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Mexico, U.S. linked by economic ties, lecturer tells forum |
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Tuesday, 13 March 2007 |
| | Manuel Palma |
By JIM GENARO
To understand the issue of illegal immigration from Mexico into the U.S., Americans need to look at the larger questions of how the two countries’ economies are inextricably linked, according to Manuel Palma.
A native of Mexico, Palma is a middle-school teacher and activist who works with immigrant issues in Yancey County. Prior to coming to the U.S., he was the director of the Na Bolom Cultural Center in San Cristobal de las Casas, in Chiapas, Mexico.
Palma
brought his message to the World Affairs Council of Western North
Carolina at UNC Asheville’s Humanities Lecture Hall on March 6. About
100 people attended the talk, which was part of the group’s Great
Decisions 2007 lecture series.
“I would like to
talk about the challenges of my country, but also the potentials,”
Palma said in his opening remarks. “I believe that in the next months,
if not weeks, you’re going to be exposed to this debate” over
immigration.
When he went to
work in Chiapas, one of the country’s poorest regions, Palma said he
had little preparation or context for what he encountered there.
He had grown up
“a middle-class Mexican living in the center of Mexico — or what I
believed was the center of the world,” he said.
Educated in a
private, “very German school,” Palma had enjoyed a life of relative
privilege. All he knew of Chiapas was that it was “a very strange place
where meat is not eaten” and that only one-third of all households
there had electricity.
When he arrived,
he found an exceptionally beautiful place — but one whose residents
suffered crushing poverty and where 72 percent of children do not
finish the first grade, Palma said.
“I was ignorant of one of the worst shames of modern Mexico,” he added.
Chiapas was also
the site of an uprising in 1994 by the Zapatistas, “a group of Indians
wearing masks, declaring war on the government,” Palma noted.
This came as a
shock for many Mexicans at the time, he said, because a common
perception — particularly in the more affluent north — was that Mexico
was a country on the rise, and then-President Carlos de Gortari “was
telling us that Mexico was ready to join the 21st century and become a
first-world country,” Palma said.
One of the
primary developments that contributed to this perception was the
passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, a
trade-liberalization treaty that was highly touted by Mexico’s ruling
class — and its counterparts in the U.S. — as the one true path to
economic prosperity, he told the audience.
Therefore, many
Mexicans were shocked when the Zapatistas declared independence from
Mexico in a manifesto that began, “We have nothing to lose — absolutely
nothing,” Palma said.
The roots of the
Zapatista movement can be traced back to the 1950s, he noted. At the
time, the highlands of southern Mexico were becoming overpopulated and
the poorest people of the region — predominantly indigenous Mayans —
were forced to take refuge in the rainforests that border Guatemala.
Left in conditions of extreme poverty, the inhabitants of those
rainforests rose up against what they saw as a pattern of oppression
and economic disparity.
Today, another political crisis has come to a head in southern Mexico, Palma said — this time over the price of tortillas.
Palma joked about the importance in Mexican society of “Vitamin T” — from which comes tortillas, tostadas and tacos.
To emphasize the
significance of tortillas, Palma noted that “the ancient Mayans
believed the gods mixed their blood with the corn” to make human beings.
In fact, the Mayans called themselves the “children of the corn,” he added.
Originally a
much less nutritive plant similar to wheat, corn was cultivated and
selectively bred in Mesoamerica for more than 6,000 years to be the
robust plant that it is today, Palma said.
About 40 percent
of the protein consumed by the region’s lower class comes from
tortillas, he noted. “Corn is really the staple of the diet of the poor
Mexicans.”
Roughly one-third of the wages of Mexico’s poorest people is spent on tortillas, he added.
However, despite
the country’s long relationship with corn, today Mexican farmers are
being put out of business by the much cheaper corn from the U.S., Palma
said.
“Poor Mexico — so far from God, so close to the U.S.,” he said, quoting a popular Mexican joke.
Under the
provisions of NAFTA, Mexican farmers were “forced to compete with the
most highly subsidized agriculture in the world,” Palma told the
audience.
Because of
federal subsidies, farmers in the U.S. can sell their corn for less
than production costs, he said. As a result, since NAFTA forced Mexico
to lift restrictions on imports, the country has gone from importing 13
million tons of agricultural products in 1993 to 23 million tons in
2000.
“We’re losing the race here,” Palma said. “We’re jeopardizing our national sovereignty.”
Although Mexico
has a thriving middle class, he said, it also has a huge population
that lives below the poverty line — about 55 million people.
Furthermore, the
country suffers from “an eternal corruption” on the part of government
officials, national corporations and international companies, which
conspire together to interfere with Mexico’s political system, he said.
These issues
were clearly illustrated by the 2006 presidential elections, in which
pro-business candidate Felipe Calderón narrowly defeated populist López
Obrador in a race that many said was marked by irregularities.
Showing a map of
the election results, Palma pointed out that Calderón mostly had
support in the country’s more affluent north, while Obrador’s
stronghold was in the south.
“This, in my opinion, is a map of poverty,” Palma said.
“This very close election was a wake-up call for Mexico’s elites,” he added.
Mexico’s upper class has continued “to turn a blind eye to two main things: education and health care,” Palma told the audience.
His experiences
working with the poor of Chiapas helped prepare Palma for his work in
Yancey County, which he noted is “one of the most economically
depressed areas in the nation.”
Among the
population of this poor, rural community just 40 miles north of
Asheville is a significant number of Mexican immigrants, almost all of
whom come from the same area, the Tarascan Plateau in the southern
Mexican state of Michoacán, Palma said.
While working
with these immigrants, Palma got involved in a study conducted by
researchers at Mars Hill College aimed at documenting the lives of
Mexicans in Yancey County — and their relatives back home.
“What we did was
to observe some of the immigrant families in Yancey and how they
communicated with their families back home,” he said.
Because many of
these people were illiterate, they often communicated by exchanging
videotaped messages with family members in Mexico.
Palma and the
MHC researchers compiled a number of these videos to create a
documentary that depicted the lives of the area’s Mexican immigrants.
This video
showed “a very neglected side” of the immigration debate, Palma said.
“And I’m talking about a profoundly human side — newspapers are not
talking about that.”
While much of
the media coverage of the issue tends to vilify illegal immigrants,
most of these people “are escaping the economic devastation that occurs
in their land,” Palma told the audience.
Furthermore, he argued, NAFTA and other U.S. trade policies have contributed much to that devastation.
“NAFTA produced
a great number of winners,” he said. “But it has also produced an
increasing number of losers — and increasing inequality.”
That inequality
directly parallels the increased influx of Mexican immigrants, he
added. More than 40 million peasants have come to the U.S. from Mexico
since NAFTA’s passage, Palma noted.
“It should be a
viable option for anyone to stay in his own land,” he said. However,
Mexico’s ruling elites “find it much more convenient to use the border
as an escape valve” for the country’s poor, he added.
The U.S. should
make an effort to combat Mexico’s poverty, as it directly affects both
nations, Palma said. “The question I would like to leave you with is,
‘Can democracy survive inequality?’” he asked in closing.
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