FROM a window seat 30,000 feet up, it's hard to tell exactly when you've crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. By day, there are some visible changes in the pattern of human structures and farmland, though less so with the passing years; by night, there are more lights on the northern side, but this difference too has diminished.
Down on the ground, though, the often-invoked term vecinos distantes -- distant neighbors -- too accurately describes the cultural chasm that prevails along our vast common frontera. The fact is, we just don't read each other very well -- or very much.
Add to this the fact that little foreign literature in general gets translated into English these days -- a trend so alarming that the PEN American Center, a branch of the international writers organization, invited dozens of the best writers from other countries to a conference in New York last year to address this crisis. (In French bookstores, for example, about 40% of the selections may be translated from other languages; in U.S. stores, it's often closer to 4%.) Many readers who used to tote around English translations of Camus, Solzhenitsyn, Garcia Marquez or Borges would be hard-pressed to name a French, Russian or Latin American writer they've read recently. In a global information society, we may listen to world music more, but we read world literature less.
Does this mean great writing has dried up beyond our borders? Of course not; it's just that less of it gets to us. Big publishers have ceded much of the territory -- unless a Nobel Prize winner or other headline-maker is involved -- to small presses and university houses. This means less money and less attention, breeding a literary provincialism we all should deplore, one that surely has political implications as well. That we know so little of our southern neighbor's literature is sadly typical, if not outright scandalous.
All the more reason to welcome "Mexico," a collection in English of short stories, novel excerpts and creative nonfiction by 24 contemporary Mexican authors assembled by writer C.M. Mayo.
