A Letter From Mexico

Ten years ago I tried to interpret Mexico for Ilan and Irving Howe in a single day. I took them to Aztec ruins and to markets where indigenous customs live on virtually intact. We strolled through the center of Mexico City, heart of our Spanish heritage. I gave them a canned version of our nineteenth-century liberal tradition and our twentieth century social revolution. I remember overwhelming them with long exegeses on Mexican life: its religious syncretism, its aesthetic sensibility, the intense feeling of community in our small towns, neighborhoods and families. “For better or for worse,” I told them, “What Max Weber called the `continuous desacramentalizing of the world’ has still not happened here.” Lat...