Piecework

That fatalism is one of the most attractive qualities of the Mexican character. You see it on the faces of prizefighters at the Arena Coliseo when, bleeding and beaten, they refuse to quit. It is general among those trapped in the coiled traffic. There is a hopeless patience among those on line at the Correo Mayor, the central post office on San Juan de Letran (a broad street that nobody calls by its new name of Avenida Lazaro Cárdenas). This is another amazing building designed by the Italian architect Adamo Boari, who began, but did not finish, the Palacio de las Bellas Artes, the grand old museum across the street. Neither suffered any damage in the earthquake while their more modern neighbors were crumpling into broken piles. And the fatalism is most apparent in the way so many Mexicans have reacted to the appalling economic crisis that has afflicted the country since 1982. Income, purchasing power, and the value of savings have been cut by at least 50 percent; Mexico remains peaceful.

My wife and I were in Mexico once when the government allowed a 32 percent devaluation of the peso against the dollar. We arrived on a Sunday, with the peso fixed at 1,700 to the dollar; by Wednesday it was 2,300 to the dollar, and the afternoon papers were screaming that it might go to 6,000. We sat down to breakfast in Sanborn’s knowing that our meal would cost less when we finished than it did when we ordered. Our hotel was $35 a night when we checked in; when we checked out it was $22. Everywhere else on earth the U.S. dollar was weak; in Mexico it retained its old swaggering power. And although there were scare headlines, much talk on TV shows, great muttering and complaining among ordinary citizens we talked to in the street, nobody did anything.

“What can be done?” a mechanic named Esteban Torres said. “The government people knew it was coming, so they all bought dollars ahead of time. The rich keep their money in Texas. The middle class, they keep it in dollars, under their mattresses. The poor don’t have any money anyway. So what can be done?”

Fatalism is combined in this city with a deepening cynicism. In the 1988 presidential elections, thirty-seven of the city’s forty election districts were won by the opposition candidate, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, who headed a coalition of leftist parties. They voted against mismanagement of the economy that had eroded the value of their work, against the pollution of the air, and most of all, against the endemic corruption.

Most Mexicans can recite personal examples of bureaucrats holding up business licenses for small (and sometimes large) mordidas; traffic cops extorting money for real or imaginary infractions; telephones magically installed after months, even years, of waiting, by the simple expedient of passing money across a desk. Much of the corruption involves low-level bureaucratic members of the ruling Party of Revolutionary Institutions (PRI), and even some of its most ardent acolytes admit that their candidate, Salinas de Gortari, probably lost the election to Cárdenas. But after days of counting and recounting, of unexplained computer breakdowns, of charges and countercharges, Salinas was declared the winner by the smallest margin in modern Mexican history.

Even then there wasn’t much talk of revolution, There were protest marches, angry rhetoric, insults cast back and forth, but no guns fired in anger. After taking office the Harvard-educated Salinas moved quickly to repair his soiled image: He arrested the boss of the corrupt petroleum workers’ union; he jailed one of the hottest players in Mexico’s corrupt stock market; he moved against some of the drug kingpins in northern Mexico, arresting several hundred corrupt cops in the process. Most important, he arrested and indicted the killers of Manuel Buendía, who was Mexico’s most influential newspaper columnist when he was shot in the back and killed five years earlier. The “intellectual author” of the crime turned out to be the man placed in charge of its investigation by Salinas’s predecessor. These moves were at once practical and symbolic; Salinas was proving he had the right to govern by actually governing. And in Mexico City the fatalists began to suspend their disbelief.

“He has some set of timbales,” said my friend Ricardo Hernandez. “Everybody is surprised. But still …we’ll see, we’ll see.”