Commonwealth and Foreign
IN DEFENCE OF MEXICO
By ALEXANDER MARTIN
BRITAIN needs Mexico's oil, across the safe Atlantic route. We have not been getting it, because we brusquely refused to understand Mexico's case. Very few foreigners know anything about Mexico, and as few hesitate to pass judgement on it. It is not altogether their fault. Their information is poor. Their darkness is met greatly lightened by the jotters, the notebook boys, who trip through the country for a few weeks and then return to write pro- foundly about it. D. H. Lawrence was perhaps Mexico's most egregious visitor. His rival is Aldous Huxley. They compete for the honour of having written the worst book ever published on the subject of Mexico. Lawrence didn't acquire Mexico fever. He was apparently born with it. And he had a theory to fit Mexico into. The result, considered as a study of Mexico, is funny as only Lawrence at his worst can be. And yet readers of the Plumed Serpent will accept his picture of Mexicans as subtle, hostile, reptilian, and with beady black eyes. How are they to know that Mexicans are actually simple and gaily friendly souls, with beautiful soft brown eyes?
Mr. Huxley suffered from preconceived ideas, unfortu- nately Lawrence's. In addition, he couldn't forgive Mexicans for not being intellectual. As Huxley is profoundly disgusted by anything that happens below a man's neck, and most Mexicans, beyond eating and drinking, are not much in- terested in anything that happens above it, it is not surpris- ing that he found Mexico uncongenial. "La betise n'est pas mon fort," he says in Beyond the Mexique Bay. It only remains to wonder why he came.
In a recent number of The Spectator (we necessarily are a few weeks behind the times here) there is a review by Evelyn Waugh of a book on Mexico by Graham Greene. That must be taken seriously. Messrs Waugh and Greene are infinitely better qualified reporters than Huxley or Lawrence, and therefore potentially the more dangerous. And a reading of Mr. Waugh's article makes one uneasy.
Apparently obsessed by the notion of wickedness, and admittedly sick, Mr. Greene was (as Mr. Waugh hints) hardly fitted to face Mexico in the raw. In fact, it disgusted him. Unfortunately his readers will see Mexico through an atmosphere of Greene-sickness and believe it disgusting. It is not. I admit that it is possible, by a firm effort of will, to be crushed by " the weight of sheer hopeless wickedness " in Mexico. It is possible, by resolutely ignoring the fact that failure to appreciate the consequences of one's actions is not wickedness, but ignorance. There is a lot of ignorance, but only the uncharitable or impatient need be crushed by it.
To be sure, there is a legacy of wickedness, and those who make trips or loiter in the capital will see more than enough to sate them with it. But what chiefly strikes a non-literary resident is the sheer disinterested goodness of the Mexican in the country and the small towns, within the circumscribed orbit of his ignorance ; his friendliness, his decency, his generosity, and his kindness. He represents about 8o per cent. of the population, and he is being gradually educated.
Mr. Greene "makes little attempt to give the historical background of the tragedy "; which is as if he were to con- demn a juvenile delinquent without inquiry into his environ- ment and upbringing. For it is precisely the historical background that is the tragedy, from which Mexico is pain- fully moving. One cannot make static judgements of a nation. For instance, there is no doubt that Mexicans kill each other all too frequently. But if you have known little beyond revolution, corrupt courts before the revolution, and slavery before that, you will ignorantly believe that the only way to get justice is to take the law into your own hands. There is another, I nearly said incentive, to murder. That is the touching faith of the Mexican peasant that he can kill on Saturday, confess to a priest on Sunday, and kill with a clean sheet on Monday.
Actually Mexico never has been a Roman Catholic country. There is all the formal apparatus of Catholicism. But spiritually the Church, that at one time owned half the capital wealth of Mexico, never existed. The practised religion, to the horror of devout visiting Catholics, was that of Columbus's recorded prayer: " 0 Lord, direct me where I may find the gold mine." Torquemada tells how the priests, ignorant of the language, indoctrinated the natives by " pointing to the sky to show that there was God, and dropping the eyes to the ground to indicate hell." After which the Indians " were converted and received baptism." The image of the Virgin stood where Huitzilopotchli had been, and the old copal incense was burnt before the new conquering god. So in this year of Grace a country Mexican will say: " Yes, they have a very good Christ in that village. But our's is better. It has done more miracles." If the Church had fed, and not merely bled, its flock, there would be no godlessness in Mexico today.
Finally, to show the decadence of modern Mexico, Mr. Waugh compares the colonial days, when " not only was it a land of magnificent architecture and prosperous industry, but of civil peace and high culture." That is pure bunkum. No doubt the handful of Spaniards had nice houses and were prosperous and cultured. But in three centuries of colonising only three hundred thousand Spaniards came to Mexico. The printing presses and universities and classes in anatomy made a nice white sepulchre. Mr. Waugh might also have pointed out the benevolence of the colonial legislation, whereby infringement of the Indian's personal liberty was punishable with death. That was also good: too good, in fact, to be true. Within one generation slavery had nearly wiped the Indians out, because no Spaniard in Mexico cared a fig for Madrid or its laws. There was civil peace because, beyond the civil disobedience implied in dying of overwork or undernourishment, it is difficult for slaves to protest. It is hard to follow an argument that calls emergence from such conditions " conscious decadence."
To be sure, Mexicans hardly know what to do with freedom or the machinery of democracy, any more than they at first knew what to do with the Spaniard's printing presses and anatomy charts. Eatanswill proves that demo- cracy is the most difficult form of Government. Yet it would be original to condemn Victorian England as decadent, or even hopelessly wicked, for all that its architec- ture and culture compared unfavourably with the Fli7a- bethan. Mexicans make wild mistakes and break their new toys, but they will learn.
Many critics point to the agricultural and industrial ex- propriations. A barrister here said to me that nations ought to be allowed to plead infancy. Mexico was an infant when she accepted the burdensome contracts. Now she is adult enough to be tired of exploitation. Mexicans can't trust foreigners any more. They know what Dollar Diplo- macy means — foreign concerns corrupting Mexican justice with staggering bribes and supplying arms to revolu- tionaries against the recognised Government ; the inevitable American marines at Vera Cruz ; the assassins of a President who wouldn't play ball actively abetted by an American Ambassador ; a Diaz regime which was a police force to keep the natives in order while foreigners took their wealth. Mexico is biting the hand that bled her, and we can't com- plain and call it iniquity.
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