Books : Critical but Loving Profiles of Mexico

The Mexicans: The Personal Portrait of a People by Patrick Oster (Morrow: $19.95; 400 pages)

Nearly every journalist with an ample collection of reporter’s notebooks suffers from the temptation to “write up his notes” and thereby turn his yellowing files into a book. That’s essentially what Patrick Oster has done in “The Mexicans,” and his work demonstrates both the strengths and the weaknesses of the genre. At its best, Oster’s book is a gallery of memorable portraiture of Mexico and its people; at other times, “The Mexicans” carries too much of the burden of old news and recycled statistics.

As Mexico City bureau chief for the Knight-Ridder newspapers, Oster saw Mexico from the odd but intimate perspective of the reporter--he was writing headline stories and picturesque features while accumulating a wealth of unpublished detail about the lives of the people he met. “I had covered Mexico’s worst natural disaster, its worst plane crash, its worst industrial accident, and its worst economic crisis,” he explains. “I had seen poverty so bleak that it made life in the . . . ghettoes of Chicago seem almost bearable. But I came to realize that the reporting required to write my usual stories on such topics just scratched the surface of Mexico’s complicated truth.”

A Series of Profiles

To give us a better appreciation of “the complicated truth,” Oster has researched and written a series of profiles of Mexicans, rich and poor, privileged and poverty-stricken: a housemaid, a playboy, a smuggler, a doctor, a Protestant evangelist, a fortuneteller, a famous comedian, a gay activist, a feminist. Each profile is the occasion for Oster to introduce us to gritty realities of Mexican life--and to report and reflect on the textbook problems of Mexico: “Poverty, illiteracy, income disparity, unemployment, malnutrition, crime, political repression, smuggling, massive foreign debt, bulging budget deficits, horrific environmental conditions, rural violence, corruption, religious fanaticism, racism, and weaknesses of the Mexican character.”

Thus, for example, we meet a man who grew up on “the mean streets of Mexico City”--and then returned to the slums as a doctor who devotes himself to the poor: “He calls it medicina salvaje, ‘savage medicine,’ ” Oster tells us. “He has no sterilizer--another item for the wish list--so he uses rubber gloves that he washes after each use.”

Then there’s a rich man’s son who squanders time and money in elegant nightclubs with the sons and daughters of other rich men: “‘Tienes coche o Volkswagen?’ one could hear them say in perfect, drop-dead fashion--’Do you have a car or a Volkswagen?’ ”

And we are given to understand the irresistible lure of the border--and its terrible perils--in Oster’s account of a young man from a remote mountain village who sought to join his older brother in the United States. If he managed to send back an extra $50 a month, the windfall would double the income of his family--but the ambitious and courageous young man becomes the sole survivor of a ghastly massacre when the other members of his party, sealed inside a boxcar by coyotes or smugglers, are literally baked to death on a siding in the Texas desert.

Sometimes, however, Oster’s journalistic tendency to treat “problems” overwhelms the richness of Oster’s information and insights. For example, Oster introduces us to Luis Hernandez, a member of the family that was profiled so memorably in the classic anthropological study by Oscar Lewis, “Children of Sanchez.” Lewis’ book, Oster observes, “was the stuff of Dickens or Dreiser.” But Oster uses his encounter with Hernandez as an occasion to discuss the traditions of fayuca or the smuggling of contraband, the underpinnings of the Mexican economy, the recent economic crisis in Mexico and the decision of Mexican President Miguel de la Madrid to join the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

Fellini-esque Grotesqueries

Similarly, Oster shows us the Fellini-esque grotesqueries of a government bureaucracy trying to turn street-corner fire-eaters into door-to-door booksellers, the almost feudal social hierarchies of Mexico City’s pepenadores or garbage pickers, the reputed “city of magic” where a pair of Berkeley graduates introduce Oster to a fortuneteller, and the despairing poetry of punk-rock street gangs.

Oster proclaims himself to be a sympathetic if critical and tough-minded observer: “The glass may be half-empty in Mexico, but it is also half-full,” he concludes. “There is joy and laughter and love of children. There is artistic talent and hard work. There is patience and, most of all, an ability to endure.” Oster makes an earnest effort to show these qualities in “The Mexicans”--and to the extent that Oster succeeds, so does his book.