Joseph Goulden
- 1966
Fellowship Title:
- Political Movements in Mexico and Guatemala
Fellowship Year:
- 1966
Tlaxcala: A Visit to Individiuality
J CG-7 Londres 190, Depto. 109 Colonia Juarez Mexico 6, DF, Mexico September 2, 1966 The story is so oft told here that its survival can be attributed to geographical accuracy if not historical truth: When Hernando Cortes returned to Spain after his conquest of Mexico in the 16th Century someone asked for a description of the country. Wordlessly, he crumpled a piece of paper in his fist and tossed it on the desk. Four hundred years later the mountain passes and high narrow plateaus represented by Cortes’ wadded paper still contain hundreds of thousands of the Mexican people, their isolation physical as well as cultural and linguistic, their ways of life insignificant tributaries of the modern Mexican mainstream. Civilization has brushed these persons, but knocked them aside rather than taking them aboard. A traveler sees them constantly in rural Mexico: Cadaverous barefoot men, squatting aside a bus station in Jalisco, oblivious to the exhaust fumes that swirl over their heads; the bright-eyed but pot-bellied children offering scaly, gray iguanas for sale at
The Cerro de Mercado: A Lesson in Revolution
JCG-6 Londres 190, Depto. 109 Colonia Juarez Mexico 6. DF July 27, 1966 Mr. Goulden is a 1965 Alicia Patterson Fund fellowship award winner on leave from the Philadelphia Inquirer. Permission to publish this article may be sought from The Managing Editor, Philadelphia Inquirer. Been from the Plaza de Armas in the center of the city of Durango, the Cerro de Mercado is a reddish-gray hill, its sides covered with mining machinery and symmetrical slashes through the scrub brush and the rock beneath it. At night dozens of campfires dot the side of the hill, like a cluster of’ giant fireflies on the horizon south of the city. Except for the mining activity and the fires, the Cerro is little different from any of thousands of similar hills scattered across the harsh, dry stretches of Durango State and the remainder of northern Mexico. From Mexico City, however, the Cerro de Mercado is a foreboding symbol of unrest, a possible harbinger of the rebirth of direct revolutionary action in a nation grown increasingly conservative
Guatemala: A Mortar and Three Pestles
JCG-5 Calle Londres 190, Depto. 109 Colonia Juarez Mexico 6, D. F. July 15, 1966 Mr. Goulden is 1965 Alicia Patterson Fund fellowship award winner on leave from The Philadelphia Inquirer. Permission to reprint this article may be sought from The Managing Editor, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 400 N. Broad Street., Philadelphia 19101. “Choking up the streets, all with green bushes in their hats, they seemed…at a distance like a moving forest, They were armed with rusty muskets, old pistols, fowling pieces, some with locks and some without; they carried sticks formed into the shape of muskets, with tin-plate locks, and clubs, machetes, and knives tied to the ends of long poles. And swelling the multitude were two or three thousand women, with sacks and alforjas(saddle bags) for carrying away the plunder. Many, who had never left their villages before, looked wild at the sight of the houses and churches, and the magnificence of the city. They entered the plaza, vociferating ‘Viva la religion, y muerte a los extranjeros!’” (Long live religion, and death
Latin Business: The Quest for a Role
JCG-4 Londres 190, Depto. 109 Colonia Juarez Mexico 1, D. F. June 27, 1966 A. Altruistic Self-preservation The plight of the hungry masses of Latin America–the tens of millions of persons bypassed by history since the 18th Century–was given articulate voice here this month by, paradoxically, the continent’s most advanced group, its businessmen and industrialists. The occasion was a plenary session of the Consejo Interamericano de Comercio y Produccion, the Interamerican Council of Commerce and Production (CICYP), most prestigious private enterprise group in the hemisphere. The 500-odd industrialists, financiers and businessmen in attendance warned each other of the keg of social dynamite on which each sits, and traded ideas on how to prevent a fatal detonation. A certain amount of self-preservation is involved, for, if the development of Latin America again takes a violent turn, as it did in Cuba A these are the persons who would be first to hear the shout, “paredon,” – To the wall. At best, the businessmen would lose their pocketbooks; at worst, their necks. And the uneasiness
Mexico’s Agrarian Reform: A Crisis
A. Governmental Fact-Facing. The Mexican government is somberly but manfully accepting the realization that land reform, backbone of its Revolution for more than half a century, has not produced a farm system capable of feeding its burgeoning population. A study by the official Banco de Mexico, now being circulated in government and financial circles, predicts serious food shortages in 1970 that will become even more grave in 1975, ranging as high as a 34 percent difference between the supply of and demand for beef. By 1975, says the Banco de Mexico (akin in function to the United States Federal Reserve System) Mexico’s present population of 41 million persons – many of whom are by no means eating well now – will have swelled to 61 million persons. Even projecting an increase in agriculture output (with market-glutting surpluses of cotton and wheat, for example), the bank says Mexico will be producing eight percent less food for each of its citizens in 1975, and will have to turn to imports to find something to put on