Mexicowoods—An Expatriate Life

Fixing Pila Seca

Potholed streets are getting new surfaces. I see construction crews all over San Miguel de Allende. Everyone has to endure inconvenient street closings and the snarled traffic that ensues. Apparently some federal money came in, so workers are tearing up the roads, filling potholes, re-setting cobblestones.

As late as last year, masons set paving stones in dirt just like in the Seventeenth Century. What little concrete they used they mixed by hand. They filled spaces between stones with a runny plaster slurry—painstakingly poured from cut-off plastic Coke bottles.

Today they use ready-mix from the Cemex plant out on the periferico—a sudden leap into modern times.

Construction methods quickly revert to the Nineteenth Century though. Laborers fill wheelbarrows from the cement truck and dump the concrete onto the street where its needed, a few square feet at a time.

Masons spread the mix and set cobblestones one at a time. Apparently the ancient art of cobblestone paving can't be mechanized.

Just before opening to traffic, Pila Seca looks pristine. Gone are the lumps, the loose stones, the potholes.

Built to newer construction standards, the street looks smoother than I've ever seen it.

Cobblestone streets don't last long. Unlike concrete or macadam roads, they need re-paving every few years. But they form an important part of the character of the Centro Historico, so we all put up with the vibration and jolts that prematurely degrade the suspensions of our vehicles, the stumbles and falls when our feet catch on uneven stones.

Despite the expense, the inconvenience, the hazards of cobblestone streets, we love their look, and we'd vigorously oppose any movement to modernize them.

Bailing Wire Fix

Even in this time of economic crisis, plenty of colonial houses undergo renovation. Where does the money come from?

The other day I walked past scaffolding built to support workers replacing a cantera window. It looks unsafe.

Two posts rest on the sidewalk, steadied by buckets full of rocks. Holes pounded into the wall receive two beams wedged in place with scraps of wood. Tying the beams to the posts: bailing wire.

The whole lash-up illustrates 1) attitudes about worker safety, and 2) problem-solving ingenuity. On the whole, I admire the builder's minimalist approach. But up north, he'd be cited for a rig like this.

Balloons over San Miguel

On early morning rides down the Oakville Grade from my ranch in the Mayacamas Mountains (between the Sonoma and Napa Valleys) I'd often look down on a scattering of hot air balloons hanging in the still air. By the start of the new millennium, their numbers had increased: to see a dozen or more at one time was not unusual.

These days, balloon sightings are becoming more frequent in San Miguel de Allende too.

 

Even a single balloon transforms the view, redefining the sky into something more than mere backdrop.

Ballooning is for tourists. Where you see balloons in the sky, you know the locale attracts visitors who appreciate beautiful views slowly unfolding as their aircraft drifts over the landscape.

Over the years the California's Wine Country transformed itself from unpretentious farms into boutique wineries visited by throngs of oenophiles. Increasing numbers of hot air balloons in the Napa skies betokened a loss of rural innocence as sophisticates displaced country folk.

Disillusioned, I moved to Mexico, attracted by its authentic culture. Today it seems that $200 balloon rides have followed me here. San Miguel feels more like Sonoma or St. Helena every day. I didn't come here for this.

Still, I feel a sense of wonder every time I see one of those great nylon gasbags hanging silently in the sky.

Righting a Fallen Horse

As riders staged for the Allende birthday parade last Thursday, one horse staged a revolution of its own, lying down on the pavement.

 

The horse's owner beat it with her crop to no avail. It refused to budge. Apparently the animal was not simply refusing to stand; it was too weak to get to its feet.

I left the scene, looking for a vantage point from which to watch the parade. An hour later I retraced my steps to find the horse still in trouble.

 

The scene was faintly surreal. The horse now was standing. To keep it on its feet, two people pushed against its side to prop it against a fire truck. Another rider squirted its nether regions with a fire hose.

Is this some kind of folk remedy? What reasoning impelled the woman to revive the animal with a douche?

A mystery of animal husbandry.

Ignacio Allende's Birthday Parade

Yesterday the country celebrated the birthday of a hero of the war for Mexican independence: Ignacio Allende, our city's namesake and one of the Founding Fathers. Captured during the fighting, he didn't live to see independent Mexico. His portraits always show him in uniform. This one by Ramón Pérez hangs in the National Palace.

 

Celebrations of Allende's birthday have military overtones, appropriate for a man who was a soldier throughout his entire life. Elements of the Mexican Army lead today's parade down the Ancha de San Antonio.

The military likes to show off new hardware. Several recoilless rifles, bazookas, and machine guns mounted on Humvees roll by.

At one time I wondered why the Mexican Army would own such heavy weapons. Guatemala and Belize present no threat of conflict, and no weaponry in Mexico could possibly defend against aggression from the USA. So the only rationale seems to be for use against Mexico's own citizens—a chilling prospect. But escalation of the drug wars provides justification for a well-armed militia. 

San Miguel's own police force makes an appearance. Compared with the soldiers, they look like they could use a few visits to the gym.

The police also have gear to show off, like these gas masks.

As armed men roll by, a group of pre-schoolers watch the spectacle, sitting in their little chairs.

 

Much of the parade is in fact made up of children. Every school in San Miguel fields a group of marching students.

 

Apparently marching, drumming, and bugling are part of the required curriculum in Mexican Schools.

The occasional child wears historical costume. This boy takes most seriously his portrayal of General Allende.

Bigger boys dress up like Allende as well. This man, holding a saber at present arms, leads a woman rider who is incongruously wearing a tiara. How she fits into the historical panorama is a mystery.

A series of flatbed trucks bears dioramas of significant historical events. This one, called Los Conspiradores, depicts one of the secret meetings between Allende, Father Miguel Hidalgo, Juan Aldama and others during the birth of the independence movement. Another diorama features El Pípila setting fire to the gates of the Alhóndiga in Guanajuato, a great flat stone strapped to his back to protect him from the defenders' missiles.

 

Assorted militias and groups of caballeros ride by. Parade dress for horses includes flowers woven into manes and odd checkerboard haircuts over their rumps.

Always the last in any parade, the bomberos (firefighters) drive by in an assortment of fire engines—some new, some decrepit but still in service. Leading the engines is a color guard made up of fire-axe-wielding young women in short skirts.

San Miguel has a reassuring practice: street cleaners immediately follow parades sweeping up litter and manure. Moments after the last unit passes by, the street looks as if nothing at all has taken place.

Patriotic parades and celebrations in the USA lack the ferver of those I see in Mexico. In San Miguel, the whole city comes to a halt for Allende's birthday. By comparison, celebration of Washington's birthday (which has been watered down these days to "Presidents' Day") seems muted.

The Stone of the Sun

Most emblematic of Mexican images is the Aztec Calendar. The original twelve-foot circular stone miraculously escaped destruction by Conquistadores bent on obliterating all traces of heathen Mexica culture. It was excavated during renovation of Mexico City's Zocalo in 1790 after being buried for almost three centuries.

A colored image of the stone hangs in the National Museum of Anthropology. The Mexica may have painted the stone, but the colors shown here are speculative. Accurate or not, they make it easier to discern details, like the hands of the sun god Tonatuih arranged on either side of his face, each holding a human heart.

(For a high-resolution diagram of the stone, click here.)

The stone is iconic. I see images everywhere. One appears on the ten-peso coin. I imagine no other country issues currency that implies human sacrifice.

 

Throughout Mexico, no souvenir stand worth its salt fails to offer a shawl or a plate bearing the stone's likeness.

Starbucks recently got itself into trouble by issuing mugs bearing the Sun Stone image without paying licensing fees to the Mexican Government. I had no idea intellectual property rights extended to works created in the Fifteenth Century. I think it noteworthy that government lawyers pursue Starbucks while overlooking all those artisans cranking out ceramic replicas. The legal principle of "deep pockets" appears to be well understood in Mexico.

I saw the stone for the first time on a recent visit to the National Museum of Anthropology. The sight of it engendered the same thrill I experienced when I first saw the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum.

The Rosetta Stone arguably had a more important influence in the development of western thought owing to its role in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics. But its content—tax regulations—is unremarkable. The Stone of the Sun, on the other hand, represents a significant intellectual achievement. It contains a pair of interlocked calendars of 365 and 260 days each which combine to track dates over a 52-year cycle. The Mexica calculation of the length of the day is more accurate than the contemporary European figure.

Mesoamerican science died with the Spanish conquest. But in its time, it was equivalent to western thinking in complexity and sophistication.

Three Views of Mexico City

The romance of cities calls to me: millions of lives, purposeful bustle, vertical landscapes. Mexico City is a real city. It may not have canyons like New York, but it does have skyscrapers. For my money, the best of them is the Torre Latinoamericana. It resembles the classic buildings of the '20s and '30s.

Mexico City is overwhelmingly big. It's hopelessly congested, smoggy, and noisy. I can't get my head around the place.

Photo: Wickipedia

Five hundred years ago the city was called Tenochtitlán. A painting of how it might have looked hangs in the Museo Nacional de Antropología. This image is said to have been carefully reconstructed from reports written by men who accompanied Cortez during his conquest of Mexico.

Occupying an island in Lake Texcoco, its setting must have been far more beautiful than that of the modern city. The population then was around 200,000, less than 1% of the current figure. What would it have been like to live then?

The Spanish came, conquered, and destroyed Tenochtitlán. The population plummeted due to warfare, the rigors of slavery, and smallpox. Four hundred years later, at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, the population had recovered to around 500,000. 

Mexican landscape painter José María Velasco depicts an idyllic place: peaceful countryside with Mexico City a tiny smudge in the center of the painting. I imagine I would have liked to visit Mexico City back then. Were only members of the nobility in positions to enjoy life in the Nineteenth Century? What was life like for ordinary people? I'd like to think those times were a golden age, today buried beneath rampant development and frantic traffic.

El Palacio de Comunicaciones

Mexico's National Museum of Art is housed in one of the intimidating buildings erected during the presidency of Porfirio Díaz. It contains a small but exquisite collection of paintings and sculptures by Mexican artists. I've enjoyed viewing it twice and I'm convinced it merits a third visit.

Originally the building was built to contain the Ministry of Communications: in fact the name is El Palacio de Comunicaciones, carved into the stone above the main entrance.

 

On a recent visit I was distracted by a phone call. While waiting for me to finish, Laura went exploring in the nether regions of the ground floor, where she discovered this—a museum dedicated to the telegraph.

Ye Gods! What a treat for a retired electrical engineer! And totally unexpected. In one moment I was appreciating José María Velasco landscapes; the next I was swimming in techie gear. 

Albeit tech stuff from long ago—like telegraph sending and receiving sets. This one might have been used for practice. You operate it by sitting behind it (in this view), tapping out messages on the red-knobbed key, and receiving the return message by listening to the clicks and clacks of the sounder (the complicated thingy on the far right).

As a boy, I learned Morse code practicing on a set similar to this one, except mine was about a hundred years newer.

Imagine you are working in the telegraph office in Mexico City in 1870. Telegraph lines come to the city from all over the country. Suppose an operator in San Luis Potosi wants to send a message to the station in Veracruz. To connect these two particular lines out of all the dozens of lines coming into your office you need a crossbar switch. That is what this is.

You make connections by pushing tapered brass pins into holes between the lines you want to connect. It's crude, it's primitive, it's effective. This board contains somewhat fewer than a thousand individual switches. The computer you're using to read this post contains more than a billion, and they operate about a billion times faster than push pins. The principles are the same; the technology has just become a million billion times more efficient.

If you don't use wires to transmit signals, you don't need a crossbar switch. Guglielmo Marconi developed the first practical wireless telegraph, using a spark gap transmitter of which this is an example. Marconi is a rare case of an engineer winning a Nobel Prize.

This machine may not do much for you, but to me it's beautiful: all that hand-worked brass, copper, wood and iron. They don't make 'em like this anymore.

Thank God.

Transmitting with one of these machines is like throwing rocks into a pond with someone  on the opposite shore counting waves to decipher the message. In effect there's only one channel: whoever throws the biggest rocks is the one that gets heard. Because of this kind of interference, it's illegal to operate a spark gap transmitter today.

This set is similar in many ways to the spark gap radios aboard the Titanic. The ship's wireless operators were too busy sending passengers' personal messages to pay attention to warnings of icebergs sent from other ships. It's the Dilbert story: engineers provided a solution, management screwed it up.

None of the technology on display in the Telegraph Museum was developed or manufactured in Mexico, but it's relevant nonetheless. Wires connected the country so that the government could react quickly to events. The telegraph set Mexico on the path to becoming a modern nation. I'm gratified that someone in the Ministry of Communications took steps to see that it wasn't forgotten.

At the Catedral Metropolitana

Whenever I walk by Mexico City's cathedral, I see tradesmen sitting by the south fence advertising their skills. Apparently this is a way of life. They put up signs announcing their specialties, they display their tools.

In California I used to hire guys like this. They would wait on the corner beside the Glen Ellen Market. Whenever I needed a few extra hands on my ranch, I'd drive off the mountain and pull up beside the cluster of ten or twenty workers. They'd swarm around and I'd look them over, trying in all the confusion to select men I thought would be good workers. I'd look for worn jeans and boots, calloused hands, guys thirty or more years old. I discovered Lupe Cano, my longtime ranch foreman this way.

This tile setter's face shows that this way of life isn't easy.

On the day I photographed the workers, police were lined up along the east fence. I guess some kind of demonstration was in the works.

What strikes me is the juxtaposition of workmen patiently waiting for a job and policemen leaning on their shields waiting for a riot.

Sitting stolidly in the background, the oldest cathedral in Latin America—a building that has seen it all.

Correos Méjico

A massive, ornate building in Mexico City's Centro Historico houses the central post office, the Palacio Postal. For my money, it is everything a public building should be: imposing, impressive, a statement about the rectitude and permanence of the State.

Marble floors, gilded columns, filigreed railings—it's hard to imagine that all this is necessary to house civil service flunkies hunched over ledgers.

It is a working post office even today: customers apply at barred teller's cages to buy stamps and mail packages. The dozens of windows are no longer necessary to handle the press of customers. The economy of email and the reliability of delivery services like Estafeta and DHL have eaten into Mexpost's business.

My primary interest in visiting the central post office was the rumored existence of a postal museum. I was an avid stamp collector when I was young, and I still like to look at old stamps. I was hoping to see stuff like this showpiece 1856 Hidalgo issue.

Alas, most of the exhibits are mailbags, mailboxes, and old photographs. I saw nothing there of philatelic interest. Instead I found this familiar image of the Chichimec god Huitzilopochtli perched on a cactus eating a snake, volcanoes Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl in the background. What is it doing in a postal museum?

Well, it is a mosaic made up of thousands of canceled Mexican postage stamps. Someone laboriously soaked them off envelopes, sorted them into a palette of colors, and glued them onto a large board. The image is so big I could hardly cram it into the frame of my camera. Not exactly postal history, nevertheless one might charitably say it is postage-related.

So the museum has little to offer, but the central post office itself is so spectacular it hardly matters.

A legacy of the Porfirion Díaz regime, the Palacio Postal was designed by Adam Boari, who also designed Bellas Artes just across the Reforma. That it continues to be used as a working post office is remarkable. Undoubtedly it will be preserved, but in what form remains to be seen. When ordinary citizens can no longer mail letters there, something irreplaceable will be lost.