Time to come clean: I’ve been in Mexico. As much as anyone actually gets away these days, given the internet apron strings.
My main motivation, of course, like that of many another gringo, was to get away from the northern winter. But I’ve been noticing that the warmer more clement weather comes with, of all things, a country attached. A country, it turns out, of 115 million people.
Mexico, the place that gives “went south” its meaning. Confronting my own fantasies of this cultural rorshach, I’ve been reading around in a fat history of the country from the library of our rental (T.R. Fehrenbach, “Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico”), cross-referencing with Wikipedia.
What I’ve found is that Mexico’s long history since the Spanish conquest, over a 100 years before Europeans established a beachhead in our part of the world, is a panorama of suffering on the part of most of the people occupying this land.
At the start of the 20th century, 80 years after independence from Spain, according to Fehrenbach, only 3% of rural families owned any land. “The quality of life was miserable and hopeless: filthy, overcrowded huts, an unbalanced, monotonous, meager diet, ever-constant death, disability and disease…..the survivors of infancy had little to look forward to but their parents’ misery…. Periodic protests were suppressed with force.”
And those were the good old days, well along in the 35- year dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, celebrated for stability and great advances.
“Yet,” according to Fehrenbach, “ the miracle was that the…Mexican peasant was not a surly dog . . . or a man choked by an eternal rage. He had a deep and sensuous grasp of life and his humanity, an acceptance of what might be, and a marvelous dignity that let him make music even on his knees. Somehow the Mexican could not quite be dehumanized.”
Better music on your knees, I guess, than no music at all.
There followed, as a corrective one might think, the revolution of Villa and Zapata. But most of a century after that, as recently as 1995, when this history was updated, “the tragedy of Mexican history” continued. “The problems [of 100 years earlier] remained unsolved.” “At least sixty percent of the people within the Republic’s borders … were still dispossessed, living more or less as the dispossessed had lived for four centuries. ..poor, remote, apathetic people who expected very little and received it.”
But straining for an upbeat conclusion: the people were “humble as only the Mexican poor could be, but people with enormous strength to endure. . . .The lesson is that people endure, and enduring, may yet hope to prevail.”
Good luck with that, was my reaction. Is there any evidence that the meek actually do inherit the earth?
In a Foreword the author addresses his likely readers north of the border: “The people of the United States like to believe that political will and good intentions can solve most human dilemmas. They often find it hard to understand Mexicans, who know better. And Mexicans are baffled by people who lack a timeless, tragic view of life. Yet both peoples have something to learn from each other.”
This a period in the U.S. in which many of what we now think of as the 99%, are experiencing considerable disillusionment about the efficacy of those “political will and good intentions” . Perhaps it is easier for us since 2008 to understand long-suffering Mexicans. Whether, as this author suggests, there is profit for us in learning a tragic view from Mexicans is a question.
Fehrenbach repeatedly praises the Mexican character as a sort of tough, all-weather carpetting which gets walked all over but somehow endures. As depicted here it seems almost a genetic endowment. This gringo wonders what that depiction contributes, as self-fulfilling prophecy, to the endurance of the tragedy of unresponsive government and dispossessed people.
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