• Gringo U

  Filed under Blog Notes
  May 24

  Dear Mexican: What’s the deal with men in masks in Mexico? From Subcomandante Marcos to El Santo, masked men seem to be a real fetish in Mexico. Am I supposed to be turned on?

  Dear Pregnant Wab*: You should be turned on by all Mexican men, chula, masked or not. I’m sure you’re looking for a answer that involves mysticism and the ancients while revealing an innate proclivity amongst Mexicans to hide themselves, weaving in references to machismo, the Conquest, and telenovelas for good measure. But you ain’t getting it from this Mexican. If you want that kind of respuesta, turn to a smarter wab: Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, who devotes a chapter in his famous 1950 book The Labyrinth of Solitude to the Mexican amor affair with masks. “The Mexican, whether young or old, criollo or mestizo, general or laborer or lawyer,” Paz wrote in “Mexican Masks,” “seems to me to be a person who shuts himself away to protect himself: his face is a mask and so is his smile.” Paz goes on to argue that Mexicans try to hide everything — their feelings, plans, illegal relatives — because “opening oneself up is a weakness” in their culture; masks, according to his train of thought, are a physical manifestation of the psychological.
  

  Gustavo Arellano, Ask a Mexican
  

  I like college towns. My uncle (shout-out, Uncle Mr!) lives in Norwich, Vermont, which is a quintessentially New England college town. My genius stepkid went to school in Charlottesville, Virginia. I myself spent one or two highly formative years in Williamsburg. The Williamsburg of my memory is like the Star Wars cantina, full of inhabitants from a variety of planets. There were baby faced sailors and English professors from William and Mary, and an old fashioned cracker class that died out after 1964 everywhere else in the world, but flourishes to this day in Southern Virginia, along with its African American counterpart. Women of both groups can be identified by their pink curlers. Black or white, they would look naked without curlers in their hair. There were frat boys and rugby players and furtive junior spies from the nearby training base, and mixed in with all of it were the colonial bit players who went about their day as if it was still the seventeenth century, and who were so much a part of the scene that nobody even thought about how weird that is.  It was, and I’m sure still is, quite the potpourri. And I like potpourris.

  Lakeside is a potpourri, and it’s also a bit like a college town. A college with really, really old students, but still, if you imagine that all of the white headed guys wearing aloha shirts and a single earring are here to attend school and are living off campus, it gives you an idea of how our two communities function together. I am always on the lookout for ways to describe how the Mexican and Gringo community functions, because people seem utterly mystified about how we manage to coexist. Honestly, it isn’t hard.  My feeling is that the people who were born here spend very little time thinking about us. I don’t think they really notice us at all, unless it’s in the way that the residents of a college town notice those darn kids. That is to say, when it affects them. But we wouldn’t be human if we went around realizing that we have very little effect on our surroundings at all.

  Like college students, there are folks around here who spend a lot of time doing a local version of online social networking. Not facebook, although I’ve noticed that more people are logging on to that site. Certainly not Twitter, for Pete’s sake. I shudder to think of what local tweets would look like. (I’m at the light. Now I’m home. Now I’m inside the house. I can’t find the remote.) No, there’s a webboard here that’s even more like the Star Wars cantina than Williamsburg. It’s haunted by a handful of local gringos day and night, and I have to admit, it’s strangely and awfully addictive, no doubt because the opportunity to voice opinions from behind the anonymity of a cyber handle brings out the absolute worst in people. Brother, talk about masks!

  A webboard is irresistible to people who have fallen in love with our beautiful location and want to be in Chapala instead of their cube, but its a poor place to gather information. Very few of the goons who patrol the webboard are interested in anything except for ongoing games of gotcha-last. I’ve been watching with interest one poor dolt who is planning his move, and diligently wading through post after post of contradictory information.  I predict he’ll give up soon, and either come or not come. If he comes, he’ll be surprised to never find anyone that he took advice from online, as they are not out in the world, but home. At their computers. Behind their mask.

  Anyway, I’m not sure where I’m going with all this. If you say the word “mask” in Mexico, the discussion can go anywhere. Including Swine-effing-flu. David Lida did a whole piece on that a couple of weeks ago, which may have been what got the idea of masks into my head, although I think its more that Octavio Paz, who the piece was about, wrote so much about our two cultures, and the gap between them is more visible to me on that dumb webboard than anywhere else.

  By the way, to try to tie the discussion of Mexican masks and gringo online networking together, Subcomandante Marcos has a facebook page.

  *And so does “The Mexican” that is quoted at the top of this post,  Gustav Arellano. Wab is Californian for Wetback. I couldn’t get away with it, but Arellano definitely has the street cred.

  
  
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