Revolution in the Air
Revolution in the Air
Mexico #4: Southern Mexican Histories Old & New
Another installment of my Mexican adventures, which began here or you can hear the first two on my podcast here. This fourth article, and the previous one (Symbols in the Selva), are also now available on the podcast here.
Huge, hot and dusty was how Villahermosa was described in one guide, and despite its name this didn't inspire it as an obvious destination to visit. I mentioned to people in San Cristobal that I was thinking of visiting Tabasco and they tended to look blankly and wonder why. The smallish state of Tabasco, of which this "Pretty Town" is the capital, sits to the north of Chiapas: it has nothing to do with Tabasco chilli, nor with the US-produced condiment. It was, however, a chance to step outside the tourist route bubble and taste a little of everyday Mexico. Having said that, the huge and hot bit wasn't wrong. I arrived sweltering at the bus station, promptly gave away my ancient winter jacket, and began a long march through the city centre to take a look at things.
One of the things to see was lots of concrete. In San Cristobal, bare walls were often revealed as made from old adobe bricks: kind of more what I expected to see, in the place that gave adobe its name. But breezeblock buildings and vibracrete fences are sadly even more prevalent in much of Mexico than in South Africa. The wonderful colours of urban centres get balanced with this choking alternative that often lies underneath; as someone committed to natural building techniques, and aware of the insane speed at which we're making this very unsustainable stuff, bare concrete is never my favourite sight. It was nearly Christmas, and in the winter heat the next day, there were the usual noisy Mexican fireworks going off, only this time very uncontrolled and being thrown in the street right outside the bus station. Added to which my bus was delayed and I lost my phone at the ticket counter. Deep breaths were needed.
However, as so often on my footsteps through a town, turning other corners brought other vistas. A big lazy river; a friendly chat in a café that had much better coffee than I'd been led to believe was available outside Chiapas, Oaxaca or Veracruz (the main southern coffee growing regions). A little grand architecture in the centre of town, sweet old churches, and a spot of grandiose sculpture. And then the obligatory Nativity scene, which had also been prominent in San Cris, this time featuring kings with shiny outfits made with recycled bottle tops and compact discs, and an enormous tinsel tree. This was to be the theme of my day, for I was staying in a local family's front room for the night, thanks to the Couchsurfing app. Omar's father and uncle were arriving from the north of the country, and other family members were on their way. His two small daughters were intrigued by my presence, which I'd like to think was a little helpful for the adults in their last minute preparations. I joined them on trips to the mall, and in a simple meal, while the girls got excited about the cakes and biscuits being prepared for the big one.
My short stay allowed for one major visit, though. This was the Parque La Venta, featuring the original gigantic basalt Olmec heads that were cleared when an oil company was going to drill the nearby archaeological site a few decades back. A Tabascan poet, Carlos Pellicer Cámara, created the park, with the objects inserted in space as a kind of interplay between object and surrounding (even if the surroundings included a lot of mozzies). It wasn't the last time I came across famously creative Mexicans also getting involved in curating things. Cámara also helped establish Frida's museum in Mexico City among other things: he was originally part of the dynamic Mexican modernist movement, after the revolution, 'for the workers', alongside Diego Rivera, Octavio Paz and other subsequently big names. In the anthropology museum also named for Cámara, there was an exhibition on Victor Jara, "the Latin American Bob Dylan", who was killed during the CIA-sponsored Pinochet coup in Chile. Artists in Latin America have often, inspiringly, and sometimes tragically, been in the frontline of social change.
Parque La Venta included more strange Mexican fauna: remarkably cute coatis, looking a little like a badger or, I suppose, a raccoon, not a creature I'd previously come across! They were roaming free in packs, chilling in trees, and generally irritating the other animals that had to stay in zoo cages (like a bored jaguar). They were not, as I first thought, tlacuaches, large rodent-like creatures who are actually marsupials. Until my visit to Mexico, I had thought marsupials were purely an Australasian curiosity. More Mexican oddities were coming my way in the museum of natural history. There were images of gigantic extinct flightless birds, dinosaurs in all but name, at one point the most terrifying predators in the Americas, and massive sloths (these poor things are just as judged in Spanish, where they're called 'perezosos' - 'lazies'). In Africa we're used to our megafauna in all its famous variety, but the Mexican version, now and in the past, seemed curiously hidden from global view.
But back to those Olmecs. The scale of these items, brought from hundreds of kilometres away (as there's no basalt in the area) was pretty colossal. In the indoor museum I also visited, there were examples of their sewage systems, as well as lots of characters sitting in meditation poses. There's a theory that these mysterious people were from Africa, because of the features on the faces, although some seem to feature Caucasian features too. The bigger mystery for me is to get a sense of their beliefs, and where these beliefs and technical abilities emerged from. There certainly seem to be a lot of cross-cultural possibilities. One of the famous Mexican comic book authors I read about, when he wasn’t designing clothes on the side, wrote a book about 'Olmec sex secrets', which the cynic in me says must have made for instant bestseller material. The small mystery here is how he got his information, but perhaps that was some kind of dream download. Also in the museum there were objects reflecting their Mayan neighbours or successors, including needles for tapestry, another reminder of the length of time such crafts have been essential round here. I also began to see elaborate censers, with decorated human and godlike features, which I would see many more of, often stupendously detailed. And then there were other cultures on display from up the coast, just known as "classic Veracruz". So much unknown richness!
My next bus trip would lead me west to Oaxaca, the eponymous capital of its state, and there I would continue to have my mind blown by the ancients. Monte Alban, on a hilltop just outside the city, was the most startling example. At first as I walked round I took photos of things that looked a bit like the remnants of Roman villas. It was only when I turned a corner and found the scale of the site that I felt awe and surprise: gigantic columns, great pyramid structures and stele, and - a key motif in the ancient sites I visited, but one the Zapotecs were clearly expert in - alignment with the directions and with dimensions in the sky. And a ball court or two. There were also a lot of murals depicting "dancers", which later archaeologists had decided actually featured people being genitally tortured. That wasn't my take at all: I think the dancer thing is probably more on the mark, as they seemed to me to show sexual energy; and some of them probably show childbirth. But, you know, turn the Zapotecs into violent bloodthirsty types if it serves you, we only have their hieroglyphs to go on. Which may be a lot more subtle than expected. If they chose to decorate their sacred places with this kind of imagery, it probably (I would hazard) had a purpose of guidance. And then there are the Mixtecs, whose extraordinary jewellery work was found in a tomb nearby, and whose capital in the east of Oaxaca state was seen as a major sacred centre when the Spaniards turned up. The jade work from the tomb was spectacular - I saw it at the cultural history museum in Oaxaca's ex-Dominican convent (a monastery, confusingly: ‘conventos’ in Spanish can be for either sex, depending more on the order). It was obvious that the whole of southern Mexico before the Spanish turned up had been an interlocking series of sophisticated cultures, with shared ideas about the tree of life, the four directions, and a cosmology of the ages. But what could we say about the region today?
San Cristóbal had had a gentle cultured side that belied the violence of thirty years ago; the old town at least seemed a place full of bookish intellectuals, higher education institutions, and strong academic opinions. I had watched the inevitable documentary on the Zapatista uprising of thirty years ago, and its demands for greater support for indigenous people and greater opposition to globalizing capitalism (as specifically represented by the North American Free Trade Agreement back in 1994). Emiliano Zapata, the hero with the big bigote (moustache) that inspired the name of the new fighters in the EZLN so many decades later, was the most radical of the Mexican revolutionaries of 1913-21 and paid for it with his life, and many of his supporters came from the south. There is a north-south divide in the country which it took me a while to understand, since I'd started in the traditionally poorer and more neglected south (and in truth I never made it to the north). And it has to be said it's partly a cultural divide and partly a mentality that is a little different to South Africa but that will still ring with some familiarity. (Perhaps it has still more familiarity to those engaged with Indian cultural dynamics, where the darker-skinned peoples of the more tropical south have also traditionally been closer to ancient tribal and indigenous teachings than the lighter skinned folk in the north, who in turn have looked down on them). The including of traditional religious beliefs and cultural practices as aspects of what makes things archetypally Mexican, was driven largely by a Mexico City-based national government over the generations, partly after independence in the 19th century, and partly again after further revolution in the 20th. The guiding myth became the idea that Mexico was a mixed race culture: mestizo, everybody supposedly descended from parents who crossed the European/indigenous lines, beginning with Cortes the conquistador and his "indigenous mistress".
In the far south, that “we're all mestizo” myth is not terribly true, because there are an awful lot of completely unmixed indigenous people there still. This fact is most obviously epitomized in Oaxaca, whose most famous son is Benito Juarez, the most popular 19th century Mexican president. At the same time as Abraham Lincoln was being a good white liberal up north, Mexican voters elected an actual native American as their president: Benito was born into a Zapotec community. Incredibly enough, that was all while whites were still slaughtering native Americans in the US, several decades before the racist Social Darwinism of Teddy Roosevelt and other US politicians started being the ideology behind US foreign policy, and in the middle of northern European colonisation of anyone darker-skinned than them. Mind you, President Juarez soon faced foreign invasion from an unexpected direction. He had to contend with the return of the French, who seem to have had more interest in Latin America than I had previously guessed. (In the South African tourist industry I had been led to believe that the French mostly travel in groups with the aid of French-speaking guides, but here in Mexico I kept bumping into independent francophone travellers.) In case you didn’t know, Napoleon caused Mexican independence (and similar uprisings throughout Latin America) by putting his brother on the Spanish throne. Then Napoleon III installed a Habsburg again as his Mexican puppet emperor, running the brief Second Mexican Empire, during his Second French one. Mexico City has a few imperial French/ Habsburg touches, because in the five years Maximilian was kind of emperor there (with Benito Juarez still rallying troops around the country and eventually returning as President of the whole Republic), he lived in the castle in the centre of Chapultepec park (echoes of Schloss Schönbrunn in Vienna), and built a grand boulevard leading to it. That's now the Paseo de la Reforma, a highway I walked down and took a double decker view along some weeks after visiting Oaxaca, punctuated by traffic circles around suitable grandiose monuments like El Angel.
(As a side note, by the time Benito Juarez first became president, Mexico had already lost and given away lots of northern territory, all becoming new US states. I can't help thinking the early Mexican republicans missed a trick: thirty years after the USA’s independence was declared, they called their new state the Estados Unidos de México, made up of a whole lot of federated states along the lines of the USA. But they never tried to renegotiate or use the “America” name themselves. As a result, US Americans get away with behaving like their little corner of the double-continent is the only thing that matters).
Like Benito Juarez, many of the people I had met in Chiapas and Tabasco, and many I would meet in Oaxaca, had a fairly solid indigenous heritage. Their ancestors had suffered along the way because of this, and made some rather reasonable claims of decades of quiet centralized but unofficial racism. Added to this was the way president Porfirio Diaz, at the end of the 19th century, 'developed' Mexican cities with the aid of new immigrant Europeans, brought in to run corporations. Diaz is kind of a historical Mexican Putin, from Oaxaca like Juarez, but with a mestizo background: initially a soldier, then winner of seven increasingly corrupt elections, and allied with the church and other conservative forces seeking a ‘strong man’ leader. Diaz's practices were the most obvious things Zapata and his followers were fighting during the long-winded revolution, a revolution that was well-timed to keep Mexico completely out of World War One (because unlike the Russian Revolution somewhere in the middle, the Mexican version ran and ran). Yet the way he developed the cities in classic fin de siècle fashion means he’s still remembered rather more fondly by some people than the average dictator: there’s an important Calle Porfirio Diaz in the centre of Oaxaca.
Some results of this long-running unofficial bigotry seemed still to be at play during my visit. It was interesting to note the rather paler skins of many politicians on local political posters for example, compared to the average person I encountered. It's possible there were a few seriously pale Mexicans in the city, alongside the international minority; but I hardly met any in the south as a whole. Hiding somewhere on a suburban hacienda behind razor wire, I might guess, though that would be generalising and judgemental of me.
Many southerners by contrast seemed generally closer to those impressive traditional pre-Colombian ways of running things (and of course pre-Colombian languages), as I’d experienced around the state of Chiapas. With the uprising of the new Zapatistas in the 1990s, there was a conscious revolutionary approach, epitomized by 'Subcommandant Marcos', the intellectual leader of the movement. A bookshop owner tried to enthuse me into buying a book of his thoughts, though I think dry political-intellectual tomes are not quite my cup of chamomile these days. Later I discovered that they include fables and other unexpected ways of writing, but instead I sought out comics, which are often my visual way of trying to understand a new culture. I found a graphic novel on the Mexican revolution! And a ‘history of the historieta’, in other words a rather wordy look at the history of Mexican comics and their impact on society, with examples and caricatures of their creators (including the Olmec sex guy). I thought I’d find something interesting in a comic shop one day, but it only sold Spanish versions of Marvel and DC, as if Mexican mythology didn’t have extraordinary alternative riches to mine. Later I found comic strips full of Mexican satire, though I didn’t buy them, much as I love Zapiro’s social commentary in South Africa as a way into the zeitgeist in our country. This was partly because of the number of slang phrases I needed to get my head around. 'Chido' - Mexican for 'cool' - didn't take too long, but I attended a comedy night in my first week and was pretty lost. My Colombian teacher said it was probably albur - a Mexican form of comedy that turns nearly everything into sexual double entendre, and sounds to me like a slightly more sophisticated version of old English 'Carry On' comedy (oo-er!) However, as the comedians I watched generally seemed more 'progressive' types with an openly lesbian MC, I think it was probably more just me not getting all the slang.
There was a very practical side to the 1990s uprising, taking over municipalities and running them independently of the Mexican state and the government of Chiapas (including women kicking men out of certain meetings), setting up schools and healthcare and farming plans that the national government wasn't interested in. The movement spread into Oaxaca and led to huge demonstrations in the national capital, and probably led to the final crumbling of the one-party rule of the PRI. It all sounded quite inspiring, apart from the violence on both sides, though political movements tend to fossilize quite quickly. In Mexico the PRI had stayed in increasingly corrupt power with its 'institutional revolution' for 70-odd years (since a little after the chaotic 8-year revolution concluded in 1921). In South Africa the ANC is a shadow of its former self after 30 years of government. And in Chiapas, where well-meaning revolutionaries, faces covered in bandanas, took regularly to the streets not so long ago, becoming a Zapatista leader was a pretty solid route in certain quarters to power and influence these days, according to some locals I spoke with. Still, with an ostensibly left-wing government in power now nationally, the Zapatistas were being celebrated in Mexico City when I arrived there later, large photos of the rebellion adorning Chapultepec Park beneath Maximilian’s castle; and there was a photo exhibition on the fight in Chiapas, in the former Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (which Benito Juarez founded 150 years ago!).
First though, I would spend more time exploring Oaxaca state than anywhere else on my trip. And life would take many surprising turns along the way.