Uncovering Mexico
Jeremy Schwartz is the Mexico correspondent for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Mexico City.What's on this page?
All the entries posted on September 12, 2006.
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Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Garage sales in a gated city
One of the more head-scratching trends to hit Mexico City in recent years is the rise of the garage sale. It might not sound significant, but in a city where most everyone lives behind locked gates, the idea of letting strangers into your home represents a sea change.
Walk down many streets in Mexico City and the one thing you won’t see are houses. Like most residents, my wife and I live in such a place. From the street all you can see are imposing green wooden doors, a half-foot thick, topped with a chain link fence. It’s only once you pass the initial barrier that the house opens up. A favorite Mexico City pastime is catching glimpses of homes when the garage doors swing open.
Being new to the city (and in desperate need of furniture), my wife and I checked out a few garage sales when we arrived in May. At one garage sale in the posh Polanco neighborhood, the owner conducted what felt like a quick personality check on the intercom before she let us in. At another, the owner kept all the valuable stuff in the back of her house and only brought potential customers inside if she felt she could trust them.
In some ways, the garage sale is another example of cultural influences bleeding into both sides of the border. But in another way, it’s the quintessential Mexico City activity, fit for a place where you can buy or sell almost anything, anywhere.
It’d be nice to be able to say it represents a defiant neighborliness in the face of an out-of-control crime rate. But the real reason is probably less warm and fuzzy: People need the money.
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Party at the bullring
President-elect Felipe Calderon celebrated with his party people on Sunday at a packed Plaza Mexico, Mexico City’s main bullfighting ring (47,000 capacity). It was the first major public gathering of Calderon’s National Action Party since the July 2 election, and his followers celebrated with, well, not quite abandon, but with a certain happiness cut with a heavy dose of relief.
But on a day dedicated to celebrating his come-from-behind electoral victory, Calderon sounded suspiciously like his archrival Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Calderon has expropriated Lopez Obrador’s major campaign theme — combating poverty — and made it his own in the name of national reconciliation.
“I am personally engaged with the issue of poverty and the millions of families who still live in poverty,� he told his mostly un-poor audience.
Calderon’s embrace of the issue highlights Lopez Obrador’s largely unspoken victory in the past week. Even as his more moderate supporters have defected his protest movement and he receives daily ridicule for his plan to form a parallel government, Lopez Obrador, the anti-Al Gore, has succeeded in forcing his opponents to recognize his anti-poverty agenda.
Whether Calderon will do more than give lip service to poverty still isn’t clear. But Lopez Obrador has shown that by not going away quietly, he’s been able to influence events in ways the Democrats of post-Florida 2000 could only dream of.