A Borderland Primer

A longer version of this review appeared in the American Book Review. For the full review please purchase a copy of the journal.

Mexican Writers on Writing

Edited by Margaret Sayers Peden

Trinity University Press

www.trinity.edu/tupress

210 pages; paper, $24.95


A Borderland Primer

By Christine Granados


Reading Margaret Sayers Peden’s book “Mexican Writers on Writing” was an uncomfortable reminder of how Anglocentric the public school education I received was, and I grew up along the Texas/Mexico border in El Paso. Not one of the twenty-four writers in her book, which constitutes the heavyweights of Mexican letters, was a part of my primary or secondary education in El Paso. Exactly two writers, Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz, were mentioned in my post-secondary schooling down along the border of Mexico.

Peden explains in her preface how language creates a barrier and may be one of the reasons “Mexico’s long history of letters … remains largely unknown to us” here in the States. I believe she is being kind to her countrymen. While, yes, language can be a barrier (a barrier Peden has done her fair share in helping to scale through her accurate translations), the Frenchman Voltaire, Englishman Shakespeare, and Russian Tolstoy managed to travel over oceans and languages into our literary lexicon. My unscientific guess would be that Mexican authors are a mystery to us here in the United States because we don’t value our neighbors to the south or the Mexican intellect.


That idea hit me while reading Peden’s cross section of Mexican authors’ thoughts. It struck me as odd that in college I read all about Sir Phillip Sidney’s “In Defense of Poesie,” but nothing about Bernardo de Balbuena’s “In Defense of Poetry.” Odder still, now that I know that Balbuena was Sidney’s contemporary, and maddening after I calculated that Kent, England is 5,000 miles away from El Paso, while el D.F., where Balbuena was raised, is less than 1,000 miles away from my college class. To know that a Mexican educated man—who, like Sidney, argued that poetry was a divine inspiration and further stated that without poetry there would be no music—would have given me such a different world view, tinged the opaque colored lenses from which I grew up viewing the world. Plus, his is a defense I buy, wholeheartedly.


I mention this only because Peden’s book fell into my lap one week after I spoke to a high school English class filled with only Mexican-American students in Austin. These students all wondered why they were studying English poets like Sidney and Chaucer. I looked at their brown faces and wondered the exact the same thing. I’m still wondering. Why do English tales take precedence over Mexican ones in the one state that shares the longest border with Mexico?


I believe that these Mexican-American students would have been better served by reading a book like Peden’s. This well-thought-out, chronological sampling of Mexican thought doesn’t have a single tiresome, scholarly footnote, which makes it such an eminently readable book and would thus be easy to teach, even at the high school level.


I can see all those brown faces coloring with pride after reading about the first novel published in Latin America. How José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’s “The Itching Parrot” written in 1816, and translated by Katherine Anne Porter, shows the meticulous Mexican work ethic that has been instilled into these students from birth. To read in print where their already strong work ethic comes from would be a strong affirmation of their culture.


Even their teacher agreed that her students would be better served learning about Juan Rulfo, Paz, Fuentes and Elena Poniatowska. They would be able to see the different colorful personalities and get a taste of each Mexican writer and be able decide for themselves if they wanted to read more about them.


Peden’s book is a good primer for the uninitiated (like me), an uplifting pep talk to up-and-coming writers (i.e. high school and college students), and a reminder to literary scholars of the great Mexican intellect.


I, like Peden, can envision a time when there will be a free literary exchange between the United States and Mexico, “and it may be that one day a natural balance will be achieved.” Unfortunately, it just won’t happen in my lifetime.


Christine Granados is a working mother who has written numerous reviews, essays, feature articles and a short story collection “Brides and Sinners in El Chuco.” She is a reviewer for the American Book Review, based at the University of Houston-Victoria.