Why more Mexicans wrap themselves in the flag
The mood is festive, buoyant. Tens of thousands of Mexicans jam the Zócalo, the sprawling public square in front of Mexico’s National Palace. They don oversized sombreros and mustaches in a raucous nod to the revolutionaries who founded Mexico, starting with the call from priest Miguel Hidalgo in Dolores to rise up against colonial Spain on the morning of Sept. 16, 1810.
“Viva México! Viva México! Viva México!” thunders the country’s leftist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, from a dais at the National Palace.
“Viva!” returns the crowd in a sonorous, synchronized chant.
The heroes of Mexican independence celebrations – which kick off with El Grito, or the cry of Dolores, each Sept. 15 – are always clear. But they are never as absolute as the rituals might suggest – and that’s never been truer than this year, 500 years after Hernán Cortés arrived at the coast of Veracruz and waged the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire.
“Viva México,” the cry of independence that marks Mexico’s struggle against imperial Spain, has always implied a search for identity in a country that defines itself as mestizo, or mixed blood, but hasn’t always been at ease with that reality.
Octavio Paz, the late Mexican poet and Nobel Prize winner, wrote in “The Labyrinth of Solitude,” an essay on Mexican identity, that the cry, when used in the context of an expletive, carries with it the subtext of a ravaged nation that is both a challenge and an affirmation. “When we shout this cry on the 15th of September, the anniversary of our independence, we affirm ourselves in front, against, and in spite of the ‘others.’”
Today the country’s struggle is no longer in opposition to European conquerors. The new foes are globalization, neoliberalism, and the
