So Far From God

In Cuernavaca one year we stayed in the Hotel Bajo el Volcan. It was on Calle Humboldt, down behind the Cortez Palace, in walking distance of the zocalo, or central plaza. There was a tower room up front, but it overlooked the street and was too noisy, so we passed on it and took one in the rear, by the swimming pool. Beyond the pool was a spectacular ditch, a chasm really, into which the poor across the way threw their garbage. The Mexicans call such ditches barrancas.

Hotel Bajo el Volcan. How cute, I thought, they’re trying to capitalize on Malcolm Lowry’s semi-famous novel Under the Volcano (bajo meaning under). Cuernavaca, after all, disguised as the fictional “Quauhnahuac,” had been the setting for the book. There had been a barranca in the book too. Lowry had used it as a symbol for the abyss on the brink of which his central character, Geoffrey Firmin, seemed constantly to be teetering.

We were in Cuernavaca several days and enjoyed the stay, especially our visits to the Brady Museum and the Borda Gardens. Popocatepetl, the real volcano, was visible out our window much of the time. As we were checking out, my wife mentioned to me that she’d overheard a couple in the lobby talking about the “tower room upstairs” as the place where Lowry had written much of his novel. Shouldn’t we go and have a look, she wondered. But I pooh-poohed it as a typical tourist come-on. Don’t be so gullible, dear. When we got home to Minneapolis, however, I happened to be leafing through Douglas Day’s biography of Lowry one afternoon and there it was, a picture of the tower room “at 19 Calle Humboldt” where Lowry, according to Day, had written his book.

I didn’t bother to tell my wife.

In Oaxaca, in 1998, the teachers were on strike. Or maybe it was the government workers. Somebody. Sheets were draped over the windowsills of the municipal building, at any rate, with handwritten signs on them denouncing the “gobierno.” Our hotel room was small and windowless. It was next to a central airshaft that made windy whistling noises all through the night. My wife went out to Monte Alban to see the ruins. I sat at a café on the zocalo, reading Reforma, the best of the Mexico City newspapers, with the help of a little pocket translator, and watching the daily honor guard in their motorcycle helmets raise the Mexican serpent-and-eagle flag out front of the cathedral across the way.

That was the year the Vikings, Minnesota’s professional football team, won 15 games but failed to make it to the Super Bowl. I went looking for a television set in Oaxaca the Sunday of the one game they lost and found one in a restaurant just off the zocalo. I had the place all to myself, just me and a couple of waiters. They had the TV on and were watching a soccer match out of Mexico City. I asked if we could switch to the Vikings game when the time came. They said, sure, but when game time arrived they refused to switch. “Momentito,” they said and kept the set tuned to the soccer match. A momentito is a little moment. “Momentito,” they kept telling me each time I asked, as, meanwhile, far away up north the game began and proceeded toward its unhappy conclusion. When it dawned on me that the waiters were simply toying with me, that they had no intention of letting me watch my game, I became angry. As I paid my bar bill and stomped out the two waiters watched with undisguised glee. They had shown the gringo who was boss. It was like a scene from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: “Vikings game? We don’t got to show you no stinkin’ Vikings game.”

San Miguel de Allende, up above Mexico City, is where my wife and I were married. It was my second marriage, her first. We chose San Miguel because it enabled us to avoid her large German Catholic family in South Dakota who weren’t very accepting of her marriage to a divorced man. It was a pretty little wedding, nonetheless. We did it outdoors at the pensión where we were staying. Waiters and bartenders and assorted residential gringos made up the guest list. The registro civil who performed the service, operating on Mexican time, was 45 minutes late. Afterwards, we all trooped downtown to the bullfights, which were being held at night in a little arena next door to the elementary school. They were the first bullfights I had ever witnessed at night. Rain threatened throughout the evening, with lightning flashes and thunder all around, lending a dramatic, El Greco-like atmosphere to the proceedings. The bullfights, unfortunately, weren’t very good.

San Miguel, a favorite retirement spot for U.S. foreign service personnel, has a sizeable American community. Some would say too sizeable. While we were there, the son of our pensión’s owners told me a joke that was then current among the town’s native-born young. It went something like this: Why is New York such a great city? Because it has more Jews than Jerusalem, more Puerto Ricans than San Juan and more blacks than Johannesburg. Why is San Miguel such a great city? Because it has more gringos than New York City.

The preceding three vignettes (let’s call them that) are meant to establish the writer’s bona fides, his credentials, as someone who has been there a time or two, for writing about present-day Mexico. It’s a country I have always had a fondness for, but one which I haven’t been back to for several years now. For a while my wife and I even talked about retiring down there, but we no longer do. Why? Well, the last time we were there—I forget the year, 2001? 2002?—there were armed guards outside the hotel in Mexico City where we stayed. This gets your attention. Why the armed guards? Because there had been a rash of kidnappings and murders of foreigners. The hotel was the Maria Cristina on Rio Lerma Street, where my wife and I had been staying in our visits south for years. I wanted to go to the excellent museum of modern art to see the Rufino Tamayo paintings but was advised not to. Stay out of the taxis, hotel guests said, the drivers are in cahoots with the kidnappers. I went to the museum anyway, riding one of the pesero buses, and was surprised to find that not only was it all but deserted, but the streets and parks around it were nearly empty too. This on a bright sunny morning in midweek. Mexico City, a metropolis of some 24 million people, seemed under siege, its population lying low.

The previous time we had been there we had taken the subway all the way out to suburban Coyoacan to visit Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul. Ours had been the only white faces, but the subway had been teeming with people, and the streets of Coyoacan had been alive with activity. Now the whole town was hunkered down. The whole population seemed scared. The U.S. State Department had begun issuing travel advisories, even travel warnings for some outlying areas to the south. This went on for weeks.

There has always been a slight undercurrent of danger in Mexico. It’s part of what gives the country its edge, and its allure. Lowry’s novel does a good job of capturing the latent menace in the everyday: the sinister El Farolito cantina, the corrupt policemen, the death worship that seems to be so much a part of things. D.H. Lawrence and Graham Greene also visited and wrote about Mexico at about the same time Lowry did, and neither had anything good to say about the place. To Lawrence it was a nation of resentful “dumbbells.” He was especially hard on the indigenous people, the Indians. “The Spanish-Mexican population,” he said, meaning those with some European in their heritage, “just rots atop a black savage mass.” As for Greene, he developed an “almost pathological hatred” for Mexico while he was there. “It is not inconceivable,” he states in The Lawless Roads, “that the worst evil possible to natural man may be found years hence in Mexico.” That was Graham Greene, writing in 1939.

But Lawrence and Greene were dyspeptic men by nature and Greene, at least, had gone to Mexico with an agenda. The Cardenas government had been persecuting the Catholic Church in the country and Greene had been dispatched by the Vatican to report back on the state of things. What neither of them talks about in their books is how good the food tastes down there, how glorious the morning sunlight is, how beautiful the jacaranda trees and the flowering bougainvillea. They never mention that there’s a special tang in the air in parts of Mexico that you just don’t find anywhere else. At least not as readily or as often. They don’t mention the dignity of the country people or the artistry that enables so many of them to make something—a mural, a child’s toy, a cathedral— out of almost nothing.

Octavio Paz, the late Nobel laureate, was perhaps modern-day Mexico’s keenest cultural observer. His book The Labyrinth of Solitude offers what has become a classic exegesis of the Mexican soul. In moments of high excitement, he tells us in it, Mexicans are apt to shout, “Viva Mexico! Hijos de la chingada!—the last part translating roughly as “sons (or children) of the great screwing.” The great screwing, of course, being the Spanish Conquest. Cortez with his little teenaged Aztec mistress Malinche is the symbol of and metaphor for that screwing. “The Sons of Malinche” is the title of one of the chapters in Paz’s book. This is what accounts for the resentment Lawrence and Greene encountered in their travels. And it’s still there: witness the two waiters in the café-bar in Oaxaca. I also remember being at a party in Guadalajara in 1968 with a group of Mexican architecture students and one of them, late in the evening, well into his cups, pounding himself on the chest, fixing me with a hard glare, and proudly proclaiming, “Me Azteca!”

The Mexicans, convention has it, are a mestiz—mixed—people, the mixture being indigenous Indian and European. But this is mainly in the larger metropolitan areas: Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, etc. Out in the countryside, and in the jungle and mountain villages, the population is mostly pure Indio—Lawrence’s “black savage mass.” (In Oaxaca, they come into town at night, tiny people less than five feet tall, many of them, to beg on the plaza; often they bring young children with them and the children have infants strapped on their backs to further heighten the sympathy quotient as all of them, en famille, make their rounds.) Census taking, like vote counting, being an inexact science in Mexico, nobody can really say what the nation’s total Indian population is. But it has to be quite large, no comparable slaughter and “resettlement” of the native peoples having taken place down there as it did up here.

Among the mestizos, those in whom the European strain dominates are the most likely to head north. They make up the army of chambermaids and packing plant workers and roofing teams that now swarm over the U.S. The ones in whom the Indian strain dominates tend to be the ones who stay put. And brood. And manifest their resentment in various ways: kidnapping, drug running or simply glaring at tourists.

I was in Mexico City in the summer of 1968, just weeks before the government machine-gunned demonstrating university students in the streets of the Tlatelolco neighborhood, killing as many as 300 of them. The true number will never be known. The students weren’t trying to overthrow the government; they just wanted a bit more autonomy for their campuses. They were gunned down quite simply to clear the streets and keep them from embarrassing the Dias Ordaz government on the eve of the 1968 Olympics, which Mexico would be hosting. Dictatorships do things like that, not democracies. The world learned little of what happened that day because the press was censored and foreign reporters intimidated. The Olympics came off as planned. And lots of grieving families buried their dead. This sort of thing is hard to forgive. Which is, of course, why the world was not allowed to know about it.

“The Night of Tlatelolco, 2 October 1968, is the deep trench that divides the contemporary conscience of Mexico,” says Carlos Fuentes in his book A New Time for Mexico. But somehow I doubt it. The statement implies a degree of national introspection I for one have never witnessed there. In reality, Fuentes’ deep trench sounds a lot like that barranca out back of our hotel in Cuernavaca: just one more place to throw the country’s garbage.

Corruption has been institutionalized in Mexico. It is by now part of the cultural fabric. A handful of very wealthy people run the country and pass the power around among themselves decade after decade. Theirs is a closed system, and it suffers from the entropy this inevitably brings. Things are running down in Mexico. The dominant political party, the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) had been in power for more than 70 years—seventy years!—before Vicente Fox and his PAN (Partido de Acción Nacional) succeeded in wresting the presidency away from it in 2000. A number of people, myself among them, had high hopes for Fox. He said the right things. He seemed really to want to turn Mexico around, open it up, air it out. But it didn’t happen. The PRI still dominated the national assembly. Fox didn’t have the votes or, finally, the energy. The country is as benighted today, after six years of Fox's presidency, as it ever was. With the result that the talented and the desperate (and the talented desperate) continue to stream northward. Official estimates place the number of illegal aliens in the U.S. today at 11 million, but nobody knows the actual number. How could they? Illegals don’t register, don’t vote and, therefore, don’t get counted. The number could be closer to 20 million, and probably is.

Today the hot spots are Chiapas, and Oaxaca, and certain large slum neighborhoods of Mexico City, where hundreds of thousands marched to protest the results of the last presidential election. But all across the landscape, Mexico simmers and occasionally Mexico boils. It may be on the verge of becoming a failed state. Like Somalia. Like Iraq. The poverty, the social disintegration, the despair are certainly there. (“Somos Todos Marcos” said the graffiti all over San Miguel the last time we were there, “We are all Marcos”—Marcos meaning Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of the Chiapas uprising of the ’90s.) Or, if the increasingly restive native population can figure out a way to break the hold of the powerful few, Mexico may decide to go the way of Venezuela and Bolivia. It may find itself a nativist Indio—a Hugo Chavez or Evo Morales—to lead it out of the wilderness, defiantly turning its back on Europeanized notions of social organization. Mexico has had Indian leaders in the past, of course. Their names were Juarez and Zapata and Huerta, but this was during Mexico’s national infancy—before the oligarchs took hold—when its total population was 20 million or less. This time around, in a teeming nation of more than 100 million souls, most of them under the age of 25, the stakes will be infinitely higher. Today, Mexico is violent and dangerous and looking for ways to explode. If it weren’t for the safety valve provided by illegal immigration, that explosion might already have occurred.

Illegal immigration is shaping up as a crucial issue in the 2008 presidential election in the United States. No matter which way it goes, we may find ourselves in an untenable position: damned if we do, and damned if we don’t. Should we tighten and restrict the interminable northward flow and risk seeing the large country just to the south of us blow sky high? Or should we continue with the current policy, only slightly modified to allow “amnesty” for those illegals already here, and risk the increased social disruption that a continuing brown tide is likely to have throughout the Southwest, along the West Coast, and indeed, by now, all over the country?

“Poor Mexico,” President Porfirio Diaz is said once, famously, to have remarked, “so far from God, so close to the United States.”

“Poor United States,” a comparable wit today might counter, “so far from God, so close to Mexico.”

The future seems fraught, the very air electric with the smell of change, even way up here in Minnesota. One reason my wife and I no longer feel the need to go to Mexico is that, increasingly these days, at the supermarket, on the radio, in the streets, Mexico is coming to us.