A few of you have asked me to explain the
project that brought us to Zamora. At the risk of boring you all I will try to
do so in this bulletin.
In 1974, when I was a mere 22 years old, I
left for Mexico City (Air India to New York and Greyhound bus to Laredo, Texas)
to research a PhD. My topic was the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920 in the
state of Guerrero. The eventual result was a book that was translated into
Spanish and, I am encouraged to discover, is still used as a textbook in
Mexico.
1970s Guerrero was a lively place. A
schoolteacher called Lucio Cabañas led a guerrilla group of the Partido de
los Pobres (Party of the Poor). Lucio staged a spectacular coup by holding
hostage the governor elect, Rubén Figueroa, a member of a powerful family in
Guerrero, and very much a gun-toting, hard-drinking old style Mexican
politician. The Mexican army occupied most of the state. I occasionally encountered
them checking passengers on buses, but the soldiers were doing much nastier
things to poor peasants up in the mountains. Guerrero, alas, was then, and is
now, a bye-word for poverty and social deprivation. The difference now is that
the drug trade has made the problems much uglier.
Guerrero has not always been the prototypical
Mexican basket case. It was here that several of the heroes of Mexican
Independence eventually defeated the armies of Spain. In 1813 José María
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| Aerial view of Chilpancingo |
My project starts at the very beginning to
investigate what Prehispanic Guerrero was like and what the Spaniards changed
in the first eight decades of Independence. My question is whether what went
wrong started with the arrival of the Spanish.
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| Laguna de Tuxpan, where maize was first cultivated |
The story begins about 7,000BC on a
lakeshore in the northern Guerrero Valley of Iguala. Here a group of nomadic
hunter-farmers were the first to cultivate the staple grain of every modern
Mexcan’s diet – maize. They prepared their dinner by grinding maize on a stone,
leaving behind traces of starch which scientists analyzed just a few years ago.
Without the agricultural innovations of those ancient guerrerenses (as the
people of Guerrero are known) there could have been no Aztecs or Mayas in our children’s
school textbooks.
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| Diego Rivera painting of an Indian woman grinding maize, 20th century |
A little later, about 2,300BC another group
of hunters were living in a bay on the site of the modern tourist resort of Acapulco.
These guerrerenses lived off shellfish and fish. Analysis of thousands of fish
bones has proved that their favourite was tuna. Now, tuna does not come close
to the shore, so these early Mexicans must have had boats and fishing equipment
to catch quite large fish. They also made the first known ceramics in Mexico:
the not very beautifully named Pox Pottery.
Ancient Guerrero was rich in things which
were hugely in demand in other parts of Mexico. Guerrerenses produced cotton in
large quantities, and made very fancy clothing for the rich and powerful. They
also cultivated cacao (Mexicans were the first people in the world to taste
chocolate) and made gorgeously painted gourd cups from which the great and (not
so) good drank. And if you wanted prestigious jewelry or sculpture made from
precious stones, or shells from the Pacific coast, craftspeople in
Guerrero could supply it. Guerrerenses were also skilled metalworkers, making
fine objects of bronze and occasionally of gold.
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| Mezcala style sculptures from Guerrero |
Guerrero was such a source of desirable
goods that the two great empires of ancient Mexico, the Aztecs and the
Tarascans fought frequent wars to control as much of the region as they could
(the Aztecs controlled most, but the Tarascans seized territory with copper
mines and salt pans).
Things changed radically when the Spaniards
arrived. The conquerors were a rough and ready lot who wanted to get rich – and
fast. As far as Guerrero was concerned, they were interested in only two
things: precious metals and trade with Asia. Guerrero was the key to both.
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| An aerial view of Taxco with the church of Santa Prisca |
In the north, not far from where those
early farmers first cultivated maize, the Spaniards found silver in a place
called Taxco. The indigenous people of Guerrero had worked metal for centuries,
but in only small quantities to make ritual objects or jewelry. The Spaniards
were different: they wanted lots of silver and they wanted it fast. For that
they needed two things: human labour in large quantities and animals to feed
the miners and to transport the metal to Mexico City – oh, and salt to extract
the silver from the ore, and wood or charcoal to heat it. They solved the
labour challenge by importing slaves from Africa, enslaving some Indians and
forcing many more to work in the mines. Taxco was not a nice place to work: the
silver ore contained lead. Since the ore had to be heated to extract the silver
the miners were exposed to lead fumes, and their families drank lead in
contaminated water. The mine owners stripped the hills of their forests to
process the ore.
The mine owners made fortunes. The richest
of all, was, curiously enough, a Frenchman, José de la Borda, who undertook
many good works for the good of his soul. He is now best known as the man who
built the exquisite church of Santa Prisca. Santa Prisca is an exception that
proves the rule: very little of the silver wealth remained in Mexico. As soon
as it was extracted, it was sent to Europe to finance the Spanish king’s wars,
or to Asia to buy exotic luxuries. Taxco is now a destination for tourists who
stroll its hilly streets lined by colonial buildings, visit Santa Prisca and
shop for silver and other crafts.
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| Acapulco bay, probably 1950s |
As some Spaniards rushed to the Taxco
mines, others headed for the coast where they hoped to find the fabled western
route to Asia. They found it at Acapulco Bay where ancient guerrerenses had once
fished for tuna. In 1565 a Spanish friar guided a fleet of ships to Manila and,
most importantly, found the return route. For the next 250 years Spanish ships
arrived every year at Acapulco.
Merchants descended on the port to trade the silver dug out by Indian
and African labour for precious silks, porcelains, works of art and spices from
Asia. They loaded their purchases on great trains of mules to transport them on
mountain tracks the 700kms or so to Veracruz on the Gulf Coast from where they
were despatched to Spain. Imagine the quantity of mule droppings deposited
along the route by tens of thousands of mules over 250 years. Many
Spaniards grew rich from the trade or from organizing mule transport.
You should not conclude from this brief and
rather simplified account, that prehispanic guerrerenses lived in a democratic
paradise: their rulers were autocrats who waged wars, owned slaves and
practiced human sacrifice. But the point is that, in that context, Guerrero had
quite a lot of things going for it. As if with a flick of a switch the
Spaniards changed all that. They reorganized the regional economy on a
south-north axis from Acapulco to Taxco and Mexico City. Everything that travelled
the Royal Road, as the dung-laden track was grandly called, left for Mexico
City, Asia or Europe, leaving little behind for the locals. Everywhere to the
right and left of the road was of little interest except for grazing beef
cattle, sheep and goats and raising mules. Before the Spaniards arrived in
Mexico the largest domesticated animal was the turkey. Within two or three
decades, Europeans travelled on horses, mules bore cargo, and herds of tens of
thousands of grazing animals were wandering the remoter parts of Guerrero.
Imagine animals whose like you had never seen coming over the hill in quantities
to eat and trample your carefully planted field of maize.
It is impossible to say whether Guerrero would
have been a better place if the Spaniards had never arrived. But while they
busied themselves saving indigenous souls, they were responsible for at least
some of modern Guerrero’s problems.
