Ramin Jahanbegloo is an Iranian-Canadian philosopher and intellectual. Having studied at the Sorbonne University, he has held various posts at Harvard University, in New Delhi, in Tehran, and at the University of Toronto (where he now teaches Political Science). In 2006, he was detained by the Iranian authorities in Evin prison for 125 days, and was awarded the 2009 Peace Prize by the Association for the United Nations in Spain.
8
Goodbye to All That
Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo
The idea of a Mexican culture
I find it extremely difficult to say anything meaningful about Mexican culture – either in the traditional sense of a national culture as spiritual way of life (attitude, identity, national character), or in the more complex sociological sense of culture as a structure of meanings tied to a system of social relations. Nowadays, if one listens carefully, almost everything that is said about Mexico and the Mexicans sounds shallow, fake, sham.
It is not Mexico that is at stake, but the idea of Mexico: not the nation itself, whether or not it exists and how, but the nation as symbol, meaningful in everyday life. And not only because of the dazzling regional diversity that has long nurtured the idea of ‘Many Mexicos’; not only because of the outrageous disparities that make Mexico one of the most unequal societies on earth – gathering several of the richest men on the planet and nearly 40 million people living under the poverty line. There is almost nothing new there – maybe some sharpened regional differences, a steeper concentration of income in the past 20 years. The real change lies elsewhere. It is the idea of the nation in itself, the image of the country as such and all its emotional connotations that seem to have lost weight and strength. The idea of Mexico, for the Mexicans, has lost its grip.
One easy way to grasp this loss of meaning is to look at the projects for the bicentennial anniversary of national independence that took place in September 2010. There were memorial coins and stamps, to be sure, dozens of useless history books, parades and plenty of fireworks on 16 September. But there is no one single idea, shared and meaningful to everyone to signify these 200 years of independent life.
We are just coming out of a century of nationalism – and therein lies part of the problem. Starting in the 1920s and up to the late 1980s, the public sphere was dominated by a powerful, pervasive and ubiquitous national idea: Mexico and Mexican identity as foundation, framework and project that informed almost any field of personal experience, from consumption to etiquette, from entertainment to corruption. It was tied to the ideological project of the Mexican Revolution, to the political structure of the revolutionary regime and to the economic model derived from it, with all its turnabouts and inconsistencies. To be sure, historically Mexican nationalism was defined through a distant and mediated opposition to Spain and a more immediate opposition to the United States. And yet, that was not the core of ‘Mexican identity’, which indeed had more to do with an idea of a future society. That is what we have lost – a sense of Mexico.
The fate of nationalism
The manifold abuses of the ruling party for over 70 years undoubtedly explain much of the current discredit of Mexican nationalism, since nationalism was the main alibi of the many ‘idiosyncrasies’ of the revolutionary regime. There is nothing new in that, nothing peculiarly Mexican. National identity and the nationalist project were the basics of Mexico’s Third Way in politics, economy or human rights regime. There was no possibility of tuning our institutional arrangements according to any international standard. To suggest something like that would have amounted almost to high treason, since it would have meant letting the country be dragged into the sphere of American (or Soviet) imperialism.
As time went by and revolutionary enthusiasm withered, the Mexican Way gradually lost its original appeal. Little by little, the colloquial language gave a new meaning to expressing nationalist clichés. To do anything according to the Mexican Way came to mean to do it in an irregular, dirty or dubious way. An arranged election, a corrupt deal or a job poorly done was the Mexican way (‘a la Mexicana’), compared with an indeterminate ‘international way’ – supposedly clean, efficient and modern.
The decay and final dissolution of the revolutionary regime was a long, protracted process that took more than 20 years. It implied the dismantling of many public enterprises and protectionist legislation, the gradual acceptance of multiparty elections within a new, competitive electoral framework, and the loosening of political networks linked to the ruling party. In the long run it meant the end of the nationalist economy and the nationalist ‘Third Way’ in politics, and carried with it not only the crisis of nationalism but of the very idea of a Mexican nation as a meaningful source of identity in everyday life.
This implied not only the watering down of the rhetoric initiated in the early 1980s, but also the stripping down of the legal, economic and political mechanisms of the Old Regime – mechanisms that for decades had sustained the hegemony of the ruling class and the plausibility of the Mexican imagined community.
To be sure, the language of nationalism persists in the Mexican public sphere up to the present. In fact, it can be argued that it has acquired a new impetus as a consequence of the globalisation process under way. But its meaning has been substantially altered. As the language to express opposition to globalisation, it is increasingly understood as a class language. At the same time, and due to the same process, a new anti-nationalist and even anti-Mexican discourse has gained strength in the public sphere. It is a reaction against the economic and political ways of the Old Regime, against its rhetoric and institutional arrangements, but it bears quite plain and clear classist undertones: the reasons for our underdevelopment are the Mexicans, which means, of course, low-class, peasant, unionised Mexicans, not fully integrated into the global economy – and dependent upon State protection.
Mexican identity, thus, day by day appears more as the name of a cleavage within Mexican society – not anymore as a hallmark of our shared values, expectations and commitments. The idea of Mexico is increasingly a cultural battleground for a belligerent ‘Mexicanism’ that clings to the more obvious and stereotypical traits of Mexican identity, and a disdainful, lofty cosmopolitanism – equally Mexican and, equally insecure.
In between lies the new ‘indigenous’ militancy: basically an offspring of the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) rebellion and its aftermath. This is not the product of an indigenous intelligentsia, but of a handful of anthropologists and philosophers from Mexico City, cherished and propagated by international (mainly European) NGOs. In a certain sense, the assertion of indigenous identity is absolutely modern and absolutely cosmopolitan in a world defined by multiculturalism; at the same time, however, it is hard for most of the Mexican public to distinguish it from the classic Revolutionary Nationalism, which incorporated the indigenous past as a fundamental trait of Mexican character and identity, a confusion made deeper by the fact that in public appearances of the EZLN leaders there was always a much visible Mexican flag.
It must be clear by now, but maybe it is not altogether futile to stress it, that this change is not only a superficial, rhetorical phenomenon, for it has its correlates in everyday life – in material culture, in ways of production and modes of consumption. In practice, it is increasingly hard to locate and identify a national culture as such, unique and distinctive. Mexican, like any other culture, is ostensibly hybrid, more than ever transnational, global and fragmented: it can be labelled ‘Mexican’ in a traditional sense only in details, oddities and vestiges, and only with a degree of irony (and maybe a tinge of nostalgia or disgust).
Which way to the border?
There is nothing mysterious or surprising in all of this. Mexico is now facing the consequences of a ‘modernisation’ process brought by the revolutionary regime, propelled to a significant extent by a nationalist rhetoric that has been outdated by its own success, or, to be fair, by its various successes and failures. Just to name a few of these: a sweeping industrialisati
on crippled by a small national market at first and crucially dependent on the American market afterwards; a small but considerable middle class, unquiet, insecure about its own status in a still hierarchical society, and fundamentally detached from the revolutionary clichés of the Old Regime; a massive urbanisation process, still under way after 50 years, that has altered habits, kinship networks and ways of life without providing a new, stable environment in cities frequently lacking basic urban facilities.
Alongside the modernisation process, the United States was simultaneously model and antagonist – the cipher of a tacit aspiration and a very explicit threat used to bolster nationalist fears and alibis. The US had riches, science and technology; they were powerful and affluent – but also decadent, lacking family values, a sense of tradition or any real culture. And, above anything else, they were greedy and dangerously close. Thus the popular wisdom, seasoned with the official discourse, rephrased in many ways the saying attributed to Dictator Porfirio Díaz: ‘Poor Mexico! So far from God, so close to the United States!’ This saying, by the way, has probably been reversed in the past decades on the other side: ‘Poor US! So far from God, so close to Mexico!’
That symbolic opposition to the United States was to a large extent the template for the assumed Mexican character. Mexicans were supposed to be brave to the point of temerity, quixotic, selfless and solidary, as opposed to the selfish, individualistic and pragmatic Americans; Mexicans were supposed to be nostalgic, melancholic, deeply wounded by history, and always carrying the weight of centuries, as opposed to the Americans, oblivious of their past; Mexicans were supposed to be sentimental, witty, clever and secretly resentful, while the Americans were hard-headed, self-confident, practical people. Needless to say, all those attributes were at the very least overstatements filtered through the class structure of Mexican society. They were, nevertheless, widely shared – a sort of chimerical national character – for they provided a self-image, more or less flattering. (Aside, by the way: during most of the nineteenth century, Catholicism was also conceived as one of the basic traits of national identity, in opposition to the Protestantism of the United States. Nevertheless, the separation of Church and State was firmly established after the restoration of the liberal Republic in 1867 and has not been seriously challenged ever since; religion had no place whatsoever in the rhetoric of the revolutionary regime and has had only a minor and ambiguous role in popular nationalism, mainly as a devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe. To be more precise: it is not devotion that matters, not even faith or religious practice, but the recognition of the image of Guadalupe as a shared symbol – an iconic token of ‘Mexicanness’).
From the 1960s onwards, the ambivalent and uncomfortable relationship with the United States crystallised in the notion of ‘periphery’. It gained currency in the public sphere for several reasons: among them, because the idea of being a peripheral nation offered a clear and secure explanation of our dilemmas. It made clear who was to be blamed for our underdevelopment but it also offered the image of certain remoteness: underdevelopment was in a sense a measure of our distance with regard to the centre. Not anymore.
In the beginning of the new century the United States – the image, the model, the economic and political reality of the country – cut across Mexican society as never before, rendering distance and distinction more problematic than ever. Whether we like it or not, our economies are entangled together, as are our financial systems and our demographic flows, be it in production or consumption, labour markets or crime, the asymmetries are as evident as the linkages. As if we were living on an extended, indefinable borderland. And thus the physical fact of the border – the very line of the border – acquires an overwhelming importance for both countries: over-patrolled, heavily guarded, always in the spotlight, it has become one of the most violent zones of the world.
Some numbers. Between 10 and 15 per cent of the Mexican population now lives permanently in the United States. Another 15 per cent has lived for months or years in the United States at some point in their life. And maybe up to 20 per cent of the population now living in Mexican territory depend in a certain measure on remittances from their relatives on the other side of the border. A not insignificant proportion of menial jobs, agricultural work and personal services, from nursing for old people to gardening and childcare in the United States depends on Mexican cheap, illegal workers. Mexican and American authorities and bureaucracies ignore this at their peril: everyday life, on both sides of the border, has this as one basic, unavoidable – even welcome – fact.
Oddly enough, much of what remains of ancient Mexican nationalism is much more alive ‘on the other side’. Militant, belligerent Mexicanism is more frequent among emigrants living in the United States, although it is slightly different, anyhow: the National Holiday in Mexico is 16 September, the day that marks the beginning of the Independence War; whereas the National Holiday for Mexicans living in the United States is 5 May, the date of the battle of Puebla, in which the Mexican Army defeated the French in 1862. That is: to be Mexican, a Mexican nationalist, even a belligerent Mexican nationalist, means slightly different things on each side of the border.
North America is a massive economic and demographic fact that, nevertheless, is hard to conceive as a unit, because it is grounded on the asymmetries between the United States and Mexico. It is the border that creates the huge ‘illegal’, cheap labour force that in part sustains both our economies. It is the looser Mexican regulation – on environmental or health issues, on taxes and fiscal control – that allows for the American investment in Mexico. In other words: North America has been erected not in spite of the border but because of it, not owing to what we have in common but to what keeps us apart, unequal and different.
The other side
The emergence of North America has meant a de-centring of the Mexican elites. In politics, economy, science or art, the Mexican elites are now integrated as periphery to a system that has its centre in the United States. The standards are set elsewhere, be it for academic performance, social success or political acceptability. And this has generated a peculiar sense of insecurity that appears as a mimetic desire: class distinctions are, as always, cultural distinctions – what is new is that today Mexico and Mexican ways appear clearly within one pole, as signs of backwardness in a class struggle that spins around the idea of Modernity.
There is scarcely anything altogether new in this tension between ever-changing Modernity and so-called Tradition, not even in its guise as a tension between a Mexican and an American way. We might even go as far as saying that our blatant ‘Mexicanness’ has been our path to (an obviously American) Modernity and it has always exhibited a characteristic class hallmark. Nevertheless, the de-centring of the elites and the decay of the post-revolutionary regime have widened the gap between the National Public Sphere and the common life of most people. In everyday politics, for example, there is an almost unbridgeable breach between local, empirical, pragmatic, old-style political knowledge and practice, and the abstract, up-to-date, cosmopolitan and technocratic knowledge of the elites. And this, obviously enough, results in a growing discredit of national politics – including special-interest groups of environmentalists, human rights activists and the like.
The fate of ‘culture’ in the narrow sense of the term can be easily understood. During the best part of the twentieth century the State was the single most important sponsor of the arts and literature. For better or worse, State institutions cared for music, painting, sculpture, dance, theatre and literature – they promoted production, protected the artists and tried to create a massive public for it all, as part of the Revolutionary programme. And, if the truth be told, some of the results were remarkable in almost every field. Nowadays, with the withering of old ideals and standards, or the very idea of a National Culture, most of those cultural institutions (with a few outstanding exceptions) are adrift and mostly looking for approval, for standards, somewhere else. The current craze for Frida
Kahlo’s paintings is a fitting example: it is basically a response to a European and American fad. In literature, just to mention another example, the universal fame of Carlos Fuentes as true representative of Mexican spirit, élan and colourful passion, is entirely for international consumption, for his novels are of little or no consequence for the Mexican public at the beginning of the new century.
Thus goes our elites’ cultural insecurity. As a vestige, or at least a token, of their (lost) centrality, they need at least some Mexican icons – but only international recognition makes them truly Mexican. Another minor inconsequence: while aggressively pushing forwards a Modernisation process that would at last let us get rid of our underdeveloped/Mexican condition, our elites are also the most vocal in the defence of traditional arts and crafts, folklore, etc. – all supposedly at risk of losing authenticity – while the popular classes have no real problem in mixing Halloween with the Day of the Dead, an orange plastic pumpkin with a handful of cempasuchitl flowers, a Mexican flag and maybe a rap rhythm.
The main issue – I will try to restate it again – is the idea of Mexico. To state it bluntly: on the institutional level ‘Mexico’ is a battlefield of sorts, opposing a liberalising cosmopolitan elite and the strong and resilient remnants of the revolutionary culture; on the cultural level (again, in the old-fashioned narrow sense of the term) it can be seen the other way round, with the elites standing for the defence of an authentic, picturesque, colourful artistic idea of the country – of what qualifies as good taste – and the majority of the people being much more at ease with a cross-bred variety. For some, being Modern and truly Mexican is a way of not becoming just second-class Americans, whereas for the rest, the assimilation of patterns of work and consumption of the United States is a way out of their condition as second-class Mexicans.
If I am allowed to end on an even more personal note, I would say that Mexico, like any other nation, is a work in the making. I would not worry very much about the strength and authenticity of its culture or its fate as a nation. I find reasons for concern, rather, in the traits of the class struggle – with no credible labour unions or political parties – and mainly in the lack of political, ideological and cultural resources of the elites to figure out new ways to integrate this incredibly complex mosaic that has always been Mexico.