To: LoneClone who wrote (21333 ) 9/18/2006 1:01:23 PM From: marcos Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 78405 en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org Together with the story of La Malinche you'll find lots of symbols and contradictions here ... note that they all involve interaction with invaders, always the busheviks du jour are arriving, slaughtering and destroying and taking, always the challenge for the mexicano is to deal with the consequences ... there has developed, generally speaking, a mexican method for doing so ... and here is an exception to it - en.wikipedia.org The mexica people themselves had been invaders to the Valle only two hundreds years before Cortés, and had largely been assimilated in culture and language, almost certainly the tradition of melding goes back before that, to the toltec and beyond .... somewhere i have a magazine article from years ago that makes the argument that Juárez was inhibited by being a full blooded zapotec, and not a mestizo, this piece got vehement reaction at the time, but there may have been something to it imho During the cold war there was developed a series of jokes that involved a mexicano, a gringo, and a russian ... there were hundreds of variations, the mexicano is always self-deprecating, and usually wins, or loses in a way that is less than the others, he does this through patience, a sense of predestination, sometimes with a smidgen of cunning Every mexicano knows before he goes to kinder at the age of four, that 1. the northern half of his country was invaded and is currently occupied, 2. the entire country was invaded before that, with catastrophic consequences, and 3. he is by culture and language and usually by blood a product of these developments This is not off-topic imho, with most all of us with hard cash among Los Hijos ... there is not, imho, a basic problem for canuck punters .... lots of contradictions, sure, the place is populated by human beings after all, and the mexicano has never known a from-the-roots english parliamentarian democracy any more than has the mongol, but he has a way of getting along, 'muddling through' as WSC put it ... largely by Make Love Not War - when Aztlán was occupied there were four millions mexicanos, now there are one hundred and ten millions, and growing ... viva la Reconquista, eh