“Our courtesy may be attractive but our reserve is chilling, and the stranger is always disconcerted by the unforeseen violence that lacerates us, by the solemn or convulsive splendor of our fiestas, by our cult of death”
“They too carry about with them, in rags, a still-living past”
“The Europeans considers Mexico
Here, Paz is working very hard to set up the Mexican as the other to the Euro-centric controlled world. The European others the Mexican, and this is a reason for his actions.
“Woman is another being who lives apart and is therefore an enigmatic figure. It would be better to say that she is the Enigma. She attracts and repels like men of an alien race of nationality. She is an image of both fecundity and death…Woman is a living symbol of the strangeness of the universe and its radical heterogeneity. As such, does she bide life within herself, or death? What does she think? Or does she think? Does she truly have feelings? Is she the same as we are? Sadism begins as a revenge against feminine hermeticism or as a desperate attempt to obtain a response from a body we fear is insensible”
Paz moves on the other women. They are not only “men of an alien race” but all women all the time. He questions their ability to be human – if humanity is established through the possession of reason, he is wondering if women have the ability to think. His over-arching “we” fears that women are insensible. This opinion of women, Paz is trying to explain to the reader, finds its roots in the dichotomy between Hernan Cortes and La Malinche.
Paz speaks a lot about capitalism and the proletariat and the individuality of the working (or lack thereof). Why?
“Everyone becomes an accomplice and the guilt feeling spread through the whole society”
Paz is talking about totalitarian regimes here, but there is something to be said for having this opinion about the modern era and not the conquest of Mexico
“We are enigmatic not only to strangers but also to ourselves”
“The character of the Mexican is a product of the social circumstances that prevail in our country, and the history of Mexico
“Our attitude towards life is not conditioned by historical events, at least not in the rigorous manner in which the velocity or trajectory of a missile is determined by a set of known facts. Our living attitude – the factor we can never know completely, since change and indetermination are the only constants of our existence – is history also. This is to say that historical events are something more than events because they are colored by humanity, which is always problematical. And they are not merely the result of other events, but rather of a single will that is capable, within certain limits, of ruling their outcome…Historical circumstances explain our character to the extent that our character explains those circumstances. Both are the same. Thus any purely historical explanation is insufficient…which is nt the same as saying it is false.”
Here Paz is making a point which is probably going to be the justification for everything I attempt to do for my senior project – history cannot be clearly separated from the present and the future and the present and the future cannot be separated from history. They all use and abuse one another to form a bigger sense of the reality of humanity. And historians cannot delineate history as a science and discount the enormous impact of the social memory – societies will view the causes and effects of history in the ways they are taught, often those that favor the dominant power of a society. People and groups will always use history to justify their own means, and therefore these histories must constantly be questioned and revised to reflect factuality within the understand of why people wish to view history in one specific way.
“We, however, struggle with imaginary entities, with vestiges of the past or self-engendered phantasms. These vestiges and phantasms are real, at least to us. Their reality is of a subtle and cruel order, because it is a phantasmagoric reality. They are impalpable and invincible because they are not outside us but within us. In the struggle which our will-to-be carries on against them, they are supported by a secret and powerful ally, our fear of being. Everything that makes up the present-day Mexican, as we have seen, can be reduced to this: the Mexican does not want or does not dare to be himself.”
What is it about Mexican nationhood that makes Paz see the national identity in this way?
“In many instances these phantasms are vestiges of past realities. Their origins are in the Conquest, the Colonial period, the Independence United States France
“History helps us to understand certain straights of our characters, provided we are capable of isolating and defining them beforehand. We are the only persons who can answer the questions asked us by reality and our own being.”
“When we shout this cry on the fifteenth of September, the anniversary of our independence, we affirm ourselves in front of, against and in spite of the ‘others.’ Who are the ‘others’? They are the hijos de la chingada: strangers, bad Mexicans, our enemies, our rivals. In any case, the ‘others,’ that is, all those who are not as we are. And these ‘others’ are not defined except as the sons of a mother as vague and indeterminate as themselves.”
“Who is the Chingada? Above all, she is the Mother. Not a Mother of flesh and blood but a mythical figure. The Chingada is one of the Mexican representations of Maternity, like La Llorona or the ‘long-suffering Mexican mother’ we celebrate on the tenth of May. The Chingada is the mother who has suffered – metaphorically or actually – the corrosive and defaming action implicit in the verb that gives her her name.”
chingada in Spanish and ties to alcohol
“Chingar also implies the idea of failure…Almost everywhere chingarse means to be made a fool of, to be involved in a fiasco…It is always an aggressive verb.”
“In this plurality of meanings the ultimate meaning always contains the idea of aggression, whether it is the simple act of molesting, pricking or censuring, or the violent act of wounding or killing. The verb denotes violence, an emergence from oneself to penetrate another by force. It also means to injure, lacerate, to violate – bodies, souls, objects – and to destroy…
The Idea of breaking, of ripping open, appears in a great many of these expressions. The word has sexual connotations but it is not a synonym for the sexual act: one may chingar a woman without actually possessing her. And when it does allude to the sexual act, violation or deception gives it a particular shading. The man who commits it never does so with the consent of the chingada. Chingar, then, is to do violence to another. The verb is masculine, active, cruel; it stings, wounds, gashes, stains. And it provokes a bitter, resentful satisfaction.
The person who suffers this action is passive, inert and open, in contrast to the active, aggressive and closed person who inflicts it. The chingón is the macho, the male; he rips open the chingada, the female, who is pure passivity, defenseless against the exterior world. The relationship between them is violent, and it is determined by the cynical power of the first and the impotence of the second. The idea of violence rules darkly over all the meanings of the word, and the dialectic of the "closed" and the "open" thus fulfills itself with an almost ferocious precision.”
What does this language signify in relation to La Malinche? The role of the chingada, according to Paz, is completely submissive and passive, without agency. By casting La Malinche in this light, the historical view of her becomes that of a woman without agency or choice in her actions. It seems to deny the actual historical description of La Malinche, which must also be questioned as previously demonstrated. Paz, however, is setting up La Malinche to be a mythical figure in terms of her lack of agency thus allowing her to image to be at the center of blame for the conquest of Mexico
“To theMexican there are only two possibilities in life: either he inflicts the actions implied by chingar on others, or else he suffers them himself at the hands of others. This conception of social life as combat fatally divides society into the strong and the weak.”
“The only thing of value is manliness, personal strength, a capacity for imposing oneself on others.”
““What is the Chingada?" The Chingada is the Mother forcibly opened, violated or deceived. The hijo de la Chingada is the offspring of violation, abduction or deceit. If we compare this expression with the Spanish hijo de puta (son of a whore), the difference is immediately obvious. To the Spaniard, dishonor consists in being the son of a woman who voluntarily surrenders herself: a prostitute. To the Mexican it consists in being the fruit of a violation.”
“In effect, every woman — even when she gives herself willingly —is torn open by the man, is the Chingada. In a certain sense all of us, by the simple fact of being born of woman, are hijos de la Chingada, sons of Eve. But the singularity of the Mexican resides, I believe, in his violent, sarcastic humiliation of the Mother and his no less violent affirmation of the Father. A woman friend of mine (women are more aware of the strangeness of this situation) has made me see that this admiration for the Father—who is a symbol of the closed, the aggressive — expresses itself very dearly in a saying we use when we want to demonstrate our superiority: "I am your father." The question of origins, then, is the central secret of our anxiety and anguish.”
“This aspect — angry Jehovah, God of wrath, or Saturn, or Zeus the violator of women —is the one that appears almost exclusively in Mexican representations of manly power. The macho represents the masculine pole of life. The phrase "I am your father" has no paternal flavor and is not said in order to protect or to guide another, but rather to impose one's superiority, that is, to humiliate. Its real meaning is no different from that of the verb chingar and its derivatives. The macho is the gran chingón. One word sums up the aggressiveness, insensitivity, invulnerability and other attributes of the macho: power. It is force without the discipline of any notion of order: arbitrary power, the will without reins and without a set course.”
“A psychologist would say that resentment is the basis of his character.”
“But whatever may be the origin of these attitudes, the fact is that the essential attribute of the macho — power — almost always reveals itself as a capacity for wounding, humiliating, annihilating. Nothing is more natural, therefore, than his indifference toward the offspring he engenders. He is not the founder of a people; he is not a patriarch who exercises patria potestas; he is not a king or a judge or the chieftain of a clan. He is power isolated in its own potency, without relationship or compromise with the outside world. He is pure incommunication, a solitude that devours itself and everything it touches. He does not pertain to our world; he is not from our city; he does not live in our neighborhood. He comes from far away: he is always far away. He is the Stranger. It is impossible not to notice the resemblance between the figure of the macho and that of the Spanish conquistador. This is the model — more mythical than real — that determines the images the Mexican people form of men in power: caciques, feudal lords, hacienda owners, politicians, generals, captains of industry. They are all machos, chingones.”
Is Paz saying that the Spanish conquistador is now the model for the Mexican man? What about the violation? Is machoism a performance of suffered violations?
“The Chingada is even more
passive. Her passivity is abject: she does not resist violence, but is an inert heap of
bones, blood and dust. Her taint is constitutional and resides, as we said earlier, in her
sex. This passivity, open to the outside world, causes her to lose her identity: she is the
Chingada. She loses her name; she is no one; she disappears into nothingness; she is
Nothingness. And yet she is the cruel incarnation of the feminine condition.”
And Chicana feminists wrote against all of this stripping away of agency that Paz claiming. La Malinche was not forced to be a translator according to the texts. She does not appear to have been forced to bear Cortes a child, though this is up to question because of the lack of a historical record of her own voice. But she is not this passive bag of bones that Paz illustrates, and this is the idea that the Chicano movement attempted to put on their women.
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