Pledging allegiance

Last Thursday was Flag Day in Mexico.  Did you know there is a Flag Day in the United States too?  According to Wikipedia, it is June 14.  Few Mexicans would need Wikipedia to know what day is Flag Day here (February 24).

From an early age kids are taught to revere the flag.  Every school begins the week with a flag ceremony called “homenagen.”  A cadre of six or seven students marches the flag around a courtyard while everybody else stands at attention with one hand on their chest.  (The salute looks funny to those not used to it.  The hand on the chest remains open with palm to the ground.)  Then everybody sings the national anthem, after which the cadre repeats the march while everyone salutes again.

Homenagen for the nursery school and kindergarteners.

Saluting the flag.

Besides school, the homenagen opens other events as well.  For instance, last week Max’s soccer team attended a trophy ceremony at the end of a tournament.  (Max joined the team too late to play in that tournament.)  The ceremony began with an homenagen.  On Thursday, Natalie and I stumbled upon an homenagen competition while walking through a park on our way to brunch.  Schools from around Oaxaca sent their flag cadres to compete.  Our camera battery was dying, but we got a couple of pictures.

In Mexico Unconquered, a book by John Gibler about resistance movements in Mexico from the conquest through the present, Gibler observes that protestors in Mexico do not burn the flag in protest, as they do in the United States and other countries.  Instead they view their movement, whatever it might be, as being true to the flag, and the groups they oppose as betraying it.  There is a widespread reverence for the flag that we simply do not see at home.  Of course, we also are patriotic in the United States and the flag is an important symbol of that patriotism.  But the ways we demonstrate our patriotism in our daily lives do not feel as formal, or reverential, as they do here.

So the question is:  what should Helen and Max do during homenagen while everybody in the school stands at attention, saluting the flag?  We have told them they do not need to salute, but we have seen both of them saluting along with everybody else.  In Max’s case, he does not want to appear to be disrespectful, while Helen probably does it because everybody else is doing it.

Helen practicing her salute.

If Natalie and I had been raised to revere the flag like they do here, it might bother us to see our children saluting a different country’s flag.  Instead, we just think it is cute.  --Harrison