Black Legend

A string of esteemed British writers came to Mexico in the last century and, with the exception of Sybille Bedford, could barely conceal their sniffiness to the verge of contempt for the place: Greene, Lawrence, Huxley, Waugh, and Somerset Maugham, the last of these quipping, when asked what he thought of the country by Frieda Lawrence, “Do you want me to admire men in big hats?”

Leonora Carrington, the English writer and surrealist painter who settled in CDMX's Colonia Roma, observed that she "felt at home in Mexico, but as one does in a familiar swimming pool that has sharks in it."

I was however surprised by how willing American travel writer Paul Theroux was to add himself to this rather long list when I read the account of his relatively recent Mexican excursion, On The Plain of Snakes...

"The Mexican border is the edge of the known world, only shadows and danger beyond it, and lurking figures—hungry, criminal, predatory, fanged, fanatical enemies—a malevolent and ungovernable rabble eager to pounce on the unwary traveler. And the Policía Federal officers are diabolical, heavily armed, stubborn and sullen one minute, screaming out of their furious congested faces the next, then extorting you, as they did me."

 

To a certain extent he is knowingly exploiting the obvious caricature there in order to reach a specific no-passporty, north of the border audience, but in other ways, one becomes aware, he is also THAT gringo...

"It is pleasant in Mexico to sit by the beach, inert and sunlit, sipping a mojito, but who wants to hear about that? What you crave in reading a travel narrative is the unexpected, a taste of fear, the sudden emergence by the roadside of a wicked policeman, threatening harm."

Maybe it makes an important difference if you enter from the south. Theroux notes how just 50 yards across the northern frontier things have turned 'improvisational'.

There's a certain abruptness to the other borders too, because Mexico is after all, Mexico, but of a rather different order. The south of course has more indigenous Mexicans and it is these people who have seemed to most unsettle the anglophone authors. Huxley: “Under close-drawn shawls one catches the reptilian glitter of Indian eyes.”

It's as if this land is also the edge of known humanity. Paul Bowles served up similarly garish depictions of the wily natives, but largely in a Muslim country, and they have name for this 'delito', Orientalism, and so today he has been at least semi-cancelled, but Mexico remains fair game for these apprehensions of lurking, wicked otherness, in the mainstream foreign press as well as literature. 

Theroux again: "From the mutters and guarded warnings, I became aware—as anyone would in the sinister rustling of these whispers—that there is a substratum of criminality even in Mexico’s prosperous places, especially in the prosperous places, and it takes unexpected forms."

Now, I have been shaken down in the past by Mexican cops, and in my own experience of travel there I have concluded that it is near impossible to visit the country without experiencing at least one really negative interaction with one of the locals, and so it was this time too.

But I'd say the same thing about France, frankly, and so I am wary of this tendency to stoke the 'Black Legend'.