The Borderlands as Mirror: ProjecTion and

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The Borderlands as Mirror:
Projection and Interpenetration
in Carlos Fuentes’ Gringo Viejo
Gregory Stephens
UNIVERSITY OF WEST INDIES-MONA
OVERVIEW
In Gringo Viejo Carlos Fuentes describes the Mexican revolution as
“ese remolino que arrancó a los hombres y a las mujeres de sus raíces y
los mandó volando lejos.” All prior social relations have been upended in
this “historiographic metafiction”1 in which Fuentes examines the return
of repressed memories that intercultural and international encounters on
the borderlands occasion. For Fuentes, the borderland is a mirror where
individuals, cultures, and nations confront their “other.” In this liminal
space, forced outside their comfort zone, people see / imagine / remember
previously unrecognized dimensions of themselves. In this essay2 I apply
the theory of interpenetration to various sorts of in-between-ness in Fuentes’
novel. Examining the theme of mirroring in the novel, I analyze the ways
in which characters project psychological, “racial,” and national obsessions
onto the various mirrors that Fuentes employs: a ballroom mirror, the mirror
of nature, intergenerational relations, and intercultural relations.
As a text that crosses boundaries of difference, Gringo Viejo belongs to
the domain of cultural and historical borderlands.3 This concept has roots in
social science discourse about frontiers—defined by Lamar and Thompson
(1981:7) as “a zone of interpenetration between two previously distinct
peoples.” Bradley Parker (2006: 80) sees frontiers as a “complicated matrix
of overlapping boundaries.” However, partly because of a “stigma” attached
to the term frontier (the backlash against the Turner Thesis), historians have
suggested alternatives such as the “contact zone,” or a “middle space.”4
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59
Borderlands has come to be favored by many social scientists over frontiers because it suggests a series of “contested boundaries” which “define
a geo-political space,” as Parker puts it. Literary critics have also found the
concept useful to analyze a body of literature that transgresses binary divisions between nations, languages, and cultures. In this sense, both the social
science and the literary uses of borderlands seem applicable to Fuentes.
The political, cultural, sexual and psychological intermixtures that
Fuentes describes may be specific to the “contact zone” between the U.S.
and Mexico, but they can also be compared to similar processes going on
in other borderlands around the world.5 In the Borderlands according to
Fuentes, families, cultures and nations are torn apart because their memories
or versions of history are in conflict. But sometimes, in the aftermath of
cataclysmic change on the borderlands, a new script emerges, Fuentes suggests. In Gringo Viejo, the main characters are in the process of questioning
the schema that structure how they live.6 A revisioning of personal identity
is portrayed as the base from which the nation is also reimagined, and
rewritten. For Fuentes, this process is normative in borderlands, emerging
especially in times of crisis, such as the Mexican revolution, where human
beings are highly susceptible to the kinds of interpenetration that the novel
visualizes, in an often highly cinematic language.7
MEMORIOUS DUST AND RECOVERING MEMORY
The novel begins with Harriet Winslow sitting alone in her Washington,
D.C. apartment, trying to remember her experiences during the Mexican
revolution. We see the narrative in the “darkroom of her mind” (Boldy 1992:
489). Winslow’s recovering memory is much like a Russian doll: inside
each emerging memory are other memories, which in turn open to more
previously concealed memories. For instance, Winslow remembers the Old
Gringo’s memories, but she also remembers the Mexicans remembering the
Old Gringo; through these characters collective memories begin to emerge,
as the Old Gringo and various Mexican characters begin to express the
familial or national memories that have shaped their individual memory.
At age 31, Winslow, a “spinster” teacher, was hired as a governess on
the Miranda hacienda in Chihuahua, but its owners had already fled before
her arrival, facing an invasion by one of Pancho Villa’s divisions. Coming
from the U.S., “su tierra sin memoria” (11),8 Harriet is confronted with
Mexico, a nation burdened by an excess of historical memory. Winslow,
“sinécdoque de la tradicional opinión pública norteamericana” (González
1999-2000: 18), is representative of the United States in a variety of ways:
in her Puritanism, her missionary complex, the ways in which her life is
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built around a lie, and her lack of memory.9
Harriet has repressed the truth of interraciality, desertion, and fraud
in her own family, we will learn. These repressed memories leave her
unprepared to process what she encounters in Mexico. There, through an
inter-ethnic romance that mirrors (and evokes the memory of) her father’s
affinity for darker women, Harriet will experience an awakening. She will
become conscious of the psychological complexes and political ideologies
that have led her to project her fears or passions onto her Mexican others.
As the Mexicans as well as the Old Gringo begin to penetrate her defenses,
Harriet’s repressed memories return with growing force.10
In this postmodernist text in a binational setting, memory asserts itself
through “multiple, dissenting points of view,” as Chalene Helmuth notes
(1997: 109). Harriet-as-narrator must weave together and reconcile dissonant
memories—both her own, which come to consciousness in Mexico, and
those of the Old Gringo, and various Mexicans, who challenge her sometimes delusional worldview. Fuentes presents this recovery of repressed
memory—and the coming to consciousness about projections—as a cornerstone of the healing and maturation process, not only for Harriet, but for
North Americans, and indeed, for all residents of the borderlands.
But at the beginning, these memories are not accessible. Of everything
that happened in Mexico, and of all the memory she recovered there, only a
fragment remains: the memory of crossing the bridge (to El Paso), looking
back into Mexico (carrying the body of the Old Gringo), and thinking that
she saw “al polvo organizarse en una especie de cronología silenciosa que
le pedía recordar” (11). This advice runs counter to what Miss Winslow is
told by her mother, and implicitly by her country: to forget the past, and to
repeat the lies that have become a part of their social fabric: to cling to myths
that reinforce the national ideology, rather than confront the complexity
that haunts even the most conservative and patriotic of families. But these
“messy” stories cannot be publicly admitted, or even privately admitted to
consciousness, lest the truth-telling bring down the house (both familial
and national), Samson-like.
Both Tomás Arroyo (Villa’s general) and the Old Gringo had told
Harriet to remember, to be truthful, and to carry her truthful memories back
with her, in order to create a new, more honest life. Back in Washington
D.C., all that happened in Mexico seems far away: marginal to her life at
the presumptive “centro del mundo” (13). Still, that “polvo memorioso”
in Fuentes’ narrative, and in Winslow’s recovering memory, seems almost
personified: “insistía en organizarse sólo para ella y atravesar la frontera”…
It swept over the continent, across the landmarks of nature that have been
mythologized in songs like “America the Beautiful” (“amber waves of
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grain” and “purple mountain’s majesty” in the song are transmuted into “los
trigales, los llanos y los montes humeantes” in the novel) (11). This dust
sweeps away forgetfulness, right up to Harriet’s apartment on the Potomac
River, where she sits alone and remembers.
Right away we can glimpse several kinds of penetration and interpenetration: Mexico’s “memorious dust” has penetrated the U.S., but this
dust was not stirred up by Mexicans alone. Different histories, memories
and cultures are penetrating and seeding each other, producing strange new
fruit. Arroyo has sexually penetrated Harriet, but her consciousness has also
been penetrated by him, and by the Mexican revolution, in a way that points
towards interpenetration. We also see that the natural world can penetrate
the urban environment, even at “el centro del mundo.” Finally, we are clued
in early that this center of the world is an ideological claim. Now that the
“margins” have penetrated the center, the language of empire, of center
and margins, must be interrogated.11 Harriet Winslow will have to develop
a new language and consciousness capable of processing the interpenetrations she has experienced. Allowing memory to come to consciousness in
an intersubjective context, she begins assimilating its lessons.
DEFINING INTERPENETRATION AND PROJECTION
Both interpenetration and projection, as I use them in this essay, have
their roots in the concept of intersubjectivity. As developed by child psychologists, this theory denies that in practice an individual’s ego, and the
contents of the psyche, can ever be independent of external social reality.12
Psychic contents are socio-cultural in origin. Christian de Quincey refers
to intersubjectivity as a “mutuality” that “relies on co-creative nonphysical
presence, and brings distinct subjects into being out of a prior matrix of
relationships.” The implication of this theory on borderlands, write the editors of Debate Feminista, is that the function of contact between subjects on
frontiers is “la generación de múltiples zonas de contacto que reconfiguran
las identidades y sus espacios.” It is significant that this reconfiguration out
of a shared matrix does not require agreement. “In fact, the vitality of this
form of intersubjectivity is that it is often heightened by authentic disagreement and exploration of differences,” emphasizes de Quincey.13
Borderlands themselves, then, are a shared matrix which reconfigure
their subjects. Interpenetration can seem counter-intuitive to those whose
primary schema of human relations is of oppression and victimization,
i.e., unilateral penetration. So it is important to proceed from the root verb,
penetrate. By examining common-sense usages of penetration, we can
recognize that the term often infers a mutual penetration, or some degree
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of intersubjectivity.
1) penetration as incursion—an attack that penetrates into enemy territory.
Armies that penetrate enemy territory will most often be penetrated by
counter-attacks, and neither side will escape unharmed, or unchanged.
Furthermore, if we were to examine the psychological motivations of
individual soldiers, we would find that their motives inevitably come
out of an intersubjective context. For instance, the Old Gringo, while
fighting with Arroyo, imagines an Oedipal drama in which he is killing his father, but also, symbolically, the Confederacy in the U.S. Civil
War.14
2) penetration as permeation—the act of entering into or through something;
“the penetration of upper management by women.”15 But once women,
or minorities, have penetrated the “glass ceiling,” they in turn will be
penetrated by corporate culture. Some in upper management will have
aspects of their thinking or habits challenged by the new presence of the
“other.” The result will be something like interpenetration; at least, a new
type of intersubjectivity will emerge. I will later apply this perspective
to the ways in which Harriet Winslow’s repressed memories about her
father permeate her upper consciousness, and thereby transform her
worldview.
3) Penetration as cultural understanding. A critic says: “I haven’t penetrated
that CD yet.” Penetration in this sense suggests moving into the internal
logic of the work of art, or digesting it. This implies that the spirit of this
artform will penetrate the person’s consciousness. They will assimiliate
it. The collective consumption of commercial art-forms infers several
forms of penetration (advertising, for instance), but the end result will
be something like interpenetration.
I use the term interpenetration in historical borderlands because I want
to retain the sense of intrusion that is inherent in the root word, penetration.
I do not want to lose sight of the violence, and sometimes the violation that
this process often entails. But I want to argue that the varieties of penetration that we can see in Gringo Viejo often precede, and to some degree prestructure, a resulting volatile state of interpenetration. Even if the resulting
new level of understanding is unwilling, it is nevertheless part and parcel
of the process of interpenetration.
Similarly, projections cannot be viewed as merely a one-way process.
Although they are psychological phenomena they occur in an intersubjec-
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63
tive context, and are thus also a psycho-social and arguably socio-cultural
phenomena. As a Freudian concept, projection was defined by Laplanche
and Pontalis in The Language of Psycho-analylsis as “qualities…which
the subject refuses to recognize or rejects in himself, are expelled from the
self and located in another person or thing.” However, the theory has been
most fully developed by C.G. Jung and his progeny. In layman’s terms,
Jung noted that “we naively suppose that people are as we imagine them
to be….[W]e still go on naively projecting our own psychology into our
fellow human being. In this way everyone creates for himself a series of
more or less imaginary relationships based essentially on projection.”16 This
is often a delusory state of mind: since the phenomenon of projection often
involves persistent misjudgements, it is akin to the theory of misrecognition.17 Whether through hatred or “blind love,” our perception is distorted,
sometimes to the point of “pathological delusions,” or collectively, “whole
delusory systems.” As Marie Von Franz has observed (1987: 2), these “are
by no means easily dissolved through improved insight.” As Freud said, “we
often see the schema triumphing over the experience of the individual.”18
The schema continue to be projected, Procrustean style, onto experiential
domains which seem unconnected or only loosely related to our complex.
Thus as can be seen with both Tomás Arroyo and the Old Gringo,
when a son has experienced his father as a tyrant, later in life he will tend
to “project the quality of tyranny onto authority figures and father figures
[and will] behave just as tyrannically himself—though unconsciously,” to
quote Van Franz again (1987: 2-3).
On the collective level, group projections are a form of “collective
contagion” in which a community or society repeatedly makes the same
errors of judgement, and becomes hostile and defensive when its irrationality is pointed out. The delusional system becomes encoded in the official
discourse of the society, “so that their mistaken judgement passes officially
for the acceptable description of reality” (von Franz 1987: 4). Fuentes has
the Old Gringo describe this phenomenon as deeply rooted and indeed
normative in the U.S. national psyche. Only through personal tragedies, or
national trauma, it seems, do the people engaged in such projections (the
sustained delusion that there were “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, for
instance) begin to seek to correct their misjudgements. One can see easily
that Harriet Winslow is a carrier of certain group delusions characteristic of
the United States (the missionary complex which compels representatives
of the U.S. to “bring civilization” to supposedly backward people).
Winslow clearly has created a set of “imaginary relationships based
essentially on projections.” But her persistent misjudgements and misrecognitions inspire such strong criticisms, and counter-projections, that
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she is eventually forced to analyze the source of her errors (psychological
complexes and political delusions). Jung’s diagnosis can be applied either
to individuals or societies and cultures: “Consciousness can hardly exist in
a state of complete projection…Through withdrawal of projections, conscious knowledge developed slowly,” he wrote (1970: 140), a process that
I believe describes Harriet Winslow’s evolution quite well.
One should also acknowledge that positive qualities can also be projected outward: worship, or the general attitude of adoration, is also clearly
a form of projection. But in interpersonal or cultural terms, this also tends
to lead to an equally delusory over-valuation of the object, as in the case
of hero worship, or when “love is blind.”
The interpersonal relations between Harriet and Arroyo, between Arroyo and the Old Gringo, and between the Old Gringo and Harriet, are all
characterized, to some degree, by obsessive projections. The projections,
arising out of the particular complex of each character, inspire counterprojections. The resulting phenomenon, intersecting projections, I will treat
as a psychological sub-category of interpenetration.
TYPES OF INTERPENETRATION IN GRINGO VIEJO
A) Memories
In the second chapter, the “memorious dust” seems to be traced back to
a scene in which Mexican soldiers are digging up the Old Gringo’s corpse.
This disinterral, along with Harriet Winslow’s subsequent reburial of the Old
Gringo in her father’s empty tomb in the Arlington Cemetery, are bookends
of the novel’s central symbolic act. While excavating the Old Gringo, the
Mexicans are forced to confront their memory of him, and hence of the U.S.,
which they see while looking into his face (which in death is like a mirror
to them). In bringing the Old Gringo’s corpse back from Mexico, Harriet is
forcing herself to confront her memories of her father, but also, implicitly,
the way in which she thinks about and remembers Latin America.
The Mexicans realize that the North Americans think about frontiers in
very different ways. “Ellos, los gringos,” noted Coronel Frutos García, “se
pasaron la vida cruzando fronteras, las suyas y las ajenas” (13). His troops
process this understanding of cultural difference primarily in relation to the
Old Gringo. Fuentes has modeled this character on the U.S. writer Ambrose
Bierce, who went against the grain of the American empire in recognizing
the equality, at times even the superiority, of other cultural traditions—at
least in Fuentes’ fictional re-imagining.19
The Old Gringo crossed into Old Mexico in the hopes that Pancho
Villa would shoot him, so that he could die a heroic death in the manner
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65
of his choosing. He was enacting a symbolic penance for personal failings
(especially as a father), and for his inability, as a journalist, to spark public opposition to the relentless march (yes, the penetrations) of American
empire. What the Mexicans saw in Bierce/the Old Gringo was a figure
that seemed to have stepped out of myth: specifically, the archetype of the
Western hero, who is always a solitary fighter.20 “No tenía familia,” one of
the Mexicans recalls as he is exhumed (14). But they also recognize that,
despite the Old Gringo’s disconnect from family and nation, his motivations
were closely connected to the memory of both his father and his fatherland:
“su padre había venido, de soldado también, cuando nos invadieron hace
más de medio siglo” (15).
While the Old Gringo’s motivations never quite seem to escape the
bitterness of personal memory, the Mexicans with their family memory
embody the “collective individuality” that Fuentes identifies as characteristic
of “my culture.”21 Whereas the gringos seemed to be able to keep moving
because they did not have a memory of a connection to a specific piece
of the earth, the Mexicans, prior to the Revolution, seldom wandered far
from their place of birth precisely because the earth was soaked in so many
familial or tribal memories.
Looking into “los ojos azules hundidos del muerto,” Colonel García
speaks to him as a representative of one collective (the Mexicans of memory)
professing to another collective (the memory-less gringos): “¿Nunca piensan ustedes que toda esta tierra fue nuestra? Ah, nuestro rencor y nuestra
memoria van juntos” (17). As with so many themes in Gringo Viejo, this
one echoes later in the text through “duplication and mirroring” (Boldy
1992: 495). Arroyo tells the man he calls “Indiana General”: “Casi nada
crece aquí. Menos el recuerdo y el rencor” (58).
As in a cinematic dissolve, Fuentes’ narrative, embedded within Harriet Winslow’s memory, then goes back in time, to the Old Gringo’s point
of view, as Bierce crosses the Rio Grande, headed towards his desired date
with destiny. Entering Mexico, his personal obsessions inevitably become
intertwined with the historical memory and resentment of the Mexicans.
He crosses a frontier which, for the North Americans, is a closely guarded
line in space, but which in Spanish, as la frontera, is a region which is
imprecise in its boundaries, and which is still being fought over by rival
groups, and shared by extended families who pay at best only cursory respects to more rigid definitions of boundaries—be they political, personal,
or cultural. In the novel, Fuentes makes many references to the fluidity of
the borderlands—our-stories of extended kinship, contestation, and interpenetration, including Pancho Villa’s incursions into the U.S., and General
Pershing’s invasion of Mexico in chase of Villa.22
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Fuentes’ narration of what the fictional Bierce sees, hears, and smells as
he rides south (on a white horse, dressed in black) emphasizes how culture
shapes our interpretation of “reality” in different ways. Immediately, the
Old Gringo is cut off from Anglo-American understandings of the frontier.
Having searched “en vano su idea de la frontera Americana” he looks back
to see the bridge burst into flames (18).31 La frontera of the Mexico-U.S.
borderlands was not a dividing line located at an imaginary center of the
Rio Grande River. The demarcation where the domain of the gringos ended
and the land of the Mexicans began was unclear; “La línea del encuentro se
alejó mientras el viejo avanzó” (11). But soon enough, all his senses remind
him of difference: “Se sintió como un gigantesco monstruo albino en un
mundo reservado por el sol para su pueblo amado” (22).
At a chance meeting with Arroyo and his inner circle, the Old Gringo
gains entry by using a Colt .44 to decapitate the eagle on a Mexican peso.
Like the hallucinogenic eagle of the national seal at the beginning of Ralph
Ellison’s Juneteenth that will not stay put, this eagle also seems to symbolize
national instability. Here we see the erosion, undermining, or delegitimation
of the “dominant” interpretations of national symbols. The eagle for both
the United States and Mexico is polyvocal: it represents not only freedom,
or national identity, but also the role of predator that has been a recurring
nightmare in the politics of both nations.24
Later, Arroyo gives the Old Gringo a lesson on the differences between
“la historia de los libros que era la historia del gringo” and “la historia de
esta tierra… este archivo del desierto.” Although Arroyo is illiterate, he
has access to other sorts of literacy. “Yo soy analfabeta, pero también me
acuerdo” (35-36). As they cross by train the immense expanse of the former
Miranda estate in the Chihuahuan desert, the General “se pegó repetidas
veces con el dedo índice en la sien: todas las historias están aquí en mi
cabeza, toda una biblioteca de palabras; la historia de mi pueblo, mi aldea,
nuestro dolor” (37).
But memory can also be confining. As Senator Sunraider says in
Juneteenth, to escape bondage to the past we must know how to forget as
well as to remember. Personal and collective emancipation requires us to
“remember selectively, creatively” (Ellison 1999: 19). But Arroyo remembers obsessively. The more he remembers his childhood—spawned by his
father’s rape of an indigenous woman, and excluded from the “good life”
that he felt was his birthright—the less free he seems to be. By contrast,
Harriet’s recovering memory of her father is libratory. Fuentes’ text demonstrates that there are no standard recipes for how to deal with memory
and trauma. Arroyo’s father represents the feudal world that the Mexican
revolution tried to destroy. Harriet Winslow’s father was a forerunner of a
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67
more inclusive United States still trying to be born.
B) International relations—a funhouse mirror
The paternal legacies that Gringo Viejo explores cross generations,
oceans, and national boundaries. The paternal penetrations (familial and
national) occasion counter-penetrations; then individuals and cultures which
are indelibly shaped by this history of interpenetrations. The U.S. penetrated
Cuba and Mexico, and yet Cuba penetrated Harriet’s father; eventually, both
Cuba and Mexico penetrate Harriet, and through her, the United States.
The Old Gringo’s father was part of the U.S. invasion and occupation of
Mexico in 1848, but the text also indicates that Mexico has penetrated his
consciousness in some ways. This informs how the Old Gringo tries to teach
Harriet about the relationship of the U.S. with Mexico and Latin America,
and also pre-structures in important ways his relationship with Arroyo.
Fuentes locates much of the Old Gringo’s teachings, along with
numerous other kinds of intentional and unintentional lessons, within a
Versailles-model ballroom on the Miranda hacienda with a floor-to-ceiling
mirror. Here, several characters glimpse the link between their “family
memory” and an international context. This ballroom mirror is a dominant
symbol in the novel. Fuentes has long portrayed the Mexican revolution as
a social mirror—especially to the previously marginalized campesinos and
indigenous peoples who form the bulk of Arroyo’s troops. In The Buried
Mirror Fuentes recounted the scene when Zapata’s troops entered Mexico
City in 1914; when they occupied the palaces of the upper class, they “saw
themselves reflected in the mirror of other people for the first time.”25
The ballroom mirror is not a regular mirror, but something closer to
spectacle, where new reflections are revealed: it is a hall of mirrors in which
all who enter see distorted reflections of themselves, or merely see what they
want to see. “¿Te viste en el espejo?” the Old Gringo asks Harriet repeatedly. He is trying to hold a mirror up to her North American preconceptions.
When the gringos travel abroad they tend to project blinkered preoccupations
onto the world, so that all the world becomes a mirror, revealing what the
North Americans expect to see. And what the gringos project, and “see,” is
some replica of themselves—which prevents U.S. travelers from looking
directly at what different cultures really contain, or reveal.
The ballroom was meant to “reproducir, en una ronda de placeres
perpétua” the steps of visiting couples from cities such as Chihuahua, El
Paso, or neighboring haciendas (44). This ballroom is a replica of European
culture imported into the middle of cattle country in the high Mexican desert.
The elite couples in this remote borderland could watch themselves danc-
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ing, and watch other people watching themselves, and watch other couples
watching other dancers watching them watch themselves—an endless series
of reflected interpenetrating gazes which perpetuated the illusion of living
within the spectacle of European elite culture. It is important to note that the
Miranda hacienda was half the size of the state of Chihuahua , and that it
took two days to cross the estate by train, across tracks probably funded by
the North Americans and Europeans who bought the Miranda’s beef. Thus,
the hacienda is a space larger than many European counties, which exists as
a sort of semi-autonomous fiefdom that has not been fully integrated into
the emerging nation-state.
Different characters see different things in this “gallery of mirrors.”
Arroyo’s troops were at first “Paralizados por sus propias imágines…Fueron
capturados por el laberinto de espejos” (44). They had never seen their whole
bodies before; only a fleeting reflection while shaving in a creek (26). So
when the troops and their women enter the ballroom, they are out of their
element. But self-recognition leads to a new consciousness, as they begin to
“connect the dots,” or put together the fragmented images. Los de abajo (the
underclass rebels) murmur: “Mira, eres tú…Soy yo. Somos nosotros” (45).
The words made the rounds, and a new collective identity is re-produced in
the round. The revolutionaries achieve a new level of group self-awareness
through reflection in a European mirror, which reveals previously unseen
facets of their identity.
From Harriet’s perspective, this imagined Europe in the middle of
Chihuahua is “violated” by Arroyo’s revolutionary troops, who invade the
parquet floor, scratching it with their spurs as they dance to norteña music,
rather than a European waltz. This appearance of “barbarians at the gates”
dismays Miss Winslow, a true believer in the church of private property
of the U.S.. She imagines her mission to be the protection of this property
until the return of the Mirandas, its rightful owners, and her employers. The
carnivaleque “misuse” of private property awakens Harriet’s full-fledged
missionary complex:
—Mírelos, lo que esta gente necesita es educación, no
rifles. Una buena lavada seguida de unas cuantas lecciones
sobre cómo hacemos las cosas en los Estados Unidos, y se
acabó este desorden.
—¿Los va a civilizar?—dijo secamente el Viejo.
—Exactamente. Y desde mañana mismo. (46)
As the Old Gringo repeats his question, over and over, “Harriet, ¿te
viste en el espejo del salón de baile cuando entramos hoy en la noche?”
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69
(47), it becomes clear that she can see neither herself, nor her would-be
subjects. She is still projecting the “civilizing mission” onto the Mexicans.
She wants to ask the Old Gringo, “¿Cuál es tu lugar aquí?” (48). Which is
what she is really asking herself, of course. They are trying to place each
other in a contested space in the hall of mirrors of the borderlands. But the
old images, icons, memories, and scripts no longer fit.
“Tu padre se fue a Cuba y ahora tú te vas a México,” Harriet’s mother
had told her. “Qué manía de los Winslow con el patio trasero” (49). This
is the old script: the gringos think of Latin America as their patio trasero.
A variety of people try to point Harriet towards a new script, including the
Old Gringo, Arroyo, and other Mexicans. Colonel García, the intellectual
of Arroyo’s troops, tells her, after she has tried to implement her civilizing mission: “Podemos gobernarnos a nosotros mismos, se lo aseguro,
señorita” (66).26
By novel’s end, Harriet will have metamorphosed into a pan-Americanist, if not precisely an anti-imperialist. When she comes back into the
United States with the Old Gringo’s corpse, and faces the national news
media, the narrator tells us that she had crossed a Rubicon of sorts: the two
Gringos “vinieron a México, él conscientemente, ella sin darse cuenta, a
encontrar la siguiente frontera de la consciencia norteamericana, la más
difícil” (176). Which would be to cross into a de-centered understanding
of the United States of America as one nation state amongst many in the
Americas, a hemisphere in which a majority speak Spanish. Crossing that
frontier would require confronting, and beginning to find a cure for, the
missionary complex of the United States. In short, it requires Harriet to
recall her projections.
So when members of the national media ask Harriet questions such
as whether she will “testimoniar sobre la barbarie imperante en México…
para que le traigamos el progreso y la democracia a México?” (175-6),
Harriet responds: “¿Le traigamos? ¿Quiénes?” (176). And in that italicized
we (implicit in Spanish, explicit in English) is the core of her transformed
political consciousness: she no longer perceives that “we” in the same terms,
as being separate from and superior to Mexico. So when she is asked by
reporters if she wants the U.S. to “salvar a México para el progreso y la
democracia,” Miss Winslow responds with vehemence: “No, no, yo quiero
aprender a vivir con México, no quiero salvarlo” (177).
Harriet’s confrontation of her own missionary impulses, and her own
repressed memories of interracial and international relations, is a gradual
process whose outcome never appears certain. Harriet arrives thinking that
“father knows best.” Although she eventually loses the illusion of “saving”
some of the unwashed masses of Mexico, clearly sometimes the knowledge
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she brings from the fatherland is “superior,” or does at least have a “saving” potential.
There is a marvelous scene in which Harriet saves the life of the twoyear-old child of the camp prostitute, La Garduña.27 She realizes that the
child only lived because she had spanked her buttocks so forcefully. “Yo me
sentí un gusto enorme en azotarla. La salvé con cólera” (97).
Harriet is still enacting a version of that earlier, Puritanical vision of
“lessons on how we do things in the United States,” “a good scrubbing” that
will “civilize” these chaotic peoples. The disciplinary father, even through
the agency of a somewhat meek spinster woman, is applying the necessary
discipline to the unruly child, and thereby saving that child as its own parents
(familial or national) were apparently incapable of doing.
It is through her affair with Arroyo, which brings to light her repressed
recognition of her father’s own interracial proclivities, that Harriet begins to
reconsider and then to rewrite that old script about her “predestined” duty
as an agent of a “redeemer nation” (Tuveson 1968).
C) Projection of Father Complexes
“Qué impalpable…es la información que un padre
hereda de todos sus padres y transmite a todos sus hijos.”
(79)
Just before leading a calvary charge against federal troops, the Old
Gringo’s mind is 50 years removed, back in the U.S. Civil War. “Quería
lo que soñó: el drama revolucionario del hijo contra el padre.” The qualifying dreamed is important: “habia soñado que su padre militaba con la
Confederación contra Lincoln” (58). As a young man as well as un viejo,
the Old Gringo wanted to do the right thing: he wanted to be on the right
side—against slavery, against empire. And he needed for his father to be
on the wrong side. Some readers of Gringo Viejo may get the impression
that the title character’s father in fact fought to defend slavery. But the Old
Gringo reveals himself at numerous points in time to be an unreliable narrator (as does Harriet).28 His schema—a “Club de Parricidas” (70)—calls
for his father to be his enemy; therefore, he dreams and fantasizes about
a “revolutionary drama,” and projects that private psycho-drama onto the
Federales. By killing the imagined biological father, which the Old Gringo
projects onto the Federal soldiers in the Mexican revolution, he will also
dispense with the haunting memory of another father figure that Bierce feels
has corrupted him: William Randoph Hearst.
But what the elder Bierce actually said about Mexico, in Fuentes’ imag-
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71
ining, is quite different from Hearst’s saber-rattling. Harriet remembers the
following conversation with the Old Gringo, when Arroyo puts his tongue
in her ear as they dance. That sexual tongue also becomes a cultural tongue,
which continues the “reverse education” the Old Gringo had predicted. So
something of the Mexican perspective comes across the generations, and
across national boundaries, relayed from the father’s experience in Mexico
to his son, the journalist, who then conveys this revisionist history to Harriet
by way of Arroyo’s penetrating tongue:
Pero el Viejo le habría dicho que en México no había
nada que someter y nada que salvar.
—Esto es lo que nos cuesta entender a nosotros porque
nuestros antepasados conquistaron la nada mientras que aquí
había una raza civilizada. Eso me lo contó mi padre después
de la Guerra en 1848. México no es un país perverso. Es
sólo un país diferente. (106-07)
Both the Old Gringo and Arroyo convert their fathers into mythic
figures who may have their origins in lived experience, but in memory become new fictions. Thus Fuentes’ Old Gringo is guided in battle by Bierce’s
actual fiction, “A Horseman in the Sky,” about a Confederate commander
on horseback who urges on his son, now his enemy: “Haz tu deber, hijo”
(60). And so the fictional story becomes “una realidad fantasmal,” which
the Old Gringo projects onto the Mexican federales; they in turn project
their fears onto him, seeing in the charging old man “un diablo blanco y
vengador, tenía ojos que sólo los tiene Dios en las iglesias; el Stetson voló
y reveló la imagen de Dios Padre” (59).
All three major characters in Gringo Viejo have full-blown father complexes.29 All of them struggle with the knowledge, or the legacy, that their
fathers (both singular in a literal sense, and plural in a cultural, symbolic
sense) transmit to their children. They are all, in different ways, engaged
in a “revolutionary drama” of either confronting, or coming to terms with,
their largely fictionalized, mythic fathers. And in different ways, the Old
Gringo, Arroyo, and Harriet have repressed their awareness of the degrees
to which they have become like their fathers, precisely by projecting their
father complexes.
For Harriet, becoming like her father means entering into danger
zones that suggests disloyalty to family, race, and nation. Those three are
closely interwoven in the memory of her father in the basement—adultery,
miscegenation, and through this apparent “jungle fever” a path towards a
form of apparent treason. Fuentes structures the gradual return of Harriet’s
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memory of witnessing her father’s interracial sexuality as a light that breaks
in on her by degrees.30
In the first brief return of the repressed memory, the “blackness” of this
incident is contrasted to the whiteness of the Washington D.C. façade—the
whitewashed national mythology that Ellison satirized so effectively in the
“Liberty Paints” section of Invisible Man.31 In Harriet’s dream, “the stark
whiteness of the pantheon of the city” is placed in opposition to “sus pozos
negros” (54). And in this black underside of D.C., other “inferior” senses
become dominant: “y el olor se volvió más fuerte….el olor agridulce del
amor y de la sangre, las axilas húmedas y los temblores púbicos mientras
su padre poseía a la negra solitaria que vivía allí” (54).
The words of that “solitary Negress”—“Capitán Winslow, estoy muy
sola y usted puede tomarme cuando guste” (55)—become a refrain, repeating
and intertwining, with the other major repeating theme of the novel: “did
you look at yourself in the mirror?” Harriet hears them both at a moment
when the Old Gringo kisses her while she sleeps.
But perhaps the voice of that father cannot enter her consciousness
directly. It is still crowded out by the voice of a larger, national father, whose
paternal imperial ideology has thoroughly embedded itself in her consciousness. Far from really thinking about what the Old Gringo is saying about
mirrors, she continues to look through the missionary lens, compelled to
try to create mirror images of American children, on their way to becoming
loyal subjects of the North American “Imperial Democracy.”32 So Harriet
chooses the ballroom to begin what she envisions as weekly classes in true
democracy. She has heard Frutos García’s words about these people being
capable of governing themselves, but Harriet knows (sitting and remembering she realizes that she thought she knew) that only through her instruction
will Arroyo return to find “la gente ya se estaba gobernando sola, de verdad,
no con esas vagas ideas” (92).
Even when Harriet is slow-dancing with Arroyo on the ballroom floor,
a form of extended foreplay not only to the first sexuality of her life, but also
to her eventual awakening from her missionary dream, she is still remembering her father through the lens of familial and national myth: “bailo con
mi padre que regresó condecorado de Cuba…salvado por Cuba, salvador
de Cuba” (105). That fragment of “saved by Cuba” seems to foreshadow
her re-examination of the missionary complex. But for the moment, she is
still in its full throes:
“Fuimos a salvar a Cuba.”
“Venimos a salvar a México.” (105)
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73
It is sexual attraction across national and ethnic boundaries that brings
the memory of the father back in greater force. Smelling Arroyo she smells
“algo distinto”—the memory of Captain Winslow’s smell; burying her nose
in “Captain Winslow’s” neck, she smells/ remembers, with a language that
carries the racial stereotypes of Miss Winslow’s era: “un cáncer vegetal
enredado en los cimientos de Washington, una ciudad mojada como la entrepierna de una negra en celo. Harriet hundió la nariz en la nuca de Tomás
Arroyo y olió a sexo erizado y velludo de una negra” (106).
It is at this moment that Harriet feels “Una lengua diferente, en su
oreja”: the Old Gringo’s deflating of nationalist and racialist stereotypes
about Mexico (107).
And it is through these interpenetrations—with both Arroyo and the
Gringo, and the coming to terms with her father that they facilitate—that
Harriet finally begins to recognize, in these two men in Mexico, a new,
more accurate image of her father.
It is Arroyo who first suggests the new script she will follow: “¿Qué
quería ella, de veras? ¿Tener un padre como el gringo viejo, o ser como su
padre con Arroyo?” (116). At that moment, the thought terrifies her: she
flees from recognizing its truth. But her memory becomes more insistent as
Arroyo becomes more amorous: after deciding that Arroyo “era el garañón
elemental…su imaginación la había conducido a los brazos de la amante
de su padre” (121). As Harriet enters new realms of her consciousness, she
continues to think about “la amante negra de su padre” and then to project
that relationship onto the present one, which she begins to racialize, when
she realizes that she cannot control Arroyo (132).
But eventually, under the Old Gringo’s tutelage (or the pressure he applies), she begins assimilating Arroyo’s suggestion. Shortly before his death,
the Old Gringo “la besó como amante, como hombre, no con la sensualidad
de Arroyo, pero con una codicia compartida.” And at that moment, Harriet
confesses a new awareness: “¿no sabes que con Arroyo pude ser como mi
padre, libre y sensual, pero contigo tengo un padre, no lo sabes?” (141).
And then under the older man’s injunction to reveal her secret before
he leaves, she confesses: “Mi padre no murió ni se perdió en combate. Se
aburrió de nosotras y se quedó a vivir con una negra en Cuba” (141). She
begins refamiliarizing this repressed event by reemplotting it.
But if Harriet’s memory of her father proves to be liberating, Arroyo’s
confrontation with the ghost of his father has very different results. What he
sees in the mirror are refractions of a family melodrama which constitutes
a fatal attraction for him—a sort of Mexican Hotel California which he can
never leave, once he has checked in. Arroyo had been watching his father
at the Miranda hacienda for 30 years before the arrival of the revolution—
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in fact, he was a voyeur. As Pol Popovic Karic (2002: 173) writes in his
analysis of “La Búsqueda del Padre en Gringo Viejo,” this close and embittered observation has transformed the father into “una raíz venenosa que
se compenetra en cada célula del cuerpo de Tomás.”
Arroyo, for Fuentes, is not merely a case study of the Oedipal complex
in a Mexican context, but a way of critiquing the way that revolutionaries
almost inevitably become like what they hate, or oppose. The Old Gringo
predicts this destiny for Arroyo: if he were to survive, he would merely
lose his youthful glory, and become like Díaz, the oppressor. “Deje que
me lo imagine a usted en el porvenir del poder, la fuerza, la opresión, la
soberbia, la indiferencia. ¿Hay una revolución que haya escapado a este
destino, señor general? ¿Por qué han de escapar sus hijos al destino de su
madre la revolución?” the Old Gringo asks (81).
Although he had been accused of “parricidio imaginario,” he reflects,
it was not “al nivel de un pueblo entero que vivía su historia como una serie
de asesinatos de los padres viejos, ahora inservibles” (79). In fact, Arroyo
seems entirely unable to imagine an alternative to the Oedipal matrix. He
projects this “solution” of dying young onto his social reality with all the
single-minded force with which the Old Gringo projects his script of being
shot by Mexican revolutionaries.
As the novel progresses, we are increasingly able to witness the
phenomenon of intersecting projections, as each of the major characters
responds to the psychological force field that is projected onto them. During
the tongue-in-ear scene, while Harriet imagines dancing with her father, Arroyo imagines dancing with his mother. But not the biological, indigenous
mother: he pictures himself with the clean, fair-skinned, legitimate wife
of his father. So although Arroyo makes noises about having been born to
protect that brown-skinned mother, it seems clear that in fact he aspires to
take his father’s place beside the fair-skinned mother (106).
Arroyo himself describes his relationship to the “big house” of the
Miranda hacienda as a sort of spell: “Óyeme gringuita: yo he estado encantado por esta casa desde que nací aquí… La hacienda y yo nos hemos
estado mirando desde hace treinta años, como tú miraste al espejo” (119).
The revolution broke the spell, leading him and los de abajo to rise up
“desde el lecho del desierto…ascendiendo como desde un sueño de marihuana” (122).
But Arroyo becomes trapped by the mirror once again—the previously
excluded now hooked by the perks of power; the illiterate peon entranced by
written words on the ancient deed. As Carmen Perilli (2001) surmises, this
“quijote moreno” represents Villistas (such as Demetrios Macías of Los de
Abajo) who are “paralizados por los reflejos de los garabatos de anónimos
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75
papeles amarillentos, que transmiten una tradición de dominación.” The old
papers confirm to him his legitimacy as an insider; therefore, they confer
upon him the power of a cacique. When Arroyo tells Harriet: “Gringa,
estoy encerrado otra vez” (123), it is clear that his infatuation with her is
one of the many mirrors he uses to sustain the illusion of the “privileges
of membership.”
D) Human-nature interaction
In Gringo Viejo nature functions as a metaphorical mirror in two
senses. First, nature acts as a screen onto which individuals project their
deepest psychological preoccupations, so that they imagine nature to be
showing some reflection of themselves or their “true nature.” Second, nature
sometimes functions as a panoramic looking glass that gives readers and/
or characters added insight into ways in which nature and humanity have
interpenetrated each other.
Understandings of nature that are determined both by individual psychology, and by socio-historical context, are ubiquitous in Gringo Viejo.
Nature penetrates the thinking of Arroyo and the Old Gringo, but of course
humans are also penetrating, and often violating nature, in ways that mirror
the damage they do to their families, or other social relations.
The Old Gringo’s observations of nature are filtered through his obsessions about family, nation, and “race.” While camped out under a huge
organ-pipe cactus, he fell asleep thinking on his dead children as he gazed
at “las nacientes estrellas azules y las amarillas, moribundas.” In his dreams
he wondered “cuáles estrellas estaban apagadas ya, su luz nada más que
su propia ilusión: una herencia de las estrellas muertas para las miradas
humanas que continuarían alabándolas siglos después de su desaparición”
(22). In like manner, Fuentes seem to suggest, we continue to praise people
or ideals long after they have disappeared from the earth; loved ones as
well as enemies penetrate our consciousness and continue to haunt our
dreams long after they have passed away. This is the “radioactive” afterlife
of projection and recollection (von Franz, 5).
Facing death, barrenness and isolation are very much on the Gringo’s
mind. In a powerful scene, as Harriet quizzes her tequila-addled compatriot
about his dysfunctional family, the Old Gringo sees in the desert a mirror
of his failed personal life. Thinking about the suicides of his sons, and the
contempt of his wife, “El gringo viejo viajó por el desierto mirando a los
tarayes junto a un flaco río. Esas matas sedientas y lujosas atesoran el agua
escasa solo para volverla amarga, salada, inservible para todos” (74). He
is like those salt cedars, his bitterness having destroyed his own family. If
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this is the price of “speaking truth to power,” then what is the value of his
ferocious, much-feared truthfulness? Is not his “altar to truth” a destructive
force? Has he been living an illusion, so blinded by the uncomfortable truths
he feels compelled to proclaim, that he has lost sight of the “comforting
lies” that people actually need, in order to survive?33 Put another way, is
the compulsion to be truthful compatible with the need for “myths to live
by”?
Such reflections shape the Old Gringo’s vision as he “trató de penetrar
con la mirada la ceguera nocturna del desierto e imaginar esas creosotas que
crecen guardando sus distancias porque sus raíces son venenosas y matan
a cualquier planta que crezca a su lado. Así se apartó de Harriet Winslow”
(75). Through nature he faces the disjuncture between his personal myth—the
moral rectitude of a voice crying in the wilderness—and the social reality
that his critical mind has isolated him and destroyed his family, as well as
his sense of community, and of patriotism. In this context, his thresholdof-death realization about the inevitability of encountering “the company
of others” is an epiphany for the Old Gringo.
Arroyo has been socialized differently, as part of a collective struggle
to survive under harsh conditions. So he reads nature in a very different
way. When the old man condescendingly asks Arroyo if he knows how
to read, Arroyo responds with an allegorical reading of his environment.
He tells the old man to look at “las esculturas torcidas y sedientas de las
plantas luchando por preservar su agua, como para decirle al resto del
desierto moribundo que había esperanza y que a pesar de las apariencias,
aún no habían muerto.” Arroyo provides an emphatic moral: “¿Crees que
la biznaga puede leer y yo no? Eres un tonto, gringo. Yo soy analfabeta,
pero también me acuerdo” (36). While the Gringo looks at the desert and
sees poisonous isolation, Arroyo sees the collective sacrifice that is necessary for survival.
Harriet is a city woman, not accustomed to “reading” nature, except
perhaps in the parks of New York or Washington, D.C. When Arroyo becomes infuriated by Harriet’s “civilizing” attempts to rebuild the hacienda
(62), and Harriet responds with serene contempt, he drags her outside and
demands that she look at the land. And what she saw was also a mirror of
her own preoccupations: “vio una tierra donde los frutos escasos tenían que
nacer del vientre muerto, como un niño que seguía viviendo y pugnaba por
nacer en la entraña muerta de su madre” (64). While the Old Gringo sees
a self-reinforcing isolation, and Arroyo sees the hope of survival, Harriet
sees her barren future: she will soon announce to Arroyo that she will never
have a child—although she fantasizes that Arroyo will give her a “Brook”
that will irrigate and renew her life.
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77
The Mexicans never seem to see Harriet as other than culturally alien.
But they seem to almost instantly recognize a level of kinship with the Old
Gringo. Thus once he has proven his bona fides, they seek to teach him about
their culture, and implicitly about their relationship with the land. The Old
Gringo is a much more conscious knight in shining armor than Don Quixote,
in whose mold he is clearly cast, and whose model he at least dimly aspires
to follow, even carrying a Cervantes with him, which he repeats that he
hopes to read before dying.34 But still, it is arguable that he only penetrates
the spirit of the Quixote he carries via its residue in Mexican/ Hispanic
culture. He has a predisposition to listen to what the Mexicans have to say,
but even so, much of what they say will be a revelation.
After the Old Gringo’s feat with the Colt .44, Arroyo’s troops honor
him by attempting to Mexicanize him.35 They give him a huge sombrero;
“le obligaron a comer tacos de criadillas con chile Serrano y moronga” (32).
He swallows the chiles whole without turning red, which further earns him
the respect of the Mexicans. They break out the mescal. The Old Gringo
begins asking questions about what is in this strange, fiery food and drink
that is being “forced” on him.
While explaining the worm in the mescal, Arroyo offers a parable
about how the preparation and consumption of food expresses very different worldviews of the gringos and the Mexicans:
—Los gringos se quejan de que en México se enferman del
estómago. Pero ningún mexicano se muere de diarrea por
comer o beber en su propio país. Es como la botella esta—
dijo Arroyo—. Si la botella y tú cargan al gusanito toda
la vida, los dos se hacen viejos muy a gusto. El gusano se
come algunas cosas y tú te comes otras. Pero si sólo comes
cosas como las que yo vi en El Paso, comida envuelta en
papel y sellada pa que no la toquen ni las moscas, entonces el gusano te ataca porque ni tú lo conoces a él, ni él te
conoce a ti. (33)
Arroyo has seen enough of life in the U.S. to know that a people who
so segregate the food they eat from the environment in which it is grown
will end up trying to sanitize everything. They will be voyeurs of a sanitized
version of war—as dramatized in the film And Starring Pancho Villa as
Himself.36 They will become so isolated from the world around them that
they will lose the capacity for direct interaction with that world—they will
always need a screen, or wrapping paper, to protect them, or to mediate
between them and “reality.” The culture that abhors the worm in the bottle
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will also abhor other forms of mixture. This culture, intent on preventing
penetration by “others,” will lose the ability to interact with the natural
world, or to accept as equals peoples who still have the flavor of the earth
in their speech, in their food, in their manner of loving, fighting, living,
and dying.
Finally, from a panoramic perspective, Fuentes gives us sometimes
disturbing portraits of how humans and animals/nature interpenetrate each
other in life and death. After a battle, human corpses are left on the desert
floor. Wild pigs take advantage of this unexpected bonanza, even as the
soldiers feast on these pigs. “Arroyo le dio la espada al gringo y lo invitó a
comer puerco como los puercos se comían a los cadáveres en el campo” (85).
This “true inter-relatedness” may be commonplace in Arroyo’s Mexico, but
it is a horror show for the gringos accustomed to eating processed pork. It
is also, however, part and parcel of the “time” and manner of remembering
that Arroyo wants Harriet to carry back to the United States.
CONCLUSION: Interpenetrating Dreams and Intersecting Projections
In the most explicitly psychological elements of Fuentes’ text, dreams
and visions, the “intersecting projections” dimension of interpenetration
becomes evident. Here characters manage to get inside each others’ most
private thoughts, and to inflect, distort, or redirect each other’s obsessions.
This process confirms Bourdieu’s insistence (1992: 97) that intersubjective
ties between individuals are always deeply social, and that interpersonal
relations in fact largely exist “independently of individual consciousness
and will.” We are strictured by what Bourdieu called “fields of power,”
although these seem to be more unstable on the borderlands than within
the institutions through which a nation-state enacts its particular forms of
hegemonic power.
Characters in Gringo Viejo frequently find ways to “penetrar sus sueños respectivos,” as in a scene where the Old Gringo kisses the sleeping
Harriet. “El sueño es nuestro mito personal,” he mused during this kiss.
He made, we are told, “un esfuerzo gigantesco, como si éste pudiese ser
el último acto de su vida, y en un instante soñó con los ojos abiertos y los
labios apretados el sueño entero de Harriet” (57). If personal dreams can
be penetrated, then the resulting dreams contain the language or form of
cultural or collective myths.
In this scene, Fuentes gives us three intersecting “dreams” or personal
obsessions, all imagined by Harriet, or by the Old Gringo, or by some sort
of intersubjective transference that is taking place between them. Thus the
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79
voices of this personal dream being fused into a collective myth are an
intermixture of Harriet remembering her father’s interracial sexuality in
the basement; the Old Gringo asking Harriet if she had seen herself in the
mirror, and Arroyo explaining to the Old Gringo what the revolutionaries
had seen in the mirror the day before.
The latter is clearly a jump cut to a scene where the two men are on
horseback, side by side, before a battle. But in terms of narrative structure,
Fuentes is linking the dreams of Harriet with the Old Gringo’s waking dream
of a revolutionary drama against his father. This is his personal myth. But
he did not create it alone; nor can he enact it as a mere individual.
Fuentes continues to develop the notion of interpenetrating dreams
or visions throughout the novel. At one point, while the eyes of the Old
Gringo and Harriet meet in the mirror, he confesses: “Pensé mucho en ti
anoche. Estuviste muy vívida en mis pensamientos. Creo que hasta soñé
contigo” (99). At another point, during a conversation with Harriet in which
they try to reach a mutual understanding about just who is really seeking
the Old Gringo’s death, he muses: “¿sabías que todos somos objeto de la
imaginación ajena?” (13).37 Which is to say, the projections of others are
always a part of our self-conception.
In the climactic scene in which Arroyo shoots the Old Gringo, Fuentes
dramatizes how humans become penetrated by fragments of consciousness
of others in their social world. As the old man entered Arroyo’s private car,
Harriet remembered that “él sólo había escrito sobre la conciencia fragmentada”; she was trying to understand that idea as Arroyo approached,
“ajeno al misterio de los dos gringos, con un fragmento de la conciencia de
Harriet dentro de su cabeza” (143-4). Then right before the shooting, “la
conciencia fragmentada de Harriet Winslow dio un salto en el vacío para
meterese en la cabeza del general Tomás Arroyo” (144). This fragment is
engraved there, so that later Arroyo “la vio en sus sueños” while she held
the dead gringo (165).
These characters emerge out of a “prior matrix”—the father complexes
that they project intersect, as do their preoccupations with their fathers, and
their conflicting preconceptions about the Mexican revolution. In practice
this fragmented matrix functions as a “co-creative nonphysical presence,” to
return to de Quincey’s definition of intersubjectivity. Their father complexes,
and their imaginary of the Mexican revolution, shape them in different ways
that are inevitably “heightened by authentic disagreement,” and yet produce
a social drama that is a co-creation. For instance, the men disagree over
who “has” Harriet—her father, or her lover. They disagree over the truest
source of historical knowledge, and the destiny of revolutions. They disagree
over the value of the papers that are sacred to Arroyo, and the proper use
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of private property. Harriet and Arroyo have penetrated each other through
the matrix of shared sexuality, but they disagree over the meaning of love,
the sanctity of human life, and the nature of “conquest.” Yet all three characters share a compulsion to “convert” each other to a different definition
of shared interests. And it is their very conflicts that lead to a co-created
outcome—via the narrative of memory that Harriet reconstructs.
What individual characters manage to penetrate (in the cultural sense
of understanding) cannot be more than fragmentary. They cannot fully
integrate those fragments, except through the alchemy of memory, or art.
And only Harriet will have that luxury. Which is why, in their own ways,
both Arroyo and the Old Gringo have invested such great hopes in her.
Gringo Viejo arrives at tragedy, but also achieves catharsis, through the
interpenetrations of nations and cultures. And there is a “moral to the story”
that Fuentes seems to have directed to the gringos. This can be located in
a wisdom at which the Old Gringo arrives, just before death: “existía una
frontera secreta dentro de cada uno y que ésta era la frontera más difícil de
cruzar, porque cada uno espera encontrarse allí, solitario dentro de sí, y solo
descubre, más que nunca, que está en compañía de los demás” (143).
Facing his death, the Old Gringo seemed to have “leapt through
the void,” and imagined a social reality beyond the cul-de-sac of AngloAmerican individualism. If we recognize that our consciousness and culture
are inescapably co-creations, then this leads inevitably to a larger sense of
community, and of shared responsibility.
Ten years after writing Gringo Viejo, Fuentes reexamined the implications, within the context of globalization, of the increasingly normative
interpenetrations of the borderlands. He concluded: “We have entered a
co-responsible universe.” Fuentes’ essentially post-colonial view of the
borderlands—of “a third world within the first world, and a first world within
the third world”—suggests that autonomy and independence for individual,
cultural, and political subjects is always relative and provisional, and in the
process of reconstruction and revision.38
As with much of borderland literature, Gringo Viejo challenges or
inverts many binaries. The “central becomes the peripheral,” while the peripheral penetrates and becomes “a part of the historical canon” (Helmuth
1997: 116-17; 22). It may be polemic to suggest that borderlands literature
“pushes the hegemonic monoculture far into the distant horizon,” as Stacy
Alaimo insists (2000: 167). But when Harriet Winslow returns to the place
where she began and knows it for the first time, we can recognize that the
“center” of Winslow’s world has been radically decentered. Her consciousness, through memory, has taken root on the periphery of the formerly
imagined center, through her affiliation with the men she has loved, men
The Borderlands as Mirror in Carlos Fuentes’ Gringo Viejo
81
who chose to live beyond the boundary.
Economic, cultural, and familial relations precede, transgress, and
often outlast political borders. This is what Harriet Winslow learns through
the transgressive “memorious dust,” which forever binds her to the other
side, to Greater Mexico, with a mixture of love and hate. Symbolically,
this memory-laden dust of the Mexican earth has penetrated and indeed
fertilized the very core of Harriet’s being. It has expanded her notions of
self, kinship, community, and nationality to include a long-standing, ongoing narrative of inter-relationships between the U.S., Latin America and
the Caribbean.
When Harriet buries the Old Gringo in her father’s empty grave,
beside her now deceased mother, she has merely replaced one lie with another, in literal terms. Psychologically, this co-presence in the tomb of two
men who turned their back on the American empire in order to embrace
“nuestra América” symbolizes Harriet’s acceptance of the interpenetration
of the two Americas. And it expresses her allegiance to a new personal,
cultural and national “time,” within “una tierra en proceso de redefinición
y reimaginación.”39
NOTES
Carlos Fuentes, Gringo Viejo (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1985),
98. Further quotes from this edition are cited parenthetically. Historiographic,
Charlene Helmuth, The Postmodern Fuentes (Bucknell University Press; London:
Associated University Press, 1997), 108-110. Fuentes’ language echoes John Reed’s
classic Insurgent Mexico (Greenwood Press, 1969; first published 1914. See also
Anita Brenner, The Wind that Swept Mexico (University of Texas Press, 1984).
2
This revision has benefited from suggestions by John Lennard. Thanks to
Maite Villoria for her insights during our re-reading of Gringo Viejo. Thanks to
my Jamaican students for forcing me to think about translation with new eyes in
a very different sort of borderlands.
3
A foundational text: Herbert Eugene Bolton, The Spanish Borderlands: A
Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1921). An excellent survey of the development of borderlands historiography: Samuel
Truett and Elliott Young, “Introduction: Making Transnational History: Nations,
Regions, and Borderlands,” in Truett and Young, eds., Continental Crossroads:
Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History (Duke University Press, 2004), 1-32.
Some influential studies in the school of “borderland literature” that have primarily focused on Chicanos and Mexican Americans in the U.S. Southwest: Héctor
Calderón and José David Saldívar, Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano
Literature, Culture, and Ideology (Duke University Press, 1991); Cecil Robinson,
1
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Latin American Literary Review
No Short Journeys: The Interplay of Cultures in the History and Literature of the
Borderlands (University of Arizona, 1992); John S. Christie, Latino Fiction and
the Modernist Imagination: Literature of the Borderlands (Routledge, 1998); Jesus
Benito and Ana Maria Manzanas, eds., Literature and Ethnicity in the Cultural
Borderlands (Editions Rodopi 2002). A more historical and mutli-ethnic approach
is beginning to emerge: Carmen Cáliz-Montroro, Writing from the Borderlands: A
Study of Chicano, Afro-Caribbean and Native Literatures in North America (TSAR
Publications, 2000).
4
Fredrick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (H. Holt and
Company, 1920). Bolton conceived of his Spanish Borderlands project as a Hispanic counter-narrative to Turner’s vision of the closing of the frontier. See David
J. Weber, “Turner, the Boltonians, and the Borderlands,” American Historical Review 91:1 (February 1986): 66-81. Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,”
Profession 91 (New York: MLA, 1991), 33-40; reprinted in Ways of Reading, 5th
edition, ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petroksky (New York: Bedford/
St. Martin’s, 1999). Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and
Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge University Press,
1991). See also Richard White and Patricia Limerick, The Frontiers in American
Culture (University of California Press, 1994).
5
Examples of the application of the concept of borderlands in other parts of
the world: Touraj Atabaki and Solmaz Rustamova-Towhidi, Russia and Azerbaijan:
A Borderland in Transition (Columbia University Press, 1995; Thomas M. Wilson
and Donnan Hastings, editors, Border Identities: Nation and State at International
Frontiers (Cambridge University Press, 1998); V. Pavlakovich-Kochi, B. J. Morehouse & D. Wastl-Walter, eds., Challenged Borderlands: Transcending Political and
Cultural Boundaries (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2004); and in North America:
J. I. Little, Borderland Religion: The Emergence of an English-Canadian Identity,
1792-1852; Betje Black Klier, ed., Tales of the Sabine Borderlands: Early Louisiana
and Texas Fiction by Theodore Pavie (Texas A&M University, 1998).
6
schema—a blueprint, map, or “ruling archetype.” Sigmund Freud. Standard
Edition 17, 119. Psychological maps are often so powerful that we project them
onto realities where they do not fit, seeing what exists only in our inner schema.
Bourdieu named as “doxa” the un-thought or self-evident “universals” that structure
or inform human agency within a particular field.
7
See for instance the discussion by Luis Rafael Sánchez of “los trucos característicos de la cámara cinemotágrifa” in his “Prólogo” to the Seix Barrall edition
of Gringo Viejo (2000: 15).
8
Latin American writers have long portrayed the U.S. as a nation without
memory. This view has become mainstream in popular discourse since the Reagan
era. For example: Ben Stein, “Has Corporate America No Shame? Or No Memory?”
New York Times, October 29, 2006.
9
Fuentes has said that he adapted Winslow’s character and circumstances
from Edith Wharton’s novel False Dawn. Interviewed by Natalie Wheen, BBC 3
(June 27, 1989).
The Borderlands as Mirror in Carlos Fuentes’ Gringo Viejo
83
return of the repressed, Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” The Standard
Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey
(London: Hogarth, 1953-74), Volume 17, pp. 217-256. Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Routledge, 2003).
11
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back:
Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2002).
12
Colwyn Trevarthen, “The Foundations of Intersubjectivity: Development of Interpersonal and Cooperative Understanding in Infants,” in The Social
Foundations of Language and Thought, ed. D. Olson (New York: W.W. Norton,
1980). Christian de Quincey, “Intersubjectivity: Exploring Consciousness from the
Second-Person Perspective,” http://www.deepspirit.com/sys-tmpl/intersubjectivity/. Mats Winther, “Critique of Intersubjectivity” (2005); http://home7.swipnet.
se/~w-73784/intersubj.htm.
13
Christian Quincey, “Intersubjectivity,” Ibid, my emphasis; “Fronteras,
intersticios y umbales,” Editorial, Debate Feminista 17:33 (abril 2006).
14
Steve Boldy, “Intertextuality in Carlos Fuentes’s Gringo Viejo,” Romance
Quarterly 39:4 (1992): 489-500. Fuentes’ scene of the Old Gringo’s fantasies
during his first battle with Arroyo has an intertextual relationship with Ambrose
Bierce, “A Horseman in the Sky,” in The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, with
Introduction by Clifton Fadiman (Citadel, 1946), 3-9.
15
Penetration as incursion; permeation: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/
interpenetration
16
Jean Laplanche and Jean Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1967). This definition has been influential in the field
of criminal psychology. It is cited in Elena Loizidou, “Criminal Law and Punishment” Punishment & Society 6:3 (2004), 308-318. C.G. Jung, “General Aspects
of Dream Psychology,” in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Collected
Works V. 8, 2nd edition (Princeton University Press, 1970), par. 507.
17
Jacques Lacan posited a phase of misrecognition in the “mirror stage” on
the threshold of the visible world (the infant’s entry to the outside world where
distinctions or become visibly different. Ecrits, Trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:
Norton, 1977), 1-6. I am drawing on an extended discussion of recognition and
misrecognition in Kelly Oliver, “The Look of Love (denigration of vision in modernism and psychoanalysis),” Hypatia (June 2001).
18
Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition Vol. 17, p. 119; in Michael Vannoy
Adams, The Multicultural Imagination: “Race,” Color, & the Unconscious (Routledge, 1996), 45.
19
Useful biographical information relevant to Fuentes’ fictionalization of
Bierce: Don Asher Habibi, “The experience of a lifetime: philosophical reflections
on a narrative device of Ambrose Bierce,” Studies in the Humanities (December
2002), 83-108.
20
On Fuentes’ use of archetypes: Gloria B. Duran, The Archetypes of Carlos
Fuentes: From Witch to Androgyne (Archon Books, 1980). On the archetypal pattern of the solitary hero who sets wrongs right through violence: Richard Slotkin,
10
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Latin American Literary Review
Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 16001860 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2000).
21
“collective individuality,” Raymond Leslie Williams, “La Edad del Tiempo:
An Interview with Fuentes,” in Williams, The Writings of Carlos Fuentes (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1996), 151.
22
Marta Portal, “Gringo Viejo: Diálogo de Culturas,” in Georgina GarcíaGutiérrez, compiladora, Carlos Fuentes desde la crítica (México: Taurus, 2001),
234-35.
23
the bridge burning refers to a scene in Los de Abajo where Memetrius
Macías looks back at his burning home. See Williams, The Writings of Carlos
Fuentes, 119.
24
Gregory Stephens, “‘What’s become of our Bliss’: Transracialism and
Transfiguration in Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth.” Free Inquiry in Creative Sociology
30:1 (June 2002), 91-115. Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (Routledge,
1990). On the symbolism and history of the Mexican eagle, see David Carrasco,
Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire: Myths and Prophecies in the Aztec Tradition
(University of Colorado Press, revised edition, 2001).
25
Fuentes on Revolution as mirror, Maarten van Delden, Carlos Fuentes,
Mexico, and Modernity (Vanderbilt University Press, 1998), 33. “Mirror of other
peoples,” Fuentes, The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 308.
26
The intellectual who explains what revolution means to the troops, or who
translates his leader’s ideals into literary / legalistic language, is so widespread in the
literature and history of the Mexican revolution as to constitute an archetype. See
for instance Luis Cervantes, in particular the speech he gives to Demetrio Macías,
in Mariano Zauela, Los de abajo (Penguin, 1997/1915), 40. A real-life counterpart is Emiliano Zapata’s relationship with Otilio Montano, which is discussed
in most biographical treatments of the drafting of El Plan de Ayala. I discuss the
phenomenon of the “camp intellectual” in Mexican literature in Gregory Stephens,
“The Poetics of Indigenismo in Zapatista Discourse: Re-visioning the Mexican
Revolution Through Mayan Eyes,” MPhil in Spanish literature, (University of
West Indies-Mona, 2008).
27
As camp prostitute, La Garduña is an intertextual sister of “La Pinta” in
Los de Abajo. See María Elena de Valdés, “La Trinidad femenina en Gringo Viejo
de Carlos Fuentes,” in García-Gutiérrez, in Carlos Fuentes Desde la Crítica, (El
Colegio de México, 1981/2000).
28
An unreliable narrator’s “account of events appears to be faulty, misleadingly biased, or otherwise distorted, so that it departs from the ‘true’ understanding of events shared between the reader and the implied author. The discrepancy
between the unreliable narrator’s view of events and the view that readers suspect
to be more accurate creates a sense of irony…[in] Mark Twain’s Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn (1884) [Huck Finn] does not understand the full significance of
the events he is relating and commenting on…. the reader is offered the pleasure
of picking up ‘clues’ in the narrative that betray the true state of affairs.” Concise
The Borderlands as Mirror in Carlos Fuentes’ Gringo Viejo
85
Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford University Press, 2004); Michael
W. Smith, Understanding Unreliable Narrators: Reading Between the Lines in
the Literature Classroom (National Council of Teachers, 1991); Bruno Zerweck,
“Historicizing unreliable narration: unreliability and cultural discourse in narrative
fiction unreliable narrator,” Style 35:1 (Spring 2001), 151-78. Both Harriet and the
Old Gringo “inventaron episodios de su pasado” notes Tittler (229).
29
Complexes are clusters or related groups of “emotion-charged ideas” that
are “wholly or partly suppressed but influence attitudes … and behavior.” Webster’s
Collegiate Dictionary (Random House, 2001). “The term ‘autonomous complex’
… is meant to indicate the capacity of the complexes to resist conscious intentions, and to come and go as they please…[T]hey are psychic entities which are
outside the control of the conscious mind. They have been split off from consciousness and lead a separate existence in the dark realm of the uncon­scious,
being at all times ready to hinder or reinforce the con­scious functioning……
They are the ‘sore spots,’ the betes noires, the “skeletons in the cupboard” which
we do not like to remember and still less to be reminded of by others, but which
frequently come back to mind unbidden and in most unwelcome fashion. They
always contain memories, wishes, fears, duties, needs, or insights which somehow
we can never really grapple with, and for this reason they constantly interfere
with our conscious life in a disturbing and usually a harmful way.” C.G. Jung,
Psychological Types (Princeton UP/Bollingen, 1971): (508-9)
30
Old Gringo is, like the film Lone Star, about the recovery of “a repressed
interracial narrative lodged deep within the national imaginary.” Rosa Linda Fregoso,
meXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003), 62. John Lye, “Some Attributes of Modernist
Literature (1997); http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/2F55/modernism.html.
“By degrees” is an allusion to Frederick Douglass’ awakening to abolitionism: “the
light broke in upon me by degrees.” The idea illustrates an implicit opposition to
Paul’s mythic version of instantaneous, light-on-the-road (to Damascus) conversions. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by
Himself. With an Introduction by Peter J. Gomes & a New Afterword by Gregory
Stephens (Signet Classics, 2005), 56.
31
Re: interracial symbolism in the Liberty Paints episode, see Gregory
Stephens, “Invisible Community: Ralph Ellison’s Vision of a Multiracial ‘Ideal
Democracy’,” in On Racial Frontiers (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
32
Imperial Democracy, Octavio Paz, “Posiciones y Contraposiciones: México
y Estados Unidos,” in Sueño en libertad: Escritos Políticos (Barcelona: Seix Barral,
2001), 167-86; “Mexico and the United States,” in The Labyrinth of Solitude and
Other Writings (Grove, 1985), 357-76.
33
Two film scenes not in the book illustrate a “Comforting Lies, Uncomfortable Truths” theme. At a release of Bierce’s Collected Works his editor praises his
“struggle for truth”: “Only to the altar of truth has he borne his offerings…The
truth has been his only obsession.” Bierce rejects this reading, then walks out.
Harriet witnesses this and tells her mother: “I’m going to tell the truth from now
86
Latin American Literary Review
on.” But in Mexico, after watching the Old Gringo truthfully tell a soldier that he
was going to die, Harriet insists: “He didn’t need truth, he needed comfort.” Luis
Puenzo, director, Old Gringo (Columbia TriStar, 1989). Re: the film version, I
mostly agree with María Elena de Valdés’ dim view of the film, in particular, Jane
Fonda’s one-dimensional Harriet Winslow. Georgina García-Gutiérrez, compiladora,
Carlos Fuentes desde la crítica, 254.
34
The recent literature on Cervantes and Don Quixote is enormous. Some
studies I have been reading: Roberto González Echevarría, ed., Cervantes’ Don
Quixote: A Casebook (Oxford University Press, 2005); Anthony J. Cascardi, The
Cambridge Companion to Cervantes (Cambridge University Press, 2002), and
María Antonia Garcés, Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive’s Tale (Vanderbilt University Press, 2002).
35
Mexicanized: Helen Delpar, The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican:
Cultural Relations between the United States and Mexico, 1920-1935 (University
of Alabama Press, 1992); José E. Limón, American Encounters: Greater Mexico,
the United States, and the Erotics of Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1998).
36
Bruce Beresford, dir., And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself (HBO Home
Video, 2003). Gringo Viejo contains a reference to a Mr. Walsh who is filming
Villa’s exploits. “Let Mr. Walsh and his cameras go fuck themselves,” Villa says,
after ordering an “execution” of the dead gringo (176). This is Raoul Walsh, who
discusses his cinematic and human relations with Villa in Each Man in his Time:
The Life Story of a Director (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974). See also Aurelio de
los Reyes, Con Villa en México: Testimonios de camarógrafos norteamericanos en
la revolución (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1985).
37
This expresses a fundamental perspective of object relations psychology.
N. Gregory Hamilton, Self and Others: Object Relations Theory in Practice (Jason
Aronson, 1996).
38
Carlos Fuentes, “Latinoamerica en la cumbre de Copenhague (March
1995), quoted in Anani Dzidzienyo and Suzanne Oboler, eds., Neither Enemies nor
Friends: Latinos, Blacks, Afro-Latinos (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 4.
39
“Fronteras, intersticios y umbrales,” Editorial, Debate Feminista 17:33
(abril 2006). This editorial was co-written by Lucía Megar and Marisa Belausteguigoitia.
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