For almost forty years, I’ve been going to Mexico. I’ve lived, gone to school, and worked there. It’s the country I know better than any other except my own. As a gringo in Mexico, I’ve learned much about the feelings of all immigrants: the initial strangeness of language, food, music, culture, the uncertainty of legal rights, the unfair legacy of historical stereotype. I’ve tried hard to understand the history of Mexico; I’ve made friends with Mexicans of varied trades and backgrounds; I’ve come to comprehend some basic Mexican myths. But whenever I return to Mexico, I remain a foreigner, a man standing on the margin of Mexican life.
Even as an outsider, I know that Mexico is part of me. Without the experience of Mexico, I wouldn’t be the same man. Mexicans have taught me much about work, honor, and pride, about courage, about the need to keep on going after common sense tells you to give up. In my attitude to the world, Mexican fatalism has been grafted onto the Irish fatalism inherited from my father; that mestizo fatalism tempers the American optimism that was so powerfully encouraged by my mother. As a writer, I’ve been enriched by the work of Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, and Carlos Monsivais. I get great pleasure from the poetry of Homero Aridjis. I have been entertained and enlightened by the crime fiction of Paco Ignacio Taibo II. Where I live, Mexican folk art is everywhere, masks and surrealist altars and mirrors made from tin. My library contains almost 500 volumes on Mexican history, art, music, and culture. On the wall above my desk, there are showcards featuring the stars of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s: Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Pedro Armendariz, and Arturo de Cordova. If they’d been French instead of Mexican, every critic in New York would know their work. Ní modo, as the Mexicans say. It doesn’t matter. Life goes on, and I’m still looking for posters of Maria Felix and Dolores del Rio.
On other walls, there are framed photographs by Agustin Casasola, the great photographer of the Mexican Revolution, and posters by such artists as Rufino Tamayo, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Jose Luis Cuevas, and Alejandro Colunga. My friends think this is all very strange. Other people’s passions always are. But in my small part of New York, and in my consciousness, Mexico lives.
Obviously, these pieces can’t express my complicated feelings about Mexico and Mexicans; that would require a book. But I hope they make clear that at least one old gringo is thankful to the Mexicans for their grace and tenacity. As I write, ten years after the terrible earthquake, Mexico is deep into another crisis. This one seems worse than any other, because so many hopes and expectations were raised during the presidency of Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Mexico, everyone said, was about to move from the Third World to the First World. Not in some distant future, but now. That didn’t happen. Once more, there are grave predictions that Mexico will plunge into bloody revolution.
Perhaps.
But I wouldn’t bet a centavo on it.