With the exception of the closing essay “The Dialectic of Solitude,” the remainder of the slim volume is an interpretation of periods of Mexican history from the Spanish Conquest to the present. Especially revealing in “The Sons of Malinche” is the discussion of the “psychic oscillations” of the Mexican. In the succeeding essays on “Mexican Masks,” “The Day of the Dead,” and “The Sons of Malinche,” the author acutely diagnoses the dominant trait of dissimulation in his countrymen, the passivity of Mexican women, the significance of the fiesta (when the Mexican explosively and momentarily emerges from his aloneness), and his often sardonic attitude toward death. His reactions to this alienation and inner solitude frequently give rise to unsocial behavior. This is a Mexican without the ties and traditions of the land of his origin who yet remains unabsorbed by North American society.
The first four analyze the Mexican psyche, starting with a discussion of the expatriate type, the pachuco, who is so numerous in Los Angeles and along the border. The universal aloneness of all mankind is his basic theme, for “solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition,” and with remarkable acumen he studies the Mexican manifestations of this universal ill in a series of nine essays. In these parlous times the quest of understanding transcends the quest of mere knowledge, for history is no longer a study of “the many truths proposed by many cultures.” Today’s appalling crisis has caused history to recover “its unity and become what it was at the beginning: a meditation on mankind.” This is a conclusion of a brilliant Mexican essayist, Octavio Paz, who is also rated as his country’s foremost living poet.
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