Society and Culture in an Era of Crises and Global Entanglements PDF

Here is the converted text from the document. ### Chapter 40: Society and Culture in an Era of Crises and Global Entanglements In the 1980s, called the lost decade by some, Mexico faced acute challenges with the debt crisis and the 1985 earthquake. When the government failed to answer adequately a...

Here is the converted text from the document. ### Chapter 40: Society and Culture in an Era of Crises and Global Entanglements In the 1980s, called the lost decade by some, Mexico faced acute challenges with the debt crisis and the 1985 earthquake. When the government failed to answer adequately after the earthquake, civil society emerged in Mexico as a powerful force. Neighborhood associations, women's groups, and other popular organizations stepped in to respond to grievances and assist in the organization and rebuilding of communities. Emblematic of community organizing was **Superbarrio** who dressed as a superhero and invigorated local residents and groups to pressure the government to take action and to participate in renewal projects. Following the tragedy of the earthquake, political assassinations and corruption led to serious divisions within the PRI. **Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas** and other leaders left the party to found the PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution). The Zapatista movement emerged in the 1990s to confront inequities in Chiapas as well as other indigenous areas and to protest Salinas's signing of NAFTA. Taken together, these developments signaled greater popular participation as PRI hegemony declined. As the PRD took control in Mexico City, many saw a democratic opening. Their dreams seemed to come true when the PRI lost the presidential election to PAN's **Vicente Fox** in 2000. However, economic issues outside of Mexico's control, escalating drug wars, and other dark forces combined to create a new obstacle course for the people. As always, they responded with the historical resilience that seems inbred in the Mexican psyche. Against the backdrop of killings, kidnappings, corruption, and drug cartels, Mexico City, with its 21.2 million inhabitants, presented a contrast, one in which women, some indigenous, played an impressive role in commerce. As heads of 80 percent of street vendor organizations, they dominated the informal economic sector which produces nearly a quarter of GDP. Their commercial associations solicit permissions from the government to sell merchandise in street markets, supplied by wholesalers in the neighborhoods of Tepito and La Merced. The largest of approximately one hundred street vendor organizations, with six thousand members, is the **Asociación Legítima Cívica Comercial** founded in 1982, and now run by **Alejandra Barrios**. In some cases, these associations have initiated self-produced housing developments. Street vendors are not immune from threats, corruption, and crime, but they do have collective backing. Less fortunate are Mexico City's domestic workers who live with the families they work for or spend several hours each day traveling to and from the sprawling state of Mexico which surrounds the capital. Studies suggest that verbal, physical, and sexual abuse of domestic workers is common, and many are accused of stealing or dismissed unfairly. Paid under the table, they have no health benefits, and their low income perpetuates poverty. Attempts to unionize to secure a minimum wage and health care benefits are still in their infancy. Despite legislation that mandates gender parity in electoral candidacies (50 percent of candidates from all parties in all federal and state elections must be women), gender inequality persisted in the political sphere where women hold 31.7 percent of political posts. At the national level, they hold nearly 43 percent of seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 36.7 percent in the Senate. Women have far exceeded parity in the field of education. Perhaps one of the most disheartening factors for Mexico is that almost 50 percent of the population still falls into the poverty classification, earning less than fourteen dollars per day due to Mexico's poor infrastructure, inefficient bureaucracy, corruption, lack of education, and a plethora of other factors. Twelve million people work in the black market economy and have no social security or health benefits. Twenty-five percent of the total adult population fall into the underemployed category while another 10 percent are unemployed. The image shows **Superbarrio** leading a protest in the Zócalo after the 1985 earthquake. ### Population By 2017, the population of Mexico soared to 130 million, three-fourths of them urban dwellers. With 9 million inhabitants in 1980, Mexico City's greater metropolitan area had swelled to over 21 million by 2015 and covered 779 square miles. Like a giant magnet, it drew people from the countryside, adding hundreds of thousands to its population each year. In the process, the capital became a bit less uniquely Mexican and more like New York, Paris, or London. Those who enthusiastically approved of the changes argued that the nation's capital had at last become cosmopolitan; those who preferred the simplicity and charm of earlier days suggested that, as each colonial structure was torn down (despite protective legislation) to make room for a skyscraper or a freeway, and as cellular phones, that quintessential yuppie symbol, rang during high mass at the main cathedral, the capital had—alas!—ceased to be Mexican. Since the 1980s, the sprawling capital city with one-fifth of Mexico's total population has numbered among the ten largest metropolitan areas on earth, and until recently had the most acute traffic and smog problems in the Western Hemisphere. To relieve traffic congestion on the main north-south thoroughfare of Avenida Insurgentes, the Federal District government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador had inaugurated a rapid transit bus line in 2005. More Metrobus lines were added under Marcelo Ebrard and finally reached a total of five. The subway and buses transport approximately 15 million people a day. In 2010, Ebrard created a bike-sharing program called Ecobici, which expanded by 2015 to include four hundred forty bicycle stations, six thousand bicycles and one hundred thousand users, making five thousand trips a day in an area of thirty-five square kilometers. The program not only contributes to reducing pollution, but it also offers exercise and recreation. During the years of PRD control, Mexico City has substantially decreased its greenhouse gas emissions but pollution continues to be a problem. In 2016, city officials declared ozone alerts several times and restricted the number of days automobiles could be driven. Nonetheless, in 2017, more than 3.5 million automobiles traveled the crowded streets daily. Over the years, huge working-class housing projects in Mexico City brought hundreds of thousands together into closer proximity than they would have imagined possible. Crimes averaged 242 robberies and thirteen murders a day in1988, but under PRD management crime rates declined. By 2010, the murder rate was down 26 percent and amounted to one-fourth of that of Washington, DC. Despite the spiraling narco violence in other areas of Mexico, Mexico City's homicide rates have remained low, although kidnapping and extortion continue to be a problem. Nationally, however, in 2016 Mexico's homicides with firearms escalated to a new high, attributable primarily to organized crime. Despite the difficulties of modernization, Mexico City has continued to dominate the entire country, with half of the country's industries and over 70 percent of daily banking transactions. Provincial Mexicans resent not only the exaggerated centralism emanating from Mexico City but also what they believe to be the arrogant attitudes of those from The image shows bicycle stands equipped with Ecobici. the nation's capital. They have coined the derogatory epithet chilango to describe them. While the provincial capitals were slightly more successful in retaining some of their local flavor, they, too, fell victim to the homogeneity of technological proficiency conditioned by electronic circuitry, pocket calculators, cell phones, and computers. Guadalajara, Monterrey, and Ciudad Juárez followed Mexico City along the path of seemingly uncontrollable pollution, and even the citizens of León, Guanajuato, worried about their health in 1995 when tens of thousands of birds migrating from Canada and the United States died after drinking contaminated water in a local reservoir. They had a right to be concerned as scientific tests soon revealed that human sewage flowing into the reservoir had turned it into a huge incubator for botulism bacteria. On Sundays the capital's major avenue, Paseo de la Reforma, is closed to vehicular traffic so that families of cyclists can enjoy an outing. Here they circle around El Ángel, the statue that commemorates Mexico's independence heroes and is also a main gathering place for protesters and sports enthusiasts celebrating soccer victories. The image included shows Sunday cyclists at El Ángel The following table features information from the year 2015 and is in millions and rounded. | | | | | :--- | :---------------------- | :---- | | 1. | Valley of Mexico | 20.89 | | 2. | Guadalajara | 4.80 | | 3. | Monterrey | 4.48 | | 4. | Puebla | 2.94 | | 5. | Toluca | 2.12 | | 6. | Tijuana | 1.84 | | 7. | León | 1.77 | | 8. | Ciudad Juárez | 1.39 | | 9. | Torreón | 1.28 | | 10. | Querétaro | 1.26 | | 11. | San Luis Potosi | 1.13 | | 12. | Mérida | 1.06 | | 13. | Aguascalientes | 1.04 | Five years later, a much more sinister and callous ecological disaster was reported in Michoacán. Loggers using chemical pesticides purposely killed 22 million migrating monarch butterflies. They reasoned that if there were no butterflies there would be no reason to continue setting aside a protected forest as the site of the annual butterfly migration. Since the 1990s, Mexico has seen the proliferation of groups advocating environmental reforms. The environmental movement is strongest in Mexico City and the border area, but local communities throughout Mexico have mobilized to protect their forests and other natural resources. Cuatro Ciénegas in northern Mexico, one of the world's desert wetlands regions with huge biological diversity, is a focus of environmental efforts because it is under threat from stock breeders and tourists. Some of the worst environmental conditions exist in the northern Mexico border cities. In 2009, fully 10 percent of the border population lacked access to potable water and a third had no access to wastewater treatment. Air, water, and soils are heavily contaminated by industrial pollution, pesticides, and raw sewage. Lack of clean water plagues the entire country, but Mexico City in particular faces a whole host of water issues. Always short of water, the city keeps drilling for more. The enormous volume of water that is pumped up from the diminishing aquifers causes sinking on an average of seven cm. per year. This problem is exacerbated by climate change. More heat and drought produce greater evaporation and mounting demand for water. The dilemma is whether to tap distant reservoirs at overwhelming costs or to further drain underground aquifers and accelerate the city's collapse. In the city's historic center, one can become dizzy just from looking at the tilting buildings with their slanted windows and doors that do not fit their frames. Mexico City has been forced to import about 40 percent of its water from outside the valley, but it loses that much or more to leaking pipes and pilfering. The shortage of water is most acutely felt in the sprawling slums outside the city where some people get tap water only once a week and must have it brought in on trucks called pipas. They generally pay more for water than middle class consumers who have running water most of the time, a lamentable inequity. The effects of pumping water from surrounding areas is nowhere more visible than at Xochimilco on the southeastern edge of the city, all that remains of the Aztec canal system. Farmers grow corn, chard, rosemary and flowers on shrinking chinampa wetlands. On weekends, thousands of tourists picnic and party on brightly painted barges, or trajineras, that ply the canals. In early 2017, a twenty-feet-deep hole opened in the canal bed, draining even more water and causing more subsidence. In addition, drainage problems are omnipresent and sewers often become blocked, whereupon the city's sewage divers go to work dredging up all manner of organic and inorganic paraphernalia, despite the fact that thirteen thousand metric tons of garbage are collected daily from the streets. The city's grand canal built to move wastewater in the late nineteenth century is now inadequate to the task; thirty miles long and wide open, it stinks of methane and sulphuric acid. Finding solutions for Mexico City's environmental problems is a monumental task facing city planners, but a small contribution can be seen in the image of Avenida Chapultepec in Mexico City, where a part of the ancient aqueduct is festooned with multi-tonal living greenery, giving it the appearance of a postmodern, cuboid serpent. One had to travel to a small village to escape the cacophony of big city sounds and to encounter some of the charm of an age now past, but there, behind the façade of what seemed quaint to the foreign eye, the disabilities of underdevelopment remained stark. While the great majority of rural children were in school by 2000, many of those schools had fewer than six grades and only one teacher. They most often served the lowest-income children in Mexico in facilities that lacked even the basic elements for classrooms such as blackboards, desks, and lights. Although improvements have been made in the past decades, rural schools still lack microscopes and computers and are unable to provide quality math and science education; their dropout rates remain high. While Mexico's overall adult literacy had grown to 95 percent by 2015, indigenous literacy lagged behind. Anthropologists concerned with preserving Indian languages applaud the fact that approximately 6.7 million Mexicans still speak their native tongues. ### Leisure and Sport Mexico City is going through a period of transformation. Political changes in the governance of the city can be seen in massive construction projects, rebranding the city in the new signature pink, while tourist facilities multiply. The New York Times, with Carlos Slim as its largest individual shareholder, named Mexico City the number one tourist destination of 2016, and tourists have taken notice. Open-top buses ferry tourists to the major museums, public plazas, and other essential attractions. For example, one of these is themed for the lucha libre, having added a night at the Arena de México to the schedule. Festivals, in general, are ubiquitous throughout Mexico, held to celebrate an enormous variety of religious and civic themes, ranging from saints' days and the Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) to patriotic holidays inculcated by post-revolutionary leaders. In November 2016, a uniquely alien Día de los Muertos procession made its way through the major avenues of the capital toward the Zócalo. The parade, designed to attract tourists, was inspired by the one featured in the James Bond movie Spectre the year before. It drew mixed reactions from locals, but no one could deny that this celebration, with the popular, elaborate, public altars to celebrate the dead created each year by businesses, museums, and government offices, has become exceedingly eclectic, mixing indigenous, Catholic, and modern traditions. While much early Mexican rock was unashamedly derivative (one scholar aptly termed it "Refried Elvis"), it eventually developed distinctive expressions that mixed pop music with traditional forms like ranchera, banda, and norteña. Along with rocantol came the disco, where salsa and other Latin music coexisted with newer fads. The 2006 Avandaro festival included groups like Café Tacuba, Jaguares, Maldita Vecindad, and Maná. A 2012 film, Hecho en México, offers a cinematic mixture of original songs (folk, traditional, and popular), as well as insights from the most iconic artists and performers of contemporary Mexico, including Alejandro Fernández. Popular singers like Thalía, Luis Miguel, Paulina Rubio, Gloria Trevi and Julieta Venegas are well-known outside of Mexico, in part because of their exposure to US audiences in the expanding Spanish-language television networks. Univisión, which gets much of its programming from Mexico's Televisa, became the fifth largest television network in the United States by 2006. The annual Latin Grammy Awards demonstrate the extent to which cultural flows have crossed borders in both directions, bringing attention to many Mexican artists. Lila Downs, the award-winning Mexican American singer/songwriter who has Zapotec ancestry, incorporates indigenous Mexican influences into her music. Música norteña is also highly prized across borders, popularized by such groups as Los Tucanes de Tijuana and Los Tigres del Norte (especially known for narcocorridos). 2012 marked the death of Chavela Vargas, a legend in Mexican music (even though she was actually born in Costa Rica). She performed Mexican ranchera songs and other popular genres of Latin American music over a seventy-year period. Her professional career was launched with the support of José Alfredo Jiménez, perhaps the foremost singer/songwriter of Mexican ranchera music. His compositions have been performed for generations by Chavela and many of the groups mentioned above. Juan Gabriel, whose popular music crossed genres, died in 2016. Known to his many fans as JuanGa and "El Divo de Juárez," he was a songwriter and performer, the first popular musician to have his own concert at the Palace of Fine Arts. He was an inspiration to many as he played with gender and sexuality norms, refusing to give in to traditional ideas about masculinity and heteronormative behaviors. In the twenty-first century, Mexico is known the world over for its filmmakers and actors even if big screen film production in Mexico itself has somewhat subsided. In 2010, Mexico ranked fifth in the world in cinema attendance. Eight-screen multiplexes have squeezed out many independent movie theaters, and there is a huge market for movie DVDs, primarily pirated and sold in street stalls all over Mexico. After three decades of declining interest on the part of producers or audiences, the 1990s saw a resurgence in Mexican film, known internationally as the new wave, or the New Mexican Cinema. El Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía, (IMCINE), established in 1983, provided scant support for movies until the early 1990s when a series of gifted directors began producing films that appealed to Mexican and international audiences. Among them are Alfonso Arau (whose 1991 Como agua para chocolate was an international success), Francisco Athié, Luis Mandoki, and the trio known as the tres amigos—Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón, and Alejandro González Iñárritu. While the world of film directing is remarkably male dominated in Mexico and around the world, directors like Marisa Sistach, Maria Novarro, and Dana Rotberg also shaped the de- velopment of the new wave. The Tres Amigos offer testimony to both the success of the new wave in and beyond Mexico and the limitations of the Mexican film industry. Cuarón and Iñárritu made their names in Mexico directing films for a national audience using international techniques, while del Toro is best known for his work in the horror genre. His first feature-length film was Cronos (1993), a gory vampire narrative, now a cult classic of the category. Cuarón's 2001 film Y tu mamá también and Amores Perros (2003) directed by Iñárritu flouted the Golden Age focus on revolutionary-era mexicanidad. The first features a road trip by two college-aged boys (played by Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal) that serves as a dual coming of age story for the boys and for Mexico as it entered a new political chapter in 2000. The latter investigates class difference in Mexico City through the stories of three people all brought together in a car accident. After their initial successes in Mexico, Cuarón and Iñárritu made their way to Hollywood where del Toro had a long-established career as a special effects make-up artist in the horror genre. There they branched out to craft films in US and European contexts, for example, Cuarón's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) and Gravity (2013), Iñárritu's Birdman (2014) and The Revenant (2015), along with del Toro's films in the Hellboy franchise. Mexicans proudly claim these films, made for international audiences, and cheer when these directors win major awards for their work. For the first time in many years, in 2017 Cuarón returned to film a family drama set in Mexico City called Roma. Movies and television for a Mexican market are still thriving, despite less support from government agencies. A particular favorite was the 2013 Nosotros los Nobles that told the story of a fresa (Mexican slang for superficial upper middle class "preppies") family patriarch who forces his children to do without his money and work for their keep. The image is an advertisement for NOSOTROS LOS NOBLES one of the highest grossing Mexican films of all time, launched the careers of its leads: Karla Souza in Mexican films and a US television series, and Luis Gerardo Méndez who stars in Club de Cuervos, Netflix's first original series for the Mexican market. Streaming services are growing in Mexico, with Netflix enlarging the catalog of original Mexican series and other content that includes an expanding Korean selection for this growing immigrant population, while Televisa launched BLIM in 2016 for the Latin American market. BLIM, despite providing the only access to a huge catalog of Televisa-produced telenovelas (the Latin American version of US soap operas), has had little success against the bigger international providers. Telenovelas filmed across Latin America continue to draw large audiences in Mexico. The current First Lady of Mexico, Angélica Rivera, got her start as an actor in telenovelas; she is often referred to as "la Gaviota" after her character in the 2007 Destilando amor set in the tequila-producing region of Jalisco. Televisa, the politically affiliated source of much criticism in the 2012 elections, dominated Mexican television for decades, but finally got a rival of sorts when TV Azteca was privatized in 1993. Since then cable television networks have moved into Mexico, making US and other foreign programs and networks available, including CNN, BBC, HBO, and even the NFL Network. Mexican children are treated not only to Disney productions but also to Bob Esponja (Spongebob Squarepants) and Dora la Exploradora, while the rest of family watch Los Simpson. Some of the cable networks and both Televisa and Azteca feature reruns of American television series, but they also produce many original news, variety, and sports shows, in addition to the most popular genre, telenovelas. The latter fall into several subgenres, including the historical romance, the teen drama, and the pop music story. Perhaps the most popular is the working-class melodrama, which typically features a poor young woman falling in love with a wealthy man whose haughty family spurns her. Beginning in the 1990s, Televisa found a huge market for its telenovelas in Eastern Europe and Asia. More recently telenovelas have aired social criticism, addressing themes of poverty, political corruption, drug smuggling, and immigration. In addition, Mexico's National University and its Polytechnic Institute produce cultural and educational programs on their own networks. Sports continued to offer diversion, predominantly in soccer. Mexico has qualified consecutively since 1994 for the World Cup competition, making it one of six countries to do so. The Mexico national team, along with Brazil and Germany, are the only nations to make it out of the group stage over the last six world cups. In terms of success, Mexico reached the quarter-finals in both the 1970 and 1986 world cups, both of which were staged on Mexican soil. The Tricolor won the Olympic gold medal in 2012 but disappointed its fans in the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Rio Olympics. Top Mexican players recruited by European teams include Hugo Sánchez, Rafa Márquez, Guillermo Ochoa, and Javier Hernández (Chicharito). The Internet has been eagerly embraced in Mexico, which counted 60 million users by 2016. Video games are another source of entertainment; a recent study showed that nearly a fourth of Mexicans spent half of their leisure time playing them. Internet cafes are found everywhere. By 2015, 80 percent of the population owned mobile phones while only 40 percent possessed landlines. Rural areas, where few wired telephones exist, are better served by cell phones, heavily used to link migrants with their families. Three-quarters of the mobile phone market has been controlled by América Movil (Telcel in Mexico), the multinational company owned by Carlos Slim Helú. As opposed to the high rates charged by his company Telmex, América Movil offers relatively cheap fixed plans and has concentrated on attracting customers en masse, but the new telecommunications reform has allowed competition from AT&T and other providers. Mexico and the USA are closely linked by telephone. More than 90 percent of the international calls from Mexico go to the United States whereas roughly 13 percent of all US international calls go to Mexico. Cell-phone users are ubiquitous on the streets, in restaurants, and more annoyingly in the audiences at public performances. Yet, according to one newspaper commentator, as a means of communication the telephone is very cold (muy frío) and not the most important. In an amusing 2007 editorial in La Reforma, cultural critic Juan Villoro maintained that in Mexico the principal means of communication is the comida, the main "midday" meal. Other forms of communication are important only for arranging the comida, which is rarely served before 3:00 p.m., lasts at least two hours, and often spills over into dinner and breakfast. The comida is only authentic when performed in the company of others: it is the venue for conducting business most efficiently and certainly in the most civilized manner. According to Villoro, "The only way to reach an agreement---either emotional or professional---involves sharing the table from the aperitif (tequila) to the after-dinner liqueur. Phone calls and e-mails are simply attempts to get to the moment when the dish of maguey worms means that we have begun to understand each other.... In some exotic countries the main meal is considered a necessity or a delight. In Mexico it's virtually a legal act. We only know that someone is making a deal or really cares for us if it happens when our mouths are deliciously full." Mexicans are funny. As in humorous. Humor is central to daily interactions, cultural expressions, and political critique. For example, the albur is a complicated form of word play, pun, or double entendre that often has a sexual connotation and Mexicans, men and women alike, constantly try to one-up each other with better albures. While these tend to be a competition among friends, political jokes are a form of public resistance. Mexican political scientist Samuel Schmidt demonstrates that these jokes often direct pointed attacks at politicians and public figures, serving as an outlet for protest not always afforded by the political establishment. The two images show memes that mock the Mexican president and First Lady. ### Scholarship ans Intellectual Activism It took a long time for professional, less polemical scholarship to reach the public, but it finally did in dramatic fashion late in 1992. Mexico's mandatory school textbooks underwent a major revision. Porfirio Díaz emerged not as a despotic megalomaniac but as a positive actor in the creation of modern Mexico. The revolutionary icons on the other hand, especially Emiliano Zapata, surfaced as rather less heroic and not entirely free of warts. In general harmony with the post-revolutionary political ethic, the textbooks no longer attributed Mexico's serious national problems solely to the imperialistic United States. For the first time, Mexican schoolchildren were allowed to read a reasonable and accurate accounting of what happened on October 2, 1968, at Tlatelolco. They deserved to know. But the textbook revisions were controversial as many recoiled at the thought that Mexican history should be rewritten to harmonize with the contemporary political and economic proclivities. In the most recent reincarnation of the idea that historical interpretation reflects the social milieu of the writer, the Fox administration proposed new changes in school curriculum that de-emphasized the study of Mexico's past in favor of texts that would point Mexico in a more modern, technological direction. Contributing to the maturation of historical scholarship over time, beginning in 1949 Mexican historians came together with their US, Canadian, and European counterparts in conferences held every four years to discuss the state of the field. In 2010, the thirteenth meeting convened in Querétaro to exchange ideas during the bicentennial of Mexico's revolution for independence and the centennial of the Mexican revolution. Aspiring historians submitted the fruits of their research to one another, tested new ideas, pinpointed lacunae, and disputed the latest revisionist interpretations. The Mexican government had been pre-preparing for years to celebrate these centenaries, spending millions of dollars in revitalizing historical places, staging pageantry, and subsidizing research and publication on these watersheds in Mexican history. The historical vision of the PAN governments did not match the revolutionary ideology so long espoused by the PRI. The image is of Elena Poniatowska, a well-known Mexican writer and social critic. Symbols of national identity were fiercely contested along civil, religious, moral, and philosophical lines, confirming that no one had a monopoly on defining lo mexicano in the twenty-first century. In a move that facilitated access to original historical sources, in 2002 during the presidency of Vicente Fox, a new transparency law changed the political landscape in Mexico. In fact, social science scholars have argued that the Mexican law became a global model for good government practice. For historians, it produced the opening of the collection of documents from the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS) that shed new light on post-World War II Mexico, especially for the 1960s and 1970s. Colloquially known as the secret police, the intelligence agency went through multiple iterations during the twentieth century, becoming what is today known as Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional (CISEN). Initially modeled after the FBI, the agents and their informants were deployed to spy on Mexican citizens, a practice that was ramped up in the 1970s. Political analyst Sergio Aguayo, who gained access to the collection before it officially opened to researchers in 2002, estimated that the one hundred twenty DFS agents in 1965 had swelled to approximately three thousand in 1981, with ten thousand informants. The agency relied on journalists, politicians, businessmen, and academics as informers, and collected substantial raw data on Mexican citizens. Most of those surveilled were involved in a spectrum of reformist and left-leaning political movements considered subversive by the government; they included student activists, Communist party members, intellectuals, and indigenous rights activists. The documents in this collection, available to researchers for twelve years, have been used to write critically revealing historical studies. In 2012, with the return of the PRI to the presidency, the transparency law was amended. New regulations, under the guise of privacy protections, require that all CISEN documents be redacted of personal information for seventy years. While it is not unusual for governments to establish a period of time before they release documents, reclassifying and redacting documents that had been accessible for twelve years reminded many in Mexico of the censorship of earlier PRI administrations. While researchers are allowed to see redacted versions, individual Mexican citizens can go to the National Archive to see their own files. In late 2016, Elena Poniatowska did just this, consulting her file of one hundred eighty-three pages that included reports on speeches she gave, protests she attended, and analysis of her writings. She commented. "I never thought that going to a student protest was a sin." ### Cultural Hybridities PRI tries to obscure past missteps and rights violations. More alarming still, in June 2017, Mexican media outlets reported that the Peña Nieto government was violating the law by using sophisticated surveillance software to spy on prominent journalists and activists critical of the government. Among the most widely read authors at the turn of the century were the cultural critics Elena Poniatowska and Carlos Monsiváis, writing in the crónica style that crosses the borders between fiction and nonfiction. Poniatowska has continued to focus on social and human rights issues, especially those involving women and the poor, in her many novels and essays. She has won several international literary awards, including Spain's 2013 Cervantes award for lifetime literary achievement, the fourth woman to do so. Monsiváis, who garnered Mexico's prestigious Juan Rulfo literary prize in 2006, has been described as a kind of "public trickster who brilliantly described urban popular culture and sought to empower his readers through his critiques of official policies. Carlos Monsiváis died in 2010, followed by Carlos Fuentes in 2012, and José Emilio Pacheco in 2014, leaving few literary giants to compellingly carry on the tradition of political satire and cultural commentary. Elena Poniatowska continues to write on Mexico's twentieth century cultural legacy, penning biographies and memoirs about intellectuals, literary figures,