The Jenkins Foundation and the Battle for the Soul of the PRI
During his final years, Jenkins set up a charity that introduced the US-style foundation to Mexico, bought the second-largest bank, and became a political football amid the left wing versus right-wing struggle for dominance within the ruling party. The Mary Street Jenkins Foundation echoed the noblesse oblige of the US robber barons, but it also facilitated Jenkins’s continued shaping of Puebla politics, keeping power in conservative hands. With the help of his film-industry deputy, Manuel Espinosa Yglesias, he performed the first major hostile takeover in Mexican history, buying number-two bank Bancomer. Under President López Mateos, he continued to loom large but as an ultracapitalistic symbol of how the Mexican Revolution had lost its way—and thus as a tool of politicized gringophobia. Impervious to criticism, Jenkins dedicated his remaining energy to philanthropy and a cotton plantation in Michoacán. Distanced from his daughters, he would daily visit Mary’s grave and read to her. He died in 1963.