new internationalist
issue 251 - January 1994
Also Worth Reading on MEXICO
For
factual analysis by far the best first stop is Tom Barry's Mexico,
a Country Guide, (Resource Center, Albuquerque, 1992). You need look no
further if you want to take an interest in Mexican society a bit deeper. Almost
everything imaginable is covered in great detail, and there are strong sections
on women's and social movements. From the same publisher comes Runaway America
by Harry Browne and Beth Sims, which disentangles what's really
happening to jobs across the US/Mexico border and outlines a radical alternative
agenda for jobs. A sharp documentary account can be found in On the Line:
Life on the US-Mexican Border by Augusta Dwyer (Latin America Bureau,
London, forthcoming, Spring 1994). I may have missed it, but I reckon the great
history of Mexico in English has still to be produced: you could do worse than
refer to Distant Neighbours (Vintage 1987) by Alan Riding (published
as Inside the Volcano by IB Tauris in the UK) for some crisp comment
by a foreign correspondent who got to know Mexico well. Lamentably few Mexican
writers of fiction have been translated into English but Carlos Fuentes
is always a good read, if sometimes a little obscure and rarefied. His most
recent is Christopher Unborn (Picador 1989). From foreign writers of
fiction, do try the wonderful 'jungle' books - written before and during the
Revolution - of B Traven, whose identity remained a mystery even when
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was made into what remains one of my
favourite movies. Most of his novels and short stories now seem to be out of
print, but a trip to the library would be well rewarded. Anyone who has not
read The Children of Sanchez (Penguin 1964) by Oscar Lewis has
missed much more than a classic oral history of a poor family in Mexico City
in the 1950s. Rubén Martínez in The Other Side (Verso 1992) writes
out of a fresh culture that straddles the fault lines between California and
Central America.
