The Place Upon the Earth

 

On our first full day in Mexico City Jan and I had an appointment in an alcaldía (administrative district) of Mexico City called Tlalpan, a Nahuatl term meaning Place Upon the Earth. My PhD supervisor, David Brading, who died earlier this year, and his wife Celia (a historian of Peru) had sold their library in 2019 to the CEID (Centro de Estudios Interdisciplinarios: Centre of Interdisciplinary Studies) in Tlalpan. I had promised Celia that we would visit CEID and tell her what has been done with the library. We were shown round a splendid modern purpose-built building by Jaime del Arenal Fenochio, a distinguished ambassador, lawyer and historian, who is the director of one of the CEID research groups, all focused on the history and practice of Catholicism in Mexico and Latin America more generally.

After our visit we just had time for a coffee, and to notice that in the centre there is a museum of the history of Tlalpan, an attractive plaza and palacio municipal (council building), built between 1889-1900 in a Neoclassical style, which fills one side of the plaza, its façade decorated with a mural depicting key events in the history of Tlalpan. We resolved to return one our last full day in Mexico to see more of Tlalpan.

Our first stop was the plaza, shaded by trees with the inevitable kiosco (bandstand) in the centre. In one corner in front of one of the trees is a modest memorial to the Eleven Martyrs, Mexican patriots who were hung from trees in the plaza by the Prefect of the Valley of Mexico in 1865. O’Horan had fought the invading French heroically at the battle of Puebla in 1862, but when the Republican troops of President Benito Juárez abandoned the Valley of Mexico he switched sides and joined the army of Emperor Maximilian, installed on his precarious throne by Napoleon III. In 1867 he was captured and executed on the orders of Juárez.

The mural on the town hall was painted in 1987 by Roberto Rodríguez Navarro and four assistants. The tale begins, from left to right, with the first settlements on the shores of lake Texcoco, and in particular Cuicuilco, the archaeological remains of a place first occupied as an agricultural village in 1,200BC, which grew into a town of 20,000 people. A later panel depicts the people of nearby Ajusco forming an alliance with Hernán Cortés to defeat their enemies the Aztecs. In return the king of Spain granted Ajusco a coat of arms. The next scene depicts the people of Ajusco in 1548 showing the Spanish Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza the Lienzo de Ajusco, a map (which has survived to this day) of the town’s communal lands. There follow scenes of early colonial Tlalpan, including the church of San Agustín. 

 

Almost all Government business still requires attendance at an office in person. Here Tlalpan residents queue with documents for their official business in front of the early history of their municipality. Note Cuicuilco's distinctive circular pyramid top right.

The Indigenous people of Ajusco present their title to their land to Viceroy Mendoza in 1548.

 

The French occupation of 1862-1867 is shown, including the occupation of Tlalpan by Mexican forces led my Ignacio M. Altamirano in 1867. After the French invasion and the Liberal Reforma of Benito Juárez, the long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz brought modernity in the form of trains, a tram service, and in 1878 the first telephone call in Latin America, made in Tlalpan. At the same time, the town was a centre of traditional Mexican culture, notably the jaripeo (bull riding). A famous jaripeo rider from Tlalpan, Ponciano Díaz, is shown in his finery. The late nineteenth century brought industrialization and labour unrest, exemplified here by the figure of a ferocious half-naked woman, a striking Tlalpan textile worker of 1872 waving a banner with the slogan mueran los explotadores (down with the exploiters). Below, the revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata tells us that the Mexican Revolution of 1910 has arrived, and behind him the village of Ajusco is burned down by the forces of one of the arch villain of the Mexican history general Victoriano de la Huerta.

Modernity comes to Tlalpan in the form of the telephone and the railway, but tradition lives on in the jaripeo, exemplified by Ponciano Díaz in his splendid outfit.

Finally, the mural tells us of the planting of trees representing the desire of the people to restore balance to the ecosystem, while the modern City of Mexico, which by now has spread over the whole Valley of Mexico, including Tlalpan.

 

Citizens plnat trees to preserve the environment while the city expands.

Encouraged that the mural suggested local pride in the history of Tlalpan, we walked the short distance to the Museo de la Historia de Tlalpan, which is advertised on several official websites and on the Facebook page of the Tlalpan municipality itself. We stopped briefly to read the sign outside which gave brief information about the history of the building and then stopped into the entrance where a rather brusque police officer asked us what business we had. We stated the obvious – that we had come to visit the museum – only to be told that the new administration (which only two weeks before had switched from the Partido de la Revolución Democráticoa to MORENA (the party of the previous president and of his (female) successor, which dominates the legislature and many of the states) had closed the museum and converted it to offices. Deflated, we moved on to see what Tlalpan might still have to offer.

Until the end of Spanish colonial rule in 1821, Tlalpan was known as San Agustín de las Cuevas, named by the friars who arrived in town about 1530 The parish church of the same name was built the church in 1532. Accounts differ as to whether the first church was built by Franciscans (according to Wikipedia) or by Dominicans led by Domingo de Estanzos (so says the historical marker outside the church). In any case, the Dominicans replaced the first church between 1637 and 1647 and added cloisters for their convent. In 1898 a great fire destroyed the main altar, which was replaced by a Neoclassical altar, which was replaced in its turn by the present altar in the 1960s. The church has three naves, six confessionals and four chapels. One approaches the church through a splendid tree-shaded garden, which would once have been an open space to accommodate the substantial Indigenous population before disease devastated their numbers. Like the church of San Pedro Atocpan, which we visited last year, a garish gateway has been added to the entrance to mark the festivities of Tlalpan’s patron saint in August 2024.

 

The church of San Agustín de las Cuevas and its garden.

We paused our sightseeing for coffee and cake at the Café Victoria in Tlalpan’s market, inaugurated in the early 20^th century by Porfirio Díaz. The café, we discovered is a cooperative founded a year or two before the pandemic. Our bearded waiter told us that the coffee is sourced from organic suppliers, and all the food items from organic farmers in Xochimilco, Ajusco and Puebla. There are currently 16 cooperativistas. Before the pandemic there had been 26. The café had survived closure during the pandemic by starting a food basket scheme, supplying organic fruit and vegetables, a service that continues today, as well as a coffee roaster that wholesales organic coffee to other outlets.

 

Before a lunch of enchiladas (green for me, mole for Jan) in the plaza, we strolled around central Tlalpan, which to date has escaped the urban development that so disfigured some other districts of the great metropolis. Narrow streets are lined by high walls and gates, behind which are homes of the well-to-do, a Pontifical university and public buildings such as schools. A block of Magisterio Nacional (National Teachers) street was, appropriately enough, occupied by three primary schools, and since we happened to arrive at closing time, the street was full of sellers of sweets, snacks and other items targeted at young children and their parents. In Mexico, wherever numbers of people gather, street vendors appear.

Outside a school named after El Niño Artillero Narciso Mendoza (a 12-year-old boy who broke the Royalist siege of Cuautla during the War of Independence by heroically spiking one of the enemy’s cannons) were two banners. One encouraged parents to ensure that their children arrived at school on time (7:30 am-2:30pm). Another displayed a graphic of the plan and programmes of study of the New Mexican School, consisting of:

·      The educational community: girls, boys and adolescents

·      Knowledge and critical thinking

·      Ethics, nature and societies

·      The human and the communal

·      Languages (Spanish, Indigenous Mexican languages, English)

·      Gender equality

·      Cultural education by means of reading and writing

·      Inclusion

·      Critical Thinking

·      The arts and aesthetic experiences

·      A healthy lifestyle

·      Critical interculturalism

This is new curriculum, introduced in 2022 by MORENA all sounds rather worthy. However, it has been accompanied by new government-authored textbooks which have been controversial for their political content and, I am told, errors. Seven states refused to distribute the textbooks.

The next school was named after Vidal Alcocer, another child soldier during the War of Inependence, who lived long enough to fight both the French in 1838-1839, and the Americans in 1846-1848. Here rather more rebellious banners proclaimed: ‘Tlalpan protests. We are struggling for a different [higher] salary!’ And: ‘They deceived us. The salary increased we were promised never arrived!’

Around the corner was yet another school, the Colegio Santiago Galas Arce, named not after a boy soldier hero but rather a prominent businessman who emigrated from Spain and founded in 1913 a company that printed calendars, and who lived in Tlalpan. A little further on yet another banner proclaimed an altogether different school, run by AMCO, an international organization that operates in the USA, Spain, Portugal and twelve Latin American countries. The banner offered facilities not available in state schools: English as a second mother tongue; small classes; digital classrooms; classes until 5pm; special classes (chess, dance, music, computing, human development); evening workshops (karate, robotics, French, Italian, fine arts).

 

Tlalpan public library

 Further along the same street was a modern building that housed a huge bookshop (with no visible customer or staff) of the state-owned publisher Fondo de Cultura Económica, and the public library. The latter had something I had not seen in many decades: a card catalogue. True, there were computers, but none was turned on nor in use. Alas, the rather dowdy collection would discourage any but the most determined reader: there were only two present when we visited. A few metres along the same street Jan pointed out another modern building which housed the Centro de Estudios Históricos, which I had been associated with in the 1970s, when it was located on the hill below the palace of Emperor Maximilian in Chapultepec Park. A helpful security guard told us that we were most welcome to visit provided we signed the visitor’s book, but that there was nothing to see. Not far from here was yet another educational institution, the Centro de Estudios Superiores en Antorpología Social (Centre of Higher Studies in Social Anthropology). Downtown Tlalpan is quite an educational hub.

The library of the Centro de Estudios Históricos.

Mexico City is a metropolis of colonias, some charming old-style villages such as San Angel or Coyoacán with a mixture of colonial and modern homes of wealthy families. The more central Colonia Cuauhtémoc is a district of late 19^th-century mansions of the political and business elite, one of which houses the British Embassy. Nearby, in Roma and Condesa, developed in the 1920s and 1930s, many delightful Art Nouveau homes that once housed the burgeoning middle class of post-revolutionary Mexico have survived earthquakes and developers.

Calle Magisterio Nacional, one block from the primary schools.

Tlalpan is a very differerent colonia. There is money her but not, at least as far as a casual visitor can tell, at the level of San Ángel or Coyoacán. The atmosphere of Tlalpan’s streets is much more proletarian, especially when schools are out. When you turn from the broad traffic-laden avenues towards Tlalpan’s centre, one enters an area of narrow one-way streets lined by high walls, behind which, we were told, stand colonial-era buildings, 19^th-century and modern mansions.

An old photo of the corner of Ignacio Allende and Benito Juárez, where the Centro de Estudios Históricos now stands.