Mexico in royal swoon

Let the naysayers and dour academics dismiss Spain’s royal wedding as a frivolous diversion for the unwashed masses if they want to. They aren’t going to spoil Alex Aguilar’s fun.

“Yes, I’m going to watch it, because the prince enchants me,” says Aguilar, 28, who makes his living styling hair in this city’s trendy Polanco district. “He’s attractive, he seems very intelligent to me, conservative, though he could be more sexy. This Letizia doesn’t deserve him. I think he should have married a princess.”

The woman in question, as every fashionista between Barcelona and Buenos Aires surely knows by now, is Letizia Ortiz Rocasolano, the 32-year-old divorced former TV reporter who on Saturday will wed Felipe de Borbon, 36, also known as His Royal Highness Crown Prince Philip, heir to the Spanish throne.

In Madrid, seven time zones and several thousand miles from here, Spaniards are girding for what promises to be the biggest blueblood blowout since Britain’s Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer tied the knot 23 years ago. Some 1,600 guests, including several heads of state, plus tens of thousands of spectators and an international TV audience, are expected to be on hand for the pomp and pageantry at the Almudena Cathedral in Madrid. Undeterred by Internet rumblings about Ortiz’s sexual past, the Spanish media already have pronounced the event “the wedding of the century.”

What may be even more striking, though, is that the coming nuptial frenzy also has been front-page news for weeks in Mexico, a country whose relations with Spain, its former colonial master, haven’t always been saluted with champagne and caviar.

The royal wedding is being broadcast live on Mexican television Saturday, starting at the over-caffeinated hour of 2 a.m., then rebroadcast later in the day. Among those hosting the transmission for Mexico’s giant Televisa network will be Rebeca de Alba, girlfriend of singer Ricky Martin, and writer-commentator Guadalupe Loaeza, who points to an obvious pop-culture underpinning of the wedding’s appeal to the Mexican public. “It’s a telenovela,” says Loaeza, speaking by phone Wednesday from Madrid and referring to the Cinderella story lines of Mexican soap operas.

Meanwhile, florid and fawning coverage of the wedding preparations, along with detailed accounts of the royal couple-to-be’s social peregrinations, charitable activities and tastes in clothing and home decor, have saturated the Mexican news media this spring. It’s a spectacle that many here find antiquated and unseemly -- if not unexpected.

“The Mexican people is a people that believes in fantasies. And to be able to be a witness to a wedding between a plebeian and a prince is like being able to live a fairy tale of real life,” says Victor Gordoa, a prominent Mexican public image consultant whose clients include numerous politicians and businessmen.

On the other hand, the Mexican government, preoccupied with a series of political scandals and other problems, appears to be giving the event scant notice. Politically the wedding “doesn’t have a great importance” in Mexico, says Rafael Segovia, a refugee from the Spanish Civil War who lives in Mexico City and teaches at the Colegio de Mexico. “The proof is that [Mexico President Vicente Fox] isn’t going to attend.” He predicts the wedding will “pass unnoticed” among Mexicans, apart from a few women who will be intrigued by the handsome prince and the bride’s clothes “and frivolities of this type.”

Countries’ relationship

But the extravaganza, which reportedly is costing upward of $6 million, has given other Mexicans a chance to reflect on their current connection to the distant Mother Country. While Mexico’s Spanish inheritance includes a common language and a dominant religion (Roman Catholicism), magnificent Baroque buildings and richly brocaded traditions in literature, music and art, it also encompasses Spain’s ruthless oppression and destruction of Mexico’s indigenous populations, the Inquisition and an onerous colonial administration that lasted until Mexico’s War of Independence ended in 1821.

Unlike the so-called special relationship between the United States and England, which has gone pretty smoothly since Brits finished torching the White House during the War of 1812, Mexico’s bond with Spain for centuries resembled that of a moody and rebellious adolescent to a grim and overbearing parent. Television commentator Hector Terrones says that certain cultural dissimilarities between the United States and Mexico reflect the difference between a colonized people and a conquered one.

Yet while Mexico’s relations with traditional Spanish-speaking friends like Fidel Castro’s Cuba have frayed lately, the respected Mexico City daily El Universal recently ran an editorial headlined “Spain and Latin America: Better Times.” It described the election of Spain’s new socialist prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, as a “happy occasion” that signals closer ties between the hemispheres. Under the previous conservative government of Jose Maria Aznar, Spain had “turned its back on Latin America,” the editorial opined.

“Our cultural relation with Spain is schizophrenic,” Gordoa says. “On the one hand, we love Spain as a country that forms a part of our roots. But on the other hand we hate the Spanish because [six centuries ago] they gave us the conquest of the Great Tenochtitlan” -- the hub of the former Aztec empire, which is present-day Mexico City. “We therefore have a brotherhood with Spain but a subordination complex.”

Even today, Spain is a strong economic and cultural presence in Mexico. Spanish-owned breweries, bakeries, hotels and banks are major players here. The Spanish professional soccer league and its perennial champions Real Madrid get the royal treatment in Mexican sports pages.

And Spanish celebrities and artists such as bad-boy filmmaker Pedro Almodovar have been absorbed into a globalized, hispano-centric pop-culture pantheon that ranges from Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Jennifer Lopez to Gael Garcia Bernal. “Everything that happens in Spain and everything that happens in Mexico has a general interest to the people of both countries,” says Carlo Antonio Rico, executive producer of Televisa’s wedding broadcast, speaking by phone from Madrid.

Student days in Mexico

As aspiring sovereigns go, Ortiz has some assets that could help win Mexicans over. In the mid-1990s she spent time as a student in Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-biggest city. Earlier this year, that life chapter provoked a mild uproar when it emerged that Ortiz had posed for a Cuban painter, Waldo Saavedra, who was living in Guadalajara. Seminude pictures of her later turned up on a website, but the chisme blew over.

Ortiz’s light-skinned, blond-haired good looks and high-fashion gloss are the epitome of today’s upmarket pan-Latin chic. “She represents exactly the physical shape of these models that advertise shampoos and many other things,” Loaeza says. She also projects the image of an energetic, modern career gal, rather than of an old-school atrophied debutante such as royals used to favor. “She’s a very beautiful woman, very well trained and very intelligent. And any woman would want to be in her place,” Terrones says.

Well, maybe not any woman, at least not on this city’s noisy streets at the start of evening rush hour. “It doesn’t interest me,” says Ana Lilia Mendoza, 31, a receptionist. “It would be better if they would look at what’s going on with the people that are dying of hunger in Chiapas or with the ecological disasters.”

Sarahi Ventura, 17, says that real life isn’t as pretty as the TV extravaganza that will unfold this weekend, nor does she put much stock in the Spanish proverb that beauty and glamour have a downside. “They say that ‘the beautiful girl wishes for the luck of the ugly girl,’ but I’m not that much of a dreamer,” Ventura says, before going back to her job selling fried pork rinds.

Researcher Froylan Enciso in The Times’ Mexico City bureau contributed to this report.