Editorial

Inequality lies at the core of society. It is not just another phenomenon, but the tectonic plate that holds and articulates all other social problems: it aggravates poverty, deepens marginalization, and feeds the expansion of each time more complex violences. It’s deepest effect is the erosion of democratic life, since inequality translates into deprivations that lead to the expulsion of ever wider population sectors from what allows to fully exercise citizenship; among other factors: access to high quality health services, to decent housing and environments with guaranteed public services, and to an effective, impartial, and expedite justice; in short, to a complete and integral exercise of human rights.

Inequality blocks the fulfillment of human rights as stated in Article 1 of the Constitution of the United Mexican States. It also jeopardizes the possibility of belonging to a political community that protects every person without distinctions, and at the same time allows the existence of representations of others as different and even as strangers. Thus, reality stops being assumed as a shared collective project.

As Dr. Rolando Cordera has described it, inequality is perennial in Mexico’s social reality as in huge parts of the world. Because of this it is no exaggeration to say that inequality works as a matrix articulating social relations, both in the public and in the private spheres, as well as in the linkages between people and institutions.

Inequality’s complexity demands to address it from a wider perspective than the prevalent one today, which stills thinks it is a problem anchored to an economic logic (income or wealth). From this perspective, inequality is a result of failures in the markets’ operation: price, salaries, or productivity distortions. Here an opposing stance is taken, one that finds that unregulated markets tend to deliberately concentrate more and more wealth, generating deep disparities in income distribution, but—even more important—in power distribution, as has been pointed out by OXFAM, on the permanence of political, historical, cultural, and symbolic arrangements that shape the borders of inclusion and exclusion in a given society.

Inequality and discrimination (its other face) are fundamentally political and historical constructions. What any given society defines as unfair and intolerable depends on a time, a place and on those in power to name them so. In Mexico, discrimination began to be assumed publicly as a structural problem as late as the 90s, mainly thanks to the ethical leadership of Gilberto Rincón Gallardo. Inequality, although always present in public debate, acquired centrality as a social problem during the first half of the 21^st century, coinciding with a renovated international discussion on its causes and effects.

Research such as Deaton’s (2003), Atkinson’s (2015), Piketty’s (2015), Saez & Zucman’s (2016), as well as studies by ECLAC (CEPAL, 2010), showed that higher inequality levels affect social cohesion and enhance vulnerability in several dimensions. In The Spirit Level, Wilkinson & Pickett (2010) showed how more un-equal societies present higher rates of violence, imprisonment, obesity, addictions, and adolescent pregnancy, among many other indicators of problems that have aggravated during the last decade. So, it was found that inequality is a phenomenon that can erode individual, communal, institutional, and democratic capacities; it is not just an income gap.

To analyze inequality, it is necessary to understand its ideological roots. Dubet (2015) warns about its deepening in neoliberal capitalism: it is not an inevitable consequence of the economic system, but the result of political decisions that have dismantled retribution and social protection mechanisms. The contemporary form of inequality is something produced and searched for: it responds to class projects pushed by governments, financial institutions, and economic elites.

This way, inequality Works as a world-idea: a set of norms, values, codes, practices, and beliefs that mark the symbolic edges of social positions. Under the neoliberal logic, inequality becomes de-politicized; social positions are credited to individual merit, type of character, or effort, erasing its structural and historical origins. The frame fosters contempt and fear of “the others”, weakening empathy and solidarity.

Pierre Bourdieu’s perspective helps us understand the subjective and relational dimensions of inequality. The habitus, created by dispositions generated by objective social conditions, guides perceptions, expectations, and practices, producing lifestyles that are characteristic of each class. Differences among groups not only relate to income, but to unequal distribution of economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capital, that allow or restrict mobility and social participation. This way, inequality acquires historical deepness while fixating itself inside subjects as limits to what we can think, as limits to the possible.

Incorporating these elements shows the complexity of inequality: it articulates economic, political, cultural, and subjective dimensions. They show also that inequality is structural, because it reproduces itself through institutions, everyday practices, and belief systems that legitimate hierarchies. As it concentrates capital, including symbolic capital, certain groups define value criteria and naturalize an order of privileges and deprivations. As stated by María Cristina Bayón (2015), it is an accumulative process where advantages and disadvantages strengthen themselves along biographic trajectories, generating persistent vulnerability cycles.

That is what the articles included in this issue of UNAM Internacional, dedicated to inequalities—to which I was kindly invited as an editor—, show. It is an ample compilation of university views, perspectives, and approaches that seek to cover inequality’s complexity, and its symbolic and material dimensions that are producing injustices in multiple stances of peoples’ lives, ever more numerous in Mexico and in the rest of the world.

Thus shows, for example, Fernando Cortés, researcher emeritus in the National System of Researchers and a member of the University Program of Development Studies (PUED), who addresses income inequality to demonstrate how its implications go far beyond the capacity of paying for basic resources, and penetrate the social, environmental, and economic structure. From a similar wide view, María Cristina Bayón, researcher of the Institute of Social Research evaluates its impact in the chaotic urban growth that has characterized cities in the las decades. healthcare Franco Martín del Campo, researcher of the Institute of Legal Research and a teacher in the Faculty of Law, analyzes inequalities in access to justice with a gender and childhood perspective, while Josefina Franzoni, founder and director of the Social Research Consulting Agency, A. C., and María Eugenia Prieto, coordinator of Communication and Public Policies at the Asociación Unidos Pro-Transplante de Médula Ósea (an organization that advocates for decent cancer treatments) address differences in health-care of chronical and degenerative diseases, where inequality not only conditions quality of attention, but the very probability of falling ill and dying.

Other texts go deep inside rights, privileges, and exclusions generated by inequality, as shown by Alexandra Haas, executive director at Oxfam Mexico, or address more painful and persistent faces of inequality, as injustices faced by indigenous peoples, as reviewed by Carolina Sáncez García, director of the University Program of Studies on Cultural Diversity and Interculturality (PUIC).

Amneris Chaparro, Coordinator of the Center of Research and Studies on Gender, adds her feminist perspective to this view, through problematizing gender inequalities in the power relations that are still keeping asymmetrical positions between men and women. These ideas dialogue with those by Siobhan Guerrero McManus, researcher at the Center of Interdisciplinary Research in Sciences and Humanities (CEIICH), interviewed in this issue about structural inequalities that the diverse sex-gender populations face. In the same spirit we can count the invitation made by María Elena García, Mariana Gardella, Mayra Huerta, Teresa Rodríguez, and Valeria Sonna, to get out of the essentially masculine canon in the teaching of philosophy through the memories of the COIL project “Challenges of studying women and the feminine in philosophical texts from Antiquity”, held at the Institute of Philosophical Research in collaboration with other HEIs from Mexico and Argentina.

This issue includes international experiences that allow us to compare and deepen our understanding of inequality between countries: those of Iliana Yaschine (a researcher at the PUED), and Ana Lorena Valle (from the University Program of City Studies, PUEC). The former tells about building learning, and challenges faced during a research stay in Argentina; the later shares her own experience as a Nicaraguan refugee in Mexico, illustrating how inequality can become unsustainable and how it even propitiates the implantation of authoritarian regimes. They both coincide in urging academy to generate transforming actions from its mandate to produce critical knowledge.

Students’ voices are present too. Luis Fernando Flores Diosdado, studying abroad at the University of Alicante, reminds about why UNAM is still the most important cultural, educational, and social project in our country, and a place not only for mobility, but for social integration that allows thousands of young people to give to their community and to build a sense of belonging to the university. Unluckily, Mexican young people that reach this privilege are still a minority.

Other Collaborations shed light on less-explored dimensions of inequality. Tatyana Kleyn, teacher at New York City College, describes recent experiences of children and youngsters in mobility, trans-border students, pointing at the need for governments to acknowledge and address the negative impacts of forced mobility in their lives; Elizabeth Randolph, director of the Medical Spanish course at Northwestern University, reflects on how the health system, instead of behaving as a social equalizer, reproduces deep disparities affecting people that do not speak fluent English while receiving health care in the United States.

On his side, Jesús Villaseca Chávez, director of the Pohualizcalli School of Community Film and Photography, exposes the painful impacts of inequality among disabled people, while Susana Xóchitl Bárcena and Ireri Lizbeth López show how the full enjoyment of their sexual and reproductive rights is still being jeopardized by inequality. Edgar Ruiz, director of the Health at Work Research Unit of the Mexican Social Security Institute, and Bruno Ali, a specialist in infectious diseases at the Institute of Social Security at the Service of the State Workers (ISSSTE), show how artificial intelligence may lead to a technological gab and biases that can become exclusion practices in the health services.

The article by Maritza Caicedo, researcher at the IIS, examines how U. S. labor market is still incorporating Mexican labor force in an unequal way, while numbers keep on growing under a dynamic of expulsion and forced return in the context of Donald Trump’s policy of persecution and fear. Erika Carcaño, teacher at the University of Guanajuato, and David Barkin, distinguished professor at the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Xochimilco, analyze communities that have established resistance processes against social inequality and its impacts in regions where they are severe as the Cherán municipality in Michoacán and the Sierra Norte de Puebla region.

Collaborations by Carlos Adrián Vargas (researcher at University of Granada), Emiliano Hersch (researcher at the Public Health National Institute, INSP), Rodrigo Aguayo (teacher at the Faculty of Medicine), and Horacio Rojas (director of Environmental Health in the Research Center on Population Health of the INSP), show how pre-existent vulnerabilities produced by inequalities, deepen in the face of environmental deterioration. The ecological crisis reveals asymmetric distribution of damages and protections especially in the health realm.

Margarita Valdovinos, researcher at the Institute of Philological Research, underlines how inequality crosses the knowledge production processes too. Academic trajectories of women are still marked with institutional barriers that restrict their development and their visibility, so it is necessary to strengthen networks and mentorship strategies to oppose those barriers and advance towards more equative scientific communities.

The artistic expression is added to all these perspectives by Ximena Gómez González Cosío in the “Enfoque” section, where she reads graffiti as a critical mirror of consumerism, war, and inequalities, making a denunciation of these evils from a dense political and poetic stance which is both playful and lucid.

The interviews to Rolando Cordera, professor emeritus in the Faculty of Economy; Eduardo Vázquez Martín, executive coordinator of the Mandate of the Ancient College of San Ildefonso, and Enrique Provencio, coordinator of the PUED, widen the horizons of the whole issue, inviting us to think inequality as a structural phenomenon that demands to re-evaluate our course of development, and at the same time, to push for a significative cultural transformation that allow us to permeate a notion of equality articulated in social justice as a foundation of civilization for the 21^st century.

As a whole, this issue of UNAM Internacional shows that inequality is a fabric that crosses bodies, territories, institutions, and biographies. Reading these texts is understanding that fighting inequality demands that we recognize its multiple expressions, its historical roots, and the possibilities of transformation that our communities, our universities, and our practices of social justice still have. If we conceive it this way we will recognize that growth is not enough to overcome inequality. What we need is a social, democratic, and lawful State that is able to guarantee every person’s human rights. Understanding inequality as a phenomenon that structures the social question in the 21^st century demands us to view it as a system of relations, meanings, and institutions that organize social life, and to dedicate the strongest of efforts to build a national project with a shared horizon in view: equality in a generally dignified key.

As poet Ruperta Bautista suggests in “Last Teardrop”, a poem written in memoriam Father Marcelo Pérez Pérez (who was assassinated on October 20^th, 2024 in the Altos region of Chiapas), included in this issue, along with English and Spanish translations of the Tsotsil original, inequality is fertile ground for the germination of the “seed of death”, that nourishes itself on deprivations and exclusions that break the social fabric. It is in this ground where violences as we see them today grow and become forces that, as the poet warns, “do not know the limit of the sacred”, reminding us that inequality fractures, both material and symbolic, not only generate social distress, but also extreme forms of aggression that hurt the very foundations of collective life. 

---