From Xico

Amos Moore should be alive today to see this published correction to African and American history

In this week's New York Review of Books, Howard W. French reviews several recent books of African history which very successfully banish the common and incorrect stereotypes of the African past that many Europeans and USAers have held: that Africa was "primitive", without states, etc.  I have known this.  I have a Master's degree in African History from the University of Minnesota where the research we were exposed to made this clear.  Nonetheless, I heard nothing at that time about Africans in the Americas before slavery.  There has been a lot of quite reasonable speculation about the possibility that Africans landed on the coast of the Americas a long time ago, but none that has been, as far as I know, acknowledged by "main stream (white?) historians. The book that finally presents this in a way that legitimizes it is  The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages by François-Xavier Fauvelle, translated from the French by Troy Tice, Princeton University Press, 264 pp., $29.95. Our friend here in Xalapa, Amos Moore, one of the very few black Americans here, had read huge amounts on the subject and talked about it with increasing weariness to his skeptical friends.  So here from The Golden Rhinoceros is some documentation for him to add if he exists in some netherworld where he can read it.  I still miss Amos more than I can say. 

The most intriguing story in Fauvelle’s book comes from the kingdom of Mali in the early fourteenth century. More than a century and a half before Columbus’s voyages, a Malian ruler named Abu Bakr II was said to have equipped an expedition involving two hundred ships that attempted to discover “the furthest limit of the Atlantic Ocean.” The expedition failed to return save for one vessel, whose survivor claimed that “there appeared in the open sea [as it were] a river with a powerful current…. The [other] ships went on ahead but when they reached that place they did not return and no more was seen of them.” Some modern historians (Michael Gomez, Toby Green, and John Thornton, among others) have interpreted this to mean that the Malian ships were caught in the Atlantic Ocean’s Canary Current, which sweeps everything in its path westward at about the same latitude as Mali.

Abu Bakr II supposedly responded not by abandoning his dreams of exploration but by equipping a new and far larger expedition, this time involving two thousand ships and with himself in command. That was the last that was seen of him. We know of this story only because when Abu Bakr’s successor, Mansa Musa, was staying in Cairo in 1324–1325 on his pilgrimage to Mecca, the secretary of the chancery of the Mamluk Dynasty asked him how he had come to power and recorded his reply. There are no other traces of Abu Bakr’s attempt. (New York Review of Books, June 27, 2019 issue).

Not Just about Jews in Mexico. Also about Samuel von Basch, the Emperor Maximilian, Mexico during Maximilian's Short-Lived Empire, Jews in Austria in the Nineteenth Century, etc. etc.

I have this pattern I now recognize to my chagrin.  A topic grabs my attention, preferably one about Mexico, even better one about our area, and I mean just to read a bit about it, talk to a few people about it, maybe look around and look at pictures and tell you about it.  But in the end I follow threads -- glittering threads which I can't let go of and which lead me to this nexus and that, to that thread and yet another.  And I spend hours and hours on these journeys, and the information from them> only a bit of it makes it into blog posts.

I guess I have to say "so be it." Or maybe "So what."  

The last topic, and the one at least theoretically lighting my way, was/is Jews in Mexico, particularly the Yiddish poet Yitzhkok (Isaac) Berliner whom I discovered in an article in Tablet Magazine.  I wrote several posts about him.  Richard Grabman picked up on him and wrote a good, concise biography.  I'm not so good at concise.  Anyway, through Berliner I discovered the Diario Judio de México (who knew?) which had a series of portraits of Jews who were either Mexican, immigrants to Mexico, or involved in some significant way in the life of Mexico as residents, at least for awhile. I read a number of the portraits, and for some reason I don't understand, fixed on Samuel von Basch, Maximilian's personal physician in 1866 and 1867, the year in which he was executed.  

But to understand this sliver of time, I found I wanted to know how von Basch's Jewish family got to Austria, how he became a doctor, what he was like.  Vienna is the city which embraced him, medicine is the field in which he excelled.  And of course how did he get to Mexico? First to Puebla where he was a physician to the French troops billeted there, and then to emerge to become not only the personal physician but a close confidante of Emperor Maximilian first in Mexico City (with an important short side trip to Cuernavaca) and finally in Querétero where the Emperor met his end?  

While I suspect his time in Mexico was the most intense of his life, von Basch returned to Austria and became an extraordinary physician and researcher considered now the father of the blood pressure measurer (sphygmomanometer is its proper name) and of circulatory system medicine.  Doing these things is what he spent most of his life at.

I am, of course most captivated by the Mexican period.  I hope I can put down my reading long enough to share some stuff with you before I find myself rushing down another path.

Mexican Jews, Jewish Mexicans, Poetry and Yiddish, and Bronx and Brooklyn Jews

Recently I discovered a Jewish poet named Isaac Berliner who emigrated from Poland to Mexico in 1922.  He started out here in Mexico City as a street peddler selling (maybe ironically) saints’ images.  He loved Mexico City and the people he lived and worked among in the crowded streets.  I found Berliner in an article accompanied by some translations of his poems by Eli Rosenblatt in Tablet. Looking for some personal rather than academic insight into Jewish DF I discovered Ilan Stavans, a Mexican, now Mexican-American, Jew from DF who is a professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts and an incredibly prolific cultural critic and novelist.  The book I chose to look at is Return to Centro Histórico: A Mexican Jew Looks at his Roots.  This is an informal bit of autobiography (he has a more formal one called A Critic´s Journey).  Its charm lies in the myriad family and local pictures which he includes and comments on.  It seems to me that in the 20^th century, Jews in Mexico City particularly followed a trajectory not all that different from Jews in New York City.  My great grandfather who lived in Brooklyn in the first part of the 20^th century sold vegetables from a pushcart.  His son, my grandfather, was a printer (and a socialist), a skilled trade.  He and his family (my grandmother, my dad and two sisters) started out in an apartment on St. Ann’s Avenue in the Bronx and went sort of upscale to the Grand Concourse.  My grandparents lived there for the rest of their lives, and as they aged, so did their building so that it was a bit worn down and shabby even when I was a child.

My father and his sisters left the Grand Concourse though my father became a doctor with a practice in the Bronx and so took a while to move, with my mother and me, to Manhattan’s Upper West Side.  My aunt Addie  married a large, handsome man with black hair who could have been Mexican.  He headed a firm of "interior architects."  They did the big lobbies and courtyards of big businesses and big apartment stores. They moved to a fancy subdivision in West Hempstead, Long Island. My Aunt Phoebe married a dentist and moved all the way to Utica in New York State where she served for a time as mayor.

Jewish immigrants in Mexico also started as pushcart sorts of people and then became owners and managers of small businesses and factoriesand then moved to the suburbs.  Stavans’s parents, as of the writing of Return to Centro stayed in DF, where they had moved, too, to a bit more upscale neighborhood. But among his relatives were an actor: his father; and an orchestra conductor: an uncle.  His father did run a small factory to pay for his art. Apparently nowadays, many Jews live in the more prosperous suburbs of Mexico City which are in fact in the state of Mexico.

But I should return to Isaac Berliner.  He is seen as a transitional poet.  Stavans doesn’t think he is very important, but Rosenblatt has a greater appreciation, with which, based on my scant exposure, I would agree.  Rosenblatt says, “The language is marked by its subversive use of allusions to the Jewish past.” He also notes Berliner’s surprising imagery.  Rosenblatt says he is a “modernist Yiddish poet,” more stuff for me to look up. By the way, Berliner became good friends with Diego Rivera who illustrated his book of poems, City of Palaces.  

Berliner wrote in Yiddish.  I’m not at all sure how much Spanish he ever learned.  My grandparents came to the U.S. speaking Yiddish and reading in Yiddish.  They only learned English after they arrived.  A heavy Yiddish accent marked their speech all their lives, and it was easier for them to fall back into their mother tongue than to try to explain complicated things in English.  I sympathize! My grandmother wrote her first letter (or anything besides a shopping list) in English to me when I was in Uganda in the Peace Corps.

Here are some of Berliner´s poems as they appear in Rosenblatt´s translation:

Godl Treads a New Land

 

(Fragment From a Long Poem about Immigrant Life in Mexico)

 

The sea behind is already suspended in green jelly

having been cast by a front of waves checkered and fluttering

like Jonah’s whale-fish, the ship remains, still by the coastline.

Here he encounters here a sun glowing with dust and pollen

He raises his eyes up to the heavens and prayerfully deep-dreams.

His still lips manage—Praise God, may His name be sanctified!—

I have just crossed the sea and arrived here in one piece.

 

Foreign-tongued voices deafen like the beats

of drums.

Strange men hand off the suitcase he carries

pulling,

His valise between valises, lifted on a wagon

two dark bodies flank him like two reyshes, bent.

Two palms lift and push the wagon hard

and Godl is off through the sunburned streets and intersections

He looks around and gazes upon it all, naked children in sand

messing around.

 

Big houses. Small, low-slung shanties bending down in prayer.

He touches the pocket in his overcoat to check if his tefillin

are there—if he had left them on the ship—God forbid—Deprivation.

 

He arrives at a house. An inscription on a board: “Hotel Espana”

A man opens the door to a room for him, better to say merely, “lodgings”

He washes his hands in a basin and wastes no time.

He takes a look through the shaded window to the eastern heavens astride,

fastens his tefillin upon his forehead and wraps the straps on his left arm

Forget it! He’ll pray in solitude, because here the Jewish street does not exist.

 

***

 

Let Us Relate the Power

 

It burns in me—the evil sin of Adam and Eve.

My troubles are soaked through with boiling tears and blood

I have never praised the Creator, I have never prayed.

I have never allowed God one tear through my wails.

 

My dreams dangle bloody on every picket

of this bright prison-world—I will beg, moan

My God—I come to you now with a holy quaking and panic,

Girded with prayers, like a devout Jew on Rosh Hashanah.

 

Each adversarial hour is a stumbling block,

Every coming day is for me a cold cruelty

Every bloody spot is a letter of Unesanneh Tokef

The red, agonized earth—an open page in the prayer book.

 

There, put those letters in all the corners of the earth:

Who from hunger? – Who in winter? – Who by fire? – and Who by water?

and I will stay a fleck of dust between red flecks

until the end of generations I will scream scream scream.

 

***

 

The Punishment Should Come

 

It became black it is a sunburned face

a piece of black coal

the light cries with red tears

toward a desolate destiny and unto horror

The Image of God wails

What has the world deserted?

 

There is no synonym

for sorrow that bullies

It is every letter

of a poem

an open mouth

that screams

moans

punishment.

 

For all

for beginning and end

for mourning-rips in cloth

upon a world of compassion and good

for us who have been dealt what we’ve been dealt

here, besides a variety of folk

for every bloody hour.

 

It moans

punishment

my song

blood, for a Jew

bloody scream

from each punishment.

 

The heart of time

has opened up a black secret

heated up my calm mood

God does not scream

in my song’s chamber

the blood of the Jew, it screams

it screams, it screams out to

a variety of folk

and it moans my every sentence

Punishment!

Punishment!

 

and I

a child

from a folk among wandering folk

 

through generations eternally in sorrow

through distant paths

through plague

through temptation

through wind.

 

I wait

for the ascent of a new day.

 

***

 

Marijuana

 

The path so muddy

A man, on the earth on the mist

Moving along lazy-stepped

with feet, like heavy pendulums

eyes, alight like candlesticks

small flames aroused, fall upon

womanly flesh and hips,

on girlishly tender faces.

 

What a waste!

He can’t avert his gaze.

Why, if man could master himself

slake in his eyes

these erotic flames.

 

The man smokes marijuana

A narcotic.

 

The dream-effect places him in a harness

 

The earth is not muddy.

He lays upon divans

that caress his feet, treading:

 

He doesn’t hear the laments,

The begging

The children on grimy corners,

play quartets

Here, thousands of singers sing

 

A man collapses from hunger?

They extend their hands and wail?

Their skin dried out?

 

An Emperor

A Youth

Upon thrones

Of red and bloody luminations

Nirvana

 

It smokes a man, that marijuana.

Narcotic.

 

He’s harnessed to the divan.

upon the earth, which is filthy.

 

Jose Guadalupe Posada, artist and printmaker extraordinaire

 

November 2  was the official Day of the Dead here in Mexico.  For at least a week beforehand, people put up their altars and set out life-size Catrinas decked in fancy dress clothes.  There have been processions, too.  In our colonia also for celebrating a saint or two.  

La Calavera Catrina was a creation of Jose Guadalupe Posada, a printmaker who used her to satirize classist living in Mexico:  the rich clothes hang on the skeleton who spent her money on them and didn't have enough for food. Calavera actually means skull, but has come to mean the whole Day of the Dead ummm woman.  Posada himself was famous as a satirist of Mexican life as well as an illustrator and a major influence on the muralist Diego Rivera. In the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth in Mexico there was in fact what I might call a movement of satirists and cartoonists who made fun of the government and society and everything related to them.  They were skillful artists, these cartoonists.  The tradition continues today, though I think in somewhat muted form.

Posada was not just a political cartoonist, however.  He made thousands and thousands of prints about all kinds of Mexican subjects.  He was enormously skillful.  He used a number of methods to make his prints including lithography, and to speed up his work, he developed a process of using a special ink directly on a metal plate.  His first pictures appeared when he was still a teenager in a journal in Aguascalientes, his hometown, called El jicote.

A self portrait.

And below a sampling of his work.

 

Posada and the catrina.

 

Revolución (Mexican, of course)

 

[I don't know the title of this one]

I don't know whether this was a cover of a book or what, but it sure wasn't pro-Spanish.

 

Some thoughts on this print can be found at this link.  If you are interested in Posada, this is a site worth visiting.

 

I'll conclude with this, the central panel of Diego Rivera's mural, Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda (Park).  Catarina has one arm through Posada's arm and with her right hand, she is holding the child Diego's hand.  Behind Diegoyou can see Frida Kahlo.  

There are hundreds and hundreds of images of Posada's creations on Google.  Because he worked mostly in black and white, the computer screen is okay for looking at his pictures.

In the beginning....

I don't have a clue why it has taken me so long to do this.  Probably because I'm in some ways nuts.

t is a shame, shame, shame that US students don't learn more about Mexican history, and from my perspective, Mexican history in particular.  It is one of those clichés that has a lot of truth: at least the Americans I know who live in the US and haven't visited Mexico still form their images from headlines about narcos and have only a tiny bit of curiosity about anything else in here.  There's a kind of "what's to know?" condescension which infuriates me.  I suspect they don't know much real US history, either.

I am going to try to draw pictures of Diego Rivera and Henry Ford and place them in their environments separately, and then bring them together as they came together in 1932.  They didn't really have much to do with each other as individuals, although they did meet, but they really serve well as, what should I call them, embodiments of their cultures and their times.  In this way, I hope we can see how these two very different cultures, Mexico's  and the United States'  developed, clashed, and paralleled each other particularly in the first third of the twentieth century. Also, I want to show how their economies became woven together along the edges at least while especially the US developed little understanding and empathy and appreciation for Mexico's cultures and history, a deficit which has had grave consequences.

But I don't want to do this in an encyclopedic way.  I'd be dead before I even got started.  So that you can dig in more depth, I am going to recommend books as I go along.  Don't feel confined to them!  My choices are all in English, usually written by Gringos: Maybe you can consider them introductory, or beginner books (though they are not simple-minded), and develop a passion for more as I have. Maybe you'll even study Spanish, as I did, if you don't already know it. 

Most (maybe all) are available for Kindles, and if they are, I've provided a link.  In no way am I boosting Amazon as the best source to buy downed-tree versions.  It's just that my Kindle has kept me reading like a junky here in our corner of Mexico where specific books can be pretty hard to come by.

The very first book I'd suggest is Richard Grabman's Gods, Gachupines and Gringos.  *,**I tried to think of something more serious to say start with, but I keep coming back to the fact that it's fun to read.  It is densely packed with personalities, opinions, punny titles and well-told tales which bring it to life.  Grabman races through the first I don't know how many thousands of years at mach speed, slows down a bit for the period of Spanish domination and hits his best stride with Independence and especially the late 19th through the first third of the twentieth century, my favorite years.  

While you are learning about Mexico in Gods, Gachupines and Gringos, I will catch you up on some American history.  

* You can order the book direct from the publisher in Mexico.  Here is the contact information:

Editorial Mazatlán, Av. Camarón Sabado no 610, Plaza Galerías, Local no. 11, fracc. El Dorado CP 82110, Mazatlán, Sinaloa, Mexico Tel 52 6699167899, [email protected]

** Richard has an excellent blog at mexfiles.net. Definitely worth following.

The News and the rain which fell during but did not dampen El Grito

For a couple of weeks I have been translating parts of columns and news articles to post here. What happens is that I start one, don't get it quite finished, then something else develops out there in the world, and, I think to myself, that's more interesting, so I start another one. Events seem to be tumbling over each other.

Government proposals for reforms in education, energy and taxation have stirred the political pot.  I reckon everyone I know, and that covers quite a spectrum, has ideas on these.  And the icing on the cake -- the melting icing which has spilled out of its pot in way too much abundance -- is the weather.For us here in Colonia Ursulo Galván, it's been almost unceasing rain for days and days and days.  We haven't had much flooding where we are, but probably as dangerous are the mudslides and landslides of various sizes.  On our walks, even along shortish roadcuts not covered in dense vegetation, there are minislides, one after another.

The worst problems have occured in the State of Guerrero, where Acupulco dwells. Acupulco itself has virtually been cut off from the rest of the country, the main highway, in what now seems an ironic name, the Highway of the Sun, to Mexico City being closed as is the airport. All runways were flooded.

A street in Chilpancingo, the capital of Guerrero, drowning in mud.  From La Jornada, 16 de septiembere, 2013

Forty thousand tourists have been stranded, there is no phone service, no internet, and in some places, no electricity.  And, I gather, virtually all streets have been flooded.  In 

A street in Acapulco. Photo from La Jornada, 16 de septiembre 2013

Guerrero, things are especially bad because two storms blanketing much of Mexico, Ingrid and Manuel, seem to have collided. The clouds just stay and stay, dumping what I believe are record amounts of rain.

Here in our area, a friend says in July we had 20"of rain, in August, 25".  I think we've already had more rain in September than in either of those two months, but I'm not sure. I do know that roads and walkways are slick with slime, mold and mud are crawling up outside walls, paint is blistering and peeling. Seeds have swum out of our garden to find other homes. Our clothes are damp in our drawers, too, though this happens every rainy season.  

The teachers' strike, for which I have a lot of unposted stuff, went on through the rain, and schools were closed not only in Mexico City in protest, but here in our area, too. Today everyone here was going to go back to school , but the governor has ordered theschools closed because of the weather.  The strikers more or less (some dispute about this) left the Zocalo in Mexico City in time for El Grito which is given in pueblos large and small all over Mexico at around 11:00 at night on the 15th of September to mark the beginning of Mexican Independence Day.  The Grito in Mexico City is given by El Presidente, and no matter what you think about current politics, it is quite a wonderful and stirring ritiual.  This link should take you to a video of it.  I am too lazy to embed it at the moment. The Mexican Revolution is said to have begun in the pueblo of Dolores (now Dolores Hidalgo) in the State of Guanajuato when the local priest, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla who was involved in a plot to overthrow the government, and some criollo associates first freed a number of prisoners.  Afterwards Hidalgo ordered the church bells rung and gathered some parishioners on the steps of the church where he urged them to revolt.  They still ring the bells as part of El Grito and call out the names of the heroes of the Revolution.  You really ought to watch the video. For a pretty concise version of El Grito, look here.

More soon. In closing, I would just like to say that I HATE Windows 8 which I have on my new laptop.  It complicates even the easiest tasks.

Saturnino Herrán: A Passionate Art

Last week, Google's search start page celebrated the anniversary of Saturnino Herran's birth.

Who, you ask, is Saturnino Herrán? ¡Qué lastima que ustedes no conzcan a Saturnino Herrán!  How terribly sad that you don't know him! I could simply say he was a Mexican painter, from the State and City of Aguascalientes who was born in 1887 and died in 1918. 

In truth, like many of the great, creative artists of his time, Herrán was part of the brilliantly colored, badly stained and tattered tapestry that comprised the first two decades of the twentieth century in Mexico.  He was born and grew up into a painter during the Porfiriato, the rule of Porfirio Díaz, which lasted from 1876-1880 and 1884 to 1911, a period which marked the Mexico's changing from a country based on all kinds of traditions and mostly rural to one that was more urban and industrialized and outward-looking. Coming after the chaotic years following Mexico's independence from Spain, the order it represented was probably welcomed by some.  In fact, while benefitting the rich and making them richer both inside Mexico and outside of it, Diaz´s rule caused massive suffering among the poor (the 99 %). Americans would benefit from learning about the Porfiriato because not unlike the US today,  profits and economic success and technological advancement came at the expense of the many and was justified ideoogically. And led to Revolution.

Mexican artists and writers, much more than American, take part in the turbulence of the political and civic life of their times.  This is really important to understand.  They were influenced by and influenced (and continue to) the thought and lives of their compatriots and are and were influenced by ideas both within and without Mexico.  While the Porfirian ideas of Positivism dominated the government and its policies, many other ideas were swirling.

In Mexico City, the Academy and formalism had dominated art instruction for quite some time, but there were many currents coming together to change that at the turn of the century. In Herrán we can see these currents: Spanish, French, impressionist, Arte Nouveau.  More important even, we can see Herran's identification with his country, a mix of indigenous and rural and sophisticated and urban and European.  It has been suggested that he is among the new nationalists of the period, showing  that the indigenous and Spanish threads had become intertwined in the mix that is Mexico.

Below, some of his work.

First, from the countryside.  In earlier times, paintings of campesinos and indigenous people were often called "costumbrista" and the faces looked more indigenous and the paintings more formalized.  In Herrán's work, the faces are often more mestizo and more individual.  

Young girl with a calabaza.

The Harvest

 

The offering

 

El Ciego (The Blind Man)

 

El Bebedor (The Drinkeer)

His wife, Rosario Arrellano, served as a model. 

This painting is called La Tehuana and is the first painting by Herrán that I knew of.  Here his wife is wearing a costume of the Zapoteca.  The Zapoteca became favored by a number of great artists.

Here she is in a more urban kind of costume, with Spanish influence.

Nudes and almost nudes interested Herrán, and he painted many, both just as paintings and with iindigenous themes.

This is one example.  I think it is called The Gods.

And another, called The Archer.

Toward the end of his life, Herrán undertook to paint a religious triptych which showed the mixing of indigenous and Spanish gods in the center panel. Altough he did not live to finish it, the sketches and preliminary paintings that endure are impressive.

In the first pane, there are Indigenas bringing offerings.

This is possible an earlier version of a detail of the Indigenas.

In the third are the Spaniards

I find this an incredible and moving image.  Herran merges the indigenous Coatlicue, the mother of the gods, with the crucified Jesus.

You can find a great many of Herran's paintings on line. I would like to find more about what he himself thought and believed.  It is easier to do this with a writer! Mexico has a great and growing tradition of art. 

Mexico in North America: A Sort of Correction and a Major Correction*

Yesterday I said without qualification that Mexico was in North America because it lay on the North American Plate--the plates constituting the hard crust of the earth.  Jim, mi esposo, said he wouldn't say that: plate tectonics didn't exist when Mexico was first considered part of North America.  And when was that?  Hmmmm....Long before plate tectonics were theorized about and studied.

So how did Mexico come to be part of North America?  This is a nice, messy topic to research by shuffling through google.

By the way, North America is not just Mexico, Canada and the US.  It is also Greenland, Bermuda,  Clipperton Island,  and Saint Pierre and Miquelon. Huh? 

Anyway, Mexico is shall we say geographically part of North America because it is mostly on the North American plate.  Apparently some geographers consider the part of Mexico below the Isthmus of Tehuantepec to be in Central America.  The Isthmus is the narrowest part of Mexico. 

Certainly above the Isthmus, Mexico just looks like part of North America (although many Europeans do, in fact, consider it part of Central America):

(map from The Encyclopedia Britannica)

"People" tend to want to lump Mexico with Central America because Spanish is the dominant language in both, and, except for the giant exception of Brazil, in South America.  But as was pointed out here, that's kind of stereotyping. though calling Mexico along with the other countries of Central and South America Latin countries isn't.  French, Portuguese and Spanish, spoken in Latin America, are all Latin languages. (So maybe Quebec should be in Latin America as well as those two French islands).

I have another idea about why Mexico is in North America.  And started there even before the US did.  Here is a map of the part of New Spain which lay in North America at the start of the Mexican Revolution in 1810:

You can see, even excluding Central America, that New Spain on the eve of its becoming Mexico occupied more of North America than did the United States.

The map below makes this even clearer (You have to include Mexico in your mind here):

The US as STATES in 1810 was the orange part.  The blue part included territories and the green part was the Louisiana Purchase.  (Don't forget to include Mexico -- or New Spain -- south of the current US in your mind.)

Independent Mexico in 1824 was no different:

The first big change (and everything Texas is big) came as the result of the Texas War for Independence from Mexico fought in 1835-1836, resulting in the Republic of Texas.  While I'm not going to go into it here, this was no simple thing.  *Santa Ana´s defeat of the Texans at the Alamo seems to have  been a catalyst leading a sufficient number of men to join the Texans for them to finally defeat the Mexicans at the Battle of San Jacinto. Of the original defenders of the Alamo, 13 1 were native-born Texans [Texians] with, according to Wikipedia, 11 of  those being of Mexican descent.  One of them at least, Juan Seguín, still has descendants in San Antonio including my former boss at the University of Texas Health Science Center who was quite clear that he wasn´tof Mexican descent (except insofar as the area had become Mexican) but of Spanish descent, one of the people who came from the Canary Islands.  You might also like to know that at least until the 1990s -- maybe no longer-- there were Mexican descendants of the owners of what became the King Ranch still in court trying to reclaim their land.  Slavery was banned in Mexico, and when Texas gained its independence from Mexico, it legalized slavery.

Mexico and the US disputed the border of the State of Texas with Mexico claiming that it was the Nueces River, the US claiming it was the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo in Mexico).

In the map below you can see that the Nueces River cuts the lower bump from Texas, more or less.

The dark green section (Texas today) is divided from the light green section (Mexico today) by the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo).

As a result of US insistence that the Rio Bravo be the boundary, Mexico broke diplomatic relations with the US.  And this pretty much marks the beginning of the First War of United States Intervention in Mexico, or as the US says, the Mexican American War. 

The two countries have noticeably different ideas about this war, and it is really worth learnig about them.  A short piece in English talking about the Mexican version can be found here.  In fact the PBS site covering the US-Mexico war is very good and has quite a number of Mexican and Mexican American authorities as well as a good list of resources.  It is really worth looking this stuff up and unlearning some of the history at least I was taught.

The result of the First US Intervention in Mexico (you have to know the US also directly invaded Mexican territory, including Mexico City) is that Mexico lost about 55 percent of its territory and ended up in the shape it is today.  This was not only a result of the battles, but of the US rewriting, on its own, the treaty the two countries had agreed on.  The map below shows the negotiations over the Mexican border from 1845-1848.

The last little bit, between the red line and the dotted-dashed line to the south, representes the Gadsden purchase of an area called La Mesilla.  The US bought it for ten million dollars, threatening Mexico with more war if it wouldn't sell it.

Obviously, the Mexican-US war is another topic on which I could go on forever.  For the purposes of the original discussion, however, which was over why Mexico was in North America, as you can see that it only was reduced to its current size in 1848.  So it was part of North America in its combined role as Mexico and part of New Spain, established in the 16th century, for longer than the United States was even the British colonies.

Harley Davidsons in México Today with an air pollution alert and in the Mexican Revolution

We've been going to Mexico City with some regularity recently to visit Jim's opthalmologist. We haven't stayed overnight except following his surgery, but even our short stays have intrigued me and have made DF seem like a place I'd really like to explore.  We arrive by bus at TAPO and take a taxi to El Hospital Angeles del Pedregal in the very most southwestern edge of the city.  Sometimes our taxis go through the streets, sometimes on the highways. For weeks, jacarandas were in bloom, filling the air with clouds of beautiful purplish blossoms.   Our next trip is this coming Wednesday. For many of our visits, the air has been remarkably clear and free of pollution, but now there is an ozone alert and people are supposed to avoid driving.

However, it is also the 110th birthday of Harley Davidson motorcycles and a grand procession of them took place en El Zócalo, Mexico City's heart.

In spite of the alert, Miguel Ángel Mancera, mayor of Mexico City, has justified the incursion of all the motorcycles for economic reasons: hotel reservations and so forth.  

Harley Davidsons weren't so friendly to México during the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, more or less. According to today's La Jornada, "There is a history of Harleys in the midst of the Mexican Revolution.  It's said that when Francisco [Pancho] Villa was angered by US support for Porfirio Díaz, the dictator overthrown during the Revolution,he crossed the frontier with his men to sack various towns in New Mexico. The government in Washington wasn't too thrilled with this and so authorized the US army to attack Villa in Mexico.  The US sent twenty thousand men to follow him and his followers mounted on Harley Davidsons, many of them equipped with machine guns.  The foreigners didn't succeed in defeating Villa and had to return to the US on their motorcycles.

If  you read Spanish, the article in La Jornada about Harleys is definitely worth your time. The material in this post comes from the La Jornada article and from Notimex via Aristegui Noticias.  The first photo is from the latter, the second from the former.

 

 

 

It's Hard to Figure Out an Exciting Title for this JSTOR News that Affects Mexico

But it is exciting.  For anyone who has found herself banging against JSTOR's stone wall of "no access" at least without paying big bucks for a momentary (well it seems momentary) glimpse of an article --the ONLY article it seems -- dealing in depth with a subject you are researching, JSTOR is offering a way in.  If limited, it is still significant, and it is free.  To find out how to use this entrance, go to JSTOR.org and you will find the homepage reads, "A New Chapter Begins."  And indeed it does.  You can sign up to read three articles at a time, each with a limit of two weeks, for free.  Don't laugh!  It really is better than nothing.

Here are some of the journals you can now access (mostly in Spanish) that deal for the most part with Mexico:

Historia Mexicana  (El Colegio de Mexico)

Estudios Sociologicos (El Colegio de Mexico)

Revista de Historia de America (Pan American Insstitute of Geography and History)

Critica: Revista Hispanoamerica de Filosofia (Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas, UNAM)

Latin American Literary Review (Latin American Literary Review Press)

Revista Geografia (Pan American Institute of Geography and History)

Estudios Demograficos y Urbanos (El Colegio de Mexico)

Estudios de Africa y Asia (El Colegio de Mexico) (Just for a change of pace)

Estudios Economicos (El Colegio de Mexico)

 

There are 1200 journals available, obviously about a lot more than Mexico.  Enjoy!