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The News - Novedades Editores - Mexico City
20 de marzo de 1994
©1994: Suzanne Cane y Olvera

THE HOURGLASS THAT IS MEXICO

It began with a No. 6 bubble envelop. The literary agent in New York said a padded envelop would not do. Padded was out. Bubble was in. The search began.

There was a time not very long ago when it would never have occurred to me to look for something as exotic as a No. 6 envelop in Mexico City. Such luxuries did not exist. They had to be ordered specially. They had to wait until a sympathic, expatriate spirit went north and offered to bring it back, like a coveted treasure acquired in a hard-fought battle. That was, after all, how I acquired my now-useless collection of No. 6 padded envelops. Life has changed, though. We now have No. 6 bubble envelops in Mexico. GATT is here. NAFTA is here. No. 6 bubble envelops are here.

Mexico is a country of contrasts. The uprising in Chiapas made that all too clear. One can picture a map of the Mexican republic contorted into the shape of an hourglass, the First World pulling from one end, the Third tugging from the other. In one bulb of the hourglass, people shop at malls and eat hamburgers at McDonald's. In the other, they shop in public markets and eat rice and beans and tortillas. In one bulb, people use No. 6 bubble envelops. In the other, they have never heard of them and probably never will. The neck of the hourglass that is Mexico is very narrow. The sand passes very slowly.

When NAFTA passed, Americans and many middle- and upper-class Mexicans as well pictured Mexico looking like a Kansas City suburb ten years down the road, and Mexican parents feared that their children would lose long-standing cultural values. Politicians however, have declared Mexican culture sufficiently resilient to survive the onslaught. It is not stylish, I know, to agree with politicians, but I do sense they are right this time. President Salinas has proclaimed that Americans will be eating tacos long before Mexican drown in a flood of hamburgers, and in the United States, more salsa is already being sold than ketchup. But tacos and salsa are a microscopic tip of an enormous iceberg. The Mexican reality runs much deeper than that.

Mexico reveres the past in a way that few Americans can comprehend. To understand Mexico, we have to retrace the steps of history on Octavio Paz's time map. The United States, Paz points out over and over again, is the child of a forward-looking England during the throws of the Protestant Reformation. Mexico, on the other hand, was sired by a Counter-Reformation Spain dedicated to holding back the sands of time.

Not all that much has changed. An American will hear rock music at a Mexican party and declare American culture victorious. The American, however, will leave the party before the Mexicans mellow out and grow sentimental and let Mexico's soul music take over. A casual observer might think it is only a matter of the older people winning the battle of the stereo to indulge in a bit of nostalgia, as older Americans might with Frank Sinatra. In Mexico, it is not that simple.

It is not only the older set and the old LP's. It is also the younger generation and the new CD's. Mexicans of all ages are hooked into the past in a way that Americans cannot see or ever imagine. An eighteen-year-old dancing a danzon of the 1940? Or a paso doble? Or cumbia? Young pop stars like Luis Miguel recording an entire album of 1950's ballads? And it sells like hot cakes? And to kids? And it even wins a Grammy? Mourners born in 1965 playing guitars at the tomb of Pedro Infante - who died in 1957? Indeed, it is beyond the American ken.

At the American High School in Mexico City, where 65% of the student body is Mexican, every June, after the last class of the last semester, mariachis play for the seniors who are about to graduate to the next step of life in the modern world of the new Mexico. The musicians play old, traditional songs, as the kids form a circle around them and sway to the music and sing along. There is never a single eighteen-year-old among them who does not know all the words to all the songs - songs that were popular decades before they were born.

One day, I watched the man at the orange-juice stand squeezing oranges and wondered what he would do in the new world of NAFTA. He will go on squeezing his oranges, I decided. His children will work in the new industries, but he will squeeze his oranges. And I suppose there are papelerías that will never stock No. 6 bubble envelops. There is a new generation of stationery stores that do sell No. 6 bubble envelops, but the ones that never have, never will.

They are like the orange-juice man: old generals. They never die. They just fade away. In Mexico, it takes a very long time to fade away.