Mexico’s gas, Mexico’s tears: Expositions of identity

Mexico repeats itself. It is haunted by bad breath, by the stillborn self exhalation that returns one to oneself as a corpse, dead. Mexico's self expression, in other words, threatens to release itself as an unwanted cultural effluvium, a gas that no one wants, to which no one confesses: the hot breath that leaves others cold, that expiration of life. Some critics figure such repetition as a return that adds up to the malodorous expression of a derivative European identity. For others, this repetition, once acknowledged, makes possible the formation out of thin air of a properly Mexican identity that waves off the lingering remains of Amerindian spirit.