Who Are The Mexicans & Why Does It Matter To The U.S.
I refer to the “U.S.” instead of “America” in the title because if there is one thing I have learned in the last year it is that Mexico, Central and South America is also part of the Americas.
There is an interesting article in the LA Times this morning about where Mexicans come from by Gregory Rodriguez, a columnist for the opinion pages, director of the California Fellows Program at the New America Foundation and author of the just-published “Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America” that will be released on Tuesday October 23.
“Mexicans,” Rodriguez says, “mythologized a tale of the violent and tragic conquest of Mexico by Spain to explain their birth as a people: the story of the Spaniard Hernan Cortes and his indigenous translator and mistress, Doña Marina, a.k.a. La Malinche.
Marina was Cortes’ victor’s prize and, in 1522, she gave birth to Martin Cortes, one of many mestizo children born to the conquerors’ mistresses and paramours. Four and a half centuries later, in 1950, the great Mexican poet Octavio Paz famously wrote that the “strange permanence of Cortes and La Malinche in the Mexican’s imagination and sensibilities reveals that they are something more than historical figures: They are symbols of a secret conflict that we still have yet to solve.”
Despite, or perhaps because of, the psychic power of the Cortes-Malinche story, you won’t find many monuments to them in Mexico City. After Mexico gained its independence from Spain in the early 19th century, Mexican nationalists, who sought to distance themselves from their European heritage, demonized the conquerors in general and Doña Marina in particular.
At the imposing two-story stone house at 57 Higuera St. in the Coyoacan district of Mexico City, for example, there is no plaque to indicate that Marina once lived there. Though for centuries she had been described as a beautiful, noble woman who commanded respect, 19th century depictions began to condemn her for her role in the Spanish conquest. Out of these portrayals arose the peculiarly Mexican concept of malinchismo, which means the betrayal of one’s own.
Paz contended that the Mexicans’ fixation on — and ultimate rejection of — both progenitors in their origin story left them in a state of “orphanhood, an obscure awareness that we have been torn from the All.” The history of Mexico, he wrote, “is the history of a man seeking his parentage, his origins.”
This alienation resonates profoundly throughout the culture. On the one hand, Mexico proudly acknowledges its Indian ancestry; on the other, it clearly prizes whiteness as a status symbol. It endlessly questions its identity: Is it modern or ancient, Spanish or Indian? And the Cortes/Malinche story, instead of defining Mexico’s origins in a constructive way, merely prolongs and exacerbates the country’s ambivalence about its history as a conquered nation.
Mexican mestizaje — racial and cultural synthesis — may have begun in a violent conquest, but it didn’t end there. Interracial love and attraction also played a role. Ultimately, racial mixture was rampant, and it combined with a rigid colonial caste system to create a society in which race was a malleable category. Mexicans developed — in the words of Mexican American poet Gloria Anzaldua — “a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity,” particularly in the realm of race and culture.
As Mexicans came north to the United States, that long history of mestizaje was also brought to bear on another cultural force, Anglo America. One scholar, Roberto Bacalski-Martinez, has described Mexican American culture in the Southwest as “incredibly ancient on the one hand, and surprisingly new on the other. Indian, Spanish, Mexican and Anglo elements have gone into its formation, and they continue to affect it. In each case, the introduction of new elements began as a clash between two peoples which eventually resulted in a newer, richer culture.”
I can hardly wait to read this book which has been said to offer an unprecedented account of the long-term cultural and political influences that Mexican Americans will have on the collective character of our nation.
Bill Richardson, governor of New Mexico and former United States ambassador to the United Nations says “In the midst of a narrow, polemical debate on immigration, Gregory Rodriguez has written a generous, sweeping, prodigiously researched, and judicious history of Mexican Americans that helps us understand their long-term influence on American society. Smart, fun, and eminently readable, Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds explores five centuries of cultural collisions and convergences, and dares us to imagine a new way of thinking about the future of America.”
In my perception, on the one hand, Mexicans purport to celebrate their indigenous history…but on the other hand the racism based on color in that country is systemic. The dilemma: how to love the conqueror’s blood in themselves. And then what happens when they migrate to this country?
Timely.
Tags: Mexico, Oaxaca
Zoe
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