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.