Ever been told that Mexican food in your favorite restaurant is not really Mexican food? As in authentic food eaten in Mexico by Mexicans? Don’t you hate when someone feels compelled to go to the trouble of pointing this out? Does it change the taste of the food or your opinion of the restaurant to hear this? Probably not. As evidence, simply count how many Taco Bell franchises are in your town.
People like Taco Bell Mexican food as well as the food of their favorite local Mexican food restaurant. The fact that it is not authentic Mexican food as eaten by the natives of Mexico in Mexico is probably precisely the very reason they do enjoy it. The same held true for the readers who originally made Maria Cristina Mena’s stories popular enough to be published in popular periodicals of the early 20th century like The Century Magazine and American Magazine. These readers were not Hispanic, but very white, very Protestant, and very nationalistic in their fervent and deep-seated belief in the exceptionalism of America. So, as one might imagine, these readers were hardly looking for ultra-realistic, non-romanticized depictions of Mexican characters and culture.
What Mena provided has been criticized often as stereotypes at best and condescending and demeaning. But she was publishing her short stories over a century ago during the second decade of the 1900’s. Had she not provided the literary equivalent of Taco Bell in her depiction of Mexican characters and culture, she would likely have gone unpublished entirely. Or, at the very least, her stories would never had made into magazines with a nationwide subscription base. She was read because she dumbed it down or lightened it up or provided Tex-Mex: whichever metaphor one is most comfortable using. To have done otherwise would have been career suicide.
What is especially fascinating, however, is that with the benefit of time and the arrival of the Age of Irony where it is almost impossible not to spot ironic content in any piece of writing, Mena’s writing has undergone a serious revision of interpretation. With the ability to spot irony now a requisite for literary analysis whereas a century ago it was hardly even necessary, one can see more clearly that what seemed demeaning or condescending to reviewers at the time are now much more easily recognized as sublte expressions of ironic upsetting of the applecart. Mena’s literature is one of very obvious heavy-handedness mingled with subtleties so finely tuned that it is easy to miss. Overwhelmed by the clunkiness, one can be forgiven for not fully intuiting the artistry going on beneath.
What may have seemed an overemphasis on cosmetic concerns of appearance in 1915 is now more easily understood as social commentary on economics and patriarchal power. What could be misinterpreted as condescension toward her Mexican characters now seem almost equally obvious as a condemnation of racist attitudes of her readership toward actual Mexicans. Time is not often kind to writers. Some who were quite popular and held in high critical esteem at the same she was writing are today hardly read and almost completely forgotten. In the meantime, Maria Cristina Mena’s reputation continues to grow and flourish.
