Guest Column
Random Readings: Foreign reflections — Using the outside to look in
- By Kelly Arthur Garrett
- The Herald Mexico-El Universal
April 2, 2007
David Lida is a New York journalist, a fictioneer, and a fairly visible fixture in the Mexico City literary world for more than a decade now.
That combination makes him an eligible receiver for endless one-way conversations launched at him by those with strong opinions about the United States, which is to say nearly everybody.
Lida’s a savvy enough observer to understand that the opinions thus shared are far from monolithic, and, in his words, “have to do with the country the opinion-givers come from, their social class and the experiences they’ve had.”
He took those facts as a starting point for “El gringo a través del espejo,” or “The Gringo Through the Looking Glass,” a compilation of 22 short pieces by mostly Mexican writers, each dealing at least obliquely with the United States.
This kind of how-we-see-them anthology is on its way to becoming a genre. Another recent example, Emmanuel Carballo’s “¿Qué país es éste?,” reviewed here recently, samples dozens of Mexican authors’ observations about their neighbor to the north.
Like Carballo’s work, Lida’s is available only in Spanish, which tells you something about who these books are not meant for.
And like the entries in “¿Qué país es éste?,” most of the contributions in “Espejo” reveal very little about the United States, but very much about the authors’ assumptions, as well as how self-fulfilling those assumptions can be.
Otherwise, the two efforts couldn’t be more different.
Carballo chose only major contributors to the Mexican literary canon, from Independence to the 1980s. In contrast, Lida’s assembled population is contemporary and often little-known — and in several cases not Mexican.
The entries in Carballo’s book are predominantly excerpts from letters, journals and casual pieces. Lida gives us complete works, mostly memoirs and short stories.
(But he doesn’t tell us which is which. Some might argue that it doesn’t matter, and that the line between memoir and short fiction is fuzzy. I, for one, would still like to know if what I’m reading is for real or made up.)
Another difference: Carballo’s compilation often shows that even lions of Mexican literature are capable of producing lame prose when the subject matter is the United States. With Lida, though, we get mostly good reads, despite some too-facile interpretations of things Mexican vs. things American.
And in one outstanding essay by the novelist Juvenal Acosta we get a must-read, in this case precisely because the author is so clear-headed about things Mexican and American.
Inevitably, several “Espejo” contributions suffer from the dismissiveness and the self-referential, shortcomings in writing about “them.”
What we’re spared, thankfully, is the anti-Yankee diatribe, a genre that Lida has consciously disqualified — not because he disagrees but because he finds such screeds “not very interesting.”
He might also have added that they’re pointless; anyone who won’t by now acknowledge the sins of the U.S. world posture never will.
But Lida still couldn’t avoid including several entries by skilled writers who stoop to treating the United States as a straw man for their own self-validation.
Laura Emilia Pacheco’s “Do It Yourself,”for example, is a witty and crisply written collection of vignettes and anecdotes from her stateside days. But in the end it’s another variation on an old theme: “What am I, a proud Mexican, doing in this bizarre land of odd people who don’t understand me?”
Álvaro Enrigue is a prize-winning author, an editor at the literary magazine Letras Libres, a writing teacher, a literature professor, worldly in his outlook, and one a temporary resident of the United States.
Yet in his entry, he finds little of interest during a cross-country drive, and much to complain about. In South Dakota, “there is absolutely nothing,” and the entire Midwest is “a blind spot in the country.”
With this particular piece by Enrigue we get an idea of how much the rules change when the U.S. is the subject, in which case even an accomplished writer can boast of his lack of curiosity and be openly contemptuous of the common folk.
The more absorbing pieces in “Espejo” are short stories, or short story-like memoirs. Even here, an established matrix usually prevails in which the United States and its “gringos” are not so much places and people as an imposing presence that must be dealt with, since it cannot be avoided.
In Mauricio Carrera’s “Azar,” two immigrants navigate their way through the alien world of the Nevada side of the Sierra Nevada mountians, one comically and ineptly, the other proudly and tragically.
In a wonderful story entitled “The Transformers,” Tijuana writer Heriberto Yépez creates a U.S.-born step-grandfather so outlandish in his anti-Mexican convictions that he’s treated more with curiosity than resentment.
“Scott” will say things like “Mexican men can’t do anything” and scorn the Dodgers baseball team because the “ignorant Fernando Valenzuela” plays for them, writes Yépez. But for the narrator, he is also an “open door” — to maturity, among other things.
In stories about the United States, the cliché is not necessarily to be avoided. In Guillermo Fadanelli’s “Poet in New York,” the narrator and three other Mexicans (poets, of course) sell Christmas trees in December-cold Manhattan and are exploited by an oversized drunken Texan (of course), treated worse than the northern European (of course) immigrants, and bedeviled by a street criminal (black, of course).
Even the speech is central casting: “Mexicanos ser mejores para la noche,” goes the Texan’s broken Spanish, literally, “Mexicans to be better (workers) at night.”
An aside: The insertion of an infinitive where a conjugated verb should be is the stereotype of incompetent Spanish by English speakers. In three decades of bilingual work, I’ve heard a lot of bad Spanish and contributed my share. But I have never — not once — heard anybody make that particular mistake in real life. Where did the idea of it come from?
Lists of commercialized Americana abound, sometimes of consumer products but usually of actors the narrator remembers from childhood. John Wayne is always included. “My grandmother ... married a man 30 years her senior just because he looked like John Wayne,” writes Norma Lazo, a prolific Veracruz-born writer.
The Mexico-based Kosovan writer Xhevdet Bajraj gives us a more satisfying, Duke-less list: “My United States is Whitman, Pound, Ginsberg, Dylan, John Lee Hooker, Patti Smith, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, New York, Los Angeles.”
But the Parisian Phillippe Ollé-Laprune, now the director of Mexico City’s Casa Refugio Citlaltépetl, puts these lists in another light:
Frankly confessing (or bragging) that to him “the American is a fictional being,” he notes that as he matured, his points-of-reference progressed from John Wayne and Jimmy Connors (Jimmy Connors?!) to the likes of Velvet Underground, William Faulkner and Henry Miller. “But I still hadn’t known a single real American,” he points out. “One fiction had replaced another.”
In the midst of all this cultural tug-o’-war comes Acosta’s fresh and contrarian essay called “The Next Great American Novel,” which is part homage to Phillip Roth and part call to abandon the identity matrix and get real.
That there is a single “paisano” experience in the United States is a Fox-era myth, he says. According to Acosta, hiding behind stereotypes, about either Mexican migrants or the “gringos,” is useful only in the sense that it “affords us an ignorant, complacent existence.”
Acosta’s essay is too rich (and no doubt controversial to many) to summarize here. Three key points will have to do:
* An obsession with “mexicanidad,” as opposed to a healthy remembering of one’s roots, is debilitating for a migrant. Acosta: “We Mexicans cling to our cultural roots with desperation, and we fall into the trap of perceiving our presence in the United States as unjust, a product of circumstance, mutually utilitarian ... (not the) carrying out of a desire but a necessary imposition. In other words, we’ve refused to accept our condition as immigrants, and it shows.”
* Insisting on occupying an identity niche in a diverse nation is limiting. Acosta: “To speak of a ‘Latino identity’ is not only inexact and trivial, it’s ridiculous. It’s an invented concept, manufactured by ad agencies to sell us beer, CDs and cars.”
* Refusing to even try to understand, let alone become part of, the prevailing culture is bad migration strategy. And for Acosta, that means accepting the difference between the term “United States” and the term “America” as it’s usually used in the English-speaking world. Acosta: “The United States designates a geographic territory, a nation-state, an official identity, but a country is always more than that. ‘America’ is an idea, a concept ... and metaphor for something more transcendent than a flag or a territory, a way to experience life, a personal narrative written in an emotional code.”
That advice would apply to most immigrants anywhere in the world without much controversy, but the on-the-ground relationship between Mexico and the United States has always been, shall we say, interesting.
The pieces in “El gringo a través del espejo” bring home how interesting it can be. Perhaps we’ll all be better off when the relationship evolves from interesting to commonplace.
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