Rubén Gallo is a writer, the author of Freud in Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis (MIT Press, 2010), and a professor at Princeton University. In this podcast, he explores the meaning in death in Mexico, from the well-known images of joyful skeletons painted by artists like Diego Rivera, to the more somber political and social manifestations of deadly impulses in contemporary society, including drug-related violence. I am Rubén Gallo, a writer and academic, and today I would like to share with you some reflections on the culture of death in Mexico. Without a doubt you have read and heard about the special place death has in Mexican culture. You might have seen photographs or paintings of the Day of the Dead, when families visit their deceased relatives in the cemetery to bring them food, thus transform mourning into a festive occasion. And you are probably familiar with the many joyful depictions of skeletons, skulls, and other symbols of death, in the paintings of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and other Mexican artists. In popular music, such as ranchero songs from the north, singers cheerfully announce that they are not afraid of death, and if they die, it should happen while they are drinking and dancing. But, as I would like to suggest today, beneath this appearance of a unique and joyful approach to death, there lies a darker reality, one that is closer in spirit to traditional accounts of death. Octavio Paz, one of Mexico’s greatest poets, made a similar argument in his essay The Labyrinth of Solitude, published in 1950. Paz argued that many of the images associated with Mexico —the celebration of life, the passion for fiestas with music and dance, the raucous drinking —conceal a more complex psychology. Mexicans, he argued, are melancholic beings, and these outwards explosions of joy are attempts to cover-up an unresolved mourning emerging froma series of historical traumas that hark back to the conquest of Mexico and to the violent encounter that ended with the destruction of the Aztec civilization. Paz, who was a passionate reader of Freud in his youth, believed that these unresolved historical traumas resulted in a repetition compulsion that can be observed in many of the most famous Mexican rituals: bright celebrations full of music, song, and dance can easily degenerate into fistfights leaving revelers dead; and, in one of his most poetic images, Paz draws attention to how at every fiesta, there comes a point when the life of the party, he who has been drinking and eating and singing, inevitably plunges into an explicable melancholia, an irrational feeling of solitude. The singing gives way to a taciturn state for which the Spanish language has a beautiful word: ensimismamiento, becoming trapped in oneself. Paz believed that the nation’s unresolved traumas led to a repetition of scenes of violence, which can be seen at various points in Mexican history. After the 1968 student massacre, a dark day in which the Mexican president, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, ordered the army to shoot on peaceful student demonstration, and left dozens of young men and women dead, Paz read this event — which was one of the bloodiest in the twentieth century — as a repetition of something that had occurred before. He noted that the massacre took place steps from an Aztec pyramid, one of the few remaining structures of a city that was once called Tlatelolco and which is now part of Mexico City. This was not a coincidence: the Aztecs used pyramids as temples for human sacrifices and, five hundred years after the conquest, the student massacre was another form of sacrifice. México: Olimpiada de 1968 A Dore y Adja Junkers La limpidez (quizá valga la pena escribirlo sobre la limpieza de esta hoja) no es límpida: es una rabia (amarilla y negra acumulación de bilis en español) extendida sobre la página. ¿Por qué? La vergüenza es ira vuelta contra uno mismo: si una nación entera se avergüenza es león que se agazapa para saltar. (Los empleados municipales lavan la sangre en la Plaza de los Sacrificios). mira ahora, manchada antes de haber dicho algo que valga la pena, la limpidez. And now in English: Mexico City: The 1968 Olympiad for Dore and Adja Yunkers -- Translated by Eliot Weinberger Lucidity (perhaps it’s worth writing across the purity of this page) is not lucid it is fury (yellow and black mass of bile in Spanish) spreading over the page. Why? Guilt is anger turned against itself: if an entire nation is ashamed it is a lion poised to leap. (The municipal employees wash the blood from the Plaza of the Sacrificed.) Look now, stained before anything worth it was said: lucidity. Paz noted that sacrifices — with their share of sadism and destruction — ...
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