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NY Times Sunday Book Review, March 10, 2019
Anglos, Hispanics and the Formation of America
By Julio Ortega
EL NORTE
The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America
By Carrie Gibson
Illustrated. 560 pp. Atlantic Monthly Press. $30.
One hundred years before the arrival of the Pilgrims, Mexicans were
already here. (With typical dark humor they used to say that when God
ordered Fiat lux!, Hispanics were late with the bill for the electric
company.) Carlos Fuentes was 10 years old when his father, a Mexican
diplomat in Washington, took him to see a film that included the
secession of Texas from Mexico; the boy stood up in the dark and cried,
“Viva Mexico!” It was a sense of duty he carried all his life. Gabriel
García Márquez journeyed to the South, following in Faulkner’s
footsteps. In his own Faulknerian accounts of too many years of solitude
he adds that the Americans, with the excuse of eradicating yellow fever,
stayed in the Caribbean far too long. Fuentes was once forbidden to
disembark from a ship in Puerto Rico, and García Márquez was asked to
strip naked at customs.
“El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America” is
the book that Americans, Anglo and Hispanic, should read as an education
on their own American place or role. The author of “Empire’s Crossroads:
A History of the Caribbean From Columbus to the Present Day,” Carrie
Gibson takes on the task of accounting for the relevant and telling
cases of our modern process of national formation and regional
negotiations. This is a serious book of history but also an engaging
project of reading the future in the past.
Crossing borders has become a formal rite de passage toward identity,
and Latin Americans are experts in dealing with the walls, fences and
barriers of misreading — as Mexican, Hispanic-American, Puerto Rican,
Cuban, Caribbean and Latin American, not to mention Latino, mestizo,
mulatto, Native and every other wall of misrepresentation. This
formidable display of categorization has produced a complex and
intricate cultural system of representing ethnic territories, racial
mappings and exclusionary perceptions. To split the atom has proved to
be easier than to split a prejudice. The civil society reinforced what
is not-inclusive: skin color, religion and language. Identity was forged
from the color of the others, languages of origin, religions and bone size.
Gibson recounts this forgotten epic, but one can also read her story as
a reliable travel guide, a long ride along the path of an elusive but
powerful history. And even if that history is new to most of us, it is a
familiar tale for many nations moving beyond the walls into a territory
of common goals. In most of the cities there have been people writing
and protesting, forging from modest presses a regional demand for a
possible public space, voices of a civilization and of a law against
intolerance and violence. They are the forgotten heroes of the press,
journalists and chroniclers, travelers and booksellers.
Some of the cases in “El Norte” are more tragic than others, like the
painful history of Puerto Rico, where the Arawak people, or Tainos, the
pacific society that Columbus encountered, had an easy laugh and were as
curious as children. We now know, thanks to the Spanish historian
Consuelo Varela, that Columbus stopped their baptism as Christians in
order to sell them as slaves; he even managed to get a percentage from
the first bordello in the Americas. The Tainos, of course, disappeared,
but others in the Caribbean did not. They didn’t appreciate Columbus’s
gifts of marbles, and they would have returned to Donald Trump the paper
towels he threw to the victims of Hurricane Maria. History repeats
itself, now as shame.
Image
What is particularly fascinating about this book is that its
encyclopedic project is not a rewriting of history but a recitation of
readings. Almost each historical event is retold through memory,
recording, evaluation and discussion. This is history as dialogue. It
leaves the mourning authority of archives and takes its place as a long
conversation, presupposing that truth can be reached through an extended
pilgrimage, a journey through violence, discrimination, racism,
exploitation and the inferno created by occupation. The narrative
becomes not a tribunal but a hospice to language, shelter to the loss of
meaning imposed by violence. Mexico lost half its territory and many
lives, but the voices of Thoreau and Lincoln are here to sound an alarm
and to hope. The model of replacing a tribunal with a conversation is
reminiscent of Montaigne: Lacking friends, he lamented that Plato was
not around to talk about the wonders of the New World and its
inhabitants, who ignored the distinction between “mine” and “yours.”
Gibson lets the facts speak. But one would also like to read the saga of
memory, that is, the version of the epic of “El Norte” through
literature and fiction. The writer and critic Domingo F. Sarmiento came
to the United States to learn from the American example of progress, and
as president of Argentina to replicate those monuments of civilization
that he saw: schools, railroads, immigration. Each of them fell short of
his expectations. The Cuban poet and activist José Martí loved New York,
but found that the people were composed of the “yeast of tigers.” In
“One Hundred Years of Solitude,” García Márquez retells the American
arrival in the South through the town of Macondo — where they discover
the banana, move the river, bring modern tools. But it all ends in a
massacre. Fuentes relates the story of an old writer who moves to
Mexico: “A gringo in Mexico, that is euthanasia.” Roberto Bolaño
recounts the number of women killed around the maquiladoras. The border
but also the migration, narcotics but also life in-between are
elaborated in Yuri Herrera’s fiction. The displacement of women in the
novels of Carmen Bullosa and Cristina Rivera Garza, as well as the
chronicles of Heriberto Yépez on dying-daily in Tijuana, explore new
discourses of sorrow.
The North has also become a growing space of rereading. The
Mexican-American novelist Rolando Hinojosa-Smith used to say that as a
kid from El Valle, he started reading fiction that had been translated
into Spanish. He thought that all writers were Mexicans, despite some
strange names — Dumas, Chekhov, Dos Passos. It seems that el Norte is
not only a cemetery. It is also a national library.
Julio Ortega, a professor at Brown, is the author, among many other
books, of “Transatlantic Translations.” “La Comedia Literaria,” his
memoirs, will appear this year.
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