ABSTRACT
Despite a nineteenth-century war of independence waged in the name of republican values, and a twentieth-century revolution fought in the name of democracy-its “verbal banner” was “Valid Voting, No Reelection” (Krauze 239)—Mexico has remained locked within a pyramidal structure that has consistently and aggressively denied political, cultural, and economic freedoms, centralizing and concentrating power in the hands of an authoritarian few. According to historian and activist Enrique Krauze, the repeated failure of democratic ideals in Mexico has in large part been due to the fact that “across the centuries,” it has submitted to the “concentration of power into a single person (tlatoani, monarch, viceroy, emperor, President, caudillo, jéfé, estadista)” (244). In Mexico: Biography of Power, Krauze describes the failure of decolonization and the Mexican Revolution to achieve emancipation and democratization as the result of a peculiarly Mexican inability to shake off an “historic” habit of elevating “personages” over ideals; the result, then, of a mass capitulation to “emblematic” all-powerful individuals (243). Such a habit, which Krauze interprets as a remnant of both Indian and Spanish traditions of absolute power, “one emanating from the gods and one emanating from God” (xiv), institutionalized a “social pyramid” (220) in which a virtually untouchable paternalist leader and state presided over a mass of Mexicans who were positioned as “submissive children” (Braun 513). In Mexico, then, power and authority have historically been mapped onto a vertical axis, with the President a personification of power at its apex, the Mexican pueblo on a horizontal plane at the pyramid’s base.
