La Malinche

 Cual fue la verdad?           

      I thought the topic for this week was La Malinche. Too bad I missed out on Cruz De Olvido. I made this arrangement of La Malinche because she is a mysterious woman. I wrote questions on the different colored peaks through her voice based off of the different perspectives historians have given. The story behind her isn’t well known and there are many theories and perspectives on the role she played during La Conquista de Mexico. She is mostly known as the traitor, but other feminist theorists say she was betrayed first when her people handed her to Cortez to basically be prostituted. Many see her as a symbolic mother, others document her incredible intelligence in the languages she spoke and knowledge of the land, others classify her as a disgraceful mistress. I’ve read many histories on La Malinche, and the image that makes the most sense is Orozco’s painting of Cortez with La Malinche. What all the stories do have in common is that she was sexually oppressed by Cortez and that she gave him information that helped in his conquest. It’s a mystery story, which I think Orozco captured quite well in his paining. Even Octavio Paz dice que “El contenido concreto de esas representaciones depende de cada espectador” (27).

This is why I disagree with Octavio Paz:

Here is my disagreement with Octavio Paz. I’m not just blankedly hating on him because of his machismo but because I do not think that he represents the essence of Mexican identity and culture universally.  First of all, as you can see in the pictures above, he was güero with blue eyes. He came from a privileged background. He grew up having access to a home library because his paternal grandfather Ireneo Paz was a liberal intellectual, novelist, publisher and former supporter of President Porfirio Díaz. He studied at Colegio Williams. And everyone knows that in Mexico, especially in the 1930s, you could only go to college if you had money to pay for it. Paz received a Guggenheim fellowship and began studying at the University of California at Berkeley in the United States, where I am positive the existentialist American ideology took full force in influencing his writings if not already in Colegio Williams since Mexican education has been almost completely westernized. I don't think that someone with this background can write on the universal identity of Mexicans since the morenos  he writes about come from humble origins, have to get their hands dirty in labor, have very spiritually strengthened lives through Liberation Theology and la Virgin morenita, and suffer things he didn't. In 1945, he was sent to Paris, where he wrote El Laberinto de la Soledad which he considers "an analysis of modern Mexico and the Mexican personality." He wrote what critics call  “la consensia intellectual de Mexico” in France which is also evident through the French theorists he references in the book.  I honestly think that an accurate analysis of the Mexican identity would have to be written in Mexico with an anthropological approach and with Mexican theorists and not French who for the longest time, just like the U.S. and still do, have seen Mexicans as a degenerate race.

 His perspective on women is exactly in line with its origins. As Alfredo Mirande documents in Que Gacho Es Ser Macho, the origins of machismo are found in the Spain's traditions of patriarchy, that placed great importance on one's ties with nobility and saw the woman as inferior, undignified, and as property as Octavio Paz's psyche so well expresses in Chapter II in Mascaras. This is contrary to the Mesoamerican cultures before colonization, not necessarily the Aztec though, but the Mayans and other tribes, yes. The indigenous woman was exalted due to her status as the bringer of life, the body by which the seed of the people was born. Paz's mentality is the same mentality through which the Spanish conquistadores gave themselves the entitlement to rape the indigenous women, acts that horrified their husbands, brothers, and sons. This historical trauma of the conquest is still present in modern day machismo, con la maltrato de las mujeres y el alcolismo as well as the patriarchy and elevation of nobility that is still present in Mexico and practically all countries. However, there are men who do not follow those norms. Octavio Paz's machismo is not a universal identity or perspective for all Mexican men as is evident through Cesar Chavez, star soccer player Alberto Garcia,  and men like my grandfather.  Octavio Paz says "la mujer es inferior, y nunca es ella misma." La mujer es la mujer, y es digna, luchadora, y casi siempre la fuerza y amor de la familia y de su jente. No es inferior.

I do not discredit Paz completely, because alot of what he writes about is true, especially in the first chapter where he discusses how some of the early Mexican Americans in the U.S. are ashamed of their origins and don't even speak Spanish. His analysis of the teenage pachucos and their disfrases is on point as he says it was a resistance against assimilating into Anglo America, but at the same time is a disconnection to their roots in Latin America. A lot of Mexicanos do have an identity crisis given the mestisaje of or people and the horrifying wounds left from colonization. But I also do not agree with his claim que los pachucos abandonaron su patria. The band of young pachucos were the sons and younger siblings of Bracero farm workers who were technically contracted to the U.S. to fill the labor supply that was missing because of the draft. Farm workers suffered constant discrimination and exploitation on the fields and were limited to living in barrios with unjust wages. As a result of full-time strained parents who couldn't spend a lot of time with their children, the pachucos were considered the first Latino gangsters who were technically formed as a resistance identity to discrimination, but at the same time disconnected from their patria. This same strain framework that sparked by hostility towards Latinos is still visible today in modern youth gangs in impoverished neighborhoods.

Some of his descriptions are accurate such as his statement saying that la sonrisa mexicana es un mascara. Ya, that is true when we’re talking about hiding pain and suffering. Throughout history in Mexico, Latin America, and in the U.S., Mexican people and other Latinos (Gualtamaltecos, Salvadoreños, etc.) suffer inequality, death, and hardship at extreme levels that in order to survive, you really can only try to be positive and pretend like the hardship isn't so bad; hence where el dicho comes from "a mal tiempo buena cara."

I could write so much more on my disagreements with Paz's descriptions on Mexican identity, but then this would become a book.  Even his title is off. Mexican identity is not solitary or individualist; it's communitarian; it has been since the times of Mesoamerica, in the time of my parents and grandparents in the pueblos, and continues to be so for many Latinos here in the U.S. who haven't quite assimilated. One thing is for sure, that no, silence will not fall over Mexico, because we are too much of an exuberant, loud, group of people, who even in the face of adversity, our laughter, joys, spirits and even nuestros llantos do not get suppressed.