Top positive review
4.0 out of 5 starsMen Behaving Badly: Mexican Edition
Reviewed in the United States on February 9, 2009
The combination of tribalism, machismo and modern weapons technology will stop the advance of civilization dead in its tracks. The Sierra Madre mountains, stretching from the US border into southern Mexico, possess all three elements in abundance, which makes them a place any sensible person will go out of their way to avoid. Richard Grant decides to lean into them instead, and the result is a lurid chronicle of bad roads, hard towns and evil men.
Originally inhabited by Indians eking out a subsistence living, the Sierra Madres were settled by Spanish ranchers, miners, loggers and Jesuit missionaries beginning in the 1600s. During the Mexican revolution, Pancho Villa and others used the mountains as a base and hiding place. The ejidos, communal agricultural lands granted after the revolution, became overgrazed and poorly farmed, and today the "crops that pay" are marijuana and poppies used to manufacture heroin. The economy of the region is dominated by the drug trade and the cultural tone is set by the narcotrafficantes, impulsive, violent men with a slash and burn attitude toward their lives and everyone else's.
Grant, a British journalist living in Arizona, brings his own cultural biases to his travels, those of a skeptical, rational Northern European who believes in a contractual society governed by the rule of law. Nothing he encounters conforms to those biases. He rails against the Mexican idea of machismo, which creates a never-ending cycle of drunkenness, violence, revenge and the abuse of women. (For instance, if you rape a woman but then marry her, it isn't a crime.) The rule of law gets subverted by threats and bribes from the drug traffickers. When the government sends the Army in to destroy drug crops, it wrecks the local economy and forces all the working age men to emigrate illegally to the US to make a living.
Hard and hopeless as he makes it sound, Grant also finds grace notes in his travels: a generous hospitality, an openness to the warm and sweaty aspects of living, a willingness to bring the mystical into everyday life, giving it a magical tinge at times. Grant finds Mexico compelling but baffling. He leans on The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz' masterful examination of the Mexican character, to help explain it: Indian myths, Catholic and Moorish influences from Spain, and the political ideas of the Enlightenment swirled together to create a culture that combines fatalism in the face of brute authority, a superstitious belief in practical magic and a stoic, inward personality that finds its truest emotional expression in drunken violence.
Modern Mexico is at a crossroads. It could become a democratic model for developing Latin American countries, or it could become the Afghanistan of the Americas, a corrupt, ineffectual government overwhelmed by a narcotics economy, a culture that combines a rigid behavioral code with impulsive violence. Grant's book is a good guide into what these issues look and feel like to the people living through them, day by hard day.