In the 1930s, English novelist and travel writer Graham Greene traveled Mexico to report on the effects of the Mexican Revolution on the Catholic Church, which backed him financially for his trip. His report, condemning virtually everything about Mexico, was published in the U.S. as Another Mexico; in Great Britain as The Lawless Roads. Visiting the Valley of Mexico, the arid north, Tabasco, and Chiapas, Greene kept faith with his patron (the Church) and duly reported the bad news about the many demolished churches and forbidden Masses of post-revolutionary Mexico. In the process, he continually complained of the hardship of travel in the Republic, and the fecklessness of the local population. Altogether, he had a miserable time of it and spared no effort to make that impression on his reader. At the same time, he was gathering background and taking notes for one of his most important novels.
In 1995, and again in 1996, I traveled many of the roads that Greene had traveled and found the Mexico of the 1990s a far cry from that of the 1930s. For Greene, the burro tracks of the fronteriza of Chiapas were not much short of lethal. Today, while there may be a new kind of misery traveling with 13 people in a rickety Toyota van over the unmarked "topes" of highland Chiapas, contemporary travel the Mexican way is fast and cheap: usually by bus or minivan, and rarely with delays, even for answering the call of nature: everyone without exception seems willing and eager to help the traveler on her way.
Yet some of the travel modes that Greene was required to use may still be found for the amusement of the adventurous traveler: riding horseback through the "selva" of the Lacandon and camping at Mayan ruins throughout the region, braving the mosquitoes and the local "tipos." Travel in rural, frontier Mexico still holds both excitement and spontaneity, and the adventure is cheap and, often, even comfortable!
This paper will focus on Greene's reactions to his experiences in Mexico, comparing them with my own experience of modern-day Mexican roads. I will also analyze and interpret his motives and writings as consciously supporting a particular pre-existing bias of his patron, not surprisingly in order to support himself and his research. As a converted English Catholic, Greene was, in the eyes of the Vatican, the best man for the job. As a result, his writing suffers; and the product becomes a less-than-second-rate example of the genius that was Graham Greene's.
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