Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Rebecca West, Charles Macomb Flandrau, and Sybille Bedford are just some of the literary greats that visited and wrote travelogues on Mexico. Indeed, Graham Greene even makes a guest appearance as a character in the novel Retornamos como sombras (Returning as Shadows, 2001) by Paco Ignacio Taibo II (or PIT), as discussed in my previous blog post. In PIT’s opinion, Graham Greene ought to avoid writing on Mexico and carry on writing ‘those spy novels that he does so well’. Perhaps one could say something similar about the writings on Mexico by many of these writers.
To delve deeper, my attention here turns to what I shall call, following Walter Benjamin, the ‘foreign flâneur’ in Mexico: the literary type as a spectator emblematic of urbanism and alienation alongside the growth of the city and modern capitalism. My focus starts with Sybille Bedford who published The Sudden View: A Mexican Journey in 1953, which has been republished as A Visit to Don Otavio: A Mexican Odyssey with Eland Publishing. What spatial and geographical insights does Sybille Bedford capture in her views on the Mexification of modernity?
Visiting Mexico in the 1950s, Bedford travelled widely across the north and south of the country including Guadalajara, Guanajuato, Querétaro, Mazatlán, Mexico City, Puebla, and Oaxaca. Displaying her initial disappointment at not getting a room at Hotel Reforma in Mexico City, she then refers to the states of Coahuila, Chihuahua, Baja California, Sonora and Durango as the ‘limbo and ante-room to Mexico’, innocent of art, architecture, and amenities, as ‘kind of natural poor relations to the Western American ones across the border’. In general, Mexico is described as ‘a clean slate, a bare new world constructed of sparse ingredients—here and there a tall cactus like a candle, adobe huts homogeneous like mole-hills, and always one man walking, alone, along a ridge with a donkey’.
Clik here to view.
The lava of the Parícutin volcano, surrounding the village of San Juan Parangaricutiro, as photographed by Juan Rulfo
During her travels Bedford was mainly located on Lake Chapala, straddling the states of Jalisco and Michoacán, staying with Esther Murphy Arthur, the character ‘E’, at a fictionalised location but most likely Hacienda San Martín, near Jocotepec. Sites such as Parícutin, the volcano that erupted in 1943 engulfing the village of San Juan Parangaricutiro in Michoacán, capture her interest as does the potential for travel across the ‘swamps’ of Chiapas and the ‘forests’ of Campeche but ‘there is no road and there is no railway’.
While thus acknowledging that the meridional character of any country is a relative phenomenon, noting that geographical differences are not governed by latitude, Bedford’s view of Southern Mexico is quite brutal.
Southern Mexico is dour. It has the sluttish elements of the South—the flies, the dirt, the chafing harnesses on the bullock, and no gaiety; no vines, no garlands, only an obdurate, sempiternal sticking in the mud.
Lacking here, for sure, is the sort of subtlety that Antonio Gramsci raised in his own reflections from 1926 in his essay ‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question’ concerning Italy, in which he railed against those bourgeois views that regarded the Mezzogiorno as ‘the ball and chain’ holding back the social development of the country, resulting in the region’s dismissal as lazy, inept, criminal and barbaric.
Yet it would be mistaken to read Bedford’s commentaries as therefore having no regard for spaces of developmental unevenness confronting Mexico. Even the ‘foreign flâneur’ can raise significant insights about their own cultural belonging and social background; spatial and temporal conditions of developmental unevenness; and, yes, comments of cultural humour and sociological acuity. In relation to the latter, my personal favourite is Bedford’s comment—still relevant today—on Mexican cooking:
to suppose it over-spiced and highly seasoned would be as erroneous as deducing this character of English cooking from the indices of curried mutton, Lea and Perrin’s sauce and Mr Coleman’s mustard.
There is also the critique of D. H. Lawrence and his 1926 novel The Plumed Serpent that surfaces throughout the travelogue. Although accepting that passages of the book make more sense when read in situ, the novel is disliked by Bedford for its portentousness, its foreboding eeriness, as well as its depiction of ‘mysterious Indians’ as repositories of power, wisdom, and evil. In contrast, the travel essays in Mornings in Mexico, written in 1927 by Lawrence, are seen to convey a lighter spirit. ‘Mornings in Mexico had a lyrical quality, spontaneous, warmed, like a stroll in the sun. The Plumed Serpent was full of fear and violence’, Bedford writes. Having myself read and also never liking The Plumed Serpent, it will nevertheless be interesting to pursue this distinction.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
More substantive still are Bedford’s spatial insights on urbanism and modernity in Mexico. ‘The first impact of Mexico City’, writes Bedford, ‘is physical, immensely physical. Sun, Altitude, Movement, Smells, Noise. And it is inescapable. There is no taking refuge in one more insulating shell, no use sitting in the hotel bedroom fumbling with guide books: it is here, one is in it’. Surrounding her is the experience of Avenida Juárez in the 1950s with blaring jukeboxes, movie theatres, and soft-drink parlours. There is the Paseo de la Reforma ‘with its unbending line of tropical trees mercilessly clipped á la francaise’.
Then there is the experience of modernity itself and its Mexification evidenced by ‘the carved fronts of palaces and the seven gimcrack skyscrapers’. For Bedford, there is ‘the unconvincing air of urban modernity’ in Mexico City in which urban existence has been reached late, piecemeal, and with only a veneer of advanced capitalism. The spatial character of Mexico and its capital city is presented as a simultaneous coexistence and representation of uneven temporal differences.
The latest lap is taken in a leap: cinema theatres, motor buses, petrol stations; juke boxes, Coca-Cola machines . . . But there is still that Indian sitting on a kerb selling a string of onions and one cabbage, still that fortuitous air as though the city were not a town but a sample bag, a travesty of modern urbanism, a cautionary tale perhaps: the caricature that gives the show away.
Captured here is the condition of uneven development in Mexico as integrally spatio-temporal. This is the Mexification of modernity, at least from the viewpoint of the foreign flâneur.