Volume 27, Number 21 & 22 · January 22, 1981
Uncle Jose in Mexico
By H.L. Rodriguez
In response to Letter from a Chinese College (September 25, 1980)
To the Editors:
The anonymous "Letter from a Chinese College" [NYR, September 25] has caused some amusement here. You really didn't have to cross the Pacific for such material; it abounds in this country. For example, I enrolled in the Escuela Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City a few years ago and my naïve hopes of learning something about anthropology sank out of sight in the same boring hours of "thought education" described in "Letter." Request a syllabus from them and learn that the basic text on linguistics is…sit tight…J. Stalin's. When I decided to leave and seek instruction farther north, I was reproached for lapsing into heresy. "Compañero," a faculty member said, "You [tú] will be studying imperialist anthropology!" And my experience can be duplicated on almost any level of what is called education here.
H.L. Rodríguez
Mexicali, BC, Mexico