The Melding Americas : Heritage : Mexico Strives to Hold On to Its Past : The government has begun a program to ensure the nation’s culture endures at a time of accelerating bicultural fusion.

Juan Enriquez was trying to make a point about Mexican-American biculturalism over breakfast last week when he suddenly leaped up from his bagel and tea. Leading a visitor to his late-model Chrysler--the driver fielding the cellular phone in the back seat--the Mexican entrepreneur set off on a whirlwind tour that he insisted would best illustrate his point.

It took half a day, and included a handful of projects totaling billions of dollars in investments that Enriquez put together during his five years as Mexico City’s urban development director.

And it showcased the cutting edge of cultural, corporate fusion in developments that are changing the face of the Mexican megalopolis.

There was the $33-million National Auditorium, where state-of-the-art sound systems, acoustics, lighting and seating have helped 36-year-old, Harvard-educated director Oscar Elizundia Tevino build the second-most profitable theater in the world in just 36 months, drawing acts ranging from Paul Simon, Jethro Tull and Ray Charles to the best Latin groups and the 1993 Miss Universe contest.

There was the high-tech Children’s Museum, fully equipped with lasers, computer-generated imagery and the latest in interactive displays--almost all of it financed by private corporate donations from the United States and Mexico and now in the hands of a private Mexican trust.

Finally, there was Enriquez’s centerpiece: The multibillion-dollar Santa Fe commercial center, the largest shopping mall in Latin America, housing merchandisers from Sears, Roebuck & Co. to an exclusive religious icon shop, where Hewlett Packard has built its steel-and-glass corporate offices beside the equally sleek headquarters of Mexico’s second-largest financial group, and where bulldozers and cranes are now creating a new, traditional, Mexican-style town center--all on what a few years ago was a 2,000-acre garbage dump and site of Mexico City’s worst slum.

At one point during the dizzying tour, Enriquez, 35, was asked if he could have put all this together--starting with a municipal budget 30% in the red--without the benefit of his Harvard MBA.

“No,” he said flatly, acknowledging the bicultural base of his vision and drive. Nor could he have managed it without the Mexican instincts he needed to break the powerful garbage mafias that ruled the dump with the threat of death over the 10,000 professional scavengers who lived there before the Santa Fe project retrained and re-employed them as sales clerks, technicians and construction workers.

The son of an American mother and a Mexican father who was born and raised in Mexico City, Enriquez is a model of the biculturalism that is helping to change the face of Mexico, other Latin countries and the United States--particularly cities such as Los Angeles that are home to large Latino populations.

The economic and social benefits of biculturalism are a positive flip side to anti-migration arguments, and increasingly important in a massive, cross-border flow that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service estimates at about 300 million legal crossings a year along the U.S.-Mexico border in both directions.

The effects have begun to grow exponentially, from the grass-roots dollar impact on rural Mexican families that have sent hundreds of thousands of young men to work in California and other border states to the macro-level payoffs such as Enriquez’s development projects.

But the young developer, like most analysts in Mexico’s private and government sectors, points out that the U.S.-Latin fusion has its limits.

At the core of Enriquez’s projects, for instance, has been a simple tenet: “You take the best of both cultures and make them work together. You take the best from there and make them work here.

“I don’t think you’re ever going to reach a level of bicultural oneness,” he said, juggling his mobile phone and traffic jams behind the wheel of his car. “And I don’t think our goal should be bicultural oneness.

“Both cultures have a great richness and a lot to offer each other. But there are several fundamental differences that I believe can never be erased, among them family, religion and the work ethic. For example, in Mexico, your main value doesn’t tend to be work. Your identity is not your work, as it is in the United States. In Mexico, your work is only a means to an end.”

Officials at the highest levels of the Mexican government agree. At the root of government policy here is an assumption that Mexican culture is so strong and deeply rooted that it can never be overwhelmed by American influence.

And yet, in what some analysts see as an illustration of the depth of the dynamic, and Mexican concern about it, the government is underwriting a program to erase some of the cultural blurring in Mexican families that migrated to the United States generations ago.

Andres Rozental, Mexico’s deputy foreign minister, said he helped launch the program six years ago to “build bridges” between Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the United States, largely to ensure that the Mexican culture endures at a time of accelerating bicultural fusion.

The program is administered through 20 Mexican Cultural Institutes throughout the United States. It sponsors visits to Mexico for gifted Mexican American schoolchildren, most of whom have never been to their homeland. It has supplied 25 Mexican teachers to the Los Angeles Unified School District to teach Spanish and Mexican culture classes. And it sponsors Mexican art and literature programs for Mexican American communities in major U.S. cities.

“The idea behind it is based on the fact that what most of these kids in America have heard from the grandparents or parents all their lives are the negatives about Mexico--the things they left behind,” Rozental said. “Many don’t even speak Spanish anymore, so we also sponsor language classes for the Mexican American community.

“In addition, we bring Mexican Americans to Mexico to help Mexicans know more about their brothers in the U.S.”

At the core of the program, Rozental stressed, is the belief that, despite the signs of cultural fusion at all levels of Mexican society in Mexico and the United States, there is little risk that Mexicans will lose their distinct culture.

“Throughout the debate over NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), I was often asked by Mexicans and American alike whether I felt there was a concern about the spillover into cultural domination by the Americans,” Rozental said. “The answer is no. Because there’s an inherent difference between our two cultures, and that is that the Mexican culture is more profoundly rooted than the American culture. Here, it is much older; you don’t have these 30 centuries of history and of cultural assimilation in America.

“Despite their loss of contact with their culture back home, even the Mexican American community we deal with has a culture that is very distinct from the American culture around it.

“In short, I don’t think we’ll ever see a dulling of the border. Rather, we are seeing a new culture emerging, and that is the Mexican American culture. But I think that is all on the other side of the border.”

Enriquez, who left his urban development job when the mayor who sanctioned it left office last November, put it in somewhat more personal terms.

“Mexicans do not aspire to become Americans,” he said. “I have no desire to make Santa Fe an American development. I want to take things that have worked in different parts of the world and apply them here in a way that works for Mexico.”

And despite his own constant exposure to American culture in his schooling, at work and at home--Enriquez’s wife is American--Enriquez laughed incredulously when asked whether he thinks of himself as an American or a Mexican.

“I’m Mexican,” he said. “This is my home.”