The Mexican Curse? - Ernesto Villanueva

Proceso: Ernesto Villanueva*

Mexico City - I have been asked by several foreign academic colleagues, Europeans and North Americans, why we are indirect in Mexico. We turn away from problems, we are submissive and demand our rights only when they authorize them. Today I'm sharing what I believe happens to us and is the crux of our problems as a country and as aspiring citizens. To this I want to add some myths about maintaining the status quo in university and probably in many other environments:

1. "Dirty laundry is washed at home"; that is, differences are settled in the dark in order to
2. "Not affect the prestige of the institution"; that is, this organizes an imaginary arena where exercising fundamental rights assumes
3. "Being controversial".

These three myths about burying corruption and impunity have acquired a certificate of naturalization in the predominant character structure and are considerably settled in academic communities. Why are we as we are? Because simulation [pretence] is part of our Mexican character structure: it impedes Mexico from advancing, developing, and generating an effective Rule of Law.

In his classic work, The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz has a section written with enviable prose that portrays us full body: "Masks". Indeed, says Paz, the Mexican "prefers the veiled expression to injury even during a dispute: for the wise, few words." The cryptic language, the smile that hides the true anger, the greeting that observes the forms, and professional "courtesy" could also be added. The culture of secrecy is in our being says Paz, and I agree with him:

"The primacy of the closed versus the open does not manifest itself only as impassivity and distrust, irony and suspicion, but as love for Form. It contains and encloses our privacy, impedes its excesses, represses its explosions, separates, isolates and preserves it. The dual Spanish and indigenous influences combine in our predilection for ceremony, formulas and order .. the dangerous slope that we demonstrate through formulas--social, moral and bureaucratic--that are other expressions of this tendency of our nature .... Form has rarely been an original creation, a balance achieved not at the expense but by the expression of our instincts and desires. Our legal and moral forms, by contrast, often mutilate our being; they prevent us from expressing ourselves, and they deny satisfaction of our vital appetites."

The pretence, says Paz,

"recreates itself every instant; it is one of our usual patterns of behavior ... The simulator pretends to be what he is not. His activity demands constant improvisation, a go forward always, through quicksand. Every minute, he has to redo, recreate, modify the person feigned, until there comes a time when reality and appearance, lies and truth, are confused ... Simulation is an activity similar to that of actors, and it can be expressed in many ways, as characters do. 

"But the actor, if he is indeed an actor, comes to his character and plays him fully, but then, after the performance, sheds it like the snake's skin. The simulator never lets go and never forgets himself, since he would merge with his image. At the same time, the fiction becomes an inseparable, spurious part of his being; he is condemned to represent it all his life, because he has established a complicity between his character and himself that nothing can break, except death or sacrifice. The lie is installed in his being and becomes the ultimate depth of his personality."

He who does not follow the ways, who does not wait his turn until it corresponds to this theater of pretence, who denounces what happens confronts the invisibility and marginalization that Paz portrays with much better words than mine:

"Not only do we conceal ourselves from ourselves, we make ourselves transparent, ghostly; we also conceal the existence of our neighbors .... We conceal them in a manner more radical and profound: we ningún [nothing] them. The ninguneo is an operation that consists in making Someone into No One. Suddenly, the nothing is individualized, it is made of body and eyes, it is No One. It would be a mistake to think that the rest will be prevented from existing. They simply hide their existence, they act as if they did not exist. They nullify it, they void it, they nothing it. It is useless that No One might speak, publish books .. No One is the absence of our glances, the pause in our conversation, the reticence of our silence. It is the name that we always forget for a strange fatality, the eternal absentee, the uninvited guest, the emptiness that we don't fill. It's an omission. And yet, No One is always present. It's our secret, our crime and our remorse."

In the sixty-three years since Paz wrote The Labyrinth of Solitude, we have changed, we move with more pauses than haste toward a different society, free, open, with dreams of exercising rights to which it shouldn't be necessary to ask permission and, sometimes, clarity should be above form. It will be possible to navigate towards that port with all possible resolve so that appearance does not win the game over transparency, over facts, over change, where fulfillment of the law can be a reality sooner than later. Spanish original

*Ernesto Villanueva is Coordinator of the Area of the Right to Information of the Institute of Legal Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Email: evillanueva99@yahoo.com Twitter: @evillanuevamx Blog: www.ernestovillanueva.blogspot.com

For related MV content, see Mexico: Fractured and Fragmented.