The Life and Times of Mexico (2004)
by Earl Shorris
Norton, 744 pp.
The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) is Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz’s influential essay about Mexico. It’s controversial among some Mexicans, for making sweeping assertions about the national character.
Such as, Mexico looks to the past while the United States looks to the future. That Mexico is mestizo—half-indigenous, half-European—but hides this dualism behind a Spanish mask. That the Mexican-Spanish verb chingar (“to fuck”) stems from the name of Hernán Cortés’ concubine and translator, La Malinche. That the conquistador’s will for conquest was influenced by the Muslim Conquest of Spain. That there’s an obsession with religion, death, and time in the Mexican psyche, along with land and language.
I haven’t navigated Paz’s Labyrinth yet.
But I have read enough of Earl Shorris’ Life and Times of Mexico (2004), which leans heavily on some of Paz’s assertions in Labyrinth of Solitude, to sense that, like the United States, Mexico contains multitudes.
Communists and capitalists, Catholics and secularists in the government; Jewish roots in the industrial hub of Monterrey; rebel Zapatistas proclaiming indigenous spirituality from the jungles of Chiapas (over the Comandante’s internet connection); radical leftists in the National University (UNAM), gunned down by reactionaries from the presidential cabinet; the h-meenoob—Mayan shamans, conducting their clandestine war on time within a stone’s throw of drunken spring breakers in Cancun.
A nation whose presidents for most of the twentieth century came from a single political party, whose name is a contradiction in terms: the Institutional Revolutionaries Party (PRI).
How can the overturning of institutions, revolution, be an institution?
Once rural, now overwhelmingly urban, its metropolis thronged with campesinos—farmers and fishermen who’ve fled to the capital to scratch a living in the informal economy of its streets and squares. Rural refugees returning to one-room apartments if they’re lucky, or dustbowl squatter’s camps subject to raw sewage, flooding, and clouds of fecal matter after the rains have dried, at night on the edge of the city. Indio peasants passing criollo aristocrats and government officials as they go.
An “Indian country,” as Earl Shorris describes it—12 percent indigenous, with most of the rest of its population mestizo—whose TV personalities look like they all come from Sweden.
A country whose fate is forever tied to its neighbor to the north, where 24 percent of its population now lives. A country in the grip of one-party rule until the elections of 2000, still trying to define what it means by democracy.
A land of lush southern rainforests, wherein lie its richest resources and the worst of its poverty, whose industrial capital is concentrated in the barren deserts of the north. With all the electric sprawl and intellectual foment of the Distrito Federal in between: Mexico City, where the mayor once waged an ideological battle over time—daylight savings time—with the president. One could tell the political faction a person belonged to by the hour to which they set their watch.
A country whose capital city was originally built on an enormous body of freshwater 7,300 feet above sea level, forever dreaming the dream of green land, in a land that now has less water per-capita than Egypt. A land that spoke 175 Mesoamerican languages when it was invaded by conquistadors from the east, explorers from an empire that was itself the only truly multicultural society in Europe at the time, consisting of Jews, Christians, Muslims, Celts, Africans, and Germans—Spain. Where today it is impossible to speak a Spanish uninformed by all of the above. A country of contradictions, a culture of crossroads, a maze of mestizaje.
Mexico is a labyrinth of multitude.
The Mask of Dualism
Mexico’s dualism, its multiculturalism, its sincretismo are reified in the historic central square of Mexico City, the Zócalo.
Here, one of the oldest churches in the New World, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin (now known as the Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral), was constructed from the remains of the Aztecs’ most revered temple. The ruins of the Aztec Templo Mayor peer from the Mesoamerican underworld, under excavation since 1978.
It’s said that Cortés himself laid the first stone of the Spanish church, with one of Montezuma’s (or more accurately, with that of Montezuma’s doomed successor, Cuauhtémoc). The building blocks were taken from the Aztecs’ patron deity—from a twin temple to the sun, god of war (Huitzilopochtli), and the earthly god of rain and agriculture (Tlaloc). A spire to the god of wind (a version of Quetzalcoatl) stood between. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost of Mexica, or Aztec, culture.
The excavated stones of the Templo glare at the sunken walls of the cathedral. A serpent leers at the Virgin, whose sacred precinct is constructed on, and of, his.
In similar fashion, in the town of Izamal in the Yucatán, the remains of three Mayan pyramids—constructed one on top of the other, from the classic, late-classic, and post-classic periods—face the Basilica de Nuestra Señora de Izamal.
“The last builders here were not Mayan but Christian,” Shorris explains.
They tore down the stones of the top of the pyramid and used them to build a church in the very place the Maya had worshipped. It was the same in Cholula and Tenochitlán, and a hundred other cities and towns. The church of Izamal, like the pyramid that faces it, is made of many architectural styles, as multicultural as Spain itself.
In the side garden of the Basilica de Nuestra Señora stands a statue of a Catholic flagellant, oozing sculpted blood. On the site of the Christian sculpture, the Mayan kings and queens of Izamal used to perform their own ritual mortification of the flesh, “pierc[ing] their tongues and sexual organs, in an ecstasy of adoration.”
This betrays more than syncretism, or the layering of one culture on top of another, Shorris argues, channeling Octavio Paz. It is “the recognition, however unconscious, however unspoken, of deep similarities.”
Like the Aztec and Maya, who practiced various forms of human sacrifice, the “Spanish brought with them the Inquisition, which in the service of the Spanish God burned living human beings at the stake,” with all the sacrificial will of Abraham towards Isaac, or the Holy Father towards Son.
The most enlightened woman in seventeenth-century Mexico, the humanist scholar Sor Juana—a nun—compared the Eucharist to the festival of Huitzilopochtli, in which an image of the Aztec god, made of corn and blood, was consumed in an act of communion.
Both civilizations were “desperate to solve the questions of death,” and “terrified about questioning their own faith.”
The Aztecs brought as many slaves to the center of Tenochtitlán, “to that great market for sale as the Portuguese bring negroes,” one conquistador observed at the time of first contact.
On both sides of the Atlantic, “priests and nobility held positions of nearly equal power.”
Both religions deified a virgin mother.
Both practiced ritual mortification of the flesh.
The dualism described by Octavio Paz. The solitude in Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude—alienation from the self—comes from masking this multitude of similarities.
Place of the Cactus
In the Zócalo, the walls of the Metropolitan Cathedral stand on a lean. The ground beneath them is sinking, along with Mexico City’s water table. Tenochtitlán (the “Place of the Cactus”), where Aztecs beheld an eagle devouring a rattlesnake atop a prickly pear—according to legend, the omen that indicated where they should found a city—was constructed on a lake.
At the founding of Tenochtitlán in 1325, most of the Valley of Mexico was green. Within twenty years of first contact, local farmers complained that Spanish livestock were decimating their crops; Spanish wheat replaced indigenous corn, and failed. Drought laid waste to whatever was left. Today Mexico D.F. (the Federal District) is nearly out of water. The tap at the hotel, even in the gentrified neighborhood of Roma, smells of it.
My guide and I left the hotel across from the Parque México, in leafy Roma, for the National Museum of Anthropology in the morning, before making our way to the Zócalo.
Reading the stories that Mexico tells itself inside the brutalist structure downtown, working backwards through the exhibits of the Museo Nacional, we wandered from the Aztecs and Toltecs of the high central valley to the Mayans of the low Yucatán, from the Zapotecs and Mixtecs of the southwest coast, to the oldest of Mesoamerican cultures, the Olmecs of Tabasco, to gaze at their colossal heads.
The choice of the last native American arrivals to Mexico, the Aztecs, from an area that is now part of the Southwestern United States, as the definitive emblems of Mexican culture, the National Museum’s grand gallery, is a curious one. But it follows the logic of Mexican history.
The Aztecs weren’t called “Aztecs” until 1821, when the newly-independent country of Mexico stole their real name: the Mexica (meh-shee-kah).
After winning sovereignty from Spain in the Mexican War of Independence (1810-1821), Mexico, no longer New Spain, needed a name for itself. “New New Spain” had an awkward ring to it. So the fledgling nation adopted the title of the people the Spanish had displaced, the Mexica.
If the inhabitants of this newly-minted, mestizo nation, the leaders of which were mostly criollo (purely European), were now named after indigenous Mexicans, how should it distinguish the indigenous Mexica themselves (the inhabitants of Tenochtitlán, who were ‘indigenous’ to the Valley of Mexico for about as long as the Spanish, some 300 years)?
The Mexica were dubbed the Aztecs, three centuries after their empire ceased to exist, in 1821.
The demonym acquired added significance after the Mexican American War a quarter of a century later (1846-48), when the U.S. usurped much of northern Mexico. Including the land from whence the “Aztecs” came, Azatlán, an undefined area of the U.S. Southwest.
For a large group of Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and Chicanos living in the United States, the origin of these people in Aztlán, hence Aztecs, is of vital importance, for it allows them to lay claim to legitimate residence in the U.S. and […] ownership of the land…
-Life and Times of Mexico
“What made them so violent?,” my guide shuddered as we turned away from the smashed skull of a sacrificial victim, seeming to foreshadow the death-cult of twenty-first-century narcos.
When the Aztecs founded what would become Mexico City less than two hundred years before the arrival of the Spanish, they didn’t really have a choice. They were driven from every habitable corner of the central valley, forced to survive on rattlesnake meat and insects while they attempted to farm the middle of a lake.
Not without reason were the violent invaders expelled from arable land. In a scene that would make the Game of Thrones “Red Wedding” look tame by comparison, the Mexica offended the locals they discovered in the Valley of Mexico.
After a brief skirmish with the new arrivals, the king of the locals offered the Aztecs his daughter’s hand in marriage—a time-honored gesture of truce. The Aztecs showed their appreciation by presenting the king, on his daughter’s wedding night, with one of their high priests—dressed in the flayed skin of the bride.
The locals asked their guests to leave.
Within a century of founding Tenochtitlán, the Mexica went from exile to empire, and developed a new system of aquatic farming. Within two, they built one the largest, and cleanest, cities on earth, in time for the arrival of the Spaniards (whom they considered filthy—the invaders, unlike Mesoamericans, seldom bathed).
Like the Spanish, however, the Aztecs presided over a mestizaje, “the mixture of races and cultures, that was Spain, but never with comfort, never with ease.”
In the word’s of Earl Shorris, in The Life and Times of Mexico:
The Aztecs had not invented Mesoamerican culture; they had won it, and they had not quite known what to do with it […] There was a neurotic streak in the culture. The sense of limits had been lost. They took too much, sacrificed too many, turned too harsh and too sybaritic at the same time. The sinewy invaders had become the nervous conquerors.
After Hernán Cortés made landfall near what is now Veracruz in 1519, vassal city-states that the Spanish encountered between the coast and the capital turned against the Aztecs—who had exploited them economically, taken them as slaves or sacrificial victims. The first of these proposed an alliance with the Spaniards; Cortés, like the early Mexica, responded with annihilation.
The Spanish began a trend that would continue through the Mexican War of Independence and the Mexican American War, of attackers launching assaults on the capital—the “Halls of Montezuma,” as the U.S. Marine Corps hymn begins—by advancing inland from the port of Veracruz.
The rest of the legend is well-known: Montezuma took the date of Cortés’ arrival for the return of the god Quetzalcoatl, due to a coincidence in the Aztec calendar (according to some, he was also rumored to be bearded and white). Due to religious ideology, the emperor declined to quash the invasion, though the Spaniards were outnumbered by astronomical proportions—if not for the rebellion of Aztec vassal states, the introduction of smallpox, and the glaring military blunders, from the Spanish perspective, of Montezuma.
Shorris muses:
Mexican history cannot possibly have happened as it did. The facts of the Spanish invasion make no sense. A few hundred Spaniards under the command of a lawyer, with no military experience, could not have brought down the great Aztec Empire.
By a twist of fate, the viceroyalty of one empire, New Spain, established itself atop the sacred precinct of another, in what is now the Zócalo of Mexico City.
Love Songs for Democracy
In the plaza of a smaller zócalo, on the outer slopes of Mexico City, sipping beer and coffee with an outlaw friend, the art critic Dave Hickey discovered the answer to a nagging question:
Why so many love songs—in American pop music, during the second half of the twentieth century?
A dignified young Mexican couple, dressed to the nines in black tie and white lace, chaperoned by an elderly duenna in formal black regalia, were obstructed as they tried to enter the plaza. They were waylaid by two dirt-brown dogs, shamelessly humping in the street.
Hickey and his friend, “asshole gringos” that they were, chortled at the awkward tableau. They watched the young suitor bite his lip, while the girl stared at her shoes, as their chaperone policed the couple’s reactions, glancing desperately about, hoping no one would notice them noticing the dogs, who showed no sign of stopping.
It occurred to Hickey—these kids, with their duenna and formalized Latin American courtship structure, didn’t require a wide range of love songs. The dogs didn’t need any love song at all.
That was the answer to his question:
We need so many love songs because the imperative rituals of flirtation, courtship, and mate selection that are required to guarantee the perpetuation of the species and the maintenance of social order—that are hardwired in mammals and socially proscribed in traditional cultures—are up for grabs in mercantile democracies. These things need to be done, but we don’t know how to do them, and, being free citizens, we won’t be told how to do them. Out of necessity, we create the institution of love songs. We saturate our society with a burgeoning, ever-changing proliferation of romantic options, a cornucopia of choices, a panoply of occasions […] We cannot do without it. Because it’s hard to find someone you love, who loves you—but you can begin, at least, by finding someone who loves your love song. And that, I realized, sitting there in the zócalo […] is what I do: I write love songs for people who live in a democracy.
-Air Guitar: Letters on Art and Democracy
A lot has changed since Hickey recognized his calling in Mexico City, including “mercantile democracy” in the United States—to the extent that “mercantile” was an accurate description of the U.S. economy, even in Hickey’s day. The two markets are more interconnected by pop culture, global technocracy and social media than ever before, and the great anti-mercantile force in the recent history of either country, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), is bemoaned on both sides of the border.
Despite the many differences, there are lessons from Mexico in the twentieth century that may apply to the U.S. in the twenty-first, to be found in The Life and Times of Mexico: a new political coalition (the PAN) that “would ask people to choose not between parties but between their own deeply held political beliefs and moral views”; an incoherent new spiritualism driving the Mexican Revolution, “an alternative structure, even if the alternative is anarchy, in which there is no state at all”; the “comedy of the language of the Revolution,” in which the Mexican Charlie Chaplin, Cantinflas, an ironist, “defined the word ‘revolution’ by making language, especially official language, incomprehensible”; “the bureaucratization of what had been an autonomous university […] fallen into the hands of managers […] tied to the government”; the very idea of Institutionalized Revolution itself.
As Shorris observed in 2004, while still acknowledging the United States’ own history of racism:
Pluralism was to be the great strength of the United States, while the dualism of Mexico—religions, cultures, and races in deadly opposition—was to be its burden. A pluralistic society diffuses oppositions and overcomes them. There cannot be a dozen different certainties. As certainty is transcended, science comes questioning; pluralism suggests seeking the new. Freedom, especially freedom of inquiry, is in the very nature of pluralism.
“A cornucopia of choices, a panoply of occasions,”—pluralism in Hickey’s words.
I don’t know to what extent these remain accurate descriptions of either country. But I still think of myself, like Hickey, as someone who writes love songs for people who live in a democracy, or something like it.
I heard another love song—after we left the Zócalo, at a birthday party for my guide’s friend (and, as it happened to be a presidential holiday, for Benito Juarez). On his apartment terrace the host had dangled a blacklight from the rooftop, bathing the tops of the jacaranda trees, in full bloom across the city, in purple iridescence. The Mexican equivalent of Zora Neale Hurston’s “will to adorn.”
As Popocatépetl, the volcano campesinos call Don Goyo smoldered in the distance (two weeks ago, the host informed us, his terrace was dusted in ash), I was informed that this was an authentic D.F. celebration that few gringos experience. My plastic cup emblazoned with a sugar skull agreed, its contents rippling to the vibrations of cumbia and reggaeton.
The love song began—Beyoncé’s latest, “Texas Hold ‘Em.” A rooftop of Mexican dancers erupted to the opening words, “This ain’t Texas.”
No kidding, I thought, glancing at the volcano belching in the distance.
On second thought…
I’ve spent most of my life in the shadow of Old Mexico. In the city where I was born—Houston, named for the general who defeated Antonio López de Santa Anna, when Texas was part of northern Mexico—I have friends who went to high school with Beyoncé Knowles.
Texas, Southern California, even Oregon, where I’ve resided for the last sixteen years, were all under the influence of New Spain.
Of the 24 percent of Mexican citizens living in the United States, la guía, the guide I met in Oregon is one. She was raised in la capital. Her friends at this authentic cumpleaños were singing a song I barely knew, in the voice of my hometown hero. One more in a burgeoning, ever-changing proliferation of options, a “cornucopia of choices” up for grabs in the twenty-first century, on both sides of the border. An archive of shared interests, the “institution of love songs.”
We cannot do without it.
Church of Revolution
It’s said that in Mexico there are two religions: the Church and Revolution.
What is called the Mexican Revolution “was not a revolution but a series of civil wars, in which the forces divided again and again and turned against each other,” per Shorris.
There was no Mexican Revolution in 1910. It was a dream, and the dreamers are many; I am among them […]
It was a Revolution written, painted, sculpted, filmed, but not real, not yet. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, or even more died for art.
An idea.
The civil wars of 1910-1920 produced no fundamental change in the social order, but they defined Mexico for the rest of the twentieth century. They did produce a new constitution in 1917, the first socialist constitution in history—predating even the Soviets’, who were just beginning their own revolution, by five years.
A new state had been defined. From that moment forward Mexico would be a democracy with a socialist constitution, and it would pass nearly a hundred years without enjoying democracy […]
The word “Revolutionary” was writ in the names of Mexico’s political parties after 1929, with the founding of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and later, the Partido of Revolutionary Democrats (PRD).
By that time “all the danger had seeped out of the word.”
“[R]evolutionary” was a word that could include all the other political words. It could be invested with whatever one wanted […]
Like the word “democracy,” in the United States in 2024.
The Mexicans could invest the word with whatever enabled them to continue to expect a better life for their children, if not for themselves. If revolution was not the accomplishment of paradise on earth, it was at least the promise of paradise. It did not mean “now”; it meant “someday.”
In other words, mañana.
Women Who Fight
We saw signs of another revolution, en route to the Zócalo. From the upper deck of the Turibus as it inched its way down the Paseo de la Reforma, past—what else?—the Avenida Revolución.
La Glorieta de Cristóbol Colón, tagged in purple—a toppled statue of Columbus, replaced with a purple female silhouette, surrounded with the names and photographs of Mexico’s missing women.
Rechristened “La Glorieta de Mujeres que Luchan”—Women who Fight.
The high was only 84 degrees Fahrenheit—typical for the warmest season in the Valley of Mexico. But the open deck of the bus had been absorbing solar heat all morning by the time we boarded it near the Museum of Anthropology. Montezuma had taken his revenge, abetted by the antibiotics I was taking for a throat infection. Breakfast promised more vendetta, so I abstained. After an hour of inhaling the capital’s legendary exhaust fumes on an empty stomach, I found myself in a sun-induced trance. We stumbled into the Zócalo.
The expansive plaza I knew from films was missing, closed. Everyone was shunted up against the sides of the cathedral. Beyond the barricades a bass drum was booming, aggressively; I wondered if the sunken walls would hold.
Sound check—preparations for a concert that evening, a festival sponsored by the government of Mexico City: Tiempo de Mujeres (Time of Women).
Even with underreported statistics, 10-11 women are killed daily in Mexico, with a 95% impunity rate. Only 1 in 10 victims report their attackers due to fear and distrust of the authorities. Hence the photos adorning the statue on La Reforma. And the political revolution expected in June.
It doesn’t look good for the Party of Institutional Revolution (PRI), or the Revolutionary Democrats (PRD). But it does look promising for the fairer sex.
For the first time in history, the Mexican president is poised to be a woman. The left-wing populist candidate, backed by a coalition of the nation’s ecology and labor movements, is polling at 60%. She’s also the country’s first Jewish presidential nominee.
Trailing her at 35% is another female candidate, backed by a coalition of Mexico’s three major political parties—the PRI, PRD, and the party that finally broke the Institutional Revolutionaries’ seventy-year stranglehold on Mexican politics in 2000—the pro-capitalist, pro-Catholic partido of the industrial north, the National Action Party (PAN).
The Revolutionaries have allied with capitalism and the Church, to stop the revolution.
With a second female candidate trailing the populist revolution, even if the establishment wins, there will still be a revolution in Mexico. The third party candidate, a man, is polling at less than 5%.
I’d heard none of this at the time. All I heard was the bass drum. Sun-struck, dehydrated and fasting in front of the cathedral, the Zócalo waxed intense. La guía stopped to buy maize cakes prepared by a street vendor, before we headed to a nice restaurant overlooking the Templo Mayor, to eat tortillas made of flour. I smelled the clash of cultures, “The God of Bread and the God of Corn.”
The saying was true. There was the Church, embodied by the Metropolitan Cathedral, and the across from it, the Revolution, sound-checking the Tiempo de Mujeres. The electrified kick drum was punctuated by the acoustics of smaller drums, those of Aztec curanderos selling ritual cleanses. Baths of smoking copal, incense and herbs. A clash of worlds reenacted, five hundred years after the fact.
Tenochtitlán in the heart of Mexico City.
War of the Virgin
There have been other revolutions, since the Spanish invasion of 1521. In hindsight the timing appears auspicious, cyclical, in keeping with the Mesoamerican infatuation with time. What is called the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920 was preceded a hundred years earlier by the War of Independence, spanning roughly the same duration, from 1810-1821.
The War of Independence was not a political revolution, but a religious one. And in Mexico, according to some, time is a religion.
The Maya based their wars on questions of time. Every major cycle of time was “seated”—that is, had its religious center—in one city-state. Power accompanied the seating of the cycle and the […] armies of the Maya city-states […] went to war with one another over it.
The return of the god Quetzalcoatl, inherited by the Aztecs from the Maya and Olmecs, was also a question of time. It precipitated the fall of Tenochtitlán.
In 2001, when the current President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (“AMLO”)— whose sexenio (six-year term) is coming to an end with the elections this June—was the mayor of Mexico City, he and President Fox differed over the use of daylight savings time.
As a result, all Mexico except Mexico City operated on daylight savings time. The argument over the control of time led to neighbors, businesses, and government bureaus choosing different versions of the correct hour. Leftists and rightists set their watches to different hours. It was ridiculous and chaotic, a contemporary form of the battles fought over the seating of the cycle of years by the post-classic Maya.
—Life and Times
The ancient battles over time “continue in other forms in Mexico, reminders of the long shadows of history, the genes of culture.”
When I started dating my guide, I discovered she has a calendrical obsession. (Things aren’t serious, I’m assured, unless she shares her Calendar app.) La guía also has a penchant for astrology.
I chalked this up to cosmic superstition, and good planning. Now I wonder if it’s not the long shadows of history, genes of her culture.
“Mexicans are the descendants of precise astronomers and powerful astrologers,” Shorris notes. Millenarians who viewed time as a series of cycles, each culminating in the end of a world. Mathematicians who invented the concept of zero centuries before it travelled from the Middle East to Europe, and were understandably obsessed with their calendars—timing is everything, when you’re predicting the end of life as we know it.
In bizarre fashion, a wrinkle in time set the stage for the end of New Spain, in the years leading up to the War of Independence. The wrinkle concerned the question of when Christianity had arrived in the New World. According to historical accounts tinged with Catholic legend, a converted Aztec given the Christian name Juan Diego was the first Mesoamerican to embrace Catholicism—in 1531, after he beheld several visions of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the matron saint of Mexico. According to tradition, an image of Nuestra Señora miraculously appeared on Juan Diego’s cloak, or Tilma, one of the most important relics in Latin America.
In 1794, a priest named Fray Servando argued that Christianity had come to the Americas a millennium earlier, and expounded his theory in a sermon. The image on Juan Diego’s tilma was actually brought to Mesoamerica in the sixth century, according to Fray Servando, marking the first conversion of the Americas a thousand years before the arrival of Spanish Catholicism. Juan Diego had merely rediscovered the cloak in 1531.
There were earlier theories about the conversion of Mesoamerica by the Apostle St. Thomas, appearing in the guise of Quetzalcoatl, but the chronology was ridiculous, off by five hundred years. By the eighteenth century, the Saint-Thomas-as-Quetzalcoatl theory had gone out of fashion. Fray Servando’s innovation was to suggest that it was a different St. Thomas, of Mylapore, who had evangelized Mexico in the sixth century.
His timing was fortuitous.
Spain had recently cracked down on its colonies, brutally deploying troops in New Spain for the first time in two centuries—against the Jesuits, an order that educated and employed thousands of indio and mestizo converts. There were political and economic reasons for the revolt against Spain, but as Shorris argues, it was not a popular uprising in the traditional sense. Fray Servando was appalled by the revolutions of 1776 and 1789, in the British colonies and France.
The revolution in Mexico was a “theological rebellion” :
The tall, white, bearded man known to the Indians as Quetzalcoatl had converted the people of New Spain long before the arrival of the Spaniards. As unreasonable as the argument sounds to the twenty-first century mind, it had a powerful effect on the people of New Spain. It fulfilled their dreams of religious, social and—did they dare say it?—national equality.
If the Mesoamerican deity Quetzalcoatl was actually a Christian saint who evangelized the Indians a thousand years before the arrival of Spanish monks, the souls of New Spain were no longer beholden to the most powerful mechanism of the Spanish crown, the Catholic Church, for salvation. Like the growth of Enlightenment ideals out of the Protestant Reformation, theological independence in Mexico was adjacent to political independence. However, with a few exceptions like the enlightened humanist scholar Sor Juana, New Spain during the colonial period was “the most unscientific part of the Western world.” The Mexican War of Independence would look very different from the revolutions of 1776 and 1789.
Rather than buttressing its declaration of independence with Enlightenment ideals about the republic of the future, New Spain turned to the distant past, conflating a god of the Aztecs, Maya, and Olmecs with St. Thomas. It couldn’t have settled on a more potent symbol.
“If the visitor to Mexico and its history were to know only a single word in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs,” Shorris says, it would be the name of the god famously translated by D.H. Lawrence as “The Plumed Serpent”—Quetzalcoatl. The “only god of ancient Mexico who still shares the throne of culture and, in some places, of belief.”
A “feathered serpent,” one could argue, is symbolically present on the Mexican flag, as an eagle and a rattlesnake.
Quetzalcoatl appears in various forms throughout Mexican history—as the two St. Thomases, as Hernán Cortés, as the god of the Olmecs, Maya, and Mexica; and as a priest in Tula, one of the many city-states in the Valley of Mexico before Tenochtitlán. His legends are “a mixture of the divine and secular.”
In the divine version, human life has ended on earth. Quetzalcoatl descends to the underworld, finds the bones of the dead, and resurrects human life on earth [by spilling his blood on the bones].
An Aztec Orpheus, or Jesus.
“He is also the discoverer of corn, which permits civilization,” as Prometheus does with fire.
In a more secular story, Quetzalcoatl is a monk from Tula seduced into drunkenness and incest by three wizards, who flees the city in sin, setting sail on the great ocean… before self-immolating and rising as Venus, the Morning Star.
The various attributes of Quetzalcoatl, including similarities to Greek and Christian myth—the drunkenness of Noah, preceding his own quest to save humanity on a great sea; the self-sacrifice and drawing of Quetzalcoatl’s blood to save humankind; a resurrection and Assumption—made him ripe for syncretism with Catholic doctrine. The fact that he was rumored to have a beard, and since at least the time of Cortés had been associated with Mediterranean skin tone, made Quetzalcoatl an acceptable doppelgänger for St. Thomas. What’s more:
One reading of [the] secular version has to do with human sacrifice: Quetzalcoatl opposed it, suggesting instead the sacrifice of butterflies.
In much the same way, Old Testament stories imply the Levites replaced human sacrifice with animal rituals. According to René Girard, the Crucifixion gave the lie to scapegoating by exposing the innocence of the victim, marking the decline of human sacrifice (the Spanish Inquisition and auto da fe notwithstanding).
The figure of Quetzalcoatl, among the oldest gods of Mexico, was the perfect bridge between ancient Mesoamerica and Mexican Catholicism. He was St. Thomas, who Christianized indigenous America before Columbus, according to a priest named Fray Servando in 1794. A politically expedient myth.
The Mexican War of Independence was fought under the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the vision on the Tilma that St. Thomas/Quetzalcoatl had carried to the New World sometime after 500 AD.
The insurgents in the War of Independence lacked a flag. A canvas portrait of Our Lady was scrawled with the grito—the Mexican cry of independence (Viva la religión! Viva Nuestra Señora Santissima de Guadalupe! …)—and attached to a long pole by a dissolute priest.
The man who uttered the famous grito in Dolores was a priest of that town named Miguel Hidalgo. A professional gambler and womanizer, if Hidalgo “followed the rules of the Church of Rome and Spain at all, it was with a sense of irony. He made jokes about the self-mutilation of saints, occasionally raised questions about the notion of a virgin birth, and preferred preaching to saying mass.” He had nearly gone bankrupt when the Spanish crown altered the financial structure of New Spain in 1804. While he questioned the notion of immaculate conception, the apparition of the Virgin was a divine intervention in the affairs of Miguel Hidalgo and Mexico:
St. Thomas/Quetzalcoatl was a conversion of the mind […] Only the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Holy Mother with a Brown Face, could have united Mexico; she was the bond among criollos, mestizos, and natives, body and soul.
The War of the Virgin began with a middle-aged priest, pistols, and grito, but soon attracted a ragtag procession of followers between Dolores and Guanajuato, where Hidalgo’s army of peasants overwhelmed Spanish swords with machetes, hoes, and sheer numbers. The loyalists, including women and children, were massacred; “The Virgin of Guadalupe was no longer an innocent.” Comanche warriors from the north joined the revolution. Hidalgo’s revolt continued until power went to his head, he dressed himself in extravagant clothes, lost the faith of his followers, became disorganized, and no longer led an army but a mob. When his luck ran out he recanted and was executed by firing squad.
A student of Hidalgo’s, a forty-five-year-old priest named Morelos, took over the revolution in 1811. Also a man who “enjoyed women, and fathered at least three illegitimate children,” Morelos encouraged parades and drunkenness in victory for his men. Anticipating the constitution of 1814, “Morelos combined ideas learned from the French and American revolutions with his utter devotion to religion and the Virgin of Guadalupe and the egalitarian notions symbolized by her.” While he was a caste (part African), he despised Indians, and “Indians hated him.” Nonetheless he proclaimed the end of slavery, the caste system, and unfair taxation of indigenous people, declaring that “people of all colors, ranging from criollos to castes to Indians” should refer to themselves as equals—“Americans.” Morelos was also executed by firing squad.
In the most ironic turn of the war, Morelos was defeated at the Battle of Valladolid in 1813 by a man born in the same town, Augustín de Iturbide. Eight years later, Iturbide made good the claim of Independence for New Spain.
Like the Mexican Revolution, the wars of 1810-1821 devolved into a “series of civil wars, in which the forces divided again and again and turned against each other.” With the death of Morelos, the War of Independence devolved into a series of guerrilla maneuvers.
Augustín de Iturbide, the man who defeated Morelos, was appointed by the viceroy of Spain to destroy the guerrilla factions who followed in Morelos’ wake. He thought better of it, and sided with the guerrilla leaders to declare Independence from Spain instead. Iturbide, the “dandy of the viceroy’s court, criollo and ultraconservative, had succeeded where the two radical priests had failed.” On July 21, 1822, Augustín de Iturbide, a distant relative of my guide, was crowned the first emperor of Mexico.
Iturbide was not long for the crown, or this world. He too was shot, when he returned to Mexico.
A popular war hero came inland from Veracruz, where he had defeated an invading force of Spaniards, and forced Iturbide into exile. General Antonio López de Santa Anna gave the country over to its first president, a former general in the insurgent army, Félix Fernández [renamed “Guadalupe Victoria”].
Thus did the man who defeated Texans at the Alamo defeat la guía’s great grandfather, Iturbide. Fourteen years after ushering the first president of Mexico into the capital, Santa Anna was defeated by the general who gave a name to my hometown, Sam Houston. New Spain was renamed after the Mexica, and the Mexica were renamed after their mythical homeland, somewhere near West Texas, Azatlán.
In an irony that would have pleased the author of Don Quixote, “the Virgin of Guadalupe gave birth to the Aztecs.”
French Empire
In another series of ironies, the French Revolution gave birth to Mexico’s second emperor, Maximillian. As revolution in France led to the Napoleonic Empire, revolution in Mexico led to the Second Empire of Mexico, ruled by France. A Hapsburg descendent of Charles V—the King of Spain who dispatched Hernán Cortés to Tenochtitlán—Maximillian was sent on an errand to rule Mexico. The man who sent him was the son of Napoleon Bonaparte himself, Napoleon III.
Ever since Independence, Mexico was beset by struggles between Liberals and Conservatives. Between the first president Guadalupe Victoria (1824) and the first republican Benito Juarez (1858), the presidency changed hands over fifty times. In the interim, Mexico lost half its territory to the United States in the Mexican American War (1846-1848), and became a Republic under Juarez. Liberals established the first democratic constitution (1857)—a source of contention between the reformers who had penned it, hoping to curtail the church’s powers, and Catholic conservatives who opposed it. A violent civil war (1857-1861) known as La Reforma (The War of the Reform) ensued, until the United States, which had just invaded the Halls of Montezuma ten years earlier, again sent war ships to the port of Veracruz, this time to assist the Liberals under Benito Juarez.
The U.S. was less concerned with liberal democracy in Mexico than with the Monroe Doctrine: preventing foreign intervention in the American sphere of influence. During one of his many presidencies Santa Anna, the general who had overthrown Mexico’s first emperor, entertained plans to install the second, perhaps from abroad. After the bloody Reforma, Conservative desire for a strong monarchy intensified, along with Conservative hopes of restoring the power they’d lost during Benito Juarez’s Liberal reforms. As the United States feared, Mexican Conservatives turned to a foreign power, France. By then the authors of the Monroe Doctrine were too embroiled in their own Civil War to intervene in Mexico.
As a descendent of the king who founded New Spain, Maximillian seemed like a good fit. Mexicans on both sides of the political divide were enamored with French culture. When the French army, at the invitation of disgruntled Conservatives, attacked Puebla on May 5, 1862, Mexican forces repelled the invasion (whence Cinco de Mayo). A year later, the second French intervention in Mexico succeeded.
The Conservatives got more than they bargained for. Maximillian, an Austrian puppet backed by the French army, proved to be quite liberal. Rather than lightening Mexico’s mestizo population with an influx of European blood (as Conservatives had hoped), he passed laws guaranteeing freedom of speech and labor rights, especially to Mexico’s indigenous people, whom he adored. In some ways, the Second Mexican Empire backed by Conservatives proved more liberal than the reformist Republic, however short lived. After the end of the American Civil War in 1865, the U.S. resumed material aid to Juarez’s Republican forces. Napoleon III began withdrawing French troops, and the monarchy collapsed. Maximillian was tried and executed by the restored Republican government in 1867.
These histories are writ large where Maximillian resided, in Chapultepec Castle—which a Texan is inclined to think of as the “Mexican Alamo.” When the Marines invaded Chapultepec at the climax of the Mexican American War, outnumbering the troops Santa Anna had failed to muster to defend it, young Mexican cadets leapt to their deaths from the hillside fortress rather than surrender. Legend has it that the last of these plunging Niños Héroes draped himself in the Mexican flag.
The Cristero
If the Conservative overthrow of Benito Juarez was a revolution of the rich, the Cristero Wars were a revolution of the church. From 1926 to 1929, the two religions in Mexico, the Church and Revolution, were one.
The reformas of Benito Juarez enshrined in the 1857 Republican constitution—most notably, the nationalization of church wealth and land—like representative democracy, had not come to pass. The late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century was dominated by the rule of one man, a president in name only, the dictatorial Porfirio Díaz, who managed to modernize Mexico with railroads and electricity while squashing free speech and civil liberties, during the Porfiriato (1876-1911). (Nostalgia for the Porfiriato, when Mexico experienced economic growth in thrall to U.S. oil, railroad, and banking interests, is immortalized in the period costumes of the mariachi.)
The Porfiriato restoration of church political and economic power came to an end, along with the Díaz regime, with the approach of the Mexican Revolution—at least on paper. The constitution of 1917 called, again, for the nationalization of church property and foreign-held interests, curtailment of religious teaching, and the complete separation of church and state. Again Mexico was declared a democracy in ink, though now a socialist one.
The constitutional demands of the Mexican Revolution, “written, painted, sculpted, filmed, but not real, not yet,” only came to fruition, partially, during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (Mexico’s FDR, one might analogize), in the 1930s and 40s. An era of land redistribution (to indio peasants this time, not hacienda estates), nationalization of the oil industry (PEMEX), labor rights and other left-leaning reforms, while communists and fascists vied for political power.
Between the Mexican Revolution, in which a young Lázaro Cárdenas fought for various factions, and the Cárdenas administration, another president did enforce one aspect of the 1917 constitution—restrictions on church power. Responding to the belated implementation of these anticlerical laws in 1926, the archbishop of Mexico declared that Roman Catholics could no longer accept the 1917 constitution. The president, Elías Calles, responded with more restrictions:
There would be no more religious processions in Mexico, foreign priests and nuns were to be deported, Church schools were to be closed, monasteries and convents were to be closed, and all priests were to register with civil authorities.
In another irony of history, the archbishop responded to this crackdown born of the socialist constitution, a product of the Mexican Revolution, by instigating a conservative revolution—using a time-honored tactic of the labor left:
[T]he archbishop declared a strike. For the next three years no last rites were given, no babies were baptized, and no masses were said.
President Calles was pleased: “the suspension of Catholic rights would cost The Church and its adherents thousands upon thousands of members.” The Church declared war.
In small towns and villages violence erupted to the cry of Viva Cristo Rey! (Long live Christ the King), as the army confronted rebels with machine guns and cavalry. The Cristero resistance was led in large part by women, who had little recourse against the machismo culture of the time (including that of the Federal troops they were now fighting), except the consolation of faith. Indigenous farmers joined the Catholics, though often as much to protect what remained of their land as to fight for Cristo Rey. Like the Zapatista rebellion to come (1994), the Cristero resistance was ensconced in the countryside alongside indios, though in this rebellion the Indians were allied with religious conservatives. “Atrocities were committed on both sides. Neither the religious Mexicans nor the liberal Mexicans showed any sense of limits.”
The Cristero rebellion reached a nadir at the end of the Calles presidency in 1928. As his successor was being feted at an inaugural luncheon, a twenty-seven-year-old caricaturist stepped forward to show a sketch of the new president to the man of the hour, Álvero Obregón. When he approached Obregón’s table, the artist drew a pistol from his pocket and shot the president-elect several times.
The assassin implicated a Catholic nun known as Mother Conchita (“little Conception”) in the plot—"his advisor, confessor, symbol of the Virgin of Guadalupe.” Mother Conchita exerted an “almost hypnotic” influence over the artist, León Toral, convincing the impressionable young man that he had to sacrifice his own life to save “la religión.”
During the trial a crowd attacked the nun, smashing several vertebrae so that for the rest of her life Mother Conchita was confined to an iron corset. León Toral was sentenced to death. As the firing squad raised their arms, Toral raised his into the form of a cross, faithful to the end. His corseted co-conspirator was sentenced to twenty years for the death of president-elect Obregón.
The young man’s version of the Virgin, Mother Conchita, fared better. She was able to leave prison early, married, and became a painter. Until the shadow of a newly erected building obscured her light, she worked in a studio in Mexico City on Avenida Álvero Obregón.
On a street named after the most distinguished victim of the Cristero rebellion.
Macario
Mexico, like certain individuals in the words of Walt Whitman, “contains multitudes.” And wherever there is a multitude incorporated in one body, be it Plato’s Republic or the Individual, in Mexico as in the U.S., there will be irony and contradiction.
A conservative Sister turned revolutionary Svengali, turned unassuming artist, Mother Conchita. A young artist turned religious reactionary, her victim, León Toral. Women fighting for religious freedom in the hills in 1926; women fighting for their lives, and the first female presidency, in the Zócalo in 2024. Priests turned radicals. An ultraconservative Spanish loyalist turned Republican freedom fighter, crowned the first monarch of Mexico. Augustín de Iturbide, ousted by the generalissimo who led Mexican forces to victory against the Alamo, then failed to properly fortify the “Mexican Alamo,” Chapultepec Castle, against the U.S. invasion of Mexico. Antonio López de Santa Anna was derided, in the end, by Mexicans and Texans alike. An eleven-term president who considered turning Mexico over to a foreign power—a descendent of the King who conquered the Aztecs, who would in turn rule Mexico for the French, for a few years, Maximillian. An Austrian puppet of racist Conservatives and Napoleon III, who nonetheless “imagined himself a Mexican,” took a Mexican woman, “la india bonita, for his mistress,” and “loved the Indians”—more so than the Liberal reformer he was sent to displace, a son of indigenous Zapotecs himself, President Benito Juarez.
Of all the men who ruled Mexico, from the fall of Cuauhtémoc to the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas four hundred years later, not one truly loved its indigenous people, except Maximillian. He made laws protecting their communal lands, and he gave land to those Indians who had none. He said the military officers, judges, and Catholic Church hierarchy were the worst of Mexico and the Indians its best.
Lázaro Cárdenas eventually fulfilled many of Maximillian’s indigenous dreams, and the promises of Benito Juarez’s 1857 Republican constitution, and the democratic-socialist constitution of 1917, making him the most popular Mexican president of the twentieth century.
Yet the party structure Cárdenas helped establish—the Party of the Mexican Revolution, née the National Revolutionary Party, ultimately the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)—would exert one-party, corporatist rule over Mexico until democracy finally succeeded, at the ballot box at least, with the election of Vicente Fox in 2000. His party, the conservative, Catholic PAN, began as a movement of fascist sympathizers opposed to Cárdenas in 1937.
Today the two parties, Revolutionaries and Catholic Conservatives, are united against the first woman, a Jew, expected to win the presidency. A projected victory for feminism—yet it wasn’t until the election of Fox and the conservative PAN that Mexican academics began to examine the Cristeros—who had many sympathizers, especially women, but had hitherto been ignored as a band of religious fanatics—seriously.
Whichever corner of Mexico’s maze of multitudes is salient at any given moment—whether it’s the secular leftism of Elías Calles (“El Jefe Maximato”) repressing Catholics, or the reactionary government of the Dirty Wars in the 1960s and 1970s clamping down, like the U.S., on suspected Marxists by using the tactics of right-wing death squads; whether Mexico’s indios are supported by religious Conservatives or a radical online leftist movement named after a Mexican Revolutionary hero (the Zapatistas); whether the nation’s folk corridos are sung in praise of insurgent priests, Catholic nuns, Revolucionarios or narcos, the majority of Mexicans go about quietly, perhaps silently sympathizing with one faction or being terrorized by another, as they carry on with the business of living.
Some are comfortable, many more are not, even in times of relative prosperity—with an unemployment rate allegedly hovering around 3-4%, comparable to the U.S., Mexico has one of the highest income gaps in the world. As one aphorism goes, here, if you want a job, you must invent one. As often as not, in the sector to which half the country belongs, the “informal economy” :
the nation of jugglers, street vendors, seamstresses, maids, day laborers, thieves, fire-eaters, bead stringers, rubber tree tappers, clowns, charcoal makers, fortune-tellers, shoeshiners, and legions of aging men in makeshift uniforms who watch the cars that need no watching.
There’s evidence of the informal economy in the weekend bazaars of gentrified Roma, where discount electronics are sold alongside sumptuous handmade beauty products made of coveted local ingredients that most norteños would pay a pretty penny for, next to medicinal tinctures of contested legality extracted from indigenous plants and fungi, in Mexico City.
If you want a job you must create one. If you cannot, according to Shorris, no people are as charitable to their own, to the people they trust. When it comes to friends and family, Mexican generosity knows no bounds. But the generosity does not necessarily extend to strangers, or “to distant relations, as in the state and its citizens or subjects […] and certainly it does not exist between economic or social classes.”
In the midst of the “Mexican Miracle”—that golden age of postwar prosperity shared by countries as far flung as Cambodia and the U.S. after World War II, which gave rise to the 1960s resort mecca of Acapulco—in 1960, my guide’s grandfather produced the first Mexican film nominated for an Oscar.
Macario, the protagonist, works in the informal sector. At the beginning of the film, he’s a woodcutter, hauling on his back what he laboriously collects in the forest to sell as fuel for ovens in the city. One of his buyers is a poultry chef, roasting an amount of food unfathomable to the poor Macario, bound for the tables of the wealthy on Día de Los Muertos.
As the opening credits explain, in abysmal English translation:
The “Day of the the Dead” is celebrated in Mexico in a unique way, because Mexicans have a strange, deeply-rooted understanding of death […] This cult of the dead dates back 8,000 years to the indigenous peoples of Mexico, but during the 16th and 17th centuries their customs and beliefs were mixed with those of Christianity, so nowadays, their rites and practices are a mixture of both cultures.
Sincretismo. The dualism in Octavio Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude.
In the second act, Macario invents a new job: healing patients with incurable diseases, with the help of a magic elixir provided by Death himself. The peasant parlays Death’s miraculous healing water into a lucrative business. The only caveat being that he has a limited supply of the tonic, and Death has the final say as to which clients are worth his charity.
Likewise, Macario gets to determine which of three supernatural strangers are worth his charity: God, the Devil, or Death. The whole plot turns on Macario’s desire, just once, to consume a turkey dinner all by himself. After his saintly wife butchers one of the few scrawny birds the family has left, she fulfills his wish, and sends Macario on to consume his turkey alone in the forest, away from the hungry mouths of his five children. Along the way he’s approached by three otherworldly supplicants, choosing to share his turkey with Death, whom he takes for another hungry peasant. His new friend gifts him a gourd of curative water in return.
Macario’s lifetime—one in a brilliant sea of tapers representing the expiring souls of humanity—burns short. Spanish Inquisitors come for him, alerted by the local physician and undertaker to his supernatural powers. His wife smuggles the last remaining vial of the Reaper’s elixir to Macario in prison, just as the Viceroy of New Spain fetches him from the Inquisition—to save his son’s life or face death in return. As Macario begs Death to heal the Viceroy’s son, Death demurs.
There is no revolution in Macario, unless it is Death’s machinations to punish the viceroyalty and help Macario outwit the Spanish Church. Macario lives his dream of a better life for a moment, always urged by his Virginal bride to be happy with what they have gained, to no avail. “He was like a child, with his whims,” in his wife’s maternal words, the last in the film: “He couldn’t even finish his turkey.”
Macario is an early example of magical realism in cinema—a literary genre which, unbeknownst to me, originated not in Colombia or Argentina, according to Shorris, but in Mexico. Produced during an economic boom by the descendent of a dandified emperor, it chooses to focus on a poor campesino, mestizo or indio, who comes to the capital to turn a living in colonial Mexico, then returns to his home in the country to succumb to the age-old preoccupations, suggesting that Octavio Paz and Earl Shorris are not wholly mistaken in their understanding of Mexico as a land where the long shadows of history, the genes of culture, are still fixated on time, religion, and death—seen through the eyes of a mestizo peasant, lurking beneath the mask of New Spain. A country where the daily lives of the majority of its people are consumed not with matters of politics, or even the Church or Revolution, except so far as these things are written, painted, sculpted, or filmed. Dreams that represent, “if not the accomplishment of paradise on earth, at least the promise of paradise.” If not “now,” “someday.”
Mañana.