Last Monday was Día de la Constitución in Mexico. As my wife Monika Maeckle and I gazed out the window of our northbound bus, entering the country’s Bajio on our way from Mexico City to San Miguel de Allende, we passed the UNESCO World Heritage City of Querétaro, a city 200 years older than San Antonio.
The two sister cities of comparable size and character share much in common, a bond that was recently renewed with an exhibition of San Antonio artists at the Museo del Arte de Querétaro in the city’s Historic Monument Zone that we attended last year. The project was the brainchild of San Antonio artists Lionel and Kathy Sosa and Antonio Arelle Barquet, the museum’s engaging director.
I count all three as friends who use art and culture to unite people across borders. Learn more about that exhibition in Episode 64 of the bigcitysmalltown podcast.
Querétaro, as any student of Mexican history knows, is the country’s Constitutional City. The Mexican Revolution (1910-1917) concluded with passage of the new constitution there in 1917, one year after the city became Mexico’s provisional capital. That constitution still stands.
Monika and I joined friends and Mexico’s 131 million people last week awaiting President Donald Trump’s threat to impose unilateral 25% tariffs on Mexican goods crossing the border into the United States. The Mexican peso dipped for a day after Trump made good on his blustering campaign promise to punish Mexico and Canada, our two main trading partners, and then rebounded after Mexican President Claudia Scheinbaum disarmed Trump in a 45-minute telephone conversation.
Mexican pundits saw the one-month reprieve from tariffs, aranceles, as the equivalent of a deftly-scored goal by Scheinbaum, praising the President for her handling of Trump in a David vs. Goliath soccer match, as if the underdog head of state had just surprised the other side with an unanticipated equalizer. In the eyes of Mexicans, the match is tied, 1-1.
Yet the clock ticks toward an early March deadline unless the agreement holds, leaving our neighbor to the south on edge over threatened economic punishment from its biggest trading partner to the north.
We live in unprecedented times. An aggrieved Russian President Vladimir Putin covets Ukraine and other vassal states lost with the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the same time, China’s Premier Xi Jinping makes no secret of his desire to seize Taiwan and tighten his country’s control of international waters in the South China Sea. Both have ruled their countries as dictators since 2012.
Now U.S. voters have returned an autocrat to power, one who sought to subvert the U.S. Constitution in 2020 in a violent attempt to stay in power. While Trump failed then, he has made his way, legally, back into power. Empowered by his return to the White House, Trump has joined Putin and Xi, sharing his own bizarre vision of expansionism: acquiring Greenland, repossessing the Panama Canal, inviting Canada to become the 51st state, and calling for the forced removal of 2 million Gazans to Jordan and Egypt, allowing the narrow strip of land on the Mediterranean to be redeveloped in a real estate play. Undocumented immigrants are starting to arrive at Guantanamo, the Cuban territory the United States occupies and uses as a prison.
Weeks into Trump’s second term, he is watching Elon Musk, his single largest campaign contributor and the world’s richest man, behave like a human wrecking ball crashing through the federal workforce.
Mexico, despite Trump’s denigrating rhetoric, remains our neighbor. The bilateral relationship is a complex one, given our fractured history dating to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo when Mexico was forced to cede 55% of its territory to the United States. That reality is not taught in U.S. public schools, certainly not in Texas public schools. Yet it is fact, not opinion.
Facts matter less these days, as does science. We returned home Monday, grateful as always to be back in San Antonio after enriching travel south of the border. I’d be a liar if I didn’t say I fear the future. My perspective, I know, is not shared by people I know who voted for Trump. That’s no reason to hold back. Trump’s many Republican Party facilitators in the U.S. Congress and those like Governor Greg Abbott, who govern red states, are turning a blind eye to the inevitable consequences. Trump’s “off-with-their-heads” rule is governance rooted in grievance rather than the rule of law.
Democracy seldom dies in an instant. It erodes, bit by bit. Pretending everything will be okay is not a strategy.
