"Pura Promesa:" Election Season in Mexico City

In Mexico City, election season is impossible to miss. Even if you never read a single Mexican news outlet or watch a Mexican news channel or follow a candidate’s social media, you will find in any part of the city just about every telephone post covered with posters for each party’s candidate at the local and national level. Although disagreements between parties can be heated and fierce — especially in the current presidential race, which pits former senator Xochitl Gálvez against former Mexico City mayor Claudia Sheinbaum — everyone involved seems to have agreed on a campaign poster style guide, each poster displaying a large, square passport-style photo of a candidate next to their name and party. Adjustments to the style guide are mostly left to pedestrians and possibly rival campaigns. Along Avenida Revolución, the word “Corrupto” has been pasted over the face of Mauricio Tabe, candidate for mayor of the Miguel Hidalgo district, whose particularly smarmy smile does give off strong snake oil salesman vibes. In my neighborhood, La Cuauhtémoc, you can see evidence of one party’s posters ripped off the telephone poles and replaced by another’s. I’ve heard of candidates competing for airtime. Here, the race to dominate physical space has not yet been abandoned.

In fact, you don’t have to leave your home for a campaign to reach your eyes and ears. Last week, I was in bed with a throat infection when a van drove in front of our apartment blasting what sounded like a karaoke version of the Italian song “Sarà perché ti amo”. But the lyrics had been changed to propagandize the Morena party’s candidate for neighborhood representative, Caty Monreal. The song came and went for about an hour as the van circled around the block and I laid in bed with no way to resist besides waiting and wishing for it to go away.

In Mexico City, people in general are open about their tastes, announcing them on their clothes, skin and cars. There is a particular affinity for cartoons that I’ve yet to fully understand. On any given day, you can see cars covered in stickers of the Super Mario Brothers, Bowser, MegaMan, Bugs Bunny, Tweety Bird, the Toon Squad, Spider-Man, Iron Man, The Avengers, Hello Kitty, Micky, Donald, Goofy, a variety of Disney princesses and a range of cartoon pandas. The purple public buses can get particularly elaborate, images of the Virgin of Guadalupe mixed with images of a favorite Luchador, the phrases and imagery adorned on each bus reflective of its particular driver. It’s a show of creativity that would get them fired or fined in any American city, where individualist creed and reverence for “law and order” have long maintained an uncomfortable coexistence.

Here in Mexico City, people put their creativity out in the open. It moves seamlessly through their everyday acts, from the melodies chanted by the street vendors, the rhythms of car horns from traffic-exhausted drivers, the multi-colored paintings on the sides of building walls and highway tunnels. In the USA, graffiti is illegal. Here, it’s encouraged.

Indeed, most people don’t seem to have much use for what is or isn’t legal, or even what might or might not kill them. You see that in the young man gripping onto the back of a garbage truck with a lit cigarette in his mouth, seemingly unconcerned that it might fall by the exhaust pipe and catch fire. Or that the truck might come to a sudden stop or move too fast over the mountainous bumps that occupy every side street and send him flying to certain injury or death. You see it in the three friends huddled tightly together, helmet-less, on the same motorcycle. Or really anyone riding a motorcycle. Once you get over the terror of sharing the road with them, their disregard for danger and restrictions can feel infectious, even liberating.

The whole of the political campaign season reflects none of that energy or creativity.  The efforts of the politicians and their teams circle above and around the people but always outside them, like an omniscient cloud of air pollution. You’d be hard pressed to find support for a candidate translate to the kind of creative support that, say, an image of Spider-Man might inspire. I saw one car with XOCHITL painted in pink letters on the side doors, but beyond the occasional lawn sign or bumper sticker, that’s about it.

In general, shows of candidate support take on a kind of oppressive banality. You will see people holding up signs at busy traffic intersections while scrolling through their phones, carrying all the detachment of an assigned day laborer rather than the excitement of a committed volunteer. In each direction of periferico (the freeway), you will see billboards pop up, awkward and out of place, supporting the Morena Party. (In my home city of Los Angeles, freeway billboards feel as if they were integrated into the planning commission; here, they seem tacked on after the fact, like an apartment developer building a wall to forcibly add on a second bedroom). The advertising for Morena is especially ubiquitous, likely because it’s the party of the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Despite what his supporters might say, he seems more than capable of giving out favorable contracts to influence the result. Each of the billboards shows a different smiling, generically attractive couple and their dog. I imagine a big sign posted at the ad agency’s office: “Always add a dog. People love dogs.”

Election day is on June 2 and the consensus is that the Morena Party’s candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum, is the favorite to win, mostly due to the overwhelming popularity of the populist incumbent. She has framed her campaign as an extension of his presidency. Whenever she speaks or poses for a photo, she shows such little charisma that it’s difficult to understand how politics became her chosen profession. She’s like the neutral smiling bureaucrat called in to create the impression of normality while the real power brokers keep everything moving in darkness. Indeed, that was precisely the role she played as Mexico City mayor when in May 2021 a train line collapsed and killed 26 people. An independent investigation by her government found fault in the contracted company (headed by Mexican monopolist Carlos Slim) but resulted in no accountability. She offered compensation to the victims’ families on, of course, the condition that they would not pursue legal action.

Xochitl Gálvez at least seems to have a sense of humor. In presidential debates in Mexico, candidates are allowed to present visual aids before the cameras. On Sunday, May 19, my wife and I, having missed the first two debates, decided to watch the third. As Sheinbaum was speaking, Xochitl took out a sign that said ‘Claudia Miente’ (Claudia lies) with her nose extended to look like Pinocchio. We burst out laughing, taken totally off guard.

Regardless of either candidate’s record or charisma, there is little faith among most people that either one will have much impact in their six year term. The campaign season seems more like a game played out among a certain class of people while everyone else keeps living their lives as best they can. In this way, it’s not all that different from the American campaign season. The institutions there might be stronger and the choice in November might be starker, but the sense of disconnect is the same. I feel it any time I turn on a cable news segment and enter a surreal, curated reality where common sense and kindness have been belittled out of existence. And I imagine it’s what people here feel watching the political machine churn out every six years, watching a show that’s been put on with no regard for its audience.

A few weeks ago, I was working at a coffee shop close to my apartment. A van pulled up and men and women in black polo shirts set up a fruit and vegetable stand. I’d seen them before, set up on that same corner once or twice a month. This time a woman with straight brown hair stood beside the stand. She wore a white t-shirt that identified her as the district’s congressional representative for the Morena party. The stand is normally quiet but this time they started blasting a song with an irritatingly cheerful, circular melody. The lyrics went something like, ‘People are nice in La Cuauhtémoc/We are happy in La Cuauhtémoc.’ It was like hearing a local politics version of It’s a Small World After All. A few constituents stopped to shake hands with the candidate while the song kept looping, mercifully interrupted by the occasional glitch in the loudspeaker. I packed my things and went inside to pay.

“They can’t fix the water system but they can pay to put on their horrible music,” I said in Spanish.

The woman behind the counter, who had short black hair and glasses and looked to be in her fifties, just laughed.

“Pura promesa,” she said. “Así es cada seis años. Pura promesa y nunca hacen nada.”