To Jalisco, home of mariachis and tequila

This week’s bulletin is a short travelogue. Chantal, a friend in the Colegio, took us on a journey through western Michoacán to the neighbouring state of Jalisco and its capital, Guadalajara.

The road from Zamora heads west along the valley into hill country with the odd small town and scattered farmland. After half an hour or so we reached a large sunken plain: this was formerly wetlands of Lake Chapala, drained by the owners of the Hacienda de Guaracha in the 19^th century to cultivate sugar cane.

Inner courtyard of the hacienda house at la Guaracha

Here the owners had their country house, chapel, workshops, a warehouse and housing for their managers and servants. The landowners ruled over a large population of workers. One of the pledges of the 1910-1920 Revolution was to break up the large landed estates to give land to the peasants. La Guaracha is now the Ejido Emiliano Zapata, named after the great peasant leader of the Revolution. The old hacienda house still stands in a rather dilapidated state as the village school. Nearby are the ruins of the sugar factory, including three chimneys, one of which was, in its day, the tallest in all Mexico. On a subsequent visit, when we stood on the roof of the old house the land, for as far as you can see (and beyond), once belonged to one family.

The land of la Guaracha was given to the ejido (land owned in common by the village peasants) by the revolutionary general Lázaro Cárdenas, former governor of Michoacán and from 1934-1940 President of Mexico. Cárdenas’ home town, Jiquilpan, is a little further along the old highway to Guadalajara. The general’s footprint is easy to see, even on a short drive through Jiquiplan: the Unidad Deportiva Lázaro Cárdenas sports centre was once the President’s country home. There is a museum, largely devoted to don Lázaro, and an obligatory statue. His sister’s hotel is still the best place to stay. On the road to Guadalajara there is a rather grand convention centre: one wonders what conventions are held in such an out-of-the-way town.

Lake Chapala from Petatán

We stopped for a late lunch of fried fish at Petatán, a tiny village on the shores of Lake Chapala, an enormous expanse of water shared by Michoacán and Jalisco. In the winter the lake is home to thousands of pelícanos borregones (literally sheep pelicans), great white birds, a few of whom remain in the summer to feed on fish scraps discarded by the fishermen. However, Chapala has a problem: an invasive Asian lily has covered large swathes of water. The authorities have introduced manatees which feed voraciously on the plants, but unfortunately local residents hunt the manatees.

A spectacular lakeside drive brought us to Mexico’s second largest city, Guadalajara, whose population of about 5 million makes it a rather mini-metropolis compared with the 21 million in the capital and its surrounding cities. Guadalajara was founded in the 1530s by the murderous Spanish conqueror Nuño de Guzmán. It was Spanish policy for Spaniards and Indians to live in separate towns. This was partly to protect the Indians from greedy, exploitative Spanish colonists, but principally to keep all the Indians in easy-to-identify places so that they could be taxed regularly and obliged to provide labour.

 

Plaza Guadalajara and Cathedral

A modern visitor can still see traces of this policy in modern Guadalajara. The centre of the city, where the Spaniards had the Indians build their city, consists of three large plazas: Plaza Guadalajara; Plaza Liberación (Liberation Plaza); Plaza Tatapatía (tapatío is the popular term for the people of Guadalajara). Many of the original colonial churches and government buildings still line the squares. There are more churches and monasteries in the surrounding streets: the church was big business in colonial Mexico. At the far end of the Plaza Tapatía stands the Hospicio Cabañas, an orphanage and institution for the destitute established by Bishop Juan Cruz Ruiz de Cabañas y Crespo.

Hospicio Cabañas

The eminent colonial architect Manuel Tolsá designed the Hospicio, including its imposing domed chapel. With an unfortunate sense of timing, the Hospicio opened its doors in 1810, just in time to catch the beginning of the wars of Independence and to be converted into military barracks. Today it is an art gallery. Its greatest attraction are the murals of José Clemente Orozco that cover the walls and ceilings of the chapel. In dramatic imagery, the murals depict Orozco’s radical nationalist interpretation of Mexican history. Rather immodestly, the artist portrayed himself in the dome as a man of fire who, by a trick of perspective, ascends to the heavens as the viewer walks round below the dome. The murals offended the governor of Jalisco, who refused to pay Orozco his fee. Orozco then painted a flattering image of the governor into one of the wall panels, collected his fee and promptly painted over the governor’s image.

The Indian districts of early Guadalajara were Analco and Mexicaltzingo. The native Indians of Guadalajara lived in Analco, across a river from the Spanish town.

Plaza and colonial church of Mexicaltzingo

In Mexicaltzingo lived the Mexica (whom we call Aztecs), Indians who helped Nuño de Guzmán conquer the region. A curious fact is that the Conquest of what we now call Mexico was largely accomplished by Mexicans, but the Spaniards took the profits. Mexicaltzingo was also separated by a river: the remains of a colonial stone bridge that linked the Mexica residents to the homes of their Spanish masters was recently discovered by archaeologists. Both Indian towns had large plazas of their own with splendid colonial churches: the Spaniards came to convert the Indian, not just to tax him and live off his labour.

If you ask Mexicans what they associate with Jalisco they will surely respond: tequila and mariachi. Tequila is made from the sugars of the agave cactus in a town called Tequila, Jalisco.

Plaza and church, Tequila

As you approach the town the land is covered with fields of the blue agave. We learned from our distillery tour that after some 6 or 7 years, the sugary core of the plant (the piña) is harvested by a worker called a jimador with a large hoe-like instrument. The piñas are cooked in large ovens for a few hours to release the sugars and are then pressed to release the juices. These ferment in great vats for a few days, after which the liquid is distilled several times to produce a powerful spirit, which is then diluted with purified water and aged in oak barrels for up to seven years. The youngest tequila is white, the next the golden brown reposado (rested), and then comes the añejo (aged).

 

Tequila bottles of many shapes and sizes

Mariachi bands vary in size but must include trumpets, violins a guitar and a guitarrón (a super-sized guitar) and possibly a Mexican harp. Many of the songs are jolly dance music: think of what we call the Mexican Hat Dance, which for Mexicans is the Jarabe Tapatío, or Guadalajara.  Other songs are more heart-wrenching tales of love betrayed by a treacherous woman (the women are always fickle), and a tearful lover who drowns his sorrow in plenty of tequila, possibly before going to his death in a shoot-out. For our more feminist friends the encouraging message is that you can reduce a gun-toting Mexican male to a tearful drunken heap with a dismissive flick of your hips.

A lunch time dance show in Tlaquepaque

The accompanying dances involve colourfully dressed women in skirts that whirl as they dance, and men in the traditional tight-fitting trousers and jacket, and the inevitable sombrero, all with much foot stomping (zapateado) to the beat of the music. We saw a spectacular show after lunch, with an all-female mariachi, in Tlaquepaque (another former Indian town, with its plaza and church, now a suburb of the city devoted to food, drink and selling Mexican crafts).

A female mariachi band in Tlaquepaque. Note the gentleman ignoring the performance