It certainly took me a long time to get around to this. A statement which is filled with ambiguity, of course, but is precisely the note I wish to hit as I begin.
It’s been more than a week since I returned from a trip to Mexico. It is hard to encapsulate what this trip meant for me, a middle-aged man who is the son of Mexican immigrants but who hasn’t been back to the country in more than thirty years. I was born in Mexico but had no memories of the country, having arrived when I was a small child. We lived in a Mexican barrio in California, and as with many such ethnic conclaves, our views of our parent’s country was suffused with a dense weave of nostalgia and sweet sadness, something that I liken at times like an intoxicating cotton candy that sustained my parents throughout their early years. It wasn’t my country, of course, for we grew up here, and all our memories were tied in with the programs and the friends and the patterns of consumption we learned here, but Mexico was a salve that was offered up to us to console spiritual cravings that only my parents had. We were always a little more diffident.
I tell myself over and over that one has to leave behind the temptation to reduce an experience to a telling word or phrase. We always knew that Mexico was an “other”, a country that was seen with suspicion if not outright disdain by many of our Anglo peers, even the more earnest sort who would ordinarily liked to think of themselves as quite tolerant. We were not prepared for school, to begin with, for we arrived chattering in Spanish, with little self-confidence or any inclination to join with our peers. At times, I remember the ridicule that was directed at us, and the taunt that we should go back to TJ (Tijuana), that our neighborhoods resembled TJ, and that if we didn’t watch out, the green IRS immigration vans would come to rround us up and take us back to where we belonged, TJ. It got to the point that we quickly internalized a sense of shame, and we sought for ways to disassociate ourselves from Mexico and our heritage, something that our parents found bewildering and disturbing, prompting them to lecture us that we needed to spend some time back in the old country, for we were in danger of forgetting what we were. We had little idea of what we were missing out on, of course, and the nostalgia that our parents expressed didn’t seem to convince us, especially not me, who dreamed with Tom and Jane and the other characters in our early readers, who lived in a much more settled and orderly world, and not in the working class barrios where we had to go from time to time to the local pantry to ask for food donations to make it through the week.
What did Mexico represent for us? I am aware that, at different times and for different generations, it represented something different. Many times, for those generations who are thoroughly assimilated to the American way of life, they may have the luxury of idealizing a country and a culture and constructing what we may view as a romanticized notion of a world that seems much more cohesive than we could have imagined. It is safe to idealize, because no one by now will question you about your ultimate identification now that you’ve lost your accent and for all intents and purposes have divested yourself of the outlook that characterized our wary, suspicious, timorous immigrant parents. But at times, when things got tough in this country, when you were still struggling to escape the violence and the culture of self-doubt and the mocking chants we immigrant kids internalized and directed against ourselves, maybe Mexico could come to seem not so much a curse but a proud statement of suffering. Like the tattoos we saw on so many young men, portraying crucified figures or demonic grinning skulls or the eternal suffering matriarch, the Virgin, an emblem that sanctified the poor suffering peasant Juan Diego, and with whom so many Chicanos seemed to identify, as they did as well with other martyrs, especially Emiliano Zapata. There has always been a symbolism associated with Chicano culture, and it is rooted in ideas of suffering and resistance, to a tragic outlook that is so much at odds with the American notion of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”, and which may be rooted as much on deep psychological traumas that characterize Mexican identity as on the experience of working class life.
How to sum up a view of Mexico that has evolved, and that in many ways has come to mean different things for different generations? I would have to say that Mexico lends itself to romanticized notions that conform to the emotional needs of those who use it as a mirror upon which to project their own desires and needs. We grew up with the notion of a “barbarous” Mexico, a violent place filled with injustice and revolutionary fervor, with an authoritarian class that repressed the needs of the poor and Indian majorities as, as with the provocative title of John Kenneth Turner’s famous book, was apt for indictment. (His book incorporated a direct criticism of the Díaz regime.) Or maybe we could move to a more memorable formulation, the one that seemed to assert that Mexico wasn’t as cohesive as one believed, that there were many psychological layers as well as socioeconomic profiles coexisting uneasily, the notion of the “Many Mexicos”, this being the title of another famous work, the history written by Lesly Byrd Simpson. Or, in another formulation that was published in the early 80s, we had the notion of the “Distant Neighbors”, a title that was memorable not only for being purged of any sentimentalizing notions that had characterized early works, but because it chose to highlight what was seemingly a contradictory juxtaposition, a dynamic that asserted that the operative dynamic of fear and suspicion was operative from the other side as well. Mexico was just as suspicious and fearful of the influence of the United States as this country was of Mexico’s influence.
This was not to be my grand re-encounter with Mexico, however. I have been back several times, but usually, for short and frustrating visits that did little to reconnect me with my roots. The journeys, especially as a child, were uncomfortable ones, short stays in which we were forced to ride on buses and look out on bleak and utterly dry desert landscapes, on fragile houses on the roads and what I remember were the constant importunings of children and adults who seemed to beg us to buy something, buy some bread, buy some tortas, buy some necklaces, buy something. We would burn up two days and nights driving down weaving roads to Nayarit and Jalisco, and it was a surprise to me to see how nervous my parents would become each time we hit an official border crossing, anyplace where government employees or, God forbid, policemen were to be found, and where the shakedown was to be applied to those Mexican migrants who were trekking back on their annual visits to see their family members. My parents would scoff in disgust at these officials, and the way our few items were scrutinized by these figures, who could be appeased only with an exchange of money, for otherwise, we ran the risk of forfeiting our humble belongings and gifts. I will never forget seeing how one Mexican migrant couple, when faced with a fine or some kind of tax that was demanded of them because they were carrying with them a small black and white television set, chose to drop in in disgust in front of the official, the glass shattering noisily as they raged at how things hadn’t changed. What could we expect if sweet nostalgic view of Mexico that was cultivated so persistently by our parents in the United States crashed in front of us? Had they been leaving out this other part for so long, the part we had dreaded because it had been intimated in all that we heard about the country from the outside?
Well, I’m no longer a child. This is not a re-enactment of a journey undertaken as a child, journeys that were not only bewildering but were frequently accompanied by a tone of crisis, as happened to so many Mexican-American children who remember sudden journeys to Mexico that were undertaken to bury a family member. There was not grief involved this time, no sense of fulfilling a family obligation, no sense that this was the last time that we would see someone, and we had best take advantage of it and be on our best behavior, cabrones! No, this was to be a different kind of journey, even if the sense of unease was still there. It was a personal and spiritual journey, to a region of the country where no family members yet lived, but it was also a way to mark a milestone. It was the sense of learning to traverse a metaphoric landscape, to catch a glimpse of where I was at this point, as a middle-aged man, having managed somehow to survive the perilous road traversed up to this point, and hoping, perhaps, to find inspiration and a new source of symbolic meaning in a landscape that was weathered but that still endured. In past journeys, I had never visited any of the archeological landmarks, and perhaps, this was all for the best, for what would they have meant to a nine year old? My cousin Rubén, the first college student in my family, had promised me he would take me when I was young. In a future visit, we would go to Mexico City, we would see the many surrounding sites, we would go to Teotihuacan. This was a promise he never was able to keep, for he was gunned down on the streets of Guadalajara over twenty years ago. I have never come to grips with his loss, and in my mind, this trip was also a journey to find him again, and to find the grandparents I never really grew to know.
It was telling as well that I should have been prompted as well by another book about loss and reconciliation, the book “The Interior Circuit” by Francisco Goldman. In the book the author, a Guatemalan writer who had taken up residence in Mexico City, details the psychic journey that he was forced to undertake after the death of his wife Aura (the name recalls another ghost, that of Carlos Fuentes' famous short story) in a tragic accident. It is structured around the idea of learning how to drive in Mexico City’s chaotic traffic, so that the metaphor of the road once again holds sway. The turmoil is complex, for he is aware of this being an adopted homeland, and of his learning to identify with Mexico, and with the pulse of history and dynamism that comes from the capital that is, also, haunted by ghosts. We have history at play here, for when we speak of Mexico City, when is it ever not manifest, it being a city of many layers, of peripheries that bound a vibrant center, of movements and the protest and the endless circulation of products, of cultural capital that is consumed far afield, by the millions of us Chicanos, for example, who have grown up “on the other side” (del otro lado). It is also a reflection on the recent dynamics not only of his tumultuous personal history, but also, on the nation’s history, and the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty that has come out of the recent Narco wars in the countries, ones that would seem to have annulled the triumphalist and brief window of hope that came with the fall of the PRI (the Partido Revolutionario Institucional, the Institutionalized Revolutionary Party) and that have signaled a reversion to the worst tendencies in the country. We see a country that has elected, under the impulse in large part of these fears and the unabashed corruption of the newly re-energized party, another PRI regime, and it would seem that, once again, we see the ancient tropes resuscitated, the idea of a savage and “barbarous” Mexico, prone to authoritarian power structures, under the behest of an ever growing narco-impelled culture of corruption. It is a type of madness at play, one that intersects with the author’s own personal experience of loss, but also, his vision of wishing to escape the confines of this mindset of fear, and find the true vigor that characterizes all humanity. It was a book that I had just begun when I set out on my trip, having read the author’s description of the maddening charms of Mexico City, but wishing as I did not to be completely beholden to his perspective. I needed to see things for myself, after all.
There would be no more long and mind-numbing bus rides on Tres Estrellas buslines to Mexico, fighting with my siblings or moaning in discomfort as the inevitable turista hit, a day or two after having eating our first bites of Mexican food. I was flying into the capital, after all, so the boredom would be kept to a minimum, as I sat in my Aeromexico seat and put my headphones on to listen to Billy Joel’s album “Piano Man”. The journey was quick, a red-eye scheduled to arrive at 5 a.m., and I couldn’t help but survey my fellow passengers. In first class, men and women of European phenotype, but speaking perfect Mexican Spanish, elegantly dressed and maybe a little diffident as they look as those of us flying in economy class, most of whom were mestizos who were dressed as I was, in comfortable jeans, in off-the-rack clothing, purchase at Walmarts and Kohls and other department stores. The Europeans in the front, the mestizos in the back, both groups obviously Mexican. This was quite telling, and it was a pattern I was to see over and over in Mexico, something which was age-old, of course. Try to find a mestizo as a news anchor in Mexican programming, or lead characters who are mestizo or Indian in telenovelas, or even as hosts on the inane morning chat shows I would watch briefly every morning before I would venture out to explore the city. Mexican programming is lilly-white, and even the commercials seems to reflect this earnest vision of a type of racial deliverance, even as the country is, quite manifestly, overwhelming not portrayed on this programming. This is, once again, nothing new, for we had been aware of it ever since we were children in the US, seeing the programming that was exported by Televisa. There are some real racial hangups at play, but I hadn’t expected any different. Well, maybe I had, thinking that Mexico City programming under the impetus of the progressive regimes of AMLO (Andrés Manuel López Obrador) and Marcelo Ebrard would have been different. But commercial television is resistant to these political movements, and we have the eternal time warp at play.
(TO BE CONTINUED)
Copyright 2014 (C) Oscar G. Romero
No comments:
Post a Comment