Mexico & the United States the critique of twin nations' divergent traditions

mexico Mexico & the United States

September 17, 1979

"We are two distinct versions of Western civilization"

(Mexico & United States, p. 357)

"Our countries are neighbors, condemned to live alongside each other; they are separated, however, more by profound social, economic, and psychic differences than by physical and political frontiers"

357.

". . . a verification of the indifference with which history perpetuates its paradoxes."

"The discovery & conquest of America are events that inaugurated modern world history,"

(361)

". . . the history of our relationship is the history of a mutual and stubborn deceit, usually involuntary though not always so."

(361)

Facts:

"It is each society's vision of the world and also its feeling about time, there are nations that are hurrying toward the future, and others whose eyes are fixed on the past."

"Civilization is a society's style, its way of living and dying."

pp. 358-359.

The north (nomadic warriors) versus south (settled agriculturalists) contrasts predate (Spanish) Mexico and (Anglo) the United States.

"In England the Reformation triumphed, whereas Spain was the champion of the Counter-Reformation."

p. 360.

"The conversion legitimized the conquest."

p. 361.

Mexico	July 2007 est.	2014	historic population change
Population:	108,700,891	119,713,203
life expectancy		76.6 years
Ethnicity		60%	Mestizo
		30%	Spanish and European
		02%	Zambo (Mulatto) African

(roughly 29% of Mexico's population, and 49% of Latin America's total Amerindian population)

62 Indigenous languages

Indian population(2007) indigenous people's conditions:

Mexico 23,500,000

http://www.public.iastate.edu/~rjsalvad/scmfaq/indpop.html

Past evidence:

The Mexican census of October 28, 1900, shows that the population of the republic is 13,570,545 or 7.6 per cent larger than in 1895.

Some other sources give the number as 12.6 million, much less -- see http://www.refworld.org/docid/49749ce423.html

Mexico City Population: 8,605,239.

Greater Mexico City area, population 17,809,471 according to 2000 census: 20,137,152 currently.

see: http://www.indigenouspeople.net/CENSUSSTORY.htm

Next: faith divides us.

"all of them [differences] can be summed up in one fundamental difference, in which perhaps the the dissimilar evolution of Mexico and the United States originated: in England the Reformation triumphed, whereas Spain was the champion of the Counter-Reformation."

(36o)

"brought to Mexico"

"of syncretic Catholicism of Roman, which had assimilated the pagan gods, turning them into saints and devils.":

(361)

Mexico Population

Mexico inherited "the history of Spain and her former colonies" . . . ."the history of an ambiguous approach – attraction and repulsion – to the modern era."

"The discovery and conquest of America are events that inaugurated modern world history. . . "

(361)

"In the United States the Indian element does not appear. . . . the major difference between our countries."

(362)

He draws a dialectic of

inclusive versus exclusive

Mexico's Catholicism vs. USA Protestantism

tolerant redemption versus intolerant purity

(363)

Emiliano Zapata painted by Diego Rivera.

Zapata "At that time of that great crisis the Mexican Revolution, the most radical faction, that of Zapata and his peasant, proposed not new forms of social organization but a return to the communal ownership of land."

"Utopia for them Mexicans was not the construction of a future but a return to the source, to the beginning. The traditional Mexican attitude toward time. . . . "

(370)

population | final contradiction | war | moral decline | reconciliation

"Here is the final contradiction. and all of the divergences and differences I have mentioned culminate in it. A society is essentially defined by its position as regards time."

"The extraordinary spatial mobility of America, a nation constantly on the move, has often been pointed out."

"The American lives on the very edge of the now, always ready to leap forward into the future."

Mexico's orientation, as has been seen, was just the opposite. First came the rejection of criticism, and with it rejection of the notion of change: its ideal is to conserve the image of divine immutability. Second, it has a plurality of pasts, all present and at war within every Mexican's soul. Cortés and Montezuma are still alive in Mexico."

(370)

the ideology of progress:

". . . displaced the timeless values of Christianity and transplanted them to the earthly and linear time of history. Christian eternity became the future of liberal evolutionism."

(369-370)

"They undertook a two-fold revolution: separation from Spain and modernization of the country through the adoption of new republican and democratic principles."

"They gained independence from Spain, but the adoption of new principles was not enough."

(371)

"Mexico is the most Spanish country in Latin America; at the same time it is most Indian. . . . . In the United States, the Indian element does not appear.

(362)

"The Indian presence means that one of the facets of Mexican culture is not Western.

(363)

population | war | moral decline | reconciliation

"In the seventeenth century (1600-1699) Mexican society was richer and more prosperous than American society. This situation lasted until the first half of the eighteenth century. To prove that it was so, one need only to glance at the cities of those days. . . . Then everything changed. In 1847, the United States invaded Mexico, occupied it, and imposed a terrible and heavy condition of peace."

(371)

"The ideological wars of the twentieth century are no less ferocious than the wars of religion in the seventeenth century.?
Now we understand that the crisis is not of a socioeconomic system but of our whole civilization."

"The contradictions of totalitarian 'socialism' are more profound and irreconcilable than those of the capitalist democracies."

"The sickness of the West is moral rather than social and economic . . . But the real, most profound discord lies in the soul."

(374)

"The crisis of the United States affects the very foundations of the nation, by which I mean the principles that founded it."

"The hedonism of the West is the other face of desperation; its skepticism is not wisdom but renunciation; its nihilism ends in suicide and in inferior forms of credulity, such as political fanaticism."

"Our only recourse is the exercise of opposing virtues: tolerance and freedom of spirit."

(375)

"the minorities inside as well as the marginal countries & nations outside – do exist. . . . we 'others' make up a majority of the human race, . . . If the United States is to recover itself it must recover the 'others' – the outcasts of the Western World."

(376)

population | final contradiction | war | moral decline | reconciliation

Writing about the past

The Other Mexico

Mexico's intellectuals

Philanthropic Ogre

Mexico's revolutions

Paz's themes

The Labyrinth of Solitude, 1950

History