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Page 13 July–August 2008 A Borderland Primer Christine Granados Reading Margaret Sayers Peden’s book Mexican Writers on Writing was an uncomfortable reminder of how Anglocentric the public school education I received was, and I grew up along the Texas/Mexico border in El Paso. Not one of the twenty-four writers in her book, which constitutes the heavyweights of Mexican letters, was a part of my primary or secondary education in El Paso. Exactly two writers (Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz) were mentioned in my post-secondary schooling there along the border of Mexico. Peden explains in her preface how language creates a barrier and may be one of the reasons “Mexico’s long history of letters…remains largely unknown to us” here in the States. I believe she is being kind to her countrymen. While, yes, language can be a barrier (a barrier Peden has done her fair share in helping to scale through her accurate translations), the Frenchman Voltaire, Englishman William Shakespeare, and Russian Leo Tolstoy managed to travel over oceans and languages into our literary lexicon. My unscientific guess would be that Mexican authors are a mystery to us here in the US because we don’t value our neighbors to the south or the Mexican intellect. Why do English tales take precedence over Mexican ones in the one state that shares the longest border with Mexico? That idea hit me while reading Peden’s crosssection of Mexican authors’thoughts. It struck me as odd that in college I read all about Sir Phillip Sidney’s “In Defense of Poesie,” but nothing about Bernardo de Balbuena’s “In Defense of Poetry.” Odder still now that I know that Balbuena was Sidney’s contemporary , and maddening after I calculated that Kent, England is 5,000 miles away from El Paso, while el D.F., where Balbuena was raised, is less than 1,000 miles away from my college class. To know that a Mexican educated man—who, like Sidney, argued that poetry was a divine inspiration, and further stated that without poetry there would be no music—would have given me such a different world view, tinged the opaque colored lenses from which I grew up viewing the world. Plus, his is a defense I buy, wholeheartedly. I mention this only because Peden’s book fell into my lap one week after I spoke to a high-school English class filled with only Mexican American students inAustin,Texas.These students all wondered why they were studying English poets like Sidney and Geoffrey Chaucer. I looked at their brown faces and wondered the exact the same thing. I’m still wondering. Why do English tales take precedence over Mexican ones in the one state that shares the longest border with Mexico? I believe that these MexicanAmerican students would have been better served by reading a book like Peden’s. This well-thought-out, chronological sampling of Mexican thought doesn’t have a single tiresome, scholarly footnote, which makes it such an eminently readable book and would thus be easy to teach, even at the high-school level. I know the students would have been riveted by reading Bartolomé de las Casas’s “An Account, MuchAbbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies” and perceived the Spanish priest’s moral outrage at the treatment of the indigenous people of the New World, which is palatable even through his antiquated English, thanks to the translation of Andrew Hurley. And yet such is the temerity and unreasonable eagerness of those who think nothing of spilling such immense quantities of human blood and depopulating those vast lands of their natural inhabitants and possesors, killing a thousand million souls and stealing incomparable treasures, that it grows stronger every day, and so by divers paths and several feigned colors these tyrannical men importune that they be conceded or allowed said conquests (which cannot be conceded to them without violation of natural and divine law, and therefore commission of most grave mortal sins, worthy of terrible, eternal torments). They would have been engrossed because he was speaking up for the people who looked very much like the students sitting in all twenty chairs of mexiCan...

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