[ilbegone]

Educated Mexicans over the age of 15 who can read and write...

How many recent American high school graduates can balance a checkbook or write a formal letter without electronic aid? What is the level of actual reading comprehension?

And our economy is booming as well - for Wall Street.

Just because there might be a decent employment rate doesn't mean that there is a decent wage rate. One Mexican told me there is lots of work in Mexico, but there's no money in it. A recent newspaper article described Mexicans, in Mexico, working multiple jobs which, combined, extend well past our traditional 8 hour day.

And just what are the definitions of "middle class" or "poverty" in America vs Mexico vs India? How are official figures compiled, by whom, and who gains by the methodology applied?

Things actually are getting better economically in Mexico, but how?

...The price of middle class goods and services literally collapsed in many realms of society and the economy...

...Today any teenager with spare change can buy a cell phone on the corner...

Some other pickings from Castaneda's book:

...While it is uncertain that low income neighborhood public schools in America are much better than middle class neighborhood public schools in Mexico, the latter end classes at 12:30 for the morning shift, with only four and a half hours of schooling. In addition to the devastating educational consequences of this short school day or mediajornada...

... This proclivity - or emptiness, some would retort - leads directly to the emphasis on ritual. It is the orderly expression of Form. And ritual invades everything, including education. It is quite possible - indeed highly probable -that the recurrent insistence on names, dates, and heroes in teaching Mexican history to children in a certain way, despite the obvious absence of quantifiable results, must be found in the ritual itself: the rite is the message. Children do not have drummed into their heads the unending list of episodes of Mexican victimization in order for them to remember them, much less understand them. The purpose of of the exercise is the exercise itself: the teachers' feeling satisfied that they have done their job (whatever the usefulness of the job); the parents, that they have fulfilled their obligations to have their children taught the fundamentals of life (even if they were not learned);the government official (from the school principle to the minister of education), that they have complied with the law and custom (no matter how silly the law or how fabricated the custom); and the country's political and cultural elites, all gratified by the proven respect for the preordained rite. This process enshrines the Mexican predilection for simulation in a quasi - religious catechism...

...They are beginning to know and understand their own country,and they certainly understand know and understand what they want,even if they may remain confused about who they are. In a poll commissioned in 2001 that asked Mexicans how they view themselves by social class, 1% said "rich", 16% said "poor", and an astonishing 82% stated that they belonged to the middle class (4% percent upper middle class, 44% middle class, and 34% lower middle class). This is a clearly "aspirational" reaction. We know that 82% of Mexicans are not middle class, at most 60% are, so at least 25% of the respondents are mistaken, but their expectations are not. They want to be middle class and believe that this status is just around the corner. But as Federico Reyes Heroles explains in an essay reflecting this poll, they see themselves as much better of than their parents ( like Lalo Sanchez) and their very poor compatriots.