Wal-Mart a la Mexicana

By John Ross, The Progressive. Posted March 14, 2005.

Each winter solstice, tens of thousands of revivalist Indians, New Age acolytes, and just plain tourists don cameras, feathered head dresses, or simple white cottons and tramp to the top of the Pyramid of the Sun in San Juan Teotihuacan to soak up the rays and revitalize their bodies and souls for the coming year.

Teotihuacan flourished for nearly a millennium between the second century BC and 700 AD. In the year 500, half a million people lived in the city, which covered an expanse of eight square miles, larger even than Rome. Having harnessed underground streams, the rulers of Teotihuacan created Mexico's first corn culture. Queztalcoatl, the plumed serpent, a deity ubiquitous in ancient Mesoamerica, ruled over Teotihuacan, and his priests maintained the balance of the agricultural seasons and upheld the sun in the sky through human sacrifice.

As I climbed the 247 steep stone steps divided into four narrow tiers to the pyramid's summit, many of my fellow pilgrims expressed their umbrage at the new Wal-Mart, in plain sight down below, just 2,000 meters away.

"It is like an invasion, a new conquest," opined Rafael, a young computer technician from Cordoba, Veracruz.

"Falta de respeto" (a lack of respect), a middle-aged woman missing her two front teeth spat. "This is Mexico, you know."

"What a horror! They insult the Gods! Quezalcoatl must be furious!" said Mexico City grade school teacher Xenia Marquez, extending her arms towards the weak December sun at the very apex of the Pyramid of the Sun. Her tirade was interrupted by the tingling of her cell phone.

The saga of the resistance to the Teotihuacan Wal-Mart is a picaresque footnote in the battle against the global leviathan. "Wal-Mart has profaned the City of the Gods, and there are no deities in Mesoamerica that can protect it," darkly warned Miguel Limon-Portillo, the celebrated translator of Aztec poetry. Whereas in the U.S., such disputes are apt to be settled before permit appeals and zoning boards, the Teotihuacan Wal-Mart touched a raw national nerve, and so this war was fought a la Mexicana.

Having jumped the gun on NAFTA by buying into the 122-store Bodega Aurrera chain here in 1992 and taking it over five years later, Wal-Mart now owns 687 superstores in 71 Mexican cities under the marquee logos of Wal-Mart, Bodega Aurrera, Superama, and Sam's Club – plus 52 Suburbias (a more upscale department store chain) and 235 Vips restaurants. Total Wal-Mart sales of $10.8 billion in 2003 dwarfed the $8 billion taken in by the next three retailers together. And Wal-Mart, the largest U.S. employer, is also Mexico's biggest job generator, accounting for 101,000.

As in the U.S., the bottom line is gospel for Wal-Mart in Mexico, and no unions or other troublemakers are tolerated on the premises. Non-union Mexican Wal-Mart "associates" earn an average of 13 pesos an hour (about $1.20) as compared to $9 for their non-union U.S. counterparts.

"It is not good for our sovereignty that all our clothes and our food come from another country," asserts Vicente Yanez, director of the National Association of Self-Service Stores. (More than 2,000 McDonald's also stain the Mexican landscape.)

A full decade after NAFTA kicked in, the commercial physiognomy of Mexico is often indistinguishable from that of its neighbor to the north.

Not many months ago, polleros (people smugglers) in Tapachula, Chiapas, on Mexico's southern border, wheedled $5,000 each from six Guatemalans and two other undocumented workers whom they promised to deposit safely in the United States.

Moving through Mexico stealthily in an old bus with its curtains drawn and slipping immigration officials the obligatory mordida (little bite, or bribe) to ease through the checkpoints, the smugglers arrived in Chihuahua City, 100 miles south of the U.S. border, drove out to an upscale suburb, and dropped their load off in front of an enormous Wal-Mart, informing the clueless clients they had arrived on "the Other Side." The Wal-Mart shared the gleaming mall with a Wendy's, a KFC, even an Applebee's, and the ten-plex "Hollywood" Cinema.

Veteran reporter John Ross has lived in Mexico City's old quarter for many years. His latest volume, Murdered by Capitalism: A Memoir of 150 Years of Life and Death on the American Left, is published by Nation Books.

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