Here in Huauchinango, a small town of about 80,000 people nestled in the mountains northeast of Mexico City, a "kiddy" birthday party is an exciting event. This particular one was being hosted by a co-worker of Raul's at Pemex (Petroleos Mexicanos), Mexico's nationalized oil company, which provides the only viable industry in town. If you have a job at Pemex you have a certain degree of security that others in the community do not‹a steady income, health insurance and the luxury of modest middle-class life.

The party, thrown more for the benefit of adults than children, was full of "petroleros," a close circle of oil industry workers interrelated by familial ties. No one gets a job at Pemex without knowing someone who works there‹an uncle, a father, a cousin or brother-in-law, and in a small town where everyone knows everyone else's history, the stakes are high in social arenas and can affect the fate of your job. This is the way business has been done at Pemex across Mexico for more than 60 years. In the current Enron-clouded atmosphere of energy industry corruption, the Mexican government is investigating the company for the first time in its long history. This, however, is not all about large-scale corporate intrigue. Pemex in small towns like Huauchinango is embroiled in the local culture, and corruption can assume the benign face of a weekend social event.

Perhaps it's for this reason that the parties are so elaborate. There are weeks of preparation beforehand; mothers and daughters make complicated decorations and party favors out of felt and plastic, and cook endlessly. Erica and Raul were our very first friends in town. Three other women and I went to Huauchinango in August 2001 to teach English at the local private college, La Universidad de la Sierra. We met Erica on a bus in town. She is 21 and married with two babies. Her 35 year-old husband, Raul, has lived in Huauchinango all his life, unlike Erica, who has no family in town. At Pemex, Raul works only on contract, a position with a little less stature, and repairs the pipelines that funnel the oil gushing from the mineral-rich ground in nearby Poza Rica out to the rest of the country. This one-year-old's birthday party was about maintaining appearances. A special hall was rented for the occasion and all the guests were in their Sunday best. Plate after plate of food was served‹tamales, tacos, gorditas, homemade posole, chicharones and mountains of fresh corn tortillas. We all drank what seemed to be an endless supply of Coronitas with lime and were offered shots of expensive tequila. After hours of this, through a tipsy food haze, we realized that the political campaign had arrived. All heads turned as Jesus Segreste, a candidate for municipal president, came in, followed by an entourage of men and a photographer. He ceremoniously made his way around to every table, shaking hands with not one hand but two; a protective clasp and moment of pointed eye contact that inspired a feeling of sincerity. Photos were snapped and the politicians took their seats as honored guests at the party. This is the PRI, the Partido Revolucionario Institutional, that only 18 months ago lost the presidency after 71 years of consecutive rule. Vicente Fox and the Partido de Accion Nacional, or PAN, won the 2000 election on a platform of change. He promised sweeping reforms of a corrupt political system that had been entrenched after decades of PRI reign. Now, more than a year later, in the wake of waning popularity, Fox announced his landmark political decision to begin investigating past abuses of the PRI.

In early January, the Mexican comptroller general, Fransisco Barrio Terrazas, confirmed that the government was looking into allegations that Pemex and the most powerful leaders of the oil workers' union, had misappropriated more than $100 million in union money to fund the failed presidential campaign of the PRI candidate Francisco Labastida. Although the announcement is significant, because these are the most serious accusations made by the Fox government so far, it comes as no surprise to most Mexicans who know that the PRI and Pemex have for a long time been intimately connected. First elected in 1929, the party was still in power on March 18, 1938 when President Lazaro Cardenas nationalized all of the foreign-owned oil companies to form one conglomerate controlled by the Mexican state: Pemex. There was a moment of victory for the values championed by the revolution‹Mexican control of Mexican resources, an ideal that still inspires great national pride. This sentiment was codified in the post-revolutionary Constitution of 1917, which declared that all the mineral-rich under-soil in the country belongs to the state. Part of Raul's job is evicting people from their land when subterranean oil deposits are found and automatically appropriated by the government.

Fox, who was the CEO of Coca-Cola Corporation before becoming president, has taken tentative steps toward some highly controversial plans for privatization. His reasoning may be valid, because although Pemex is the world's largest oil company in terms of employees, it ranks fourth in production and desperately needs to modernize. For decades, the government's budget has been financed largely by oil revenues, and corruption has been rife for most of that time.

PAN's victory proved that people were indeed desperate for a change, but despite the mainstream coverage of his campaign in the American media, not everyone in the country voted for Fox. Erica chides Raul for voting for the PRI, which he grumblingly tries to deny under his breath. But it's not hard to imagine his position‹a dispensable worker anxious to keep his job to support his growing family, and, for the most part, working at Pemex means supporting the PRI. This was proven recently by a whistle-blowing oil worker in Tabasco State who accused the management of improperly pressuring the employees to donate to, and campaign for, the party. Raul knows that in Huauchinango, not having a job at Pemex essentially means not having a job at all, so when the birthday guests gave three cheers to Segreste, we all clapped along.

Despite the widespread promises of change, life continues in much the same way it has for years in Huauchinango. Just because the PRI no longer holds the reins of government does not necessarily mean reform has arrived in semi-rural Mexico. Here, where one-year-old birthday parties are political rallies and keeping your job means declaring your party allegiances, transformation of the political culture is especially difficult. With the announcement of this new investigation, Fox has taken symbolic steps toward examining the mistakes that were made by his predecessors, but what are the prospects for the future? Certainly, "hay trabajo"‹there is much work to be done.