Title: On the Plain of Snakes Pdf A Mexican Journey
Author: Paul Theroux
Published Date: 2019
Page: 448
Paul Theroux has spent his life crisscrossing the globe in search of the histories and peoples that give life to the places they call home. Now, as immigration debates boil around the world, Theroux has set out to explore a country key to understanding our current discourse: Mexico. Just south of the Arizona border, in the desert region of Sonora, he finds a place brimming with vitality, yet visibly marked by both the US Border Patrol looming to the north and mounting discord from within. With the same humanizing sensibility he employed in Deep South, Theroux stops to talk with residents, visits Zapotec mill workers in the highlands, and attends a Zapatista party meeting, communing with people of all stripes who remain south of the border even as their families brave the journey north.
From the writer praised for his “curiosity and affection for humanity in all its forms” (New York Times Book Review), On the Plain of Snakes is an exploration of a region in conflict.
Still traveling In earlier times it was not unusual for writers to be known for both their novels and for travel writing. D. H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, and others published both serious novels and travel books. Today, the only serious novelist I can think of who is as well known for his travel writing as for his novels is Paul Theroux. In fact, Theroux is probably far better known for his travel books than his novels, despite being one of the most original and skillful novelists of the post-WWII era.Advancing age (Theroux is 78 as I write this) has not slowed down his taste for adventure, or perhaps his need. In 2013, when he was 72, he published The Last Train to Zona Verde, about a trip done the length of the African continent, mostly by bus and train. In it he suggested that this was his last great adventure, an opportunity to visit the places he’d lived as a young Peace Corps volunteer and teacher, and to see how they’d changed. Two years later saw the publication of Deep South, a series of trips, mostly by car, through the American South- a big change from past travels. There were no dangerous bandits, corrupt policemen and politicians, unsafe roads and trains, language barriers, or any of a thousand other hazards.And yet, just a few years later Theroux decided, for whatever reason, to travel through Mexico- one of the most corrupt nations in the Americas- by car and bus. He actively seeks out some of the most dangerous areas, those places controlled by the smugglers, gangs, corrupt officials, and cartels, places where people have massacred for no other reason that that a particular gang needs to show off its power. Everywhere he goes in the cities, he’s shaken down by police for bribes- once nearly $200. He insists, to the discomfort of his hosts, on visiting a church that is a shrine to Santa Muerte, the personification of death, who is often associated with the gangs of Mexico.In the cities, he meets with other writers, artists, and intellectuals who discuss with him the history, the future, and the meaning of Mexico. He spends several days teaching a seminar to a group of students who (it turns out) are all established writers and poets.But Theroux is mainly drawn to the backroads and the villages. He once wrote “Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going,” and that expresses his way of traveling. He sets off for Oaxaca, and when he path (and that of dozens of other cars and busses) is blocked by a demonstration by the teacher’s union (a nearly daily occurrence, he is told) he takes the advice of a bus driver and follows what looks more like a path than a road. He’s again hit up for a bribe, but this time it’s only a dollar and a half, and on the way he picks up three young women, students studying education, who help guide him.Once in Oaxaca, Theroux settles in for a long visit. He signs up for a language course, in part to improve his Spanish, but also to have an opportunity to converse with the locals on a regular basis, to have more than a passing contact with them. From Oaxaca his travels take him through other regions where the people are more indigenous than Spanish, where Zapotec is the most common language. Eventually he reaches the regions where Mexican government control has long been ceded to the Zapatistas. Here, he sees a very different Mexico. Still poor, but a place where the people are safe, and the children can go to school. The Zapatistas reject globalism, NAFTA, and capitalism is general but they also reject the paternalism of the NGOs. Here, Theroux sees a philosophy in tune with his own experiences in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere- people who simply want to be left alone to live their lives, and not prodded and forced into a life strangers from far away have laid out for them.The trip back North is in part a recapitulation of his trip south, encountering refugees, aid workers, working people, border crossers, signs of criminal gangs marking their territories, and of course, corrupt officials. As he drives back across the border for the last time, having paid the requested bribe ($180) to a customs official under a sign reminding visitors that such bribes are strictly illegal, he remembers the words of his Zapotec hosts: Don’t forget me.Critics of Theroux’s travel books- almost always tourists who’ve passed through a place he’s written about- have accused him of being overly critical, or misrepresenting a place and its people. What’s more, they’re not just dismissive; they get downright angry, as if he’s stealing their experience from them. What they want is validation of their idealized memories- yes, this is a wonderful place, and Don Pablo and Maria really made us feel like family. What they get instead is a very personal and honest view of a place and its people. Theroux doesn’t sugar coat what he sees, but at the same time he’s unstinting in his praise of good people and places.His early travel narratives always had a underlying sense of loneliness, of the stranger in a strange land, curious but anxious to return home. He was a younger man then, with a family, and his travels then were perhaps motivated as much by his need to earn an income as by his wanderlust. By the end of The Happy Isles Of Oceania (1992) he seemed to have finally found his Eden, a place where he could stop traveling and simply live his life as a gentleman of leisure, keeping bees, spending his days lying in a hammock, sipping piña coladas, and yet twenty-seven years later he’s still wandering. In his more recent books, he seems especially anxious to explore as much as possible while he’s still able to do so. Maybe he’s still looking for a place where he truly feels at home, or maybe he’s trying to experience as much as he can while he’s still able. Whatever the reason, his readers are better off for it.Riveting, an urgent read ! Paul Theroux is America's most prominent and entertaining travel writer; thorough, insightful, facially non political, poetic and self deprecating in parts. At 76, he jumps in his car and leaves his home on Cape Cod and drives to Mexico, meandering in and along this troubled border from Tijuana in the West to Brownsville in the East and then into the deepest recesses of Mexico.This is the riveting story of his trip; the crimes of the cartels and the police, the brothels ("an image of neon promises and dazzling lights, winking drabs and knaves, strip shows and skin flicks, of harlotry and whoredom,..."), the irony of America's demand for "drugs, [and] the cheap labor," and the "odd medieval strategies of the very poor..," and the poetic beauty of a mass of butterflies as he drives away from the border to Monterrey," "a straggling mass of buttery beating wings,....[t]his wilderness of preposterous winged confetti continued to tumble." Few can write this way; reality as a poetry.Topical, necessary, an urgent read; Theroux's "On The Plain of Snakes" is far far better and informative than any news or governmental report on "the crisis on the border."High hypocrisy No question that Paul Theroux can write a good sentence, a good paragraph and a good description.But this book is highly hypocritical to put it mildly.Theroux taxes every opportunity he can to lambaste American laws regarding immigration, and to spit poison darts at our current president and the barriers along the southern border intended to keep drug and human traffickers from transporting their illegal wares and enslaved victims (among other people and things) across into the U.S.Yet Theroux seeks out the parts of Mexico where crime is rife and mass murder is as gruesome as it comes.Theroux can travel wherever he wants for as long as he wants and write about it however he wants.But let him not tell Americans that we need not police our southern border; he himself admits that illegal immigrants from India, South Asia, the Middle East and South America do in fact try to cross into the U.S. with all kinds of ills in tow, to the detriment of the people they smuggle and enslave, and the detriment of the Mexican people and America alike.A land of snakes indeed.
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