Over the border and a world away

Poor Mexicans man, doesn’t anyone like us?

(Just so you know, at this point I was going to punctuate this rant with some Spanish, real ethnic, italicized and all, but I couldn’t do the phoniness. I haven’t spoken Spanish for years and I understand it when it’s spoken slowly with common words. I am of Mexican descent, I’ve alluded to it many times, however I’m not thoroughly immersed in my culture. To keep in mind during the remainder of this post. Read: Pocho)

It seems we are so reviled as an ethnic group (at least in the U.S.) that the only people who can tolerate Mexicans are other Mexicans (and even that is disputable).

Black people get a lot of shit also, yes, but at the risk of sounding like a racial Pollyanna, they have had a much longer history in this country, and consequently have become rather adept at infiltrating and becoming an integral part of Americana. Black culture has grown within the blueprint of American history. In essence, black culture has defined much of American culture as well. Inseparable but slightly equal approximately defines the state of black social advancement in this country, whereas for Mexicans it seems to be defined by “separate and forgotten.” Mexican culture tends to be insular and enamored of the Spanish language and the old country (which is too destructively close to the United States for there to be any semblance of Mexican assimilation into American culture.)

Porfirio Diaz, the Mexican President at the turn of the 20th Century, said it best in his observation, “Poor Mexico – so far from God and so close to the United States.” Rather than construing the sentiment as “anti-American,” I believe it is merely stating a simple, unequivocal truth that Mexico, possessed of whatever failed government or culture it did have, still never had the ability to succeed or fail in a manner which it completely owned. All Mexican triumphs and tragedies were realized through the fuzzy distortion from the immediate presence of the magnificent gravitational pull of it’s northern neighbor’s affluent mass. I believe Diaz was pointing out that geographical and historical happenstance are partially to blame for Mexico’s less than sublime historical record (at least from a First World status-oriented perspective). Would Mexico’s fortunes have smiled otherwise? I don’t know, but in such a situation Mexico’s fates would have been its own to build or destroy.

And thus Mexico’s birth into an existence in the shadows of the most powerful and wealthy country in the world thus struck its soul down.
Unable to assert tremendous strength or weakness; only proliferating an unwavering sense of insignificant notoriety in its people and its culture, Mexico has two choices in concurrence with Diaz’ quote. Embrace the United States and its ambitiously responsible culture, or eschew its principles of capitalism and cheesy hedonism. Having chosen the latter, Mexico was left to fend for itself to find a way to create a viable and independent nation while resisting the imposing gravitational wake issuing from the north.

Mexicans, we are a half-hearted American minority. We own our culture outright and being Mexican seems to be a state of geography and language above all. Our culture belongs to us, and exporting it to other nations, even in Latin America, has proven to be troublesome at best. Our culture is encapsulated by our language and brushed in broad, esoteric strokes which have not proven transmittable to strangers. The other segment of Diaz’ quote offers a curious dichotomy for the Mexican people.
So far from God.
My opinion, which was assuredly not Diaz’ in the year 1900, is that another ingredient in Mexico’s travails in its march to independent and healthy self-governance was the presence of the overbearing and dictatorial Catholic church. “So far from God” in the sense that the Catholic church, consumed and bloated with power and its centralized, earth-bound dogma, never allowed Mexico the opportunity to know any sense of God, for Mexico was inserted so deeply into Rome’s anal orifice that the poverty-ridden country was, for all intents and purposes, an unthinking and blindly devoted satellite puppet of the Vatican. Yet one more meek nail in the coffin for a country seeking to establish an identity and a culture.

Hence, on one hand, Mexico heeded the call of a small but powerful religious state halfway around the world whose global hegemony insisted on Mexico’s dependence, suffering and intellectual submission. And on the other hand, Mexico was asked to choose between joining the mighty ranks of the swelling cultural pulse of American wealth and dominion…or not. Instead, my ancestor’s timorous embrace of the American dream and journey to the foreign land (a concept which loses its potency considering the foreign land was a short walk away) failed to be magnificent in glory or in doom.

Where is…Mexico?