while i was searching about the differences in how spaniards and mexicans pronounce the language, i found this.
Sorry for the crappy babelfish translation.
If anyone has a translator or can read in spanish, the complete text is here
http://www.mty.itesm.mx/dhcs/deptos/ri/ri-802/lecturas/lecvmx208.html
Sorry for the crappy babelfish translation.
he Mexicans
The author analyzes some characteristics that the Mexicans characterize and how they are influenced by his history. One talks about, to the essential elements that the Mexican has like: the resistance between the ritual and the disorder, prefers to be individualistic more than to work in equipment, it has an enormous inner force, h
is particular sense of the time, his fatalism sonre the future, its great human heat, his fear to that the women betray it, lives retrospectively, his way to be related to other men, the appearances to reflect a social position, the language that uses. Finally, it concludes that Mexico and the Mexicans cannot separate of a past that they prefer to contemplate, that grows dark the present and conforms the future.
I
Between the noise and the smoke of the city of Mexico there is a calm seat where the modern building of the secretariat of Outer Relations and a colonial church of century XVI contemplates the rest of Hispanic pyramids of Tlatelolco. The government has called it the Seat of the Three Cultures, like symbol of the patrimony of mixed or racially mixed blood of Mexico. In the front of the church there is a plate with the simple and stirring words: " E1 13 of August of l521, heroically defended by Cuauhtemoc, fell Tlatelolco in being able of Courteous Hernán. It was not triumph nor defeat. It was the painful birth of the racially mixed town that is the Mexico of today ".
Nevertheless, the pains childbirth of the new racially mixed race have not finished. To more than 460 years of Conquista, one has not assimilated the Courteous triumph of nor the defeat of Cuauhtémoc, and still repercussions of that bloody one feel to get late in Tlatelolco. Nowadays, 90 percents of the Mexicans are racially mixed, in strictly ethnic terms, although as individual they follow catched in the contradictions of his ancestry. They are as much children of Courteous as of Cuauhtémoc, they are not Spanish nor indígenes, are racially mixed, although they do not admit his mestization. Also like country, Mexico looks for an identity interminably and oscillates, in form ambivalent you, between old and the modern thing, traditional and the fashionable thing, the native and the Spanish, Eastern and the western thing. The complexity of Mexico is as much in the confrontation as in the fusion of it is anvil roots.
The Mexicans do not have problem some to be understood among them. They obtain by means of the secret keys - customs, language and gestures that, unconsciously, learn from the childhood, and accept the consistency of his inconsistencias like part of an established pattern that only repeat. However, they suffer when they try to explain itself to themselves. They realize which they are different - nonsingle, of the European esladunidenses and, but also of other Latin Americans -, but seem to not know the reason. He has asked himself poets, novelists, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists who define " the mexicanidad ", but they are even confused when they try to distinguish " the masks " of the real " faces " of the Mexican personality. There is a magical, inasible, almost surreal air in the Mexicans. And, which is more frustrating still, when it arrives to be caught by a description, is disguised of cartoon.
The key is in the past, in a deep one happened subconscious that is alive in the Mexicans of today. One is a past continuous, but nonconsistent. In him, the Mexicans must conciliate the fact of being conquered and conquering, to conserve many racial characteristics and characteristics of the indigenous personality, and to even glorify their pre-Hispanic antecedents, to the time that speak Spanish, practice the catholicism and think of Spain like the mother country. The legacy of the past also is overwhelming for the society. On the ruins of one it releases succession of theocratic empires and militaristas, Courteous it imposed the values of an intellectually repressed deeply catholic Spain and. Thus, then, Conquista reaffirmed a strong tradition of political authoritarianism and divine omnipotencia that, still now, resists the incursions of western liberalism.
There were other countries of Latin America conquered and colonized by the Iberian Peninsula, but the results were different. The colonies of the Caribbean and the coasts of the Atlantic, very little populated, formed with emigrants of Europe and, later, with slaves of Africa. In the countries of America Central and the $andes, where numerous indigenous populations subsist, the European of pure blood continue being the dominant classes. Only Mexico is truely racially mixed; it is the only nation of the hemisphere where the religious and political mestization occurred, in addition to the racial one; it has the only political system that is due to understand within a pre-Hispanic context; and their inhabitants are still more Eastern than western. The countries of the world are few where the character of people is reflected so much in its history, policy and social structure, simultaneously that is reflected of them.
Some times, it seems as if the Spaniards occupied the body of the mestizos and the natives conserved the control of their mind and semimientos. After all, the spirit surpassed to the matter. Most of the Mexicans meditates and filosofan, discreet, evasive and is distrusted; they are proud and watchmen of the honor questions; they are forced to work much, but they dream about an idleness life; they are warm, ocurrentes and sentimental and, sometimes, they are violent and cruel; they are immensely creative and imaginative and, nevertheless, it is impossible to orianizar them because in internal it they have defined ideas and in the external thing they are anarchical. Their relations between himself-and with the society considered in general- are guided more by the traditions than by the principles, by the pragmatismo more than by the ideology and the power more than by the law.
The strangest resistance of all could be in the ritual and the disorder that seem to coexist within the Mexican, although it also illustrates the predominance of the spiritual thing on the material. The preoccupation by the emotional aspect and the spiritual one of the life is visible in a powerful religiosidad, the attachment to the traditions, the ceremonious conduct and the formality of the language. The mechanical efficiency, the puntualidad and the organization of an Anglo-Saxon society seem not to have sense in this context. Mexican take into account more what one is than what does, the man and not since it occupies: it works to live and not to the inverse one. It can face the external chaos as long as their spiritual preoccupations are taken care of, but cannot allow that their identity is opacada by human forces. Rather, it interprets the world in agreement with his emotions. In surroundings of apparent disorder, it can improvise, to create and, finally, impose his personality to the circumstances. At heart, for the sake of expressing his individuality, it contributes to the disorder.
This basic attitude is evident in all the aspects of the life. The Mexican is not equipment player: in the sports he excels in the boxing, but not in futbol; in tennis, but not in basquetbol. He is to him difficult to accept an ideology that demands strict congruencia between its ideas and their acts. Even the legal rights, frequently, are due to leak by the discretionary faculties of the individuals being agreed upon personal favors. And, although the influence of the Mexican can derive from its political position, exerts it like projection of its personatidad. Perhaps because it recognizes that the self-discipline and the respect of the law need some substitute so that the society works, also accepts the dictations imposed by an authoritarian collective genius. Thus, from the family to the nation, the rules that operate are virtually tribal. If it wants to be part and to remove benefit, has to respect the rules.
Like carrier of the beliefs, accumulated customs and passions throughout many centuries, the Mexican is owner of an enormous inner force. And, as well as this is pronounced in a Metaphysical sense of the solitude, also does erupciónn in a creativity almost without control. The temples, the sculptures, the jewels and the ceramica bequeathed by civilizadones Hispanic belong to an intact tradition of the artistic expression. Nowadays, not only the natives, but also the mestizos, continue being extraordinary craftsmen, in a tradition that still considers that a meticulous sense of the detail and the design is more important that the production in mass. All their wood weaves, ceramics, orfebrería and statures have a distinguishing personal seal. Its challenging use of the color-pink, dwelled, green and oranges-not is less original and at the same time reflects the natural flowers and those of paper that their lives adorn. The interminnable variety of the Mexican subjects of gossip and its careful presentation offer a field where it is combined the ritual and improvisacióon. In addition, the Mexicans lie down to sing to the smaller provocation.
The Mexicans have even faced the western sense of the time. The cultures that watch the birth as a principle and the death as a end cannot have sense of an alive past. The Mexicans do not consider that the birth or the death interrupts the continuity of the life and they do not grant too much importance either to them. One becomes ridicule of the death in songs, pictures and popular art. Every November, in the day of deads, the Mexicans even crowd around in the cemeteries of all the country, taking flowers and foods and drinks to the tombs of their ancestors, in form very similar to usanza Aztec. The belief in the comunión with deads very is spread, but not in a psychic or spiritual sense, nor based on a believing Christian faith in further on, but simply like a derivation of the knowledge of which the past he is not dead.
On the contrary, the future it is contemplated with fatalism and, therefore, the planning concept is abnormal. Thinking that the course of the events is predetermined, the Mexicans do not find great justification to discipline themselves in a routine. The industralists try to obtain *** TRANSLATION ENDS HERE ***
If anyone has a translator or can read in spanish, the complete text is here
http://www.mty.itesm.mx/dhcs/deptos/ri/ri-802/lecturas/lecvmx208.html
