Long-Term Economic Challenges
Despite huge gains, Mexico’s Revolution of 1910 is nevertheless incomplete. Improved public health, education, income, and opportunity have barely outdistanced Mexico’s population, which has increased nearly sevenfold—from 15 million to 100 million—from 1910 to 2000. For example, although the illiteracy rate has decreased, the actual number of Mexican people who can’t read, about 10 million, has remained fairly constant since 1910.
Moreover, the land reform program, once thought to be a Mexican cure-all, has long been a disappointment. The ejidos of which Emiliano Zapata dreamed have become mostly symbolic. The communal fields are typically small and unirrigated. Ejido land, formerly constitutionally prohibited from being sold, has not traditionally served as collateral for bank loans. Capital for irrigation networks, fertilizers, and harvesting machines is consequently lacking. Communal farms are typically inefficient; the average Mexican field produces about one-quarter as much corn per acre as a U.S. farm. Mexico must accordingly use its precious oil-dollar surplus to import millions of tons of corn—originally indigenous to Mexico—annually.
The triple scourge of overpopulation, lack of arable land, and low farm income has driven millions of campesino families to seek better lives in Mexico’s cities and the United States. Since 1910, Mexico has evolved from a largely rural country, where 70 percent of the population lived on farms, to an urban nation where 70 percent of the population lives in cities. Fully one-fifth of Mexico’s people now lives in Mexico City.
Nevertheless, the future appears bright for many privately owned and managed Mexican farms, concentrated largely in the northern border states. Exceptionally productive, they typically work hundreds or thousands of irrigated acres of crops, such as tomatoes, lettuce, chiles, wheat, corn, tobacco, cotton, fruits, alfalfa, chickens, and cattle, just like their counterparts across the border in California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas.
Staples—wheat for bread, corn for tortillas, milk, and cooking oil—are all imported and consequently expensive for the typical working- class Mexican family, which must spend half or more of its income (typically $500 per month) for food. Recent inflation has compounded the problem, particularly for the millions of families on the bottom half of Mexico’s economic ladder.
Although average gross domestic product figures for Mexico—about $10,000 per capita compared to more than $40,000 for the United States—place it above nearly all other Third World countries, averages, when applied to Mexico, mean little. A primary socioeconomic reality of Mexican history remains: The richest one-fifth of Mexican families earns about 10 times the income of the poorest one-fifth. A relative handful of people own a large hunk of Mexico, and they don’t seem inclined to share much of it with the less fortunate. As for the poor, the typical Mexican family in the bottom one-third income bracket often owns neither car nor refrigerator, and the children typically do not finish elementary school.
© Bruce Whipperman from Moon Puerto Vallarta, 7th edition