The audio version of this article, together with my previous Mexican piece on Oaxaca, is now available on the podcast. My series on my Mexican trip begins here.
I had rather a delightful surfeit of baroque experiences last year in Vienna and thought it would be some time before I had anything similar. However, I’m currently listening to a playlist of rather good baroque music I’ve never heard before. From Mexico, or, to be more precise, Nueva España (an area of the Spanish Empire that included Guatemala, which apparently has one of the most spectacular baroque cathedrals in the world). There’s the odd Bolivian piece thrown in on this 42-hour playlist (thanks to the wonders of Spotify), I see, but a lot of it is Mexican, and after my trip I’m not surprised. Until recently I wouldn’t have even thought to look for it. Mexico totally upturned most of my ideas about the Renaissance and baroque periods, and so we’d better return to the beginning one more time, to the Templo de Santa Domingo in San Cristobal de las Casas. I spotted the church in the distance the first time I was walking down the road: sumptuous Renaissance domes rising above the rooftops. I got closer to it when walking through the wonderful marketplace: even with all the artisan colours around, the intensely detailed baroque décor on the exterior were even more elaborately sculpted than things I’d seen in Europe, a sort of fractal baroque. And inside: gold, gold, gold. Gold leaf everywhere.
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are often called the ‘Golden Age’ of Spanish culture. And that’s quite literally true. The plunder and destruction wreaked upon central and southern America was boom time: in many ways it funded the cultural expansion back in Europe, where the Spanish monarchs were the most powerful (and, as they were Habsburgs, they owned a lot of the European mainland too). What I hadn’t quite realised was that it was also boom time in the Americas, if you were the right kind of new American. There’s 300 years of history between the arrival of Cortes and the declaration of Mexican independence, which is a hell of a lot more time than the British and French held the comparatively empty northern bits. The other point is that the Spanish conquistadors soon headed into the interior: contrast with the initially seafaring coastal bases of the Brits, French and Dutch. Or even the Portuguese, who skated round the Cape, leaving another 150 years before any Europeans seriously landed here to set up camp. In the 16th century Oaxaca and Puebla were already growing centres in the south, needing churches, which needed artists and sculptors, and then needed music. The glory of Spain had to compete, after all, with a quite extraordinary amount of glorious indigenous art and culture and temples and silver and gold. So there was cultural work to be done, on behalf of the great European Catholic project. My theory is that after the genocide, came the desire to beautifully rebuild, otherwise there was no way to ever exalt God again, they’d just have been forced to confront their sin over and over. It was probably urged by the many religious orders who followed the thuggish conquistadors (or indeed those Dominicans and Franciscans who came over first with them, and wanted books and libraries and schools set up even as they ignorantly clamped down on the local ‘superstitions’).
In Oaxaca, the gold-leaf in the church of Santa Domingo was superb, outdoing the cathedral (not too shabby in its own right). However, it’s all a later addition, because when troops were stationed there during the nineteenth century wars, they scraped off the original gold leaf and sold it. Which is perhaps comeuppance: all the gold in the indigenous temples was originally melted down and repurposed, often into these churches, but also leading famously to the beginnings of serious inflation in Europe as gold flooded the market. There I could see a key aspect of Mexican baroque: witnessing how extremely curly and forest-influenced all the indigenous cultural decoration was, the new painters and sculptors had to compete, adding extra curls and borders wherever possible. Or perhaps it was all subconscious, themselves influenced too by the cultural mycelium networks of the land. In any case, my sense is that there was a lot more two-way influence than we might imagine: Mexican baroque decoration is as vibrant as the music I’m listening to, and those going back to Europe would no doubt have been inspired.
The city of Puebla de los Ángeles, in the state of Puebla, was the first city deliberately founded by the Spanish, as a centre for their culture, rather than (as in Mexico City or Cholula) planting themselves into a pre-existing urban centre. I was not quite aware of how much larger it was than places I’d been so far, until arriving and getting thoroughly confused at the enormous bus station and range of public transport networks to get into the old city. These days it forms one conglomeration with Cholula and stretches up to the old centre of Tlaxcala too: yet, like elsewhere in the country, it was pretty efficiently set up with buses, if you were prepared to enquire forcefully. The downtown blocks were very pretty, but much more imposing than in Oaxaca: chunky three-storey buildings were commonplace, often coloured or with the kind of elegant brickwork that would give facebrick a much better name if replicated more often! There were whole streets of dulcerias – selling among other things camotes, in boxes for tourists – a very worthy and lightly sugared tube made from sweet potato, coming in numerous colours that tasted rather similar.
I also tried chipulines at last in Puebla, mixed in with a good dose of guacamole, having seen them on the streets of Oaxaca and not been immediately tempted. Going round on a Oaxacan tour with middle class Mexicans and Colombians, I didn’t quite get tempted by the gusanos (worms), and the hormigas (ants) seemed a bit pointless; but people kept raving about these deep fried grasshoppers.
Certain conservative commentators have been raising fears around humanity moving on to insect protein in a big way. I get where they’re coming from, especially if it involves large-scale industrial farming, but chipulines aren’t that. These need plucking by hand from the crops where they’re pests; rich sources of protein, and frankly, even deep fried, they’re pretty tasteless, hence the guacamole. Strangely, they’re difficult to follow from source to plate, so I couldn’t be sure I was eating ‘organic’ ones or ones that had been chomping down on pesticides, so I’m not sure they currently make that healthy an option. In fact, even though they’re pests, the chipuline pickers often contend with unhappy farmers who think they’re ‘poaching’. Strange politics. But there we are: a real Oaxacan favourite, also available a little further north in Puebla. Oaxaca was a major centre for another useful bug in the past: cochineal beetles grow on nopal cacti (prickly pears) and when they’re crushed up make the most intense natural red dye, which used to be Mexico’s second most lucrative export after silver. Like fungus, insects have so much more to offer than most Northern farmers and consumers realise.
Puebla also has its special mole (sauce), the mole poblano, which is spiced and includes cacao, though it’s rather browner than the Oaxacan version. I ate some with enchiladas; I also visited the ex-convent de Santa Rosa where it was supposedly first created, by the nuns there for the visit of the viceroy. And it was there that I really got a sense of Puebla’s dominant craft, ceramics. This explains the wonderful brickwork; but also, and particularly, the wonderful pottery, in ‘telavera’, going back centuries, influenced by Chinese, Turkish and European styles, but with a magic of its own. There were kitchen pots in which the mole was prepared (these days you can pick up boil-in-the-bag home versions in the city streets); and then an incredible range of sculptural pottery, with the particular theme being the tree of life, though artists have taken it into all kinds of unexpected directions both as craft pieces and pure artwork. It was here that I understood how the tree of life image has evolved, equally as varied and elaborate in its branches as the old Mayan glyphs, but now with other kinds of images. Some represented fauna, some religious or personal stories; individual takes on the theme, in yet another Mexican combination of museum and gallery. And there was an oval window or two around the place above head height, the only windows in from the outside world for the nuns. These represented God’s eye, keeping watch on the nuns’ activities.
It’s worth noting that one of the most famous and celebrated personalities of the Spanish Golden Age is Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a Mexican nun who lived in the 1600s, a little closer to Mexico City than Puebla. She wrote sensual love poetry, sexy proto-feminist comic plays, and baroque music, as well as educated rebukes to Catholic bishops. Needless to say she’s seen as a major Mexican heroine. While England and Italy banned women from the stage at the time (to such an extreme extent that Italian operatic theatre often castrated boys so they could still sing the high female parts, which was somehow ethically preferable to letting an actual female do it), the French and Spanish theatres were happy to allow actresses and women writers long before English and Italian men got over themselves, and there’s apparently a host of proto-feminist Spanish plays from the period. They do rather need searching for, however: while some people claim Shakespeare can’t be Shakespeare because he wrote no less than 37 extant dramas, Lope de Vega, his great Spanish contemporary, scribbled off more than 1000, and in the general excess of the age, there were dozens more playwrights and companies at the time in Spain than in little old England; archivists haven't got close to getting through all those plays yet.
Puebla has the oldest library in the Americas (after the Spanish had finished burning the locals’ codexes, they brought more books in and wrote some). It also has the oldest dedicated public theatre in Mexico, though it’s not as old as the works above. I had seen the grand fin de siècle theatre in Oaxaca, which it was pointed out had ‘casino’ written above the top floor: public theatres were essential parts of the dictator Porfirio Diaz’s public building programmes in Mexican cities, but they were often places for the elite to show off. I’m reminded of the contrast in Cape Town between the brutalist Artscape theatre building – formerly known as the ‘Nico Malan’, after an apartheid-era politician – which produced mainstream popular European-focused pieces of theatre, music and opera - and the Space theatre, which occupied a temporary liminal space in Long Street and produced international quality, challenging theatre. Mexico’s baroque is amazing but casts a similarly long ‘mainstream’ shadow in some respects. I wasn’t able to catch any theatre while in Puebla, as it was too close to the festive season for anything new and exciting to be on; but I did have some good chances to talk with Lala, co-organizer of Laboratorio Magdalenas Puebla, creating intentional community theatre with a feminist focus and links throughout Latin America. It was a challenging moment: I joined her and her colleagues in a protest because one of their Venezuelan colleagues had been assaulted and murdered in the jungle between Brazil and Venezuela. Puebla is full of universities and that includes actors in training, but many of them aim for the big screen or the West-End style theatres across Mexico City; theatre for life is a bigger challenge today, perhaps as it always is: are we here to educate, or just to entertain? Goethe asked that question at the start of his epic play ‘Faust’ two centuries ago; and probably Euripides was trying to do the same 25 centuries ago. The famous Teatro de los Insurgentes in Mexico City features a grand mural by Diego Rivera illustrating the struggle history of Mexican theatre; yet the actual show on offer there when I passed was Mamma Mia! The edge of compromise is always there, and who knows what those baroque Mexican composers were thinking as they penned off another piece of delicious froth for some hacienda owner.
Cholula is perhaps the most dramatic case in point. This is where the conquistadors tricked the local rulers into a meeting, and slaughtered them all. The ‘hill’ outside the town centre is actually, by volume (though not height) the biggest pyramid in the world, a centre for cultures going back thousands of years, with layers and tunnels and images of feathered serpents, and of men and women drinking some sort of trippy juice. Once the Spanish had knocked out the hierarchy, they built a church on top, and a big cross outside. The cross got struck by lightning three times in the course of a couple of decades, but finally it seems the local gods conceded defeat. The church, of course, is exquisite. So is the Franciscan monastery’s church in the town itself, built squarely on top of the ruins of a temple to Quetzalcoatl. Nowadays Cholula is a bustling student and tourist centre, where I met Lala again (and had a rather delicious cheese semilla – just a roll really, but the bread was crunchy and quite different to a hamburger bun!). Some of these universities and colleges have grandiose names, like the most expensive private one of all, the Universidad de las Americas.
The oldest university in Puebla, however, began with the Jesuits. The Society of Jesus weren’t the first religious institution to turn up but they were definitely one of the most influential. (The former Escuela Preparatorio Nacional I visited in Mexico City had also originally been built by them). The most formidable intellectual arm of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, Jesuits were concerned with modernising the Catholic church and promoting a revived system of education and research that still firmly tied them to Catholic doctrine, but was a counterweight to the usual Reformation charge that Catholics were just superstitious and out of date. They had lots of power and influence and money, at least until the Spanish monarchy decided to expel them from Latin America for getting too big for their boots. I wandered through Puebla’s University Museum, which included whole series of brilliant baroque paintings, kept together as originally intended in ways I’ve certainly never seen in Europe – twelve portraits of the tribes of Israel, allegories of the elements of the seasons, whole collections of saints. I was fascinated by all this, as was the local woman I walked around with. Our Colombian acquaintance sat and waited for us in the courtyard, however!
One of the things I really enjoyed doing towards the end of my trip (as my Spanish was improving) was spend much more of my time with ‘Couchsurfers’ – either people couchsurfing themselves, or locals keen to meet travellers. Through this I had a lot more interesting interactions. I first met the Colombian guy, outside Puebla’s cathedral, where there was piped classical music pumping across the square and the fountain. The stunning interior had the kind of weight you’d expect of a major Catholic centre, and the baroque altar is quite ridiculous (though not as ridiculous as the extraordinary extravagance in the nearby Capilla del Rosario in Santa Domingo – by this point I was definitely running out of superlatives). We wandered around, picking up a cheap comida corrida and chatting about politics: Colombia currently being destabilised by the refugee situation with neighbouring Venezuela; clearly a current global theme. Puebla was the first place I’d seen the literary scene explode into corner stalls too: newspapers and history magazines among other things, and I picked up a few play scripts in a delightfully extensive second hand shop. (In Mexico as a whole, the number of bookshops is striking; there’s definitely a resistance to the digitilisation of everything. This certainly includes currency: even large-scale tourist restaurants far from ATMs were often insistent on only accepting cash; this included even places in the capital.) Locals were happy to show us places like the artists’ quarter, full of tiny studios and places you could take daytime classes; or where the best street food was (I was guided to have a molote, some sort of local taco which was delicious with huitlacoche fungus!); and cafés where we could hear more specialist styles of music (such as trova, another Cuban folk style that was new to me, and probably fed in to the more bolero forms of salsa, but exists in smaller, heartfelt ensembles). The busy streets included bronze sculptures of local creatives in their common poses, some of which were sitting rather grumpily on street benches.
We also toured the Museo Amparo; spectacular curation of the incredible range of Mexican art and craft over the centuries, and modern pieces that comment on it all. But it also included an inspiring and heartbreaking exhibition on the Yanomami, the large indigenous group on the border of Venezuela and Brazil: a part of the world close to where Julieta lost her life the week before, and where illegal miners have been threatening the tribe so much they have picked up arms in self-defence, despite being hit anew by deadly disease from the outsiders. The beginning of the exhibition included photos by anthropologists trying to capture the tribe in the 70s, including shamanic rituals with a hallucinogenic bark; the end was much more political and focused on the present crisis. I remember watching their leaders on TV in the 80s, travelling with Sting and other celebrities and politicians to publicise their plight. Our collective fate is being written partly with the kinds of fights indigenous groups are putting up in the Amazon right now; seeing this in an art gallery/museum was another reminder of the instant history we’re creating and living through. After a day of seeing multiple examples of living Mexican cultural items, from all over this amazingly diverse country, it was a potent reminder of the necessity of driving our creative expressions towards something organically better, even as these forces of destruction eat at what has been.