How Do Mexico and the US Perceive Each Other?

Keynote Speech presented by Pete Hamill

At the Images of Mexico in the US Media symposium

Columbia University on February 4th, 2000

It is now almost 44 years since I crossed the border at Laredo and took a Transportes del Norte bus heading south into the country I love more than any other except my own. I was 21, brimming with excitement and ambition, determined to use the Gl Bill to make myself into a painter. I remember seeing the lights of Monterrey at dusk and the deep blue silhouette of the mountains beyond, and the long winding journey that followed, in that year before the opening of the four- lane highway More than half the passengers on my bus were Mexicans, and after dinner, as we climbed into those awesome sierras one of them produced a guitar and began to sing and soon all of them were singing, songs filled with the melancholy of separation and the joy of return. Singing in a language I did not know. Singing about themselves and their families and the people they loved. Singing songs that I knew were not much different from the songs I d heard from my parents and the other Irish immigrants who populated my childhood. They were going home. And though I didn’t know it at the time, so was I.

In the year that followed, Mexico revealed itself to me in a thousand small ways, and changed my life. As a stranger, I was now the marginalized one. I had arrived bearing other histories and different myths. My command of Spanish was faulty at best barbaric and laughable at its worst. Ni modo. Mexicans were kind to me. They were patient with me. Most of all, they affirmed in me certain notions that were also true of the Irish and Italian and Jewish immigrants I had grown up with in distant Brooklyn The absolute importance of family. The corollary importance of work. The insistence that men and women must live with a certain dignity, a dignity that had almost nothing to do with money. The poorest Mexican campesino, taking a hard living from the indifferent earth, could live with dignity.

That insistence on basic dignity had its dark side, of course. The codes of machismo often demanded that certain slights or personal insults must not go unanswered. But the same codes established the limits beyond which men must not go, except at great risk. This made for a formality in manners that served as one of the binding elements in Mexican society; everybody knew the rules. There were always certain lines that you did not cross. These were lessons that a young person should always learn; in my case, Mexico was a kind of graduate school, elaborating and codifying things that I already knew about what it meant to be human. Much has changed in Mexico since I was young; but the core if its spirit remains the same. Mexico is a country that reminds us in its dailiness about the need to be more human.

I mention these matters - and my own education in Mexico - because those of us who care about Mexico and the United States often despair of the version of that relationship that we read about in newspapers and magazines or see on television I've worked as a reporter in Mexico; I briefly edited a newspaper in Mexico City. But across the years I’ve come to realize that journalism - including my own - is often a blunt instrument. It can relate the facts without ever expressing the truth. It can miss the deeper meanings of events. It can fail to see the hidden templates of a society.

For example if your knowledge of Mexico depended solely upon our journalism, you would be forgiven if you believed that there are only a few important things to know: drugs and the drug business; the faceless undemocratic monolith of the PRI- endemic corruption. Cynicism about such stories is general. There has been some superb reporting about those subjects on both sides of the border. And there is no doubt that the growth of narco power is a fact, that dirty money is corrupting too many Mexican institutions, that drug use is spreading among too many of the Mexican young, that too many policemen have flipped to the side of the criminals. Nobody is more alarmed at such developments than Mexicans. Not simply Mexican intellectuals, not simply brave young uncorrupted Mexican journalists, not simply the alarmed middle classes But the campesino too. The rural schoolteacher. The honest cop - and there are many. And yes, many Mexican politicians, including a good number who are members of the PRI.

These are people - in Camus' phrase - who want to be able to love their country, and justice too. They don't want to have to apologize about their country - either to foreigners or to their children. They despise what is called in Mexico "the culture of impunity". Some have embraced the opposition parties; others have chosen to work within the complex world of the PRl. Many admit to bouts of despair, but are also proud of the great advances in recent years: the emergence of newspapers like La Reforma and El Norte. the modernizing of El Universal, the existence of La Jornada and Proceso and Letras Libres When I was a young man in Mexico City, it was inconceivable that such journals could publish without Government interference and be available on corner newsstands. Like American television, Mexican television is far from perfect- but the news programs are no longer blatant forums for government propaganda. Certainly there has been renovation of the political system, with thriving opposition parties, the first party primary in the history of the PRI (indeed, of the modern era), an end to the tradition of the dedazo - the outgoing president choosing his successor.

Again such changes have brought criticism - in Mexico, and in the international press - as if they were all some

elaborate con game, manipulated by hard men in smoke-filled rooms. The American press is as cynical as some parts of the Mexican population. But many Mexicans live according to the formulation of Antonio Gramsci: Optimism o the will, pessimism of the intelligence." But I think the great changes are genuine, and virtually irreversible. If you have traveled back and forth to Mexico for more than 40 years, as I have, you see these changes for what they are: enormous. Modernity has come at last to Mexico, and there is no going back.

That presents another challenge to all who report on Mexico. The great journalists, of all nationalities, have been men and women who take a torch to the back of a cave and report what they see to the rest of the tribe. They must be accurate. They must not see a rabbit and describe a dragon. And vice versa. Sometimes the survival of the tribe itself hangs in the balance.

So only an incompetent reporter would stop reporting on drug traffic and corruption. Only a naive reporter would surrender skepticism - not cynicism, healthy skepticism. Every good reporter, and most citizens, know the difference between fine oratory and actual practice. If anything, the reporting enterprise should widen in Mexico. The more concrete information that we have about this tremendously important country, the better off we shall be, and the better off Mexico will be.

In fact I would like to see teams of Mexican and foreign reporters share some of the work. It stands to reason, for example that drug corruption does not stop on the last inch of Mexican soil. If Mexican drug traffickers are moving their cargoes across the border to the United States, common sense tells us that the United States side of that border must itself be porous with corruption. Drug smuggling is a system. A primitive capitalist system based on supply and demand. I assure you that Amado Carrillo didn't prowl through Denver and New York with his posse, forcing yuppies at gunpoint to snort his cocaine. They wanted the stuff. They would pay for the stuff. And that demand was - and is - being met. But the products still had to get across that border, and there is not much written about the corruption on the American side. There is almost nothing written about those drugs - including much of the heroin - that comes across the Canadian border into the U.S. There is no talk in Congress about "decertifying” Canada.

This failure to open the lens more widely is what leads many Mexicans of my acquaintance to see an invincible self- righteousness in American attitudes towards Mexico. Some suspect that this myopia has deep roots in American

Puritanism, in centuries of racial stereotyping, in the ancient conflict between the Protestant north and the Catholic south, and in an enduring, perhaps subconscious guilt over what was done to Mexico in the 19 century, when one-third of Mexico was taken by the United States.

There might be something to all of those theories. Certainly we see them reflected occasionally in the reporting from Mexico. A few months ago, for example, there was a story about the discovery of a graveyard on the Mexican side of the border that was supposed to hold the bodies of at least a hundred missing people who had presumably been killed by Mexican drug traffickers. Investigators from the US joined Mexicans searching for these cadavers. Headlines shouted. Television showed men digging. On one Nightline show, Ted Koppel raised the theoretical possibility of sending American troops across the border to "clean out" the drug gangs. He smiled in a hopeless way, as if to say that such a drastic step could never happen. But he raised it. In the end, eight bodies were found. Not a hundred. Eight. And Mr. Koppel, a man I respect enormously, has never suggested - even theoretically - that US forces should cross the border with Canada to "clean out" the heroin smugglers.

Journalists must continue to do their own digging for one additional reason: the drug corruption might eventually destabilize Mexico. The smuggling system has one additional component: the illegal shipping of arms to Mexico. Nobody knows who might die from those weapons. After the Revolution, it took almost 30 years to get the gun out of Mexican life. Now thanks to corrupt American and their Mexican allies, the gun is seeping back into everyday life. Reporters from both countries must dig harder into this two-way traffic, not only because simple fairness demands it, but because any destabilization fueled by drug money, and made more lethal by American weapons, will hurt both countries.

But even those stories will be a distortion of the truth if they don't fit into a wider context. That wider context is both social and cultural If in the 1920s in the United States, foreign reporters had only reported on Al Capone and the bootleggers they'd have missed some extraordinary changes: the rise of a powerful American literature that included Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, to mention only a few. They would have missed the triumph of the movies They would have missed the enormous changes wrought by the phonograph record and the development of the radio They would have missed the development of commercial aviation, as epitomized by Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart They'd have missed the sudden explosion of big time sports, from Babe Ruth to Jack Dempsey. They’d have missed the creative development of jazz and the comic strip and the mass circulation popular newspaper. The bootleggers were important figures; they were popular heroes on some levels because they defied one of the stupidest laws of the American 20th century. But like today's narcotraficantes, and the American Mob that was founded during Prohibition, they corrupted bankers and politicians and judges. They wielded enormous power, and it survived for more than 50 years. But again: they were not everything.

The drug traffickers in today's Mexico are not everything either. Journalists - more important, their editors - should work very hard to place the drug mafias in a wider context. And they should try to avoid the cliches of past coverage. It is simply lazy to take easy ideas off the shelf. There is the one about the Mexican revolution being dead - 77 years after the last serious shots were fired; I've been reading variations of that story since the 1950s. But when that hoary subject comes up, we should remember that 79 years after our own Revolution, human beings were still allowed to own other human beings. Millions of black Americans stiII lived in slavery. And it took a national convulsion to allow other Americans to love their country, and justice too. If foreign travel teaches us about our own country, and a foreign language teaches us about our own language, then the reverse should hold: our own imperfect history should be part of the context when we begin to judge the state of perfection of other countries.

We cannot know for example, how our histories would have developed if the United States had not stolen a third of

Mexico's territory during the war of 1846-47, a war that Ulysses S. Grant called the most unjust war a strong nation ever fought against a weak one (and he served in the war, as did Robert E. Lee). Would Hollywood have been in Missouri? Would we have been able to create the automobile economy of the 20th century without the cheap oil of Texas, Oklahoma and California-? We can't ever answer such questions; they are among the what ifs of this hemisphere s history. (But we can keep in mind that today's fevered arguments about immigration - legal and illegal - sound peculiar coming from people who live in places named Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Diego, San Antonio, y El Paso. We should not be annoyed when someone - Mexican or American - occasionally reminds us that the battle at the Alamo was a fight over slavery. The Mexicans had forbidden it. Their immigrant guests, who had accepted Mexican citizenship wanted the right to own slaves in Mexico in defiance of Mexican law. Santa Anna was a reckless fool in many respects; but in the fight with the slave-hungry Texans, he was on the side of the angels. The Texans wanted to be free, all right: free to own other human beings. And the debate over the conquered territories - slave or free? - led directly to the Civil War.

But that historical context also has a modern context. I don't believe that a reporter can do a complete job of covering any country without building on an ever-deepening understanding of that country's culture, past and present. You could not truly cover England without reading Dickens and Trollope, Shakespeare and Marlowe, along with such contemporaries as lan McEwen and Martin Amis and Ted Hughes. You wouldn't truly understand the American South without reading Faulkner. You wouldn't truly comprehend France without Balzac and Flaubert, Camus and Sartre, Descartes and Racine and Pascal.

No serious correspondent in modern Mexico can hope to understand the context without some immersion in Octavio Paz and Alfonso Reyes Ramon LopezVelarde and Sor Juana, Angeles Mastretta and Elena Poniatowska, Carlos Fuentes and Carlos Monsivais. The serious correspondent in Mexico can't simply rely on the AP wire, or the morning newspapers- he or she must read Enrique Krauze and Jose Emilio Pacheco, Juan Rulfo and Paco Ignacio Taibo II. And that is to mention only a few of those writers who have contributed their own unique pieces to the Mexican mosaic.

Any serious student of Mexico must look hard at Mexican architecture, from the simplest vernacular building of the

pueblito to the baroque masterpieces of the colonial era to Barragan and Legoretta, to see how people live, how they have given expression to their private visions of the way to exist in the world. No serious student of Mexico can ignore Mexican painting, from such 19th century figures at Hermenigildo Bustos and Jose Guadalupe Posada to the muralists -Rivera Siqueiros and Orozco - and Rufino Tamayo. Nor should the student, the reporter, the writer, miss the great explosion of the visual arts now under way in Mexico, among young painters who live beyond the Distnto Federal, in Oaxaca and Zacatecas and other cities. None should fail to comprehend Mexican folk art, in all its extraordinary variety. All of this graphic work tells us something about the times in which it was created, and about the way Mexicans see their own country - and sometimes ours. Culture is usually dismissed by editors as "soft" news, but it is often the most important and enduring news of all. Babe Ruth was more important than Calvin Coolidge. Literature, said Ezra Pound, is news that stays news. He could have broadened "literature" to that wider word: art.

In Mexico there are even deeper sources from which all of us can learn - media professionals more than any others. One is sports. How does soccer fit into the psychological template of millions of Mexicans? And why has soccer never become a maior sport in the United States? What is the role in Mexico of baseball and boxing? And what about lucha libre: the world of professional wrestling is rich on many levels, but the most fascinating is the enduring role of the mask. Masks were part of Mexican life for centuries before the arrival of the first European. Any good correspondent must try to understand the role played in the Mexican imagination by such characters as El Santo and Mil Mascaras, if that correspondent hopes to understand the way Superbarrio became so important after the 1985 earthquake and why the Zapatistas in Chiapas have also chosen the mask as a way of making a political point - about the popular anonymous collective - which is also infused with magic.

The movies are another rich resource. From Santa in 1931, directed by Antonio Moreno, through the marvelous 1930s movies of Fernando de Fuentes to Luis Bunuel's Los Olvidados of 1950, you can see how a true Mexican national consciousness was formed - compared to a series of linked regional identities - and sense something else: the Mexico that remains part of the memory of millions. Every reporter, every student of Mexico, should try to get the full set of Cantinflas movies, and watch them in sequence. The viewer will see in all the backgrounds the way Mexico City changed from 1940 until the 1960s. The great beautiful city where the air was clear. Will understand why so many Mexicans of a certain age look at the present city with anger, and a longing for the unreachable past. The student can look at the marvelous films of Pedro Infante, and understand why Mexico was so filled with grief when he died in an airplane crash in 1957. Or Dolores del Rio, in Maria Candelaria (with the astonishing Pedro Armendariz), or Maria Felix in Rio Escondido, or Arturo de Cordova in Bunuel's El, and you will understand what Mexicans mean when they use the phrase La Epoca de Oro. That was a golden age for Mexican films. If their language had only been French, these films would be as famous today as any of the world's classics.

Most powerful of all as a way of understanding Mexicans and Mexico is popular music. There are certain songs that have been driven into the hearts of all Mexicans - and many of us who were fortunate enough to hear them when young. I don't mean the classical music of Chavez, or Ponce, or Revueltas, as fine as so much of it is. I mean the music that was listened to in cantinas and kitchens, on buses and at work, and at wakes and weddings. I still want to weep when I hear the heartbreak in the voice of Lucha Reyes, like a premonition of her suicide. I can't imagine having had the same life without the music of Cuco Sanchez or Jose Alfredo Jimenez, Agustin Lara or Los Panchos, Alvaro Carrilo and Los Tres Caballeros with Chamin Correa. This music still triggers the nostalgias of millions of Mexicans (and others in the Spanish-speaking world), because it brings back the time when they were young and first learned those words, when they needed the consolations of music to help them through hard times or to articulate feelings for which they as yet had no language. Popular music - from Edith Piaf to Frank Sinatra - has that power.

Music is also a measuring device. It is one means of stating a time and a place. When you are trying to understand an unhappiness about the present from New Yorkers or Mexicans - expressed in such phrases as "this place is gone to the dogs" - you must always ask a simple question: compared to what? Some people will begin to hum. Because music is a special component of human memory. And the classical popular songs of the Mexican past have found new life over the past five difficult years with their interpretations by Luis Miguel. He gave the songs respect; he didn't try to make them into some awful new pop music form; he didn't dismiss them with irony. Luis Miguel said, by the way he delivered those songs, that the people who loved them long ago were not wrong. Through his versions of the songs, the young could yearn for a time they had never known, a simpler, safer time, and the old could remember what it was to be young themselves. In that sense, Luis Miguel brought together the generations in Mexico in a way that no politician ever could, and no writer. And for any correspondent it should be a duty to explain to the readers back home not only how his subjects die, or vote, or are abused by the system; but what makes them well up with emotion. If they write about Luis Miguel, they must go beyond his success, and the money he makes, and his love affairs, and try to understand what deep chords he has touched in the Mexican psyche. That subject is worthy of journalism. That is far more important than the latest intra-mural battle in the PRI or the indictment of some banker.

That, in a brief form, is what I mean by context. Any American who goes to Mexico should reach out and embrace the culture that has produced so many extraordinary human beings. I mean all Americans. Journalists, of course. But also businessmen, diplomats, even law enforcement people and spies. When I was young, E. Howard Hunt was working at the American Embassy; there was room for all of us. But I would hope that serious tourists would do the same. There is more to Mexico than lovely beaches and margaritas. The serious tourist can read before leaving. Read the novels and the poetry and the history. And back home, remember that the small quiet man working in that New York grocery store or this sweatshop, is a descendant of people who built great civilizations. The architects of Chichen Itza and Monte Alban, the painters of Palenque, Maya and Olmec and Aztec, all looked like those heroic, dignified people who have come among us in larger numbers than ever before, enriching us here the way they have enriched us in Mexico itself.

We should all remember that: and remember too that the people who got us here - we who are the children of other vast migrations, Irish, Jews and Italians - those amazing people were no different than these young Mexicans. They believed in family. In dignity. In work. They didn't envision careers for themselves, but sacrificed their lives for their children, working at the worst jobs, earning the worst pay. And yes: they dreamed of the Old Country. Yes: they could sing their old songs. And no: it was never easy.

I remember so clearly one sweltering August night when I was 12, hearing my father weeping in the dark of our tenement flat in Brooklyn. He was an immigrant from Ireland, with an eighth grade education. His mother signed his birth certificate with an X. When he was 23, he had lost a leg playing soccer in the immigrant leagues here in New York, playing, that is, the game of the Old Country. But on this August night, he was not weeping for any of that and was certainly not consumed with self-pity. The pain in the stump of his leg was too much for him. In the factory where he worked, standing each day on concrete floors, there was no air conditioning. And the skin of his stump - what was left of the soccer player'sgolden leg-was raw and blistered and hurting. My mother came to him with ice and comforted him and said, It's allright, Billy, it's all right, Until he fell back into sleep. The next day, he went to work. I remembered him when I first went to Mexico and saw so many people working so hard and recognized in them my father's own life. And I know that somewhere tonight, a Mexican father will weep involuntarily in the dark while one of his children listens. He will weep in some maquiladora town near the border. He will weep in Guanajuato or Vera Cruz, Los Angeles or Queens or Chicago. And get up in the morning and go to work. And the boy or girl who heard his weeping will vow to honor that pain. To honor it through all the days of a life. That's why I believe so strongly that we honor our own people when we honor the new. Those of us who have worked in media, from the days of the manual typewriter to the brave new world of the Internet, must remember that we are engaged in an enterprise that is also, in the end, ethical. We can vow not to add the stupidity of the world. And whether we are in media, or not, we should be able to say to every poor Mexican who comes to this country: thank you for coming. Thank you for reminding us of who we are. The story of our parents and grandparents tell us: the pain will pass. And when some of the present pain passes, here and in Mexico, I know what will follow. I know it the way I know the sun will rise tomorrow. Someone will produce a guitar and all of us will sing. Together. Que viva Mexico.