Last week’s front-page mention of the Chapala area’s popularity with foreigners prompted echoes of Mexico’s fame in the “beginning” days of the late 1950’s and 60’s and the growing popularity of bullfighting – the corrida.
This appeal, which spread widely north of the border, particularly in Los Angeles and San Francisco, grew out of the proximity of the inviting spirit of Tijuana and its bullring and was stimulated in good part by the resurgence of the popularity of Ernest Hemingway’s writing, including his opus, “Death in the Afternoon.”
Also accompanying this was the growing number of U.S. veterans who found Ajijic congenial, especially those who were seriously committed to writing.
In fact, there was an obvious surge in the production of American fiction coming out of Lake Chapala pueblos. It fed off the publication of new works by well-known fiction authors (Hemingway, Steinbeck, Gore Vidal, Ford Madox Ford, etc.).
These included unparalleled bundles of fiction by thinly known authors such as B. Traven – clearly not an American, but an unequalled fiction author. In Traven’s case it was, for instance, the paperback “pocket book,” a matter of “Stories by the Man Nobody Knows” that reached readers who had never heard of him. These readers became life-time enthusiasts of Traven through the influence of stories such as “Burro Trading” and “Midnight Call.”
It was during this period that I and my friends were discovering other Mexican pueblos – but specifically Ajijic. A fiction and poetry instructor at the University of Southern California became selected as a source that year when one of his short stories, set in Ajijic, won a place in the annual publication of “The Best American Short Stories.”
Ajijic at that time was drawing the attention of other authors – and soon-to-be authors – for the fact that its small community was distinctly that of a pueblo. The work of these “new” authors began appearing in international publications, and in 1967 stories of mine and by several acquaintances were published in “The Best American Short Stories.”
Such authors were often distinguished by the fact that they were explorers of similar pueblos to Ajijic. Many of them were World War II vets. But rather rebelliously so. They emphatically could not be called “joiners.” Some had an inclination of situating themselves, at least for a while, near ranches that raised fighting bulls. Some of them were fairly well behaved, others not so much. They had an individualistic inclination to hang out with Mexicans in order to better understand Mexico and its people.
That was not always happily embraced by some folks from the north, especially in the seemingly odd neighborhood of Chula Vista – a place in which people lived in “aggressive fear” as someone has defined it. My wife and I had some friends who, for a short while, rented a home there, and dried laundry by hanging it in the sun in their back yard. They were quickly and unkindly told that neighbors disapproved of such a thing.
In contrast, living in complete freedom was Lysander Kemp. He lived in Jocotepec where there were very few gringos, and translated the work of one Mexico’s great intellectuals: Octavio Paz’s immensely wise exploration of the habits and woes of Mexican culture. Kemp admirably interpreted Paz’s Spanish language, his probing and revelatory style of both thought and construction. He did that to great extent ‘isolated” in a very unsophisticated intellectual atmosphere. It was Paz and his brilliant translator helping the world understand Mexico. That included Mexican habits of functioning – and often not functioning – coupled with a manner of making clear often obfuscating political and psychological, as well as social and certainly self-destructive behavior.
Nothing, say Paz’s legions of admirers, intellectually equals the insight and freedom for the non-Spanish-speaking world as does Kemp’s “Labyrinth of Solitude” translation.
Happily, then, this newspaper continues to exercise the generally widely embracing and curiosity-motivated mind set. It’s pleasant to be able to say that about such a broadly searching – and long-lasting – publication.