Mexico Reading the United States was scarcely an idea five years ago when Mary organized a conference panel at the University of Colorado, Boulder, on Mexican writers in dialogue with the United States, and invited Linda to participate. That was our first meeting. We have since discovered that we both have deep, rich and cherished connections with the Mexican and Latina communities that inspired us to work together on the book.

Linda Egan is an Associate Professor of Spanish at UC Davis. She is the author of Carlos Monsiváis: Culture and Chronicle in Contemporary Mexico and a book on Sor Juana.

Mary K. Long, Ph.D. is the director of International Spanish for the Professions, University of Colorado, Boulder, has written on the work of Salvador Novo and on cross-cultural exchange between Latin America and the United States in the business and non-profit sectors.

Mary
Married into a Mexican family, I lived for years in my husband’s homeland and enjoyed, shall we say, an enlightening time, principally thanks to my marvelous mother-in-law. Nohémi Sánchez taught at the Universidad Politécnica medical school, where many students and doctors asked why Americans didn’t greet them: “¿Es que se creen muy importantes?” Startled by that interpretation of American custom, I explained that it was about shyness and concepts of personal space and privacy, but I did quickly learn to greet everyone first as my mother-in-law generously led me through the city to the market and the drapery store as I set up my household. Many such exchanges over the years with my husband and his relatives, as well as my network in the Latina world as director of my university’s International Spanish for the Professions major, formed a strong backdrop to my conceptualization of Mexico Reading the United States and my collaboration with Linda.

Linda
Now a Mexicanist at the University of California in Davis, I did not grow up speaking Spanish, although I was surrounded with its sounds and speakers on a cotton and alfalfa farm some 18 miles from Blythe, California. My father Burl’s 16-hour days in the 120-degree heat, working side-by-side with the braceros who came each year, reading up to six books a day amid the daily chores, getting homework done before 9 p.m., hearing Nicolás, a worker on Linda’s father’s farm who came to the U.S. through the Bracero program, crouched outside my bedroom window sighing, “la radio, la radio,” as I drifted off to sleep –these non-events marked the rhythm of my childhood in the Mojave Desert. One year, an old Buick drove up the dusty driveway and out stepped an unrecognizable Nicolás in a snazzy suit. Then came his señora and a stairstep throng of children.

He had come to shake Mr. Burl’s hand and thank him for making it possible to bring his family up from Mexico. I watched silently under the blazing sun. And never forgot. I recently collaborated with a Latina professor from Sonoma State to bring famed Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska for a double campus visit. Over dinner one night, Elena was quizzing me about my disastrous, short-lived marriage, from which at least I ended up with a beautiful son. Elena laughed so hard at “Linda’s tragic telenovela” that she cried and we three bookish ladies nearly fell out of our chairs: the gringa, the Mexican and the Latina. In the end, strong women making a difference in life, the question of culture moot. Two years after the Boulder conference, Mary organized another panel on Mexico viewing the United States. Now we eagerly agreed: we would co-edit a volume from the rare perspective of Mexicans critically viewing culture, politics and society in the United States. It was a challenging two-year process of dialogue, bird-dogging and revelation. Hilda Chacón’s analysis of Mexican cybercartoonists’ views on U.S. political and economic crises is illustrative–as well as entertainingly illustrated; Peruvian-American Oswaldo Estrada’s read of a Mexican novel written in Spanglish provides a bittersweet look at a Mexican girl’s failed attempt to become a Latina; another essay evaluates a new type of novel, often written in Spanglish by Mexicans in the United States, whose characters have dual identities and ambiguous notions of place. The entire collection is like that: as unsettled and unsettling as the border itself and the line that lived reality and the people creating it have already erased between them and us.

By Linda Egan and Mary K. Long