2,230 words

Being as I am a creature of little judgement and less discrimination, I have friends both woke and White Nationalist. These being hypergolic, I have to keep them separated so they don’t leave each other’s body parts on my rug. Like most Americans, both have odd and, usually, badly inaccurate notions of Mexico, the White Nationalists being wrong as a matter of doctrine and the woke because of mild lunacy. On the eccentric principle that perhaps people should know a bit about a neighboring country, I offer the following somewhat chaotic thoughts.

I should note that I have lived in Mexico for over 20 years with Violeta, my Mexican wife, a half-hour south of Guadalajara in west central Mexico. We speak Spanish in the home. I being a retired news weasel (most recently for the Washington Times) and she a weaselette, or maybe weaseless, by inclination, we follow the news both national and international, and travel often in Mexico. In short, we have a pretty good handle on the country.

The Mexico we live in bears faint resemblance to descriptions on American sites. No, I do not support open borders, which are a bad idea. Yet, since the immigrants are unlikely to go away, an idea of what they are and of what they are able might be of use.

Let me begin by asking readers a few questions, which we will answer shortly.

What is the rate of literacy in Mexico?

What is the total number of births per woman?

What proportion of the population speaks Spanish?

What proportion of the Congress are women?

How many of the two presidential candidates are women?

Let’s clear up some common misunderstandings found on racially truculent sites. I have repeatedly seen it said that Mexicans throw trash and garbage everywhere. In Mexico they do not, as anyone could tell by Googling several Mexican cities, clicking on images, and looking for the trash. I have been to more Mexican cities than a Congressman has brain cells — okay, that would be about three cities, but I have been to dozens and seen no trash.

An American woman once asked me, “Does Mexico, like, have paved roads?” Annoyed, I said that no, Mexico does not have paved roads. All Mexicans sit asleep at the bottom of a big cactus, with a sombrero and a burro. Why would they need paved roads? Actually, roads vary from broken up and essentially abandoned in the vast, empty northern deserts to splendid four-lane highways with most being at least reasonably good.

I have read on a racial site of Latinos on Staten Island leaving their children in filthy diapers while going out to seek drugs. Perhaps on Staten Island. I couldn’t check, and doubt that anyone did. Not here. Mexicans like their kids. You can see young couples walking along the boardwalk with both tads, maybe three and five, holding them by the hands. They actually like them.

Gringos in the north of the continent often seem to think that Mexican doctors cure diseases by sacrificing chickens, perhaps holding a goat in reserve for difficult cases. This is as silly an idea as I have heard, and I have lived in Washington. Of my own experience, I have had eye surgery in Guad on three occasions, my ophthalmologist teaching at the University of Guadalajara and routinely doing corneal transplants, both descemet membrane endothelial keratoplasty (DMEK) and penetrating keratoplasty (PK). I just underwent a cardiac angiogram by high-resolution computerized tomography, and there was no goat or even a chicken.

Daily life in what some call a Third World Hellhole: The other day we cranked up the CR-V to take it to the Honda agency to feed it fresh oil and have filters and suchlike parts of its anatomy reinvigorated. The agency is exactly like a Honda agency in Berlin or Chengdu: all plate glass and shiny tiles, waiting room, bathrooms, competent techs, and boring, as an automotive agency should be. No trash.

Okay, we catch an Uber to El Chai del Carmen, a favorite restaurant some distance away. Guadalajara is big, some six million. It is full of large, glittering shopping malls as glorious as any in the United States. That is, it is like any big international city. El Chai has a substantial patio under its roof, in effect on the sidewalk except there is no sidewalk but a plaza. Food good, international, in the morning orange juice that has actually had the recent acquaintance of oranges, tables full, people chattering, an occasional ambulance shrieks by.

Here we come to an aspect of Guad and Mexico that is more easily sensed than described. It is European. Americans oftten think of Mexican culture as being alien, like that of Saudi Arabia, Cambodia, or Mongolia. It is not. It is as European as America. Just as north Europeans founded Canada and the US, southern Europeans founded Mexico. It has a European language, religion, and legal system (based on the Napoleonic Code). An Italian deposited on the grounds of the multitudinous churches would think he was at home. Mexican literature, except for place names, is indistinguishable from European. Churches are Catholic and are often very old because, being built of stone and masonry, they last. The music could be called southern European with Mexican characteristics. It could never be mistaken for, say, Arabic, Chinese, or Mongolian.

Which brings us back to El Chai. Here is the part hard to explain. In restaurants, bars, in the plazas and parks, in the streets, there is a . . . how to put it? . . . a Latin liveliness that is more Italian than Spanish and certainly not American. As you go northward in Europe above France and enter Nordic realms, colors fade, food becomes boring, while efficiency rises. Seville and Oslo are just different. I suspect that much of the distaste felt by Anglo-rooted Americans for immigrants is just the Anglo-Latin disjunction of Europe replicated across the Atlantic.

Back to questions. From the CIA World Factbook:

Literacy in Mexico: 95% (the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says 96%). Now Google “Functional Illiteracy in the United States.”

Total number of births per woman: 1.76. This seems to me low, but who can doubt the CIA? In any event, there is no population explosion.

Percentage of women in Congress: 50, give or take a couple of percent.

How many of the two candidates for President are female? Both. Whatever one thinks of this, it is not machismo.

Guad is a city of fountains, and of andadores: wide, paved expanses that are often patterned, with benches, statuary, trees, and zero cars, lined with restaurants and bars, none of them those damned American chains. People can sit inside or outside for coffee, wine, what have you, and small children can run free, as there is nothing to run them over. One such fountain shoots pulsed bursts of water high into the air. Whoever is in charge of such things can redirect the water pulses so they fall outside the catchment pool and children run shrieking through the downpour. Think Rome.

Organized crime in Mexico is as bad as you have heard and, I promise, much worse. It is godawful, and it is out of control. It is not street crime. Vi and I walk in the cities without concern, likewise in countless small towns. There is no danger here of being attacked and beaten by “teenagers,” pushed in front of trains, or carjacked, as there would likewise be none in the United States if there were no feral blacks. Some one to two million gringos live in Mexico by choice — numbers vary — which they would not if they thought it a hellhole.

Recently my stepdaughter Natalia, a clinical psychologist, visited Austin to see a friend and came back appalled. There were, she said, lots of people sleeping on the sidewalks. Further, she said, the houses were all exactly the same.

Mexico is heavily and increasingly middle class, much of this being what Americans would call lower middle class. In countries that I have seen the world over, this status engenders a sharp drop in crime, fertility, and anti-social behavior in general. Parents send their children to school and, when they can, to university. The narcos come chiefly from the underclass. (Middle class means roughly having a job, house, refrigerator, flat screen TV, and kids in school.)

Many in America will be surprised to learn that there are universities in Mexico. There are in Guadalajara, among others: la Universidad de Guadalajara, la Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara, la Universidad Marista, and la Tecnológica de Monterrey (which has campuses in 31 cities). I could not find a comprehensive listing of Mexican universities in English, but this list is fairly clear, naming the parent university followed by campuses around the country. Note that there are lots.

In principle the American system — high school, four undergraduate years to learn basics and grow up, followed by grad school — is much superior to the Mexican, which is high school followed by med school, law school, or what have you. Today? I am not so sure. Standards in America have been so deeply enstupidated, and there is so much pure political crap in education, that I would prefer a Mexican schooling. A brief look at what this means:

Vi went through U. Guad as a literature major. An American undergrad major would include maybe five courses in lit — today of worthless writers, most likely. A Mexican lit major studies nothing but lit (and related things such as etymology and semiotics) for four years, leaving her in coursework terms with more than a Master’s but less than a PhD.

Perhaps off topic a bit: There is, between the Rio Bravo and Tierra del Fuego, a vast amount of writing, music, and art totally unknown to the north. Americans are notoriously anti-intellectual, poorly educated, and parochial. A pity. Among the political, there is also a tendency to deduce reality from doctrine. If I introduced a three-foot iguana as my wife, my woke friends would become inclusive and say that of course it is as intelligent as everybody else, and besides species is a social construct and doesn’t exist. My Racial Right friends would think the beast acceptable if I told them it was an American iguana of English descent, but would probably think green to be on the wrong side of the color line and favor albino iguanas.

A staple of hellhole theology is that Mexicans are of low intelligence. If this be true, it isn’t obvious here. The idea suffers from a deficiency of plausibility. Consider: Mexico is awash in banks, which have employees who sit at computers and manipulate exchange rates, intermediate banks, SWIFT codes, and the like. Somebody maintains the computers, somebody networks them in the bank, and wide-area network engineers link them to corporate, probably in Mexico City, where programmers maintain hardware and code on central computers. Others maintain big turbofans at the airlines, and the avionics, and run the instrument landing system. Others run the landline phones, the cell networks with all their towers and routers at various levels, and the medical magnetic resonance imaging machines and high-resolution computerized tomography equipment. It is not clear how this sort of thing, repeated across countless industries and technical specialties, is accomplished by a people allegedly two IQ points above American blacks, who do none of these things.

Apparently people read books, as there are at least 31 bookstores in Guad. I know because some website lists that many. The five I know are excellent, my favorite of these being of two large floors and covering everything from the pre-Socratics through biochemistry. In Spanish. Violeta is reading a vast book on Cataluñian syndicalism in Barcelona after the First World War. Somewhat acerbically, I suppose, I wonder how many Americans, including college grads, know what Cataluñian means, what syndicalism is, what ocean borders on Barcelona, or the dates of the war.

Americans are mostly against mass immigration, which is reasonable, but do not seem hostile to Mexicans, which is different. Vi and I have travelled much of the United States and, with one exception, have encountered only friendliness. Under the circumstances, that’s a lot of civility. At my fiftieth high-school reunion in rural King George County, Virginia, Vi was a great hit and ended up leading the girls in dancing.

Finally, a brief eruption into sociology. Mexico is said to be politically unstable. Given the power of the narcos and a level of corruption equal to that in America, this is plausible. On the other hand, I have been hearing this for 20 years, so perhaps the country is stably unstable.

It is, however, culturally stable. It is almost a monoculture, has a universal language, and is overwhelmingly Catholic while being devoid of friction with Protestant denominations. There is no color line but a racial blur that produces nothing resembling the racial hostilities in America. There is legal separation of church and state, but this does not mean, as in the US, an attempt to abolish Christianity. I don’t know how many really believe, but towns are happy to celebrate the days of their patron saints with splendid fiestas, belief or no.

By contrast, the United States is neither politically nor culturally stable, with no common culture, religion, or language, intense political division, powerful racial and ethnic divisions, and a collapsing economy.

That’s life in a Third World Hellhole.