A Telling Tale of Mexican Revolution Sparks Row Over Who’s Doing the Telling

“The Old Gringo” is a novel by Carlos Fuentes, a movie by Argentine director Luis Puenzo--starring Jane Fonda and Gregory Peck--and an occasion to dwell on the way Mexico tells its story to Americans.

The film, which opened in the United States this past week, has already sparked a new and lively version of the age-old debate in Mexico about what is wrong with American, supposedly stereotypical portrayals of the nation and its people. As one might expect, it has rekindled the nation’s never-ending discussion about whether those Mexicans who know how--and want--to share their vision of the country with foreigners in general, and Americans in particular, are traitors, fools, or--more reasonably--marvelous decrypters of Mexico’s code of fantasy.

Nobody tells the story of Mexico to Americans the way Fuentes does. In his maturity as a writer he has partially devoted his talent to an often unrewarding task: translating Mexico and the rest of the hemisphere into American.

Fuentes always had a gift for interface. His first three novels, which many still consider his best, told disbelieving Mexican readers the story of what their adolescence in small provincial towns (“The Good Conscience”), their capital (“Where the Air Is Clear”) and their revolution (“The Death of Artemio Cruz”) had all become.

Fuentes taught an entire generation of midcentury Mexicans about the country they really lived in. He is now striving to teach end-of-century Americans about their neighbors--across the river, but increasingly across the tracks. “Gringo Viejo,” the movie, is not strictly Fuentes’--he did not write the script--yet in a sense it is his most ambitious, and successful, attempt to achieve this end. It is a story deeply rooted in Mexico about the lives, loves and death of Americans in the Mexican Revolution, told in a way that can catch the American imagination.

But the film is also a set of impressions of Mexico, historical and present-day, as Fuentes thinks Americans should see it. Like other Latin American intellectuals, Fuentes has achieved a certain balance in the presentation of his country and continent, of its history and customs. He is not complacent with Americans, telling them what they want to hear. Nor does he lecture them, resorting to the moralizing or paternalistic tones that often drive many citizens of the United States to distraction. But he does have a message, a vision of Mexico that he wants Americans to share, a message that he believes they should receive instead of any other.

The result, in “The Old Gringo” and in many of Fuentes’ other contemporary writings (including the just-translated “Christopher Unborn”), is a rough, proud, highly nationalistic and frequently anti-American, deeply introspective yet brash Mexico that clashes with other images that Americans are familiar with. Fuentes’ tour de force is twofold: It consists of presenting this real Mexico, and doing so in a way that does not turn Americans off to the country and its people.

In Mexico, while a box-office success, the film has been damned by some as a “ gringada “--a typically Americanized, Hollywood production with all the stereotypes that many Mexicans consider demeaning. The scenes that most infuriate Mexico’s right-wing, nationalistic keepers of the faith are undoubtedly those of the violence and debauchery the Revolution wrought: the taking of the Miranda Hacienda, the horse in the mansion and bedroom, the macabre death dance in the cemetery, the prostitute accompanying the revolutionaries on their adventures.

The film’s critics have let their xenophobia reach new extremes, blaming the the movie’s inevitable Hollywood traits on director Puenzo’s Argentine nationality, on Fonda’s political leanings or on Fuentes’ success along the U.S. lecture circuit. They have also complained about the film’s constant association of its main participants with trains: They ride on trains, sleep and make love on trains, do business on trains and are invariably hanging around trains. But this is the way Mexico’s revolutionaries liked to be photographed, the way they posed, the way the Casasola Photographic Archive of the Revolution depicted them.

Similarly, the Revolution was the supreme violent episode in a notably violent country. Mexico was and continues to be a nation of pent-up, fully justified and unending anger against unfathomable injustice, inequality and authoritarian abuse. The Mexican people respond to the drama of their existence in alternating fits of resignation and rage; their proverbial violence is not a stereotype, but a reality. So are many of the other traits of national character that the film depicts, in its own, avowedly Americanized fashion.

Thus one of the film’s heroes, Gen. Thomas Arroyo, gets into trouble with a subdued Pancho Villa (played by Pedro Armendariz Jr.) because he decided to stay at the Miranda Hacienda more or less indefinitely. Why did he settle down in that marvelous, entirely out-of-place mansion? For the most Mexican of reasons one could imagine: He made a friend (San Francisco journalist Ambrose Bierce, played by Peck) and fell in love (with Harriet Winslow, played by Fonda). And more profoundly, the hacienda was where his mother, a servant, was raped by the oligarch himself. Arroyo was born of that violent encounter, and in his simple vision of the world, by prolonging his stay and sleep on the bed of the crime, he was avenging his mother’s violation.

Even Bierce’s view of Mexico and the Fonda character’s magical Mexican rejuvenation are stereotypical--yet not far from the perception Mexicans have of why Americans come to their country. In one of the film’s best lines, Arroyo explains to his friends from the north: “Now I know why Americans come to Mexico: They can’t stand each other.” In fact, Bierce learns how to die and Jane Fonda learns how to love in Mexico, fields in which Mexicans believe themselves miles ahead of their puritanical Protestant neighbors. Certainly since Malcolm Lowry and D.H. Lawrence, Mexico’s fascination with death and its rituals have escaped few informed Americans, but the obsession with--and beauty of--death in Mexico dates back many centuries.

In its own way, the film brings out the difference: Bierce comes to die in Mexico, and learns that there is a better way to do so than the one originally reserved for him north of the Rio Grande. Like any country or people, Mexico has its vanity. Carlos Fuentes and the film reflect it well.

There is a price to pay for Fuentes’ gift of interface. Unavoidably, the trade-off is unfair, but real. The better Fuentes is at telling his country’s story to Americans, the greater the distance between that story and the official one Mexicans tell themselves. The more accessible the same story is for Americans, the more stilted or even corny it can seem to nit-picking, superficially nationalistic Mexicans.

This is the underlying explanation for many of the recent attacks Fuentes has been subjected to in Mexico, as well as many of the friendships and loyalties he inspires. The critics come from the darkest, most conservative side of Mexico--the same groups who believed journalist Alan Riding betrayed his Mexican friends’ trust by writing a best-selling book (“Distant Neighbors”) about the country he worked in for a decade. The supporters have a different origin: They spring from pride in having someone like Carlos Fuentes tell their story to an all-important neighbor, and in having it told as splendidly as it is in “The Old Gringo.”