Mexicowoods—An Expatriate Life

Modern Mexican Cultures at the Anthropology Museum

The entire first floor and grounds of the National Museum of Anthropology are devoted to pre-Hispanic culture. After three hours of wandering through Mayan and Aztec artifacts, I ate a good lunch in the museum restaurant and then ventured upstairs to a smaller series of galleries devoted to modern Mexican cultures. The exhibits there capture the fast-disappearing features of various regional population groups.  At the entrance to the galleries, I came upon the largest tree of life I have ever seen.

Hundreds of clay figures perch on its branches. The wealth of detail depicts all of the cultures covered in the galleries that follow. It would have taken me an hour (which I didn’t have) to fully absorb all those scenes. A first visit to the Museum of Anthropology is like that—continuous forming of intentions to return for closer looks.

The museum generally omits references to colonial era history and culture: another museum in Chapultepec Park deals with that subject. But displayed among exhibits of modern cultures was a reproduction of the Osuna codex, describing pictorially and in both Spanish and Nahuatl the punishments meted out by Spanish courts to indigenous people. Shown below is a depiction of an imprisonment device called the mantrap.

Dioramas convey some idea of how various groups lived. I suspect people still live as depicted only in the remotest settlements if anywhere at all.

The dioramas have a staged look, as romanticized as a Diego Rivera mural. People probably still lived like this during Rivera's day some eighty years ago, but today all I ever encounter are people in jeans and baseball hats.

Besides dioramas, collections of modern artifacts are on display. I particularly was taken by the musical instruments. The old Mexican harp on the right looks identical to the instrument played when Laura and I were married. The mandolina made from a gourd is unique to me; I would have liked to have heard it played.

Growing sugar cane is big business in Mexico, but smallholders also raise cane. This diorama shows a farmer extracting sugary juice from with a horse-powered mill. In front of the diorama a model of the mill permits close inspection of the mechanism. The gray pottery cups to the right are molds for forming the conical loaves of raw sugar called piloncillos, still widely sold in mercados and even supermarkets.

To the delight of many and the despair of others, the introduction of sugarcane to Mexico led to readily available alcoholic beverages like aguardiente.

I could have devoted an entire day’s visit to the modern cultures galleries of the museum. And on a future trip to Mexico City, I will.

The National Museum of Anthropology

Getting my head around the magnitude of ancient Mexican civilization is tough for me. An advanced civilization arose in Mexico while my Northern European ancestors were still living in huts. Mayans were writing hundreds of years before people living in the British Isles were. They developed a sophisticated calendar and the mathematics to support it before the Greeks invented geometry. If not for accidents of history (environmental collapse, cultural obliteration by the Spanish) Mesoamerican civilization might have carried through to the present day. Who knows what contributions they might have made to the modern world.

One place to learn about the scope of Pre-Columbian accomplishment is in the crown jewel of Mexican Museums, the National Museum of Anthropology.

The museum's ground floor consists of a series of galleries devoted to different ancient cultures—Olmec, Pre-Classic, Teotihuacan, Toltec, Mexica, Maya... Entire temples have been moved from the far corners of Mexico and assembled here in Mexico City: this one, a Mayan temple all the way from the Yucatán.

The museum collection consists of more than 120,000 objects, some 5,000 of which are on public display. The huge number of artifacts cannot be appreciated during a visit of a single day. There's simply too much to take in. Here a Chac mask, a representation of the Mayan rain god.

A mask of an Aztec god, fashioned from semi-precious stones.

A small statue of Ehécatl, the Aztec wind god whose breath made the sun and moon move through the heavens.

This bowl of flint razors amazes me. They were shaped by a single blow to a flint nodule with very little secondary working. Imagine the consummate skill of the artisan who made them.

A tiny number of gold objects survive for our inspection today. Cortez got most of the gold, melting priceless art objects to make ingots for shipment back to Spain. The man would have fit right in at Goldman Sachs.

Rounding a corner, I was surprised to see pots from the American Southwest—until I remembered that the region was at one time part of Mexico.

A deformed skull reminds me that punkers didn't invent body modification.

Only three authenticate Mayan codices have survived, and all of them are conserved in European museums. Reproductions are on display at the National Museum of Anthropology. I wondered at first if they might not be originals. They are so carefully made—perfect copies down to the last tear, wrinkle and stain.

The museum is more than a collection of artifacts: it provides much material for teaching visitors about the history and culture of ancient Mexican peoples. This diorama of the Tlatelolco Market is an example. Thirty thousand Aztecs were said to have met here daily to trade in Pre-Conquest times.

A group of scholars holds a seminar among the exhibits, evidence that the National Museum of Anthropology is a place of learning.

It is one of the world's great museums. In my opinion it ranks with the Met or the Louvre. I'm ashamed to say I've known about it for thirty years, yet I made my first visit just now. It is one of those museums to keep returning to, like the Prado or New York's Museum of Natural History. A visit to the National Museum of Anthropology is justification enough for a visit to Mexico City.

A Walk in Chapultepec Park

Not long ago I found myself alone in Mexico City with time to kill. On impulse, I hopped on the Metro and rode out to Chapultepec Park, Mexico City's huge playground. Of course Sunday afternoon is the best time to visit, when the park fills with tens of thousands enjoying their day off from school and work. But I was there on an uncrowded weekday morning. Relatively few visitors walked along the vendor-lined pathways.

(The skyscraper in the distance is the Torre Mayor, the tallest in Latin America.)

Mexican people seem to use parks better better than norteamericanos. How often do you say, "Hey. How about spending a day in the park?" Mexicans say it all the time.

Here an energetic couple entertains junior by chasing one another in circles. Bear in mind they are running full out at an elevation of 7349 feet. Acclimatization is everything.

The less fit sit on a balustrade, watching a busker do the entertaining.

Limbs intertwined, lovers find an spot away from traffic. Parks are full of cuddly couples. I suspect we see so much public romance because houses are small and crowded. Privacy is relative: In Mexico, a park beats sharing the living room with Grandma.

Chapultepec, separated from bustling Tenochtitlán by the waters of Lake Texcoco, was once a retreat for Aztec chieftans. Today the lake is mostly filled in, but remnants exist in the park, like this duckweed covered canal that offers cool shade on warm days.

Another remnant: Lago Chapultepec, where you can rent a paddle boat for an hour or a day. The world's best parks—Central Park, Golden Gate Park—afford city dwellers opportunities to get out on the water.

Today's stroll took me past the monument to Los Niños Héroes, commemorating six military school cadets who fought to the death opposing the invasion of Mexico City by U. S. forces during the Mexican-American War.

The attractions of Chapultepec Park cannot be appreciated in a single day and probably not in an entire week. Twice the size of New York's Central Park, it contains an amusement park, a zoo, and more than six museums, including the National Museum of History, a children's museum, and two modern art museums.

It also contains the incomparable National Museum of Anthropology and History, and the objective of my walk through Chapultepec Park was to pay it a visit. I'll post about that experience in a few days.

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.

Mexico City's Policewomen

You see them everywhere in the Centro Historico, waving gloved hands and blowing whistles in frantic monotony: tweetweet, tweetweet, tweetweet, tweetweet, tweetweet. They are Mexico City's transitos and these days most are women.

Their presence gives evidence of liberal reforms undertaken by the Mexico City government. Over stiff opposition from male officers, women have been given police careers. Female officers are less prone to corruption, so incorporating them accomplishes two important goals: a more egalitarian society and less extortion.

Although women have broken into the formerly all-male bastion of the police force, they are used mostly in trivial positions. I've never seen one issue a citation, and drivers ignore their orders more often than not. Moreover women remain shut out of the more notoriously corrupt departments such as the transitos of Estado de Mexico.

Women now serve with the federal police in positions of real importance and, given Mexico's drug wars, of considerable danger. Female police, female prosecutors, female judges—Mexico is finally getting law enforcement working.

In the 9:00 PM darkness I sit writing at my desk in the Hotel Gillow. I hear the women, sounding like crickets, pushing the last of the rush hour traffic through the intersection at Cinco de Mayo and Isabel la Católica: tweetweet, tweetweet, tweetweet, tweetweet, tweetweet. Their sounds make me feel comfortable and reassured.

Zócalo Navidad

Back from Ecuador, I'm waiting in Mexico City for Laura's return flight from Seattle. I walk over to the Plaza de la Constitutión for a look at Christmas festivities. Commercial buildings face two sides of the Zócalo, covered with huge holiday decorations...

...that light up at night. Newspaper El Universal says the displays surrounding the plaza mayor use 80,000 colored lamp bulbs.

On the Zócalo I wander through snowy attractions, part of a program the city calls "La Magia de la Navidad." The centerpiece is the pista de nieve—the ice skating rink. Largest in the world at 200 by 100 feet, up to 400 people can skate on it at a time.

Other attractions include a ski slope that kids slide down on rubber rafts, tables full of snow for making snowmen, and a rink for motos de nieve—snowmobiles.

A large tent houses la guerra de nieve, a day-long snowball fight. Lines for this attraction are the longest: children wait for hours for an opportunity to pelt each other with snow. For most, this will be their first winter experience.

The line between private enterprise and government affairs blurs. Eighty percent of the funding for La Magia de la Navidad comes from private sources, paving the way for commercial attractions such as Toon's Land, "Where dreams come true." I'd say it's more like "Where we sell toys based on cartoon characters."

Domino's Pizza operates an outlet on the plaza, feeding festival goers with archetypal Mexican food.

As if all this isn't enough, a group of teenagers demonstrates, exacerbating traffic jams caused by street closures around the Zócalo. This group's complaint: their school has no water.

Every day, somewhere in Mexico, demonstrators shut down a road—a hallowed tradition.

The Metropolitan Cathedral seems lonely and forgotten amid all the activity. This is the biggest time of year for the Church, but nobody is paying it any attention.

Not everything is about winter sports or commercialism. The largest of the lighting displays depicts Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus—perhaps the lone reminder in all of the Zócalo that la Navidad celebrates the birth of Christ.

La Magia de la Navidad still exists, but perhaps not on the Zócalo. I find it in the posadas, in singing the old carols, and in my heart.

To all of you, Felíz Navidad.