Chick, as in Starbucks Chick...Posh, as in McDonalds Posh

                            

Before I even start this blog post I will assume that, even if most serious colleges have courses that reflect upon the problems of globalization, most of us have never stopped to actually analyze on how interaction between individual elements of different cultures (aka. value-systems) actually affect our everyday lives. In this post I will talk of how a very popular facet of every day American culture, fast food franchises, are received by Mexicans, particularly in big cities such as Mexico City.

Mexican culture devours American elements only to reframe them and insert them back into the mainstream culture completely changed. It idolizes them, completely robbing them of their original value and reinserting them within a completely different frame of mind. 

When the first McDonald’s arrived in Mexico City, about 20 years ago, it was a major event. Even now, two decades and hundredths of McDonald’s later, people in the city continue to talk about the inauguration as one of the great developments of the last decades: "Months would pass and there’d still be lines and lines of people outside, in the street. The lines would stretch for kilometers, blocks and blocks without end. People would spend the whole Saturday in line with their whole family. It was a full-day plan to get a Mcburger".

 First Mcdonalds in ex-USSR. 

You get the idea. 

This first McDonalds has by now turned into on the biggest one of the Spanish speaking side of the American continent. What could this mean? Surely the relationship of Mexicans with McDonalds is just a special instance of a particular form of extreme anglophilia. Surely there’s something particular about McDonald’s relationship to the Mexicans that doesn’t apply to all relationships of Mexicans with American Culture.  Sadly, this is not the case. 

In Mexico, American standards are among the only standards to determine whether something is classy or not. The standards for "good taste" have always come from the outside: Americans in Mexico are always "chick", Mexicans are not, American culture is the ultimate definition of "posh", Mexican culture is seen as low-class.

Mexicans have a special word that makes an explicit reference to the attitude by which one praises outside culture over one’s own. The fact that this word exists only in Mexico (and not in other Spanish speaking countries) is not a mishap; as Noble Price winner Octavio Paz mentioned in  "The Labyrinth of Solitude", the word "malinchismo" makes an explicit reference to the first local Indian woman in Mexican history to have sexual intercourse with the Europeans.   The Malinche was the first one to establish deep emotional relationships with the outsider, thus opening the way for a colonization that would constantly look down to any type of feeling of mexican-ness. 

The effects of this 300 year long intercourse,  the mestizaje, can still be felt in our ever day lives, here in post-colonial globalized Mexican society, it’s subject to discussion all the time. Now days, Modern day malinchismo is focused on a different outsider: The United States. 

Consider the following instances. Starbucks, once a shitty cafeteria where the working class could grab a quick coffee on their way to work, is known in Mexico for being a place to socialize and meet with the elite and the middle high-class. Krispy Kreme donughts, once considered a sort of middle class treat, are located in the trendiest of places here in Mexico: the doughnuts are very expensive, they considered as "gourmet food”. 

However, the most recent and extreme example of this cultural (mis) appropriation is the example of IHOP. Considered once as the "pit stop" of trailer and bus drivers of southern USA, one of the firsts IHOP to make it to the Mexican ground is currently located in the most luxurious corporate area of the entire city. This place is now the meeting place for Mexican CEOs and the like; it is actually considered a proper restaurant (the maple syrup comes in glass jars, the pancakes costs fortunes and are made with high quality dough, so they said). 

 Mmmm... Gourmet Food. 

If Mexican culture could influence American culture in the same top-down manner as American culture influences Mexico, the results would be so absurd that we could barely conceive them. Imagine a society in which tacos are seen as top of the notch gourmet food! Or a 5th avenue taco-restaurant with a queue of NY CEOS dying to get a high-class quesadilla!

Of course, the fact of the matter is that economic relations permeate cultural ones, and it’s hard to decide who influences who and it one ways. The fun thin is that these things happen all the time in our globalized world: if we see these expressions from the outside, we have no other choice than to sit down and laugh.