Preface
My first
visit to Mexico was anything but
auspicious. It was 1949
and I was a graduate student and teaching fellow at the University of
Texas in Austin. As
Christmas approached, I realized that I would not be able to afford
the long train trip back to Michigan to spend the holidays with my
parents. So, after apprising them of my financial
situation, I decided to use my two weeks free from classes for a
sortie into Mexico -- launching my first incursion into a region
whose geography, history, anthropology, languages, and culture had
been the focus of most of my undergraduate university training at the
University of Michigan. Indeed, with three years of
Spanish and one year of Portuguese behind me, at graduation I had
been offered a position as a 'junior executive' in what we would
nowadays term a "multinational" corporation, replete with such fringe
benefits as a villa of my own (with swimming pool, of course) and a
company car. The corporation, which shall
remain nameless, had carved out an empire of its own in a large part
of western South America and was viewed as one of the dominant
"Yankee" presences in that part of the
world. Naturally, I was
both flattered and tempted by this job offer -- tempted, that is,
until I found out by doing some research of my own that the company
in question paid its Peruvian workers eighteen cents a
day! Then, the position suddenly lost all of its
appeal, because I couldn't see myself driving my car into a gated
villa compound each evening when I knew that I was surrounded by
crushing poverty on all sides. I told the recruiter that "if
I was as attractive to him as I seemed to be with a bachelor's
degree, then maybe I'd be even more attractive to him with a
master's, because I had decided to go on to graduate school", and in
that manner I effectively put an end to my brush with the corporate
world.
The bus ride from Austin to Laredo was long in itself -- after
all, Texas is big! -- and after what seemed an interminable customs
inspection at the border, the Mexican bus started out of Nuevo Laredo
sometime after midnight. It was crowded, as Mexican
buses always are, and a couple of seats behind me two peons in big
sombreros chatted amiably with each other all night
long. From the few
snatches of conversation with I managed to pick up, it seemed as
though they were discussing how best to kill someone, and I sincerely
hoped it wasn't me that they had in
mind. As the first rosy
glimmers of daylight began to show themselves on the eastern horizon,
the bus was beginning its arduous climb up the Mameluque Pass, and I
took heart in seeing that the landscape had changed from one of
monotonous flatness to one of intriguing and rugged beauty. Just before six in the
morning the bus arrived at the terminal in Monterrey and the various
passengers scattered to their respective
destinations -- some to
make connections with other buses, some to be met by relatives and
friends, others -- like the two peons -- no doubt off to carry out
the nefarious deed they had hashed over at such length during the
night.
Tired, red-eyed, hungry, and cold (at 600 meters elevation,
Monterrey can be very chilly on a December morning), I wandered into
the bus-station restaurant to see if I could order some breakfast --
getting my first chance to practice Spanish in a real-world
situation. I sat down at
a small table after brushing way what seemed to be five hundred flies
and tried to signal a waiter for some attention. As I waited, I watched a man
at the counter ordering a cup of coffee and a sweet
roll. It was duly served but hardly had he received it
when a loud speaker blared that his bus was leaving for Durango, so
he gulped down his coffee, slapped some money on the counter, and
dashed off. The man behind the
counter calmly cleared away the coffee cup and the money and then
proceeded to place the half-eaten roll back in the glass case on the
wall back of him. Having witnessed that -- and
with the flies still swarming around me in great clouds -- I decided
that it might be prudent to look elsewhere for my
breakfast.
My guide book told me about one of the finest restaurants in
Monterrey, so, after orienting myself with the schematic map it
contained, I set out to try to locate it, little suspecting that it
would take me an hour and a half of walking to find
it. In 1949 most of the
streets of Monterrey were unpaved -- at least those I ended up
walking along -- and by the time I reached what I anticipated would
be 'my oasis in the desert' I had run almost the full gamut of
confrontations that can befall a neophyte gringo -- and experienced
some of my most profound "culture shock" in the
process. Emaciated,
wrinkled women looking far older than they probably were in fact,
wrapped in serapes against the bitter cold, crouched along the street
cradling small babies in their arms, held out their hands for
whatever centavos or pesos a passerby might give them. Nearby, a pink
Cadillac with obscene tail fins stood in the patio of an equally
obscene pink stucco villa, surrounded by an elaborate wrought iron
fence. (I immediately
envisioned myself in my company house in Peru, and shuddered.) Tacked to a telephone pole
out in front of the house was a tattered poster adorned with a hammer
and sickle. Along one of the streets a
good-looking, dark-eyed boy about 12 stepped out of a doorway and
asked if I would like to buy the services of his teen-age
sister. When I replied that I
wasn't interested, he smiled broadly and said, "Maybe you like me
better?" I shook my head
and walked on. As I
neared the main plaza, an older man motioned me to one side and asked
if I'd like to buy some "Spanish fly to make my girl friend more
eager". Again, I had to confess that I wasn't interested,
and finally seeing my goal, I ducked inside the restaurant and found
myself a booth.
The waiter promptly brought me a menu and then returned with a
glass of water and some cutlery wrapped in a paper
napkin. The water was so
cloudy that it looked as though a half-hearted attempt had been made
to rinse out a glass of milk, and when I unfolded the napkin I was
appalled to see that the tines of the fork were caked with the
remains of some one else's
meal. If this was
Monterrey's finest restaurant, I wondered how long I could expect to
survive this questionable escapade into the
unknown. Doing my best to think positive thoughts as I
downed a cup of hot chocolate and ate a plate of huevos
rancheros, I
quickly came to the conclusion that I'd either starve to death before
reaching Mexico City or maybe something
worse. So, by the time I
started my long walk back to the bus station, my mind was pretty well
made up: instead of
continuing what promised to be a journey of ever-mounting problems, I
decided that I'd better turn around while I was still able to do
so. And, as I retraced my steps through the dusty
back-streets, I slowly but surely emptied my pockets of all the
Mexican money I had by distributing it to the shivering women and
babies huddled in the weak morning sunshine, hoping that somehow
their Christmas might be a tiny bit better than it would have been
had I not reached Monterrey. Then I hopped the first bus back to Austin that I
could.
The trauma of that introduction to Mexico had earth-shaking
consequences as far as I was
concerned. Much to the
displeasure of my graduate advisors, I decided to give up my program
of Latin American studies and turn my attention to Europe
instead. Awarded a Fulbright grant to
Norway in May of 1950, during the next two years I completed my work
on a doctoral dissertation at the University of Oslo, married a
lovely Norwegian girl, and for the next twenty-odd years taught and
did research in the Scandinavian
area. Not until
1973, when I was teaching a geography field course at Middlebury
College (Vermont), did I venture into Mexico again, this time with
much careful logistical planning in
advance. As luck
would have it, it was during this extensive field trip that I
stumbled onto what seemed to be the solution to a problem that had
puzzled more than a generation of archaeologists -- the origin of the
strange 260-day Mayan calendar -- and for the next twenty years my
research focused on searching for the roots of Mesoamerican
civilization. In the
process, my love affair with Mexico only deepened with each passing
year, at least as long as I immersed myself in the "unreality" of its
distant past. But, each
time I am awakened to the growing trauma of modern Mexico I do so
with terrible ambivalence -- with affection and admiration for the
Mexican people, their indomitable spirit, their warmth, and their
resilience, but with deep sadness and increased misgivings as I view
the un-addressed problems of racism, corruption, and injustice that
continue to surround them. Unfortunately, the present volume is bound
to reflect some of that disquiet and concern.
To truly understand the contemporary Mexican scene, it is
first necessary to comprehend the striking physical diversity of this
fascinating land, for it has been upon this multifaceted stage that
many stirring chapters of the human drama have played themselves
out. Because Mexico was
the very cradle of civilization on the North American continent, it
is only fitting that we begin our account of mankind's occupance of
this stage by taking an in-depth look at the country's rich
prehistory. The traumatic arrival of the
Europeans in the early decades of the 16th century and their impact
on the indigenous peoples and their cultures initiated a collision of
two worlds whose reverberations continue to this day, as witnessed,
among other places, by the on-going struggle for justice and human
rights in the mountains and jungles of
Chiapas. The legacies of
a medieval economic, social, and political system based on racism and
religious fanaticism have survived both a war of independence and a
revolution and still haunt a nation striving to achieve a more
democratic way of life. Confronted both by the
challenges of a demanding environment and a turbulent history, Mexico
enters the new millennium with a very mixed prognosis; how well or
how poorly it can solve the dilemmas it faces promise to impact not
only the country itself but ours in the bargain.