From: nacho@dec5120h.ccs.northeastern.edu (Nacho Silva-Lepe)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.mexican
Subject: Re: Mejicanos, OJO!
Date: 22 Jan 93 15:05:24 GMT
Organization: College of Computer Science, Northeastern University

In article <C14359.EAn@news.cso.uiuc.edu> stuart@eagle.sangamon.edu (Jim Stuart) writes:

   Estimados Mexicanos:

	I'm a college professor in Springfield, Illinois and teach
   a general education course called (presumptuously) "Understanding
   Mexico." The syllabus says: This course is designed to provide a
   multidisciplinary examination of Mexico's culture, values, and
   perspectives on the world. Students completing the course should
   have a deeper understanding of Mexico and Mexican perspectives,
   and by extension, some appreciation of how Americans look from
   our neighbors' vantage point.

	The course is basically a social and cultural history of
   Mexico that attempts to help US students to understand more about
   Mexico and how the perspectives and world views of
   Norteamericanos and Mexicanos differ on topics from how we think
   about history, individualism, families, friendship, race,. etc,
   to current issues like NAFTA, maquiladores, undocumented workers,
   environment, drug traffic, etc.

	Students read the following:

	Distant Neighbors:  A Portrait of the Mexicans, by Alan
	  Riding (Vintage, 1986)

   ...

   James W. Stuart                    STUART@EAGLE.SANGAMON.EDU
   Sociology/Anthropology             (217) 786-7301
   Sangamon State University
   Springfield, IL  62708

I would like to recommend the book

   The Mexicans. A Personal Portrait of a People
   Patrick Oster
   Sorry, I don't seem to have the publisher :-(

Here's an abstract I read in a book catalog before getting my hands on the
book.

   When asked recently to predict the sleeper foreign-policy issue that the
   United States will face in the 1990s, former secretary of state Henry
   Kissinger answered, "Mexico".

   Now Patrick Oster, an American journalist who lived and worked in Mexico
   for four years, gives an in depth profile of this complex and challenging
   society whose fate seems so inextricably linked with ours.

   He answers all manner of questions Americans are bound to have about
   their next-door neighbors. How has a typical Mexican worker who earns
   three dollars a day survived the country's recent period of triple-digit
   inflation and enforced economic austerity? What freedoms do Mexicans
   enjoy -and not enjoy- under their authoritarian, one-party government?
   Will the nation's new Harvard-educated president be able to provide his
   nation with continued political stability despite a shaky mandate and
   current civil unrest? Wnat underlies the Mexican's man~ana approach to
   life?

   Oster also has some disturbing statistics about this proud though
   impoverished nation where the rich remain rich while the poor get poorer.
   While wealthy Mexicans have drained their country of $53 billion in
   savings and sent it to save havens abroad, 3 million former campesions
   live just outside of Mexico City in a ghetto that they now call the
   world's largest slum.

   Oster's most disquieting revelations involve details about widespread
   corruption. He recounts, for example, how payoffs permit one drug kingpin
   to serve out a jail sentence languishing in a cell equipped with a marble
   sauna, Oriental carpets and a live-in cook. "Bribery is what many
   Mexicans think of first when they want to get something done," observes
   Oster. "It is probably the most serious obstacle to Mexico's becoming a
   modern, developed nation"

   Yet he also holds out cause for hope as he tells of growing opposition to
   the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which has single-handedly
   ruled the country since 1929 - and of new trade agreements that will
   force Mexico into the global marketplace and perhaps set the stage for an
   economic miracle similar to Japan's.

   The Mexicans offers a multifaceted portrait of a complicated,
   increasingly turbulent land that we must come to understand.

This may sound a little biased at times, but overall Oster does provide
with a faithful recount of the sectors of Mexican society he talks about.

I should also add that the book's organization is to tell the story of a
particular kind of Mexican citizen (there is El Pollo, La Guera, El Junior, El
Policia, etc) in a separate chapter and related chapters bundled in separate
sections, which makes reading assignments convenient and does not impose a
particular order or that the book be read in its entirety.

IMHO, definitely a book to be read both by Mexicans and non-Mexicans.

-- Nacho.
--
(____)- Ignacio Silva-Lepe ----------------------------------------------(____)
(_____) College of Computer Science, Northeastern University            (_____)
(____)  360 Huntington Ave #237CN, Boston, MA 02115  Pho: (617) 437 3824 (____)
(___)-- Internet: nacho@flora.ccs.northeastern.edu - Fax: (617) 437 5121 -(___)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.mexican