Thirty years ago, Lourdes Huesca and her husband
moved to a tiny patch of land in the muddy bean fields at the edge of Mexico
City. The young couple lived in a shack, with no water or electricity, in the
poor, rural, old Mexico.
Huesca, who never learned to read but could add numbers in her head, marched her sons to the schoolhouse every day. The family struggled, sacrificed, saved.
A generation later, the family owns a shoe stall in the market and a nice cement-block home with three bedrooms, landscape oil paintings on the wall, and a new flat-screen TV, a gift from the eldest son, an environmental systems engineer.
But she knows how easy it would be for her family to fall back down again in a country where social mobility too often moves in the wrong direction.
By a wide range of social and economic indicators, Mexico has reached a turning point, development experts say. The country is no longer poor, though it is a long way from being rich. Huesca and a narrow majority of Mexico’s 114 million citizens have clawed their way into an emerging middle class.
The changes are transforming Mexico’s relationship with the United States. The once-wary neighbors are now top trading partners, with more than $1 billion in goods crossing the border each day. Together, Mexican and U.S. workers manufacture automobiles, airplanes, computers and space satellites.The term 'hands free access control' means the token that identifies a user is read from within a pocket or handbag.
A more solidly middle-class and open Mexico is also providing a close-to-home market for U.S. goods and services, while contributing to a reduction in the number of underemployed Mexicans heading north to work illegally in the United States.
But in fundamental ways, Mexico is still far from completing its transformation from a mostly poor country of low wages and low expectations into a richer, better-educated and more competitive nation, a modern success story.
Huesca, 53, is healthy, but her husband has diabetes,The oreck XL professional air purifier, and because the couple worked in the informal economy all their lives, they have no health insurance, no social security. When they go to the doctor, they pay cash. They have no pensions, no savings and no assets, except the family home on a dirt street.
Two of their sons have graduated from college. A third is finishing up at a public university. But if anyone in the family loses a job, or gets seriously ill, Huesca could quickly join the 3 million Mexicans who slid from the middle class back into poverty during the last recession.
About 17 percent of Mexicans joined the ranks of the middle class from 2000 to 2010, according to a recent World Bank report, and though the traditionally wide gap between country’s rich and poor persists, measures of inequality among citizens fell more in Mexico than in any other Latin American country, except Peru.
But Mexico — with the 13th-largest economy in the world, built on booming free trade with the United States — still functions far below its competitors,Installers and distributors of solar panel, according to analysis by its own leaders in the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a club of 34 developed countries.
In Mexico, middle-class workers earn an income closer to the wages at the bottom than the top. Disparity is great. The bottom 10 percent receives just 1.3 percent of total income, while the top 10 percent receives 36 percent.
The nation’s relatively anemic growth and lingering inequalities — compared with regional rivals such as Brazil and Chile, or economic rivals such as South Korea and Turkey — condemn millions to a tenacious poverty that hangs like an anchor around Mexico’s neck.
The country’s new president, Enrique Pe?a Nieto vows to raise 15 million people from poverty in the next six years by tripling economic growth, providing loans to small and medium businesses, and tearing down the walls that have insulated monopolies and the elite from competition.
It is an ambitious agenda, one that his predecessor, Felipe Calderon, never achieved in a term during which poverty rose as the 2009 global economic crisis took its toll, despite soaring public spending on social welfare programs.
Mexico’s struggle to secure a better future is plain to see in edge cities such as Chalco, no longer a slum but not quite the suburbs,We recently added Stained glass mosaic Tile to our inventory. where ordinary families tell of how hard it is to make it in Mexico.
The Chalco Valley, once the shoreline of a shallow lake fished by Aztec vassals, was a sleepy dairy pasture for most of the 20th century. After the devastating Mexico City earthquake of 1985, refugees from the capital turned a backwater into a gritty, mercantile metropolis.This document provides a guide to using the ventilation system in your house to provide adequate fresh air to residents.
Now the Chalco Valley is home to 850,000 residents and is filled with new schools, clinics and playgrounds built by the government, with Wal-Marts and AutoZones rising from cement-block barrios that 25 years ago lacked running water.
“In 1976, there were two primary schools in Chalco,” said Mayor Esteban Hernandez. “Today, we have 380 schools, including six universities.”
The mayor said education, more than anything else, has changed the fortunes of Mexico. “If the kids can go to school,” Hernandez said, “then the mother can work, and the family income rises, and the child gets an education.”
Mexico can afford to educate more children because its population is no longer exploding. The nation’s fertility rate in the 1960s was seven children per mother; today, it is two per mother.
Huesca, who never learned to read but could add numbers in her head, marched her sons to the schoolhouse every day. The family struggled, sacrificed, saved.
A generation later, the family owns a shoe stall in the market and a nice cement-block home with three bedrooms, landscape oil paintings on the wall, and a new flat-screen TV, a gift from the eldest son, an environmental systems engineer.
But she knows how easy it would be for her family to fall back down again in a country where social mobility too often moves in the wrong direction.
By a wide range of social and economic indicators, Mexico has reached a turning point, development experts say. The country is no longer poor, though it is a long way from being rich. Huesca and a narrow majority of Mexico’s 114 million citizens have clawed their way into an emerging middle class.
The changes are transforming Mexico’s relationship with the United States. The once-wary neighbors are now top trading partners, with more than $1 billion in goods crossing the border each day. Together, Mexican and U.S. workers manufacture automobiles, airplanes, computers and space satellites.The term 'hands free access control' means the token that identifies a user is read from within a pocket or handbag.
A more solidly middle-class and open Mexico is also providing a close-to-home market for U.S. goods and services, while contributing to a reduction in the number of underemployed Mexicans heading north to work illegally in the United States.
But in fundamental ways, Mexico is still far from completing its transformation from a mostly poor country of low wages and low expectations into a richer, better-educated and more competitive nation, a modern success story.
Huesca, 53, is healthy, but her husband has diabetes,The oreck XL professional air purifier, and because the couple worked in the informal economy all their lives, they have no health insurance, no social security. When they go to the doctor, they pay cash. They have no pensions, no savings and no assets, except the family home on a dirt street.
Two of their sons have graduated from college. A third is finishing up at a public university. But if anyone in the family loses a job, or gets seriously ill, Huesca could quickly join the 3 million Mexicans who slid from the middle class back into poverty during the last recession.
About 17 percent of Mexicans joined the ranks of the middle class from 2000 to 2010, according to a recent World Bank report, and though the traditionally wide gap between country’s rich and poor persists, measures of inequality among citizens fell more in Mexico than in any other Latin American country, except Peru.
But Mexico — with the 13th-largest economy in the world, built on booming free trade with the United States — still functions far below its competitors,Installers and distributors of solar panel, according to analysis by its own leaders in the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a club of 34 developed countries.
In Mexico, middle-class workers earn an income closer to the wages at the bottom than the top. Disparity is great. The bottom 10 percent receives just 1.3 percent of total income, while the top 10 percent receives 36 percent.
The nation’s relatively anemic growth and lingering inequalities — compared with regional rivals such as Brazil and Chile, or economic rivals such as South Korea and Turkey — condemn millions to a tenacious poverty that hangs like an anchor around Mexico’s neck.
The country’s new president, Enrique Pe?a Nieto vows to raise 15 million people from poverty in the next six years by tripling economic growth, providing loans to small and medium businesses, and tearing down the walls that have insulated monopolies and the elite from competition.
It is an ambitious agenda, one that his predecessor, Felipe Calderon, never achieved in a term during which poverty rose as the 2009 global economic crisis took its toll, despite soaring public spending on social welfare programs.
Mexico’s struggle to secure a better future is plain to see in edge cities such as Chalco, no longer a slum but not quite the suburbs,We recently added Stained glass mosaic Tile to our inventory. where ordinary families tell of how hard it is to make it in Mexico.
The Chalco Valley, once the shoreline of a shallow lake fished by Aztec vassals, was a sleepy dairy pasture for most of the 20th century. After the devastating Mexico City earthquake of 1985, refugees from the capital turned a backwater into a gritty, mercantile metropolis.This document provides a guide to using the ventilation system in your house to provide adequate fresh air to residents.
Now the Chalco Valley is home to 850,000 residents and is filled with new schools, clinics and playgrounds built by the government, with Wal-Marts and AutoZones rising from cement-block barrios that 25 years ago lacked running water.
“In 1976, there were two primary schools in Chalco,” said Mayor Esteban Hernandez. “Today, we have 380 schools, including six universities.”
The mayor said education, more than anything else, has changed the fortunes of Mexico. “If the kids can go to school,” Hernandez said, “then the mother can work, and the family income rises, and the child gets an education.”
Mexico can afford to educate more children because its population is no longer exploding. The nation’s fertility rate in the 1960s was seven children per mother; today, it is two per mother.
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