Personalismo relates our initial reaction and the first actions we took when our rental contract came up for renewal;
• Renewing Rent Contract 2: Rule of Law Kicks In describes how 'the system' effectively corralled the owner by enforcing limits around her arbitrary wishes;
• Renewing Rent Contract 3: We Sign New Contract!; 
• Bureaucracy: Labyrinths of Power relates what we learned when we had to move our bank account from Pátzcuaro to Mexico City;
• What Makes Mexico's Legal System So Different? is the question we had to answer when trying to renew our resident visas at Immigration;
• Work in Mexico: "It's my job" discusses the rise of the informal economy not only as a coping strategy for dealing with an authoritarian, often arbitrary and hostile environment, but as a way of maintaining personal dignity and respect;
• Partying With Impunity next-door to Jenny's apartment discusses yet another aspect of the rule of law; namely, a lack of effective enforcement mechanisms. 

Related articles translated from Mexican newspapers and posted on Reed's Mexico Voices blog:

• Mexico Post-Election: And now what?" asks Marta Lama, anthropologist and leader in the movement for women's rights. Her description of the destructive role of machismo in Mexican political practices and advocacy for development of a strong opposition in the Congress includes the role of negotiation in arriving at solutions agreeable to the entire country; the discussion is useful because it means developing agreements that are mutually beneficial, rather than one-sided;
• Mexico Post-Election: On Education and Politics by Manuel Pérez Rocha, President of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), celebrates the success of informal education projects undertaken at the grassroots level by the left and urges their continued effort;
• Mexico Post-Election: Creatively Fed Up by internationally-recognized activist Gustavo Esteva describes growing grassroots social movements, precisely the kind of activity urged by Pérez Rocha in the previous article.

Renewing Rent Contract 3: We Signed New Contract!

The outer bands from Hurricane Ernesto persist today over Mexico City, but the sun is shining in our apartment. Today, August 13, is turning out to be a very good day for us. This morning we met with our lawyer to sign next year's rental contract.

August 14 at Dawn! We feel blessed by the gods! After way too many days totally socked in due to rain bands from Huracán Ernesto, here's the vista that greeted us this morning! At the left, snow-capped Iztaccíhuatl sleeps nestled among the clouds, while Popocatéptl continues smoking away at the right. Today is a very good day!

The number thirteen is significant in Mesoamerican culture. The Divinatory Calendar (El Tonalpohualli) was created by combining twenty day-names with thirteen numbers in rotation. The Divinatory Calendar was used to foretell the fate of individuals at birth. I haven't been able to discover specifically why thirteen, but a scholarly paper notes that:

"The mathematic relationships and interactions of the tonalpohualli, involving the Venus cycle in conjunction with the solar and lunar calendars, gave rise to complicated calculations, auguries, myths and legends in the Mesoamerican belief system."

August 13: Auspicious Day to Sign a Contract

Our meeting with the lawyer was quite remarkable...as have been many of our encounters with the people of Mexico.

We were at the lawyer's office promptly at 9:00 AM. He arrived a couple of minutes later. The contracts were ready for Reed to initial and sign. We wrote the check for the "rent guarantee" that will kick in if we fail to pay the rent.

Then we chatted a bit. He told us that the owner had been ignorant of the law in the area of "successive contracts", such as rental agreements. Then he added:

"My job is to conciliate—not to provoke the owner, but to find ways to raise awareness about the applicable law and in so doing, to reconcile the interests of all the parties to a contract." 

I responded:

"As foreigners, there is nothing we can do to raise awareness about the rule of law in Mexico. But when we encounter a legal situation that involves us directly, we feel it is our responsibility to take a position that upholds the rule of law.

"We could not have done this alone. We want to thank you for your help. Not only do we lack the language skills, but we lack the necessary legal foundation and cultural awareness. You have been essential in helping us, perhaps, to raise the awareness of one landlady in all of Mexico about the rule of law." 

He smiled as he nodded in agreement, then added:

"It is my pleasure to help you. When people try to take advantage of someone, I want to use the law to protect the rights and obligations specified by the law on behalf of all the involved parties."

At his words, I recalled our first meeting, he spoke what is, for him, obviously a much-rehearsed line:

"As renters, you have certain rights and obligations under the law...but so does the owner."

His comment is interesting because it speaks directly to the observation of a recent legal expert who wrote in a Mexican newspaper:

"The Mexican citizenry has a weak commitment to 'legality'. The citizenry has a tendency to see the law as a space for negotiation rather than as a framework of obligations with which one must comply."

I shared this comment with a wise friend much experienced in the practical aspects of Mexican legal practice, and I asked her, "Is this how the condo's owner sees the issue?"

"I agree fully with the author of the paragraph...that the majority of Mexico's people do not see the law as a set of rights and obligations, but as something that can be adjusted to their own needs or simply not even taken into account, if one has sufficient influence or economic power.

"And yes, effectively, that is the position of the owner of the condo."

Given this legal context, it is encouraging that our lawyer sees his role as one of raising awareness of the legal 'rules of the game'.

So it is our hope that we have succeeded in establishing a precedent. We hope that next year's renewal process will be routine. We hope that our record of consistent on-time rental payments, coupled with our care of her condo, will persuade the owner over the course of the next year that we are the buenos inquilinos, good tenants, that she initially judged us to be.

This has not been a comfortable process for us, but we feel gratified by the outcome. We are hopeful that this process may have contributed in a minor way—by helping one landlady become more aware of what 'rule of law' in Mexico is coming to mean in everyday terms.

Still Curious?

Related Jenny's posts:

• Renewing Rent Contract 1: Civil Society, Rule of Law and Personalismo relates the first actions we took in response to the owner's 'arbitrary' demand for a rent increase in violation of the contract;
• Renewing Rent Contract 2: Rule of Law Kicks In adds richness to the tale by adding the point of view of both the rental agent and don Rigoberto, who owns a couple of rental properties;
• Partying With Impunity next-door to Jenny's apartment touches on a key issue for rule of law; namely, the absence of reliable enforcement mechanisms;
• Aztec Stone of the Five Suns describes the Divinatory Calendar;
• Bureaucracy: Labyrinths of Power relates what we learned when we had move our bank account from Pátzcuaro to Mexico City;
• What Makes Mexico's Legal System So Different? is the question we had to answer when trying to renew our Mexican resident visas;
• Work in Mexico: "It's my job" discusses the rise of the informal economy not only as a coping strategy for dealing with an authoritarian, often arbitrary and hostile environment, but as a way of maintaining personal dignity and respect.

Posts about Rule of Law in Reed's Mexico Voices blog, which presents articles in translation from the Mexico press:

• UNAM Head Urges Mexico Legal Profession to Resolve Challenges of Justice reports remarks by President of National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) to meeting of legal professionals;
• Mexico: Citizenship in Its Infancy and the Culture of Illegality by Héctor Aguilar Camín—journalist, historian and novelist—who writes often about Mexican politics and the challenges facing Mexico. He is editor of Nexos, a monthly magazine of political and cultural commentary.

Renewing Rent Contract 2: Rule of Law Kicks In

What a roller coaster we've been on! It feels as if we've lived through about five hundred years of Mexican history in the last ten days!

In few words, the owner of the condo we rent blindsided us by asking for a 10% rent increase when the contract stipulates a 4.3% increase, tied to Mexico's inflation index. When we reminded her of the contract, she authoritatively explained that the 4.3% is the minimum increase. In over our head, we explained the situation and our concerns to Carlotta, the building's administrator, who referred us to a lawyer.

We felt we had no choice but to look for another apartment and spent last Sunday doing so. It was not a happy experience. The truth is: we love where we are—our building and the pueblo-like atmosphere of the neighborhood. Colonia Parque San Andrés is a special enclave in a huge city.

We walk to our local mercado (fruits, vegetables, chicken, plastics, flowers, stationary supplies!), to the bank, to nearby restaurants and small shops. We are reasonable taxi rides away from Mexico City's historic downtown and from the airport. The apartment is just right for us. We have no desire to move.

In desperation, we called the Century 21 agent who had brokered the original rental agreement. Before she arrived, we paid a visit to Don Rigoberto, who owns the laundry where we take our clothes.

What a happy idea! It turns out that Don Rigoberto is also a landlord. In addition to the laundry at the front of his spacious home, he also owns two rental properties: a house in Cuernavaca and an apartment down the street.

His explanation of the rental facts of life was not just useful, but illuminating. In a nutshell, he told us:

"The owner is just negotiating. I do it, too, but I listen to my tenant. In Cuernavaca, she is a friend of my daughter. She told me she can't pay a lot. I'm happy to have her, because she takes good care of my house, and that is important to me. 

"It isn't easy to get good tenants. The tenant in my apartment here in Coyoacán ran up a 20,000 peso (roughly US$1,500) water bill that I had to pay, and I can't get rid of her." 

He gave us our negotiating points, which was extremely useful. It told us how people of Mexico think about the issue which, honestly, is how business people anywhere would think about it:

• Tell her that you do not agree with her arbitrariedad, arbitrariness, including lack of fairness; it was so important to Don Rigoberto that we understand this word that he insisted I write it down and even checked my spelling; 
• Tell her: We are good tenants; we pay on time and take good care of your apartment;
• Tell her: We painted the apartment out of our pocket; 
• Tell her: If we leave, you are going to lose two or three months rent to get another tenant, who may not be as good as we are; 
• Ask her: Why do you want to risk losing two or three months rent over 150 pesos (about US$12)?

He concluded by suggesting that we counter by offering a tiny amount over the 4.3% increase—essentially, rounding up "360 pesos" to four hundred pesos. It was tempting, but we wanted to stand firm on adhering to the terms of the contract. It seemed to us that if the door were opened now to annual 'negotiation', it would result in never-ending haggles for which, quite frankly, we have zero appetite.

Fresh from our conversation with Don Rigoberto, we met with Josefina, the agent. We thought we were meeting to discuss how to go about finding a new apartment, but naturally we brought her up to date on the owner's refusal to acknowledge the contract. We also gave Josefina a tour of the apartment, pointing out improvements we'd made: freshly painted throughout, newly re-tiled kitchen floor to fix cracked tiles, new bathroom faucets, dimmer switches for ceiling lights.

Her reply was clear:

"Ten percent is too much; even six percent is too much; the law is 4%. Let me call the fianza to see what's going on."

It is our understanding that fianza is a company that insures rental contracts; in essence, guaranteeing that the owner will receive the rental amount even if we stop paying. Josefina put her mobil on speaker, so we were able to hear the conversation; we understood most of it. From the opening greetings, which were warmly familiar, it was obvious that her relationship with this company is longstanding and ongoing.

When Josefina explained what the owner wanted, we heard the person on the other end object, "Oh, that's too much!" I have to say, her response was music to our ears. Could it be that the rule of law might prevail?

The administrator said she would speak to the lawyer and get back to Josefina, which she did in less than five minutes. The bottom line:

"The owner has agreed to the 4.3% increase, and the afianza lawyer has spoken with your lawyer about the contract."

Josefina also said that she would call the owner: "The owner doesn't want you to leave. I will call her tonight. Don't be distressed. Everything is going to be all right."

We told Josefina that we would be happy to pay her for her help: "Oh, no, the owner will pay, if it comes to that."

The next day we were able to meet with our lawyer, who confirmed what Josefina had said. I won't dwell on the fact that he hadn't thought it important to inform us of the conversation he'd had with the afianza attorney, at which time he'd asked her to send the contract both to my email and to his.

Taking Stock

Reed's 'take' made me laugh:

"The owner is a real loose cannon, but 'the system' has effectively corralled her: her own insurance company is setting limits, as is her own real estate broker, our lawyer, and the building administrator [who had backed us by pushing back when the owner called her to complain about us]."

We don't have the new contract yet, but we expect it to arrive...mañana, in due time. It seems time to sit back and reflect on our experience. Like so much of Mexican culture, it seems that several levels of cultural reality have been operating simultaneously.

Mesoamerican Culture

Mexico's strong trade, or commercial, tradition is grounded in the tianguis, open air market, where barter, not money, was used. When we had to buy a replacement computer for Reed, we visited the Plaza Tecnológico thinking of something like Office Max.

We chuckled ruefully to discover that the 'Plaza' was a traditional mercado, market, with boxes of merchandise stacked in narrow aisles fronting tiny shops, and salespeople hawking sophisticated technology in the traditional way! 

This tradition is a natural explanation of the habit of "negotiating" just about everything. As my longtime Mexican friend explained,

"People in Mexico love to haggle. They bargain. The owner led off with 10% to be able to negotiate from there. Many times they do it just out of a habit, not because they have bad intentions.  

"Ignorance also plays a role here. They just forget there is a contract and there are rules in the renting game."

Spanish Colonial Culture

The social and political structure of Nueva España—authoritarian, hierarchical and often arbitrary [Don Rigoberto's word!]—was designed to protect and preserve the Spanish ruling elite. The common people (los de abajo, those of below, the Have-nots) had no choice but to defer to the demands and whims of anyone with any kind of official authority. Put the other way, the elite was accustomed to demanding deference and unquestioning obedience.

Independence from Spain (1810-1821); Mexican Revolution (1910-1917)

Mexico's War of Independence from Spain began in 1810 and finally ended in 1821. But 'independence' from Spain set off what was essentially a century-long internal struggle for control among competing regional strong men.

Mexico's War of Independence is usually described as a fight by Mexico's criollos (Spanish born in Mexico) for political power denied them by the Spanish Crown. The Mexican Revolution early in the twentieth century was a struggle for power by los de abajo, the Have-nots. It is sometimes said that the Mexican Revolution was never completed in the sense that power is still denied to the majority of Mexico's people.

Modern Mexico

When the Revolution finally wound down, the struggles for power and control continued. Eventually, the struggle was resolved by President Plutarco Elías Calles, who successfully substituted party rule for struggles between individual strong men. He, however, remained the strong man behind the presidency until the election of President Lázaro Cárdenas who, once elected, made clear his independence.

Arguably, Cárdenas is Mexico's most beloved president. Nonetheless, one-party rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) established by Calles in 1930 delivered "stability without democracy" to Mexico for 70 years until the year 2000, when Vicente Fox of the PAN (National Action Party) won the presidential election.

This is the context within which rule of law (following the rules) is developing inside Mexico. It is fair to say it remains an ongoing process. NAFTA has opened the country not just to the business operations, but to the business practices of transnational companies. The impact of NAFTA on Mexico and her people is a decidedly mixed bag, but one thing is clear: "It's not good for business" has emerged as a dynamic moving the culture toward increased acceptance of the need for rule of law.

Back to Our Rental Contract

The owner's behavior in dealing with renewal of our rental contract seems to illustrate many of these trends. Her reliance on a fianza company is a key example. Carlotta just told us that the previous tenant had not paid several months rent, which the owner lost because she had no rent insurance—a defect that she remedied when she rented to us.

The owner's decision to engage a transnational real estate company, Century 21, rather than a local Mexican agent is also interesting. I wonder what her thinking was. I doubt she thought that in upholding the terms of the contract, "her" agent would end up arguing "our" case. Tellingly, the owner's own choices have set limits around her arbitrary tendencies.

I'll bet that it never occurred to her that the same contract terms that bind us would also bind her. As our lawyer pointed out to us, "As tenants you have rights and obligations under the contract, and so does the owner." A good contract is mutually beneficial, not one-sided.

Oh, have I mentioned that we are never bored living in Mexico? Stay tuned!

Still Curious?

A light-hearted, even humorous article comparing U.S. and Mexican attitudes toward rule of law appeared recently in the Mexican newspaper La Jornada. Legal "Fines" as a Teaching Tool was written by a Mexican anthropologist and academic who lived in California for some months while he was a visiting professor at UCLA.

Related Jenny's posts:

• Renewing Rent Contract 1: Civil Society, Rule of Law and Personalismo relates the first actions we took in response to the owner's 'arbitrary' demand for a rent increase in violation of the contract; 
• Short history of Mexico characterizes Mexico's major historical periods;
• Partying With Impunity next-door to Jenny's apartment;
• Bureaucracy: Labyrinths of Power relates what we learned by our experiences trying to move our bank account from Pátzcuaro to Mexico City;
• What Makes Mexico's Legal System So Different? is the question we had to answer when trying to renew our Mexican resident visas;
• Work in Mexico: "It's my job" discusses the rise of the informal economy not only as a coping strategy for dealing with an authoritarian, often arbitrary and hostile environment, but as a way of maintaining personal dignity and respect.

Jenny's posts touched on here:

• A Walk Around Jenny's Neighborhood;
• Jenny's Neighborhood: Making Friends Mexico City Style; 
• Saturday Market in Coyoacán;
• Tlatelolco: Twin City of Aztec Capital includes a section that describes Tlatelolco's flourishing mercado, market, and the crucial role its long-distance traders performed on behalf of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán.

Renewing Rent Contract 1: Civil Society, Rule of Law, and Personalismo

It is one thing to visit Mexico. It is another thing to read about Mexico. It is an altogether different kettle of fish to live in Mexico—up close and personal.

But that's what is happening to us right now. It's time to make new arrangements for rental of the apartment-condo where we've lived for the past year. The apartment suits us to a 'T': all the space we need and not an inch more. Plus, we love our garden-balcony and occasional view of the volcanoes.

Balcony Garden.
Yes—all this and intermittent views of two volcanoes!

In good faith, we wrote to inform the owner of our desire to remain in the apartment for another year. Her response shocked us. Rather than the increase equal to Mexico's inflation index (4.3% in June) specified in the rental contract, she wanted to increase our rent by 10%; moreover, she asked us to pay half of what she presented as an "insurance policy" on the apartment—a brand-new charge.

We responded by quoting the appropriate clause in the contract and calculating the new rental amount based on the increase of 4.3%. We also asked her to specify the cost of the "insurance policy".

Again, she surprised us. According to her, "the inflation index is the minimum the rent can be raised"...!  However, given that we've been such good tenants, she would agree to accept a 6% increase. We took very deep breaths.

In effect, the owner was telling us that she, not the contract, was in control of the rental amount, and she would raise the rent as she pleased. The oft-repeated Mexican dicho comes to mind: The law is respected, but not obeyed.

Like many interested in Mexico, we have read about the challenges the country faces in implementing the rule of law, but this transaction is bringing the issue home to us. Out of the goodness of the owner's heart, she would agree to a lower rental amount. She gave us the impression that the terms of the rental contract were nothing more than words on paper.... Our 'take' is that the amount is manageable this year, but what happens next year...and in the years to come? No, thank you, we said.

What's going on here?

We remembered that a year ago, "because you are foreigners", the owner had initiated all kinds of bureaucratic machinations to get guarantees that we would pay the rent. First, she wanted us to have a Mexican national, a resident of Mexico City, guarantee our contract. A good friend agreed, but the agency kept moving the goal posts: each time she submitted documentation, they asked for something else.

Finally, we said, "Ya basta!" (Enough!) and offered to pay the entire year's rent in a lump sum. At that, they said, "Oh, that's not necessary—if you'll agree to a two-month deposit, everything will be just fine."

Reed reminded me that people often attribute their own negative attributes to others; in this case, trustworthiness—or lack thereof. From what we now know, it seems the owner might have assumed that we would try to cheat her by not paying the rent, but she also made this assumption because she, herself, would try to cheat us.

Help!

Once a week, Sandra helps us with the apartment. Her husband is an accountant for a firm whose offices are in the building. Sandra also helps out Doña Carlota, our building administrator. Sandra introduced us to Álvaro, who laid down new kitchen tile when the old tile floor heaved and cracked.

Sandra is what sociologists call a 'gatekeeper'—someone who has links to a variety of social networks and can activate them to bear on whatever issue arises. I mentioned to her that the owner wanted to raise the rent more than the contract permitted.

After rolling her eyes while commenting disdainfully, "She just wants the money," Sandra said that she knows a good lawyer; years ago, he helped her with a problem that her mother had. She offered to tell Doña Carlota the situation and suggested that I get the lawyer's name from Doña Carlota.

Every afternoon Doña Carlota sits in the lobby for a couple of hours; we tease her that she's holding 'office hours'.  So yesterday, I went down to speak with her. She knew exactly what I needed.

After stating emphatically, "The owner is entitled to percentage increase equal to the rate of inflation, but not a peso more," she told me that the lawyer is in our building, gave me his name and apartment number and told me she'd already spoken with him: he was expecting us.

Seeking Legal Advice

After making sure that we had all the documents, we rode down our elevator in Tower A, walked back to the Tower B elevator, rode up one floor, walked to the door and rang the bell. A nice young man, probably in his thirty's, answered the door and invited us in.

We explained the situation and showed him the documents—rental contract and email correspondence. After he'd read them, he asked if we were unhappy with the 6% offer. We explained that we were more concerned about establishing the precedent that gave the owner control over the annual increase.

We indicated that we are somewhat familiar with Mexican culture. We touched on differences between the U.S. and Mexican legal systems. Perhaps most significantly, he explained to us what might be going on with the owner.

"Unfortunately," he said, "when an owner gets a good tenant, they don't seem to know how to treat them; they abuse them by trying to cheat them as much as possible. You are foreigners, and she may think, 'Let's see what I can get out of them'.

"But it works both ways," he continued, "because tenants often don't pay—they don't pay the rent; they don't pay the water or the gas. We have a tenant in this building who doesn't pay for parking. It's barbarous—he owes thousands of pesos." 

We believed him: the former tenant in our apartment had not paid utility bills, so when we tried to change the accounts to our name, we learned about the outstanding bills—which the owner, to her credit, paid promptly and without question.

On another level, it was difficult to believe our ears. Mexicans occasionally write that some Mexican practices are barbarous, but it is something else to hear a Mexican say it out loud, as a matter-of-fact.

Wait a Minute!

My mind races: barbarous—outside the city gates, outside civil society, uncivilized. I recall reading that the Spanish Crown was so threatened by 'civility' that when Spain conquered Italy, the Spanish governors systematically destroyed the civil society in Naples that had been the heart of that city's great trading empire.

The eighteenth century historian Anthony Genovesi saw public trust as the essential ingredient of a civil society, and he identified three aspects of this trust:

• Ethical trust as an 'exchange of confidence' between persons and is the moral basis for all forms of public exchange;
• Economic trust as 'the security that derives from the security of funds from which all loans are made'; and
• Political trust as 'that which is born of the conventions and promises sustained by the civil law'.

"Nothing," Genovesi adds, "must be cultivated so zealously as public trust, for on that men rely, and it is that which generates confidence, which produces and sustains agreements between men, which is the base not only of commerce, but of all of civil society." 

By attempting to reinterpret the rental contract in her favor, the owner not only tried to manipulate us, but she destroyed any basis for trust in our business relationship, which has now become defensive rather than mutually beneficial.

A Work in Progress: 'Civil Society' in Mexico Today

There is, of course, at least one other component to this story. We think back to our time in Pátzcuaro, where we benefited from being accepted into a network of good people—mostly teachers at CELEP, our Spanish school—who helped us with introductions and connections.

In Bureaucracy: The Labyrinths of Power, I wrote about how the Spanish Crown systematically prevented the development of any independent base of power in its colonies, including Mexico. In effect, Spanish colonial culture created a hostile environment—one where the Crown intentionally set one group against others. Hence, all social, economic and political activity was based on personal relationships—on who one knew, or could get introductions to, and on how much influence could be brought to bear on them.

Put differently, since 'civil society' was non-existent, the burden of survival and success fell squarely on individuals, on family groups, and on the networks they were capable of assembling. Anyone outside of one's own personal group was treated as a potential enemy or competitor—as someone to be taken advantage of or ignored altogether, depending on circumstances.

Labeled personalismo, this web of social relationships is often described as the foundation of Mexican society. Reflecting one aspect of personalismo, the apartment's owner has quite explicitly identified us as extranjeros, foreigners, to be taken advantage of; her idiosyncratic, personalized, interpretation of the rental contract is another facet of personalismo—as in, "The law is to be respected, but not obeyed." 

But viewed from another perspective, we are also benefiting from increasingly being perceived as belonging to a building-related network of trusted relationships. Not insignificantly, when Sandra and other Mexicans have introduced a new person to us, she—and they—unfailingly use the phrase, "es de confianza," to let us know he is trustworthy.

The attorney's response when I asked about his fee explicitly reflects this attitude. Moving his hand side to side in the universal signal for 'negative', he said, "We are neighbors; there's no fee for this; she's trying to pull a fast one. If you have to go to the judge, then we'll talk about the fee."

Doña Carlota had clearly paved the way for us by telling the attorney, in effect, that we are neighbors de confianza—trustworthy.

Stay Tuned

The attorney helped us put together a plan based on our rights as tenants under the law. So long as our rent payments remain current, the owner is obligated to allow us to remain until August 1 of next year. At that time, if she wants us to leave, she is obligated to notify us as by July 1 of her intent to terminate the contract.

As the lawyer explained, "You have both rights and obligations under the contract—and so does the owner."

It's going to be very interesting to see how the owner responds to our insistence on compliance with the terms of the contract under rule of law. Stay tuned!

Still Curious?

Other Jenny's posts also touch on the theme of rule of law and bureaucracy in Mexico:

• Partying With Impunity next-door to Jenny's apartment; 
• Bureaucracy: Labyrinths of Power is introduced by our experiences trying to move our bank account from Pátzcuaro to Mexico City;
• What Makes Mexico's Legal System So Different? is the question we had to answer when trying to renew our Mexican resident visas. 

Bureaucracy: Encountering Labyrinths of Power

Months ago, I lost my debit card to our Mexican bank account. When I tried to initialize the replacement card at an ATM, the system blocked the card.

Now that we're settled in Coyoacán, I set about fixing it. A visit to our local branch of Bancomer brought me to the desk of a young, twenty-something bank bureaucrat, Vanessa.

Vanessa's initial response to my description of the problem was to raise her bureaucratic 'mask'—a veiled, guarded look definitely not conducive to creative problem-solving. So my first challenge was finding a way to help her drop the mask.

Over time I've honed my strategy: Orchestrate body language and use formal Spanish in a show of respect bordering on deference, coupled with acute sensitivity to the bureaucrat's subtle responses. When the glimmer of an opening appears, find ways to expand it.

Success is assured when the mask drops. Invariably it is replaced by a personable, friendly smile. The smile seems to say, "You passed the test—now I will treat you as a person, rather than as a threat."

What's going on here?

What's going on is bureaucracy, plain and—well, maybe not so simple, Mexican bureaucracy.

Living in another country can be a real eye-opener to customs taken-for-granted back home. One such custom is the principle of equality before the law.

The U.S. tradition of 'fairness' is rooted in it: one law for everyone, and everyone equal before the law. The idea of impartial fairness spills over, too; for example, the idea that the goal of a bureaucracy is to apply its rules impartially to all who apply for its services.

How do I know? Because Mexico comes at bureaucracy from a completely different starting point.

Twenty-five years ago the Diccionario de la Lengua Española published by the Spanish Royal Academy defined burocracia like this (my translation): "Excessive influence of public employees in matters of the State."

So where, you ask, does 'excessive influence' come from? The answer, it seems to me, is two-fold: first, it rests in the Spanish Crown's top-down strategy for governing Nueva España (Mexico); second, it lies in how those excluded from power adapted to that top-down strategy.

Spain's Strategy for Governing Nueva Espana

The Spanish king was head of both Church and State, and he adroitly used both institutions to maintain tight control over Nueva España, whose sole purpose in the monarch’s plan was as a source of wealth to fund the Spanish Empire.

The Spanish State was represented in Mexico City by the Viceroy and his court, which was modeled on the Spanish Court—which, in turn, aped the decadence of the French Court under Louis XIV at Versailles. The Spanish Catholic Church was represented in Nueva España by its bishops. Both institutions were authoritarian, hierarchical, and established powerful bureaucracies to control the population.

State Bureaucracy in Nueva España

If the English colonies were guided from the outset by the idea of equality before the law, something very different happened in Nueva España, where a strong, centralized, authoritarian and hierarchical State was reinforced by a powerful bureaucracy designed to protect the privileges and jurisdictions of the Spanish elite headed by the Spanish king.

Instead of one law for all, there were separate laws for different groups. Indian Laws applied to the conquered indigenous peoples. Caste Laws applied to the different ethnic groups that constituted the population of Nueva España:

• Peninsulares (Spanish born in Spain); 
• Criollos (Spanish born in Nueva España-Mexico); 
• Mestizos (Indigenous-Spanish); 
• Africans imported from the Caribbean to work hemp and sugar plantations on the Yucatán Peninsula; 
• Mulatos (African-Spanish). 

Religious orders, merchants, artisans, miners—each group was governed by its own set of laws.

Power and Bureaucracy in Nueva España

The Spanish king tightly controlled access to power in Nueva España. Political and military power was reserved for Peninsulares. Criollos could neither hold political office nor serve in the army, but they were allowed to own land, so they developed and held economic power. Religious power was shared by both Peninsulares and Criollos.

Mestizos were excluded from all power. Treated as outcasts for centuries, they survived as beggers and petty thieves and, when provided for by their fathers, sometimes achieved the status of small shopkeepers. Their Spanish heritage gave them natural immunity to European diseases; hence their numbers grew. Eventually the Mestizos would align with the Criollos to force social and political change.

Meanwhile elsewhere in Europe, suggests Octavio Paz, university education in the 16th and 17th centuries, in effect, prepared the social group that was to become at the end of the 18th century, the bureaucracy of modern society.

In Paz's view, the process of modernization of the Mexican national bureaucracy was interrupted by the War of Independence (1810-1821) from Spain and the Mexican Revolution a hundred years later. Writing twenty-five years ago (1982), Paz concluded that as of the middle of the 20th century, Mexico still couldn't rely on a modern bureaucracy.

Paz would be pleased to note that the current Diccionario de la Lengua Española (available in MS Word-Spanish) offers these definitions of burocracia (my translation):

     1. Organization regulated by rules that establish a rational order for the distribution and management of matters (within its jurisdiction);
     2. A group of civil servants;
     3. Excessive influence of civil servants in public matters.

Over the last twenty-five years, then, a modern definition of a 'rule-regulated' organization whose purpose is to 'establish a rational order' over matters within its jurisdiction has supplanted the definition based on 'excessive influence' (cited earlier and which now occupies third place). It was this definition that was current when Paz analyzed Mexican bureaucracy in 1982.

Reed has a saying, "In a battle with culture, the culture always wins." It is reasonable, then, to expect the lingering influence of the earlier definition of bureaucracy.

Los de abajo (The Have-nots) Respond

Exclusion from power is relative, and the ways of responding to arbitrary, authoritarian rule are many. This reality complicates efforts to describe the response of the have-nots during the three hundred years of Spanish rule.

Even los de arriba (those from above, the haves) had their coping strategies. Mexican historian Rubio Mañé, for example, writes (my translation): "Clearly, the Viceroy always had the freedom to express his opinions to the king, to recommend certain measures and at times to contradict orders sent by the king. The formula is a familiar one: Obey, but don't carry out [the king's orders]". In Spanish the saying is, "Obedézcase pero no se cumpla". A loose translation might be, give lip service to but don't carry out, orders from above.

Coping was considerably more difficult for los de abajo. Excluded from political power, the Criollos were nonetheless able to use their economic power to influence the state bureaucracy. 

The situation of Mestizos was very different. Excluded from all power, the Mestizos had to fall back on their own resources. Arguably, these resources, learned at the knees of their indigenous mothers, included the value of the primacy of family and a tradition of work as honorable.

The legacy of the Spanish fathers was more complicated. When fathers made the effort to help beloved sons, they typically set them up as petty shopkeepers. But far too often, the Spanish handed down a disdain for work linked to the strong sense of privilege grounded in a love of luxury and culture brought from Spain.

How the Spanish monarchy sought to control the indigenous population also played a significant role. From the Antilles Islands, the Spanish brought the role and title of cacique, which translates roughly as chief. The cacique performed the role of head man, even strong man, among his people. As the sole bridge between the Spanish and the indigenous communities, caciques wielded enormous power, which they used to benefit family and friends.

To repeat, the social and political structure—authoritarian, hierarchical and often arbitrary—was designed to protect and preserve the Spanish ruling elite. The common people (los de abajo) had no choice but to defer to the demands and whims of anyone with any kind of official authority.

Independence from Spain (1810-1821) brought political power to the Criollos, but only marginal improvement to the situation of the Mestizos. Attitudes and behavior remained controlled by arbitrarily created policies designed to protect and enrich the expanded ruling elite (Criollos), and by the personal agendas and even the whims of individuals in power.

While the U.S. and Western Europe were striving to achieve the ideal of equality before the law, with associated principles of justice and fairness; the former Spanish colonies, including Mexico, were struggling to come to grips with their problematic Spanish colonial legacy. In what was essentially a hostile environment, all social, economic and political activity was based on personal relationships—on who one knew, or could get introductions to, and on how much influence could be brought to bear on them.

Thus the burden of survival and success fell squarely on individuals, family groups and the networks they were capable of building. Anyone outside of one's own personal group was treated as a potential enemy or competitor—as someone to be taken advantage of or ignored altogether, depending on circumstances.

Labeled personalismo, this web of social relationships is evident today; in fact, some say it is the very foundation of Mexican society. Mexican public intellectual Jorge Castañeda's recent book (2011), Mañana Forever?: Mexico and the Mexicans, was written in English to explain Mexico to readers in the United States. Castañeda uses the word 'individualism' to describe this culture trait, but it is more accurately described as personalismo—personalism.

So, you might ask, how does one thrive in such a hostile setting?  Individuals able to achieve positions of authority—beginning, it might be argued, with the caciques—use their power not only for their own benefit, but for the benefit of family and friends as well. Enter bureaucrats of all kinds!

Where Does that Leave Us Today?

So at the bank when Vanessa drops her mask, she is indicating that she feels respected and that hence she will deal with me on a more personal level. She will use her authority and her connections to obtain the result I seek. And that is precisely what has happened.

When the branch in Pátzcuaro confirmed that, yes, Jenny and Reed have an account at our branch; they nonetheless neglected to email or fax a copy of our signature card. Consequently, Vanessa says she has no way of confirming that, indeed, we are the people with the account in Pátzcuaro—yes, I know, but please don’t go there. Arguing does absolutely no good—trust me on that!

But not to worry, assures Vanessa with perfect bureaucratic aplomb, if you will bring your passports plus copies of your electric and phone bills to confirm residency in Coyoacán, I will be able to transfer your account from Pátzcuaro to our branch here in Coyoacán and issue new Debit cards to each of you. Yes, Reed’s card is now blocked as well. Sigh….

Shall I mention here that I have been involved in this process for weeks? Perhaps now is also the time to mention the primacy accorded to the value of paciencia—patience—in Mexican culture.

Oh, and if arguing will get you nowhere, neither will getting angry. Years ago, when I was working at Pemex, a Mexican colleague relayed a traditional Mexican saying, "He who gets angry, loses." Sigh....

Keen to Know More? 

If you're interested in another take on Hispanic bureaucracy, Jenny's post Tips for Succeeding with Mexican Bureaucracy begins with a hilarious, highly informative, professionally produced 'short' (3:30 min) documentary depicting Spanish bureaucracy. Don't miss it!

The 'short' is followed by my adaptation to the idiosyncrasies of Mexican bureaucracy of Seven Simple Steps for dealing with bureaucracy, which were initially developed by an expat from the United Kingdom living in Spain. Jenny's 'Take' builds on insights we've gained in our multi-year experiences of learning to deal effectively with the bureaucracy.

If you're dealing with Mexican bureaucracy, Jenny's post What Makes the Mexican Legal System So Different? will help you understand how Mexican law, grounded in the legal system known as Civil Law, is quite different from the U.S. legal system, which is grounded in Common Law. This understanding is essential for dealing effectively with Mexican bureaucracy.