Syncretic Culture: Mexamerica

Nine Nations: Mexamerica
by Jason Godesky

What threatens the invasive culture’s dream most is the fact that a syncretic culture is already developing in the bioregion. Mexican culture had already achieved much of the bioregional syncretic ideal by mixing indigenous and Spanish elements to create a new, creative whole; that it is now so quickly absorbing the invasive culture of Phoenix, Tucson and Los Angeles testifies to the power of the Mexamerican bioregion, and the previous success of the Mexican culture as a syncretic experiment. And what better symbol could there be for the Mexamerican culture than the image of Our Lady of Guadelupe, patron saint of the Americas?

On one side of a column, there is a thirty-foot-tall Virgin of Guadelupe, the brown-skinned Madonna who, 450 years ago, only a few years after the Spanish started their New World conquest, appeared to an illiterate Mexican Indian with the revolutionary message that the poor were her people, whom she would protect. Her image is inextricably, and purposefully, bound to the flip side of the pillar, on which is a stylized rendition of the pagan earth goddess Tonantzin, whose veneration the Virgin superseded.16

The apparition of Guadelupe occured on Tepeyac hill, where there once stood a Mexica pyramid honoring Tonantzin, whom the Mexica called, “Our Mother,” because she made humans in the Fifth Sun along with the plumed serpent, Quetzalcoatl, who has often been compared to Jesus. The plumed serpent is sometimes described with white skin and a beard; he opposed human sacrifice, was a symbol of death and resurrection, and born of a virgin. Like the Virgin, the serpent also winds its way through modern Chicano murals with a mixture of Christian and Mexica symbolism.

Serpents rear their heads on these murals and scream in a style reminiscent of the horse in Picasso’s Guernica. The snake was venerated by the Central American Indians, to the horror of the first padres, who saw it as a symbol of evil. But to the Indians, the earth was holy, and the snake was the being always closest to it, and as a result, he was a symbol of wisdom. A thoughtful mural dedicated to a gunned-down farm laborer depicts, in Dali-like fashion, stoop-laborers chained to the cornucopias of vegetable crates they fill.

On another column Cuauhtemoc, the last emperor of the Aztec, and an eagle both fall. The artist has played complicated tricks with perspective and light to make his point about the ancestor of today’s Chicanos.

And all the while, the cars roar overhead, on the way to Coronado Island.17

Language is an important part of relating to a bioregion; Mexican Spanish diverged from regular Spanish thanks to the stabilizing linguistic influence of Mexico City, where Mexica outnumbered Spaniards. As a result, Mexican Spanish is marked by a large number of hispanicized Nahuatl words. Mexican Spanish already emobides an invasive language that became native. Today, that syncretic language is influencing English in the southwest, as well.

In MexAmerica, languages are converging, so that an Anglo may be asked to presta mi su credit card. But also, a Mexican-American is confronted by a used-car-dealer whose sign says: COMPRO Y VENDO CARROS. Buy and sell cars is what it means., but “carros” is not a Spanish word. Like the commonly heard “truckos” and “hamburgesa,” it’s an adaptation of English. The question “Where do you work?” can even come out “Donde puncheas?” That lifts not only an English word, but a labor concept that certainly did not originate in rural Mexico. The question, in effect, is “Where do you punch (your time clock)?” …

It’s come to the point where a weary official of the Mexican American Cultural Center in San Antonio told me he’d just come from an organizational meeting for a new weekly at which a ferocious argument had been waged over which of three languages the paper should be printed in.

One possibility was English. The second was traditional Mexican Spanish, which holds in high esteem a richly colored, quasi-poetic, Cervantesque style of writing. But the most controversial choice was, for lack of a better word, MexAmerican. This language, built on Spanish, not only relies on adaptations of English words for much of its vocabulary, but, most important, has a fast-paced, direct, United States style that says what it has to in a hurry. “Those Mexicans!” said the Hispanic official with a sigh. “They want to make a minor point, and they build up to it, and build up to it, and build up to it, and it can bore your ass off.”18

Even in matters like cuisine, fashion and music, there is a fusion that is beginning to incorporate invasive culture in Mexamerica.

The growing Mexican influence is evident in food, fashion, and music. Dos Equis and Carta Blanca are offered as premium imported beers in California clone bars. The standard alternative to a roadside steakhouse in the Southwest is a Mexican restaurant, exactly the role Italian restaurants play in the Foundry. Tacos and burritos are as common as lasagna and ravioli elsewhere, although Mexicans view the spreading of hot sauce over everything as an American—and especially Texan—habit as barbarous as the suggestion that pizza was invented in Rome.

White, cotton Mexican dresses with meticulous, colorful embroidery are gaining favor among Anglo women during the long, hot southwestern summers. Anglo men becoming bored with oversized Texas cowboy hats are discovering that there are dozens of styles of Mexican broadbrimmed hats—each of them specific to a Mexican state—which are at least as rakish as anything Dallas can produce.19

A binational, bilingual, bicultural region is not stable; the real problem agitating so many closeted white supremacists, lurking behind the “border fence” squabbles and the question of “immigration reform” is the understanding that the invasive culture is horrifically unsustainable. Mexican culture has already set a high bar for syncretic, adaptive culture in the Mexamerican bioregion, having incorporated Spain’s invasive culture long ago. Now, it is beginning to incorporate America’s invasive culture. What the gringos are afraid of is precisely the truth: when a sustainable, syncretic culture does eventually emerge, it’s going to have far more in common with the indigenous cultures before the invasion. They still eat the tortillas invented in ancient Teotihuacan. The Virgin of Guadelupe became a superficial mask for Tonantzin. The old gods of Mexamerica are still the Catholic saints venerated by Chicanos today; and it is not a secret continuity. It is understood, and even celebrated. The virulent racism reflects the growing awareness that the invasive gringo culture will simply become the latest palette of colors in which Mexamerica’s natives will paint the same murals they’ve always painted: the murals that express Mexamerica’s genius loci.

Read More . . . http://tobyspeople.com/anthropik/2007/06/nine-nations-mexamerica/