Let me pause amid the hurricane to talk a little about what I think Mexican immigrants are leaving when they leave Mexico.

I believe what Mexicans are leaving is Mexico City. … Or, better put, what Mexico City represents in Mexican culture.

(Btw, it’s also, in another way, the theme of my first book, TRUE TALES FROM ANOTHER MEXICO: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx.)

Obviously Mexico City has many wonderful aspects to it. I lived there for 10 years. But Mexican immigrants…, I believe, are escaping north to freedom when they come to the United States. They are escaping all that Mexico City represents: the lethargy, the narcissism, the isolation of Mexico’s elites.

Mexico City, btw, is recreated in every state capital in Mexico, and in every county seat – cabecera municipal. That is to say, the same tendencies exist in state capitals and county seats as exist in Mexico City – the concentration of power, the reverence for the powerful, stifling of the poor, of independence and creativity.

If you’re poor in Mexico, you want to be far from what that.

A quote attributed to Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz goes, “Mexico: So far from God so close to the United States.”

Which is to say that Mexico is stifled because of its proximity to the U.S. Historically there’s a lot of truth to that, given our meddling in that country.

But where immigrants are concerned, that quote needs revising. It is better put: “So far from Mexico City, so close to God.”

That is, the farther one is from what Mexico City represents and the closer one is to the United States (culturally, geographically and economically), the better chance one can be all one can be – trite though that sounds.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the one party state that ran the country for most of the 20th Century, embodied all that immigrants are trying to escape. It was the modern face of the Aztec elite, of the Spanish virreinato and Catholic church hierarchy, and of the succession of caudillos and dictators that afflicted Mexico through its first century of independence.

The PRI completed the congregation of all power in Mexico City, explaining why a city 7300 feet above sea level became the world’s largest. It congregated all tax revenue and decision-making there, and thus universities, politics, business, entertainment, there as well.

My feeling is that Mexicans have been trying to slip from the yoke of this inheritance for years now. They did it through the 1990s as they moved to oust the PRI from its monopoly on power. But the ones who’ve been doing it longest are immigrants, who chose simply to leave it.

(The PRI, not surprisingly, treated immigrants as traitors, sellouts, as non-Mexicans. It had to. By leaving, they showed how poorly the party was doing its job of running the country.)

One place that shows what I’m saying to be true is actually in Mexico: the borderlands with the US. It’s the place in Mexico that is farthest from Mexico City, both geographically and culturally. It’s also closest to the enormous US economy -- both physically and in attitude.

Mexicans tend to view it as less Mexican.

That’s a mistake.

True, the border can be ugly, grim, violent. But it is also beautiful because it is a blank slate – virtually uninhabited until 30 years ago. It is largely uncontrolled by elites and tradition and history, and thus it is a place where poor people have a greater chance of remaking themselves according to their own abilities.

Thus millions of people from the interior have moved there. No surprise.

In my book, I tell two stories of how therapeutic the border is.

One is the story of how opera emerged in Tijuana, through the efforts of people, working like underground war resisters in that city’s cacophonous culture.

They brought in the first orchestra – direct from the crumbling Soviet Union. Russians implanted classical music in Baja California. Later, Tijuana opera lovers started one of the few opera companies in Mexico that doesn’t rely on governmental support.

(They now have an annual Opera Street Festival around July 10 that must be seen to be believed. In one of Tijuana’s toughest, most rumpled and graffitied neighborhoods – La Libertad -- two hundred yards from the wall separating the two countries, they set up stages and singers perform Verdi, Wagner et al before thousands of Tijuanans. It’s quite something.)

The other story is the history of velvet painting, and the boom in that art that emanated from Ciudad Juarez in the 1970s. (Yes, the velvet painting of Elvis, Tweetie Bird, Dogs Playing Poker, and Jimi Hendrix.)

It’s about a collection of outcasts – a Georgia farmboy, a Chicago Jew, Palestinians, Scientologists and of course working-class Mexicans. They all used an outcast region – the border – and an outcast art – velvet painting – to create a boom and new lives for themselves.

In Mexico, only on the border could velvet painting, the great despised art form, helped create a class of artists out of working-class Mexicans who’d never have had access to art school.

The larger point of both stories is that on the border and far from everything Mexico City is and represents, poor and working-class people can find themselves, can allow their imaginations freer rein.

The border, not coincidentally, is also the place where Mexico’s gradual revolt against the PRI began. That’s understandable because, as I said, people have come north to freedom.

The border is where people view with most jaundiced ear the suave nonsense of Mexico City politicians. It’s also the part of the country most connected to the ethos and demands of the global economy.

(BTW, their revolt is not complete. Mexico remains captive of Mexico City even after ousting the PRI. I’ll deal with that in another blog.)

Finally, let me say, Mexican immigrants believe they come to the U.S. for the jobs.

That’s not exactly true. I believe they come for a whole set of New World cultural/economic/social/political attitudes, habits, traditions and customs.

These attitudes and traditions are quite opposite to those ingrained in what Mexico City represents in Mexican culture.

But they are what give rise to those jobs, to opportunity, and to the chance for poor people to be who they could not in Mexico.

Some immigrants really get this. Some don’t.

I’ll deal with the problems it creates when they don’t in another blog.

Cheers,

Sam