To me, the Mexicans are Odyssean in spirit. Having relocated from the northeastern United States, I at first found everything in Mexico's colonial heartland at odds with what I knew. From the harsh but fertile landscape to the double entendre-laden language to the fervent yet hushed display of religious zeal, Mexico and Mexicans seem a land and people of unreconcialable contrast. The Mexicans, equal descendents of both the Conquistadors and Aztecs, seem to have inherited equal proportions of adverserial cultures. Both deeply religious and proud of its indigenous roots, the Mexican culture is unfathomably complicated. And yet, despite their history of repression, conquest, and ongoing economic crises, the Mexicans are some of the happiest people in the world. And at times seem the saddest, the most private, the most difficult to get to know. And regardless of, or because of, everything, they go on. And this, to me, is their Odyssean spirit: their will, regardless of good or bad prognosis, to go on. And on. Partly religious, partly spiritual, partly because they have no other choice.

I have been inspired by Octavio Paz's The Labyrinth of Solitude, in which he writes:

“In the Valley of Mexico man feels himself suspended between heaven and earth, and he oscillates between contrary powers and forces, and petrified eyes, and devouring mouths. Reality – that is, the world that surrounds us – exists by itself here, has a life of its own, and was not invented by man as it was in the United States. The Mexican feels himself to have been torn from the womb of this reality, which is both creative and destructive, both Mother and Tomb. He has forgotten the word that ties him to all those forces through which life manifests itself. Therefore he shouts or keeps silent, stabs or prays, or falls asleep for a hundred years.”

 

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