“Unless it rains ... (B)ut it never rains on Sunday morning in Jocotepec. The priest has forbidden it.” Lysender Kemp wrote that shortly after tidying up his extraordinary translation of Octavio Paz’s 1950 ground-breaking, internationally successful “Labyrinth of Solitude,” an analysis of Mexican character and thought.

Mexico’s political/judicial clime appears so stalled — not-quite democratic, but deeply corrupt — that it puzzles its own top analysts and leaders.

A young Mexican I barely know asked me Monday if I were an Estadounidense o Candiense. I said I was a U.S. citizen. He shook my hand to congratulate me on my nation’s Independence Day. After a few pleasantries, he asked: “Que´paso con los Estatos Unidos?”

July 4 Independence Day celebrations in many United States citizens’ minds are bound (often unconsciously) to a cluster of quiet, if exceptional, events that took place 1783-1789 in the wake of the War of Independence.