Mexico (Location Key)

Mexico is mentioned in 7 texts, but the only characters who spend any time there are Nathaniel Burden and Joe Christmas in Light in August - Burden in the antebellum period; Joe in the early 20th century - and Caddy Compson in the "Appendix," when she goes to Mexico in 1925 to get a divorce from her second husband. In The Town the "Jicarilla Apache squaw" with whom Byron Snopes has four children is from Mexico (379). In the context of Faulkner's world, their relationship is transgressive, and from any point of view their children are uncontrollable. "Mexico" has similar connotations of lawlessness elsewhere in The Town: Chick Mallison says Byron Snopes "escaped to Mexico" after robbing Colonel Sartoris' Bank (113) and later imagines Flem might do the same thing. Similarly, in The Mansion it is suspected that Flem might be planning to ship another cousin there (69). And in "Knight's Gambit," the "spinster aunts" of Yoknapatawpha speculate Harriss might have left his wife and taken off for Mexico (157). Two other texts - "Lion" and Requiem for a Nun - use it a point of reference, comparing the "Aztec" chiefs to the lordly dog Lion and contrasting the kind of ambitions someone like "Maximian of Mexico" had with the dreams that are possible in Missouri and Mississippi (249).