Outwitting Manic Depression: My Mexico Trail
While teaching high school history in the 80s, I assigned Francis Parkman’s classic journal, The Oregon Trail (1847), to my students. Parkman’s purpose was to immerse himself in the life of the Sioux of the 1840s for a few weeks to obtain better insights into the French & Indian War that he was chronicling.
As Parkman wrote in his Autobiography (1868):
If any pale student, glued to his desk, here seek an apology for a way of life whose natural fruit is that pallid and emasculate scholarship of which New England has had too many examples, it will be far better that this sketch had not been written. For the student there is, in its season, no better place than the saddle, and no better companion than the rifle or the oar.
Although the young Harvard graduate came to hold a grossly negative opinion of Native Americans, his works do provide valuable information about tribal conditions. The fact that he undertook what became a life-long investigation regardless of very poor health will always serve as an inspiration to scholars, especially those of North American history.
Following the two devastating earthquakes that struck Mexico City in September 1985, a foundation organized by members of Opus Dei in New York decided to sponsor a summer service project for interested college student volunteers. Since I, as a teacher, had my summers free and purportedly spoke Spanish, I was asked to lead the inaugural effort. I was confident that my having taken Spanish classes from fifth grade all the way through Dartmouth College would give me a fighting chance to communicate on the ground without assistance from anybody.
Later on, I was to discover that my Spanish was about as fluent as Parkman’s dominion of Sioux dialects. For example, on one construction project, I asked for some string and the neighborhood kids brought me a bowl of ice (hielo instead of hilo). It took me so long to find out how poor my Spanish was upon because Mexicans tend to be an extremely polite people, much akin to the rest of the supposedly uneducated “Third Worlders”.
I had the good fortune to lead the first five of those service projects to Mexico that, happily, continue to this day to a variety of destinations. My fascination with the people, especially the ordinary people of that country and their culture grew with every passing year. I resolved that I would focus my life on the Mexican question inasmuch as it would inevitably become a matter of national security for my beloved country. How would the United States incorporate the steady and unstoppable stream of mostly impoverished and poorly educated Mexican immigrants into its society? What were the principle hopes for cultural concord? What would be the strongest arguments to win over enough conservative thinkers like me so that they might see these migrants as assets rather than liabilities?
In short, I decided to follow Parkman’s footsteps into total immersion, except that my guiding curiosity was to be about the future instead of the past of our continent. At Dartmouth, I had studied the relationship between religion and culture under the aegis of professors Charles T. Wood, Charles Stinson, Jeffrey Hart, and Catholic chaplain Monsignor William Nolan (They bear no responsibility for my opinions). My favorite mentor was cultural anthropologist and Oxford don Christopher Dawson, who argued in Understanding Europe (1952):
If we are to make the ordinary man aware of the spiritual unity out of which all the separate activities of our civilization have arisen, it is necessary in the first place to look at Western civilization as a whole and to treat it with the same objective appreciation and respect which the humanists of the past devoted to the civilization of antiquity.
A few years afterwards, two semesters of studying American history at Harvard as a “special student” with giants like Professors Bernard Bailyn and Oscar Handlin gave me a sliver of a crimson pedigree or, better said, “badge” that is venerated by Mexicans of every social class in direct proportion to their wealth. I do admit that I often needed my Ivy League badges to flash at employers, academics, and blind dates. Furthermore, I confess that virtually no one in the entire country has heard about Dartmouth College except Dartmouth graduates, if that pleases the Crimson Tide.
To make my match with Parkman complete, I too happen to have a banged-up body in accord with my mentor: featuring bi-polar disorder treated with lithium bicarbonate until kidney rejection leading to transplant and inoperable hernia (that makes flirting at bars most uncomfortable), accompanied by osteopenia (“I’m melting!”), plus other side effects such as ground-down teeth and indelible warts on my hands and legs (those on my hands being well-nigh impossible to disguise from curious female eyes). As long as I take my daily cocktail of umpteen pills and get regular check-ups, I have been able to go anywhere and do anything… for the time being.
Yet unlike Parkman, I have an artist’s propensity to exaggeration, distraction, and forgetfulness. I have no great claim to professional or scholarly distinction in the Dartmouth or Harvard or University of Texas at Austin (MBA) alumni hall of fame. As one might expect with a person of my ilk, my professional résumé has more holes in it than the bullet-riddled remains of Bonnie and Clyde.
Nevertheless, the accumulation of these attributes, along with a well-honed Marx Brothers sense of humor, have made me a kindred spirit to ordinary Mexicans who their country’s foremost media magnate characterized as being “totally screwed” (jodidos).
Fortunately, my self-anointed mission has long served to keep this tin can together despite the slings and arrows of manic misfortune. Periods of depression were blown away by imagined trumpet flourishes of a John Williams medley (themes to Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Superman … along with John Barry’s “007” scores). They say that Mexican cats have seven lives, so I figured that this American cat might outlive the rest by two more.
I did not have much money, but I hoped that I might find fame and fortune as “Our Man in Mexico,” spanning two cultures during a critically important period in North American relations. I became determined to thus redeem my existence and, of late, make enough money on my menagerie of memories to help pay off the mortgage. Much like the ancient mexica tribe, I began my definitive pilgrimage to worship Huitzilopochtli, the fire snake wielding Aztec god of war and sacrifice.
Money aside, I simply cannot over-emphasize the importance of my loyalty to this cause. In my darkest hours of failure, rejection, and solitude, my stubborn focus on this windmill proved to be, along with my Catholic faith, a most valuable ally. I would go so far as to recommend to anyone with my kind of psychiatric challenges that they bind themselves to faith-filled family and friends and their own “Mexican Trail”.
These were the reasons why I decided to live and work and study in Mexico for much of the 90s. I got to experience a 30% monetary devaluation of the peso, several never-solved political assassinations along with the maturity of an independent electoral commission, and the triumph of an opposition alliance. I made dozens and dozens and dozens of friends and acquaintances from several cities and towns and every social class. Maxim: once you make a friend in Mexico, you have a friend for life.
Four extremely generous families of different social classes adopted me. None of them knew the other. That circumstance prevented any one of them from suspecting (to the best of my knowledge) that I was the greatest gringo gorron (leech) in the city’s, maybe the country’s history. I may have also been one of the most grateful.
Alongside all of my Mexican friends, I did enjoy the friendship of a handful of Americans on the scene. Those relations are very dear to me. Nevertheless, I did my best to socialize with the locals without going entirely “native”.
As a regional headquarters employee of FedEx and later as a professor at one of the country’s most respected educational institutions, I was able to work with and train colleagues throughout the country and Central America. The American expatriates at the company were congenial to me, especially my immediate gringo supervisors. However, it was curious how I was not made a part of their dollar-denominated world. For example, I was not invited to the annual Fourth of July celebration at the prestigious American School. Perhaps that suited me, since I was not in Mexico to make merry in the foreign community where I found that too many conversations were about the regrettable failings of Mexico and the Mexicans. In addition, I did not have enough cab fare to show up at the place.
What I did notice with some expats in my company and other foreign concerns is that they could become so overcome with power and money that they lorded it over the Mexicans (and particularly the mexicanas) in their orbit. Their winning middle-class demeanors thus become transformed into something wholly un-American. Some mexicanas would find their behavior a nuisance while others would make the most of it. I knew of one secretary who so bewitched her American boss in Monterrey that he divorced his wife and newborn baby for her and la vida loca. To the contrary, another female colleague reported sexual harassment to U.S. headquarters and had the American offender quietly removed from the country.
Although I could not draw upon a blue blood fortune such as Parkman’s to finance my most quixotic endeavor, I was blessed with the necessary support of my parents and friends, both in Mexico and the United States.
These same friends helped me to launch the North American Educational Initiatives Foundation, Inc. (www.naeif.org), in March 2000 (Our website needs a thorough overhauling). Together with a former American student who once had worked in Mexico and two Mexican physicians, we aimed to challenge North American university students to recognize and appreciate the equal dignity of the Mexican indigenous and poor. As a volunteer organization, we have always been aware that our efforts are admittedly miniscule in the face of such an ambitious agenda. Nevertheless, our cultural paradigm based on Aristotle’s teachings about authentic friendship and Catholic social doctrine is definitely potent and unique. This reasoning process was the fruit of a decade of mind/soul-searching as we transitioned from the concept of helping the uneducated poor to helping the overeducated rich.
One thousand years before St. Augustine, Aristotle taught in his Nicomachean Ethics that there are three kinds of friendship: authentic friendship, transactional friendship, and friendship for pleasure. While transactional friendship and friendship for pleasure constitute mutual superficial benefit, authentic friendship is termed “the perfect friendship” because it means the mutual improvement of one another. As Aristotle defines this relationship, “Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in excellence; for these well alike to each other qua good, and they are good in themselves.”
The Good News of Jesus Christ harmoniously lifts up this noble theory to its highest expression: the Lord Incarnate becoming the divine friend of every woman and man of whatever condition. As it has developed over the centuries, Catholic social doctrine strives to alleviate human suffering and enhance economic and social relations.
Over the years, we have sponsored essay contests, leadership awards, a magisterial essay series on friendship by a world expert on Aristotle, a North American student conference on solidarity and voluntarism, two Great Books summer program at The University of St. Thomas in Houston, and literacy and motivational projects for Hispanic students attending a Houston public elementary school.
The foundation’s priority program is the North American Leadership Institute (www.northamericanleadership.org), an innovative new model in human rights education that asks university leaders to discern what are the common civic values of the predominant cultures of our continent. Based on these studies, the students are prepared to consider the fundamental multicultural strengths and weaknesses of our societies. We have run two successful, three-week model programs in the summers of 2005 and 2007. The Provost for DeSales University visited the program and recognized that it merited credit for academic and experiential learning. The program is available on our website and is intended for wide distribution to the university community at no cost, only attribution. The ideal arrangement for propagating this program would be for an accredited university to give the course elective credit so that its students and students at other universities might participate as an educational enterprise… not as a service trip, as worthwhile as they are. To date we have not found any sponsors in the United States.
As we celebrate our 24th anniversary of NAEIF, I have had the privilege of serving as a consultant to six private universities, namely, Dartmouth College, DeSales University, Northwestern University, St. Thomas University (Houston, Texas), UNIVA (the largest Catholic university in Mexico based in Guadalajara) and the Universidad Panamericana (based in Mexico City). I have served as an international advisor to the Cardinal Newman Society, to FOCUS (Fellowship of Catholic University Students) as it plans its expansion into Mexico, and to the Mazahua Mission, an ecumenical center for a particular indigenous community of central Mexico. Over the years, the foundation has provided assistance to nascent undergraduate NGO’s based out of a select number of undergraduates’ vision and passion in Chicago, Chapel Hill, and Houston. These educational organizations want their students to learn about human dignity in the classroom and in the field in such a way that students’ good feelings crystalize into enduring convictions.
Our current focus is on interconnecting institutions and student leaders with our human dignity values. For many years, we have been suggesting fundraising ideas to the Universidad Panamericana. We recently co-sponsored an important Symposium on Poverty with the Health Sciences Department of that same institution. We are introducing American universities to Mexican universities. The foundation is exploring international intellectual interfaces based on studying the works of the members of “The Inklings” in association with the McGrath Center of Notre Dame University. We continue our ongoing commitment to an underprivileged community in Coyoacan, Mexico City. We have been implementing beautification and quality of life efforts for that area in the form of chapel renovations, increased floral areas, playground improvements, and murals.