On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey By Paul Theroux

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Author: Paul Theroux

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The legendary travel writer drives the entire length of the US–Mexico border, then goes deep into the hinterland, on the back roads of Chiapas and Oaxaca, to uncover the rich, layered world behind today’s brutal headlines. Paul Theroux has spent his life crisscrossing the globe in search of the histories and peoples that give life to the places they call home. Now, as immigration debates boil around the world, Theroux has set out to explore a country key to understanding our current discourse: Mexico. Just south of the Arizona border, in the desert region of Sonora, he finds a place brimming with vitality, yet visibly marked by both the US Border Patrol to the north and mounting discord from within. With the same humanizing sensibility he employed in Deep South, Theroux stops to talk with residents, visits Zapotec mill workers in the highlands, and attends a Zapatista party meeting, communing with people of all stripes who remain south of the border even as family members brave the journey north. From the writer praised for his “curiosity and affection for humanity in all its forms” (New York Times Book Review), On the Plain of Snakes is an exploration of a region in conflict.

At this time of writing, The Audiobook On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey has garnered 8 customer reviews with rating of 5 out of 5 stars. Not a bad score at all as if you round it off, it’s actually a perfect TEN already. From the looks of that rating, we can say the Audiobook is Good TO READ!

Special Edition On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey with Free PDF EDITION!

Theroux, Paul (2019). On the plain of snakes: A Mexican journey. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Release date: October 8, 2019.Theroux wants to be known as a traveler rather than a tourist. However, his bias and brief and shallow knowledge distinguish him from those who study a country for a lifetime and love and know it well.The title is revealing and unrevealing. There is in Mexico no “plain of snakes.” The Aztecs came from the central highland agricultural plateau of El Bajio (Guanajuato/Queretaro) to Mexico’s Central Valley, when they settled where an Eagle with a snake was perched on a cactus. Mexico West and East is famously mountainous, and those mountains merge into the mountainous South. The South in Oaxaca and Chiapas is deeply mountainous. The catchy title tells us nothing, and misleads. The same is true of the book. Of course, the snake is omnipresent in Mexican mythology. Those who know Mexico will learn little from the book. Of the tens of millions and millions who live in and visit Mexico, Theroux encounters only a select few, not at all representative.A lover of travel narratives, from Marco Polo to Haklyut to anthropological classics to V.S. Naipal, I have read many Theroux books. They are all worth reading, but with care, because of the author’s deep biases and ignorance. He despises mere tourists, as opposed to “traveler’s” like himself, but seems blind to the many students and scholars of his countries, to those who live in and deeply love and know the country. This book shares his virtues and defects, his curiosity and his hypocrisy. His “real” Mexicans, like his “real” Africans, are romanticized rural people, the better the more separated from the modern world. In Mexico, he travelled the border from Tijuana to Brownsville/Matamoros, drove into Mexico all the way to Mexico City and then to Oaxaca and Chiapas, the poorest states with the most Indians/Indigenous. Along the way, he participated in a demonstration against the Government, met with Sub-Commandante Marcos and lectured Zapatistas in Chiapas, taught a class of writers in Mexico City, and took a Spanish class himself (he speaks Spanish, but not well) in order to meet locals. There is a curious Left-bias in the people Theroux met, chose to write about, or thinks “real.” He writes that the “real” Mexico is to be found outside the urban areas, whence his resort to Oaxaca and Chiapas. He does not allow most Mexicans—the 90%-- to be “real.” The real Mexico is urban and mestizo, 32 states in a huge country, with great diversity, the Many Mexicos of which Simpson wrote. Theroux’s slice of Mexico misses most of Mexico. He also encountered the deep and regular corruption of Mexico, when forced to pay bribes to police, but does not explore or convey that corruption well.In the opening section, he criticizes President Trump and others who express negative views of Mexico, but then goes on to recite facts from Mexicans and Americans which prove the negatives true. He does not then offer apologies for his wrong criticism.I know Mexico well, fluent in Spanish, visiting regularly since 1975, in 22 of its 32 states, living in Mexico, working with Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the US from all parts of Mexico, teaching about Mexico, and widely read in Mexican history and literature. I know all the twin border towns from Tijuana/San Isidro/San Diego to the Valley (Rio Grande Valley) and Brownsville/Matamoros. I know American and Mexican friends who live in Mexico, and others who support orphanages/schools and missions/churches in Baja, Michoacan, Oaxaca, and Chiapas. I get daily news from Juarez and small towns in Guanajuato, the US Spanish media, and daily visit with Mexicans in the US who tell what is happening in their towns and villages. For decades, I have been their lawyer, and asked their stories. The Mexico I know is not that which Theroux describes. I don’t see 92% Catholic Mexico with its daily cycle of feast days and processions in honor of The Virgin, or vibrant 8% Protestant Mexico. Theroux seems unaware of the churches of Mexico, though they dominate each town square and fill the daily lives and annual ceremonies of most Mexicans. He is more interest in the fake saint of Death than the real saints, images, and people of Mexico’s vibrant religions. I don’t see the people who make the 12th largest GNP in the world work. Where are the leaders who created the factories and jobs on the border and deep in Mexico, as in Guanajuato and Queretaro? Where are the over 1 million Americans who live in Mexico, the 40 million plus tourists who visit each year, the expatriates in the US who send $30 billion each year in remittances? Where are the businessmen and truckers who cross the border, making the two countries trading partners? Where is the commercial dynamism of Monterrey? I don’t see the teachers in local schools in Guanajuato struggling to teach, or students working their ways through college to make a better life in Mexico. I don’t see the rich central farmland of El Bajio, or the dynamism of Mexico City, Guadalajara, or Monterrey. I don’t see the people of energy and enterprize who created and took advantage of NAFTA, the new USMCA, and modern Mexico with its multiple parties, so unlike the PRI-dominated dictatorship of most of the 20th Century. Strangely, since Theroux is a writer, I don’t see awareness of the great writers on Mexico, including sociologist Oscar Lewis writing of Tepotzlan and of Mexico City’s poor, and Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz (The Labyrinth of Solitude, and his great Nobel Acceptance Speech. Paz gets a throwaway mention).There are today about 132 million Mexican citizens, and over 40 million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the United States, with 12-22 million illegal aliens from Mexico. In 1950, the Mexican population was only 28 million. The histories of the two countries are deeply intertwined, with Mexico deeply dependent upon the US for oil sales, tourism, and remittances, and well as for its citizens seeking employment. Indigenous Mexicans vary, depending upon definition. At most, by self-identification they are 21%, but most of these today speak only Spanish, and are located in the south of the country (primarily Chiapas and Oaxaca).Nor do I really see dark Mexico, the Mexico of the narco-gangs, of murders, massacres, and mutilations, of abandoned children and machismo, of lack of rule of law, of failures to prosecute crimes, and of deep police and official corruption and la mordida (the bribe). The US State Department warns Americans not even to visit many Mexican states, including all the border states, because they are so dangerous. If most of the women migrating through Mexico to enter the US are raped, Mexicans are doing this. In most Mexican towns and villages, the front doors are locked. To protect Mexicans from whom? Other Mexicans. One fourth of Mexico has fled to the United States, and one remembers that Mexico has a long history of violence, oppression, and dictatorship, where “hated” America has been the place of refuge to which Mexicans (and other Latin Americans) flee even while they excoriate the Gringo and the Yankee. In gaining independence, Mexicans merely substituted Mexican oppressors for Spanish ones. In the Revolution, millions died and millions fled. Catholic Mexico in the 1920s was attacked by the atheist Mexican Government, which criminally prosecuted and executed Catholics, as Graham Greene showed us in The Power and the Glory. Theroux does not show us the traditional and healthy Mexico of Christmas in the Mountains or the despair which led to the Civil War of Los de abajo. We actually learn very little from Theroux’s travels, which actually involve little time in Mexico, and little contact with the real Mexico. Oaxaca and Chiapas are not Mexico, though part of it: they are perhaps the most unrepresentative states of Mexico. One of the best books on Mexico is Simpson’s Many Mexicos, which tells us of the great diversity in Mexico.In this and his other works, Theroux is properly criticized for his false romanticization of rural and indigenous/native people, the Noble Savage, while criticizing those corrupted by cities and modern civilization. This means that such writers tend to seek out the minority and “oppressed” and ignore regular people. For Theroux, this means idolizing Subcommandante Marcos and his Chiapan rebels. When Theroux writes on Africa, he is often factually wrong (e.g. on failing to recognize African employees and administrators of aid programs) and spiritually wrong (when he blames much on Europeans, and leaves Africans and other indigenous off the hook for their lack of development, their superstitions, and their own crimes). He is wrong too in many of his views of Mexico and America’s dealings with Mexico. He is like Americans who idealize an Olde Ireland which never existed (That made for American Tourists: The Stage Irishman, the Island Man, the Romanticized Gaels from the West, and the made-for-tourists world of Ireland of the Welcomes) and deprecate the actual Ireland of the modern economic miracle, and the actual post-Independence Ireland of our own cultural repression. He is Rousseau, seeking and praising communist Zapatistas, their hypocritical leader, and indigenous poor Indians, while disdaining those making modern Mexico and its economy actually work, and refusing to see that repression is no less real when it is by ourselves (The Irish, or the Mexicans). Theroux’s sour relationships with the places he has lived and worked, with great writers and travel writers such as V.S. Naipul, make the point—he does not get along with the world. We are reminded of a remark from Malamud: “He took his tea without sugar, and thought the whole world bitter.” We are not meeting the people who make Mexico, nor who fill its daily life: the pastors, farmers, business leaders, middle class doctors and lawyers, officials, politicians, military and police. Where are the Mexican Rotary Club leaders, who are helping end polio and who give free surgeries to the poor? Where are the Boy Scouts, with their love of Mexico and joy in nature? Where is the beautiful Mexico of Mexico Desconocido? Theroux is notable as much for what he leaves out as what he puts in. He gives partial knowledge and the illusion of knowledge through charming writing style.

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