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