Escape from the busy city: Lake Camécuaro and one of Mexico’s famous presidents

This week’s theme is leisure and business, with a little local history as a bonus.

You will have gathered from the previous bulletins that Mexican towns are crowded, noisy, busy places. So, quiet spaces for leisure are much sought after. When our son John visited us this week, we asked for recommendations of things to do, and everybody recommended

Lake Camécuaro, a national park in the adjacent municipality of Tangancícuaro. Buses leave every 15 minutes from the Central de Autobuses and drop passengers, upon request, on the main road, leaving passengers to walk 700 metres to the lake.

 

Lanchas parked at lakeside

By 11am the park was already busy with children splashing around in the shallower waters, family groups carrying elaborate picnic supplies, including small gas burners and large cooking pots. Other families were already paddling around the lake in brightly painted lanchas. It is not hard to imagine the delight of young children (or in more remote spots courting couples) in escaping from the urban hubbub to the rural hubbub and cool shade and waters.

El Chino's restaurant

You will also have gathered that commerce is ever present in Mexico. Camécuaro is no exception. To the right a number of stalls offer a wide variety of food offerings. Smaller-scale operators provided grilled corn-on-the-cob and a variety of other snacks. To the left were the sellers of flotation aids and other child-centred paraphernalia. As we left after lunch, a candy floss seller was alighting from a taxi with a long pole from which hung plastic bags of many-coloured floss. By lunch time a 10-piece mariachi band was entertaining a particularly large family group.

A mariachi at Lake Camécuaro

The lake, some 1,400 metres long by 100 metres wide, is fed by spring waters. A winding creek takes the waters to the irrigation system of the Zamora valley. Trees, many of great antiquity, grow round and in the lake providing shade. It was declared a national park by President Lázaro Cárdenas in 1940. More of him at the end of this bulletin.

The creek at Camécuaro

A friend at the Colegio had recommended the last food stall on the right, known as El Chino. Despite

Mojarra adobada

his nickname, El Chino is a Mexican with curly (unusual for a Mexican) black hair. Although the business carries his name, we discovered that his wife does the cooking and collects the cash. As our friend recommended, we ordered mojarra adobada, grilled marinated fish served with salad, beans, rice, prickly pear leaves, tortillas and the obligatory salsa. All served at a lakeside table.

Camécuaro is a welcome respite from the bustle of Zamora, which is above all a business town. And its business is agriculture on an imposing scale. The original agricultural wealth was built on lettuce, tomatoes and potatoes. The climate and abundant water enabled production out of season. Then Chilean berry growers arrived, seeking extra capacity, and American importers came seeking reliable supplies. The Americans supply the plants and market the berries. The Mexican growers do the hard work of growing under poly tunnels and picking. The Chileans provide the irrigation technology. This is not a business for small peasant farmers, since it requires substantial investment in plants, poly tunnels and irrigation. The berries are shipped both fresh and frozen, so packing and refrigeration factories are dotted around the edges of town. The road around Zamora offers an expansive view of acres of poly tunnels, the urban sprawl driven by an increasing population, all dominated by the bulk of the Sanctuary of our Lady of Guadalupe, and ringed by green hills.

Cattle ranching in Zamora's hills

In the hills around the valley are the cattle farms. As milk prices have fallen cattle farmers have turned increasingly to raising cattle for beef. The market is in the populous state of Mexico, around the capital, where the demand for barbecue meat is enormous.

Occasionally, as you travel round the valley you see smoke rising from the hills. This is a sure sign that a slash-and-burn peasant farmer is clearing a small plot of land to grow maize. This was the way of agriculture in Mexico for centuries, but in the modern republic it is the sign of poverty and marginalization.

Finally, to return to President Lázaro Cárdenas. Tata (“father”) Lázaro, as he was known, was the last

President Lázaro Cárdenas del Río

president who had fought in the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920 which formed the modern Mexican republic. He was born in Jiquilpan, not far from Zamora, in 1895, and was governor of his home state from 1928-1930. As president, he distributed land to Mexico’s impoverished peasant villages, promoted education and public libraries, even in remote towns. He is most famous for nationalizing the oil industry, then dominated by British and American companies in 1938 (the 80^th anniversary was marked this month). Nationalization has been reversed by opening the oil and gas market to transnational companies in the current administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto.

Lázaro’s son, Cuauhtémoc (named after the last Aztec emperor, tortured and murdered by the Spanish conquerors), was in turn governor of Michoacán, and held several other official positions within the regime managed by the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party). He broke with the PRI and ran for President in 1988. It is generally considered that he won the election but that the PRI rigged the result to prevent his victory. The ruling party’s blatant theft of the election caused a political shock that undermined the PRI’s grip on power. In 2000, Vicente Fox of the opposition PAN (National Action Party) became the first non-PRI candidate elected in more than seven decades. Cuauhtémoc ran for president subsequently but was not able to repeat his success of 1988. Cuauhtémoc’s son, Lázaro has, in turn, been governor of Michoacán and held other elected offices.

Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas campaigning for the presidency in 1988

The preservation of Camécuaro is, then, one of the legacies of an exceptionally powerful Michoacán family.

Tortillas, aguas and tortas: making a living in Zamora

This bulletin’s theme is daily life: an attempt to give a flavour of how one makes a living in a small provincial Mexican city.

Our neighbourhood is Fraccionamiento Las Fuentes: a fraccionamiento is land divided into lots for housing. In this case, care was taken to provide plazas many with large fountains: hence the name Las Fuentes (the fountains). The one small snag is that the fountains contain no water. Nevertheless, the largest plaza at the end of the street is the location of the local church and a place to sit or stroll in the cool of the evenings. Saturdays, scout groups gather there for exercises. Sunday evenings the plaza fills with food stalls, sellers of (certainly illegally copied) DVDs and other inexpensive items, trampolines and other amusements for children.

 

Evening in the square of Las Fuentes

Las Fuentes is a neighbourhood of pleasant middle-class housing, ranging from homes of a modest size to larger properties, often decorated with flamboyant architectural touches: columns, rather baroque pediments and the like. 

Domestic architecture in Las Fuentes

Abarrotes Gladis

We buy much of our daily food from small grocery shops called tiendas de abarrotes: there are three within less than five minutes’ walk from our apartment. These are often lean-tos built onto the front of the shopkeeper’s house. Space is scarce so the shops cram in as much merchandise as space permits. The shops open early and close late. Each has its strengths: in our block the shop stocks berries destined for the American market in their US packaging; a short walk further across the plaza is the somewhat larger Abarrotes ‘Gladis’, which stocks a wider range of fruit and vegetables.

Contrary to popular stereotypes, Mexicans work hard: the legal working week is long and holidays, other than public holidays, positively parsimonious. One way to supplement income is to trade from one’s house of an evening or at the weekend. Across the road from us, the ancient Ford Falcon is moved out of the parking area onto the street to make room for plastic chairs and tables. Food is prepared in the converted garage. Service of tacos, tortas (a Mexican sandwich) and other small food items begins around 6pm and carries on to 10pm or so. A little further up our street, another neighbour has a small food stall outside the house from which lunch is served. On the plaza where the church is located, one man stocks a small range of sweet rolls and pastries in a small glass case. Another house is the location of a small ice cream and iced lolly shop.

Aguas de fruta for sale

Others offer more elaborate food at weekends: a local house sells pozole verde, a stew of meat and hominy maize in a delicious sauce with a good kick of chile. If space is lacking at the front of the house, the alternative is to set up a small table on the pavement, put up a plastic sheet for shade and patiently wait for an occasional customer to pass by. One popular item sold on the street is a range of aguas de fruta, a sort of fruit squash made from fresh fruit: perhaps guava, lime, cucumber, watermelon, or bright purple hibiscus flowers (agua de jamaica). Fidel Castro, in exile in Mexico City before leading the Cuban Revolution, scraped a living selling aguas de fruta.

A little further, up on the main street that runs along the north side of Las Fuentes, is our local tortillería. Here one buys the lunch time or evening stack of maize flatbreads that have been the mainstay of the Mexican diet for centuries. The cheery lady who sells us our tortillas told us that she and her husband start the day at 8am, making the maize dough, and close in the evening, seven days a week, taking only public holidays. A stack of 250 grams is enough for our lunch and costs us 4.5 pesos (roughly 20p).

 

The tortillería

Walking round Zamora, you notice the large number of repair businesses: car repairs, car spare parts, electrical repairs, watch repairers, tailors repairing clothing, sellers of assorted repaired motors and odd bits of machinery, or bicycle parts. In Mexico incomes are low and machinery expensive, so fixing things up until they can be fixed up no longer is an essential part of daily life. It also provides a lot of work.

Our walk into the centre takes about fifteen minutes and takes us past countless small businesses: tortillerías, a roast chicken seller, a small baker, a torta shop, a place that specializes in a great variety of dried beans (another staple of the Mexican diet) and various edible seeds. Then we reach 5 de mayo, the main north-south thoroughfare, and a sea of movement of people, trucks, taxis and small rickety buses whose rasping exhausts emit one of Mexico’s most typical sounds.

Calle 5 de mayo

Across 5 de mayo, the hubbub increases as we reach the edge of the main market. The crowd of street sellers and their customers make movement a slow affair of weaving in and out of people, stalls, young men on bicycles or scooters. On sale are chunks of coconut spiced with chile, tacos, drinks made from tropical fruits, plastic cups of chopped fruit. The shops that line the streets round the market sell clothes, small electrical goods, cheap toys (Mexico is a country of children and young people), mobile phones. The most visually striking shop is a seller of paper tropical flowers: a riot of brilliant colours.

 

Goods for sale  everywhere

Benito Juárez

Monday 19 March is a public holiday to mark the birthday of Benito Juárez, a 19^th century president always referred to as “el benemérito” (the meritorious). Juárez is one of the nation’s heroes. He was an Indian, born in the southern state of Oaxaca, who became a lawyer, and in the 1860s President. When Napoleon II invaded Mexico to install as Emperor Maximilian of Austria, Juárez moved the government out of Mexico City and travelled round the country leading a stubborn resistance. The Mexicans wore down the French troops until Napoleon tired of the project, leaving Maximilian to face Juárez alone. The Emperor was captured and executed on a hill in northern Mexico (the subject of a famous painting by Manet). His wife Carlota became mad and died in an asylum.

Catholic Central: a Quick Tour of Zamora, Michoacán

 This bulletin will concentrate on urban planning, architecture, and one or two other aspects of culture in the broader sense of the term. Zamora was founded by the Spanish in 1574. Unlike many other Mexican towns this was a novel foundation, not built on an existing indigenous settlement. 

 

The cathedral and zócalo, Zamora

In typical Spanish style, the centre of the urban plan is the plaza, or in Mexican parlance, the zócalo, still surrounded in part by colonnades. The cathedral occupies one side. The centre is planted with shade trees and small areas of garden with seating, and in the centre is the obligatory bandstand. Last Sunday the music was played by the Gran Banda Orquesta de Jacona (a nearby town), whose tunes from the bandstand occasionally drowned out the priests’ words at Sunday mass, until the bells struck back drowning out the Gran Banda. The Cathedral is in a rather restrained Neoclassical style. It dates from the mid-19^th century and was designed by Eduardo Tresguerras (his last name means “three wars”), a notable architect at the time. 

Bandstand and Gran Banda Orquesta de Jacona

Around the corner from the cathedral is the equally Neoclassical church of San Francisco.

Santuario de Guadalupe

The largest structure in town by a considerable margin is the Sanctuary of our Lady of Guadalupe, nicknamed, as one of our hosts here informed us, “la inconclusa” because of the long time it took to be completed. Work began in 1898, to be interrupted by the Mexican Revolution in 1914. Construction finished in 2006, although some work continues on decorative details such as sculptures and balustrades. The style is imitation Gothic in a dark grey stone. The towers dominate the modest skyline of Zamora from anywhere in the valley. The Virgin of Guadalupe is extraordinarily important in Mexico. She appeared miraculously during the colonial period to a Mexican Indian on a hill north of central Mexico City and inspires great devotion.

Zamora seems still to be a very Catholic town. Certainly, in the 1930s this region was a strong supporter of the Cristiada, a revolt against the anticlerical government. To this day, a church marriage in Mexico has no legal standing, although the days of official anticlericalism are long past.

 

Centro Regional de las Artes

Next to the Sanctuary is Zamora’s great political white elephant. The wife of President Vicente Fox (in office 2000-2006) is from a wealthy Zamora family. She decided to bestow on the town a cultural centre. The building is a huge white modern cantilevered affair, clearly intended to be Zamora’s modern architectural statement. Alas, once Fox left office the state of Michoacán ran out of money to fund it and the centre now sits closed and silent.

The Mercado Morelos

Just off the zócalo, to one side of the cathedral is the 19^th-century red-stone Mercado Morelos, named after José María Morelos, the great leader of the struggle for Independence from Spain. The market is now largely given over to selling sweets (Mexicans love sugar), the main market being a walk across the street. This is the Mercado Hidalgo, named after the priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, who launched the war of Independence, but died before it was achieved ten years later. This is a huge sprawling affair that fills streets far around the market building itself, which is barely visible behind the plastic sheeting of the street sellers.

 

Calle Francisco I Madero

If you take the main street, Francisco I Madero (“The Apostle of Democracy” and a hero of the Mexican Revolution of 1910: Mexican history if full of heroes) south you eventually come to a large crossroads. Heading further south you are on the causeway to Jacona, a neighbouring town of prehispanic origins, that we plan to visit this weekend. We have not been there yet, but instead we turned onto Virrey de Mendoza avenue, which runs West-East. This is Zamora’s answer to North American consumerism: a few blocks of modern, glitzy shops and restaurants. Eventually, the glitz gives way to the more Mexican jumble of car repair yards, electrical repair shops, assorted small stores, and the inevitable Farmacia.

On the subject of architecture, I should describe the Colegio de Michoacán (Colmich) to which we stroll every weekday at 9:50 or so. Colmich is set behind high walls in carefully tended gardens. There are three modern buildings linked by a first-floor walkway and a third-floor roof garden, complete with solar panels. Each building is set round a rectangular garden. The library and administration building is a separate, large structure well-lit by a glass roof over an open area of work tables. Colmich is a graduate institution and the teacher to student ratio is very high.

 

Walkway to the Centro de Historia, Colegio de Michoacán

Jan has been assigned some tasks in the library which I only vaguely understand. She has been given a north-facing office, which apparently is a great privilege. I have an office in the Centre of Historical Studies (CEH) but spend most of my time in the library where my books have been assembled for me, and placed on a trolley for my convenience. Last Wednesday I was given a formal welcome by the CEH, at which I gave a presentation of my project and answered questions. I survived.

Biblioteca Luis Gonález, Colegio de Michoacán

Last Friday we were given a tour of the library, and in the special collections we were shown a portion of an illustrated manuscript in Otomí (an indigenous language), with occasional lapses into Spanish. Since it was written in Roman characters and includes occasional phrases in Spanish, the scribe was almost certainly an Otomí who must have received education from the Spaniards. The manuscript is thought to date from the 1640s and was found in a small Otomí village. It recounts the conquest of the Otomí people by a Spanish Conquistador and his indigenous allies in the 1520s. The illustrations include dramatic battle scenes, with Spaniards armed with arquebuses (an early firearm), Otomí fighters armed with bows, and arrows flying in all directions.

Lunch at the cafeteria, Colegio de Michoacán

At about 2pm we head for the Colmich restaurant managed by Lety. Her sister is the chef. Lunch consists of the obligatory soup, a main dish with rice, beans and vegetables, and dessert (usually ice cream). Tables are set on the terrace around the building looking on to the gardens: butterflies and hummingbirds accompany us.

As far as cuisine, is concerned the local delicacy is chongos, a dessert made from the milk of newly lactating cows and piloncillo, a hard brown sugar produced as a residue of processing cane sugar, and cinnamon. They are quite delicious, but not suitable for those on a diet.

And, as to weather, the day starts agreeably warm, gets pretty hot by lunch time, then cools down for an evening of pleasant breezes.

To Zamora, Michoacán, “Berry Town”

We arrived in Mexico 26^th February 2018. Our first two days were in Mexico City. There was evidence of the recent earthquake (September 2017) in the neighbourhood of our hotel. Two streets were closed and in one place people were still living under temporary plastic sheeting. We were told that there are now large alarms giving three minutes’ warning of a quake: our friend Pepe Ballesteros told us that his female colleagues no longer wear high heels at work because they can’t run in when the alarm sounds if their heels are fashionably high.

 

Diego Rivera's San Ángel studio

Our first day we took a trip to San Ángel, to the south of the city. After a brief stop for coffee and carrot cake we visited the studios/houses that Juan O’Gorman designed for Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and himself. The Rivera studio was full of his popular and ancient Mexican art collection. We also saw the bed on which he rested from painting, and in which he died. A handy arrow hanging from the ceiling showed us the height of the great artist: I am a few centimetres shorter.  There was also an exhibition of art relating to his visit to Moscow in the 1930s.

The second day was a trip to Coyoacán, a district of the city noted for its colonial architecture and a fine colonial church. We walked past the house of Diego Ordaz who was one of Cortés’ captains during the conquest of Mexico.

 

The church of San Juan Bautista, Coyoacán

Our two days in Mexico City were also full of eating: we had dinner with Chris West and Pepe Ballesteros, two publishing friends from many years ago; lunch with Paul Schmidt, an archaeologist who has helped me with my project; Anne Johnson, an anthropologist who has also given me advice; and the Landera family, my landlords in 1974-1975.

Our journey to Zamora was a bus trip of about five and a half hours. The trip begins in the enormous northern bus terminal, climbs out of the Valley of Mexico (its slopes a jumble of informal settlements that occupy every space, however steep), along the Valley of Toluca and then a left turn into Michoacán. The state’s name is prehispanic and means “place of the people who eat fish” taken from the many lakes we drove past. The road to Zamora goes through lush countryside with poly-tunnels in vast quantities: the town is the centre of a transnational fruit-growing business.

Our friend Verónica Oikión and her husband Sergio met us at the bus station and delivered us to our apartment, a convenient few minutes from the Colegio de Michoacán where I will be carrying out my research. We share the building with two anthropologists (one American, the other French-Canadian). Our neighbourhood is pleasantly quiet (with the notable exception of two dogs on the roof of the house behind us). A short walk to the south is a large square with a catholic church and the town’s cultural centre.

 

Jan outside our apartment building

Friday was a rather exhausting day of introductions to numerous colleagues in the history department, the library, and the administration department. All greeted us with a smile, a handshake and the assurance, in true Mexican style that they are “a sus órdenes” (at your service). One surprise, was to discover that the Canadian English teacher, Paul Kersey has a Suffolk connection: his grandfather was a Barnardo boy given as his new name that of the village of Kersey in Suffolk. The Colegio is a collection of modern, well-lit and airy buildings, with gardens below, and a roof garden with shade and tables and chairs. We can already testify that the cafeteria provides an excellent lunch (lentil soup, stuffed pepper or breaded fish, tortillas, and a Mexican version of bread-and-butter pudding, with orange or guava juice for £2).

 

The Luis González Library, Colegio de Michoacán

The Centre of Historical Studies has 12 academic staff and 18 students (all the students of the five departments are post-graduates). Next Wednesday the department gathers to welcome Jan and me. I have to give a brief talk about my research project.

The view from the roof of our building

We must say that Zamora is not a town of infinite charms and stunning architecture, but it bustles with movement and the endless shops and street vendors whose wares make a walk around any town a riot of colours and odours. We walked yesterday to the centre to check it out and find ground coffee (not available in our local shops). We bought local coffee in a shop that sells coffee and Catholic memorabilia, prayer books and the like: a novel business model in my experience. For those of a sweet tooth, there are lots of “neverías” (ice cream shops).

Daily life poses a few challenges which we will deal with one-by-one: how to adjust the water heater, how to work the washing machine; how to handle the enormous bottles of distilled water that provide drinking and cooking water; rubbish collection (daily, no recycling, hanging a bag of rubbish on a nail on the telephone pole outside the gate).