Two Mexicos: North From the Labyrinth of Solitude Tony Castro - VOXXI
go to original September 23, 2012

Don Jose Angel Castro and Catarina Guevara Castro, circa 1917.

My grandfather used to tell me there were two Mexicos. There was the Mexico that he dreamed about, isolated as he was in America from his homeland. Then there was the Mexico of which he had nightmares.

“Why do you let it give you nightmares?” I would ask him.

“Because,” he would answer, “you cannot have the Mexico of perfection without the Mexico of despair.”

My grandfather was neither the first nor the last Mexican for whom Mexico would be the source of tremendous heartache, bewilderment, anger and self-flagellation. Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea maxi-ma culpa.

For my grandfather, Mexico was like the gifted child who had foolishly squandered all his talent. Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, too, I was to learn in life, abandoned all reason and logic when it came to Mexico, which historically has instilled its sons with a nationalistic neurosis matched only by the Irish.

Perhaps it is only coincidental that both Mexico and Ireland are Catholic countries ripped at the seams by unsettled violence and a suspicion of anything closely resembling royal rule and ruling royals.        

“Mexico,” my grandfather used to say, “will always break your heart.”

But then, my grandfather, like most Mexicans, was a romantic. He was a revolutionary, and he had fought with Pancho Villa.

One of his prized possessions, in fact, was a faded sepia photograph of himself with Villa. At least, he claimed it was himself standing with Villa, each with bandoleers crossing their chests.

When my grandfather died, his sons and daughters wound up in a royal row over that photograph and a Bible on which he said Villa had sworn to fight until the revolution had been won.

I remember once asking my grandfather why, if he dreamed about his homeland so much, he had never once bothered to return to Mexico or even set foot back there.

“Because,” he told me, “the revolution isn’t over.”

Which, of course, is the same thing they are still saying in Mexico today.

But I am my grandfather’s heir to the neurosis of dreams and despair over Mexico. I think of Richard Nixon’s famous line - “I am not a crook” - and I am reminded not of Watergate or of Nixon’s downfall but of what my grandfather once said to me:

“An honest man will never be elected president of Mexico.”

Years later, I had an opportunity to discuss my grandfather’s philosophy about Mexico with Octavio Paz, the poet and statesman, who offered what is generally considered to be the most poignant insight into the Mexican mind in The Labyrinth of Solitude.

“(The Mexican) passes through life like a man who has been flayed,” Paz wrote. “Everything can hurt him, including words and the very suspicion of words.

“His language is full of reticences, of metaphors and allusions, of unfinished phrases, while his silence is full of tints, folds, thunderheads, sudden rainbows, indecipherable threats…

“He builds a wall of indifference and remoteness between reality and himself, a wall that is no less impenetrable for being invisible. The Mexican is always remote, from the world and from other people. And also from himself.”

Of course, that described my grandfather and every Mexican I have ever known down to a T.

At the Harvard Faculty Club where we dined, Paz himself said that Mexico was “a country looking for a masked ball”  -  that Mexico, like Mexicans, continually wears a mask that hides its real face from the world.

Two Mexicos, in other words, like my grandfather had always said.

I shiver at the thought today because the euphoria among politicians and businessmen in Mexico - and in the United States, to  - suggests that Mexico, like Icarus, has successfully escaped the mythical labyrinth.

In the myth, however, Icarus flew out of the labyrinth on wings attached with wax that melted when he soared too close to the sun.

This, then, as it welcomes a new president while in the grips of its deadliest period since the revolution of Villa and my grandfather, is now Mexico’s most critical hour. It is a time of both dreams and nightmares, a time of watching and waiting.

It is a time of romantics, and that reminds me of my grandfather and one of the last things he said to me about Mexico.

“The revolution,” he said, “will never be over.”

Los Angeles-based writer Tony Castro is the author of the critically-acclaimed “Chicano Power: The Emergence of Mexican America” and the best-selling “Mickey Mantle: America’s Prodigal Son."

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