Here's a review that ran well over a year ago in the Herald Mexico. It deals with how Americans perceive Mexico and Mexicans. Much of the way the two populations see each other is demonstrably misguided, of course, but much of the false perception is not just the result of ignorance but also the heritage of consciously constructed myths. This is a look at how the newly installed Anglo leaders of Los Angeles re-created the city's Mexican past (more often called the Spanish past) in order to prevent Mexicans and their descendants from having a role in the city's future.
Whitewashed Adobe:
The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of its Mexican Past
By WIlliam Deverell
University of California Press (2004)
Romanced to Death
BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT
That U.S. expansionism in the 1840s cost Mexico half its territory is something Mexican commentators need no coaxing to bring up. Outsiders, in fact, are struck by how often they do bring it up. Regrettable as the Treaty of Guadalupe obviously was from the Mexican point of view, why the need to repeatedly remind the world of it more than a century and a half later?
“Whitewashed Adobe,” California historian William Deverell’s relentless examination of Mexicans’ fate under U.S. rule, suggests some answers. The book details how, starting in the post-war 1850s, the new Anglo-Los Angeles elite socially engineered the conquered Mexican population right out of the city’s future.
What we also see, however, is how the strategies for doing that — especially the one-two punch of discrimination and romanticization — allowed the dominant society to effectively freeze Mexicans in time and space. Such “cultural cryogenics” (Deverell’s phrase) made it easy to ascribe to all Mexicans general character traits, and Deverell’s list of the historical stereotypes sounds as up-to-date as a weather report: “childlike, simple, quick to anger, close to nature, primitive, hard-working, lazy, superstitious, possibly criminal.”
In other words, relegating the Mexican population in California to a colorful, sleepy “Spanish” past not only marginalized the longtime area inhabitants as the rest of Los Angeles grew, but also created what Deverell calls “an Anglo cultural stance toward Mexicans.” That harmful stance persists today, complicating L.A.’s transition to a multicultural metropolis. It also continues to trouble U.S-Mexico interactions.
Most Mexicans today understand on one level or another that Americans’ self-serving vision of them — the ongoing “cultural stance” — is in a large part an inheritance of the U.S.-Mexican war and its aftermath. So one explanation of the still burning obsession with the consequences of that war might be that it’s still doing damage.
Another explanation is that the U.S.-Mexico war didn’t end with the takeover of California and other former Mexican lands in 1848. Though Anglo settlers in the past had acknowledged and even adopted the ways of the old Californios, once in charge they would have none of it. Eliminating Mexican rule was not the whole battle. Mexican influence, Mexican culture, and as far as possible the Mexican presence itself, all had to go too.
Terror and violence were the initial methods of choice. The Mexican-American war morphed into a war against Mexican-Americans. “The bloody 1850s sent Los Angeles spinning with such ethnic hatred that it has yet to fully recover,” Deverell tells us. The strategy, combined with Anglo in-migration, worked well. L.A.’s population went from 80 percent Mexican to 20 percent in one generation.
After the newly arrived railroads converted Los Angeles into an 1880s boomtown, the city boosters turned to subtler tactics for keeping ethnic Mexicans down while simultaneously disguising southern California’s violent recent past. They chose obliteration through appropriation, a clever plan that has colored U.S. perceptions of ethnic Mexicans for more than a century. It was the remaking of a Mexican past that the book’s subtitle alludes to, and Deverell’s penetrating analysis of the phenomenon is what makes “Whitewashed Adobe” so fascinating for anybody who cares about the overlapping story of Mexico and California.
Essentially, the Mexican presence was turned into a historical pageant, a nostalgic fiction drenched in the romance of missions, rodeos, dances and festivals. The notion was wildly popular among the city’s transplanted residents; it gave them an unthreatening regional identity free of any effect on their day-to-day lives.
At the same time, it allowed the elite to contrast Anglo progress with pleasant but sleepy Spanish and Mexican periods. With things Mexican safely relegated to a long-gone past, flesh and blood Mexicans were now relics, virtual non-entities assigned to unsanitary barrios near the flood-prone Los Angeles River and to low-wage manual labor.
Deverell explains developments not through generalities but by looking into specific manifestations of the whitewashing of the region’s Mexican-ness. Two fascinating examples — the “typical” La Fiesta de Los Angeles in the 1890s and the quaint, sentimental Mission Play starting in 1912 — are described in intricate detail, perhaps too much detail for many readers. But we get the picture: “From the vantage of a century later, La Fiesta looks like the party white Los Angeles threw to celebrate the triumph of Manifest Destiny in the Far West.”
Deverell isn’t of the school that requires history to read like a novel. He has a point to make, and he eschews entertainment in favor of countless contemporary source citations to bring it home. But he does have a deft touch for passing along, without comment, particularly telling quotes by the beneficiaries of the whitewashing.
In a chapter on the L.A. area’s biggest brickyard, where the all-Mexican and Mexican-American workforce was confined to company housing and starvation wages, Deverell quotes a newspaper reporter attending the annual brickyard Christmas party for the workers’ children: “To see those merry-faced, brown-skinned youngsters carrying off their treasures ... is to get a new light on the melting pot of America.”
“Whitewashed Adobe” stops at the onset of World War II, after which the stirrings of Chicano political activism began to change the equation. But the U.S. “cultural stance” continues, played out on a broader, NAFTA-era stage.
As I read “Whitewashed Adobe,” I kept thinking about two movies. Mexican director Paul Leduc’s subtle and political biopic of Frida Kahlo screened for the Motion Picture Academy of America as a Best Foreign Picture hopeful in 1985. The huge theater nearly emptied by the time it was half over.
In contrast, some two decades later, the Hollywood version was a box-office success. The Mexican movie was infinitely better, not to mention more accurate. But the Hollywood movie delivered the Mexico that plays best stateside: bright colors, romance and pretty people speaking in charmingly accented English. It reflected a U.S. cultural stance 150 years in the making.
Friday, June 29, 2007
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Commentary: Lay, government, lay
With religious leaders feeling their oats and a pro-Church party in power, the push for injecting religion into government isn't letting up. The following lightly abridged opinion piece could have been written yesterday, but it appeared in the Herald Mexico on February 19, 2006. At the time, Vicente Fox was president and Carlos Abascal was Interior (Gobernación) secretary. Abascal, along with Fox and lame-duck PAN party leader Manuel Espino, is still a key figure in the PAN's religious-right faction.
Have Faith, Will Govern
BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT
Not many of social and cultural critic Carlos Monsiváis’s observations over the decades have had more impact than his January 31 warning about new fissures in Mexico’s already-cracked wall between church and state. Red flags about this have been going up with increasing frequency since Vicente Fox and the National Action Party (PAN) re-introduced religion as a governing posture, if not tool. But Monsivais’s speech marked a turning point in the escalating battle.
One reason Monsiváis’s own red flag is getting more attention than others’ is because it was raised rather unexpectedly as the major theme of his acceptance speech after receiving one of the few literary prizes he hadn’t already claimed, the National Award for Literature. What’s more, the speech was delivered at Los Pinos during a gala awards ceremony attended by President Fox himself (who showed his own knack for barbed rejoinders by closing the festivities with, “God bless you”).
Another reason is that Monsiváis named names. The name he spent the most time on was none other then Carlos Abascal, the former labor secretary whom Fox selected to close out the sexenio as Interior (Gobernación) Secretary after Santiago Creel resigned to run for president.
Monsiváis indicted Abascal not so much based on his (and many other panistas’) activism on specific issues like the morning-after pill, but on his more far-reaching philosophical statements that reveal a decidedly theological approach to organizing the state.
Monsiváis also has cited Abascal’s contributing role in his father’s 1997 book skewering Benito Juárez as the original cause of such atrocities as civil marriage, tolerance of protestant sects, and the advent of public lay schools (or in the senior Abascal’s words, the “terrorism” of “atheist education”).
In his Los Pinos speech, Monsiváis focused on Abascal’s statement a few days earlier at something called the World Ethical Forum. Abascal’s words, translated: “It is necessary to reclaim ... religion as the space for promoting the link between the human being and his transcendent destiny, in order to give meaning to the ethical values that comprise his daily life.”
Not without good reason, Monsiváis finds it disturbing that a high government official considers it “necessary” to promote religion as the basis for deciding what’s ethically appropriate. Of course, many people do base their ethical judgments exclusively on religion, or think they do. But they’re not in charge of the internal policies of a constitutionally secular government. Abascal is.
Abascal’s substantive defense was that he was misunderstood: “What I said is that in the ethical formation of its citizens, it’s important for the state to turn to all its sources of strength — the family, the schools, business, political leaders, and the churches.” In interviews, the secretary stressed that he had no intention of undermining the nation’s traditional church-state separation, and that indeed he’d done plenty to ensure that the clergy stays out of politics.
Monsiváis wasn’t buying it. “He cites what he didn’t say to respond to criticism of what he did say,” he said. “What he said is that only religion gives meaning to ethical values.”
Abascal’s political defense was less conciliatory: “I respect those fundamentalists who accuse me of fundamentalism.”
The implication was that Monsiváis, in criticizing Abascal, was being intolerant — if not of religion itself, then of those who hold views about it differing from his. The Catholic Church leadership, in one of its publications, quickly backed up Abascal, accusing Monsiváis of “trying to lock the clergy back in the cloister.”
Monsiváis clearly meant no such thing, but the counterattack was still an effective move, right out of the Karl Rove playbook. Turn the tables on your opponent by attacking his strength with a catchy soundbite. It doesn’t matter if the accusation is ludicrous, such as putting a “fundamentalist” label on a defender of religious freedom. What matters is changing the terms of the debate.
But Monsiváis seems to be less interested in winning small political battles as he is in re-energizing respect for what a secular state really means. It’s not a mere negative, the absence of religious establishment. Rather, it’s a positive statement of a people’s commitment to free inquiry, individual rights, religious freedom, and democratic government.
In his acceptance speech, Monsiváis paid homage to that commitment, and those from previous generations who “bequeathed us their faith in reason, their exercise of freedom of expression and belief, their extraordinary creative powers, their love of culture, art and science, and their humanistic and democratic impulses.”
Some wonder if Monsiváis and others aren’t overreacting. Mexico’s laicismo wasn’t decreed by founding fathers; it was fought for over several bloody decades. That high price helped establish it all the more firmly in Mexico’s political tradition, and it’s doubtful that a minority of politicians could succeed it toppling it.
Perhaps. But turn on CNN. The world is hardly racing in the right direction. And here in Mexico there’s no doubt that some people in high places see no harm and much benefit in squeezing religion into the halls of government. That, Monsiváis is saying, is a threat, even if they ultimately fail.
For Mexico to advance, secular government can’t just survive. It needs to thrive.
Have Faith, Will Govern
BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT
Not many of social and cultural critic Carlos Monsiváis’s observations over the decades have had more impact than his January 31 warning about new fissures in Mexico’s already-cracked wall between church and state. Red flags about this have been going up with increasing frequency since Vicente Fox and the National Action Party (PAN) re-introduced religion as a governing posture, if not tool. But Monsivais’s speech marked a turning point in the escalating battle.
One reason Monsiváis’s own red flag is getting more attention than others’ is because it was raised rather unexpectedly as the major theme of his acceptance speech after receiving one of the few literary prizes he hadn’t already claimed, the National Award for Literature. What’s more, the speech was delivered at Los Pinos during a gala awards ceremony attended by President Fox himself (who showed his own knack for barbed rejoinders by closing the festivities with, “God bless you”).
Another reason is that Monsiváis named names. The name he spent the most time on was none other then Carlos Abascal, the former labor secretary whom Fox selected to close out the sexenio as Interior (Gobernación) Secretary after Santiago Creel resigned to run for president.
Monsiváis indicted Abascal not so much based on his (and many other panistas’) activism on specific issues like the morning-after pill, but on his more far-reaching philosophical statements that reveal a decidedly theological approach to organizing the state.
Monsiváis also has cited Abascal’s contributing role in his father’s 1997 book skewering Benito Juárez as the original cause of such atrocities as civil marriage, tolerance of protestant sects, and the advent of public lay schools (or in the senior Abascal’s words, the “terrorism” of “atheist education”).
In his Los Pinos speech, Monsiváis focused on Abascal’s statement a few days earlier at something called the World Ethical Forum. Abascal’s words, translated: “It is necessary to reclaim ... religion as the space for promoting the link between the human being and his transcendent destiny, in order to give meaning to the ethical values that comprise his daily life.”
Not without good reason, Monsiváis finds it disturbing that a high government official considers it “necessary” to promote religion as the basis for deciding what’s ethically appropriate. Of course, many people do base their ethical judgments exclusively on religion, or think they do. But they’re not in charge of the internal policies of a constitutionally secular government. Abascal is.
Abascal’s substantive defense was that he was misunderstood: “What I said is that in the ethical formation of its citizens, it’s important for the state to turn to all its sources of strength — the family, the schools, business, political leaders, and the churches.” In interviews, the secretary stressed that he had no intention of undermining the nation’s traditional church-state separation, and that indeed he’d done plenty to ensure that the clergy stays out of politics.
Monsiváis wasn’t buying it. “He cites what he didn’t say to respond to criticism of what he did say,” he said. “What he said is that only religion gives meaning to ethical values.”
Abascal’s political defense was less conciliatory: “I respect those fundamentalists who accuse me of fundamentalism.”
The implication was that Monsiváis, in criticizing Abascal, was being intolerant — if not of religion itself, then of those who hold views about it differing from his. The Catholic Church leadership, in one of its publications, quickly backed up Abascal, accusing Monsiváis of “trying to lock the clergy back in the cloister.”
Monsiváis clearly meant no such thing, but the counterattack was still an effective move, right out of the Karl Rove playbook. Turn the tables on your opponent by attacking his strength with a catchy soundbite. It doesn’t matter if the accusation is ludicrous, such as putting a “fundamentalist” label on a defender of religious freedom. What matters is changing the terms of the debate.
But Monsiváis seems to be less interested in winning small political battles as he is in re-energizing respect for what a secular state really means. It’s not a mere negative, the absence of religious establishment. Rather, it’s a positive statement of a people’s commitment to free inquiry, individual rights, religious freedom, and democratic government.
In his acceptance speech, Monsiváis paid homage to that commitment, and those from previous generations who “bequeathed us their faith in reason, their exercise of freedom of expression and belief, their extraordinary creative powers, their love of culture, art and science, and their humanistic and democratic impulses.”
Some wonder if Monsiváis and others aren’t overreacting. Mexico’s laicismo wasn’t decreed by founding fathers; it was fought for over several bloody decades. That high price helped establish it all the more firmly in Mexico’s political tradition, and it’s doubtful that a minority of politicians could succeed it toppling it.
Perhaps. But turn on CNN. The world is hardly racing in the right direction. And here in Mexico there’s no doubt that some people in high places see no harm and much benefit in squeezing religion into the halls of government. That, Monsiváis is saying, is a threat, even if they ultimately fail.
For Mexico to advance, secular government can’t just survive. It needs to thrive.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Between Us: What's The News?
Here's most of an ad that's been running stateside:
"The News, an English language daily based in Mexico City is relaunching
this year. We are looking for editors and reporters to join us in this
exciting new venture. Editors need a minimum of five years experience,
reporters at least three years. Knowledge and interest in Mexico is a
decided advantage. Fluency in Spanish is preferred. InDesign knowledge a
plus."
People involved with this "exciting new venture" (or who want to be involved) have been effecting a self-important secrecy about the project, as though it were the local equivalent of the Manhattan Project. So there's a lot of unconfirmed hearsay floating around. But the ad tells us a few things:
1. There will be an English-language daily in Mexico sometime this year, barring a last-minute pullout.
2. It will be a re-incarnation of The News, the bland tabloid that the O'Farrill family published for more than 50 years through 2002.
3. Management is recruiting outside the country, asking for more experienced journalists than the old News usually hired.
4. Management considers knowledge of Mexico to be an "advantage" rather than a necessity, and Spanish fluency is "preferred" rather than required.
5. Whoever writes their ads needs some work on hyphen and comma use, as well as noun-verb number agreement.
We don't know yet whether the new News will be like the old News. That will depend on the publication's approach to some variables. Such as:
Independence: A conservative slant is the prerogative of the publisher and isn't necessarily a quality-killer. But the old News was so compromised by its pro-government bias that its credibility was close to non-existent.
Quality: There's no polite way to put it — the old News was a porquería, a very amateurish endeavor. Gross mistakes were common, and a lot of the locally produced copy made very little sense. Will the new News give us what we deserve?
Professionalism: Experienced journalists rarely worked at the old News, unless their experience was entirely at the News itself. The career journalists who slipped in were watched closely as potential troublemakers, and prevented from having an impact on the product itself.
Mission: Since the paper will surely not have a staff large enough to cover "all" the news, it should decide what it will focus on. If it does, it will be a rarity among such publications here. That's because most English-language efforts have chosen -- or been forced — to fill up their pages with whatever they could get their hands on. They’ve had no journalistic purpose other than to be in English.
(An exception is the monthly Inside Mexico, which knows exactly what it wants to do: serve as a sort of house organ for the English-language "community" by emphasizing service articles and people pieces. They do a pretty good job, but that approach isn't substantive enough for a daily newspaper.)
The old News had no criteria for what to put in the paper, but lots for what to leave out — controversy, opposition viewpoints, intelligent comment. Which leads us to the final variable:
Intelligence level: For some reason, there's an assumption among media heavies that English speakers, because they are less well-versed about Mexican society, need to read at the level of six-year-olds. Newspapers by definition are published for the common reader, but the common Anglophone reader in Mexico is not necessarily the boob that these publishers think.
The leader in this department is not a written publication but the radio program Living in Mexico. I'm an admirer of Ana María Salazar and I'm glad there's a news and commentary program available in English. But I'm telling you, the show is so dumbed down I feel like I'm listening to Barney the Dinosaur.
The Herald Mexico was far from perfect in this regard, especially in the entertainment and culture section, but it condescended considerably less than its predecessors. So maybe things are moving in the right direction. Will the new News treats us like intelligent, curious adults?
Or perhaps more to the point, will it be capable of doing that?
You can ask them yourself. The contact address is: publicrelations@thenews.com.mx
Let me know if you get an answer.
"The News, an English language daily based in Mexico City is relaunching
this year. We are looking for editors and reporters to join us in this
exciting new venture. Editors need a minimum of five years experience,
reporters at least three years. Knowledge and interest in Mexico is a
decided advantage. Fluency in Spanish is preferred. InDesign knowledge a
plus."
People involved with this "exciting new venture" (or who want to be involved) have been effecting a self-important secrecy about the project, as though it were the local equivalent of the Manhattan Project. So there's a lot of unconfirmed hearsay floating around. But the ad tells us a few things:
1. There will be an English-language daily in Mexico sometime this year, barring a last-minute pullout.
2. It will be a re-incarnation of The News, the bland tabloid that the O'Farrill family published for more than 50 years through 2002.
3. Management is recruiting outside the country, asking for more experienced journalists than the old News usually hired.
4. Management considers knowledge of Mexico to be an "advantage" rather than a necessity, and Spanish fluency is "preferred" rather than required.
5. Whoever writes their ads needs some work on hyphen and comma use, as well as noun-verb number agreement.
We don't know yet whether the new News will be like the old News. That will depend on the publication's approach to some variables. Such as:
Independence: A conservative slant is the prerogative of the publisher and isn't necessarily a quality-killer. But the old News was so compromised by its pro-government bias that its credibility was close to non-existent.
Quality: There's no polite way to put it — the old News was a porquería, a very amateurish endeavor. Gross mistakes were common, and a lot of the locally produced copy made very little sense. Will the new News give us what we deserve?
Professionalism: Experienced journalists rarely worked at the old News, unless their experience was entirely at the News itself. The career journalists who slipped in were watched closely as potential troublemakers, and prevented from having an impact on the product itself.
Mission: Since the paper will surely not have a staff large enough to cover "all" the news, it should decide what it will focus on. If it does, it will be a rarity among such publications here. That's because most English-language efforts have chosen -- or been forced — to fill up their pages with whatever they could get their hands on. They’ve had no journalistic purpose other than to be in English.
(An exception is the monthly Inside Mexico, which knows exactly what it wants to do: serve as a sort of house organ for the English-language "community" by emphasizing service articles and people pieces. They do a pretty good job, but that approach isn't substantive enough for a daily newspaper.)
The old News had no criteria for what to put in the paper, but lots for what to leave out — controversy, opposition viewpoints, intelligent comment. Which leads us to the final variable:
Intelligence level: For some reason, there's an assumption among media heavies that English speakers, because they are less well-versed about Mexican society, need to read at the level of six-year-olds. Newspapers by definition are published for the common reader, but the common Anglophone reader in Mexico is not necessarily the boob that these publishers think.
The leader in this department is not a written publication but the radio program Living in Mexico. I'm an admirer of Ana María Salazar and I'm glad there's a news and commentary program available in English. But I'm telling you, the show is so dumbed down I feel like I'm listening to Barney the Dinosaur.
The Herald Mexico was far from perfect in this regard, especially in the entertainment and culture section, but it condescended considerably less than its predecessors. So maybe things are moving in the right direction. Will the new News treats us like intelligent, curious adults?
Or perhaps more to the point, will it be capable of doing that?
You can ask them yourself. The contact address is: publicrelations@thenews.com.mx
Let me know if you get an answer.
Friday, June 22, 2007
Rumblings: Abort mission
José Luis Soberanes, the national human rights czar for most of the PAN era, has officially crossed the line from "controversial" to "embattled."
He seems to like it that way.
His samurai mentality should be an asset for a National Human Rights Commission president. The job description, after all, is to advise government officials when their actions violate somebody or everybody's human rights. Since government officials seldom appreciate this kind of advice, the ombudsman (as the position is often called) has to be ready to rumble on occasion.
Soberanes can get down with the best of them.
In recent weeks he's torn off letters blasting anyone who dares to criticize him in print — including Carlos Monsiváis and (through an underling) the UNAM law professor John Ackerman. Earlier, he scolded former top federal cop Eduardo Medina Mora for ignoring his recommendations.
He also invited the growing chorus of critics to "pull up a chair and get comfortable" because he never, ever, is going to resign.
But here's what's noteworthy about the fighting side of José Luis Soberanes: With some exceptions, such as the now forgotten Medina Mora incident, his offensive has not been aimed at the usual target of a federal human rights president, i.e. the federal government. Instead, he's been going after the critics of the Calderón administration and of the military that Calderón commands.
It's gotten to the point where non-government human rights groups, the major opposition party (the PRD), and a host of commentators such as Monsiváis and Ackerman are convinced that Soberanes is doing the government's bidding — exactly the opposite of what the head of the supposedly autonomous CNDH is supposed to do.
"He has placed himself at the service of Calderón," said UNAM political science professor emeritus Octavio Rodríguez Araujo. "He has usurped functions that don't correspond to him."
Even early in his tenure Soberanes showed signs of, shall we say, an unorthodox set of priorities. Once he claimed that secular public schools violated the human rights of children by denying them religious instruction. The statement was baffling, but it served to clarify where he stands on the church-state divide and why some legislators tried to make his alleged Opus Dei membership an issue at his confirmation hearing.
Critics base their current concern mostly on two recent actions. In April, Soberanes issued an opinion that soldiers had not raped an elderly indigenous woman in the Veracruz mountains as she had claimed with her dying words.
It's not unusual for an ombudsman to find that a human rights violation had not taken place. But it is unusual for him to exhume a body to oversee a second autopsy that conveniently fails to find the semen traces that the first autopsy did find, and then inform the president, before issuing any report, that the victim had died of gastritis.
Anyone inclined to believe that the CNDH was helping Calderón protect the military now had more reason to believe it.
More unsettling for the nation's political stability in the coming months was Soberanes' move to challenge the Federal District's recently liberalized abortion law before the Supreme Court. The court will hear the case. That guarantees, regardless of the outcome, a full future schedule of highly emotional political battles carried out in all kinds of venues, including the streets.
Soberanes had no business getting involved with the DF abortion law. That was essentially confirmed by a recent Supreme Court finding that the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), and by extension all autonomous quasi-governmental bodies, including the CNDH, have no authority to challenge legislation before the Supreme Court.
But Soberanes' action has served its purpose by framing the abortion issue as a human rights concern -- not women's rights to control their bodies but the "human rights" of the "product of conception."
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court challenge will be led by the other plaintiff, the federal Attorney General. That person is none other than Eduardo Medina Mora.
Why are Calderón and the PAN bothering with the abortion fight? Part of it is ideological. Most panistas are staunchly pro-Church and maybe even genuinely anti-abortion. They don't want to see the liberalization trend spread outside the PRD-controlled DF.
But the real reason, as usual, is politics. Though most capital residents support a woman's right to choose, the nation as a whole is pretty much split 50-50. But those who would deny a woman that right to choose feel stronger about the issue than pro-choice voters. With the PRI now in the pro-choice camp, the PAN is in a position to own that hard-line 50 percent.
For the PRD, Soberanes's behavior confirms their contention that the nation's institutions have been compromised. From their point of view, the 2006 presidential election exposed the post-2003 IFE and the Electoral Tribunal as accomplices in a plot to keep them out of Los Pinos, now and forever. Now the CNDH is helping a PAN effort to prevent the PRD from enacting reforms even where they do slip into office.
You can accept or deny the validity of that thinking. But it exists, and it's worrisome. An opposition that feels it has no recourse but the streets will take to the streets.
That's what we're all trying to avoid, isn't it?
He seems to like it that way.
His samurai mentality should be an asset for a National Human Rights Commission president. The job description, after all, is to advise government officials when their actions violate somebody or everybody's human rights. Since government officials seldom appreciate this kind of advice, the ombudsman (as the position is often called) has to be ready to rumble on occasion.
Soberanes can get down with the best of them.
In recent weeks he's torn off letters blasting anyone who dares to criticize him in print — including Carlos Monsiváis and (through an underling) the UNAM law professor John Ackerman. Earlier, he scolded former top federal cop Eduardo Medina Mora for ignoring his recommendations.
He also invited the growing chorus of critics to "pull up a chair and get comfortable" because he never, ever, is going to resign.
But here's what's noteworthy about the fighting side of José Luis Soberanes: With some exceptions, such as the now forgotten Medina Mora incident, his offensive has not been aimed at the usual target of a federal human rights president, i.e. the federal government. Instead, he's been going after the critics of the Calderón administration and of the military that Calderón commands.
It's gotten to the point where non-government human rights groups, the major opposition party (the PRD), and a host of commentators such as Monsiváis and Ackerman are convinced that Soberanes is doing the government's bidding — exactly the opposite of what the head of the supposedly autonomous CNDH is supposed to do.
"He has placed himself at the service of Calderón," said UNAM political science professor emeritus Octavio Rodríguez Araujo. "He has usurped functions that don't correspond to him."
Even early in his tenure Soberanes showed signs of, shall we say, an unorthodox set of priorities. Once he claimed that secular public schools violated the human rights of children by denying them religious instruction. The statement was baffling, but it served to clarify where he stands on the church-state divide and why some legislators tried to make his alleged Opus Dei membership an issue at his confirmation hearing.
Critics base their current concern mostly on two recent actions. In April, Soberanes issued an opinion that soldiers had not raped an elderly indigenous woman in the Veracruz mountains as she had claimed with her dying words.
It's not unusual for an ombudsman to find that a human rights violation had not taken place. But it is unusual for him to exhume a body to oversee a second autopsy that conveniently fails to find the semen traces that the first autopsy did find, and then inform the president, before issuing any report, that the victim had died of gastritis.
Anyone inclined to believe that the CNDH was helping Calderón protect the military now had more reason to believe it.
More unsettling for the nation's political stability in the coming months was Soberanes' move to challenge the Federal District's recently liberalized abortion law before the Supreme Court. The court will hear the case. That guarantees, regardless of the outcome, a full future schedule of highly emotional political battles carried out in all kinds of venues, including the streets.
Soberanes had no business getting involved with the DF abortion law. That was essentially confirmed by a recent Supreme Court finding that the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), and by extension all autonomous quasi-governmental bodies, including the CNDH, have no authority to challenge legislation before the Supreme Court.
But Soberanes' action has served its purpose by framing the abortion issue as a human rights concern -- not women's rights to control their bodies but the "human rights" of the "product of conception."
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court challenge will be led by the other plaintiff, the federal Attorney General. That person is none other than Eduardo Medina Mora.
Why are Calderón and the PAN bothering with the abortion fight? Part of it is ideological. Most panistas are staunchly pro-Church and maybe even genuinely anti-abortion. They don't want to see the liberalization trend spread outside the PRD-controlled DF.
But the real reason, as usual, is politics. Though most capital residents support a woman's right to choose, the nation as a whole is pretty much split 50-50. But those who would deny a woman that right to choose feel stronger about the issue than pro-choice voters. With the PRI now in the pro-choice camp, the PAN is in a position to own that hard-line 50 percent.
For the PRD, Soberanes's behavior confirms their contention that the nation's institutions have been compromised. From their point of view, the 2006 presidential election exposed the post-2003 IFE and the Electoral Tribunal as accomplices in a plot to keep them out of Los Pinos, now and forever. Now the CNDH is helping a PAN effort to prevent the PRD from enacting reforms even where they do slip into office.
You can accept or deny the validity of that thinking. But it exists, and it's worrisome. An opposition that feels it has no recourse but the streets will take to the streets.
That's what we're all trying to avoid, isn't it?
Monday, June 18, 2007
Commentary: Consider it an insult
Porrúa, a major Mexican publisher, and the Tampico city government is releasing a compilation of works by poets and short story writers who have won the Efraín Huerta National Literature Prize during the 25 years of that prestigious award's existence.
One of the featured prize-winners is Sergio Witz, a Campeche poet who was at the center of a revealing little episode two years ago. Here, from the Oct. 23, 2005 Herald Mexico, is an opinion piece about what was going down at the time.
Insult a Symbol, Go to Jail
BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT
At the fantasy level, there's something to be said for selective punishment of certain poets. Anyone who's been trapped at an aggressively discordant poetry slam, or tricked into sitting through a bottom-numbing reading by some self-indulgent misanthrope falsely billed as an emerging talent, can imagine appropriate sentences.
But what's happening to a Campeche literature professor named Sergio Hernán Witz Rodríguez is no fantasy. He's on trial for writing a poem. Witz, who really is a legitimate, published poet, is in trouble because his piece “Invitación (La patria entre mierda)” is accused of “insulting national symbols.”
The particular national symbol Witz has supposedly insulted is the granddaddy of all national symbols — the flag. The actual insult involves a reference to mingling said symbol with human liquid waste matter.
Now, urine-soaking has achieved something close to cliché status in artistic circles. In recent years, artists have given saviors, fetuses, sharks and assorted body parts the pee treatment, and the worst they've suffered for it has been the scorn of the self-righteous and perhaps some pulled funding.
Witz, on the other hand, is looking at six months to four years of hard time just for putting the idea in writing.
That's because his literary wet-flag contest allegedly violates Article 191 of the federal penal code, which prohibits any insult (ultraje) to the flag or its insignia, “in word or in deed.” The law's actually quite clear: Insult the flag, go to jail.
What's less clear is how such a law can stay on the books when the Mexican Constitution explicitly guarantees freedom of speech. Article 6 states unequivocally, “The manifestation of ideas will not be the object of any judicial or administrative inquiry ...” And the opening sentence of Article 7 leaves no doubt: “The liberty to write and publish about any matter is inviolable.” The only limits are a respect for individuals' private lives, and for public morality and peace.
The inconsistency between the free speech ideals of the Constitution and the seemingly outmoded restrictions of Article 191 is what brought the matter to the Supreme Court earlier this month. Witz was seeking an amparo, meaning in this case that he wanted the charges against him dropped on Constitutional free speech grounds. The case gave the court an opportunity to strengthen freedom of expression in Mexico — something the Fox administration has often bragged about doing — and at the same time excise rules about insults from the law books and put them into the etiquette books where they belong.
But the five-justice panel saw things differently. By a 3-2 vote they upheld the law, re-established its limits on free speech, and sent Witz back to Campeche to face trial. To get around the free speech issue, the majority cited, among other things, a clause in another article giving lawmakers the faculty to regulate the use of national symbols.
That and some other excerpts from the majority opinion reveal a lot about persistent Mexican priorities. We are told that the work “doesn't just injure the flag, but the nation itself.” Also, an insult like this one to the flag “affects the security and stability of our nation.”
As a poet, Witz must harbor mixed emotions about the hubbub. On the negative side, every commentator, pro or con, has gone out of their way to pronounce the poem a bad one; it's even been officially designated a “pseudo-poem” in court texts. That's gotta hurt.
On the other hand, one of the leading minds of Mexican jurisprudence, Justice Olga Sánchez Cordero, ascribes to Witz's modest poetic effort the capacity to destabilize the entire country. How many poets can claim to write so powerfully?
Legal justifications aside, the ruling seems more political than anything else. The three majority justices clearly came down on the side of nationalism in its perceived struggle to survive against “international” ideas like freedom of expression and global engagement. Mexico's peculiar brand of ultra-defensive nationalism is less a manifestation of the national character than a manufactured creation of post-Revolution thinkers who saw a political use for it. But whatever needs it may have served in the 20th century, it's seen by many to be a liability today.
Judging from published quotes, challenging reflexive nationalism (as opposed to sincere love of country) was precisely the purpose of Witz's poem. As poets do, he used bold imagery to make his case. How well he pulled it off is beside the point. How “insulting” his text may be is also beside the point. What matters is that the force of the law is being used to punish him for commenting on a pressing social topic of our day — the role of nationalism and nationalistic symbols.
That's about as clear a case of repressing speech as one can imagine, yet Witz's plight hasn't caused much of a stir. PEN, the writer's guild, wrote a letter supporting his cause, and commentators such as José Antonio Crespo in El Universal and Enrique Canales in Reforma have pointed out the absurdity of the proceedings.
But many journalists remember not-so-distant times when writing negative information about sitting politicians was dangerous to one's career, if not one's health. To them, apparently, a rarely enforced written law like Article 191 is nothing compared to former unwritten laws that were enforced harshly.
The man in the street isn't too worked up about the issue either. Most Mexicans, like most citizens of any country, don't like having their flag insulted, and protecting others' right to do so is not a high priority for them. Those who should be pointing out the necessity of defending unpopular speech — that is, politicians — don't see much of an upside to it right now. The case for tolerance doesn't fit well in a 30-second TV spot, but 30 seconds is just long enough to get yourself branded as a proponent of flag-insulting.
Meanwhile, the hamster-wheel hopelessness of the issue is dizzying. How can the desirability of revering national symbols be debated if the negative side of the argument is illegal?
The take-home lesson here is that commitment to a noble ideal requires more courage than many people are willing to invest — not just in Mexico but around the world. As always, supporting free expression in theory is easier than defending a specific application of it. Sergio Witz is an unlikely martyr who never asked for the job.
One of the featured prize-winners is Sergio Witz, a Campeche poet who was at the center of a revealing little episode two years ago. Here, from the Oct. 23, 2005 Herald Mexico, is an opinion piece about what was going down at the time.
Insult a Symbol, Go to Jail
BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT
At the fantasy level, there's something to be said for selective punishment of certain poets. Anyone who's been trapped at an aggressively discordant poetry slam, or tricked into sitting through a bottom-numbing reading by some self-indulgent misanthrope falsely billed as an emerging talent, can imagine appropriate sentences.
But what's happening to a Campeche literature professor named Sergio Hernán Witz Rodríguez is no fantasy. He's on trial for writing a poem. Witz, who really is a legitimate, published poet, is in trouble because his piece “Invitación (La patria entre mierda)” is accused of “insulting national symbols.”
The particular national symbol Witz has supposedly insulted is the granddaddy of all national symbols — the flag. The actual insult involves a reference to mingling said symbol with human liquid waste matter.
Now, urine-soaking has achieved something close to cliché status in artistic circles. In recent years, artists have given saviors, fetuses, sharks and assorted body parts the pee treatment, and the worst they've suffered for it has been the scorn of the self-righteous and perhaps some pulled funding.
Witz, on the other hand, is looking at six months to four years of hard time just for putting the idea in writing.
That's because his literary wet-flag contest allegedly violates Article 191 of the federal penal code, which prohibits any insult (ultraje) to the flag or its insignia, “in word or in deed.” The law's actually quite clear: Insult the flag, go to jail.
What's less clear is how such a law can stay on the books when the Mexican Constitution explicitly guarantees freedom of speech. Article 6 states unequivocally, “The manifestation of ideas will not be the object of any judicial or administrative inquiry ...” And the opening sentence of Article 7 leaves no doubt: “The liberty to write and publish about any matter is inviolable.” The only limits are a respect for individuals' private lives, and for public morality and peace.
The inconsistency between the free speech ideals of the Constitution and the seemingly outmoded restrictions of Article 191 is what brought the matter to the Supreme Court earlier this month. Witz was seeking an amparo, meaning in this case that he wanted the charges against him dropped on Constitutional free speech grounds. The case gave the court an opportunity to strengthen freedom of expression in Mexico — something the Fox administration has often bragged about doing — and at the same time excise rules about insults from the law books and put them into the etiquette books where they belong.
But the five-justice panel saw things differently. By a 3-2 vote they upheld the law, re-established its limits on free speech, and sent Witz back to Campeche to face trial. To get around the free speech issue, the majority cited, among other things, a clause in another article giving lawmakers the faculty to regulate the use of national symbols.
That and some other excerpts from the majority opinion reveal a lot about persistent Mexican priorities. We are told that the work “doesn't just injure the flag, but the nation itself.” Also, an insult like this one to the flag “affects the security and stability of our nation.”
As a poet, Witz must harbor mixed emotions about the hubbub. On the negative side, every commentator, pro or con, has gone out of their way to pronounce the poem a bad one; it's even been officially designated a “pseudo-poem” in court texts. That's gotta hurt.
On the other hand, one of the leading minds of Mexican jurisprudence, Justice Olga Sánchez Cordero, ascribes to Witz's modest poetic effort the capacity to destabilize the entire country. How many poets can claim to write so powerfully?
Legal justifications aside, the ruling seems more political than anything else. The three majority justices clearly came down on the side of nationalism in its perceived struggle to survive against “international” ideas like freedom of expression and global engagement. Mexico's peculiar brand of ultra-defensive nationalism is less a manifestation of the national character than a manufactured creation of post-Revolution thinkers who saw a political use for it. But whatever needs it may have served in the 20th century, it's seen by many to be a liability today.
Judging from published quotes, challenging reflexive nationalism (as opposed to sincere love of country) was precisely the purpose of Witz's poem. As poets do, he used bold imagery to make his case. How well he pulled it off is beside the point. How “insulting” his text may be is also beside the point. What matters is that the force of the law is being used to punish him for commenting on a pressing social topic of our day — the role of nationalism and nationalistic symbols.
That's about as clear a case of repressing speech as one can imagine, yet Witz's plight hasn't caused much of a stir. PEN, the writer's guild, wrote a letter supporting his cause, and commentators such as José Antonio Crespo in El Universal and Enrique Canales in Reforma have pointed out the absurdity of the proceedings.
But many journalists remember not-so-distant times when writing negative information about sitting politicians was dangerous to one's career, if not one's health. To them, apparently, a rarely enforced written law like Article 191 is nothing compared to former unwritten laws that were enforced harshly.
The man in the street isn't too worked up about the issue either. Most Mexicans, like most citizens of any country, don't like having their flag insulted, and protecting others' right to do so is not a high priority for them. Those who should be pointing out the necessity of defending unpopular speech — that is, politicians — don't see much of an upside to it right now. The case for tolerance doesn't fit well in a 30-second TV spot, but 30 seconds is just long enough to get yourself branded as a proponent of flag-insulting.
Meanwhile, the hamster-wheel hopelessness of the issue is dizzying. How can the desirability of revering national symbols be debated if the negative side of the argument is illegal?
The take-home lesson here is that commitment to a noble ideal requires more courage than many people are willing to invest — not just in Mexico but around the world. As always, supporting free expression in theory is easier than defending a specific application of it. Sergio Witz is an unlikely martyr who never asked for the job.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Random Readings Redux: Mexico mod
Rubén Gallo is a sharp and original academic observer of current developments in Mexican art and literature. This review of his book "Mexican Modernity" appeared in The Herald Mexico in 2006.
Mexican Modernity:
The Avant Garde and the Technological Revolution
By Rubén Gallo
The MIT Press (2005)
BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT
Mexico can do something most countries cannot, which is date its passage into modernity to a specific year. By 1920, the civil war had calmed and the new revolutionary leaders were eager to justify their existence by moving the nation into the 20th century — a few decades behind schedule, to be sure, but with dispatch and considerable success.
“Whereas Mexico City in 1920 was a sleepy town pockmarked by the repeated assaults of rifle-wielding caudillos,” Princeton Latin American literature professor Rubén Gallo reminds us, “by 1940 it had become a bustling metropolis full of contrasts.”
But the noun in the title of Gallo’s engrossing and eye-opening “Mexican Modernity” has little to do with government programs or population growth. It refers to the artistic revolutions and social shifts that marked the first half of the last century in much of the world. It is the modernity of James Joyce and Henry Ford, Walter Benjamin and Pablo Picasso.
Gallo’s thesis is that this modernity grabbed ahold of Mexico in the 1920s, and changed the way Mexicans saw the world around them. The rise of avant-garde sensibilities took place not just in conjunction with the belated arrival of machine-age technology, but because of it. It wasn’t an abstraction or a leisurely evolution, but a revolution carried out with the aid of five specific and surprising (to the uninitiated reader) technological advances.
How surprising? Consider:
The conditioned response to a requested list of factors influencing the Mexican character usually might include the corn plant, the mask, the Conquest, the Virgin and the family. But according to Gallo, those folkloric standbys were modified, if not replaced, by the circa 1920 advent of the camera, the typewriter, the radio, the large stadium, and ... cement. Yes, cement.
The towering art world figure in the first half of the 20th century was, of course, Diego Rivera. His role in Mexican Modernity is as an early and prominent advocate of technology as liberation, both artistic and social. In Gallo’s book, we meet up with Rivera not in Coyoacán or the Alameda, but in Detroit, where he impressed the entire industry there with his knowledge of auto mechanics and production.
Rivera’s work was the mirror image of the government’s simultaneous commitment to a forward-looking physical progress and a backward-looking makeover of the national identity. His murals celebrated new machines, but the tools he used to create them — fresco painting, for the most part — were no different than the previous century’s.
The camera, however, offered an entirely new way of representing the world. Photography was hardly novel in 1920, just more widely available to the masses. As an artistic medium it was still largely unexploited.
True, there were prominent “artistic” photographers in Mexico City during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and the Revolution that followed. Many of them, such as transplanted Germans Hugo Brehme and Wilhelm Kahlo, were widely admired (though the latter’s place in art history would be eclipsed by his painter daughter, Frida). But these photographers, who specialized in portraiture, used the camera to produce works that looked like paintings, and paintings from the previous century at that.
This was intentional. Mexican portrait painters were almost ashamed of the camera’s automatic reproduction of whatever it was pointed at. They chose instead to manipulate the photographic image to resemble painting. The muralist David Álfaro Siqueiros scoffed at these pictorialist photos as “falsifications of primitive Italians.”
It took two foreigners to open up photography’s modernist possibilities in Mexico. The first, U.S. photographer Edward Weston, was already a legend when he arrived in Mexico City in 1923. He brought with him a commitment to exploiting the camera’s mechanical nature rather than concealing it. Weston and his camera let Mexico see itself with new eyes, so to speak.
Still, Weston was the opposite of Rivera in that he used a modern medium (the camera) to depict pre-modern Mexican themes (the rural and the traditional). Technology, in Weston’s view, was “spoiling” Mexico. He was neither the first nor last American who would prefer to deny Mexicans their modernity in the interest of his own aesthetic preferences.
It fell to another transplanted foreigner — the Italian-born Tina Modotti, a disciple of Weston — to marry the modern artistic medium with modern subject matter. Essentially, Modotti spent the 1920s wandering around Mexico City taking pictures of the technological wonders of the age, including telephone lines and industrial complexes, typewriters and radios, stadiums and concrete government buildings.
Gallo makes a case for Modotti as the mother of Mexican modernism. She was certainly the first to follow the Soviet critic Aleksandr Rodchenko’s dictum that “only the camera is capable of reflecting contemporary life.” Modotti and her camera could show us unexpected beauty in a mesh of telephone wires shot from below, injecting the scene with a sense of possibility.
Gallo takes us through his line-up of the tools of Mexican modernism chapter by chapter. The typewriter, like the camera, was not new in 1920, but still mostly limited to the office workplace. Authors and poets were slow to adopt the Oliver, Remington or Underwood as a tool of the trade. As late as the 1970s, Carlos Fuentes could tell an interviewer that he wrote standing up in front of a drafting table, putting pen to paper.
Still, Gallo assures us that the advent of mechanical writing changed Mexican writing permanently, without offering much in the way of example. He does deliver an anecdote exposing the inevitability of typewritten manuscripts. Mariano Azuela, an anti-modernist, had written into his great novel of the Revolution, “Los de abajo” (The Underdogs), a scene in which a band of revolutionaries literally, as well as symbolically, smash a looted Oliver to pieces. But to finish his novel on time, Azuela had to cross to El Paso and type it out on a borrowed Oliver.
Commercial radio came to Mexico in the 1920s with much fanfare, and plenty of direct involvement by modernist artists. Indeed, the first Mexico City radio station was launched by a literary magazine called “El Universal Ilustrado,” which published work by experimental writers and artists, including Modotti.
The first words spoken on the inaugural program were by the avant-garde poet Manuel Maples Arce. From that moment on, texts abounded that were either about radio, meant to be read on the radio, or influenced by radio.
And then there's cement. Cement, a known adhesive since antiquity, is simply rock mixed with water. But cement in its modern form of reinforced concrete not only changed Mexico physically but also provided it with a new architectural language. And unlike cameras, typewriters and radios, cement was everywhere to be seen in the 1920s, its endless forms duly recorded by Modotti.
Today we see the excesses and ill use of concrete as a visual blight. But as it flourished in 1920s Mexico City, the shape-shifting possibilities of this “magic powder” turned Mexico City into a mecca of functionalism — the form-follows-function school of architecture.
The post-Modotti camera loved cement as well. A young lensman named Manuel Álvarez Bravo, later considered Mexico’s greatest photographer, made his name with studies of cement, including the now-famous “Tríptico cemento” that juxtaposes a pile of loose cement with a concrete wall.
Reinforced concrete also made possible the large stadiums that the revolutionary government began to build in the 1920s. Bullrings had been around, but they were nothing like the massive new complexes designed to hold tens of thousands of people.
As he does throughout the book, Gallo helps us think about familiar objects in new ways, a modernist undertaking if there ever was one. “The monumental stadium gave rise to a most unusual form of representation,” he writes, “(which were) mass spectacles performed by thousands of bodies lined up in geometrical formations.” As always, Modotti was there to record these geometrical formations for us, though without the bodies.
One of the “mass spectacles” that took place in concrete arenas was the inauguration of new presidents. Four of them (Calles, Portes Gil, Ortíz Rubio and Cárdenas) received the presidential sash in the National Stadium between its completion in 1924 and the year 1934. The stadium held 60,000 souls, a sixth of Mexico City’s population when it was conceived by Education Secretary José Vasconcelos in 1921.
It was demolished in 1950. “Today all that remains of Vasconcelos’s National Stadium is a statue of a javelin thrower that stands, alone and out of context, on a corner across from the Multifamiliar Juárez,” Gallo tells us. “Almost no one remembers the stadium, and Colonia Roma’s residents often wonder why the streets around the housing complex are shaped like a giant horseshoe.”
"Mexican Modernity" is an unexpected pleasure to read (and to look at, with its generous collection of photographs and illustrations). Gallo necessarily writes in the language of the art critic, but his prose is snoot-free, friendly, and never tedious.
For many, Gallo’s book will be a salutary corrective to their exclusively folkloric view of Mexican art and society. For everybody, it will be a memorable tour through territory at once familiar and unknown, led by an able and knowledgeable guide.
Mexican Modernity:
The Avant Garde and the Technological Revolution
By Rubén Gallo
The MIT Press (2005)
BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT
Mexico can do something most countries cannot, which is date its passage into modernity to a specific year. By 1920, the civil war had calmed and the new revolutionary leaders were eager to justify their existence by moving the nation into the 20th century — a few decades behind schedule, to be sure, but with dispatch and considerable success.
“Whereas Mexico City in 1920 was a sleepy town pockmarked by the repeated assaults of rifle-wielding caudillos,” Princeton Latin American literature professor Rubén Gallo reminds us, “by 1940 it had become a bustling metropolis full of contrasts.”
But the noun in the title of Gallo’s engrossing and eye-opening “Mexican Modernity” has little to do with government programs or population growth. It refers to the artistic revolutions and social shifts that marked the first half of the last century in much of the world. It is the modernity of James Joyce and Henry Ford, Walter Benjamin and Pablo Picasso.
Gallo’s thesis is that this modernity grabbed ahold of Mexico in the 1920s, and changed the way Mexicans saw the world around them. The rise of avant-garde sensibilities took place not just in conjunction with the belated arrival of machine-age technology, but because of it. It wasn’t an abstraction or a leisurely evolution, but a revolution carried out with the aid of five specific and surprising (to the uninitiated reader) technological advances.
How surprising? Consider:
The conditioned response to a requested list of factors influencing the Mexican character usually might include the corn plant, the mask, the Conquest, the Virgin and the family. But according to Gallo, those folkloric standbys were modified, if not replaced, by the circa 1920 advent of the camera, the typewriter, the radio, the large stadium, and ... cement. Yes, cement.
The towering art world figure in the first half of the 20th century was, of course, Diego Rivera. His role in Mexican Modernity is as an early and prominent advocate of technology as liberation, both artistic and social. In Gallo’s book, we meet up with Rivera not in Coyoacán or the Alameda, but in Detroit, where he impressed the entire industry there with his knowledge of auto mechanics and production.
Rivera’s work was the mirror image of the government’s simultaneous commitment to a forward-looking physical progress and a backward-looking makeover of the national identity. His murals celebrated new machines, but the tools he used to create them — fresco painting, for the most part — were no different than the previous century’s.
The camera, however, offered an entirely new way of representing the world. Photography was hardly novel in 1920, just more widely available to the masses. As an artistic medium it was still largely unexploited.
True, there were prominent “artistic” photographers in Mexico City during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and the Revolution that followed. Many of them, such as transplanted Germans Hugo Brehme and Wilhelm Kahlo, were widely admired (though the latter’s place in art history would be eclipsed by his painter daughter, Frida). But these photographers, who specialized in portraiture, used the camera to produce works that looked like paintings, and paintings from the previous century at that.
This was intentional. Mexican portrait painters were almost ashamed of the camera’s automatic reproduction of whatever it was pointed at. They chose instead to manipulate the photographic image to resemble painting. The muralist David Álfaro Siqueiros scoffed at these pictorialist photos as “falsifications of primitive Italians.”
It took two foreigners to open up photography’s modernist possibilities in Mexico. The first, U.S. photographer Edward Weston, was already a legend when he arrived in Mexico City in 1923. He brought with him a commitment to exploiting the camera’s mechanical nature rather than concealing it. Weston and his camera let Mexico see itself with new eyes, so to speak.
Still, Weston was the opposite of Rivera in that he used a modern medium (the camera) to depict pre-modern Mexican themes (the rural and the traditional). Technology, in Weston’s view, was “spoiling” Mexico. He was neither the first nor last American who would prefer to deny Mexicans their modernity in the interest of his own aesthetic preferences.
It fell to another transplanted foreigner — the Italian-born Tina Modotti, a disciple of Weston — to marry the modern artistic medium with modern subject matter. Essentially, Modotti spent the 1920s wandering around Mexico City taking pictures of the technological wonders of the age, including telephone lines and industrial complexes, typewriters and radios, stadiums and concrete government buildings.
Gallo makes a case for Modotti as the mother of Mexican modernism. She was certainly the first to follow the Soviet critic Aleksandr Rodchenko’s dictum that “only the camera is capable of reflecting contemporary life.” Modotti and her camera could show us unexpected beauty in a mesh of telephone wires shot from below, injecting the scene with a sense of possibility.
Gallo takes us through his line-up of the tools of Mexican modernism chapter by chapter. The typewriter, like the camera, was not new in 1920, but still mostly limited to the office workplace. Authors and poets were slow to adopt the Oliver, Remington or Underwood as a tool of the trade. As late as the 1970s, Carlos Fuentes could tell an interviewer that he wrote standing up in front of a drafting table, putting pen to paper.
Still, Gallo assures us that the advent of mechanical writing changed Mexican writing permanently, without offering much in the way of example. He does deliver an anecdote exposing the inevitability of typewritten manuscripts. Mariano Azuela, an anti-modernist, had written into his great novel of the Revolution, “Los de abajo” (The Underdogs), a scene in which a band of revolutionaries literally, as well as symbolically, smash a looted Oliver to pieces. But to finish his novel on time, Azuela had to cross to El Paso and type it out on a borrowed Oliver.
Commercial radio came to Mexico in the 1920s with much fanfare, and plenty of direct involvement by modernist artists. Indeed, the first Mexico City radio station was launched by a literary magazine called “El Universal Ilustrado,” which published work by experimental writers and artists, including Modotti.
The first words spoken on the inaugural program were by the avant-garde poet Manuel Maples Arce. From that moment on, texts abounded that were either about radio, meant to be read on the radio, or influenced by radio.
And then there's cement. Cement, a known adhesive since antiquity, is simply rock mixed with water. But cement in its modern form of reinforced concrete not only changed Mexico physically but also provided it with a new architectural language. And unlike cameras, typewriters and radios, cement was everywhere to be seen in the 1920s, its endless forms duly recorded by Modotti.
Today we see the excesses and ill use of concrete as a visual blight. But as it flourished in 1920s Mexico City, the shape-shifting possibilities of this “magic powder” turned Mexico City into a mecca of functionalism — the form-follows-function school of architecture.
The post-Modotti camera loved cement as well. A young lensman named Manuel Álvarez Bravo, later considered Mexico’s greatest photographer, made his name with studies of cement, including the now-famous “Tríptico cemento” that juxtaposes a pile of loose cement with a concrete wall.
Reinforced concrete also made possible the large stadiums that the revolutionary government began to build in the 1920s. Bullrings had been around, but they were nothing like the massive new complexes designed to hold tens of thousands of people.
As he does throughout the book, Gallo helps us think about familiar objects in new ways, a modernist undertaking if there ever was one. “The monumental stadium gave rise to a most unusual form of representation,” he writes, “(which were) mass spectacles performed by thousands of bodies lined up in geometrical formations.” As always, Modotti was there to record these geometrical formations for us, though without the bodies.
One of the “mass spectacles” that took place in concrete arenas was the inauguration of new presidents. Four of them (Calles, Portes Gil, Ortíz Rubio and Cárdenas) received the presidential sash in the National Stadium between its completion in 1924 and the year 1934. The stadium held 60,000 souls, a sixth of Mexico City’s population when it was conceived by Education Secretary José Vasconcelos in 1921.
It was demolished in 1950. “Today all that remains of Vasconcelos’s National Stadium is a statue of a javelin thrower that stands, alone and out of context, on a corner across from the Multifamiliar Juárez,” Gallo tells us. “Almost no one remembers the stadium, and Colonia Roma’s residents often wonder why the streets around the housing complex are shaped like a giant horseshoe.”
"Mexican Modernity" is an unexpected pleasure to read (and to look at, with its generous collection of photographs and illustrations). Gallo necessarily writes in the language of the art critic, but his prose is snoot-free, friendly, and never tedious.
For many, Gallo’s book will be a salutary corrective to their exclusively folkloric view of Mexican art and society. For everybody, it will be a memorable tour through territory at once familiar and unknown, led by an able and knowledgeable guide.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Commentary: Latino culture? What's that?
Bear with us for a few more days of summer re-runs, in late spring no less. My guess is that most Mexicalpan visitors missed these Herald Mexico pieces the first time around. Today's encore presentation, still fresh as the day it was published (January 22, 2006), deals with a subject that won't be going away anytime soon.
Latino Culture? What’s That?
BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT
One of the first things Ana said when we finally firmed up the decision to move ourselves and the kids back home to beautiful downtown Naucalpan after an ill-advised three-year stint stateside was the following: “It’ll be nice to be a Mexican again instead of a ‘Lah-teen-uh,’ whatever that is.”
I’ve never been either, but I understood her frustration. Being assigned to an ethnic category not of your choosing (Latina) at the expense of your natural self-identity (Mexican) must cloy by degrees of magnitude progressing over the years from mildly disconcerting to grating.
The notion of a brand of human beings named Latinos is a U.S. invention of necessity. Just as African-Americans or Asian-Americans face unique problems as participants in a pan-ethnic U.S. society, so do those U.S. residents of Latin American descent or of recent Latin American residence. It certainly made political sense for common victims of a certain style of historical discrimination to unite their efforts, even if all they have in common are two major languages and a hemisphere of origin.
“Latin-American-American” being an unwieldy term mixing two meanings of the word “American,” the “Latino,” aka “Hispanic,” was born. The terms are geographically challenged. Italians, even those from Latium, don’t count as Latinos in this sense of the word, nor do the Spanish qualify as “Hispanic,” though they're often confused as such. Strictly speaking, the words make no literal sense as used.
Not only that, the creation of an impossibly broad ethnic category like Latino has had a backfire effect, creating for some an even more impossibly broad category. As the political scientist and former Latin Americanist for Jimmy Carter’s National Security Council Robert Pastor once pointed out, this strange partitioning trend “has melted together ethnic groups like Poles, Jews, Irish and sometimes even blacks into a new undifferentiated mass called ‘Anglos.’”
I thought of this recently when some market-manufactured Mexican starlet (I forget which one; all those midriffs start looking the same after a while) mentioned Lenny Kravitz as her favorite “Anglo” musician, a tag that might surprise the African-American singer/guitarist.
The other day I received an e-mail from a reader commenting on my interpretation of Mexican politics “from an Anglo point of view.” I took it as a compliment, but I wonder how my Irish and Scottish ancestors would feel about their distant descendant being assigned to a tribe they fought for centuries.
But the etymological fuzziness isn’t the real problem. After all, English uses plenty of geographically ambiguous terms — “Indian” and the aforementioned “American” come to mind — but we seldom have trouble understanding them correctly in context. If “Latino” is used basically to mean Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking (or descendants of same) and “Anglo” means everybody else, then so be it. As already pointed out, it’s often politically useful to divide the U.S. population that way.
It’s also a marketing gold mine.
Where we run into problems is when the Latino label is used either too specifically (that is, to homogenize individuals) or too widely (beyond the U.S. border). There is debate among Chicanos and Mexicans in the United States about the appropriateness of terms like Latino or Hispanic, both vis-à-vis each other and in absolute terms.
Some object to the Eurocentrism of the labels, which leaves no room for the indigenous element. “Mexican! Not Hispanic. Not Latino. Stop the cultural castration,” read a storefront sign several years ago at the East Los Angeles office of an organization called Mexica Movement. It may still be there.
But even granting (perhaps too generously) that Indian blood is assumed in the term Latino, it’s still troubling to hear the word applied instead of Mexican, when the person in question is indeed Mexican. It’s the tyranny of the facile generalization. “Latino,” in fact, seems to be turning into just one more manifestation of the outdated and never-valid U.S. perception that Americans of Northern European descent are somehow the norm . . . and then there’s everybody else, available to be grouped according to their relationship with the norm. (Remember the term “World Music?” Same thinking.)
It never occurs to some Americans, then, that most Mexicans don’t think of themselves as Latinos. Sure, they recognize their bond with the rest of Latin America, but they certainly don’t think of themselves as essentially the same as Brazilians or Argentines or Dominicans. A Mexican looks out his window, he sees Mexicans, not Latinos.
The strategic value of the Latino cause in the United States has long been eclipsed by the Latino consumer category promoted by those who see riches in diluting the popular culture of each individual nation and selling the resulting gruel to the “Latino market.” And trust me, they’re not thinking much about Pedro Infante or Real de Catorce (the band or the place). They’re loading up the sappy soap operas, the schlock variety shows and the flavor-of-the-month pre-fab pop stars that have nothing to do with any Mexican or even “Latino,” tradition.
Forgotten is the rich Mexican popular culture that spawned a golden age of film and a canon of popular songs to rival any output on Earth, and is still multiplying today, under the radar. In its place is the dumbed-down pablum churned out by an amoral clique of greedy bottom-feeders with hegemonic control of the entertainment media on both sides of the border.
But no matter, it’s all “Latino culture” now. That’s how the marketeers define it, so that’s what it is. “Latino” may just end up superseding “Mexican,” even in Mexico.
Latino Culture? What’s That?
BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT
One of the first things Ana said when we finally firmed up the decision to move ourselves and the kids back home to beautiful downtown Naucalpan after an ill-advised three-year stint stateside was the following: “It’ll be nice to be a Mexican again instead of a ‘Lah-teen-uh,’ whatever that is.”
I’ve never been either, but I understood her frustration. Being assigned to an ethnic category not of your choosing (Latina) at the expense of your natural self-identity (Mexican) must cloy by degrees of magnitude progressing over the years from mildly disconcerting to grating.
The notion of a brand of human beings named Latinos is a U.S. invention of necessity. Just as African-Americans or Asian-Americans face unique problems as participants in a pan-ethnic U.S. society, so do those U.S. residents of Latin American descent or of recent Latin American residence. It certainly made political sense for common victims of a certain style of historical discrimination to unite their efforts, even if all they have in common are two major languages and a hemisphere of origin.
“Latin-American-American” being an unwieldy term mixing two meanings of the word “American,” the “Latino,” aka “Hispanic,” was born. The terms are geographically challenged. Italians, even those from Latium, don’t count as Latinos in this sense of the word, nor do the Spanish qualify as “Hispanic,” though they're often confused as such. Strictly speaking, the words make no literal sense as used.
Not only that, the creation of an impossibly broad ethnic category like Latino has had a backfire effect, creating for some an even more impossibly broad category. As the political scientist and former Latin Americanist for Jimmy Carter’s National Security Council Robert Pastor once pointed out, this strange partitioning trend “has melted together ethnic groups like Poles, Jews, Irish and sometimes even blacks into a new undifferentiated mass called ‘Anglos.’”
I thought of this recently when some market-manufactured Mexican starlet (I forget which one; all those midriffs start looking the same after a while) mentioned Lenny Kravitz as her favorite “Anglo” musician, a tag that might surprise the African-American singer/guitarist.
The other day I received an e-mail from a reader commenting on my interpretation of Mexican politics “from an Anglo point of view.” I took it as a compliment, but I wonder how my Irish and Scottish ancestors would feel about their distant descendant being assigned to a tribe they fought for centuries.
But the etymological fuzziness isn’t the real problem. After all, English uses plenty of geographically ambiguous terms — “Indian” and the aforementioned “American” come to mind — but we seldom have trouble understanding them correctly in context. If “Latino” is used basically to mean Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking (or descendants of same) and “Anglo” means everybody else, then so be it. As already pointed out, it’s often politically useful to divide the U.S. population that way.
It’s also a marketing gold mine.
Where we run into problems is when the Latino label is used either too specifically (that is, to homogenize individuals) or too widely (beyond the U.S. border). There is debate among Chicanos and Mexicans in the United States about the appropriateness of terms like Latino or Hispanic, both vis-à-vis each other and in absolute terms.
Some object to the Eurocentrism of the labels, which leaves no room for the indigenous element. “Mexican! Not Hispanic. Not Latino. Stop the cultural castration,” read a storefront sign several years ago at the East Los Angeles office of an organization called Mexica Movement. It may still be there.
But even granting (perhaps too generously) that Indian blood is assumed in the term Latino, it’s still troubling to hear the word applied instead of Mexican, when the person in question is indeed Mexican. It’s the tyranny of the facile generalization. “Latino,” in fact, seems to be turning into just one more manifestation of the outdated and never-valid U.S. perception that Americans of Northern European descent are somehow the norm . . . and then there’s everybody else, available to be grouped according to their relationship with the norm. (Remember the term “World Music?” Same thinking.)
It never occurs to some Americans, then, that most Mexicans don’t think of themselves as Latinos. Sure, they recognize their bond with the rest of Latin America, but they certainly don’t think of themselves as essentially the same as Brazilians or Argentines or Dominicans. A Mexican looks out his window, he sees Mexicans, not Latinos.
The strategic value of the Latino cause in the United States has long been eclipsed by the Latino consumer category promoted by those who see riches in diluting the popular culture of each individual nation and selling the resulting gruel to the “Latino market.” And trust me, they’re not thinking much about Pedro Infante or Real de Catorce (the band or the place). They’re loading up the sappy soap operas, the schlock variety shows and the flavor-of-the-month pre-fab pop stars that have nothing to do with any Mexican or even “Latino,” tradition.
Forgotten is the rich Mexican popular culture that spawned a golden age of film and a canon of popular songs to rival any output on Earth, and is still multiplying today, under the radar. In its place is the dumbed-down pablum churned out by an amoral clique of greedy bottom-feeders with hegemonic control of the entertainment media on both sides of the border.
But no matter, it’s all “Latino culture” now. That’s how the marketeers define it, so that’s what it is. “Latino” may just end up superseding “Mexican,” even in Mexico.
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