From Xico

This Makes Me Sick -- McCain NO no. 9

Actually this is about a tragedy now occurring during the Bush Administration, but there's no reason to think McCain will even address it, given his enthusiasm to stomp around being war-like as seen in how he's going after Russia at the moment. The tragedy: The Center  for Capacity Building of The National Center for Atmospheric Research has been closed, supposedly for budget reasons.  Its paltry 500,000 annual budget must have been the straw that broke the war machine's back.  This highly respected center did research and developed programs to help poor countries to address problems associated with climate change which they are facing now.  You can read about it here.  Voting for McCain who seems thrilled to be wallowing in belligerence and ignorance and selling them to the public won't help this situation.

Which brings up, what the hell is he doing sending delegations to Georgia?  Who does he think he is?  It makes me think of organ donation: a suffering country that has Connections moves to the head of the line, above Darfur, above Congo, above any number of countries with people suffering greatly (more than in Georgia) even if they are not at war.  AND he seems to think it appropriate to puff himself up and pretend it is still the Cold War.  He IS out of touch, isn't he?

And I do hope that Obama will forget his suggestion that Georgia has to be admitted to NATO as soon as he returns from Hawaii and gets some real information.

(I never did like Cokie Roberts.  Imagine calling Hawaii too foreign for him to be taking a vacation in!  And who wants to go to Myrtle Beach anyway?  It's not very nice in August, though it's better than DC.  I hear a lot of fading DC types still think of it as a vacation spot.)

Final thought for this post:  Some people seem still to like McCain.  I wonder if maybe he isn't really kept up-to-date on his own campaign: maybe it's been hijacked without him realizing it, though I kinda doubt it, given the company he is accustomed to keep.

Read These!

Another funny, pointed column by Garrison Keillor here.

And a remarkably insightful and poignant post by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his Atlantic Monthly blog here.

HOW Many People Did You Say Were in Mexico When Cortés Arrived?

The tulipanes de la India, the big soft red flowers that grown on trees around here in early summer had fallen on the bumpy stone walkway at La Orduña.  I meant to take a picture after tai chi: a nice arty shot, colors and textures competing nicely.  But I had heard a noise -- I thought something dragging behind the car -- during the second part of my drive to class.  When I checked after class, I discovered I had a completely and totally flat right rear tire: llanta ponchada, completemente sin aire .  So I forgot about the picture.  

So this is an indirect way, or maybe a direct one, into asking about whether what you see is what you get, or why do we notice what we notice and what does that all have to do with history and interpreting the world around us. 

In my last post, I talked a little about the size of the indigenous population of Mexico around the time of the coming of the Conquistadors.

I don't remember hearing much about population sizes when we rushed through Cortés's conquest of the Aztecs in high school many years ago.  From then until a few years ago, I carried around the notion that of course the Spanish conquered the Aztecs: they had guns, horses, armor, whatever: they were after all European.    I wasn't alone. 

Automatic assumption among Westerners (and maybe particularly among Americans)  of conquest being a manifestation of European superiority to the rest of the world began to change in the 1960s and 1970s. Cultural sprouted, culture wars broke out.  Colleges and universities opened departments of black studies, women's studies, Chicano studies.  Political correctness entered the vocabulary. 

I myself was a beneficiary of these changes.  After two years in the Peace Corps in Uganda, I came back as a graduate student in history at the University of Minnesota where they had a brand new collection African history courses and some excellent professors.  Having been in Uganda, it didn't seem the least bit a matter of political correctness to think that African history was worth learning: I knew it was, and I was really curious to learn more about the deeper past of where I had lived.  Living oversea remade the box of my brain into a more complicated shape which held new kinds of information and new thoughts about it.  There were passageways for non-European ideas to make their way in.  And there was a bright light shining on my realization that western individualism, capitalism, etc. etc. were really only one culture's way of shaping lives and perceptions.

(As an almost complete non-sequitur, David Brooks's column today was an excellent discussion of "harmonious collective" outlooks vs. individual outlooks, how they differ, and how the former is more attractive than we may have thought.  My only complaint is his last line.  He said, referring to the "harmonious collective" that "It’s certainly a useful ideology for aspiring autocrats."  I would think he would know better: both kinds of ideologies have been useful for aspiring autocrats.)

In the late 1960s and 70s a lot of ummm junk scholarship, propaganda, really, was churned out to support growing militancy among people who really and truly had been kept down. This stuff fed into the hostility and noisiness of conservatives (think The Closing of the American Mind by Harold Bloom).  But basically, the changes were good because if the world was becoming more densely woven together, if strands of cultures were being stretched from one continent to another, we really had to learn to recognize how varied the cultures of the world are, how many different answers to human problems exist. And actually how many ways there are to cause human problems. 

We need the approaches this vastly more varied world. The answers we Americans thought we had aren't turning out to work so well. 

So back to the population of Mexico at the time of Cortés arrival, and to what happened to it after he came.

Well, not quite.

Remember, Columbus landed in the New World in 1492.  By the 1519 when Cortés arrived on the southeast side of Mexico,  the Spanish had set themelves up in Cuba.  Columbus had landed there in 1492.  In 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued a Papal Bull commanding Spain to "conquer, coloize, and convert the Pagans of the New World to Catholicism."  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Cuba, n.11)  Columbus returned in 1494 and explored the south coast, including what today is Guantánamo Bay. 

After colonizing Hispaniola, the Spaniards started establishing settlements in Cuba in 1511.  The Spaniards were brutal to the people they found there, burning alive many leaders and massacring most of the rest of the population with extraordinary brutality.  According to Wikipedia, by 1515 the local population was effectively destroyed "as a culture and a civilization."  The destruction of so many people, the death of more from disease, and the flight of the rest meant that the Spaniards could not find cheap labor.  In 1513, they began importing slaves from Africa.

The Spanish seem to have gotten themselves firmly established quite fast in Cuba: by 1517, in fact.  The govenor, Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar who had arrived with Columbus on his second voyage, was already interested in further explorations to the west.   In 1518 Governor Velázquez sent an expedition also to the Yucatan, and another followed (There had been a first voyage in 1511).  Juan de Grijalva, the leader of this group landed on San Juan de Ulua, and it was news of his arrival which reached the Aztecs in Tenochtitlán. (You can read a little about it here.) So Moctezuma was well aware there were foreigners sniffing around when Cortés travelled the coast of Yucatan and then landing on what is today the coast of Veracruz in 1519. 

It wasn't hard for the Aztec emperor to learn about the arrival of the Spaniards.  The central and southern parts of Mexico were heavily populated at the time, and communication from shore to center quite good.   As I mentioned in my last post, there may have been as many as 25 million people in the area.  And they weren't just standing still.  In fact, some scholars think that the Aztec Empire might have been one of eight cultures which were on the brink of being able to move outward to find the larger world if Spain hadn't. The other seven are Polynesia, the Incas, Japan, China India, Islam, Latin Christendom.  (Francis Brooks, p.131) 

But within 150 years of Cortés's conquest, the population of Mexico had been reduced probably by 90%.  What happened?  No.  It wasn't weapons.  And it wasn't simply disease.  And it wasn't inferior technology.

Don't worry, more to come. 

Below is a picture of a stone road not far from where we live.  Our dogs Giaco and Cosi can be seen in it.  This would not have been a prehispanic road, because as you may or may not know, the indigenas managed to achieve quite a remarkable civilization without wheels and without beasts of burden.  These two lanes would have been for something with wheels. 

History Stew in Veracruz

We have had little rain recently.  Enough to keep things green and fresh, but not the daily storms. I fear we are going to start hearing about the lack of water again this year.  We've been walking and hiking in the afternoon without getting wet. 

With Robert and Ilonke from Barcelona on the hike where you walk down a stone path to a bridge and stream and falls and then up the other side.  It is

 the short route from Xico Viejo to Xico. You can only go by foot, but it's quicker than going by the regular road even in a vehicle.

There are stone foot and burro and horse paths criss-crossing the local hills and fields and forests.  As I've said, we wonder who's walked on them, how old they are.  Here generations and centuries tumble on top of each other and mix together.  I had the same feeling in Florence forty years ago, where people lived in spaces that might have been created in the Renaissance or last year or both.  Indeed, the stones being used for a new road were probably dug up from an old one.  People near one of Santa Anna's haciendas, Manga de Clavo, probably live in houses built from the materials from his buildings.

There's a wandering American named John Todd, Jr. who lives in Veracruz.  I've never met him, but he has a lovely web site. He tells of looking for Manga de Clavo, near the city of Veracruz.  This is the hacienda in which Santa Anna raised his first family (or, rather his wife did) and grew crops and kept cattle and other animals quite successfully. And also allowed friends to hide in during dangerous political times. The hacienda has pretty much been erased, no maps or surveys exist to pinpoint its exact location. Todd did a lot of investigating to find the barest traces of it. So the relatively recent remains, by Mexican standards, of Santa Anna's hacienda are gone, but nearby, you can find scattered in the grass and still standing on the crests of hills and in fields temples and ball fields and cemetary stones five times and more as old as would be Manga de Clavo.  You can sit on them, picnic on them, almost sense the ghosts of the people who lived among them.  And you can sense them doing very ordinary things, minding their children, tending their gardens, talking about the weather. 

Having lived in San Antonio, Texas for quite a number of years, and now here in Santa Anna's stomping grounds, I have grown curious about him.  And have added curiosity about him to my growing interest in the history of this region I now call home.  So I've been reading as well as walking.

I've been going back and forth through the years decades and centuries: I've stopped being chronological.  One question leads to another, and in fact the tapestry has overlapping threads and colors and sudden holes and repeating imagery and splotches of mold and thick bloodstains too.  Too much blood, I think.

The whole southern part of Mexico was heavily populated at the time the Spanish arrived: estimates are that there somewhere between 16 and 30 million people, maybe more (estimates for all Mesoamerica range from 30 to 50 million) with a number of scholars settling at about 25 million.  The diseases the Spaniards brought with them killed so many indígenas that much of the land fell silent after the Spaniards' arrival.  Perhaps 150,000 remained only a few years after Cortés and his Conquistadors defeated Moctezuma.

The Spanish radically transformed the landscape not only by disease but by bringing European plants and animals.  In the Northeast of the United States, the plants were much more similar to those in Europe, so while the Indian population was decimated, the landscape didn't change anywhere near as much as it did in Mexico, at least not until industrialization.  The Spanish went to work with amazing speed to transform Mexico.

I have ideas about what the Northeastern US looked like in the early years of its settlement.  I grew up in the Northeast and can imagine the Iroquois in their long houses settled in the dense northern forest.  We were all taken as school children to see dioramas and large exhibits which purported to show Life among the Indians and Life in Colonial Times at the Museum of Natural History. Indeed, there were recreations of the interiors of historic houses at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  I liked to sit at the window in one that wasn't roped off and do my homework from time to time. Of course I don't know how accurate my ideas are, but they are comfortable to nestle in when I read the history of my home turf.

We've traveled a lot now in Veracruz, but I still have a hard time conjuring up indigenous villages intermingled with Spanish settlements through the colonial era. Or were they intermingled?  Or were some?  Today, in villages further from the cities and colonial towns here in Veracruz, people look more indigenous, and are often poorer, but they are very Catholic -- the Catholic is the top and most prominent layer of any mix with indigenas' belief systems. They raise cattle and goats and sheep which were brought by the Spanish and in many places they have tvs, and they drink coca cola as they herd their flocks or ride burros, also brought over by the Spanish, with wooden saddles.

Some  goats at a stream.

I'd like to know more about this interpenetration of cultures. Before the Spanish came, I don't think there were very many groups that were isolated.

And then I find my thoughts drifting to Santa Anna: the most hated man in Texas history as anyone who lives or has lived in Texas knows.  So I've been reading about him, too.  He was born in a house which is now the main branch of our bank in Xalapa.  Huh!  And walked the same streets I've walked.  And I've been in one of his haciendas a few times: El Lencero.  And he was in Texas before he killed off all those Texas heroes in the Alamo and he liked it and considered it part of HIS world and HIS country.  And boy, was he a complicated person.

So I leave you with these questions for now.  But I hope I've peaked your interest.

Acamalín -- view seen from stopping point of hike with Ilonke and Robert.

Barack Obama as Typical American

As the granddaughter of a Polish-Jewish couple who immigrated to the United States and learned English in the US and NEVER spoke it without an accent and who most often spoke Yiddish at home AND the granddaughter of a set of grandparents, American Baptist and Catholic, with  roots in England, Ireland and supposedly France, I have always considered myself a mongrel.  AND I have thought of most Americans as mongrels.  

Obama is a mongrel, and he is quintessentially American, if you ask me.  Jumping around a bit, I have been digging into Mexican history which of course I think Americans would really find very worth knowing more about.  I came across the name David Carrasco, a third generation Mexican-American scholar at Harvard, in both the Divinity School and the Dept of Anthropology.  I was interested to find out if his book on Aztec religion was available online (only to libraries and universities).  In the process, I came across this letter he wrote in response to a David Brooks column in 2004. It addresses the old myth that our culture is at its core Anglo-Saxon.  I think it is worth reading again. 

Population Growth in Mexico

Time to throw out your stereotypes.  Mexico has had one of the most radical reductions in population growth in the world.  It has made the effort to do so. From women giving birth to an average of 6.5 children in 1970-1975, the rate has descended to women giving birth to an anticipated average of 2.2 children in the period from 2005-2110.

In many pueblos we have visited, even the most far-flung, you can see efforts to address birth control painted on the sides of local clinics and offices, on light posts and fences.

This is just one example.  There's no public outcry that I can discern.  This is not a political issue.  It more than a quality of life issue.  It is a survival issue.  AS you can see, there's nothing subtle.   And it's working.

John McCain NO NO NO No. 8

Again Garrison Keillor says it best here.

Here is my paranoid dream.

There is a Dick Cheney, or several of them, shadows behind John McCain, playing him for all he's worth, playing on his old man's dream, and he, like Bush, will be the puppet of the same very dangerous cabal of which Bush is a puppet if he wins the election.

THIS is truly scary.

Your laptop and a whole lot more can be seized at customs coming into the country even if you are a US citizen, according to the Washington Post:

The policies cover "any device capable of storing information in digital or analog form," including hard drives, flash drives, cell phones, iPods, pagers, beepers, and video and audio tapes. They also cover "all papers and other written documentation," including books, pamphlets and "written materials commonly referred to as 'pocket trash' or 'pocket litter.' "

Is it even remotely possible that salmonella on chiles jalapeños originated in the US?

This possibility was raised when a major farm journal here connected the dots:  if the germs were found in a US distribution center, mightn't they have originated there?

If you read Spanish, this newspaper, El Agropecuario, is definitely worth looking at.  I discovered it a few weeks ago at Paco's stand at the Mercado del Sabado in Coatepec.  More about that soon.

No to McCain 7: If you think the surge is working, and that everything is hunky dory in Iraq

Read Juan Cole's very good and knowledgeable blog. 

He is not the only one to report today that the US plans to sell $9 billion in weapons to Iraq.  As he says,
"This sort of thing, if it continues, would make the Iraq War worthwhile to the Military-Industrial Complex. If you want to turn an enemy into a customer, nothing does the trick like conquering the difficult population..."

I would imagine the military-industrial complex would do very well under a John McCain presidency, especially since he has proposed that he would use similar techniques in US cities to those used in the surge.  How giving city police in the US more and bigger weapons, some humvees, some apache helicopters and those Star Wars-type uniforms the soldiers wear?

Here's what ABC's David Wright reported about McCain and high crime neighborhoods:

"John McCain suggested that military strategies currently employed by US troops in Iraq could be applied to high crime neighborhoods here in the US. McCain called them tactics 'somewhat like we use in the military...You go into neighborhoods, you clamp down, you provide a secure environment for the people that live there, and you make sure that the known criminals are kept under control. And you provide them with a stable environment and then they cooperate with law enforcement.' The way he described it, his approach sounded an awful lot like the surge. As part of his argument, McCain praised the crime-fighting efforts of former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani; Urban League president Marc Morial countered that while New York did experience a drop in crime under Giuliani, there were several major instances of police misconduct."

By the way, McCain's talk at the Urban League was substantive.  He did talk in a bit of detail about what he'd do about education.  He is for school choice. This would be an excellent topic for the candidates to debate in detail.  I wish they would.

I would like to add that many, many people think Giuliani gets way too much credit for the decline in crime in NYC and that many of his tactics were regarded as questionable.  Also, he overcleaned NYC.  AND please remember, he basically conned Mexico.  He took a lot of money for accomplishing virtually nada.