Snapshots From the Other Mexico

Among the incalculable costs of seven decades of one-party rule in Mexico is the damage it wrought on the Mexican psyche. Authoritarian rule in Mexico--”velvet repression,” to borrow journalist Mary Beth Sheridan’s phrase--was not only bad for the country’s economy and infrastructure, it also was deeply demoralizing to its people. The corruption it fostered was more insinuating than malicious, more wheedling than ironfisted.

In a recent editorial in The New Republic, this quiet form of coercion was cast as a virtue. The ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party was even praised as “pretty solid” and “not bad at managing the economy.”

But the shortsightedness of this argument becomes evident after reading Sam Quinones’ “True Tales From Another Mexico,” his intriguing account of the invisible life of this often misunderstood country. There was something insidious in the PRI’s rule, the “Mexico behind the sunglasses” in his vivid metaphor. Its very benignity, he insists, undermined the vitality of Mexico’s cultural and civic life: The Mexican government’s power did not reside in brutality so much as in something “beautifully simple, more humane, and a lot easier”--in short, institutionalized bribery.

Potential dissenters were bought off, not smashed. The loyalties of peasants, labor unions, community organizations and business groups were purchased by money, land, positions--and sometimes much less. Press outlets that dared to criticize were strangled, and the Mexican economy lumbered from crisis to crisis. Mexico’s governing system “became history’s proof that every man has his price. As a powerful government in a poor country it found that men come pretty cheap.”

Living in a country where loyalty comes cheap is profoundly frustrating, especially for those at the bottom. They see nothing in the future but what has always been: a system whose injustices churn on, drawing all opponents into the gears.

Quinones sets out to paint a portrait of another Mexico, a Mexico that managed to strive and invent beneath this stultifying layer of velvet. In 15 short “tales,” written between 1994 and 2000, he offers us snapshots of this Mexico, the vital part, he maintains, the resourceful part. The stories are part folk history and part political analysis, a sampling of his journalistic wanderings from Los Angeles to Oaxaca.

By themselves, they make good reading. Quinones’ effort to bring them together under the rubric of some greater thesis about Mexico seems more labored, and many of the tales are too long and redundant, at times simply a reprisal of what was in Quinones’ notebook after six years of reporting.

But this is also a book of fascinating surprises. A freelancer whose work has appeared in The Times, Quinones is a good journalist, willing to follow a story down whatever twisted path it may lead (and there are a lot of twists in this book). He relies far more on what he observes than on what people say, always the hardest and smartest thing a reporter can do. And he has no fear of ambiguity. One is often left unsure of what to think of many of the characters who populate the world he portrays.

Quinones gives us the shoeshine man bent at the feet of the idle functionary (who treats him as part of the furniture). There are the Baja California migrants who convince their teenagers to substitute service clubs for gangs, and closer to home, there is Central Valley farm worker Bonifacio Cabellero, an immigrant who spends years planning a triumphant return to his native Mexican village but somehow never quite gets around to it. It is a tale replicated in countless other lives across every mile of Los Angeles. To Quinones, the United States is a kind of outlet for Mexican dynamism, stifled under PRI rule.

Mexico’s “greatest modern catastrophe is that it has treated the emigrant poorly,” he writes. “His absence is of greater consequence to Mexico than the 19th century territorial losses of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.”

The best avatar of this creative immigrant in the tales is corrido singer Chalino Sanchez, a poor, uneducated former jailbird who left his native Sinaloa, lived for a time in Inglewood and was murdered mysteriously on a return trip to Mexico in 1992 at age 31. Chalino, with his cocked white cowboy hat, would eventually reinvent urban Mexican American identity through his roughhewn music--a genuine Los Angeles folk hero who transformed the urban Latino youth scene.

Chalino’s death took him instantly from music phenomenon to legend. From roots that could hardly be more humble, the Sinaloan made a revolution, turning Mexico’s version of country-hick music into a tool with which urban English-speaking Latinos would cast off shame and embrace their Mexican origins. “After Chalino, guys whose second language was an English-accented Spanish could pump polkas out their car stereos at maximum volume, and pretty girls would think they were cool,” Quinones writes.

But Chalino’s emigrant dynamism and pluck are not the only things that seeped from beneath paternalistic one-party rule. The tales also show a darker side to recent Mexican developments. They include the spontaneous torture and lynching of two traveling Mexican salesmen by a drunken mob in Hildalgo state, which Quinones links to government corruption. Vigilante law, he argues, is the people’s answer to “a nationwide Tammany Hall”--in which the justice system is so perverted that the powerless assume it will not do its job. They fill the void with their rage.

The tales include the terrifying chronicle of the scores of unsolved murders of young women in Ciudad Juarez--86 at the time Quinones wrote his tales and more than 200 by the time he wrote the book’s appendix. Quinones concludes that it may not be one or two serial killers on the loose but many, that the murders are “a product of the social decomposition of a place,” as one source tells him: the disintegration of Third-World Mexico in a helter-skelter border metropolis. But sadism, murderousness and rage are difficult phenomena to pull apart in any culture, and Quinones’ explanations on occasion seem strained.

The book also has a limitation in that the tales focus on fringes of Mexican society. Quinones feels the need to defend his choice, saying he has not set out to write merely about the “bizarre for bizarre’s sake.” Rather, in “a country with an arid officialist culture like Mexico,” he argues, “precisely on the edges is where some telling truths can be found.”

Maybe. But there remains plenty of life in Mexico between its fringes and its official culture. Members of Mexico’s vast, urban and increasingly educated middle classes were instrumental in toppling the PRI’s monopoly. A book about them would also be enlightening to American readers.

These are small gripes, however. The virtue of this book for Angelenos is the light it shines on the immigrants who have transformed this city more than any other. Mexicans are the overwhelming majority of Latino immigrants to California, and Los Angeles is their capital. Forty-six percent of Los Angeles County residents are Latino, and a large share have some roots in rural northern Mexico, a region almost as distinct from Mexico’s mainstream urban centers as from the United States and too little understood by either.

Some of the tales, like that of Chalino Sanchez, are required reading for anyone who wants to understand Los Angeles, and there are insights hidden in other chapters, such as Quinones’ suggestion that many Mexican campesinos come to the United States less for economic reasons than because they are fleeing violent feuds at home.

The Angeleno will find something else of interest here: “True Tales” was written before July 2, 2000, the day that opposition party candidate Vicente Fox was declared president of Mexico. Quinones addresses the victory, which broke 71 years of one-party rule, only in the afterword. Fox’s win was compared by supporters to the fall of the Berlin Wall and invokes the same jittery elation in Quinones that it did in many Mexican citizens.

He is right to mark this as a turning point. Whatever Fox’s ultimate impact, his election underscores the fact that Mexico is changing and globalizing, especially the part of Mexico Californians seldom see: central urban Mexico, an area distinct from the northern border regions from which most immigrants flow.

Mexico’s heartland has always resembled southern Europe culturally. Now some economists say that financially, too, its relationship to the United States is beginning to look a lot like that of Italy’s to northern Europe when the European Union began.

As agrarian Mexico wanes, this urban Mexico is on the rise. Foreign capital is flowing in. Mexican educational attainment is increasing; the birthrate is plummeting. Today, young middle-class women in Mexican cities juggle jobs and day-care just as American women do, and it is common for them to have double or triple the number of aunts and uncles as they do children, so rapid has been the change in family size.

Though there remains deep skepticism in and outside Mexico about its future, still imperiled by drug corruption and economic uncertainty, Quinones captures the morale boost supplied by Fox’s victory. An increasingly educated country, brought low by one-party rule, has suddenly seem to feel better about itself.

Quinones thinks it may add up to a very important result: “The flow of Mexicans to the United States will begin to staunch considerably,” he predicts, arguing that, “Mexican wages won’t have to equal those in the U.S. for this to happen.” As Mexican development grows and the government becomes more responsive, he writes, “the hazardous trip north will seem increasingly less worthwhile. Moreover, the simple hunch that things are getting better, and the government is at least theirs, will keep more Mexicans at home.”

Los Angeles, meanwhile, has been the destination of the outflow from Quinones’ “another Mexico” for a long time. It has taken for granted its access to a ready labor force, and, however painfully, adjusted to being a city of immigrants, with recent surveys showing people here are increasingly likely to see immigration as beneficial and integral to the character of Southern California.

But Mexico’s changes will be ours soon enough, just as Quinones’ “Another Mexico” has become ours.