Mexico and the U.S.: Ideology and Reality

Octavio Paz, 68, is one of Mexico's most distinguished avant-garde writers, critics and poets. He is best known for The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), a classic work that has explained Mexico to foreigners, and to many Mexicans, for more than a generation. In the following piece for TIME, Paz assesses Mexico's complex, often tortured relationship with its overpowering northern neighbor.

The border between Mexico and the U.S. is political and historical, not geographical. There are no natural barriers between the two nations. The Rio Grande does not separate, it unites. But the sameness of the landscape only accentuates the social and historical differences. They are most visible ethnically and, above all, economically. The wealth of the U.S. and the poverty of Mexico are usually expressed in social and political terms: development and underdevelopment, the policies of American expansionism and Mexican defensiveness. This opposition is real enough, but the true difference is more profound. It has been apparent since the birth of the two societies, when the U.S. was New England and Mexico was called New Spain.

To cross the border between the two countries is to change civilizations. Americans are the children of the Reformation, and their origins are those of the modern world; we Mexicans are the children of the Spanish empire, the champion of the Counterreformation, a movement that opposed the new modernity and failed. Our attitudes toward time clearly express our differences. Americans overvalue the future and venerate change; Mexicans cling to the image of our pyramids and cathedrals, to values we suppose are immutable and to symbols that, like the Virgin of Guadalupe, embody permanence. However, as a counterbalance to their immoderate cult of the future, Americans continually search for their roots and origins; we Mexicans search for ways to modernize our country and open it to the future. The history of Mexico since the end of the 18th century has been the struggle for modernization. It is a struggle that has been frequently tragic and often fruitless. To ignore this is to ignore what is Mexico today, with its economic vicissitudes and the continuous zigzag of its political system.

From the beginning, Mexicans have been aware of the material and psychological differences that separate them from Americans. And from the beginning, the interpretation of these differences has ranged from blind admiration to an equally blind repulsion. During the 19th century, Mexican liberals saw American democracy, not without reason, as the archetype of modernity. This led them to adopt the American political system. Their attempt failed, in part, because Mexico for three centuries had been a Roman Catholic monarchy; neither its people nor its leaders had experienced the great spiritual, political and economic revolution with which modernity began. We wanted to leap from a traditional society to a modern one, but we lacked the bourgeois and middle classes, and the intellectual and technical elements that had made change possible in Europe and the U.S.

Aversion to the U.S. was, during the last century, a sentiment shared by conservatives and those nostalgic for the old Spanish order. Today this sentiment has changed its stripes and colors: it is the revolutionaries who have declared their inflexible antipathy toward the U.S. This, understandably, was a natural reaction against the American policy of expansion and domination of Mexico. It is a policy that, since the middle of the last century, has oscillated between the big stick and benign neglect.

Disgracefully, many Mexican and Latin American anti-imperialists, enchanted by the ideology of a totalitarian "socialism," have forgotten their democratic origins. Thus what unites yesterday's conservatives with today's radicals is not only a just anti-imperialism, but also the authoritarian and antidemocratic temple. In the Mexican middle class, the breeding ground of our leaders, it is common to rind an amalgam of the conservative sentiments of the criollos [Mexicans of pure Spanish blood] of the 19th century with the diffuse anti-imperialist ideology of the 20th. These traditional beliefs, heirs of the criollo aristocracy, are the unconscious psychological foundation and the hidden source of the modern authoritarian ideologies professed by many Mexican intellectuals and politicians.

It is no exaggeration to say that ignorance and arrogance define the American attitude toward Mexico. The exceptions have been a few lucid and generous men and a handful of poets, historians, teachers, scientists, humanists. None have appreciably influenced popular opinion, let alone Washington. This is regrettable: the perpetuation of this attitude is and will continue to be fatal for the U.S. and for the whole continent. It is hardly necessary to recall the case of Fidel Castro, whom Washington pushed toward Moscow (or to whom, at least, the U.S. gave the pretext for falling into Soviet arms). Without firing a shot, the Soviet Union obtained what Napoleon III in the 19th century and Wilhelm II in the 20th could not: a political and military base in the Americas.

The Soviet presence in Cuba signifies the end of the Monroe Doctrine: our continent has become, as in the 16th and 17th centuries, one of the theaters where the great powers struggle for supremacy. Facing this new situation, American leaders have attempted to design a new Latin American policy; they have succeeded only in repeating the old mistakes. But this criticism must also be applied, although in the other direction, to the Latin American anti-imperialists. The example of Castro's Cuba, now a "socialism of the barracks"--as Engels called Bismarck's Germany--dependent on Moscow as Batista never was on Washington, should open our eyes.

One of the brightest moments in Mexican-American relations was during the Administrations of Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lazaro Cardenas. In Mexico there were great social changes, but the U.S. Government, without concealing its occasional displeasure, respected those decisions. Contributing to this harmony was an identical view of international affairs: for both Presidents, the defense of democracy against Hitler and Mussolini was primary. The circumstances today are different, but the principles on which that good relation was founded still apply: respect for the independence of Mexico, tolerance toward the necessary and almost always healthy diversity of opinions, fidelity on both sides to the interests of democracy.

The new President of Mexico was elected by an ample majority in a clean election. He is young, and he is surrounded by young people. Almost all of them, including the President, completed their studies in the U.S.; they have had direct experience with American life. All of this favors dialogue. Washington, however, should seek or hope not for docility, but rather for understanding and independence.

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