Obama: Your Children and My Children Are Our Children

What is the new fortune of spokesperson Obama, the black descendant of immigrants, president of the United States? How does he position himself in front of all that represents the place whence he came? That nation of immigrants, which now is being affected by immigration from all areas oppressed by its economic and warlike arm in one form or another: on all continents, America’s colonialism.

That nation which established the borders of “inside” and “outside” from an always depraved democracy of equality. Its paradigm: The differences revert back to the same, because the “inside” and the “outside” are clashing within its own territory. We see it.

Obama is less a man than a paradox: Within his country, he is a ruler who seeks social equilibrium. On the other hand, abroad we have his relentless war policy. What’s important to him?

Obama came [to the Museum of Anthropology] to refer us to his vision of Mexico: “… a nation that is remaking itself.” He tacitly attempts to locate us in a certain brokenness, a trial.

In his Mexico of the readers of newspapers and platitudes: The ancient past, our iconic heroes, renowned poets, the Octavio Paz of the colonized south — through his imperial voice, Obama envisions Mexico “… creating new prosperity — trading with the world. Becoming a manufacturing powerhouse — from Tijuana to Monterrey to Guadalajara and across the central highlands — a global leader in automobiles and appliances and electronics, but also a center of high-tech innovation, producing the software and the hardware of our digital age.”

He encourages us toward this “progress” — for which he needs us to be at peace and to be skilled (we, ourselves, capable, post-colonialism). He needs cooperation in security, cooperation in economics and education.

He cited Sor Juana in shared modernity; curious, indeed, the identity of the West for which he speaks. His West began in the 16th century — a century before Sor Juana was born — with trade flows that sowed the North Atlantic with Christianity and Protestantism, and resulted in a diverse colonialism with its own biases: The aegis of Eurocentrism and the aesthetics of consumption, led by the United States. Stages of colonialism distributed in time and space across the five continents. But we tell the story in a different way.

Obama brings us to Octavio Paz with a quote about modernity that is not his to share: “Modernity is not outside us, it is within us. It is today and the most ancient antiquity; it is tomorrow and the beginning of the world; it is a thousand years old and yet newborn.” His is a modernity that demands that we here renounce tradition. It is a mental trap that distances us from everything we’ve been, before and after the Spanish: our unredeemed Indigenism, our meritocratic Creolism, our mestizoism reinvented and reconfigured by the passage of all the influences that assail us (and that become increasingly bothersome).

Can we be modern without sacrificing tradition? The pressure we are seeing every day on TV really exists. It lives on the other side of our cultural schizophrenia. It lives within the outside of our own inside. It is the extreme expression of something which we are and which we don’t know.

That “modernity” of which Obama speaks is a euphemism referring to the colonialism of yesterday and today, and to its conditions. His values are “success” and “progress.”

Obama needs us to achieve them — or at least needs us to behave. He finds hope for the success of his paradigm in “the spirit of young people.” He quotes a young Mexican: “I feel like we can reach the same level as anyone in the world.” Oh! Innocent statement that corresponds to imperial condescension. We can have it all … when we leave our inadequacies behind.

Yes, stay here. He just wants a free flow of goods, not people. That is the freedom he is thinking about — the market: “a growing and prosperous Mexico that creates more jobs and opportunities for young people here.” Do not move, please.

Why did Obama not speak of freedom? Of that with which each person makes herself upstanding, finds her Truth in herself? Of that which constitutes her ethics and is hence another trap?

But the [immigrant] “outsider” who came back here to visit, what he has inside himself is the same impetus felt by those who went there [to America]. It is necessary to recognize the “outside” of his “inside.” In other words, to face up to his sameness.

Obama, your children and my children, they are our children. Know that.

Liberation for all the “outsiders” from the inside, there and here.