ABSTRACT

This chapter serves as a point of departure for Octavio Paz 's meditation on Mexico's culture, that is, chiefly the male culture of proletariat Mexico. The Mexican "senses of inferiority" of which Ramos writes, however questionable as a catch-all term for qualifying Mexicanness, is nonetheless revealing. The subaltern Mexican denies herself, and at the same time goes through a morsel of self-affirmation. In fact, interdependency, interrelationship, and interaction exist in all aspects of Mexican culture. Amerindian and mestizo women from traditional cultures care for the children of the privileged class; they come into contact with gardeners from the countryside cannot help but influence these young minds. All aspects of Mexican culture are interrelated nothing is capable of acting independently of anything else. Cultures are for some reason or other often seen as hardly more than oppositions between the powerful and the helpless.