Tomorrow Mexico Will Celebrate Its Children. The Other 364 Days Are a Different Conversation.

Tomorrow is April 30. The Zócalo will fill up. There will be free concerts, and throughout the city different activities will take place.

Mexico has over 38 million children under 14. Roughly a third of them live in poverty. Not relative poverty. The kind where you skip meals. The kind where school exists on paper and not always in practice. The kind that has nothing to do with whether there is a free concert at the Zócalo tomorrow.

This is not an attack on the holiday. Día del Niño is one of the most embedded traditions in the country, established in 1924, the same year José Vasconcelos was building schools and the same year the government decided that November 20 was too important for the Revolution to share with children. So April 30 was invented. Which tells you something, maybe, about the order of priorities. But that's a different topic.

What's worth noticing before tomorrow's celebration is something more specific. Over 70% of Mexican children under 12 already have access to social media. A space with no filters, and although coders and programmers have done their best to block certain types of content, sometimes the truth is impossible to hide. Those children will be celebrated with clowns and concerts, while elsewhere there is content no one is moderating and a digital environment that no government event counteracts for more than a few hours.

Mexico is good at this. At absorbing contradiction and making it feel like culture. At turning a structural condition into an aesthetic moment. It's a skill the country has refined over centuries, and it would be dishonest not to acknowledge that. But it is also worth asking what gets obscured in the process.

A celebration is not a policy. A tradition is not a system. A free book with grammar mistakes and misleading information does not close the gap between a child who attends a private school and one who attends a half-functioning public school.

None of that is a reason not to celebrate. It's a reason to hold both things at once. The piñata and the question underneath it. The joy, which is real, and the condition that surrounds it, which is also real.