The Comfortable Enemy

“The Enemy (God) wants humans to focus on their actions and choices, while the devils aim to distract them with worry about the future consequences.”
Uncle Screwtape to Wormwood in The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis.

As I was writing this text, a news story broke on social media. On Saturday morning, July 12th, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, posted a letter on his social media platform, Truth Social, dated July 11th and addressed to the Mexican government, in which he announced the imposition of a 30% tariff on imports from Mexico if the country did not control fentanyl trafficking. This is not the first time Trump has made this kind of threat. Since his second stint at the White House, he has often made these kinds of statements. Meanwhile, political experts have warned of more pressing issues for the United States, such as its relationship with Russia and the invasion of Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza, and the trade war with China. However, the relationship with Mexico has proven to be one of the most complicated issues during this administration. Mexico doesn’t seem to be a diplomatic priority, but rather a domestic obsession, that is, as the comfortable enemy. In the first 100 days of the Trump administration, nearly 135,000 people were deported, and news of ICE agents arriving at schools, churches, and even baseball and soccer games has saturated the media.

Mexico-United States relations have never been simple. As neighbors, they have experienced good times and more difficult times. The current relationship has led to a significant decline in tourism to the United States in general. At the same time, a new term emerged worldwide, digital nomads, that is, people who earn money in dollars or Euros while spending them in other emerging market currencies and in other cities where their money is worth more and where the quality of life is better. This phenomenon, which is not new, emerged at the beginning of this century. A prime example is Berlin, where creative foreigners were able to adapt to a divided society and turn it into a trendy place. Vicenzo Latronico’s book Perfection (2022) tells the story of a couple who rent their living space on a seasonal basis to foreigners who can afford to pay the surplus value the area has acquired. This novel shows how digital nomads operate. In real life, several European cities (Berlin, Lisbon, Barcelona) have been affected by this wave of human movement, and now, from Europe to Latin America, Mexico City has become a very attractive destination.

What makes Mexico City attractive? First, its proximity to the United States. How can we forget Porfirio Díaz’s famous saying: “…so close to the United States, so far from God?” Second, within the global imagination, Mexico City is a place that enjoys a mild climate, where you don’t need to wear a sweater and you can walk around in shorts and open-toed sandals year-round. However, this vision is far from reality. The weather in Mexico City is quite varied, and the natives know the art of dressing like an onion, leaving home in a jacket and sweater and then removing layers of clothes throughout the day and putting them back on at night. Not to mention the rainy season, which in recent years, due to climate change, has lengthened and become synonymous with chaos and unexpected storms. And finally, there’s the reputation for Mexican gastronomy and the way Mexicans treat foreigners.

Neotameme (2024) de Chavis Mármol

In March of last year, in a post-Covid environment in the Roma neighborhood, one of the most popular amongst digital nomads, a new monument, meme, or joke emerged. The installation by artist Chavis Mármol, Neotameme (2024), on an empty lot located on Colima 71, behind a fence, shows a blue Tesla Model 3 being crushed by a colossal nine-ton Olmec-style head, a direct reference to a Chrysler being crushed by a reddish Xitle stone as a wink towards Jimmie Durham’s Still Life with Spirit and Xitle (2007), which for years stood on a street in Pedregal and is currently part of the Hirshhorn Museum’s collection. Within days, the piece became so popular that it was cited in President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s daily press conference, La Mañanera, as an example of “national pride” (“AMLO muestra obra…” en La Jornada de Oriente, March 18, 2024).

Neotameme became a viral image, a contested object (accused of being an appropriation of a cartoon), and at the same time the subject of multiple interpretations. Much was said about its literal meaning, as critic Edgar Hernández wrote in the magazine Cubo Blanco: “To put it briefly, it’s important to consider it a work of art, but more important to appreciate it as a meme” (Neotameme, de Chavis Mármol, May 17, 2024). The piece belongs to a series of works linked to the Olmec head, from Mr. Olmeca Head (2021), to the version of a backpack food delivery, to the epitome of the Neotameme. The tameme was a person who moved merchandise from one place to another, a nod to the past and present, as ways of working have not changed entirely. Between the literalness of the title and the staring figure, the work suggests that history (which we pretend to have overcome) smashes the technological fantasies of the present. As Mármol said, “In conclusion, what I was looking for in making this piece was to troll Elon Musk and his new car plant in Mexico, a large-scale meme. (Instagram @Chavismarmol, March 11, 2024).

One year after its creation, Neotameme continues to be “a battlefield,” to quote Octavio Paz, that reveals Mexico’s complex relationship with the United States, the tense back-and-forth of Trump’s “friendship” with Elon Musk (the owner of Tesla, a donor to Trump’s campaign, and his political advisor during his first months in office), the relationship with digital nomads, and the gentrification of Mexico City. In the 1980s and 1990s, Octavio Paz himself spoke of a cultural field paved with polished concrete, bilingual signage, and welcome cocktails. What used to be cultural embassies are now boutique hotels with galleries on the ground floor, and what used to be criticism is now Instagram captions celebrating with a mezcal in one hand and selfies in the other.

Paz understood culture as a contested space, not only between ideas but also between systems of power. In his time, when Olmec heads traveled as “cultural ambassadors” from New York to Venice, led by museographer Fernando Gamboa, this dispute was waged between the post-revolutionary state and intellectual elites, between the autonomy of thought and ideology machinery. Today, the field has mutated: public institutions have been dismantled, private institutions are becoming more sophisticated, symbolic capital circulates faster on Instagram than in magazines or the cultural programs that are disappearing to give way to endless podcasts. But the conflict remains, disguised as collaboration, as grandiosity. On July 18^th, Mexico celebrates 700 years since the founding of Tenochtitlan and the great myth of the encounter between the Mexica and the eagle devouring the serpent on a cactus in the middle of a lake. As part of the government celebration, five monumental sculptures made from fiberglass were presented along with a light and sound show, a sign that perhaps we can still be amazed as the Spanish mirrors amazed the ancient inhabitants of this city.

While original artwork once traveled the world as ambassadors of Mexican cultural splendor, today artists produce nine-ton sculptures on vacant lots, and the government responds with monumental fiberglass simulations. Are people confusing mass with masterpieces?

Many questions remain. While support for our fellow Mexicans abroad continues to be conditioned by political interests, on the streets of Mexico City, beyond the renders and gallery cocktails, someone wrote with a marker: Gringo Go Home.

If the intellectual was once an awkward mediator, today the artist is expected to be an effective manager, a producer of discourses that serve cultural diplomacy or symbolic tourism. Just look at the promise of Chapultepec: Nature and Culture, a project spearheaded by Gabriel Orozco. Almost six years after the Master Plan, the promised spaces have disappeared, like the Pabellon Contemporáneo Méxicano, or have not yet materialized, as is the case with the Cinemateca Nacional in Chapultepec or the Bodega Nacional de Arte. The cultural battle has changed its setting: there are no more manifestos, just calls for action; no more speeches, just scandals in the press. This is the way the government responds. Today, public demands range from transparency regarding the Dolores Olmedo collection to the accountability of Mexican cultural enterprises involved in the Gaza conflict.

Octavio Paz wrote how the Mexican was marked by a history of betrayal and shame, the “son of Malinche,” silent, hermetic, afraid of being abused. National identity, he maintained, was constructed as a shell, a mask against humiliation. But Neotameme doesn’t remain silent, instead it smashes things, a work that doesn’t hide or apologize. The Olmec head on top of the Tesla doesn’t seek reconciliation, it seeks scandal. It mocks progress, solemnity, and the global technophile narrative, even though sales of this narrative have declined in the last year after its association with the Trump administration and Musk’s quest to create a third political party in the United States. In the words of Thomas More: “The devil… the prowde spirite… cannot endure to be mocked.” Perhaps that is the key to the piece’s viral effect, not because it is monumental, but because it mocks. Because it reminds us that power, when ridiculed from below, reveals its fragility. And because doing so from a mixed-race, ambiguous aesthetic, without institutional backing, hurts twice as much. And because mocking power, from the South, isn’t an evasion, it’s visual insubordination.