Playing Mexicans and Indians

[ilbegone]

I really didn't see prejudice in Mexico during many visits but I'm sure my host's were extremely careful.

Sometime refer to an Apache as being Mexican and watch for the reaction. I have read accounts of Mexican brutality concerning Mexican Indians, not the least with the attempted extermination of the Yaquis. There was once a Mexican bounty for Indian scalps from northern Mexican and border Indians, from which the scalps turned in often were obtained from female Mexican villagers rather than Indians (easier "take"). I read a dated account about Mexican teens way laying Indians taking their wares to market, with sadistic pleasure in beating on them, taking their goods, and driving them off.

The key word now is "cultural" rather than "racial" in Mexico. There was once something like 38 words to describe degrees of racial mixture in Mexico with a dominating society obsessed with racial purity, but Mestizos have been the majority since the late 1800's.

Benito Juarez became president of Mexico precisely because he ceased being Zapotec Indian by being educated by Spanish priests in his teens. I don't think he even spoke Spanish by the time he was 13 but learned fast enough to study law in Mexico City. In fact, during some of the early turmoil of his political career he had fled Mexico City to Guanajuato whereupon there was a dispatch from Guanajuato to Mexico city about "we have a crazy Indian here who claims to be (important political post, I believe it was President)".

The racist essay The Cosmic Race by Mexican intellectual Jose Vasconcelos (who had a hand in shaping post 1910 Mexican Revolution public education) essentially stated that it would be Mexican racial mixture which would overcome the United States (which he seemed to resentfully admire in the essay, but was sympathetic of Nazi Germany during WWII - bizarre contradictions in his thinking possibly explained by his experiences as a child being schooled in Eagle Pass Texas and his resentment of the Mexican American war).

As I remember, the towering Octavio Paz wrote concerning racial attitudes in Mexico that people who were mostly brown would stress Spanish ancestry, mostly whites would look to the Indian past, while the Indians themselves didn't care. He went on to state that The Mexican (I take it that it is in the cultural Mexican mestizo sense) denied his dual ancestry, The Mexican didn't want to be descended from either one, that his history began with himself.

Enrique Krauze, a close associate of the late Octavio Pass wrote that the first Mexican was Martin Cortes, the son of Hernan Cortez and Malintzin - Martin was the first Mestizo and Mexican culture is derived from both Indian and Spanish culture but belongs to neither one.

It is my observation that Mexican culture demands cultural assimilation, that the children of foreigners in Mexico have intense pressure to become culturally Mexican. Few Mexicans would state that "Mexican Americans" are Mexican unless there some angle being played (think Mexican Government or an advantage to be gained).

The (Late 60's - early 70's) film El Pocho staring Lalo Gonzalez showed his Mexican ancestry pulling him to Mexico while Mexico rejected him for his Americanization (represented by the scene with Lucha Villa - if I remember right there was first American music being played and danced to, then Lucha Villa sang Mariachi after telling Gonzalez that he was a Pocho [perjoratve calling him "white"], the scene further describing Gonzalez' duality). America rejected him for his Mexican-ness, while his Americanization pulled him towards America (both points shown in the last scene with his Mexican friend pushing him south and his American girlfriend pulling him north - last shot was of him laying down in a concrete ditch representing the border and saying "this is where I was born, right in between").

Unless you have money and in spite of all the lip service to the contrary, to be culturally Indian in Mexico is to be a nobody. The only Indians Mexico has any use for have been dead for 500 years.