On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey

BOOK REVIEW- FIVE STARS

On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey by Paul Theroux

This journey in Mexico by Paul Theroux is an up to the minute look away from glitter and glitz to their dirty neighbor’s wall running from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico plus a trip down seldom traveled country roads deep into the country.

I came away deeply impressed with the author's perceptive observations and magnificent personal profiles, political insights, and culinary regional idiosyncrasies all honed with extensive years of traveling.

The book is worthy of more than five stars because the author has something to say and says it well.

I have lived in Mexico over thirty five years, traveled the country extensively, and written two books on the subject...trust me this book is better than good.

Excerpts:

The fat cats and petrocrats in Mexico City, thirty listed billionaires, including the seventh-richest man in the world, Senor Carlos Slim, who together have more money than every other Mexican combined. But the campesinos in certain states in southern Mexico, such as Oaxaca and Chiapas, in terms of personal income, are poorer than their counterparts in Bangladesh or Kenya, languishing in an air of stagnant melancholy on hillsides without topsoil, but with seasonal outbursts of fantastical masquerade to lighten the severities and stupefactions of village life. Famine victims, desperadoes, and voluptuaries, all more or less occupying the same space, and that vast space, that Mexican landscape, squalid and lush and primal and majestic.

Mexican hospitality to gringos is in ironic contrast to the present ubiquity of Mexicans who are demonized and fenced in, stamped as undesirable, considered suspect, and unwelcome in America.

It’s a mistake to disclose that you’re passionate about going anywhere, because everyone will give you ten reasons for not going, they want you to stay home and eat meatloaf and play with a computer, which is what they’re doing.

The eagles soar in the sky alone, but we Mexicans share the land with snakes.

NAFTA, he said, was a tool of the sort of globalization that he characterized as a sinister power grab by international corporations to subvert governments all over the world. “The world’s new masters have no need to govern directly. National governments take on the role of running things on their behalf. This is what the new order means, unification of the world into one single market. States are simply enterprises with managers in the guise of governments, and the new regional alliances bear more of a resemblance to shopping malls than to political federations.