Where is the force that causes
our misery?
-Juan Rulfo
died I was a friend, Ramon Eduardo Ruiz. He lived in Rancho Santa Fe, California, just above San Diego. Born in 1921. Devoted his life to Mexico and its history. In 1998 President Clinton awarded him the White House gave him a medal for his most outstanding intellectual and academic career. Among many other things, like writing fifteen books and numerous essays on Mexico (Mexico did not believe that would have been a Revolution), was the founder Department of History, University of California, La Jolla.
had little more than 21 years when a pilot was flying a B-24 between Guam and Tokyo, where American Superfortress still could not land on the island of Ivo Jima was left halfway. After the war Ramón Eduardo Ruiz declined again to say nothing of the aircraft. Bored him, he said. "Too many hours doing nothing." He earned his doctorate in history from UC Berkeley.
already over 89 years was declared a blood disease but curiously was not what took him from this world. One morning in July and in the garden of her beautiful home in Rancho Santa Fe, is encountered and hit his head on a slab and the accident was that determined his death.
was a very particular. A good man, elegant, tender and wise. His great passion was the history of Mexico as seen in his books: The Great Rebellion: Mexico, 1905-1924, Triumphs and Tragedy: A history of the Mexican People (1992), On the Rim of Mexico: Encounters of the Rich and Poor (1998).
Almost none of his books was translated into English. There used to be invited to conferences and symposia such as those held this year on the subject of the bicentennial, perhaps because he was a thinker too uncomfortable for the people of the academy and the intellectuals who have: he was a leftist historian, I do not know if Marxist. He also wrote a book on Cuba: The Making of a Revolution (1968). He gave no classes or lectures at the Ajusco, but in Trinity College, Oxford, England, or Stanford, Princeton, Harvard.
The exception is Mexico Editorial: Why a few people rich and poor?, Who has just published the editorial Ocean in the translation of Enrique Mercado. "Why is a potentially rich country remains mired in poverty, corruption and injustice? This is a brave book, angry and absolutely indispensable, "Timothy J. arises Henderson.
is a question that we Mexicans do every days.
Perfectly bilingual (he was born in San Diego to Mexican parents), in his autobiography Memories of a Hyphenated Man (2003) account of what it meant to be Mexican by birth and heart. A man between the dashes: Mexican-American.
His book is heartbreaking: it strives to understand why we have become a country of fifth row, unable to organize fair elections, why prosperity has benefited only a crony forty groups, businessmen, politicians, drug traffickers.
We have become imitators and not innovators. We are one dailies, copy it all to the United States, especially the rich economic ties U.S. capital.
