What part of “E pluribus unum” do you not understand?

BBC World news has a short (and alas not easily downloaded) clip on the work of Argentine photographer Ariel Carlomagno, “The many faces of Mexico” which — besides in some small way making up for the caddish behavior (behaviour?) of those upper-crust twits on their second rate knockoff of Tom and Ray,  The Car Guys — is a nice counterpoint to recent bashing the idea of multi-culturalism has taken, not just in Britain, but even here in Mexico.

Of course, the British attack came from a politician (well, the Prime Minister, to be exact) and was couched in the terms of a critique of how a government social policy is implemented — “state multiculturalism” as he called it.  It probably is a “dog whistle” appealing to racists and xenophobes, but British “identity politics” and the long history of English racial theories is something they have to live with… I don’t.

The anti-multiculturalism rant from Mexico was harder to figure out, the author being a long-time foreign resident blogger (nothing wrong with that), who — even though he continually lets readers know he is married to a Mexican — appears to have moved to Mexico well over the weight limit of emotional baggage.

The pseudonymous author of “The Bierce Account” sets up a ridiculous “straw man” argument between “Don Trendy” and “Don Ambrose”. that frankly makes no sense at all.  Either “The Bierce Account” takes his sense of “multiculturalism” from sources hostile to diversity, or his intellectual development was stunted somewhere before Franz Boas started publishing at the turn of the 20th century. There is certainly nothing “Trendy” in the idea that minority cultures exist and are valid components of a national culture… nor that the national culture is stronger and better for diversity.

The Don Ambrose character also misquotes Abraham Lincoln, totally misusing Lincoln’s “A house divided against itself cannot stand” to somehow argue that nations are like families… all alike (Which, I suppose might be true if you’re talking about incestuous families… or royalty — which amounts to the same thing).  The REAL Ambrose Bierce, proud of his service in Mr. Lincoln’s Army — would have made mincemeat of this poseur.  I might suggest “Don Ambrose” read Bierce’s work, starting with The Affair at Coulter’s Notch, and The Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge: both dealing with cultural identity in the multi-cultural world of 1860s United States.

But, to be honest, I’m not all that interested in the fake Ambrose Bierce, nor in his several other several pseudonymous sites, nor in the bizarre Alan Wall, whose “Letters from Mexico” are still available on vdare.com who  like “Bierce” makes continual mention of being married to a Mexican, as a shield against claims of racism.  I’m not going to bother with the links for Alan Wall — they’re on a white supremacist “hate site” that is blocked in some countries (and by U.S. military computers) which means a good number of my regular readers can’t access it anyway.  And I don’t think racist assholes deserve any hits , except maybe the kind delivered with a baseball bat.

I am bothered that there are foreigners who just don’t “get” Mexico, but feel obligated to write about the place as if they have a cultural understanding of it. What makes this so very, very odd is that these guys seem to consciously block out the fact that they live in one of the most radically multi-cultural societies on the planet.  Is it always peaceful?  No, but even conflicts that involve communities of varying ethnicities are not rooted in their cultural differences, but in normal things like property disputes. One does, occasionally run across inter-cultural disputes between members of a community embracing “mainstream values” and dissidents holding “traditional values” (as in religious conflicts in Chiapas within Mayan communes), but they are NOT the result of “multi-culturalism” (trendy or otherwise), but of cultural values in transition… and even “mainstream” cultures change.

At any rate, the Bierce Account author — like Alan Wall — is what one hopes is only a handful of foreign (mostly U.S.) Mexican residents who are obsessed with their own self-proclaimed position as the arbiters of cultural propriety. That is, as representatives of “white culture” they feel obligated to pick out the flaws in Mexico, or Latin America (or elsewhere) as “proof” of the superiority of whatever it was they left behind. Which, of course, begs the question why they are here, other than they seem to expect those of us who embrace Mexico, and celebrate our differences, to shoulder their white man’s burden.

Photos all copyright © Ariel Carlomagno:  Latidos de América.