Me canso ganso, “I’ll get tired, goose,” is a playful rhyming way to say that something will certainly be done. According to México Desconocido, the comic actor Tin Tan popularized it in the film Niño perdido (1947).
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador used it for a promise: “me canso ganso, estará funcionando el Nuevo Aeropuerto Internacional de México,” the new international airport of Mexico will be operating.
On the night of July 6, 1988, the vote count of Mexico’s presidential election stopped. Manuel Bartlett Díaz, the official in charge of supervising the election, announced that the system had failed. The night entered Mexican memory as se cayó el sistema, “the system fell.”
In 2023, Bartlett said in an interview with the journalist Ciro Gómez Leyva: “Yo no dije que se cayó el sistema” (I did not say that the system fell). He called it a phrase that was used “to put the result of the electoral fraud on me.”
Te doy mi palabra, “I give you my word.”
Palabra de honor, “word of honor.”
Lo prometido es deuda, “what is promised is a debt.”
Del dicho al hecho hay mucho trecho, “from saying to doing is a long way.” The Ministry of Public Education uses the saying as the title of a school lesson on sayings.
On September 1, 1982, President José López Portillo gave his last annual report to Congress. In it he nationalized the banks and imposed exchange controls. He described his share of the blame this way: “Soy responsable del timón; pero no de la tormenta” (I am responsible for the helm, but not for the storm).
In 2020, INEGI’s National Housing Survey counted 5.8 million rented homes in Mexico, 16.4 percent of all private inhabited homes. According to a report on the survey by the legal publication IDConline, only 54 percent of rented homes had a current lease contract.
On the night of May 3, 2021, an elevated section of Line 12 of the Mexico City Metro collapsed. Twenty-six people died. The Norwegian firm DNV analyzed the collapse and found four failures: in the design, in independent certification and supervision, in the installation of bolts, and in maintenance and inspection.
The report pointed to responsibility in three city administrations, those of Marcelo Ebrard, Miguel Ángel Mancera and Claudia Sheinbaum. Sheinbaum, then head of the city government, rejected DNV’s third report as “tendencioso y falso” (biased and false). In October 2021, prosecutors announced homicide charges against ten former officials, among them the head of the original construction project.
In an article in the Revista Mexicana de Sociología, the sociologist Héctor Castillo Berthier described the traders of La Merced, the Mexico City market that preceded the Central de Abasto. The traders followed customary norms rather than formal law. They kept “un riguroso código de honor,” a strict code of honor, and their deals were not made in writing, with notes and receipts.
The large wholesalers extended credit to the smaller traders, and the credit bound the smaller traders to them.
Mexican football fans speak of la maldición del quinto partido, “the curse of the fifth match.” Mexico was eliminated in the round of 16 at seven World Cups in a row, from 1994 to 2018. The fifth match, the quarterfinal, never came. In 2022, Mexico did not get past the group stage.
In 2026, the expanded tournament added a round of 32. Mexico beat Ecuador 2-0 at the Estadio Azteca and so played a fifth match. The press debated whether the curse had really been broken, since Mexico had still not passed the round of 16. In that fifth match, the round of 16, Mexico lost 3-2 to England.
In March 2002, Mexico hosted a United Nations summit on financing for development in Monterrey. Before it, President Vicente Fox telephoned Fidel Castro. He invited the Cuban leader to lunch and asked him to leave after his speech, “para que no me compliques el viernes,” so that he would not complicate Friday for Fox. The call became known by the phrase comes y te vas, “you eat and you leave.”
In April 2002, Cuba broadcast the recording. The Mexican government answered that Fox “en ningún momento le pidió a su contraparte que no asistiera a la Cumbre de Monterrey,” at no time asked his counterpart not to attend the summit. In 2016, Fox called the arrangement “una propuesta mía,” a proposal of his own.
On June 29, 2014, Mexico played the Netherlands in the round of 16 of the World Cup in Brazil. In the 94th minute, Klaas-Jan Huntelaar scored a penalty after a play between Rafael Márquez and Arjen Robben. The Netherlands won 2-1. Thousands of Mexican fans answered with the hashtag #NoEraPenal, “it was not a penalty.”
Robben later said: “Es deporte, es futbol, y creo que era penalti” (It is sport, it is football, and I think it was a penalty). In 2020, Márquez said in an interview: “Yo acepto el error porque al final fue penal porque lo marcaron” (I accept the mistake, because in the end it was a penalty, because they called it).