Rich and poor side by side

WINDOW ON MEXICO. This is the journal of Julius Ocwinyo, author of Fate of the Banished among other books and an associate editor at Fountain Publishers who is on a writer-in- residence programme in Mexico.

One of the things that one notices immediately about Mexico is the yawning socio-economic divide. At the individual level, this is more evident in the urban areas than in the rural.
For instance, in Mexico City, on two of the avenues that slice right through the city, the Paseo de la Reforma and the Zona Rosa, there are sprawling supermarkets and showrooms dealing in goods ranging from brand-new shoes, clothes and musical instruments, to electronics and cars.

Haven of affluent
And there are always hordes of moneyed folks on these avenues, checking out the goods on display and making purchases. You will also see some of the most expensive cars in the world on these avenues: Porches, Benz Maybachs, Ferraris, Hummer limos…
Here, too, are found some of the upscale restaurants that charge, on average, 500 pesos (about Shs105,000) for a four-course meal and a glass of wine. It is not surprising, therefore, that the wealthiest person in the world currently, Carlos Slim Hélu, is a Mexican.

A needy existence
On the same avenues, however, one can’t help but notice the homeless people, mostly adults, idling their lives away on the verandahs and benches, and around the garbage skips. Some look stoned to the eyeballs; others are so filthy their skin has taken on a mottled grimy hue and their hair become straggly and greasy; and yet others have lost most of their teeth, despite the free dental services offered by the state.

These are the poorest of the poor, who can barely afford the cheapest, most basic foods at the hole-in-the wall eateries, and who often beg with leech-like tenacity or stare at you with such menace in their eyes that they set you thinking they turn into something very dangerous when night falls.

This lot are also unemployed and unemployable and are frequently, I was informed, migrants from the rural provinces.

A fair livelihood
There is a category of the poor who are not, however, in such desperate straits. These are those who earn the statutory minimum wage of about 62 pesos (about Shs13,000) per day. Those in this category comprise some of the municipal workers (such as garbage collectors), private security guards and waiters at the low-end restaurants. Some of those who earn incomes close to the official minimum wage are the rickshaw-riders.

A tale of two communities
One evening, as I returned from a trip to Milpa Alta, a far-flung part of Mexico City Metropolitan area, I espied a number of rickshaw-riders getting ready to bed down in the doorways of the more derelict parts of Mexico City, close to their rickshaws. Such inequalities are driven home more strongly when a comparison is made between these low-income earners and, for example, police officers (who earn, on average, 8,000 pesos or Shs1, 700,000 a month) or telecom engineers (who pocket at least 20,000 pesos or Shs4, 250,000 a month).

The Mexican nation itself seems split into two by an invisible socio-economic line whose impact, however, is all too visible. Whereas the northern and middle parts of the country enjoy access to a broad range of resources, the south comes across as quite deprived, especially in the spheres of natural resources and social services.