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Chapter 9. Participatory Parables: Cinema, Social Action, and Steinbeck's Mexican Dilemma
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Participatory Parables: Cinema, Social Action, and Steinbeck’s Mexican Dilemma 227 AT THE END OF 1939 Steinbeck found himself exhausted by his work over the spring and summer on the medical documentary The Fight for Life (about care in maternity hospitals), by the publicity surrounding the publication of The Grapes of Wrath in April of that year, and by the mixed public reactions to the book, some of which—in circles of privilege and power—were quite violent.1 On October 16 he wrote, “I have to go to new sources and find new roots.”2 Then on November 13 he wrote, with a somewhat panicky humor, “There are things in the tide pools easier to understand than Stalinist, Hitlerite, Democrat, capitalist confusion, and voodoo. So I’m going to those things that are relatively more lasting to find a new basic picture.”3 On February 28, 1940, he was exuberant: “We’ll be off to Mexico within a week. I’m terribly excited, as I guess my handwriting shows.”4 He was about to leave with Ed Ricketts for a voyage around the Gulf of California. On that trip, and in relation to it, he found the new source, the new basic picture that he sought. The sequence of novels, screenplays, and travel accounts set in Mexico constitutes what might be considered the single most neglected aspect of John Steinbeck’s writing.5 That Steinbeck would find Mexico and its people congenial to his imagination will not surprise readers of “Flight,” Tortilla Flat, and Steinbeck ’s other paisano stories, set in or near Monterey and the Salinas Valley. In these stories he drew on his experience as a young man working side by side with Mexican laborers (paisanos) in the fields and visiting them in their homes. “Flight,” especially, published in The Long Valley in 1938, is essentially a Mexican story set on the central coast of California. With the CHAPTER 9 Marijane Osborn 228 Marijane Osborn exception of that more serious tale, a major difference between the lively paisano stories and Steinbeck’s three major fictions set in Mexico—The Forgotten Village, The Pearl, and Zapata—is that the latter writings are overtly political in nature. They are political in that they are concerned not only with displaying the lives of interesting subaltern populations but also with revealing how the power structures in which such people exist oppress them with poverty, powerlessness, or ignorance (each of these conditions, of course, contributing to the others). They also bring attention to and examine the success of particular efforts to take action to redress this injustice and ameliorate unjust social conditions, and readers familiar with Steinbeck’s fiction will correctly anticipate the usual outcome of such efforts to be ambiguous and fraught with unintended consequences. These stories are parables of injustice because in them Steinbeck creates “real people,” individuals with great strength of character with whom we identify and whose difficult lives we want to see improved, as a stand-in for larger populations and their problems. He says this himself in his brief introduction to The Forgotten Village (the book of the film): “We wished our audience to know this family very well, and incidentally to like it, as we did. Then, from association with this little personalized group, the larger conclusion concerning the racial group could be drawn with something like participation.”6 This essay examines how these three stories set in Mexico unveil a particular aspect of Steinbeck’s concern for distressed peoples, a concern that is well known and relatively uncomplicated when the subject is Caucasian agricultural workers, like the Joads of The Grapes of Wrath, who are exploited by other Caucasians within a culture familiar to them and to the writer. In the case of Mexico, however, that same concern enters both the colonialist realm, where complacent assumptions about race are a factor, and the vexed arena of “humanitarian intervention,” in this case nonmilitary engagement that is intended to minimize the suffering of peoples in a state (or a culture within a state) foreign to the persons intervening. In other words, here Steinbeck is entering territory far more complex and ethically problematic than in his novels and stories about people mainly of his own race and culture. As for the Californian paisanos, he typically evades serious engagement with their lives by representing them as colorful rather than oppressed. His deep involvement with underprivileged Chicago women giving birth in The Fight for Life made him aware...