This is something that never occurred to me before spending time in Mexico (where we go for a few weeks to reduce the length of winter). A very big difference between north and south of the border is in the content of “we.”
Mexico is a much more racially homogenized society than ours. It’s one of the pleasures of this place.
Sitting in the main plaza of this central Mexican town, with the exception of the very clearly distinguishable community of retired and aging snowbirds from El Norte, I see very few palefaces. Almost everybody else has the distinct look (skin color, hair, stature) of the race that’s been here from before recorded history: native American. “Indios,” or the way the pre-Columbian population is often referred to, “indigenes.”
When we “white” Americans, still a large majority, say “we”, as in “we the people”, we mean almost universally “we of European stock.” It’s a post-Columbian “we.”
When a modern Mexican says “we” it includes and is anchored in thousands of years of pre- European Indian history along, with the 500 years since Cortez.
At least so we are assured by the one Mexican we have had the opportunity to ask, our Spanish teacher.
It’s the same basic people that we’re told made it over the Bering Strait Ice Age landbridge 15,000 or more years ago and drifted south. But those who for whatever reasons came east or stayed in what came to be thought of as the “American West” (after it was the “Mexican norte” )became, those not entirely exterminated by deliberate and inadvertent genocide, an eternally isolated “they.”
Melting pot we have called ourselves, liking the democratic, statue-of-liberty sound of it, but for the most part we have held ourselves aloof, choosing not to meld with the native population.
It hasn’t been just those of African descent against whom we have maintained a de facto color line but the native population.
In the movies from which we got most of our education about cowboys and Indians “we” are always the cowboys. Even the black hats.
To our Manifest Destiny– to steamroller the continent with European culture from coast-to-coast–the native population was just a speedbump. But Mexico was destined to become, in numbers anyway, Indian.
The Spanish Europeans that dominated the area and brutally subjugated the native population also (perhaps because they didn’t bring as many women with them as did our Europeans) got intimate with them and produced the racially mixed society so evident today. For the most part contemporary Mexican population consists of “mestizo” or “la raza,” a racial mix in which it must be very difficult to draw a line.
What a huge difference in the feel of our two places. In the US we have long had “reservations” for what’s left of the native population. In Mexico the whole country is the reservation.
And what must that Mexican “we” think confronting the “we” of us tourists from the north?
I should caution that my observations are just that, what I see or think I see in our few weeks here. We are told that paler Mexicans get more than their share of political offices. In restaurants we see the occasional table of light-skinned Spanish speakers and wonder what their “we” includes. Are they visiting from Spain? Have they held the line against racial impurity all these centuries?
But it is evident from sitting in the park or walking the streets that there is a large difference in our two cultures’ relationship to the original inhabitants of the so-called New World. Maybe it never occurred to me until spending time in Mexico because it’s not taught in our schools.
Our fastidiousness in matters of racial mixing—one of the less obvious forms of racism– is a not very flattering feature of our culture.
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