I agree, the cooling performance is not very great in hot summer conditions. That's because in Europe it isn't as warm as in Mexico...
Packs and recirculation fans are two different things, and
afaik every airliner has the same concept (maybe 787 is different): You take bleed air, drive the packs with it, out comes cool air. Because not all air is vented outside, part of it will be reused and blown into the cabin again, after going through some filters. These blowers are called recirculation fans.
In the F100, there are two different fan groups, one for the cabin and one for the cockpit. In some cockpit versions they are called cockpit and cabin, in some 1 and 2.
Economy is a reduced cooling by the air conditioning. Has nothing to do with the recirc fans. When button is selected, you get roughly 70% of the cooling performance. In our company, we start using ECON when 60 pax or less.
hth,
Dani