Stuart A. Day

Foretelling Failure: Questioning the Mexican Political Left From Within

����� � The presidency of Vicente Fox Quesada, for better and for worse, will guarantee the continued dominance ofneoliberal ideology in Mexico. A political cartoon in La Jornada by Helguera, printed soon after the election, alludes to what the future might bring: Fox, with a caricaturized mustache, carries a sign in trademark Coca Cola lettering that reads “Enjoy Petro-Qu´ (a reference to the petrochemical industry). Other cartoons refer to the plight of the poor under Fox, confirming through parody the victory ofneoliberal ideology in Mexico. If1988 represents the fraud-ridden, unjust loss

Introduction: A New Kind of Public Intellectual?

Already in late 2011 things were heating up, a year away from the elections of 2012, one of those unusual years in the political cycle in which citizens of both the United States and Mexico were voting in presidential contests. Candidacies were bruited about, and the press lamented the anti-intellectualism pervading so-called political debates. On the ground, locally, things often looked somewhat different. In early November of 2011, the international hackivist group “Anonymous” backed off its promise to publish names and personal data of Mexican drug cartel members—an Internet action that would have been effectively a declaration of war, with real rather than video-game kills on both sides (revealing the locations of known cartel members would effectively target them for rival cartels; drug trafficking organizations had already murdered numerous Internet journalists and incautious users of social media). That same day, poet Javier Sicilia, the subject of the last chapter in this volume, was leaving cempazuchitl flowers at the Angel Monument in Mexico City for Day of the Dead, promising to lead a new caravan, this time from the US side of the border, to Washington DC, to protest the US counter narcotic strategy. The reelection of Obama has done little to stem the anti-intellectualist tide in US politics; that of Enrique Pena Nieto in Mexico seems a worrisome return to the PRI-dominated stagnation that marked most of the twentieth century.

It’s My (National) Stage Too: Sabina Berman and Jesusa Rodríguez as Public Intellectuals

The fissure between past and present was defied by the woman who walked toward Mexico City’s zocalo, the main meeting place for demonstrators who in this case had come (by foot, on the metro) to listen to Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the man who, for a time, and without irony, was considered by millions to be the “presidente legitimo de Mexico,” the legitimate president of Mexico, and who continues to be known as Peje or AMLO (“Te AMLO,” a play on “I love you,” reads a common slogan). The woman was clad as a nun, “suffering” silently in the heat as she played the role of seventeenth-century poet Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. Her performance of resistance was a fitting combination of word and image: the many depictions of Sor Juana, often seated in her library, were recalled through the habit donned by the performance artist who marched assertively among a sea of yellow AMLO T-shirts, visors, and umbrellas; and the large placard she carried presented a productive parody of Sor Juana’s untitled poem known as “Hombres necios” (Foolish men). The first four verses of the re-inscription read: “Foolish priests who accuse / Resistance in act ion / Knowing that it is you / Who are accomplices of corruption.”1 In this case, the ridiculous men of Sor Juana’s iconoclastic poem are converted into present-day priests accused of active complicity in a web of corruption, among other key issues related specifically to the 2006 elections.