Many Mexicos: Vistas de la Frontera
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We enter modern times, post-revolutionary Mexico, a time of industrialization, feverish cross-cultural contact and exchange, political stability and political storms, and ever closer ties between Mexico and the United States, between Mexicans and Americans, and, conversely, of widening gulfs, of polemical discourse, and ambivalent views. Frontiers of modernity began to knock loudly on Mexico's door in the 1940s and 1950s, and the great Mexican comedian and film star Mario Moreno, better known as Cantinflas, was there to satirize it all. As one historian aptly put it, Cantinflas represented the human debris of industrialization, a rootless migrant to the big city who survived by his wit in a bewildering and coldhearted environment.
Cantinflas was the master of physical comedy who elicited sympathy for the lower-class underdog. Known for his double-talk and rejection of linguistic and social conventions, Cantinflas alternated between deference and defiance in order to undermine the legitimacy of authority. Take this dialogue, for example, in the film Ahí está el detalle. After the prosecutor calls Cantinflas "estúpido" out of frustration with Cantinflas’s refusal to give a straight answer, the prosecutor excuses himself and returns to his seat, whereupon Cantinflas replied, "Usted es excusado," You are indeed a toilet! In 1992, the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language formally acknowledged Cantinflas's status as an institution in the larger Spanish-speaking world by adding to its dictionary the verb cantinflear, meaning to talk a lot without managing to say much.
And finally, we end up at the border. Mexican immigration to the United States and increased violence over issues of supply and demand in the drug trade have promoted what can only be described as neighbors talking at each other rather than to each other. Some have suggested that Mexico is at another brink because rural Mexico is empty, with millions having left to find employment in the cities and especially north of the international border, that the narcoviolencia has become extreme enough to cast doubt on Mexican institutions. Historians interrogate the past and identify patterns of violence that have posed grave challenges to the structural integrity of the Mexican polity, including the Spanish conquest of the Aztec confederation, the wars for independence from Spain, the U.S. invasion of 1846, the three-year civil war, the French occupation, the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, and the Mexican Revolution of 1910—all discussed in the Many Mexicos exhibition. In each occasion, however, Mexico emerged not quite the same but not altogether different. Put another way, persistence and malleability accompany reaction and change.
In the end, such efforts to find historical analogies are limited in their ability to explain change over time, which is what concerns historians, because the contexts in which these momentous events unfolded are different. In other words, 1521 and 1821 are distinct, 1810 and 1910 are distinct, because each period witnessed its own complex interplay of politics, culture, and economy. When the political rhetoric heats up, however, when the air is not yet clear, when poisoned polemic not only threatens to offend our intellectual sensibilities but also threatens to stymie binational, humane solutions, or worse, break up families and promote dangerous travel through the Sonoran Desert as fathers and mothers search for economic security for their children, I can think of no better way to mitigate such ill-tempered passions than to provide the sobering views of historical context. But that in itself is not enough. I end my remarks this evening by posing a rhetorical question to the audience, something for you to think about as you make your way through the exhibition. And the question is inspired by three lines from one of my favorite poems, Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall.”
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall;”
“Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence;”
And the final words of the poem,
“Good fences make good neighbors.”
So my question for all of you tonight: Which of these lines best encapsulates the direction you think Mexico and the United States should take? It is my sincere hope that the Many Mexicos exhibition will help fashion not only your response but the manner in which you respond. Thank you so much for your kind attention this evening, and I very much look forward to seeing you at the exhibition. Thank you.
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