ON THE PLAIN OF SNAKES

A veteran traveler explores our complex neighbor to the south.

Accomplished travel writer and novelist Theroux (Figures in a Landscape: People and Places, 2018, etc.) has been writing about his travels for more than 50 years. Like his previous accounts, this journey, narrated in his usual, easygoing, conversational style, includes countless lovely descriptions of Mexico’s landscapes and insights into the country’s history and literature, including Mexican magical realism. Being a naturally inquisitive guy, Theroux talks to the people he meets, everywhere and often, because “it is in the nature of travel to collect and value telling anecdotes.” This “shifty migrant” chronicles his navigation of cities, towns, and tiny villages on both side of the borderlands, a “front line that sometimes seems a war, at other times an endless game of cat and mouse.” Most Mexicans Theroux met “said urgently to me, ‘Be careful.’ ” He cites harrowing statistics of the violence that occurs near the border. “On their trip through Mexico,” he writes, “…migrants are brutalized, abducted, or forced to work on Mexican farms, as virtual slaves. In the past decade, 120,000 migrants have disappeared en route, murdered or dead and lost, succumbing to thirst or starvation.” The author also discusses NAFTA and how it turned the “Mexican side of the border into a plantation, a stable supply of cheap labor.” He writes about the thousands of gallons of water at aid stations destroyed by the border police and his encounters with Mexican police who, with a wink and a nod, accepted bribes for made-up charges. Outside Mexico City, he visited Frida Kahlo’s Blue House, a “kind of habitable sculpture.” He also experienced a Day of the Dead ceremony and drank homemade mezcal. “I had made friends on the road through the plain of snakes,” he writes, “and that had lifted my spirits.”

Illuminating, literate, and timely—a must-read for those interested in what’s going on inside Mexico.