Border Ballad
Reflections upon the upcoming national PBS premier of When Worlds Collide (Mon., September 27), a feature-length documentary about the first century of “Contact” between New World and Old and the rise of “mestizo” culture. In an examination of cultural fusion—and tension—across many frontiers, Rubén Martínez leaps from L.A. to Latin America to Spain, weaving together the personal, the political and the historical.
The Latin American mall. Not to be confused in any way with the American mall, which is for the middle class on down. The Latin American mall is for the upper-middle-class and up.
In Latin America, being "middle class" often means affecting social status more than actually having it. And in these, the years of inseguridad, it means being shockingly vulnerable.
In Mexico City, you don't have to look for history in a museum. The city itself is one, a living diorama of history, which is always somewhat astonishing to me, the native of L.A., the past-less paradise.
So far, el D.F. has been spared most of the hardcore violence, but the narcos are here, too. In la Roma, in Condesa, hanging out in the hottest nightspots--consumers and producers and distributors, on the streets and across every social swath.
Everything here is so classically chilango--the easy juxtaposition of signs of disparate origins, a kind of "radical mestizo."
In which the author revisits his one-time home, the mega-city of the global South, Mexico D.F.--one of the few great world capitals where gay marriage is legal.
To invoke the word "mestizo" raises all kinds of issues--500 years' worth. A new blog by Rubén Martínez.
Author, performer and teacher, Rubén Martínez is the son and grandson of immigrants from El Salvador and Mexico. He was born and raised in Los Angeles and has worked and lived across the United States and Latin America. He is Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature and Writing at Loyola Marymount University.
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