El fracaso del mestizo by Pedro Ángel Palou (review)

El fracaso del mestizo studies the rise and fall of the Modern Mexican State through the lens of the mestizo and mestizaje. Pedro Palou acknowledges these concepts as Mexico’s master signifier and unifier after the end of the Revolution in 1917. This ground-breaking work accompanies his earlier La culpa de México, la invención de un país entre dos guerras. In his new work, Palou offers a careful intellectual history of Mexico grounded in Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological concept of the habitus, that is, the values and expectations acquired through everyday life, which depend on history and memory. Thus for Palou, the Mexican habitus is created and recreated through José Vasconcelos’s and others’ mythical and mystical interpretations of mestizaje. El fracaso del mestizo examines how literature and film reproduce this myth, which has been forcibly remembered in Mexico throughout the twentieth century.

The book, Palou’s first written from his academic position in the US, examines Mexico from an outside perspective that remains deeply ingrained in Mexico’s cultural and academic milieu. El fracaso del mestizo’s greatest strength is that it proposes a post-identity politics for Mexico while engaging with theories of identity, gender, sexuality and race. The book begins by accepting the importance of this problematic master signifier, and continuing a discussion begun by critics such as Joshua Lund and Estele Tarica, whose works have enhanced the study of mestizaje and the Mexican State in significant ways.

Palou’s essential contribution is rereading mestizaje in the cultural practices of literature and film as both an aesthetic goal for the Mexican phenotype and as a defining feature of Mexican State policy. It adopts a thematic rather than strictly chronological approach to survey Mexican history and culture, which succeeds only because it is hyperaware of history. El fracaso del mestizo employs a psychoanalytic framework and dialogues with Slavoj Žižek’s attention to the spectral and haunting elements of the Lacanian real and with Mari Ruti’s understanding of singularity as a self that comes into being in response to this same reality. This innovative theoretical approach leads to fresh readings of canonical texts and films by authors and directors such as José Revueltas, Guillermo Fadanelli and Luis Buñuel. Each chapter pairs literary works and cinematic counterparts, either a novel and its adaptation to the screen or a film with strong intertextual links to a novel.

El fracaso del mestizo’s introductory “Obertura” and concluding “Coda” allude to its musical style and suggestively imply that Mexico could be a symphony instead of a disaster. The introduction reviews multiple historical contributions to the concept of mestizaje, including Manuel Gamio, Moisés Sáenz, Octavio Paz, Claudio Lomnitz, as well as Vasconcelos. The book’s musicality further comes to light in multiple chapters that return to one another in a series of narrative asides.

The first chapter pairs Federico Gamboa’s Santa and Agustín Yáñez’s Al filo del agua with analyses of their cinematic versions. It explains Santa’s popularity, and relates it to the myth of the Malinche and Hernán Cortés. The chapter then explains how the film changes the novel, particularly as it tames the blind brothel keeper, Hipólito. For Palou, these fatherless novels and films echo how the Revolution killed the national father, pre-Revolutionary dictator Porfirio Díaz.

The second chapter compares Luis Buñuel’s documentary Los olvidados to Revueltas’s novel El luto humano. Palou masterfully considers incredible amounts of information without being dense, boring or stilted. He explains that in Los olvidados, the myth of the revolutionary mestizo has been: “traicionado y no puede lograrse porque ese proyecto instala al mestizo mismo como una especie de esclavo asalariado” (69). Palou points out that in Buñuel’s work, the mestizo is free to live as long as this life is invisible; he adds that in Revueltas’s novel, these invisible characters become allegories and symbols for the impossibility of the mestizo.

The subsequent chapters...