The Old Gringo [Paperback]

Carlos Fuentes's book is an ambitious project: the disappearance of the great American writer Ambrose Bierce and his fictional confrontation with Pancho Villa and his army in Mexico.

Both face defeat.
Ambrose Bierce `believed he could shape the destinies of others through a journalism of accusation and satire', `while my lord and master of the press cannibalized my anger for the greater glory of his political interests and his massive circulation and his massive bank accounts.'
Mexico and its people `conquered by a destiny of defeat: slaves and rustlers, never free men, except by being rebels.' Why this rebellion? `Because we are tired of a world ruled by the caciques, the Church, and the strutting aristocrats.'

Carlos Fuentes is a brilliant writer: `The mountains rose like worn, dark-skinned fists and the old man imagined the body of Mexico as a gigantic corpse with bones of silver, eyes of gold, flesh of stone and balls hard as copper.'
But, another author, J. M. Coetzee, tackled the same theme in his book `The Master of Petersburg', where another famous author F.M. Dostoyevsky is confronted with Russian anti-tsarist terrorism. While J. M. Coetzee wrestles with the problem of political violence head-on, Carlos Fuentes slides into another `Cambio de Piel" and explicit sex.

A big opportunity missed.

I've heard it more than once, living in New Mexico, from my Hispanic brethren, that "I didn't cross the border, the border crossed me," a not so subtle reference to the enlargement of the United States following the war with Mexico in 1848. Clearly the destinies of these two countries are intertwined, and at one time it was primarily an issue for the Southwestern US, but in the last 30 years, most of the US is involved. A prime, even essential reason to try to understand our relationship from a Mexican perspective, and there is no finer Mexican writer than Carlos Fuentes.

I just re-read this excellent novel, and consider it, along with The Death of Artemio Cruz (FSG Classics) to be his best works, and most accessible. His erudition, and his literary style dazzles. And his anger at power relationships, including those with his northern neighbor, burns white hot. He chose an interesting mix of major and minor characters to tell his story. The "Old Gringo" is revealed at the end of the book to be Ambrose Pierce, who in real life was a sardonic, cynical satirist famous for writing The Devil's Dictionary (Thrift Editions) and who disappeared in old age, in Mexico, at the time of the revolt led by Pancho Villa. The two other principal characters are Harriet Winslow, a teacher fleeing an unhappy family situation in Washington, DC, including the ghost of her father who disappeared in Cuba, during the Spanish-American War in 1898. The third is the illiterate General Arroyo, on the side of Pancho Villa, and who possesses the papers that proves he is the true owner to the hacienda that his troops burn. The minor characters are equally fascinating, including La Luna, (she of the moon face), La Garduna, various troops fighting the war, and the "ghosts" of all the principal's fathers.

In regards to the Mexican-American relationship, consider: "Haven't you ever thought, you gringos, that all this land was one ours? Ah, our resentment and our memory go hand in hand." In real life Bierce worked for a period for the king of the "Yellow Press," William Randolph Hearst, a precursor to "Fox News," and Fuentes provides scathing critiques: "he had attacked it by orders of his boss Hearst, who had enormous investments in ranches and other property and feared the Revolution; but as he couldn't say, Go protect my property, he had to say, Go protest our lives, there are North American citizens in danger, intervene!" and Bierce reflected on his own role: "...wary of his journalist's tendency to form the instant stereotype that enabled the stupid masses to understand in a flash and feel flattered for it; a tag for everything, that was the Bible of his boss, Mr. Hearst." Towards the end, a reporter, shades of our recent adventure in Iraq, asks: "Don't you want us to save Mexico for democracy and progress, Miss Winslow?" Fuentes also tells the "best history," the history that we did not know, and forced me to consult Wikipedia concerning the American invasion of Vera Cruz in 1914.

But the book is so much more than about political or power relations. It really is about the changes that events unforeseen force on the characters. How they react to events. And Fuentes style of foreshadowing, and backing and filling, like pixels in a picture is impressive. For example, on the first page you learn that a female character might have given her child the name of "Tom Brook," but it is more than half way through the novel that you learn why, under Fuentes wry guidance.

The book is also very much about what passes for love; and this includes a particular passage of eroticism, both in terms of the physical and physiological, that could rival any in literature. "No, I had him." The frontiers are more than that formed by a river, called the Grande in the North- they are also about crossing our internal ones.

Overall, a superlative read, richer the second time around, and an essential read for all Americans. `Tis a pity that the book has a low Amazon rating, due to its assignment to students who would have learned far more picking grapes for a month with our friends from the South.

(Note: Review first published at Amazon, USA, on July 02, 2009)

Though this novel has all the hallmarks of a recognized classic, it is, surprisingly, only twenty-five years old. Set during Mexico's civil war in 1914, the author shows Mexico determined to be independent and true to its own history, while the US wants to create outcomes there which coincide with US goals and political agendas here. For more than forty years, Fuentes has also been fascinated with the story of American author/journalist Ambrose Bierce, who is believed to have vanished in Mexico during that war, and he exploits this long interest by making Bierce the "Old Gringo" of the title.

Bierce, age seventy-one at the time of his disappearance, had traveled the world and had already written most of what he felt he had to say. Drawn to Mexico, where a popular revolution was threatening to change the country's history, Bierce is thought to have gone there to join up with Pancho Villa and his men, who were fighting the federales and the government of President Victoriano Huerta, known as "the Jackal." Bierce never returned, his fate unknown.

On the level of plot, this is a story told by Harriet Winslow, a thirty-one-year-old American from Washington, D.C., who has been hired as a teacher by the wealthy Miranda family. Fuentes uses flashbacks to reveal Harriet's background and that of the Old Gringo, who has just arrived in these lands. Harriet regards the Old Gringo as a father figure, understanding that he has come to Mexico to die, while he in turn sees her as his final temptation before death. Harriet has had a brief but passionate relationship with Tomas Arroyo, the general who has driven out the Miranda family and hanged many of the federales protecting the property, and she is tormented by that relationship.

Fuentes clearly admires the Old Gringo, but he also shows him to be human, a man grappling with his future, even as he believes that he has no future. The sense of each person's connection to the past through family permeates the novel, and as the characters separately try to make their own lives worth living, they parallel the goals of the rebels who, as hard-working poor, are determined to protect their own past and their country's history. The novel's outcome--the Old Gringo's death--looms over all the action from the outset, which begins with a grim scene of his exhumation, but the novel is not just a story on one level. It is also a story illustrating the political differences between Mexico and the US, between a country with a long and complex cultural history and one that is not even two hundred years old, and between the poor and helpless victims of economic and political aggression and their exploitation by wealthy autocrats.

Fuentes spends much time describing the characters' philosophical quandaries (some of them repetitious), but he also suggests Mexican myths related to the sun, moon, and stars. Nature comes to life here, and symbols abound--the desert being the ultimate image of war. These images contrast with artificial excesses of church décor and, on a smaller scale, with the Miranda hacienda and its elaborate mirrored ballroom, in which many soldiers see their full images for the first time. The contrasts between real life and its artificial reflections, between the realities of war and the perhaps unrealistic dreams of its participants, and between remembered history and its loss, add significance and thematic richness to the author's seemingly simple story. Mary Whipple