This Way to Mexico: The Family Entrance: The Inviting Story of Mexicans at Home

THE DAYS OF OFELIA. By Gertrude Diamant. Houghton Mifflin Company. $2.75

MEXICO is as difficult to compress into a book and deliver to a reader’s understanding as are the manifold contents of a long-lived-in house to ship and set up in another dwelling in another place. Books and articles on Mexico have poured from the presses in this Good Neighbor era, but the formulae for explanation still fall far short of mathematical precision. There is social addition and subtraction in Mexico, but little blending. For this reason perhaps, the microcosmic approach to Mexican life has produced the books with the greatest reality.

Miss Diamant, an American archaeologist working in Mexico City, focuses attention on a little Mexican girl, Ofelia, who had insinuated herself into the author’s employ as a servant. The day-by-day experiences of the employer and her little maid are recreated with sympathetic insight. Purely personal relationships are delicately dignified, tinged with humorous pathos and patient courtesy. The outer world of man and of nature is almost palpably remorseless. There is no good working method for understanding its action, and thus avoiding or taking advantage of its consequences. No hay remedio. There is no remedy. With this phrase Miss Diamant’s Mexican friends and associates express their lot.

The author went to Mexico to give intelligence tests to an Indian group. She had to live in terms of the Mexican medium white-collar class. She was not insulated from working Mexico like the tourist, nor was she affiliated with the directive level of Mexico, like the international group of government agents, business heads, or “cultural relations boys.” She apparently was not seeking the nirvana of absolute creation. She was living in the world of ordinary people, in a small, ordinary household with those who do not have private wires to the mighty, nor yet to the “ soul ” of the people.

This book is valuable not only for its literary charm but also for its bearing on the whole process of interAmerican — or, for that matter, international — understanding. There is usually a way for directive groups to understand each other. Those who use their minds and pens professionally likewise can find means of communication. But when there are millions of people hermetically sealed from one another by custom, habit, and economic status, anything more than superficial internationalism, or even pan-Americanism, seems an impossible goal. The elaborate procedures of economic loans, textbook exchange, radio programs, newspaper communiqués, with which the literate groups of various countries approach one another, appear fantastically superficial when scaled off against the scene revealed by Miss Diamant.

Miss Diamant discloses the dignity of human relationships among these poor people of Mexico. A child in Mexico has a status and receives a respect from elders that is inconceivable in North America. Even our progressive methods in education, while rendering lip service to the individuality of the child, basically are trying to change him. Humanity among these poor people is restricted to deeds within their power, not to blueprinting a City of Heaven.

In our Western civilization, there is an economic and intellectual framework which guides our growth and walls out the infinite menace of natural forces. The underprivileged in Mexico, some 90 per cent of the population, do not have such a lattice to screen off the processes of the laws of nature. Crop failure, famine, illness without benefit of scientific medicine, economic ruin, all are very close to a resident in Mexico. Perhaps that is why individuals in Mexico show great sweetness to one another and have a keen appreciation of social if not of legal rights.

The Days of Ofelia is an enchanting book, fit to rank with Spratling’s Little Mexico, Flandrau’s Viva Mexico, and Madame Calderon de la Barca’s Life in Mexico, John O’Hara Cosgrave’s illustrations reinforce the mood of the book, the atmosphere of a city whose working classes live as they did in their rural pueblos. Miss Diamant has given us a charming study of Mexico, the flavor of which can be appreciated just as much by a casual reader as by an ardent Mexicanophile. I am going to add The Days of Ofelia to my list of twenty must books for Mexico.

GEORGE C. VAILLANT