What Americans Miss About Mexico Electing Claudia Sheinbaum
Mapping American identity politics and our political spectrum on our neighbors distorts our understanding of them
When Claudia Sheinbaum was announced president-elect of Mexico this week, my phone blew up. I’m a Jewish woman and political researcher who spends a substantial amount of time in Mexico so it makes sense I would get a lot of texts with a lot of questions.
Folks started congratulating me, saying I must be so excited to have a woman and a Jew leading a country I have called home. Of course, this is a historic moment. Yet the American fixation on her gender and religion snapped me out of my “gringa chilanga” (chilangas are CDMX residents, gringa being a non-Mexican) split-mentality and reminded me of the ways in which Americans love to map their understanding of identity politics and a left-right political spectrum onto other countries where the heuristic doesn’t neatly apply. To understand Claudia more authentically, Americans need to step outside of their own mental mapping of the world.
This piece is a brief layman’s corrective to understanding the new Mexican president with a bit more context. Click on links for deeper dives into these dynamics.
Women in Mexican Politics
The first thing you have to know is that Mexicans have known their next president was going to be a woman for the past year. Sheinbaum’s opponent was Xóchitl Gálvez, a businesswoman, engineer, former mayor, and Otomi woman who served as the head of the institute of indigenous affairs in former president Vicente Fox’s conservative government.
For a country that suffers some of the largest femicide in the world, with over 39% of women reporting some kind of domestic violence, having a woman as president is no small feat. “La Doctora” Claudia Sheinbaum is impressive: she is an American educated engineer, was part of a Nobel Prize winning panel of climate scientists, and was the former mayor of Mexico City — the largest city in North America.
Mexico has made strides in gender-based representation. In 2019 they instituted a mandatory “parity in everything,” such that 50 percent of all elective and non-elective posts in government must be held by women.
Xóchitl represented a coalition of the dominant political parties, which included the PRI (“left”), the PAN (“right) and the PRD (a PRI offshoot) — shorthand parentheses for the Americans reading here. The PAN and PRI used be enemies, so some folks did not trust a candidate representing and uniting opposing legacy parties — they saw it as disingenuous and an attempt at elites trying to claw back power. Yet all of these parties felt that Claudia and her party Morena, a new party started by the current charismatic president, were a threat to democracy and united together to oppose her.
A Successor to a Movement
Sheinbaum’s campaign slogan is #EsClaudia, or “It’s Claudia.” In many ways, this genius slogan (which ignores her Jewish last name) reflects the feeling of inevitability that she would become president because she is successor to Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO for short), the current president elected in 2018 who had left the PRI, the socialist party that had governed the country for most of the 20th century, to found a new left-populist party, Morena. Morena means “brown-skinned woman” in Spanish roughly. It speaks to the indigenous heritage that so many Mexicans hold.
We can think of AMLO as a kind of lefty Trump, but lefty as in more 1930s socialist interested in workers, big infrastructure, and the poor — less “progressive social values” as understood in the American sense. Remember, Mexico is already a fairly socially conservative country and majority Catholic in many ways, though abortion and gay marriage is legal. Equating our “Democrats” and “Republicans” onto Mexican parties isn’t perfect, though of course American politicos have created their own alliances (see my writing on CPAC México) AMLO galvanized support at home and abroad by speaking directly to “the people” via morning broadcasts on Youtube and television called “mañaneras.”
AMLO founded Morena with a promise to instigate the “Fourth Transformation” or “Cuatro T” “4T.” This would be an effort to revolutionize Mexico via progressive social, economic, and political changes, including increased minimum wages, improved pensions, and large state-sponsored infrastructure projects (see the “Tren Maya” or Maya Train in Yucatán for instance). A core part of AMLO’s promises and rhetoric have been to kick graft and stop government employees from enriching themselves.
As my dear friend and Mexican diaspora expert Vita Dadoo writes, Mexicans abroad have been resoundingly inspired by AMLO, who they see as repairing the flawed and corrupt government that cause them to have to leave Mexico to begin with, in order to find economic opportunity elsewhere. She writes there are 11.7 million Mexican-born Mexicans living in the US, with 37.2 million if you consider folks of Mexican origin. Laws passed in the past 20 years allow those Mexicans abroad to vote and, more recently, allows those of Mexican descent to claim nationality and vote. This has created a huge opportunity for those seeking votes, one which AMLO has successfully tapped.
Opponents have called AMLO and Morena generally as part of “Narcocommunism” because of AMLO’s “Abrazos no balazos” (“Hugs not bullets”) policy attitude towards cartels — a reaction to the “War on Drugs” approach by the conservative PAN party that has been criticized. They accuse his party of being too cozy with cartel members. Some reports by ProPublica have alleged that drug traffickers funneled millions of dollars into his first campaign. Drug-related violence has spiked in recent years (partly causing migration to the US) and this election was bloody; there were over 30 murdered candidates.
Sheinbaum was part of a sweeping victory, with Morena winning most of the country, governorships, mayorships, and many other seats leading to a supermajority — essentially creating a mono-party for Mexico. This is not entirely new: much of Mexico was governed solely by the PRI for most of the 20th century to relatively stable effect. However, experts have criticized some of AMLO’s and Morena’s proposed policies as eroding democracy and checks-and-balances on power in the electoral commission and courts.
The jury is still out on Sheinbaum, who is known as a less charismatic leader and more of a technocrat. Some have accused her of being AMLO’s puppet. She certainly frames herself as a continuation of the 4T. Living in Mexico for many months of the year, I hope she tackles the water crisis that is currently gripping the country and especially CDMX.
Identity Politics and Jewishness in Context
The biggest question I get is “Will Claudia be good for the Jews?” This is a common question/gripe/trope within the Jewish community. The answer is not simple and nor am I equipped to answer it. I also got so many texts “congratulating” me for having a Jewish and female president — as if this automatically meant I would be politically aligned because we share a gender and religion. Let’s unpack this a little bit.
One thing I must say is that “identity politics” as conceived in the United States does not play the same role in Mexican politics — in fact it simply doesn’t translate easily. This is not to say that classicism, racism, sexism, and colorism do not play significant roles in who has and doesn’t have power in Mexican society. However, the tokenizing of folks based on identity does not hold the same political premium as it does in the U.S. The “multi-hyphenate” experience of being American (an Indian-American, a Mexican-American, Jewish-American and so on) simply does not offer the political and rhetorical impact. Most Mexicans born in Mexico, regardless of their other ethnic or religious origins, would opt to say they are Mexican — period. I recall trying to explain “identity politics” in a Spanish-language interview with a Mexican television station once and the producer looked….very confused and not because of my Spanish!
I was surprised that there was not much hugely public antisemitism lobbed at Sheinbaum during her campaign, aside from an early tweet from former president Vicente Fox referring to her as a “Bulgarian Jew” in what critics called an attempt to discredit her based on her ethnicity. There were accusations that she was pandering to believers by wearing the Virgin of Guadalupe on a dress or even marrying her current husband (named Jesus). She mostly shrugged off these attacks.
In fact, many Mexicans claimed that they didn’t even know Sheinbaum is Jewish. For her part, she emphasized her secular upbringing and other credentials. The New York Times reports that her grandparents were Jewish Holocaust refugees and her parents were involved in Mexico’s leftist movement in the 1960s and 1970s. She has downplayed her ethnic roots, but hasn’t denied them either.
In the wake of Hamas’s brutal attacks on Israelis on October 7th, many Jews are concerned about Sheinbaum’s attitude towards Israel. AMLO condemned the attacks and had not previously called Israel’s actions in Gaza genocide—a stance which Sheinbaum has shared. The International Court of Justice recently announced that Mexico joined South Africa’s case accusing the Israeli government of genocide against the Palestinian people. For many Jews in and out of Mexico, Sheinbaum’s lack of proactive support for Israel is seen negatively.
Many members of the Jewish community did not vote for Sheinbaum, considering what they may see as a lack of solidarity with Israel or a too-far-left candidate who will hurt democracy and business. There is also a bit of an inside baseball cultural element of when a Jewish person achieves a high level office, she is not just representing herself, but the Jewish community as a whole — failure would reflect more broadly on the community and be “bad for the Jews.”
Concerns and Final Thoughts For More Information
Depending on your political, economic, and social position, there are so many “takes” about Sheinbaum, AMLO, and Morena. That said, simply celebrating her for her religion or gender might not mean she aligns with your political, economic, or social values as an American. I hope this offered a little context to understand beyond our own “identity politics” driven American discourse to go deeper into what’s going on in Mexico.
More reading based on conversations and texts I’ve had with all of you:
Time Magazine piece Criticizing Sheinbaum, but also the legacy policies and politics that brought her to office.
The Washington Post did a unique piece on how Mexico’s cartels infiltrated the tortilla business, including some political implications for this.
If you haven’t heard, read El País and how the avocado trade is often impacted by cartels now too , with cartels forcing farmers into this crop or other forms of coercion. Just be aware!
The Economist warns of Sheinbaum and her policies. The peso did drop when she was elected!
Good shabbos! (and apologies for pre-shabbat typos!)
Good to know I was "mentioned" in the article as one of the people blowing up your phone! LOL!!