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The people who buy and sell in this new Mexico bear about as much resemblance to the old-fashioned U.S. caricature of a barefoot peon on burro-back as Ruiz Cortines does to Pancho Villa. They are a people who have moved out of the adobe huts into the main stream of urban life. They include professional men trained in modern universities. They eat bread instead of tortillas (thereby creating a brand-new demand for wheat that threatens to shake the country's immemorial corn monoculture). They give their children a good education; they live in houses with hot water and plumbing; they own cars. And they have taken to spending their vacations at resort hotels that until recently had lived almost entirely on U.S. tourist trade.
Besides these solid citizens commuting from their solid jobs to their solid neighborhoods, Mexico proliferates with the new rich, those who make money fast and like to spend it freely. In Mexico City's luxurious Pedregal and Lomas, in Guadalajara's fashionable lakeside Chapalita, on the suave green slopes of Cuernavaca, they inhabit glittering glass villas that are the last word in international-style architecture. They drive bright-colored Cadillacs and set a fast pace at the country clubs. Bedecked with diamonds and keen to be seen, they jam the opera for performances at which tickets cost more than at New York's Met. They bet heavily at the races, and they have done a far better job than either the Reds or the Rockefellers in taming that old radical, Diego Rivera, by keeping him busy painting the portraits of their daughters.
Caught up in their careers like middle-class people the world over, these Mexicans are obviously not revolutionaries in the old Latin American sense. With their stake in society, they are rather a new bulwark against the succession of rebellions that kept Mexico on edge through much of its history. They are nevertheless the products of the great social upheaval that took the lives of some 1,500,000 Mexicans a generation or so ago. Until the Mexican revolution, the nation suffered from a form of split personality, oppressed or angered by the ever-present reminders of a high Indian civilization that had been smashed by the white invaders.
Old Heritages Resurgent. The sons of the revolution appear to have learned to cherish equally their Indian and Spanish Christian heritages. Having accepted their past, they are ceasing to brood over it. Today it is fashionable in Mexico to collect pre-Columbian art, to dabble in archaeology, to wear Indian costumes and to study Indian customs. At the same time the Roman Catholic Church, long suppressed and persecuted by anticlerical revolutionists, is resurgent in Mexico. All over the country new modern churches are rising to replace those wrecked in the revolution. Nuns and priests wear their habits and cassocks in public; more and more parents send their children to Catholic schools. Under Ruiz Cortines, whose wife goes to church (though he does not), this trend is likely to continue.