Old 10-14-2009, 10:08 PM
ilbegone ilbegone is offline
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Rodriguez 2)
Quote:
Mexicans will remember this century as the century of loss. The land will not sustain Mexicans. For generations, from Mexico City, came promises of land reform. This land will be yours.
What more seductive promise could there be to a nation haunted by the memory of dispossession?
The city broke most of its promises...
The Goddess of Liberty... may well ask Mexicans why they are so resistant to change, to the interesting freedoms she offers. Mexicans are notorious in the United States for their skepticism regarding public life. Mexicans don't vote. Mexicans drop out of school.
Mexicans live in superstitious fear of the American diaspora. Mexican Americans are in awe of education, of getting too much schooling, of changing too much, of moving too far from home.
Well, never to be outdone, Mother Mexico has got herself up in goddess cloth. She carries a torch, too, and it is the torch of memory. She is searching for her children.
A false mother, Mexico cares less for her children than she does for her pride. The exodus of so many Mexicans for the U.S. Is not evidence of Mexico's failure; it is evidence, rather, of the emigrant's failure. After all, those who left were of the peasant, the lower classes – those who could not make it in Mexico.
The government of hurt pride is not above political drag. The government of Mexico impersonates the intimate genius of matriarchy in order to justify a political strangle hold.
You betray Uncle Sam by favoring private over public life, by seeking to exempt yourself: by cheating on your income taxes, by avoiding jury duty, by trying to keep your boy on the farm.
These are legal offenses.
Betrayal of Mother Mexico, on the other hand, is a sin against the natural law, a failure of memory...
Mexico always can find a myth to account for us: Mexicans who go north are like the Chichimeca, - a barbarous tribe antithetical to Mexico. But in the United States, Mexican Americans did not exist in the national imagination until the 1960's – years when the black civil rights movement prompted Americans to acknowledge “invisible minorities” in their midst. Then it was deemed statistically that Mexican Americans constituted a disadvantaged society, living in worse conditions than most other Americans, having less education, facing bleaker sidewalks or Safeways.
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