It's an old habit on both sides of the border. Mexicans blame Americans for moral contamination. Americans imagine that Mexican drug lords have infected their innocent teens. The latter view, I think, has lead recently to a gringo romanticism for Latin toy boys, apparent in the sudden popularity of Ricki Martin. Thirty years later, American hippies went into the desert of northern Mexico, looking for a brujo who might dispense the secrets of the enchanted mushroom.
Lovers kiss and butterflies come out of their mouths.
Old Indian women float. Twenty years ago, after a Mexico City appearance of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I remember seeing long lines of Germans and Americans, waiting for the autograph of the master-illusionist. I wondered, then, why magical realism had become the easiest way for Europeans and Americans to read Latin America. The fact is that more and more North Americans are becoming, like Latin Americans, seduced by magic away from reality. To that extent the border between fiction and non-fiction, North and South, is blurring.