By far the best-known work by the Mexican Nobelist, a collection of essays that sets out to discover and explain Mexican identity. Paz starts out fairly tamely by exploring the inferiority complex Mexicans develop when living among their Northern neighbours, and the pachuco counterculture that was a reaction to that, then he moves on to the macho culture with its insistence on suppressing emotions ("the mask"), the key role of the fiesta as an outlet, and the significance of the Mexican national swearword, the universal verb chingar.

But the real substance of the collection seems to be in the set of essays where he takes us succinctly through the cultural history of Mexico from Cortés and Malinche to his own generation, via the major signposts of independence in the 1820s, reform in 1857, and the revolution of 1910. He talks about the collision and fusion of Aztec and Catholic ideas, the flowering of Mexican culture in the late-baroque period (with the emergence of remarkable figures like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz), the way every liberal reform movement before the revolution ended up concentrating power and land in the hands of a new elite, but left peasants no better off than before, and the mid-20th century situation of Mexico as a postcolonial developing country struggling to get away from the standard problems of debt, foreign ownership and an economy based on agriculture and minerals that leaves it constantly vulnerable to market fluctuations.

Clear, concise exposition, in which Paz ties Mexican culture into what was going on in the rest of the world, whilst insisting on its special situation as one of the very few postcolonial countries where a complex and highly-organised pre-colonial administration collapsed suddenly and left the colonisers to take over and superimpose their own culture. ( )

Collection of essays in which the Nobel laureate describes and explains Mexican history and society. To understand Mexico and much of Latin America, this is a good read. Some of the essays were written during the politically charged 60s, but they are still readable today. ( )

En este volúmen, Paz esboza con minuciosa detalle las conexiones entre las estructuras que hacemos los sujetos para ocultar nuestra carencia del otro, y las estructuras sociales en que nos hallamos, que exigen respuestas nuestras, y en que anhelamos (sin fé) dissolvernos en la "communión." Me sorprendió muchísimo su atención a la economía y a la geopolítica mundiales de su época -- no conozco a otro pensador de su tiempo que tuvo una mirada tan lúcida de las maneras en que los verdaderamente importantes conflictos del medio del Siglo XX eran las de las "periferias," y de la lucha en búsqueda de la dignidad individo y de un lugar mas-o-menos participante en la sociedad mundial.

No sé muy bien a donde zarpar desde las costas a las que Paz me guío; sus últimas conclusiones parecen señalar al regreso a una vida de forma vieja, "cerrada," quizá normal y consistente, como única respuesta a las exigencias del momento histórico en que estamos, y además sugieren que la igualdad internacional sea un paso imperdible de este camino de vuelta. ¿Pero no es eso una admisión que la misma ideologia de "desarrollo" y del tiempo "progresivo" que Paz (como tantos otros) critica nos muestra igual la única manera de avanzar? ¿No prescribe para México un acercarse al mundo "adelantado" que buscara una comunión imposible? ¿Cómo se vive, como individuo o como nación, una vida solitaria pero asegurada? ( )

Originally published 1950, calling for more democracy in Mexico.

An insightful book; yet in spite of its apparent tangencies with Mexican character, how unique does it really make them? After all, we all use masks, few of us open ourselves to strangers, and no one willingly "se raja." Still Paz's Spanish prose is intoxicating. ( )