COLUMN ONE : Anguish of ‘Spanglish’ and Barbie : American culture is seen as ‘infesting’ Mexico, stoking a debate over national identity. Who wants to be as Mexican as apple pie?

Que gorgeous, those American-made blue jeans. You know, the “Jeans on Sale” advertised in English in the window of Esprit. Great for una noche de relax , a night at home with Domino’s pizza, Diet Coke and “The Addams Family.”

Even the kids know el look. Made in U.S.A. They want Ninja Turtle pinatas at their birthday parties, with M & Ms of course. In the grocery store, they pick Trix cereal over national brands, even before they can read.

For those who read them, there are American magazines such as GQ and Heavy Metal. Mirabella makes “The Case for Adultery,” while Young and Modern holds forth on that most American malaise, the “Fat Attack.”

Thin is definitely in, at least among those who can afford to eat lite. But now with almost-free trade, even the middle class and poor can buy a slice of the American Way of Life. How about a Bart Simpson key ring? Or a Raiders T-shirt-- muy sport.

“Ten years from now,” said Mexican author Guadalupe Loaeza, “we’re all going to run into the street screaming, ‘Who am I?’ We used to be formal people like the Japanese. Now it’s, ‘Hello, Domino’s Pizza, this is Claudia. . . .’ And before you know it you say, ‘Hi Claudia, this is Guadalupe.’ It’s all easygoing. But bad for our identity.”

As government officials move into the home stretch of negotiations for a North American free-trade agreement, the debate has heated up in Mexico over the impact of open borders on Mexican culture and national identity.

Look at how English is eating into our Spanish, some critics complain. Aren’t American goods promoting American consumerism and credit cards? What about those other gringo quirks such as individualism. And loose sexual attitudes. Just look at what the Chicanos do to our blessed Virgin of Guadalupe, dressing her in miniskirts and tattooing her likeness on their chests. What will happen to the traditional Mexican family?

Other observers suggest that the economic opening might bring more positive changes: some American efficiency into Mexican business, and U.S.-style democracy to Mexican politics. Won’t the exposure make Mexico less macho, they say, and more cosmopolitan?

These cultural questions may not be unique to Mexico in the new world economy, where Russians eat Big Macs and Poles wear Levi’s. But they are particularly sensitive to a country that lost half its national territory to the United States and shares a 2,000-mile border.

For decades, post-revolutionary governments defined Mexican nationalism in terms of resistance to the United States. Nationalism was synonymous with a closed, state-run economy and suspicion of the colossus to the north. Good Mexicans were a good bit anti-American.

But President Carlos Salinas de Gortari has turned even this truism on its head. The Harvard-educated president equates nationalism with modernization and a strong economy in sync with the United States. It is free trade and faxes, computers and privatized companies.

“Nationalism is that which strengthens the nation. It is not the longing for forms and traits of other times,” Salinas said in his third State of the Nation speech. “Our culture is not, cannot and should not be a dead catalogue of past . . . triumphs. Nor can it be impermeable to interchange with other cultures.”

Upon taking office, Salinas reduced tariffs from as much as 200% to an average of 9%. As a result, American exports to Mexico have more than doubled in three years, filling Mexican markets with everything from Spam to Sara Lee croissants.

Salinas’ opening to foreign investment and franchises has brought the Price Club and I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt to Mexico. In newspaper advertisements, McDonald’s Mexico promises to expand its 39 restaurants to nearly 300 very soon.

Imports and foreign investment are likely to balloon even further once a free-trade agreement is signed and adopted by the United States, Mexico and Canada, perhaps early next year. While few people dispute that free trade already is making its mark on Mexican culture, there is little agreement as to whether the changes represent a gain or a loss for the country.

Some cultural observers say that an open economy is only hastening a cultural transformation that began shortly after World War II, when Halloween made its way south to overtake the Day of the Dead. Immigration, a shared border and mass communications make cultural cross-pollination inevitable, they argue. The Americanization of Mexico will continue--with or without free trade.

“When I was 18, we all dressed like hippies and listened to Jimi Hendrix,” said political scientist Jose Antonio Crespo. “This is a continuum.”

Author Carlos Monsivais added that the change “has been going on for decades. It has just been accelerated by the religion of globalization. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the war against Iraq, there is only one way. Private enterprise is the saint and free trade is the Holy Grail.”

In the 19th Century, conservatives decried Europe’s liberal influences on Mexico. Now, at the end of the 20th Century, the historical left laments an Americanization of Mexican culture. Who wants to be as Mexican as apple pie?

Salinas supporters say critics are using culture and national identity as a pretext to attack his neo-liberal economic policies. After all, they say, Mexican culture is essentially imported, a hybrid of Spanish and Indian cultures.

“Cultures are enriched in their contact with each other,” said Hector Aguilar Camin, a novelist and editor of the monthly magazine Nexos. “This is going to be a different Mexico from that of the 1940s, but I find it hard to believe it’s going to be a Mexico of Americans, rednecks and WASPs. Mexicans may like American chocolate and rock and read Fitzgerald, but they are still Mexican.”

Aguilar Camin is unfazed by the penetration of English into Mexican Spanish, the tool of his trade, saying: “The idea of a pure, chaste language is conservative and stupid. English is the new lingua franca of business, technology, science. . . . It is impossible to live without the lingua franca. But you only have to go to New York to see how it is being corrupted. Sub-languages are emerging. In another century, the English of Texas and English of Boston may not be the same language--or the English of some neighborhoods in Mexico.”

But some Mexicans are infuriated by the invasion--particularly those who cannot speak English and have little hope of learning.

Taxi driver Alfonso Constantino stopped at a red light and pointed to a remodeled gas station belonging to the national oil company, Pemex. The containers over new gas pumps were printed in English.

“Look at that!” Constantino barked. “Either I learn English or I’m going to have to leave here, because the United States is buying us up.”

While English is most common among the upper classes who shop at Mexican malls and dance in discos, it is making its way steadily into the middle and lower classes. On Coruna Street in the middle-class Asturias neighborhood, stores with English names--Cotton Casual and Casual Touch--sell American clothes. The liquor store sells Johnny Walker to relax, Ultra to lose weight and Heavy Weight to gain.

In Tepito, the poor man’s market, a Sony cassette player bellows, “Where is your pride . . . “ in Spanish as 17-year-old Eduardo passes by wearing a T-shirt of his favorite group, Guns N’ Roses. Nearby, a vendor sells Ninja Weapons, Special Police Dart Guns and Jet Gun Launchers--the sort of toys that drive columnist Cristina Pacheco ballistic. The markets are “infested” with American toys that advertise bad values and put traditional Mexican artisans out of business, Pacheco says.

“War toys, Barbie--they have nothing to do with Mexican ideology or style. Barbie is offensive, the object-woman that says if you don’t have a big bust you’re not worth anything,” she said.

Marcelo Suarez Orozco, a UC San Diego anthropologist, doubts that what he calls “superficial” changes in language, fashion and consumption are producing deeper changes in Mexican values. Microwaves do not make Americans, he contends.

Suarez Orozco has conducted comparative studies of teen-age Mexican-Americans, Mexican immigrants in the United States and Mexicans in the state of Guanajuato, which sends many migrants to the United States and receives dollars in return.

The differences are profound.

“Mexicans value family over money,” Suarez Orozco said. “They want to make it in order to give back to the family. American youth are ambivalent toward their parents. In Mexico (Guanajuato), parents remain the focus of authority. These are deep cultural factors--what makes people tick.”

The northern border city of Tijuana has been a free-trade zone for decades, a mecca of American goods, tourists and advertisements. Residents of Tijuana receive San Diego radio and television. Yet Jorge Bustamante, president of the Northern Border College, argues that Mexican values remain as strong at the border as in the interior of Mexico.

Tijuanans are not confused about their national identity, he says. He calls the Spanglish they often use a “Mexicanization of English.”

“Just because they say, ‘Ahi te watcho a dos bloques de la marketa ‘ (or ‘See you two blocks from the market,’ in a mix of English and Spanish) doesn’t mean they’re ready to declare allegiance to the United States,” Bustamante said.

What is happening to Mexican culture is not Americanization, Bustamante argues, but modernization--the urbanization of Mexico and the expansion of its middle class. That means more Mexicans are adopting the same values shared by the middle classes not only in Los Angeles and Dallas but also in Buenos Aires and Paris. They want upward mobility and higher education, services and accountability from their government. They want democracy.

Typically, northerners are more independent than Mexicans in the rest of the country and more critical of the central state and Institutional Revolutionary Party that has ruled for more than 60 years. Opposition parties, particularly the conservative National Action Party, have found it easier to gain a foothold in border states. In Baja California in 1989, Ernesto Ruffo Appel became the first opposition governor to take office.

Some Mexican political observers suggest that this independent attitude will flow south with American goods and services, media and information. Free trade means a freer flow of information, as the Mexican government learned recently when Canadians leaked a draft of the free-trade agreement to the Mexican press. Traditionally, the Mexican government has kept tight controls on information and the media.

Eventually, this should have an impact on Mexico’s authoritarian political system.

“As economic integration continues and choices expand in consumer goods and information sources, over the long term, that has to exert a certain degree of pressure for political liberalization,” said Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for U.S.-Mexico Studies at UC San Diego.

Despite such potential benefits of free trade, many Mexicans are disturbed by the growing attitude, among youth in particular, that what comes from the United States is necessarily better than its Mexican counterpart--be it politics, music or candy.

“We are allowing ourselves to be conquered,” said Rafael Anaya, 21, an architecture student at the Iberoamericano University in Mexico City. “We should take the good things from the United States and Europe, but not everything.”

Smoking Marlboro cigarettes in the school cafeteria, Anaya and his classmate Antonio Garcia suggested that their generation is losing its roots.

“Many people our age don’t know much about our traditions,” Anaya said.

“I like mariachi music, but it’s rare for people to go listen to it,” Garcia added.

“People dress up like Vanilla Ice. They’d rather eat hamburgers than mole, “ Anaya said.

Anaya’s brightly colored sweater covered a T-shirt with letters in bold print. “Is that English or Spanish?” he was asked.

“Both,” he said exposing the front with a smile. “It says, ‘Smoke Marijuana.’ I bought it in Cancun.”