One of the best things about living abroad for half of Donald Trump’s first year in office has been getting away from the endless conversations that all lead back to the same subject—how terrible Trump is, what new damage he and the Republicans are doing to the country, whether anyone can control the rogue President, and how he ever won in the first place.
This same conversation, which never seems to lead anywhere, also comes up in Mexico when we get together with other Americans. But Mexicans are not obsessed with Donald Trump. They have other things to talk about. For one thing, the Mexican presidential election, likely to be the dirtiest in history, is coming up in July 2018.
President Enrique Peña Nieto has been tied to vote-buying, personal corruption, and plagiarism. His administration is accused of covering up the disappearance and alleged murder of forty-three student teachers who were protesting the government’s education reforms. The Mexican president has faced steadily declining public approval since he took office in 2012. He is the target of mockery on social media. His approval rating is lower than Trump’s.
But corruption, rigged elections, and politicians who abuse their offices to enrich themselves are old news in Mexico. People are more jaded about these subjects than are voters in the United States. And in that way, as exhausting and dispiriting as the first year of Trump has been, one thing it makes clear is that we Americans have not lost our capacity for outrage at the debasement of our democracy. We are still relatively idealistic.
Recently, flagrant self-dealing, including the Trump family’s financial entanglements and the passage of the Republican tax bill, which specifically enriches its authors, is bringing the United States closer to Mexican levels of cynicism.
Mexicans’ shrugging attitude toward government corruption could be our future. Maybe we will become so inured to the bad acts of our politicians that we just give up. Smart, caring people who are otherwise engaged with the world and their own communities will simply tune out national politics, as do many people we know here in Mexico. But we are not there yet.
Writing about the fundamental differences between the United States and Mexico, the great Mexican writer Octavio Paz observed in his 1950 book, The Labyrinth of Solitude, that, unlike the United States, Mexico’s constitutional democracy was a lie from the very beginning.
“We move about in this lie with complete naturalness,” Paz writes. “For over 100 years we have suffered from regimes that have been at the service of feudal oligarchies, but have utilized the language of freedom.”
Paz has many interesting observations about the way history has shaped the people of Mexico. Some of his insights are as revealing to Americans as they have been to Mexican readers of his classic work.
The Americas, Paz writes, were an invention of the European “discoverers”—“a utopia and a place to project themselves free of their own history and trappings.”
But in Mexico, that project of European reinvention is tempered by a robust indigenous influence. Plus, the majority of Mexicans are of mixed race—products of both the indigenous victims of conquest and the Spanish conquerors. In the United States, the genocide of Native Americans is widely repressed. (I went to school from kindergarten through high school on the very land where the Black Hawk War took place, and never heard a word about it in a single class.)
One fundamental difference between the United States and Mexico, Paz points out, is that New England Puritans shunned the Native Americans from the beginning. Whites pushed them onto reservations and locked them out of the whole cosmology of the white, Protestant United States. The Catholic Church, in contrast, forcibly converted and integrated the native population, subjugating them, but also bringing them into the family.
“I hate the Spanish,” says a computer programmer friend of ours. A weekend astronomer, he gets angry thinking about the destruction of indigenous scientific knowledge by the conquistadors and the Church. Like a lot of Mexicans, he identifies with Mexico’s indigenous roots—even though he speaks no indigenous language and has Spanish ancestry, too.
Paz makes a lot of the internal struggle of mestizo society as the defining force in Mexican culture. He and other writers diagnose a massive Mexican inferiority complex.
On the flip side, Paz is impressed with American optimism and energy. But he also sees us as stiff, phony, in denial about death, and in thrall to the myth of the self-made individual. Having lived for a time in Los Angeles, he mulls Americans’ terrible loneliness. Freed from history, culture, and family ties, we are obsessed with work and desperately disconnected. He sees something suicidal in our atomized existence.
To read Paz is to see how, from an outside perspective, our individualistic, consumer culture is killing us. And the most poisonous aspects of our society have reached lethal levels with the election of Donald Trump, the prototypical Ugly American.
The boorishness, proud ignorance, and destructive egotism that gall us so much in our current President—maybe this is the suicidal streak Paz perceived when he visited the United States.
Living in Mexico, you can’t help but notice a healthier alternative: a lively street life, a neighborliness and friendliness that make everything more pleasant and less brutally competitive.
Living in Mexico, you can’t help but notice a healthier alternative.
It’s possible to imagine a better future for both countries, in which we recover a sense of our shared history, understand ourselves better, and acknowledge our interdependence and our common fate.
This is the truth that Trump’s nationalism and xenophobia deny. No one knows it better than Mexicans, who are pragmatic about the importance of the United States to their own economy. After all, almost everyone has lived in the United States or has a family member there.
It’s a bit of a shock to realize how much more Mexicans know about us than we do about them. Thanks to U.S. cultural imperialism and the constant flow of people back and forth across the border, many Mexicans are us.
A friend here in Oaxaca who runs an ecotour company crossed the border illegally with his family when he was eleven years old. He speaks English with a Southern California accent. He moved back to Mexico in his twenties and leads tours to Zapotec villages, including the one where his grandfather still plows his fields driving a team of oxen and his grandmother is a traditional healer. He knows his American clients very well—he tended bar and waited tables in Los Angeles and Anaheim for years. But we Americans are flat-footed when it comes to the Zapotec culture.
An artist I met here in Oaxaca was born in Chiapas and raised in Mississippi, after her mother moved to Hattiesburg. She is Mexican, but speaks English like a Southerner. She sees similarities between Hattiesburg and the coastal town in Chiapas she came from—racism, hierarchy, and old-style plantation society—and was not surprised by the 2016 election results. “I understand the Trump voters,” she says.
Like many Oaxacans, my artist friend is inconvenienced by the regular street demonstrations by the teachers’ union, with blockades that tie up traffic for hours. But, she says, the teachers have to keep it up. Without that spirit of rebellion, they’d be run over by a wealthy and corrupt elite.
“That’s the spirit of rebelliousness Americans have lost,” she says. “Everyone complains about Trump. But no one is doing anything. They should be blocking highways!”
The whole first year of Trump, we Americans have been in a stunned state. We have been reliving the trauma of the election over and over. Now it’s time to move on.
There is real potential for something better to come next. To make that happen, it helps to appreciate what we have and understand what we lack.
What we have is the memory of living in a more democratic, public-spirited time, and the innocence to believe we can recover a government that serves the interests of the public. We are not Mexico.
What we lack is the sense of community that could help us overcome the worst parts of our culture—the worship of money and rich people, vicious egotism, isolation, and sheer bad taste, all personified by Donald Trump.
Reconnecting with other people and letting go of the mad pursuit of stuff, at all costs, is easier when you surround yourself with other people who are doing the same. I’ve been traveling through Chiapas lately, surrounded by the inspiring radicalism of the Zapatista-influenced autonomous communities.
The Zapatistas are running a purely symbolic candidate for president this year—the first campaign by an indigenous woman in Mexico’s history. But people everywhere in Chiapas are involved in community organizing and in an overt, radical rejection of the government’s collusion with multinational corporations. There is a spirit of rebellion and self-help, as in the blockades we ran across where people working to repair local roads demanded a contribution. “The government does nothing for us,” a sign over one of these blockades explained.
There are other ways to live than the frantic, anxious treadmill of earning and spending that has become normal in the United States. The current political crisis might help us see those other possibilities. First, we have to start thinking about something besides Donald Trump.
Ruth Conniff is filing regular columns from Mexico this year as editor-at-large for The Progressive.