The Old Gringo by Carlos Fuentes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“No More West, Boys”

Like most who know of Ambrose Bierce, his Devil’s Dictionary was the sum of what I knew about him. That and his disappearance in the deserts of Chihuahua in 1913. His book became a companion of my young adulthood, confirming my own less than positive attitude about things as diverse as military life, patriotism, and so-called family values in America. I suppose the mystery of his final months provided an excuse to consider him as ‘taken up’ rather than dead, a sort of literary Elijah whose prophecies were being fulfilled. I think Carlos Fuentes may have had similar feelings when he wrote this fictional ending to Bierce’s life.

That life spanned a crucial transition in American culture. Not only did Bierce experience the horror of the Civil War, he also watched as the country subsequently was transformed into a dominantly corporate society controlled by men like Leland Stamford and Randolph Hearst, that is to say by finance and information (Bierce had investigated the former on behalf of the latter). Bierce knew both intimately and hated that he had worked in and for the system that fostered them and the other corporate robber barons who ran the country for their benefit (and largely still do). His frequent journalistic sarcasm was self-directed as much as it was comment on American society.

Manifest Destiny, the idea that white Northern Europeans were entitled to expand across the North American continent to the Pacific, was the prevailing policy of the American government during all of Bierce’s life. And the policy-objective had been achieved by the end of the 19th century. There was no more Western frontier. The American Dream had been realised: “In his own lifetime, the old gringo... had seen an entire nation move from New York to Ohio to the battlegrounds of Georgia and the Carolinas and then to California, where the continent, sometimes even destiny, ended.” What had been produced was not the predicted utopia of Calvinist pre-destination but a cultural cesspit. “My country 'tis of thee, Sweet land of felony...,” Bierce sings. His mere presence in Mexico as an escapee from his own country is a mockery of “God, his Homeland, Money.”

Like the Dutch building dikes, perhaps, America doesn’t know how to stop its successful expansionism. Among other things, it invades Cuba on a pretext, sends troops into Mexico to fight ‘bandits,’ and shells the port of Veracruz for ‘insulting the flag of the United States.’ The cultural imperialism and racism of America cannot contain itself. “We are caught in the business of forever killing people whose skin is of a different color,” the old gringo muses. And, of course he is right. The momentum of American hatred for what is ‘other’ continues unabated more than a century after Bierce’s self-exile.

The Mexicans know why Bierce has come: “The old gringo came to Mexico to die... He wanted us to kill him, us Mexicans.” A running theme throughout the story is the mirrored ballroom of a hacienda captured by Pancho Villa’s troops. The locals had never seen a mirror before and don’t know what to make of the images; but the gringo (and a rather stupid gringa who could well be the United States in a skirt), see themselves as never before. The vision in the mirrors is disconcerting and it changes the self-images of the Americans. They recognise that “each of us carries the real frontier inside.” The dream had been a delusion. To recognise the inherent inferiority of this delusion is why “to be a gringo in Mexico is one way of dying”

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