Reading ‘Mexamerica: A Culture Being Born’
“Mexamerica: A Culture Being Born” is a compilation of writer Fey Berman’s interviews, essays and reviews on Mexican Americans living in the United States. Berman was born in Mexico but has resided in New York for over three decades. She outlines her motivation for writing the book on its first page: “Because we are very diverse, because crossing the border, legal or illegal, is just another detail of who we are and what we have become, because we are definitely participants in a nascent and distinguishable culture, I decided to publish this book of essays about the Mexican presence in the United States.”
Published in 2017, the five-part book examines the emerging Mexican American culture through various characters: filmmakers, musicians, photographers, artists, dancers, choreographers, researchers, activists and dreamers. All of whom are a part of the 37.5 million Mexicans living in the United States. As Berman points out, the Mexican American population in the United States is comparable to Canada, with two-thirds of its population born in the United States.
In the first part of her book, she tells the story of Martin Ramirez, "the portraitist of our exile." Ramirez, a farmer from Jalisco, migrated to California in 1925. After the Great Depression, he was hospitalized in an asylum, where he spent his life drawing with pencils and crayons. "Rooted in Ramirez's experiences outside the hospital, they are a hallucinated reconstruction of his memories or of his memory of the iconic motifs of Mexico America,” she writes. “Mexamerica: that geographical and imagined territory where North America and Mexico hybridize to mutate into something else, something new.”
She goes on to tell us about Dulce Pinzon, a photographer who pays homage to undocumented migrants with her series "The True Story of the Superheroes." The photographs portray super heroes in working environments: Spiderman cleans a building’s windows, Catwoman attends to her two children, and Superman rides a bike to make a delivery.
Her essays “Chicago” and “New York: Bolivar's Dream” merit special attention. In Chicago, she wonders why, despite the city’s high population of Mexicans, they are not seen on the streets. She walks through Chicago’s neighborhoods, looking for lost Mexicans, until she finds them in the neighborhood of Pilsen, a former refuge for immigrants from Eastern Europe, with murals featuring Mexican emblems. “In Pilsen one feels as though he were in Mexico,” she writes. “Or rather, one feels himself to be in a bucolic — and at the same time very gringo — reinterpretation of what Mexico is.”
In "New York: Bolivar's Dream," Berman explains how Simon Bolivar’s designs were fulfilled in the city: A new culture is being forged in the city; it is the center of a new elite of academics, scientists and artists; there is Hispanic unity; the city embraces and celebrates their customs. Mexicans have long led the new “Hispanity,” with figures such as Marius de Zayas and Jose Miguel Covarrubias. The city is at the forefront of Hispanic cultural manifestations.
Berman writes that New York City supports the flourishing of indigenous identities. "A multitude of groups with government financial support are supporting the expression of Nahuatl and Maya and the preservation of Mixtec, Zapotec or Poblano traditions,” she writes.
Written in Spanglish, the essay “Du yu spic Spañish?” shows the hybridization between English and Spanish. It reveals an enlightening fact: There are 45 million Spanish speakers in the United States, only a million behind the number of speakers in Spain.
"In the United States we are living through a time of transformation of our language similar to what happened when Spanish traveled from the Iberian Peninsula to the American continent and was impregnated with indigenous languages," Berman writes, although she points out that each Hispanic group handles its own jargon.
However, for U.S. Spanish to survive, according to Berman, Hispanics must insist that their descendants be bilingual, and immigration must continue, as the children and grandchildren of migrants are forgetting Spanish.
“Mexamerica: A Culture Being Born” is a necessary book. There is no better way to rescue and make visible a culture than with its artistic manifestations, with the stories of those who represent this hybridization. The ignorance of the other is what causes fear and feeds the xenophobic rhetoric of recent years. This book is an invitation to know and end the prejudices against Mexican Americans.