This is part 2 in a 2-part series on Labyrinth of Solitude.

In this episode I’m going to perform a quick medical diagnosis of one of the best books written about Mexico. And also one of the most self-indulgent and cringeworthy books ever written. First we’re gonna talk about teenagers, then we’re gonna talk about Coca-Cola, and then we’re gonna talk about the major, glaring flaw with this book, because huge parts of Octavio Paz’s masterpiece are completely unreadable, while other parts are completely perfect. 

This is not an attempt to summarize the book. If you’ve ever read it, you probably understand how difficult a task that would be. If you haven’t read it, it’s an impossible task.

So rather than condensing it, I’ll instead point out some of the parts that were most interesting to me. 

The Pachuco and Other Extremes

Paz writes that many of the thoughts that inspired him to write Labyrinth of Solitude came to him when he was in the United States. He wanted to understand American culture, but he kept seeing himself reflected in his questions about American customs.

He writes about a chicano subculture called Pachucos. They got their style of dress from a character called Tin Tan, played by the actor German Valdes, in the early 1950s. The guy was somewhere between The Fonz from Happy Days, Charlie Chaplin, and Robert De Niro’s take on The Godfather, as opposed to Marlon Brando. Octavio Paz says the Pachuco style came as a response to being Mexican in racist-Post War America. Pachucos were adolescents who didn’t want to go back to being Mexican, but also didn’t want to try to pass as white.

And in my own estimation the Pachuco falls into the trap every adolescent falls into: Trying to prove his/her distinctness and individuality by totally conforming to the rigid rules of whatever subculture or counterculture they gravitate towards.

Paz writes that the adolescent cannot forge himself, because when a person finally forges themselves, they are no longer an adolescent.

According to Paz, the Pachuco is the product of two irreconcilable worlds: Mexico and the United States. In my opinion the adolescent mind is tortured by that supposed dichotomy and therefore lashes out. The adolescent wants to fit in somewhere, because an adolescent is still a child and still wants someone to protect him. By taking on the outward appearance of a particular subculture, the adolescent hopes that subculture will protect him from the hardships of the world.

This is possibly why pop stars like Selena as well as academics find themselves struggling incessantly with biculturality. Selena was 23 when she died. That’s only slightly older than a college graduate. And anyone who spends their entire life in a college will probably not mature very much beyond that point. So we find people like Gloria Anzaldua who are much older than people like Selena but who still write about how tortured they are by being between two cultures.

The adolescent mind of a pop star in their early 20s and the adolescent mind of a career academic need to go through a long process before forging themselves into adulthood.

I’m reading another book about Mexico…which, duh, obviously. But I came across something by another writer that completely validates Octavio Paz’s explanation of mexicanness. It’s about Coca-Cola.

Oppenheimer/Coca-Cola

If you want to be politically fashionable in Western liberal democracies in 2017, you can never even imply that a gigantic multinational corporation could ever be right about anything in any way. Ever.

Well, since I turned 30 I’ve stopped caring about the contemporary political orthodoxy. So screw it.

Coca-Cola is right about something.

They wanted to boost sales of Diet Coke in Mexico, so they did a study. When a huge corporation has billions of dollars on the line, their studies aren’t arbitrary and they don’t play