Is Mexico as patriotic as the US? Just look around!

I plead guilty. Whenever the Mexican national anthem was played at this year’s World Cup, tears welled up in my eyes. It was pride. Pride that my team was participating in a flagship event of contemporary football — and that, moreover, they were performing so well, for once!

And yes, I was that ridiculous woman. And so was my mother, my sister, and even my mother-in-law, who, although born in the Soviet Union, has been Mexican longer than I have been alive. We all cried in pride. Tears flowed from our eyes in unison: “al sonoro rugir del cañón” — and that was just for the World Cup!

And I know I’m not the only one. The overwhelming response of people celebrating our victories at the Angel of Independence on Paseo de la Reforma confirms it. Thinking about that, I sincerely wonder: Are Mexicans as patriotic as people from the U.S.? This is harder to answer than I initially thought.

Proud of our roots?

Mexico is a megadiverse country. Biologically, of course, but also in terms of ethnic groups. On numerous occasions, I have written for MND about Indigenous neighborhoods that are still alive even in Mexico City, and how we still have a syncretic understanding of our relationship with God and the church. People don’t find that in the U.S., because our colonial pasts were indeed very different.

And as such, our relationship with Indigenous peoples is very different. While in the United States less than 3% of the population identifies as Native American, according to the most recent census, 19% of Mexicans identify with an Indigenous group.

Mexico City’s Indigenous neighborhoods that are still alive today

Therefore, Mexico’s relationship with its Indigenous peoples is also different and very complex. Besides being inevitably tainted by racism and pigmentocratic segregation, it is ironically painful to think that we take pride in the 68 Indigenous languages ​​still spoken throughout the country.

This diversity, at first glance, gives us a very strong sense of history and identity that hardly any other country in the Americas shares. However, at the same time, “60.8% of Indigenous people live in some level of poverty,” according to the most recent INEGI survey. This equates to almost 8 million people who, due to a fundamentally racial issue inherited from the colonial period, live in some state of poverty. Painful? Yes. And deeply shameful, too.

Although there are distinctly Indigenous towns — and possibly entire states — throughout Mexico, like Oaxaca, we don’t have anything like a reserve for Native nations, as happens in the U.S. This topic alone could be a doctoral thesis, but it undeniably deserves a mention in an article about national pride. All of which brings me to the next uncomfortable issue.

The issue of malinchismo

Octavio Paz wrote a lengthy essay on this issue in 1950. In “The Labyrinth of Solitude,” the author explores our relationship with “la chingada,” that is, La Malinche: the historical figure who, despite being Indigenous, married a high-ranking officer among the Spanish invaders.

In a word, Paz thinks that our relationship with that first mother, Malintzin, shaped by the European invasion, still weighs heavily on us. Our colonial past not only shames us, but it severely affects our Mexican identity. Ouch. This leads us to what’s called malinchismo: the notion that something is better simply because it’s not Mexican. This extends to nationality, language, everyday products and even systems of thought.

How does malinchismo interact with our sense of national pride? It’s hard to say. It’s a difficult relationship that reminds us of the shame of having been dominated by European invasion, but it coexists in our national history as part of our very identity. I think it all boils down to the fact that it’s a common saying among Mexicans that, nowadays, only people from Puebla want to be Spanish.

A short history of Mexican Independence celebrations

That simply does not exist in the United States. On the contrary, it’s a grave insult to be “un-American,” right?

God bless … Mexico?

My partner lived at Penn State for a year because of his dad’s job, and he remembers with a strange feeling that the “Pledge of Allegiance” to the flag was recited every morning. In Mexico, the closest thing we have to that is what Sarah DeVries described as “Honores a la Bandera.”

Although there are points of convergence, our civic culture is more diluted: You don’t see Mexican flags in the homes of ordinary Mexicans. It’s more common to see virgins, saints or crucifixes. On the contrary, it seems, at times, that we forget our national symbols until September, or perhaps when there’s a major global sporting event, like the World Cup.

You’ll hardly find anyone in Mexico saying they’re a proud patriot, or that they’re proud of our troops. We usually never trust the police — let alone the army. Along the same lines, I’ve never heard anything like “God bless Mexico!” Perhaps because we don’t have the legacy of Manifest Destiny looming over our sense of nationalism.

You will find, though, a general feeling of pride in being a Mexican, although we have a very complicated relationship with our colonial past. Our sense of national pride, moreover, still has a very PRI-ist tinge to it — which again, might be material for an entire doctoral thesis on its own.

Proud to be a Mexican

A recent poll by YouGov shows that “70% of Americans say they are proud to be Americans; 16% say they are not.” In contrast, 89% of Mexicans expressed being proud to be Mexicans in the 2020 National Survey of Civic Culture (ENCUCI).

However much national pride those figures might inspire, we feminists do not hesitate to denounce the Mexican state as a rapist macho man, using it as a rallying cry in our gender struggles. That is perhaps one of the most frequently used slogans in the March 8 marches. And at the same time, at an official event, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second to salute my flag with pride.

Perhaps, more than certainties, this article raised more questions for our readership. It was probably meant to be that way. And that’s the wonder of the social sciences: They don’t aim to provide straight answers, but rather to expand the conversation to raise more interesting questions — no matter how uncomfortable or painful they may be.

Andrea Fischer contributes to the features desk at Mexico News Daily. She has edited and written for National Geographic en Español and Muy Interesante México, and continues to be an advocate for anything that screams science. Or yoga. Or both.