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Though Mexico is next door to the U.S., though millions of U.S. citizens have seen it themselves, the country south of the border is still mostly a colorful legend. It is—to many Americans—unsanitary and exotic, the place where Aunt Clara got dysentery and watched dark-skinned boys dive 165 ft. into a surging wave at Acapulco. It is violent: the plump señora in the cartoon scolds her sombreroed husband as he cleans his pistol, saying "Oh, Pablo, you're not going back into politics!" In the cities it has modern hotels, traffic jams, skyscrapers and ocherous murals; in the country drowsy peons in scrapes prop the walls of moldering churches in quaint colonial villages.
U.S. citizens with a firm grip on French and British history may remember, when it comes to Mexico, little more than the cinema-celebrated names of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, and the conquistador Hernán Cortés. Few are aware that in the past three decades Mexico, historically unstable (see box), has stirred itself, put away its pistols and begun an explosion of industrialization that has pulled one-third of the once-somnolent population into a new middle class.
"I Promise . . ." One morning last week, in a northern sierra of this awakened land, twelve Tarahumare Indians, famed for their fleet feet, rose at dawn and began running south. Six days later (with an assist from a truck) they chuffed into the capital to honor the grand inauguration of Mexico's new President, Adolfo López Mateos, 48. It was a ceremony worthy of the effort. The setting was Mexico City's famed Palacio de Bellas Artes, an Italianate pile of marble as remote from today's Mexico as an igloo, despite murals by the famed Big Four of Mexican art: Rivera, Siqueiros, Orozco and Tamayo. As López Mateos entered, the 3,000 guests, including U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, stood and cheered the President-elect's march to the stage.
Outgoing President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines lifted the ceremonial red-white-and-green sash of office from his shoulders, draped it on his successor, returned to his seat and retired from public life. López Mateos repeated the oath of office, which, in anticlerical Mexico, specifically excludes the usual "so help me God." "I promise to observe and uphold," he said, "the political Constitution of the United States of Mexico and the laws that derive from it. And if I fail, may the people call me to account."