México Bucólico
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Jesús Balmori (1887-1948) was a Filipino poet, playwright, and novelist who wrote in Spanish. One of his most celebrated works is the collection of poems called Mi Casa de Nipa, with which he won first prize in the national literary contest in 1938. Seven years earlier, in 1931, Balmori had traveled to Mexico with the aim of making Spanish-Filipino literature known in Latin America and of delivering a conference in verse about Japan. He chose a very bad moment for doing so: his references for poetry in Mexico were modernistas, such as Amado Nervo or Salvador Díaz Mirón, who were long outdated and almost despised by the more avant-garde generation of poets of the early 1930s, called Los contemporáneos. This frustrated him up to a point that he ended up saying (in an interview by his friend Manuel Bernabé) that there were no real poets in Mexico, none that could be compared to Filipino poets. Furthermore, at that time Japan had invaded Manchuria and there was a negative view of a country that was trying to colonize another one, in a kind of rehearsal of the colonizing attempts that Japan would carry out later on in the Asian Pacific. Being Mexico an ex-colonial country, they were not very keen to listen to accounts about the idealized wonders of Japan.
When he got back to the Philippines, he wrote a very interesting travelogue in different installments about his trip. The first part is a classic narrative account of his stops in Japan, Hawaii, and the US. In the second part, Balmori narrates his stay in Mexico in poems describing his expectations and experiences in a critical manner. These poems could be read in the Philippine newspaper Excelsior –different from the famous Mexican newspaper of the same name. In this particular poem, Balmori evokes a boat trip in Xochimilco. He does not describe Mexico in an entirely positive way, but still, he points out several similarities between the country and the Philippines, such as "There are restaurant-boats with a Filipino-like aroma that makes us hungry". That Balmori finds similarities between Mexico and the Philippines is not completely unexpected as both countries share the Spanish language and colonial history, the Philippines being a capitanía from the viceroyalty of Nueva España (now Mexico and Guatemala).Source
Relation
Cuesta, Jorge. 1928[1985]. Antología de la poesía mexicana moderna. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Donoso, Isaac. 2010. “Introducción” in Jesús Balmori, Los pájaros de fuego. Manila: Instituto Cervantes.
Gasquet, Axel. 2020. “Filipino Poet Jesús Balmori: Testimonials of His Mexican Journey Passing Through Japan (1932–1934).” In: Lu, J., Camps, M. (eds.) Transpacific Literary and Cultural Connections. Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
Sheridan, Guillermo. 2004. México en 1932: La polémica nacionalista. México: Ediciones sin nombre.