What Retirement Means to Mexicans

I'm posting, verbatim, an article from the Guadalajara Reporter, about the problems facing older, "retired" workers in the Mexican state of Jalisco. I don't know whether a link will work for long, hence my decision to post the article in total. I don't quite know why, but when I read it I felt that it's the sort of story people in the U.S. should read and think about.

Story by : ALEX GESHEVA

At 8 a.m. on a weekday morning, business is booming at the intersection of Lazaro Cardenas and Guadalupe in Guadalajara. Horns honk, motorists wave and a stately gentleman, well into his 70s, escalates to a jogging shuffle and weaves among the cars selling gum and candy. A few missing teeth have not dimmed his radiant smile.

“It doesn’t matter what you do, it’s how you do it,” he says, as coins exchange hands. “I’m useful, I have a job, I’m alive. I’m very lucky.”

Asked for a name, he responds only with a slightly creaky bow and a “Dios le bendiga” and rushes off again. His right hand is elevated, curiously evoking a ballet position, left hand supporting his small tray of Trident gum.

It may not be most people’s idea of retirement. Then again, retirement is not always an option. As the state government reaches this year’s goal of handing out 500 pesos a month to 10,000 impoverished senior citizens, many of Jalisco’s oldest and wisest workers are asking for opportunities, not handouts.

“The support checks from the government are a wonderful thing,” says Carmen Raquel Acero, a sprightly 70-year-old who attends activities organized for seniors by the family development agency DIF. “There were two or three people in my group who participated in the program. A friend’s mother is 90 and bed-ridden and the youngest in the family is 60 and working as a secretary – four of them live on 3,800 pesos a month. Five hundred pesos isn’t much, but when you have nothing, it’s monumental.”
The controversial program, the brain-child of Jalisco Governor Emilio Gonzalez, parallels similar Mexico City initiatives by the leftist PRD. Both efforts are recognition that Mexico’s aging population faces a crisis. In Jalisco, the state government has already distributed 25.5 million pesos to seniors over 70 who lack a pension and the ability to work, pay rent, or cover medicine. The amount, some seniors say, is a tiny drop in an endless sea.

“If they opened a little service window where impoverished senior citizens could go, the line would be never ending,” says Acero. “We need research, personal caring research quantifying the problem. Ask us to help: we can go door to door and find those of us who are most needy.”

What’s lacking is more information and more teamwork. “There are a lot of available programs through the government,” says Maria Guadalupe Elizondo, another struggling senior in her 70s, who says that DIF assistance programs saved her sanity. “But people don’t know about them, unless a friend passes on the information. With more communication and participation, more lonely, isolated seniors could be helped to meet people, exercise a little, maybe learn how to earn some extra money.”

Earning money is a tricky proposition in a country where a 42-year-old accountant is sometimes considered over the hill.

“There are no opportunities,” says Elizondo. “At our age, the only places that let us work are the large supermarkets, to bag groceries. Even there, they often ask for your DIF identification to check if you’re trustworthy.”

Senior citizens who bag groceries aren’t paid, only tipped by customers. On a good day, they may earn around 30 pesos. The stories are endlessly heart-breaking and government money woefully finite. Jalisco is aging. And, if you ask its senior citizens, all that experience and wisdom is going to waste.

“I’ve taught classes, I worked construction, I can tell young guys the best ways to lay brick or create road drainage and teach them all kinds of things like that,” says Ramon Solano, a diminutive 76-year-old bagging groceries at Gigante in Plaza Tepeyac. “But I guess nobody wants to look at me anymore or think that I can do something better than they can.”

“Many of us like handicrafts and we’re good at them,” adds Elizondo. “Maybe the government could lend us a plaza or a vending booth somewhere, so we can at least recover our investments and sell our work. We’re hard-working people. Let us work. Give us something to do.”

Next year, Jalisco’s state government hopes to extend its program to 42,000 poverty-stricken seniors in Jalisco who lack a pension and health insurance and have fallen through the cracks of all other federal and local support programs.
“Yes, many of them obviously need the help and I don’t begrudge it,” says Solano. “But you know, the rest of us aren’t doing so well either, not when pensions can be a minimum wage or less.”

For Teresa Perez, a worker at DIF Jalisco’s center for senior citizens in Bugambilias, handing out money is the kind of short-term solution that misses the point.

“It’s well-intentioned, but much like putting a band-aid on a large infected cut,” says Perez. “It doesn’t tackle the underlying healing process.”