Robbie Gil, The Big Picture

I needed some time to reflect on the last few days. Coming back to Mexico, two years ago, has been a new experience for me. In a way, I found a Mexico that has a new infrastructure, new ways of looking hip and buoyant, expensive superhighways and new art spaces.

But at the same time, I also found the other Mexico, the one I have always seen relegated and culturally denied. The same discourse the Zapatistas were talking about back in the nineties, the deep Mexicans from Yucatán where I made my thesis about and the ones that have always seemed so far away from the decisions of the capital city.

If I can say what seems to be the new dramas of this plot, I would have to start with the complete loss of values. The value of our natural resources, the dignity unto which we used to rely upon. We have now, sacrificed ourselves to get some more gold coins so we could cruise and relish on our big Hummers, pay for strippers and insert ourselves on the covers of the Hola! Magazine.

We have a football player, an actress and a clown running for a candidature, Jalisco is burning and shot down by narcobazookas while other Mexican states are so silent, it's eerie. We have vigilante groups fighting for their own land and people, collective pits found as a negative force feeding the land and journalists silenced, killed and harassed all around Mexico.

So when people from Birmingham City University and Centro design, t.v. and film school wants to create workshops for creative economies, I have the feeling I know exactly where they are coming from but I wonder if they can truly affirm where they're going (here).

I've seen enough culinary shows from the BBC or eaten in a few places in London to understand when these folks are saying people look for the familiar experience in regards to their homey, comforting food, they mean they're looking for that experience. But in Mexico that concept has so many connotations, specially in regards to street food. Just a quick example could be, the difference between a tlacoyo and my grandmother's comforting food. One is pre-hispanic roots, our land, tequila and the essence of Mexicaneity, the second one is home, the familiar experience.

Good news is we are up to par culturally. There were weary English minds looking at us through the process, wondering if (and I quote) "we had it". That is: the ability to generate ideas and create a complex creative process that certifies clients, the validity of a chosen strategy for their business. A modified process of generating innovation, where Design Thinking is not enough, or to to describe it better, a more efficient way of engaging, prototyping, researching and bulletproofing 4D and Design Thinking.

I wish sometimes, I could shift the train of progress towards inner Mexico and not towards US, Europe or any other nation's parameters without feeling retrograde, without feeling that I ask for any society to go back to homeopathy when technology has aided medicine or science has taken men to space.

Energy Addicts

What I mean is, precisely because men have been on the moon is that I ask Mexicans if they all want to go towards foreign parameters/ways of life without having some input of our vision in it. If the Zapatista discourse is: against global capitalism and the inclusion of different worlds in a world, then I ask the Zapatistas, aren't you contradicting this idea by excluding capitalism in that process? Yet, I do understand the subtext in those statements. Do we want to die connected to a cell phone or to the real needs of the land?

The fact we Mexicans might not know first world jargon doesn't make us less valuable (e.g. Hidden Innovation). Maybe we don't want to understand them if this future takes us to live in such expensive terms where our time feels like coins making a clinking sound as they fall by each second going by. Where reflection seems such a luxury or a vacation period we dare to take from summer or winter periods. Maybe we want to be left behind from these arrogant acts of nature depletion and life quality called promising future.

I'm glad I see so many design, fashion, food and art projects popping everywhere. Are these mostly done from people that went abroad and came back? Or people that have a broader view and still believe there is a way of making innovation without becoming condescending or a conqueror? Torolab and the Farmlab in Tijuana might hold some answers, ones I might be inclined to discover this summer.