LINDO MÉXICO QUERIDO

Mexico is certainly a place full of colors, joy, party and music. Its weather, vegetation and landscapes make it an unforgettable place to visit; despite of its many educative, financial, political and ethical opportunities that it still has to become a first world class country.

Its mere and vast territory makes it a target place to live and, if we only thought about its nice, friendly people, nobody would hesitate about staying here for a very long time. I say so because when I woke up today, I listened to some Mariachis outside my house. They were singing the “Cielito lindo”, “Mexico lindo y querido” and some other famous songs. I could listen to the mariachis who sang with very emotional and vibrated voices which could be heard everywhere.

Their guitars and their strings, the trumpets and their keys, their double bass and its beautiful sounds, all together, made me feel the beat of my heart when I thought about the place where I wake up every day and where many of my friends live. In that moment I remembered that it was September 13^th and that it was time to begin the celebrations of Independence in Mexico.

With the music in mind and while I drove to my job, I could see many big and small Mexican flags everywhere. They were hanging on the streets, stuck on the windows of the houses and attached on the cars´ hoods that passed by. Their white, red and green colors reminded me of those times when I went to basic school and sang the Mexican Anthem every Monday morning at the patio of a school, while we worshiped our flag and our nationality.

There have passed many years that I have not done that practice every morning anymore, because I have worked for a long time in higher education and this is not a mandatory activity in this level. However, today when I arrived at my job I also knew that we would do our national ceremony again and I could not avoid feeling happy about it.  That was really nice for me to know that news, and although UNESCO (2015) proposed education as a common good and to reestablish civic education in the globalized world, with equilibrium among respect to plurality, universal values, common progress and the wellbeing for humanity, and it also proposed to form students with a global vision of their work and to educate them with no borders in mind, so that they are able to share their knowledge at any place, it is impossible not to love the place that we saw for the first time when we opened our eyes at birth or where we grew up happily with our beloved ones: a father, a mother or with both.

It does not mean that because of the love that we feel for our territory, we have to close our eyes to the reality, because we really still need to learn how to collaborate with the knowledge society as Tobon (2017) proposes. Even more, we also need to begin thinking globally as Gary Hamel (2012:5) states in his book What Matters Now when he says that “the Web is also producing a new sort of global consciousness, a heightened sense of our interconnectedness”, by recognizing that we can live in a country, but we must learn from others and to collaborate ethically with them, even when we are at home and we are connected to the Net.

Then, at work, it was nice to see many future engineers who arrived with the traditional, colorful, embroided Mexican hats and hand woven party-colored dresses to celebrate past facts that cannot easily be forgotten here.

Many of them carried candies and traditional Mexican food to share with their classmates, such as pozole, tostadas, chalupas, enchiladas, mole, nogada chilis, a wide variety of tacos and so on. However; in spite of the fact that we have many things to celebrate and to be happy about, when we listen to our music or we dance, we must be aware that we need to accept that there are still so many practices that we, as Mexicans, should elude to become better citizens immersed in peace and order, to have a more tranquil and respectful life.

Rosalía Nalleli Pérez-Estrada