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.

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.

Nuisance Control

At the entrance to the Teotihuacan Museum, a sign informs us about limits on our behavior. Set for the common good, we accept them gratefully.



No dogs, no bike riding, no futbol, no boom boxes. No roast turkey.

Got it.

The Museum at Teotihuacan

A rcheological workers at Teotihuacan have unearthed a wealth of objects. A museum on the site displays a selection. We wander through a series of softly lit galleries.

 

Fragments of frescoes carefully lifted from hidden walls tantalize us with glimpses into the minds of ancient artists.

During the millennium since the fall of Teotihuacan, a few pieces of pottery managed to survive, some better than others. A tiny seated figure meditates; a life-sized head seems all the more terrifying for the pieces that are missing.

The head of a singer informs in a single piece that the inhabitants of Teotihuacan practiced performing arts as well as plastic ones. The piece is perfect, miraculously surviving the fall of the city and subsequent depredations of vandals and scavengers.

Ancient Mesoamericans may not have used the wheel for transportation, but they certainly found other uses for it. The perfect form of this exquisite alabaster bowl could only have been produced on a lathe.

Sharp tools were made from obsidian, a volcanic glass that when properly worked, produces edges as keen as scalpels. The curators cleaved this large chunk of obsidian as a demonstration piece by striking it with a round stone hand hammer.

Wicked leaf-shaped knives are on display, some nearly a foot long. Outstanding among the obsidian artifacts, this knapped hook catches my imagination. It looks just like the knife used by the torturer to eviscerate Mel Gibson in Braveheart.

A finely polished bone needle illustrates yet again the sophistication and skill of Teotihuacan's toolmakers.

An entire gallery is dedicated to housing a scale model of the pyramid site. This view encompasses the north half of Teotihuacan, with the Pyramid of the Sun in the foreground and the Pyramid of the Moon in back.

Curiously missing from the museum's exhibits are metal artifacts. Probably only objects made from gold would have survived uncorroded. I imagine security considerations would preclude housing such valuables at a location so remote as this one.

A small but exquisite museum, I was torn between spending time studying the exhibits and going outside to explore the ruins.

Pensacola Naval Avation Museum

While Laura was off catching up with old friends, I visited the Pensacola Naval Avation Museum, sited on the grounds of the Naval Air Station, Pensacola, right across the bay from Fort Pickens. Housed in a large building, the museum contains a large and beautifully restored collection of historical aircraft.

Aircraft range from a Wright Brothers era contraption to modern military jets. It even has a scorched Apollo capsule. I particularly was taken with this biplane—a seaplane with wooden pontoons, hanging over a row of missile toting fighters.

A huge graphic dominates the entry hall. It bears a slogan typical of "can do" military spirit:

UNITED STATES NAVY AIRCRAFT CARRIERS

four-and-a-half acres of sovereign U. S. territory, anytime, anywhere

 

The museum ranks up there with the world's best. Scores of aircraft. an IMAX theater, and many cockpit trainers and combat simulators provide visitors with a hands-on experience. I could have easily spent a couple of days playing here. But alas, I had only the one morning.