Mexico

Guess who's quoting whom in the following extract: 'How right [he] was when he wrote... "...70 per cent of these people are real savages, quite as much as they were 300 years ago. The Spanish-Mexican population just rots on top of the black savage mass".'

Well, it's Graham Greene in his 1930s Mexican travel book The Lawless Roads, and he's quoting from DH Lawrence, who wrote his awful novel The Plumed Serpent in the 1920s. Lawrence had gone to Mexico convinced - for reasons best known to himself - that 'native' Mexicans must possess some kind of essential life force. Sorely disillusioned by the people he actually met, he gave vent to this racist outburst. I'd like to think that in later life Graham Greene would have disowned his endorsement of it.

As I prepared to go to Mexico the problems of prejudice struck me pretty forcefully. Two years earlier I had been to Brazil to write a magazine about the Amazon and I returned feeling that my political prejudices had been largely confirmed - a reassuring but ultimately unsatisfactory experience. This time it would be different.

It is, however, quite impossible to do a 'travelogue' magazine like this without having some precon- ceptions. I had to convince the rest of the NI co-operative at our annual editorial meeting more than a year ago that Mexico would make a good subject, then summon up the gall to go to a huge and complicated country and write the whole magazine myself.

The origins of this style of magazine at the NI are largely functional; the only way we could afford for editors to travel to the Third World was to save on the cost of paying other people to write for us. But the practice does have positive advantages. While normally we tackle an important theme and construct an argument with articles from around the world, in these 'country' magazines we start with a particular place and see how the themes interact on the ground, in the lives of the people we meet.

If we get it right - if we set out from roughly the same starting point as you, our readers, and take care to listen hard to the people we meet - then we can act as a bridge you can cross into a world you might otherwise not have known.

Even so, the view you get depends upon whom we choose to meet. I also looked for people I thought you might have wished to meet yourselves. Out of almost 90 million Mexicans I can't have spoken at length to more than a few dozen. But even that makes for a lot of words: listening to the tapes of our conversations afterwards I found that on average it took just 10 minutes to say 2,000 words, or the equivalent of a long feature article in the magazine. So just an hour's talk would fill an entire NI.

In the end I'll doubtless have to pay for the hubris of it all. But whatever the price, it will still have been worth it to spend time with such beguiling people in an enchanted place that poor old DH Lawrence and Graham Greene, blinded by prejudice, never seem to have seen.

Through the Tortilla Curtain
There's only one place in the world where North meets South directly across a land border. David Ransom starts a journey through Mexico at the junction between the two.

Border blues
Over the bridge from El Paso in the US to Ciudad Juárez in Mexico - the barriers to trade have come down as the barriers to people go up.

The spirit of the Huichol
A flight into the remote mountain fastness of a vibrant community of indigenous people that thrives on changing traditions.

Superbowl city
Into the inferno of Mexico City - there's a game being played with rules that can't be found in any book.

PRI - RIP?
A chat with the politicians about the world's longest-lived government.

MEXICO - THE FACTS

A parable and your cup of coffee
Down south to Mexico's poorest state and the border with Guatemala - a radical bishop and fair trading for coffee are exceptions to the traditional rules.

Simply - a brief history of Mexico

Bad dreams and cold showers
Final thoughts on two different worlds.

Also worth reading on MEXICO

Letters
Letter from Lagos
Updates
Reviews: plus Samuel Bechett classic
Curiosities
Endpiece: by Teeare Scarrott
Country profile: Tokelau

FRONT COVER PHOTOGRAPH: BOY PEERING THROUGH BANNER ON A DEMONSTRATION IN MEXICO CITY, SEPTEMBER 1993, BY DAVID RANSOM
ONLINE MAG MAINTAINED BY SIMON LOFFLER