The post Journalist Alfredo Corchado appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Corchado came to America against his wishes; he returned to Mexico City years later as a reporter against his parents’ wishes. I’m a foreign correspondent on paper, he said. But “Mexico has never been foreign to me. Mexico has always been personal.”

As a 13-year-old working in the fields, Corchado was interviewed by a television reporter who was asking the teenagers what it was like to do their jobs. The homesick Corchado believed that “the best way to return [to Mexico] was to be a reporter.”

Since 1986, he’s reported in and around Mexico—and he has “witnessed the plight of a people always coming closer, but not close enough.”

Despite Mexico’s struggles, Corchado remains hopeful for the country. One of the biggest transformations he has witnessed “has been Mexico’s willingness to stop blaming everyone but themselves,” he said. And, “We’re learning that corruption is not cultural or part of our genes.”

The return of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (the PRI) is in some ways the return of the past. But Corchado believes that the Mexican people are finally laying claim to their nation—in ways both big and small. He cited the firing and subsequent apology of an official whose daughter threw a fit at a restaurant; people took to social media to call her out. Corchado himself used technology to expose police officers who had pulled over a friend of his and were trying to extort money from them in exchange for letting him off.

Mexicans, said Corchado, are learning to build a civil society. One piece of evidence lies in the work of journalists there. This year, three Mexican journalists won Pulitzer Prizes. For every journalist who is threatened, censored, disappeared, or killed, said Corchado, there are one or two more willing to risk their lives to break news. He said that the reporters he knows—and reporters are known for their cynicism—are more hopeful than the people they cover.

Corchado also sees hope in Mexicans in America, who are discovering their political voice. Our natural instinct, he said, is for people who have immigrated across the border to shut the door going back for the next generation. But Mexican-Americans are recognizing that Mexico is growing—and isn’t going anywhere.

In the question-and-answer session, audience members asked Corchado to talk about the drug trafficking violence he writes about.

How often does he think drug-related violence crosses the border?

It happens, said Corchado, although not as often as people think it does. The News covered a story about a Mexican attorney who was gunned down outside Dallas on the orders of a Mexican cartel. But in the United States, crimes also lead to trials—where you see names, numbers, faces. In Mexico, by contrast, criminals are shadowy figures without names. “Rule of law here, as imperfect as it is,” said Corchado, “gives you a sense of what it could be in Mexico.”

Can he talk about violence spilling into Puerto Rico?

“It extends everywhere,” said Corchado, although he hasn’t reported specifically on Puerto Rico. In fact, the drug war violence came to Mexico in the first place because it was migrating—trafficking moved to Mexico in the 1980s after Ronald Reagan shut down the Caribbean.

What does he think about President Enrique Peña Nieto’s approach to the violence?

“He’s been very smart about lowering expectations,” said Corchado. He’s focused on the economy. But sooner or later, he’s going to be tested. “There won’t be peace without justice,” said Corchado.

Another audience member asked Corchado if Mexicans need to seek justice outside the government, citing a community where people drove off a cartel by arming themselves. Could vigilantes help end the violence?

In a few different parts of Mexico, people have gotten fed up and decided to do things on their own. “The concern is that this might lead to something else,” said Corchado. Are people taking the law into their own hands because they’re tired of violence, or because they’re influenced by a different cartel?

The post Is Mexico Finally Turning the Corner? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I am a son of Mexico. I come from a typically large Mexican family—I’m the eldest of nine. Tradition in my Durango town of San Luis de Cordero dictated that our ancestors buried the umbilical cord of every newborn to remind us—especially those destined to leave—of a place of first sunsets and sunrises: No matter how far I traveled, I’d never forget. More than half the town’s population of 2,000 worked in the United States at some point—among them, my father, a bracero, part of a generation of temporary guest workers whose sweat slowly transformed the face of the United States.

I arrived in the United States in 1966, kicking and screaming, pledging to my parents—Juan Pablo and Herlinda—that one day I’d return to Mexico and prove them wrong about the promise of the United States. I’d echoed the words of my tío Delfino, who refused to go north. He reminded us that Mexico wasn’t cursed by history, but by betrayal. My parents proved my distrust of the United States wrong by giving us the possibility of reinvention in a new land.

In California’s San Joaquin Valley, my father drove tractors and my mother stooped over a short hoe weeding fields of sugar beets and lettuce. My brothers and I joined her picking every imaginable crop to help keep America fed. We grew up cramped in a trailer house surrounded by fields of melons. Later my parents took our dreams to El Paso, a city along the U.S.-Mexico border, across from Ciudad Juárez.

The excitement of that place was a catalyst for an aspiring journalist, the profession that paved my way home. From my parents’ small restaurant, Freddy’s Café, three blocks from the international bridge, I plotted my return to Mexico. As a student at El Paso Community College, followed by the University of Texas at El Paso and later as a reporter for the Herald-Post, I crisscrossed the border and shook with excitement at what, throughout the 1980s, felt like a people’s revolution taking place just feet from U.S. soil. I was inspired by men and women hell-bent on reclaiming a nation beset by one-party rule, a powerful oligarchy and entrenched monopolies.

Even when I went north to further my career, Mexico remained close. In Philadelphia, where I worked in the Wall Street Journal’s regional bureau, I’d spend long winter nights alongside my new friends Ken Trujillo, David Suro, and Primitivo Rodriguez. At the time we believed we were the only four Mexicans in Center City, where we talked the same big ideas about what Mexico could be as we nursed tequila. I was drawn by their resilience, the daily greetings of Buenos días, Buen provecho, Buenas tardes, the haunting smell of corn on a cob and the sounds of Javier Solís.

Just as Mexico’s hopes fell with the latest peso devaluation, mine rose with my job at the News. I was finally home. Mamá was proud that her son, a high school dropout, had finally made something of himself, but she would have preferred I did something else—and, certainly, somewhere else. She dreaded the day when we’d drive to the El Paso International Airport, where I would catch a flight to my new home, Mexico City. As we said good-bye, she watched me with her lips pressed together and eyes that said, “I’ve lost one. I will not lose another.”

The homecoming was bittersweet. I loved the strength I saw in the streets, the cry for democratic change, the young and old, the men and women marching through the streets of Ciudad Juárez, of Guanajuato, San Luis Potosí, Monterrey and, of course, Mexico City. But I’ve lost count of the number of times I walked back from El Zócalo or the Angel of Independence, feeling hopeful about Mexico’s future, only to gradually watch the country plunge further into darkness.

I arrived as the Party—the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI, as the regime was known—was in a nosedive, as was the peso. The party had been created in response to the instability and political assassinations that followed the Mexican Revolution. It worked so well that the PRI had ruled Mexico since 1929, taming any unrest by crushing or co-opting rivals.

Twelve years after the devaluation of 1982, however, the regime could no longer mask gaping problems in the economy, impunity in the justice system or pervasive social inequality. I watched the clock tick past midnight on New Year’s 1994 with my then best friend, Angela. Uneasiness hung in the air. Mexico City seemed to stand still, eerily quiet, as did the rest of the nation.

I was convinced that my coverage would serve as a bridge between two countries. The United States had long pushed Mexico to clean up its house, tackle corruption, strengthen wobbly judicial institutions, and stem the cartel tide. Few listened. I certainly didn’t. It wasn’t my reporting beat. We had one of the best reporters covering drug trafficking and all the ills that came with it. But the newspaper industry was unraveling. A staff of 12 led by Tracey Eaton, our narco beat reporter, was dwindling. Suddenly, I was thrust into a darker story of Mexico as I took up the cartel beat.

Like many in Mexican society, I had convinced myself the country was on the right track, but we now watched hopelessly as a small, powerful group of men with big guns, protected by corrupt government officials, held a nation hostage. The conditions—poverty, impunity, corruption—were so deeply rooted that any region facing the threat of traffickers was swallowed by violence.

All I could do was hold on to the best of my ability.

The post A Son of Mexico’s Journey appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The post Will It Ever Be Safe To Be a Journalist in Mexico? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The year was 1994. The peso was tumbling, and the country seemed to be falling apart. Yet here I was. Ecstatic. Excited. Pumped. I was Mexican again, disguised as a full-time correspondent for The Dallas Morning News.

Thirty years earlier, in the 1960s, my parents and I left my native Durango, Mexico for California’s San Joaquin Valley. The powerful nation up north brimmed with opportunities, but I had left Mexico unwillingly. Yes, California seduced me, as did Texas, Utah, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts—states I later lived in. Yet Mexico always tugged at me. It called me home at night, at midnight when I could hear my mother softly mouthing the words to Javier Solis, proof that her nostalgia was greater than the promise of our new land. I would fall asleep wondering how I could ever find my way back.

So, that New Year’s Eve, I wasn’t just anywhere. I was in Mexico City, the iconic capital of culture, music, food, and drink. I had been gone for so long that my Spanish was poor, a mess of tangled verbs and mangled vocabulary. There, in the middle of the Zócalo, I inhaled deeply. The smog managed to smell like fresh air to a gleeful native son. I wanted to scream to anyone in earshot: I’m home!

But it was also foreign. Strange. Scary. Hmmm, 20 million Mexicans. Can a city actually function with so many Mexicans? What does it look, sound, operate like? Would nostalgia, romanticism prove right? Can you actually go home again?

The air was permeated with carnival smells: the rich aroma of corn roasting on a wood-fired stove, the greasy scent of pork frying with hot chiles toreados and blue corn quesadillas toasting on a griddle. Modernity choked the ancient city with pollution. Because of its location 7,000 feet above sea level, the city sits on a highland “bowl” that traps the cold air sinking onto the city and in the wintertime makes the smog, which can’t escape, worse.

I wandered around with the latest Caifanes CD soundtrack to mark my homecoming: The fanatical guitar solo of Caifanes’ Aqui No Es Así blasted in my earphones. Only the honking and loud engines of the lime green Volkswagen beetle taxis could make themselves heard over the music.

The city was spectacular, even though marks of destruction from the catastrophic 1985 earthquake were still visible. (The earthquake had delivered a jolt a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima.) Yet something also seemed wrong. The nation felt uneven, hypocritical, and stuck. The rich locked themselves behind their large doors, and the poor used their creativity to work any job they could for a paltry handout. People couldn’t understand how I, a Mexican with a suit and tie, didn’t belong to the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

I lived in one of the richest neighborhoods, Coyoacán. Wealthy neighbors would often ask where I was from or who my relatives were. What they were really asking about was my blood lineage. I’d tell them calmly and slowly, “I’m the son of a bracero from Durango.” I could detect their embarrassment. Leaving the country had allowed me to climb the economic ladder and become a correspondent for a major publication. It didn’t say much for Mexico’s own possibilities.

Recently, I retraced my steps along those same streets I wandered back in 1994, weaving through a narrow maze of streets like Donceles, where the stately Teatro Metropolitano stood, near the old Regis Hotel, through a jumble of colonial building to the corner of Avenidas Lázaro Cárdenas and Juarez, where Parque Alameda, built in 1592, began behind the Palacio de Bellas Artes, with its white marble walls and copper-tinted cupola. Couples sat on the theater’s stairs and kissed. Organ grinders known as cilindreros cranked their antiquated 80-pound German-made music boxes. The musicians, working in pairs, took turns passing the hat for a peso or two.

I swaggered back to Madero Street, where triumphant generals and revolutionaries once glided in on horses and wagons to the Zócalo, the largest public gathering place in the western hemisphere—almost as big as Red Square in Moscow. For sale were electrical parts on República del Salvador; toys on Calle Corregidora; jewelry on Brazil; sportswear on República del Uruguay, and musical instruments on Venustiano Carranza.

I saw the Templo Mayor, where the cries from human sacrifices once pierced the quiet of dusk during the Aztec times, and the stone palaces that were once home to Moctezuma and later the conquistador Hernán Cortés and his indigenous wife, Malíntzín. The union of Cortés and Malíntzín helped mark the rise of the mestizo, a mixture of indigenous and Spanish blood, although some historians insist the core of indigenous Mexico remained largely untouched by the few conquering Spaniards who arrived.

I stared, transfixed, at the colorful Orozco murals, followed by the cathedral, which the Spaniards constructed with stones that included those of the Aztec pyramids and temples they destroyed in their conquest. This was once Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital and crown jewel of Mesoamerican civilization. The Aztecs had decided to build Tenochtitlan on this swampy place, on the spongy clay of a shrunken lake, because, according to historians, they saw an omen: an eagle with a writhing snake in its beak and talon, perched on a cactus, the same image embossed on the Mexican flag today. Cortés once stood where I was now standing and praised the Mexican culture and architecture as the most beautiful and sophisticated he had ever seen—even as he planned to reduce it to ruin.

Since I first moved back to Mexico in 1994, I have tried leaving, only to return, and I will probably never leave for good. I suppose I have gone native, but I’m not sure what that means anymore. That day, as I strolled through much of the city, I found myself wondering whether any Mexican who has left can go native again. Around me was an array of U.S. franchises, and the sound of English permeated the place. The words didn’t seem foreign.

The old nationalistic wave is dying off, unless some politician tries to win instant points by punching the evil bully up north. Issues of sovereignty still resonate, but less so. With some 35 million Americans who trace their roots back to Mexico, separating the two nations is becoming more difficult. But one thing became clear as I walked those streets: Sometimes I need to walk both sides of the border to feel complete.

The post You <em>Can</em> Become Mexican Again appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.