MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In this essay I explore an alternative role played by Mexico in the imagination of U.S. writers from the 1940s. Both popular and intellectual portrayals of the country typically accentuated the “colorful,” “primitive” or “exotic” aspects of Mexican culture, particularly in the 1920s and 30s (after the violent period of the Mexican Revolution had ended). In search of “authenticity,” in contrast to the industrialized and modernizing United States, such viewpoints tend to emphasize the regional and provincial aspects of Mexico in contrast to the cosmopolitan qualities of “international” culture rooted in Europe. While this viewpoint persists even today, I focus on works from the years surrounding World War II that avoid such impulses, choosing instead to place the regional and provincial settings of Mexico on the larger continuum of landscape and culture that includes both the country and the city in a reciprocal relationship. Writers as diverse as Dorothy Baker, Ray Bradbury, John Steinbeck and Tennessee Williams universalize the specificity of the Mexican setting in a way that reinforces the knowable aspects of human environments amid the international confusion and destruction of the Second World War. Each seeks a sense of harmony as their narratives move from unknown lands to hopeful visions not of a perfect and universal world, but a world in which the foreign becomes known. Such lived experience in which the provincial informs the global becomes the mark of a truly cosmopolitan perspective.