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PARTISAN REVIEW
esthetic, moral, religious. It is an identity embodying three centuries
of Hispanic heritage, a culture that Riding promises to reveal but
does not.
History affects daily life in Mexico, but while Riding recognizes
this, he doesn't explore it. His treatment of the colonial period is
more or less what any tourist could learn from the murals of Diego
Rivera: the distorted and Manichean official version.
Distant Neighbors
fails to mention that Mexico saw one of the most
interesting experiments in cultural transference in Western history:
the meeting of Spain and Meso-America. The tensions that arose
when these radically different cultures met preoccupied contemporary
theologians, interested Montaigne, and even today are the subject of
passionate study. In the United States, Indians were exterminated
or forcibly settled in reservations. In contrast (and without denying
Spanish domination), Spain almost built a theology around the rights
of the natives. The resulting moral restrictions, coupled with exten–
sive intermarriage
(mestizaje),
moderated the impact of racism (even
with respect to the black population), and brought about a sense of
equality. In 1542, the Spanish Crown issued the Laws of the Indies,
which protected the Indians' freedom, patrimony, and nonreligious
cultural life. Those laws, implemented by the "trail" of churches, con–
vents and schools which still winds through the Mexican country–
side, formed part of a huge process of cultural transference, whose
rubrics, however indirectly, for better or for worse, continue to give
order
to the Mexican mentality.
If
there is one decisive fact which may explain public life in
Mexico, it is the adaptation of the political architecture of Spain: the
construction - different from the English social pact between indi–
viduals - of a political body, a hierarchical entity, in which the wishes
of the prince and the people theoretically coincide, in obedience to
natural law, and in the interests of
felicitas civitatis.
Thus, although
painfully distant from the Italian Renaissance, the Protestant Re–
forms, political individualism, and the Industrial Revolution, Mexi–
can colonial society progressed in a different way: by the development
of moral and legal philosophy. It is easy to forget, for example, that
New Spain abolished bondage long before the Anglo-Saxon colonies
did, and that the indifference and cruelty towards blacks and natives
which continued to be manifest in the United States in the mid-nine–
teenth century had long since disappeared in Spain's American colo-
