How to spot a Mexican by the way (s)he speaks

 

One of my reads on our last visit to Mexico trip was Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s Tirano Banderas: novela de Tierra Caliente. Valle-Inclán (1866-1936) was a Spanish poet, novelist, playwright, essayist and journalist. When I was a student, it was his poetic works, especially his sonatas, Primavera, Estío, Otoño and Invierno (Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter) rather than this novel that were in the curriculum.

 

However, he visited Mexico twice, in 1892-1893 during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, and in 1921 when the revolutionaries who had deposed Díaz had finally triumphed. He met Francisco I. Madero, the leader of the 2010 Revolution and the first revolutionary president. This must have been in 1892-1893, before Madero became an important opposition political figure, since he was assassinated in 1913. One of the characters of Tirano Banderas, don Roque Cepeda, a mystic and idealist, is clearly based on Madero. Various other figures clearly had Mexican originals, such as Doctor Atle, a reference to the artist and writer Gerardo Murillo, whose pseudonym was Dr. Atl (atl being the Nahuatl for water).  Tirano Banderas, the dictator of Santa Fe, is advised by científicos (followers of European knowledge and the philosophy of Auguste Comte) as was Porfirio Díaz. Valle-Inclán also became a friend of Álvaro Obregón, one of the most important revolutionary generals, and himself president of Mexico from 1920-1924.

 

The novel reflects aspects of the Mexico that Valle-Inclán knew, but the imagined country in which it is set, Santa Fe de Tierra Firme, is clearly not one hundred percent Mexico. The capital is a fetid port, a tropical hothouse, while Mexico City is set in a high, temperate mountain valley. The dictator chews coca, an addiction of the high Andes of South America, not Mexico.

 

Valle-Inclán was one of the Generation of ’98, a literary group that sought ways to respond to the shock of the Spanish-American war of 1898. In Tirano Banderas he sought a unity of Spain’s lost empire by creating a literary language that reflected the many kinds of Spanish spoken throughout the Hispanic world, of which Castilian was (and still is) a minority. My edition includes a 16-page glossary of non-Castilian vocabulary, including many Mexicanisms and Nahuatl terms, but also the Spanish of Argentina, Chile, words from the speech of gypsies and so on. This vocabulary does not make for an easy read.

 

In Mexico, people assume from my looks that, like most visitors from overseas (the majority being from the USA) I speak little or no Spanish and almost always with a heavy English accent. When I respond in Spanish they often try to guess where I am from, always without success. They are puzzled, because a lot of what I say sounds like them, but they can see that I most certainly am not Mexican.

 

My first education in how to speak Mexican was in the summer of 1972 at the daily tertulia (afternoon coffee gathering) of my landlady Consuelo Cevallos and a group of her neighbours. It took time to attune my ear to the chat, but once I could follow the conversation, I joined in. Although I was admitted to the tertulia, the ladies asked me “Why do you speak like that? Why don’t you speak like us?” Over that long summer, I discovered that life was much easier and more enjoyable if I spoke to the Mexicans I met in their own variety of Spanish. My spoken Spanish was further polished by many nights in the bar of the Camino Real hotel and at the subsequent poker games with a group of young students who befriended me. From them I learned a Mexican Spanish that was far less polite than that of Consuelo’s ladies.

 

Language, of course, is not just a mechanical means of communication, but a window into culture. For example, Mexicans tend to be more elaborately courteous than Spaniards. If you read early colonial Spanish documents, there is an elaborate emphasis on status and formal politeness. And the Indigenous societies that Spain now ruled were very hierarchical and emphasized courtesy and self-deprecation in their rhetoric. It is hardly surprising that Spanish and Indigenous forms should result in a Mexican emphasis on politesse and deference. For example, in Castilian, if I do not quite understand what somebody has said to me, I might respond “¿Qué me dijo?” (What did you say?) but in Mexico the phrase is “¿Mande usted?” (literally What are your orders?). I was once told in Valencia, when I used just that phrase, that I should not be so servile. Similarly, the Mexican “A sus órdenes” (At your orders) is rarely if ever heard in Spain.

 

Then there are the words that come from Nahuatl and other native languages. Chocolate (chocolatl) has passed to Mexican, Castilian and English speakers. Tomate and tomato are similarly of Nahuatl origin, but Mexicans retain jitomate, a word closer to the Nahuatl xitomatl; tomate means that green fruit with a thin brown husk that Americans call tomatillo. Nahuatl terms for everyday objects similarly passed into Mexican Spanish: huipil (Nahuatl huipilli) is a woman’s blouse. A petate (petatl)rather than an estera) is a mat, and a popote (not a pajita) is a drinking straw. . A young child might be referred to affectionately by a Mexican as an escuincle or escuintle. Similarly, a man might refer to a male friend as guëy (pronounced like weigh) from the Nahuatl huey (man). The Aztec emperor was known as the huey tlatoani (the man who speaks). Tlatoani passed into Mexican Spanish to denote an Indigenous chieftain. Terms also moved the other way. The Spanish mandón (bossy boots) in colonial Mexico meant a minor official, not a jumped-up bossy character.

 

And, of course, Spain was very remote from Mexico, so that the two varieties of Spanish developed differently over time, especially after independence in 1821. In essence, Mexican Spanish became a variant of 16^th/17^th-century Castilian. I once had to pacify a director of the Alhambra, who had been annoyed by the editing of his text. As soon as he heard my Spanish he commented “Oiga, habla usted el español de Cervantes” (“You speak the Spanish of Cervantes”). His irritation disappeared and we became friends.

 

A mannerism that is much more frequently used in Mexican Spanish than in Castilian is the frequent (even prolific) use of the diminutive. A Mexican would often ask for “un cafecito”, a Spaniard for “un café”; in Mexico “unas tortillitas”, in Spain “unas tortillas”, or please (“por favor”) might become “por favorcito” The overall effect in Mexican speech is to convey great pleasure and self-deprecation.

 

Some phrases tell you much about cultural differences between Mexico and Spain. In my experience, it is quite rare for a Spaniard to invite you to her/his home, preferring instead to host a meal in a restaurant. Mexicans, on the other hand, are proud to invite one to their home, especially a foreigner or a person of high status. The guest is welcomed with the phrase “Está usted en su casa”, “Aquí tiene su casa” (literally This is your home”) or something similar that expresses pride and pleasure in your visit.

 

The formal usted form of verbs has been almost completely abandoned in Spain; but in Mexico it is still regularly heard, even if I now hear some shocking uses of the informal tú. However, it will take a long time for Mexicans to abandon the prolific use of titles to address one: licenciado (a person with a first degree); arquitecto, ingeniero, or more simply jefe (boss).

 

Then there are the words that just mean something different. If you are told that a camión will take you to Oaxaca to visit that beautiful city you should expect a bus (autobús for a Spaniard for whom a camión is a lorry) and you should board it at the central camionera not the estación de autobuses. I recall once landing unexpectedly at JFK airport in New York because my plane had a fault that required a long runway (and waiting fire engines). A Puerto Rican employee of Eastern Airlines addressed us in an English which was almost entirely incomprehensible. A group of elegantly dressed Mexican businessmen asked her if “¿Nos van a llevar en camión?” (Will we be taken by bus?), to which the airline employee replied in appalling Spanish as if addressing peasants: “¿Un camión? Un camión es una trocka!”  

 

The verb chingar (never to be used in polite company), and its derivatives, is so rich a vein of Mexican slang that the Noble prize-winning poet Octavio Paz devoted a small essay to it in his book El Laberinto de la Soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude). My Spanish dictionary cites five definitions:  rather demurely, to annoy; more frankly, to copulate; to steal, as in “me chingaron el dinero” (they stole my money); to kill, in my experience usually figuratively (“ya se me chingó el carro”: my car is done for); to finish something, as in “se chingaron todo el pastel” (they scoffed the whole cake). One could add several meanings and derivatives. A boastful Mexican might claim to be “el más chingón” (the very best; more politely he might be “el mero mero”, the bees knees). Another derivative, una chingadera means “a lot” or “ a ton of” (as in “gané una chingadera de dinero jugando poker”: I won a ton of money playing poker).

 

A word that trips up many Castilian speakers is the verb coger, for which my dictionary gives many meanings, of which the most common usage is to take, hold or catch: as in take an apple from the tree or money from a purse; hold a package; catch a bus; and so on. But in Mexico its meaning is invariably just one: the expletive equivalent of the English F word. The usual Mexican alternative is agarrar (defined as “to take or seize strongly, especially with the hand”); i.e. to grab. I was once severely chided for my use of agarrar instead of coger by a client in Barcelona, whose company distributed my reference books, and who moved in high social circles (he sailed with King Juan Carlos). He was greatly amused by the way I speak Spanish, but when, at the end of our lunch, I asked “Dónde puedo agarrar un taxi” (Where can I get a taxi?), he reprimanded me sternly: “Aquí no se agarran sino que se cogen” (Here we don’t grab them, we catch them”).

 

Finally, there are considerable differences of pronunciation and tone. The lisped Spanish ‘c’ before the vowels ‘e’ and ‘I’ and ‘z’ before all vowels, is always an ‘s’ in Mexico (consequently, Mexicans frequently misspell words: e.g. cocer (to cook) and coser (to sew) are commonly both spelled coser. In place names an ‘x’ is either a ‘sh’ or a guttural ‘ha’ (like the Spanish ‘j’): Xochimilco (Shochimilco) or Oaxaca (Wahaca). And the charming girl’s name Xochi (Nahuatl for flower) is Shochi. Vowels tend to be pronounced rather longer in Mexico than in Spain.

 

In tone, Mexican Spanish is much lighter, more musical on the tongue, and much less guttural than Castilian. To my ear, at least, Mexican speech has a musicality that Castilian lacks. And social interactions in Mexico are more formal (a Spaniard might say deferential) and elaborate. A speaker in a shop or restaurant in Spain who is more familiar with Mexican social norms may find Spaniards much more direct and forthright/brusque: the overall impression is that one is engaged in a business transaction which is to be briskly conducted; in Mexico, the interaction will be longer and more formally polite.

 

Lest my Castilian-speaking friends consider me unduly prejudiced against Iberian Spanish and Spanish society, we recently resumed our visits to Spain: a few days in Valencia and a delightful stay at the Voramar hotel on the beach in Benicassim lulled to sleep by the sound of waves of the Mediterranean are a great pleasure. But Mexico and its language has a special appeal which endures.

Colouring history in Puerto Vallarta

 

One of the not very useful facts that I know from my studies of Mexican history is that in 1582 cochineal was being produced in Chilapa in the mountains of Guerrero, and a few years later in Huamuxtitlán, Olinalá, Tlapa and Ahuacuotzingo. The little insect Dactylopius coccus was used to produce a dye much in demand in the textile workshops of Mexico City.

 

But while I had read about cochineal I had never seen it, and had no idea how the dye was made nor what colours it produced, until Jan and I paid our annual visit to a shop called Casa Oaxaca in Puerto Vallarta. The shop is the retail outlet of a cooperative of Indigenous textile workers in Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, a drive of more than 1,300 kilometres so Google informs me.

 

In front of a loom were several baskets each containing different dyeing materials. There was indigo from plants of the Indigofera genus, pods of a shrub called huizache (Vachellia farnesiana) whose seeds produce blacks and greys; a mineral used to break down the lanolin of wool so that dyes can be absorbed.

 

And there was a basket of a shiny material that I took to be small stones, but was in fact the dried bodies of the cochinilla insect. It feeds on the sap of prickly pears, in three months growing to about one centimetre. These are voracious little creatures as our son Chris told me later: they ate the prickly pear in his garden in San Vicente in no time at all. But the textile workers of Teotitlán love them: they infect prickly pears with a male and female and wait for them to multiply and suck the plant dry.

 

The young man who served us gave me a demonstration. He crushed some cochineal in his hand, applied a few drops of lime juice; a red stain appeared on his hand. Then he added a little ground chalk to produce a different shade; next slaked lime for another shade. With judicious application of a variety of alkaloids, a range of reds can be produced. So here the historian who knew about the cultivation of cochineal almost 500 years ago was given a beginners class in how it is used to produce goods for tourists today.

 

These insects little have other uses. They are edible, but apparently have no great flavour. They can be used as a food colouring, and are added to mezcal.

A day at Vallarta Botanic Garden

Arriving for work with Chris

Chris's "office"

 

The orchid lab, where rare orchids are propagated and new varieties created.

A view from the orchid house.

Chris with the fruit of the cuastecomate tree. The fruit apparently has medicinal properties. The outer skin was used in ancient Mexico to make drinking vessels.

 

Orchids in the orchid house. Mexico has 3,000 varieties, of which the garden has 300.

 

The view from the restaurant of the Horcones River valley.

 

A hummingbird visited us for breakfast.

Lots of spiders hanging high up on their webs.

 

 

Lots of butterflies of all colours and caterpillars. We joined a presentation and walk by the local butterfly conservancy. Dulce, who led the presentation and walk, told us that this not very attractive caterpillar has a nasty sting.

A cacao tree. The whiteish pods contain the seeds from which the chocolate is made from and the small white flowers growing up the trunk will produce more pods.

 

 

 

“Gente importante”

 

After we had returned home from dinner with our friends Lupita and Eliseo, our son Chris received a message from Eliseo thanking us for inviting them to dinner, especially since the restaurant is a place where “important people” (gente importante) go.

 

You may recall from a blog item about two years ago that we last met Lupita and Eliseo for dinner with their teenage son Carlitos, who had both legs amputated because of cancer. Alas, Carlitos died of his cancer shortly before our visit to Puerto Vallarta last year. While we were visiting, Chris, his then boss Arturo and Eliseo spent a day at a local hospital offering to give blood to replace some of the blood given to Carlitos.

 

Both Eliseo and Lupita are blind. As they entered the restaurant with Chris “en tren” (“in train”) Lupita with her hand on Chris’s shoulder, Eliseo’s on her waist, they surprised their surviving son Eliseo who is a waiter at Campomar where we ate. Eliseo Jr.’s other given name, we learned is Charbel, after Charbel Makhlouf, a Lebanese saint known for uniting Christians, Muslims and Druze, and known as the Miracle Monk of Lebanon.

 

Some of you may recall that Eliseo has been blind from birth (he has no eyes) and Lupita from a later stage of life. Eliseo continues working as a physiotherapist at Pasitos de Luz, the children’s charity where Chris worked until recently. Lupita teaches braille at a government agency called DIF (Desarrollo Integral de la Familia; Integral Family Development). Lately, she has devoted more of her time to providing social interaction for elderly people who are losing their sight and who lack the skills and confidence to leave their homes. She organizes gatherings to enjoy music and dancing.

 

Both Lupita and Eliseo are involved in a theatrical event, a production about a famous figure in Mexican history, La Malinche. Malinche was an indigenous noblewoman from south-eastern Mexico who had learned Spanish from a shipwrecked Spanish sailor. She played an important role in the Spanish invasion of Mexico as an interpreter who enabled Cortés to negotiate alliances with enemies of the Aztecs. She also became his lover and mother of his son Martín Cortés, and has an ambiguous role in Mexican history as a capable indigenous woman. But many Mexicans consider her a traitor who betrayed their motherland. The play is to be performed entirely by blind actors. The director is a professor who is losing his sight. The audience will wear blindfolds so that, as Eliseo put it, they will experience the sounds and smells of the production.

 

When we meet Lupita and Eliseo we are acutely aware of the importance of their non-visual senses. For example, Lupita commented to Jan that she sensed that the restaurant was very busy, although of course she could not see the customers, nor distinguish between the talk of staff and customers. Then there were the screens showing American football games and their associated commentary, and the clatter of knives and forks on plates. As for smells, the food provided plenty to assail the senses.

 

I reflected on Eliseo’s comment that our fellow diners were important people. In the sense that they had the money to arrive in nice cars, have someone park it for them, and order food that was beyond the means of our guests, they are no doubt important. But in the Bahía de Banderas area there are really only two ways to make money, tourism (hotels, restaurants, and tours/events) and real estate. Success in these businesses can require permits to build perhaps where permission should not be given, or building on a scale that should not be allowed; ignoring ecological damage to flora and fauna (turtle nesting on the beaches, for example, are vulnerable to development); and so on.

 

I think I much prefer the company of Lupita and Eliseo to the “important people” of Campomar.

Footsteps of history in Mexico

  

Among the pleasures of exploring Mexico City are the unexpected traces of history one encounters. As we strolled along the grandly named Triunfo de la Libertad (Triumph of Liberty), a narrow street typical of central Tlalpan in Mexico City, a sign on an otherwise unprepossessing wall caught my eye. It informed me that on that location once stood the Hospicio de San Antonio de los Padres Dieguinos de las Filipinas, a residence for missionaries en route from Spain to the Philippines. The hospicio was donated to the order in 1580 by a certain Beatriz de Miranda, together with 15,120 varas (almost 19,000 hectares) of land, including an orchard and vegetable garden.

Here the missionaries could recover from a long, arduous, and sometimes dangerous, journey from Seville to Veracruz, and then on horse or mule back through the mountains to Mexico City. They then faced a journey of thirteen to sixteen days to Acapulco, through mountains, crossing the Balsas river, one of Mexico’s largest, on wooden rafts, staying overnight in remote wayside inns, and braving mosquitos. Fray Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, bishop of Tlaxcala, commented on the arduous terrain during his visit to parishes in the mountains of eastern Guerrero in 1610-1611. On one occasion, he complained he had travelled “an appalling” 28 kilometres of “foul” tracks. In the 16^th century, Acapulco was not the luxury tourist resort it became in the last century; rather it was a small, hot and humid tropical settlement with few buildings of substance. But, despite its lack of facilities, it was the Spanish empire’s only authorized gateway to all of Asia.

The friars occupied the property in Tlalpan until 1827 when it was expropriated by the governor of the state of Mexico, one Lorenzo de Zavala, a prominent Liberal politician. Zavala was a prominent figure in independent Mexico: he helped to draft the constitution of Mexico’s first Liberal Republic in 1824; was minister of finance and ambassador to France, and travelled widely in Europe. In 1835 he fled to the state of Texas from one of the many coups of the grandly named Conservative General Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón, more conveniently known plain Santa Anna. Zavala then became an advocate of the independence of Texas and signed its Declaration of Independence in 1836. Consequently, Zavala is reviled in Mexican history books as a national traitor, but praised as a hero in Texas where a town and a county are named after him. However, the town (Zavalla, in Angelina County) named in his honour could not get the spelling quite right and had only 603 residents to remember him in 2020. Zavala, in Jasper County, got the spelling right, but was abandoned in the second half of the 19^th century. Those who named Zavala County (in southern Texas) in Lorenzo’s honour in 1858, also mangled his spelling, and only removed the surplus in 1929. Only a cemetery honours Lorenzo today.  Zavala’s nemesis, Santa Anna, on the other hand is persona non grata in both Mexico (for losing Texas) and in Texas (as the besieger of the Álamo).

By mid-century, the former hospicio was the site of the betting tables during Tlalpan’s fair. In 1847 the invading forces of the USA occupied the property, after which it was abandoned and the land divided. In 1978 Carlos Hank González, former governor of the state of Mexico purchased the site and donated it to form the Literary Institute of the Autonomus University of the State of Mexico; it is now the cultural centre of the university. Hank González, by the way, was famous, among other disreputable things, for the motto “A poor politician is a poor politician.” He was certainly not a poor politician.

The façade of the Viceroy Mendoza house in Tlalpan.

A few minutes around the corner from the former site of the hospicio is a building said to have been a residence of the first Viceroy of New Spain, Antonio de Mendoza, who ruled the future Mexico from 1535-1550. It is thought that Mendoza lived there during the annual Easter festival of the Holy Spirit in Tlalpan’s church of San Agustín de las Cuevas.  In 2007 a citizen-led campaign saved the building from demolition. A modern visitor sees little of Mendoza’s country residence, now much modernized as a community educational centre, other than its 16^th-century style façade, and, like other properties in central Tlalpan, a garden of surprising and impressive size in modern super-crowded Mexico City. The garden is now a wild place, but stone remains of former structures, prickly pears and trees hint at a once larger residence and a substantial kitchen garden and orchard.

The modernized interior of the Mendoza house.

The Mendoza house garden, partial view.

 

The church where Mendoza celebrated Easter was built in 1532. Now much remodelled inside, it retains its façade, a bell tower, the ringers’ ropes attached from the garden below (nobody climbs the tower to ring), and a two-storey cloister where friars once lived. In front is a sizeable garden. These large open spaces of early Mexican churches were used to minister to the indigenous people, then far too numerous to be accommodated inside the church itself.

San Agustín de las Cuevas, Tlalpan

 

Jan and I have become fond of Tlalpan after two visits. Here we can sense a Mexico of the past, and of the modern city where parents walk children to school, deal with official matters in the town hall on the main plaza, and dine in restaurants where pale-skinned visitors like us are a comparative rarity, and welcomed with courtesy and pleasure.

In another colonial-era district of Mexico City, the Plaza San Jacinto in San Ángel, a statue commemorates Comandante John Riley. Riley was an officer in the US army ordered by President James Polk to invade Mexico in 1846-1848. The army included a battalion of men of Irish origins, known in Mexico as the Heróico Batallón de San Patricio (The Heroic Battalion of Saint Patrick). Polk’s invasion was essentially a land grab – Mexico was obliged by military force to ”cede” to the USA California, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico and Texas, about half the national territory). The Irish soldiers evidently understood exactly why they had been sent into Mexico, and true to Irish traditions of anti-colonialism, decided to fight for Mexico’s territorial integrity.  Alas, Mexico was soundly defeated, the Irish soldiers killed or captured, and most of the prisoners were tortured and hung, many of them in Plaza San Jacinto.

Bust of John Riley, Plaza San Jacinto, San Ángel, Mexico City.

The day between our visit to Plaza San Jacinto and Tlalpan, we had taken our son David to see the Trotsky House in Coyoacán. Trotsky arrived in Mexico after a long peregrination seeking asylum in several countries. Finally, in the 1930s President Lázaro Cárdenas, who had admitted many Republican refugees from the Spanish Civil War, offered Trotsky asylum. His admirers, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo became friends (Kahlo slightly more than friends) and visited him regularly in what was then a country house (now a multi-lane highway runs past the door). Guarded by young acolytes from the USA, Trotsky, his wife and their youngest son survived an armed assault led by the painter David Alfaro Siqueiros; the only casualty was the son who was lightly wounded. Watchtowers on the walls testify to the threats under which the family lived. After the attack, Trotsky’s office was fortified with heavy cast iron shutters and doors. In the end, of course, it was not a gun that killed Trotsky, but an ice axe wielded by a Catalan Communist infiltrator, trained in Russia. Gory black and white photos record the deed. Trotsky and his wife are buried in the garden where he once tended his rabbits and chickens.

The burial place of Trotsky, his wife Natalia Sedova Kolchvsky, and their grandson Estéban Volkov Bronstein and a partial view of the Trotsky house. Note the guard post top right.

 

 

Romance Vallarta Style

 

After we arrived at our apartment on Playa Amapas yesterday I went down to the beach. At one end, a small white tepee stood was decorated with electric candles, red roses, and illuminated letters spelling T E A M O (I love you). Two sunshades provided shelter from the sun. Later a couple of young women lay among the roses and embraced on. Our son Chris tells us this ia a favourite LGBTQ+ beach.

 

This morning, as we prepared breakfast the sound of a trumpet drew our attention. About where the two young ladies had embraced yesterday, a heart-shaped display of false red roses had been erected. In its centre was an illuminated sign asking “Will you marry me?”. A red carpet was lined by electric candles and red roses. Two displays of roses stood either side of the arch and behind on the beach more electric candles. A bouquet of red roses was strategically placed on the red carpet just in front of the heart.

 

 

A glamorous young woman in an elegant trouser outfit and beach sandals was busy on a mobile phone, while a young man dressed in black with a pony tail was busy setting his camera for the event. The trumpet player was a member of a mariachi that was gathering and preparing its instruments.

And then the couple arrived. We felt a certain sympathetic tension. Would she say yes, or no? The girl wore a fetching long dress, her beau some not so elegant shorts and a black shirt. The mariachi played. He fell to his knees, produced and fitted on her finger a ring.

 

What next? The suspense rose.

 

The beau stood up; the girl embraced. They kissed. The answer was clearly YES. The bouquet was presented. There followed many photos and videos. No doubt the young couple are now on Snapchat or Tiktok.

Given the elaborate arrangements, we assumed that the Yes was a foregone conclusion.

Distant memories and present realities

 

 

As is our habit when we visit our con Chris in Puerto Vallarta, we first check into the hotel Villa La Estancia for a few days of luxury relaxation. There was an innovation this year in the breakfast restaurant: quesadillas with hand-made tortillas, with cheese and a choice (or combination) of mushrooms, spinach, tinga de pollo (chicken in a sauce of tomatoes and smoked chiles), or birria. The latter is a western Mexico speciality of beef, goat or lamb, cooked for two to three hours in a marinade of chile ancho and guajillo, garlic, cumin, oregano, thyme, black pepper, cloves, cinnamon, bay leaf and vinegar. It is hearty and absolutely delicious.

 

Chatting to Yolanda, who made our breakfast to order, I discovered that she was born in Chilpancingo, the state capital of Guerrero (and the place where Mexico’s first constitution was drafted) seven years after I had stayed there for a couple of months to consult the state archives. We reminisced about Chilpancingo’s culinary speciality, pozole. Everyday white posole is made from long-cooked hominy, pork, garlic, onion, bay leaf, oregano, pepper and salt, and served with lettuce, radish, avocado, oregano and lime. But the truly special pozole is the green pozole made only on jueves pozoleros (pozole Thursdays), flavoured with fewer herbs and spices, but with that all-Mexican herb epazote, and with tomate, which in English we call either green tomato or tomatillos, and jalapeños.

 

Yolanda making quesadillas.

 

 

Our conversation reminded me of a long afternoon sharing local mezcal and quantities of pozole verde with a colleague from the Autonomous University of Guerrero. The pozole was delicious, the mezcal too copious, and our fellow diners included anybody who was anybody in Chilpancingo.

 

Apart from the rather mundane mornings spent in the archives, I was trying to make contact with the Figueroa family, whose ancestors had been important figures in the state during the Revolution of 1910-1920. Indeed, they had continued to be important players in state politics, and Rubén Figueroa Figueroa had recently been elected governor. The governor was, to say the least, a colourful figure. He was one of the breed of rough and tough gun-toting politicians who had ruled Guerrero not at all well for half a century. The most spectacular episode of his career had been his capture by the guerrilla band of Lucio Cabañas. Figueroa had hoped to persuade Cabañas to give up his armed struggle in return for ‘election’ to remunerative political office. However, instead of pulling off a political coup de théâtre, Figueroa found himself held captive until all political prisoners in Mexico were released. Cabaña’s bands methods were rather haphazard, and on one occasion the corpulent governor-elect had managed to walk away from his captors, only to be recaptured. Finally, the band was betrayed and caught in an army ambush. In the midst of the firefight, Figueroa walked over to the army side and demanded to be given a gun with words to the effect of ‘so I can shoot the bastards.’

 

I had tried to meet the governor in Acapulco, but was told that he was fishing with the Shah of Iran. In Chilpancingo, however, I managed to make the acquaintance of the governor’s cousin, Arturo Figueroa Uriza, the family historian and guardian of their archive. Arturo refused my request to have access to the archive, arguing that all that was in the archive was in his book Ciudadanos en Armas (Citizens in Arms). I tried to gain access to the archive through another cousin, Jesús Figueroa, who lived in the family’s home town, Huitzuco (now known in full as Huitzuco de los Figueroa) and made wine there. But he asked me what I was interested in. When I replied ‘The social background of the followers’ of his relatives, hoping to allay fears that I might be digging for dirt, he responded that the archives contained no such material. The Figueroas guarded their past carefully, so I never was allowed to see a single document, except for a few which were in the national archives, beyond family control.

 

However, don Arturo offered to introduce me to the governor. We found him meeting the people who brought their petitions hoping that the governor would take up their case. Anybody of importance who happened not to be the governor’s enemy need not queue up, but ordinary citizens (almost all small-scale farmers) had to wait their turn. I was taken straight to the front of the queue, where I found the governor, a corpulent man dressed in a white guayabera shirt. He was flanked by two other rotund gents wearing guayaberas; the greatest living poets in the state I was told.

 

We talked about the governor’s rescue by the army and he invited me to a seminar of the mayors of the state’s largest cities to discuss municipal finance. Guerrero’s main problem is poverty and an economy and political system structured so as to keep the majority impoverished. In the context of the seminar, a secondary problem was the number of tiny municipalities. The population of each is too small and too poor to pay much in taxes, so the governor commented that, except in the larger municipalities, such as Chilpancingo or Acapulco, they lacked sufficient budget even to buy pencils. Nevertheless, locals often jealously and forcefully guarded the autonomy of their municipalities, despite the fact that they did very little to benefit their tax payers.

 

In these circumstances, I was often impressed by how resourcefully the people of Guerrero could manage to improve their lives with very little (or no) support from those who were “elected” to govern them. I recall being asked by the head teacher of a politically radical secondary school in Acapulco to give a presentation to a class about the history of their state. The head’s office was equipped with a desk, a couple of chairs and a filing cabinet, as minimal as the office of the mayor of Buenavista de Cuéllar, far to the north of the state, who I once visited. But the head’s room was palatial compared to the classrooms.

 

Looking at the class, I was struck by the footprint of the history of enslaved Africans on the coast: many of these young men and women had much darker skins than fellow Mexicans descended from the ancient peoples of Mexico. When I had finished my talk, the students were not interested in the history of their state; they wanted to ask me questions about my own country. In response to a student who asked what the police in the UK were like I answered that “en mi país los policías no tienen pistola”, meaning that they were unarmed. This remark caused such hilarity that the head decided to end the class there; in local slang a pistola was a penis, and I had told these young people that British police officers don’t have any.

 

As I reminisced with Yolanda, she commented that many say that the people of Guerrero are bad and violent. We both agreed that this is an unjust stereotype. This reminded me of a conversation with Margarita Zavala, wife of the president of Mexico, Felipe Calderón Hinojosa. The occasion was the private view of an exhibition in 2010 about Moctezuma Xocoyotzin at the British Museum to mark the 200^th anniversary of the beginning of Mexico’s war of independence. Noticing that Margarita was alone after giving her speech in English, my friends Dudley and Silvia Ankerson and I introduced ourselves to her. She was very keen to be reassured that her English was up to scratch. We assured her that it was excellent, and Silvia complimented her on her elegant rebozo (a Mexican stole). When my friends commented that I had studied the history of Guerrero, the First Lady commented “Un pobre estado con muchos problemas” (a poor state with many problems). Quite what her husband was doing to solve the problems of Guerrero she did not say.

 

Guerrero’s current predicament as one of Mexico’s most violent states is in some ways a historical conundrum. In pre-Columbian times the region had abundant resources of cotton, coffee and metals, all much in demand. The indigenous communities fared reasonably well. Spanish law gave the indigenous some useful privileges and protections. They paid no sales tax, could not be tried by the Inquisition for heresy, and were left to govern most of their own affairs. The best-placed municipalities were able to accumulate substantial community funds and to defend many of their cultural practices, their land and treasured documents.

 

Then came the Bourbons followed by Independence. The Bourbons, hard up for cash, “asked” for loans from village funds. Independence piled on the problems. The Liberals who led the movement to free Mexico from Spanish rule decried the supposedly infantilizing protections and privileges given the Indians under Spanish rule: they must have the full rights and responsibilities of all Mexicans and pay taxes like everybody else. And the Liberals deplored the communal property of indigenous towns as “la mano muerta” (the dead hand) that stifled economic development. Instead, village lands were to become private property on the open market, and thus, coincidentally, available for non-indigenous Liberal thinkers to snap them up and accumulate capital. This process was sometimes resisted determinedly and violently by communities in the mountains of Guerrero; ironically, the only ruler to try to help them retain their land was the Austrian-born emperor Maximilian I, only for disamortization as it was called to be pursued with greater vigour by the government of the national Liberal hero Benito Juárez (himself an indigenous person) and his successors.

 

The revolutionary regimes after 1920 distributed land to many communities, an initiative to which the Figueroas were opposed. However, this was not ownership by the community, but rather a highly conditional tenure controlled by federal law and politicians. True, clinics and schools appeared in small towns and villages, but politicians focused on grand initiatives that did little to ease rural poverty. Meanwhile fortunes were made in tourism, the only modern sector of Guerrero’s economy, in Acapulco and Itztapa Zihuatanejo. Oh, and the Figueroas came to control some key sectors of the state’s economy, notably passenger and goods transport.

 

And most recently, crime syndicates have seized control of much of the state and have suborned local politicians. Those who do not submit to the demands of organized crime pay with their lives. So the hardworking and long-suffering people of Guerrero live in poverty and insecurity.