POUND FOR POUND

“To awaken to history was to cease to live instinctively. It was to begin to see oneself and one’s group the way the outside world saw one; and it was to know a kind of rage. India was now full of this rage. There had been a general awakening. But everyone awakened first to his own group or community, every group thought itself unique in its awakening; and every group sought to separate its rage from the rage of other groups”.
(Naipaul, A Million Mutinies Now)

There is, Harry ponders, some of this rage in the Mexican too, which comes from this awakening of historical consciousness. Rage is one of the founding-stones of the oppressed, of the misunderstood, of the betrayed. As India has Islamic invasions and its British colonial past, so does Mexico have Spain’s cultural engulfment and the United States’ neo-colonial pillaging and raping (although since Spain is, for better or for worse, a part of what Mexico “is”, the rage is mostly directed against the U.S.). And rage is exactly the word that correctly expresses what Harry feels when someone refers to the U.S. as “America”. The symbolic appropriation and possession, in one simple word, of an entire continent: the fucking back-yard. So, you don’t have a proper name for yourselves? Just call yourselves gringos, from Gringoland, that’s what Harry’s Mexican grandpa used to say. There is a rage in the witnessing with impotence as the victor, once again, writes history to serve his purposes, turning the Hitler-like anschluss of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Colorado (“Half our territory”, the Mexicans like to remember, with a resignation only slightly tinted with rage), into fairy-tales involving the heroics of cowboys and silly guys wearing beavers on their heads. Only the best men in the US opposed the barbarity and sheer injustice of the Mexican-American wars, and to Henry David Thoreau I bow down. There is rage in the cruel and useless war on drugs that is bleeding Mexico’s heart dry. Drugs that Americans cannot do without, yet which they hysterically and puritanically prevent from being legal: and thus the war: you give us cocaine and heroine and we will pay you back with our surplus guns; definitely not a good deal, Harry thinks (leave us the drugs and keep the guns!). Someone once told Harry in the streets of Gdañsk, that Poland and Mexico shared the same sour fate of having a big mean brother living next door. Brother?, said Harry, surprised, Yes, said the Pole with a sad grin, one cannot choose family, but is forced to live with it. There is rage, rage everywhere, even in this “family” business. There is rage in Nafta, in the pathetic inequality of an agreement for the free movement of goods and money, but not of people, rage even in these mixed-feelings, this “amor-odio”, which attracts and repels with equal force, which pulls the Mexican towards the “American way of life”, and then makes him hate what he has become. We are a schizophrenic nation, and our identity is, today, more and more sculpted in opposition to this overpowering other than it is in accordance to any other communal, religious or regional feelings of belonging, or to any positive idea we might have of who we are. Thus the importance of symbols: the flag, the guadalupana, el tri. The holy trinity. This identification through opposition curiously, sadly perhaps, is what makes the identity strong.
There are, of course, a number of communal groups in Mexico, divided by region and ethnic origin, and especially by economic status (classes, no castes), but nothing like the internal divisions of a country like India, or of the United States, either. For Mexico is, in that sense, the true melting pot. Mexico opens his/her arms to embrace all, irrespectibly of race, creed or provenance. That is why even I, as much a Maltese-gringo as I am a Mexican, am really a Mexican. No one has or will ever doubt my mexicanness, except for, occasionally, people outside Mexico with a racial view of national identity and belonging, who will stare blankly in my eyes and say “you don’t look Mexican”. And there is a rage there too, ponders Harry, in the doubting of your identity there is a subtle form of an extreme violence, a small, symbolic anihilation of the Self. But Harry is used to it by now, he has formed a shell, like a tortoise, a hard and rubbery, yet light and flexible shell: to him the doubting of his communal sense of belonging is merely a sign of the other’s ignorance of what that sense of identity is, of his prejudice. I could go on and on, thinks Harry, but to what purpose? All this ranting is like kicking a bucket in frustration for something you know deep inside there is no remedy. And yet it feels good to rant, once in a while.
Memories of the old bar in Gdañsk came to Harry’s mind as he thought all this. The tall beer glasses and the shots of vodka, so early in the morning, and the small wiry man, the sailor on leave, an ex-boxer who admired Julio César Chávez, best boxer in the world, ever, he said, raising his glass, pound for pound. Mexicans make good boxers, like Poles and Irishmen: there is all that rage inside, for sure, but most of all they can take a good beating. It was may and the baltic air was very cold, but the vodka made us warm inside.

*