Who Live in Mexico
MOST writers on Mexico concentrate on the conventional fresco of huge snow-capped vol- canoes and steep pyramids towering over a debased, miscegenous (yet vital) peasantry oppressed by corrupt revolutionary governments. Greene and Lawrence both, in their different ways, work out this idea. The merit of A. t'Serstevens's travelogue is that he breaks away from these precedents. He records the mountains in passing, puts the finger on the Aztecs ('bloody and revolt- ing') and sees the people with less sentimentality than the Anglo-Americans. His triple subject is the three geographical zones from the lowlands to the high plateau; the pre-Columbian, Spanish, and now North American cultures; the three races. Indian. mestizo and Spanish. The Indians are only now emerging from the silence of centuries of slavery, but urban behaviour tends to resemble that of industrial, other-directed societies such as the US and Britain. Here t'Serstevens is led astray by his conservative French background. Com- plaining of the hideous Mexican cooking (he lost thirty pounds in a year), he writes bitterly, 'Cars, with women, constitute the first and last objective in life.' But surely this is common enough. Admit- tedly it is carried a little far in Mexico City. for it is by no means unusual for a married man to run three or four mistresses—las casas—and se larcenous are the inhabitants that if one wishes to keep one's car one just doesn't park it in the street. Finally, a historical suppression of Orwel- lian dimensions: of Cortes there is not even one official mention in the whole country. Where the conquistadores forced the pass of Ixtaccihautl, however, a monument without his name shows the conqueror on the bronze stele, 'half hidden among his companions . . . it is the Indian guides whe occupy all the foreground.'
DAVID RFFS
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