Mexico & Middletown

MEXICO: A STUDY OF TWO AMERICAS--Stuart Chase--Macmillan ($3).

Latest fad of the intelligentsia is Mexico. One by one they go, see and are conquered; come back to the U. S. to spread their tidings. Stuart Chase, onetime accountant turned journalist of economics, went to Mexico with his wife because a friend told him the Indians had no time-sense and that they ought to see the murals of Diego Rivera. Chase's report is as lyrical as most, more arrestingly factual than many.

The Chases liked Mexico, spent altogether about five months there. They kept away from the border states and Mexico City, concentrated on agricultural central and southern Mexico. They traveled by train, plane, motor car, motor boat, horse, burro, Shanks' mare. A lover of comparative statistics, Chase found plenty of Mexican facts & figures to contrast with U. S. opposite numbers. He found one town in particular (Tepoztlan) which he says is typical; compares it with U. S. "Middletown" (Muncie, Ind.). "By and large, in dramatic contrast with Middletown [Tepoztlan] is not a cog in the wheel, but an economically independent community. . . . If you ask a Tepoztecan, shortly after high noon, what time a given fiesta dance will start, he is likely to reply: 'It will take place right now at about three or five o'clock.' . . . On roughly one day in three, the year around, Tepoztecans are celebrating a major or minor festival. . . . A hundred days of playtime, more or less. . . ."

"Our clothes make us abnormally uncomfortable; our food abnormally constipated; our apartments and our cities abnormally compressed and deafened; our recreations abnormally weary. . . . We are cluttered up with things essentially meaningless, and, being human, we flounder, puzzled and perplexed, trying to find the values which will give meaning back to life. Tepoztlan has never lost these values. It works, plays, worships, attires itself, composes its dwellings in the normal rhythm of homo sapiens upon this planet, without abnormal effort, without waste. It knows what life is for because every move it makes contributes to a legitimate function of living." Wistful, Author Chase sighs: "If we could but take the manifest assets of Tepoztlan and the manifest assets of Middletown, and combine them. . . ."

Like many a serious traveler he thinks he sees the country more steadily and whole than his resident compatriots do. He says: "I am not proud of what I have seen, or the reports I have had, of the American colony in Mexico." By the same token he thinks Dwight Whitney Morrow did a good job as ambassador. "I was able to find hardly a Mexican who distrusted him, or an American business man who had a good word for him--thus establishing beyond cavil his point of view." In conclusion he gives Mexicans some "advice from a parvenu cousin''; urges them not to turn their cities into "a second-rate Memphis, Tennessee." Says he to Mexico: "Be yourself, hombre."

The Author. Stuart Chase, 43, a moody-looking, brown-skinned, snub-nosed man with strong opinions and a flair for eye-catching phraseology, comes from New England but talks more like a Southerner. A Harvardman, he went from college to his father's Boston accounting office. But he did not like accounting; after the War he went to Manhattan and began to write magazine articles, mostly about economic waste. Even before the Depression he made a hit with The Tragedy of Waste. He is the only U. S. author to make three book clubs: Your Money's Worth (with F. J. Schlink) was a Book-of-the Month; Prosperity, Fact or Myth? was a Paper Book; the Literary Guild has chosen Mexico for August. He has been twice married (divorced from Margaret Hatfield in 1929), lives in Redding, Conn. and goes to Manhattan once a week to work at the Labor Bureau (without pay), and at the one accounting job he has kept (which pays well).

Mexican Muralist Diego Rivera has illustrated Mexico with 15 black & white drawings, a colored frontispiece.

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