NAME: ERIKA ALEJANDRA FLORES RIVERA | 4M

HISTORY II | EMILIANO BARCLAY

BACHILLERATO INTERNACIONAL UNINTER
FEBRUARY 15, 2023.

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Old or adolescent, Creole or mestizo, general, worker or licensee, the Mexican
appears to me as a being who locks himself up and preserves himself: masks the
face and masks the smile. Planted in his stingy loneliness, thorny and polite at the
same time, everything serves him to defend himself: silence and word, courtesy and
contempt, irony and resignation. His language is full of reluctance, of figures and
allusions, of ellipsis; in his silence there are withdrawals, nuances, indecipherable
threats, between reality and his person he establishes a wall, of impassivity and
remoteness. The Mexican is always far away, far from the world, and from others.
Far away, also from himself.

Popular language reflects the extent to which we defend ourselves from the outside:
the ideal of "hombría" is to never "break up". The Mexican can bend, humiliate
himself, "get away," but not "to scratch", that is, allow the outside world to penetrate
into his intimacy. Hermeticism is a resource of our suspicion and distrust. It shows
that we instinctively consider the environment around us dangerous, this reaction is
justified if you think about what our history has been. In the face of sympathy and
sweetness, our answer is reservation, because we do not know if those feelings are
true or simulated.

Our anger is nourished nothing more by the fear of being used by our confidants -
general fear of all men - but by the shame of having renounced our loneliness, the
one who trusts himself, is alienated. The manhood is measured by invulnerability to
enemy weapons or to the impacts of the outside world. Stoicism is the highest of our
warlike and political virtues, more than the brightness of victory, we are moved by
integrity in the face of adversity.

The Mexican, against what is a superficial interpretation of our history, aspires to

create a world ordered according to clear principles. The dangerous inclination that
we show for the formulas - social, moral and bureaucratic - are as many expressions
of this tendency of our character. The Mexican not only doesn't open; it doesn't spill
either.

Sometimes the forms drown us. During the last century, liberals vainly tried to subject
the reality of the country to the straitjacket of the Constitution of 1857. The results
were the Dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and the Revolution of 1910. In a sense, the
history of Mexico, like that of every Mexican, consists of a struggle between the forms
and formulas in which we intend to enclose our being and the explosions with which
our spontaneity takes revenge. The Mexican is a compound, and evil and good
subtly mix in his soul, the hero becomes a problem.
They must also defend their privacy. In other countries, prostitutes or virgins are
revered; in others, mothers are rewarded; in almost all, the great lady is flattered and
respected. We prefer to hide those graces and virtues. The secret must accompany

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the woman. But the woman must not only hide but also offer a certain smiling
impassivity to the outside world. In the face of erotic sting, it must be "decent"; in the
face of adversity, "suffering". In both cases, their response is not instinctive or
personal, but according to a generic model. And that model, as in the case of the
"male", tends to underline the defensive and passive aspects, in a range that ranges
from modesty and "decency" to stoicism, resignation and impassivity.
Mexican women, like all the others, are a symbol that represents the stability and
continuity of the race. Its cosmic significance is linked to social: in daily life its function
is to make law and order, piety and sweetness prevail. It is curious to note that the
image of the "bad woman" is almost always accompanied by the idea of activity. In
the opposite of the "abnegade mother", the "girlfriend who waits" and the hermetic
idol, static beings, the "bad" comes and goes, looks for men, abandons them.
We all take care that no one "disrespects ladies," a universal notion, without a doubt,
but that in Mexico it takes to its ultimate consequences. Naturally, Mexican women
should be asked their opinion; that "respect" is sometimes a hypocritical way of
holding them and preventing them from expressing themselves. But how are we
going to allow them to express themselves, if our whole life tends to be paralyzed in
a mask that hides our intimacy?
All these attitudes confirm the "closed" character of our reactions to the world or to
our fellow human beings. We lie for pleasure and fantasy, yes, like all imaginative
peoples, but also to hide and put in the shelter of intruders. Simulation is an activity
similar to that of actors and can be expressed in as many ways as characters
pretend. But the actor, if he really is, surrenders to his character and embodies him
fully, although later, after the performance, he abandons him like his skin the snake.
The simulator never surrenders and forgets itself, because it would stop simulating
if it merged with its image.

To simulate is to invent or, better, to pretend and thus avoid our condition.
Dissimulation requires greater subtlety: the one who disguises does not represent,
but wants to make invisible, go unnoticed - without renouncing his being. The
Mexican exceeds in the dissimulation of his passions and of himself. Fearful of the
gaze of others, it contracts, reduces, becomes shadow and ghost, echo. And we
hide. We hide with such determination that we hardly exist.

In its radical forms, dissimulation comes to mimicry. The Indian merges with the
landscape, it is confused with the white fence on which it rests in the afternoon, with
the dark land in which it tends at noon, with the silence that surrounds it. His human
uniqueness is so disguised that he ends up being abolished; and he becomes stone,
pirú, wall, silence: space. Not only do we hide ourselves and become transparent

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and ghostly; we also hide the existence of our fellow men. We hide them in a more
definitive and radical way: we ignore them.

None is the absence of our eyes, the pause of our conversation, the reluctance of
our silence. It is the name that we always forget because of a strange fatality, the
eternal absentee, the guest that we do not invite, the gap that we do not fill.