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Hayek has a strong influence on young Mexican women like Rosalva Orozco, 24, who passed up a cushy P.R.I. patronage job to work as a reporter at a small, independent radio station. "I look at Salma, and I see choices my mother never saw," Orozco says. "I can do something with my life in Mexico beyond the P.R.I. or Televisa or all the other stodgy things."
She isn't alone. The NAFTA generation is noted for shunning the ubiquitous bureaucracy to seek careers in the private sector or take the risk of starting a business. Diego Ordax, 21, and three young cousins this year set up a one-stop shop for computers in Mexico City. It is doing well, he says, thanks to "customers like us." Many deride the gargantuan, tuition-free National Autonomous University of Mexico as a socialist-era anachronism and scrape together scholarships to attend private colleges like the Monterrey Technological Institute. The young leave home for studio apartments before marriage--something previous Mexican generations never dreamed of doing--and they aren't afraid to take a job in a city hundreds of miles away. Says Gerardo Guerra, 27, who left his native Guadalajara, got a master's degree at Yale and holds a management post at a private cement firm in Monterrey, one of Mexico's leading industrial centers: "We just want a system that works and works fairly, and we still don't have that."
But it is far from certain that they'll replace it with something better. Although they vote, the members of the NAFTA generation are known for their reluctance to get involved in the process they whine so much about. Aside from a mass demonstration against economic policy last October, one of the few marches young Mexico City residents have joined in the past year was a protest against a change of music format at one of their favorite radio stations.
Still there are grounds for optimism. The young, uncorrupted public attorneys (average age: 29) who handle consumer-complaint and civil-damages cases have turned the federal small-claims court into the only branch of Mexico's judicial system that functions honestly and efficiently. "Here," says public attorney Bertha Arteaga, 28, "I feel that I'm actually righting wrongs." And novice politicians like Heriberto Ramirez, 27, a P.A.N. member who last year made headlines when he refused to let local P.R.I. bosses annul his mayoral victory in the small town of Huejotzingo, are convincing their peers that running for office is as cool as heading for Hollywood.
Official Mexico knows it must catch the new wave. Zedillo recently appointed Luis Sanchez Gomez to be director of a new government-sponsored group called Causa Joven, (Youth Cause) effectively making him the President's adviser on issues involving the young. And last Sunday the federal election commission set up mock voting booths for children around Mexico City. Throughout the day, radio stations broadcast cute interviews with the preteen electorate. But the implication is serious: for the foreseeable future, anyway, the voices that count in Mexico are those of the pups, not the old dogs.
--Reported by Paul Sherman/Mexico City and Daniel Dombey/Monterrey