Mexico’s I.F. Stone

The star of the show at the Ciudad Nezalhualcoyotl soccer stadium was the revered Juan Gabriel, Mexico’s foremost author and singer. But when the crowd realized that Carlos Monsivais was in the audience, a murmur spread across the vast field: “Monsi, Monsi, Monsi.” In minutes, more than 10,000 voices had joined in the call for Monsivais to share the stage with his friend. Cornered, the shy writer and journalist had no choice; he ascended the stage and bowed humbly to the crowd.

No other Mexican writer can boast such public acclaim among his or her countrymen. There are some who sell more books and some who are talked about more in literary salons, but no one else is as much a public hero as Monsivais.

His fame, however, has not extended beyond his native land. In the United States, he is known mainly in those cities where modern Mexican culture is alive. To introduce him to the broader English-speaking audience, a British publishing house, Verso, has compiled 13 of his chronicles in “Mexican Postcards.” Selected from five of his published books and journalistic essays, each postcard provides rare and lucid insight into Mexico’s soul. “Mexican Postcards” offers a rare opportunity for an American audience to grasp the real nature of things Mexican, sans cliche and stereotypes.

The essays deal with seven topics about which the author has written extensively and which represent some of his major concerns. There are pieces on modern Mexican history and the troublesome issue of Mexican identity. There are chronicles about some fundamental beliefs of national life and profiles of people who subsist at the margins of society. There are essays that deal with the essential attributes of three movie idols, a literary giant and bolero music. At the end of the book, there is, as the icing on the cake, an exercise in baroque literature that demonstrates how economic and political power takes precedence over metaphysics.

In some enigmatic way, this Mexican intellectual, often compared to the late American gadfly I.F. Stone, has become a key player in the current Mexican transition to democracy by advancing the cause of free and critical journalism in Mexico. Curiously, Monsivais’ books have never been bestsellers; they tend to be difficult works that intimidate common readers. Even though his writings draw heavily from popular language and culture, many of his pieces are deceivingly complicated. In addition, his unique, and highly recognizable, style often calls for repeated reading.

Monsivais’ secret weapon lies in the moral fiber of his words, whether they appear in newspaper and magazines or are heard on radio and television interviews. Watching his bits--promotional videos--on TV with famous artists, like rock star Gloria Trevi or crooner Luis Miguel, has become an element of urban life. More important, perhaps, is that people see in him a person who tells the truth. In a country where many public practitioners have turned lying into an art form, Monsivais tells the truth in an unassuming and funny way. Devoid of sentimentality, his chronicles mock the solemn attitudes and stiff speeches of government and private business officials. The “official” version is his target.

When asked which of the two Carloses--Marx or Monsivais--had had a bigger influence on him, Subcomandante Marcos, the masked revolutionary who led the Chiapas revolt in 1994, answered: “I don’t know, but I am sure I read Monsivais before I read Marx.”

Back in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, when Monsivais began to carve his niche in cultural life, he concluded that both Mexicans and Mexican institutions suffered from mental sclerosis. To break that condition, he decided to write literary pieces ridiculing the acts, gestures and language of corrupt and inept politicians, entrepreneurs, policemen, lawyers, union leaders, etc. He laughed at them for a serious purpose: to expose to the public and to themselves their foolishness and pretentiousness.

As a keen witness to his time and place, Monsivais has the happy ability to question mores while avoiding the tone of a moralist. It is that quality in his joyful chronicles, perhaps more than anything else, that has won him Mexico’s embrace. He is an incorruptible, unrelenting man whose eye lets nothing escape.

“Monsivais,” says Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “is the only human being I know who is truly a specialist at everything. I don’t understand how he has the time to read so much about so many things.”

Consider, for example, the first of his postcards in the book. The topic is modern Mexican history. Starting with the title, which chillingly telegraphs the content--”Mexico 1890-1976: High Contrast, Still Life,” the essay is a devastating indictment of rulers from Porfirio Diaz at the turn of the century to Luis Echeverria in the 1970s. They are responsible, writes Monsivais, for the economic inequality and political immobility that characterize the country. Using contrasting images laced with irony that pierce through the official versions he so heartily detests, Monsivais concludes that trust, the necessary bond between citizens and rulers, does not exist in Mexico.

In another essay, “Identity Hour,” Monsivais explores what it means to be a Mexican and how the nation’s people can make the transition from an idealized version of their past to the chaotic present. “In Mexico,” writes Monsivais, “the worst has already happened.” Confronted with the turmoil that defines life in Mexico City, the people who refuse to leave the city function admirably, so great is their psychological ability to compensate for the discomfort and inconvenience. “In the capital, to counterbalance the lack of clear skies, there are more than enough inhabitants, spectators, car owners, pedestrians.”

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Three pieces in the book deal with marginal sectors of the population. In “Dancing: The Funky Dive,” Monsivais describes how young dead-end working-class Mexicans strive to live in the modern world, taking United States culture as their model. Working-class kids may be able to mimic the moves in funky dives but, Monsivais concludes, they are not Americans. Without the resources of the United States, he implies, the Americanization of the young Mexican proletariat is an impossibility.

“Red News” documents how the crime pages in newspapers and magazines have transformed the tale of the common criminal into the horror story of narco-politics, in which a simple murder becomes an issue of national security. “Millenaranisms in Mexico: From Cabora to Chiapas” deals with delusion: the Mexican belief that the arrival of the millennium will bring back a mythical golden age presided over by the “right” leader. The essay elaborates on times in the past when Mexicans from the right and the left thought they had created a utopia. “I believe,” writes Monsivais, “that utopianism lies not in intentions, however praiseworthy, but in the articulation of language. The utopian question is a simple one: What possibilities today lie beyond reality?”

In “Tradition Hour,” Monsivais deals with the most revered Mexican symbol, the Virgin of Guadalupe. Guadalupismo is a unique phenomenon whose influence on the life of Mexicans continues to be enormous in spite of the religious diversification the country has gone through. At a time when more than 20% of the population is no longer Catholic, Guadalupismo persists across the land.

“The Boy Fidencio and the Roads to Ecstasy” deals with another face of orthodox religion. The essay addresses what Monsivais likes to calls “the mystique of desperation.” To the extent that despair plays a dominant role in Mexican life, he says, figures like the Boy Fidencio provide Mexicans with a mystic they can believe in. Born two years before the turn of the century in the state of Guanajuato, Fidencio was an altar boy with psychic powers. According to the testimony of the people, he had the gift to heal people. Fidencio is the Messiah preaching a popular religion in whose theogony Aztec gods mix with Christian saints.

In his essay on the novelist Juan Rulfo, Monsivais acknowledges his respect and admiration for a writer who has pictured Mexico in its bare bones. “Rulfo,” says Monsivais, “has probed deeper than anyone else into the essence of Mexico.”

Three other stories, sketches of larger-than-life figures in Mexico’s world of entertainment, demonstrate how easily Monsivais delves into popular culture to reveal three different facets of the Mexican personality. Dolores del Rio represents, for Monsivais, the ideal of Mexican beauty. Mario Moreno Cantinflas, the late actor and comedian, articulated in his work a form of speech whose only goal was to put its interlocutor into a locked cage; somehow, Cantinflas anticipated a Mexican verbal version of the theater of the absurd. The sketch on Tin Tan, the actor who played the pachuco on and off the movie set, is a vision of the man who immigrated to the United States and returned to Mexico to become a movie star. For Monsivais, Tin Tan should be credited with inventing in the 1940s the language Mexicans will speak in the 21st century: Spanglish.

The last of the formal essays in the book considers the preferred music of urban Mexico, the bolero. That musical genre, says Monsivais, has the sadness of melodrama but, incongruently, makes Mexicans happy. Cultivated in Cuba, Mexico, Colombia and the Dominican Republic, the bolero is the epitome of the romantic song and a genre that refuses to die and everyday finds itself being reinvented.

“The Catechism for Reluctant Indians” is an obscure exercise in rhetoric that borrows a bit from the Mexican picaresque tradition and satirizes the way ideas about life are taught and accepted. It is a wry comment on the church and unquestioning allegiance to its principles.

To attempt the translation for this book was a courageous enterprise. John Kraniauskas does a competent job. He should be praised, although there are paragraphs in which one may disagree on the choice of words or on his interpretations of well-known phrases. Overall, and considering the difficulty of Monsivais prose and syntax, the translation is more than satisfactory. That, unfortunately, is not the case with the hideous and vulgar cover of the book, which perpetuates stereotypes of Mexico by using symbols of Chicano culture. Even more offensive is the audacity of the translator in dedicating a book he did not write.

No other country in the world affects daily life in the United States as does Mexico. And even though most Americans believe they know our Southern neighbor well, that is not the case. Monsivais’ “Mexican Postcards” helps bridge that gap. It is an honest chronicle of life in a land that is all too often for Mexicans, as it is for Americans, an enigma.