Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Mexico and Central America constitute a growing demographic powerhouse with which
the United States has an inextricable relationship. Mexico's population of 111 million plus
Central America's of 40 million constitute half the population of the United States. Be-
cause of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), 85 percent of all Mexico's
exports go to the United States, even as half of all Central America's trade is with the U.S.
While the median age of Americans is nearly thirty-seven, demonstrating the aging tend-
ency of its population, the median age in Mexico is twenty-five and is much lower than
that in Central America (twenty in Guatemala and Honduras, for example). The destiny of
the United States will be north-south, rather than the east-west,
sea-to-shining-sea
of con-
tinental and patriotic myth. (This will be amplified by the scheduled 2014 widening of the
Panama Canal, which will open the Caribbean Basin to megaships from East Asia, leading
to the further development of Gulf of Mexico port cities in the United States, from Texas
to Florida.)
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Half the length of America's southern frontier is an artificial boundary line in the desert
established by treaties following the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. Crossing this
border once, having traveled by bus north from Mexico City, was as much of a shock for
me as crossing the Jordan-Israel border and the Berlin Wall. Surrounded by beggars on
the broken sidewalk of Nogales, Sonora, I stared at the American flag indicating the bor-
der. The pedestrian crossing point to Nogales, Arizona, was in a small building. Merely by
touching the door handle, I entered a new physical world. The solidly constructed handle
with its high-quality metal, the clean glass, and the precise manner in which the room's
ceramic tiles were fitted seemed a revelation after weeks amid slipshod Mexican construc-
tion. There were only two people in the room: an immigration official and a customs offi-
cial. Neither talked to the other. In government enclosures of that size in Mexico and other
Third World countries there were always crowds of officials and hangers-on lost in anim-
ated conversation, sipping tea or coffee. Looking through the window at the car lanes, I saw
how few people there were to garrison the border station, yet how efficiently it ran. Soon,
as in Israel, I was inside a perfectly standardized yet cold and alienating environment, with
empty streets and the store logos made of tony polymers rather than of rusted metal and
cheap plastic. Because of the turbulence and semi-anarchy I had experienced amid over
100 million Mexicans for weeks just to the south, these quiet streets appeared vulnerable,
unnatural even. Arnold Toynbee writes, in reference to the barbarians and Rome, that when
a frontier between a highly and less highly developed society “ceases to advance, the bal-
ance does not settle down to a stable equilibrium but inclines, with the passage of time, in
the more backward society's favor.”
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Since 1940, Mexico's population has risen more than five-fold. Between 1970 and 1995
it nearly doubled. Between 1985 and 2000 it rose by over a third. Mexico's population of
111 million is now more than a third that of the United States, and growing at a faster rate.
