(7 of 9)
"We are a poor people," says Ruiz Cortines. He likes to compare his country with a pyramid whose base must be broadened by spreading the wealth more widely. The statistics-minded President reminded his people last week that 42% of all Mexicans are illiterate, that Mexico must still bring 19 million peasants into full participation in its fast-growing economy. In ten years, he said, the population had jumped 6,000,000, loosing new armies of wetbacks—illegal migratory workers—to cross the U.S. border seeking jobs. To absorb these people, said the President, Mexico must produce more food.
New Men in a New Land. Out of the Mexican revolution has come both a vigorous new middle class, where nothing like it existed before, and a new rich to take the place of the oldtime aristocracy. Domestic tranquillity, world war and the Alemán era of growth and expansion gave great impetus to the process. The very country has changed and matured, a fact that helps account for the rise of such a leader as Adolfo Ruiz Cortines.
Even on the scarred grey face of the Mexican countryside, tilled for more than a thousand years by pointed sticks, changes are visible. South of the Rio Grande near Matamoros grow great fields of cotton, where only mesquite flourished 15 years ago. In booming Lower California, Mexico's newest state, ranchers have sown the republic's biggest wheat fields in reclaimed desert land, and set out hundreds of thousands of fruit and nut trees beside newly driven artesian wells. Among the volcano-ringed Puebla valleys, water led 7 miles through new mountain tunnels has brought record crops of corn and beans. Since World War II, Mexico has switched the emphasis from the revolution-blessed ejido (communal farm) to the privately owned farm, and with men on tractors tilling their own land there has been a healthy rise in food output.
Slicing through the cloud-mantled mountains and the coastal rain forests, through cactus-fenced pastures and corn-clad canyons, four major paved highways now march from the U.S. border to Mexico City. New roads, rebuilt railroads and oil pipelines now crisscross the countryside. Some sleepy towns of yesterday have become buzzing 20th century cities. Colonial Salamanca, seat of the government's big new oil refinery, looks like a Texas oil town by night, with its orange flares glowing over pipes and vents.
Mexico City, now the continent's No. 3 city, with well over 3,000,000 inhabitants, is as jammed with new buildings as Houston. Skyscrapers, one of them 43 stories high, soar above its Spanish church towers. Along its principal avenues flow rivers of cars, most of them assembled in Mexico (in U.S.-owned branch plants). From hundreds of sleek factories on the outskirts come office furniture, cosmetics and toilet articles, trucks and buses, cortisone and refrigerators. Along broad Insurgentes Avenue, one of the hemisphere's brightest shopping centers, Mexicans can buy a Jaguar, a cabin cruiser, a Paris gown, a set of tubular-steel garden furniture.