Travelers' Tales: Mexico

Mexico: An Introduction

Mexico, so prone to stereotyping, is one of the most deceptively complex countries in the world. "Melting pot," a phrase more often applied to the United States, is applicable in a deeper way to Mexico's towering and ancient layering of civilizations, which continues to this day in its swirling crosscurrent of indigenous peoples, multiple languages, dialects, riotous art and music, religions behind religions, hidden cosmologies, uncounted ruins, and secret knowledge. We forget just how old Mexico is. We forget, for instance, that Teotihuacán, the ancient city just north of Mexico City, was larger than Rome in its imperial heyday.

And yet Mexico is so simple, her people so lovely. Families and children are the core of life, as is music, food, hard work. Every town has a patron saint and a square, or zócalo, where the pulse of the community can be witnessed and sometimes shared. There are so many festivals in Mexico you would have to spend a lifetime sampling them. (One town even has a festival that runs 365 days a year - every year.) The most famous fiesta of course is the Day of the Dead, during which the dead are remembered, and in a sense, brought back to life by honoring and savoring their lives through photographs, favorite foods, and of course, stories. Life in Mexico is hard, but the hard life here has a richness it doesn't always have in other places. Mexicans are friendly and remote, shy and gregarious, and usually generous to a fault.

Mexico is deeply Catholic, but in many places, behind the façade of Roman Catholicism, there lies a different landscape of shamanism, ritual, superstition, mystical labyrinths thousands of years old. You can go to a great Mexican beach, have a wonderful time, and be back in a week, but getting to know Mexico is the work of years and repeated visits. There are many Mexicos: resorts lush enough for anyone, colonial silver cities, stunning desert beauty, jungles, brooding ruins, modern cities, murals the likes of which you won't see anywhere else. It's a disturbing place too, with serious pollution, official corruption, and population problems, but disturbing also in the best sense: you can't go there and remain the same - unless, as many do, you go only to a hermetically sealed resort - and even then....

Any discussion of Mexico must also include its love-hate relationship with the United States, the giant to the north which both beguiles and torments Mexico. Mexico's problems spill over the border like quicksilver and American culture oozes south to erode traditional Mexican family life. Solutions are as elusive as the vast no-man's land that separates the two countries, so interlinked by conquests of different sorts, ever more linked by commerce and immigration.

But one fact remains: Mexico's future is North America's future. It is worth getting to know.

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