Books

america-del-norte-review-the-unfinished-search-for-mexican-identity

Sun May 24 21:12:45 IST 2026

The novel “América del Norte” by Mexican writer Nicolas Medina Moro is an intellectual exploration of Mexican identity as part of North America, which is overwhelmingly dominated by the United States. The novel reads like a fictional counterpart to Octavio Paz’s non-fiction “The Labyrinth of Solitude,” the foundational meditation in which Paz analyses and interprets Mexican identity from psychological, cultural and historical angles. Paz concludes that the search for Mexican identity remains unfinished. Medina extends this inquiry into the era of the right-wing politics of Trump and the upending of Mexican politics by the leftist ex-president Lopez Obrador.

The author acknowledges that his editor at Soho Press, who, instead of steering him toward convention, encouraged him to make the novel weirder, longer, funnier, and riskier. The result is visible throughout the book. Medina has taken full advantage of this editorial encouragement to be more provocative, adventurous, and unconventional, including challenging English-language readers with all the subtitles and some texts fully in Spanish without translation.

Sebastian Arteaga y Salazar, the protagonist, is the descendant of an elite Mexican family who studies at Yale and then enrolls in a Master’s program at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. During his job as a teaching assistant, he gets caught in the crossfire in the ideological polarization of the American academic world following Trump’s assault against woke culture.

Sebastian has the familiar American Dream to settle in the US. He has been 'conditioned to desire America and Americanness even in the face of heartbreak'. His repeated attempts for a Green Card ended in failure after Trump’s policy of increasing restrictions against immigration. When he returns finally to Mexico, Sebastian finds that his conservative, wealthy family is at the receiving end of the leftist agenda of President Lopez Obrador. He feels out of place in Mexico, too. He realizes that he belongs fully to neither Mexico nor the US. He was not white enough for Trump's America, yet his family was not brown enough for Obrador's Mexico

Sebastian is acutely uneasy with his creole (descendent of the Spanish colonizers born in the Americas) identity and privileges within Mexico. He defines creole as "That colonial subject who benefits more than he suffers from the colonial situation. The creoles are to imperialism as the professional and the manager are to late capitalism; their function, like those of the overseer and the comprador, is to mediate between the ruling class and its subalterns—or, what is the same, to administer the colony for the benefit of the metropolitan ruling class. This is why the so-called 'revolutions of independence' of the various Latin American colonies were not conflicts between imperialists and anti-imperialists, but between imperialists and aspirants to imperialism”. It was the creoles of Mexico who had invited and crowned the Austrian prince Maximilian von Habsburg to become the emperor of Mexico in 1864. The Mexicans were able to defy the notorious Monroe Doctrine at this time since the US was mired in its internal civil war. Sebastian says, “ Emperor Maximilian was eventually killed by the Mexican revolutionaries, but the Mexican creole rulers have all shared an Austro-Hungarian temperament: a vulnerability to zealous passions, a predisposition to the fevers of ambition and a weakness for fantasy.”.

In an interview about the novel, Medina remarks that “the creoles served the same social function: translating, informing on, explaining the colonies to the imperial elite. Translators are often lovers, but they’re also always traitors”. He adds, “I am far from the only Mexican writer to betray his country by translating it into the language of the empire. The origins of Mexican literature are to be found in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Letters of Relation, the prose chronicles that inform the Spanish court of what was going on in the colonies. Nothing much has changed since then”.

Like every colonial elite, the creoles of Mexico resented their metropolitan cousins, whose laws excluded them from the highest spheres of wealth and power. Betraying their underdeveloped sense of proportion, they began to identify with the grandeur of the pre-Columbian past—though never, tellingly, with the Indigenous present—sincere in their conviction that the fact that the Spaniards treated them as second-class citizens brought them close to the people their grandfathers had massacred. As their resentment mutated from self-pity to self-regard, they saw their creole condition as an addition rather than a subtraction from their Western identity.

Sebastian falls in love with an American musicologist who is attracted to Latino men and Mexico. Yet his love for her gets complicated by the constant questioning of his own identity against the American attitude of subtle superiority and casual condescension. He finds that his "American classmates treat Mexicans nicely not because they see them as equals but because they are light-skinned curiosities in well-cut suits, distinguished guests from a quaint but insignificant country. With Indigenous people and mestizos, it was a different story. The Chicago Boys’ belief in individual freedom didn’t extend to people with dark skin. Their economics was not the objective science they claimed it to be, but a political instrument designed to justify imperial expansion—a postmodern American equivalent of sixteenth-century Spanish Catholicism".

Sebastian is equally clear-eyed about the structural role he was groomed to play: "The Americans had let me go to Yale because they wanted me to become a translator, a go-between. I was supposed to go back to the capital, leverage my last name into a position in the highest levels of government, and advocate for American interests. For better or worse, I was a child of NAFTA, which realigned Mexico along a north-south axis and created incentives to move all valuable commodities toward the United States. At the same time, the treaty forced Mexican farmers to compete with the industrialised agriculture of the Middle West, which, despite the US government’s breathless celebration of free markets, remained subsidized. Millions of Mexicans, many from Michoacán, were forced to emigrate to the North, where they found themselves marginalized by the law and excluded from lucrative work. Predictably, some turned to the drug trade. When they returned home, they discovered that the collapse of the old state apparatus from the days of one-party rule had left a vacuum of services and, therefore, authority. It’s no surprise they decided to fill the gap".

Mexico is home to the largest and most vital native Indian population in the Americas. Mexican intellectuals and artists celebrate the Indian mix of their culture to distinguish themselves from the Europeans and Americans.

This backdrop of dispossession and displacement gives the novel its deepest resonance.

Mexico had lost half of its territory to Trump’s predecessors in the second half of the nineteenth century. A well-known joke captures this historical wound, which still haunts the Mexican psyche. A US Border Patrol agent tells a Mexican, “Mister, you have crossed the border.” The Mexican replies, “señor I did not cross the border. The border crossed me”. The border crossing is not just geographical but persists in economic, political, racial, and imperial terms. As a result, the search for Mexican identity remains an unfinished and continuing journey.

The author is an expert in Latin American affairs

romila-thapars-just-being-the-historian-as-a-courageous-contrarian

Sun May 24 13:11:50 IST 2026

History was once a subject we studied in school, then it became a topic of fierce debates, and now it’s a bruising street brawl. Facts are flung around like brickbats, feats answered by counterfeits, and propaganda by improperganda. Unfazed amid this din and drivel, stands a towering, glowering figure – Romila Thapar. The contrarian historian has just come out with her memoirs – the story of her life and unstoppable rise to prominence. At 700 plus pages, the book demands of you an unflagging interest in times past, a good deal of patience and wrists of steel. If you have all of the above, the book will provide an insight into the twists and turns that history has taken across the arc of independent India. Side by side, you will get to know how an individual, when suitably armour-plated with erudition, evolves into an icon.

As a prefect in a school in Pune, young Romila was the one selected to give a speech on the country’s first Independence Day. She duly delivered the address, standing apart from her schoolmates. Since then, it’s become something of a habit - standing apart from her cohorts and ploughing the lonely furrow. In Just Being, Thapar looks back at the long road she has walked and is uncharacteristically dismissive. She says: "This book has no pattern. It is a lazy ramble through my life, narrated chronologically; otherwise, it would be too scattered and even shapeless". It’s an interesting ramble nevertheless, not least because India at that time was "on the cusp of a historical change of immense magnitude".

Thapar learned history from the legendary A.L. Basham (of ‘The Wonder That Was India’ fame) and followed it up with assignments at prestigious universities around the world. From an early age, it appears that she has always been in a natural position of command – the shepherd chosen to tend to the flock rather than be part of the herd. Her stint at the Kurukshetra University was underwhelming—it lacked the intellectual vigour she was looking for. Her big break, if historians are allowed to have ‘breaks’ like film stars, came at Jawaharlal Nehru University. She joined in 1970 on a propitious date – November 14th, Nehru’s birthday. It would almost appear as if she and JNU were made for each other—both were articulate, unaccepting of the status quo and fashionably left-leaning. She served JNU for over half a century, and her signature is all over the institution. She has written over 24 history books and a clutch of textbooks. Before she knew it, she had become an institution.

But it’s not been roses all the way. Every change in the central government spawned a crop of critics. Fools who came to mock remained to blaspheme, claiming that Thapar’s contract for professor emerita at JNU had expired. Their mission fell flat on its face when someone pointed out that the title of emerita is for life, and doesn’t carry a ‘Best Before’ date.

As a critical thinker, Thapar is very much in the Nehruvian mould. Our first prime minister, paranoid at the thought that scholarship in the newly independent nation could be hijacked by Hindu revivalists, had encouraged independent thinkers. Thapar and her team, independent thinkers all, swept key posts in major universities and formed a kind of franchise model of marketing Marxism to young minds. They belonged to the school, which said that history should be more than a chronological narrative of who did what to whom. Instead, it should peel the layers and explore social structures and motivations. Well, to each his own.

Thapar is unquestionably the most famous living historian in India today. But even the GOAT can have nay-sayers – people who question her methods and point to the lack of verifiable evidence for some of her theories. But such critics find no echoes across her autobiography. That is surprising considering that Thapar sees herself as an evangelist of enquiry and is supposed to encourage informed dissent. Arun Shourie gets the briefest of mentions with a vulgar quote uncharacteristic of the research-driven journalist and writer. There seems to be no place for young challengers like Vikram Sampath. One also wonders why the Somnath Temple episode is blanked out. Two decades back, Thapar had turned conventional thought on its head by pointing out that Hindu and Jain texts made no mention of the repeated plunder by the infamous Mohammad of Ghazni. Then, whodunit, who reduced the temple to ruins? Thapar blames the Brits—useful fall guys when events can get communal overtones. It was, Thapar told us, the Brits who made a song and dance over an episode that the Hindus may well have forgotten if left to themselves. So, where does this explanation leave us? Well, nowhere! I remember the tabloids saying of the slain socialite—Nobody Killed Jessica. On the same lines, we conclude—nobody destroyed Somnath.

Thapar is all of 94 and currently not the toast of the establishment. She is its intellectual antithesis. Moral of the story: rebels don’t age well. But her aura of authority, almost of infallibility, sits well. With her stately bearing, measured diction and the kind of accent you would hear in a cathedral, she will continue to draw admirers to her original perspective on history. Like the prefect in her Pune school decades ago, Romila Thapar stands apart from all the rest, and this memoir tells us why she always will.

Title: Just Being

Author: Romila Thapar

Publisher: Seagull Books

Pages: 710

Price: Rs 1,499

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