Jim and I came to Mexico for the first time in 1986. We came with four of our five kids because we wanted them to see more of the world than midwestern St. Louis which is what they'd known all their lives. We had both been in the Peace Corps in the 1960s, forever changed by the experience of living with people in environments radically different from those we had grown up in, forever glad we had been changed. We wanted to be sure our kids realized, as we had, that there were many ways to do things, many ways to see them, and that our technologically complicated world didn't necessarily have the best solutions to everything. And that there was so much that was not just interesting but compelling and beautiful and breathtaking and shocking and decent beyond our borders.
We chose Mexico mostly because we knew it was definitely different, and because we could afford it. We didn't speak Spanish, and we didn't know much about it except for the whisps of simple-minded history we'd had in high school, how Mexicans appeared in movies in the US, that in fact t here were a few Mexican actors in the US who didn't look like stereotypical Mexicans and that they'd had some really good muralists. And when I was a child, my mother had always bought me charming, folk-artsy tschotchkes from a Mexican store in NYC called the Phoenix-Pan American Shop.
I wanted to find a place that was "Mexican" as opposed to touristy. I remember saying, something like the Mexican equivalent of Cleveland, meaning a place people lived and worked and just kind of went about their business. We were, Jim and I agreed, NOT going to go to a resort. I went through guidebooks and came up with Xalapa, a city which was a university town, a place with art, bookstores and local businesses and, as far as I could tell, no tourists. It called itself a city of flowers. At around 4000 feet, it promised to be cooler than Saint Louis, rainy and foggy. Just right for me.
But not for the kids. After a few days in Mexico with a Mexican friend, they were unmoveable. So we went to Oaxaca. But that's for another post.
We got off the plane in Mexico City in the rain and took a taxi to a hotel on the Zocalo, the main plaza. It was a fine old hotel that fit our image of what one in Mexico should look like: wrought iron, tall ceilings, tiled floors, dark walls, romantic like in an old movie. I had no clue that the Zocalo itself was in fact constructed on the ruins of Tenochtitlán, the capital city of the Aztec Empire. I can't believe I didn't but I didn't. I didn't realize the crumbly excavation, casually fenced off, unguarded, in an open space on the left side of the Cathedral which was Cati-cornered from our hotel, were Aztec ruins.
This first visit took place just under two years after the terrible Mexico City earthquake. Some parts of the city were untouched, but evidence of damage was all around us, including piles of what had been skyscrapers. At night especially the city had an eerie, haunted, ruined feel to it. We ate in a restaurant one night that no longer had back and side walls.
Mexico dug itself into my heart in that visit. It started when we visited the Museum of Modern Art with its passionate, wounded paintings. There is now also a Museum of Contemporary Art Rufino Tamayo which looks like this. Jim and I simply have to go see the museums in Mexico City soon.
In my last post about Mexico I did not tell you how many Mexicans died following the Spanish Conquest. Now I will tell you that out of a population of maybe 16-30 million, a century or so afterwards, the indigenous population had lost 90% of its members. This is one of the most catastrophic losses of life in recorded human history. Of course they didn't die simply in battle with the Spanish conquistadors.
Why do we so easily ignore the history of the great Aztec Empire which lived right at our doorstep? Why does it seem so foreign? Do others among you think, as I did, that the stories which described the Aztec Empire as huge and incredible might perhaps have been exaggerated, or somehow not real, or only the stuff of movies, because, after all, the stories were speaking about indigenous peoples, Indians. The very terms conjure up people in loin cloths jumping around making funny noises.
We were tourists in 1986 and did tourist things. And were shocked, too, by the young men who inhaled gasoline and spit out fire. They were likely to sicken and probably die, I learned, within a couple of years after starting. They needed money. They still do.
We took a bus out to see the Temples of the Moon and Sun, the remains of Teotihuacan about 45 minutes from Mexico City. On the way, I remember we stopped at an agave farm and all had shots of tequila. And my stepdaughter and I bought earrings. When we arrived outside the ruins, a man started hassling my stepdaughter (who is and was very beautiful.) Or maybe it was as we returned to the bus. She pretended she didn't know English, which the man did, and spoke in a most convincing made-up jumble of words which confounded him completely.
We were duly impressed with the ruins: the wide avenue, the giant pyramids. And we found at the very top of the Temple of the Sun a young man sitting cross-legged, with his own personal crystal, chanting. He was, needless to say, not a Mexican. My memory may be tricking me, but I think he came from Caifornia.
I remember the area around Teotihuacan as being fairly rural, undeveloped. All has changed, it is a somewhat slummy, crowded burb that blurs with Mexico City. And in 2004 a Walmart opened within site of the ruins. All kinds of people protested, but to no avail. Here is a story about that Walmart.
Anyway, for that trip and all the way until I took my Diplomado en Estudios Mexicanos in 2004 or so, I thought Teotihuacan was the Aztec capital.
Teotihuacan preceded Tenochtitlan, the actual Aztec capital, by several hundred years: more than fifteen hundred if you go back to its beginnings. And it was an extravagant place, the sixth largest city in the world at its height, with a population of maybe 150,000, monumental buildings, trading systems, technological innovations, and a well-organized government.
Here is a map of Teotihuacan.
The site on which I found this map is loaded with pictures and videos and information about Teotihuacan. You should look at it.
Teotihuacan existed from about two centuries BCE and it thrived as a big, powerful place at least from the fourth century CE till around the seventh century, eight hundred plus years before the Aztecs came to dominate. Teotihuacan collapsed suddenly. I don't think how is known yet.
There were people and pueblos and cities and kingdoms all over Mesoamerica from well before Christ: in the really olden days. By 1400 BCE, the Olmec civilization dominated the coast of Veracruz, not far from where I live, and their influence spread far inland.
Here is a map of the Olmec area. The city/Port of Veracruz would be to the west. Of course it didn't exist then.
The second best and also truly wonderful anthropology museum in Mexico is here in Xalapa. It celebrates the Olmecs. You might recognize the Olmecs from having heard of their giant sculptures of heads, like this one. The heads were generally taller than people, sometimes as tall as nine or ten feet.
At La Ceiba, they constructed a copy of an Olmec head out of concrete a couple of months ago. I don't know what for. We took some pictures of it with a cowboy hat on, but unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) I can't find them.
The Maya on the Yucatan peninsula also thrived when much of Europe was rural and backward in the Middle Ages. A grand civilization existed in Oaxaca, too, and we visited there. That, however, will have to wait, except that I have to tell you that there were stone reliefs of physicians doing brain surgery.
Interestingly, there are far more substantial remains of grand architecture from the Maya and Teotihuacan Oaxaca and other areas than there are from Tenochtitlan, so thoroughly did the Spanish destroy it. When I walk in the Zocalo I am walking on the remnants of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan.
Here are a couple of maps of Mesoamerica, the region that contained the great pre-Hispanic civilizations prior to the coming of the Conquistadors at the beginning of the sixteenth century, just to give you an idea of where it was. You'll notice northern Mexico is not included and that most of Central America isn't either.
Recent Comments