Racism in my Experience — Part 15
Mexico
In 1975, I spent three months traveling and camping out in an old VW bus throughout Mexico – West Coast, central Mexico and East Coast, beginning in Nogales and ending at Tulum -- the first of many trips there. The Mexicans have historical reasons to detest us as we took Texas, California, New Mexico Arizona, Nevada and Utah from them by force of arms over 150 years ago. In Western and Central Mexico, we met and talked with people who had worked and lived in the US in agriculture and construction, and wanted to trade stories about their lives and experiences living in the US (they liked it) and to explain and show us the glories of Mexico (they loved and were very proud of it). Throughout Mexico, the magnificent churches, beautiful old colonial buildings and central plazas housed a wonderful, rich, festive and familial culture, so very different from our own Anglo-based culture. Partly it may be the profound difference between the Mediterranean, Catholic, Spanish and indigenous culture of Mexico and the Northern European, English, Protestant culture in many parts of the US. Partly it’s the difference between a highly developed first world nation and a next-door neighbor struggling to get there. And partly it's the difference between a proud mestizo nation and one still struggling with its history of slavery and racism.
The great sprawling, vibrant, revolutionary, murals of Siquieros, Riviera and Orozco in the Palacio de Bellas Artes completely captivated me, like a great Tolstoy novel. Who are our nation’s pictorial/visual equivalents? I’m not sure that I can identify them. Would it be Dorothea Lange and Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keefe during and after the Great Depression? Or would it be the luminescence of Church and Cole and Bierstadt during the opening of the nation? Or would it be the photography of Edward Curtis, Ansel Adams and Edward Weston? Or our Civil War as seen through the lens of Matthew Brady?
In Hermosillo, we visited the outdoor museum of Olmec sculptures; the massive carved heads seemed to be of strong African men, and I wondered whether some of their ancestors had come from West Africa, not so. The Olmecs were the first great Mexican civilization between 1200 and 400 years BC. Apparently their ancestors came from Asia across the Bering Sea and established a highly advanced civilization on the East Coast of Mexico. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olmec_alternative_origin_speculations
I had always been curious about the Mayans who had advanced astronomy, architecture, mathematics, cities, roads, art and writings. They had many rises and falls of dominance by different city states in the region, dating back prior to 2000 BC, reaching a peak before 900 AD and then a renaissance and subsequent decline not long before the Spanish invasions of the late 1500’s. They were dominant and endured for over 3,000 years in their regions of Guatemala, Belize, the Yucatan and Quintana Roo. We visited Palenque, Chichen Itza, Uxmal, Tulum and Coba. The collapse(s) of the Mayans may have been due to the excessive warfare between the cities, the collapse of agriculture due to droughts and over-cultivation, or an overthrow of the priests and nobles by the common people who did all the labor to support these magnificent cities constructed for the elites. The Mayans continued to revolt against the occupation of their lands by Ladinos in Mexico as late as the 1840s, And in the Guatemalan highlands from 1965 until very recently, the US backed Guatemalan military was massacring Mayan peasant farmers with enormous loss of life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan_genocide
During our travels, we met and talked with many young, professional and well educated men close to our ages in the cafes and plazas. We discussed the killings of demonstrating students at Tlateloco during the ’68 Olympics and the insurgency that developed in the high mountains of Southern Mexico afterwards.
On the East Coast, we became friendly with a highly educated young Mayan man; he looked as if he had walked out of one of the Mayan murals at Bonampak. The Maya have retained a vibrant independent ancestral culture despite the Spanish conquest.
Mexico is a Mestizo culture – a blend of Spanish and indigenous peoples; my impression was that they had avoided the racism that plagues the US through intermarriage. Intermarriage/miscegenation by contrast was a crime in parts of the US ‘til 1960s. During our travels in the 70’s, I was acutely aware of classism and sharp economic divides in Mexico, but I was completely unaware of the racism. But it apparently exists and is quite pronounced in Mexico. https://theconversation.com/study-reveals-racial-inequality-in-mexico-disproving-its-race-blind-rhetoric-87661
There are many distinct and vibrant indigenous cultures in Mexico, but we only got a chance to know the Maya in the Yucatan and Chiapas. In the 90’s, the indigenous peoples of Southern Mexico began a new Zapatista movement to redress the lack of education, health care, income and governing autonomy for indigenous peoples in Mexico. http://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/news-item/the-zapatista-movement-the-fight-for-indigenous-rights-in-mexico/
Mexico and the US are so deeply entwined along the US Southwest border states; it is hard to understand how the racial hatred for Mexicans that Donald Trump espouses and foments finds fertile roots here, yet this is where it originated and where it first found fecund political soil.