Mexico's National Research Articles

The Face of the Mexican: Race, Nation, and Criminal Identification in Mexico

ABSTRACTVarious scientific techniques are used worldwide in contemporary criminal identification. Caramex, called the “Face of the Mexican,” is a face‐recall system for criminal identification specifically developed for the Mexican population. It is a photographic database composed of Mexican facial traits to generate composite sketches. In this article, I examine Caramex and show that it works according to specific ideas of nation, mixture (mestizaje), and race (mestizo). In contrast to racial ideologies in which purity is the assumed and desired condition of races, Caramex highlights hybridity. This specific framework—drawing on what I call “Mexicanness”—guides the construction of the database and thus the production of portraits. The analysis historically situates the development of Caramex and provides insights into the daily use of this technology. It shows that Caramex not only reproduces old views of nation and race but also generates new ideas on these issues, as users can alter the photographic database and contest the ideas that shaped the technology. Thus, more generally, this case shows how technologies of identification incorporate and construct ideas of nationhood and human variation in Latin America. [face‐recall system, mestizo, race, Caramex, Mexicanness, Mexico]

Associations between prenatal serum levels of leptin, IGF-I, and estradiol and adolescent mothers' height gain during and after pregnancy.

Mexico is within the top three Latin American countries with the highest proportion of adolescent pregnancies while being in the lowest ten Latin American countries in terms of height. It is still unclear how much growth in adolescence is affected by pregnancy; therefore, this study was designed to study the association between prenatal serum concentrations of leptin, IGF-I, and estradiol and the increase in the height of a group of pregnant adolescents between the 28th week of gestation to one year postpartum. We conducted a cohort study from 2009 to 2017 in pregnant adolescents in their third trimester of pregnancy receiving prenatal care at Mexico’s National Institute of Perinatology. Data on hormones, other covariates, and confounding variables were analyzed through bivariate analysis and then a linear univariate analysis. Our patients were an average of 15.5±1 years and gained an average of 9.5 mm during the study period. A Pearson’s correlation showed a positive and significant height increase between height and leptin and IGF-I, and negative between height and estradiol. The general linear model (adjusted by age, bone age, gynecological age, parent’s stature, breastfeeding, body fat, energy intake, and BMI) found that leptin and estradiol serum concentrations explained 39.6% of height increase; IGF-I did not have any predictive effect. Leptin and estradiol concentrations in the third trimester of pregnancy are associated with increased height in our group of teenage mothers. No effect association was observed between height and IGF-I concentrations.

Internet adoption and usage patterns in rural Mexico

The aim of this paper is to identify the socioeconomic and demographic factors that stimulate Internet adoption and use among Mexico's rural population. Using an econometric model to deal with potential selection bias problems, and information from Mexico's National Survey on Availability and Use of Information Technologies in Households (ENDUTIH), our results suggest that the probability of using the Internet is higher for people who have digital skills and for women. Internet usage patterns differ by age, educational level, employment type, and geographic location. Young people are more likely to take part in online activities for entertainment purposes, while people of working age go online for information, communication, and e-commerce-related activities. These findings provide evidence on the existing digital divide in terms of Internet penetration and usage in Mexico's rural sector, which is in the early stages of Internet diffusion.

M.K. Bess, Routes of Compromise: Building Roads and Shaping the Nation in Mexico, 1917–1962

M.K. Bess, <i>Routes of Compromise: Building Roads and Shaping the Nation in Mexico, 1917–1962</i>

Suicide attempt in teenagers: Associated factors.

Attempted suicide is the main risk factor for completed suicides. To analyze the prevalen ce of attempted suicide in junior high school and high school students in Mexico City, and its asso ciated factors. Observational, cross-sectional and descriptive study conducted with data from the Mexico National Survey on Drug Use Among Students (ENCODE) 2012. The validated survey was anonymous, structured and self-applied, and contains seven sections: Sociode mographic; Tobacco, alcohol and drug use; Problems related to drug use; Antisocial behavior; Social sphere; Interpersonal sphere and Personal sphere. Family atmosphere, communication with parents, and self-esteem indexes were created using principal component analysis. A binomial logistic regres sion model was adjusted, and the odds ratio (OR) were analyzed. The estimated prevalence of attempted suicide was 6.8%. The factors that increased the attempted suicide possibility were: being a woman (OR 3.1), be under 16 years old (OR 1.6), living in an unfavorable family atmosphere (OR 1.5) or having a poor communication with parents (OR 1.8), having low self-esteem (OR 1.9), behavioral or learning problems (OR 1.4) or suffering a mental illness (OR 3.6); having been forced into sexual contact (OR 2.6); or drugs use, smoking or alcohol consumption (OR 1.7, 1.2 and 1.7). The attempted suicide prevention should be focused on women younger than 16 years, with any psychiatric disorder, behavioral problem or low self-esteem, who live in an unfavorable family atmosphere, with risky behavior such as smoking, or alcohol or drugs consumption, or who have been forced into sexual contact.

Michael K. Bess. Routes of Compromise: Building Roads and Shaping the Nation in Mexico, 1917–1952.

Michael K. Bess. Routes of Compromise: Building Roads and Shaping the Nation in Mexico, 1917–1952.

SPECIES: Supporting big-data-driven research

SPECIES (Stephens et al. 2019) is a tool to explore spatial correlations in biodiversity occurrence databases. The main idea behind the SPECIES project is that the geographical correlations between the distributions of taxa records have useful information. The problem, however, is that if we have thousands of species (Mexico's National System of Biodiversity Information has records of around 70,000 species) then we have millions of potential associations, and exploring them is far from easy. Our goal with SPECIES is to facilitate the discovery and application of meaningful relations hiding in our data. The main variables in SPECIES are the geographical distributions of species occurrence records. Other types of variables, like the climatic variables from WorldClim (Hijmans et al. 2005), are explanatory data that serve for modeling. The system offers two modes of analysis. In one, the user defines a target species, and a selection of species and abiotic variables; then the system computes the spatial correlations between the target species and each of the other species and abiotic variables. The request from the user can be as small as comparing one species to another, or as large as comparing one species to all the species in the database. A user may wonder, for example, which species are usual neighbors of the jaguar, this mode could help answer this question. The second mode of analysis gives a network perspective, in it, the user defines two groups of taxa (and/or environmental variables), the output in this case is a correlation network where the weight of a link between two nodes represents the spatial correlation between the variables that the nodes represent. For example, one group of taxa could be hummingbirds (Trochilidae family) and the second flowers of the Lamiaceae family. This output would help the user analyze which pairs of hummingbird and flower are highly correlated in the database. SPECIES data architecture is optimized to support fast hypotheses prototyping and testing with the analysis of thousands of biotic and abiotic variables. It has a visualization web interface that presents descriptive results to the user at different levels of detail. The methodology in SPECIES is relatively simple, it partitions the geographical space with a regular grid and treats a species occurrence distribution as a present/not present boolean variable over the cells. Given two species (or one species and one abiotic variable) it measures if the number of co-occurrences between the two is more (or less) than expected. If it is more than expected indicates a signal of a positive relation, whereas if it is less it would be evidence of disjoint distributions. SPECIES provides an open web application programming interface (API) to request the computation of correlations and statistical dependencies between variables in the database. Users can create applications that consume this 'statistical web service' or use it directly to further analyze the results in frameworks like R or Python. The project includes an interactive web application that does exactly that: requests analysis from the web service and lets the user experiment and visually explore the results. We believe this approach can be used on one side to augment the services provided from data repositories; and on the other side, facilitate the creation of specialized applications that are clients of these services. This scheme supports big-data-driven research for a wide range of backgrounds because end users do not need to have the technical know-how nor the infrastructure to handle large databases. Currently, SPECIES hosts: all records from Mexico's National Biodiversity Information System (CONABIO 2018) and a subset of Global Biodiversity Information Facility data that covers the contiguous USA (GBIF.org 2018b) and Colombia (GBIF.org 2018a). It also includes discretizations of environmental variables from WorldClim, from the Environmental Rasters for Ecological Modeling project (Title and Bemmels 2018), from CliMond (Kriticos et al. 2012), and topographic variables (USGS EROS Center 1997b, USGS EROS Center 1997a). The long term plan, however, is to incrementally include more data, specially all data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. The code of the project is open source, and the repositories are available online (Front-end, Web Services Application Programming Interface, Database Building scripts). This presentation is a demonstration of SPECIES' functionality and its overall design.

Routes of Compromise: Building Roads and Shaping the Nation in Mexico, 1917–1952

Routes of Compromise: Building Roads and Shaping the Nation in Mexico, 1917–1952

Prevalence of low serum vitamin B12 in Mexican children and women: results from the first National Nutrition Survey (1999) as a basis for interventions and progress.

Serum samples from the 1999 Mexico National Nutrition Survey (NNS) were analyzed to determine the prevalence of low serum B12 concentrations, identify factors related with low values including B12 intake, and importantly, to provide a baseline for monitoring progress in reducing deficiency. Samples for B12 were available from 488 children and 464 women, a sub-sample of the nationally representative 1999 NNS. The national overall prevalence of low (<200pg/mL) and marginal (200 to 300pg/mL) serum B12 was 25.6% and 21.0%, respectively. Adolescent girls had the lowest serum B12 concentrations (325±308pg/mL) and the prevalence of deficiency was 40% in pregnant women even using a lower cut-point (<135pg/mL). Residents of rural areas and the South, population groups with poorest socioeconomic status, and illiterate and indigenous women had the lowest serum B12 Children and women who met dietary recommendations for B12 intake had higher serum B12 than those who did not. Overall 45.9% of intakes fell below the Estimated Adequate Requirement. Dietary B12 intake of children and women was directly correlated with serum B12 (r=0.18, p<0.001 and r=0.11, p=0.0304). The prevalence of marginal and deficient B12 status in 1999 was much higher than the most recently published national data suggesting the success of national policies to improve micronutrient status.

Mujeres y el origen común de la nación en México

Este artículo explora la poderosa influencia de la sexualidad y los roles de género en la identidad nacional y el nacionalismo. Por lo anterior el objetivo del artículo es revisar cómo es concebido el origen común de la nación mexicana, y cómo contribuyen a él las mujeres en la historia. El artículo incluye tres partes. La primera identifica los principales tipos de nacionalismo en México y su interrelación con los roles de género y los nacionalismos que plantearan Nira Yuval-Davis y Floya Anthias en 1989. La segunda desarrolla de qué forma, tanto los tipos de nacionalismos como los roles de género, coadyuvan a la construcción de la masculinidad y la feminidad. La tercera explora los roles de género y sus distintos niveles de subordinación en la mitología nacionalista contemporánea, particularmente, el mito del mestizaje en tanto pareja fundadora de la nación moderna. Para ejemplificar el argumento se utilizaron algunas fuentes no convencionales, tales como los calendarios populares de las primeras décadas del siglo veinte, y una narrativa sobre el mito del mestizaje escrito por una escritora española radicada en México en 1884.

Did I Make the Right Career Choice?

Special Section: The Value and Future of Petroleum Engineering JPT asked several active young professionals about their career path thus far and what they liked about petroleum engineering. Here are some of their answers. Feeling Lucky Carter Clemens, BP I lucked into the petroleum industry; I did not know much about it before choosing it as a major at the University of Texas. It has allowed me to live and travel to distant countries I never thought I would visit—whether it is Abu Dhabi, Port of Spain, Cairo, or Aberdeen, the oil industry has an incredible reach to some interesting locations. It has also enabled me to pursue engineering while spending a lot of my time outside instead of in front of a computer screen. When I was riding around with well operators in Wyoming and Colorado, I thought of how lucky I was to not be in a cubicle. There is something special about being on a well-site surrounded by snow in Wyoming or watching a sunrise from a rig in the middle of the ocean—you can’t get that with most industries. Personal Satisfaction Bruno S. Rivas, Mexico National Hydrocarbons Commission Petroleum engineering is more than get-ting oil out of the ground; it means delivering the energy that the world needs to fight poverty, increase human wellness, and accelerate growth in a sustainable way. The oil and gas industry has given me the opportunity to interact with professionals from all over the world, to exchange different experiences, to solve problems in a responsible and efficient manner, and to inspire future generations. With no doubt, if I had to decide again what to study, my choice would be oil and gas; it is certainly not an easy path, but realizing that I’m generating a positive impact on others’ lives is a personal satisfaction. Let’s Talk Climate Change Angela Dang Atkinson, Encana Corp. I love saying, “I’m a petroleum engineer and I believe in anthropogenic climate change.” It catches people off guard and begins a nuanced conversation about energy. It is an opportunity for me to talk about the importance of incremental change and that there is no silver bullet in solving the world’s energy challenges. As Harvard economics professor Ed Glaeser states, “Once we start thinking that there’s a silver bullet…we lose the fact that we need to be working day by day, over decades, to effect change.” We, the oil industry, are among those working day by day to effect change—whether we are increasing the use of recycled fracture water or finding creative ways to reduce emissions, these are the types of incremental gains on the way to better energy solutions. This nuanced conversation should not primarily exist in 150-character tidbits online. It is up to us to have that conversation in a grassroots manner, face to face, with our community.

Review: Routes of Compromise: Building Roads and Shaping the Nation in Mexico, 1917–1952 by Michael K. Bess

Review: Routes of Compromise: Building Roads and Shaping the Nation in Mexico, 1917–1952 by Michael K. Bess

SPECIES: A platform for the exploration of ecological data.

The modeling of ecological data that include both abiotic and biotic factors is fundamental to our understanding of ecosystems. Repositories of biodiversity data, such as GBIF, iDigBio, Atlas of Living Australia, and SNIB (Mexico's National System of Biodiversity Information), contain a great deal of information that can lead to knowledge discovery about ecosystems. However, there is a lack of tools with which to efficiently extract such knowledge. In this paper, we present SPECIES, an open, web‐based platform designed to extract implicit information contained in large scale sets of ecological data. SPECIES is based on a tested methodology, wherein the correlations of variables of arbitrary type and spatial resolution, both biotic and abiotic, discrete and continuous, may be explored from both niche and network perspectives. In distinction to other modeling systems, SPECIES is a full stack exploratory tool that integrates the three basic components: data (which is incrementally growing), a statistical modeling and analysis engine, and an interactive visualization front end. Combined, these components provide a powerful tool that may guide ecologists toward new insights. SPECIES is optimized to support fast hypothesis prototyping and testing, analyzing thousands of biotic and abiotic variables, and presenting descriptive results to the user at different levels of detail. SPECIES is an open‐access platform available online (http://species.conabio.gob.mx), that is, powerful, flexible, and easy to use. It allows for the exploration and incorporation of ecological data and its subsequent integration into predictive models for both potential ecological niche and geographic distribution. It also provides an ecosystemic, network‐based analysis that may guide the researcher in identifying relations between different biota, such as the relation between disease vectors and potential disease hosts.

Classification and Subject Indexing Issues at a Mexican Library Specializing in Law Research

Subject indexing and classification of law resources is a complex issue due to several factors: specialized meanings of legal terms, meanings across different branches of law, terms in legal systems from diverse countries, and terms in different languages. These issues led to the development of a classification and subject indexing system which will help answer the major challenges of indexing and classifying law resources in the Research Institute Library at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Adopting its own classification required interdisciplinary work between law and information organization specialists, constant updating by legal specialists and others beyond the Legal Research Institute; and the sharing of this classification system with other institutions. Now, this classification system is used by important institutions that specialize in law, such as the network of Libraries of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation of Mexico. The purpose of this article is to show why and how this law classification and subject system was developed and is continuously being updated by libarians and law scholars in order for it to meet their specific needs.

Integrating VSM and Network Analysis for Tourism Strategies – Case: Mexico and the Chinese Outbound Market

With China leading since 2012 global outbound travel, this paper introduces a Systemic Model for Chinese Outbound Market exemplifying with Mexico’s Case study, the seventh most visited country worldwide. Seeking to contribute increasing the applications of VSM, deepening its understanding and relevance stating proper functions integration to face Chinese Outbound Market leadership occurred in global tourism environment. First section of the manuscript introduces research objectives and gaps as well as document sources review discussion; second section details research design; third section covers proposed model and it’s functions’ operationalization, as well as network science analysis of information collected during an academical research stay on 2016 from Mexico National Polytechnic Institute to China Sun Yat Sen University Zhuhai Campus Tourism Faculty, and the Centrality measures found to confirm model pertinence.

The Collapse of Culverts-Arch in Several Cities around the World, Technical Arguments for Their Maintenance and a Legal Proposal for Prohibiting Their Construction in Mexico

Construction underground pipes and underground culvertsarch (UCA) in order to transport the flow natural rivers and city’s sewage at the same time, is a practice that should be prohibited by the Mexico National Water Law (NWL). When UCA collapse, it causes severe damage to surrounding infrastructure, public and private property, and puts citizens’ lives at risk. This work presents some examples of UCA collapse incidents in several cities around the world, emphasizes how important preventive maintenance of these structures is, highlights the need to classify risk areas, and stresses the need to formulate norms and civil defense plans as article 83 of the NWL suggests. We also propose an addition to Fraction I, article 100 of the National Water Law, to protect the animal and plant life of its banks and safety of their natural runoff.

The history and impact of digitization and digital data mobilization on biodiversity research.

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen a rapid rise in the mobilization of digital biodiversity data. This has thrust natural history museums into the forefront of biodiversity research, underscoring their central role in the modern scientific enterprise. The advent of mobilization initiatives such as the United States National Science Foundation's Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC), Australia's Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), Mexico's National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (CONABIO), Brazil's Centro de Referência em Informação (CRIA) and China's National Specimen Information Infrastructure (NSII) has led to a rapid rise in data aggregators and an exponential increase in digital data for scientific research and arguably provide the best evidence of where species live. The international Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) now serves about 131 million museum specimen records, and Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) in the USA has amassed more than 115 million. These resources expose collections to a wider audience of researchers, provide the best biodiversity data in the modern era outside of nature itself and ensure the primacy of specimen-based research. Here, we provide a brief history of worldwide data mobilization, their impact on biodiversity research, challenges for ensuring data quality, their contribution to scientific publications and evidence of the rising profiles of natural history collections.This article is part of the theme issue 'Biological collections for understanding biodiversity in the Anthropocene'.

Expected changes in obesity after reformulation to reduce added sugars in beverages: A modeling study.

BackgroundSeveral strategies have been proposed to reduce the intake of added sugars in the population. In Mexico, a 10% sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) tax was implemented in 2014, and the implementation of other nutritional policies, such as product reformulation to reduce added sugars, is under discussion. WHO recommends that all individuals consume less than 10% of their total energy intake (TEI) from added sugars. We propose gradually reducing added sugars in SSBs to achieve an average 10% consumption of added sugars in the Mexican population over 10 years and to estimate the expected impact of reformulation in adult body weight and obesity.Methods and findingsBaseline consumption for added sugars and SSBs, sex, age, socioeconomic status (SES), height, and weight for Mexican adults were obtained from the 2012 Mexico National Health and Nutrition Survey (ENSANUT). On average, 12.6% of the TEI was contributed by added sugars; we defined a 50% reduction in added sugars in SSBs over 10 years as a reformulation target. Using a dynamic weight change model, sugar reductions were translated into individual expected changes in body weight assuming a 43% caloric compensation and a 2-year lag for the full effect of reformulation to occur. Results were stratified by sex, age, and SES. Twelve years after reformulation, the TEI from added sugars is expected to decrease to 10%, assuming no compensation from added sugars; 44% of the population would still be above WHO recommendations, requiring further sugar reductions to food. Body weight could be reduced by 1.3 kg (95% CI −1.4 to −1.2) in the adult population, and obesity could decrease 3.9 percentage points (pp; −12.5% relative to baseline). Our sensitivity analyses suggest that the impact of the intervention could vary from 0.12 kg after 6 months to 1.52 kg in the long term.ConclusionsReformulation to reduce added sugars in SSBs could produce large reductions in sugar consumption and obesity in the Mexican adult population. This study is limited by the use of a single dietary recall and by data collected in all seasons except summer; still, these limitations should lead to conservative estimates of the reformulation effect. Reformulation success could depend on government enforcement and industry and consumer response, for which further research and evidence are needed.

Routes of Compromise: Building Roads and Shaping the Nation in Mexico, 1917–1952. By Michael K. Bess. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Pp. xiv, 206. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $60.00 paper.

Routes of Compromise: Building Roads and Shaping the Nation in Mexico, 1917–1952. By Michael K. Bess. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Pp. xiv, 206. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $60.00 paper.

First assessment of the conservation status of the jaguarPanthera oncain the Sierra Madre de Chiapas, Mexico

AbstractAlthough the Near Threatened jaguarPanthera oncaranges from the south-west USA to central Argentina, populations outside Amazonia are generally small and isolated. One such area, the Sierra Madre de Chiapas in the state of Chiapas, Mexico, is potentially an important area for jaguar conservation but information on the species in this region is limited and its conservation status is unknown. In this study we documented the occurrence and abundance of jaguars in the Sierra Madre de Chiapas complex. We compiled all available records of the species within the region and conducted a camera-trap survey during August 2015–December 2016. Interviews were conducted to determine the perception of the jaguar by cattle owners and to obtain information on any livestock predation. We found that jaguars still occur throughout the Sierra Madre de Chiapas landscape, including the plains on the Pacific Coast of Chiapas, but its abundance in the region is low. On the basis of our findings we have incorporated the Sierra Madre de Chiapas in Mexico's National Jaguar Conservation Strategy, and recommend that international organizations include this area in their priorities for jaguar conservation. To improve coexistence between jaguars and the communities of the Sierra Madre de Chiapas, strategies need to be developed, in collaboration with the local communities, to improve livestock practices for reduction of predation by jaguars, to strengthen government conservation policies and to implement educational and communication programmes about the importance of this species in the region.