Mexico and Harmonism
Mexico and Harmonism
A Harmonist reading of Mexico and the Mesoamerican civilization it carries, organised through the twelve pillars of the Architecture of Harmony: Dharma the central pillar, and eleven peripheral pillars around it (Ecology, Health, Kinship, Stewardship, Governance, Finance, Defense, Education, Science & Technology, Communication, Culture) carrying the diagnosis and the recovery. See also: Architecture of Harmony, Harmonic Realism, Religion and Harmonism, Shamanism and Harmonism, The Five Cartographies of the Soul, Entheogens, The Guru and the Guide, Criminal Networks, The Captured Architecture, The Globalist Elite, The Financial Architecture.
Nahui Ollin — The Sun of Movement
Mexica cosmology counted four suns before this one, and each ended in catastrophe: jaguars, wind, a rain of fire, a flood. The fifth sun, the one the world lives under now, is called Nahui Ollin, Four Movement, and the old accounts say it will end in earthquakes. Mexico City has been reminded of the date. On 19 September 1985 an earthquake brought down hospitals, schools and apartment blocks across the capital and killed at least five thousand people, by estimates that independent counts put far higher. On 19 September 2017, two hours after the annual drill held to remember 1985, another killed 370. A third struck on 19 September 2022. The city stands on the bed of a lake its builders drained, and satellite measurements released in 2026 put the ground under its airport sinking about two centimetres a month.
Nahua sages had a proverb for this condition. Tlaalahui, tlapetzcahui in tlalticpac: it is slippery, it is slick on the earth. The Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún wrote it down in the sixteenth century among the sayings his informants used of someone who had lived well and then fallen. Their philosophy began from that ground. If the earth is slippery, the question is how to walk on it without falling, and their answer was a word usually translated as truth. Neltiliztli meant something closer to rootedness: a thing is true when it is well planted, a person true when their life has roots that hold.
Every December, on the northern edge of the same city, a crowd walks to a hill. Local officials counted about 12.8 million pilgrims at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe on 11 and 12 December 2025, a record. Before the conquest the hill of Tepeyac was a shrine to a mother goddess the Nahua addressed as Tonantzin, Our Revered Mother. In December 1531, according to the Nican Mopohua, a Nahuatl account printed in 1649, a Virgin appeared there to a baptised Nahua man named Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin and spoke to him in his own language. The image on his cloak shows a dark woman standing on the moon, robed in stars, with a black sash at her waist that Nahua viewers would have read as pregnancy. Mexico’s mestizo civilization has its founding icon there: a mother who chose the conquered, on the hill of the mother they had lost.
Harmonism recognises in this a doctrine it holds: the world is in motion, and only what is rooted in its order holds. Mexico keeps that recognition in its villages, its fields and its household altars. Its rulers, from the Mexica emperors who claimed the sun needed blood to the cartels that now claim bodies by the hundred thousand, have kept a counterfeit of it, in which the instability of the world becomes a licence to take. The Architecture of Harmony, twelve pillars with Dharma at the centre and eleven peripheral pillars around it, is the instrument used here, and Mexico, a country of about 130 million people, shows both readings at full strength.
The unit is a civilization rather than a border. Mesoamerica runs from the Wixárika of the western Sierra Madre to the Maya of Yucatán and over the southern border into Guatemala; some ten million Mexican-born people live in the United States; and the industrial north around Monterrey has long faced Texas more than it faces Oaxaca. Mexico is the state that holds most of it.
The Living Substrate
Mexico still keeps five institutions alive in daily practice, and the national image leaves out the strain on every one of them.
Guadalupan devotion as a working synthesis. The 2020 census counted 77.7 per cent of Mexicans as Catholic, down from 96 per cent in 1970, and the devotion to Guadalupe reaches further than the Church, into homes, taxis, prisons and the tattooed backs of men who never enter a parish. It integrates what the conquest set against each other: an indigenous mother and a Christian one, a Nahua hill and a Roman feast, the conquered and the faith of the conquerors. That integration is real and has held for nearly five centuries. It is also wide rather than deep. Devotion runs on vow and pilgrimage, the manda promised and paid with knees bloodied on the basilica’s stones, and offers very little daily interior discipline. Two devotions have grown fastest in the last thirty years. Evangelical and Pentecostal churches held 11.2 per cent of Mexicans by 2020, and more than a third of the people of Chiapas and Tabasco, the most indigenous states in the south, where the synthesis was supposed to be strongest. The other is the Santa Muerte, a skeletal folk saint the bishops condemn and the cartels have adopted, whose devotees the scholar Andrew Chesnut puts at some twelve million.
The milpa and the maize. Maize was domesticated from a wild grass, teosinte, in the Balsas River valley of southwest Mexico some nine thousand years ago, and the milpa, a field of maize, beans and squash grown together so that each feeds the others, has fed Mesoamerica since. Mexico still holds dozens of native maize races, kept in family seed stores and adapted valley by valley. The Nahua spoke of people as made of maize, and in the villages the phrase sin maíz no hay país, without maize there is no country, is a political slogan and a plain description at once. Since the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect in 1994, cheap American yellow corn has poured south, and Mexico became the largest buyer of US maize in the world while its smallholders left the land.
The dead who are fed. On the night of 1 November families across the country build altars of marigold, copal smoke, bread, sugar skulls and the favourite food and drink of their dead, and many sit through the night beside graves lit with candles. UNESCO inscribed the practice in 2008. Its premise is that the dead remain members of the household and return once a year to be fed. Mexico City added a costumed parade only in 2016, borrowed from the opening scene of a James Bond film, and the commercial calendar now sells the holiday back to its owners. A harder qualification sits beside the first. The national registry counted 132,735 people as disappeared at the end of August 2026, and their families, the mothers most of all, walk fields with iron rods, pushing them into the soil and smelling the tips for the odour of remains. A civilization that sets a place for its dead every November has more than a hundred and thirty thousand it cannot find.
The village that governs itself. In Oaxaca 417 of the state’s 570 municipalities choose their authorities by their own customary systems, the usos y costumbres, through assemblies rather than parties. Office is a service owed to the community, unpaid and often ruinous to the holder: the cargo system rotates men through civic and religious posts, and the tequio calls every household to communal labour on roads, wells and schools. On 15 April 2011 the Purépecha town of Cherán in Michoacán rose against loggers protected by organised crime, barricaded its entrances, expelled the municipal police and the political parties, and has governed itself since through a council chosen by neighbourhood assemblies. The same institution has excluded women. In 2007 Eufrosina Cruz won the mayoral vote in Santa María Quiegolani, Oaxaca, and the village’s male authorities threw out her votes on the ground that office was for men; Oaxaca amended its constitution in 2009 after her complaint.
Languages that still carry the flower and song. Mexico recognises sixty-eight indigenous languages, and the 2020 census counted about 7.4 million speakers, Nahuatl the largest among them at around 1.6 million. In them survives a literary tradition the Nahua called in xóchitl in cuícatl, flower and song: poetry as the way a mortal speaks truly of what does not pass. Yet the share of Mexicans who speak one has fallen from about one in six in 1930 to about one in sixteen in 2020, and in most families the grandparents speak to the children in a language the children answer in Spanish.
Read side by side, the five tell one story. Mexico has kept rootedness alive at the scale of the village, the field and the household altar, and has largely lost it at the scale of the state, where land, water and bodies have been treated as things to be moved.
The Central Pillar: Dharma
Rootedness and the Face and Heart
Nahua thought asked one question above the rest: how a mortal keeps balance on the slippery earth. The philosopher James Maffie, whose Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion (2014) is the most rigorous modern reconstruction, calls its answer the middle way of a balanced life, in which moral, practical and aesthetic rightness are one condition. Neltiliztli, truth as rootedness, names the condition from the side of the world; Miguel León-Portilla, the historian who brought Nahua philosophy into modern scholarship with La filosofía náhuatl in 1956, found its human form in a phrase the sixteenth-century texts repeat: in ixtli in yóllotl, a face and a heart. A person was not born whole. Schools, the calmécac for priests and nobles and the telpochcalli for commoners, existed to give each young person a wise face and a firm heart, a self others could see and a centre that did not move. The old texts called the teacher one who puts a mirror before others.
Harmonism reads in ixtli in yóllotl as the Nahua name for what Dharma feels like from inside: a life aligned with Logos, the inherent order of reality, so that what shows on the face and what moves in the heart agree. Neltiliztli is the same alignment seen from the world’s side: a person rooted in the order that holds while everything else slips. The tlamatinime, the “knowers of things” whom León-Portilla called philosophers, said the truest speech a mortal could make was flower and song, because only poetry could say something rooted about a world in motion. Harmonism would say that alignment with Logos is the root, and that beauty is how it shows.
The Christian layer did not erase this so much as receive it. The Nican Mopohua puts in the Virgin’s mouth the words that every Mexican Catholic knows: ¿No estoy yo aquí, que soy tu madre? Am I not here, I who am your mother? Juan Diego is not told to become someone else; he is told he is already held. A culture that had learned to look for roots in a slipping world found in Guadalupe a ground that came to it.
The friars recorded how long the receiving took. Diego Durán, a Dominican raised in New Spain, reproached an indigenous man around 1579 for some fault, and the man answered: Padre, no te espantes, pues todavía estamos nepantla. Father, don’t be alarmed; we are still nepantla. Asked what that meant, he said they were in the middle, believing in God and keeping their old customs too. Durán heard confusion. Maffie reads nepantla as the most basic motion in Nahua metaphysics, the middling and weaving by which opposites are joined, and on that reading the man was describing how a world is woven well. Mexico has lived in that middle for five centuries, and the question its history keeps asking is whether the middle is a loom or a wound.
Teotl and the World in Motion as Harmonic Realism
Nahua cosmology held that one sacred power runs through everything. Maffie calls teotl “a single, dynamic, vivifying, eternally self-generating and self-regenerating sacred power”, and, in his best sentence, “simultaneously the weaver of reality, the weaving of reality, and woven reality itself.” Gods, people, maize and mountains are its forms. It moves by pairs held in tension, life and death, dry and wet, male and female, gathered at the summit of the cosmos in Ometeotl, the lord and lady of duality. Harmonic Realism says the same of the cosmos: alive in every part, moved by Logos, and built of paired opposites from the Void and the Cosmos down to body and energy body. Nahua sages reached that recognition by watching how things change, and gave it a cosmology in which change itself is sacred.
Their anatomy of the person is equally exact. A body carried three animating forces: the tonalli in the head, heat and fate received from the sun; the teyolía in the heart, the soul that survives death; and the ihíyotl in the liver and belly, breath and drive. Harmonism’s account of The Human Being already names the third as the Nahua witness to the belly-will that the Chinese place in the lower elixir field and the Japanese in the hara. Healers today, in Nahua and Otomí villages, still treat susto, fright, as the loss of the tonalli, and call it back.
Here the substrate parts from its political use. In the account León-Portilla assembled from the chronicles, the counsellor Tlacaelel, in the decades after 1428, rewrote Mexica history and set at the centre of the state the doctrine that the sun must be fed with human hearts, so that war for captives became a cosmic duty and the empire its servant. An older current ran against it. The Toltec priest-king Topiltzin Quetzalcóatl, in the legend the Nahua told of him, refused human sacrifice and offered flowers, butterflies and birds. Mexico has never settled which of the two its cosmology means. The question returns today in a form the friars would have recognised: the Santa Muerte shrines where traffickers leave cash and bullets, the bandit saint Jesús Malverde in Culiacán, and the Knights Templar cartel of Michoacán, which issued its gunmen a printed code of honour. Each borrows the grammar of the sacred and turns it toward taking.
Soul-Register: Devotion Without a Daily Discipline
Mexico preserves at depth the devotional opening of the heart. A pilgrim walking for days to Tepeyac or to San Juan de los Lagos, a grandmother keeping a candle lit before the image, a family speaking aloud to the photograph of a dead son on the November altar: each opens the heart toward what lies beyond the self. In the mountains the older paths survive. Wixárika pilgrims walk some five hundred kilometres to Wirikuta, the desert of San Luis Potosí where the world was born, to gather peyote; Mazatec healers in Oaxaca still hold the night velada with sacred mushrooms that María Sabina opened to the American banker Gordon Wasson in 1955, and that Life magazine opened to the world two years later. She lived to say the mushrooms had lost their power once the foreigners came looking for them. Harmonism’s own map of the entheogenic field counts the Wixárika pilgrimage among the oldest continuous ceremonial uses anywhere, and the Mazatec velada as the first container in which the West met psilocybin. In March 2026 a federal judge in San Luis Potosí annulled mining concessions inside the protected area of Wirikuta, after fifteen years of Wixárika litigation, and left others standing.
What Mexico lacks is the daily interior discipline that stabilises what the pilgrimage opens. The parish offers the Mass and the rosary, the village the fiesta, the mountain the ceremony; almost no one is taught to sit, breathe and hold attention in the heart day after day. What the soul needs has moved into the altar, the mural, the ranchera and the corrido. Octavio Paz, in The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), described the Mexican as a man behind a mask, alone and guarded, who breaks open only at the fiesta, in a burst of noise that ends in silence; the fiesta is where the self escapes, and nothing carries the escape into ordinary days.
Mexican Catholicism has carried that discipline at least once, in a lay life. Concepción Cabrera de Armida, born in San Luis Potosí in 1862, married in 1884, raised nine children, was widowed at thirty-nine, and left more than sixty thousand handwritten pages of prayer and interior union. The Church beatified her at the Basilica of Guadalupe on 4 May 2019. A mother of nine who prayed without ceasing is a native witness to what the devotion can become. Harmonism offers the methods that make such a life teachable: the Indian and Chinese disciplines of breath and attention, and, closest to Mexico’s own Christianity, the repeated prayer of the Orthodox monks. Religion and Harmonism and Shamanism and Harmonism place Mexico’s two streams within the wider map; The Guru and the Guide sets the aim for both, a practitioner who in time no longer needs the shrine.
1. Ecology
Tenochtitlan was built on water, and its builders knew how to live with it. In the lake basin they raised chinampas, long fields of mud and reed anchored by willows in the shallows, so fertile that some yielded several harvests a year; the canals between them carried canoes into the heart of the city, and Xochimilco still keeps a remnant of them under UNESCO protection. The poet-king Nezahualcóyotl of Texcoco and the Mexica ruler Moctezuma Ilhuicamina built a dike across the lake to hold back floods and keep the city’s water fresh. A city that historians put at two hundred thousand people or more fed itself from the lake it stood in.
Every government since has treated the lake as an enemy. Cortés broke the dike to bring his brigantines through. The Spanish began draining the basin in 1607; the Porfirian regime finished the Gran Canal in 1900; the twentieth century pumped the aquifer from below. Mexico City now runs short of water and floods in the same year. In June 2024 the reservoirs of the Cutzamala system, which pumps water more than a kilometre uphill to supply about a quarter of the valley, stood near a quarter full, the worst crisis its operators had seen; two wet years refilled them to 87 per cent by September 2026, which was weather, not policy. Under the airport and the Angel of Independence the ground drops about two centimetres a month. Elsewhere the pattern repeats. The army built the Tren Maya through the Yucatán’s limestone, and in October 2025 the environment ministry acknowledged that piles driven for its fifth section had damaged eight caves and cenotes in an aquifer that is the peninsula’s only fresh water; the train carried 1.3 million passengers in 2025 and covered about a ninth of its operating costs. In Michoacán, orchards for the American avocado market, which takes 87 per cent of its avocados from that one state, account for about a fifth of the state’s forest loss between 2001 and 2017, and the pine forest that loggers and their protectors had cleared at Cherán, more than ten thousand hectares by 2011, was what the town rose to defend.
Mesoamerica’s own knowledge holds the better contract. The milpa feeds the soil it draws on, the chinampa makes fields from the lake instead of draining it, and the Purépecha of Cherán replanted their hills once they had driven the loggers out. Recovery means water managed as a basin rather than a pipeline: the aquifer recharged, the lake partly restored where its bed still lies open, rainwater captured at the scale of the household and the barrio, and large projects in the Yucatán submitted to the communities who live above the cenotes. The error of reading a living world as a stock of resources has its general account in Materialism and Harmonism; in Mexico it produced a capital that drained the lake it was founded in and now pumps the ground out from under itself.
2. Health
Mesoamerica carried a medicine as old as its maize. Sixteenth-century texts record hundreds of medicinal plants in Nahua use, and the Libellus de medicinalibus Indorum herbis of 1552, written by the Nahua physician Martín de la Cruz and translated into Latin by Juan Badiano, is the oldest surviving herbal of the Americas. The curandera and the huesero, the herbalist and the bone-setter, still work in every region; the temazcal, a domed sweat lodge of stone and clay, is still used for childbirth recovery and for cleansing; and the traditional diet of maize treated with lime, beans, squash, chile and greens was among the most complete ever devised by farmers.
That diet has been displaced faster than almost anywhere. Mexicans drink about 150 litres of soft drinks a person a year, half again as much as Americans, and researchers in Chiapas put consumption in that state at 821 litres, where the bottled drink has entered ritual itself, offered in churches and at curing ceremonies. The national health survey of 2022 found 18.3 per cent of adults diabetic, a third of them undiagnosed, and more than 37 per cent obese. Ultra-processed food rose from under a quarter of Mexican calories in 2006 to 28 per cent by 2023, still well below the American and British share, which means the old kitchen is still there to defend. Mexico has tried: black warning octagons on packaged food from 2020, among the strictest labels in the world, a ban on junk food in schools from 29 March 2025, and a sharp rise in the tax on sugared drinks for 2026. The public system has swung through reorganisations, from the Seguro Popular to the short-lived Insabi to IMSS-Bienestar, and in September 2026 patients were still going without insulin, metformin and cancer drugs while the president promised full pharmacies by January 2027.
Recovery begins in the kitchen and the field. Nixtamal, the lime-cooking of maize that releases its niacin and that made the milpa diet sufficient, is a Mesoamerican discovery; Europeans who took maize without it suffered pellagra for two centuries. A health system aligned with what Mexico already knows would treat the traditional diet as primary prevention, protect native maize as a health measure as much as an agricultural one, license and refer to trained curanderas and midwives, and treat diabetes first through food, movement and the temazcal before the prescription. The Wheel of Health holds the same order for one body; Big Pharma describes the system that prefers the prescription.
3. Kinship
Mexican kinship reaches past blood. Compadrazgo, co-parenthood, binds the parents of a child to the godparents chosen at baptism, first communion and marriage, so that a family accumulates compadres across a village and up the social ladder, each tie carrying obligations of help, loyalty and hospitality. Grandmothers raise grandchildren while parents work; the Sunday meal gathers three generations; and the household altar keeps the dead inside the family circle. Mexicans say la familia es primero, family comes first, and the welfare state has always assumed it.
Migration has stretched that web across a border. About 11.1 million Mexican-born people lived in the United States in 2024, and the US$61.8 billion they sent home in 2025 paid for houses, school fees and fiestas in villages where whole age cohorts of men are absent. Children grow up with fathers on a telephone. Fertility has fallen to 1.6 children per woman, below replacement, in a country whose grandparents had six. Inside the house the strain has a darker form. Paz built a chapter of The Labyrinth of Solitude around the verb chingar, to violate, and the figure of La Malinche, the Nahua woman who interpreted for Cortés and bore his son, as the violated mother of the mestizo nation; the macho, in Paz’s reading, is the man who refuses to be opened and opens others. More than two thousand women were murdered in Mexico in 2025, 721 of the killings classed as femicides, and 12,474 women were reported disappeared, about thirty-four a day. Mexico’s own devotion holds the counter-image: the most honoured figure in the country is a mother, and the founding scene at Tepeyac is a mother protecting a poor man.
The correction is already inside Mexican kinship. Sebastian Purcell, reconstructing Nahua ethics in The Outward Path (2025), finds it running in the opposite direction to modern self-help: a person is rooted first in kin, place and community, and only then turns inward, so that the household is the first school of a life lived in truth. Compadrazgo is chosen kinship, a way of making family out of neighbours, and the usos y costumbres assembly is a family of households governing itself. Recovery keeps the web and names what preys on it: men held to the obligations compadrazgo already assigns them, violence against women treated as an offence against the lineage and not a private matter, migrant families given a way home that does not require choosing between income and children, and the household altar, which almost every Mexican family still builds, used for what it already does on the night of 1 November, making peace among the living in front of the dead. Where The Hollowing of the West finds families already dissolved, Mexico’s are stretched thin and still standing.
4. Stewardship
Mexico’s material economy has rested on two things it does not fully own. The first is what lies underground. Silver from Zacatecas and Guanajuato financed the Spanish empire; oil, expropriated from British and American companies by Lázaro Cárdenas on 18 March 1938, became the property of the nation and the basis of Pemex; copper, gold and silver are now mined under concessions held largely by private groups, the largest of them Germán Larrea’s Grupo México. On 6 August 2014 a holding pond at Grupo México’s Buenavista del Cobre mine at Cananea released about forty thousand cubic metres of acidified copper sulphate into the Bacanuchi and Sonora rivers, poisoning the water of some twenty thousand people along 250 kilometres of river; the trust fund set up for remediation was wound up in 2017 with much of its money unspent, and the promised clinic and water-treatment plants were never built. The second is the assembly line. Since the 1960s maquiladoras have assembled goods for the American market from imported parts, and more than four-fifths of Mexico’s record US$665 billion in exports in 2025 went to the United States. Foreign direct investment also reached a record that year, US$40.9 billion, and the headline hid its content: two-thirds was profit that foreign firms already in Mexico reinvested, and only 18 per cent was new investment. Nearshoring has so far meant more assembly, not more Mexican industry.
Land, the third kind of wealth, was the revolution’s prize. Article 27 of the 1917 constitution made the soil the nation’s and gave villages ejidos, communal lands that could not be sold. In 1992, two years before the free-trade agreement, Carlos Salinas amended Article 27 to allow ejido land to be parcelled and sold; on 1 January 1994, the day the agreement took effect, the Zapatista army rose in Chiapas and called it a death sentence for the indigenous peasant. Thirty years later the state reversed course on maize. On 17 March 2025 an amendment to Articles 4 and 27 declared maize an element of national identity, banned the planting of genetically modified varieties and bound the state to promote native seed and the milpa, three months after a free-trade panel ruled against Mexico’s earlier attempt to keep GM corn out of tortillas. More than nine-tenths of the yellow maize Mexico eats and feeds to its animals still comes from the United States. Each move fought over who owns the land; none has yet settled what the land is for.
Mesoamerica measured wealth differently. In the village, prestige went to the man who spent his savings sponsoring the saint’s feast, and a household that hoarded was suspected; the tequio treated labour on common works as a debt every household owed. Stewardship recovers when it is judged by what stays rooted: mining concessions answerable to the watersheds and communities above them, ejido and communal land protected from forced sale, the free-trade review used to secure the smallholder’s market instead of trading it away, and industrial wealth made in Mexico rather than merely assembled there. Without maize there is no country; without its land there is no village to grow it.
5. Governance
Mexico has known two long forms of one-party rule. The Institutional Revolutionary Party and its predecessors held the presidency from 1929 until 2000: seventy-one years in which each president chose his successor by the dedazo, the pointed finger, and stepped down after a single six-year term. Mario Vargas Llosa called it, on Mexican television in 1990, “the perfect dictatorship”, because it never needed to look like one. Its method was absorption: unions, peasant leagues, intellectuals and rival factions all brought inside the party and paid. The opposition won in 2000 and governed for twelve years, the PRI returned for six, and in 2018 Andrés Manuel López Obrador won an absolute majority on a promise to end the corruption of all three.
His movement, Morena, has rebuilt the hegemony by other means. After the 2024 election its coalition held 364 of the 500 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. In September 2024 it passed a constitutional reform replacing appointed judges with elected ones; at the first judicial election, on 1 June 2025, about 13 per cent of voters took part, and the new Supreme Court, sworn in that September, was filled with candidates close to the governing party. In December 2024 seven autonomous regulators were abolished, among them the transparency institute, the competition authority and the telecommunications regulator, and their work handed to ministries. The National Guard, created in 2019 as a civilian force, was placed under the Defence Secretariat. Each measure was defended as the people’s will against captured elites, and the elites had been captured; Mexico’s courts and regulators had served the powerful for decades. Yet a movement that answers capture by absorbing the institutions that might check it has repeated the PRI’s method under a new flag. The hegemony is not total. In March 2026 the party’s own allies sank President Claudia Sheinbaum’s electoral reform in the Chamber, 259 votes to 234, short of the two-thirds it needed.
Beneath the contest of parties the state’s monopoly of force has slipped. In parts of Michoacán, Guerrero, Tamaulipas, Sinaloa and Zacatecas the cartels tax limes, avocados and tortillas, choose mayors and settle disputes. Two cases from American courts show how high the entanglement reaches. Genaro García Luna, Felipe Calderón’s security minister from 2006 to 2012, was convicted in Brooklyn in February 2023 of taking bribes from the Sinaloa cartel he was charged with fighting, and sentenced in October 2024 to more than thirty-eight years. On 29 April 2026 federal prosecutors in New York indicted the sitting governor of Sinaloa, Rubén Rocha Moya of Morena, with nine other officials including a senator, alleging that the cartel kidnapped opponents and stole ballots to win him the governorship in 2021. Both cases were brought abroad.
Mexico’s own traditions hold the measure. In the village assembly the officeholder serves without pay and answers to those who chose him; the Zapatistas of Chiapas made the principle a slogan, mandar obedeciendo, to lead by obeying, though in November 2023 they dissolved their own autonomous municipalities as armed groups advanced across the state; Cherán expelled both the parties and the cartel and has governed itself for fifteen years without either. Measured against them, a presidency that dissolves the bodies that could refuse it is the opposite of the assembly, however many votes it wins. The 2024 reform of Article 2 made indigenous peoples subjects of public law with rights to self-determination, and a Mixtec lawyer, Hugo Aguilar Ortiz, now presides over the Supreme Court; whether that is recovery or capture in indigenous dress depends on whether the principle climbs. Recovery means power returned downward: municipal and communal self-government recognised in law and in budgets, as Cherán won in 2012; judges who cannot be selected by the party that rules; and an end to the six-yearly refounding of the state by one office.
6. Finance
Mexico runs its own currency and has guarded it carefully since the crisis that taught it caution. In December 1994, weeks after Ernesto Zedillo took office, the peso lost about half its value within weeks, and Washington and the IMF assembled a rescue of some US$50 billion. Banco de México had been made autonomous that April, and the lesson held: the peso floats, the central bank has kept inflation in single digits for most of the century, the peso traded near 18 to the dollar in October 2026, and Mexico keeps a precautionary credit line with the IMF, cut to about US$24 billion in November 2025. Monetary sovereignty is real and better kept than in most of Latin America.
It sits on narrow foundations. In the second quarter of 2026, 55.1 per cent of Mexican workers, 33 million people, worked informally, outside contracts, pensions and taxes. Most banking is foreign-owned; the largest bank, BBVA México, is a Spanish subsidiary that earns more than twice its nearest rival. The bank rescue of 1995, the Fobaproa, converted the private losses of the crisis into public debt that taxpayers are still paying. Pemex owed US$79 billion in financial debt in March 2026, its lowest since 2014, after years in which the treasury paid its bills. Remittances fell in 2025 for the first time in eleven years, to US$61.8 billion, as fear of deportation spread in the United States and Washington imposed a 1 per cent tax on cash transfers. A country whose foreign currency comes from oil, from factories assembling for one buyer and from the wages its emigrants send home has kept its currency while giving away most of what stands behind it.
Village Mexico has its own finance. The tanda, a rotating savings circle in which members pay in weekly and each in turn takes the pot, runs in every market and office without banks or interest; the cargo sponsor spends his savings on the community and is repaid in standing. Recovery means building on what already works: cooperative and community savings recognised and protected rather than pushed into banks, cash kept as a lawful right while the state presses digital payment, a fund for oil and mineral revenue governed by published rule, and the Fobaproa debt audited in public. The monetary system Mexico floats in is mapped in The Financial Architecture; the Mexican peculiarity is a sound currency resting on a hollow economy.
7. Defense
Mexico lost half its territory to the United States in 1848 and drove out a French-installed emperor in 1867, and its army has not fought a foreign enemy at home since; it has spent most of a century turned inward. It fired on the student movement at Tlatelolco on 2 October 1968, killing dozens or hundreds, a number still disputed; it fought guerrillas in Guerrero in the 1970s; and since December 2006, when Calderón sent troops into Michoacán, it has fought the cartels. Homicides rose for most of the following fifteen years. They are now falling: the statistics institute counted 27,989 in 2025, 16 per cent fewer than the year before, a rate of 21 per 100,000. The war has narrowed rather than ended. In Sinaloa the factions of the cartel have fought each other since September 2024, six weeks after Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada was flown to Texas by a son of his old partner; that war killed 3,724 people in two years, and Zambada was sentenced in July 2026 to life. The army killed the leader of the Jalisco cartel, Nemesio Oseguera, “El Mencho”, on 22 February 2026, and the government has sent 92 imprisoned traffickers north in three transfers since February 2025. Most of the guns come from the north too. Mexico has one legal gun shop, run by the army in Mexico City; the cartels’ rifles are bought in Texas and Arizona, and when Mexico sued American gunmakers, the United States Supreme Court threw out the suit unanimously on 5 June 2025.
The response has been to give the armed forces more of the state. The army built and runs the Tren Maya and the Felipe Ángeles airport, has run customs and ports, and in 2023 was given an airline; since 2024 it commands the National Guard. The forty-three students of Ayotzinapa were taken in Iguala in September 2014 by municipal police while an army battalion monitored events in real time; twelve years on, the remains of three have been identified, about 150 people have been detained, the former governor of Guerrero was arrested in August 2026, the national human-rights commission has cleared the army, the international experts who exposed the official story have not been allowed back, and the investigator accused of fabricating that story lives in Israel. The pressure from the north has turned from advice into threat. In February 2025 Washington designated six Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organisations, and in January 2026 the American president said his forces would “start now hitting land”; Sheinbaum answered that organised crime is not solved by foreign intervention.
Mexican tradition kept the armed man under a higher authority. Quetzalcóatl’s legend set the priest above the warrior, and the community police of Guerrero’s Montaña, founded in 1995 and answerable to village assemblies, show force held by those it protects; so did the town guards of Cherán. Recovery means an army returned to defence and out of construction, airlines and customs; police rebuilt at the municipal and state level and accountable to elected authorities and, where they exist, assemblies; a sustained campaign against the arms traffic from the north, pressed in every forum; and justice for Ayotzinapa as the test of whether the state can try itself. When force is legitimate and how far it may go is set out in Jurisdiction of Force.
8. Education
Mexico has founded schools with unusual ambition. The Mexica sent every child to one, the calmécac or the telpochcalli, to be given a face and a heart. Vasco de Quiroga, a judge who became the first bishop of Michoacán, founded hospital-towns in the 1530s on the model of Thomas More’s Utopia, where Purépecha families held property in common, worked six hours a day and learned a trade; the region still credits him with its village crafts, the guitars of Paracho and the beaten copper of Santa Clara. After the revolution José Vasconcelos, as the first head of the Secretariat of Public Education from 1921, sent teachers into villages as missionaries, printed the classics by the hundred thousand, and commissioned the murals that made public walls a school. The rural normal schools trained village teachers from peasant families. One of them, at Ayotzinapa in Guerrero, sent out the forty-three students who disappeared on the night of 26 September 2014.
The school Mexico runs now is large, centralised and captured by its own politics. The official teachers’ union traded votes for posts for decades, and posts were bought and inherited; its dissident rival, the CNTE, strongest in Oaxaca, Chiapas and Guerrero, has fought every reform with months-long encampments in the capital’s main square, most recently over pensions in 2025 and 2026. A reform in 2013 tried to tie posts to evaluation; the next government repealed it in 2019 and abolished its evaluation agency in 2024. In the PISA tests of 2022 Mexican fifteen-year-olds scored 395 in mathematics, their worst since 2006. Vasconcelos himself, for all his ambition, wrote in La raza cósmica (1925) that the mestizo would absorb the indigenous peoples into a higher synthesis, and the school he built taught generations of indigenous children that their language was a stage to leave behind. Ivan Illich watched this machine from Cuernavaca, where he ran the documentation centre CIDOC from the 1960s until he closed it in 1976, and wrote Deschooling Society (1971) there: the school, he argued, teaches people to confuse being taught with learning and a diploma with competence.
Mexico’s own traditions hold the better principle. The Nahua school formed a face and a heart, not a transcript; Quiroga’s towns taught a craft and a common life together; Illich’s critique was written in Mexico about Mexico. Recovery means children taught to read first in Nahuatl, Mixtec or Tsotsil where those are spoken at home, apprenticeship in craft and agriculture recognised beside the diploma, elders and curanderas invited into schools as holders of knowledge, and the rural normal schools protected as the one institution that ever trained the village’s own teachers. Harmonic Pedagogy calls this cultivation, not formation.
9. Science & Technology
Mesoamerica built one of the world’s independent sciences. Maya astronomers tracked Venus in the tables of the Dresden Codex to within about two hours over five centuries, wrote a zero more than two thousand years ago, and kept a calendar of interlocking cycles that still governs ritual in the highlands of Guatemala; Nahua engineers managed a lake. Modern Mexico has real capacity on that inheritance. The National Autonomous University, UNAM, is the largest university in Latin America, and Mario Molina, trained there, shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1995 for showing how chlorofluorocarbons destroy the ozone layer.
Little of that capacity serves Mexican purposes. Mexico spent about 0.27 per cent of its output on research and development in 2023, a fraction of the OECD average, and in January 2025 its science council was folded into a new ministry, Secihti. Factories in Querétaro and Nuevo León build for foreign firms, and the data centres rising around Querétaro draw on aquifers in a state already short of water. The government’s showcase, a small electric car called Olinia designed by public engineering institutes, was unveiled in June 2026 for production in 2027. Lithium was nationalised in 2022 and has produced lawsuits but no lithium. The most advanced technology the Mexican state has bought is a weapon pointed at its own people. In 2011 the Defence Secretariat became the first government customer of Pegasus, the Israeli spyware that turns a phone into a microphone; it has since been used against journalists, human-rights lawyers and the international experts investigating Ayotzinapa, and the army’s own intelligence centre was still using it against journalists and activists between 2019 and 2021.
Technology that serves a people’s Dharma, the question The Telos of Technology asks of every tool, would in Mexico begin from what the country knows and needs: water, maize and the plants of its own pharmacopoeia. Recovery means public research directed at the aquifer, the milpa and the herbal tradition, with indigenous communities as partners and owners of their knowledge, as the 2024 reform of Article 2 now promises for traditional medicine; data infrastructure sited where water allows; and surveillance tools outlawed for use against citizens, the Pegasus contracts opened to public audit and those who ordered the spying prosecuted.
10. Communication
Mexico’s public sphere grew up under one loudspeaker and one ally. For half a century Televisa, the Azcárraga family’s network, served the ruling party so faithfully that its owner Emilio Azcárraga Milmo called himself a soldier of the PRI, and the party returned the favour with concessions; TV Azteca, sold by the state in 1993 to Ricardo Salinas Pliego, turned the monopoly into a duopoly. Newspapers lived on government advertising. Since 2018 the president has spoken to the nation for two hours or more every weekday morning in the mañanera, a press conference that sets the day’s agenda; López Obrador used it to name and discredit journalists in a weekly segment on “who’s who in the lies”, and Sheinbaum’s version carries a segment called the lie detector.
Mexico is also one of the most dangerous countries in the world to report from. Article 19 counted seven journalists killed in 2025 and an attack on the press every nineteen hours; Reporters Without Borders ranked Mexico 122nd of 180 countries in 2026. Most of the dead are local reporters covering crime and municipal corruption, and almost none of the killings are solved. On paper the protection is strong. Articles 6 and 7 of the Constitution guarantee free expression and the free circulation of information, and defamation has not been a federal crime since 2007. A new telecommunications law passed the Senate on 29 June 2025 after its most contested clause, which would have let the state block digital platforms, was dropped; it abolished the independent regulator and requires carriers to give authorities the real-time location of phones. A 2025 reform created a biometric national identity code, with fingerprints and photograph on a single platform open to prosecutors and the national intelligence centre; enrolment is voluntary, acceptance obligatory. Mexico imposed no vaccine mandates during the pandemic, and no case has come to light of banks or professional bodies punishing lawful political speech. In practice the danger runs through three channels: organised crime kills or silences the reporter, the state has spied on him, and the presidency makes a daily ritual of exposing him. Doctrine protects the speaker; the gun, the phone and the morning podium punish him.
Mexico has an older institution for public speech. In the village assembly every household head has the floor and nothing is decided until the talking is done, and the Zapatistas turned communiqués written by a masked spokesman to the whole world into a literary genre. Recovery means the killers of journalists tried as a priority of state, the federal mechanism for protecting reporters funded and staffed, the spyware banned, state advertising distributed by published rule, community radio in indigenous languages expanded, and the morning podium returned to its proper scale: a government that answers questions, not one that tries its critics before an audience. The wider information order is the subject of The Epistemological Crisis. Mexico adds one finding of its own: a press can be free in law and silenced in fact, by a gun on one side and a podium on the other.
11. Culture
Mexico explains itself in public, on walls, in song and at the table. After 1921 Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros painted the revolution’s account of the nation onto the walls of ministries, schools and palaces, so that a peasant who could not read could see his history in the National Palace. Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955) sent a son to a village called Comala to find his father and found it full of the murmuring dead, and Latin American fiction has been answering that novel since. The son jarocho of Veracruz, the mariachi of Jalisco and the ranchera carried the countryside into the cities, and in 2010 UNESCO inscribed traditional Mexican cuisine, the cooking of Michoacán first among its examples, on its list of intangible heritage. Few countries are so recognisable from so few bars of music or so few dishes.
The same culture is now fed back to Mexico by the trades that profit from it. Frida Kahlo’s face sells tote bags. The Day of the Dead has a parade invented for a film. And the corrido, the ballad form that carried the deeds of revolutionary generals in 1910, now carries the deeds of traffickers: the narcocorrido and its recent offshoot, the corrido tumbado, have made gunmen into heroes for a generation of listeners on both sides of the border. In 2025 ten states, from Baja California to the State of Mexico, restricted their public performance; when the singer Luis R. Conriquez refused to play them at the Texcoco fair that April, his audience wrecked the stage, and Washington revoked the visas of a band that had projected the image of the Jalisco cartel’s leader during a concert in Guadalajara. A ballad that once sang of Villa now sings of whoever pays for it.
Few countries have more to remember with. Recovery means the murals’ purpose renewed, art that tells the people its true history in public, not a museum economy that sells it; indigenous music, dance and language supported where they are practised, not staged for tourists; and the corrido returned to its older office of praising those who served the community. Bans address the symptom. A culture that rewards the cartel with its songs will change its songs when it stops rewarding the cartel with its admiration, and Rulfo’s Comala, a village of the dead waiting to be heard, is a better mirror than the gunman’s ballad.
The Contemporary Diagnosis
Mexico’s condition is a civilization rooted at the bottom and uprooted at the top. Its villages, fields, altars and families still hold, and a state that has moved through three centuries of viceroys, a century of revolution and party, and a generation of free trade has spent each period pulling up what the villages planted: the lake, the communal land, the native maize, the people themselves sent north to earn the country’s foreign currency. Into the cavity left by a state that could not protect, judge or employ its people grew the cartels, which do all three by force. Mexico’s prestige image, the warm, devout, family-centred country of fiesta and cuisine, is true at the scale where it applies. Behind it stands a political class entangled with the trafficking economy at the highest levels, as two American indictments, of a former security minister in 2019 and of a sitting governor in 2026, have shown in foreign courts.
The entanglement has a precise shape. Oswaldo Zavala argued in Los cárteles no existen (2018) that the cartel as Mexicans imagine it, a rival state at war with the government, is largely a story told by the security services of both countries, and that much of the violence follows the militarisation that story justifies. He overstates it; the graves are real, and the men who dug them belong to organisations with names. But the record supports the narrower version. The Mexican state disciplines some trafficking networks while it is entangled with others: it killed El Mencho and sent ninety-two prisoners north while a governor of its ruling party stands accused of winning office with the Sinaloa cartel’s help. The pattern is neither capture nor war but selection, by a state that chooses its partners.
Mexico has named this condition itself. Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, in México profundo (1987), argued that the country contains two civilizations: a deep Mexico of Mesoamerican origin, living in villages and in the habits of the urban poor, and an imaginary Mexico of the elites, organised around a Western project that has always treated the deep one as an obstacle to be overcome. His critics have answered, fairly. Claudio Lomnitz and Roger Bartra showed that “deep Mexico” was itself partly an invention of nationalist intellectuals, and the line between the two Mexicos runs through every Mexican rather than between two peoples; mestizaje is a real synthesis, older than the conquest in a Mesoamerica of many peoples, and Guadalupe is its proof. Both hold. The synthesis is real in devotion and kitchen and family, and the split is real in power, where every regime has governed the deep Mexico as a problem. Javier Sicilia, a Catholic poet whose son was murdered in Cuernavaca in 2011, put the cost in a sentence when he led the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity across the country that year: estamos hasta la madre, we have had it up to here, a phrase that in Mexican Spanish invokes the mother. Fifteen years later, in April 2026, he said the state not only fails to protect but deepens the violence, and that every party, PRI, PAN and Morena alike, had joined the logic of impunity.
The specifically Mexican inflection lies here. Modernity elsewhere emptied the world of the sacred, the condition The Spiritual Crisis and Materialism and Harmonism describe. Mexico’s elites tried that and failed; the country remains thick with saints, the dead and the Virgin. What happened instead is that the sacred grammar was kept and turned. The Santa Muerte receives the trafficker’s offering, the corrido canonises the gunman, the cartel issues a code of honour, and the bodies disappear into the ground of a country that feeds its dead. It is the old question from Tlacaelel’s century returning: whether the world in motion licenses those who take or calls for those who root.
The population carries part of the disease. A people that has lived for a century with a state that did not serve it has learned to expect nothing of public power and to live around it: by family, by compadre, by the informal market, by the mordida, the bribe paid to make things move. That adaptation kept Mexico alive, and it also left the field to whoever is willing to take public power for private use. Each new president is greeted as the end of the old corruption, and each six-year term ends with the same families, by new names, in the same rooms.
Mexico within the Globalist Architecture
Mexico’s place in the transnational order that The Captured Architecture, The Globalist Elite and The Financial Architecture describe is that of the United States’ closest dependency that is not formally a territory, though the dependency runs both ways: in 2025 Mexico became the largest market for American exports, and takes about a third of all American corn. More than four-fifths of its own exports go north, its industrial base was built after 1994 to assemble for American firms, and its banks are subsidiaries of Spanish and American groups. The asset managers have arrived for the infrastructure. Larry Fink of BlackRock met Sheinbaum in April 2026; BlackRock’s infrastructure arm kept 30 per cent of the power producer Saavi Energía when Grupo México bought the rest, and it is bidding, alongside Apollo, KKR and Blackstone, for the 5.6 trillion pesos of ports, railways and energy projects the government’s Plan México lists to 2030. Mexico’s two richest men, Carlos Slim and Germán Larrea, were worth US$125 billion and US$67 billion that year. The governor of its central bank from 2010 to 2017, Agustín Carstens, went on to run the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, the central bank of central banks.
The trafficking economy belongs to the same architecture and not to a separate world. American consumers supply the demand and American gun shops the rifles; American and European banks have handled the money, HSBC paying US$1.9 billion in 2012 to settle charges that it had laundered Sinaloa cartel proceeds and Wachovia settling in 2010 over hundreds of billions of dollars in transfers from Mexican exchange houses; and the prohibition regime that the United States built and exported is what turns a plant into a fortune. Since February 2025 Washington has treated the cartels as terrorists, which turns any Mexican bank, firm or official that touches their money into a target of American law. At the review of the free-trade agreement on 1 July 2026 the United States declined to renew it in its current form, putting it under annual review; the tariffs imposed in 2025 on the pretext of fentanyl were struck down by the American Supreme Court in February 2026, while 25 per cent duties on steel, aluminium and cars remained. Washington sets the terms on drugs, guns, migrants, energy and trade at once, and Mexico negotiates each separately.
Across the pillars the pattern is single. Buyers in the north put the price on Mexico’s land, water, labour and young men, and a small Mexican elite whose fortunes ride on that price manages them at home. Maize prices are set in Chicago (Ecology, Health). The maquila’s wage is set by what the American buyer will pay (Stewardship). The peso’s stability is a function of remittances and exports to one market (Finance). The rifles come from Texas (Defense). The spyware came from Israel and was bought by the army (Science & Technology, Communication). And the cartels, which profit from every one of these flows, have become the hidden shareholder of the arrangement. Criminal Networks gives the systematic account of the state–criminal fusion; The Captured Architecture gives the account of the order that made it this rich.
The Recovery Path
Mexico already holds the ground of its own recovery: a philosophy of rootedness on slippery ground, a devotion that integrated the conquered and the conquerors under one mother, a field system that feeds the soil, and a village assembly that treats office as service. Taken seriously, as a Mexican statement of Harmonic Realism and of Dharma instead of a heritage display, those four supply the standard by which any Mexican government can be judged. Six moves follow from them, five public and one interior.
Mexico has something to give in return. It gives Harmonism one of the clearest civilizational statements anywhere of a world in motion held by an order within it: teotl, the weaver and the weaving and the woven, is as exact a native name for Logos as any cartography holds outside Greece and India. Neltiliztli gives Harmonism a word for truth that is already ethical, truth as rootedness. In ixtli in yóllotl gives it a picture of personhood as something cultivated, face and heart. Guadalupe gives it the most successful synthesis of two civilizations’ sacred grammars on record, achieved not by a theologian but by a devotion. And Mexico’s history gives a warning: the words of the sacred can stay alive in the villages for five hundred years while rulers, Mexica, viceregal, revolutionary or criminal, use the same words to take.
Power returned to the assembly. Mandar obedeciendo, to lead by obeying, is the Zapatista formulation of a principle that 417 Oaxacan municipalities already practise when they choose their authorities by custom, and the Zapatistas’ own retreat in 2023 shows what happens when self-government is left without protection against armed men. Applied to the state, it asks for municipal and communal self-government recognised in law and paid for in the budget, as Cherán won from Michoacán’s legislature in 2012; for judges who cannot be selected by the party that rules; for the autonomous bodies that guarded information and competition restored under new and better rules; and for an end to the six-yearly refounding of the nation by one office. The warrant is not a foreign theory of democracy. It is the village.
Land, water and maize held by those who work them. The constitutional protection of native maize is the right first step. It needs the rest of the field behind it: ejido and communal land shielded from forced sale; smallholders guaranteed a market and a price for native maize; the milpa and the chinampa taught and financed as agricultural science; the aquifer of the Valley of Mexico managed as a basin, with the lake partly restored where its bed lies open; and mining concessions made answerable to the watersheds below them and to the peoples whose sacred ground lies above them, so that the Sonora River is not repeated and Wirikuta does not need another fifteen years in court. Without maize there is no country, and without water there is no maize.
Force under law and the bodies found. The disappeared are the measure of whether the Mexican state exists. Recovery means a national forensic search funded at the scale of the hundred and thirty thousand, the madres buscadoras protected and given the state’s resources instead of its indifference; the army returned to barracks and out of airports, railways and airlines; police rebuilt at the municipal and state level and accountable to elected authorities and, where they exist, community assemblies; the arms traffic from the north pressed in every forum; and Ayotzinapa tried to the top of the chain, whoever stands there.
Speech protected from the gun, the phone and the podium. The killers of journalists tried as a priority of state; the spyware outlawed and its past use audited in public; government advertising distributed by published rule; community and indigenous-language radio expanded; and the presidential morning conference returned to the scale of a government answering questions.
Wealth that stays rooted. Value made in Mexico rather than assembled for export; a fund for oil and mineral revenue governed by published rule; the tanda and the cooperative recognised as finance; cash kept as a right; and the remittance economy treated as a debt the country owes its emigrants, repaid by making it possible for them to come home.
A daily practice for the devotion. Guadalupe opens the heart once a year at Tepeyac, and on every day a candle burns before her image; what is missing is the discipline that keeps the heart open between pilgrimages. Yogis, Daoists and the monks of Mount Athos each built such a method, of breath, of stilled attention, of a short prayer repeated in the heart, and the Wheel of Presence arranges them into one person’s day. For Catholic Mexico the nearest is the Jesus Prayer of the Orthodox monks, a cousin of the rosary its grandmothers already say, which turns devotion into a daily practice. Offered to the Wixárika, Mazatec and other ceremonial lineages, these disciplines complete the ceremony rather than replacing it, so that what the peyote or the mushroom shows for a night is held by day. Concepción Cabrera, a mother of nine in Porfirian Mexico who prayed without ceasing, already showed that Mexican Catholicism can carry such a life. The aim in both cases, as The Guru and the Guide has it, is a person who eventually needs neither shrine nor plant.
Mexico is doing almost none of this. Each move depends on Mexicans deciding to apply the village’s rule to the palace and the devotion’s rule to the self, and on a population that has learned to live around the state choosing instead to remake it. The village, the milpa and the Virgin are all still there. What Mexicans build from them is theirs to decide.
Closing
The Mexica told of a sun that would end in earthquakes and concluded that it had to be fed, and they built an empire on that conclusion. Their own sages had reached a different one. If the earth is slippery, they said, a mortal must be rooted, and the truest thing a person can say about a world in motion is flower and song. Mexico has lived both conclusions for five centuries. Every age of rulers chose the first: the world is unstable, so take what you can and feed the sun with someone else. Its villages kept the second: plant the milpa, feed the dead, serve the assembly, walk to the mother on the hill.
Harmonism takes the villages’ side, because their conclusion is its own. Logos is the order that holds while everything moves; Dharma is the life rooted in it; and in ixtli in yóllotl, a face and a heart that agree, is what the rooting looks like in a person. A civilization of 130 million people that still grows the plant it domesticated nine thousand years ago, still sets a place each November for its dead, and still walks by the millions to a mother who asked a poor man whether she was not there for him, has not lost its root. On 19 September the ground under Mexico City moves, as the old account says it will. What holds is what was planted.
See also: Architecture of Harmony, Harmonic Realism, Wheel of Harmony, Wheel of Presence, The Human Being, Religion and Harmonism, Shamanism and Harmonism, The Five Cartographies of the Soul, Entheogens, The Guru and the Guide, Harmonic Pedagogy, Jurisdiction of Force, The Spiritual Crisis, Materialism and Harmonism, The Hollowing of the West, Big Pharma, The Telos of Technology, The Epistemological Crisis, Criminal Networks, The Captured Architecture, The Globalist Elite, The Financial Architecture, The Multipolar Order, Spain and Harmonism