Manana Forever?: Mexico and the Mexicans - Hardcover

Casta�eda, Jorge G.

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9780375404245: Manana Forever?: Mexico and the Mexicans

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375404244 ISBN 13: 9780375404245

Publisher: Knopf, 2011

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Why are Mexicans so successful in individual sports, but deficient in team play? Why do Mexicans dislike living in skyscrapers? Why do Mexicans love to see themselves as victims, but also love victims? And why, though the Mexican people traditionally avoid conflict, is there so much violence in a country where many leaders have died by assassination?

In this shrewd and fascinating book, the renowned scholar and former foreign minister Jorge Casta�eda sheds much light on the puzzling paradoxes of his native country. Here’s a nation of 110 million that has an ambivalent and complicated relationship with the United States yet is host to more American expatriates than any country in the world. Its people tend to resent foreigners yet have made the nation a hugely popular tourist destination. Mexican individualism and individual ties to the land reflect a desire to conserve the past and slow the route to uncertain modernity.

Casta�eda examines the future possibilities for Mexico as it becomes more diverse in its regional identities, socially more homogenous, its character and culture the instruments of change rather than sources of stagnation, its political system more open and democratic. Ma�ana Forever? is a compelling portrait of a nation at a crossroads.

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About the Author:

Jorge G. Casta�eda was born and raised in Mexico City. He received his B.A. from Princeton University and his Ph.D. from the University of Paris. He has been a professor of political science at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C., and a visiting professor at Princeton University and the University of California at Berkeley. He was Mexico’s foreign minister from 2000 to 2003, and is now Global Distinguished Professor of Politics and Latin American Studies at New York University. He is a member of the board of Human Rights Watch and lives in New York and Mexico City.

Preface

Few countries have devoted so much time and energy as Mexico to dissecting and debating, to hailing or regretting their “national character.”

Our obsession with who we are, and why, is endless and constant. It is not only ours. The number of foreign “regards” of Mexico is lengthy indeed: from Ambrose Bierce to Walter Lippmann, Cartier- Bresson to Jacques Soustelle, from D. H. Lawrence to Graham Greene, from Oscar Lewis to Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, B. Traven, and Leon Trotsky, from Sergei Eisenstein, Luis Bu�uel, and Elia Kazan to John Reed and Jean Le Cl�zio. Mexican poets, novelists, anthropologists, sociologists and journalists, politicians, and painters have all delved into the Mexican soul, hoping to discover the Rosetta Stone that will finally decrypt and reveal the unpolished jewel of Mexican identity that so attracts admirers, discourages skeptics, and systematically fascinates and thwarts academics.

This is not a book about the Mexican national character, but about some of the country’s most distinguishing origins or features, and their consequences. It is about their contradiction with the daily reality of a society ever more removed from an initial series of national traits that rendered it so endearing and frustrating to Mexicans, no less than to foreign visitors, travelers, retirees, or adventurers. It is essentially an attempt to explain Mexico to Mexicans, and to Americans. It seeks to explain why the very national character that helped forge Mexico as a nation now dramatically hinders its search for a future and modernity. While clearly in a country as regionally, ethnically, and socially diverse as Mexico such generalizations are perilous, shared cultural, historical, and geographical experiences do nonetheless create shared characteristics. A discussion of national character as a whole has obvious limitations and is inevitably superficial, leading to a turgid academic debate that this book seeks to avoid. As recently as 2007, Alan Knight, th outstanding British historian of the Mexican Revolution, pointed out the difficulties and contradictions of working with notions such as a Mexican “national character,” preferring terms like “objective and subjective national identities.” We have no dog in that fight, and will limit ourselves to working with the terms used often interchangeably here.

The traits we will address are not exactly those stereotypes understandably offensive to Mexicans: lazy, irresponsible, violent, or despondent. Nor are they mannerisms often linked to Mexicans though hardly restricted to them: machismo, a different sense of time, or a special feeling of uniqueness embodied in what Jos� Vasconcelos called our “cosmic race.” Furthermore, this contradiction between the cultural traits and the reality of the country is by no means its only obstacle to full-fledged modernity. But it is, in our view, the most crucial. Others have written about the lack of a democratic tradition, corruption, the enormous concentration of wealth and power in the hands of very few, the negative impact of living beside a neighbor such as ours or, conversely, the poorly exploited benefits of contiguity with the United States. The purpose of this exercise, as the Coen brothers’ Big Lebowski might have said, is to determine what “ties the room to gether.” It is the disconnect between Mexico’s national character and its current reality.

The book is organized by contrasts. One chapter seeks to describe, substantiate, and probe a particular trait of the national character; the following chapter attempts to confront that trait with the description of a central feature of modern Mexico that contradicts and invalidates the previously depicted trait. It hopes to show how that specific trait is no longer viable in today’s Mexico, and has become a major obstacle to its progress. Each trait is derived from three “fonts of wisdom”: the classics, the numbers, and the author’s own experience. What makes the three sources appropriate and useful is, precisely, their diversity.

First, the classics. Rarely has a country devoted so much intelligence, hard work, speculation, and soul-searching introspection to
identifying its identity. As far back as a century ago, and as recently as two decades past, the examination of the Mexican soul has consumed poets like Octavio Paz, novelists like Carlos Fuentes, essayists like Jorge Cuesta, Alfonso Reyes, Samuel Ramos, and Salvador Novo, dramatists like Rodolfo Usigli, psychoanalysts like Santiago Ram�rez and Jorge Portilla, anthropologists from Manuel Gamio and Miguel Le�n-Portilla to Roger Bartra,MauricioTenorio, and Claudio Lomnitz, sociologists from Guillermo Bonfil to historians like Edmundo O’Gorman. They have nearly always disagreed on details, devoting interminable pages to highly specialized—on occasion arcane—polemics, yet at the same time their research and reflection have had the same fundamental object. They cannot be lumped together into one single corpus of theory or description, but viewed from outside the specialists’ realm, they share enough conclusions so as to suggest something of a consensus.We shall select and study a few of those consensual traits—acknowledging that there are many others, far less unanimous—by taking the experts’ common viewpoints at face value. In many aspects, though not in all, they got it right.

A second set of sources are the mountains of data that the classics partly lacked to buttress their ruminations, insights, and intuitions, but which would have confirmed them, had they been available. This is not so say that they based their views only on hearsay and impressionistic analyses—there was that, but also intuition, travel, study, experience. Still, Mexican society was, until the mid-1980s, a very opaque one from just about every point of view. Over the past twenty years or so, however, it has been dissected by innumerable polls, surveys, focus groups, microstudies, sponsored and carried out by public and private agencies, universities and marketing firms, political consultants and parties, international agencies and local scholars. The National Statistics Institute, founded in 1985, has only recently compiled comparable historical surveys, while national household income and spending studies are less than thirty years old. After years of living without polls other than for certain very specific marketing purposes—why bother with election polls when there are no real elections—Mexico has become a pollster’s paradise, partly thanks to the advent of modernity and democracy, partly perhaps as a result of a certain narcissism. There is no relation between the data available to the classics—even the most recent among them—and that which any student or candidate for office can retrieve today from almost infinite sources. This information is not always easily or accurately comparable in time and space; series are not uniform; regional perspectives are often unavailable; and, inevitably, there is a great deal of self-serving information culled from leading questions or foregone conclusions. Similarly, there are valid doubts and objections regarding the reliability of Mexican polling firms, especially in view of their relative youth and inexperience. This explains why we often quote or refer to several polls simultaneously, and why the data we cite should always be seen as indicative of trends, not as precise measurements. Nonetheless, this trove of facts provides the speculation of the classics with the type of solid statistical foundation that they were partly deprived of before, and which either would have made their ingenious intuitions impossible if wrong, or more reliable if right.

Finally, there is the vantage point of the author. It is the lot of millions of my compatriots now, before, and in the foreseeable future to find ourselves in a curious internal/external position. The latter lends itself to eternal ambivalence, which encourages insights and discoveries that others, too far removed or excessively entrenched in everyday life, cannot easily acquire or achieve. More than 11 million native-born Mexicans reside abroad; 300,000 to 400,000 depart every year, more or less for good; the country’s leading businessmen, intellectuals, scientists, writers, and artists have almost all studied, worked, lived, and triumphed partly outside their birthplace. But with a few notable exceptions that I would never hope to emulate, these remarkable and simultaneously detached Mexicans have not devoted their talents to crisscrossing the country, studying it, and organizing the product of their study in a layman’s volume such as this. Most Mexicans who have never left the country are too close to perceive and admit its weaknesses; those who permanently settled in the United States are in all likelihood too distant and critical of their homeland to penetrate its mysteries and be captivated by its enigmas. So a lifetime of traveling throughout Mexico, lecturing at universities, writing in the local media, visiting small communities, and speaking with social activists and professionals, all the while teaching and writing in the United States, may lend this author the possibility of seeing what some others do not. A nomadic childhood and university studies in the United States and France may also contribute to this perspective.
An Outline

The first chapter describes one of the most neglected attributes of the Mexican ethos: an acute individualism and stubborn rejection of any type of collective action. It is contrasted with the thrust of the second chapter, that is, the emergence of Mexico today as a middle-class society, which by definition imposes limits on that individualism, and a growing reliance on collective endeavors. The third chapter returns to a classic feature of the Mexican soul: a powerful reluctance to engage in any type of conflict, a reverential respect for form and appearance over substance and content, and a constant effort to disguise feelings, interests, ambitions, and aspirations. This is challenged in the fourth chapter with the advent of representative democracy from the mid- nineties onward; the incompatibility of the necessary attributes for coping with authoritarian rule (during nearly five centuries) is coupled with the requirements of rough-and-tumble, transparent democratic politics, warts and all.

Chapters 5 and 6 delve first into the Mexican penchant for introspection, and fascination with history and the past, as well as fear and rejection of the “other,” especially of the “foreign other,” of which Mexico has always been a “victim.” This, once again, is a trait recurrently described by the classics, ever since they began to write and reflect upon the Mexican soul, and which thoroughly contradicts contemporary reality. Despite its closed- off, monopoly- dominated markets, Mexico’s economy is one of the most open in the world today;* Mexico is one of the world’s main tourism destinations; remittances from its population abroad represent one of the largest sources of its hard currency earnings. More importantly, few countries in the world have as close, complex, and multifaceted relationship with another, as Mexico does with the United States.

The seventh chapter is dedicated to the Mexican tradition of absolute disregard for the law, both for justified and understandable reasons and other unacceptable ones, and to the patrimonial approach to government service and Mexico’s world-renowned corruption, summarized by the marvelous admonition “El que no transa, no avanza” (“He who doesn’t trick or cheat gets nowhere”). Conversely, Chapter 8 examines Mexico’s need today to build a set of judicial institutions that guarantees the rule of law, and secures personal rights to property and due process. This clash is more current than the previous ones, since Mexico is already, up to a point, a democracy, a middle-class society, and an open economy, but is nowhere near to becoming a nation of laws. If anything, drug- trafficking and drug wars have distanced it from this goal in recent years, even if corruption has in all likelihood diminished. It is a crucial clash, because the resistance to living by the law, and as well as the traditional justifications for not doing so, are perhaps even more deeply entrenched in the Mexican psyche than other attributes of the national character.

Finally, in an almost desperate plea for the viability of change, and in an equally desperate search for a strong reason not to discard it, we will try to ascertain whether Mexicans in the United States, when placed in a different context, become different. There is almost a reallife, real-time experiment under way, involving millions of Mexicans about whom we know a great deal and can discover much more, who have decided, or been forced to decide, to transport themselves into an environment that is even more contradictory to their national character than the country they left behind. Mexicans in the United States live, work, marry, and settle in a context that, as much as they may attempt to make it resemble or replicate the one “back home,” is radically different from the country they left days, months, or years ago. Can Mexicans change, overnight or gradually? Can they adapt to settings so dissimilar to the ones they were born and grew up in? Is the modernization of Mexico possible when taken to the extreme— i.e., when peasants or students or children are uprooted and moved north—supposing it is desirable? Or, phrased in a more positive light, can Mexicans acquire the traits of a new national character, one truly compatible with their double nationality and double new reality: at home and abroad? These are the questions to be addressed in the last chapter.

Where and What Is Mexico?

The dysfunctional relationship between the classic traits of Mexico’s national character and its contemporary economic, social, international, and political landscape is well illustrated by one of the few relatively long-term statistical series regarding Mexicans’ values and beliefs compared with the rest of the world’s. In that series, which stretches from 1981 through the beginning of the new century, the nation’s values were plotted on a graph where the horizontal axis tracks changes between attitudes of survival and those of self-expression.*The former is considered by the team of social scientists who drew up the tables as “premodern,” and the latter as “modern.” The vertical axis also shows movement from traditional (“premodern”) to secular/rational stances (“modern”). From this perspective,Mexico falls clearly in the group of lower- and middleincome, emerging, or poor countries from Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Islamic world, where traditional and survival attitudes prevail. It is not bunched together with the industrialized, “modern” nations from the North Atlantic, the post-Communist societies in Eastern Europe (now part of the European Union), or the prosperous East Asian ones (such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan), where attitudes and values are of “self-expression” and “secular/rational.” But by its other features—Gross Domestic Product per capita, total exports, literacy, urban population, proximity to the United States, emigration, among others—it is clearly more part of that world, generally grouped together in the OECD, theOrganisation for Economic Co-operation andDevelopment (to whichMexico nominally belongs), or in the cluster of countries from Eastern or Southern Europe. It is closer to Poland and Portugal than it is to Peru or Paraguay.

That said, this contradiction, which constitutes the central premise of this book, does not rest on an underlying culturalist, essentialist, or ontological bedrock, or on a revised formula of what academics would call cultural determinism. The nation’s traits have ch...

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