Yesterday's Train
A Rail Odyssey Through Mexican History
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Since 1988, Terry Pindell has been exploring North America, seeking integration of past and present, history and headlines. The result has been three highly acclaimed book spinning a beautiful web of culture, people, travel, and sociology. Now, in his fourth quest for the soul of the continent, Pindell brings us his fullest history and most expansive cultural portrait yet.
Yesterday's Train starts from a twisted tree at the shore near Veracruz--where according to local legend Cortes first chained his ships in 1519--a place where the earth itself seems in protest. From there, Pindell and collaborator Lourdes Ramirez Mallis travel to the stunning extremes of Mexico's landscape while casting back through its past. From ancient Toltec myth and Aztec ritual to the recent crisis in Chiapas and the halls of Mexico City power, they explore the strange contradictions of Mexico's character.
Journeying mostly by train, Pindell and Ramirez Mallis discover a country in conflict with the Western symbolism of their chosen mode of travel. That is Mexico's story today--a clash between the old Mexico and the new one its leaders and much of the rest of the world hope to create.
In Yesterday's Train, Terry Pindell brings us an odyssey through the most troubled part of the continent, witnessing for a year the roots of Meixco's current civil upheaval. And as always, he accomplishes more than a journey, traveling straight to the restive heart of a land and its people.
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Mexico is not Nebraska, Pindell (Making Tracks) remarks at the end of this engrossing journey, but "hatever the impenetrable barriers to a foreigner's vision... visiting provokes... a renaissance of spirit in the hearts of visitors like me from a world where humanity is too easily chartered and packaged into forms that can be marketed for profit." He and his native collaborator criss-cross the country along the routes of its rail system from north to south, east to west, through its stunning landscapes, cities, villages and open country, and as they detrain to rest in a hotel, explore a famous site and talk to people, they lay bare in gripping detail the many struggles of the Mexican people as they have endured slavery, miscegenation, revolution and corrupt government over the centuries while still, the authors claim, managing to assert a true "soul of the nation." In the authors' view that staunch soul is characterized by its "unbridled humanity...its transmutation of loss into an intensity of feeling, the earnest desire of every Mexican to make human contact." It is made visible to visitors mostly in its great creative arts, its festivals and in the lively cacophony of its marketplaces and plazas. The authors discuss the effect of NAFTA on various communities they travel to, and they believe the recent uprisings in Chiapas--which they visit--and elsewhere are evidence of a slow but enduring struggle for equity that has existed since the days of the conquistadors. This is a moving and contagious celebration of a nation whose history, pains, perseverance and values are still among the most foreign and difficult for North Americans to comprehend.
