Mexico in Review

    As I finished the Russia unit, I started to intersperse some miscellaneous books because it gets boring to read only the same topic over and over again. But the big unit I moved to next was another country, Mexico. I read 6 books about Mexico: Pedro Páramo, Mexico's Crucial Century, 1810-1910, In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl, Fifth Sun, El laberinto de la soledad, and then All the Pretty Horses. All the Pretty Horses is the first in a trilogy that I plan to read, but I am cutting off the blog post here, and I hadn't even been sure I would include it as a Mexico book, but the book was set mostly in Mexico and I finished it before writing this post. Two of the authors, both of more "literary" books, were Mexican. I tried to avoid the Mexican Revolution since I think there is just so much on it, but it was impossible to truly avoid it since almost everything in modern Mexico is touched by it. So Pedro Paramo, El laberinto de la soledad, and All the Pretty Horses all discussed the Revolution or the Cristero War in some way or another.

    The first big theme I picked up on in my reading was modern Mexico needing to catch up to the modern world. There is sort of a feeling that Mexico was this great empire under the Aztecs and then a really successful colony under the Spanish through the 18th century, but that it fell behind, and that the 19th and 20th centuries have been a big effort by Mexico to catch back up. This is really noticeable in Mexico's Crucial Century, as well as in El laberinto de la soledad, where Octavio de la Paz is very explicit that he sees the Revolution as a big moment that allowed Mexico to reach modernity.

    The other big theme was most apparent in Shadow of Quetzalcoatl and Fifth Sun, which was the birth of Mexico through contact between the indigenous people and the Spaniards, resulting in alliances or war between and among all the different people in contact with each other. It is pretty unusual in world history for two people to merge so fully like in Mexico, and when I went to Mexico City in June, it was apparent in murals and art and in the history museums that Mexicans see themselves as a combined people, who glorify their European and their indigenous history, especially the Aztec side of things. 

    Visiting Mexico in June made all of this a lot more significant and salient for me. Getting to see Teotihuacan and the Templo Mayor made it really cool to see how massive of structures the people of Mesoamerica could build, but then also how primitive it was compared to what the Spanish were doing an ocean away. The arrival of the Spanish was nothing short of cataclysmic, just like the arrival of the English and the French to the north. But the difference was that the natives combines with the Europeans in Latin America in a way that didn't happen to the north, and the way that people conceive of themselves in North and South America today are different as a result. North Americans can only really claim either Native American or European heritage, but it is very unusual to be able to claim descent from both like is common in Mexico.

    A big difference from the Russia unit is how the state is felt in each country. In Russia, the state is the primary violent actor. There was tons of death and destruction, but it was all at the hands of the Russian state or a state invading Russia. In Mexico, it was the opposite: a more extensive violence that operated at a higher level than Russia at peace but a lower level than Russia at war. The big danger to the safety of the people I read about in the Mexico books was not the government of Mexico, but the local government or criminals. 

    Reading the Mexico unit made me want to read a lot more literature in Spanish, building on my goal of reading more fiction this year. I think I've turned a corner and gotten a lot more interested in reading fiction, but I still don't know how to write about it yet. With my non-fiction books, I've settled into a "reflection," where I write the things I think are important to know from the book and I give a couple of my thoughts on it. But that has gotten a little redundant so I am trying to mix it up in these units where I can do some comparisons. With fiction, it is a totally different ballgame and I still don't know exactly what to write about for those books. But this unit has encouraged me to add more books in Spanish to my miscellaneous reading in between and throughout units, because I really need the practice. Next, I am moving on to some books broadly in the category of science.