X

Narrative by Chris Arning, Posted March 5, 2025

Proposed Mexico City airport, visualisation by Foster Associates (2015)

The CASE FILE series — to which SEMIOVOX has invited our semiotician colleagues from around the world to contribute — shares memorable case studies via story telling.

In October 2012, I was approached by a long-standing contact of mine, Alfredo Troncoso at de la Riva, one of Mexico’s top research agencies. I was still buzzing in the afterglow of the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony (bad logo, great ceremony), so it was exciting to learn that Alfredo’s team had been tasked with a semiotic analysis intended to surface global emergent codes of ‘Mexico-ness.’ President Enrique Peña Nieto, a young and charismatic reformist, had just been elected; his administration had hired de la Riva to tell a new story (to Mexicans and the rest of the world) about Mexico. They were looking for a visionary way to express Mexico-ness, Alfredo explained, while remaining rooted in truth.

Nieto’s inaugural speech was on December 1st, so we needed to get our skates on! My agency, Creative Semiotics, put together a team of semiotic analysts from across the key global markets identified by the client. The brief was to analyse a series of ‘Mexico’ images that were prototypical in each market, and also to compare Mexico’s ‘cultural output’ as compared with other Latin American nations like Brazil.

As the results started to come in, I was fascinated to see the rich tangle of meanings associated with Mexico from geographically and culturally enmeshed markets such as the USA and Spain, say, versus the relative void of meanings (beyond stereotypes) surfaced in markets like China and the UK. The client received a detailed report sketching out top associations per market and a menu of eight consolidated ‘future Mexico’ narratives, any of which we believed had potential to work as nation-branding and soft-power strategies for the Mexican government and organisations seeking to attract investment and tourism.

One of our favorite ideas emerging from the synthesis of semiotic country reports was that of ‘X.’

As the University of Toronto semiotician Marcel Danesi writes in his book X-Rated!: The Power of Mythic Symbolism in Popular Culture, many of the previous meanings of ‘X’ are still in use: “it is the variable par excellence in algebra… it is a sign of danger when put on bottles of alcohol; it is a symbol marking treasure on a pirate’s map and so on.” Today, ‘X’ is a marker of profanity, the transgressive, the unknown, the seductive, the intoxicating, and extreme sports. It is used by radio stations, hip-hop artists, pornography websites, and as a sign of the occult and the forbidden. (All of this, by the way, was before Elon Musk rebranded Twitter.) For us, ‘X’ was great for Mexico, firstly because it lies at the heart of the country’s name, but also because it is full of rich potential to be invested with more meaning.

We told the client:

‘X’ is a marker of a crossroads, and marks a destination on the map. It can mark a liminal zone between two separate zones. Mexico is situated in a liminal zone — a passage of migration from South to North, officially part of North America, tied into US economy, but a leading country in Latin America.
Playing on the X will have to be handled carefully and the transgressive meaning hidden ‘below the hood’ as it were, with the ‘X marks the spot’ the primary communication point.
Mexico is one of only two countries with the letter X in its name, and aside from some tax fraud, it’s fair to say Luxembourg is less associated than Mexico with risk-taking transgression.

As de la Riva worked with the ‘X’ concept, they found additional reasons to back this particular strategy. The letter’s phonetic relevance in the Nahautl language, for example; and its resemblance to the Aztec sun god, Sol Tonatiuh. Alfredo and his team made the following pitch: ‘X Marks the Spot… but it also marks Mexico as an unknown country to be discovered.’ This captured the imagination of President-elect Nieto and his communications team.

The ‘MeXico’ branding strategy nearly resulted in what would have been commercial semiotics’ largest-scale success story of all time. Nieto committed $13 billion to the development of a new airport, and commissioned and announced an international design competition. British firm Foster & Partner’s airport design with Mexican studio Fernando Romero Enterprises (FR-EE) were selected as the winners of an open competition in 2014. The airport’s central hub, it was proposed, would be shaped like… an X. Nieto called the project ‘a grand work, a symbol of modern Mexico.’

However, a new president was elected and the airport was canceled halfway through its construction in 2018. On hearing the news, our feelings of excited pride overnight turned into crushing disappointment. I had been thrilled that a testament to semiotic power — in which I’d played a modest role — was due to be embedded in such visible public infrastructure. I travel between the UK and Mexico frequently, and every time I fly into or out of Benito Juarez airport, I think with a pang of the ‘X’ that never was.

PS: Be sure to check out Gabriela de la Riva and Alfredo Troncoso’s book La X de México: Narrativa país para mexicanos emergentes.

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