Mexico

[Macmillan, $.3.00]

THIS brief and readable volume is one of the latest additions to the flow of books concerning our Southern neighbor which threatens to become a flood. When, four decades ago, I began first to take note of such books, — for personal reasons, — to buy, borrow, and read, they were a mere trickle.

The increase began under the Diaz ‘reign,’ 18791911. But ‘the Revolution’ — in the singular and with a capital —of 1911 to 1917 made a real bid for our attention. Had there been no other reason, the loud wails for ‘protection’ of sonic thirty or forty thousands of our citizens, caught in that tropic tornado, could not fail to be heard. Mexico put herself ‘on the map.’

Mr. Chase is an analyst, He sees the Mexican tal cual ex, the ‘American in Mexico no less. And he is for the Mexican, for Mexico. ‘ I like Mexico. I like its color, its violence, its raw tumbling mountains, green checkerboard valleys, dizzy trails, purple sky and stabbing sun.

. . . I like the way Indians look, the way they walk, the polite “buenaw tardes" they fling one on the trail; their dignity I like, their utter lack of pretense, their disregard of clocks, the tilt of their sombreros, and the fling of the sarape across the shoulder. . . . I do not like white Mexicans so well, nor the cities they live in, nor their taste in interior decoration.’

This credo will make it clear that Mr. Chase does not share the horror felt by Mr. Wallace Thompson concerning ‘indianization.’ In fact he bluntly (and properly) rates the gloomy forebodings on this head in the latter’s book as ‘the ravings of a disordered mind.’ Building on Dr. Griiening, Mr. Redfiekl, Miss Brenner, Dr. Gamio, and others, he supplies from personal observation engaging analytical studies of Mexico’s indigenous culture, especially of the village organization and life, the contrast between cooperation and individualism, between handicrafts and the machine, Indian and white. For the citizens of the United States living in Mexico yet refusing to he naturalized, or even to learn Spanish, despising the Mexicans, their government and all their ways, mourning still for ‘the good old days of Diaz,’ he has few kind words. One of the best passages in the book is that iu which he gives a descriptive definition of the terms ‘Mexican’ and ‘American’ — as applied, I mean, to human beings.

The book is brief, not documented, but it conveys much information and is sprightly reading. One could pick a few minor flaws, but I refrain. With a single exception. The Revolution’s debt to Carranza has never been appraised. Obregdn’s propaganda against his Chief, much needed to veil his own dishonor, still dominates the atmosphere. If Mr. Chase and Dr. Omening will secure and examine the proyecto of a constitution submitted by Carranza, and mainly the fruitage of his own thinking, to the Convention of 1916-1917, they will discover in it all the creative elements in the instrument that was finally adopted, minus some of its most glaring defects.

Typographically this book is almost beyond reproach. The illustrations by Diego Rivera arc, in their way, as illuminating as the text. But one could wish that a house of the standing of Macmillan would do the Spanish language the courtesy of preserving its accents. They arc, incidentally, a crutch to the reader who knows little of the pronunciation of Spanish words.

GEORGE B. WINTON