The decision of the new president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, not to invite the King of Spain, Felipe VI, to her inauguration, who at the time had not even responded to the official letter from the government of Mexico asking him to open a dialogue on a possible request for forgiveness for the massacres of the “Spanish conquest” of America, has caused enormous unrest in Spain to the point of blurring the iron trenches which condition daily political life: the government coalition of the left also joined the monarchical and right-wing indignation to the point of not sending any official representative to the inauguration this Tuesday, in solidarity with the king, even if Gerardo Pisarello, deputy of the commons – integrated in the Sumar space, led by Vice President Yolanda Díaz – and secretary of the Congressional Board, invited in a private capacity.
The uproar against Sheinbaum is based in part on the accusation that the new president displays an alleged anti-Spanish attitude, following his predecessor and mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. But it is a huge paradox: Sheinbaum will not only become the first female president of Mexico, but it is difficult to find a profile in the Mexican presidency with more personal and political ties to Spain. Of course, forged in a tradition very far from the palaces of the Bourbons: Republican Spain, which precisely found its great refuge in Mexico after the catastrophe of the civil war thanks to the determination of the Mexican president of the time, Lázaro Cárdenas.
No one has welcomed as many republican exiles as Mexico, a country which, in 1945, also protected the constitution of the republican government in exile and supported it to the end: it was the first to recognize it and the last to abandon it, refusing to ever legitimize it. Franco’s Spain – which reestablished the Bourbons in 1969, with the oath of Juan Carlos as “successor to the king” – and maintained the link with the symbolic republican executive in exile until its self-dissolution in 1977 , after the first democratic elections.
The imagination of Mexico as the last bastion of the Spanish Republicans has always permeated the Mexican left, in which Claudia Sheinbaum’s parents participated enthusiastically, notably in the movements of university professors and the platforms that emerged inspired by May 1968. French, the furthest from the trappings of power and the sclerified Institutional Revolutionary Party.
As he explained to the journalist Arturo Cano, author of Claudia Sheinbaum: president (Grijalbo, 2023), the new president’s left-wing consciousness began in his childhood, in the family home itself: “At my house, we talked about politics at breakfast, lunch and dinner. » Even on vacation and in moments of leisure, and always with resonances of the Spanish Republic: during car trips, the family sang in chorus the songs of the Spanish Civil War, which the exiles had brought, as she explained herself in an interview with elDiario. .es.
Republican and anarchist professors
For these reasons, it is not at all strange that Sheinbaum’s parents enrolled her in the Bartolomé Cossío school, founded precisely by two Spanish Republican professors with anarchist ideas, ultimately exiled to Mexico after a long and painful journey. to Franco’s victory in the elections. civil war: Patricio Redondo and José de Tapia. The first was born in Cubillo de Úceda (Guadalajara) in 1886 and the second in Cordoba, in 1896, but both had met in Catalonia in the 1930s, deeply involved in the experiences of educational renewal of libertarian inspiration which flourished during the Second Republic around the groups Batec (to beat, in Catalan), The Spanish Cooperative of Freinet Technique and the magazine Cooperationamong others.
The Franco regime, which restored in Spain reactionary educational models, by rote and a national-Catholic patriotic exaltation, wanted to completely eradicate these very progressive educational experiences, which aspired above all to promote the development of students as human beings and their critical and participatory sense. And he succeeded to a large extent: very few people – with the exception of specialists – know today in Spain these avant-garde educational experiences, pioneers in the years of the Second Republic: this is not not for nothing was it “the Republic of Teachers”. »
Among these, the Freinet methodcreated by the French teacher Célestin Freinet (1896-1966), promoted among others by Redondo and Tapia, supporters of a model which put “self-management, cooperation and solidarity between students” at the forefront.
However, this republican tradition that Franco wanted to eradicate not only managed to survive thanks to the welcome of Mexico but also decisively influenced, in its first years of training, none other than the one who would be proclaimed president of the country, a student at the Bartolomé Cossío de Redondo y Tapia school, which continued with the Freinet method and its anti-authoritarian philosophy, as opposed to the schools where the dominant class is usually trained: “My school considered girls and boys as subjects intended to play and learn to play in democracy. I was educated with general assemblies in which presidents and secretaries were elected from the courts and there was a mural where every Friday we said: “I criticize”, “I congratulate”, “I would like”, Sheinbaum explained to ElDiario.es.
Spanish family (in exile)
Sheinbaum’s republican consciousness of political identity, brought by Spanish exiles, was further solidified with her first marriage to former Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) leader Carlos Imaz Gispert, whom she met in 1989 during a strike at the National Autonomous University. Community of Mexico (UNAM). Imaz is the son of two families of republican activists who came to Mexico after the civil war to flee Franco’s repression: from Donosti on his father’s side and from Barcelona on his mother’s side.
Sheinbaum’s children – Rodrigo Imaz Alarcón, from his father’s first marriage, and Mariana Imaz Sheinbaum – have not limited their Spanish roots to a purely sentimental matter: they are now also Spaniards in their own right, since both have acquired nationality thanks to Historical Memory. Law promoted by the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.
In addition, Sheinbaum’s daughter studied a master’s degree in comparative literature at the University of Barcelona (UB), a city to which politics itself also turned to better prepare for the great challenge of leading Mexico City, a megalopolis of nine million inhabitants, in 2018. After winning the municipal elections and before taking office as head of government (mayor, in Mexican slang), she flew to Barcelona, welcomed by the municipality of Ada Colau, to learn from the inside how the municipal machine worked. draw lessons from the most innovative experiments launched at the time, particularly on issues of gender and citizen participation in neighborhoods.
Learn in Barcelona
Her mentor in this steps, who lasted a week, it was Gerardo Pisarello, then deputy mayor, and that’s where the friendship began that continued later with several visits by him to Mexico – including during the events of the electoral campaign of the last presidential elections, which Colau also joined – and which now explains the personal invitation for the inauguration, at which Pisarello will be present despite institutional tensions. “I was impressed by the thirst for learning and the extreme austerity he demonstrated, consistent with the republican austerity proposals of his political party. [Morena]“, remembers Pisarello.
Imaz and Sheinbaum’s marriage split amicably in 2016 and the Mexican president’s new partner, Jesús María Tarriba, whom she married last year, also has many ties to Spain, although that in this case outside the republican tradition: doctor in physics from UNAM – where he met Sheinbaum when they were both students – he was director in Madrid at Banco Santander for 16 years as an analyst and responsible for risk models. His daughter, from his first marriage, currently resides in the Spanish capital.
The “anti-Spanish” label is therefore the polar opposite of Sheinbaum, unless we find the anti-Spanish logic used by Franco: the new president of Mexico was trained with Spanish teachers, married with a man from a family of Spanish exiles. , then in a second marriage, with a man who spent almost his entire professional career in Spain. Their children have dual nationality, Mexican and Spanish. And even she herself could have Spanish nationality if she had taken advantage of the decree law approved by Spain in 2015 to grant nationality to Sephardim, the descendants of Spanish Jews expelled in 1492 as compensation five centuries later.
Sheinbaum’s second last name is Pardo and traces its roots to a family of Sephardim from Bulgaria who came to Mexico fleeing endless pogroms in Europe.
In her time, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo did not withdraw the papers to be Spanish, but the initiative, welcomed by all parties, was confirmation that 500 years is nothing to repair an injustice.
Or at least, to talk about it.
Or, at the very least, to respond politely to the letters sent by the presidency of a country that already surpasses Spain in terms of GDP and that has done so much to welcome and maintain the flame of a great Spanish tradition, even if this is not the case. favorite or the king nor establishment: the republican.
