Jesus Padilla and La Raza Cosmica in the 21st Century

What LA-based journalists Luis Bueno and Andrea Canales uncovered about Jesus Padilla was not that big a deal. Their reporting showed that Padilla, a young forward for Chivas of Mexico, was born in San Jose, Calffornia, not San Miguel de Alto in the Mexican state of Jalisco, as stated on the club’s website. This is only an issue because of Chivas’ policy of only fielding Mexican players. This policy, writes Luis Bueno, was in fact “an unwritten law which dates back to the early 1940s, when then-club president Ignacio Lopez Hernandez wrote in a letter that the club would henceforth accept only ‘Mexicans born in Mexico’ and shut the door completely on foreign-born players.”

Jesus Padilla (photo: Mexsport/mediotiempo.com)

The revelation about Paddilla has forced Chivas to alter its long-held policy. The club says that it will now follow the definition of citizenship laid out in the Mexican constitution, which states that “those born in a foreign country of Mexican parents; of a Mexican father and a foreign mother; or of a Mexican mother and an unknown father.” On the face of it, this shift seems like a purely sporting matter. But it is not. In fact, definitions of Mexican identity are shifting in society as a whole, profoundly affected by the numbers of migrants leaving for the United States. The case of Jesus Padilla is simply one example of how Mexico as a whole is being forced by massive demographic shifts to change its notions of what it means to be Mexican.

Ideas about what it means to be Mexican are complicated and long in the making. Few people can be said to have had as strong an influence on shaping Mexican identity as Jose Vasconcelos. The Mexican lawyer, philosopher, and presidential candidate is best known for his 1925 book La Raza Cosmica (The Cosmic Race). Vasconcelos’s work was a response to some who claimed that the Mexican “race” – a mix of indigenous, European, and African people – was inferior. Vasconcelos sought to turn the argument on its head, claiming that this mixture was precisely what made Mexicans unique.

Jose Vasconcelos (photo: Arikah.net)

Vasconcelos’s work was used as part of a nation-building project in Mexico that sought to unify the country after the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920. During those 10 years, fighting between Mexicans of diverse backgrounds racked the country. Governments immediately following the Mexican Revolution latched on to the idea of la raza (to which it was shortened), promoting its message that all citizens are united by the “race” they share. Vasconcelos’s ideas have continued to be important in shaping Mexican identity and the relatively high degree of nationalism in the country is not unconnected from them.

There is no evidence that Chivas implemented its “Mexicans born in Mexico” policy to directly appeal to this strong strain of nationalism. But the club’s decision to do so has led to it having one of the strongest fan bases in Mexico. Chivas USA defender Claudio Suarez, who played nearly 150 matches for Chivas Guadalajara in the 1990s, told Andrea Canales that many fans’ support for the club comes from its Mexican-only selection policy.

Chivas fans (photo: redchivas.com)

The national pride promoted by Vasconcelos’s ideas and taken advantage of by Chivas has had to be reconsidered recently, especially in the face of high levels of emigration from Mexico. The millions of Mexicans and their descendants now living in the United States have presented a challenge to conceptions of Mexican citizenship and identity. Is someone who moves to the US a Mexican? What about someone born to Mexican parents who live in the US? What about the child of Mexican-born father and an-American born mother of Mexican descent? This is exactly the scenario in which Jesus Padilla was born.

Having so many of its people living outside of the country has forced Mexico to reconsider ideas about who is Mexican. It was this that led to citizens living abroad being given the right to vote in Mexican elections for the first time in 2006. The contradiction between the constitutional definition of citizenship and the reality that millions of Mexicans were being disenfranchised could no longer be sustained.

Jesus Padilla’s situation also presented a contradiction between the club’s stated policy and the reality that there are millions of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans living in the United States. The club would undoubtedly like to take advantage of this potential pool of players. Indeed, they were already been doing so with Padilla as well as Los Angeles-born youth player Carlos Borja. The realities that the demographic shifts of the past several decades present are affecting Chivas’ selection policy just as surely as they are voting rights for Mexicans living abroad.

In announcing the decision to recognize foreign-born Mexican players, Chivas vice president Nestor de la Torre acknowledged these new realities in words that could just have as easily come from the mouth of a presidential candidate courting votes in Los Angeles. “In Mexico, because of the social reality, there are many countrymen who have to go work in the United States. Does that need and the accident of someone’s birth in another piece of land that’s not Mexico take away his values, customs, and Mexican race?”

This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 6:45 am and is filed under Ethnicity/Race, History, Immigration, Latin America, Nationalism/Identity, North America. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.