Mexico Archives - Page 4 of 6

History Museums: Museo Nacionál de Antropología, Mexico

By Robert Wilks

Museo Nacionál de Antropología, Mexico. Via Wikipedia.

My favorite history museum, and one of my favorite museums of any type, is the Museo Nacionál de Antropología in Mexico City. It is housed in an enormous structure filled with the pre-Columbian culture of Mexico. It covers every civilization, period and style in its artifacts. They are beautifully displayed, perfectly lit and present a dazzling array of forms and colors. There is so much to see, multiple visits are required. I was totally amazed at the richness and variety of cultures. I highly recommend it.

Monolith of the Stone of the Sun, also named Aztec calendar stone.

No Mere Shadows: Faces of Widowhood in Early Colonial Mexico, by Shirley Cushing Flint (2013)

What would Mexico City—or Tenochtitan as it was known to its indigenous population—have looked like to ten year old Doña Luisa Estrada, when she arrived with her parents in 1524, three years after it fell to Spain? What is clear is that her life soon intermingled in the early conquest society. At thirteen she married 26 year old conquistador Jorge de Alvarado. He also experienced the New World as young child: he had been participating in expeditions since he was nine. After his death, Doña Luisa administered his grant of tribute Indians (encomiendas) and accumulated estates that stretched from Mexico City to Guatemala. While unfortunately neither left what certainly would have been fascinating memoirs, tantalizing glimpses of their lives appear in Shirley Cushing Flint’s No Mere Shadows: Faces of Widowhood in Early Colonial Mexico.

Flint was initially fascinated by the history of one of Doña Luisa’s sisters, Doña Beatriz de Estrada. Doña Beatriz leveraged her fortune to finance the famous expedition of her husband, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, to the American southwest. As the author delved into the collective biographies of Estrada wives, husbands, and children she discovered how three generations accumulated and diversified forms of economic wealth and social status, acquired assets in the core and then the periphery, and constantly engaged in lawsuits to maintain them.

Spanish colonial map of Culhuacán, now in present-day Mexico City, 1588 (Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin)

Separate chapters explore the ups and downs of the Estrada family’s marriages, widowhood, children, and finances. These include the matriarch, Doña Marina (Gutiérrez Flores de la Caballería), who arrived as the wife of the newly appointed royal treasurer Alonso de Estrada and who, on his death, managed the extensive properties of urban and rural real estate including a profitable mill. She arranged favorable marriages for her daughters, not only for young Doña Luisa and Doña Beatriz to conquistadors Alvarado and Coronado, but for her daughter Doña Francisca, whose husband possessed the most valuable grant of Indians for tribute after Hernán Cortés. The fortunes of the next generation waned with the marriage of granddaughter Doña María to Alonso Ávila, as he was beheaded in 1566 over charges that he participated in a conspiracy to challenge royal hegemony. She spent her later years in Spain attempting to recover the family fortunes.

Tracing these compelling personal vignettes of the lives of the Estradas provides rare insights into the challenges and opportunities of life for Spanish women in post-conquest Mexico.

Sixteen Months in a Leaky Boat

by Kristie Flannery

A few weeks ago José Salvador Alvarenga drifted onto a small island in the South Pacific Ocean in a worn-out, 24-foot long, fiberglass boat, wearing nothing but a tattered pair of underpants. With the aid of a Spanish interpreter, Alvarenga explained to surprised locals that he had been lost at sea for at least sixteen months after his fishing boat was pushed out to sea off the coast of Mexico. He said that he stayed alive by catching and eating raw fish, turtles, and birds.

Media outlets around the world have rushed to tell Alvarenga’s amazing story of survival, but from the beginning they have doubted the veracity of the fishermen’s version of events. Underlying the media’s skepticism is the belief that it is simply not possible for a human to survive for so long at sea without food and fresh water.

Jose Salvador Alvarenga, who spent 13 months on a remote Pacific island, after being rescued. (Image courtesy of Mashable)

One Fox News article asked, “Was it all a mirage?” The Sydney Morning Herald described Alvarenga’s story as “a tale of ocean survival that smells a bit fishy.” Searching for holes in Alvarenga’s story, a number of reports pointed out that Alvarenga was rather plump for someone who had been through such an ordeal (Doctors later confirmed that his paradoxically bloated appearance is consistent with a state of long term starvation).

Could Alvarenga really have drifted for 8000 miles from Mexico to the Ebon atoll in the Marshall Islands? If we look into the history of the great Pacific Ocean, we find several stories of survival that suggest Alvarenga is telling the truth.

In his famous history of The Manila Galleon, William Lytle Schurz talked about the survivors of one of these large Spanish treasure ships that was lost crossing the Pacific from Mexico in 1693. Two men made it all the way to the Philippines in conditions similar to what Alvarenga endured (thanks to Steph Mawson for this reference). The Galleon‘s

fate was eventually learned from two men picked up long after near the town of Binangonan de Lampon. In the boat in which they had managed to reach the Philippines was the corpse of a dead companion. One of the two survivors had gone stark mad from his sufferings. Before the burning galleon had foundered six men put off from her side in an open boat and headed westward. After three weeks their food gave out and two of the starving men slid over the gunwales into the sea. Those who were left then ate their jackboots and their belts to stave of starvation. At last it was decided to draw lots as to which of the four should be eaten by the rest. One of the three preferred to starve rather than to turn cannibal. It was only the last two who survived these horrible experiences, one without his reason, the other broken by his sufferings and long under the shadow of the Church for having partaken of human flesh.

Maris Pacifici by Abraham Ortelius (1589), the first printed map of the Pacific and the Americas. (Image courtesy of Helmink Antique Maps)

Early 17th century map of the Pacific. (Image courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France)

Perhaps the most famous Pacific castaway is the British Naval Captain William Bligh. In 1789, Bligh and eighteen of his men were forced to disembark from Bligh’s ship The Bounty and climb into a 25-foot long launch boat; a tiny vessel intended for carrying people and supplies from ship to shore. The mutineers surely believed that their deposed Captain and his supporters faced a certain death. Yet over the next forty-seven days, Bligh used a quadrant and a pocket watch to navigate the very crowded launch from near Tonga to the Dutch settlement at West Timor, a 4350 mile journey.

Amazingly, only one man died on this voyage. Greg Denning’s history of the mutiny Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty wrote that:

“From [Bligh’s] careful record of every item consumed … the total food each man had in forty-eight days was this: seven pounds bread, one pound salt pork, one pint rum, five ounces wine, two and one-quarter coconuts, one banana, one pint coconut milk, one and one-quarter raw seabirds, four ounces fish … A sailor’s ordinary food allowance has been calculated at about 4,450 calories a day. On the figures I have given here a nutritionist estimates that the launch people were reduced to 345 calories a day. This would mean a possible daily energy deficit of 4,105 calories and a total weight loss of 56 pounds.

In 1947, the intrepid Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdhal and five other men crossed the Pacific Ocean from Peru to Polynesia in a small, balsa-wood raft named “Kon Tiki” that Heyerdhal built with his own hands. The boat was a replica of a pre-Inca raft, and the purpose of this dangerous exhibition was to prove Heyerdhal’s theory that it was the South Americans who first discovered and populated Polynesia thousands of years ago using similar vessels.

Kon-Tiki raft, circa 1947 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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A Kon-Tiki expedition across the Pacific, 1947 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Although the Kon Tiki’s voyage doesn’t exactly prove Heyerdhal’s origins theory, (which for most scholars doesn’t hold water), the fact that six men completed a 101-day long, 4300-mile voyage on a 40 square-foot raft was at the time, and continues to be, a pretty exciting feat. The raft didn’t have oars and couldn’t really be steered in any direction. Although the Kon Tiki was equipped with US army supplied food, the crew reported a rich supply of fish (and sharks!) in the warm-water currents that carried them to Polynesia. If you are interested in Heyerdhal’s adventure, the story of the Kon Tiki is told in Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg’s 2012 film, which is currently available on Netflix.

After reading this piece, you might agree that Alvarenga deserves an apology from the news outlets around the world who rushed to accuse the fisherman of fabricating his story. We historians of the Pacific world know that the history of this largest ocean is punctuated by amazing stories of survival that should be celebrated.

War Along the Border: The Mexican Revolution and the Tejano Communities edited by Arnoldo De León (2012)

By Lizeth Elizondo

The Mexican Revolution knew no borders. Mexicans migrated north seeking refuge from its tumult, Tejanos, (Mexican-American Texans) assisted the fight by supplying weapons and incorporating these new immigrants into their communities. Other Tejanos and African Americans from Texas even joined the Mexican revolutionary forces. Texans were then, both directly and indirectly, by choice or by circumstance, part of this historic period.

Prior to the publishing of War Along the Border: The Mexican Revolution and the Tejano Communities, the lived experiences on the Texas side of the border had never been told in a transnational historical perspective. Raul Ramos sums up the importance of this approach in writing that “people, families, ideas, capital, goods, and violence crossed back and forth across the border to the point that self-contained national narratives lose their power to explain and make sense of the past.”

Book cover of War Along the Border: The Mexican Revolution and Tejano Communities edited by Arnoldo De León

The porousness of the boundary between the United States and Mexico during the Mexican Revolution is eloquently captured in this edited volume. The histories told illuminate the lived realities of communities on both the Mexican and the U.S. side during this tumultuous period. One need not be an expert on the variety of revolutionary factions, alliances, and motivations. The opening essay by Paul Hart offers readers a concise historical background that contextualizes the larger ideals of the Mexican Revolution. From this point forward, the reader is guided through more intimate scenes of the period.

The emphasis on the lived experiences of Tejanos makes this a path-breaking endeavor. Rodolfo Treviño tells the intimate family history of his grandfather’s immigration. In sharing one family’s struggle to survive after migrating, Treviño elucidates the possible similarities between his family’s history and the history of many others, who like his grandfather, emigrated from Mexico into Texas during this period. As a cotton picker, Geronimo Treviño – and other Mexican immigrants both male and female—helped propel the agricultural industry in Texas. As Treviño explains, these are the forgotten histories of “ordinary people doing extraordinary things in American history.” The exceptional story of Felix Tijerina, proclaimed to have been the first Mexican-American millionaire in Houston, also serves as an example of an overlooked history of a remarkable American. The chapter details Thomas Kreneck’s quest for unearthing the truthful birthplace of Tijerina, a self-proclaimed American citizen. Kreneck’s pursuit takes him across the border, where he discovers the small villa where Tijerina so adamantly denied having been born. American citizenship during a period filled with racism and opposition to the influx of immigrants from Mexico, explains Kreneck, helps to contextualize Tijerina’s obstinate desire to be recognized as an American at all costs. In fact, Kreneck discovered Tijerina’s birthplace only after Tijerina’s death. Felix Tijerina died as a proud American.

Black and white photograph of Mexican rebels camped outside Juárex, Mexico, 1911

Mexican rebels camped outside Juárez, Mexico, 1911 (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

Not all stories left untold revolve around successful rags-to-riches sagas. Violence, racism and death were also consequences of the Revolution on the American side of the border. Two chapters describe in detail the triangle of violence that resulted from the Plan de San Diego, the Revolución de Texas, and the Texas Rangers. Richard Ribb outlines the violent repercussions lived by Tejanos and Mexicans, after discovering that social revolutionaries called for the Mexican and Mexican-American community to join forces in an armed uprising against the United States, scheduled for February 20, 1915, that would seek to kill all Anglo Americans. The discovery of this plot initiated a period of Anglo violence toward the Mexican-American population regardless of their involvement or support of the plan. La Revolución de Texas as Trinidad Gonzales details, was different than the Plan de San Diego in ideology; however, the lived experiences of Tejanos at the wrath of the Texas Rangers and Anglo vigilantes, was the same. Supporters of La Revolución de Texas, clearly outlined their motives for their uprising as a response to the continual racism experienced in Texas. Ironically, this forthright challenge to prejudice served as a catalyst to massacre hundreds of Tejanos and Mexicanos. A year later, in 1916, El Paso experienced its own form of Revolutionary violence. Miguel Levario evaluates the influence of the El Paso Race Riot fueled by the slaughter of American engineers at Santa Ysabel, Chihuahua, in categorizing Tejanos as “un-American.” The race war and race-related violence in Texas during the period of the Mexican Revolution claimed the lives of Anglo Americans, Tejanos, and Mexicans.

The violence and death experienced on both the Mexican and the American sides of the U.S.-Mexico border also ironically created niches of opportunities for some women. The essays by Juanita Luna Lawhn and Sonia Hernández convey the ways in which women sought safe-haven in the United States from this revolutionary violence. Lawhn unearths the experiences of elite women in exile. She utilizes newspaper records to trace the lives of the wives of famous revolutionaries with surnames like Madero, Villa, and Carranza. Hernández on the other hand, relies on bi-national archival research to excavate the experiences of women in the labor industry, as well as their social and political activism during the revolutionary period.

Black and white photograph of members of the U.S. Army's Pancho Villa Expedition camped in San Jerónimo, Chihuahua, Mexico, 1916

Members of the U.S. Army’s Pancho Villa Expedition camped in San Jerónimo, Chihuahua, Mexico, 1916 (Image courtesy of the U.S. Federal Government)

The contributors to War Along the Border entangle the Mexican Revolution with transnational history and American history. By focusing on the experiences of Tejanos, by disregarding the political boundaries of the international border in their research, and by choosing to present this period as one of multinational influences, these scholars sketch a rich historical account of the Mexican Revolution as it affected Americans. War Along the Border is an invaluable contribution to the histories of Texas, the Mexican Revolution, Tejanos, Mexican-Americans, Mexicans, and the history of the United States in the early twentieth century.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

New Books in Women’s History

We are celebrating Women’s History Month this year with recommendations of new books in Women’s History from some of our faculty and graduate students. From third-century North Africa to sixteenth-century Mexico to the twentieth-century in Russia and the US, and more…

Judy Coffin:

Deborah Cohen, Family Secrets: Living with Shame from the Victorians to the Present Day, (2013).
A history of shame and changing social norms, of privacy and how a “right” to privacy was established, and of changes in what families will and will not confess — to themselves and to others. It’s bold, refreshing, and readable. (In fact it comes with Hilary Mantel’s endorsement.) Published in Great Britain in January, the book due out here at the beginning of April. You can read the introduction on the Amazon website, and pre-order. This is a book that everyone interested in gender, sexuality, and families will want to read.

Linda Greenhouse & Reva Seigel, Before Roe v. Wade: Voices that Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court’s Ruling, (2010).
Here’s another readable and important book. It reconstructs the everyday politics of contraception and abortion before Roe v. Wade, making it clear that the now landmark decision was one case among many, the justices’ reasoning was rather narrowly cast. This is not an all-roads-led-to-Roe story; it is much more interesting, unpredictable, and historical than that. Siegel is a professor at Yale Law School and Greenhouse covers the Supreme Court for the New York Times.

Lizeth Elizondo:

Catherine Ramirez, The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory, (2009).
Catherine Ramirez illuminates the ways in which Mexican-American women rebelled and chose to express their individuality by joining the popular zoot suit movement of the 1940s. By focusing on the women behind the suit, Ramirez offers a revisionist interpretation of the involvement of women in the infamous Los Angeles Zoot Suit riots and the Sleepy Lagoon case of 1943.

Alison Frazier:

Thomas J. Heffernan, The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, (2012).
In one volume, Heffernan presents the essential text and tools for readers to begin thinking through the unique and precious “prison diary” of Vibia Perpetua, the visionary young mother who led a mixed-gender group of Christians to martyrdom in early third-century North Africa.

Laurie Green:

Barbara Ransby, Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson, (2012).
In contrast to the enormous attention paid to the acclaimed African American singer, actor, radical and civil rights activist Paul Robeson, his extraordinary wife, Eslanda “Essie” Robeson has remained in the historical shadows. For the first time, in Ransby’s biography, we can grasp her amazing lifework, including her intellectual career as an anthropologist and journalist, and her passionate involvement in women’s rights, racial justice and anti-colonialist movements on an international scale.

Janine Jones:

Fatima Mernissi, Dreams Of Trespass: Tales Of a Harem Girlhood, (1995).
Scholar and activist Fatima Mernissi’s captivating memoir of her childhood in a Moroccan harem during the end of the French Protectorate is not to be missed.

Halidé Edib, House with Wisteria: Memoirs of Turkey Old and New, 2nd ed., (2009).
Turkish journalist, novelist, and early feminist activist Halide Edib’s lyrical memoir of growing to adulthood during the chaotic collapse of the Ottoman Empire is filled with stories of tragedy, love, and strength.

Anne Martinez:

Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, Love and Empire: Cybermarriage and Citizenship Across the Americas, (2012).
Schaeffer puts desire in the context of the global economy, class, and cultural citizenship in this book about transnational cyber-relationships since the 1990s.

Joan Neuberger:

Marina Goldovskaya, Woman with a Movie Camera: My Life as a Russian Filmmaker, (2006).
“I started school in 1948. In my class of more than forty children, I was the only one who had a father.” This memoir traces Marina Goldovskaya’s career in Soviet television and her emergence as Russia’s best known documentary film maker. Along the way, we get an inside look at the everyday politics of survival and success in two of late-twentieth-century Russia’s most interesting industries.

Megan Seaholm:

Michelle M. Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right, (2012).
The significant role that women played in the rise of conservatism from the 1950s through the 1964 presidential campaign. This careful study of conservative women in southern California explains how “populist housewives” became impassioned activists who influenced the conservative agenda for decades.

Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, (2011).
Fifty years after Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, often credited with igniting the feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, Professor Coontz examines this book and the impact it had on readers.

Susan J. Douglas, The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture Took Us From Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild, (2010).
Cultural historian Susan Douglas has written a perceptive and often humorous book about the way that icons of popular culture encouraged a generation of women (the “millennials”) to believe that feminism had accomplished its goals.

Ann Twinam and Susan Deans-Smith both recommend:

Camilla Townsend, Malintzin’s Choices, An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico, (2006).
The wonderfully readable and compelling book tells the story of Malintzin, the young Nahua woman who became Hernando Cortés’ translator and mistress during the conquest of Mexico. Townsend takes on the difficult task of giving voice to someone who, while typically vilified as a traitor and sexual siren, left no words of her own. The resulting portrait allows us to see Malintzin’s understanding of her situation and the difficult choices she made in a rapidly changing political landscape.

2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse by Matthew Restall and Amara Solari (2011)

by Kristie Flannery

While many in the US thought the world would end on November 6 when the guy they didn’t vote for won the Presidency, another whole section of the population is convinced that the apocalypse will come on December 21, 2012; the fast approaching winter solstice, in accordance with predictions made by ancient Mayans. A Reuter’s poll of 16,262 people in 20 countries conducted in May this year showed that “nearly fifteen per cent of people worldwide believe the world will end during their lifetime and ten per cent think the Mayan calendar could signify it will happen in 2012.”

These are striking figures, and ones that you might find easier to believe after scanning the results of a Google search for the terms “Maya prophecy.” Only last week the electrician visiting my apartment told me that he thinks something like the apocalypse is coming: according to 70 year old Austinite Sonny, there will be a big earthquake on the east coast of the USA, and something like 9/11, but bigger, pretty soon.

Why are so many people convinced of the world’s impending destruction? There is no doubt that pop-culture has nurtured the apparently widespread fears of the looming end of the world. Roland Emmerich’s blockbuster disaster film 2012 (released in late 2009) surely played a role in translating the Mayan apocalypse from a fringe discourse into the mainstream. Furthermore, in the past twelve months, serious news-media outlets including The Guardian have discussed the end of days as predicted by the ancient Mayans (this British newspaper published the comforting words of expert archaeologists who reassure us that “the end of the world is not quite nigh”).

What is going on here? Should we start filling the bathtub with water and hoarding stocks of canned food, flashlights, and medical supplies as December 21 approaches?

Clay rendering of a Mayan priest (Image courtesy of Wolfgang Sauber/Wikimedia Commons)

Thankfully two historians, Mathew Restall and Amara Solari, have come to the rescue with the publication of a new book 2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse. In the authors’ own words, this study “takes seriously a potentially silly topic.” Restall and Solari provide an interesting discussion of pre-conquest Maya texts, including the famous but poorly understood Long Count calendar and “Monument 6” that form the basis of the present-day “2012-ology,” a the authors call it, which anyone interested in the approaching end of the world will want to read.

Albrecht Dürer’s 15th century woodcut, “The Revelation of St John: 4. The Four Riders of the Apocalypse” (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Restall and Solari’s most important contribution is showing that the belief in a near apocalypse is a deeply-rooted tradition in Western society. Drawing upon the Bible, the writings of the twelfth-century theologian Joachim di Diore, and Albrecht Dürer’s beautiful set of fifteen engravings of the apocalypse, Restall and Solari make a compelling argument that the origins of the Maya Apocalypse lie in the medieval European millenarian tradition. “Whereas millenarianism is not easily and clearly found in ancient Maya civilization, it is deeply rooted and ubiquitous in Western civilization. Whereas Maya notions of world-ending Apocalypse – with a capital A – was a profound and pervasive presence in the medieval West.”

A 1701 transcription of the “Popol Vuh,” a compilation of Mayan K’iche’ creation myths (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

This book examines the survival of the apocalypse discourse from the early-modern period through to today. Restall and Solari make the bold claim that Chilism (the specifically Christian version of the belief that an impending transformation will dramatically change society), is at the heart of Western modernity – in Christianity as much as in Marxism.

A Mayan alter excavated in Caracol, Belize. (Image courtesy of Suraj/Wikimedia Commons)

Those interested in colonial New Spain will appreciate Restall and Solari’s analysis of Mayan documents such as the books of Chilam Balam (the Books of the Jaguar Prophet), which reveal how the Western apocalyptical discourse influenced Mayan conceptions of time and the world.

Watch for our December post on Milestones on the Mayan calendar and the history of the concept of Apocalypse

Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis by Rubén Gallo (2010)

by Adrian Masters

In a posh neighborhood of Mexico City in August of 1940, former Soviet leader and Marxist intellectual Leon Trotsky was murdered with an ice-axe. The perpetrator, a Spaniard named Ramón Mercader, confessed to the murder, but initially refused to discuss his motives (he was only later confirmed to be a Stalinist agent). To dissect the tight-lipped Mercader’s mindframe, criminologist Raúl Carrancá y Trujillo drew out his own ice-axe: Sigmund Freud‘s essays on psychology and criminal behavior. Mercader agreed to speak to Carrancá’s psychoanalysts and was bombarded with questions about his family, religion, politics, and his innermost self. Doctors traced Mercader’s murderous impulse to “a very active Oedipal complex” — the killer’s hatred for his father had been projected onto Trotsky. Mercader was given twenty years in a Mexican prison, and criminological psychoanalysis became a full-fledged practice in Mexico.

After authoring a number of books on Mexican culture and society, Rubén Gallo brings us the electric (and refreshingly jargon-free) Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis. Dividing his work into two relatively independent segments, Gallo explores both Freud in Mexico and Freud’s Mexico. The first segment of Gallo’s work focuses on Mexican artists’ and intellectuals’ interpretations of Freud, and gallops through some truly unexpected expanses of Mexican cultural history. We are introduced to Sebastián Nova, a campy libertine poet and acolyte of Freud writing in the 1920s, whose very public fantasies included pornographic dreamlands populated with virile Mexico City cab drivers. While a character so ebullient as Nova would seem hard to top, Gallo’s research turns up an even more intriguing case: a Benedictine monk in 1960s Cuernavaca named Gregorio Lemercier whose alleged affair with drugs, sex, and psychoanalysis scandalized both the Vatican and the Mexican popular press. We learn of Freud’s impact on Mexican nationalism in the writings of Samuel Ramos and the renowned poet Octavio Paz, and explore the inner worlds of surrealist painters Frida Kahlo and Remedios Varo. Gallo shows us how Freud’s writings were attractive to the particular inclinations of each of these figures, be they driven by sexual preference, the question of Mexican nationhood, cynicism towards ‘consumer society,’ a quest for God, or even by murderous international politics. In Freud in Mexico, Gallo’s writing is almost breathless, and unafraid to be funny, a true rarity in history writing!

Sigmund Freud (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

If the first segment of the book twists with the eclecticism of a dream sequence, the second segment feels somewhat like a therapist’s session. This is not to say that Freud’s Mexico is uninteresting; after all, what therapy session with Sigmund Freud could be boring? Yet the tone is slower, the verve dampened, the humor relatively muted. This is perhaps no fault of Gallo’s at all, for he is exploring a rather esoteric set of subjects: Freud’s relationship with the Spanish language, his scanty literature on Mexico, and the even more limited treatment Mexico receives in Freud’s works. Still, Freud’s Mexico digs up fresh insight on the European (and Viennese) idea of Mexico past and present and on the Austrian psychoanalyst’s strange relationship with a country he never set foot in. In the midst of these insights we follow, among others, the tragic invasion of Mexico by Austrian Emperor Maximilian, Freud’s rather odd childhood loves and friendships, and a mischievous ‘little Aztec god’ who haunts Europe named ‘Vitzlipuztli.’

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Because records of Freud’s ideas of Mexico are so limited, it is often Gallo who places Freud on the therapist’s couch, teasing out the Austrian’s unspoken inner thoughts. Gallo is incisive and transparent about his own inferences, but his playful psychoanalysis of Freud left me wishing for a more in-depth disclosure of the author’s own views on his famous subject. Still, Gallo has offered a book that balances craft, humor, and insight into the under-explored field of Mexican psychoanalytical history. Funny, light-footed, and brisk, Gallo gives us a cultural history aimed at the reader’s pleasure principle. Only those stricken with an acute narcissistic cathexis of the ego could possibly turn Freud’s Mexico down.

You may also like:

Our review of Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, on Leon Trotsky’s final years in Mexico.

Patrons, Partisans, and Palace Intrigues: The Court Society of Colonial Mexico 1702-1710 by Christoph Rosenmüller (2008)

by Susan Zakaib

Christopher Rosenmüller is one of a number of recent scholars to revisit history’s “great men,” who were the focus of most studies on colonial Spanish America until social history’s rise to popularity in the 1960s. These historians are reassessing the roles of individual rulers and colonial institutions, using methodologies borrowed from social and cultural history more often used to examine the ruled rather than rulers. Rosenmüller brings to life the “palace intrigues” of the Duke of Albuquerque, who served as viceroy of New Spain (now Mexico) from 1702 until 1710. His approach, though centering on a single figure, echoes that of many social historians: he examines the viceroy not as an intrepid leader or a cog in an imperial machine, but as a participant in a complex social network. While scholars have already begun to examine the relationship between social networks and state power in early modern Europe, Rosenmüller is the first to apply this methodology to new world viceroys, who are surprisingly understudied. The result is at once a compelling biography and an insightful contribution to scholarship on colonial Mexico.

Patrons, Partisans, and Palace Intrigues explores Albuquerque’s political career in vivid detail, focusing especially on his relationships with New Spain’s elites. Although royal law required viceroys to remain detached from local society, in practice the rule was rarely observed. From the late seventeenth century onward, especially, these representatives of the King often constructed a power base by fostering close ties with local traders, entrepreneurs, and friars, waiving royal laws that harmed these elites’ businesses in return for their loyalty. Viceroys also bolstered their local authority by appointing their clients and allies to offices in the colony. Albuquerque was no exception to these trends.

In the early eighteenth century, King Philip V began a campaign to curtail these practices, in hopes of ensuring that the viceregal court would serve royal prerogatives rather than local ones. Instead of extending royal authority as the King had ordered, however, Albuquerque, continued the tradition of power-by-patronage. In doing so, he not only filled his own coffers and reduced local opposition to his rule, but also helped New Spain’s elites to deflect the royal reforms that threatened their interests. Yet, as Rosenmüller demonstrates, Albuquerque’s disobedience ultimately worked to the Crown’s advantage. The Bourbon dynasty only recently had wrenched the Spanish throne from the long-reigning Hapsburgs, which made the maintenance of the viceroy’s local power networks more critical than ever. By pandering to local interests, Rosenmüller argues, Albuquerque played a crucial role in maintaining New Spain’s loyalty to the Bourbons during a period of instability.

Francisco Fernández de la Cueva, the 10th Duke of Alburquerque

Although Patrons, Partisans, and Palace Intrigues neglects to address the roles of non-elites in viceregal political culture, it is nevertheless an excellent study. Rosenmüller’s consideration of local actions and interests alongside broader political developments tells the fascinating story of Albuquerque himself, but also reveals the workings of Spain’s imperial power more broadly. It shows that viceroys were not mere mouthpieces of royal authority, but active mediators between colony and metropolis, charged with balancing their often-competing interests. Consequently, the maintenance of the Crown’s authority and legitimacy in early eighteenth-century New Spain was as much a product of local interests and political intrigues as of royal policy. Taken together with Alejandro Cañeque’s The King’s Living Image (2004), Patrons, Partisans, and Palace Intrigues provides valuable insight into the role of viceroys in upholding and legitimating colonial rule, which is critical to understanding political culture in colonial Mexico.

You may also like:

Zach Carmichael’s review of a book about the relationship between Bourbon Spain, its New World possessions, and the native peoples living on the borderlands of the Spanish empire.

UT Professor Susan Deans-Smith’s DISCOVER piece on Casta Paintings, which depict the inhabitants of Spain’s American colonies.

Narco-Modernities

by Edward F. Shore

Drug trafficking – especially as it pertains to Mexico – has been a main fixture in today’s news for some time now. But UT graduate student Edward F. Shore argues that the violence, disorder, and political, social, and economic instability associated with the drug trade has a long history, and one that has had international repercussions. Shore’s website “Narco-Modernities” shows that while drug-related episodes may take place in specific countries or regions, the people, governments, economies, and societies they have affected and continue to affect span the globe. Through book reviews, primary sources, maps, secondary historical literature and the author’s own original commentary, “Narco-Modernities” discusses current events while also engaging historical debates surrounding globalization, immigration, crime, gangs, prisons, the “War on Drugs,” the Cold War, and present-day U.S.-Latin American relations.

Nicaraguan Contras

An August 23, 1986 e-mail message from Oliver North to Ronald Reagan and National Security Advisor John Poindexter. In it, North describes his meeting with Panamanian Leader Manuel Noriega’s representative. “You will recall that over the years Manuel Noriega in Panama and I have developed a fairly good relationship,” North writes before explaining Noriega’s proposal. He notes that if U.S. officials can “help clean up his image” and lift the ban on arms sales to the Panamanian Defense Force, Noriega will “‘take care of’ the Sandinista leadership for us.”

“Godfather of Cocaine” Pablo Escobar’s mug shot

A recently declassified Department of State briefing paper from Inter-American Affairs. It showcases Washington’s frustration with the Guatemalan government’s failure to investigate the a surge of violence, assassinations, and an attack on an American citizen in that country. The United States was particularly concerned about the Guatemalan government upholding human rights, implementing judicial reform, and monitoring drug trafficking but felt that “it can continue to be unresponsive to [its] interests.”

University of Texas at Austin – Department of History

(Professor: Jeremi Suri)

For Greater Glory (2012)

By Cristina Metz

“¡Viva Cristo Rey! Long Live Christ the King!” The rallying cry of the men and women who fought for religious freedom against Mexico’s revolutionary anti-clerical laws gave the movement its name. The Cristero Rebellion (1927-29) was a bloody uprising waged in central and western Mexico less than a decade after the end of the Mexican Revolution (1910-20). Director Dean Wright’s For Greater Glory (opening June 1, 2012) tells the tragic and violent story of President Plutarco Elías Calles’s zealous implementation of the anti-clerical laws inscribed in the 1917 Constitution and popular reactions to it. Tension between the Catholic Church and state had heightened after the Revolution. For liberal politicians—those who favored the modern over tradition—the Church was an outdated institution that threatened their modernist state-building projects. The anti-clerical laws were designed to decrease the Church’s power by, for example, prohibiting it from providing primary education and from intervening in national politics. By 1926, the Church became more vociferous in its opposition to the laws and Calles responded by sending in federal troops to enforce them.

Many reviewers of For Greater Glory will undoubtedly focus on the desire for religious freedom dramatized in the film. Such a view, however, overlooks the film’s other important contributions, not least of which is that it alerts us to the power struggle between two of Mexico’s major institutions. Would the ecclesiastical structure submit to the authority of a secular state or would the Church become a state within a state answering to the Vatican, not the Mexican president? The value of For Greater Glory is that it portrays these concerns and extends beyond them by also offering viewers insight into the impact of religion on daily life in 1920s Mexico, the opposition tactics that cristeros adopted, a history of the conflict, and into how history itself is constructed.

Andy García plays General Enrique Gorostieta Velarde (1889-1929), a retired army general whose military prowess was well-known, but who had retired to a life as a soap manufacturer. As Calles enforces restrictions upon Catholic clergy and public displays of religiosity, Gorostieta clashes with his wife Tula (played by Eva Longoria) over his anti-clerical liberalism and her concern for the Catholic education of their daughters. As Gorostieta’s family adjusts to the changes—Tula becomes responsible for her daughters’ religious education—two other important storylines develop.

The Liga Nacional de Defensa Religiosa (League for the Defense of Religious Liberty) organized opposition to Calles’s law, initially adopting non-violent tactics to fight the restrictions on Catholic life. In response, Calles deployed federal troops to stamp out opposition. Troops desecrate churches, execute priests, and persecute cristeros, both in the film and in real life. It is this violent repression and religious persecution that pushes the League and others to radicalize. The film shows individuals reacting to threats against their civil rights – their right to religious expression – showing how politics and religion came together to drive participation in the Cristero Rebellion. League members take up arms along with 20,000 others, smuggle munitions to the fighters in the field, and form an intelligence network. The League also hires General Gorostieta to unify all of the Cristero armies under one centralized command.

Why was religion so important to Mexicans in this period to propel them into armed revolt? A third storyline that focuses on 13-year-old José Luis Sánchez del Río (who Pope Benedict beatified in 2005), shows the many ways religion saturated daily life. When we meet José, his godfather, Mayor Picazo, is dragging him by the ear to church to apologize to Father Christopher, the local priest, for having misbehaved toward him. José must do penance by cleaning the church. All of this conveys the deference, inculcated at an early age, that the laity had toward the clergy and that underpinned the Church’s authority in early-twentieth-century Mexico. As we watch José complete his penance and begin training as an altar server, we glimpse the central role that religion plays in daily life during this period. Families attend mass together, their homes display religious paintings, and we see children and adults go through the Catholic rites of passage, or the holy sacraments (baptism, communion, marriage, etc.). Seen in this light, the reaction to Calles and repression of the Church becomes much more complex. For some, participation in the rebellion had to do with non-religious concerns and the film shows this. For others, however, civic life was intertwined with religious life and participation in the uprising was as much about defending the civil right to freedom of religious expression as it was about defending markers of one’s identity. After all, Mexicans in 1927 did not go to city hall to get married or to register births and deaths—such major life events were validated by one’s priest and recorded in the local parish record.

The cristeros developed their own reasons for joining the rebellion, but events also occurred at the highest level of national and international politics that they had little chance of influencing. Interspersed among the scenes of Gorostieta readying his army, of League collaborators mobilizing, and of José finding his revolutionary self and suffering for it, is another important story about twentieth-century international relations, especially between Mexico and the United States. While the federales were killing priests and desecrating Catholic churches, the United States saw its economic and political interests in Mexico threatened. In one scene, President Calvin Coolidge sends Ambassador Dwight Whitney Morrow to Mexico to negotiate a resolution to the war that will protect U.S. oil interests. In exchange for oil concessions, the U.S. decides to sell military weaponry to the Mexican government. Not unsurprisingly, Ambassador Morrow becomes a key figure in peace talks, not between the state and cristeros, but between the state and the Church, the two institutions who were fighting for legitimacy and hegemony. In the film, all of this happens without cristero input. In fact, while Calles and Morrow discuss an end to the conflict that would protect U.S. interests and appease American members of the Knights of Columbus who pressured the State Department into acting on behalf of their besieged Mexican Catholic brethren, Gorostieta is busy building a unified cristero army out of many smaller militant groups. Unbeknownst to him and the other cristero generals, many of whom had fought in the Revolution, the stakes and tactics of war had changed. What began as a local conflict would be shaped by Cold War geopolitics, new military technologies, and a new mode of governmentality embodied by the political party that would rule Mexico for 70 years, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI).

A pro-Catholic Church fighter standing in front of an abandoned church during the Cristero Rebellion.

This film is, superficially, a descendant of spaghetti western kitsch with all of the expected gunfights and feats of bravado, but upon closer analysis, it offers much more than that. It is about war and new methods of communication. Railroads, telegraphs, and photographic images made possible greater global integration, inasmuch as information about the cristeros spread around the globe more rapidly. The film also provides viewers with an entertaining lesson in the sources that historians use to construct narratives of the past. In this case, Gorostieta’s letters to his wife, photographs, presidential speeches, and records of diplomatic intervention provide the primary sources of a narrative that shows elite perceptions of the cristeros and ordinary peoples’ own perceptions of themselves and their role in national and regional politics. Finally, For Greater Glory offers an explanation for why people radicalize in response to government action, reminding viewers that war is never simple.

The Cristero Rebellion inspires homage and this film is dedicated to those who fought and died in the rebellion, yet there are a few surprising holes. Gorostieta says in one scene that “women are as important to this war as any soldier” yet the lone female figure shown collaborating with the League plays a minor role in the larger narrative and the range of female cristero activity shown in the film is limited to the collection of signatures in petition drives and smuggling bullets. Women from all social classes acted as cristeros or as their supporters in a wide range of ways. Notwithstanding, For Greater Glory is a moving and informative film and deserves a wide audience.

For more on the church-state crisis of the post-revolutionary period in Mexico you might enjoy:

Matthew Butler, Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico’s Cristero Rebellion: Michoacán, 1927-29 (2004)

And here on NEP: Matthew Butler’s review of Graham Greene’s novel, The Power and the Glory, which takes place during the same period.

Watch “For Greater Glory” here.

Photo credits:
National Photo Company, “Gen. P.E. Calles,” 31 October, 1924
National Photo Company via The Library of Congress
Unknown photographer, Untitled
Unknown photographer via locaburg/Flickr Creative Commons

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