Off the Milking Stool: On Leaving Mexico

On the last day of May 2012, we left Mexico after fifteen happy years there, the first decade in Guanajuato in central Mexico, the last five in Mexico City.

And on leaving any place after a prolonged sojourn, you have to ask yourself what have you learned, what you are taking away? So this is not about food.  It’s about life, history and politics.

I’ve had to come with four major cultures in my life.

The first was England where I grew up.  The second was the mainland United States where, for reasons of the heart, I landed up in the early 1970s.  The third was Hawaii where, for reasons of employment, we landed up in the mid 1980s. And the fourth was Mexico. Of England and the mainland US I will say nothing.

Of Hawaii, I will talk because it was the springboard to Mexico.  We went with the usual tourist agenda of palm trees, beaches, and indigenous Hawaiians who swayed to the music in our minds.

After ten years, when we left, I’d learned that this was no more than tourist pandering.  Hawaii was vastly more interesting. It was a place of not one but three  diasporas, the Hawaiian, the Anglo (from both sides of the Atlantic) and the Eastern Asian (from China, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines).  Over thousands of miles of oceans, they’d packed in their cultures, including  religions (indigenous, Christian and Buddhist), plants (taro, wheat, and rice), cooking methods (underground ovens, hearths and ovens, and woks on bench stoves), and medical systems. Understanding Hawaii was to understand world history with its huge migrations, its colonization of distant lands, and its debates about civilization.  And about how, for a period, the peoples of Hawaii had resolved their differences in Local culture, with a language (Hawaii Creole) and food (Local Food) that united all groups and distinguished them from the American mainland.

So in Mexico, the tourist propaganda of beach resorts (again) and indigenous peoples and pyramids overlaid with mariachis and brilliant colors simply did not wash.

Nor did the intellectualized version of this image (like the tourist version invented in the wake of the disastrous revolution/civil war of the early twentieth century century) of total otherness, Mexico’s dance with death, Mexico’s affinity for religion and art, not for science and technology. It just didn’t  square with the place we had landed in.

Guanajuato (you can prounouce it if you go slowly, GWAN-A- HUAT-O) was a great introduction to Mexico as it’s been one of the economic and political power centers of the country for centuries.  I was thrilled to be there because, as an undergraduate geologist, the great Valenciana mine, the reason for the city’s existence, had been held up to me as the mine that had probably produced more silver than any other spot on earth.  To stroll up there on my morning walk, to look at the great construction works, to hear the baroque organ in the mine church, was more than I had ever dreamed of.

The Guadalupe mine, half a mile from the mother vein, but photographing better than the Valenciana mine

By the late sixteenth century and through the colonial period, this remote spot, four hundred miles from the coast, at the edge of the rain-watered and the desert areas, was at the hub of a world network while the settlers in what was to become the United States huddled in humble settlements on the East Coast.

The church for the Valenciana mine in Guanajuato

To Guanajuato, miners poured in from Germany and Spain, Africans (up to 20% of the population) were herded in and indigenous Otomis too, mules took loads of silver to the port of Acapulco and where they were loaded on to galleons bound for the Mexican colony of the Philipppines. There the silver was traded for blue and white porcelain and for Asians who knew how to work stills, and for silk. These were  brought them back to Mexico on the longest, hardest voyage in the the world, the one that took the world global. And the Filipinos (called Chinos) distilled palm wine for the miners and it went up to the mines on the backs of those same mules.

The organ in the Basilica, another of the five or six baroque organs in Guanajuato

The mine owners, Basques by and large, came from the home province of San Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, and thus Guanajuato was part of one of the first global business and intellectual networks, that of the Jesuits, operating in China, Japan, the Philippines, the Congo, and across Latin America, involved in the slave trade, chocolate plantations, sugar, and the importation of maize to Africa.

First the churches, then the intelligensia imported books from Europe.  Here’s the rare book room of the University of Guanajuato, at the back filled with the theological publications that poured out following the Council of Trent, the Catholic response to the Reformation, and at the front a perfect enlightenment library, with Montesquieu and Locke and Buffon lined up in leather-bound volumes along the shelves.

The rare book library of the University of Guanajua

This set the scene for Independence and the debates about the political form that the new nation was to take.  In 1845 in Guanajuato Juan Bautista Morales published a dialogue, El Gallo Pitagórico (The Pythagorean Cock) in which animals debated the liberal and conservative alternatives.  And for years one of my walking companions had a comida corrida (quick main meal) place downtown called La Gallina Aristotélica.

El Gallo Pitagórico

Mexico, like the United States, is a child of Europe, albeit having been more open to indigenous (and perhaps African and Asian) culture. We talked endlessly with Mexican friends about different European settlement strategies (mining communities, haciendas, small farmers), about how colonies survived and the search for exports (silver, tobacco, sugar or manufactured goods), about independence from the home country and civil wars to try to create a nation, about succesive waves of migration and whether to assimilate them (US) or ignore them (Mexico) and so on and so forth.

The last conversation, the night before leaving, in the garden in Chimalistac, Mexico City. Amalia and Vivette (philosophers of law and biology in the background), Larry with Juan and Pablo (lawyers and philosophers of law in the foreground)

So Mexico’s not the other.  It’s more than just mestizaje, the mixing of indigenous and Spanish.

It’s part of the history of the Americas: colonization, coming to terms with the indigenous, importing labor, creation of locally-born elites, revolutions against the colonizing country, civil wars, European migration, and nation building.  Should any of this need saying?   You’d think not.  But penetrating the public images of other countries is really hard.  So it needs saying, I think, to those outside Mexico.

To those in Mexico it is obvious. And all the Mexican in our circles asked:  How come they went from being the most successful colony in the Americas to a laggard?

And that, because we all want to know what makes states successful, is a question for everyone.

So, I’m back after four months. I hope to respond to all your comments soon.  I have a pile of stuff to blog on.  And new thoughts on being back in the United States.

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