Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

294 reframing latin america
If the drama had been set in central Mexico, that would have been much
more understandable. It appears that residents of Mexico City, like Edith
O’Shaughnessy, did not really know a revolution was taking place until
1913! Here is yet another clue that makes us realize that the book and movie
only adopt the northern frontier as a backdrop, a not-so-artful disguise for
the all-powerful central valley of Mexico. The food comes from there as do
the customs and behavior, which seem much more Indian than is customary
along la frontera, which even then had been strongly infl uenced by the
United States—a typical case, then, of the center dominating the periphery
as it has since 1433, when the Aztec Triple Alliance took control of the
central valley [. . .].
This mixture of the spiritual, the sensual, and the emotional gives the
fi lm its poignancy and its resonance with Mexicans. It is a celebration of
the female sphere—the kitchen with its smells, its wonders, its sacrifi ces,
dangers, and pleasures, a world that for many Mexicans still exists, if in
part due to the affordability of servants. For if Mexico is not an immigrant
country, it is a nation that can proclaim “thirty centuries of splendor,” as
the 1992 exhibit at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art called itself in
hopes of winning recognition of Mexican greatness on the other side of the
border. Such tradition, as Tita’s plight reminds us, is not easily dismissed.
There are few nations in the world as culturally rich as Mexico, where
the past so intrudes on the present that it hardly seems past. In a recent talk
in Washington at the Library of Congress, Dr. María Carmen Serra Puche,
director of the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, spoke of
her awareness of hidden spirits as she began directing the excavation of a
pre-Columbian site in central Mexico in 1993, the same year that the fi lm
was released. Finally, she decided that crew members would sacrifi ce a turkey
to the gods before they began their labors.
In that regard, Mexico is unlike any other nation in the Western Hemisphere.
Although countries such as Guatemala and Bolivia have a vibrant
Indian past and present, the fi rst chooses to turn its back on its Indian
heritage (as shown quite beautifully in the fi lm El Norte), and the second
merely tolerates it. However, Mexico has built its history as an independent
nation on its Indian past. It is no accident that one of its major presidential
candidates in 1988 and 1994 bore the name of the last Aztec emperor,
Cuauhtémoc [. . .].
So we return to my mother’s question: Why didn’t Tita marry the nice
Dr. Brown, who loved her? Quite apart from the fate that Tita felt bound her
to Pedro, there are several other reasons in the book and fi lm meant, at least
in part, for Mexicans. The nice Dr. Brown was not brown at all; he was a
güero—tall, blond, and Anglo even to his heavily accented fl uent Spanish.