DIAGNÓSTICO DE LAS COMERCIALIZADORAS DEL SECTOR

Porter concluded: "... there is not one shred of evidence that Mr Chase ever set foot in this country, except for some rather sketchy glances at the scenery. Everything else, he could, and did, I believe, read from books, and most of them very silly books recently published on Mexico"(254). Porter considered Chase's patronising tone symptomatic of his failure to understand the country. Her irritation stemmed from Chase's determination to see Mexico as a pre-industrial country where the Indian's condition was to be lauded rather than criticised. Porter failed to take into account Chase's avowed anti-machinist beliefs which necessarily led to his distorted portrait of Mexico as a romantic antidote to rampaging American industrialisation.

Porter became increasingly incensed as her review continued, and finished her article with a warning:

If you really love the way of life you find here, keep your hands off it. All this uproar of publicity helps to change, commercialize, falsify it.... The Indian arts are very beautiful, but so are the folk arts of other countries, and there is no special occult value to them. Their fiestas have about the same degree of meaning as popular fiestas in other countries.... Americans, travelling, seem to believe there is nothing so integral, so good of its kind, but can be improved by their pawing and fumbling it over a little. It is better, when you visit here, to leave your superiorities at home, and if possible, to shed your ignorances here, before you write a book interpreting Mexico (2 5 5 ).

In the wake of the revolution Mexico had become a fashionable subject to write about; Porter, having witnessed the appearance of an ever-increasing volume of poorly written books, felt they threatened to undermine the country. She saw a link between the influx of tourists and the inevitable destruction of the Mexico she knew. Porter, too, had contemplated writing a travel account, as she confirmed in 1925: "It is, it has been, my life-long hope to travel, and, of course I mean to write a travel book." 26 However, Porter was ever sensitive to the difficulty of being a responsible recorder of place, as her response to Chase's book reveals. Porter never wrote a travel account.

Porter's vitriolic outburst at the start of the Chase review - "Mexico is not really a place to visit any more, or to live in" - her general discontent with Mexico, which was evident in letters to friends, and an increasingly and consistently pessimistic representation of Mexico in her fiction resulted in, as noted, the idea that by 1930-31 she had grown to loathe Mexico. However, these two book reviews, appearing at each end of her Mexican stay, succinctly reveal a consistency in her attitude towards the portrayal of Mexico.

26 In "Shooting the Chutes", New York Herald Tribune Books: March 8, 1925: 10. Reprinted in "This Strange, Old World "and Other Book Reviews by Katherine Anne Porter edited by Harbour Unrue.

Porter's disillusionment with the revolution dated from much earlier than 1930. She had misgivings from the outset of its potential and its failure to deliver the promised reforms disappointed rather than surprised her. In an unpublished letter to her friend, Mary Doherty, dated November 1, 1943, she confirmed how brief her belief in the revolution had been: "[my] childlike faith in the Revolution was well over in about six nx)nths".27 As Walsh and Alvarez say in their introduction to the Uncollected Early Prose o f Katherine Anne Porter.

The assumption has been made that she entered the country idealistically committed to the political changes that the Revolution promised but eventually lost hope in the few dedicated idealists in government, who were hamstrung by implacable forces from without and within.... Her remarks are misleading because they suggest an all too simplistic version of her experience in Mexico. They suggest that the failure of the Revolution was the sole source of her disillusion, omitting Porter's own psychological state before she set foot in the country (6).

The reference to Porter's unstable and changing psychological state is significant because it affected how she viewed and then represented Mexico on paper. The clearest illustration of this is a comparison of "The Fiesta of Guadalupe" and the two versions of the sketch "Xochimilco". In The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings o f Katherine Anne Porter, Porter dated'The Fiesta of Guadalupe" as written in 1923. However, Walsh in Katherine Anne Porter and Mexico reveals that the essay was actually written on December 12, 1920, the feast day of the Virgin, and was based on Porter's visit that day to the basilica of Guadalupe. He speculates that she must have written the piece within several hours of her visit since it was published the following day in the English section of El Heraldo de México. 28 The implication of this is huge since it proves that Porter's disillusionment with Mexico did not happen at a later date but, rather, occurred almost immediately she arrived in Mexico. "The Fiesta of Guadalupe" is a bleak view of the submissive and downtrodden Indians. Only three months later (in March 19 2 1 ) Porter wrote the sketch "Children of Xochitl" which was then rew ritten and became "Xochimilco", published in May 1921 in the Christian Science Monitor. Both versions of the sketch are joyous accounts of the Indian village, Xochimilco, which Porter described in Edenic terms. The three articles show the inconsistency in Porter's approach to Mexico, an approach largely determined by her state of mind.

At the end of her final Mexican sojourn. Porter reflected on why Mexico no longer satisfied her in another letter to her friend, the writer Josephine Herbst, and concluded: