The camera zooms in on Salma Hayek, who smolders on cue. "I
don't care what you say or promise," the Mexican actress, star
of the movie Fools Rush In, growls. "For years you treated me as
if I were under your boot heel. I'm leaving you for someone who
will never hang up on me." A tempestuous scene from an upcoming
epic? No, it's Hayek's pitch for Avantel, one of Mexico's new
long-distance-telephone competitors--and an oblique slam at the
old economic establishment. The object of Hayek's scorn is the
former telephone monopoly, Telefonos de Mexico (Telmex)--a
behemoth Mexicans have long reviled under their breath for a
history of indifferent service and steep rates. But as a pillar
of the formerly state-dominated economy, Telmex never endured
such complaints in public.Hayek, 28, the first celebrity to vent that pent-up consumer
spleen on national television, has credible credentials for the
job. A native of Coatzacoalcos, she is well known in Mexican
entertainment circles as a strong-minded individualist who is
willing to trash the rules and thumb her nose at Mexico's
autocratic elite--a rebel without an ideological cause. Six
years ago, as one of the country's most attractive young
soap-opera stars, Hayek got fed up with the banal scripts ground
out by the television giant Televisa. The TV company has close
ties with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (P.R.I.), which
has ruled Mexico for the past 68 years. She walked out. In the
past, a move like that would end an actor's career. But Hayek
bolted to Hollywood, something few Mexican actresses dare, and
is today one of the world's fastest-rising film stars. As for
the P.R.I., she's not fond of it either. "I'm not impressed with
any party in Mexico," Hayek told TIME. "That's what makes me and
my generation different: we don't believe in anyone until they
show us they deserve it."
Hayek is more than an opinionated starlet. She is a leading
member of Mexico's NAFTA generation, the young,
independent-minded and numerically huge generation ages 18 to 29
that will be shaping the future of Mexico--starting this year.
Named after the groundbreaking North American Free Trade
Agreement, which took effect in 1994, Mexico's equivalent of the
U.S. baby-boom generation is just emerging as the largest and
most important youth wave Mexico has seen since the 1920s.
Almost 60% of the country's 95 million people are now under age
25, and more than a third of registered voters are under 30. The
boomer bulge is likely to extend over the next decade; its
political clout will begin to register this July 6, when voters
go to the polls in elections for the lower house of the
legislature, the mayoralty of Mexico City, and hundreds of other
state and local offices. In this election, unlike those of the
past, boomers' votes will matter--or at least so the
government says. President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon has
promised that the upcoming vote will be free, fair and
untainted--and many people, for once, believe him.
As a result, Zedillo's own party, the P.R.I., has reason to be
worried. The NAFTA generation is more disaffected by the
country's old political ways than any in memory. It is
prematurely jaded by the political corruption that keeps
blackening Mexico's image. And it is unhappy at the seemingly
endless sense of economic crisis; because of it, the NAFTA
generation has an unemployment rate twice as high as that of the
rest of the population. The generation harbors the next phalanx
of technically proficient Mexican yuppies, but it also embraces
more poverty than any other Mexican generation. In an alcove
beside one of Mexico City's busiest metro stops, Insurgentes, a
growing community of homeless and jobless young men live on old
mattresses and sofas. "So many guys our age, and there's no
work," says an 18-year-old named Luis.
In a recent poll of Mexicans ages 18 to 24, only 1% said they
trust the government. "Disgust, nonconformity, it's all there,"
says Guillermo Martinez, 24, "youth reporter" for the national
Radio Red network. "I don't see the current system surviving us."
That statement is looking less like braggadocio every day. In
the last presidential election, three years ago, more than half
of voters ages 18 to 29 opted for Mexico's opposition parties
for the first time; for students it was 65%. The trend is likely
to continue in July's midterm balloting. The NAFTA generation is
also much readier to break with entrenched economic and cultural
traditions--in part because the famed trade agreement has
undermined many of those cozy arrangements of the past. Today's
young Mexicans shun the ubiquitous public-sector bureaucracy to
stake their careers in private-sector organizations or take the
risk of founding their own business. They want realism instead
of nationalist ideology in their movies and music. Surveys show
that they prize honesty, competence and pragmatism over
knee-jerk anti-Americanism and more abstract ideals like
national sovereignty and lockstep political thinking. "It's
going to be very hard to fool this generation," says political
scientist Sergio Aguayo, head of the electoral watchdog Civic
Alliance.
But will the new generation of Mexicans have something better to
offer? They are just beginning to find their feet--and haven't
yet found their sense of direction. In that sense they're more
like their grunge-attired U.S. counterparts, Generation X. A
good label for Mexico's youth might be Generation Dos XX, after
the popular Mexican beer.
If they are looking for role models, Mexico's young generation
think they have found one in Hayek. During her visit last month
to the Guadalajara Film Festival, a crowd of young women
followed the actress at every turn. One of those trailing in
Hayek's wake was Rosalva Orozco, 24, just out of college, who
passed up a cushy government job to be a cub reporter at a small
Guadalajara radio station. Orozco says her decision was due in
part to Hayek's influence. "I look at her and I see choices my
mother never saw," she said. "I can do something with my life in
Mexico beyond the P.R.I. or Televisa or all the other stodgy
things."
That attitude, amplified by the NAFTA generation's numbers, is
causing concern all the way up to the presidential palace. Fully
aware of the demographic trend, Zedillo has appointed a new
youth czar, Luis Sanchez Gomez, to build bridges to the younger
vote. Sanchez has changed the name of his government agency from
the turgid General Directorate for Attention to Youth to Causa
Joven (Youth Cause); he has also updated its social-services
agenda to include issues like AIDS prevention and career
training for women. Zedillo has put a string of colleges and
universities on the presidential itinerary of almost every
hinterland visit he makes this year. On the road, the reserved
professional economist dives into crowds of students like a
wannabe rock star.
So far, the moshing isn't doing much good. Political analysts
say the NAFTA generation's disenchanted vote was a big factor in
a spate of P.R.I. state and local electoral losses over the past
two years. Last month the P.R.I. was stunned in civic balloting
in the central state of Morelos outside Mexico City.
Twentysomething voters helped thirtysomething candidates from
the conservative National Action Party (P.A.N.) and the leftist
Democratic Revolution Party (P.R.D.) take more than half the
state's municipal and legislative seats. Their victory added to
speculation that in July the P.R.I. could for the first time
lose its majority in the lower house of the legislature as well
as the powerful Mexico City mayor's office.
The NAFTA generation's enthusiasm for change--any change--has
pragmatic roots. It isn't just that they bear the brunt of the
1994 peso crisis. Since they were kids in the 1980s, they have
known spasms of prosperity interrupted by one economic disaster
after another. During the same period, Mexico has been more open
to outside influences than ever before, giving the younger
generation access to different standards and values by which to
measure the old order. What's more, Mexicans entering today's
job market cannot count on the authoritarian patronage of a
state-dominated economy to shape their future. Whatever else the
government has done in the past decade, its privatization
campaign has eliminated hundreds of thousands of sinecures. Says
Pablo Raphael, 27, a novice restaurateur whose hip El Octavo Dia
is a favorite Mexico City hangout for the younger set: "We're
the crisis generation."
Given their jobless rate--and the fact that a million additional
young Mexicans flood the workforce each year--that self-image
won't change soon. Even when they find work, members of the
NAFTA generation, according to a recent survey by the University
of Guadalajara, are more likely to remain loyal to the political
opposition.
It's tempting to liken the NAFTA generation to its angry
predecessor, the generation of 1968. That politically active
group, which saw hundreds of its members massacred by government
forces in the capital's Tlatelolco Plaza on the eve of the
Olympic Games, was eventually co-opted by the P.R.I. The most
prominent members of that generation, such as Zedillo and former
President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, got Ivy League Ph.D.s and
became the ruling technocrats of the '90s.
Members of the NAFTA generation, like Guadalajara lawyer
Cristina Organista, 25, look back on the achievements of their
predecessors with cynicism. The 1994 peso crisis--Mexico's worst
economic contraction in 60 years--canceled her dream of graduate
study in the U.S. "My family's aspirations went from sending me
abroad to simply saving our house," she says. Organista was part
of the electoral force that swept the opposition P.A.N. into
power two years ago in Guadalajara's Jalisco state. "The youth
vote had an enormous impact," recalls Jorge Zepeda, editor of
the Guadalajara daily Siglo 21.
Neither opposition party can feel smug about their future
chances just yet, however. The NAFTA generation is a tough
voting bloc to charm. Waiting her turn to shoot pool at a hall
in Mexico City's trendy Condesa neighborhood, computer
saleswoman Fabiola Mosqueira, 22, says she hasn't a clue who
she'll vote for in July. "The P.R.D. is a lot of old hippies I
don't like being around," she says, "and the P.A.N. is a bunch
of conservatives who want to keep me from wearing a miniskirt."
Again unlike its predecessors, the NAFTA generation shuns
activism. That reluctance to get involved in the political
process it complains about may, in the long run, be one of its
biggest disabilities. "I do worry about how black we make the
horizon look sometimes," says Martinez, "especially since we
don't have many answers of our own." Aside from a demonstration
against economic policy last October, one of the few marches
young Mexico City residents have joined over the past year was
one that protested a change of music format at one of their
favorite radio stations.
But individually, rather than in clumps, younger Mexicans are
more definite about what they don't like--the public sector, for
example. The traditional place to start a career in Mexico was
always inside the P.R.I.-led bureaucracy. Now, says Gerardo
Guerra, 27, a Guadalajara native, "I wouldn't work in the
government, not with its corruption problems." Guerra went
straight from American University in Guadalajara to a managerial
job with U.S.-based Procter & Gamble, then got a master's degree
in management at Yale University. Rather than crunch numbers at
the Treasury Ministry as Zedillo's generation did, Guerra joined
the financial department at privately owned cement giant Cemex
in Monterrey. "I'm not going to ask the government to give me
what it once gave my parents," he says. "We just want a system
that works and works fairly, and we still don't have that."
Higher education in Mexico has always revolved around the
gargantuan state-controlled and tuition-free National Autonomous
University of Mexico (unam). But today's students tend to deride
overcrowded, antiquated unam as a socialist-era anachronism, a
place to prepare for anti-American cafe chatter, not a 21st
century career. More and more students are trying to get
scholarships to attend private colleges like the Technological
Institute of Monterrey, known as El Tec, with its gleaming
office towers, environmentally correct bins for three kinds of
recyclable garbage, and banks of personal computers in the
hallways. "We're not so tied up in nationalist ideals that get
you nowhere," says Mario Oviedo, a 21-year-old Tec economics
student. "We're less frightened of confronting the outside world."
They are also bolder about leaving the nest. Even the generation
of 1968 lived at home until marriage, but the life-style of the
NAFTA generation has created a whole new real estate unit in
Mexico: the stu-dio apartment. NAFTA generation members are more
mobile than their predecessors. While impoverished campesinos
migrate to slums or the U.S. for work, middle-class children
leave their families in Guadalajara to work in industrial
centers like Monterrey, as Guerra did. Those cities have seen
new youth enclaves sprout up. In Monterrey especially, once one
of Mexico's most buttoned-down towns, rap dance clubs and
computer shops-cum-coffee bars are the leading new spots to see
and be seen.
The watchword is self-reliance. Even affluent young Mexicans are
more likely to start their own business than take the helm of
the family firm. With three young cousins, 21-year-old Diego
Ordax set up a one-stop-shop computer store in Mexico City; it
is doing well, he says, thanks to "customers like us." With
Mexico's banks still reeling from the peso crash, Ordax got the
capital for his start-up from relatives--one reason why 77% of
young Mexicans say they still believe in the family, even if
they prefer not to live within its traditional confines. The
flux in attitudes and life-styles is causing headaches and
challenges for at least one group beyond politicians--marketing
executives. Today's Mexican youth are living in a commercial
world that is more open than any faced in earlier times. But
they are not easy prey. "We're more global," notes Alfredo Leal,
22, another Tec economics major. "We have Internet access and a
thousand times more information." That's why Avantel, a
consortium headed by the U.S. firm MCI, tapped Hayek as a
spokesperson. The company says she has raised its name
recognition in Mexico from 3% in 1995 to 75% today. Avantel is
still working to get a foothold in the market Telmex has long
dominated, but, says Patricia Maciel, 24, who co-writes Hayek's
scripts, "My grandparents aren't going to give up Telmex, but I
will."
Maciel thinks she knows what her generation craves from the
world of commerce: "You have to be honest and direct with us.
This is a far more pragmatic, even cynical age group than Mexico
has ever seen." It is also demanding more open discussion of
topics that were long taboo in Mexico's conservative media.
AIDS, for example, is the third leading killer of Mexicans under
35, and so the young generation is demanding a franker
discussion of sex. Mexico's traditionally prim soap operas are
starting to respond. The upstart network TV Azteca last year
aired a soap called Nada Personal (Nothing Personal), which put
Mexico's first nude love scene on the small screen. "We don't
have the luxury of hiding reality away anymore," says Nada
Personal star Ana Colchero.
The same yen for realism is filtering into Mexican movie
production, previously the last refuge of the saccharin romantic
epic. New directors like 33-year-old Carlos Marcovich are
undermining convention with such offbeat films as his
soon-to-be-released Quien Diablos Es Juliet? (Who the Hell Is
Juliet?). The film, which features Hayek in a cameo role,
follows two young women, Mexican and Cuban, who face their
countries' more sensitive realities and taboos as they join in
search of their fathers.
On the pop-music front, Mexicans are turning away from frothy
Menudo-style acts to the tough tones that come from roquero
(rock) groups like Los Jaguares and grungy trova (troubadour)
artists like Fernando Delgadillo. Some have brought punk and
gangsta nihilism south of the U.S. border, like Tijuana No and
the rap band Molotov. But, as in most things, the fans' numbers
rule: the Miami-based, Spanish-language mtv Latin America has
developed programs such as Afuera (Outside) that showcase
trendsetting Mexican artists, something the network has not done
for any other Latin market.
Is the NAFTA generation finding more than diversion in its new
status as a demographic balance point? Fernanda Gallego, a
24-year-old Jalisco government counsel who heads Youth
Development, one of the numerous nonpartisan civic forums
sprouting up in every Mexican city and university these days,
isn't sure. Says she: "Every time I hear public officials shout
about defending our national sovereignty, I shake my head,
because I know their corruption and mistakes have compromised my
country's sovereignty as much as any gringo has."
The best grounds for optimism about the path that the NAFTA
generation will take are still on the margins, where young
people like Gallego are struggling to inject new values--old
values, actually--into the society they are about to inherit. An
example is Profeco, the federal small-claims court that most
Mexicans agree is the only branch of their judicial system that
functions properly and efficiently. One reason for the agency's
success is the young, uncorrupted corps of public
attorneys--average age: 29--who handle the consumer-complaint
and civil-damages cases. They have become one of the few sources
of redress for many citizens. Bertha Arteaga, 28, is one who
found the appeal of such meaningful work irresistible. She fled
the Agrarian Reform Ministry to join up and tackle cases
involving unscrupulous tourist hotels. "Here," she says, "I feel
that I'm actually righting wrongs." Says Fernando Lerdo,
Profeco's chief and a former university professor: "They're
showing Mexicans that the public-service concept of looking
after people is doable here."
No one knows better than the NAFTA generation how badly the
country needs it.
--With reporting by Daniel Dombey/Mon-terrey and Paul
Sherman/Mexico City
