There is no border in the world anything like the one between the United States and Mexico: a wealthy industrialized nation sharing a 2,000-mile frontier with a developing country barely able to raise its millions above subsistence-level poverty. It’s as if France were to border directly upon Algeria, or Germany upon Somalia.
American writers from Ambrose Bierce, who vanished during the Mexican revolution of 1913, to Cormac McCarthy, whose “All the Pretty Horses” depicted Mexico as a land of enchantment and deadly violence, have always seen it as a land of extremes. Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 film “The Wild Bunch” dramatizes near-phantasmagoric violence.
The brilliant Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz maintained that mutual incomprehension between the two countries was permanent and inevitable. America’s legacy, Paz wrote in “The Labyrinth of Solitude,” “is Democracy, capitalism and the Industrial Revolution,” while Mexico’s is “the counter-reformation, monopoly and feudalism.” READ MORE