One man's take on his culture's stereotypes

usted sabe lo que dicen: Arbol que crece torcido jamás su tronco endereza

One man's take on his culture's stereotypes

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Dear Mexican: What is it with the Mexican hang-up on body parts? When General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna was struck by a cannonball at the knee in one of his 8,000 wars, his right leg was removed from the knee down. When he returned to Mexico City, he ordered a state funeral be held for his leg. Everyone in the city was commanded to attend. Later, when Santa Anna fell out of favor with the public (he was president 11 times), the aroused populace dug up his leg and paraded it in the streets. The last it was seen, a pack of wild dogs were carrying it across the Zócalo (see The Eagle and The Raven by James Michener). Also, General Álvaro Obregon’s arm – blown off in battle – was enshrined in a huge bottle of preservative in the basement of a monument to him in Mexico City until about 15 years ago, when his family suddenly realized it was embarrassing. A tattoo on the arm read, Lowriders rule! Gringo Solo

Dear Gabacho: Relying on James Michener for history is like relying on Mexico to stop illegal immigration. So, readers: Gringo Solo’s assertions about lowrider tattoos, embarrassed families and feral dogs are damned lies; every other wild detail is true.

And Solo forgot to mention Mexico’s other fetishized chopped-off body parts: Pancho Villa’s missing skull; the severed head of patriot Miguel Hidalgo; Emiliano Zapata’s mustache; and the pickled remains of Mexico’s first president, Guadalupe Victoria (legend has it that two gabacho soldiers during the 1848 Mexican-American War tried to drink the liquid that preserved Victoria’s innards and promptly died).

I could cry double standard, given America’s love for breasts, skin color and Britney Spears’ panocha, but I’m not. Mexicans do obsess about the body parts of dead people, but that phenomenon is better understood in the context of two mexcellente traits: the Catholic tradition of relics and megalomania.

The use of messianic imagery was significant on two levels, Columbia University professor Claudio Lomnitz wrote in his essay Passion and Banality in Mexican History: The Presidential Persona. It was a way of identifying the presidential body with the land, and it cast the people as being in debt to the caudillo for his sacrifices.

Lomnitz concludes that passage wryly: Sovereignty, that location where all Mexicans are created equal, has been a place that only the dead can inhabit, which is why we sometimes fight over their remains. And ain’t that the pinche truth.