The construction of Mexicans’ identity as beasts in three English travel narratives of the 1930s

Abstract

The objective of this contribution is to show how English travel narrativesfrom the 1930s coincide in constructing a distorted profile of the Mexican character that lies in prejudices and colonial attitudes. We analyzed three English narratives: D. H. Lawrence's Mornings in Mexico (1927), Aldous Huxley's Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934), and Graham Greene's The Lawless Roads (1939). Within these narratives, we analyzed, using Cognitive Linguistic tools, the conceptualizing processes of categorization and metaphor through two frames that depict Mexicans as beasts: the Wild Animal frame and the Domestic Animal frame. We demonstrated how these English novelists established, through these frames, an axis of identity opposition and, with it, a hierarchical stratification between the European civilized man and the Mexican savage. These colonizing heteroperceptions of identity are still relevant today since they seem to be valid in many current discourses that outline an ideal for the Mexican collective identity.