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.