From Xico

Bishops Play Church Queens as Pawns - NYTimes.com

When I was a student at Barnard College in the 1960s, I was a lost soul until I took medieval history as a junior. The professor, Norman Cantor, brought medieval Europe to life.  Not only that, he brought medieval Muslim countries to life, teaching us that without the Muslims, we would indeed have been greatly impoverished.  But much as I would like to tell you about those Muslims whom the Christians attacked in the Crusades, here I would like to talk about Catholicism. 

I was a Latin major at the beginning of Professor Cantor's course, not because I wanted to be but because I had so many credits in Latin I could do it easily.  And my mother thought it was thrillling to have a daughter who knew Latin (but that's another story).  Halfway through Cantor's course, I switched to being a history major with a concentration in medieval history (I'd already taken medieval Latin) with Professor Cantor as my advisor.  What a nerd I sound like!  I got one of three As in a class of 150 in both terms.  

Why did I love it?  Certainly Norman Cantor did not inspire crushes: a large, soft man whose jaw hung.  But somehow he saw something in me and encouraged me.  Neurotic as I was, at the end of the second semester, I couldn't finish my paper on Peter Abelard.  I took an incomplete.  I went to Maine to my second summer as a camp counselor and that summer as a unit leader, in charge of a whole age group which meant three cabins under my wing. I brought my term paper in a box.  After all the campers  had gone to sleep, I'd pour through my notes and drafts.  I'd cut and paste and tear apart -- electric typewriters I don't think even existed.  It wasn't just that I was neurotic: it was that Abelard was so interesting, and so were his times, and so was the church.  In the end, I sort of ordered the stuff in the box and sent it off to Professor Cantor who had become my advisor.

I got an A in the course.

And in my senior year, I found myself in a graduate medieval history seminar.  It was a small group and it included three priests.  The three priests and I would go to the West End Cafe for beer after class.  They were wonderful men, much like the nuns described not just in Maureen Dowd's cited above column but in other places as well. They were committed to social justice  as were many nuns and priests of that era.  They thought the idea of unmarried priests, among other ideas, was silly, but since they'd sworn to it, they felt they had committed to it.  

At the end of the seminar and at the end of my senior  year, we had a party at my parents' apartment.  During the party, Professor Cantor asked if he could talk to my parents privately, and the three of them retreated to my parents' bedroom (New York apartments could be small).  As they told me after everyone left, Professor Cantor (who was Jewish and assumed I was) told my mother (who was Episcopalian) and my father (who indeed was Jewish) that he was afraid I was, because of my love of medieval church history and my friendship with the priests, being tempted to become a Catholic.

Was I? Yes and no.  Throughout my life, I have been drawn to the Catholic Church, but every time I step too close, I feel the flames not of  hell (well maybe of hell), but certainly of all-too-human rigidity, of anti-womanhood, of the grip of men who are cruel and self-righteous, etc. etc. etc.  I remember people like the Sister Annes and those devoted to teaching at places like Our Lady of the Lakes University, the nuns of St. Bridget of Ireland, the priests in Latin America involved in Liberation Theology.  But I can't take the step.  There are too many Pope Benedicts, too many ambitious men who follow him, too many abusers allowed to go free, TOO MANY MEN PERSECUTING DEVOTED AMERICAN NUNS. (See link to Maureen Dowd's column.)

I cannot believe what Pope Benedict, that old snake, is doing to American nuns.  Why?  Why? Why? The Catholic Church STILL enfolds so many great human beings.  When will it be free?

 

A Very Pricey Pineapple - NYTimes.com

I may be naive (I don't think so), but this absolutely shocked me. I don't know any solution. When there is no sense of community responsibility, when government and private industry are interwoven and corrupt, where do we turn?

Here is the link to the original column by Gail Collins (one of my favorite writers) in the NY Times.

Not about Wal-mart

I wasn't really satisfied with my post on Wal-Mart--not in the least.  I will try again in the next few days. In the meantime, you can go to the Mex Files here and get a broader perspective.  Sr. Grabman was kind enough to cite my blog in a later post, but I don't think I deserved it.

But here I will just recount one tiny incident.

I was just sitting and reading when movement on the floor caught my eye.  It was a daddy-long-legs, limbs stretched forward from its tiny body, quivering.  I thought it was dying.  I watched.  Suddenly it drew its legs up so they bent and circled its body.  And then it lay still again.  The legs stretched and drew together once more. I wa sure it was dying.  It was in fact dying.  But so very slowly.  I watched it repeat its dance and then decided I would move it off to the side so that no one would step on it.  I took a napkin and gently slid it towards a corner.  Two of its legs came off and it lay still.  But just for a few seconds.  There it went on its six legs to find its missing limbs.  It nestled close to them and seemed to reattach them. And then it sank down again, legs stretched out together.  

How could it not be dying? A couple of hours later I went to look.  The spider was sitting like a flower, its body in the midst of its eight curled legs.  A puff of dust seemed to have trapped it.  I reached over and tried to pluck the dust off as gently a I could.  The spider fell into pieces: leg joints and body.  There was no more recovering for it.

 

 

Well yes, Mexico has a lot of corruption, but....

The New York Times articles on Wal-Mart pay-offs and corruption make me want to SCREAM and PULL MY HAIR OUT!

First of all, whether or not Wal-Mart pays people illegally to build its big ugly boxes is actually not the worst thing it does.  As in the US, the worst thing it does is build stores in places where it can devour small businesses.  And they are pretty smart at doing it.  Both the Wal-Marts in Xalapa (yes there are two) are in ugly commercial areas that you can easily walk to or get to by bus since car traffic is not so accessible to the majority of poorer people who might shop at Wal-Mart.  Lots of not so poor people shop at Wal-Mart, too. And they shop at Sam's Club -- USAers like being able to buy their favorite USA brands.  And Wal-Mart has a grip on rich shoppers as well.  It bought out a chain called Superama where you can get all kinds of expensive goodies including organic foods which small merchants not far away are also trying to sell.

Even worse than building in Xalapa, which after all is a big city with a lot of chains (though Wal-Mart takes the cake) is the fact that it is building a store in Xico.  Right on one of the two main streets in town.  It won't be called Wal-Mart, but it's a Wal-Mart.  About six months ago, people realized it was on the books and signs started appearing all over protesting, of course to no avail.  It is going up in a fairly tight space so its narrow end will be the front door.  The parking lot is already completely covered in concrete from one side to the other.  The back has a bunch of loading docks.  It looks about ready to open.

We know reasonably well some local shop owners.  Needless to say, they are very, very worried. Two own dress shops.  I mentioned to a Gringo acquaintance that the monster was likely to eat them alive.  The Gringo said,"I don't see why.  Mexicans don't buy the artisan items.  They are too expensive."  I said, well they buy regular clothes!  That hadn't occurred to her. Xico, being a tourist town (now a Pueblo Magico) has a main street with shops selling what you'd expect.  But all you have to do is walk a block in either direction and you come upon fruit and vegetable stores, butchers, grocers, shoe stores, bakeries, hardware stores, flower shops, cheese shops, a local market, and so forth. Sometimes the stores sell jumbles of all these things.  A lot of the produce, meat and dairy is local so that not just shop owners but producers are likely to suffer.

I suspect that the mayor of Xico (El Presidente) got a good deal for allowing the Wal-Mart.  The mayor is in deep trouble with his constituents because he had some grandiose plans which now sit partly completed because he doesn't have the funds to finish them.  The one I know about is his plan to build a four lane boulevard into Xico for which a beautiful long arcade of trees sheltering the road (a perfectly good, newly paved road) was cut down.  

A friend of ours says he's destroying all the reasons Xico became a Pueblo Magico to begin with.

So these are reasons I hate Wal-Mart. Please don't shop in Wal-Mart.  There are plenty of other places you can indulge your craving for stuff: my favorite is Costco.  I feel guilty going there, too, but at least its employees are apparently paid well by Mexican standards.  Which is a whole other issue.

 

 

Catholicism: US Nuns under the Heel of the Vatican

I wonder what Mexican nuns would do if this happened here in Mexico.

A Brief History of Anxiety - NYTimes.com

Anxiety and I are soulmates, I guess. When I was younger, I didn't even realize I was anxious until someone would say something like, can't you calm down? Or there's nothing to worry about or some such thing. I'm not really sure I want to be completely without it: it adds an edge, an alertness, an awareness that I value when it's under control. This is a very good article on anxiety that I appreciate for its acknowledgement of anxiety's complexity.

The Human Lake | The Loom | Discover Magazine

This revelatory and beyond fascinating post on (ultimately) the human body as ecosystem should keep you occupied until I finally finish my own post(s). It astonished me.

Catholics in Mexico

http://mexfiles.net/2012/03/25/pope-porri/

This is now sliding into being old  news, but the Pope visited Mexico last week.  Richard Grabman wrote an excellent post on the visit, news coverage of it, and Mexican Catholics at http://mexfiles.net/2012/03/25/pope-porri/

I am going to expand a bit on the nature of Catholicism in Mexico because I think when people say things like Mexico is such a Catholic country they have in mind images from the movie Zorba the Greek where older women run around, dressed in black from head to toe; where women have ten children, where the churches are filled, where gloom predominates.

As Richard points out, the Catholic Church in Mexico was and is anything but homogeneous.  I can add just a few details. 

That Mexico, before it was known as  Mexico, before it had ever heard of Catholicism, had a long, rich, crowded history cannot be stressed too much.  And the longer and deeper archaeologists and historians explore, the more the truth of this becomes evident.  Obviously this long, rich pre-Hispanic history was not Catholic history.  The Spaniards came upon a world filled with people of different, highly developed, often somewhat related ethnicities, languages, architecture,  governments, arts, trade, warfare and religions.  The imposition of Catholicism on Mexico and the rest of Latin America is not a simple story partly because there were so many different circumstances, from local people who allied with the Spanish because they wanted to get the Aztecs off their backs to Conquistadors and church people who were unbelievably brutal in defeating local states and in instituting Catholicism.  Individuals were important: from friars who were champions of the indigenous to those who cruelly abused them.  The Inquisition existed in Mexico, too.  The results were and are kaleidoscopic. 

So as Richard points out, the Catholicism of Mexico is syncretic: it is a mix of what was here and what the Spaniards brought.  Not surprisingly, the most Catholic Catholics were the Spanish settlers, the rich Spaniards who were landowners and city dwellers  during the colonial era.  In the San Antonio Museum of Art’s Mexican wing, there is (or at least was) a gallery devoted to the  art of this period that hung in the houses and haciendas of the rich.  It is, if I remember correctly, a longish, dark gallery with dark walls in startling contrast to most of the rest of the Mexican art in the wing.  Still today, you can peak in big old mansions in Coatepec and Xico and see heavy overstuffed furniture covered with brocade and woodwork polished to a mirror-like sheens; you can see elderly ladies sitting and drinking maybe coffee with fuzzy little white dogs at their feet.

The rich weren’t all pure Spanish.  Hernan Cortez himself had heirs from his union with La Malinche who themselves had heirs who fought over possession of large amounts of land.  Many conquistadors were happy to marry the relatives of  Moctezuma since they regarded these Aztecs as aristocrats. 

I can sense myself going off on a long essay about classes and ethnicity in Mexico so I’m going only to say here that among these groups, the Spaniards, or those from Spain, the Criollos, originally those of pure Spanish blood born in Mexico, and aristocratic indigenous and Spanish mixtures were considered privileged groups – and the only privileged groups.  People will quite legitimately be able to argue with me about this.  Let’s just say this for now for convenience, though.

These privileged people would be the most traditionally Catholic and would be most closely allied with the formal Catholic hierarchy in Mexico, and to some extent they still are.  The alliance wasn’t and isn’t strictly religious. It involves social ties, property and money.  The Catholic Church, at one point the biggest landholder in Mexico, and the privileged were tied at the hip (so to speak) by loans and marriages and political alliances.  It was a tight group.  PAN, the political part currently in control of the national government, is the party of these rich people.  I am always amused when US officials seem to think they are speaking to people who represent a large proportion of Mexicans when they deal with President Calderón and members of his party.

I live in a colonia which, as I’ve said, is probably most closely analogous to a blue color town in the US, maybe in upstate New York.  People in the US seem to assume that these poorer Mexicans are more Catholic.  This is completely wrong.  I think a few fireworks went off when the Pope arrived, but nobody even mentioned it.  Maybe it was spoken about in church, but few people regularly go to church in our area. What really matter to people as a group are processions and fiestas, often in honor of saints of mixed heritage. And velarias for the dead, held in people’s homes.  Interestingly, in our area, holy women appear to be more important that Jesus.  The patron saint of our community is La Virgen de Guadalupe; of Xico it is Maria Magdalena.  There is another Mary whose title slips my mind as well.  These are the figures that dominate the home altars and the capillas.  Of course Jesus appears in the churches, often lower than the Virgen, and always as a suffering Jesus, whether dragging his cross on the road to Calvary or hanging from it, a bloodied, tormented figure.

I speak here as an outsider, but it seems to me that people pray, or talk, to the Marys and to Jesus asking for relief in this world, or comfort, for themselves and their families, not to seek salvation in the next.  Heaven doesn’t appear to be too much on their minds.  This is not the Catholicism of an angry or stern Catholic hierarchy but of people who know suffering in their lives and turn to their faith for comfort.  As I’ve mentioned, my close friend Doña Gloria lit a candle to La Virgen de Guadalupe for my daughter when she had cancer.  My daughter and I were very grateful.

Pope Benedict went to the state of Guanajuato which has been called the most conservative state in Mexico by some.  By conservative is meant rich and Spanish and Spanish-style Catholic.  Lots of people in Guanajuato are quite fair-complected. These are the people who might say they side with the pope on abortion and birth control, though even among the people I knew from this area, few had ten or twelve kids.  They are the ones who will be most likely to be vocally anti-gay.  But Guanajuato and the adjoining areas are, as I said, not all of Mexico, and the real head of the Mexican church is in Mexico City (he’s no flaming liberal either).   But Mexico City is a very open city with legal gay marriage, legal abortion, and BIKE PATHS for heaven´s sake.  Not to mention extremely modern art.  Its politics are definitely leftish.  I’ve mentioned before that Mexico has much stricter laws separating church and state than the US.  In Mexico City and much of Mexico, these laws are valued and upheld.  In PAN country, though the alliances may be unofficial, PAN and the church are close. 

So when you think about Mexico, think of a country that is regarded as a success where birth control is concerned; where the official high school curriculum teaches very complete sex education, where there are processions for somebody every day and fiestas and celebrations, and where the gloom of the old Catholic church isn’t characteristic, even in Guanajuato.