Meanwhile, I’ve noticed that political pundits regularly express their worry that provincial governments, like that of Michoacan, which have had more than their fair share of terrorist attacks and related government corruption, and where weapons caches have been discovered, are using the fear of a 2010 apocalypse as an excuse for reactionary social reprisals. “They’re drawing questionable parallels between those who fight for the poor and the self-serving armed terrorists,” a journalist friend of mine warned me, and added that there is no sign that Hernandez has anything to do with the EPR despite claims to the contrary. So, what is the ordinary fool supposed to believe? The drug cartels are ready as ever to exploit popular national holidays as excuses for narco-terror. Last year, for example, during Independence Day festivities in drug-infested Michoacan, narcos brutally murdered seven innocent bystanders with fragmentation-grenade explosions. Mexicans were shaken again in September when bombs exploded at three Mexico City banks, and another near an old 16th Century church. No one, from what I gathered, was hurt, but to many chilangos, or capital residents, the blasts appeared to be an omen of things to come.
Apart from over-reported guerrilla and drug-cartel violence, another specter is the unrest surging like some swamp creature from Mexico’s besieged economy. Given its enormous reliance on the production of oil for income, and its slavery to the American market, and not to mention remittances from Mexican wetbacks, legal or illegal, living and thriving there, which tumbled unexpectedly following the loss of their jobs, the global recession has hit Mexico where it really hurts. Unemployment has exacerbated Mexico’s chronic poverty as well, while nearly 30 million people face hunger every day. A report I’d recently read by the Colegio de Mexico, one of the country’s top universities, warned, “A national social explosion is knocking at the door.”
Then, the head Roman Catholic Bishop, Gustavo Rodriguez, cried on television that, “We cannot separate the economic crisis from the violence and criminal crisis that we live day by day.”
So much for looking forward to salvation from above!
While many are afraid the Bicentennial observances could aggravate the fermenting discontent, most notably with the symbolic parallels surrounding 1810 and 1910, the president, along with his ministers, insists that Mexico will break free from horrors that menace its very existence, and the awful historical cycle will come to an inevitable end. In fact, many believe 2010 will be a time of peaceful transformation, and to have that happen requires only the positive affirmation of the natives. Furthermore, just in the last couple of months I’ve heard many say that they believe Mexico to be on a different course, inching toward reform, the restoration of peace, and lasting financial recovery. And yet, the voice of democracy has been strangely silent given threats that entrenched political groups conspire to remove constraints on re-election for Mexican office-holders, which they call “major political reforms.” It would be a change, they insist, that will give the voters more power, though they may lose their freedom of choice. They obviously count on the old historical adage that for evil to triumph, good need only do nothing to stop it. The move is significant, moreover, because, on the eve of the Bicentennial, many recall that the present ban on re-election was a pillar of the Revolution of 1910.
Before anyone, including the president, can use the Bicentennial as a means by which to effect the much heralded change, notwithstanding, something, anything, must happen to jar the ever-whining majority out of its smug intransigence. The economic crisis has forced chronic delays for most of the projects the government, along with private groups, had in the offing. Fortunately for Mexicans, their “me vale madre” attitude has spared them much grief with respect to the imminent doom forecast for 2010. On the contrary, they seem to be, according to my correspondents, sick and tired of the warmed-over economic crap flung at them by the financial power-brokers, and are ever-willing to turn on their leaders for serving it to them cold. The Bicentennial year might not offer the fireworks of a revolution, but, unless Mexico can escape its overall miasma of trouble, perennially hanging over the ever-deferred promise of prosperity, the year shall witness a melancholy and dispiriting cultural and political devolution.
Many in this exasperating country still want to blame America for ALL of its ills, but this incurable jealousy and resentment still rankle in the hearts of the inexorably bonded nations, which have despised each other, the one as a wilderness of barbarians, and the other as an extensive plantation of slaves ever since Davy Crockett called it quits at the Alamo. Ignorance is the ground of suspicion, the wise have said, and suspicion has been inflamed into daily provocations since that moment they signed the NAFTA agreement. And, if not caused by the leaders, certainly their respective citizenry have causes to gripe: prejudice is blind, hunger is deaf; and Mexico (if taken as a metaphor for its leadership) is accused, even by her own dissidents, of a design to starve its people out of their pride, sense of purpose, and national dignity.
I have tried to read as much of Mexico’s classic literature while I could, and in some 19th Century folk-tale there is a fable of a campesino (peasant), who was ruined by the answer to his own prayers: he had prayed for water; the Rio Bravo was turned into his grounds, and his flock and cottage were swept away by the inundation. Such was the fate deserved by, or at least it was the belief of, the commons in praying for the unattainable since it leads to divine punishment for conceit and presumption, hence the recurring reason for all of Mexico’s woes.
They esteem themselves, nevertheless, as the first of the North American nations; but this foolish arrogance has been humbled by the unfortunate events of their social, narco-trafficking, and guerrilla wars against their elected governments, not to mention the very inhabitants they pretend to defend and protect.
Fortune has left Mexico little to lose, except its identity; with all the hate, murder, and narco-trafficking going around, Mexicans seem to have lost their respect for life, and to despise life is the first qualification of a rebel ~ a label many Mexicans gleefully embrace. Regarding the narco-traffickers and their despicable ways, assassination has been their recourse in view of the government crack-down as of late, yet they do not seem to know that assassination is the last resource of cowards ~ an insulting charge your average Mexican will not deign to forgive.
Whether or not Mexicans really care for their future or the sanctity of their national identity, they are still distinguished by the subtlety and sublimity of their understandings, and they are the first ones to boast of it; but these qualities, unless dignified by liberty and illuminated by contemplation, will decay into a base and boorish cleverness (at least that is what historians write). It is a proverbial saying of the persecuted descendants of Moctezuma, “From the Spanish caballeros who oppress our bodies, the monks who torment our souls, and the hacendados who starve us into humiliation, Good Lord deliver us!”
The Gachupines (Spanish) and Criollo hacendados, or wealthy cattle-ranchers, always walked with supine disdain among the glorious ruins of Aztec and Maya antiquity; and such was the destitution of their character, that they seemed incapable of admiring the genius of the people from whom they stole this country.
In the great revolutionary struggle for reform, restoration of rights, and restitution of ancestral lands, the vigor of opposition was succeeded by the lassitude of despair, and the common folk ended up no better economically than they had been before the ouster of Diaz, except that now they were nominally in control.
Yes, it is true that some lasting gains were made, democracy proceeded along a difficult and dangerous course, and freedom, in all of its political forms, is the first step to curiosity and knowledge. The latter did not exactly flourish, but they slowly re-awakened in the consciousness of Mexicans, and the pleasing reign of poetry and fanciful fiction was succeeded by the light of speculative and empirical philosophy, and today Mexicans are as literate as the citizens of advanced industrialized nations. Genius may anticipate the season of maturity, say the wise men, but in
the instruction of a people, as in that of any person, the memory must be massaged before the powers of reason and imagination can be expanded. The artist may not hope to equal or surpass, till he has learned to emulate, the works of his predecessors ~ and what predecessors Mexicans have had!
This portrait of Mexico was transcribed from the diaries of an historian of the revolutionary period; but the adulation of a servile and superstitious people has been lavished on the worst of tyrants, incompetents, the corrupt and the frivolous. The virtues of demagogues and political charlatans are often the vices most useful to their ambitions, or most agreeable to those who voted for them. A nation ignorant of the equal benefits of liberty and law, as Mexico was during the Porfiriato, must be awed by the flashes of arbitrary power. The cruelty of despots, like Huerta or Calles, or the corruption of most of the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) leaders after World War II, assumed the character of justice; their profusion, of liberality; their obstinacy, of firmness. If the most rational pretext be denied, few acts of obedience will be found impossible. Thus, guilt must tremble where innocence is threatened, and conviction takes cover where doubt lurks about.
Heaven and earth must rejoice in the perdition of miscreants, but Mexico laments losers more than she lauds the virtuous and brave.
As for my now sainted, departed ancestor, Fulgencio San Roman, I learned that the more you try to chase life down, the more you are renounced to it when comes the awakening to vanity and the vexation that carnal pursuits bring. Ambition, he would say, is a weed of quick and early vegetation in the vineyard of dreams. But, there is also inconstancy to be had in the swamp of superstitions, and his art, his imagination depended on all those ugly and inconstant creatures that inhabit this swamp of the subconscious.
He held his metaphorical mirror to life, and it reflected images of his people he would have preferred not to behold. He admired and at once deplored the currents of thought running below the facade of conventionality. Such powerful motives should have firmly attached the voluntary and pious obedience of the Mexican people to their spiritual and temporal attachments. But, the machinations of partiality and of interest are often upset by the sallies of undisciplined passion.
The Indian who fells the tree that he may gather the fruit, and the Mestizo who plunders the trains of commerce, are actuated by the same impulse of savage nature, which overlooks the future in the present, and renounces for momentary rapine the long and secure advantage of the most important blessings. And, it was thus that the country was profaned by the thoughtless revolutionaries and so-called reformers. They pillaged the offerings and wounded the faithful without computing the number and value of similar commerce, which they prevented by their inhospitable terrorism. Even the influence of superstition is fluctuating and precarious, and the Cristeros and other defenders of the Church’s prerogatives in Mexico were no better; and the slave, whose reason is chained to the pillar of fear, will often be delivered by his avarice or pride. Mexicans have somehow managed to conciliate ambition and avarice since those terrible days during and following the Cristero War. The generations who went though all that are dying off, and the newer ones are screwing things up again for their own gain.
A credulous devotion for the fables, supernatural visions and oracles of the Catholic priesthood most powerfully acts on the mind of a Mexican; yet such a mind is the least capable of preferring imagination to sense, of sacrificing to a distant motive the appetites and interests of the present world. It sacrifices to an invisible object, perhaps an improbable ideal. In the vigor of health and youth, Fulgencio’s practice would perpetually contradict his beliefs till the pressures of age, sickness, and calamities awakened his terrors, and compelled him to satisfy the double debt of piety and remorse. Under the reign of superstition, he had much to hope from the ignorance, and much to fear from the violence, of his fellow Mexicans.
Of the vanity and arrogance of Mexicans, what can I say? A nation nursed in sedition, intractable and scorning to obey, unless they are too feeble to resist. They have been feeble for too long not to have noticed what became of their precious revolution of a hundred years ago. When they promised to serve, they aspired to prosper; if they swore allegiance, they watched the opportunity of revolt. Yet, they vented their discontent in loud clamors. Yet, their doors, and their counsels, were shut against them. Dexterous in mischief, they have never learned the science of doing good in good conscience; such displays of do-gooding were only viable as public pronouncements of piety and Christian humility. Odious to earth and heaven, impious to God, seditious among themselves, jealous of their neighbors, as Fulgencio once wrote, and inhuman to strangers (who have no money, as I observed), they love no one, by no fellow Mexican are they beloved; and while they wish to inspire fear amongst themselves, they live in base and continual apprehension of the outside world, especially of the colossus directly to the north.
Thus wrote Fulgencio just before passing away: “Lofty in promise, poor in execution; adulation and calumny, perfidy and treason, are the familiar traits of their collective character.
They will not submit. They know not how to govern. Faithless to their betters, intolerable to their equals, ungrateful to their benefactors, and alike impudent in their demands and their refusals, they are my people. They are my blood!”
And with that, no more excuses would matter.
E P I L O G U E
The last feeling has departed from the heart of charity. I would broker no more bullshit, no more prejudice and intolerance. There wasn’t much to reflect upon, only the end of an extraordinary, tedious, scary year-long journey. I departed with an indictment of Mexico for lauding itself a failed state whereby I ended up whispering to myself, “Me vale madre!”
My friend Billy’s words would resonate in my head, round and round, during my final hours in Mexico: Free your mind, and your ass will follow!
Well, my mind was free. I had now to get the old butt in gear to head North once more. No more tacos, no more beans, only introspection.
... Thus I left old Mexico ~ as magical, musical, mystical, muddle-headed, and certainly as malodorous as I had entered it!
T H E
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A Wetback in Reverse Page 41