The Labyrinth of Solitude

A book of essays on Mexican identity by the poet and later Nobel laureate, first published in 1950 and revised in 1959. Paz begins with the pachuco, the young Mexican American of Los Angeles who neither belongs nor assimilates, and moves to the masks Mexicans wear: reserve, formality and a closed attitude that guards an inner solitude. He reads the fiesta and the Day of the Dead as moments when that closure breaks open. The best-known essay, 'The Sons of La Malinche', analyses the insult chingar and the figure of Malinche, the Indigenous woman who served Cortés, as signs of a wound left by the Conquest. Later chapters retell Mexican history from the Conquest through colonial rule, independence and the Revolution, and discuss the country's intellectuals. A closing essay treats solitude as a universal human condition. Critics have questioned its generalisations about 'the Mexican' and its portrayal of women.

It is the classic modern essay on Mexican and Latin American identity, and a powerful study of how history, masks and myth shape a people's sense of itself.