A Fading Aztec Sun

Abstract

▪ This article examines the changing nature of contemporary political discourse in Mexico. The traditional nationalist political discourse centered on issues of sovereignty and social justice, carefully cultivated and controlled by the Insititutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to legitimize its dominant position in a one-party corporate state. Using the 1994 presidential elections as my entry point, I argue that the PRI has undergone a semiotic metamorphosis, shedding nationalist rhetoric and image in favor of global ones. Its discourse has evolved as the domestic socio-economic situation has devolved. Central to this project is the redefinition of national identity. As Chatterjee (1993: 21) observes, 'nationness is virtually inseparable from political consciousness'. The PRI is establishing new sets of institutional myths about the relationship between prosperity, the free market and globalization. Complementing its symbolic rebirth is a redefinition of danger in a stark survivalist narrative -the politics of everyday fear. President Carlos Salinas's (1988-94) message emphasized that traditional nationalist economic policies were dangerous, and that Mexico could only survive through economic globalism. Over the course of his term, he was able to disarm the nationalist symbolism of the leftist opposition candidate, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, with an equally powerful integrationist utopian discourse that promised prosperity, especially to the middle class. I conclude by noting that there is a pronounced disjuncture between material conditions and the historically imagined identity of Mexicans that signifies a break between the nation and the state. Out of the detritus of economic reform, a critical project facing Mexicans is to reimagine what it means to be Mexican and carry forward a sense of social justice in the new global economic order.