Book Review: Readings

True Tales From Another Mexico

University of New Mexico Press, 320 pp., $29.95

If Mexico's idea of the United States as a bloated and heartless empire is an exaggeration of historical truths, so is our equally outrageous claim that our southern neighbors are superstitious invaders who come only to steal jobs and benefits that rightly belong to our progressive, hardworking citizens. Sam Quinones, an American journalist who has covered Mexico for the Los Angeles Times and Ms. Magazine, among others, takes a large step toward unwriting easy stereotypes of the Mexican community with his collection of sociological portraits, True Tales From Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx. Each of the 15 articles expertly introduces the reader to unknown and often fringe personalities who have pushed the nation's winding story along -- for better or worse.

You've heard of drug pushers and corrupt politicians, Quinones argues, but have you also heard about the transvestites who get all dolled up and dance around Mazatlan once a year in celebration of their beauty? Or about the basketball player from Oaxaca who has used hoops to transform the lives of teenagers in Los Angeles? The characters he seems to praise all bear similar qualities: They reject the overwhelming political and social climate, invent their own customs, and move others to freer lives.

But while the figures he introduces add to a fuller notion of what Mexican society actually is, Quinones does not attempt to whitewash the Mexican struggle by providing a cheerful coalition of saints and martyrs. He is particularly sharp toward Mexico's handling of its waves of emigration. The flight of so many valuable Mexicans, he writes, is "of greater consequence ... than the nineteenth-century territorial losses of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas." Think of that the next time you see a group of these men sweating to finish a building downtown.

Quinones is also careful to include tales that reveal the darkest sides of recent Mexican history. There's the village that grew violent one afternoon and lynched two innocent salesmen based on the false molestation charge leveled by a young girl. And the horrifying series of murders that have occurred along the U.S. border, where desperate women toil in assembly plants only to be murdered and discarded. "A few days later they found her blouse on the Mexican side of the river," Quinones writes of one of the victims. "She lay strangled to death on the U.S. side. Her case has not been solved."

Similarly, some of Quinones's arguments lie on the other side of last year's electoral revolution while others have crossed over. His afterword reflects much of the optimism that has swept the country since Vicente Fox's landmark victory in the presidential election of 2000: "The day after July 2 in Mexico City was a gorgeous, bright, sun-shiny day, with a big blue sky and little trace of the smog that usually carpets the valley of the capital. Rightly so. The PRI had been toppled the day before." Whether or not the promise of the people Quinones has followed actually rules the nation forward, True Tales From Another Mexico provides a startling examination of the country that remains at once our closest and most distant relation.