The Mexican culture has very rich and varied manifestations, product of its pre-Hispanic past and its Iberian heritage. However, it has been seen throughout its history that, despite having enough elements to achieve greater importance in front of the world, it has preferred to continue in mediocrity. This has been studied by both foreign and national writers. What is the reason, then, why this full incorporation into the concert of the nations has not yet been achieved? Throughout the twentieth century several works have been published to explain these features, and much less publications, to propose solutions.
In 1908 the book "Mexico Barbaro" by John Keneth Turner was published, where from his North American perspective, he sees the Mexican people as a people of savages, ignorant, conformist despite living oppressed, lazy, fanatic and inconstant.
In 1934, during postrevolutionary Mexico, Samuel Ramos published "The Profile of Man and the Culture of Mexico," where he applies techniques of psychoanalysis to the Mexican people. According to his conclusions there are three types of Mexicans:
The Peeling He defines it as "the most elementary and most clearly defined expression of the national character". He is the coarse Mexican, intellectually primitive and savage, in a denigrating state of life, which constantly requires self-affirmation that he seeks to achieve through both physical and verbal violence.
The Mexican city. He is the proletarian Mexican: disenchanted, pessimistic, distrustful, working out of necessity, studying the minimum necessary and boasting of his ignorance.
The bourgeois Mexican. It is the Mexican who has a comfortable economic position, seeks to live with refinements, is an exaggerated nationalist. However, when they are in confidence or under the influence of alcohol, they bring out their true nature: envious, passionate, intolerant, sexist and discriminating.
"Laberinto de la Soledad" is a collection of essays published in 1950 by Octavio Paz. In it he makes a study of the Mexican, and why he is the way he is. One of his conclusions is that miscegenation is the product of a violent imposition, of a violation, or in the best of cases, of a deception and seduction. He gives Malinche as an example, and states that, lacking a father figure and being born to a woman who was raped, the Mexican is "a son of a bitch" and lives in constant solitude.
For 1984, Alan Riding, from his own observations and supported by the previous works, Turner, Ramos and Paz, also exposes what he perceives as Mexican: ritualistic, disorderly, unpunctual, tends to self-devalue and at the same time wants to pretend that he lives better of what is your reality.
As we can see, the perception of the Mexican as a dependent, lazy, unpunctual, lacking self-commitment, self-degrading, disinterested of their future has remained throughout the 20th century.
The proposals for change.
But not all have remained static. José Vasconcelos published in 1925 "The Cosmic Race", an essay in which he exposes, contrary to the ideas of the time on the purity of race, that the miscegenation of Latin America gives it the characteristics to form a fifth race, mestizo, that in its culture has the best elements of each of the ethnic groups that make it up. This fifth race is the Cosmic Race.
We consider that this proposal by José Vasconcelos was ahead of its time, since that universal culture of the universal man, is the challenge that Globalization and the Internet now impose: an access to the knowledge of humanity, accessible to all, in a manner that can be assimilated by all.
