The first Spanish-language copies of “Vecinos distantes” arrived at Librerías Gandhi in Mexico City on a Tuesday morning in late January 1986. By Thursday, they were sold out. By the following week, the face of its author, Alan Riding, stared from every newspaper kiosk in the capital.
Not that he was being celebrated.
“Superficial, overgeneralized and lacking in objectivity,” thundered one Mexican critic quoted in the Guadalajara Reporter. Another called the book “an exercise in foreign arrogance.”
But what had Riding, an English journalist, done exactly?
He had told the truth. Or rather, he had spoken certain things out loud, which, as he would later put it, was his only real sin.
The first edition of the book was called “Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans,” and had appeared in English in January 1985. The choice of title was itself a provocation; an elegant paradox that captured the core of Riding’s thesis: geography meant nothing without understanding. To him, the United States and Mexico were neighbors in the most literal sense, yet they remained psychologically and culturally separated by an almost unbridgeable gulf. “Probably nowhere in the world do two neighbors understand each other so little,” he wrote.
While many Americans took Mexico’s stability for granted, Riding saw a relationship built on mutual incomprehension. The United States viewed its southern neighbor as a subordinate satellite, a source of cheap labor and oil, while Mexicans nursed a painful historical memory of invasion and intervention that had left a profound mark on their national psyche.
Riding, then 42, had spent four years as The New York Times bureau chief in Mexico City, and he had watched the country with the intensity of a foreign correspondent who refuses to be fooled by surface calm. He had seen the corruption that lubricated the PRI’s machinery, the clientelism that passed for governance, the authoritarian design hidden beneath the revolutionary rhetoric. He had listened to Mexican businessmen confide what they would never say in public, and Mexican intellectuals lament what they could never publish in their own “bought” press.
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