A heated Mc-culture clash

OAXACA, Mexico--The zocalo, or central plaza, a 473-year-old colonnaded square, is the heart of this city, and its languid beat almost never changes. In timeless rhythm, people linger in sidewalk cafes under its stone arches, watching passersby stroll in the shade of Indian laurels around its gazebo. The same two dozen local merchants along its perimeters have been fixtures for years, enjoying moderate, easygoing prosperity.

That’s why eyebrows shot up in May when El Mundo Elegante shut down after 52 years of selling clothes on the zocalo’s eastern edge. The explanation, two months later, was an even bigger jolt: The owner had agreed to lease the place to McDonald’s.

The ensuing protest in defense of “slow food” has stalled the hamburger chain’s bid for an operating license and opened a debate here over the cultural correctness of Big Macs. The debate is echoing across Mexico, where large American retailers have become ubiquitous in a decade of freer trade but have yet to become universally accepted.

Oaxaca is world-renowned for its Indo-Spanish cuisine and mind-boggling variety of chili peppers. It boasts seven kinds of mole, a painstaking sauce that takes three days to prepare. Deep-fried crickets, not French fries, are the snack of choice.

More than a food fight, however, the conflict is about money, power and urban geopolitics: Should a multinational giant, in return for investment in one of Mexico’s poorest states, be ceded space in the very center of a culturally distinctive city?

“Perhaps sacred is too strong a word, but our zocalo has a style, a soul, a way of being that would be altered forever by American fast food,” said Francisco Toledo, a leading Mexican artist and Oaxaca native, who launched the protest with the battle cry “No McZocalo!”

Yet people here are sharply divided over the proposed franchise. The city’s business elite, backed by many who simply love burgers, argues that Oaxaca can ill afford to snub a foreign investor that promises to respect the zocalo’s treasured Spanish colonial architecture (no golden arches allowed) and create more than 70 jobs.

Mayor Gabino Cue Monteagudo proclaims neutrality as he struggles to reconcile fast versus slow, growth versus tradition. The law allows him to veto any project that endangers “intangible” elements of the city’s cultural heritage, including cuisine, but no mayor here has ever used that power.

Oaxaca is still a “slow” city, and the mayor is in no rush to decide.

Indeed, this battle has a laid-back style, unlike other recent fights over globalization in Mexico and elsewhere that have stirred violent passions. The farmers who forced the cancellation of a new international airport for Mexico City in August and the marchers resisting plans for a Costco bargain warehouse on the site of an old spa in Cuernavaca have wielded machetes and clashed with police.

In the most famous attack, farmer and activist Jose Bove drove a tractor through the glass front of a McDonald’s under construction in Millau, a cheese-making center in southwestern France, three years ago.

In Oaxaca, Toledo and his band of artists, writers, intellectuals and conservationists showed disdain for McDonald’s last summer by gathering people in the zocalo and giving away tamales by the thousands. The rallies have been peaceful, the debate civil, the deliberations glacial.

A range of ills

Rather than tackle the issue head-on, Mayor Cue chose to move the discussion beyond McDonald’s to confront a wider range of ills degrading the old city center. This month, he organized a six-day forum so Oaxacans could think up ways to rescue that 188-block zone from traffic jams, vandalism, noise, shoddy maintenance, unlicensed vendors and marchers for political causes who camp in the streets for weeks on end.

“All the polemics over McDonald’s, all this energy, we’re trying to channel into something more ambitious: a revival of our city center,” the mayor said in an interview. “What we eventually decide about McDonald’s is secondary.”

The City Council will soon debate the licensing request, he said, after searching for a consensus in hours of transcripts from the forum and thousands of still-uncounted ballots cast in an informal referendum over the last weeks.

McDonald’s has opened 235 franchises across Mexico since 1985. One opened here in 1993, but it is clustered with Sears, Office Depot and Sam’s Club on the city’s outskirts, where some Oaxacans think such retailers should be confined.

Patrick Santamaria, who manages that McDonald’s, said market studies pointed to the zocalo as the ideal spot for a second restaurant because of heavy pedestrian traffic there. He noted that the chain has put franchises on or near the central squares of five Mexican cities with nothing like the opposition raised here.

“It’s not going to hurt the culture of Oaxaca to serve hamburgers in the zocalo,” said Santamaria, a Frenchman who is married to a Oaxacan. “Nobody is going to hold a gun to your head and say you have to eat at McDonald’s.”

Santamaria’s franchise is so popular with people like Jacinta Chares, whose sons are 6 and 10, that they favor the zocalo’s central location. “It would take one bus ride to get my kids to McDonald’s instead of three,” said the 30-year-old waitress, who serves traditional Oaxacan fare at a zocalo cafe.

“If it were up to the kids, McDonald’s would win their franchise,” said Guillermo Garcia Manzano, the city’s top official for tourism and commercial development.

The strength of adult protest took many by surprise.

Josefina Diaz, 57, whose Spanish immigrant father founded El Mundo Elegante, said she thought there was no reason to say no when McDonald’s offered to rent her two-story property. She had decided to close the store and go abroad for cancer treatment and she still doesn’t understand “the scandal kicked up by that painter,” referring to Toledo. She let go of 18 employees, about one-fourth the number McDonald’s would hire.

“You’ve got McDonald’s in the center of Paris, Rome, London, Moscow, Beijing, everywhere,” she said. “It’s normal.”

Gustavo Esteva, a researcher at Oaxaca’s Center of Intercultural Encounters and Dialogue, rose at the recent forum to warn against that sort of logic. The fast-food chain’s penetration of city centers around the globe is nothing less than “a march of cultural conquest,” he declared, and the line must be drawn here.

Such McDonald’s-bashing dominated the forum, which was co-sponsored by the mayor and Toledo’s Pro-Oax group. Pro-Oax represents Oaxaca’s artistic community, which has recently bought and renovated many buildings in the city center in hope of reviving its dying residential neighborhoods.

The artists are at odds with an established business elite, who own about 55% of the real estate downtown, over who calls the shots there. The two groups have taken opposing stands on McDonald’s, trading jabs in the press.

Toledo, 62, whose rumpled attire and wild mane are icons in the anti-McDonald’s fight, suggested at one point that Oaxacans boycott not only American fast food but all local restaurants, and eat at home to be sure their food is not contaminated.

Daniel Hernandez Cruz, president of the local chamber of restaurant owners, said that if the painter were truly concerned about hygiene, “he should bathe, shave and cut his nails.”

Hernandez, who imports Texas beef for his Oaxaca steak house, said his chamber supports McDonald’s in the name of variety and free enterprise. “If we served only traditional food here,” he declared, “some people would die of hunger.”

On closer inspection, fast food and other cultural imports already have a foothold in the zocalo. Street vendors sell hamburgers there, as do some of the cafes, and Disney characters rise above the crowds on helium balloons hawked by the hundreds.

A multinational invasion

But McDonald’s might herald a full-scale multinational invasion of the colonnaded square, traditionalists argue. The company reportedly agreed to pay Diaz $8,000 per month rent, well above the going rate. “What would stop other merchants there from giving up their space to Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken, which are also ready to pay high rent?” Toledo asks.

“He may be right about that,” said Iliana de la Vega, who runs El Naranjo, an acclaimed restaurant offering traditional Oaxacan food just off the square. “But I think it’s more dangerous for a few people to dictate what kind of food can be serve in the zocalo and what kind cannot.”

“What’s authentic? Who’s going to judge?” she asked. “If we have to accept other forms of business to raise our standard of living, I’m for it. We don’t want to preserve our poverty.”