The Future is ... where?

This is Daniel Corres, 19, of Oaxaca, who took a year off between high school (la preparatoria in Mexico) and college to run his own business designing and managing paginas web (web pages, for those of you who totally flunked Spanish.) Check out his work.
Like his computer-whiz counterparts in the United States, he is self-taught, save for one six-month course. The only difference is that while there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of American teenagers working on the Internet, he’s still a bit of a rarity in Mexico. He’s the only one of his friends who is into the Internet. But he says that his changing.
According to statistics, Danny is right. Internet users in Mexico, a country of about 100 million people, jumped from under 3 million in 2000 to 17 million last year. DSL subscriptions increased 50 percent in the first half of 2005, according to First Monday, a peer-reviewed journal on the Internet. While home computer users represent less than half of all users in Mexico, there are Internet cafes every few blocks and even in the smallest pueblos.
This is the scene (left) on the road into Tlacolula, a town of about 13,000 that is 19 miles east of Oaxaca. Once you get into town, you find “Cyber’s Café’s,’’ a name only a wordsmith from Silicon Valley could love.
As for Danny, he’s will enter Tecnológico de Monterrey in the fall and is deciding whether to study tecnología informacíon, IT in English, or business or politics. He has lots of interests and doesn’t want to be a web master the rest of his life. He said the market for IT people here is growing as more people have access to the Internet. When I told him there have always been plenty of IT jobs in the United States, even during the tech slump, he was unfazed.
“Isn’t the United States suffering a decline right now?’’ he asked. “The future is in China.’’