Mexicans live in an environment of profound economic disparities. In a country where $100 a week is considered a good wage, a new coffee table book titled Rich and Famous is coming to be viewed as a biopsy of what is wrong with Mexican society.
On page after page, the wives, daughters and lovers of Mexico's mega-wealthy are shown in opulent surroundings as they strike sometimes provocative and other times defiant poses....
The images, they say on television talk shows, are grotesque, vulgar, obscene and decadent.
"People find it shocking," says photographer Daniela Rossell, the book's 29-year-old creator who insists she never intended to ridicule the wealthy. But many Mexicans, she adds in an interview in her own Spartan Mexico City apartment, "find it offensive."
"Everybody knows that there is a lot of wealth accumulated in Mexican homes," Rossell says. "But perhaps we aren't used to looking at it as well, to seeing the proportions and the incongruity."
Apparently, the notion that many of their countrymen live in abject, crushing poverty is lost on these women. Indeed, I wonder if any of these women even actually know about, much less understand, the plight faced by so many ordinary Mexicans.
Besides being in truly bad taste given Mexico's current economic climate, the book seems to be a documentation of the mindset of these women, who seem to view their lot in life as their birthright. So people are starving? Let them eat cake....
"The life of these rich women," political analyst Lorenzo Meyer writes, "takes place in a morally unacceptable island ... surrounded and nourished by a sea of historical Mexican poverty."
Other social critics fire their darts at the women's extravagant opulence. "The money itself is not as offensive as the way it is used," says Guadalupe Loaeza, a newspaper columnist who has gained fame satirizing the Mexican upper class, to which she belongs.
"It is so kitsch, so ugly and common," she says. "Such exaggerated bad taste, so sad and lamentable in a country like Mexico where there is so much (artistic) wealth and history."
The women appearing in Rich and Famous, Loaeza says, "are female objects, empty, like inflatable women, a rowdy party of vulgarity."
Most of the women pictured in the book hail from the clans that ruled Mexico and built fortunes during the 71-year reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which lost control of Mexico's national government in December 2000.
Last week's edition of Proceso, one of the country's leading news magazines, featured the book and its women, snidely calling them "the grand daughters of the revolution."
Loaeza says that while the book "is a portrait of the decadence of the PRI," there is little to indicate that such decadence has gone out of style in the post-PRI presidency of Vicente Fox.
"They are still here," she says of those Mexicans who enjoy their extreme wealth in a way that she views as a little less than perverse.
Yet the book is no furtive product of a paparazzi who sneaked behind high walls and past ferocious guard dogs. Rossell herself grew up in a moneyed family, beginning her Rich and Famous project in 1994 with photographs of relatives and friends in settings of their choosing.
The brazen attitudes displayed by Rossell's subjects testify to the trust she gained over the years and also, perhaps, to the esteem that the women hold for their lifestyle. All the women pictured in the book signed release forms, permitting publication of their photographs, Rossell and the book's publisher say.
It's only now, after the book's publication, that some of the women depicted are beginning to realize what callous fools they've been. Tellingly, their reaction has not been to apologize for their own behavior and appalling lack of sensitivity. No, they've threated the photographer and creator of the book, who now rarley goes out in public. Talk about more money than common sense....
Isn't it about time for a revolution?
