In the Shadow of Cortés: Conversations Along the Route of Conquest 0816521034, 9780816521036

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Chronology of Events
Translators’ Note
Introduction
Part I. First Landings: Veracruz
Three Veracruces: Staging Conquest and Colonization
Villa Rica and Antigua de la Veracruz
Xalapa: State Capital
Nahua Perspectives from Comunidades in the Sierra Zongolica
Interview Selections, Part I.
Part II. The March Inland: Tlaxcala, Cholula, and Puebla
Crossroads: San Francisco de Ixtacamaxtitlan
Tlaxcala: Allies, Foes, and Identity Politics
The Sacred City of Cholula: Destruction and Survival
Conquests and Continuities: The Valley of Puebla
The Spanish City: Puebla de Los Angeles
Interview Selections, Part II.
Part III. The Center: Mexico City-Tenochtitlan
Las Colonias and El Estado de México
Back to the Center: The Historic District
The Retreat Toward Cuernavaca
Interview Selections, Part III
Part IV. El Otro Lado: Mexicans in the United States
Mexico and the United States of America
Interview Selections, Part IV
Conclusion
Appendix A. Glossary of Cultural Terms
Appendix B. Suggested Further Readings
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

In the Shadow of Cortés

In the Shadow of Cortés Conversations Along the Route of Conquest

Kathleen Ann Myers Translations by Pablo García Loaeza and Grady C. Wray

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The University of Arizona Press www.uapress.arizona.edu © 2015 The Arizona Board of Regents All rights reserved. Published 2015 Printed in the United States of America 20 19 18 17 16 15   6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-2103-6 (paper) Cover designed by Nicole Hayward Cover photo © Steven L. Raymer Publication of this book was made possible in part by funding from Indiana University’s Office of the Vice President for Research, the College of Arts and Humanities Institute, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, as well as a Grant from the Ministry for Cultural Cooperation Between Spain and the United States, and by the proceeds of a permanent endowment created with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Myers, Kathleen Ann, author. In the shadow of Cortés : conversations along the route of conquest / Kathleen Ann Myers ; translations by Pablo García Loaeza and Grady C. Wray. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8165-2103-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Mexico—Civilization. 2. Mexico—Civilization—Spanish influences. 3. Mexico—Social life and customs. 4. Mexico—Description and travel. 5. Mexicans—Interviews. 6. Mexican Americans—Interviews. I. Loaeza, Pablo García, 1972– translator. II. Wray, Grady C., translator. III. Title. F1210.M94 2015 972—dc23 2015005909 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Chronology of Events. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Translators’ Note. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Part I.  First Landings: Veracruz Three Veracruces: Staging Conquest and Colonization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Villa Rica and Antigua de la Veracruz.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Xalapa: State Capital.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Nahua Perspectives from Comunidades in the Sierra Zongolica. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Interview Selections, Part I. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Part II.  The March Inland: Tlaxcala, Cholula, and Puebla Crossroads: San Francisco de Ixtacamaxtitlan.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Tlaxcala: Allies, Foes, and Identity Politics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 The Sacred City of Cholula: Destruction and Survival. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 Conquests and Continuities: The Valley of Puebla. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 The Spanish City: Puebla de Los Angeles.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 Interview Selections, Part II.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Part III.  The Center: Mexico City-Tenochtitlan Las Colonias and El Estado de México. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 Back to the Center: The Historic District. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 The Retreat Toward Cuernavaca. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 Interview Selections, Part III.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238

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Part IV.  El Otro Lado: Mexicans in the United States Mexico and the United States of America.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269 Interview Selections, Part IV.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294 Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314 Appendix A.  Glossary of Cultural Terms.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319 Appendix B.  Suggested Further Readings.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325 Notes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329 Works Cited. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339 Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347

Preface

This book began as an exploratory project. Since the mid-1980s I have carried out research on the colonial period in the central and Oaxaca valleys. Struck often by Mexicans’ passionate interest in talking about the Spanish conquest and its legacy today, as well as by the rich layering of visual imagery—produced over millennia by multiple ethnic groups and conquests—I developed this book’s working hypotheses: first, that Mexicans of all walks of life can shed new light on how the reality and perception of the Spanish conquest inform current traditions, identities, and debates about Mexico’s future; second, that visual imagery from both historical and contemporary sources can add a crucial element to this testimony. This book is not a traditional scholarly monograph, but rather a reflective essay based on a living archive of narrator informants and a visual storyboard. Both reveal how the conquest permeates popular and official culture in Mexico. The project aims to encourage understanding of our Mexican neighbors—with whom we share our borders and, increasingly, our hometowns—by bringing their voices to a general as well as a scholarly audience. I seek to enlarge U.S. Americans’ understanding of the importance of Mexico’s past in its present reality. I draw on a vast academic and popular literature to explore the ongoing debates over historical memory, imperialism, identity politics, indigenous legislation, educational and land reforms, and revivalist movements. But I offer a fresh perspective: the voices and images of a wide range of people living today along the first historic route of conquest taken by Cortés in 1519, the Ruta de Cortés, from the port of Veracruz to Mexico City. Over a hundred interviews—selected, transcribed, translated, and contextualized—bring to life Mexicans’ vivid historical memory and vast cultural diversity. The voices of housewives, children, statesmen, artists, street vendors, and activists bear witness to the profound and continuing impact the events of the conquest and its aftermath have had on intimate, complex worlds in which official discourse intermingles with lived experience. One informant advising us on the project put it succinctly: “Neither you nor I speak for them. Each Mexican must speak his own history” (Gerardo Pérez, interview). In addition to their own words, we present a broad range of images, including indigenous pictographs of the conquest, archival vii

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materials, reproductions of post-Revolutionary Mexican art, and historic and contemporary photographs, to illustrate the rich interplay of history, memory, tradition, and identity. Whether created by inside or outside observers, images carry a nuance that complements the oral and written records. In 2006, funded by a New Frontiers Grant from Indiana University, I traveled the Ruta de Cortés from Veracruz to Mexico City with the photographer Rich Remsberg. We consulted renowned Mexican scholars in the fields of archaeology, ethnography, history, and political science; interviewed people on the street, and in stores, museums, and archaeological sites; photographed markets, historic monuments, and other relevant locations; and researched smaller archives that contain visual materials. Over the course of the next five years, I conducted more in-depth and follow-up interviews with both specialists and nonspecialists in the field. Each research trip focused on one of three distinct geographical areas along the Ruta de Cortés: the coast of Veracruz, the inland valleys of Puebla and Tlaxcala, and the historical city center of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Each area has its own set of diverse ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and historical characteristics. In addition, I collected a huge variety of archival, print, and multimedia materials dealing with the representation of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, the Spanish conquest and colonization of Mexico, and contemporary educational reforms and heritage. I also consulted the Cortés documents at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain. These diverse materials provide both a popular and scholarly framework for the interviews. Generous funding was provided by The Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry for Culture and United States’ Universities, Indiana University’s Office for Research, and faculty exchanges with CIESAS (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social) in Mexico City and the University of Seville. In May 2008, funded by an Indiana University Multidisciplinary Ventures Grant, Indiana University School of Journalism professor and former National Geographic staff photographer Steve Raymer photographed some of the people and places along the Ruta de Cortés. A grant from the Lilly Foundation helped us mount a traveling text-panel and photographic exhibit (2009–15), In the Shadows of Cortés: From Veracruz to Mexico City. I include here many of these images. Numerous individuals made possible the conception and execution of this project. Visionary colleagues at Indiana University, John Eakin, John McDowell, Bradley Levinson, and Rich Remsberg, encouraged me to delve into new territory. Departmental chairs and colleagues, Catherine Larson, Consuelo López-Morillas, Josep Sobrer, and Steven Wagschal, provided valuable support with letters of reference and research leaves. The staff at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures at Indiana University, in particular Geoffrey Conrad and Elaine Gaul, graciously helped us mount a traveling exhibit. IU budget wizard and friend Jill Piedmont made sure this project got off the ground and kept moving. Colleagues Carla Gardina Pestana and Linda Curcio-Nagy provided important feedback on the project in both its early and final stages. Graduate students in several seminars helped define the contours of this book

Preface 

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as they engaged in frank and insightful dialogue about Mexico’s past and present. In addition, Gaëlle Le Calvez provided valuable contacts in Mexico City and Cara Kinnally helped immensely in the early stages of preparing the manuscript. Benjamin Reed lent his outstanding bibliographical research skills to answer questions and check facts. Travis Williams, in particular, served as a skillful and insightful research assistant in the reorganization and preparation of the final manuscript. Julia Analena Hollmann offered expert assistance in transcribing several interviews. Licia Weber brought her energy and expertise to the final preparation of the images. Pablo García Loaeza stands out in a category of his own as a constant interlocutor, translator, and cultural touchstone at every stage of this project. Grady C. Wray brought a dynamic energy to the project in its final stages; an accomplished translator, he crafted with care and a keen ear for a variety of registers the voices I sought to share in English. I thank, in particular, my husband, Mark Feddersen, for helping at every stage of this project, whether tracking down an image, reading a first draft, or providing valuable insight into the project. The acquiring editor at the University of Arizona Press, Kristen Buckles, enthusiastically and expertly guided the final format and production of the book. My deep thanks go to all these individuals. Fieldwork in Mexico took on new themes and topics as people of all walks of life made invaluable suggestions. I am particularly indebted to the talented and generous aid of Dr. Lilian Álvarez, Sergio Hernández, Marcelino Hernández Beatriz, Enriqueta Loaeza Tovar, Gerardo Pérez, Judith Santopietro, John Todd Jr., and the Zayas family—Concepción, Hugo, and Librada. My archival work in Seville benefited greatly from the knowledgeable input of Berta Ares Queija, Justina Sara Viejo, Consuelo Varela, and Salvador Bernabéu. My deepest gratitude goes to the hundreds of Mexicans who opened their hearts and homes to me and my questions. Their regard for this project, willing participation, and insightful support propelled me forward, even when the breadth of it threatened to overwhelm me. Finally, I dedicate this book to Mark and Anna. They joyfully traveled the Ruta de Cortés with me—both in Mexico and in the long years of writing the book. They added insight, support, and joy to this project as it unfolded.

Figure I.1.  Portrait of Hernan Cortés. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

Chronology of Events

I.  Pre-Hispanic Central Mexico ca. 100 BC–ca. 750

Teotihuacan—rise and fall; apogee ca. 450–650

ca. 800–ca. 1180

Tula—rise and fall; apogee ca. 900–1100

1325

Foundation of Mexico-Tenochtitlan

1428

Establishment of the Triple Alliance of Mexico, Texcoco, and Tlacopan

II.  The Conquest of Mexico 1511

Occupation and colonization of Cuba, under command of Diego Velázquez

ca. 1515

Cortés marries Catalina Suárez Marcaida (alternate spellings: Xuárez, Juárez, Marcayda)

1517

First expedition to Mexico, led by Francisco Hernández de Córdoba

1518

Second expedition to Mexico, led by Juan de Grijalva

1519

Third expedition to Mexico, led by Hernán Cortés February

Cortés departs from Cuba, against Velázquez’s orders

March

Cortés reaches the Yucatan Peninsula; Spaniards find translators, Jerónimo de Aguilar and Malintzin/doña Marina/Malinche

April

Spaniards arrive in Veracruz

June

Spaniards arrive in Cempoala

September

Spaniards arrive in Tlaxcala; battle with the Tlaxcalans

October

Massacre at Cholula

November

Cortés and his men arrive in Tenochtitlan and enter in peace; Cortés arrests Moctezuma and effectively holds him hostage

May

Cortés leaves Tenochtitlan to face Pánfilo de Narváez in battle; Pedro de Alvarado attacks the Tenochca nobility during a religious ceremony (the Festival of Toxcatl)

1520

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Chronology of Events

June

Cortés returns to Tenochtitlan. Moctezuma is killed; Cuitlahuac is chosen to replace Moctezuma as the new tlatoani (supreme leader)

June 30

La Noche Triste. Spaniards are forced to flee Tenochtitlan

July

Spaniards take refuge in Tlaxcala

October– December

Smallpox decimates Tenochtitlan; Cuitlahuac dies

February

Cuauhtemoc is chosen as the new tlatoani

May

Spaniards begin the siege of Mexico-Tenochtitlan

August 13

Cuauhtemoc is captured; the siege ends; Tenochtitlan is conquered by Cortés

1521

1521–23

Expeditions to conquer the rest of Mesoamerica. Cortés goes north; Alvarado and Cristóbal de Olid go south (to Guatemala and Honduras, respectively)

1522

Cortés’s wife, doña Catalina Suárez, arrives in Mexico; shortly after her arrival, she dies mysteriously in the palace at Coyoacan; Cortés is suspected of her murder, but no formal criminal charges are brought against him (although civil charges were filed)

1524–26

Expedition of Cortés to Hibueras (Honduras) against Olid



Execution of the rulers (tlatoqueh) from the Triple Alliance

1528

Under orders from Charles V, Cortés returns to Spain

1529

Cortés marries doña Juana de Zúñiga



Charles V rewards Cortés for his services in New Spain by naming him Marquis of the Oaxaca Valley. Much to his disappointment, however, Cortés is not named viceroy of New Spain

1530

Cortés returns to the New World with his mother, doña Catalina Pizarro, and his new wife; he settles in Cuernavaca, Mexico

1533–39

Cortés outfits expeditions to Baja California

1535–36

Cortés leads expedition to Baja California and attempts to establish a colony there

1539–40

Besieged by legal problems and disputes with civilians in New Spain, Cortés returns to Spain for the last time, accompanied by his mestizo son, Martín (son of Malinche). Although he attempts to gain the support of Charles V, his petitions are largely ignored and neglected by the court

1541

Cortés is permitted to participate in the expedition against Algiers on the Barbary Coast; Spain is defeated

1547

Cortés decides to return to Mexico, but dies near Seville before he is able to make the journey

Chronology of Events 

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III.  A Brief History of Mexico: Colonial Period to Present Day 1527

First Audiencia, a Spanish court system, established

1531

Alleged apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe

1550–90

The Chichimeca War in northeastern Mexico

1569

Establishment of the Inquisition

1570s–80s

Smallpox epidemics decimate indigenous population in Mexico

1629

Great Flood, Mexico City underwater for over five years

1632

End of repartimiento system, affects transition from forced to free labor

1642

Juan Palafox y Mendoza, named archbishop, and briefly viceroy, initiates multiple ecclesiastic and secular reforms

1734

Virgin of Guadalupe named patroness of New Spain

1767

Expulsion of the Jesuits

1786

Bourbon reforms in New Spain; territory is divided into intendencias and begins to participate in free market

1790

Aztec calendar and statue of Coatlicue are discovered in an excavation in the zócalo

1803

Spain loses Louisiana territory to Napoleon

1810

The Hidalgo Revolt, beginnings of the Mexican War of Independence

1821

Mexican Independence from Spain becomes officially recognized

1836

Texas declares independence from Mexico; Mexico loses Texas territory

1846

United States declares war on Mexico

1848

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ends U.S.-Mexican War; Mexico loses nearly half its territory to the United States

1857–61

Reform War (Conservatives vs. Liberals)

1858

Benito Juárez elected president (the first and only full-blooded indigenous president of Mexico)

1861–67

French intervention. Maximilian of Hapsburg declared emperor of Mexico

1876

Porfirio Díaz is elected president of Mexico; rules politics in the country for over thirty years, until the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution

1910

Mexican Revolution begins

1914

U.S. forces seize the city of Veracruz and remain there for six months

1917

A new Mexican constitution is adopted, officially putting an end to the Revolution, although intermittent fighting continues well into the 1920s

1926–29

Cristero War in Mexico. Conservatives lash out against the loss of the Catholic Church’s political and economic power under the new constitution

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Chronology of Events

1929

Creation of the National Revolutionary Party, which later renames itself the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI); the PRI will rule Mexican politics for the next seventy years

1948

National Indigenist Institute (Instituto Nacional Indigenista, INI) established in Mexico City

1968

Tlatelolco massacre of student and civilian protestors in the Plaza of the Three Cultures in Mexico City

1985

Mexico City earthquake; at least 10,000 people are killed, 30,000 injured, and thousands of buildings destroyed or damaged

1987

Mexico begins registering cultural and environmental sites at UNESCO

1991

Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution revised, eliminating the ejido system of collective land ownership for agriculture, thus opening the way for privatization and foreign investment

1992

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) signed by the United States, Canada, and Mexico

1994

NAFTA goes into effect; partly in response, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) goes public, issuing their First Declaration and Revolutionary Laws

2000

The PRI loses the presidential election to an opposition party for the first time since 1929. Vicente Fox is elected

2001

Amendment to Article 2 of the constitution, officially recognizing Mexico as a pluriethnic country

2003

General Law on Linguistic Rights of Indigenous Peoples goes into effect, giving indigenous languages of Mexico full status as national languages and guaranteeing their speakers legal protection. National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples (Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas, CDI) replaces INI

2006

War against drug cartels initiated by newly elected president Felipe Calderón. By 2013 more than 60,000 people had died

2010

100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution; bicentennial celebration of Mexican Independence

2012

The PRI wins the presidential election. Enrique Peña Nieto is elected

Translators’ Note

The transcription and translation of oral language are daunting. The process of transcription is subject to the quality of the recordings, the idiosyncratic speech patterns of the interviewee, and the familiarity of the transcriber with the various registers of a particular dialect. In transcribed oral text, hesitations, pauses, unconnected phrases that appear as lapses of thought, lack of exact punctuation, and repetitions of the same verbal tics keep readers from progressing smoothly through the narrative. Literary or academic prose narrative normally eliminates excess repetition of certain phrases and stall words, but because the main feature of this book is the variety of voices included, we have preserved certain individual particularities that accentuate the interviewees’ natural speech flow. Also, Spanish in general, and the Spanish spoken in Mexico in particular, is rich and varied with many colloquial expressions, unique terms that come from Nahuatl, diminutives, passive constructions, and present-tense narration styles that do not translate easily to English. Therefore, in an effort to improve readability, we have adjusted the style to a certain extent to reflect how a native English speaker from the United States would express the same sentiment. Our process included the preparation of an exhaustive, more literal draft that ensured the accurate essence and content of all the interviews. Then, we returned to each interview and highlighted the informant’s distinct personality. We maintained some natural stalls, or filler words, that underscore the interview’s orality or impromptu style. For instance, some people may pause to think about the next sentence or phrase, or they may wish to capture the listener’s attention when beginning to relate an event that has great significance for them, as if to say, “Get ready, this is something that’s not easy for me to say.” Likewise, hesitations and false starts reflect the fact that a person has not previously thought about a particular question. For example, before being asked, Adolfa Tiro had probably not considered the impact of the Spanish conquest in traditional life. She is thinking as she speaks: “Los españoles nos dejaron nuestro, ahora sí que nuestro . . . nos enseñaron y [en] eso pasamos la vida nosotros,” which we translated as “The Spaniards left us our . . . yes . . . they taught us, and that’s how we spend our life.” We hope we have maintained each informant’s individual character. We always kept the native U.S. English speaker in mind, and we did not assume readers would xv

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Translators’ Note

have knowledge of Spanish. Thus, we avoided using terms in Spanish or Nahuatl and found acceptable equivalents. If we felt a term was difficult to translate, untranslatable, or required more explanation, we left it in italics with a short equivalent in commas or parentheses and included a more detailed explanation in the glossary (appendix A). Finally, the use of certain terms such as “Indian,” “indigenous,” “native,” “original peoples,” and “first peoples” can be loaded or even offensive in both Spanish and English. We decided, however, not to change the original speakers’ choice of words, hoping that readers will pay close attention not only to word choice but also to the overall content of the interviews so as to glean each individual’s feelings and attitudes toward the indigenous people of Mexico. Taken together, we hope that our efforts to carry over stylistic variations from Spanish to English bring to life the dynamic qualities of the various informants’ spontaneous speech and, more importantly, the nuances of their individual ideas about the shades of conquest that still loom along the route of Cortés. —Pablo García Loaeza and Grady C. Wray

In the Shadow of Cortés

Figure I.2.  Sixteenth-century Franciscan Diego Durán’s history records Cortés’s march inland with indigenous porters.

Figure I.3.  Map of the major pre-Hispanic and Spanish routes connecting Veracruz and Tenochtitlan. (Courtesy of Bernardo García Martínez, Monika Beckmann, and Fernando Montes de Oca.)

Introduction There are different ways of thinking. Everyone has their own way of thinking. They’re your own experiences. You’ve lived them, you’ve seen them, they’ve happened to you. They’re not written, they’re not told, but they’re real experiences. —maría del pilar mancio

Plastic tarps set up by street vendors conceal a massive stone church in the center of Mexico City, the sprawling megalopolis built on the ruins of the great Tenochtitlan, itself the heart of the ancient Aztec Empire. As I walk past washing machines, baby dolls, and cassette tapes, I spot a plaque nearly hidden by a makeshift red awning hung from the old building. The plaque commemorates the site where the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and the Aztec emperor Moctezuma first met. At the entrance to the Church of the Hospital de Jesús, founded by Cortés himself in 1535, a smaller plaque briefly tells the story of Cortés’s landing in Veracruz and arrival in the capital city. I am here to find his burial site, but in the darkened church there is no evidence of a crypt. Nightmarishly bloody scenes of the Apocalypse painted by José Clemente Orozco in the 1940s, at about the same time that Cortés’s remains were publicly reburied, cover the domed upper choir. I ask a priest, “Por favor, where are Cortés’s remains?” He replies curtly: “On the side altar, but you can’t see them. It’s just a plaque and nothing more.” The Hospital de Jesús adjacent to the church is still in operation today. A handsome bronze bust of the conqueror hides in the shadows of an interior patio. This is Mexico City’s only public monument to Cortés. In 1985—the five-hundred-year anniversary of Cortés’s birth—a group of protestors found out about the bust and tried to storm the hospital.1 Since then, visitors have had to check in with a security guard before proceeding into the patio. Few Mexicans know of its existence. Instead of monuments, three famous murals inside nearby historic buildings depict a half-naked Cortés holding his native Indian concubine and interpreter Malinche, 3

Figure I.4.  A popular comic draws a parallel between the Spanish conquest and contemporary economic issues. (Pueblos prehispánicos. Conquista, colonia. © Miguel Angel Gallo.)

Introduction 

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5

a deformed man stricken with syphilis, and scenes of the cruelty and viciousness of the conquistadors.2 An eighty-two-year-old guide at one of these sites explains, “The Spaniards didn’t come to dance, but to seek their fortunes.” He notes that “they also brought the true religion . . . more than 90 percent of Mexicans are Catholic,” but he recounts with outrage: “It is as though you enter my house with religion ‘X’ and order me to burn all of my books” (anonymous, National Palace). The army of conquest led by Hernán Cortés was the catalyst for profound cultural and political change in Mesoamerica. Mexicans from all walks of life point to a complex web of factors that have made the conquest narrative integral to culture and politics. In the last twenty years alone, the country has undergone a major transformation as it grapples with the legacies of conquest, colonization, and nation building. Dozens of indigenous languages have been officially recognized, mandatory school texts have been rewritten, the Zapatista uprising has galvanized indigenous groups, and a revival of pre-Hispanic traditions has swept central Mexico. And in a few years the country will confront the five-hundred-year anniversary of Hernán Cortés’s fateful expedition. As a reflective journey, In the Shadow of Cortés: Conversations Along the Route of Conquest takes readers through a historical and symbolic geographic space and presents a diversity of voices and ideas about history and conquest. Many Mexicans view the geographic trajectory of the Ruta de Cortés from Veracruz to Mexico City as a symbol of a moment that changed forever the course of their history. But few U.S. Americans understand how the events of half a millennium ago continue to inform Mexico’s recent legal and educational reforms as well as how Mexicans view the United States. One of our younger informants put it rather bluntly: “Our teacher says that people in the United States don’t have history” (Ernesto García, interview). I hope to help bridge a cultural divide between contemporary Mexican and U.S. citizens by showing how the legacy of the conquest pervades Mexicans’ historical memory and sense of identity, and how it is manifested in national and grassroots politics as well as in religious affairs.3 Over time, the Ruta de Cortés has become what scholars like Pierre Nora refer to as a “site of memory,” a place where memories have crystalized local and especially national history.4 While the Ruta de Cortés is a national symbol of conquest and colonization (until recently a tourist route promoted by the Mexican government), the Spanish conquest did not take place within a single historical or geographical arc. Cortés himself used at least four distinct routes as he moved between the coast and Mexico-Tenochtitlan over the course of two years. The conquistadors sometimes followed established pre-Hispanic routes, while at other times they avoided them for strategic reasons. After the conquest of capital city Tenochtitlan, many more routes of military and spiritual conquest were established.5 Eventually these routes crossed all of central Mexico before moving north and south, as Cortés and others mounted expeditions to Michoacán and Honduras. By midcentury the Royal Road (Camino Real) from Veracruz to Mexico City was established and solidified, a route that connected the

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inland city to the coast but did not necessarily retrace Cortés’s route. The importance of the route continued throughout the colonial period. When new viceroys arrived from Spain, they symbolically reconquered Mexico by retracing major segments of Cortés’s route from Veracruz, through Xalapa, Tlaxcala, and Otumba before arriving at Mexico-Tenochtitlan. By the mid-nineteenth century, the geography of the route had become a theme of interest for both national and foreign scholars. Naturalists, such as Alexander von Humboldt, and historians, like William Prescott, transported readers to the Mexican landscape and portrayed (and sometimes embellished) its colorful history. Their vivid visual vocabulary was accompanied by images, which circulated widely in Mexico and abroad.6 Prescott’s Eurocentric History of the Conquest of Mexico, in particular, contributed to U.S. expansionist interests.7 Today the Ruta de Cortés continues to inform historical imagination and cultural memory. The British BBC, Spanish TVE, and U.S. National Geographic, among others, have sent camera crews to retrace and reinterpret Cortés’s march. Around the time of the quincentennary, a Mexican of European descent founded a tourist Ruta de Cortés, taking mostly German and Spanish tourists along the famed route. She jokes about being the conquistador’s fairy godmother, while noting that government officials later renamed the route to the less politically charged Route of the Gods. She observes, “Mexicans didn’t want to celebrate our conquest” (Marlene Ehrenberg, interview). More recently, the Mexican photographer Manuel Zavala y Alonso created an exhibit, La Ruta de Cortés, which stages artistic images of conquest along the route to provoke reflection. So while the study and interviews presented here follow the traditional Ruta de Cortés, I use it as a trope to access popular and scholarly discourses about conquest, history, memory, and identity. Rather than delve into debates about the exact location of the route and which events took place when, I focus on key geographic regions (the coast, inland cities, and the highland valley surrounding Tenochtitlan) as a framework to explore the legacies of conquest in these town and city centers today. The topic of conquest often becomes a springboard for Mexicans to consider a number of more contemporary issues—in particular, the status of indigenous populations today and the relationship between Mexico and the United States. The story has grown to include pre-Hispanic conquests by the Aztecs, Spanish, and other European incursions, and later processes of nation building, as well as the effects of neoliberal policies, U.S. imperialism, and the shockwaves of globalization. My perspective as interviewer and essayist is that of an outsider whose own U.S. academic training in colonial Mexican culture and travels through contemporary Mexico have led me to take a more personal interest in people’s stories. My role is “extracultural,”8 and my reflections are cultural translations. Through informal interviews, I explore the intersection of the dominant conquest narrative with local and individual concerns, official and unofficial campaigns, and recent research that calls into question many long-accepted aspects of the account. In so doing, I provide a forum for informants to discuss a national passion: the complex interplay of history,

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social memory, and culture. As I follow the rhythm of a traveler along the Ruta de Cortés, visiting crucial as well as less important “sites of memory” (a grand pyramid, a monumental statue, an obscure plaque, or a regional museum), I develop a cultural cartography, a map of the varied personal and historical geographies on which the conquest stories are grounded. Thus the conquest narratives I collect begin geographically in Veracruz and thematically with the Spanish defeat of the Aztecs, but then follow the geographic route to Mexico City and my informants’ thematic leads as they offer new insights on recent imperialism and modern conquest of lands, cultures, economies, and peoples today.

Official Histories, Modern Interpretations The suffering implicit in a national identity based on violent conquest was powerfully expressed over fifty years ago in Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz’s essay El laberinto de la soledad. Paz declares that all Mexicans are heirs of the chingada: “What is the chingada? The chingada is the mother opened, violated, or deceived by force. The ‘son of the chingada’ is the offspring of the violation, of the abduction, of the deceit.”9 In the same work, Paz points to the hope and vitality offered by the legacy of pre-Hispanic cultures: “Fleeting as it may be, any contact with the Mexican people shows that beneath occidental forms ancient customs and beliefs still pulsate. Those remains, which yet live, attest to the vitality of pre-Cortésian cultures.” Since Paz’s foundational essay, many writers and artists have attempted to decode the multilayered identity that emerged from the traumatic collision of Spanish and pre-Hispanic cultures. In the last two decades in particular, many writers have challenged Paz’s interpretation of a Mexican identity based on victimization. Recent publications offer more nuanced reflections on ethnic diversity and document a broad range of survival strategies that often combine accommodation and resistance. (See appendix B for a selected bibliography of these rich materials.) These newer studies continue a long tradition of often politically motivated writing about the role of indigenous societies in the conquest story. Ever since the first accounts by the conquistadors themselves, the (re)construction of key events of the conquest has been crucial to many groups as they contested the established order. As early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, indigenous authors created illustrious genealogies and ethnic histories to carve out favored positions for themselves within the new society.10 Indigenous people who had (or claimed) noble heritage were often granted special privileges. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century creole intellects, such as Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and Francisco Xavier Clavijero, borrowed these rhetorical strategies to create symbolic genealogies in which creoles laid claim to a (metaphorical) Aztec lineage to contest the dominance of the peninsular Spanish.11 During the struggle for Independence, nineteenth-century insurgents and intellectuals further appropriated the pre-Hispanic past to justify rebellion

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and the throwing off of Spanish tyranny. Historians, such as Carlos María de Bustamante, depicted Aztec emperors as patriotic forefathers of the new nation. Porfirio Díaz’s liberal reforms in the 1850s, along with state-sponsored education reforms and ambitious works (such as Vicente Riva Palacio’s five-volume collaborative history of Mexico), further reinterpreted the conquest story. By the end of the nineteenth century, indigenous founding fathers began to be replaced with Miguel Hidalgo and other heroes of the Independence movement. In the 1890s heated debates erupted in Mexico City’s newspapers over the true founders of the Mexican nation: Was it the Aztec emperors? Cortés? The church fathers who evangelized Mexico? Or was it the revolutionaries of the Independence movement? The indigenous past continued to be severed from the indigenous present in nationalist ideology.12 Early twentieth-century movements, such as the indigenismo movement and the ideological campaign of mestizaje championed by José Vasconcelos and others, attempted to bridge these contradictions, but instead reinforced the privileged status of the elites and contributed to the further erasure of living indigenous cultures.13 Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012), a prominent cultural spokesman for Mexico, summarized the national obsession with the Spanish conquest: it is “the principal mental headline on every Mexican’s mental newspaper. . . . It continues to occupy a central place in our historical memory, in our memory of identity.”14 But it is a newspaper that has been rewritten countless times. The vision promulgated in mandatory government textbooks for the second half of the twentieth century condemned the Spanish conquest and idealized pre-Hispanic indigenous cultures. They also promoted official post-Revolutionary discourse, which maintained that all Mexicans are of mixed heritage (mestizo), effectively erasing the ethnic diversity of many indigenous groups. Two watershed events challenged the official ideology. In 1992 the quincentennial of Columbus’s first voyage and landfall in the Americas provoked debates and protests and inspired yet another reevaluation of the conquest.15 Two years later, Subcomandante Marcos led the Zapatista (EZLN) uprising in Chiapas, Mexico’s most economically depressed state and the state with the highest indigenous population. These events awakened national and international awareness of the plight of the country’s original populations. Current practices of often brutal discrimination and the silencing of indigenous Mexico through an official identity narrative that excluded contemporary indigenous cultures were brought into a harsh light by the Mexican press and politicians. As a policy maker in former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s administration argued in an interview: “The most important lesson we obtained in recent years in Mexico about understanding differences . . . is the Zapatista uprising. We thought we were a country that was mixed, that didn’t have any racial problems . . . and we found out that we were very, very racist . . . [it was a] crude lesson, but it’s a lesson, and it’s very crucial for us” (Gustavo Gordillo, interview). Interpretations of the conquest story in the new millennium are pushing Mexico in new directions. The 1917 constitution was amended in 2001 to recognize that

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Figure I.5.  An eighteenth-century copy of a Mexica map, said to have been conserved by Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, illustrates the legendary journey to central Mexico and the founding of Tenochtitlan. (A Collection of Voyages and Travels. London, 1704. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.)

“the nation has a pluricultural composition based on its original indigenous peoples [pueblos indígenas], the descendants of populations that have inhabited the present territory of the country since the beginning of colonization and preserve all or part of their own social, economic, cultural and political institutions.”16 At the same time, mandatory school textbooks were revised to refer to Mexico as a pluriethnic society. Two years later, the General Law on Linguistic Rights of Indigenous Peoples gave sixty-two indigenous languages full status as Mexican national languages and guaranteed their speakers legal protection, although many debate whether the law will effect real change. Institutions established in post-Revolutionary Mexico, such as the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI), ostensibly founded to protect the indigenous populations, ultimately promoted cultural homogeneity and assimilation.

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These institutions have been replaced by governmental bodies such as the Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas (CDI), which has as one of its missions to help pueblos indígenas develop their own sustainable practices.17 At the local level, however, a variety of reactions challenge the success of the most recent policy changes. Older working-class people who have struggled with economic crises since the 1980s see an abyss between institutional changes and their own reality. A housekeeper originally from a traditional indigenous village on the outskirts of Mexico City observes: “I think many people are against it, but they never get asked. They don’t ask anyone from the common people.” So things have changed “little by little” (María Mancio, interview). A part-time chauffeur notes more sharply: “The conquest of Mexico is happening to this day,” as new empires and looters take Mexico’s riches (Mauro Barrón López, interview). They often look to their grandparents’ generation and the Mexican Revolution for inspiration. “We need another revolution,” concludes one man (Vicente López, interview). For some, the new recognition of cultural diversity has been both the result of and a further catalyst for the transformation of individual and group identities, often based upon the preservation and the revival of pre-Hispanic cultural traditions and languages. Some officially designated indigenous communities (comunidades indígenas) are mobilizing to ensure the continuity of tradition and the recognition of legal rights, even as the lack of jobs and resulting emigration threaten the viability of many of these towns. A man living in a Nahua community in the Zongolica mountains estimates that over a third of his small town has emigrated in the last fifteen years (Gabriel Mazahua, interview). Other residents of rural towns with indigenous heritages seek to reidentify their communities in a process that would allow them more autonomy and special privileges.18 Yet others, in particular urban dwellers, are forging new identities in response to globalization of indigenous movements.19 Many once self-confirmed mestizos are engaged in a process of deliberate reidentification as they seek stronger connections to an indigenous heritage.20 They capitalize on the relative permeability between racial and caste categories that dates back centuries. In urban settings where there has been massive immigration from rural areas, Nahuatl language classes are often overenrolled and neo-Aztec dancers perform in public plazas. One schoolteacher, who dedicates his weekends to disseminating information about Aztec dance, acknowledges: “True Aztecs no longer exist. Anyone who claims to be one is lying. Very deep in our blood stream, in our genes, a little of our ancient Mexican heritage remains, but a pure Mexica, an Aztec, doesn’t exist” (Arturo Muñoz Mota, interview). Yet for some people like Muñoz, language and ritual have become ways to access and reframe their own ethnicity. Likewise, residents of regions with strong links to African heritages—in particular, the coastal clusters around Veracruz and Acapulco (la Costa Chica)—are beginning to officially recognize the importance of Afro-Hispanic influences in Mexico’s diverse ethnic history. While the active revival movement la tercera raíz, “the third root”—Spanish, Indian, and African—appears to be an outsider’s project rather than a grassroots

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Figure I.6.  An Aztec dancer performs near the Templo Mayor. The Mexican flag in the background draws on pre-Hispanic iconography for its national symbol. (© Steve Raymer.)

movement, it has broadened Mexicans’ awareness beyond the official categories and binary opposition of European and indigenous peoples.21 Today, Mexico’s past—including the interpretations of it—is much like the many pyramids that still stand in central Mexico. Sacred pre-Hispanic sites, developed over centuries by successive ethnic groups, were officially rebuilt, razed, abandoned, and later given new Christian layers in the wake of the Spanish conquest. In the nineteenth century, archaeologists began uncovering many of these sites. In the last century, many sites have become centers of cultural renewal. In a few cases they have suffered further destruction, exemplified by the infamous case of a Walmart superstore built within the Teotihuacan archaeological precinct, even after archaeological remains had been documented on the site.22 One informant summed up many Mexicans’ relationship with their pyramids: The pyramids are our “greatest pride” (Alejandro García Moreno, interview). One of the most famous of these sacred pyramids today is the Templo Mayor, the ceremonial heart of the Aztec capital city Tenochtitlan. Popular lore recounts how clever Aztec laborers ignored orders to build the Spanish cathedral on top of the Templo’s ruins and instead sited it a few hundred yards away. In 1978 an electrician

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working in the area discovered the base of the sacred Templo. Homes that had been built on top of it, some from the colonial period and the nineteenth century, were themselves razed to reveal the foundations of the pyramid. Now one of the country’s most popular museums interprets the archaeological ruins for thousands of national and international visitors each month. The site has become a preeminent symbol of the massive effort to unearth and construct a new patrimony of the nation.23 Just three hours away, in the city of Cholula, which has been continuously inhabited for thousands of years, stands an even greater pyramid, with an even more complex history. The largest pyramid (by volume) in the world is aptly named Tlachihualtepetl, Nahuatl for “artificial mountain.” Far more ancient than the Templo Mayor, it contains at least seven levels constructed, rebuilt, and eventually abandoned by successive pre-Hispanic ethnic groups. By the time the Spaniards arrived, the pyramid was a grass-covered hill. Here they built the Basilica of the Virgin of Remedios (known as La Virgen Conquistadora because of her legendary role in the conquest). In the 1920s a team of archaeologists rediscovered and partially exposed some of its many layers. It is now another symbol of cultural revival. Despite the Virgin of Remedios’s Spanish origin, she has now become the very symbol of Cholulan identity—honored as part of “the true faith” but surrounded with rituals based in pre-Hispanic belief and practice. Mexico’s past, like its pyramids, is built layer upon layer by ethnic domination, conquests, and evolving cultural practices.

Figure I.7.  The base of Templo Mayor was rediscovered in 1978 under layers of colonial and modern buildings in the heart of Mexico City. (Photograph by Rich Remsberg.)

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The reinterpretation of culture is exemplified by changes in vocabulary that reflect the dynamic interplay of history, politics, and ethnic identities. As Spanish colonialism became well established, it became increasingly common to level ethnic and social differences among native populations, referring to them as indios, a generic term with derogatory connotations. The precise meaning of “indio” has been debated for centuries. It is not a natural category but rather an evolving term, dependent on “changing politics and epistemologies of blood and culture, time and place.”24 Recently the less loaded term “indigenous,” drawn from natural history, is often used, as well as the expression “pueblos originarios” (First Nations). Criollo, or “creole,” used widely by the midcolonial period, most often indicated society’s elite born of European descent. “Mestizo,” first used as part of the Spanish casta system to indicate a mixture of European and indio, came to represent a positive ideal of a postracial, modern Mexican. A corresponding movement during the twentieth century, known as “indigenismo,” sought to revalorize the indio of the past and preserve elements of indigenous culture; its tenets are actively being challenged by contemporary indigenous movements.25 Indeed, today all these terms are being challenged as both scholars and the general public acknowledge that the construction of “indio” (starting with the navigational errors of Columbus) is based on a Eurocentric perspective of the “other.” The evolution of ethnic categories and terminology underlines the fluid, socially constructed nature of self and group identity.

Interviews and Images The body of interviews offered below takes a long clear look at many Mexicans’ “mental newspaper” as described by Fuentes. The informants bear witness to intimate, complex worlds in which official discourse intermingles with lived experience. There is often a curious mixture of local legend and national historiography with more recent revisionist interpretations that challenge the dominant narrative. A pervasive sense of historical memory comes through the distinct registers of each story. As one Mexican reporter noted, “There is nothing more alive than History. Nothing ignites more passion than what happened centuries ago, since the interpretation of memory moves our present.”26 A crucial testimony to cultural diversity is found in the rich traditions of visual imagery drawn from historical codices, popular culture, and archival and contemporary photographs. This project offers a collection of imagery as a visual cultural narrative in its own right. Imagery has always been an integral part of the creation of cultural and religious identity in Mesoamerica. The richly illustrated codices were used as mnemonic devices by pre-Hispanic tlacuiloque (plural for tlacuilo), the specially trained scribes and painters, for ceremonial retellings of the past.27 After the conquest, Spaniards used visual imagery as a tool for converting indigenous populations to new meanings and practices. The influx of European images changed the nature

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Figure I.8.  Schoolchildren visit a fort in Veracruz. (© Steve Raymer.)

of the codices and stone carvings, but the importance of visual culture remained. The image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, for example, began to circulate widely by the midcolonial period. Highly charged symbolic imagery was also widely employed in nineteenth-century nation building and in post-Revolutionary Mexican cultural and political campaigns, such as the muralist movement. Over the centuries an extensive, heterogeneous visual narrative about the conquest and Mexican history has influenced the conceptualization “Mexico.” A recent study suggests, for example, that nineteenth-century visual culture performed an important social role in re-forming identity as New Spain became Mexico. People were both spectators and objects in a dynamic visual culture that moved beyond autonomous entities and “mere reflections of social and political processes.”28 Visual imagery aids contemporary viewers in constructing a heterogeneous cultural canvas, and serves as another framework to witness and interpret cultural processes that draw on social and historical memory.

The Standard Narrative The complex relationship that many Mexicans have with their past begins with the version of the story they learn in school. Mandatory textbooks (textos gratuitos), first published in the 1960s by the Secretariat of Public Education, reflect an official

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interpretation of the conquest to reinforce national identity. The first edition, and even the newer editions revised in the wake of more recent political and cultural changes, recount the conquest story in less than six pages. The facts as outlined are straightforward. After having been driven off the Yucatan coast by the Maya, Cortés arrived at the coastal area of modern-day Veracruz in April 1519. He was in desperate need of a success, because he had set sail for Mexico against the express orders of his superior, the governor of Cuba. Two native ethnic groups met him: ambassadors for the Mexica leader Moctezuma (Montezuma), the head of the Triple Alliance popularly known as the Aztec Empire, and local Totonaco Indians, who made themselves known once negotiations with Moctezuma’s messengers had stalled. The Totonacos had been conquered and subdued by the Triple Alliance but resented their overlords. This encounter was the first indication that Cortés had of the divisions among the many Mesoamerican ethnic groups. He quickly exploited these interethnic rivalries to strengthen his own position. After landing in Veracruz, Cortés and his army traveled up the coast to the center of Totonaco culture, Zempoala. Astutely playing off Totonaco-Aztec rivalries, Cortés received Totonaco supplies and carriers for the steep climb to the area of present-day Xalapa, on through Ixtacamaxtitlan, and into Tlaxcalan lands. The first battle of the conquest took place against these Tlaxcalans, a confederation of groups independent from the Triple Alliance. After some fierce but inconclusive skirmishes, the Tlaxcalan leaders made a fateful choice: they decided to enter into a key alliance with the Spaniards against their Aztec enemy. The Tlaxcalans provided thousands of warriors and marched with Cortés on Mesoamerica’s most sacred city, Cholula. Here, in the first major violence of the incursion, several thousand Cholulteca religious leaders and nobles were massacred. News of the carnage and of the Spanish alliance with the Tlaxcalans traveled quickly to Moctezuma in Tenochtitlan. The combined Spanish and Tlaxcalan army marched on to Tenochtitlan. When the Spaniards first glimpsed the great island city, they were stunned. They witnessed a city far larger than any in Europe, filled with bustling markets, waterways, and elaborate architecture. In this great capital city Cortés was first greeted peacefully by Moctezuma. But the tide soon turned. Details are sketchy, but political factions among the Spaniards, a brutal massacre of hundreds of nobles who were celebrating the feast of the deity Huitzilopochtli, and the imprisonment and death of Moctezuma led to an uprising and the ousting of Cortés’s army. According to a popular legend known as “La Noche Triste” (The Night of Sorrows), Cortés wept at the loss of Tenochtitlan and, more likely, over the loss of two-thirds of his soldiers and the gold confiscated from Moctezuma. But textbooks emphasize that Cortés did not give up. After a strategic retreat he regrouped, gathered more local allies, and managed to subdue more neighboring territories. In December 1520 he laid plans for a final assault on Tenochtitlan. He constructed brigantines, ships far larger than any vessels seen by the Aztecs, and laid siege to the island city. On August 13, 1521, after eighty

Figure I.9.  The sixteenth-century codex Lienzo de Tlaxcala depicts the leader of the Tlaxcalan federation, Xicotencatl, greeting Malinche and Cortés.

Figure I.10.  An illustration from the Lienzo de Tlaxcala of the Spanish-Tlaxcalan massacre of religious leaders in the sacred city of Cholula en route to Tenochtitlan.

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days of urban warfare, Moctezuma’s successor, Cuauhtemoc, was forced to retreat to Tenochtitlan’s partner city, Tlatelolco, but was captured en route before he could escape. The last ruler of the Triple Alliance was imprisoned, tortured, and eventually put to death at Cortés’s command. Within two years Cortés had not only conquered the great twin cities of TlatelolcoTenochtitlan at the heart of the Triple Alliance but also allied with or subdued a whole series of neighboring ethnic groups. Mexican textbooks emphasize that without these alliances the Spaniards would never have reached Tenochtitlan, let alone conquered it. The texts also point out that while the Spaniards brought Christianity, they also inaugurated an era of violence and massive depopulation due to forced labor and disease. Spanish colonization led to widespread expropriation of lands and power and the destruction of indigenous sacred sites. Still, depending on the edition, the conquest is presented with varying degrees of ambivalence. In textbooks published in 1992, for example, Moctezuma is portrayed as subservient to Cortés, and Cuauhtemoc’s defense of the city is hardly mentioned.29 By 2009, however, Cuauhtemoc is celebrated as “fundador de tu patria,” or a founding father of Mexico.30 Much of the complexity of this story is missing from textbooks, since they focus on the post-Independence period, when all residents of New Spain became “equal” citizens in independent Mexico. Some simplification of the story can be accounted for by the intended primary-school audience. But key elements are significant in their absence. For example, the multiple stages of the conquest, the continuing influence of pre-Hispanic systems of governance and ethnic alliances on postconquest social and political order, and the role of the African slave trade are all omissions that obscure the cultural diversity of the colonial world. The complex and often contradictory European response to the presence of vast native populations is often overlooked. Yet, beginning with the first conquests in the Americas, Spaniards deliberated on how to deal with indigenous peoples. The 1493 papal bull had granted Spain vast rights to conquer the new lands for the express purpose of evangelizing new souls. Early edicts by Queen Isabella prohibited the enslavement of the original inhabitants. But two widespread practices affected the course of the conquest. First, Crown policy asserted the doctrine of “just war” (a medieval doctrine used as a rationale for wars against all non-Christians, in particular the Muslims) to justify the conquest of the New World populations. The Requerimiento, a document written in 1513 and read in Spanish to natives, required them to subject themselves to the authority of the king as the agent of the church and ultimately God himself. Second, the policy of encomienda (another holdover from the Reconquista in Spain), granted conquistadors authority over indios who paid tribute or labor in exchange for their Christianization. The system in fact subjected hundreds of thousands of natives to virtual enslavement. Even the famous midsixteenth-century debate in Valladolid, called for by King Philip himself in order to determine the true nature of “indios” and if conquest procedures were justified, did

Figure I.11.  An elementary-school textbook instructs students on Mexico’s history, highlighting the last Aztec emperor, Cuauhtemoc, and the War of Independence hero Miguel Hidalgo. (Formación cívica y ética, primer grado. Courtesy Lilian Álvarez and the Secretaría de Educación Pública.)

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not immediately put an end to the encomienda system. It would take another twenty years to be officially abolished, although the practice would continue unofficially in different guises. While the New Laws put an end to encomiendas, except for widows who were still entitled, it was replaced by repartimiento, which eventually led to a wage labor system. Other systems were also put into place, such as the exemption of indios from prosecution by the Inquisition and an Indian court and code that provided an avenue for indigenous grievances until the eighteenth century. For nearly fifty years (until extensive revisions at the turn of the twenty-first century) textbooks did not comment on the Spanish approach to colonization, which allowed for a complex system of Spanish-native relations. The creation of two separate “republics”—one indigenous, one Spanish—sought to ensure a degree of survival and transformation among the many indigenous cultures. While the Spanish built European urban centers based around a central plaza, indigenous groups either remained in their original areas or were “reduced,” mixed with other native ethnic groups and moved to new lands.31 While the system of segregation ultimately failed because colonizers were dependent on indigenous goods and labor, some repúblicas de indios maintained a degree of autonomy and tradition throughout the colonial period. Indigenous communities paid tribute or were drafted for labor. But they were also permitted—at least by law and at times in practice—to establish their own local governments, use their own languages, and even seek recourse in the Spanish courts, using Spanish or the indigenous lingua franca, Nahuatl. In some cases special privileges were granted to people of noble indigenous lineage and to groups that had allied with the Spaniards. Studies of archival documents increasingly demonstrate how indigenous subjects negotiated the terms of their own submission; the image of the indio as “vanquished” in passive submission does not reflect historical reality.32 Although practices of forced labor, confiscation of land, and discrimination continued, there is increasing evidence of the effectiveness of indigenous groups who used the Indian law and courts to petition for land rights and exemption from tribute. The survival of indigenous and nonassimilated cultures continued through the colonial period. Textbooks also often omit the complex history of indigenous groups allied to the Spanish during conquest. While the role of the Tlaxcalan confederation is acknowledged, nothing is said about the many other ethnic groups, such as the Texcoca and the Huaquecholla, who allied with Cortés.33 Indeed, post-Independence Mexico itself employed the distortions of the Black Legend (begun in the late sixteenth century by England, which vilified the Spanish for propagandistic purposes) to unify Mexicans “us” against the cruel Spanish “them.” Textbooks focus instead on the loss of the glorified indigenous past and the painful birth of a new nation. The process of racial and cultural ethnic mixing, called mestizaje, was symbolized by the birth of the first mestizo, Martín Cortés, the son of Hernán Cortés and his interpreter, known as La Malinche. Mestizaje originated in the Spanish-based casta system and its category for a mixture of Indian and Spanish,

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Figure I.12.  The cruelty of the Spanish conquest was emphasized in the late sixteenthcentury engravings by Theodore de Bry in his Les grands voyages. Widely translated and circulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the multivolume work contributed to the dissemination of the Black Legend.

mestizo. It is a cultural and political, not a biological, concept. Only with the recent revisions to textbooks at the turn of the twenty-first century is another form of ethnic mixing included: the arrival of large numbers of Africans in central Mexico. Despite the fact that more blacks and people of mixed African and European descent (mulattos, also known as pardos) than Europeans lived in New Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, few Mexicans today recognize the historical presence of the tercera raíz. Another legacy from the colonial period was silenced by official post-Revolutionary discourse. New Spain’s casta system was based on the concept of calidad, which included not only skin color but also place of origin, occupation, wealth, purity of blood, honor, even integrity and virtue. In this system people of noble indigenous

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descent could sometimes lay claim not only to territorial rights but also to a “pure bloodline”—and therefore a high calidad, which entitled them to additional rights.34 Light-skinned slaves of high calidad could in effect become Spanish.35 Identity labels were flexible; they could change over the course of a lifetime, and they could be manipulated to gain benefits for an individual or family. As we will see, ethnic labeling is integral to Mexico’s official history and continues to surface in contemporary Mexicans’ self-narratives.36 In the state textbooks, for example, each chapter includes folkloric “Cuentos de abuelos,” grandparents’ tales, which cast moral truths as coming from unchanging indigenous ancestors. These ancestors are represented visually as archaeological objects, stone carvings that have no living presence in present-day Mexico. A forty-year-old woman born in a region with a thriving Olmec population criticizes this approach: “Elementary school textbooks talk about these civilizations as if they’d disappeared . . . discriminating against them, eliminating them in order to fit them into a scheme or a stereotype” (Lucía Fortuno Hernández, interview). Textbooks also deemphasize an equally important conquest: the Roman Catholic Church’s evangelization of indigenous populations, known as the “spiritual conquest,” was both a motivation for and a justification of the Spanish invasion.37 Responding to Cortés’s request to the king that the Franciscans begin the evangelization of New Spain, the first twelve Franciscans arrived in Veracruz in 1524 and retraced Cortés’s route from Veracruz to Tenochtitlan barefoot. Textbooks focus on the arrival of Christianity as a cultural phenomenon and do not mention that by the 1570s conflicts between the Crown, secular clergy, and mendicant orders such as the Franciscans had radically changed the policies that had originally fueled the process of evangelization. Official neglect of this story may be explained by the fact that Mexico is the only Latin American country to have broken completely with the Vatican for more than a century (1860s­–1992) in an attempt to separate church and state. The constitution prohibited the church from owning real estate or operating schools and denied it any civil status, including the right of clergy to vote. One informant notes that Mexico in effect conducted a religious war with the church during a period of intensive nation building, a campaign that may have aided the survival and development of local religious practices (Gustavo Gordillo, interview). The evangelization process was a centuries-long history of imposition, negotiation, and accommodation among factions within the church as well as the communities it served.38 Within a few years of their arrival the Franciscan friars, for example, after closely observing indigenous religious practices, had condensed the Ten Commandments into seven for their Nahua neophytes.39 In turn the Nahua interpreted Catholicism within a preexisting religious framework. With the arrival of Christianity indigenous communities developed an intricate system of duties and stewardships (cargos and mayordomías) to organize their ritual life around the Catholic cult of the saints, while maintaining local practices associated with their ancient deities of the natural world. Communities formed strong new traditions through the

Figure I.13.  Native Tlaxcalan Diego Muñoz Camargo wrote a local history and depicted Franciscans using a sacred ball court as a stage for evangelization.

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layering of cultural practices and ideologies. They created hybrid iconic images, such as Saint Francis, patron saint of birds and all nature, astride an eagle clutching a nopal, or prickly pear cactus, the sacred symbol of the mythic founding of the city of Tenochtitlan (lit. “place of the nochtli”). Many factors, including acrimonious internal disputes as well as cataclysmic depopulation, made the Franciscan vision of a new Christian land only partly successful. By the 1570s many of the monasteries had been left unfinished and abandoned. Today along the so-called Ruta Franciscana, massive half-built Franciscan monasteries lie in ruins, often within a quarter mile of newer churches that were no longer associated with the orders that had evangelized New Spain. Other evidence of the geography of conversion permeates rural and urban communities today; conversion was a chief organizing principle in the construction of both town and community.40 One of the most important aspects of the spiritual conquest that endures today is the continued celebration of the fiesta patronal, a town’s patron feast day. This custom thrives in most rural—and even some urban—areas all along the Ruta de Cortés.41 Some small towns in the remote Sierras still celebrate the feast of Saint Francis and carry through the streets the composite image of the saint riding an eagle.42 Efforts over many centuries to suppress, co-opt, or accommodate the older worldviews have resulted in a kaleidoscope of communal religious identities that represent a compromise between Catholic and local spiritual practices.43 The evangelization process destroyed many elements of indigenous religion but preserved or transformed others.

Mestizaje and Archetypes In stark contrast to the Spanish system, which sought to reconstitute indigenous social structures within a colonial administration, the Mexican Constitution of 1824 made no provisions for los indios. The rhetoric of the newly independent nation instead attempted to level ethnic differences. This was the beginning of what many recent critiques have called the “politics of ethnocide” or “de-indianization.”44 The government revoked indigenous rights to common land and access to common law and insisted on Spanish as the official language, acts that led to harsh discrimination against the indigenous populations in the courts.45 Although indigenous communities continued the same ritual celebrations of their patron saints and cultivated the same crops, individuals and communities began to revise their official identities in response to changes in state politics. By the end of Porfirio Díaz’s presidency (1911) only 29 percent of Mexico’s population identified themselves as indios compared with 60 percent earlier in the nineteenth century.46 Following the Mexican Revolution and the Constitution of 1917, Mexico sought to officially reintroduce ownership of common lands, the basis for peasant and indigenous community life, in the form of the ejido.47 Yet the liberal agenda put forth by

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Figure I.14.  Diego Rivera’s murals about pre-Hispanic civilizations and the conquest of Mexico fill the inner courtyard of the National Palace in Mexico City. Here Cortés and other Spanish figures are depicted as greedy and syphilitic, while an indigenous mother and her blue-eyed baby look on. (© Steve Raymer.)

elites still viewed the concept of the indio as an obstacle to modernization. Even as the indigenismo movement grew and promoted a folkloric, nostalgic view of indios from the past, ideological campaigns devalued contemporary indigenous identities. One of the founding fathers of the ideology of the post-Revolutionary period was Mexico’s first secretary for education, José Vasconcelos. He argued that over time the original four racial troncos (branches) in Mexico had been erased, making way for all Mexicans to be considered culturally advanced mestizos.48 He drew inspiration from Mexico’s glorious pre-Hispanic past but sought to “disappear” the real indio through integration.49 In essence, his definition of the “cosmic race” was a Western concept intended to make contemporary indigenous cultures obsolete. Vasconcelos’s book Hernán Cortés: Creador de la nacionalidad (1941) further endorses the superiority of Mexicans based on this special “racial mixture” and argues that “Cortés deserves, more than anyone else, the title that has so often been denied him of ‘father of our nationality.’”50 Vasconcelos promoted his vision of assimilation by inaugurating a public arts and education program. Among other initiatives, he funded the muralist

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movement led by Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco and hired them to render highly charged scenes of Mexico’s history for public consumption and edification. During the post-Revolutionary nation-building project, as the state promoted the concept of mestizaje, three key indigenous figures came to represent the role of indigenous peoples in the conquest story: Malinche, Moctezuma II, and Cuauhtemoc. Malinche was one of twenty Nahua (Aztec) slave women given by the Mayans to Cortés after a skirmish at Tabasco, the Battle of Centla, in 1519. Bilingual in her mother tongue and the language of her Mayan captors, she became crucial to Cortés’s military campaign, since she could translate Nahuatl into Mayan, which was then translated into Spanish by Gerónimo de Aguilar. She was baptized as doña Marina by the Spanish and was also known by the honorific Malintzin. She was so essential to Cortés’s campaign that in several postconquest native codices she and Cortés are always pictured together. Since he spoke through her, the name Malintzin refers to both of them.51 Cortés took Malinche as his mistress, had a son (Martín) by her, and then married her off to one of his captains. According to nationalist discourse, especially after the Mexican Revolution, Malinche became an icon of the complex identity of Mexicans themselves. She is represented variously as a traitor to pre-Hispanic Mexico, a shrewd and astute survivor of the new regime, and the mother of the modern Mexican nation.52 In the 1980s a statue commemorating the first mestizo family was erected in Coyoacan, where Malinche lived after the fall of Tenochtitlan. But the ambiguity of her role led to a public outcry so forceful that the statue was removed. Like Malinche, Moctezuma II (ca. 1466–1520) is an ambivalent figure in official and popular discourse. For decades, school textbooks portrayed him as superstitious and weak. Recent revisions have done little to alter this perspective. Yet his story is more complicated. During his rule as tlatoani—Nahuatl for supreme leader or ruler—of Tenochtitlan (1502–20), the Triple Alliance extended and consolidated its power throughout much of central Mexico. Mexicans still debate why Moctezuma allowed Cortés into the heart of Tenochtitlan, but he quickly became a prisoner in his own palace. The oral accounts of Nahua elders gathered by the Franciscan Bernadino de Sahagún record Moctezuma’s anguish: “What is to become of us? Who in the world must endure it? Will it not be me [as last ruler]? My heart is tormented, as though chile water were poured on it; it greatly burns and smarts. Where in the world [are we to turn], oh our lord?”53 After Cortés’s captain Pedro de Alvarado initiated a massacre of indigenous nobles during the feast of Huitzilopochtli, Cortés and Bernal Díaz reported that Moctezuma was stoned to death by his own people in the ensuing uprising. But other accounts contest this version, reporting that Spaniards killed him once it became clear the ruler could not pacify the city. Nahua elders who recalled the conquest depicted a leader who was at a loss: Moctezuma “lamented his troubles at length; he was afraid and shocked. He told the troubles of the altepetl. And everyone was very afraid. Fear reigned, and shock, laments, and expressions of distress. People talked, assembled, gathered, wept for themselves and for others.”54

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Figure I.15.  A sixteenth-century codex attributed to the Jesuit Juan de Tovar portrays Moctezuma as the last in a line of splendid Aztec kings. (Tovar Manuscript. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.)

Most historians now agree that the legendary association of Cortés with Quetzalcoatl and the return of the feathered serpent was a postconquest myth created to explain the conquest. They postulate that Moctezuma followed Mexica tradition and diplomacy by allowing Cortés into the city before devising a plan to expel him and his army. Others theorize that Moctezuma may have been curious about the new invaders and did not feel threatened by a few hundred men.55 There are few historical facts that could settle these debates and rescue Moctezuma from the popular perception as a weak leader mired in uncertainty. In the nineteenth century he was sometimes invoked as a link in creating a genealogy for Mexico as a nation-state. Today popular culture, such as fiction by Carlos Fuentes and a blockbuster museum exhibit at the British Museum in 2010,56 plays to these stereotypes while at the same time attempting to revise them by giving him more agency. The ruler’s daughter, Isabel Moctezuma (Tecuichpoch), the only one to be recognized as a legitimate heir by the Spaniards, is depicted in contradictory terms in both indigenous and Spanish accounts. She has been nearly removed from the official conquest narrative today.57

Figure I.16.  A group reenacts Moctezuma’s reign for Mexico’s centennial celebration of Independence from Spain, 1910. (From Genaro García’s Crónica. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.)

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By contrast, the last Aztec ruler, the young Cuauhtemoc (ca. 1495–1525), once nearly forgotten, emerged as a hero in the late nineteenth century and has remained a key figure in popular memory. The statue erected in the 1870s to honor him still stands while those to Cortés and Malinche have not.58 Cuauhtemoc led the final resistance to the Spanish but was captured while fleeing the ruined city. In defeat, he boldly faced Cortés, saying “take that knife from your belt and kill me if you can.” Cortés spared his life, only to hang him a few years later on charges of treason while en route to Honduras. Beginning with the Mexican Revolution, Cuauhtemoc became a symbol of democratic resistance. More recently he has come to symbolize indigenous resilience and strength. Even his name, often rendered in English as “Descending Eagle,” implies a fierce determination. Cuauhtemoc is one of the few non-Hispanic given names that remain popular in Mexico today. A bust of Cuauhtemoc gazes out over Mexico City’s zócalo. Another statue of the warrior hero oversees traffic on the central Boulevard de la Reforma. In the grand Palace of Fine Arts, David Siqueiros’s mural (1951) depicts Cuauhtemoc’s stoic endurance while being questioned about Moctezuma’s legendary hidden treasures. When his answers were found unsatisfactory he was tortured by having the soles of his feet burned. A plaque in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, the site where the tlatoani surrendered, states: “Heroically defended by Cuauhtemoc, Tlatelolco fell to the power of Hernán Cortés. It was neither a triumph nor a defeat. It was the painful birth of the mestizo nation that is Mexico today.” In 1968 the plaza’s symbolism as the site of resistance made it the choice for demonstrators asking for more democratic processes. The government’s response was a massacre of over a hundred people. A second plaque commemorates this modern tragedy. Today, Aztec dancers throughout Mexico and parts of the United States connect their tradition with the last Aztec leader by invoking his legendary words, “One day we shall rise reunited, gaining strength from our new Sun to fulfill our destiny.”

Shadows of Cortés The man who set in motion radical change in Mesoamerica has provoked controversy from the first. Cortés’s role in the conquest was contested even before his army left the coast for the march inland. He left Cuba without the governor’s permission, put down a rebellion of the governor’s men, and then sank his ships to prevent rebellious soldiers from returning to Cuba. Heated public debates began to appear in both the central valley of Mexico and Spain almost immediately after the initial phase of the conquest. Heroic accounts, such as Cortés’s own Segunda carta de relación (1524) and his chaplain’s biography of him (López de Gómara, 1552), circulated widely in Europe.59 Yet the latter was soon put on the Index of Prohibited Books and stayed there for nearly two centuries. Cortés’s beloved Franciscans, whom he had invited to evangelize New Spain, considered the conqueror a “New Moses.” Cortés

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himself had linked his enterprise with the religious conversion of Constantine the Great by setting sail from Cuba under the banner “By this sign we conquer,” reminiscent of the legendary words the emperor saw etched into the sky during the Battle of Rome.60 Yet one of the first Nahua Christian plays, written in 1524, casts Cortés as an infidel.61 The Crown’s official “Defender of the Indians,” Bartolomé de las Casas, painted Cortés as an assassin in his popular Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542).62 Spain’s official chronicler, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, chimed in to portray the conquistador as a perjurer.63 Even Cortés’s own foot soldier Bernal Díaz records the details of the captain’s cruelty and drunken feasting at the fall of Tenochtitlan, the biting graffiti on Cortés’s house with which soldiers attacked the captain’s greed, and the misguided execution of the likeable Cuauhtemoc.64 In the courts, dozens of plaintiffs, ranging from the viceroy of New Spain and the governor of Cuba to whole indigenous towns, even Cortés’s own family, initiated lawsuits against the conquistador. Accusations against him included the unjust killing of Cuauhtemoc, the murder of his Spanish first wife, the seduction of women, the theft of Moctezuma’s treasure, improper payment to fellow conquistadors, and mistreatment of entire indigenous towns. He also initiated suits against others, in one case aiding an indigenous town that sought to sue another conquistador for mistreatment while Cortés was in Spain.65 While the conquistador mounted further expeditions and fought for the coveted position of viceroy of New Spain, he was ultimately banished from the city he had conquered. But he was granted a huge encomienda that included Cuernavaca, some thirty miles from Mexico City, where his palace still stands, and given the title of Marqués del Valle de Oaxaca. He died in Seville during one of his trips to Spain, troubled to the end by legal disputes.66 The conquistador’s last will and testament made explicit his desire to be buried in Mexico. In 1566 his remains were finally transferred to Mexico City. But even in death his presence provoked unrest. His remains were moved seven times over the course of four centuries and were held in a secret burial place from Independence until 1946.67 Since the protests of 1985, only priests and their aides are allowed next to the main altar, where Cortés’s remains are embedded in a sidewall of the church that he founded. Cortés’s will also enumerates his many officially recognized offspring, both in and out of wedlock, with both Spanish and indigenous women. The prestigious family title of Marqués del Valle de Oaxaca passed to his criollo son Martín (not to be confused with his mestizo son, also named Martín), who, like his father, was accused of plotting a rebellion in Mexico City and later was banished from Mexico.68 Although there are no officially recognized descendants of Cortés in Mexico today, the director of the hospital he founded wryly observes that, because of Cortés’s notorious womanizing, he “left many mementos behind him” (Julián Gascón, interview). While the surname “Cortés” is not uncommon, few people acknowledge a direct link to the conquistador, even when they share his first name and one of his surnames.69 Cortés, Moctezuma, Malinche, and Cuauhtemoc all have become archetypes in the Mexican imagination. In earlier centuries popular accounts, epic poems, and

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even a European opera depicted the heroism of Cortés, the treachery of Malinche, and the tragedy of Moctezuma. But in the last century popular culture and media have more frequently depicted a complex, often cruel, Cortés. Malinche and Moctezuma remain enigmatic figures. These archetypes, suggests one informant, are present in the identity of every Mexican community, from individual families to cities and even the nation as a whole: “I would say, there’s always a Moctezuma in every Mexican. And then there’s difference . . . then the way each Mexican wants to present himself, even in the small community of his own family, borders between Cortés and Cuauhtemoc . . . people want to be heroic, or . . . want to be conquerors” (Gustavo Gordillo, interview). History, as the study of the past, was once considered almost a scientifically verifiable practice. We now know that historical narratives can be used to privilege, silence, recast, or manipulate the historical record. Foundational stories interpreted or even created by an array of Spaniards and colonial creoles, indigenous elite and state officials—as well as twentieth-century academics—have formed a complex, symbolic landscape of Mexico’s past and present. One such reworking of history for contemporary purposes comes from the grand centennial celebration in 1910 of the founding of Mexico. A few hundred indigenous people, costumed to represent pre-Hispanic groups, paraded with a man dressed as Moctezuma to the National Palace. There they met with others reenacting the roles of Cortés and his soldiers. Drawing on the colonial custom of public festival and spectacle, Mexican officials symbolically appropriated their claim to a united Mexico.70 A pervasive matrix of history, culture, authority, and identity is found throughout central Mexico. Yet it is the folding of fact, perception, interpretation, and retelling of national history into a variety of collective and individual as well as local and regional narratives that reveals the resilience of the dominant conquest narrative.

Keepers of Memory: Peoples and Places The people I interviewed are guides to a real and symbolic route of cataclysmic change and enduring permanence. And the conquistador who has been singled out throughout the centuries as a catalyst for change served as the point of entry for my interviews. Inquiries about the man Cortés inevitably led to a broader discussion— whether a recounting of facts learned about the conquest, perceptions about the nature of history itself, or the continuing sense of history as contemporary lived experience. Responses to my questions were often ambivalent, even self-contradictory, but always rich in details that reveal the personal construction of identity and its relationship to the perception of history. Depending on their own cultural heritage, regional identity, social class, and age, my informants reinterpret the official conquest and the nation-building stories in wholly individual ways. While a middle-aged woman schooled in France admires

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Cortés’s tenacity, a chauffeur from the working-class poor criticizes the continual sacking of Mexico’s riches by the elite, and a Nahua journalist speaks of five hundred years of displacement: “The history of the Mexican state in regard to the indigenous peoples has been one of constant ideological, territorial, and economic displacement” (Mardonio Carballo, interview). People often choose a certain identity or focal point through which they represent their views—and often their life stories. Many narrator informants enact a sort of performance of historical memory as they weave together their experiences with received knowledge. Not surprisingly, people in public, civic spaces in particular, such as conchero dancers, tour guides, and public figures, often have solidified their narratives into an embodied or performative identity. Thus the first coordinate for mapping the interviews is the people themselves, and the imprint of ethnicity, education, social class, age, gender, and community position on the views expounded. Place is the other coordinate in the interviews, from a geographical point of view as we travel sections of a historic route of conquest, as well as from a demographic perspective: the contrast between urban/rural, peripheral/central, criollo/mestizo/ indigenous, and so on. Human experience in Mesoamerica has always unfolded within sacred and natural local landscapes. Pre-Hispanic civilizations were organized around the complex concept of the altepetl, a loosely based regional and often multiethnic political entity in which religion and politics intermingled.71 In Nahuatl the word altepetl means water (a-tl) and mountain (tepe-tl), literally highlighting the significance of natural surroundings in Mesoamerican social organization. Codices, maps, and primordial titles emphasize this interconnectedness between local landscape and community origins.72 Place-names for many of these pueblos are “mute witnesses” to the history of cultural encounter; hybrid names combine indigenous place name with Christian saints, names that endure today, such as San Francisco de Ixtacamaxtitlan and Huaquechula de San Martín.73 Altepetl was often translated into the Spanish word pueblo, a word that comes from the Latin populus, or a grouping of people, and has evolved to also indicate the place where they live. The populus was separate from the senatus, and so in both Latin and Spanish the word has always had the connotation of the common people, separate from government and aristocracy.74 In places where the local groups’ role as allies in the conquest weighs more heavily, such as in Tlaxcala, the conquest history—and the performance of it—are integral to everyday life.75 Conversely, people living in areas less directly affected by Cortes’s conquest, such as the port of Veracruz or the remote Zongolica mountains, focus on more recent conquests, such as the 1914 U.S. invasion. All along the Ruta de Cortés many of the clearest expressions of regional identity and place are the annual fiestas patronales. The geography of conversion in indigenous communities and the building of a spiritual heart for Spanish colonial cities ensured strong connections between the traditional community and religious practices, such as in the hybrid Nahua, Totonaco, and contemporary Mexican rituals found in the Cruz de Mayo celebration in the first permanent settlement established

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Figure I.17.  An indigenous aristocrat drew up this sixteenth-century primordial title to claim land rights near Tlaxcala (Ocotelolco). The “monte” in the background represents the ancestral volcano Matlalcueyetl, called La Malinche today. (Courtesy of the Lilly Library.)

by Spaniards, Antigua de la Veracruz.76 These fiestas are more than colorful, traditional gatherings; they reflect the amalgamation of local culture and meaning over the centuries. The intersection of place, people, and history creates individual, local, regional, and national stories that reflect the nuanced role that the conquest and its aftermath play in Mexico.

Figure I.18a. Costumed dancers perform for a fiesta patronal in the Nahua community of Xochiapulco in the Sierra Norte de Puebla. (Photograph by Irenne García and Coralia Pérez. Courtesy of Hugo Zayas.)

Figure I.18b.  A holdover from the colonial period, the dance of the “negritos” is still practiced at some fiestas patronales and carnival, but its meaning and complexity depend on local interpretations. (Photograph by Irenne García and Coralia Pérez. Courtesy of Hugo Zayas.)

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Narrative Sequences and the Reconstruction of History Almost all the informants, despite their differences, see Mexican history not as a fixed set of truths but as a dynamic process of military, religious, and cultural conquests as well as a process of accommodation and alliance between cultures. It is a history of conquest and perseverance, silencing and survival, integration and coexistence. This overarching awareness plays out in three dominant narrative sequences: the initial Spanish incursion, the changing role of indigenous populations, and the more recent geographic and economic “conquest” by the United States. In the first narrative sequence, there is a certain local “centering” of national history as individuals, towns, and regions refocus the standard conquest narrative to highlight local history and its significance in the conquest history.77 Some towns even draw on centuries-old primordial titles and codices for information about their ancestors’ versions of the conquest. These serve as a record of a local ethnic group’s “acceptable memories” of the conquest narrative.78 And in some cases, like in Cuauhtinchan, they can also serve as legal documents for claims to land rights today (Lorenzo Bonilla, interview).79 Other informants—for example, a man who lives on the hill where Cortés defeated the Tlaxcalan army—perform the conquest narrative from the point of view of Tlaxcalteca warriors, his “brothers” (Guadalupe Ramos, interview). The second narrative theme, the impact of the Spanish conquest upon indigenous populations and its legacy today, lies at the heart of nearly every interview. The “cuestión del indio” represents a centuries-long debate about the role of indigenous peoples and cultures in the political, religious, and social structures.80 While indigenous populations in the colonial period could sometimes have access to privileges and an Indian court, during Independence they were essentially erased from the new nation’s agenda, through the redistribution of land and the closing of indigenous courts. More recently, the post-Revolutionary solution, the principle of cultural homogeneity through mestizaje, has come under attack. The EZLN uprising, using the battle cry “Never again a Mexico without us,” brought the indigenous populations to the forefront of Mexican news and politics.81 The cultural and ethnic integrity of distinctive groups, the amount of local autonomy, and the development of sustainable economic practices have become key issues for many indigenous communities and people.82 Informants have many different takes on these more recent agendas, but most link them with the consequences of the Spanish conquest and the creation of the Mexican state. Despite informants’ differences, one fact is almost always recognized: 80 to 90 percent of the indigenous population died within a century of the conquest. Many informants imagine a lasting trauma: “Those who survived . . . wondered, how can we still be alive if our gods are dead? . . . [It’s] what you call survivor’s guilt, . . . ‘I’m still alive, and all my loved ones are dead’” (Gustavo Esteva, interview). While some people still base their construction of indigenous subjects in their conquest narratives on foundational texts such as Miguel León-Portilla’s popular compilation of indigenous texts, Visión de los vencidos (1959), now in its twenty-ninth edition, others strongly critique the view of all indigenous populations as “vanquished.” They point to the

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great diversity within indigenous groups both past and present. Still others, especially activists and intellectuals, look to works that critique modern Mexico, such as the anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla’s México profundo, una civilización negada (1987). He proposes that the structural legacy of the conquest is the existence of two Mexicos: one real and one imaginary. The real Mexico (by which he meant indigenous communities, “de-indianized” rural mestizo communities, and the urban poor) is still rooted in Mesoamerican civilization, he argues, while the elites have attempted to create an imaginary nation based on Western concepts, in conflict with cultural reality. In addition to the historical conquest and indigenous themes, a third narrative perspective often emerges toward the end of many interviews: the role of the United States in a modern “conquest.” The 1846–48 war with the United States, in which Mexico lost more than half of its territory, has not been forgotten. Mexicans still feel a close tie to the land they call “El Otro Lado,” the Other Side, “el Norte.” Today there are an estimated twenty-five million Mexicans working in the United States and as many as one out of every five Mexicans has a family member there.83 As one informant notes, “We didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us” (Alejandro García Moreno, interview). Recent events such as the unpopular free trade agreements with the United States and Canada (NAFTA 1994), harsh U.S. immigration policies, and the cross-border violence of the drug war have contributed to an evolving conquest narrative. For example, Tlaxcalans took advantage of a visit by President Bill Clinton during the signing of NAFTA to stage a performance in which Clinton wore a traditional mask representing the conquistador.84 Controversy associated with Mexican and U.S. neoliberal policies is found throughout central Mexico. In 2005, for example, it was revealed that Walmart had bribed the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), the official guardian of Mexican national patrimony, and successfully built a superstore over archaeological ruins that surround the ancient city of Teotihuacan.85 In the 2012 presidential elections, campaigners for the Alianza por México, composed of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) party and the Partido Verde Ecologista de México, were accused of offering prepaid gift cards to the Soriana supermarket chain in exchange for votes supporting the PRI candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, who eventually won.86 Informants use the language of conquest to report on these political and economic crises, the further depopulation of the countryside after the ejido land reforms that accompanied the adoption of NAFTA, and the more general pressures of economic and cultural globalization.87 The interpretation of contemporary events using the familiar tropes of the conquest story was not part of my initial research agenda. Nevertheless, new threats of foreign economic and cultural invasion fuel the memory and articulation of earlier conflicts. The conquest paradigm is popularly applied in any number of ways: capitalism, the market economy, and globalization. The new casualties are not only indigenous peoples but also, for many informants, all Mexicans who see their families, culture, towns, patrimony, and economy change dramatically in response to the geopolitics of “El Otro Lado” as well other global powers, such as China. Because of informants’ pervasive use of the conquest paradigm in our interviews, my initial

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focus on the peoples of the geographic and symbolic Ruta de Cortés expanded to include the experiences of several Mexicans traveling or living abroad. The active reconstruction and reinterpretation of the meaning of the conquest have shifted in the last thirty years as ideas about history, ethnicity, and power have changed. Many semiofficial attempts have been made to consolidate the narrative sequences discussed above into a coherent history. New “sites of memory” have been established all along the Ruta de Cortés, including the Museum of Memory (Tlaxcala), the Museo Amparo (Puebla), the Museo de la Ciudad (Cholula) and the Community Museum of San Francisco de Ixtacamaxtitlan (Puebla). Increasingly, the survival and perseverance of original local cultures in spite of the Spanish conquest dominate the physical exhibitions and accompanying text panels that interpret them. Each institution tells a local story, but they all use the conquest as a focal point for the reconstruction of identity. A conchero notes, “Even as a child I realized that what I felt when I went to, say, the anthropology museum was significant. Seeing those enormous stone sculptures stirred emotions I didn’t understand at the time, and as a child there was no one who could explain it to me. That’s where the seed was planted; it grew little by little into my interest in our beginnings, our identity, and our culture, which we should be proud of” (Arturo Muñoz Mota, interview). Outside these local and state museums, an increasing number of cultural activities draw inspiration from original cultures. Seminars offer information about pre-Hispanic practices, and radio and television broadcast programs about indigenous traditions. Community groups re-create dance rituals. Artists paint the indigenous past. Writers collect local histories and publish books. While some of this cultural production draws on traditions kept alive in remote areas around central Mexico, other people re-create tradition based on reinterpretations of social and historical memory and texts. Revivalist movements are emerging in the heart of urban centers. The evolution of changing cultural practices and the role of historical memory within them influences the debates about who should be publicly commemorated. More than a dozen informants mention statues—real and proposed—that honor certain historical figures from the conquest. As mentioned above, people protested the statue of Cortés at the Hospital de Jesús and a sculpture that commemorated the first mestizo family.88 But the statues of Cuauhtemoc have been left to stand without controversy. One informant mused that Mexico will only make peace with its past when “we put Cortés’s remains at the entrance to Boulevard Reforma and Cuauhtemoc’s where it ends” (Julián Gascón, interview).

The Ruta de Cortés: From Veracruz to Mexico City and Beyond The organization of this book follows the ascent of Cortés’s first march from the lowlands of Veracruz to the high-altitude interior and Mexico-Tenochtitlan. But it departs from the traditional trajectory of the Ruta de Cortés to follow a more

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contemporary and transnational cultural and demographic arc suggested by the people interviewed. In the final section we cross into the United States, “El Otro Lado,” as the conquest narrative is reformulated to include Mexican emigration and U.S. economic and cultural imperialism, a subject that is the focus of many valuable popular and academic studies in its own right. The book is therefore divided into corresponding parts: “First Landings: Veracruz”; next “The March Inland: Tlaxcala, Cholula, and Puebla”; third, “The Center: Mexico City-Tenochtitlan”; and finally, “El Otro Lado: Mexicans in the United States.” Each part opens with a brief essay about the region as a whole—its role in the conquest and today—followed by in-depth interviews, which include an introductory portrait about the person and a short selection from the interview placed at the end of each part. Each part also includes a broad range of historic and contemporary visual images. Part 1 begins in the Caribbean port of Veracruz, where Cortés first landed on Good Friday in 1519. Today the harbor boardwalk (malecón) is filled with strolling families, vendors, fishermen, and a group of teenagers who show off their diving skills for tourists. One vendor sells only two items: replicas of the Spanish brigantine in which Cortés sailed, and medallions painted with Aztec glyphs offering good luck, health, and fortune. Like many people in this city, the vendor takes a practical view: “The conquest had to be. We wouldn’t have today without Cortés. The Spaniards were brutes, convicts and criminals, but they brought religion to us” (anonymous). The impact of the conquest is not registered as traumatic here. After all, the area was lightly populated, and there was no large-scale destruction of the local Totonaco indigenous culture. Cortés only passed through it on his way north to Zempoala, the center of the Totonaco civilization, whose leaders allied with Cortés. Instead, citizens of the port of Veracruz emphasize their uniquely close ties with Afro-Caribbean culture. They speculate that the conquest would have been worse if the English had arrived first. To Veracruzanos, the term “conquest” suggests most strongly the U.S. invasion in 1914. The port of Veracruz, which wouldn’t exist without Cortés, has only one street a few blocks long named after him, while the important oceanfront Boulevard Xicotencatl is named after the warrior who resisted the conquistador in neighboring Tlaxcala. Yet the religious legacy of Cortés’s landing is still celebrated in smaller cities throughout the state of Veracruz with the traditional Spanish fiesta Cruz de Mayo, which mixes religious devotion to the “True Cross” (in honor of Cortés’s landing on Good Friday) with pre-Hispanic-based rituals and newer cultural revivals. We visit Antigua de la Veracruz, the home of the Spanish regional government from 1523 to 1600 (one of three towns that bore the name Veracruz) during the Cruz de Mayo celebration, to interview Aztec concheros, Totonaco voladores, and spectators. La Ruta de Cortés leaves the hot, humid coast and climbs upward toward the fourteen-thousand-foot peak of Cofre de Perote. The huge snow-capped Citlaltepetl (Pico Orizaba), at almost nineteen thousand feet the highest peak in Mexico, dominates the horizon. The route then passes through the capital of the state of

Figure. I.19.  Map of places along the Ruta de Cortés. (© Pablo García Loaeza.)

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Veracruz, Xalapa. Part 1 ends with interviews of two Nahua men who still live in comunidades indígenas in the Sierra Zongolica, a region most Veracruzanos point to as emblematic of the diversity of their state, where inhabitants discuss the urgency of change as well as the continuities in their lives. Part 2 follows the Ruta through Ixtacamaxtitlan, a crossroads between the Totonaco and Nahua cultures, before moving into a plateau region surrounded by a rim of volcanoes. There, three cities (Tlaxcala, Cholula, and Puebla) and a handful of smaller towns provide a key to understanding the legacy of conquest today. Although Tlaxcala, Cholula, and Puebla are within an hour’s bus ride of each other, their vastly different roles in the conquest and colonization set them apart from each other and from the rest of central Mexico. Because the confederation of Tlaxcalan sovereign towns (altepetl) provided thousands of warriors for Cortés, the colonial city of Tlaxcala was constructed as a privileged administrative and religious center for the Tlaxcalan confederation.89 Cholula was the site of the first massacre of the conquest when thousands of unarmed nobles and religious leaders were killed. During the colonial period the city of Cholula was designated as a town for “los naturales,” that is, as an Indian town that maintained some of its traditions, such as distinct neighborhood or ward identity (calpulli). In contrast, the new city Puebla de Los Angeles was strategically sited between the coast and Mexico City on lands that were not heavily populated by natives. Envisioned as a New World paradise for Christianity, it was constructed as a city for Spaniards, with economic systems and cultural traditions that emulated the European model. Today Tlaxcalans suffer from the label “traitor” because of their alliance with the Spaniards, although they resist this label by celebrating the initial battles the confederation fought against Cortés led by the local hero Xicotencatl. Cholula is a symbol of both Spanish brutality and cultural renewal, as the city honors and celebrates its unique religious feast days that date back centuries. Puebla continues to be known as a conservative criollo city, although it too celebrates its resistance to foreign invasion in the events of Cinco de Mayo, the day the nineteenth-century French invasion was halted in Puebla, and continues to change rapidly with new immigration. Before moving on to Mexico City, we pause our chronologically based exploration of the Ruta in order to survey the lasting impact of two later routes of conquest in central Mexico: Cortés’s campaign of attrition as he subdued neighboring altepetl en route to retake Tenochtitlan, and the Ruta Franciscana, the network of Franciscan monasteries built in strategic areas during the spiritual conquest, the first wave of evangelization of indigenous populations. Rather than in-depth interviews, this subsection offers brief sketches that illustrate the kaleidoscopic layering of conquest and colonization found in the region today. Part 3 takes us to the center: Tenochtitlan-Mexico City. When Cortés depicted the wonders of the island city Tenochtitlan, he boasted it had a population larger than any city in Europe, with marvelous temples, houses, and markets—all signs of a highly developed civilization. Cortés’s foot soldier Bernal Díaz later recalled that

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the city was like the imaginary lands in chivalric tales, but that when the great city finally fell after a month-long siege “we found the houses full of corpses, and some poor Mexicans still in them who could not move away. . . . The city looked as if it had been plowed up. The roots of any edible greenery had been dug out, boiled, and eaten, and they had even eaten the bark of the trees. . . . There has not been a generation of men in the world which has suffered from hunger and thirst and continual fighting as much as this one.” The once splendid city that Cortés had compared with Europe’s finest had been razed to the ground. From the neighboring city of Coyoacan, he directed the rebuilding of the city, now named Mexico City, the center of New Spain. Centuries of continual transformation completely obscured the original preHispanic city. The sacred ceremonial district was buried under rubble, covered over by colonial construction and the central cathedral. But in 1978 workmen accidentally discovered the base of the Aztec sacred Templo Mayor. Teams of archaeologists have slowly excavated sections of the Mexica sacred precinct beneath subway lines and four-hundred-year-old buildings. Since then the remains of Tenochtitlan have become a focal point for the resurgence of interest in Nahua history and culture. The district continues its role as the spiritual and civic heart of the city. Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City, with a great metropolitan area of over twenty million, has an ability to devour and renew itself, thus earning its menacing but engaging nickname: el Monstruo.90 Here indigenous leaders, tour guides, poets, a distant relative of Moctezuma, a housekeeper, and a taxi driver all converge, each with their own strongly held ideas about the conquest and its legacy. To better focus this extensive chapter, it is subdivided into three parts: colonias, or neighborhoods around the city center, the historic district, and the outskirts. The final part of the book leaves the Ruta de Cortés to follow the ideological and geographical theme that the conquest narrative suggested to many informants. We cross over to “El Otro Lado,” the United States, and touch on the reconstruction of the conquest story by Mexicans visiting my hometown (a Big Ten university town) to give public talks about Mexican culture, and by Mexican immigrants who draw on Mexican history to construct self-narratives in a new transnational context. Like their counterparts in Mexico, they touch on the complex historical, cultural, and political connections between the two countries. A question about the Spanish conquest leads to talk of more recent historical events: Mexico’s loss of half its territory to the United States, the lifting of tariffs by NAFTA, and the ensuing depopulation of Mexico’s rural communities, as well as the drug war along the U.S.-Mexican border. In addition, they discuss the “crossing over” experience of living in a cultural, political, and personal borderland. In spite of centuries of Spanish attempts to centralize religious and secular govern­ ance, post-Independence efforts to create a national identity, and post-Revolutionary reformulations of foundational stories, vast political and cultural differences in the conquest narrative remain. A common denominator among all the versions of the

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story is the extreme violence of conquest. But the variety and complexity of people’s responses are still evolving today. On the one hand, some—often because they have a privileged European ancestry or because they live in a place where the footprint of Cortés’s march is less visible—still maintain that Mexico has successfully become a mestizo nation. On the other hand—judging by indigenous movements such as the Zapatistas, the vibrant religious festivals that mix Catholic and pre-Hispanic traditions, a national government that both promotes and curtails the autonomy of indigenous communities, or the growing conchero movement, which now extends to U.S. cities—there is a trend among Mexicans to accept and even celebrate the multiethnic nature of their country. The recasting of personal and national identity even evolved during the course of my interview process, during President Felipe Calderón’s presidency (2006–12). Current events, such as the bicentennial, the drug war, immigration policies, and the corn crisis, continued to alter informants’ thoughts about history and their country. The nation of Mexico is not the result of a seamless process of merging and converging cultures, but rather it embodies a series of amalgamations, accommodations, and re-creations of cultures that are still in flux today. Terminologies, archetypes, and symbols, born out of political and cultural convenience to promote a national identity, oversimplify the reality of Mexico as a vital, ethnically diverse nation that includes a wide variety of surviving indigenous languages and cultures. Mexicans today are actively seeking or producing responses to centuries-old issues about ethnicity and identity, religious and cultural heritage, and economic and political rights. Mexicans are unearthing, rebuilding, and re-creating an intricate and complex past that, like the multilayered pyramids and Franciscan monasteries they excavate and restore, connects to the present and the future. While state discourse now attempts to consolidate a sense of national identity through the recognition and celebration of its “pluriethnic mosaic” of cultures, individuals and communities throughout central Mexico weave their own versions of history and identity. The symbolic geography and cultural capital of the conquest fuels a pervasive historical memory of Spanish colonialism that continues to shape lives today.

Voices and Images: A Method for Exploring Mexico’s Past and Present In order to invite reflection on the meaning and consequences of cultural encounters, I employ three complementary approaches to explore the conquest theme along the Ruta de Cortés and beyond. First, documentary research from historical and modern print sources provides a strong framework for understanding the complex factors that over the centuries contribute to the construction of heterogeneous social and historical memory. Then, ethnographic interviews of more than a hundred people demonstrate the strong undercurrent of the national narrative even as they

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resist becoming part of it. Finally, the collection and analysis of visual materials from archival and contemporary sources reveal how over the centuries the conquest has been transformed into a highly symbolic visual history that continues to form social and historical memory and culture. The first methodology provides a framework for the other two. A broad array of documentary testimony about the conquest and colonization has survived from the first days of the Spanish incursion into Mesoamerica. Not only do Spanish and indigenous sources present different perspectives, but also there are vast differences in the testimonies of the diverse indigenous ethnic groups themselves. The traditional paradigm of Spanish and Indian, victor and vanquished, does not fit the reality of the enterprise.91 The study of later historical and popular sources about the conquest and Mexico reveals more modern and persuasive representations of the conquest in cultural sources such as school textbooks, television, art, and comic books. The materials fall into seven main categories: (1) archival sources and scholarly works; (2) contemporary popular sources such as children’s books, comic books, songs, and movies; (3) literary and artistic representations of the conquest, especially novels, plays, and murals; (4) popular media, including radio and television programs, websites, and YouTube videos; (5) newspaper and magazine articles; (6) official government and institutional documents; and (7) educational materials (from schools, museums, churches, etc.). This wide range of print and graphic materials provides a context for the oral interviews. (A bibliographical essay provides suggestions for further reading in many of these areas; see appendix B). The second method of ethnographic interviews is informed by scholarly methodologies for interpreting oral sources. For four years starting in May 2006, I collected more than eighty hours of interviews from over a hundred people living along the Ruta de Cortés. After initially traversing the entire route, in subsequent trips I focused on one region at a time in order to get a better sense of people and place. When interviews kept pointing at the ongoing sense of conquest as a framework for articulating U.S. imperialism and its relationship to Mexico, I later began interviewing Mexicans who were visiting or living in my hometown (Bloomington, Indiana). All interviews were videotaped, transcribed, and translated with the permission of those being interviewed. In general, I was less concerned with establishing historical facts and more interested in accepting—and understanding—the intrinsic value of the perspectives of people who live along the Ruta de Cortés today. As noted above, one informant advised: “Neither you nor I speak for them. Each Mexican must speak his own history” (Gerardo Pérez, interview). Only a few people did not immediately recognize Cortés’s name: a group of elementary-school children, and a group of indigenous women who were selling herbs at the Cholula market. All but two informants—both in their eighties—were willing and even eager to be recorded. The interviews, as a whole, varied in length from ten minutes to three hours, with some follow-up interviews. I always posed the same four basic questions: What do you think about Cortés and the conquest of

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Mexico? How did you learn about the conquest? Do you think there is any evidence of the conquest in Mexico today? What else do you think I should know about for this project? I finished each interview with the open-ended “Do you have any questions for me?” This often turned the dynamic of the interview into a more equal exchange, and I was often asked what U.S. Americans think of Mexicans and why I was interested in the project. My interview process reflects the rhythm of a researcher-traveler who stayed in the heart of historical town centers along the Ruta de Cortés and interviewed people along the way. The interviews took place without a photographer present; we retraced steps later to gather photographs of some of the informants. Traveling to key symbolic sites of the Spanish conquest, I first interviewed people whom I encountered in the streets and at historical sites such as museums, churches, and archaeological ruins. Later I often followed up on their suggestions to interview other informants. My interview method intersects with historical, ethnographic, and travel genres. Our encounters inevitably occur within a cultural “contact zone,” the place where different cultures and peoples “meet, clash, and grapple with each other.”92 The interviews engage individuals in a wide range of locations. Indeed, the interviews for the last section, “El Otro Lado,” are based on serendipitous encounters with Mexicans who were visiting as cultural liaisons or who had immigrated to the United States. When I presented my project to potential informants, I did not offer myself as an authoritative historian but rather as someone who had studied Mexican colonial history and during my travels had become more and more curious about what people I met thought about their own past. I also emphasized that my goal was to bring this material to a U.S. audience in the hope that it might better inform my compatriots about Mexico’s diversity and history. With time, I noticed that I offered a forum for people unaccustomed to sharing their thoughts about the conquest with outsiders. For other people with clearly developed narratives, either because of their own interests or because they are on the front lines of policy development and cultural change, my interest seemed to provide validation of the worthiness of their work, and they eagerly engaged my questions. Narrator informants of all walks of life had different ideas about what they thought I would like to hear when we first began the interviews. While people living in rural areas or comunidades related their local traditions and reflected on the urgent need to interpret more recent conquests, people in Mexico City talked more often about the pre-Hispanic past. I try to capture performative elements of an oral interview in my biographical sketches. Often informants expressed pleasant surprise when I insisted on hearing about their own perceptions. As a Nahua man living in a comunidad exclaimed, “I am surprised that someone from the U.S. is interested in my opinion about history” (Gabriel Mazahua, interview). Although my choice of informants was not systematic, I was able to include a broad range of people from diverse geographic and cultural regions, social-economic classes, ethnicities, educational backgrounds, age groups, genders, and religions.

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Not surprisingly, individuals of indigenous heritage were the most challenging to gain access to. In general these interviews were short and spontaneous and conducted in public places. More than a dozen times a lengthier follow-up interview was arranged, only to have it indefinitely postponed. Distrust of outsiders is common and understandable. Anthropologists often live in indigenous communities for years before gaining access to key informants. I explore some of the proximate causes of this distrust within the context of my project. In order to include more voices from people who live in remote comunidades indígenas, I was able to conduct video interviews via Skype in a few cases. More often, I used the telephone to interview informants in several Nahua towns in the Zongolica mountains of Veracruz (there is no high-speed internet there). This process had limitations: cell-phone reception often was spotty, and the physical cues of a face-to-face interview were not available. Even so, these interviews provide a valuable glimpse into current cultural recovery projects as well as how informants living there see these as being linked to concern for basic human rights issues in the area. In the biographical sketches below, I always mention where and how an interview took place. By allowing informants to address their own concerns and inviting them to ask questions, which they often did, interview sessions usually evolved organically into a discussion about the importance of identity and heritage, ethnicity and politics, and the need to define who and where are Mexico’s indigenous populations today. To help readers understand the nuance of the interviews, the introductory sketches about informants mention both unique and common thematic and stylistic characteristics found in the interviews, such as the frequent role of the speaker as a witness protagonist who uses a recent past to give context to centuries-old history. Through rhetorical analyses we can access identity politics, the role of historical memory, and the process of mythification. For example, people use the pronoun “they” (ellos) to represent the Spaniards as the “outsiders.” Depending on the speaker, these outsiders were enigmatic, brutal, attractive, depraved, or inspired. On the other hand, they frequently employ the first-person plural “we” (nosotros) as they talk about the role of pre-Hispanic peoples in the conquest and the survival of pre-Hispanic ancestry and culture. There is often a clear rejection of the Spanish and a selfidentification with the pre-Hispanic. In other cases, informants create a rhetorical space for the listener by using the informal you (tú), which invites the listener into a shared critique of the conquest. As noted earlier, my own role as an outsider creates a sort of contact zone as informants formulate their narratives for a U.S. audience. Often they begin with an official framework and then move into more individual lived experiences and perceptions of the consequences of conquest, creating an alternative narrative to the official paradigm they had begun with. These responses and transitions are sometimes conscious and seamless, other times more halting and indirect, which results in a more multivocal narrative.93 The brief introductions also emphasize the performative element of interviews: the importance of setting, tone of voice, gesture, and the interaction between informant

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and interviewer. I hope to avoid the fossilization that occurs when an oral interview is abbreviated and transcribed into a written text. The process of selecting only a few paragraphs as samples of each interview was difficult. The selection process highlights the heterogeneous responses to the conquest narrative. Original wording and narrative order in the interview selections have been maintained. I gave informants the option of editing a copy of both the biographical sketch and the selection that would be published. With just one exception, informants chose to let their original interviews stand with only a few, mostly grammatical, corrections. We attempt to allow the texts to reflect the varied registers of the informants. The translators’ note outlines some of these registers and nuances. The third methodology is based on the premise that visual cultures have always played a crucial role in Mexican history. The conversation that takes place between word and image—and its ability to create multiple ways for stories to be understood—have long been recognized by journalists and authors. Imagery has been key to narrative complexity since pre-Hispanic times, since it played an integral part in the creation and maintenance of cultural and religious identities. Elaborate visual imagery in the form of pictographic codices, murals, and sculpted stone provided a visual narrative for origins and deities. Nahua tlacuiloque both painted codices and interpreted them through oral narrative performances. After the initial Spanish conquest, the importance of sacred imagery on a monumental scale continued as local artisans and laborers built monasteries and churches, often incorporating indigenous iconography into Christian religious decoration. They performed continual processes of cultural translation between European and Mesoamerican artistic worlds, recompositions that became part of the process of reidentification as subjects within the new colonial order.94 In nineteenth-century Mexico, new cartographic images helped Mexicans imagine traveling from colonial New Spain to an independent Mexico.95 In post-Revolutionary Mexico, the government sponsored a national program of muralists to repaint Mexico’s history in the public imagination, choosing highly visible and symbolic places, such as the National Palace (Rivera), Cortés’s palace in Cuernavaca (Rivera), and his final resting place (Orozco), to depict an idealized indigenous past, a cruel Spanish conquest and colonization, and a modern mestizo nation. More recently, new murals, codices, and even comic books depict the interplay of conquest, identity performance, and national and international politics.96 Images drawn from historical codices, popular culture, and other primary and secondary sources offer a parallel story about Mexico’s past and present. In choosing the images, consideration has been given to each image’s point of view, the ethnicity of the creator, the uniqueness of the occasion, and the overall cohesive balance of the sequencing. In some cases images illustrate an informant’s interview, while at other times the images communicate their own narrative. We use three categories of imagery to give viewers a glimpse of the complex visual interplay of history and life today. A wide variety of contemporary photographs by Mexican and

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American professional and amateur photographers provide images as seen through the lenses of people traveling through Mexico as well as by people living along the Ruta de Cortés. Some of the photographs were offered by informants themselves—of their families, towns, and traditions. Archival photographs assembled by the archival image researcher Rich Remsberg and by Mark Feddersen reflect contemporary and historical events discussed by informants. Lastly, images of nonphotographic cultural materials, such as codices, murals, archaeological artifacts, and cartoons, underscore how these materials have created a rich historical and popular vocabulary of visual images about history and conquest that permeate contemporary Mexico. Taken together, original primary sources, archival visual materials, contemporary photographs, and ethnographic interviews shed new light on the myriad ways Mexicans reinterpret the Spanish conquest in a contemporary narrative. They both invite reflection on cultural encounters and contribute to an alternate understanding of what history is.

Part I

First Landings Veracruz

Figure 1.1.  Cortés first landed in Veracruz on the island of San Juan de Ulúa, where a fort still stands. (© Steve Raymer.)

Figure 1.2.  The interior of the fort on San Juan de Ulúa. (© Steve Raymer.)

Three Veracruces Staging Conquest and Colonization

The founding of Veracruz is inextricably linked with the Spanish conquest and colonization, even as contemporary Porteños feel distanced from its impact and legacy. As Cortés surely observed soon after landing, the geographically and ethnically diverse area that now encompasses the state of Veracruz was a crucial staging point for his campaign. Yet the port city of Veracruz is in a sense a false start to understanding the conquest. After the initial landing the Spanish administrative center was moved several times, to locations further up the coast and even inland for at least a century. This chapter includes the port city of Veracruz as well as other sites to give a more nuanced picture of the conquest and the continuing cultural diversity of the region. When Cortés landed on the island of San Juan de Ulúa (just off the mainland from contemporary Veracruz), two canoes with messengers sent from the Aztec emperor Moctezuma met his ships. News had traveled to Tenochtitlan about Cortés’s skirmishes against the Mayans on the Tabasco River. On Easter Sunday, the first full-scale exchange of these two civilizations took place on land. Tendile (also spelled Tentlil), the regional Aztec tlatoani, brought a box of gold as well as food and other provisions. Cortés had Mass celebrated and then executed a show of arms with galloping horses and firing cannons. The indigenous spectators painted a vivid scene for Moctezuma on their return, describing the cannons as “fire (conch) trumpets.”1 On another day Tendile brought a large gold sun wheel and silver moon for the conquistador. In exchange, Cortés gave him glass from Florence and linen shirts from Holland. But Cortés refused to heed Moctezuma’s request to leave, and soon the Nahua messengers—and the food supply—disappeared. Only then did the indigenous group native to the area, the Totonacos, appear. They took Cortés further up the coast to Xicomecoatl, whom the Spaniards called the cacique Gordo, at the central inland city of Zempoala. There Cortés learned of the interethnic rivalries and the heavy tribute paid by the Totonacos to the Triple Alliance. Cortés resolved to play off this rivalry to gain his first allies. With a strategic 49

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deceit, Cortés imprisoned messengers sent by Moctezuma to punish the Totonacos for housing the Spaniards. He then secretly released some of them with messages to send to Moctezuma. Fearing revenge for their treachery, the Totonacos allied with the Spanish. They provided Cortés with a plan to march through the allied Tlaxcalan territories and with four hundred porters (tamemes) to carry cargo and food. In mid-June 1519, Cortés’s army of conquest, which now included as many Totonacos as Spaniards, climbed the steep road to Xalapa and continued on into Tlaxcalan territories. Arriving in the spring when water is particularly scarce, Cortés had moved his army near the Totonaco city of Quiahuiztlan, sixty kilometers up the coast from the original landing site. Fresh water was available nearby, and an isolated rocky outcropping, El Cerro de los Metates, commanded a view of the sea for many leagues in all directions. On the beach below the hill Cortés set up a military camp and established the first European settlement in North America, Villa Rica de la Veracruz (only the first of three settlements named Veracruz during the sixteenth century). It was here that Cortés scuttled his ships, first stripping them of precious materials, to prevent a rebellious faction of soldiers from returning to Cuba. He was determined to make a stand. Villa Rica de la Veracruz was moved just two years later to a more protected port with river access, known today as La Antigua de la Veracruz.2 For the next seven decades, Antigua served as the administrative center for the coast and was the site for the beginning of the slave trade from Africa. In 1599 the government center was returned to the original landing site, the current port of Veracruz. The new port offered a protected harbor for the Spanish navy to transport goods and resources across the Atlantic. But the intense heat and lack of a good water supply—and later the deadly yellow fever (vómito negro)—retarded its growth.3 The port served as an outpost where government offices for the Spanish Armanda could process the nearly seventy Spanish galleons that gathered there each year to transport gold and silver back to Europe. Despite the importance of the port of Veracruz, the state capital of Xalapa was eventually founded at higher elevations in the interior to avoid the intense heat and disease of the coastal regions. Xalapa soon became an important stronghold along the Royal Road from the port to Mexico City.

The Port City of Veracruz A Sunday crowd on the boardwalk moves at a snail’s pace as a cargo ship from Africa pulls into the port city of Veracruz, past the fort of San Juan de Ulúa, site of Cortés’s first landfall in the area. Green and white banners along the central streets of the city boast “Veracruz: Primer Ayuntamiento de América,” while license plates bear the imprint of El Tajin, the great Totonaco “Pyramid of the Niches.” In the zócalo, folkloric dancers perform a Spanish flamenco-style dance. A wandering marimba

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Figure 1.3.  Vendors sell toy brigantines and Aztec jewelry along the boardwalk in the port of Veracruz. (Photograph by Rich Remsberg.)

band playing music with Afro-Caribbean roots drowns out an indigenous Totonaco flute player and even a mariachi group. As bells call churchgoers to Catholic Mass, a large crowd gathers around the green-masked Shrek clown just outside the cathedral doors. Porteños describe their city as unique in Mexico. For centuries Spanish, African, Cuban, and, more recently, U.S. cultural traditions have flowed into the port and mixed with indigenous and more traditional Mexican elements. The “Gateway Port” (puerta Puerto) has served as an entryway to Mexico since Cortés first landed in 1519 and founded Veracruz in an audacious legal maneuver to break ties with the governor of Cuba and ally himself—and, therefore, his conquest—directly with the king. While the city’s official identity draws on this foundational act, the state’s iconic symbol of a pyramid emphasizes pre-Hispanic civilizations. People in the port city tend to be pragmatic about their past: they often say that the conquest “had to be” (tenía que ser). The European Age of Exploration was underway and they conjecture that a conquest by the English would have been worse. Most comment on a nearer brush with conquest: the U.S. invasion in 1914, when Woodrow Wilson ordered the occupation of Veracruz during the Mexican Revolution. Indeed, Porteños recall the U.S. landing of troops on April 21 each year, rather than Cortés’s landing on April 19. Veracruz’s unofficial city chronicler and legendary radio entertainer Bernardo (Nayo) Lorenzo broadcasts his radio shows Leyendas y vivencias de Veracruz and the

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Figure 1.4.  The U.S. occupation of Veracruz, 1914.

live Música tropical from a table at the Café Portales on the zócalo. Don Nayo, as people respectfully refer to him, completed only a few years of elementary school, but for thirty-five years he has presented stories about the port city’s rich past and hosted traditional music shows. As we sit at the café he adjusts his traditional white guayabera shirt, and his deliberate movements reveal his eighty-six years. Don Nayo speaks softly in a short staccato style mixed with a few longer set pieces. He is accustomed to varying his speech for effect. When I ask about the conquest, he relates two iconic moments: the Tlaxcaltecas’ initial resistance and the Noche Triste, when

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Figure 1.5.  U.S. soldiers remove the body of a dead Mexican in Veracruz, 1914.

Cortés stood weeping after his first major defeat in Tenochtitlan. Then he recounts the prophecy of Moctezuma’s sister, who had a vision of large vessels bearing the sign of a cross coming toward shore. For Don Nayo, the conquest is a series of legends rather than a historic legacy: “There’s nothing left of the conquest for us; we’re now Veracruzanos.” Yet he attributes his fellow citizens’ easygoing, noble character to the native populations: “People seem so joyful . . . that comes from the indigenous influence because the Spaniards who came here were evil. They committed many crimes; they robbed a lot.” Talk of conquest soon turns to talk of the U.S. invasion of Veracruz: “As for the U.S., they are conquerors; they hold power. What they wanted from Mexico, they got. They get what they want, and that’s the truth. It’s reality. That’s not your fault.” He abruptly ends the interview and invites me to his broadcast of Música tropical on Saturday. As it happens, this Saturday is May 3, the traditional Cruz de Mayo. Some people link the celebration to Cortés’s landing on Good Friday, the Christian day to commemorate the Crucifixion, and his naming the city Vera Cruz (the True Cross). Throughout the state, small towns and cities continue this celebration, which has evolved into a mixture of the Spanish Cruz de Mayo and local traditions. But the port city, which developed primarily after the eighteenth century, only lightly observes most long-standing religious festivals. Only one large blue cross is visible in the downtown area. Many Porteños characterize themselves as “not very Catholic” compared

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Figure 1.6.  Don Nayo (seated) broadcasts his radio show live from the zócalo. A musician spontaneously improvises a décima, a popular poetic form that dates to the sixteenth century. (Photograph by Mark Feddersen.)

to the people in the nearby state of Puebla. “We receive ashes on Holy Wednesday, but then go right back to work” (Rolando Torres, interview). Others comment on the popular African-based rituals. “Our city is like a convent with an ocean view,” says Lucía Fortuno, whose restaurant promotes Afro-Mexican music and food. The festival they prefer to celebrate is May Day, International Worker’s Day, when the port city fills with Mexican tourists and music with Caribbean, African, Spanish, and indigenous roots. Across town from the lively eighteenth-century city center lies the spiritual heart of the early settlement, the Church of Santo Cristo del Buen Viaje. Since the sixteenth century, sailors have prayed for a safe voyage in this one-story whitewashed church, which seats at most a hundred people. Every Sunday devotees stand ten deep outside the open doors to hear Mass. A colossal brown statue of Pope John Paul II commemorates his visit in 1990, which was the first step toward restoring the severed relations between the Vatican and Mexico. Across the street, the brisk pace of business at a Christian evangelist bookstore seems to defy the authority of the pope. A longtime

Figure 1.7.  Outside the oldest church in Veracruz, the popular Iglesia del Cristo del Buen Viaje, a Nahua artisan from the Zongolica mountains sells his carvings. (Photograph by Rich Remsberg.)

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resident of the city, Rolando Torres, suggests that the growing numbers of Protestant groups offer “solutions for the stomach and for the spirit” in these times of economic necessity and a scandal-ridden Catholic Church. The port of Veracruz easily mixes the new with the old as a constant influx of foreign influences flood the city and Porteños cultivate their reputation as a party town. As in many metropolitan areas, only two of the informants were born in the port city, yet all consider themselves fervent jarochos (natives of Veracruz). Unlike many places in the interior, the ongoing representation of conquest is not all pervasive in local culture and politics. For most residents, the conquest has had little influence on personal identity narratives, but rather constitutes a thin layer beneath a larger conquest narrative that includes the Afro-Cuban slave trade and invasions by the United States. One man affably describes his project to map and trek along Cortés’s original route. Two friends with different ethnic backgrounds debate the meaning of the conquest. A state director for cultural promotion and an owner of a popular restaurant emphasize the port’s Afro-Cuban heritage. Their views are not one-dimensional and often offer surprising twists to the conquest narrative. A man who shares a surname with Cortés’s brutal captain (Pedro de Alvarado) is the harshest critic of the conquest, while the only man born in a traditional indigenous area of Chiapas of a Nahuatl-speaking mother embraces his identity as a mestizo. The man promoting Veracruz’s Afro-Cuban roots spends weekends learning Nahua dance rituals. But all share a somewhat distanced view of the conquest: they see its importance, but feel that it is not crucial to an understanding of Veracruz today. Instead, they point directly or indirectly to indigenous populations in other parts of the state of Veracruz and Mexico as the visible yet silenced legacy of conquest.

Isidro Rendón Bello, Café Portales Some will say [Cortés] was very cruel, others will say he wasn’t, that it was the times and it was his role as evangelizer and, well, I think he wasn’t, as some say, excessively cruel.

A seventy-two-year-old man greets me with a formal handshake at the traditional Café Portales on the zócalo. A server pours equal amounts of dark Veracruz coffee and steaming hot milk from pewter kettles for our midmorning lecheros. Isidro Rendón Bello is a public notary who spends his free time racing sailboats and organizing 4×4 club expeditions along the Ruta de Cortés. He describes in legalistic detail his search for the exact locations (puntos ciertos) where Cortés and his army paused on his march to Tenochtitlan. Rendón notes that different groups, including one from National Geographic, have never accurately established the route. In search of certainty, the notary has traveled segments of the route nine times. His method combines information from accounts by Cortés and his foot soldier Bernal Díaz,

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topographical evidence, and GPS readings with his own common sense (an army needs fresh water). He has faith in the reliability of his research and believes that most interpretations are simply recast, ultimately based on Cortés and Bernal Díaz. As the notary speaks in a style laced with refrains and personal opinion—a style not so far removed from Bernal Díaz’s lively narrative—he argues that Cortés “may have lied about the number of warriors, but as for the places he passed he didn’t need to lie.” He believes that Bernal Díaz’s work is even more trustworthy because he was a young man when he participated in the conquest and “events from youth stay well etched in your memory.” Occasionally, the notary interviews locals about the landscape, but maintains that few have the time to know much about history: “They have to work at producing food to eat. Culture is the result of a prosperous society. Even the man who has a magnificent voice, if he doesn’t have money to get an education, he’ll keep on being a farmhand. . . . That’s why it’s taken me years: I have to work to eat and get some money together to do the expeditions.” About ten years ago, he financed the publication of his first findings. Compelled to discover more about the route, the notary will celebrate his santo (his namesake’s feast day, May 15) by traveling with his biologist daughter and granddaughter to the area where Cortés describes a great defensive wall built by the Tlaxcalans. A fourth-generation jarocho, Rendón explains that his club respects Cortés as the founder of Veracruz. Yet he acknowledges that, despite jarochos’ general tolerance, there are extensive divisions among his friends. Some argue that Cortés was excessively cruel and others that he was merely a man of his times. Rendón tends to agree with the latter. Talking about the first large-scale massacre of the conquest in Cholula, he echoes his Spanish sources, where the blame is placed on interethnic rivalries and conspiracies between Cholultecas, Tlaxcaltecas, and Mexicas, rather than other accounts that suggest Cortés’s strategic manipulation of these rivalries. Rendón is proud to be part of a powerful legal system that dates to colonial times, established in part by Cortés and based on his own legal training. He explains that the Hispanic notary system allowed for legal disputes to be settled outside court.4 Thus, notaries in Mexico play a far more important role than their counterparts in the United States. Because of this centuries-old Hispanic legal tradition, Spanish and Mexican archives overflow with documentation about disputes, including dozens of legal petitions involving Cortés himself. Indeed, the founding of Veracruz, documented by Cortés in his famous Cartas de relación to the king, reveals a lawyer-like agility in the manipulation of Crown policy to his own advantage. As we talk, a marimba begins to play under the cool arches of the café. Without a word, the notary pays the bill and moves deftly across the zócalo, finding every last inch of shade in the midday heat. We enter the shadows of the interior courtyard of the municipal building: “There it is.” He points to the mosaic funded by Rotary International of Cortés’s founding of Veracruz. With the port in the background, Cortés proclaims the founding of Villa Rica de Vera Cruz in the name of Charles V. An Indian scribe sits at his feet recording the event in a pictorial codex. Few jarochos

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know of this mosaic. He walks outside the building to read aloud two bronze plaques on either side of the building. One commemorates the founding of Veracruz and the other celebrates Veracruz’s valiant defense of the port against the United States’ invasion. Rendón quietly remarks that jarochos associate conquest with the United States, not Spain: “It’s carrot-and-stick politics. The U.S. doesn’t have friends; it has interests. Right now it’s on very good terms with Mexico because it’s interested in oil.” I ask to photograph him but he refuses, insisting that “what matters are my words, not my image.”

Romeo Cruz Velázquez and Antonio Francisco Rodríguez Alvarado, Archivo Histórico You can’t leave the figure of Hernán Cortés aside. He was the founder of the city at a certain time in history . . . no doubt he was cruel, but you’ve got to look at him in a historical context. I don’t recall any conquest that wasn’t cruel. —Cruz Velázquez [Cortés] came to bury our whole culture. —Rodríguez Alvarado

Down the street from the busy fish market and across the street from the Naval Museum, where a portrait of a weary Cortés and a diorama of indigenous peoples in canoes meeting his ships are on display, stands the archive for the city in an old colonial building. One of the librarians, Romero Cruz Velázquez, jokes easily about his brown, beardless face and his mestizo heritage. He adheres to the idea born out of the quincentenary, “Ultimately it was the integration of two cultures, and there’s the result: mestizaje, which, along with the vices it may have given us, that’s where we are, right?” Currently completing his doctorate in history, he has worked for years in the archives and has read extensively about the conquest. As he talks about Cortés’s indisputable role as founder of Veracruz, Dr. Antonio Francisco Rodríguez Alvarado arrives and joins the discussion, only to disagree respectfully with his longtime friend on most issues: “[Cortés] came to bury our whole culture, to destroy all of our culture. He didn’t come just because he was eager to conquer, he came because he was eager to pillage.” In the early 1980s, the doctor worked in rural Yucatan with displaced Mayans. Moved by this firsthand experience of an indigenous culture, Dr. Rodríguez studied and then published a book on the multiple indigenous groups in a region known as the Tuxtlas in the state of Veracruz.5 The librarian teases his friend about inheriting the surname of Cortés’s cruel captain Alvarado, and about their different physical appearances, heritages, and interpretations of the conquest: “My colleague right here, as you can see, he’s white, got a beard; you might as well be looking at Hernán Cortés himself, no? I believe that’s why he struggles inside a little with Hernán Cortés, but me, since I’m a mestizo, I’m

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Figure 1.8.  Veracruz’s lively fish market fills streets in the old city center near the Historical Archive. (Photograph by Rich Remsberg.)

the product of both of those cultures.” Cruz, who points to his skin color as he firmly identifies himself as mestizo, grew up in Chiapas, the poorest state in Mexico and the state with the largest indigenous population, surrounded by his mother’s Nahua culture. His family left the area in the early 1970s, in search of work and education offered in the state capital, Xalapa. In contrast, the doctor grew up with little direct contact with indigenous cultures, in a town outside the port of Veracruz. And yet, now, after years of studying indigenous cultures, he identifies strongly with native culture. The doctor speaks of pre-Hispanic culture as “our history” using the first-person plural nosotros: “I realized I knew nothing about our culture, not a thing. I wanted to fill that gap, that void . . . and I began to read and I grew doubly impassioned about learning all that they did to us.” The two friends’ opinions about the conquest do not follow an expected ethnic-racial cultural divide. As Cruz notes, “He [Rodríguez] lived there [in an indigenous congregación], but I’m from Chiapas.” The man whose life was so affected by the lack of opportunities in rural indigenous areas emphasizes the process of amalgamation over time, while the doctor, an outsider eager to learn about indigenous traditions, sees only the devastation of the conquest. As the friends debate, they agree on the crucial role played by both sword and cross in a double-pronged military and spiritual conquest. The legacy of the Papal Bull of 1493, granting Spain complete military autonomy in exchange for the prompt evangelization of any territories conquered in the Americas, informs their discussion

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of the issues faced by indigenous peoples today: government intervention, voluntary segregation, emigration, and the Catholic Church’s continued treatment of indigenous populations as “children who need parental guidance.” They explain that indigenous groups have been affected to varying degrees by church and government attempts to assimilate them into a national project. The Chamulas, a group that lives mostly in the highlands of Chiapas, have maintained a degree of autonomy:6 the doctor asserts that some are genetically “pure Indian.” Other indigenous groups have followed the path of the colonial ladino and learned Spanish language and customs. Still other communities follow newer trends that reclaim indigenous customs, in an adaption of what they call Zapatista political strategies. Cruz, who continues to have strong ties to the Chiapas region, quotes a schoolteacher friend of his from the area; the view of Zapatismo reveals both the sense of justice and the irony of the movement: “Lately, my fellow Chiapanecos have taken to not working because the government gives them money so they won’t block the highways or rise up in arms . . . [they say,] ‘For 500 years they exploited us, now we are going to exploit them.’” As much as the historian and doctor attempt to categorize native ethnic groups and their responses to colonization—both past and present—contradictions emerge. What is clear to both of them, however, is that this complexity and diversity has existed since the time of the conquest. The indigenous groups and individuals of the first contact chose a variety of responses: to flee to remote areas and isolate themselves; to become ladinos who could manipulate indigenous and Spanish cultural systems to their own benefit; to integrate themselves while retaining a separate identity within the official república de indios; or myriad solutions that would shift and change over the centuries. Even as the librarian-historian accepts the “light and dark” sides of the legacy of the conquest today, he insists that it is current state projects that most threaten indigenous communities: “When the Spaniards came, they founded the república indígena, or the indigenous part of the nation, and the Spanish part, the república de españoles. The indigenous people have their own laws. I mean, they’ve been able to survive for five hundred years, let’s just let them live. If they’ve kept their way of life and been able to survive the changes, let them stay the way they are. Why is the Mexican government so interested in their integration into a national project at this stage? It’s illogical. They’re integrated in their own way. They have managed to survive for five hundred years, let’s leave them alone, don’t you think?” The lively conversation between friends begins to slow as the intense late-morning heat penetrates the three-foot-thick colonial walls and pours through the paneless windows. The doctor leaves to meet with a patient at his nearby office, and the librarian turns to help students on a school project. Returning to the zócalo and clinging to the last bits of shade offered by a block of colonial buildings, I begin to feel the enormity of trying to grasp the legacy of the conquest today. The vast ethnic diversity of the population, both at the time of the conquest and now, makes it impossible (and certainly unnecessary) to solidify the legacy into a museumlike description.

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Lucía Fortuno Hernández, El Rincón del Trovar What is the conquest? It’s what we are. . . . We Mexicans are also the indio, the mulatto.

In a local restaurant tucked into a quiet pedestrian street just off the zócalo, the rhythms of son animate a full house of diners and dancers as the aroma from a mixture of African, Spanish, and indigenous culinary traditions fills the air. The owner of El Rincón de Trovar, Lucía Fortuno Hernández, established the restaurant as a “cultural project” to keep alive the Afro-Caribbean musical tradition of the Cuban son jarocho, one of the region’s traditional music and dance styles based on a blend of indigenous (primarily Huastecan), Spanish, and African elements. Fortuno retells in a lively, articulate style how she grew up in a musical family—her aunts had their own band. For years she worked at the Institute of Veracruz Culture before opening her restaurant. Now she hires the elders who mastered son jarocho and encourages younger groups to learn it. Music, she says, is a universal language, which both Veracruzanos and foreigners can understand: “It’s the only thing that unites us, and it doesn’t matter if we don’t speak the same language, or if we have different tastes, music unites us.” Reconnecting this unique Veracruzano art form to its origins, argues Fortuno, helps promote Veracruz’s unique tercera raíz. She emphasizes the importance of African slaves in the formation of Veracruz: at one point in the sixteenth century there were three people of African heritage to every one Spaniard in the port city. Many were imported to begin work on sugarcane production. “So many words we use everyday, like names of cities or places near the port of Veracruz, are African; from a musical word, or an instrument like the marimba, to even a small village called Mocambo.” Her cultural project intersects with the small but significant movement to validate the role of Afro-Mexican traditions and communities.7 And yet, she observes, the fundamental Spanish legacy in the port city is clear: “They left children all around . . . here everyone’s last name is Hernández, or everyone’s last name is Ramírez. What does that mean? That there’s a part of us that’s Spanish; that’s a part of the conquest too.” Most Jarochos share at least one of their two surnames with one of Cortés’s soldiers. The result is a genetic and cultural mix that Fortuno characterizes not as a homogeneity but as “cultural amalgamation.” As she attempts to pin down the legacy of the conquest, her words become less fluid, a series of starts and stops about unresolved issues brought on by the conquest, the Catholic Church, and, later, the national projects in response to centuries of colonialism. The restaurant owner likens Veracruz to a room with many doors, each door leading to a different tradition. Talk turns quickly to indigenous populations: “The indigenous issue is a recurring theme when you want to go back to your origins or to being who you originally were.” The polemic that incited great passion and caused profound divisions among Spanish clergy, conquistadors, monarchs, and colonizers throughout the sixteenth century

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Figure 1.9.  Lucía Fortuno’s restaurant features Veracruz’s rich Afro-Caribbean gastronomical and musical traditions. (© Steve Raymer.)

still looms large today. Fortuno observes a continuing lack of respect for indigenous cultures. Schools, families, and the government hold in high esteem pre-Hispanic culture while disparaging the language, food, and clothing of the people today: “Being indigenous makes us feel ashamed. Really, it makes us feel ashamed. You’re not going to call me indigenous. What’s wrong with you? I’ve studied; I’ve got an education. It’s offensive to say that.” In order to right this centuries-old pattern, the restaurant owner insists, using the first-person plural nosotros, that Mexicans need to recognize that “we” are also the “indio.”

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Rolando Torres Hernández, Instituto de Cultura Veracruzana How am I going to understand my country, how am I going to understand the peoples that are here if I don’t participate, if I am detached from it, and if my tiny eyes look more toward other issues?

A harpist tunes his instrument as he prepares for another weekly musical broadcast from the cool interior patio of the former Convent of San Sebastian, now the Institute of Veracruz Culture. At the other end of the huge, one-square-block building, giggling fifth graders dressed as Spaniards and Moors ready for the annual reenactment of a different conquest story: the triumph of Catholic Spain over the Arabs that for centuries has also served as an allegory for the Spanish conquest of Mexico. I meet here with Rolando Torres, the director of cultural promotion, a warm, brighteyed man in blue jeans. Torres speaks passionately about the rich cultural traditions in the state. There are more than ten different native ethnic groups, he notes, each with its own traditions. Two decades ago, Torres left his hometown of Córdoba in the interior to learn more about his home state of Veracruz. “Seeing diversity is part of my identity as a Veracruzano.” Now, he travels throughout the state attending popular cultural events. A copy of his recent article on a Veracruz festival sits on his desk. As we talk, Torres underscores the importance of interviewing Mexicans about the conquest: “They are the current-day participants.” Like Lucía Fortuno, his former colleague at the institute, Torres defines the port city as international, cosmopolitan, and based on three root heritages. Yet he argues that the three heritages are far from balanced. “The only Indians in the city are street vendors from Chiapas.” People with direct Spanish heritage continue to control hotels, restaurants, and government offices. And, African heritage is mostly seen in the pervasive Afro-Andaluz musical and dance tradition throughout the city. Being a gateway into Mexico has further formed Veracruz’s identity, he explains: “Its eyes are cast toward Cuba and the Caribbean, rather than Mexico City.” But it also is the nation’s “bodyguard,” over the centuries defending Mexico from British privateers, French invaders, and, more recently, the United States. “Here, the U.S. invasions are part of the city’s heroic character, you know, because they relate to the defense of national identity, of sovereignty.” The impact of the Spanish conquest is “diluted” in this seaport. Rather than talk about the Spanish conquest, Torres focuses on the pre-Hispanic legacies in rural areas of the state, where a dozen official indigenous languages continue to be spoken and town festivals celebrate centuries-old traditions linked with agricultural cycles and divinities. This immense indigenous world is a “living process” of change and persistence. While regional governments currently are officially documenting indigenous traditions throughout the state, Torres maintains that the fiestas patronales in rural towns, in particular the music-dance traditions, provide the best windows onto the mixture of Old World and New World cultures. For example,

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many towns continue to include an annual danzas de moros y cristianos, a ritualized reenactment of the Battle of Covadonga in 711, when Christians halted further penetration of Islam into the Iberian Peninsula. The meaning of this Hispanic tradition was transferred to symbolize the defeat over all infidels throughout the Americas. Many other towns in the state celebrate another remnant from colonial times: the Andalusian Cruz de Mayo, the adoration of the cross and an important symbol for a region named after “the True Cross” (Vera Cruz) by Cortés. As the interview unfolds in an easy exchange over a second cup of coffee, Torres leans closer, talking in a quiet but excited tone. Six months ago he set out on a personal quest: “If I don’t assimilate indigenous thinking on its own terms, I’m never going to understand it; I’ll always be apart, outside their reality.” He enrolled in an ongoing workshop based on oral Nahua tradition from the Zongolica region of Veracruz, taught by an indigenous médico. Still a beginner—and perhaps respecting a tradition of reticence when talking about sacred concepts with outsiders—he offers few details about the practice, except that it includes ritual dancing and the ceremonial temascal purification. The workshop is not an academic exercise for the director of culture. It is a personal spiritual journey, a journey he shares with many others in search of indigenous traditions that have been kept alive in isolated communities, transformed and revived over time. These cultural revivals have captured the hearts and minds of a broad cross-section of society, especially the generation born after 1960. Torres sees himself and others like him as seekers rather than “actors.” His journey draws on a mixture of official twentieth-century historiography promoting the value of pre-Hispanic cultures with a more recent impulse to revive these traditions for urban dwellers seeking an alternative to the state mestizo identity.

Villa Rica and Antigua de la Veracruz

The new highway from modern-day Veracruz to Cortés’s first settlement, Villa Rica de Veracruz, is nearly deserted as we pass through fields of cattle, mango trees, and burning sugar cane. According to John Todd, a Texan oil company administrator who has made Veracruz his home and his hobby, the road cuts directly through twenty square kilometers of unexplored Totonaco archaeological sites. Dozens of grass-covered hills are actually unexcavated pyramids. Only a gravel road with a cattle gate marks the climb up to Quiahuiztlan, a Totonaco ceremonial burial site perched next to El Cerro de los Metates. It was from this commanding view of the gulf that Cortés saw an area on the coast below where he would found the first settlement, Villa Rica. Today, a handful of fishing boats roll up onto the shore as the morning catch is unloaded. A few dirt roads and cow pastures over, construction workers erect a luxury vacation home. A forty-six-year-old caretaker born and raised here says only a few dozen households live here year round, but the recent influx of foreigners and people from Mexico City fill the town on holidays. He only nods when asked about the conquest and the town founder. The nearby inland city of Cempoala is the same Zempoala, ceremonial center of Totonaco culture, where Cortés was taken to meet with the Totonaco leadership. Now it is a highly reconstructed set of ruins, with a small but well-stocked tourist shop at the entrance that offers statues of Tlaloc, the god of rain and fertility, alongside straw hats, beach towels, and sunblock. A guide points to a circle of stones and calls it the “gladiator pit” as he tries to bring native culture closer to a European framework, following terminology first coined by conquistadors who linked an indigenous ritual with ancient Rome.8 Even at this Totonaco archaeological site, however, the topic of the conquest does not ignite passionate responses or opinions. There is a gentle acceptance of the official discourse that pre-Hispanic cultures were westernized and have become merely a symbol of Mexico’s past glory. 65

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Figure 1.10.  The Cerro de Metate and ancient Totonaco burial grounds overlook Villa Rica, Cortés’s first settlement on the Gulf of Mexico. (Courtesy of Pricetravel.)

About halfway between Villa Rica and the port of Veracruz lies Antigua de la Veracruz. When Cortés abandoned the first Villa Rica, Antigua was established as the sixteenth-century coastal center for the Spanish enterprise. It provided a more defensible haven from the fierce north winds and invading forces. Abandoned after seventy years for the deeper harbor of modern Veracruz, the quiet town now promotes its Spanish heritage. Peeling red letters on a crumbling cement wall welcome visitors to the second stop (after San Juan de Ulúa) of the Ruta de Cortés. A few youngsters wearing red T-shirts offer their services as tour guides. This is one of the few towns in Mexico that boast of their link to the conquistador. The central attractions in this cobblestone town of nine hundred inhabitants are the ruins of an early sixteenth-century house, known as La Casa Cortés (see plate 1.1), an ancient ceiba tree, said to be where Cortés tied his ships, and one of the first churches built on the continent. The Hermitage of the Virgen del Rosario, constructed in 1523, only four years after Cortés’s incursion, is the oldest still-standing church in North America. Travelers leaving the coast and heading inland stopped

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Figure 1.11.  Built in 1523, the Hermitage of the Virgin of Rosario was the first chapel built in the wake of Cortés’s conquest. Travelers prayed in the chapel before embarking for Europe by sea or by land along the official Camino Real, which began here and eventually reached as far north as New Mexico and California. (© Steve Raymer.)

here, at the start of the Royal Road that eventually went as far north as San Francisco, to pray for safe passage. Nearby, another church named the Cristo del Buen Viaje, stained by pigeon guano, dominates the central plaza. The ruins of the so-called Casa Cortés and a more modern mosaic inlay of Cortés and Malinche are some of the few reminders of La Antigua’s past. Just down the street, near the massive ceiba tree, a mural on the outside wall of the family-run Hotel Malinche portrays Cortés and Malinche arm in arm, peacefully overlooking the gulf.

Isaac Hernández, La Casa Cortés At the Casa Cortés, now just roofless walls of tumbling brain coral and brick held together by the massive roots of a strangler fig tree, a wide-eyed, serious thirteenyear-old guide waits for tourists to arrive. Three years ago Isaac Hernández completed a course at the county Department of Tourism and became an official local

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tour guide. Whenever tele-school (a program of distance education serving students in rural areas) is not in session, he waits for customers. The guide plays up local lore: pigeons inside the church descend from Spanish messenger pigeons; the first Totonaco Indian was baptized over the large stone font on display; Cortés’s tree brings good luck if you kiss it (some people here say this is a remnant of an early Mayan belief that the ceiba tree connects the terrestrial with the spirit world). He even transposes historical fact as he places the first twelve Franciscans as residents of the Casa Cortés, and identifies the statue of the Virgin of Rosario at the hermitage with one brought by Cortés. Notably, the guide doesn’t mention the conquistador’s infamous scuttling of the ships to prevent a rebellion, or the school two blocks away where the first African slave trade on the continent began. When I ask him about Cortés’s house, he admits that the conquistador never lived there; it was a customhouse. As our discussion turns to the conquest the young guide struggles to answer, vaguely echoing the official story that the Totonacos thought Cortés was a god. He tentatively weighs in on the contemporary debate about whether the conquest was good or bad: “Well, I don’t think anything bad about [the Spaniards] because one way or another something similar was going to happen. And it’s over. There are people who feel, I don’t know, resentment, but . . . no. To my way of thinking, they’re wrong, because it’s over and you can’t get like that, right? No way. And partly yeah . . . Now we’re Catholic because of them. And we have culture. But if they hadn’t been the ones who conquered us, who knows what would’ve happened. . . . Perhaps things would’ve turned out the same or maybe a bit worse, I don’t know. But one way or another, we have to keep going.” He has trouble settling on a comfortable feeling about the conquest. Ambivalence seeps through as he attempts to reconcile his job to promote Antigua and the Ruta de Cortés with the negative impact of the Spanish invasion. The guide notes that while locals have little interest in hearing about Cortés, tourists from Mexico City “listen up.” And Spanish tourists feel “proud” and ask a lot of questions: “I suppose because they conquered us, they conquered Mexico.” In La Antigua, he maintains, “only young people and old folks are interested in history. Old people can tell you many things that we don’t even know.” When I see Hernández two years later, he has grown into a tall young man who, while still proud of La Antigua, hopes to become a mechanical engineer and leave the region. He says that his father works two hours away in Córdoba and comes home only on Sundays. The guide dreams of working in the United States for “five or six years to earn a little money” and asks about job opportunities in Chicago and if racism is a problem. Recently another incident has taken a toll on his family: his grandfather became an evangelista, joining one of the many growing Protestant groups based in the United States. While such groups offer what Rolando Torres called “solutions for the stomach and for the spirit,” they also prohibit members from wearing traditional dress and attending festivals, which are all based on centuries-old local traditions intertwined with the Catholic Church’s liturgical cycle and feast

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days. Emigration and Protestant evangelization contribute to the rapid loss of tradition in La Antigua and surrounding rural towns. The guide says that the last native Totonaco speaker in La Antigua died four or five years ago, but now gente preparada, educated Mexicans like a local biologist, are helping local people recover “our education.” As we will see all along the Ruta, indigenous culture is no longer transmitted strictly from inherited tradition but from nonindigenous Mexicans, often educated and urban, who seek to reestablish a connection with their pre-Hispanic heritage.

Festival of the Cruz de Mayo Antigua comes fully alive each May 3 for its fiesta patronal, the Cruz de Mayo, a mixture of Christian, Nahua, and Totonaco traditions. The quiet town and parish church are completely transformed. On the eve of the festival a twelve-foot wooden cross is adorned with freshly baked loaves of bread, large clusters of red grapes, and white roses. For Catholics these are symbols of the body and blood of Christ, and bring the promise of resurrection and eternal salvation. But the cross will be embedded in a sawdust bed with Aztec symbols of springtime abundance. At dawn the parish priest, accompanied by a band, townspeople, and an Aztec conchero group—dancers who reenact sacred rituals said to date back centuries to indigenous roots—parade the Vera Cruz to the front of the church, anchor it into the ground, and surround it with a carpet of dyed sawdust that depicts the four cardinal points sacred to indigenous peoples throughout the Americas. Singing praises to the True Cross, the concheros circle rhythmically around the sawdust carpet. Their song ceases when the bishop arrives. He steps through the carpet and into the church, which overflows with girls dressed in white gowns and boys dressed in sailor suits anxiously awaiting the sacrament of confirmation. The scene is reminiscent of the Andalusian Cruz de Mayo festival that commemorates the fourth-century discovery of the remains of the True Cross by Saint Helena, the patron of discoveries. But the musicians, concheros, and Totonaco pole fliers (voladores) as well as the sawdust carpet mark La Antigua’s Cruz de Mayo as uniquely Veracruzano. The town is not just celebrating its Spanish heritage. During the festival at least five cultural traditions live side by side: Andalusian roots, Nahua conchero rituals, Totonaco sacred pole fliers, the popular Cuban-based danzón, and, more recently, a hard-driving electric salsa band that takes over the late night scene.

Conchera, Patio of the Church of Cristo del Buen Viaje In the courtyard behind the church, the preparations begin. A young beardless man who wears an ankle bracelet made of rattles and shells slowly purifies himself with smoke from burning copal and carefully places each feather he handles into his

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headdress. He joins a circle of ten concheros who surround a young Malinche, who in Aztec dance ritual represents a semidivine figure rather than Cortés’s mistress and translator. She wears a blue gown and is in charge of purifying the circle of members with burning copal. The group’s leader, Don Germán, a wiry man with a long gray ponytail and a peaceful smile, talks quietly with each person. As they leave the shaded courtyard and process to their place in front of the church and cross, they begin to sing in praise of the True Cross. A crowd of about thirty to fifty people gathers. The rhythmic sound of shells begins as they move to the sounds of stringed instruments made from the armadillo’s shell (from which the name “concheros” is derived) and indigenous drums. The group continues a ritual purification and offering as they sing and dance to the four cardinal points. Soon the circle widens to allow bystanders to join a series of dance rituals that will continue for almost three hours. Only one woman and a child bravely step in. When the conchero group finishes, the group leader is gently elusive and ducks behind a stand when I try to approach him for an interview. A short forty-five-yearold woman who held the symbolic headdress during the opening ceremonies invites my questions (though she prefers to remain anonymous) as she heads toward a gold 1980s Chevy sedan filled with clothes and pillows. The parish priest invited her group from the state of Mexico to perform at Antigua’s festival. The woman, a school principal, beams with a contagious joy from the ceremony as she explains the sense of transcendence she experiences from the spiritual practice, the significance of the dance, and the symbolism of her hand-embroidered costume. Each aspect of the dance and costuming is carefully codified, she explains. Their costumes “speak, it’s their color, their shape; it’s Nahuatl writing, like the codices, like the ancient texts.” Although she has no Nahua heritage that she can trace, about eighteen years ago she joined this traditional group whose lineage follows the guardian of the volcanoes of Tepetlixpan, “who inspires us to sing, to dance in the towns.”9 Now her mother and fifteen-year-old daughter also participate. Dancing has become a way of life for the school principal; she explains: “I have to mix tradition, devotion, with work. So I joined up with a teacher of this tradition to practice it, because when I don’t dance I get sick from so much work, so much stress . . . it’s to feed the soul; it’s to offer oneself.” The conchero and Aztec dance movement is widespread in central Mexico and has been spreading internationally to the United States and even Europe. One estimate states that while there were about a thousand concheros in the 1940s, in the last few decades these numbers have swelled to tens of thousands.10 From the first, Nahua ritual music-dance captured the imagination of Europeans: Cortés had thirty-eight Aztec dancers perform for both Carlos V and the pope. Albrecht Dürer engraved this exotic New World phenomenon, and his work circulated widely in the European imagination.11 Legend recounts that a new Christian ritual dance with Nahua origins emerged spontaneously at the Battle at Calderón Pass in 1531. When Santiago, the patron of the Spanish Reconquest from the Muslims, appeared to a victorious group

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Figure 1.12.  The Tovar codex richly illustrates Aztec rituals, including the nobles’ ritual dance. Today some Aztec dancers study these codices as part of the revival of pre-Hispanic traditions. (Tovar Manuscript. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.)

of Christianized Indians (who had fought against a group of non-Christian Indians), they began to sing and dance in veneration. Other versions of the story include the apparition of the Holy Cross.12 While few scholars argue that Nahua dance disappeared completely after the conquest, most question the authenticity of current danza azteca and conchero practices in relationship to preconquest symbols and practices. Some maintain that the traditions were kept alive in cofradías, or religious brotherhoods; others insist that it survived in remote areas; still others say it was revived in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. In any case, danza azteca has periodically moved into public view in times of great historical change. Ritual dance performance claims a powerful space for reconstructing and reconfiguring ethnic identity. What began as a cultural adaptation of Nahua ritual music and dance practices under Catholic domination has become an evolving spiritual and cultural practice with political implications. The movement has taken on new dimensions in urban areas where most of the participants are self-identified mestizos, consciously seeking to reconnect with a spiritual ethnic indigenous identity.

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Pedro Morales Pérez, Totonaco Volador A few steps away from the church, a much larger crowd gathers around an eighteenmeter-high metal pole driven deep into the ground at the cobblestone intersection in front of Cortés’s tree to witness the ceremony of the pole-flying voladores. A hat is passed while the caporal (captain-priest), Pedro Morales, a small-statured man with dark brown skin and eyes, plays the flute. When I ask for an interview, he requests a donation. Morales is the only person in all my interviews who asks for money, and he drives a hard bargain: two hundred pesos for a ten-minute interview, after his group performs the next ritual bajada (hanging descent). One by one five men climb the pole and take their positions around a steel circle at the top. Four men wrap four-inch-thick ropes around their torsos while the caporal sits in the middle playing the flute and drum. The four men represent the four cardinal directions as well as the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water); the caporal at the top represents the sun. The four voladores drop simultaneously from the circle to hang upside down, absolutely motionless, with their arms outstretched and their feet crossed. The ropes fly them around in a circle thirteen times as they descend to the ground. This traditional ceremony, which so impressed the Spaniards that the first on-site royal chronicler illustrated it, takes about fifteen minutes from start to finish. The sum of the circles times the number of fliers carries ritual significance, representing the annual cycle of the sun.13 Although Antigua no longer has native Totonaco speakers, townspeople clearly identify more strongly with the Veracruz voladores than with the central Mexican concheros. There are five times as many spectators, and the town has invested in a permanent steel pole anchored in front of the town hall. Nahua-based concheros are a popular but imported tradition. To some they are a reminder of the region’s subjugation to the Aztecs before Cortés’s arrival and of the continued national focus on Aztec culture rather than on local indigenous traditions. Most voladores come from Papantla, in the northern reaches of the state, where Totonaco culture still thrives. In 2009 UNESCO recognized the tradition as an Intangible Cultural Heritage. For several decades now the voladores have extended their travels beyond Mexico, to the United States and Europe. Like so many pre-Hispanic traditions, the custom was suppressed by the Spanish, practiced in secret or only locally, and revived periodically. In the twentieth century, it began to be promoted as a symbol of the indigenous past (and a tourist attraction) in various regions of Mexico. After the descent the caporal begins talking in a Spanish that reveals him as a nonnative speaker. His first language is Totonaco, a language not related to Nahuatl, which is spoken in the surrounding states. He comments that their town makes a concerted effort to continue speaking Totonaco, despite new pressures to leave it behind: “All of us locals have to speak Totonaco. We speak our mother tongue because many people don’t like to speak it anymore. They are ashamed to speak it. . . . We practice our mother tongue.” Dressed in white and red, which symbolize “clarity

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Figure 1.13.  Now recognized as an Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO, the Totonaco volador ritual awed Spanish conquistadors and is frequently performed on feast days throughout the state of Veracruz. (Photograph by Lucía Alvarado Herrera.)

and blood,” and a cap adorned with mirrorlike spangles that he says symbolize “the Spaniards’ deception” (although most say they symbolize the sun). He has personally witnessed the results of this deception: “[The Spaniards] told us that mirrors were worth much more than gold, and it wasn’t true. When we were in Barcelona, Spain . . . there’s some gold that they took. There it says ‘gold from Mexico’ in letters this big. In Barcelona, Spain, I saw it. There it says ‘Mexico.’ And that’s the way it is.” As he talks, the dutiful nature of his interview rapidly dissipates and his strong belief in the power of the ceremony takes hold. He notes that his father and grandfather were

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voladores—and the tradition goes as far back as anyone in his family can remember. Now his son is doing his training at the traditional School for Dance and Music in Pozo de la Cruz, Papantla. Although the ritual has been commercialized, Morales is a professional who balances the religious roots of the practice with its status as a tourist attraction. The livelihood of his family and community depends on the strict observance of sacred rituals, put into place for the safety and the success of their offerings. Among other rules, Morales explains, a volador must not touch his wife for twelve days before and twelve days after flying, and he must always ask permission from Mother Earth before climbing the pole. The tradition is rooted in the agricultural cycle of the community: “Our forefathers set that [pole] up so as to ask [for rain] in times of drought; it hadn’t rained, there was nothing to eat. So what our ancestors did was eat roots. They ate roots from any tree . . . from that banana tree that has a lot of juice, for that reason we fly.” Like others in the community, Morales and his family cultivate maize, beans, and oranges. In their performances they seek “favor from Tlaloc and the blessing of a good harvest.” They travel to festivals throughout Mexico (six to twenty a year) and even abroad. He notes that audiences in other countries

Figure 1.14.  Early Franciscan friars reinterpreted pre-Hispanic ritual for Christian ends. Here the Codex Azcatitlan depicts angel wings added to the volador ritual.

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are often more interested in their performance than Mexicans are. He speculates that “maybe they no longer notice it because we have a lot of culture.” The caporal accepts the ritual as both a sacred tradition and a product, marketed to bring money and recognition back to his community. Morales believes that the Spanish military conquest had little effect on his traditional community. He points to the mural at the Hotel Malinche and notes how Cortés passed through Antigua and Zempoala on his way to Cholula, but never went further north to Papantla. Even the spiritual conquest has not had much effect on his beliefs; he explains that everyone is Catholic because if they do not go to church then the problems begin. Yet, beyond church attendance, “the belief we have depends on each person and . . . we keep doing the same things with the culture we already have.” Morales flies to celebrate Tlaloc during a festival of the True Cross in the town that depends on Cortés’s legacy for much of its livelihood. Church attendance seems to be the only relic of Catholicism in his spiritual practice. Rather than a melding of Totonaco and Spanish Christian beliefs into a single system there is a personaland community-based belief that defies easy categorization. A facile application of the word “syncretic” (used widely by both scholars and the general public until recently) does not get at the complex core of Morales’s beliefs. The performance of the voladores and concheros provides a connection to a real or imagined past, in a festival setting that is not their own. The embodied ritual becomes an agent for knowledge and social memory.

Anonymous, U.S.-Mexican banker, Patio of the Church of Cristo del Buen Viaje As concheros sing the closing praises to the True Cross, a blue-eyed blond in his late forties, the only other güero—or light-haired person—I’ve seen all day, suddenly turns to me and asks in English, “Why are you attending this festival?” Switching to a mixture of Spanish and English, he answers for himself: he is here “to get rid of the stress from the U.S. . . . especially with the economic recession.” Born in Veracruz to a Mexican mother and an Italian father, the man works in Los Angeles as a mortgage loan officer. Work life in the United States is so intense, he says, that he hasn’t been back to Mexico in seven years. I recall another man who had been filming the festival for his homesick brother, who lives in New York City and hadn’t been back to Mexico in five years. The banker left Mexico when he was twenty-two years old. Now he is a U.S. citizen who dreams of helping his native Mexico, but “they don’t listen to what I say in Spanish. I would like to write a book saying, Mexico I love and I hate you, both, you know? . . . I wish I could become an ambassador from the U.S. to Mexico. Oh, yeah! Then I would be able to say, guys, now I’m here, I know I was born in Mexico, but I’m from the U.S. now, so you should do this against corruption.”

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The banker notes that Europeans—he recognizes the irony of his own halfEuropean ancestry—have dominated Mexico since the time of the conquest. European castes in Mexico still control and corrupt everything: “The people in power, they just take the money. It really makes me angry.” Catholicism has aided the corruption, he argues. He values Mexican family life but hates how the masses have been manipulated ever since the conquest: “Do you know about the history of Mexico? By force, by blows they killed them, and all that just so they would believe in God.” He goes on to talk about how the region was looted. Today religion, sports, and festivals have replaced violence as the preferred means of control. He repeats the refrain, “Give people circuses, high-wire acts, and theater, and people are happy.” There is a stark contrast between his voice and those of the conchera and volador. The fiesta patronal helps him reconnect to his homeland, but it also plays up how traditional spectacles have contributed to the creation of mythic identities that obscure economic and political realities. We will hear again at the end of this chapter of the tension between global perspectives and local traditions inside indigenous communities. Night has fallen and the sounds of dancers’ ankle shells and drums have ceased; a salsa band sets up for the nighttime party. The banker departs with a few final words about his new country. Speaking just months before the crisis in the U.S. banking system, which contributed to the 2008 free fall of the global markets and a recession, he talks of the U.S. financial empire and its narcissistic, irresponsible behavior: “What makes me also sad is that people in the United States don’t realize where the system is ultimately taking them.” There are no easy solutions either for Mexicans who stay or for those who leave rural Mexican towns like La Antigua. For those who leave, the possible financial gain of immigration is often accompanied by a sense of cultural loss. For those who stay, economic survival is increasingly difficult, and some depend on charity offered by Protestant groups. Nonetheless, growing numbers of people are seeking deeper community by participating in a revival of both colonial Spanish festivals and pre-Hispanic spiritual traditions. The fiesta patronal on the site of early colonial Veracruz connects the community to its past while also offering evolving models of identity for the present.

Xalapa: State Capital

Guy Rozat Dupeyron, Casa de Campo There is a yearning for history because people feel something’s missing. They feel there’s a little something in their head that they don’t understand.

What was once a long, arduous climb from the coast into the verdant mountains surrounding Xalapa now takes about two hours via air-conditioned express bus. PreHispanic settlements existed throughout this highly fertile region, which enjoys an eternal springtime, but little is known about them except that they were associated with El Tajin. Cortés simply passed through what was then a sparsely populated region on his way to Tlaxcala, but Xalapa later became the seat of Spanish government in the state, as criollos sought to escape the tropical heat and disease in Veracruz. I arrive as a parade of schoolchildren completes its final turn around the central streets of the capital to commemorate Cinco de Mayo, Mexico’s defeat of the French in the Battle of Puebla (1862). A tall, white-bearded Frenchman who works for INAH, Guy Rozat, meets me and then takes me to his house in the country nearby. Several decades ago, Rozat presented an audacious critique of Miguel León-Portilla’s idea of the “vision of the vanquished”: “León-Portilla denies the moment of the conquest. His work denies the possibility of considering the conquest, the colonial period, and it denies the possibility of considering the preconquest; that’s the main issue: the denial of ancient America.”14 Now he hosts an annual international colloquium, “Rethinking the Conquest.”15 Rozat argues that the Mexican state and academy have created an “antihistoria,” a denial of the true historical processes at work in Mesoamerica since ancient times in favor of a hegemonic official history. More than a decade ago, he and his family left Mexico City and bought property with money he had made from his French restaurant, La Fonda de los Disparates. Rozat is passionate about cooking for his family of four and tending the land, where he has planted a huge garden. As we walk inside his house, Rozat talks about how he built the earthen walls from the dirt on his land and in the process uncovered a black onyx nosepiece and a huge metate (grinding stone), which he used for the hearth. 77

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Settling in at the kitchen table with his dog Happy at his side, Rozat tells his story. Born to traditional Basque and Catalan parents, Guy received a doctorate in linguistics before the political-cultural revolution of May 1968 changed the course of his life. Accused of being involved in a 1968 student plot against the French government, he was shipped off to fulfill his obligatory year of military service. During that time he read about the Mexican Revolution: “I read everything that had been written in French about Mexico and I arrived at the conquest. . . . And the conquest to me seemed confusing and untruthful. When I found the perspective of the conquered, or the visión de los vencidos, I had to go back. Who was it? To find out about the conquest I started reading [about] Spain up to the Greeks. And I started looking to see who were these ‘Indians’ . . . , everything there was about the ‘Indians.’ Since I like reading, and I was never into TV . . . I read, read, read, read.” Soon he moved to Mexico, married, and completed a second doctorate on the history of the conquest of Mexico. Rozat argues that even though Cortés is “mal visto” (frowned upon) today, for seventy years the ruling PRI party used the conquistador to perpetuate “the identity myth, the foundational myth” for Mexicans. The myth helped to keep the state in control and to repress indigenous groups. He cites as examples the national use of archaeology as a way of fossilizing “indios” as something of the past, and he also cites his sons’ school textbook from the 1990s. Indios—and only those of local interest—are mentioned twice and then disappear from the rest of the two-hundredpage primary-school history text. The three-hundred-year colonial period—a time of intense Hispanization and cultural negotiation—is skipped over: the text jumps from the conquest to Independence. The construction of an antihistory has had serious consequences for indigenous peoples; the indios have been invented and put into “a kind of souvenir shop that puts them in their place and does away with them.” He maintains that many of the current revivalist and indigenous movements are based on “a false identity,” leading to Aztec dancers who are “neo-indio,” Zapatistas who are driven by international interests, and new university centers where scientists have exchanged their labs for dances to the sun. Meanwhile, ethnic groups who have continued pre-Hispanic traditions live in a misery that belies the state myth. Decades of national mythmaking, argues Rozat, have created a gap between the official story and reality, producing in all Mexicans a “a deep yearning for history,” a strong desire to know more, but an inability to recognize many myths, much less deconstruct them in order to see ethnic and national identities. The gap produces a profound sense of not belonging and of discomfort and has led, Rozat says, to a society of “llorones” (crybabies). Nevertheless he states: “I believe more in Mexico than many Mexicans do.” As I will see in later interviews, although Dr. Rozat speaks harshly, many people agree with him in part, saying that nothing will change until they can see clearly how state-sponsored glorification of a mythic past has created a divided society and separated them from the very forces that make Mexico Mexican.

Nahua Perspectives from Comunidades in the Sierra Zongolica

Mexico’s diverse, vibrant indigenous past and present lie at the heart of many informants’ narratives of history and identity. The state of Veracruz in particular has one of the highest numbers of indigenous communities (more than two thousand) among the thirty-two states in Mexico. Today there are more than half a million speakers of indigenous languages. Only half speak Nahuatl. The remaining groups include, among others, Totonacos, Huastecas, Popolucas, Zapotecas, Chinantecas, Otomies, Mazatecas, Tepehuas, Mixtecas, Zoques, Mixes, Mayas, and Tzotziles.16 Because so many Veracruzanos refer to this ethnic diversity in their state, I diverged from the Ruta de Cortés to interview residents of two remote comunidades located in the Zongolica mountains in southern Veracruz, an area often mentioned by informants in the port of Veracruz as a region with many native Nahua communities and traditions that date back to the colonial period. Unable to travel to the Zongolica, I interview by phone two young men living in one of the many indigenous regions that Aguirre Beltrán called “regiones de refugio,” or refuge areas for indigenous populations.17 They are far less sheltered today.

Gabriel Mazahua, Macuilca The constitution and all that, well, things just stay the same, you know? Nothing comes from them. The people in the communities are still there, forgotten, with their rights still being violated.

The thoughts of urban initiatives for a pluriethnic Mexico quickly fade away as Gabriel Mazahua describes his indigenous Nahua community. Encouraged by 79

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government initiatives in the 1970s, the once self-sufficient traditional agricultural community converted to a mostly monocultural system of coffee growing, making it more dependent on national and global markets. Hit hard by the coffee crisis of the early 1990s when prices fell dramatically, nearly a hundred of the town’s three hundred inhabitants have emigrated to urban Mexico or the United States. The changes in the social and economic fabric of Mazahua’s comunidad began in the same years that Zapatismo and institutional initiatives gathered momentum. The 2003 constitutional amendment protects linguistic diversity, he notes, but for the last decade only the “older people” speak Nahuatl. More significantly, the community-wide Xochitlaliz and viuda celebrations for planting and harvest, which used to include ritual performances with live music and elaborate offerings of special moles, tamales, and local produce, are now just a simple prayer to el monte, the community’s natural resource that also has spiritual qualities, asking permission from Mother Earth to plant or harvest. The most sacred of traditions, the Día de los Muertos, which once lasted over a week, has been reduced to a day or two and now also features “plastic Halloween pumpkins in the local grocery.” Low incomes in the wake of economic crisis and the exodus of nearly one-third of the original community mean that people “don’t have enough [money] to set up an altar.” The intangible yet visible forms of traditional culture and community are now mere remnants of past practices. The eldest son of coffee cutters, Mazahua is in the minority: both parents and all three children in his family still live together. But the loss of local, sustainable incomes has an impact on family social structures as well as intangible heritage. The twenty-one-year-old doubts that he will find work in his comunidad after finishing his undergraduate thesis on the economic, social, and cultural implications of the town’s dependence on coffee-bean production (caficultura). He has spent the last four years studying at the Intercultural University of Veracruz, a relatively new educational initiative begun in 2004 to create a culturally hybrid higher education degree program for area residents. The program attempts to bridge the gap between Western academia and local traditional knowledge, especially Nahua culture and tradition, making the degree more applicable to students’ home communities. Students choose a specialization in language, sustainability, communications, health, or law. Mazahua also actively participates in Guardianes de la Memoria Oral, a student collective sponsored by a group from Mexico City. Participants received training in interviewing, video recording, and radio broadcasting, and are now collecting, analyzing, and disseminating information about local issues and culture. But in spite of national efforts to raise consciousness and institutional reforms intended to foster ethnic and linguistic diversity, Mazahua observes, “It doesn’t reach the community level.” According to community oral history, the town was founded by five equal families (Macuilca, in Nahuatl, means “five families”) after the Revolution reinstated the system of common lands (ejidos), a part of the process that led to many foundational myths associated with the Revolution. But it is increasingly divided by land disputes and economic inequality. Corrupt officials and the growing inequity among

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Figure 1.15.  Members of the Guardianes de la Memoria Oral prepare a publication under the sponsorship of Iguanazul. (Photograph by Itzel Pereda and Fernando Robles.)

community members contribute to an untenable situation. Last year, Mazahua’s neighbor was shot and killed in a land dispute with another neighbor. When the widow attempted to seek justice, Mazahua recounts, the neighbor hired a lawyer with funds received from relatives living in the United States, and the killer was cleared. The widow was left with no main wage earner, children to raise on her own, and less land to support them. While some families receive remittances from family members who work in other parts of Mexico or abroad, those still working in the community have only coffee as a cash crop, which is inadequate, since there is a commercial monopoly with only one buyer. Other locally grown agricultural products, such as mango, pineapple, and chile, Mazahua explains, have no outside market in the remote sierra. As the economic crisis continues, the loss of seasonal and religious community celebrations jeopardizes the cohesiveness of his comunidad. When I ask about the legacy of the conquest, there is no vehemence in his response. Mazahua repeats a phrase I have heard from many other people: “The Spanish conquest had its pros and cons.” He notes how indigenous agricultural practices were readily adapted to the plow; the example of the plow emerges with some frequency among people living in comunidades. As the student of local sustainability considers the question further, however, he describes a more mixed and immediate legacy: caciquismo, the political power of a local boss in a rural area. Just

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a twenty-minute walk from his town, two hundred people in another Nahua comunidad still live and work on a large hacienda owned by a single nonindigenous family, a remnant of the colonial and Independence periods. Mazahua notes the irony of the fact that, while the inhabitants are not well paid, they have sustainable incomes. Their community has not been completely transformed by massive emigration as have so many others. By remaining on the hacienda as a relatively intact community, residents continue speaking Nahuatl and celebrating their traditional heritage. When I ask about possible discrimination or abuse, Mazahua maintains that Nahua workers would leave if they were badly mistreated. The 1990s academic paradigm of contemporary indigenous peoples as either vencidos, victims of the Spanish conquest and colonization, or heroic resistance fighters has no place in Mazahua’s nuanced views on transformation and survival, or in his more urgent concerns about the radical changes in community structures since the economic crises of the early 1990s. Changes to traditional agricultural practices—the introduction of cash crops, the change in the ejido system, and the lifting of economic tariffs with NAFTA—have led to a difficult situation in his comunidad. Issues of economic survival are key to Mazahua’s narrative.

Rigoberto Nopaltecatl, Xochiojca What’s most important is that we’ve worked . . . conducted research in the communities themselves . . . that’s what’s most important now . . . ourselves as internal actors.

Just five kilometers from Gabriel Mazahua’s town, a resident of Xochiojca (seven hundred inhabitants) and a colleague of Mazahua, protests, “How could they have conquered me!?” While no one knows when Xochiojca was first established, by the mid-nineteenth century a group of anthropologists had already recorded its extensive traditional cycle of religious festivals. Today Rigoberto Nopaltecatl, as a member of the Centro de Derechos Humanos Toaltepeyolo (the Toaltepeyolo Center for Human Rights), documents the continuing vibrancy of his Nahua comunidad. He rejects the implication that the conquest five hundred years ago destroyed his culture. Nopaltecatl questions the use of the word “conquest,” saying that people use it like the conquest of a novia (a girlfriend or bride). “I don’t know who came up with [the phrase] ‘the Spanish conquest’ . . . because it’s like someone came who maybe wasn’t familiar with that part of the world.” He prefers the term “meeting of different cultures,” which he believes does not downplay the impact of the initial conquest but emphasizes the continuity of indigenous culture today. He observes that colonial law offered a degree of local autonomy even as authorities imposed Catholicism and a new tribute system. More importantly, he argues, “the first peoples already had their ways of organizing themselves,” which helped to ensure their survival as a

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community. Spanish political and religious structures for community organization were adapted to indigenous forms. Viewed from the outside, his comment “I don’t see the contradictory part of the conquest” may seem disingenuous, but it is based on his own experience living in a comunidad indígena and mocks the stereotype of “the poor indigenous people.” As a boy Rigoberto grew up speaking Nahuatl, wearing the traditional white cotton pants and shirt, and participating in core community events. Nearly twenty years ago, Nopaltecatl’s father left the family for Mexico City and never returned. The young boy grew up in the home of his grandmother, who practiced traditional medicine. His mother worked actively in the community. While Nopaltecatl studied law at the Intercultural University of Veracruz and completed a major in intercultural development management (gestión intercultural para el desarrollo), he continued to live in a nearby Nahua community. He experienced firsthand many similarities among comunidades indígenas as well as the significant differences in Nahuatl dialects and community organization. Now, as a young man in his early twenties, he has left behind traditional dress. He jokes, “You gotta be up-to-date with fashion, right?” Still, he diligently chronicles the continuation of immaterial culture. Trained by the collective to use video recordings and interviews, Nopaltecatl focused first on the community’s yearlong preparations for the fiesta patronal, Cristo Rey (the image of Christ the King). He combines ethnography with being what he calls “an internal actor.” Catholicism plays a central role, he explains, yet it is the local adaptations of Catholic traditions for the continuity of community that are fundamental to his individual identity and to Xochiojca’s collective identity. Town meetings make communal decisions; mayordomos, or lay stewards, and parishioners set up music and fireworks and construct elaborate floral arches. No priest leads this activity; it comes from within the community, following at least a century and a half of tradition. His description, often told in a striking dialogic style in which he articulates the voices of others using the first person, is a stark contrast to Mazahua’s portrayal of cultural loss. Nopaltecatl projects a strong sense of belonging to Xochi­ojca, defined as a place as well as a community of people, traditions, and resources. But it is the gap between his own lived reality and official legislation that drives his ambition to work on development from within comunidades. Last year Nopaltecatl documented Xochiojca’s traditional medicine and the extensive abuses of “right to health care” when town inhabitants sought Western medical help for graver illnesses. He called a community asemblea to gain full participation and then interviewed nearly a hundred people. Two realities repeatedly surfaced in the interviews: overt discrimination and the marginalization of traditional practices. When people went to clinics they were told, “There’s no medicine, go to the hospital,” but then they were never seen, even after waiting for hours. If a patient saw a Western doctor, the doctor often harshly criticized traditional practices. Now community members are conflicted. They question traditional medicine and yet have limited access to Western medicine, despite national legislation that bars discrimination. In response to his

Figure 1.16.  Residents of the Zongolica comunidad of Xochiojca gather for an asemblea, a general meeting or work session that follows a traditional format. (Photograph by Claudio Flores Hernández. Courtesy of Rigoberto Nopaltecatl.)

Figure 1.17.  The Xochiojca musical group El Viento performs Nahua and ranchera music at town gatherings and festivals. (Photograph by Claudio Flores Hernández. Courtesy of Rigoberto Nopaltecatl.)

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findings, Nopaltecatl and others disseminate knowledge about traditional medicine in a weekly radio program and fight abuse by offering workshops on human rights and methods to ensure that doctors observe them. Nopaltecatl was just four years old when EZLN made its declaration of war and asserted, “Never again a Mexico without us,” and he believes that its fundamental principles, the need to control local material resources and the right to “selfdetermination,” are the key to vibrant, sustainable comunidades. Two years ago, he relates, a hydroelectric company hired foreigners to dam local water supplies and create electricity for the state of Veracruz. Xochiojca was not consulted. Now the town’s main water supply is “returned water,” stagnated water that has been processed for electricity. To town members, it is contaminated water. The plant has not benefited their community but violated it. According to the Nahua tradition of the altepetl, a comunidad is a people, a place, and a set of resources. Many comunidades refer to these resources as “el monte,” and they believe that it possesses spiritual qualities essential to the vitality of the community. Nopaltecatl argues passionately that the hydroelectric company “is violating the right to consultation” as well as “the right to a livable environment, the right to a life.” People’s autonomy to decide for themselves is a key issue. Nopaltecatl emphasizes that “there may be a law, some regulation that says you have the right, that you have access to those services. You can take on those activities without anyone saying anything about it. You have to be autonomous; you may speak your indigenous language; you can practice your culture. But you find . . . sometimes those programs limit you, even the institutions themselves.” He is part of a growing trend to integrate or even reconcile state ideology with individual and local realities. New legislation has not significantly changed centuries-long practices of raiding local indigenous resources. Many of the most densely populated indigenous areas in Mexico, such as the Zongolica and Chiapas, correspond to areas rich in natural resources. The struggles between local comunidades and national and international economic demands promise to continue well through the twenty-first century. For both Zongolican informants, core issues—sustainable incomes, access to education and health care, the authority to make decisions that affect resources—stand out. They have an impact on the viability of immaterial heritage and the survival of the community itself. Yet there is no single model solution to these problems, even among three Nahua communities within an hour’s walk of each other. According to Gabriel Mazahua, a nearby hacienda comunidad under the authority of a cacique boss has changed little since colonial times, while Mazahua’s own post-Revolutionary community is threatened by massive emigration and the abandonment of community structures. In contrast, Nopaltecatl’s comunidad navigates change by reaffirming continuity even as it allows for transformation. As asembleas and the fiesta patronal continue, the town encourages emigrants to return for traditional festival cycles (about sixty out of eighty emigrants return on a regular basis). Well-connected community

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members like Nopaltecatl’s mother work within traditional structures, while young people like Nopaltecatl use their knowledge of legislative changes to document and combat centuries of discrimination. The graduate describes the urgent need for “increased awareness” and “respect” at all levels to create development that supports “the well-being of the community, for the people.” Post-Independence official historiography glorified the “ideal Indian of the pre-Hispanic past” and twentieth-century state anthropology cultivated the “museum indio,” fixed in time and custom. These labels are nowhere evident in Nopaltecatl’s description of Xochiojca. In both urban and rural settings a new generation is meeting the complex challenges created by a variety of local ethnic and cultural circumstances, gaps between legal discourse and practice, contemporary globalization of indigenous movements, and the rapid exodus of young people from comunidades.

Interview Selections, Part I

Isidro Rendón Bello How did you become interested in the Ruta de Cortés? Well, I’m a fan of four-wheel-drive vehicles. For many years I drove Land Rovers, but then I couldn’t get Land Rovers any more, and I started driving Wagoneers . . . , and we started a four-wheel-drive club. One of the proposals we had for club activities was tracking Cortés’s route to Mexico City. There were engineers, merchants, just regular everyday workers, really all sorts of people in the club, but nobody who knew much about history. So, they put me in charge of figuring out what road he took. I looked into it because, as you know, it’s not just any open road that you can drive in any old car. You’ve got to remember that Cortés made the trip on horseback, not by car. And also, the road’s still pretty rough, so you need a four-wheel-drive vehicle. I’m interested in the route, or the road, Hernán Cortés traveled because he’s the one who built the ayuntamiento, or city hall, which has been around for a long time. There were some other ayuntamientos before this one here in Veracruz, but they’ve all disappeared or been moved. But, the ayuntamiento of Veracruz has constantly been in use. Almost nowhere is there a street named for Hernán Cortés, but here in Veracruz, there is a “Hernán Cortés Street” because he’s the city’s founder, and all cities honor the memory of their founders.

Romeo Cruz Velázquez and Antonio Francisco Rodríguez Alvarado What’s your opinion of Hernán Cortés? Cruz:  Well, for me, Hernán Cortés was an extremely intelligent person, a great captain; strategically he was an outstanding person, very outstanding, on a level with the greatest conquerors in the world. But on a human level, he leaves much to be desired, yes indeed, much to be desired because he came to destroy an established culture that, whether superior or inferior, was completely different from the culture 87

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they knew in the Old World. They didn’t come only to conquer, because for as much as they conquered, they also changed culture. He came to bury our whole culture, to destroy all of our culture. He didn’t come just because he was eager to conquer, he came because he was eager to pillage. They came looking for treasure. They came looking for slaves because the slave trade was popular at the time. The Spaniards had already finished off the last slaves they got in the Canary Islands; they saw in America a great source of slaves, first in the Caribbean, when Columbus arrived, and they exterminated everyone. They had to bring Africans. They reached Mexico. They traded the . . . well, many conquistadors traded indigenous people for livestock, for cows, and others sold them. They sold Maya and Yaqui slaves in the Caribbean islands because there were no . . . well, not even Africans. . . . Well, there were, but what I mean is that they wiped everything out. The proof is that out of the, let’s say, twenty million indigenous people they found in Mexico, in less than fifty years not even two million were left. They wiped out nearly the entire population. Not only because the Spaniards were very aggressive in killing the men to rape their women and in stealing women and children to sell them as slaves, but also because of the great epidemics that were unknown here and were devastating. That germ warfare, or biological war, to a great extent ended the high population density in Mexico. More than anything the most densely populated region of Mesoamerica when the Spaniards arrived was in the Mexican highlands. It was the most densely populated region of Mesoamerica when the Spaniards arrived because the Tarascos to the north and the Maya populations to the south weren’t as numerous. Those areas weren’t as populated because the majority of indigenous cultures were concentrated in the Mexican highlands, and there they were packed like sardines in a can. All this to say that, on the one hand, you can say that I admire Cortés’s clever strategy as a conquistador, but as a human being he leaves a lot to be desired. However, I believe that he has to be considered in a larger context, don’t you think? Because he certainly was cruel, sure he was, all conquests are cruel to a point, and we would’ve fared worse if it had been the English. You see what happened in North America: there was no integration there. I’m a result of that mestizaje, or mixing of races. Honestly, I can’t deny my skin color; however, if I had lived in North America, I wouldn’t exist because I would have disappeared. There they weren’t interested in cultural integration; there they were more interested in making that culture disappear. So imagine if the English had arrived first. They say you shouldn’t speculate with history, but well, it would’ve been more . . . well, the culture would have completely disappeared. So, you have to look at Cortés in a certain context too. In my view, if he was cruel, it was in the early years of the conquest. And the kind of soldiers he had . . . they were not the most elite that Spain had to offer either. I think he would have . . . I mean . . . it’s controversial. It began in 1492 with the discovery of America; okay, was it a conquest or was it the disappearance of a culture? Ultimately, neither. Ultimately, one of Mexico’s great philosophers [Edmundo] O’Gorman used to say that, ultimately, it was the integration of two cultures, and

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there’s this result: mestizaje, which, along with the vices it may have given us, that’s where we are, right? So, as a historian, I think Cortés must be seen in this context. And for Veracruzanos, well, my colleague right here, as you can see, he’s white, got a beard; you might as well be looking at Hernán Cortés himself, no? I believe that’s why he struggles inside a little with Hernán Cortés, but me, since I’m a mestizo, I’m the product of both of those cultures. Rodríguez:  My esteemed colleague Romeo’s very correct in what he’s said. He’s a very good friend of mine, but we must remember that the Spaniards had one directive: increase the number of people who could adopt the Christian faith, because they came directed not only by the empire; they came directed by the papacy. It was said that, well . . . when Luther mostly decimated the number of [Catholic] Christians at the time of the schism or chaos . . . I don’t know what you call it—he [Cruz] can certainly correct me if I’m wrong—the number of [Catholic] Christians was greatly reduced. So, when America was discovered, the papacy saw a great opportunity to increase the numbers of its members, or Catholics, and engaged in manipulation, because it’s all manipulation. They’re not going to convert you so you can be free, so you can find fulfillment and enlightenment. No. They’re going to convert you so they can have you as someone to manipulate. And that was the other . . . or the second weapon they used to conquer us, because first it was the sword, then the cross. The cross even prevented the indigenous resistance from gaining strength in its uprisings because when there was an uprising, the cross came out to pacify the indigenous insurrections . . . emancipation . . . the freedom movements of the indigenous people themselves.

* * * Cruz:  I’m from Chiapas. He [Rodríguez] lived there, but I’m from Chiapas, from Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas. I was born there, and all my family on my mother’s side is from there. There are some indigenous villages that the government’s helping, but only after a social movement like the Zapatista movement. Lately, my fellow Chiapanecos have taken to not working because the government gives them money so they won’t block the highways or rise up in arms. And I’ve got a friend who’s a schoolteacher, who used to tell me: “Look, we earned it. For five hundred years they exploited us, now we are going to exploit them.” So, the indigenous people now are . . . since they showed them how, they’re saying, “I won’t work. Either you give us our grants every year, from Conasol [National Council for Social Development] or from the money that the government sends to Chiapas, or we seize the highways again, or the wells, or we start an armed conflict.” So the government gives them money to avoid an uprising like there was, if I remember correctly, in ’94.

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The indigenous people have their own laws. I mean, they’ve been able to survive for five hundred years, let’s just let them live. If they’ve kept their way of life and been able to survive the changes, let them stay the way they are. Why is the Mexican government so interested in their integration into a national project at this stage? It’s illogical. They’re integrated in their own way. They have managed to survive for 500 years, let’s leave them alone, don’t you think?

Lucía Fortuno Hernández Do you think that musical heritage comes from Africa, or is it indigenous? That’s a part of our tercera raíz, or third root. No, the indigenous people tended to be more melancholic. They weren’t so . . . let me just say, they didn’t get the rhythm. The indigenous people were . . . indigenous music always has long drawn out sounds, but it’s just not . . . how can I put it? It’s just not as strong. It’s more like a call to . . . to keep or preserve things, I mean, in spiritual terms. Not like the African influence, no. The African influence is more about drums. And that’s the thing that we have, the tercera raíz. What can you say about the effects of the conquest? We can talk about syncretism or about a sort of . . . a cultural blend, or amalgama cultural, of what makes us what we are and, well . . . that’s the way we are. We can talk about a lot of different things. Just like you can enjoy a criollo meal, you can dance to a son or have a good time at a tablado [flamenco show], for instance.

* * * I used to argue a lot with my colleagues, other cultural promoters, when we organized artistic projects in poor areas. “What are you gonna show them? You don’t ‘make’ culture. We just promote culture.” What does a cultural promoter do? Set something that’s already there to movement; advertise it. But you can’t force, for example, an operatic event in this area where they’re not gonna understand. Now, don’t misunderstand me. It’s not because they lack culture or cultural understanding, that’s different. It’s simply that it doesn’t go along with what they’ve lived. I can’t offer, for example, chamber music to people who are not used to hearing it—I’m not used to it either, and I have a little higher level of education than they do, because it doesn’t have to go along with what you’ve studied, although there may be some indigenous folks who will enjoy it—it also has to do with your sensitivity to those things. If you want to be a successful cultural promoter, study the community. What do they want? In that sense, political discourse in Mexico is about providing funds so that they’ll be better off, but I don’t think that’s the way to go. They haven’t really studied this. And still, when the indigenous people themselves are fighting for survival, in Chiapas for example, and since we’re talking about Mexico, what about

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the Lacandon region? They know very well what they want to do there, with their culture. But they’re seen like topics for folklore. “Oh, sure, I want my picture taken with a Lacandon.” But people in Veracruz, or in Mexico in general, don’t have an appreciation of what it means to be indigenous. Being indigenous makes us feel ashamed. Really, it makes us feel ashamed. You’re not going to call me indigenous. What’s wrong with you? I’ve studied; I’ve got an education. It’s offensive to say that. I think there needs to be a reassessment of what being indigenous means.

Rolando Torres Hernández What can you tell me about the fiestas patronales? Look, traditional festivals have to do with the relationship with the land, with what’s produced on the land. If the people out in the country don’t produce something, what are they going to celebrate? They’re not going to have anything to celebrate. So, if you don’t offer a program for support and aid in rural areas, you won’t have a festival. In other words, you may be supporting or helping the dancers, the danzantes, but the danzantes have to earn a living from agriculture too. So, they’ve got to also have support for production, because they have the festival to celebrate the harvest, not so tourists can come. That must be clear, and government programs have to be very clear to address every aspect, to attack the problem from all sides. Sure, tourism does attract resources, but it must be regulated, because otherwise you’ll spoil the festivals and create things that grow out of proportion, that lose their meaning, that no longer have their original dignity and strength.

* * * I think that more and more they re-create festivals thinking about tourism, unfortunately, but that’s why they’re re-created. And no, I don’t think it should be that way, because then it becomes a cardboard festival lacking a clear objective. In other words, there’s no reason for the festival because, as I said, it has to do with a harvest, with producing something, and if that’s no longer true, if you’re simply re-creating something so a tourist gets to see a fiesta, well, that turns out to be a bit fake.

* * * I think that the groups you mention, the concheros, the danzantes, are kind of a recent phenomenon. I mean, we really don’t have evidence to say that pre-Hispanic dance was done like this, or they danced it like that. There’s no better reference to them than, what do you call them . . . the codices; we have no references to the music, for how it was played. So, I don’t believe there’s anything left that can tell us whether this is a genuine, authentic pre-Hispanic dance; there’s just not anything. It’s

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a presentation that has to do with traditions like the one for the Virgin of Guadalupe and other saints who are honored and celebrated when they perform these dances.

* * * The indigenous world is immense. It’s a world where each indigenous population has its own specific context that can be approached in many ways. I believe the richness is in how you dress, how you speak, how you eat, all of that, don’t you? I can tell you that understanding the indigenous world is truly amazing and we are barely . . . well, personally at least, I’m just now in the process of seeing what it is, getting closer to understanding it. We’re becoming more open to it; I think in general it’s what’s happening now, don’t you? I mean it’s the knowledge . . . or maybe living the knowledge from our roots. In other words, I can be familiar, as you say, with laws and other matters related to indigenous groups in Mexico, but if I don’t assimilate indigenous thinking on its own terms, I’m never going to understand it; I’ll always be apart, outside their reality. Their economic problems may be very hard to solve, but it will be even harder if I don’t understand how they see the world. If I do, then I’ll be able to contribute to a better solution. Yeah, because if I don’t, I’m outside, alien to the process, I’m in the margins, I don’t participate. And in that sense, it doesn’t result in success, in doing things that help carry out projects. So I believe it’s good. It’s good to keep going. And it’s good to use technology, since we can, in order to spread and help out in the process. And also because the world is changing, and we’re not going to say that we’re hypertraditionalists and that everything has to be rudimentary and the like. It’s not like that; there are processes of change that are happening and that have to happen, necessarily, because the world is spinning and it’s changing.

* * * Here, the U.S. invasions are part of the city’s heroic character, you know, because they relate to the defense of national identity, of sovereignty. Here, there’s a Plaza de la Soberanía, a Sovereignty Plaza, I don’t know if you’ve seen it. It has a gigantic flagpole and a flag; there are similar ones in other parts of Mexico, where heroic deeds in the defense of sovereignty took place. In this case, the port [of Veracruz] has defended against French invasions and twice against U.S. invasions, and I think that gives Veracruzanos a sense of identity, that sense of being . . . How can I put it? . . . of being guards or watchmen.

Guy Rozat Dupeyron How did you become interested in the conquest of Mexico? I came for a few months, because I wanted to see . . . because I had written my doctoral dissertation about the problems of indianidad, or what it means to be “Indian,”

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in indigenous texts of the conquest, the famous visión de los vencidos, or the perspective of the conquered, that in the sixties seemed something new, extraordinary, you know, finding the visión de los vencidos. That was always the claim. History is written by the conquerors. They’d found it right there . . . and, like everyone else, I went right along until I finally realized that no, there was no visión de los vencidos. It was just another way history manipulated the Indian even more. And besides, it’s not even history, because what’s even worse is that in Mexico there is no history. There are historians, but there is no history. It doesn’t make sense. I think this is important, although it hasn’t been worked on much. Mexican nationalism is not based on history, but anthropology. And we must remember what anthropology is: an antihistory, the very negation of history. In the eighteenth century, end of the nineteenth century, when the great Enlightenment discourse gets all separated out, history is made for beautiful people, the ones who have a certain status, who have culture, and are generally white. Everything else is dealt with by anthropology, because it’s an antihistory. But in Mexico, it’s impressive how history is created.

* * * In fact, that’s what I did in my dissertation . . . showed that the Indian written about from the perspective of the conquered can’t be an Indian; it’s an Indian created by the conqueror, the Christians’ Indian. Obviously, this wasn’t that important when I got here. People were into the Revolution and how all this was going to end with the Revolution, with socialism, the end of history and all.

* * * They didn’t know anything about their history. That’s when I realized there’s no history in Mexico, but a sort of anthropological discourse that serves as history but also negates history. And I believe that what’s not working as it should in Mexicans is precisely related to not having a history. If there’s history, there’s identity; there are roots; there’s a solidness at least, right? Here there isn’t any. There’s no solidness. People always end up crying, drunk and crying, about a deep pain, a tremendous pain about their identity. Why? Because there is no history. And all the history Mexicans get thrown in their face is always a history full of shame, of defeat, of worthlessness.

* * * Remember that for fifty years everything has been controlled by the Mexican government. Everything. All the festivals, all the popular culture, everything related to the indigenous population. There’s no spontaneous form of expression, or if there was it died. Everything was put together with financing from the government, which is very involved, and has controlled everything since 1940, ’50. That nationalism, that

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culture, that Mexicanness was sort of the cement that allowed the creation of fifty, seventy years of power, right? It was necessary to give people consensus: a consensus of this revolutionary nationalism that is anti-Spaniard, or as they say anti-gachupín, antiforeigner, although they wanted scholarships for their children. But, theoretically the U.S. was to blame. It’s all a farce, right? Identity is false, so everything that’s going to come out of it is false, right?

Gabriel Mazahua How do you feel about the loss of local traditions? I find it very sad because, from what little I know, from the little I’ve just been telling you, and from what my father tells me, I imagine that there used to be something like a sense of respect, right? And nowadays practically no one has it, you know? Respect for nature itself. And even back then, although people didn’t know about school, they had it . . . respect. Nowadays, although many people go off to study and all that, it’s like they no longer . . . I mean, I’m talking about myself here too, because we no longer really care, and it’s like we’ve lost that respect, you know? Have the constitutional amendments or the Zapatista movement changed the ideas within the community? Very little, very, very little. Practically, the changes that have . . . even the ones you mentioned, the constitution and all that, well, things just stay the same, you know? Nothing comes from them. The people in the communities are still there, forgotten, with their rights still being violated. I mean, many people still don’t even know about it. I’d say there’s practically been no change. So we can talk about community leaders and all that, who at some point start initiatives or have very interesting ideas to change things, you know? Changes that aren’t only for themselves but for the benefit of everyone. But unfortunately, once things get started, they’re either threatened or offered money. And everything stays right where it was.

Rigoberto Nopaltecatl The Spaniards came and brought us new things; yes, that’s very important. They came and, well, there’s nothing you can do about it, that’s just the way history is, but I’m really neither for nor against it. It’s a change that happened. It had to happen, and it did, but sometimes, yes, it’s hard to accept. The things we used to have, the values that existed within the indigenous communities. . . . Truly, it’s hard. The word “conquest” for us, and for me in particular, is something very different, you understand? How could they have conquered me? The word “conquest” makes me think of many things because really, the word “conquest” isn’t really appropriate. It can mean a meeting of different cultures. Why don’t we say it like that?

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What does “conquest” mean to you? The conquest is, so to speak, like having a girlfriend and going to see her, right? I’m going to take you out to do this or that. I’m going to bring you these gifts to earn your admiration, show off my superiority so that you’ll notice me. That’s how I think about it. The conquest is as if they told my people, “Mexico, look at what I’ve got for you, new things. Why don’t you take them and use them in your land?” That’s the way to conquer, right? I don’t know who came up with the Spanish conquest, the conquest of the Mexican people, because it’s like someone came who maybe wasn’t familiar with that part of the world. In my opinion the term conquest is really not used right. You can say “meeting of various cultures,” because they met at that time. However, the events that took place when, for example, like when the kings said: “I am king, and I’m going to rule over this territory because it’s mine. It will be mine. I will handle things by using goods and assets, economic resources, official authority. I will establish my policies,” right? But perhaps the first peoples already had their ways of organizing themselves, their products, which they exchanged among themselves . . . with one another. For example, maybe they’d go to the store to barter. But in this case, the Spaniards may have used the notion of bartering, but in a different way, meaning a different value, you know? In other words they had more knowledge of how to conquer us. They conquered us because they brought us new products, new things that we didn’t know about. Do you think that others in your community, your family, would agree with you regarding the meaning of the event and the term conquest? Well, yes, at times I’ve mentioned it. I’ve talked about it with my family, and I ask them: “Do we really believe in or do things because of the identity we had? Do we really do activities that really reflect what our grandparents, our Mexican ancestors, our roots, wanted for us?” Sometimes you’d like to bring them back to life, which is impossible, and ask them: “How did you live? How was your community governed? How was your region governed? What did you do? What did you believe in?” Did they believe in a god or did they worship a saint, or did they really do things for somebody important, or who knows, things like that. These are questions that make you go back in history, right? Back before the conquest, to find out. . . . [But] there’s no going back.

People and Places Along the Ruta

Plate 1.1.  A local storyteller stands vigil over the ruins of the Casa Cortés, the Spanish customs building used from about 1523 to 1600. (© Steve Raymer.)

Plate 1.2.  Storekeepers in the Nahua community of Xochiapulco, Sierra Norte de Puebla. (Photograph by Irenne García and Coralia Pérez. Courtesy of Hugo Zayas.)

Plate 1.3.  Musician and chronicler José Guadalupe Ramos Flores recites the Tlaxcalan version of the conquest every year on the anniversary of a battle that took place on the hill where he lives. (© Steve Raymer.)

Plate 1.4.  The mayordomo Gilberto Galicia Muñoz and his family at the Basilica of the Virgin of Remedios, built on top of a pre-Hispanic pyramid in Cholula. (© Steve Raymer.)

Plate 1.5.  Procession of the Virgin Conquistadora, Cholula. (© Steve Raymer.)

Plate 1.6.  Antique dealer in downtown Puebla. (© Steve Raymer.)

Plate 1.7.  Interior of the Casa Malinche, now home to the muralists Rina Lazo and her husband, Arturo García Bustos, in Coyoacan. (© Steve Raymer.)

Plate 1.8.  The poet Blanca Luz Pulido in front of the chapel built by Cortés, across the street from the Casa Malinche, Coyoacan. (© Steve Raymer)

Plate 1.9.  Subcomandante Marcos, 2001, Mexico City. (Photograph by Ulises Castellanos.)

Plate 1.10.  Judith Santopietro (far right) with a Nahua group recording local history, sponsored by the literary magazine Iguanazul, 2010. (Foto de Archivo Iguanazul.)

Plate 1.11.  Mexicans protest the visit of President George W. Bush, 2007. (© Daniel Aguilar / Reuters / Corbis.)

Plate 1.12.  Border wall at night. (“US Mexico Border Fence in Nogales, Mexico” © PIOTR Redlinski / Corbis.)

Part II

The March Inland Tlaxcala, Cholula, and Puebla

Figure 2.1.  The sixteenth-century Codex Telleriano-Remensis depicts the jaguar deity Tepeyollotl, who represented powerful forces of nature, such as volcanoes, and is a symbol for the community of Ixtacamaxtitlan.

Crossroads San Francisco de Ixtacamaxtitlan

A poster of a statue of a basalt jaguar perched on a serpent announces the indigenous community of San Francisco de Ixtacamaxtitlan, a frontier borderland between the states of Veracruz and Tlaxcala. The jaguar represents the deity Tepeyollotl, the “heart of the mountain,” associated with earthquakes and echoes, elements central to the volcanic geography of the area. But the family who unearthed it during a tequio (from the Nahuatl tequitl, a customary, obligatory workday) affectionately calls it “our little doggy.” They found the statue on top of the commanding foothill where the original political-religious center of Ixtacamaxtitlan stood. Tepeyollotl dominates a serpent, a symbol of the multitude of towns under Ixtacamaxtitlan’s sovereignty. Once a powerful altepetl at the crossroads of important pre-Hispanic commerce routes where different ethnic groups, including Otomies and Olmecs, had converged over the course of centuries, Ixtacamaxtitlan shares the heritage of both Totonaco and Nahua groups. At the time of the Spanish arrival it guarded a key pass between Tenochtitlan and the coast. It was in the process of assimilation, or “Nahuatlization,” and collected tribute for the Triple Alliance. Today the town is a gateway into the Sierra del Norte in the contemporary state of Puebla, a remote geographical area where many different indigenous communities took refuge in the centuries after the European conquest and colonization. Cortés, who passed through the area in August of 1519 on his march to Tenochtitlan, describes the altepetl as an important fortified town with thousands of inhabitants and mentions receiving an offering of three hundred soldiers and women. The original city for the elite overlooked the deep river gorge whose banks were lined with houses for many miles. Today only seventeen families live at the top of the hill. Locals say that these families refused to be moved from their perch when the Spanish moved Ixtacamaxtitlan to the valley below. These families continue to assert their independence. In the 1990s they were offered free land in the “new” town. Once again they refused to move. When the founders of Ixtacamaxtitlan’s 99

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Figure 2.2.  Tucked into the foothills of the Sierra Norte, the recently established Ixtacamaxtitlan Community Museum is housed in a former sixteenth-century Franciscan church. (Photograph by Hugo Zayas.)

newly established community museum wanted the basalt jaguar for its permanent collection, the families leveraged their perrito (little doggy) for electrical service. In return for the jaguar, hundreds of the town’s six hundred inhabitants helped carry the heavy electrical poles up the steep footpath to the settlement. But in 2008, over the community’s objections, the national institute in charge of Mexico’s rich historical and archaeological patrimony, INAH, invoked its authority. The jaguar was taken to Puebla’s new Museo Amparo, dedicated to the region’s pre-Hispanic and colonial past. Fearful that the jaguar might never come home, the community museum required INAH to sign a document promising its eventual return. The efforts to preserve ethnic heritage often result in power struggles among individuals, communities, states, and the national government. The small community living on top of the sacred hill ceded its jaguar to larger local efforts of preservation and education, which in turn were forced to cede to state and national

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interests. Ixtacamaxtitlan is in the process of taking stock of its past and working to solidify a sustainable indigenous heritage, which, as in the case of the jaguar, first needs to be unearthed.

René Bonilla López, Museo Comunitario de Ixtacamaxtitlan This place, we need to reclaim it, ancient Ixtacamaxtitlan. Because it has a history . . . a series of historic events that are transcendental not only for the region but for history in general.

The man at the center of the jaguar controversy and one of the cofounders of the Community Museum is René Bonilla López. He works in blue jeans, an oxford shirt, and a blue baseball cap in his upholstery shop at the edge of the five-square-block village that serves as the county seat for a rugged ninety-square-kilometer area. Son of a Nahua “india pura” mother and a mestizo father, he exclaims, “I feel flattered when they call me Indian.” Bonilla dedicates his energies to the promotion of Ixtacamaxtitlan’s indigenous heritage. As we walk to the family’s restaurant, the rush of urban life is nowhere evident: there are nearly equal numbers of cars and goods-laden donkeys. Many men wear traditional white straw ranchero hats, and the zócalo displays a huge pre-Hispanic carving of a serpent. But the livelier town center this Sunday afternoon is the covered basketball court and bleachers; basketball is the most popular sport in the Sierras. Bonilla greets everyone, pausing to hug some and walk a few steps arm in arm with others. Once seated in the restaurant, he talks in a fluid, engaging style that anticipates nearly all my questions. He recognizes his inherited gift for oral history and storytelling; his Nahua grandmother was a storyteller. Only the sound of a blender periodically interrupts the interview, and he explains, smiling proudly, that his wife and daughter are preparing the Sunday special: a traditional mole made with twenty ingredients, all roasted without oil. As head of the grassroots Ixtacamaxtitlan Citizen’s Movement, Bonilla works tirelessly to reestablish a strong cultural identity for his town. Seeking to create a vital community that embraces its legal and cultural status as a comunidad indígena, which allows for certain customary practices (known as usos y costumbres) in lieu of state and national laws, the group is developing an agenda for political reform in the municipal elections. The agenda includes strategies for a revival of Nahuatl and traditional indigenous dress, in particular the warm shawl. The group is powerful. Several years ago, with the support of the town, it took over the municipal presidency for six months because the governmental candidate did not make good on his campaign promises. Yet Bonilla sees the difficulty of their cultural and economic project. Unlike their sister indigenous comunidad, Libres (San Juan de Ixtacamaxtitlan), which has preserved both language and customs such as traditional marriage rites, Ixtacamaxtitlan has no fluent Nahuatl speakers. Reintroducing Nahuatl brings with

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it the problem of which local dialect to learn. He likens the many Nahuatl dialects to the breakdown of languages in the mythical Babel. To build a strong cultural and political community, Bonilla has turned to local history. He refers to it as “the history of the motherland” and as a method for rewriting “the history of the fatherland” taught to generations of Mexican children. His choice of words reflects a personal stake (in view of his india mother and mestizo father). Promoting “historia patria” while ignoring the other side of the story only “rub[s] salt in the wound.” The concept is key for his work as an activist: “This place, we need to reclaim it, ancient Ixtacamaxtitlan. Because it has a history . . . a series of historic events that are transcendental not only for the region but for history in general.” Ixtacamaxtitlan, he explains, was the original seat of power for the pre-Hispanic and postconquest altepetl. But the Crown revoked its power as punishment for a rebellion in 1555, during which the local Franciscan convent was burned. This rebellion had antecedents, he explains: while the leader Tenamazcuicuitl gave Cortés soldiers and women, another group led by Ollian resisted Cortés’s attempt to pacify them after the Spaniards were ousted from Tenochtitlan. Bonilla highlights the errors in popular history books, such as Hugh Thomas’s The Conquest of Mexico, which present Ixtacamaxtitlan solely as an ally. Official national history does not record Ollian’s attempts to resist the conquistadors, the burning of the Franciscan monastery, or the more recent attempts to defy mestizo municipal leaders and INAH. Remembering this history of resistance and rebellion will help Ixtacamaxtitlan overcome the “shame of the conquest” and help reverse the process of “desculturación,” argues Bonilla. He hopes to help his fellow citizens embrace their indigeneity and reclaim their heritage and, ultimately, their power. When his collection of essays on the history of Ixtacamaxtitlan is published, he plans to distribute it for free. Lineage is important in this town and the town’s history, so he jokes, “I didn’t have sons, but I’m having a book.” Later we walk the few blocks from the restaurant to the edge of town, where the ex-Franciscan chapel was converted into the Museo Comunitario ten years ago. The doors open wide to the cool but intense mountain sun. The jaguar case on the main altar sits empty. More glass cases line the walls of the single-nave church, displaying objects from at least seven distinct ethnic groups over the centuries. They tell the story of Ixtacamaxtitlan’s role as the crossroads to multiple civilizations. In the center of the nave, a large freestanding map highlights Ixtacamaxtitlan’s place on the Ruta de Cortés. Nearby, an enlarged reproduction of the Códice San Juan Ixtacamaxtitlan (1564, BNF, Collection Aubin) documents the 1555 rebellion and serves as a counterpoint to the official conquest story of the altepetl’s alliance with Cortés. Bonilla focuses on the devastating impact of mestizaje and the transfer of Ixtacamaxtitlan’s power to another town after the rebellion. He describes a generation of children rejected by their Spanish fathers and their indigenous communities. They were left to wander: “They say there were groups of children who, since they were the product of rapes, weren’t wanted by either the indigenous people or the Spaniards.

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So, imagine how upsetting it would be to find a group of little children wandering around like animals all over the region, where they were scorned . . . it was an atrocity, a crime against humanity, the way they conquered us.” The idea that these children were the birth of the mestizo nation is “a real fallacy.” After completing his book on local history, Bonilla plans to write a novel with a protagonist from this “lost” generation, highlighting the suffering born out of the conquest. He explains, “The character will live right in the middle of the conquest. You’ll see his suffering when they separate him from his family. How his environment is damaged, how his traditions are damaged, his beliefs especially, his modus vivendi, you know? His surroundings, his altepetl, everything. Everything turns into nothing. . . . The Spaniards had a special ability for making people suffer.” But Bonilla will not retreat into a fictional past. In order to enact his dream to reclaim indigenous traditions, he plans to run for municipal president in the next elections. To develop the local economy, he wants to follow the lead of other indigenous villages and promote Ixtacamaxtitlan as a tourist destination along the Ruta de Cortés. He points to the beauty of the roaring river that winds through the gorge below the foothill where some indigenous families still live and where the town’s jaguar was found. The plan risks destroying the very heritage he wants to preserve, and he acknowledges that finding a sustainable balance is difficult. As he talks, I think of the popular tourist destination for

Figure 2.3.  Totonaco musicians wait to accompany masked dancers for the fiesta patronal in Ixtepec in the Sierra Norte de Puebla. (Photograph by Lucía Alvarado Herrera. Courtesy of Concepción Zayas.)

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foreigners in the nearby “Sierra Mágica,” the indigenous town of Cuetzalan, where the first language is Nahuatl and the second language is English. Tourism based on the commodification of indigenous identity has been seen as a way to preserve or even reclaim it. Bonilla’s plans reflect recent neoliberal post-mestizaje approaches to cultural heritage: if the indigenous past can justify itself economically, it will be saved; if it cannot, it may disappear.1 Ixtacamaxtitlan faces a similar dilemma to the Nahua communities in the Zongolica: how to revive and maintain indigenous communities from within while also creating a sustainable economic base so as to fight depopulation and deculturation. As we leave Ixtacamaxtitlan and the foothills of the sierra, I begin to sense the vibrancy of towns that have resisted complete westernization for centuries. Although many of the outward indicators of heritage, such as Nahua language and dress, have nearly disappeared, there is still a powerful connection to place and heritage.2 Even more, there is a feeling of urgency within comunidades like Ixtacamaxtitlan to define their own relationship with history and cultural identity in harmony with modern political agendas for economic development.

Tlaxcala Allies, Foes, and Identity Politics

A sign, “Tlaxcala: Cradle of the Nation,” announces the entrance to Mexico’s smallest state and the sixteenth-century city of the same name. Today the streets are blocked off for the second annual running of the bulls. This popular event has no antecedents in Mexico, but mimics the famous festival of Pamplona in northern Spain. More than anywhere else along the Ruta de Cortés, Tlaxcala struggles with the redefinition of its historical identity: caught between promoting its independence from the Triple Alliance, its initial resistance to the Spanish army, and its ultimate alliance with the Spanish. Tlaxcala claims an impressive list of historical firsts: the cradle of evangelization (it contains one of the first cathedrals on the continent and the site of the first baptisms), the cradle of the nation (Tlaxcalan soldiers and families helped settle other regions of Mexico), and the first indigenous town to receive a Spanish coat of arms, among others. In the last two decades, however, it has also erected a statue to Xicotencatl, the warrior who fiercely resisted the Spanish invaders. The town has built the Museum of Memory to honor its pre-Hispanic heritage and the Independence period. Shifting ethnic alliances in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica and early colonial New Spain were the norm, but since the twentieth-century nation-building process, Tlaxcalans have been labeled as “traitors” throughout Mexico. More than most people I interview, they are driven to renegotiate the conquest narrative in an attempt to carve out a less stigmatized space for themselves. Whereas most Veracruzanos feel a certain personal distance from the conquest story, Tlaxcalans realize and accept their key role. Whether living on the hill where a key battle took place, dedicating a lifetime to recasting Tlaxcalan history, or leaving the countryside in order to retell Tlaxcalan history from a more Nahua point of view, they are eager to recast themselves as a valiant, independent people. Tlaxcalans use civic space and even their daily lives to perform history, carving out Tlaxcala’s role in the conquest as an exception and exemplar.3 105

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A secretary I meet outside America’s first cathedral offers to show me his niece’s third-grade textbook about state history: it highlights both Xicotencatl and a local mural depicting the alliance of Cortés, Malinche, and Tlaxcalan leaders.4 The text provides little further detail, but it is now well known that the Tlaxcalan confederation under Xicotencatl’s command resisted Cortés’s army. Only after several skirmishes, ambushes, and divisions among themselves did the Tlaxcalans decide to ally with Cortés. Less well known, however, is that according to Cortés’s account, he had caught them in the act of plotting against him even after they had agreed to join forces with him. The conquistador’s response was to cut off the hands or thumbs of the men who brought food and supplies to the Spanish camp and send them back to their leaders.5 In the end, Tlaxcalans provided hundreds of soldiers in the initial march to Tenochtitlan and sent several thousand more a year later to help retake the city. While Cortés and others maintained that the independent confederation was completely hostile to the Triple Alliance, which was slowly strangling the region by cutting off access to key foodstuffs such as salt, there is some evidence that there were also political ties between the two.6 Xicotencatl’s altepetl, Tizatlan, was only temporarily the most powerful within the confederation itself. It is possible that Xicotencatl the Elder made his alliance with Cortés as much to shore up his internal position as to defeat his people’s external Mexica enemy.7 Soon after the conquest, the city of Tlaxcala was built as an administrative center for the confederation under Spanish control; it was modeled on Spanish town centers but allowed a degree of indigenous self-government. In recognition of its valuable alliance with the Spanish, Tlaxcala was granted special privileges (such as not paying tribute) and an official coat of arms. But from the number of legal suits in the archives, it is clear that in practice the privileges were often not observed.8 The label of “traitor” was first given to Tlaxcala centuries after the conquest, based on its alliance with the Spanish at the beginning of the Independence movement (1810). As nation-building projects gathered momentum in the first half of the twentieth century, the label began to be applied retroactively—and anachronistically—to the Tlaxcalan role in the Spanish conquest. A local historian explains: “And that’s where the Tlaxcalan people’s frustration comes from. We were subjugated, our gods ripped away from us. . . . We were enslaved . . . and then to say we’re traitors! Now . . . it’s our turn to show that Tlaxcala was a brave people, so we can somehow heal that subjugation from inside, from within our own individual psychology” (Sergio Hernández, interview). The sense of a divided identity in this once-strong confederation, which was able to remain independent in the face of the encroaching Triple Alliance and later stand as a proud indigenous city that had received royal recognition within the Spanish system, is still palpable today. Although many other indigenous ethnic groups ultimately allied with Cortés, Tlaxcalans alone bear the stigma of traitors, a people who turned against the state before the idea of nation even existed. Just as René Bonilla attempts to reclaim the history and self-respect of Ixtacamaxtitlan by emphasizing the altepetl’s rebellions

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Figure 2.4.  A mural by local artist Desiderio Hernández Xochitiotzin highlights Tlaxcala’s unique role in the conquest. It depicts Xicotencatl making an alliance through Malinche with Cortés. (© Steve Raymer.)

against the Spanish—rather than its role in providing men and women for Cortés’s army—Tlaxcalans too are actively engaged in a dialogue with and a rebuttal of official national conquest history. But Tlaxcala’s history is ambiguous and contentious, recast over the centuries as a human drama with nobility, treachery, cruelty, courage, and ambition on all sides—and its performance by locals in ritual and retellings serves to etch the larger conquest story into contemporary local identities and politics.9

José Guadalupe Ramos Flores, El Cerro de Tzompantepec, Chichimecateuctli Then the Spanish came back through here, to this little hill . . . this hill where I’m standing. And Xicotencatl’s men were already waiting for them on this very hill.

Today is one of the most sacred days of the year in most rural areas of Tlaxcala and all of central Mexico. Cempazuchitl (marigold flowers), sweet breads, tortillas (the name Tlaxcala means “place of tortillas” in Nahuatl), flickering candles, and relics

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of loved ones fill homemade altars erected for Día de los Muertos. As we travel the road from Tlaxcala to the municipality of Tzompantepec and El Cerro de Tzompantzingo (Hill of the Skull), where the first skirmishes between the Tlaxcalans and Spaniards took place, we wind past town cemeteries filled with families who are shoveling dirt back up onto mounds and watering them down, and placing buckets of fresh flowers next to crosses that mark the graves of loved ones. From the top of El Cerro we see fertile plains stretching for miles until they rise up to a rim of brilliant snow-capped volcanoes. The nearest peak, just outside the city of Tlaxcala, is named La Malinche, after the conquistador’s translator and mistress, but known to the original Tlaxcalans as Matlalcueyetl, “Lady of the Green Skirts.” Farther in the distance, in the neighboring state of Veracruz, lies Pico de Orizaba. It is the highest mountain in Mexico and third highest in North America, and is known by many names, including Iztactepetl, “White Mountain,” and Citlaltepetl, “Star Mountain.” To the west, the great Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl flank the pass taken by Cortés to the Valley of Mexico and Tenochtitlan; it is now called “El Paso de Cortés.” The family of Guadalupe Ramos has lived for generations at the base of “el cerrito,” as locals fondly call the hill. Ramos, the town chronicler and a retired musician, lives here in a three-room house with a cement floor, filled with brightly colored Mexican blankets of striped cotton. A three-stringed bass is tucked into one corner of the living room. A wall of photographs highlights a map of the Ruta de Cortés and the cerrito, next to photographs of patron saints, grandchildren, and his deceased wife. As a young boy in the 1930s Guadalupe accompanied his aunt on her rounds to teach at area primary schools, where he listened attentively. But his formal education didn’t last more than a few years. He later studied solfège, musical sight-reading and singing. First a textile worker and later a professional string bass player, he is now a well-known local chronicler for this cluster of towns about an hour outside the city of Tlaxcala. Every September, groups of local schoolchildren and Lions Clubs gather to listen to his recitation of the conquest narrative, commemorating the first encounter of Cortés and the Tlaxcalan army. Over the last five decades the BBC, INAH, and others have interviewed the chronicler. Today he is addressed with respect as don Lupe. On this Día de los Muertos, don Lupe offers us pulque, the fermented juice of the maguey cactus, and the traditional pan de muertos, a round loaf of bread decorated with dough in the shape of bones. He points to the bottle of beer on the Day of the Dead altar, saying, “My parents liked to drink a bit.” He begins to recount the legend of the goddess of maguey, Mayahuel, and her gift of pulque to humans. But his story is cut short by the arrival of his grandson and great-granddaughter, who have built a modern house right next to don Lupe’s. Another branch of the family from Mexico City arrives soon after. Don Lupe’s family has gathered to greet the annual arrival of the spirits of their beloved deceased. A granddaughter opens a huge brown ceramic pot filled with the traditional chicken mole that is sitting on the altar and passes out Tlaxcala’s famous maize tortillas.

Figure 2.5.  Local chronicler José Guadalupe Ramos Flores with his granddaughter Ofelia Andrea Huerta Vergara. (© Steve Raymer.)

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Don Lupe then digs into an old wooden chest and pulls out several faded pink file folders and points to a full-size map. He shows us a 1960s black-and-white photograph of his house and his dear cerrito. Next he pulls out his three prized books: an old leather-bound edition of Bernal Díaz; the first official history of Tlaxcala, written by the mestizo Diego Muñoz Camargo (first published in 1585); and his primary-school history book, carefully inscribed with his name and the year 1934. The local chronicler turns to the pages in his textbook that describe the battle that took place at the base of the cerrito and begins a well-practiced performance, unfolding local history before his listeners. The eighty-six-year-old don Lupe’s eyes, though clouded with age in his dark, weathered face, light up with the retelling of the cerrito’s proud history. Cortés’s departure from Cuba and arrival in Tenochtitlan are mere bookends for a detailed local drama. According to don Lupe, it was from the Cerrito Tzompantepec that Xicotencatl the Elder, ruler of the altepetl Tizatlan, watched Cortés’s army and allies march into Tlaxcalan lands in September of 1519. It was from here that his son Xicotencatl Axayacatl began the battle against the intruders. After initial skirmishes, Xicotencatl’s army carried out a surprise night attack. Cortés was saved only by climbing a tree. Xicotencatl nearly defeated Cortés before being overruled by his elders, who saw a greater advantage in an alliance with skilled warriors and their superior weapons. The town’s official name, San Salvador de Tzompantepec (the name of the hill and the name of the town’s Catholic patron saint), commemorates this legendary event. Don Lupe casts the story as “the visit Cortés paid us,” making the events personal and less violent; a visit, rather than a conquest. In one version of the local chronicler’s story, Cortés baptizes and marries Malinche in Tlaxcala. His narrative makes clear a continued identification of Tlaxcala with the conqueror. Don Lupe repeats the official line: “At first Cortés was judged pretty badly because he was very cruel, he killed a lot of people and all. The Indians didn’t understand, they didn’t have an education . . . our own poor brothers and sisters . . . but then came civilization, and Cortés brought it; that’s why he conquered Mexico.” He notes the stereotype of indigenous peoples as ignorant and pitiful, needing to be civilized, but acknowledges his kinship with “our brothers and sisters.” Cortés, on the other hand, is both “shameless” (sinvergüenza) and human, weeping upon being routed from Tenochtitlan. Don Lupe conveys resignation: “We are living in peace and many of the things we got from Hernán Cortés are useful to us.” For centuries, official Tlaxcalan history silenced the role of Xicotencatl as indigenous administrators attempted to broker special privileges with their Spanish overlords. Although don Lupe’s interpretation of the conquest generally follows the 1930s official post-Revolutionary historiography, one of the key turning points, the story of Tlaxcalan resistance, illustrates how alternate local histories are kept alive and passed down. While the role of Xicotencatl is important in contemporary regional history, don Lupe’s own cerrito is the central protagonist in his narrative; a living witness to a history that dates back more than five hundred years.

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Figure 2.6.  Ramos with a map of the hill where he lives, the site of a key battle between the Tlaxcalan confederation and Cortés’s army. (Photograph by Mia Dalglish.)

Like most places in central Mexico along the Ruta de Cortés, El Cerro de Tzompantepec has an ancient history that predates the events related by don Lupe. Hills, mountains, and volcanoes were part of the sacred world, and this site had been occupied by a culture that had abandoned it before the arrival of the Spaniards. A pre-Hispanic stone at the top of the hill still marks the four cardinal points. But don Lupe recounts a recent, far less noble story of the cerrito, when locals lost control of the sacred site. In the 1970s, plans were made to “desecrate” the hill. A state project had been approved to build water tanks there. Don Lupe and others petitioned the governor and even President José López Portillo to oppose the project. The petition was successful, but when the governor died a few years later the project was pushed

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through anyway. Now the stunning vistas and the pre-Hispanic stone are partially obscured by barbed wire around a large cement water tank. Close by, squatters have settled and built their houses. One of don Lupe’s friends remarks upon hearing the chronicler’s recitation about his cerrito, “Our ancient beliefs still live in us, still live at an unconscious level in our daily lives and beliefs” (Sergio Hernández, interview). Don Lupe’s respect for the local history of the cerrito is a blending of a pre-Hispanic sense of the life present in a sacred place, and a more European sensibility of the conquest as the deliverer of “civilization.” The layers of history contained in the hill are a metaphor for the complexity of negotiated identity.10

El Maestro Desiderio Hernández Xochitiotzin, the Artist’s Home, Tlaxcala In Tlaxcala everyone knows something about history; or I should say everyone knows legends and very easily confuses legends with history.

Up a steep hill from the center of Tlaxcala, past one of the first cathedrals in the New World (Catedral de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción) and the first open-air chapel for the indios (Capilla del Rosario), lives Tlaxcala’s renowned muralist, Maestro Desiderio Hernández Xochitiotzin. His house shares a courtyard wall with the chapel. In the vestibule the maestro’s Beatos Niños Mártires, a painting of the three legendary Tlaxcalan children killed by their families because they became Christians, hangs alongside a portrait of Pope John Paul II, who beatified them in 1990. The family life of four generations unfolds in a large living area that opens onto a dirt patio with a few plants and chickens. The maestro’s wife of sixty years knits while her granddaughter tends to her own two-year-old baby asleep in a car seat. Already seriously ill when we visit, the maestro summed up his life’s work with lively humor: “It’s very hard to make a living from art and it’s very hard to make a living from history. And putting them both together is suicide.” Motenehuatzin H. Xochitiotzin, the youngest of the maestro’s ten children, helps his father understand my questions. The muralist’s ears show signs of age and his energy is waning, but his mind is sharp. A smile spreads across his face as he talks about his lifelong vocation: a vindication of Tlaxcalan history. Starting in 1956, the muralist worked for almost fifty years on the walls of the Palacio de Gobierno, the sixteenth-century administrative offices which were partially burned during the indigenous rebellion of 1692 and are now the seat of the state government. His vivid murals cover both the upper and lower interior patios and reinterpret local history from the legendary arrival of the first peoples through Independence and the Revolution. The maestro’s work drew inspiration from the muralist movement taking place in Mexico City, with its revolutionary revival of the role of the tlacuilo, who depicted the mythical and historical foundations of communities. Begun in the 1920s and

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Figure 2.7.  Desiderio Hernández Xochitiotzin recalls his life’s work, decades of painting a uniquely Tlaxcalan version of history on the walls of the sixteenth-century Palacio de Gobierno in Tlaxcala. (Photograph by Mark Feddersen.)

flourishing through the 1950s, the movement—best characterized by the “Big Three” (Orozco, Rivera, Siquieros)—sought to promote the ideals of the Revolution. The murals were made for public consumption and to impart social-political messages about the unity of the nation and its mestizo identity. Even today, almost a century later, the images painted on the walls of government, cultural, and educational centers are equated with Mexican identity by both Mexicans and foreigners. While the Big Three focused primarily on the role of national history, Maestro Desiderio adapted their ideology to serve a regional purpose. His murals reemplot the national image of his birthplace: the Tlaxcalans are represented not as traitors but as “a people who have always fought for their freedom.” The murals emphasize Tlaxcala’s subjugation to the Mexica and dramatize Xicotencatl the Younger’s resistance to the Spanish. But the maestro believes that Cortés’s version of the story needs to be given its due, in contrast to the images of violence and cruelty painted by Diego Rivera and José Orozco: “He wrote what he saw with the eyes of a European and many things that he saw and wrote about, he didn’t understand. So, he offered his version . . . he wrote what he was able to understand.” More importantly, he points out that people tend to forget that Tlaxcalans “allied with [the Spaniards] to defeat the common enemy, the Tenochcas, or Mexica.”

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As we will hear more frequently in Mexico City, for many years official history was silent about the violence of the expanding Aztec Empire at the time of the Spanish conquest. The idealization of pre-Hispanic “Mexico” obscures the reality of interethnic rivalry and warfare. Favoring a more local, nuanced view of ethnic differences, the maestro’s murals reveal a purposeful reconsideration of post-Independence and post-Revolutionary attitudes toward the Spanish. He argues that hatred of the Spaniard only resuscitated the Black Legend (La Leyenda Negra), the anti-Spanish sentiment propagated by early modern Protestant England. In its place he proposes a more pragmatic view, arguing that, just as with the Greeks in Troy and the Norman French in England, “All wars are the same when it comes to interests. Therefore what happened, happened; because it had to happen. That’s not fatalism, it’s logic.” The maestro depicts the “collision” (choque) of the two worlds as a powerful conflict of two forces that had very different but equally strong religious frameworks for understanding and organizing the world. He insists that “the fruit of the conquest is the continuity of the local spirit with the new values that arrived.” Like others, he sees Malinche as the key to the conquest, but his interpretation of her role is not ambivalent. In one painting that his son shows me, she is standing arm in arm with Cortés as they placidly watch the ships burn off the coast of Villa Rica, the symbolic point of no return in the conquest story. In the central mural at the Palacio, Malinche is positioned as she was depicted in the sixteenth-century Tlaxcalan Codex, on equal footing with Cortés as they greet the Tlaxcalan leaders.11 The muralist is a hero to most Tlaxcalans. He was named city chronicler in 1984 and for years wrote a weekly column in the local newspaper. Yet, as a new reinterpretation of the conquest began in the late twentieth century, others outside Tlaxcala and more recently within Tlaxcala have criticized his views. He graciously accepts their criticism: “Just as I have friends, I have more enemies because of these ideas.” Elaborating on his working aesthetic and moral foundation, he states, “I’m a friend of truth without being a demagogue. . . . It’s very hard to approach truth soberly. I have tried not to deceive people, to speak clearly to the extent that I’m able to understand the historical phenomenon.” His depiction of Tlaxcala as a pueblo of warriors ready to fight for its freedom, he argues, outweighs any historical details. Like don Lupe’s dramatic narratives, the maestro’s management of the conquest story focuses on a local agenda to rewrite the region’s role and counter the “official” national interpretation of the conquest. His depiction—and the public’s response to it—also demonstrate how the portrayal of Tlaxcala has changed through time, from a powerful altepetl independent of the Aztecs, to a tenuous ally of the Spanish, to a national traitor in the modern nation-building processes, and, more recently, to “the cradle of the nation.” When I mention my recent visit to the Palacio, the maestro is eager to know who my guide was and comments, “That one doesn’t have cultural ability . . . he’s a liar.” As we will see in the next interview, interpretations of this artist’s work, like the interpretation of history, are out of his hands. But his message lives on in the busy Palacio de Gobierno.

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The maestro is due for a transfusion tomorrow and the interview is brief. As we wish him a speedy recovery, his final words strike a chord: “God knows what is best for me.” He accepts death as integral to life. The fight for life and the surrender to the inevitability of death are simultaneous. Six months later his son, now dressed in black, opens the centuries-old wooden door to the house. He describes a “spontaneous garden of love”—wreaths of lilies, bouquets of roses, burning candles, and messages of thanks and sorrow—that filled the two blocks leading to their door when his father died. The maestro’s studio, now darkened by shutters and dust, lies empty, but the family plans to convert it into a museum to keep his message alive.

Pedro Nájera, Palacio de Gobierno Legends come through even to our time. Because they’re oral traditions, and you can’t shut someone up simply by saying something shouldn’t be said. Legends in Mexico are the perfume of our history; they’re what sustain our past.

Six days a week, a man in well-worn huaraches and a white guayabera waits for clients by the entrance to the Palacio de Gobierno, a mixture of Spanish plateresque, Arabic-influenced mudéjar, and pre-Hispanic stone relief carving. Pedro Nájera left his itinerant work as a farm laborer three years ago to become an official mural guide. As he takes us through the murals, Desiderio Hernández’s larger-than-life figures become animated with Nájera’s performance from what he calls his Nahua perspective. He reads the murals’ narrative in the style of the tlacuilo, as though they were old codices. He poetically reinterprets the maestro’s rendering of Tlaxcala’s mythical founding, pre-Hispanic “republics,” and uneasy alliance with the Spanish. He often takes the perspective of the great Citlalteptl (Pico de Orizaba), “the forceful, mysterious, ever-watchful mountain witness to Tlaxcalan history.” Pre-Hispanic legends, he maintains, “transcend history . . . every idea they left in those legends has a philosophy so deep that with our way of thinking we can’t comprehend them. But they’re telling us many truths.” Even as the guide proudly recounts the pre-Hispanic past, he delights in emphasizing Tlaxcala’s official list of “firsts” and even includes a myth of his own: Tlaxcala as the cradle of mestizaje, contradicting official history by asserting that it is the birthplace of Martín Cortés, son of Malinche and Cortés, the first mestizo. The guide expresses no uneasiness about combining pride in his Nahua heritage with his view of Cortés as a great man. The conquest brought about a new way of being, “like mixing two molecules to make something,” without contradicting the old ways: “The ancients always believed in duality, in light and darkness, in life and death, and so it came to be: two ideas, two peoples, and they produced something.” For him, the conquest plays a minor role in the leap from one world to another: from pre-Hispanic cosmogonies to the identity of Tlaxcala today. He glosses over the

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Figure 2.8.  Maestro Hernández’s version of the death of the Tlaxcalan hero Tlahuicole, which the Nahua tour guide Pedro Nájera explicates. (Photograph by Mark Feddersen.)

maestro’s central images of Cortés, Malinche, and the Tlaxcalan leaders. Instead he focuses on his own history: “to have come from below and now to teach others.” He uses colloquial phrases to illustrate the Tlaxcalan aptitude to adjust to Spanish ways: “We were ready, like yeast for flour.” Explaining the images of skulls, crossbones, and a castle, Tlaxcala’s coat of arms, he reads the motto “Spain and Tlaxcala joined until death” and nostalgically comments, “Tlaxcala was a province of Spain, and they understood each other.” For him there is no contradiction in seeing Tlaxcala as allied with Spain and still faithful to its indigenous origins. As a man of Nahua heritage who left the countryside to teach history through the murals, Nájera both repeats the official discourse of conquest as a successful mixing of cultures and revises it in order to focus on the enduring legends about the ever-present volcanoes that surround the city of Tlaxcala. When the guide steps outside the Palacio and outside his professional role to talk about his life, he offers a traditional Nahua greeting, “Noyolpaquiz atepan

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nimitzitta” (My heart is happy to see you again). He gravely proclaims: “History is identity.” Growing up in the 1950s in a nearby comunidad indígena, he heard his mother speak Nahuatl. Although he paid little attention to the language, he eagerly collected stories and legends, which he learned to recite. For him, the maestro’s images of pre-Hispanic Tlaxcala and its mythical origins have become a springboard for relating the essence of these stories. The murals also provide daily audiences for his interpretative performance, a performance the maestro himself disliked because of its focus on pre-Hispanic Tlaxcala. Nájera’s own cultural revival project goes beyond interpretative performances of the murals: he is studying his maternal language, Nahuatl, insists that his children learn it, and writes short stories based on pre-Hispanic legends. Like Desiderio Hernández in his lifework and individual negotiation of the conquest narrative, Nájera hopes to preserve—or even consecrate—his own version of a regional identity narrative. Their personal quests to understand history and find a place within it for themselves and their community are like “yeast for flour,” an ingredient ready to make it rise.

The Sacred City of Cholula Destruction and Survival

The ancient city of Cholollan, the longest continually inhabited city in the Americas, was situated in a fertile valley framed by massive snow-capped volcanoes separating it from Tenochtitlan to the east and Tlaxcala to the north. The great pyramid of Quetzalcoatl in the city center, the center of a preeminent religious cult a thousand years before Aztec dominance, was already legendary by the Spanish arrival. After the Tolteca-Chichimeca takeover of the area in the twelfth century, the ceremonial center was moved to a different location in the city. By the time of the conquest the great pyramid was covered in grass. It appeared to the conquistadors as merely a steep hill with a central teocalli (Nahuatl for “god house”) sited on top, surrounded by more than 360 smaller temples. Within days of their arrival, the Spanish-Tlaxcalan army slaughtered over three thousand nobles and religious leaders. According to Cortés and Bernal Díaz, the animosity between Tlaxcalans and Cholultecas incited the massacre. But the catalyst for the massacre was hotly debated at the time and is still contested today.12 During the colonial period the city was designated a república de indios, and in the mid-sixteenth century it had an estimated 14,000 to 20,000 indigenous households. As late as the mid-eighteenth century, 4,000 indigenous households still dominated the population, beside the 530 castas (mixed-blood) and 190 Spanish households.13 By the end of the sixteenth century, Catholicism had been imposed. The Franciscan fortress monastery of San Gabriel, named after the archangel that appeared to Mary foretelling the birth of her child, was built in 1549 on the site of the massacre, and the Sanctuary of the Virgin of Remedios, who was said to have miraculously appeared to the Spaniards as they fled Tenochtitlan, was built atop the ruins of the central teocalli (1575). Today the Virgin of Remedios is the focal point of Cholula’s sacred ritual community life. According to legend, the original twenty-seven-centimeter statue of the Virgin was brought from Spain by Cortés’s soldier Juan Rodríguez. After being lost for 118

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Figure 2.9.  One of the most massive volcanoes in central Mexico’s interior, Popocatepetl dominates the geography of the region. The famous Paso de Cortés outside the Valley of Puebla provides access to the central valley of Mexico. (Photograph by Mark Feddersen.)

several decades, it was found and is now housed in the sanctuary. Called the Virgen Conquistadora, she was originally a quintessential Spanish figure. She gained new vitality in 1810 when Spanish loyalists invoked her aid to compete with Hidalgo’s mobilization of the Virgin of Guadalupe for the Independence movement (the Virgin of Remedios is still the patron of Spain’s armed forces today). Yet Cholultecas’ devotion to her defies easy classification. She is often identified with Tonantzin, a generic title given to many Aztec female deities. The mayordomo, or lay steward, who cares for the sanctuary explains her complex origins and meaning: “At one time they said there was so much love for Tonantzin, our Beloved Mother, that Quetzalcoatl was probably buried beneath Tonantzin. That’s how great the love was. But I believe it’s like we’ve already put aside the Spanish influence. This is ours . . . definitely ours” (Galicia Muñoz, interview). Cholula today is a symbol both of Spanish brutality and of cultural renewal. After centuries of neglect, the pyramid of Quetzalcoatl was rediscovered in 1927. For the next three decades archaeologists tunneled into its massive base, revealing layer upon layer of walls, water canals, hidden passages, and ceremonial platforms built by at least seven successive ethnic groups over the course of more than twelve centuries. The pyramid’s base is four times larger than that of the Great Pyramid in Giza and the surrounding area includes burial chambers, murals, large carved stone heads,

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and a sacred ball court. On the pyramid where centuries ago Olmecs, Toltecs, and other groups performed sacred rituals with the massive snow-capped Popocatepetl in the background, modern Cholultecas now parade their parish saints to pay their respect to the Virgin, and a festival is still held every winter in honor of the traditional importance of pulque. Visitors can witness how European religion and culture were literally placed on top of the pre-Hispanic sacred sites, dominating and yet never eradicating the older traditions. From the patio surrounding the sanctuary, the ancient volcanoes that once held sacred meaning for area inhabitants look alive. Smaller hills that dot the valley are actually the remains of hundreds of teocalli destroyed by the Spaniards. Today both church and pyramid serve as a tangible metaphor for the layers of cultural heritage that lie unseen under centuries of official neglect. These layers are the very foundation of contemporary life. In this UNESCO World Heritage city (1987), the heart of cultural life is an elaborate calendar of feast days and rituals based on the pyramid’s mixture of cultural traditions. On most Sundays of the year, groups of students perform reenactments of Nahua healing rites and dance at the base of the pyramid while local church parishes take turns parading their patron saint up steep steps to visit the Virgin. On a still day the sounds of Nahua drums blend with those of brass bands accompanying processions to the sanctuary. When I visit, a brass band is playing as a group carries a statue of San Miguelito around the sanctuary. Once a year each parish’s patron saint visits Cholula’s most sacred site. On the eve of her feast day (September 1), the Virgin gets a turn. Starting at sunset, thousands of people process with her to each of the ten barrios—neighborhoods built around the original pre-Hispanic organization of Cholula. The celebration continues until dawn with a convite (a convivial gathering with food and drink for the whole neighborhood) held at the house of the mayordomo, the man elected to organize the feast each year. For a week, Cholula fills with festival flowers, dances, carnival rides, fireworks, and special masses. When I ask an elderly guide at the archaeological site, “What are Cholultecas known for today?” He replies, “Being brave, but that’s a long story.” I think of William Prescott’s popular nineteenth-century history of the conquest and his description of how the Tlaxcalans mocked the Cholultecas as cowards and sedentary weaklings. The guide continues, hitting one hand hard into the palm of the other, “Cortés destroyed 363 teocalli . . . he killed 7,000 Cholultecas . . . Cortés took all the sacred jewels in exchange for mirrors” (Leno Romero, interview). A student and Aztec dancer at the base of the pyramid elaborates: “Cortés destroyed our wisdom. We are trying to relearn it . . . you can cut the tree, but not its roots” (Anonymous, interview). The conquest is not ancient history here. People who live in this millennial city consider themselves first and foremost Cholultecas, belonging to a place with an ancient and profound religious rhythm and community organization that dates back millennia. The city’s director of the Casa de Cultura, Susano Toxqui, remarks, “One thing we’re sure about, Spaniards we’re

Figure 2.10.  Cholula’s landscape captured the attention of hundreds of foreigner visitors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1870 Colonel Albert Evans illustrated the view from the Plaza de la Concordia outside the Franciscan compound, looking toward the pyramid and the Basilica of the Virgin of Remedios. (Our Sister Republic, Mexico, 1870.)

Figure 2.11.  When archaeologists dug into the massive pyramid of Quetzalcoatl, they discovered that at least seven successive ethnic groups had rebuilt the pyramid over the centuries. A tunnel through the heart of the pyramid allows visitors to walk through the layers. (Photograph by Mark Feddersen.)

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not.” He points to underlying pre-Hispanic traditions that still flourish in Cholula today, such as the telpoch mayordomo, a position given to a young boy whose duty is to ensure that the other children in the parish learn the tenets of Catholicism. He describes the open-air market two blocks away filled with indigenous vendors and artisans selling traditional agricultural products and crafts. Toxqui notes that scores of young professionals and middle-class people of all ages enroll in the Casa’s weekly Nahuatl classes. Learning the Nahuatl language has become a symbol of the recovery of pre-Hispanic culture and identity. Yet, as we will see below, in the open-air market Nahuatl-speaking vendors complain that their children and grandchildren have little interest in speaking the language, fearing they will be stereotyped as poor, ignorant “indios.” The many paradoxes and multilayered responses to cultural loss, preservation, and revival permeate every conversation in this city.

La Familia García, Sanctuary of the Virgin and Plaza de la Concordia I come from that culture. They were all very important for all of Meso­america. The Cholultecas were very important. Quetzalcoatl, Tlaloc, and many gods came to these pyramids. Only the pyramids and the statues remain. There you also learn some history. —ernesto garcía And even Mexicans, in the same country, in the same territory, look down on these people. That is, they are treated like Indians, like poor uncivilized people, poor things, without realizing that they have more culture than we do because for a long time they’ve kept their language, their respect for nature, for their gods. —isabel garcía

The chapel entrance to the Virgin of Remedios fills with hundreds of flickering candles, and a family of four visits before the head of the household leaves for six months. A native of Cholula, Sr. García works as a gardener near Philadelphia, an area heavily populated by immigrants from the state of Puebla, and lives in a neighborhood of South Philadelphia affectionately known by residents as “Puebladelphia.” He explains matter-of-factly, “A person has to eat,” but he returns home every September for the Virgin’s feast day. Delighting in describing the weeklong homage to Cholula’s Virgin of Remedios, he explains that the conquest was cruel, but it gave Cholula its Virgin. His grandson suddenly speaks up at the mention of the Spanish conquest: “Cortés said that [Cholula] is so beautiful that I need to conquer it.” Continuing breathlessly, he recounts the story of the infamous massacre in legendary terms: “Blood ran down from the pyramid and covered the streets of Cholula after Cortés killed the priests.” Ernesto says he learned all about the conquest of Mexico in his fourth-grade class. The boy’s mother, Isabel, also joins the conversation: “[Cortés] was brutal, but the Tlaxcalans wanted to get at Cholula and they helped

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Figure 2.12.  The García family visits the Basilica of the Virgin of Remedios before Sr. García leaves for migrant work in Pennsylvania. (Photograph by Mark Feddersen.)

the Spaniards.” Now even the older woman, Ernesto’s grandmother, who had been sitting quietly, speaks out in anger: “Cortés took everything from us.” But she soon grows quiet again when her husband gently touches her shoulder and reminds her that she is from Tlaxcala. A debate ensues within the family, and it becomes clear that there are still strong feelings about Cholultecas being labeled as victims and Tlaxcalans as traitors. Nearly five hundred years have passed and yet the search for understanding what really happened—and perhaps, who is to blame—continues. Six months later on a busy Sunday I meet the family again for a full-length interview in the plaza where the massacre took place, recently renamed the Plaza de la Concordia. Ernesto is now in fifth grade and studying the Independence period. His recall of the conquest history is less vivid than before, yet it reveals the process of learning, remembering, and forgetting historical events. The early primary grades are the first and last time in Mexico’s formal educational system that students will learn about the conquest, and Ernesto’s knowledge is based on the mandatory government textbooks. He speaks again about the bloody massacre: “Blood started to run through all the streets.” Notably, the great pyramid plays a central role in the legend as witness to the massacre that took place in the very plaza where we sit. While the boy calls Cortés a traitor for his rebellion against the governor of Cuba, he also unwittingly

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rewrites the legend of the Noche Triste: Cortés cried when his soldiers massacred the nobles in Tenochtitlan, instead of when he was ousted from the city. I recall a taxi driver from Cholula, an older man of indigenous heritage, who described the piles of bones from the massacre unearthed several years ago, when new water lines and pavement were installed in the streets leading into the plaza (Ricardo Guzmán, interview). Whether as history, urban legend, or myth, the aftermath of the massacre remains on most Cholultecas’ minds. Ernesto’s grandmother, Isabel Sánchez de García, is a native of Tizatlan, a town of about a thousand inhabitants just outside the city of Tlaxcala, the dominant altepetl in the Tlaxcalan federation at the time of the conquest. Although she left her family’s maize-growing farm when she was thirteen years old, Sánchez maintains, “Cortés manipulated the Tlaxcalans. I’m from there and everyone calls us traitors. He manipulated us to come to Cholula and kill our own brothers.” Rather than address the conquest further, she recounts legends about her town’s pre-Hispanic past. Tizatlan boasts the ruins of Xicotencatl the Elder’s palace: “They say that Xicotencatl’s treasure is still buried near the Palace” right near the pyramid where “they sacrificed all the beautiful women. . . . It was dangerous to be beautiful back then!” Sánchez has lived in Cholula for over forty years now, but she continues to be “rooted in her pueblo” and returns for Tlaxcala’s biggest feast, the celebration of the Virgin of Ocotlan. The regional and generational differences in the family and the multilayered interpretation of the conquest become clearer when Sánchez’s daughter (Ernesto’s mother) finally speaks. The tall, thin woman wearing wired-rimmed glasses states in a thoughtful voice that she, like her son, views the conquest as “brutal,” but she corrects his sympathetic version of Cortés on the Noche Triste: “I was told that he really cried because he had grabbed a good amount of booty, but because he was fleeing so fast, he lost it.” Like her mother, she then shifts the focus to her interest in pre-Hispanic cultures and the evidence of the conquest in their lives today. As a biologist finishing a master’s degree, Isabel García criticizes the national education system that only teaches Western traditions while ignoring a wealth of pre-Hispanic knowledge about plants and medicines and culture. She believes these have survived and are carried forward through ritual and custom as well as through active revivals of tradition, such as the Aztec dances at the base of the pyramid and in the plaza. Other traditions form part of a centuries-long practice that she calls “unconscious” and that includes religious rituals that acknowledge a pre-Hispanic god “over a Catholic god.” She mentions the case of the Totonaco voladores just outside the archaeological site of the pyramid. The four men flying around the man in the center represent the four cardinal points moving around the sun, she explains. “So that’s how they express, in a peaceful way, their disagreement with the imposition of a religion that isn’t theirs . . . they do this dance, but they know what it means, and they go to Catholic places . . . without, let’s say, the respect, without the devotion that they perform their dances with.”

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Isabel, an educated woman in her thirties, emphasizes the negative legacy of the conquest. Although official cultural programs promote Cholula’s heritage, she sees how contemporary indios, the heirs to this past, are viewed as “poor and uncultured.” She sees a deep ambivalence about the people who have maintained Mexico’s essential traditions for centuries. Insisting that issues about the conquest are still very much alive, especially in indigenous communities, she urges me to go to the market two blocks away and talk with the women who come from nearby comunidades indígenas to sell their families’ agricultural products. A year and a half after our first meeting at the Virgin’s sanctuary, I see the family one last time. In the patio to the Franciscan monastery of San Gabriel, more than fifty flower growers are creating huge floral arrangements to cover the massive entrance to the church. They are preparing for the feast of La Santísima Trinidad, the day that honors the Holy Trinity. Tomorrow at dawn the Virgin of Remedios will be processed around the plaza. Instead of a festive air, a worried gloom has come over the family. While her father is still in Pennsylvania, Isabel García, who has completed her degree and is looking for work, is also facing the possibility of emigration. She will take her son with her, and her mother will stay in the family’s modest house nearby. The conquest is far from their minds today as they anticipate the coming separation in the family, but they draw hope from the preparations for the Virgin’s procession.

Traditional Markets: Nahua Vendors Adolfa Tiro, Fausta Romero, Yolanda Sánchez, Sara Hernández, and Juana Ramírez We don’t know anything else, just the fields. We come here, and then we go back. We plant, nothing else. The Spaniards left us our . . . yes . . . they taught us, and that’s how we spend our life. As little ones, we grew up seeing how our fathers, how our mothers planted. Our parents used the plow. —adolfa tiro

Taking Isabel García’s advice, I walk three blocks to visit the traditional market. A parallel world unfolds at the Sunday and Wednesday market, which spreads throughout Cholula’s center. Men and women in Western dress sell everything from toothbrushes to sweet rolls in makeshift stalls, while women in traditional dark woolen skirts and shawls sit with folded legs on blankets and display carefully bundled herbs and garden vegetables. The smells of ripe mango and fried tortillas mix as the calls of vendors create a low, steady din. At the main entrance to the market a line forms around an indigenous woman spinning a wooden tool to froth champurrado, a chocolate beverage thickened with corn masa that dates back to pre-Hispanic times, in a huge brown ceramic vat over a gas flame. Locals say she has been there for over forty years.

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Figure 2.13.  Twice weekly, people come from area towns to sell their produce at Cholula’s traditional market. Many, like these women here, come from indigenous comunidades near the base of Popocatepetl. (© Steve Raymer.)

Down the street two women with greying braids sell green squash and a handful of herbs on a bright blue tarp. They explain with warm, shy smiles, “We are peasant farmers” (campesinas) and “we don’t know history,” but they talk readily about food and work. Around the next corner, another group of women from nearby comunidades indígenas discuss similar topics. There is no mention of reviving tradition; their work has been ongoing, continuous, even as it has adapted to changes over time. A sense of both urgency and timelessness permeates their conversation about work and the new generation. In each group, one woman speaks up more than the others. As they are native speakers of Nahuatl and have not attended more than a few years, if any, of public school, Spanish is their second language. Their sentences are short with little detail, but their words are often repeated by the other women, resulting in a chorus-like echo and a collective voice. This pattern changes when the conversation turns to the many ways to prepare chiles—then everyone has her own elaborate recipe. Stereotypes of indigenous populations as poor and ignorant have seeped into one woman’s self-description: “I’ve already spent most of my life as a peasant farmer. We don’t even know our own age because our parents’ didn’t send us to school. We can’t even read the letters [of the alphabet]. We’re like little

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donkeys” (Yolanda Sánchez, interview). The enthusiasm for Nahua indigenous revival and reclamation that we heard from Ixtacamaxtitlan leader René Bonilla or muralist guide Pedro Nájera is not evident here. Instead, a centuries-old pattern of colonial and national racial/ethnic classification permeates the market women’s own narratives. There is a clear contradiction between academic and political programs for cultural preservation and economic and cultural realities faced by indigenous communities. And indigenous women in particular have often been the most marginalized members of Mexican society.14 While her friend emphasizes the cyclical and absorbing work of a campesina, Fausta Romero discusses the challenges she sees with the changes in her town. Protestant sects have converted more than half the population. The younger generation refuses to speak Nahuatl. Her pueblo, San Buenaventura Nealtican (pop. 13,000), officially recognized as a comunidad indígena, recently established a bilingual school (Spanish-Nahuatl). But the young people want to be “modern.” They are ashamed of their mother tongue, she says, naming several towns within half an hour of hers that have a Nahua heritage but no Nahuatl speakers. Ironically, just one block away from the market, at the Casa de Cultura, Nahuatl language classes are full. Since the 1990s an official discourse has promoted a pluriethnic nation, but centuries of discrimination against native ethnic groups have taken their toll. Often Mexicans who have lost a connection with an indigenous past seek to recover it, while those that are born into an indigenous heritage often want to disown it, seeking to escape centuries of discrimination. As I sit with the second group of women, a younger woman in her thirties, Yolanda Sánchez, says she is a campesina. Unlike the others, however, she sits on a stool and sells stuffed animals rather than agricultural products. Her home comunidad of San Nicolás de los Ranchos, a town tucked into the folds of the great Popocatepetl close to the Paso de Cortés, is now popular with foreign tourists. She is the only vendor I interview who ventures a response to a question about Cortés: “The Spaniards came here only to . . . I mean, to leave . . . , or maybe, to set up . . . let’s say, some sort of rules, I guess. Right, that’s it. For example, the beliefs as we call them here, beliefs.” Like the others, she focuses her comments on her work and life, even broaching the topic of emigration to the United States. Part of a younger generation and a native of a tourist destination, Sánchez has had more exposure to U.S. culture than many of her peers. She describes the waterfalls, adventure sports, and luxury chalets for Americans just outside her town. And she complains about the ill treatment of Mexican workers by some Americans who live there. Without using the word “empire,” she points to a new economic conquest—this time coming from the north—and the continued exploitation of indigenous workers. Despite generations of discrimination by outsiders, both groups of market vendors assure me that we have talked as “amigas” and invite me to their towns for a visit. As I will find all along the route, there is a respect for the curiosity and desire of outsiders who want to learn more about Mexico.

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Padre Francisco Morales OFM, Monastery of San Gabriel The groups that come are indigenous, as I’m sure you know. And I’ve told them many times, “If Cholula is going to keep its identity as Cholula, it’ll be thanks to all of you and to the Virgin. . . .” It’s like the world of the past [the conquest] doesn’t influence them in the present.

Fortress walls reminiscent of medieval Spain enclose the compound of the Franciscan monastery of San Gabriel, completed in 1549. The monastery dominates one side of the Plaza de la Concordia, site of the Cholula massacre. Inside its walls another world unfolds, with five Franciscan friars, an elementary school that enrolls over a thousand students, and a new research library dedicated to the Franciscan who documented Nahua culture and history, Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590). There are two churches in the compound: the elaborate cathedral built for the colonial criollo elite and the striking Capilla Real para los Naturales, reminiscent of Córdoba’s famous Mezquita (mosque), built by indigenous nobles so that thousands of Indians could hear Mass. In the busy office, a family with a one-year-old daughter requests prayers for a departed family member and pays thirty pesos for the last available slot, the 6 a.m. Mass. The next couple in line requests a blessing of their home. Later that day when I meet with Padre Francisco Morales, the director of the research library, he notes wryly that he has performed more religious ceremonies in the last year and a half in Cholula than during forty years living in Mexico City and Washington, DC. “Cholultecas live in a religious world.” In the quiet reading room of the Centro Sahagún, a large modern stained-glass window frames Padre Francisco’s easy, warm face and smile. A native of Cholula, he remembers begging his mother to let him enter the Franciscan order when he was eleven years old. Soon after, he began the process of becoming a friar and later was sent to monasteries in the United States and Mexico City. Padre Francisco recently returned to Cholula after four decades. When he can, he spends mornings writing articles and organizing symposia that focus on the influence of indigenous cultures on the early Franciscan friars. The friar easily traces early Franciscan history in Mexico. Cortés chose his beloved Franciscans to be the first to evangelize New Spain and build a “new society.” The monastic order arrived with dreams of creating a new church, one that would hark back to the simplicity of early Christianity. Instead the friars experienced “a failed encounter” because of the radical difference between the Mesoamerican world and their own. The Spanish Crown further hampered their evangelization efforts with lawsuits against Cortés. By the 1530s the Franciscans were caught between their own failed encounter with the indigenous peoples and the power struggle among the Spanish, so they left for the Pacific coast with plans to embark for China. But a fateful storm and the arrival of a new regime more favorable to the Franciscans turned their plans around. By 1540 the foundations of a new church were laid, with schools in

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Figure 2.14.  Padre Francisco Morales, OFM, describes the culture shock experienced by the first Franciscans in Cholula. The Monastery of San Gabriel is still fully functioning, and many colonial-era murals cover the interior courtyards. (© Steve Raymer.)

Nahuatl and Spanish for indigenous men and construction of large monasteries to house them. Padre Francisco argues that within two decades the conquest had affected the Franciscans as much as the indigenous peoples: “Earlier the friars were already beginning to think about an approach that could get closer to the indigenous world. So that’s when all these ideals were born, by the end of the 1530s; by 1540 they were very well set up. And by the end of 1540, when they began to build these big

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monasteries, they were already dreaming.” The friars already had learned some local Mesoamerican languages, traditions, and beliefs. For the next thirty years Franciscan compounds were built throughout central New Spain, forming what has been called the Ruta Franciscana, an important element of the colonization project. But with the arrival of other mendicant orders and a power struggle that favored the secular church after the Council of Trent, the expansion of the Franciscan order came to a halt even as the overall number of clergy grew from 1,500 in 1580 to 3,000 in 1600. 15 Padre Francisco’s fluid narrative turns more hesitant when he discusses Cortés’s controversial position and his relationship with the friars: “In his time, he had friends and enemies.” The early Franciscans called Cortés the “Moses of the new church,” a prophet who brought a people to the true religion and created bridges to build “a new society.” But ultimately, argues Padre Francisco, the friars recognized him as simply a man of his times, a Machiavellian figure whose loyalties were primarily to himself and his men. As a priest with pastoral duties in Cholula and as a scholar studying the early Franciscans, Padre Francisco believes that many historians and anthropologists miss the point when they categorize Cholula as indigenous or Spanish: “Here in Cholula one doesn’t consider himself indigenous, but Cholulteca, not a poor little Indian. I suspect many of these strong controversies come from higher up. I mean here the indigenous community doesn’t much care if it’s a certain way. When the anthropologists, the historians, come and start saying one thing and another . . . well, okay, so? . . . This core is still strongly community based.” Witness to Cholula’s past and present, he concludes, “Cholula is Cholula, a thriving millenarian spiritual center.”

Gilberto Galicia Muñoz, Mayordomo, Sanctuary of the Virgin of Remedios I feel this passion for church caretaking and stewardship, or mayordomía, because of our traditions. . . . I feel it as if it were already in our blood. We just have to be motivated a little, and it comes out, it does, because Cholula has been Cholula for thousands of years, since before the arrival of the Spaniards. We were a city long before the Spaniards. So, as far as I know, the practice of mayordomía is similar to something . . . something from before the Spaniards got here.

Well-worn steps lead up the pyramid to the Sanctuary of the Virgin of Remedios, and the sun sets between shrouded volcanoes. This is a sacred place with a long memory. Taking a break from the daily closing tasks, the sanctuary’s mayordomo, Gilberto Galicia, sits on a stone bench in a niche outside the church. (See plate 1.4.) He talks of the great honor and responsibility of being a mayordomo. The most important secular post in Cholula’s religious cycle and one that dates back to colonial times,

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it often gave religious and social authority to indigenous leaders within their communities. For nearly two decades Galicia worked his way up through half a dozen lesser posts in his parish (barrio) in order to be eligible for his current position, which rotates among Cholula’s ten traditional parishes. Everything he has learned about these community roles has been passed down orally through the generations. He shows me the plaque that lists previous mayordomos, including his father. With a twinkle in his eye, he says that perhaps one day one of his sons will work toward the position. Whereas Padre Francisco talked about the decline in religious vocation for friars, the mayordomo talks about the growing enthusiasm to serve in the many secular posts within the community’s religious organization: “We Cholultecas carry this in our blood.” When the friars handed Galicia the keys to the sanctuary, he knew that his family would be in charge of maintaining the church and organizing and paying for the important convites. The post as mayordomo requires total dedication of time, family, money, and faith. Galicia describes a wholehearted acceptance of and complete surrender to service in the name of the love of Mary, and he repeats a proverb: “A year won’t make you either richer or poorer.” He owns a banquet hall, but his oldest son is managing it for the year. As we talk, the youngest of his five children, a seven-year-old boy, comes over to check on his father while his wife helps close the sanctuary. As the interview unfolds, it is clear that many Cholultecas have made devotion to the Virgin a family affair. Galicia patiently responds to my questions about the conquest and then gently returns the interview time and again back to a detailed, systematic description of the complex, centuries-old cyclical liturgical year and its corresponding feast days. It is a world of faith, ritual, hierarchies, and service, which, he maintains, predates the Spanish conquest. His explanation gives nuance to the concept of syncretism and its ideological role in ultimately promoting assimilation as an integrated system of mixed cultural beliefs.16 The Spanish brought “the true faith,” but the mayordomías, traditions, and even the object of veneration have continued unbroken from their “ancestors” (a term that always refers to pre-Hispanic peoples). Galicia traces a connection between Quetzalcoatl, Tonantzin, a generic pre-Hispanic female deity, and the Virgin of Remedios. He argues, “We’ve already put aside the Spanish influence. This is ours . . . definitely ours.” Echoing Padre Francisco’s observation, he sees no paradox or contradiction in his belief. For him, the Virgen Conquistadora is not a Spanish Virgin who has imposed fully Catholic beliefs and traditions on the local native population. Behind her image and veneration lies a complex, still unconsolidated tradition and faith that includes rather than excludes a full range of deities: Queztzalcoatl, Tonantzin, and the Virgin of Remedios, “our Blessed Mother.” Like other cases in which Christian icons and rituals were superimposed on local deities, over time ritual practices continued while also being transformed. The different threads of belief are distinct, not woven into a uniform fabric, and yet they are not always fully visible.

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Ernesto Cuizpalli, Plaza de la Concordia Whoever played the drum got his hands cut off; if someone spoke Nahuatl, they got their tongue cut out. So it was a really severe massacre of identity.

On a Sunday morning, just outside the Franciscan compound in the Plaza de la Concordia, a family of four unloads large conch shells, drums, and headdresses from a taxi. A two-kilo ball (pelota) is hoisted out last. Ernesto Cuizpalli carefully arranges the feathers in his headdress while his wife, son, and younger brother remove their street clothes, don costumes, and streak red and black paint on their faces. Cuizpalli talks in a slow, deliberate style, becoming more engaged and offering more details about the Aztec dance movement the longer we talk. According to him, concheros in late colonial times danced in church courtyards built at the base of razed sacred pyramids (teocalli). Now he and his family dance at the base of the great Quetzalcoatl’s house. Each dance is directed toward the four cardinal points, the axis mundi of pre-Hispanic cosmology, he explains, but each represents different aspects of the culture, such as the many animal deities and the sacred agricultural cycle: “Aztec dance narrates a moment in that time, it narrates what there was, what existed, what lived at that time, how they sowed, the importance of sowing, of names, of presenting their children to the great spirit, what they call baptism nowadays. Each dance is related in a different way to our present-day life or to our ancestral life.” His own interest in the movement began fifteen years ago, when he was a teenager with an elementary-school education from a family who had little interest in Mexico’s pre-Hispanic past. After hearing about the Nahua traditions, he set out to learn from “the school of life” and traveled to sanctuaries and villages in the shadow of the volcanoes near Cholula, places where Cuizpalli says some of the old traditions were kept alive through oral tradition, huehuetlahtolli (the sayings of the elders). He follows in the tradition of the great conchero Felipe Aranda,17 but he acknowledges the dynamic character of the dance tradition. As the movement grows, “new young people, well, they now do a mix of dances . . . a re-creation of what could have been.” Cuizpalli has also taken Nahuatl and Nahua philosophy courses, which led him to take a Nahua surname. For the last decade he and his wife have made a living selling jewelry. They finance trips to dance at sacred festivals with income from their “cultural dissemination”: conch shells, conchero music, Nahua poetry, photocopies of pamphlets with Nahuatl stories and vocabulary, copies of Miguel León-Portilla’s books, and a documentary on the conchero dance movement. The Sunday performances also fund travel to Aztec dance celebrations held at sacred geographical sites throughout central Mexico over the course of the year. Reconquest of place is a recurring theme in the Aztec dance ritual. In May they will join with several thousand Aztec dancers in Chalma, Mexico’s second most important spiritual center after the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, to celebrate Pentecost with el Señor del Chalma, the

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Figure 2.15.  Burning the traditional Nahua copal, Ernesto Cuizpalli purifies a woman before an Aztec dance ritual. (© Steve Raymer.)

Black Christ of the cave sanctuary that was once dedicated to Tezcatlipoca, the god of darkness. In contrast to the conchero dancers we found immersed in a religious ritual experience to celebrate Antigua’s Cruz de Mayo, Cuizpalli dances on Sundays in Cholula as part of a mission to teach others, especially the younger generation: “More than anything so the children can see [the dance] and know that once this culture existed, this race, this way of giving thanks to God.” The movement has grown exponentially over the last few decades as Aztec dancers respond to Cuauhtemoc’s legendary call to action: “Even though our sun has been hidden and left us in darkness, we know that it will reawaken and fill us Mexicanos with light.” In the last few decades, however, a process of “Aztecization” has created two often distinct camps: the more traditional concheros, whose name originates from the adaptation of Spanish strings to armadillo shells, and the “Mexica” dancers, who hark back to depictions in codices to re-create a neo-Aztec dance tradition.18 The membership in the latter group is often more urban and professional.

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Cuizpalli identifies himself as both conchero and Mexica. Despite many Mexicans’ ambivalence toward indigenous tradition, movements such as the Aztec dancers are growing and have spread to cities in the United States. While Padre Francisco and the mayordomo continue centuries-old Catholic traditions, Cuizpalli and his family follow a newer national and even transnational movement to revive and re-create Aztec culture. The dance ritual in new contexts both preserves an indigenous identity and at times “folklorizes” it for new audiences and consumption. Cuizpalli comments that many foreigners seek out Aztec groups and even invite them to perform abroad. Later that afternoon about thirty people, including a handful of European and American tourists, watch his performance. Some of the onlookers take part in purification rituals. But fifty yards away, a much larger crowd laughs at a red-nosed clown performing stunts while a boom box blasts rap music. Here on the main plaza in Cholula—the most sacred site in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, scene of the historic massacre—the revival, and marketing, of indigenous traditions develop alongside the attractions of modern pop culture.

John O’Leary, Café Hotel Cholollan de los Naturales Cortés is not really part of the mix. . . .

John O’Leary stands out in a crowd of Cholultecas. The tall Texan has lived in Mexico for forty years and he carries his camera everywhere. Today a new high-definition digital camera hangs around his neck as he walks into a hotel coffee shop displaying his black-and-white photos of religious processions. An amateur archaeologist and a professional photographer, O’Leary documents sacred life in Cholula. He jokes that through his camera lens he has been as faithful as any Catholic in the last several decades. O’Leary left the United States during the Vietnam War to study archaeology in Mexico, but quickly abandoned the university for the camera. He published a photographic study, Cholula, La Cuidad Sagrada = Cholula, The Sacred City, funded by the Volkswagen Company in Puebla.19 Dedicated to preserving Cholula’s rich history, O’Leary is known as the American who helps Cholultecas value their cultural heritage. He works to preserve Cholula’s cultural riches, which are threatened, he says, by neglect and the sheer abundance of artifacts. Even after decades of community work, marriage, and children, however, O’Leary is still “an outsider, the gringo. . . . They really don’t know what to do with me.” When he returns to Texas, people are also uneasy: “It works both ways, I’m suspect here and I’m suspect there.” As an expatriate, a man who feels he has no country, O’Leary sees clearly from both sides of the border. When asked about the conquest, he comments in his characteristic straight-talking style: “Cortés is not really part of the mix. . . . There is more animosity felt toward North Americans than . . . toward Spain.” The well-attended lecture about the Virgen Conquistadora sponsored by Padre Francisco, for example,

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linked Cholula’s Virgin with the Spanish past. But the audience didn’t identify with the Spanish Virgin of Remedios: “It’s not part of their Virgin. It doesn’t upset anymore.” Their own Virgin has been transformed over time into the quintessential cultural and spiritual focal point of life in Cholula. Like many informants, the photographer soon turns from old conquests to more recent cultural and economic challenges. Mexicans have a growing ill will toward the United States, especially regarding immigration policies. O’Leary believes that both sides need a more productive dialogue in order to gain understanding about how each country makes and views laws about immigration. We will hear this concern expressed more urgently by Mexicans living in the United States in the last section of this book, as we follow some of the people who have crossed the border.

Figure 2.16.  Area residents use traditional footpaths to move between comunidades at the base of Popocatepetl. (Photograph by José Glockner. Courtesy of Arqueología mexicana magazine.)

Conquests and Continuities The Valley of Puebla

Situated between the basin of Mexico, the gulf coast, the lowland jungle, and the Oaxaca plateau, surrounded by a rim of four great volcanoes, the fertile PueblaTlaxcala valley has been a crossroad of migration, settlement, warfare, and pilgrimage for hundreds of ethnic groups over the course of thousands of years. While most historians focus on Cortés’s first military campaigns in the area (Tlaxcala and Cholula), it is his second route, his campaign of attrition, followed by the Franciscan evangelization and colonial resettlement projects, that began the radical transformation of the physical and cultural landscape in the valleys. A month after Cortés had fled Tenochtitlan and reached the safety of Tlaxcala, he received reinforcements from Cuba and began a second military operation in the area. While his men and their indigenous allies constructed brigantines to besiege the island city of Tenochtitlan, Cortés initiated a ruthless campaign of attrition against all the altepetl allied with the Triple Alliance along the main pre-Hispanic route from the coast to the Valley of Mexico. His primary goal was to ensure a supply route to Tenochtitlan. Tepeyacac (modern-day Tepeaca) was his first target. In pre-Hispanic times, Tepeyacac was already an old settlement renowned for its extensive and untamed market. Within months after Tepeyacac had been subjugated, many other altepetl either allied with Cortés or were themselves subdued, including the powerful Huaquechula and Cuauhtinchan. The people of the region were accustomed to periodic invasions, subjugations, and shifting alliances over many centuries. But the changes initiated by Cortés and continued by the Spanish church and colonizers over the years would permanently alter many aspects of life. Pre-Hispanic settlements often were located on the slopes of volcanoes and above deep ravines. Seeing the political-religious organizational structure in the area as scattered and difficult to police, the Spanish conquistadors and friars collaborated to merge indigenous groups into congregaciones, while conquistadors were given encomiendas. Native groups were often forced to abandon 137

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their hilltop settlements and move into the valleys below. Sacred teocalli were destroyed, and people were converted—at least in name—to Christianity and forced to provide labor or tribute to the new conquerors. These newly organized settlements often became the basis for repúblicas de indios. But within a generation after the conquest, the divisions between repúblicas de indios and repúblicas de españoles often became blurred. The Franciscan friars used indigenous labor to construct the first monasteries outside the Valley of Mexico. As we learned in Padre Francisco Morales’s interview, members of the religious order believed they were creating a new world paradise of Christianity, led by a new generation of devout indigenous friars who administered to their own people in this densely populated region. But the decimation of the native population as well as the revocation of the broad ecclesiastical powers granted to the first Franciscans resulted in the abandonment of this utopian project, leaving massive and often unfinished monasteries in ruins by the seventeenth century. Today, throughout the area the ruins of monasteries, partially unearthed hilltop pyramids, and pre-Hispanic settlements are all that physically remain of the first century of contact, colonization, and evangelization. But many former repúblicas de indios and congregaciones still managed to maintain elements of their heritage during the colonial period and even through the nation-building and Revolutionary periods. Many of these communities are officially recognized as comunidades indígenas.20 However, as we heard in the interviews with Gabriel Mazahua and Rigoberto Nopaltecatl in the Sierra Zongolica, René Bonilla in Ixtacamaxtitlan, and the market vendors in Cholula, the challenges facing diverse original cultural heritages have not ended. Moreover, a resident of Cuauhtinchan believes that the city of Puebla, as one of the fastest-growing urban centers in Mexico, now threatens many outlying areas with a new regional conquest through absorption and centralized control (Lorenzo García, interview). We start our overview of this process in the altepetl that Cortés passed through on his first journey to Tepochtitlan (Calpan and Huejotzingo) and continue to places that were deeply affected by his campaign of attrition (Tepeaca and Huaquechula). These communities often became important bases for Franciscan evangelization projects. In many towns, I happened to arrive on the eve of or in the wake of community festivals, which clearly underscore the layering of communities’ religious and social cultures over centuries. As one informant put it, “Religious festivities give cohesion to the communities themselves . . . they are not only territorially but also symbolically cohesive” (Gerardo Pérez Muñoz, interview). This section on conquests and continuities ends with a case study of an art restorer who works in a former Franciscan monastery in what was once the powerful center of a group of altepetl, Cuauhtinchan (Eagle’s Nest). Here townspeople interact with past and present conquests, Spanish colonialism, mestizo nationalism, and ethnically diverse indigenous histories as they rewrite history and forge their future. What becomes clear is that the Spanish conquest did not subdue, convert, or Hispanize everyone at the same time, in the same way, or to the same degree.

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Figure 2.17.  Pre-Hispanic motifs mix with Christian motifs in architecture all along the Ruta Franciscana in central Mexico. (Photograph by the author.)

Calpan, San Mateo de Ozolco, Huejotzingo, Tepeaca, and Huaquechula After the massacre in Cholula, Cortés and his armies passed through Calpan (Izcalpan), a dependency of allied Huejotzingo and an important town in its own right, en route to the 3,400-meter pass to Tenochtitlan. In Calpan, Cortés was received with gifts and complaints about the Aztecs.21 Today a partially paved road, used by flocks of sheep, fruit-laden donkeys, and a very occasional mountain biker, heads up through cornfields and pear orchards, between the flanks of snow-capped Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl, to where Calpan is tucked away. There is no talk of conquest in this peaceful hamlet. The two paved streets sport political banners announcing candidates for upcoming municipal elections. Two blocks away at the edge of town

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an image of the Virgin Mary, crowned with a nopal cactus, is carved into a wellpreserved niche (posada) of the mostly abandoned sixteenth-century Franciscan monastery of San Andrés. Just beyond the monastery’s courtyard a tethered horse circles round to mill corn, and a few faces peer out of a small general store to watch the newcomers. Only when a van of architectural students from UNAM, the national university, arrives does anyone engage with my questions about the conquest. Two students in particular speak up about the sad irony of the Ruta Franciscana and the evangelization process. The conquest brought together two rich architectural traditions, but by the time the Calpan monastery was completed in the 1550s the large altepetl had been decimated by disease and few men were left to join the friars. But the monastery still stands as a testimony to indigenous artists and helps people “understand its value and what it meant early on.” The students point to the nopal carved on top of the Virgin’s crown, saying it demonstrates how indigenous sculptors “rank this place high, like they’re stressing ‘this is Mexico’” (Anonymous, interview). Townspeople suggest that I go twenty minutes further uphill to San Mateo Ozolco (six hundred households). The muddy road winds through an area dotted with cinderblock houses and small garden plots. It becomes increasingly rural as we head deeper into the folds of the volcanoes. San Mateo Ozolco, once a república de indios, is an official comunidad indígena in which most people still speak Nahuatl and the elementary school is bilingual.22 Some households even follow the traditional rites for indigenous marriages, in which the man’s entire family goes to the woman’s house to ask for her hand. They bring flowers and baskets of fruit and jewelry, and shoot off fireworks. If the proposal is accepted, the wedding will be celebrated over the course of three or four days in the bride’s house. Within minutes of arriving at the town center—a small plaza with the government building on one side, and a single-nave colonial church whose façade is a wall of flowers left over from the town’s patron feast day—a deafening peal of bells rings from the church tower. A red Ford pickup truck laden with three-foot-high floral arrangements pulls up. Men and women arrive and solemnly carry the flowers to their santo inside the church. The mayordomo for Saint Joseph’s feast day (March 19), Senovio Jiménez, a forty-year-old father of two, explains that each of the church’s seventeen saints has a mayordomo who is elected to a yearlong post to care for it. The steward pays for and delivers flowers bimonthly, and hosts a yearly fiesta with music and food for the saint’s feast day. On Sundays and holy days a Franciscan friar comes from Calpan to say Mass, but the town takes care of all regular church functions and maintenance. As we talk, a friendly seventy-year-old man wearing traditional huarache sandals and a white straw hat, Graciano Ríos, greets us in Nahuatl before switching to Spanish, saying, “You must be Catholic because you have pierced ears.” In recent years, more evangelical Protestants and Mormons, mostly from the United States, have arrived in the area, and suspicion of outsiders has increased. According to this town fiscal, or attorney, the growing number of Mormons—now about fifty families in

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town—has been a divisive factor: “The Mormons don’t believe in a saint, but they come to sell during the saint’s festival. It’s wrong. They set up to sell in front of my house.” They do not participate in the town’s religious feast days—nor in the service required for keeping them going—but they profit from selling goods at the days-long Catholic festivals. Another factor threatens the centuries-old traditions. As we heard in Cholula, the young people are divided: while as some mature they embrace the traditions of their ancestors, continuing to speak Nahuatl and following religious customs, others “don’t want to be like their parents. They want to be different. They are ashamed to speak Mexicano [Nahuatl], and they leave San Mateo” (Graciano Ríos, interview). The mayordomos are all campesinos who plant corn, explains Ríos, which often makes it difficult to pay the expenses required of the post, especially since the recent corn crises spurred by the lifting of tariffs in the wake of NAFTA, a move that contributed later to the nationwide protest that rallied around the cry “Sin maíz, no hay país.” (No corn, no country.) As the bells cease their ringing, a loudspeaker pierces the mountain air: “Tomás Martínez, tienes una llamada urgente” (Tomás Martínez, you have an urgent call). In the last decade or so, a third to a half of San Mateo’s residents have emigrated to Philadelphia; many blame NAFTA.23 While families stay in touch by sharing the few phones in town, many have left behind the observance of San Mateo’s traditional feast day. Instead, former San Mateo residents are the core of the Cinco de Mayo celebration in “Puebladelphia,” when they reenact the battle in which the Poblanos turned back the French invasion of Mexico. Cinco de Mayo has become the premier Mexican American holiday in the United States. By establishing a hybrid culture that transforms the past in its present-day adaptations in new lands, San Mateo’s emigrants now celebrate their broader heritage. Just half an hour from San Mateo lies Huejotzingo (twelve thousand inhabitants). According to some records, the city boasted a population of about forty thousand— larger than any city in Spain—at the time it allied with Cortés and aided in the siege of Tenochtitlan. Originally perched on the slopes of Popocatepetl, controlling one of the key passes into the Valley of Mexico, Huejotzingo was one of the two powerful and relatively autonomous enclaves within the Aztec Empire.24 After the conquest the territory became part of Cortés’s estates, and later the city was moved from its perch at the pass. When Cortés left for Spain in 1529–30 the city was turned over to Spanish administrators, who exacted heavy tribute in the form of labor and services much heavier than the pre-Hispanic tribute system. Upon Cortés’s return, Huejotzingo filed a petition, with his support, asking for justice, in a document now known as the Huejotzingo Codex. In 1538 the king ruled in Huejotzingo’s favor. Two-thirds of the collected tribute was to be returned. No one knows for sure if this ever happened. The Franciscans chose this important city as the site for their first monastery outside the Valley of Mexico (1526). In early colonial times the city adopted San

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Figure 2.18.  The Huejotzingo Codex contrasts the pre-Hispanic tribute system with the Spanish system and petitions for new terms. The image of the Virgin Mary emphasizes that residents are now Christians.

Miguel, the warrior-archangel who fought Lucifer, as its patron and source of protection. Throughout the sierras and indigenous towns San Miguel became key to local spirituality; the archangel was said to have first appeared to the Tlaxcalan Indian Diego Lázaro to expel the devil and idolatries.25 Today, inside the chapel of the former monastery of San Miguel Arcángel, the saint reigns over a sea of fresh lilies and flickering candles, left over from his feast day yesterday. Raising his sword, San Miguel crushes a dark-skinned infidel beneath his feet. Every fall, throughout Puebla’s Sierra del Norte, indigenous and rural communities enthusiastically celebrate his feast day. The remains of this huge monastery have been restored and converted into the National Museum of Evangelization. It contains interior patios decorated with elaborate carvings (created by indigenous artisans), the original locutories (the rooms in a monastery where monks were allowed to converse), frescos of the twelve Franciscan

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friars, a furnished refectory, and individual living quarters, along with exhibits with artifacts and panels about Franciscan history in New Spain. One gold-leafed object stands out: a hollowed-out wooden statue of Saint Francis. Ester Menéndez, a twentyyear-old guide whose father also works at the museum, explains that indios hid their own gods in such sculptures and continued to venerate them while ostensibly worshipping the Catholic saint. She conjectures that the indigenous gods remain hidden behind the main retablo on the altar. Calling it “hibridismo,” a hybrid practice, the guide describes how in the first generations after the conquest, deities were literally hidden by layering the real object of veneration beneath the ruling order’s image. Historical accounts document how the church sometimes uncovered this “worship of idols”—at times with the help of zealous indigenous converts to Christianity—and destroyed the older images. But many others were never discovered. As memory faded over generations, the practice of venerating the double images with nonCatholic traditions continued. Often the practitioners did not know why they did so. In a city that still includes in its annual carnival the symbolic casamiento indígena—a reenactment of popular colonial society’s ritualized acceptance of racial difference and the creation of Christian families among indigenous people—as well as battles that reenact the pre-Hispanic ritual flower wars, the processions for the feast of San Miguel have adapted the pre-Hispanic and medieval European custom of parading their deities. There is a clear community pride in these rituals. Around the corner from the statue a replica of the city’s petition, the Huejotzingo Codex, is on display, highlighting an image of the Virgin Mary with indigenous features and coloring. She looks on as twenty indigenous men and women wearing slave collars are given to Spaniards. The document makes clear the continuity between pre- and postconquest Mexico: from pre-Hispanic times the city was familiar with the practice of paying tribute and owning slaves, but the Spanish requests during Cortés’s absence were excessive. The overriding presence of the Virgin Mary in the codex emphasizes the injustices inflicted on Huejotzingo’s newly converted Christians who had willingly become part of the Spanish system. But, as Menéndez notes, the abuses against the region’s Indians continued: “Many times the tributes were so high that the indigenous people themselves couldn’t pay them. And when they didn’t pay them, what they’d do was they’d sell their children as slaves. And if after that they couldn’t pay what they owed, then the debt kept going from generation to generation. So then almost all their descendants ended up being slaves of the Spaniards.” The Huejotzingo case illustrates the ongoing shifts in patterns of ethnic alliances as well as factionalization among Spaniards during the first decades of the conquest. With the passing of the generations, however, the imperial practice of lumping all indigenous groups into the second-class category of indio had eroded their influence. Menéndez sees no end to this erosion: indigenous peoples are “poorer all the time.” About an hour to the east of Huejotzingo lies modern Tepeaca. In pre-Hispanic times Tepeyacac was a well-fortified, flourishing city built into the hills surrounding

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the current location in the valley. Using the deaths of some Spaniards in the area as a pretext, Cortés began his campaign of attrition with this city. After subduing it, he renamed it Segura de la Frontera, suggesting its importance as a stronghold on the frontlines as he gathered more troops. From here, in October of 1520, Cortés wrote his famous Segunda carta de relación to Charles V. The letter details his first route of conquest, describes the city of Tenochtitlan, his army’s retreat to Tlaxcala, and the initial victories as they set out to retake Tenochtitlan. He closes the letter with a plea for reinforcements, conveniently ignoring the fact that he had no official mandate for the conquest in the first place. Today the zócalo tells much about the history of Tepeaca since colonial times. On one side a boarded-up building, known locally as the Casa Cortés, displays a plaque stating that Cortés wrote his letter here, although the city’s current-day location dates from twenty years later, when the town was moved from its hilltop location to the valley below. The building houses the city History Museum, which is closed for restoration. Two young women selling CDs at the shop attached to the museum say that they have never seen anyone there. They giggle and react with disbelief when I ask what they think about sharing a building with Cortés: “We don’t think about it.” On another side of the zócalo stands the nearly empty fortress-style Franciscan monastery of San Francisco de Asís. The chapel, built in the 1540s, is also closed. One lone worker pushes a wheelbarrow full of rubble from a wall that is being excavated. A tourist looks at the inner cloister, the only open section of the monastery. Carved into the stone arch, European-style angels mix with jaguars. Directly across from the zócalo, which has turned into a carnival site with mechanical rides and stalls filled with local sweets for the fiesta patronal, the parish church teems with activity. The floral wall covering the front façade has been erected and worshippers stream in and out of the church to honor the feast day of El Santo Niño de Jesús, Doctor of the Ill (April 30). Saint Francis lost his post as patron saint of Tepeaca when a group of nuns brought the statue and worship of el Santo Niño to the city in the 1940s. Some people see the demotion of Saint Francis as another sign of the attempt to cast off the last memories of colonialism. In the center of the zócalo, the mid-sixteenth-century mudéjar-style rollo—a six-sided brick tower built to help police the new town center—no longer marks the center of the huge Friday indigenous market, which everyone in town boasts has been in continuous operation for at least seven hundred years. Fifteen years ago, city officials moved the market to the outskirts of town and allowed vendors to sell manufactured clothing and goods along with traditional agricultural products and crafts. The thriving market has become a combination of a big-box store with goods from all over the world and a place where the traditional barter system still thrives. On the outskirts of Tepeaca, cows, sheep, and burros line the roadside as ranchers buy and sell livestock, part of the Spanish heritage of raising cattle. Five minutes farther down the road, a colossal, futuristic-looking grey CEMEX cement factory, inaugurated in 2007, has risen in a field near woods that have been stripped away.

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Townspeople say Tepeaca is on “the verge of change” as they point to the thirtyfive-kilometer road back to the city of Puebla, a diesel-fumed, congested two-lane highway that is being expanded to four lanes. This once independent altepetl and key market town, later part of the strategic conquest and a colonial cabecera (a head town that had more privileges than subject towns) may soon be absorbed into the greater metropolitan area of Puebla.26 South of Calpan, on the southwestern flanks of the great Popocatepetl, the walled city of Quauhquechollan guarded another strategic route into the Valley of Mexico. The city of some thirty thousand inhabitants boasted of its descent from the Toltecs and was home to many teocalli. After the Tepeaca campaign, it became another target of Cortés’s campaign of attrition. The city had first followed the lead of Huejotzingo and allied with Cortés, but then thousands of warriors from Tenochtitlan were sent to reestablish control of the city. In 1520 Cortés, with the help of many of its inhabitants and his Tlaxcalan allies, attacked and massacred the entire Aztec garrison, killing a son of Moctezuma II. Soon afterward the city was moved to its present location in the valley of Atlixco, given to Jorge Alvarado as an encomienda, and renamed San Martín de Huaquechula, in honor of its generosity to the first weary Franciscans who arrived in the 1530s.27 Over the next forty years indigenous laborers erected a huge fortress monastery. Today a sign by the altar talks of the “spontaneous syncretism” that occurred, with dozens of indigenous artisans working under the direction of the three or four Spanish friars who lived there. Stone carvings of Saint Peter and Saint Paul mingle with an Aztec warrior with a plumed helmet and war shield (chimalli), serpent masks with Aztec speech scrolls, and Nahuatl glyphs (including the date “Six Flint,” 1576). A schoolgirl guide says she heard that many of the friars were Indians who practiced human sacrifice, and local lore has it that the custodian does not sleep in the apartment at the monastery because spirits disturb his sleep. We visit Huaquechula on the Día de los Muertos, and our young guide takes us into the street, where we follow pungent, bright marigold petals that mark the entrance to a modest cinderblock house. The flower petals are meant to serve as a guide for the returning spirits of deceased family members. Two women sit motionless by a Día de los Muertos altar that includes a red bike, a toy truck, and the smiling face of a young boy reflected in a mirror (traditionally, photographs of the deceased are shown via mirrors so as not to disturb their spirits). Last month the boy fell and died. The heartbreak of loss, along with the comfort felt by the return—if only for two days—of the boy’s spirit, is felt by even the most uninitiated visitor. Today thousands of tourists will flood Huaquechula to view its Día de los Muertos celebration. Once a quiet annual tradition combining the pre-Hispanic cult of the dead with Catholicism’s All Saints’ Day, El Día de los Muertos in Huaquechula has been promoted as a tourist destination for Mexicans and international tourists. When the national office of tourism replaced the Ruta de Cortés with the less politically charged Ruta de los Dioses (Route of the Gods), the celebration in Huaquechula

Figure 2.19a and b.  Día de los Muertos altars honor recently deceased family members and are open for public visitation in the community of Huaquechula, Puebla. (Photograph by Mia Dalglish.)

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Figure 2.20.  The Discovery Channel films the traditional spreading of marigold petals in Huaquechula, Puebla. (Photograph by Mia Dalglish.)

was identified as an attraction. In the last few years it has become a combination of a pilgrimage and a town fair. On the day we visit, film crews from the Discovery Channel are setting up in the house of a recently deceased sixty-year-old man. Dozens of people carrying candles jam the foyer of this well-to-do household. A relative arrives and places a bottle of the deceased’s favorite beer on the fifteen-foot-high, three-tiered white altar, called an ofrenda. In the interior patio a team of indigenous women prepares tortillas, large ceramic pots of mole, and chocolate de agua on open-air fires, while others pile high platters of sweet breads, tamales, and fresh fruit to offer the visitors. A woman from the city of Puebla has made the pilgrimage to Huaquechula for five years now and enjoys telling us about pre-Hispanic beliefs about death and the afterlife. She notes that the holiday is not just a remembering of the deceased, but a celebration of their return: “I know that for these days my dead relatives live again!” (Pilar Pacheco, interview). In the zócalo, the usual dominance of a pre-Hispanic piedra del sol (stone calendar) and the stone fragment of a deity are obscured by carnival rides and stalls filled with traditional sweets. Though the town was once a thriving Nahua center, only about 20 percent of its three thousand inhabitants now speak Nahuatl. New cultural influences are felt as outsiders bring their gaze (and their money) to bear on centuries-old traditions.

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A Case Study: San Juan Bautista Cuauhtinchan, Lorenzo García Bonilla Nowadays, we go back to the same way of doing things, just like it was in the conquest.

Near Tepeaca a small road winds away from the congested two-lane highway, up through hills and ravines dotted with nopal cactus, mules, and dry garden plots planted with “the three sisters” (corn, beans, and squash) awaiting the now-tardy start of the rainy season. A sign marks a cattle crossing, a legacy of the Spaniards who populated the area with livestock and began centuries-long disputes with locals over grazing and water rights. Another sign announces the entrance to Cuauhtinchan, Nido de Aguila (Eagle’s Nest), a town of about three thousand inhabitants. Conquered around the time of Cortés’s Tepeaca campaign, then moved from its original hilltop and cave location and evangelized in the late 1520s, the original settlement predated the Toltecs. Cuauhtinchan boasts five títulos—the postconquest native cartographic histories (also known as codices) which include territorial mapping as well as information about genealogy, conquests, and migrations—that prove Cuauhtinchan’s importance in pre-Hispanic times. We know that the area was home to an extensive, multiethnic series of altepetls well before it was conquered in the late 1400s by the Aztecs. Today, dozens of nearby hills and caves contain sacred pre-Hispanic sites. Some were in use for worship as late as the 1960s, but most are still unexcavated. Ornate west-facing sites render tribute to the sacred Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl, god and goddess of the great volcanoes that separate the Valley of Puebla from Mexico City and are believed to be sacred to Tlaloc, the rain deity. Today, a few cobblestone roads surround a small zócalo with a parish church and town government building. Farther up the main street the imposing Franciscan monastery, San Juan Bautista (1528–54), is half-hidden by purple bougainvillea and jacaranda trees with their lavender flowers. Inside the church, four men attached with safety belts to a three-story scaffold work under portable lights on a sixteenth-century fresco that soars forty-five feet up on the side of the main altar. A soft-spoken man in his forties smiles broadly, inviting my questions as he climbs down the scaffold. Lorenzo García Bonilla talks with measured pride about being the foreman of a team of local men. For years he has been painstakingly restoring the artwork, which was “made by conquering minds, but indigenous hands.” The Franciscan friars, he explains, believed in a process of spiritual conquest they called “reconciliation” and “mediation”—a relatively softer approach that often conflicted with the will of the military conquistadors. After the 1580s, the secular clergy began the harsher practice of “imposing.” Clearly aware that he is restoring part of the very culture that contributed to the destruction of the indigenous way of life, García also sees how the monastery preserves many pre-Hispanic artistic traditions. One mural of the Annunciation, reminiscent of European medieval woodcuts, depicts a tlaquimilolli (a knotted sacred bundle) made out of jaguar skin on Mary’s bed, while an eagle and jaguar painted in

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Figure 2.21.  The sixteenth-century Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2, which records the mythical founding of the altepetl, is being used today by town members to petition for status as a comunidad indígena.

pre-Hispanic codex style stand guard. In the cloister’s courtyard, the spiritual heart of the monastery originally reserved for the friars, stone eagle and jaguar (ocelotl) heads tower over a fountain. An archaeologist notes the parallels in the artistry and symbolism of both cloister and codices: “Here, in the spiritual heart of the conquering colonial power, the [indigenous] mapmakers live on.”28 García laments, however, that “we don’t know what we’d be like now if our culture had continued.” He points out with a certain ironic pride that Cortés had to conquer Cuauhtinchan first before he could retake Tenochtitlan. The títulos asking for recognition of territory and tribute rights illustrate the altepetl’s assertion of privilege in the new colonial order. García then traces the marginalization of Cuauhtinchan, a territory that once extended up to the door of the present-day cathedral in Puebla: it was subdivided by the Spaniards into encomiendas and later absorbed into other municipios (districts). All that is left now is a town of a few thousand people. The original Cuauhtinchan títulos have been expropriated by museums in Puebla, Mexico City, and France. Other Nahuatl documents detailing Cuauhtinchan’s past fill the recently restored archive in the town’s Palacio Municipal, but no local people can read them. By the turn of the twentieth century, García comments, all the Nahuatl speakers had died off: “They even took away our Nahuatl.” García and a team of local citizens are fighting centuries of loss and, more urgently, the threat of further cultural and political conquest and absorption. What began in 1987 with the careful restoration of religious art executed by the first

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postconquest generation of indigenous artisans has become part of broader efforts to reclaim and even reintroduce indigenous traditions. Since the mid-1990s, with both national and international laws increasingly supporting the recognition and preservation of native ethnic groups, towns like Cuauhtinchan have mobilized.29 Cuauhtinchan has initiated the long, difficult legal process to be named an official comunidad indígena. The status would enable them to protect precious—and sometimes sacred—resources from further destruction. García explains that they have retained a lawyer and will present their case to state officials in Puebla: “That’s the only way we can protect ourselves, because all of the indigenous communities have their own autonomous laws. . . . It’s one way to protect our hills, our woods, because they are destroying them all.” He recognizes that attaining comunidad status will be an uphill battle. Although Cuauhtinchan boasts a rich cultural heritage and five official títulos, many of the indicators of a vibrant contemporary indigenous culture, such as language, dress, and rituals, are not as evident in the town. The art restorer talks of the town’s efforts to find a Nahuatl teacher, but also notes the most pressing need for many households: “to have money to eat, and that’s it.” Still, an increasing number of its residents now self-identify as indigenous. An impressive number of outsiders, mostly archaeologists and historians from Mexico City and, more recently, Harvard, have worked extensively in the area. David Carrasco’s monumental Cave, City, and Eagle’s Nest (2007) published the work of a team of scholars on the significance of one postconquest título the size of a large tablecloth. The Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2 depicts a complex mixture of ritual and mythical journey, a history that spans centuries and includes claims to territory.30 The presence of outsiders who value the town’s past has helped fuel the resurgence in indigenous heritage and identity in the last two decades. In 2006 the Franciscan convent was named one of the hundred most endangered historic sites by the World Monument Fund, and American Express pledged $100,000 to help with the restoration. García observes that these foreigners “have more culture in terms of study, but less hands-on knowledge. We learn it because we live in it.” As we leave the quiet peace inside the Franciscan walls and walk a block to the edge of town, García points to a long stretch of wooded hills about half a mile beyond bean fields that are awaiting rain. These sacred hills gave meaning to their original altepetl as a place that drew rain to their fields and honored the god of rain and fertility. Today the term “bosque” is used—like don Lupe’s “el cerrito” and “el monte”—to refer not only to the woods but also to the resources it produces and the sacredness it is believed to hold.31 The recently built CEMEX cement factory looms on the other side of the fields. It has already stripped bare a portion of the woods, and plans are being developed to expand it. The military and legal battles already lost so many centuries ago do not favor the odds for a better outcome this time around. A growing number of foreign visitors to the town and new national economic interests may help the cause, but each will bring its own set of challenges.

The Spanish City Puebla de Los Angeles

Each of the towns and cities we have just visited in the Valley of Puebla reveal the vital rhythms of places that layer the pre-Hispanic past with Spanish colonialization and post-Independence national agendas. As we move to the regional heart of these places, to the city that was established for Spaniards and their descendants, the role that conquest memory and history plays is very different. Puebla is Mexico’s fourth largest city and the key link between the coast and Mexico City. Yet, Poblanos look to outlying areas in an attempt to understand the diversity of their state. In 1531 Puebla de los Angeles was established in the lightly settled valley of Cuetlaxcoapan, formerly a staging ground for ritual flower wars between area ethnic groups. According to legend, the first bishop of Tlaxcala had a prophetic dream about a fertile valley with few indigenous settlements where Spaniards could establish a city of artisans and monasteries to aid colonization and to showcase New Spain as a paradise of Christianity. The city was built as a república de españoles by indigenous laborers from surrounding communities who were housed in separate areas. Puebla’s famous baroque gold-leaf Dominican Chapel of the Virgin of Rosario, for example, was constructed by indigenous laborers, but upon its completion they were not allowed inside. Instead, they attended church in the relatively simple Capilla de los Naturales built in the adjacent courtyard. By the midcolonial period the city boasted dozens of baroque convents, monasteries, and churches built around a central zócalo and cathedral. These religious institutions configured a cultural landscape that created a strong creole community identity.32 Since colonial times this city has been a wealthy, powerful center exerting significant political and cultural control throughout the region. In an attempt to shake off its colonial past, Benito Juárez renamed it the Heróica Puebla de Zaragoza, commemorating its role in defeating the French (on Cinco de Mayo, 1862). Today Puebla is growing rapidly—it is the first large city traveling southeast between Central America and Mexico City, and a key destination for the exodus from Mexico City that began after the 1985 earthquake. 151

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Figure 2.22.  The city of Puebla is built on a Spanish grid design with central plazas that showcase churches. These continue to be the focal point of community life. (© Steve Raymer.)

Until the mid-1990s Puebla was a one-day stop for tourists: the old colonial center was congested and smog-filled, although boasting some of the best examples of New World baroque art (it was named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987). Now international hotels and cultural centers in renovated monasteries punctuate the historical center. The once-homely zócalo fills with families who are enjoying gardens, fountains, and a host of civic events, including the city’s new annual Día de los Muertos civic celebration. While examples of the strong U.S. economic influence border the zócalo, with a Burger King, a McDonald’s and a Domino’s Pizza, the

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state tourist office nestled between them displays posters of indigenous dances and waterfalls from its remote Sierra del Norte, and calls the region the Sierra Mágica. Despite the cultural renaissance and increasing international visibility of Puebla, which draw heavily on the city’s colonial past and the exotic elements of the state’s indigenous present, there is little evidence of the man who set colonization in motion. Only the Hotel Colonial just off the zócalo, which appeals to European and U.S. tourists, dares to display a portrait of Hernán Cortés. His image, which shows him humbly holding his helmet and gazing wearily toward the heavens, greets guests at the reception desk. Puebla is still a conservative criollo stronghold, a city where people in general have not had to confront on a daily basis the legacy of centuries of upheaval and extinction. The receptionist, who is working under the watchful eye of Cortés, Verónica López, emphasizes, “Puebla, if it’s got anything, it’s Spanish culture; the indigenous people are elsewhere, in places like Cuetzalan.” And yet, every informant in Puebla focused on the role of indigenous peoples—both past and present—when they talked about the conquest. Elaborating a point of view often heard among people who have had limited contact with indigenous communities, a middle-aged professor of mathematics at the University of Puebla argues that Mexico’s social ills stem from two sources. First, the Spaniards who conquered Mexico were “just low-class Spaniards; that is . . . the worst kind. Hernán Cortés came . . . only with folks who got out of jails, and really because of that we’re stuck with that culture that we can never leave behind.” Second, although pre-Hispanic indigenous peoples originally had a “culture superior to [that of] the conquistadors,” they all fled to remote regions. Now groups such as the Lacandon (in Chiapas) and Tarahumara (in the northwestern Sierra Madre) “will continue to be an ignorant people . . . definitely . . . always with very backward cultural tendencies. They don’t want to get out of their rut. They have a very bad religion; they continue to believe in things that are no longer [valid]. And that’s our backwardness” (Jesús Chávez, interview). With no explanation of the gap that he sees between preconquest culture and “backward” present-day indigenous culture, the professor focuses only on what he views as Mexico’s legacy: “low-class Spaniards” and an “ignorant [indigenous] people.” An administrator in the Puebla state archives notes that, in general, Poblanos have unwittingly absorbed post-Revolutionary national ideological campaigns over the decades and simply repeat the paradigm in which “only dead Indians are exalted” and all Spaniards are “low-class people” (Pilar Pacheco, interview). Many people in the younger generation, however, linked their ideas about the conquest with changes they observe in their own attitudes as they consider the many indigenous communities in their state. As one college student observes, “The Zapatista movement was a great achievement for the country’s native peoples . . . now the indigenous people are no longer afraid to recognize themselves as indigenous, because government policies had put them in the same bag as the poor . . . either you’re poor or you’re a peasant farmer. And the Zapatista struggle made it so that the

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indigenous people from every state of the republic could say, I’m Mije, or I’m Zapoteco, or I’m Nahua and I accept myself just as I am, and they’ve recognized the value of their languages and their cultures, something that until 1994 they couldn’t openly express” (Alejandra Valencia Niño, interview). Hugo Zayas, a student of Mexican history, notes that his worldview changed radically when he left his native Puebla to intern for half a year in an indigenous community’s museum (Xochiapulco), helping to set up the museum and record local histories. He left Puebla expecting to see indios in traditional white cotton dress, selling a few things on a blanket. Instead of finding this stereotype, he encountered indigenous peoples dressed in jeans, who traveled to the United States and were still directly connected to traditional ways of running their town and church with mayordomos. He observes, “In the city you can’t see those things, until you go among them and at least partly get in there and live together with them. Then you realize they have a completely different dynamic, that they see the world in a completely different way. What goes on around them does affect them, but, even so, they have a very special way of leading their lives that isn’t completely like living in the cities, right? Even if they move to a different setting and adapt to it, they still keep their cultural identity. So it was at that moment when I really began to see indigenous people” (Hugo Zayas, interview).

Figure 2.23.  A community elder records local Nahua history for the new community museum in Xochiapulco in the Sierra Norte de Puebla. (Photograph by Irenne García and Coralia Pérez. Courtesy of Hugo Zayas.)

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While an increasing number of indigenous communities, such as Ixtacamaxtitlan and Cuauhtinchan, recast historical memory to formulate new ways of bringing attention to their work and demands for equality and recognition, many Poblanos turned interview questions about the conquest into a narrative of their own attempts to work with the state’s indigenous communities. They also recount how they have learned that they must tread carefully, aware of the potential of contributing to the loss of what they hope to help. In the interviews below, a retired teacher recalls the year in her youth spent working to “modernize” a Nahua community through Hispanization. A younger woman studying “alternative tourism” and new legislation about cultural heritage describes her hope to develop sustainable tourism with indigenous communities. And the former state director of indigenous culture talks of challenging a “hypocritical state discourse” that claims to be helping indigenous communities while “impeding their autonomous self-definition.”

Luz María Mora Beltrán, Puebla Another thing I liked about them is that they are fighters. They don’t keep quiet anymore. I think I also taught them something about that because I was always very rebellious.

In 1948 a seventeen-year-old girl, accompanied by her grandmother, left the rustic hill town of Cuetzalan and walked three hours along a muddy path through coffee groves to the indigenous community of Xaltipan in the municipality of Xiutetelco, on the humid (eastern) side of the Sierra Norte. With only a primary-school education, Luz María had been hired as a rural teacher, part of the federal government’s new program to help “modernize” indigenous communities by sending them Spanishspeaking schoolteachers. Bilingual teachers would not come into use for decades. In the community of thirty Nahuatl-speaking families, only the president, don Alberto García, spoke some Spanish, while Luz María, born and raised in Puebla, did not speak a word of Nahuatl. Sitting in her close friend’s living room in Puebla today, wearing the traditional huipil, a loose-fitting white cotton dress with rainbow-colored, detailed embroidery around the yoke, Mora recalls in vivid detail her year as a rural schoolteacher over half a century ago. She is writing a memoir, “Don Alberto y yo,” about her experience as a young woman determined to bring Spanish language and household culture to her students. She narrates polished vignettes about a past full of clear divisions between “them” (ellos) and “me” (yo)—she uses the plural nosotros (us) only once in a two-hour interview. But her story is also full of respect for her Nahua students. Without a word in common with her students, the young teacher began with a simple but significant lesson on classroom management, teaching two important commands: “line up” (formar) and “dismissed” (romper). Later, she observed the

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students’ connection with the natural world and began to use the world around them as a lesson plan. Over time, the young woman began a campaign to teach them “healthy” customs, such as lifting beds and eating areas off the floor. She recalls, “I was always very rebellious.” She was infuriated to learn that outsiders forced town inhabitants to provide free labor to other areas in the county of Cuetzalan, so the teacher coached the community on their rights, informing them that this labor practice was illegal. Despite her and others’ efforts in the last half century, she says, similar practices still persist today. Even as a strong-minded liberal, Luz María never interfered with the townspeople’s spiritual beliefs. Her biggest challenge was the itinerant priest who visited the community on feast days and Sundays. A product of the post-Revolutionary break with the Catholic Church, the seventeen-year-old felt no obligation to attend weekly Mass: “I’m Catholic, but I wasn’t very Catholic, and I’d sometimes take advantage of Saturdays and Sundays to go visit my mother, or my friends would invite me to a party in another town. Remember I was seventeen years old.” The priest tried to turn the community against the “teacher-devil” (diablo-maestra), saying she would bring evil, illness, and crop failure. He even threatened to cancel Mass on the community’s important annual feast day. After a confrontation in the confessional between the priest and Luz María—and with the discreet intervention of don Alberto after a community gathering (jura) on her behalf—the two reached a peaceful coexistence. Through Mora’s memories, we glimpse the often unexpected negotiations between indigenous communities and a variety of outsiders (in this case from both the church and the state). The picture takes on more complexity, however, when Mora reveals that the priest spoke perfect Nahuatl. In her story, he is the “fanatic” who wants to keep outsiders away, while the indios of Xaltipan practice equanimity. The community turned to its traditional jura system to keep both outsiders working for their community. They wanted Sunday Mass as well as Spanish classes for their children. The scenario may be less about religious beliefs and more about power within the community. Although Spanish-authored conquest narratives often describe a scenario in which people of indigenous heritage rejected regular observance of Catholic sacraments, the archives reveal many cases in which native communities and Franciscan friars worked together to maintain control. When the Augustinians replaced the Franciscans in sixteenth-century Teotihuacan, for instance, the native community rioted. In other cases, Franciscan friars used their knowledge of Nahuatl to keep other outsiders out of the indigenous community.33 Mora’s story suggests a certain continuity with colonial history rather than an upheaval; through resistance and adaptation, the community had developed ways to maintain control over Xaltipan. Luz María Mora’s story reveals her own process of discovery about indigenous culture. She echoes her mid-twentieth-century education when she describes meeting on her first day in Xaltipan with the “illiterate” (analfabeto) president of the community and with the children who had been taught only “farm work; that is, their own

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traditions, but things related to culture and the like, nothing, absolutely nothing.” By the time she gets to the story of don Alberto’s skillful negotiation with the priest, the president has become a respected “wise man”: “You’ll see how illiterate people can be very wise, . . . this gentleman . . . had wisdom and reasoning beyond what some educated people have.” She recognizes now that he was a skillful go-between, a cultural broker who helped his community negotiate Western practices within the context of local tradition and needs. As Mora continues, her vignettes of the past become increasingly interlaced with the present. In 1999 she returned to Xaltipan for the first time since leaving in 1950. She visited former students, now in their sixties, and watched their grandchildren performing the traditional danza de los quetzales, the dance tradition of the Sierra del Norte that may date as far back as the Toltecs, at the local bilingual school established for the town’s now sixty or seventy families. She proudly shows me photographs of her godchild and the family’s raised eating and cooking area. She criticizes the tendency today for teachers to live outside their students’ communities, saying that they never get to know the community’s cultural practices. She feels that the national standardized exam system further impedes progress: “It makes no sense . . . there should be an exam that corresponds to each person’s place of origin and to the educational level they may have, and to their social level.”

Figure 2.24.  Neighbors visit in the Totonaco community of Caxhuacan in the Sierra Norte de Puebla. (Photograph by Lucía Alvarado Herrera. Courtesy of Concepción Zayas.)

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As a young woman, Mora was eager to return to family and city life and left Xaltipan after only one year. Now, from the perspective of a woman who went on to get her degree in education, marry, and raise children, Mora understands that working as a rural schoolteacher was the adventure of a lifetime. She is nostalgic about living next to the old rustic, one-room schoolhouse and about the community’s old way of greeting people by barely touching hands. Many changes have come to Xaltipan in recent years: running water, electricity, and a modern schoolhouse—and she was one of the first to initiate the wave of modernization in the Sierra. But her ambiguous feelings about the role of Hispanization in her beloved Xaltipan remain. Now, Mora values the very culture that as a youth she helped change. She laments that indigenous people “are disappearing, they’re already disappearing, right now. There are still people (not all) who do marginalize the indigenous.” She understands better the conflict between the two cultures. She recognizes as well the enduring violation perpetrated against indigenous peoples in the name of the Christian God, “culture,” or national economic agendas. She underlines the depth of misunderstanding by telling the story of indigenous tamemes (porters) who were used even in Cortés’s time to carry Spanish supplies. When the Spaniards asked if they wanted to eat, the carriers responded in Nahuatl, “Nimayana” (I am hungry). The conquistadors thought they were saying “ni mañana” (not even tomorrow), and so did not feed them. The former rural schoolteacher concludes, “When you research all the religions, you realize it’s all the same, isn’t it? That the same God is everyone’s with a different name . . . and an enslaved people can’t be happy.”

Cynthia Flores Bautista, City of Puebla Tourist Office As a Mexican woman, however, I think he’s [Cortés] terrible. Why? Because he was wrong. He appropriated things that weren’t his.

Carefully crafted Talavera pottery, a type of majolica ceramic with trademark blue glazes introduced by the first Spanish settlers, lines the storefront window of Puebla’s state tourist office on the zócalo. Posters showing mist-covered mountains and people in traditional indigenous dress advertise Cuetzalan and the Sierra Mágica. A bright woman in her early twenties, Cynthia Flores Bautista, works one of her final shifts as she completes a four-year tourist administration degree at the University of Puebla. Flores wants people to know “our own country” and specializes in alternative tourism, which includes contact with indigenous people. She recalls her great surprise on a class field trip to the indigenous community of Cuetzalan four hours away. The region still has “what we would call witches, shamans, healers.” More surprising yet, the people of Cuetzalan speak Nahuatl or Totonaco, and even English, more frequently than they speak Spanish, owing to the importance of international tourism in their area. Yet, as she observed deep poverty, she asked herself: “Gosh,

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how’s it possible that in Mexico, being so rich and all, such things could happen? You’ve got to analyze these things; you’ve got to look deeper into what’s going on, and how to help.” Flores sees incongruity in the fact that the people in comunidades buy Coca-Cola but do not have money for clothing; it is another type of conquest. She grapples with how to help. There must be a two-pronged approach, she notes: “Alternative tourism tries to maintain, rescue, and value their customs,” while it also provides economic sustainability to ensure quality of life. But obstacles are everywhere. School­ children in Puebla are taught “half-truths” in government books about the conquest of indigenous civilizations: “The government finds a thinking people inconvenient.” Generations of children in comunidades in the Sierra del Norte have learned not to trust outsiders, at least since the colonial-era practice of imposición, the imposition of foreign cultural and religious customs. The gap between the two worlds is huge. Projects initiated from outside the community are often rejected, unless direct payments of cash are involved. The student clearly understands the contradictions and paradoxes within her own views. She stands divided about Cortés: “In general, I think each person has their own specific way of thinking. Personally, I think if we look at it in a cold and calculating way—I’m a tourism manager, so, as an administrator—I believe he was a great leader because he was able to accomplish many things in spite of the situation. As a Mexican woman, however, I think he’s terrible. Why? Because he was wrong. He appropriated things that weren’t his.” And while she promotes the Sierra Mágica, Flores acknowledges that she isn’t ready to live there. She would be treated as an outsider and would have to make do without urban comforts. Instead, she wants to help fight the insular tendency of her fellow Poblanos: “When you run into an indigenous person, you stop and ask yourself, ‘What’s going on?’ But it only happens then, because people usually go on with their normal lives, worrying about their own affairs, nothing else . . . that is, about their families.” The urgency of daily life, she maintains, causes many nonindigenous Mexicans not to stop and consider the meaning and impact of old stereotypes and current issues.

Gerardo Pérez Muñoz, the Historic City Center There’s a low-intensity but systematic genocide, since the conquest 515 years ago; it’s become systematic. Now they don’t kill you with weapons, but they do it with hunger, you see?

On April 7, 2008, Gerardo Pérez Muñoz, the former (and recently dismissed) state director of the department for indigenous culture (Unidad Regional de Culturas Populares e Indígenas Puebla), filed a petition for reinstatement, calling his dismissal “unjust,” “absurd,” and “Kafkaesque.” The petition included an impressive

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list of his accomplishments within indigenous communities, including workshops on indigenous arts, history, languages, legislation, and medicine. The case erupted into a scandal in the local and national press. According to Pérez, he was fired because of his philosophy of—and success at—promoting more autonomy and visibility for Puebla’s pueblos originarios (First Nations). While government discourse promotes both, in practice it does not: “There’s a real Mexico that exists and a legal Mexico.” The result, he argues, is “schizophrenic”: new laws protect indigenous rights while the state fails to enforce them and daily practice undermines them. We met for three interviews over the course of a year and a half: the first while he was still director, the second at a small café hidden inside an old colonial building, the last on the zócalo in the public eye, after his dismissal. Pérez’s uniform is blue jeans and he smokes Camels. A small-framed wiry man in his midfifties, he speaks with a quiet, articulate intensity using the informal tú, perhaps in an attempt to draw the listener into a more intimate connection with the issues he raises. Though Pérez speaks some Nahuatl, Totonaco, and Mixteca, he is not of direct indigenous ancestry. He first experienced indigenous life as an observer in his native Huauchinango in the Sierra del Norte, an interethnic region with five different indigenous groups (Nahuas, Totonacos, Na Nus, Otomies, and Tepehuas). Later, as a young man preparing for the priesthood (which he never entered), he lived in indigenous communities. Then he joined the Communist Party and began fighting on their behalf. In 1976 Pérez and a Totonaco colleague helped organize the Cumbre de Barbados, the first gathering of pueblos indígenas in Latin America. Later the two tried to unionize coffee workers in Zihuateutla. In 1988 his colleague was assassinated, probably for political reasons. Pérez himself was asked to leave Huauchinango. He moved to Puebla to study and teach philosophy and later took the position as director at Culturas Populares. One of his first projects brought together local chroniclers from different comunidades to discuss their local histories and traditions. Meeting in the wake of the 1992 quincentennial, he observed that at first many chroniclers focused on the initial moments of the Spanish conquest in order to challenge Eurocentric histories. Now, increasingly, local chroniclers are developing longer historical frameworks and more nuanced readings of their local histories. Because the Puebla region was the site of the first large-scale massacre and some of the most intense evangelization, explains Pérez, its many different indigenous ethnic groups retreated farther into the Sierra, creating what Aguirre Beltrán called zonas de refugio, many of which remain today.34 The state of Puebla has the fourth largest indigenous population of any state in Mexico (about 20 percent). Altogether they speak some forty distinct languages. This complex multiethnic situation—very different from the more uniform Maya in the Yucatan—makes policy reform particularly challenging. The comunidades originarias, he continues, are distinguished not only by dress and language but by a completely different system of symbolism and interpretation. In order to understand each community, he says, “you have to share in their rituals . . . their festivals.”

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Figure 2.25.  Former director of the Department of Regional Popular and Indigenous Culture for the state of Puebla, Gerardo Pérez Muñoz is an activist who works with comunidades throughout the Sierra Norte de Puebla. (© Steve Raymer.)

Shortly before his dismissal, a second annual festival showcasing indigenous creadores (creative artists) was canceled by Conaculta (the National Council for Culture and the Arts) with little notice and less explanation. Pérez believes that his goal to empower the creadores conflicted with state efforts to turn the event into a tourist destination: “Our project has nothing, nothing in common with the vision that tourism has; because the vision that tourism has is to folklorize the indigenous communities.” He elaborates how his program allowed indigenous groups to organize their own presentations and lead them. After notifying the press about the last-minute cancellation, the director quickly organized a highly visible workshop on indigenous rights. Leaders in developing policy for Mexico’s native ethnic groups, including one of the founders of the new National Institute for Indigenous Languages and a lawyer specializing in recent international laws about cultural heritage and diversity, gathered with area students to examine the future. At the end of one of the sessions, Pérez noted that there were only four indigenous representatives (diputados) out of five hundred in Mexico’s House of Representatives. Within months he was fired. Instead of quietly retreating and taking a government position outside Puebla, the former director increased the visibility of his cause. “I have a restless spirit,” he says.

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His strong vocation for the cause means that “they can’t disappear me.” He has organized forums and conferences and for over five years now has broadcast weekly on the radio, as well as publishing a quarterly magazine, Colibrí: Publicación en Lenguas Originarias, dedicated to exploring a variety of creative works and political issues in indigenous languages. As we talk at the café on the zócalo, the former director interrupts the interview several times to hand out to acquaintances a poster announcing a state forum on the topic “Diversidad Cultural y Discriminación Social en Puebla,” sponsored by his new cultural collective, Xikmtikan, which is dedicated to fighting both racial and sexual-orientation discrimination. He also points to a man who turns out to be a former PAN (Partido Acción Nacional) senator (2000–2006) and current member of the Comisión de Asuntos Indígenas: “You have here before you . . . the man who, in 2001, when he was Puebla’s state senator, voted against endorsing . . . the San Andrés accords.” Pérez asserts that the former senator represents the agenda of many elite Mexicans: his politics seek to provide more social services from the outside to “indio-objects,” a system that only deepens the centuries-long marginalization of indigenous groups. Pérez articulates a frontline position that we also heard from two people living in comunidades, Mazahua and Nopalteca in the Zongolica. We will hear it again in Mexico City from several informants who are working in the fields of media and education to change culture and policy. The fight to prevent the loss of pluriethnic cultural heritage must be fought alongside the rights for First Nations’ self-governance. Increased autonomy would allow for new economic models based on individual community needs, resources, and traditions as well as the mobilization of modern media: radio, television, and the Internet.35 Pérez sees many changes in his country. He believes that for the first time in five hundred years, pueblos originarios are regrouping. Mexico is opening up a space to train communities. Mere recognition of Puebla’s culturas originarias is insufficient. Pérez argues that in order to break the pattern that Bonfil Batalla called the divide between “real Mexico” and “imaginary Mexico,” indigenous communities must define their own agendas and economic models. Only in this way, claims the activist, will they be able to combat centuries of poverty, exacerbated by the agrarian reforms in the 1990s and the massive emigration of young people from these communities. Having led activists and government policymakers for decades, Pérez continues to participate in the highly charged debate about the role of state and national government in protecting indigenous rights, a fight he insists has been ongoing since the conquest. While outsiders such as national and state governments—and Pérez himself—may facilitate the process, he emphasizes: “I’m not their spokesman. I have a relationship with them.” He repeats, “Ni tú ni yo somos su vocero: Neither you nor I speak for them.”

Interview Selections, Part II

René Bonilla López How do you see the conquest? They say it wasn’t a conquest, but a meeting of two cultures and all that, which is a real fallacy. The truth is we’re not even children of mestizaje, or a mixing of races, but children of rape. Show me a marriage license that says a Spaniard was officially married to an indigenous woman. Here they gave away women like animals. More and more I’m seeing how, when Cortés came through here, they gave him several so-called young maidens, to win his good graces. But that was just the beginning because later came the specific abuse from the ones who took us down the path to becoming children of shame, children of the humiliation they forced on us as indigenous people.

* * * In my opinion, the way they conquered us was barbaric, a crime against humanity. That’s my personal view of the conquest, okay? And so, as you can see, that small group of abandoned children wandering around was precisely the basis of mestizaje in Mexico today. So, where does that idea of a great mestizaje come from? A meeting of two cultures? An encounter between two worlds? No, no, and no. Anyone who knows history has to agree that what those people did when they came to Mexico was a true crime against humanity. But, on the other hand, maybe it’s also an issue that should be left alone; you shouldn’t rub salt in the wound or pick at the scab. No, enough already. It happened; it’s a matter for history. And what we have to do now is just analyze, analyze objectively, isn’t that right? If we’re not objective when we analyze our history—our historic origins from the colonial period to where we are today—we’re at a loss because, then, we don’t know. . . . If we’re to know where we want to go, or what kind of race, or what kind of people we are, we need to fully understand our identity, and those are our origins, starting with the colonial period, don’t you think so? 163

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Here, like everywhere else, people love their history and fully identify with it. Look, some people still want to see men wearing their traditional pants and women in their traditional native wool outfits with a simple or embroidered blouse and a shawl or something similar, taking tiny steps with their head bowed, as if they were weighted down by history and asking for forgiveness for still being alive. That’s what they think of as being indigenous. But no, being indigenous isn’t like that anymore. Indigenous people are gaining awareness of their origins, of their path in this life, and of the weight of history on them, on their generation, and on the life they have to live. So we’re not ashamed of anything. Truthfully, what should we be ashamed of? Some things make us sad, but nothing makes us feel ashamed.

* * * I think that all the contact with another world, globalization, and the events that influence daily life in general, have done nothing but reveal exactly what we are and help to defend indigenismo, or what it means to be indigenous. So, it hasn’t had any impact. I feel flattered when they call me Indian. So, that’s it, wanting to recover our history, organizing a Nahuatl language course to be taught here . . . everyone signs up. What I mean to say is . . . they’re traditions. . . . Indeed, we’ve lost a lot of our culture . . . a lot. We have. The elders have. Why do we say we’ve lost our culture when there’s a contemporary culture we can adopt? That’s not it, we’ve lost the culture of true indigenismo, the traditional dress, the language. But only because we’ve had no choice. I mean, if we’d been given the choice, we’d speak Nahuatl and dress in our indigenous ways. But, historically, there was no other option. So we’re getting back what we can. That’s why I was talking about true expressions of what it is to be Mexican, or mexicanidad, given how we feel as true indigenous people. And that’s precisely it. So the jaguar that was unearthed has become a symbol for Ixtacamaxtitlan? This jaguar is a symbol of power. We consider it the tepetyollotl. The tepetyollotl is the heart of the hill, but it’s just a reference to the preclassical mother culture, the Olmecs: there are no real jaguars here. It’s a jaguar half-seated on the jaws of a snake. It’s a symbol of power because, let me explain, the jaguar represented . . . or maybe I should say it was a very powerful symbol associated with the earth, with the hill, with power, with everything that is powerful. And the snake’s jaws it sits on . . . for us, one of the many different meanings for the snake has to do with representing a crowd. A very prestigious archaeologist who’s now dead, but he was here not long ago, Professor Pareyón, was a teacher for the ENAH [Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia/National School of Anthropology and History] in Mexico City. He was a leading expert in the field, and he used to say: “How could the snake not represent a crowd? Imagine, from the top of Colhua in its splendor, a crowd walking on a road. What does it look like? It looks and moves like a snake. So that’s how the serpent

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came to represent a crowd.” It’s the power of the hill over the multitude; it’s very hard to find a graphic representation of Ixtacamaxtitlan’s political importance. In other words, it’s a symbol of power. It’s as if you’re saying that it represents the importance of this region as the entrance to the sierra. Now we have highways that go through the sierra, but since the head steward, caretaker, or tlapizque, of the Mexica was here, they collected tributes here. They brought them all here. That’s why this location was important. It was the start of the sierra; Ixtacamaxtitlan was the entrance.

José Guadalupe Ramos Flores Where does the name of this hill come from? In the battle they had a great big animal, the mare of this guy called Pedro de Morón. This mare was feisty. And right here, on this little hill, they cut its neck with a single blow of a macuahuitl, an Aztec sword, and it was done for. So the Spaniards couldn’t do anything anymore because the horses fell whenever anyone cut their legs. But one of Hernán Cortés’s captains . . . he wasn’t a captain, someone of rank that had come with Hernán Cortés, approached the Spanish army; they had a banner. So that man took the banner away from Cortés—and God knows where that banner ended up. That man, or that boss man, Hernán Cortés’s head honcho, was from San Pedro Nonoxtla, from a town upward of Santa Ana, where he was born, and he always went around . . . he was very fierce. And that man’s name was Diego Marcelino Tzonlima Chichimecateuctli. So that’s why this little hill is known as Chichimecateuctli, after that brave man’s name. What do you think about Hernán Cortés? What I think, and what many Mexicans think, is that it was very bad for him to come conquer us, another people and all, because we could have gone on like we were. But we’re partly against him and partly for him because he brought us many things. He brought us religion, manners, things we didn’t know about, and that’s helped. That’s why Hernán Cortés and his conquest did help us. But some don’t think so; they think he was a traitor, who knows. . . . He was beating them, killing them, that’s why they didn’t like him. But to sum it up, yes, it’s possible to see it another way. Yes, why not? We appreciate him because he did bring us many valuable things. Now, he was a despicable scoundrel too because he stole a lot of money; he just took it with him. But he also wept at the Noche Triste tree when the Spaniards were first defeated because his people—his soldiers—spread smallpox and wiped out the people there. Some of his people who did have gold with them got into the lake, and they sank because it weighed them down. That’s my way of thinking. Well, look, if different conquistadors had come, who knows what they would have brought us, good or bad, we don’t know; we really don’t know the answer to that. But for those who came, as we can see, there are many things that Mexico has benefited

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from. They were unwelcome because, well, they beat them, they killed them, and so many other things. But at any rate, we’re living in peace, and many of the things we got from Hernán Cortés are still useful to us. Yes, ma’am.

El Maestro Desiderio Hernández Xochitiotzin How did you get interested in the history of Tlaxcala and decide to paint it? I’m not a historian and have never been one, but the voice of a poet, Miguel N. Lida, suggested that I paint some murals in honor of my homeland. I lived in Puebla but I’m Tlaxcaltecan. And I took this on without realizing the enormous problem it was going to be. The first thing I did was go see a friend of mine who was also a historian, he wasn’t a professional either, but it was his calling; he told me about history. “Beware,” he said, “no history tells the truth; everyone writes history according to their interests, their mentality whether political, religious, commercial, etc.” So I asked him, “How can I understand?” He told me, “History must be seen as a special phenomenon of what has happened.” “Explain,” I asked, and he said, “Look, they killed a man or a woman; history is the fact that they killed him, then the research begins: Why was he killed? For money? To rob him? For an inheritance? So you must look for the historical event.” Then the biggest conflict is that there are two cultures. Two cultures . . . Each culture had its own vision of the world. What message do the murals convey? Freedom. What matters to me is that the murals don’t disappear. Not for my sake, but for the sake of the message they hold. Every single year . . . every year, the Tlaxcalteca people fight to be free. First, they fought when they came seeking land and following their gods. Then, they fought against the Tenochcas. Then, the Spaniards came, and they fought the Spaniards. Then, for political reasons they became allies to wipe out the Tenochcas, the common enemy. There are no Tenochcas left anywhere. They were done away with in the conquest and then in the colonial period. Independence came and they fought against the independence liberals who accused Tlaxcala of treason. And now there’s still fighting going on against the Mexico City centralist economic machine. They’re a people who are always struggling. The message of my murals is freedom, insofar as it’s possible; that’s a very dangerous thing to say and even more so to do. I know it.

Pedro Nájera Can you tell me about Tlaxcala and the conquest? Moctezuma I got angry at the Tlaxtacaltecas and he told them, “As punishment for killing my son, I will take away four products from your market.” And he took away cotton, salt, cacao, and precious feathers. They didn’t have those four products for

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sixty-two years. That’s why, when Cortés arrived, they made an alliance to get the products they needed. That’s why Tlaxcala was an ally of the Spaniards but never a friend of the Aztecs. That’s why there’s some confusion around the word traitor. You can’t be a traitor when you’re enemies; there’s treason when there’s friendship. When you’re enemies, you can’t be traitors. Because philosophically, it’s as if we, as Mexicans, had joined another country and gone against Mexico itself; then it would have been treason because there’s nationality involved and before that, there wasn’t. That’s why at first I said there were Mayas, Zapotecs, and each one took care of their territory. The whole thing about treason started with Independence, and it’s kept going on ever since. It’s the mentality we got from Spain that leads to calling someone a traitor, but it was really never like that here. No, it wasn’t really that way here. You hear about all this everywhere, from north to south. But it’s also been a stigma that’s minimized Tlaxcala economically as much as politically and all that, for sure. Yeah, the stigma’s affected things quite a bit. What do you think about the conquest? The conquest had to happen sooner or later. If we look at it from the positive side, those of us who have a different idea about the conquest, we see it as something good. Those who have a different way of thinking see it as something pretty bad. But the conquest was good. It’s like mixing two molecules to make something because with one you couldn’t have made anything. There had to be two, right? The ancients always believed in duality, in light and darkness, in life and death, and so it came to be: two ideas, two peoples, and they produced something. If not, others would have come to conquer us, and perhaps they would have gotten rid of us all, like the British who got rid of the Cherokees, the Navajos, the Redskins, and all the others. To me, the conquest was good. Cortés was very lucky, very clever, and he had the character to be able to do what he did on his own: the conquest, without having to ask anyone’s opinion. He said, “I’ll do it,” and then he does it. He was a great man.

The García Sánchez Family Ernesto Figueroa García What do you know about Hernán Cortés? Hernán Cortés was sent by a man who wanted to find out about the world, and he was sent here to Mexico. That’s when Hernán Cortés came to Mexico, to Veracruz, to the coast of Veracruz. It was there where he started to . . . where he wanted . . . where he left his ship and decided to find out more about these places, and he went to Veracruz and named it Veracruz. Then he went to Tlaxcala. There he joined forces with an army, with the Tlaxcaltecas. He joined his forces to conquer this place: Mexico. Then, after joining forces, he decided to come here to Cholula. Here he was well received and stayed for several months. But, also here, a great massacre took

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place because he was summoned back by his captain, or I should say, his captain called him back, but his soldiers didn’t know what to do. So they gathered everyone in this plaza, this one here, the Plaza de la Concordia. They got them together, and after a few minutes they started to kill them. According to the history, blood started to run through all the streets here in Cholula. When Hernán Cortés got back he saw the whole massacre and asked his soldiers what had happened. Since they didn’t know what to say, some were killed. Then, with the remaining soldiers, Cortés decided to continue his journey until he reached Teotihuacan [Tenochtitlan], also known as the Place of the Gods. And there he saw all that was there, and according to a prophecy, an ancient god from here, called Quetzalcoatl, was going to return, and the Aztecs thought that Cortés was Quetzalcoatl and they offered all that he [Quetzalcoatl] had: his golden clothes, fine feathers, and precious jewels. Cortés saw all that and said, “Well, I wonder where they got all of this.” He saw everything and said, “Things are very good here.” He stayed for several months until some of his soldiers advised him to take over. Then, in 1520, they started attacking. Many months went by until 1521, when he managed to take over, killing their emperor Moctezuma. But when Moctezuma was killed, according to legend, he didn’t die very fast. He lived and tried to kill Hernán Cortés. . . . I’m forgetting some, because I can’t remember everything. . . . Now, they recognized Hernán Cortés as their new emperor or king. Hernán Cortés decided to call this place Mexico–New Spain, and he converted them. Instead of their religion, he took away all of their sacrificial rituals and all that, and he ordered the worship of the Catholic religion. And so it went on until . . . well, later the indigenous people got tired and decided not to be ruled by Hernán Cortés or his viceroys. Then, Mexico became independent three hundred years after Cortés conquered New Spain. How did you learn this history? Our textbooks are where our history comes from. There’s also a place in Mexico City. It’s a tree, well, I don’t know if it still exists. It’s called the noche triste tree. One day, during a celebration at a temple in Teotihuacan [Tenochtitlan], Cortés’s soldiers began attacking them. Cortés didn’t want this to happen. So he went to a tree and started crying. He cried all night by that tree. Cortés was also a little greedy because he wanted them to give him more jewels, more gold. And he didn’t want the soldiers to kill the Aztec warriors because he wanted them to praise him more; to give him more because they thought he was Quetzalcoatl, which means feathered serpent. And that’s why he cried there. I don’t know why Cortés wanted to be so ambitious if that wasn’t his plan here in Mexico. Also, he had to have told his soldiers . . . told them what they had to do and what they didn’t have to do. Cortés is a traitor because he didn’t obey his captain; because instead of coming only to explore, he came to massacre and conquer. Some [Indians] did survive but couldn’t keep going because they didn’t have their wealth, and Cortés had taken it all away. In any case, that culture would’ve evolved

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with time and we’d all be the same today. I come from that culture. They were all very important for all of Mesoamerica. The Cholultecas were very important. Quetzalcoatl, Tlaloc, and many gods came to these pyramids. Only the pyramids and the statues remain. There you also learn some history.

Isabel García (Ernesto’s mother) Is that the same story you were taught? Well, we were told the same story, but the person I learned it from gave me a different take on it. My teacher was a woman. She told me it was brutal, you see. I suppose I should say there was really nothing heroic about it. On the contrary, the whole idea of coming to cause such destruction is really malicious. Perhaps the cultural transformation could have been done in a more peaceful way, without so much robbing. Even this business about the Noche Triste tree; I was taught that he really cried because he got a good deal of gold, because the emperors, or at least he thought all the emperors had a hidden treasure, Moctezuma’s famous treasure. That’s the very reason they tortured Cuauhtemoc. I was told that he really cried because he had grabbed a good amount of booty, but because he was fleeing so fast, he lost it. He dropped it, or, I don’t know, something happened, and when he realized it, he didn’t have it anymore. And then, he was so frustrated and angry he started crying. Do you like learning about history? I like it a lot. I like learning about cultures because I’m intrigued by the great respect for and all the knowledge they had about plants, if you know what I mean. I like plants a lot; I’m a biologist, so I’m very curious. I’m very interested in finding out new things because we’re always taught from the Western perspective. For example, how Aristotle classifies organisms, but we’re never told that the Teotihuacanos, the Aztecs, also had a classification system as well as very sophisticated systems of farming, of production, which is what helped them be a very successful culture. So I tell my son that it’s important for us to understand that part as well. Don’t you think so? It’s important to know that because, for instance, there’s Nezahualcoyotl, who was an Aztec. Well, he had his own theory about the origins of organisms, and they never mention that in school, since they educate us in a very Western way. So now, with my undergraduate degree and my master’s, I have been able to learn about different cultures and their points of view. You’d be surprised at the amazing way they managed everything that was around them, their systems, but even more, the respect they had for it all, you know? Do you think the effects of the conquest can still be felt? I think the conquest’s impact is still felt because there really are cultures that have tried to stay the same, that have tried to keep their traditions, their language, their

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traditional dress. And even Mexicans, in the same country, in the same territory, look down on these people. That is, they are treated like Indians, like poor uncivilized people, poor things, without realizing that they have more culture than we do because for a long time they’ve kept their language, their respect for nature, for their gods. And even though Catholic culture has been imposed on them, they continue to have ceremonies so they’ll have a good harvest, to bless their seeds, to ask for more or less rain, for it not to hail. Now, for instance, the so-called temperos, or rainmakers, are gone, none are left; or if there are any, they’re very few, in very far away regions. So now, brutal ways continue to be used to try to keep forcing things, you see? Previously, they used traditional planting. Now because of certain programs they are forced to use greenhouses, for example. So all they used to do keeps disappearing, and, well, they keep exploiting them because they pay them very little. Indigenous people continue to be mistreated.

Cholula Market Women: Adolfa Tiro and Fausta Romero Do you continue any of your ancestors’ traditions? tiro:  Well, we’re just peasant farmers. We don’t know anything else, just the fields. We come here, and then we go back. We plant, nothing else. The Spaniards left us our . . . yes . . . they taught us, and that’s how we spend our life. As little ones, we grew up seeing how our fathers, how our mothers planted. Our parents used the plow. Back then, it was just the plow . . . with only bulls. Not anymore because now . . . now there are horses, tractors. But back then we didn’t know about tractors, only the bulls, the donkeys. There were no horses. I’m from San Jerónimo Tecuanipan. My mother died already. My father died already too. Now I only have two children: a son and a daughter. They’re the ones who are still living. Only they don’t live with me anymore because they’re married now. They also farm. Like now, my son just planted calabacita squash, but only for this season. Not much rain . . . that’s why there isn’t much. Only this came up. It’s from sunup to sundown for us. We start early in the morning because it’s just us. No one pays us. We come every day. We eat here. We bring cold tortillas. And then in the late afternoon, when it starts to get dark, we go back. Do people in your town still speak Nahuatl? romero:  I still speak Mexican [Nahuatl]. Others there in San Buena still speak it a lot, but in Tecuanipan there’s not a soul who speaks it. But in San Buena we do. But [the young ones] don’t like to talk that way anymore. Even when you speak it to ’em, they don’t answer. They understand, but don’t speak it. They don’t want to anymore because they’re ashamed of our language. They don’t like it anymore. And there are some who no longer understand it . . . some. But I do. My children know it. They speak it, but not much. They no longer want to speak like that.

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Tiro:  They no longer want to speak it. Even if we tell them to speak it, they don’t speak it. They’re embarrassed. Romero:  We talk, and we tell ’em. And they say, “But what’s that, Grandma? What’s that you’re saying to me.” And, then, I explain, but they say, “Come on, Grandma, I can’t say that.” They want to be modern, that’s what you get. Tiro:  They want our Nahuatl language to disappear. Romero:  They don’t want to. They don’t want to speak it anymore. Now they just want it to go away already. But we, the older people, about my age, we still speak it. The more modern young ones don’t anymore. They don’t want to. Even if we tell ’em to, they don’t. There’s the school. It’s one of those schools . . . what do you call it? Bilingual. But not anymore. Over in Nealtica, they teach ’em, and they demand it, but they don’t speak it anymore. For the little ones that are going to kindergarten right now, and elementary, there’s a bilingual school, one of those that makes them speak it. Tiro:  You’re right. But like it is now they almost don’t speak anymore. They don’t want to anymore. It will keep going away. There’s very little left. Romero:  Now they only wear pants, just pants or a skirt up to here. Now they dress all modern like. Only us, the older folks dress like this, but only a few people, just us old folks. The young ones don’t anymore.

A Second Group of Market Vendors: Yolanda Sánchez How long have you come to the Sunday and Wednesday market? I’ve already spent most of my life as a peasant farmer. We don’t even know our own age because our parents’ didn’t send us to school. We can’t even read the letters. We’re like little donkeys because we can’t even read a single letter. What happened to indigenous populations after the massacre here in Cholula? I don’t know much about history. Do you think there is still evidence of the Spanish conquest or indigenous traditions? The Spaniards came here only to . . . I mean, to leave . . . or maybe, to set up . . . let’s say, some sort of rules, I guess. Right, that’s it. For example, the beliefs as we call them here, beliefs. That’s what they came to leave us . . . the cultures, and that, well, that comes from here, from Mexico. But there are some rules that they came to leave here such as, for example, beliefs, right? Beliefs in the saints and all that. Everyone has their own beliefs. But, even though we don’t want it, I guess they also came to leave a little of themselves.

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* * * What happens is that here, for example, here in Mexico people like to work, we work very hard. Since sometimes there’s no work here, we have to go look for it. So, that’s why, after a while, we leave. . . . So suppose we don’t get work because, let’s say, maybe we don’t have much schooling or there isn’t work, at least we know how to embroider, or, for example, there are many of us who make [these embroidered] dolls. There are many of us who do different things, and this is really Mexican work.

Padre Francisco Morales You mentioned that the Franciscans were following a utopian mission to convert indigenous populations. Can you talk more about that vision? In fact, it was too utopian. You see, at least, that was their tendency, and they were the ones who were going to come, those who kept the radical beliefs of observance but with a utopian vision. It was going to be a failed encounter at first because they were coming with dreams of a great mission; that everyone would be approachable. And then they got here, and they were alone. Not only alone, but no one understood them because they didn’t speak the language, they didn’t know anything. So it was going to be a very hard blow for the friars. I believe that after about ten years, once they started to get a grasp on the language, it was the opposite. They understood the indigenous people, they saw the myriad qualities, and they began to build in a different way. The great monasteries are from the mid-sixteenth century, not the first part of the century. So it’s when they’ve already gained an understanding of, and I would even say a dominance over, the very large indigenous communities that the friars end up taking the place of the high priests of ancient times, the grand old high priests. Then, their way of seeing things begins to change. And there’s a very strong relationship with society, but with the indigenous part of the world. By the mid-sixteenth century, they’re back to dreaming about re-creating the primitive church, very different from the European church. A simple church, but in another way, a totally different church, without benefices or a lot of riches . . . They formed a very strong relationship with the indigenous world. What’s your opinion of Cortés? Well, Cortés is a man of his time: the Renaissance period where . . . Machiavelli . . . let’s just say, so much power, but, at the same time, winning people over; knowing how to treat them; good manners. I think his treatment, especially his support . . . I think it was honest. I mean, he was a man from the Renaissance period. Cortés supported the friars because he realized the important role they could play in forming a society. So clearly he provided them an image: Moses of the New Church, right? Whatever they may say, we still have to understand him within the world of

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the Renaissance. Don’t you think? He deals with power. He makes friends, a life, although not a very Christian one, if you know what I mean. After having a son with Malinche, he gives her to one of his . . . [subordinates]. That’s a classic man from the Renaissance, isn’t it? However, perhaps in view of Cortés’s support, the friars seemed to overlook the man’s life, seeing him rather as a bridge builder who’s creating a new society. Do Cholultecas see themselves as indigenous? Look, I also have my doubts. The day we had the conference here, one of the professors who was here came with a different experience apparently, an experience in Bolivia and Peru. He said, “Well, from what I found in those communities in Bolivia, they’ve suddenly gained their sense of identity. They’re engaged in an all-out fight against former Spanish domination. So what’s happening here in Cholula?” We all stared at him. I said here in Cholula one doesn’t consider himself indigenous, but Cholulteca, not a poor little Indian. I suspect many of these strong controversies come from higher up. I mean here the indigenous community doesn’t much care if it’s a certain way. When the anthropologists, the historians come and start saying one thing and another . . . well, okay, so? Frankly, I don’t know. But . . . I mean, I’m familiar with a few, with some specific groups, not all of them. Now I’m in charge of going and celebrating mass at the sanctuary; I’m celebrating their masses. So, many come. Evidently many of the groups that come are indigenous, as I’m sure you know. And I’ve told them many times, “If Cholula is going to keep its identity as Cholula, it’ll be thanks to all of you, and to the Virgin. You want to remain Cholultecas; you don’t want to be Poblanos, or Chilangos, people from Mexico City, or anything else. Therefore, you are Cholultecas.” It’s like the world of the past [conquest] doesn’t influence them in the present.

Gilberto Galicia Muñoz Why did you become a mayordomo? The passion, the love for Our Mother of Remedios, I feel it even more right now because I’m here, but if you ask anyone from the barrios or the towns, they’ll tell you their love for Mary is above everything else. I feel this passion for church caretaking and stewardship, or mayordomía, because of our traditions . . . I feel it as if it were already in our blood. We just have to be motivated a little, and it comes out, it does, because Cholula has been Cholula for thousands of years, since before the arrival of the Spaniards. We were a city long before the Spaniards. So, as far as I know, the practice of mayordomía is similar to something . . . something from before the Spaniards got here. Back in ancient times, we used to . . . well, our ancestors used to worship, even give their lives through human sacrifice that took place here, to the god Quetzalcoatl, to Huitzilopochtli, and so on. So, what

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did the Spaniards do? They brought us the true faith we believe in and replaced Quetzalcoatl with Tonantzin, our Blessed Mother. It’s as simple as that. I feel that’s why we haven’t lost our love for our traditions and our mayordomía, because it was only a change, it’s as simple as that. So, for instance, in the royal chapel [originally built for the natives] there’s a festival called the fiesta de la tlahuanca, which means drunkenness in Nahuatl. It falls on the third Monday of Lent, if I’m not mistaken. It’s a very ancient tradition. It doesn’t go back to the arrival of the Spaniards, but to even before. So it was the fiesta de la tlahuanca, of drunkenness; now it’s spiritual drunkenness. It’s as simple as that . . . as simple as that. Does one of the two traditions, ancient and Spanish, dominate more than the other? At one time they said there was so much love for Tonantzin, our Beloved Mother, that Quetzalcoatl was probably buried beneath Tonantzin. That’s how great the love was. But I believe it’s like we’ve already put aside the Spanish influence. This is ours . . . definitely ours. . . . We firmly believe in our Catholic religion. Yes, completely. I read a little when I was in high school. . . . Octavio Paz used to say that whoever messed with Our Most Holy Mother of Guadalupe or with our dead better be careful because we’ll come to blows with you. Have you read Octavio Paz? The Labyrinth of Solitude. They assign it in secondary school, in high school. And something stuck with me because he talks a lot about the wealth of our traditions. I believe there’s a combination. As I was saying, I feel like we’ve left Spanish influence to one side. We follow our ancestors’ path but with the real faith, the Catholic faith. That’s how I truly feel. Yes, that’s how I truly feel. And, as far as the Spanish influence, it’s like, fine, thank you very much for your faith, but enough, no more. Because personally, yes, the Spaniards upset me because they killed us. They killed our ancestors. They carried out a massacre. They pillaged us. So, again, Spaniards, thank you very much for your faith, but no more, that’s enough. Thank you very much for your faith, but leave it at that. We follow the path of our ancestors, but let me repeat, with the true faith. That’s how I feel about it.

Ernesto Cuizpalli When did the conchero tradition begin? Well, this movement begins in 1731, two hundred years after the invasion, when the Inquisition eases off, and thanks to the concheros, who tricked the Spaniards when they danced outside their churches. They were preserving the rhythm of the drum, the teponaxtli, with the armadillo shells or conchas, where they get the name concheros from. So, thanks to them, we know this dance, thanks to how they tricked the Spaniards so they could dance, since under every church you find the remains of a teocalli, or house of god, from our pre-Hispanic beliefs. In 1999 there was a race from Guatemala and from the tribes in the north to the city of Cholula. The point of

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the race was to go from here to Teotihuacan, where the tribes from the north, from the south, and from here in Anahuac would hold a meeting. There, Cuauhtemoc’s instructions were read: “Tona ye motlati, tona yez polihui, ihuantzin tlalohuayan notizcate mati mati inhualan quizaqueh in tlahuiqui, in talhuicayo in mexica.” “Even though our sun has been hidden and left us in darkness, we know that it will reawaken and fill us Mexicanos with light.” That’s the last message of Cuauhtemoc, the Aztec emperor. That’s when it all began. The message was read to all the young people, to all the people who wanted to join in reviving what it is to be Mexican, or mexicanidad, through dance . . . through the art of dance.

* * * Foreigners have a stronger interest [in conchero dancing] than our own people; Mexicans see what we do as just a show. It only gets to the heart of a few because when the Spaniards came here they began to make people think all this was bad, that it’s not ours. And since they killed everyone . . . they killed a lot of people; they killed our roots. Whoever played the drum got his hands cut off; if someone spoke Nahuatl, they got their tongue cut out. So it was a really severe massacre of identity. And it’s always been that way here in Mexico . . . you watch and learn. The English come, the Europeans come, when the English [people from the United States] came, that was really a lot. So now Mexicans want to be like people in the United States. They want to live like them. Why? Because it’s what they see on TV; it’s what the [government] teaches them.

John O’Leary [speaking in English] Cortés is not really part of the mix as a person. They won’t mention like Hernán Cortés, you know. Now, I have a standing joke. They say, oh you have lived here a long time, and I always say, yes, I didn’t personally know Cortés however. And they laugh at that because they know who Hernán Cortés is of course. But no, the focus is on the indigenous population, and the fact that the indigenous population was massacred by the Spaniards. The adoption of the Spanish Virgin of Remedios even is not a topic of conversation. Now, they give talks, historical lectures and things, but nobody has really cared too much about that aspect of it. There was a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful talk given by Eduardo [Matos Moctezuma], the archaeologist, just a fabulous talk about the 450th anniversary of the arrival of the Virgin of Remedios. And he goes through this whole story of where, probably, the original image came from in Europe, and how it came here, who brought it, and all this type of stuff. They listened to it. But it’s not part of their Virgin. It doesn’t upset anymore. Another example is VIPS, the Spanish-owned restaurant chain. They’re having a big thing on Spanish cuisine and the sign outside says, come and enjoy the food

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from la madre patria [the mother country]. And I thought, isn’t that insulting? But no, it’s not. If somebody said that to me in the U.S, I’d say, are you crazy or what? It would mean nothing. But here it’s a way of saying, come and enjoy the food that comes from our mother country, I guess. And one of the funny things is, that’s always kind of been curious to me, there is more animosity felt toward North Americans than any animosity, if any, felt toward Spain . . . Spain doesn’t come into this. In other words, it just isn’t part of the picture. It probably has to do with Spain isn’t a neighbor, and it was a long time ago, and Spain has also been very paternalistic toward Mexico in an unusual way. There’s a movement right now here in Cholula to do a sister city thing with Cádiz. And I said, you know, of all the places that you could do a sister city with, why a Spanish sister city? What is happening now, you can even feel it here in Mexico, there’s a backlash, especially here. Forty years ago it was like an honor to have me as a guest in someone else’s home here. Now it’s kind of like, well, he’s an American, but he’s a nice guy. I have another friend who always introduces me as the only American that he likes. I find that there’s an attitude that’s developing here. And it’s an attitude of dislike. And it is dislike. . . . It’s a funny thing. There is definitely a cultural misunderstanding about immigration and migration. The U.S. culture is very proud of compliance in legal matters, and in this culture, there’s a saying here that says rules are made to be broken. It’s part of a mistake on both sides, part of a big mistake. They can understand how it’s not good that Central Americans are coming up and coming here illegally. They understand that. But they can’t understand why the North Americans mistreat them by the fact that they go up and work illegally in the U.S. They can’t understand that. Mainly because they say, but there’s so much work available, why can’t I go up? What is your perception of Cholula? It’s the fact that Cholula, being the oldest continually inhabited city in the Americas, there’s never been a time for reflection. In other words, like, we can step back and look at Teotihuacan for instance, and put that into certain context, even though Walmart had absolutely no problems establishing a store right in front of Teotihuacan. Here in Cholula, for example, there used to be a glass case of skulls at the base of the pyramid; they were from a grave they found. The skulls had evidence of decorative deformation. They were young; they were probably sacrificial victims, but nobody really knows. They eventually crumbled from being exposed to the UV rays. There are just kilos and kilos and kilos of this stuff all over the place. The only reason they would leave this stuff out there is because it had no particular value other than as an attraction. With this latest project of replacing the streets . . . The street project, by the way, was quite interesting because part of the deal was to replace the water mains. There were terrible problems with water mains, and with the sewage link ups, and with

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some of the sewage pipes and stuff. So they pulled up the streets, they did salvage archaeology and at the same time fixed the water mains and sewage hook ups. And they did find several burials in the process. Right in front of my studio they found a couple of ceremonial burials, right out front there. They were in fetal position; they weren’t stretched out. So, there’s a contradiction here. Mexico is, in general, in most places, very . . . there’s a great deal of pride felt for our . . . the historical part, but not a great deal of action as far as wanting to conserve, or going out of their way. And I find that even with the Department of Anthropology, the INAH.

Lorenzo García Bonilla What do you think about the conquest? We’re talking about Cuauhtinchan, a pre-Hispanic lordship that disappeared. It had a vast territory that the Spaniards doled out. Unfortunately, when Hernán Cortés arrived, they distributed all of what was Cuauhtinchan. They left us a small population, and nowadays, we go back to the same way of doing things, just like it was in the conquest. Now the big cities want to absorb us. That’s hard for us because we were a population with a very long history. We know that Cuauhtinchan existed since before 1200 B.C. So, although it was made up of different ethnic groups, today we can still say we have this wonderful culture that was brought and left to us by the Spaniards. However, they did leave us pretty marginalized. They took away a lot of territory from Cuauhtinchan, which was very important at one point, with governors, and now it’s . . . Well, a poor Cuauhtinchan. We have a population of 2,800 to 3,500 people at the most. So, like I said, it’s very small. Old Spain had a population of 60,000; Cuauhtinchan alone had 70,000. Ten neighborhoods, each one with 10,000. . . . Seven, seven neighborhoods with 10,000 residents each. From Puebla’s cathedral, going toward Atlixco to the border with Izúcar de Matamoros, Molcajá, part of Tepeji, up to Perote around Pinal and Malintzin, that was Cuauhtinchan. When Hernán Cortés arrived the colonial period begins. He gives some lands to Puebla; he takes away Tepeaca, Tecalli, Tecamachalco, Acatzingo, Molcajá. In other words, everyone gets their share. We feel that our population should be much more important. Now the government has abandoned Cuauhtinchan because we’re so small. They haven’t paid any attention at all. Now even the government has forgotten about it even though it’s so close to the city of Puebla; we’re half an hour away. They should take advantage of our strong touristic potential. We have pre-Hispanic settlements, ten or twelve, or more. They’ve been registered and catalogued by the INAH. They haven’t been unearthed yet, but one of them was recently surveyed by Harvard University, just last year. And they even took away our Nahuatl. They all spoke Nahuatl; there were Mixtecs, Zapotecs, Xicalancas. . . . We Cuauhtinchancas are from different ethnicities, but even so, as I said, even the [language] is disappearing from Cuauhtinchan.

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What about the Franciscan influence? Well, the Franciscan influence, and this is something you should note. . . . It’s incredible that when they arrived, after having finished several buildings, when the Franciscans finally began building this one in 1569, the most important part was the monastery. The most important part of the monastery was the cloister, and there, they put two pre-Hispanic symbols. That means that faced with a very strong community their idea was not necessarily to impose. There seems to have been a certain compromise by placing two pre-Hispanic symbols in a place that was very sacred for them. That means that there’s a cultural mediation. The eagle, which was a symbol of the people found in some ceremonial temples, and the fountain’s waterspouts are shaped like ocelot, or jaguar heads. This means there was a kind of fusion there. So, as I said, I feel the religious conquest took more time here, and that it was more sensitive, not so forceful. Unfortunately, when the secular clergy arrived in the late seventeenth century, everything changed. That’s also why all of this was left abandoned. We now know that the Franciscan order was a [mendicant] order, a poor order; the friars were very poor, they depended on charity. But, nevertheless, the building is very rich and very big. The size reflected the population, but it’s rich in its architecture. It even has a pond to raise fish for food and gardens. I don’t know if it was because water was so easy to find, but, as I said, that shows us how smart they were. As I said at the beginning, we don’t know what we’d be like now if our culture had continued. Does everyone consider themselves more Mexican than Indian, or mestizos, or do they not even think about it? No, we all simply say we’re Mexicans. But we’re thinking about reclaiming the indigenous community. We’re working on it. We’re about to report, next week I think, on registering as an indigenous community. We’re taking a group to register and, we’ve already . . . As I said, within the week we’re going to request land reform. Because we’re one of the few towns in Mexico that has five titles, five pre-Hispanic maps; two are kept in Mexico: one in Puebla, in the Museo Amparo, one at the INAH, and the others in France. So [we have] five titles showing Cuauhtinchan from pre-Hispanic times to the time of the conquest. What do you need to do to be officially recognized as an indigenous community? Many, many things. But now we have gone through the process, done all the paperwork, and gone down [to the city] with a lawyer to register as an indigenous community, because if we don’t protect ourselves, like other towns, Cuauhtinchan will be absorbed. . . . That’s the only way we can protect ourselves, because all of the indigenous communities have their own autonomous laws, they’re self-governing and there are international organizations that protect them besides. It’s one way to protect our hills, our woods, because they are destroying them all. It’s a ruling that’s coming

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into effect, and as soon as it does, it will invalidate certain changes in land-use rights that they’re already trying to implement. So it’s going to be difficult to get all of this authorized, but it’s in their best interests.

Luz María Mora Beltrán What was working as a rural teacher like? When I got to Xaltipan it was 1948. I went to work there, but no one knew how to speak Spanish, and everyone spoke Nahuatl. They were all illiterate. The only one who spoke a little Spanish was the leader, or presidente, whose name was Alberto, Alberto García. It was my second year to work, and I was seventeen years old. I only had an elementary-school education. So, when I arrived the place was just a little rural settlement or camp, a ranchería. It still is: an indigenous ranchería. But in 1948 when I got there to work, no one spoke Spanish. Don Alberto was in charge of the town, of both the school and the church because he was the only one who more or less spoke Spanish. He was also illiterate, about seventy years old . . . an older gentleman. So, when I arrived, he was the one who helped me make myself understood because I didn’t speak Nahuatl, no Nahuatl at all. He was the one who helped me. So the day I got to the community, I immediately introduced myself and showed him my letter of appointment. Well, he held it in his hands and wasn’t able to read it because he didn’t know how to. When I realized this, I read it to him. Then I told him, okay, take me to the school. The school was a room with a dirt floor, a tile roof, without doors or windows; it was just a room with a doorway but no door. He told me that this was the school. There was a blackboard made from old rubberized fabric; I don’t know where they found it, but they stuck it up there. An old, rickety, wooden table they got from somewhere, because they didn’t use tables to eat. They got me that table, a chair, and student desks that were actually a log split in half, and they made some holes with a machete or, I don’t know, a knife, where they forced in the legs, which were made from the same tree—tree branches cut and stuck in there. This way they made a little bench for them to write on and another one for them to sit on. So, at first, when I got there and he told me that no one spoke Spanish, that no one could read or write. Well, obviously, I felt . . . especially at my age, “What’ll I do?” I’d only gone to elementary school. That was the extent of my education, and I said, “How am I going to teach them if I don’t know Nahuatl, and they don’t know Spanish?” But on his face I saw his sadness when he thought I didn’t want to stay. That’s what he thought, you see, when he realized I was doubtful, his face turned really sad. When I saw that, I said, “Okay, I’ll stay, Don Alberto. I’ll work; I’m going to stay, but you’re going to help me.” And he immediately said yes, he would help me. So, after that, I stayed.

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Another thing I liked about them is that they are fighters. They don’t keep quiet anymore. I think I also taught them something about that because I was always very rebellious. And when it came to things they were forced to do in the municipio, or municipal district, I told them, you’re not going to do it because you’re not obligated to do it. When I got there, the indigenous people were obligated to go to the junta auxiliar, or the region where they belonged, or to the municipio, which was Cuetzalan, on Saturdays and Sundays to work for free because they didn’t get paid. They went to do cleaning or construction work in those towns, which weren’t theirs. So, when I arrived, I told them that they didn’t have to do it. But they were threatened with fines or jail time. So I told them, “Nothing’s going to happen to you because I’ll defend you.” In those days, and still today, it’s like, “If you don’t do as I say, I’ll throw you in jail.” And since they don’t know much about laws or anything they’re always imposed upon by the authorities and forced to work: “You will do this . . .” It makes me angry to this day. Look, it makes me mad even now because the authorities force them to work. The authorities tell them, “Look, you’re gonna come here because you’re gonna work here. We’re gonna work on the highway. We’re gonna clean. We’re gonna do this and that.” For free. But now that the federal and state governments send money to the municipios, they have money to pay them. I don’t know it for a fact, but I can imagine that when they report their expenses to the treasury for building a certain section of highway, they say, “We paid this much,” but often they don’t pay. Although it looks like they paid the workers, many of them didn’t get paid. Or I should say, every day they got a soft drink, a torta, or sandwich, and that’s it. And if they got paid, it was barely a wage. So, back then, when they didn’t send as much money to the municipios or anything like that, it was even worse. Do you think that the community was the same as it had been for centuries? No. Let me put it this way, they undergo changes. From generation to generation, they pass on their traditions, their wisdom, their own culture, their beliefs. But they keep them to themselves. Since the whole Catholic issue has been mixed into it, since the Spaniards imposed it on them way back when, they hold on to the Catholic faith. But let me also say that back when I was there, they weren’t fanatics. I’m telling you, they weren’t fanatics because if they had been, they would’ve lynched me. I mean it. They would’ve lynched me because one day, after the new school was finished, and I was happy with it all, one of my students said to me, “The priest doesn’t like you.” In the meantime, Don Alberto—who, as I said, was involved with everything because he was the only one who spoke Spanish—went to see the priest so he’d say mass. The local church was in the same condition as my school, no floor, no door; that was what the church was like. So, he went to see him about saying a mass and the priest said to him, “Not as long as you have that teacher, who’s a heretic, who’s a teacher sent from the federal government—she’s got the devil in her. If you keep her, you’re going to have a lot of problems. So get rid of her.” Then he said, “As long as you have that teacher, I will not say mass.” Then Don Alberto

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told him—and here you’ll see how illiterate people can be very wise, well, at least, this gentleman, who was the one I knew the best, the one I had the most interaction with. He had wisdom and reasoning beyond what some educated people have. Don Alberto said, “Why should we get rid of the teacher, my good Father? The teacher is good to us. She helps us. There’s no reason for us to get rid of her, Father.” Then, the priest said, “Well then, choose: mass for your patron saint or the teacher?” And then Don Alberto said, “Okay, Father, my patron saint sees we want to have a mass for him, but that you don’t want to do it. So we’ll see you tomorrow, Father.”

* * * Then one day, one of my students said, “Teacher, teacher, why doesn’t the priest like you?” And I asked him, “Why do you say he doesn’t like me?” He says, “Because every time he comes to say mass, when he talks, he says you’re bad, that you’ve got the devil in you.” The thing was that the priest was around fifty or sixty years old; he spoke Nahuatl perfectly, and I think he was of indigenous descent. He spoke Nahuatl really well, so of course he could speak to everybody in Nahuatl, and he could tell them. My student went on, “He says our animals are going to die because you’re here and we’re going to get sick, that you have to leave, that they have to get rid of you because if not, a lot of things will happen to us.” Then I said, “That’s what the priest says?” And he said, “Yes, that’s what he says, but my mother says that he’s a gossip.” That’s why I told you they would have lynched me.

* * * Then, after Don Alberto confirmed that all of this happened, and I spoke with all of them, one Saturday I decided to go to Cuetzalan. I had to walk because I didn’t have a horse. You realize it cost money to rent a horse, and they didn’t even have horses there, just mules. So I went to see the priest. I went to the secretary and said, “You know what? I want to talk with the priest.” I’ll never forget his name, Doroteo. “I want to talk to Father Doroteo.” He’d already gone. Or he didn’t want to speak to me; he told her he couldn’t . . . that he didn’t have time to talk to me. He wouldn’t see me. So the next day, I went to mass, at 5:00 in the morning. I was staying with my uncle who lived in Cuetzalan, where he had a store. On Sundays the family attended the early 5:00 mass so they could open their store because Sunday was market day, and they opened the store early. So I said to Yolanda, my aunt’s daughter, my cousin, “Listen, when you leave for mass at 5:00, could you let me know?” “Don’t tell me you’re gonna go,” she said. “Yes, I’m going,” I told her, and so I went. I said, “Tell me which one is Father Doroteo’s confessionary.” And she said, “That one’s Father Doroteo’s, and the other one’s the vicar’s.” “Oh no,” I said, “I want Father Doroteo’s.” So I went over and kneeled down; there was a lady already there. Then she left, and I went in. He asked my name, how old I was, and I don’t know what else; he began

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the confession. I don’t know why it occurred to him, but he asked me, “Do you have any enemies?” I told him, “Yes, I have one, and it’s you, sir.” He stuck out his head to look: “You’re the teacher from Xaltipan.” I said, “Yes, and I want you to tell me what I’ve done to turn you against me and for you to speak ill of me, stirring up the people in the town.” I said, “Look, it’s not like they’re fanatics. If they were, they would’ve lynched me already, and you’d be responsible. For one thing, I don’t know what I did to you. You don’t help them. How long have you been here? What have you done for them?” I said to him, “Nothing. Why are you so angry? What did I ever do to you? I want you to tell me.” “No,” he said, “in big towns, in big cities, the first thing to be built is the house of God, and here the school was the first thing they built.” I said, “Well, who’s the priest?” “I am,” he said. Then I said, “Why haven’t you built your church? As a teacher, I wanted the school so my students could be comfortable, happy. So that’s why.” I told him, “I’m surprised that you, in spite of your education, because you have more education than me, that you didn’t have the intelligence to say to me, the teacher, ‘You’ve built your school, now help me build my church.’”

Cynthia Flores Bautista Can you tell me more about Cuetzalan and the role of tourism? That’s where the impact tourists make comes in. First, we’ve seen people acquiring another language that’s not even this country’s, for instance. They also see publicity for things that maybe aren’t even . . . well, they’re sold here but you think, how can they drink Coca-Cola when they don’t even have money to dress properly? Or they have enough to buy a hamburger but not a . . . ? What I mean to say is that these are things you find out of sync. So, as a researcher or a tourism student, you realize the negative impact this makes, don’t you think so? Not everything is positive. It would be better if their culture could be preserved. I mean, it was too hard for tourists, even those from inside the country, not just foreigners, not to influence their way of life, right? It would be better if it was done in a positive way. That is to say, for the benefit of their . . . Well, to begin with, to appreciate them. And second of all, they should be helped in terms of their economy so they could have a higher quality of life. That would be something.

* * * Because they’ve been offered things at other times, and since they [the authorities] haven’t followed through, it’s harder for them to believe and trust anyone. And precisely because of that, I think it’s kind of hard for them to trust not only national projects but also foreign ones. And of course, there’s always a certain mentality about what’s happened in the past that they don’t easily forget, and that’s why they’re not so open to other options.

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What do people think of Cortés? In general, I think each person has their own specific way of thinking. Personally, I think if we look at it in a cold and calculating way—I’m a tourism manager, so, as an administrator—I believe he was a great leader because he was able to accomplish many things in spite of the situation. As a Mexican woman, however, I think he’s terrible. Why? Because he was wrong. He appropriated things that weren’t his. To me, he was a bad person. But looking at it objectively, I say, how is it possible for one person to have so much of an impact, so much power, so much help from the local people, and for things to happen the way they did? So, those are two different points of view. Although it may seem contradictory, I think it’s valid. On the one hand, he was a strong person, but on the other, it’s too bad he came.

Gerardo Pérez Muñoz What was the impact of the conquest on indigenous groups in the region? [The conquest] caused them to spread out and new communities to appear. And in that process, here in the state of Puebla, it’s only in the ’90s when the indigenous presence starts becoming more visible. In fact, it’s a presence that hasn’t always been here, but starting in the ’90s the society at large begins to feel it. Some ten, fifteen years ago, you started gaining a greater awareness of the existence of indigenous peoples in the state of Puebla. Why does it begin in the ’90s? I think several phenomena had an influence. One of them is the role played in the northern sierra by an organization such as the Independent Totonaca Organization (OIT), which is the first group that’s strong. They came down from the sierra, and they held their uprising here, in a profoundly racist society like Puebla’s. Until the late ’80s, a segment of Puebla’s society, especially here in this district, or municipio, didn’t just commemorate, but actually celebrated October 12 as Hispanic Day, or the Día de la Hispanidad. There were floats, a whole set of paraphernalia that reflected the spirit behind their view of the indigenous people. There was a very symbolic show of how the indigenous people had to be redeemed by the priests, a particularly Spain-centered, or hispanista vision of things. The presence of the OIT begins to break down this vision. They met at the same time as a forum, the First State Forum on Human Rights, which took place in Xicotepec de Juárez and included the participation of several organizations. It had ample repercussions here in the city of Puebla, and what’s set in motion after that is the sudden appearance of the Ejército Zapatista, or the Zapatista army. And in some ways, that’s what begins to change how indigenous peoples are perceived. It’s also through a process that starts in December of 1993 in Huauchinango, Puebla, when we organized the first Meeting of Chroniclers and Historians of the

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Northern Sierra. The job of chronicler, or municipal chronicler, or local historian, had been left in the hands of mestizo chroniclers and historians. What we did through the Department of Popular Cultures was to invite or take on the task of asking about, locating, and inviting municipal, town, and community chroniclers. At this meeting we managed to identify people and invite them to participate in this process. Obviously, they’re the ones who speak from their perspective, not us. What do you see as the differences between those two perspectives? The sources each one uses. But besides that, there’s something else that’s happening among them that’s very interesting to me. There’s also the beginning of an interesting process of differentiation in regard to the pre-Hispanic world, especially the role the Aztecs played in the conquest of other indigenous peoples. This is happening with the Totonacos. They’re starting to rename many places, sacred ceremonial sites and communities, in their own language. They’re beginning to shift this other process of conquest that took place before the Spaniards’ arrival and was done by the Aztecs. This is a phenomenon that’s also starting among the Otomies. And it’s the struggle between the different groups of people and the Nahuas, who were the dominating group or the majority, and all of them against the conquest. Now though, getting back to your question, it’s obviously the sources. Here they rely much more on the oral tradition, on a kind of guardian of the oral tradition. But also, and it’s very, very rare, I mean, it’s not easy to get access to some communities that keep the codices. And there are people who know how to read the codices for you, and through them, they interpret the historical continuums and the cultural continuums. Of course, not all indigenous groups are engaged in thinking about lineal history or reevaluating their own history. We have also found indigenous colleagues who repeat official history very well and have assimilated it as theirs. Do the younger generations respect this history and knowledge? I think there’s enormous tension. There’s a social dynamic in many communities in the state of Puebla that’s related, for example, to what happened with coffee. Along with corn production, coffee is like the backbone of material reproduction for indigenous peoples. As international coffee prices started to decline, emigration began to increase. And, indeed, in many communities, young people, or at least some young people, didn’t want to speak their own language anymore. On the other hand, there are opposing phenomena. A very large number are beginning to appreciate their own language, their own culture. And there’s even a process of acculturation in some mestizo sectors that now identify themselves as indigenous. As far as what you were saying about governmental support, there may be more resources, but generally, what the indigenous people and communities are asking for isn’t resources, it’s to be accorded and recognized with their full rights under the law; the ability they have to govern themselves. I think that’s the central issue and that it cuts across and becomes part of the national project as a whole.

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What do you think is the biggest challenge for indigenous peoples in daily life? Okay, I think in this schizophrenic political reality, we now recognize the existence of indigenous peoples, their diversity, and other things. Five hundred years had to go by before indigenous peoples were recognized in the constitution. Paradoxically, however, the indigenous peoples haven’t been allowed to develop their own material base to support themselves. So, in a new national project, recognizing the nation’s plurality is not enough, you’ve got to change the economic model. Under the current economic model neither the indigenous, nor the workers, nor anyone will be able to lead a life of dignity in terms of what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states. Is it hard for a community to be recognized as indigenous? Look, it’s impossible owing to the current state of the country’s social and judicial systems. What happens is that one of the basic ways to weaken the structure of the large majority of indigenous peoples is to take away their territory and not recognize their capacity for self-government. This has been the main policy.

* * * Let me explain it to you the way a former Mexican president, [José] López Portillo, put it. For him, indigenous peoples were trees without any roots left, which today is proving to be false. Even demographically, they’re saying now that they have a higher reproductive rate than the mestizo population. They’re not going extinct, they’re expanding, demographically speaking at least. I think those are some of the elements that are there. The other thing is the full recognition of the indigenous peoples’ rights, which still hasn’t happened. A central issue in the current debate is the reform of the Federal Radio and Television Law, where the main point is the right of indigenous towns and communities to have their own communications media. Here in Mexico there’s an enormous communications media monopoly.

Figure 3.1.  The sixteenth-century Codex Mendoza depicts the mythical founding of Tenochtitlan. The iconography of the eagle and nopal cactus was later adapted for the Mexican flag. (© Steve Raymer.)

Part III

The Center Mexico City-Tenochtitlan The city is not just a geographical or spatial place. It is an essential process for our lives and our history. The city is us and where we come from . . . a territory that transcribes our lives. —cuauhtémoc cárdenas, former mayor of mexico city, cited in ross, el monstruo

The 125 kilometers from Cholula to the heart of the Aztec Empire took Cortés and his army several weeks to traverse. Today I climb aboard the two-and-a-half-hour express bus from downtown Puebla to Mexico City’s TAPO bus station. The toll road is nearly empty of cars; it serves as a thoroughfare for buses and trucks connecting eastern Mexico to the capital city. Leaving Puebla’s fertile fields of beans and maize, we climb upward through the Paso de Cortés, past the dramatic pair of snow-capped volcanoes. The temperature drops twenty-five degrees as the green fields give way to pine forests. Near the highest point, a small blue church with large peeling letters bids travelers a safe journey: “Protege nuestro camino.” We curve around the last bend and there below lies the massive central valley of Mexico. From this distance, buildings and roads extend out in all directions from a dense hub; they climb like insects up the hills and the thirty-some volcanoes that surround the valley. Mexican flags fly from many rooftops, left over from Mexico’s most patriotic holiday, September 16, Independence Day. This wondrous first glimpse of the extensive, densely populated valley that has astonished European travelers through the centuries was first documented nearly five

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Figure 3.2.  Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos leads a protest in the zócalo in the wake of the signing of NAFTA. (Photograph by David Cilia.)

hundred years ago by Cortés’s soldier Bernal Díaz. He compared it to descriptions from chivalric novels: “We were amazed and said it was like the enchantments told about in the book of Amadís, on account of the great towers and cues and the buildings rising from the water. . . . Some of our soldiers wondered if what they saw was a dream. . . . I do not know how to describe it, seeing, as we did, things never seen before, nor heard, nor even dreamed.” This mile-high floating island city was first the epicenter of the extensive Aztec Empire, then the hub for the viceroyalty of New Spain, which eventually reached to the Philippines and northern California, and finally ground zero for a nation-building project that would take the city’s own name for the nation itself. Built over landfilled lakes and canals, on top of pyramids whose bases are still visible from inside the depths of subway stations, today Mexico City-Tenochtitlan is both impressive and an overwhelming conglomeration of grand historical monuments, urban sprawl, traffic jams, and a mass of humanity. Past the last tollbooth, we descend into the “Monstruo,” the term affectionately adopted by Subcomandante Marcos for this megalopolis.1 At the bus station, I grab a taxi from the newly established “secure taxi” area and continue toward the heart of the city and the nation, the zócalo. We dart down side streets lined with open-air store

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fronts: first several blocks of mops and cleaning supplies, then blocks of Halloween decorations, Christmas lights, and piñatas. The smog now burns my eyes and my throat tightens. Colors are muted as the smog diffuses the sunlight. By the time we hit Calle 20 de Noviembre, open storefronts have changed to elegant window displays for international stores. As we make one last turn, the massive cathedral looms in the foreground. The red-rock cathedral—one of the world’s largest—anchors one end of the fourteen-thousand-square-meter central plaza, where for centuries institutional symbols of power have been layered upon each other. Thirty years of arriving at the zócalo have not diminished the awe I feel as its monumentality and vitality envelop me once again. The experience of taking cabs has not changed either. Many Chilangos, as residents of Mexico City call themselves, like to talk about the conquest. Taxi drivers seem to like to talk about it even more—no doubt because foreigners continue to be fascinated by the topic. Unlike in Veracruz, passengers don’t need to broach the topic; taxistas often bring it up within minutes. Today is no exception. Driving along the four-lane street that once was an Aztec calzada, one of the few causeways into Tenochtitlan, twenty-four-year-old Roberto Martínez remarks that the history embedded in the streets “is our past, present, and future.” Living on the remains of Mexica ruins and being weaned on cultural campaigns about the pre-Hispanic past, Martínez has a strong sense of historical memory. Passing a construction site where old water lines filled with clay, which contributes to Mexico City’s struggle to improve water quality, are being replaced, Martínez explains that the project has taken months because the pipes lie on top of Aztec ruins. He launches into the story of a more prominent conundrum for the city: the zócalo and cathedral are sinking at the rate of fifty centimeters a year. When workers began drilling to create supports for the sinking cathedral, they unearthed Aztec ruins. After a high-profile debate, they decided not to shore up the cathedral: “The Spaniards built the cathedral and it’s part of our history. That’s a fact. But what’s even more a part of us are the Aztec ruins.” According to Martínez, Spanish society was built on top of the Aztec city, but colonial culture must now be subordinate to Aztec history. He conjectures that the ruins themselves will end up supporting the cathedral better than any twenty-first-century support pillar. When I ask him for a formal interview, he offers instead to take me to the City of Mexico Museum, just a few blocks away. The museum lies just across from the site on the Iztapalapan Causeway where Moctezuma and Cortés first met, and where Cortés is now buried in the church he built. A huge stone serpent head peers out from under the weight of the palace, rebuilt in the seventeenth century for the Count of Santiago de Calimaya, a descendant of one of Cortés’s conquistadors, which now houses the museum. Spaniards placed the serpent at the base of the building to symbolize its subjection, but indigenous craftsmen believed that the serpent occupied a place of power closest to the sacred underworld (inframundo). Mexico City’s oldest historical districts reveal layers of cultural history. They also reveal a (sometimes convenient) mutual misunderstanding

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of worldviews. A harpist for Mexico’s national symphony orchestra chuckles as he recounts a tale he heard growing up: “When the Aztecs burned incense around the Spaniards, the conquistadors thought they were being seen as gods, but really the Aztecs just thought the Europeans smelled bad” (Baltasar Juárez Dávila, interview). Inside the converted palace a permanent installation, inaugurated in 2005, poses a question to Mexico City residents. “Who are we?” it asks, suggesting a method for answering the enigma: “Meditate, concentrate, illuminate the paradoxes, and reconcile.”2 The process of knowing is complex in this ancient city center.

El Ombligo del Mundo According to Mexica legend, the city was founded in 1325 and given the name Tenochtitlan (“the place of the prickly pear”) when the migrating Chichimeca saw an eagle land on a prickly pear cactus in the middle of Lake Texcoco. To some the sacred sign signaled the site as “el ombligo del mundo” (navel of the world) and foretold its eventual political and spiritual dominance throughout central Mexico. Today this sacred site is occupied by the zócalo. The country’s most powerful political, judicial, and religious institutions line the edges of the plaza. The first Spanish colonizers symbolically reconquered the city by building the National Palace on the ruins of Moctezuma’s palace, and building the cathedral with the volcanic rock from the temple in the Mexica sacred precinct. With the development of an extensive urban archaeological site and museum after the 1978 unearthing of the Templo Mayor, the Mexica site now vies in importance with the institutions of Spanish colonization and nation building. The zócalo, officially renamed La Plaza de la Constitución after Independence, symbolizes the continual redefinition of Mexican culture and the politics of culture. Yet it also functions as the popular heart of the city—and for many people, of the nation. A panel on display at the City of Mexico Museum explains: the zocálo is “where the social temperature of the city is measured.”3 Since the Aztecs, the area around the zócalo has been the center for the creation and destruction of empires and nation. When Cortés arrived on November 8, 1519, the city of Tenochtitlan was home to about a quarter of a million people, three times the size of the largest Spanish city, Seville. To European eyes, the city showed all the signs of a highly developed civilization: it had orderly, clean streets, large, varied marketplaces, and well-developed living and religious quarters. Built as an expression of Tenochtitlan’s political-sacred power, four long bridges connected the island city’s symbolic quadrants, the four cardinal points, to the surrounding land. In the center rose the Templo Mayor, a double pyramid dedicated to the gods Huitzilopochtli (war) and Tlatloc (rain). Moctezuma II’s intricate palace flanked one side of the Templo.4 From this ceremonial district, the Mexica extended their geographical and imperial power over much of central Mexico and even into present-day Guatemala, as well as to both the Gulf and Pacific

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Figure 3.3.  The 1524 Nuremberg map of Tenochtitlan, published alongside Hernán Cortés’s account of the conquest, shows the Aztec bridges into the city and the sacred ritual center. (© Steve Raymer.)

coasts. They controlled the empire with a system of tribute and labor (coatequitl) that did not require a full-fledged European-style imperial incorporation of conquered peoples and lands. Rulers were usually left in place, as long as they continued to provide labor and tribute and added the deity Huitzilopochtli to their pantheon. It was here, next to the Templo Mayor, that the face of the conquest changed forever. After eight months in Tenochtitlan, Cortés left for Veracruz to fend off Spanish soldiers sent by the governor of Cuba to quash his rebellious expedition. Cortés left his captain, Pedro de Alvarado, in charge. Alvarado and his men promptly massacred the Mexica priests and noble warriors during their celebration of the Festival of Toxcatl, honoring Huitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca. Alvarado claimed that they were heading off a plot to ambush the Spaniards, but the massacre led to a popular uprising and the Spaniards were soon ousted from the city. Cortés retreated, only to return in less than a year with more indigenous allies to begin the attack on the waterways. Cortés laid siege to the city, and after a brutal month of suffering with no supplies or fresh water, the Tenochcas surrendered on August 13, 1521. For decades, on this date contemporary Aztec dancers have filled the zocálo with song and dance to commemorate the end of the siege and celebrate the doomed bravery of the Aztec warriors.

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Filth, decaying bodies, and epidemics spawned by the siege led to the complete breakdown of the social order. Bernal Díaz gives a vivid description of the exodus of people from the ravaged city and concludes wryly that Tenochtitlan was “unfit for most Spaniards.” The city that Cortés had described to his king as having markets, plazas, and houses as grand as any in Granada, Seville, and Salamanca had been razed by canon fire.5 From his camp on the shore of Lake Texcoco, in nearby Coyoacan, a city that had been vanquished early on in the conquest and had served as a staging ground for the conquest of Tenochtitlan, the conquistador ordered the volcanic rock from Tenochtitlan’s sacred pyramids and noble houses be used for the literal foundation of what he named “New Spain.” It was not until the 1580s that most all of the rubble had been removed or incorporated into new structures. But even then the base of the Templo Mayor was still visible. By the midcolonial period Mexico City was the showcase of the Americas, even as indigenous politics and self-government continued for nearly two hundred years to varying degrees in certain sectors of society.6 The secular and sacred governance for a viceroyality that stretched for thousands of miles was centered in buildings surrounding the zócalo. The city housed more than fifty churches, twenty convents, and a dozen hospitals. Outwardly, the process of superimposing the new Spanish political-religious ceremonial center onto the ruins of the Mexica imperial center was complete. The cathedral and viceroy’s palace were mostly finished. Frequent European-style civil and sacred festivals took place in the zócalo, which even then could accommodate forty thousand people. Yet these festivals, vehicles for a public display of colonial hierarchies and hegemony, also provided an opportunity for the non-Spanish sectors of Mexico City to formulate new cultural identities and traditions. One example is the Feast of Corpus Christi, which during the late eighteenth century focused on good governance in all sectors of society, including Hispanic, indigenous, and even African confraternities.7 The zócalo also became the stage for social protests. One of the biggest rebellions during the colonial period, the corn riot of 1692, took place here during the Feast of Corpus Christi and led to the burning of the National Palace. Large numbers of indigenous groups were involved. After Independence, through the Revolution, and into the twentieth century, the zócalo has served as a focal point for social-political unrest. In 1828, thousands of citizens used the political tensions generated by the contested presidential election to collectively storm the Parián building. In 1882, students marched against Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship. In the 1920s, workers struck for better working conditions. In 1968, thousands of students participated in a completely silent demonstration against the PRI. The next month the government responded by sending thousands of troops to the national university (UNAM) and detaining over half a million students. The protest—and the government’s embattled military responses—culminated in the 1968 massacre at another historic plaza in the city, La Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco, a symbolic site of resistance where Cuauhtemoc had surrendered to Cortés. When thousands of buildings collapsed in the 1985 earthquake and as many

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as forty thousand people died, crowds again flocked to the zócalo and created a spontaneous mass organization for rescue and rebuilding. In March 1995, thousands of Mexicans, led by Subcomandante Marcos, marched on the zócalo to pressure the government into rolling back threats to the newly founded EZLN. In 2008, when the last tariffs protecting corn—a staple for agrarian life and a crop that many Mexicans feel is part of their national patrimony—were lifted in accordance with the NAFTA agreement, exacerbating an already grave agrarian crisis and hastening the massive depopulation of the countryside, large-scale protests in the zócalo began again. Throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, the zócalo has continued to grow in importance as the symbolic, popular heart of Mexico. With the arrival of Andrés Manuel López Obrador as Mexico City’s popular mayor (2000–2005), the sacred-political possibilities of the zócalo were harnessed and rechanneled into entertainment. Periodically, the zócalo is transformed into an arena (hosting book fairs, rock concerts, lucha libre professional wrestling matches, large screenings of the Pemex trials, World Cup soccer broadcasts) or a center for popular recreation (a moveable museum, an ice rink, even a beach). In the months following the 2006 presidential election, López Obrador and his supporters occupied the zócalo to protest a controversial court decision that Felipe Calderón had edged out López Obrador by a fraction of a percent. In recent decades, the Roman Catholic Church has attempted to regain its prominence in the zócalo. On the Feast of Corpus Christi, the day that brought out all sectors of colonial society, Mexico’s highest-ranking ecclesiastical authorities process from the cathedral into the plaza and stage a large choral Mass. The only remnants of popular participation, however, are the toddlers dressed as humble inditos, with charcoal mustaches and artificial dark braids. The image of the Indian as humble and marginalized has become a symbol of Christ’s humility for this church feast day. The zócalo still reflects the “pulse” of national politics and initiatives. For the bicentennial celebration of Mexico’s Independence on September 16, 2010, the government paid millions of pesos for a huge celebration that included twenty-seven free-falling paratroopers who landed in the packed zócalo. In contrast, the centennial of the Mexican Revolution, the event that most significantly rewrote Mexico’s contemporary history, slipped by, as Mexico’s lawmakers were unable to gain a majority vote to release government funds to carry out an elaborate official celebration. Several informants who identify themselves as part of “el pueblo,” the struggling working class, mention the Revolution as a model for future change in Mexico. “We need another Zapata or Pancho Villa,” concludes Vicente López. The meaning—and outcome—of the Revolution is still contested. Even as the Catholic Church and Mexican state seek to control the symbolic use of the great plaza, hundreds of thousands of people spill out into it from the mouth of the subway and tens of thousands more cross the space to attend to daily religious, legal, and commercial affairs. Street vendors sell traditional medicines and tamales as Aztec dancers seek to reclaim the spiritual power of the space that belonged to their

Figure 3.4a and b.  Dozens of vendors sell anything from traditional herbs to ice in the massive zócalo in front of Mexico City’s cathedral and Templo Mayor. (Photograph by author.)

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ancestors. Protesters stake out areas in which to fight government policies as national guards with machine guns line the front of the National Palace. And the Templo Mayor has grown in importance since its rediscovery. It once again dominates the zócalo and the cultural identity of central Mexico. Beyond this city center, Mexico City has expanded exponentially. Since the beginning of the twentieth century the population of the Federal District (distrito federal, D.F.) has multiplied forty-six times, and the city limits have expanded forty times. Most of this growth has occurred since the 1970s. Over the centuries, onceindependent altepetl and colonial Spanish towns have been engulfed and incorporated into the great city. The city reaches far south from the zócalo to the quaint colonial town center of Coyoacan, where Cortés lived with a series of mistresses and wives, and even farther south to Xochimilco’s 180 kilometers of dark-black canals and chinampas (floating gardens), actively cultivated since pre-Hispanic times for fruits and flowers. To the north, past the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco, the city extends as far as Monte de Tepeyac, a sacred place in pre-Hispanic times and now the site dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe, just forty kilometers from the archaeological city of Teotihuacan. To the east, in the basin of the drained Lake Texcoco, the shantytown of Nezahualcoyotl experienced dramatic growth during the economic crises of the 1980s. It has now been absorbed into the city. In contrast, not far from Mexico City’s limits, San Miguel de Xicalco lies just off the two-lane highway leading to Cortés’s retreat and palace in Cuernavaca. Here the pounding pace of urban life melts away as Nahuatl and Spanish speakers follow the centuries-old tradition of celebrating their patron saint. “Everything fits in a basin,” concludes the exhibit in the City of Mexico Museum—literarily and figuratively a basin formed by the rim of ancient, sacred volcanoes that surround the Valley of Mexico. In contrast to the open, vital zócalo in the heart of the historical center, a nearby interior space administers to a more direct legacy of Hernán Cortés: the hospital founded by the conquistador. Inside the hospital, a family gathers around a man on a stretcher. A bronze bust of Hernán Cortés looks on from the shadows of the courtyard. The man who installed the statue, Julián Gascón,8 only the second hospital director outside the Cortés family, proudly notes the hospital’s record of firsts in the Americas and its continuous operation through centuries of tumultuous historical change: the War of Independence, the war against the United States, the French invasion, the War of Reform, and the Revolution. As life-size portraits of Cortés and his son look on, the eighty-five-year-old director concludes: “Here we live miracles. Sometimes the saints perform miracles.” A prolific author, he hands me his most recent book, a three-act historical drama that incorporates his campesino origins on the Pacific coast in northwest Mexico, the ancestral home of the Mexica, into the conquest story.9 The play follows the conquest north and depicts the local indigenous leader’s valiant defense and ultimate defeat by Nuño de Guzmán.10 Whether fact or fiction, Gascón’s numerous publications highlight local history interpreted within national paradigms of conquest and more recent political change.

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Talking about the hospital today, Gascón asserts, “We have no racial issues. An Indian can come here and receive treatment. . . . There are legal provisions that eliminate discrimination.” For centuries this was not the case. He observes wryly, however, that “the day we put Cortés’s remains at the entrance to Boulevard Reforma and Cuauhtemoc’s where it ends, that’s when we Mexicans will stop being at a loss over these historical matters, . . . but erasing historical matters from your mind isn’t easy. . . . I don’t know how many centuries it will take.” Moving beyond this guardian of Cortés’s place in history, first we go to Coyoacan, where we hear from residents of the Casa Malinche and from artisans protesting what they see as a continuing conquest. Next we travel to outskirts and boroughs (colonias) that have been enveloped by the city, where both working-class people and a historian offer views of the conquest as vital still today. Finally, we return to the historic city center, the heart of the Monstruo, to listen to a variety of people who link social memory and conquest history to their own cultural work, whether archaeological, artistic, or educational.

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Blanca Luz Pulido, Coyoacan So even today, in spite of our diversity, we continue to repeat patterns that have been around since the colony. As much as we complain and don’t name streets after Cortés, etc., a part of us goes on repeating the same pattern of the Peninsular upper class that looked down on people with dark skin. They looked down on those with mixed blood, or the mestizos . . .

South of the great zócalo and Hospital de Jesús, the picturesque Villa de Coyoacan, where Cortés and his captains built the first Spanish-style homes in the Valley of Mexico, is still a comfortable refuge from the busy city center. Over breakfast at Sanborn’s, an English-style department store on the main plaza a few blocks from the Casa Malinche and right in front of where protestors removed a statue commemorating the first mestizo family, the poet and translator Blanca Luz Pulido says, “Well, I think she [Malinche] found a way to survive, don’t you? Perhaps she found certain advantages. Besides, she was a born translator. She liked languages. In that sense, I understand her very well. I don’t think she was any more of a traitor than . . . Naturally, Cortés would’ve found someone, if not Malinche, someone else to be his translator, to help him with the conquest.” (See plate 1.8.) Pulido has published eleven books of poetry since 1980, but she makes a living as an editor and translator of French into Spanish. Her poetry explores the intimate interior worlds of the emotions and has received wide recognition throughout Latin America. Pulido continues, “There wasn’t a notion of nation” in pre-Hispanic Mexico. Each ethnic group responded to Cortés out of self-interest and survival. Unafraid to put forth an opinion that has been written out of national historiography, Pulido suggests that because of the Mexicas’ insatiable demand for tribute, slaves, and human sacrifice, rival indigenous groups may have found the new Spanish invaders more appealing, at least at first. 197

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To Pulido, the most damaging legacy of the conquest was a brutal internal racism. The poet points to “a deep contradiction in our views as a country.” Mexicans want to stamp out Cortés’s “shadow” and ignore the fact that he “had children here. He left his seed.” Yet, they continue to hold people of European ancestry in higher esteem. She recounts daily examples of the unconscious racism that pervades her country: “First impressions mean a lot if you’re dark complected or not . . . even though we know we’re all very mixed. . . . There’s kind of a special privilege because those who’re not dark complected are considered more beautiful.” As a fair-skinned, hazel-eyed woman, whose maternal grandparents are Spanish, Pulido frequently hears people say she doesn’t look Mexican. Culturally trained to be flattered by this remark, she pauses and is horrified by her own complacency. Her keenest hope is that one day we will be able “to bring together all the elements that make us up.” She has no concrete solution beyond saying, “We have to work toward accepting the indigenous people, at giving them real opportunities in life, at not changing them.”

Artisan Protestors, Coyoacan They want . . . to banish us. . . . I don’t think they’re done conquering us yet. It just keeps happening. —hugo sánchez

Just outside Sanborn’s, the huge double plazas—each the equivalent of a city block— are under renovation, enclosed by an eight-foot-high chain-link fence. Twenty booths line one side of the fence, and a couple of dozen combat police in a paddy wagon look on. A voice broadcasting through a megaphone explains the police presence: “Luchamos para mantener diversidad cultural” (We are fighting to preserve Mexico’s cultural diversity). Colorful banners denounce the government’s effort to “disappear the cultural tianguis, or market.” Here in Coyoacan, the artist market in Mexico City’s second most popular plaza is over twenty years old. Every weekend for many years about 500 artisans, representing 7,000 workers from all over Mexico, have sold their crafts to between 30,000 and 50,000 market goers. In the late 1990s, as their numbers grew, the vendors agreed with officials to purchase licenses and pay taxes. But now there is a citywide ban on street vendors, as well as a movement to place them in officially designated public spaces along a citywide tourist corridor—in the case of these vendors, to move them half an hour south to Xochimilco. One artisan believes that the simultaneous enclosure of both plazas for construction is an attempt to remove the protestors permanently and relocate them to remote areas. The protestors argue that, unlike the ambulantes, or peddlers, around the zócalo, who sell manufactured items from all over the globe, they sell only handcrafted items and promote Mexico’s rich cultural traditions. Two months into the protest, they have gathered 75,000 signatures for their petition to remain in the plazas. Local government officials have not responded to their request for a meeting.

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María de la Cruz Martínez sits with her husband and nine-year-old daughter in a booth that displays amber jewelry and marble figurines. For years they both worked at jobs that didn’t even pay enough for basic necessities. As a youth, her husband had learned to sculpt, and he eventually returned to a craft that had garnered him awards in annual competitions in Chiapas. Now the family sells his wares in Coyoacan: “It’s the best option for a decent life.” Even their young daughter helps out and earns money “to pay for her own notebooks and tennis shoes.” They have joined a diverse mixture of artisans, which include Spanish-speaking mestizos, eight different indigenous ethnicities, and professionals with college degrees. The artisans argue that they have helped reestablish links to traditional Nahua tianguis that were suppressed by the Spanish, and are only following recent official government agendas to promote cultural diversity. But the city government’s response has been to scare them off with riot police and try to force them out. “Now we’re going through exactly the same thing: they’re making the people who work on the street disappear and taking over the markets.” Hugo Sánchez, an artisan and rock musician who plays the “stick” (an instrument that combines guitar and bass), jumps into the conversation. He argues vehemently that the cultural tourist corridor is a pretext to allow Spaniards and people of Spanish descent to invest in the fashionable Coyoacan historic center. He gives an example of an official who was born in Spain and bought a Mexican passport, and hands me a pamphlet that reads: “Coyoacan: Closed to the people of Mexico, open to foreign investors and big capitalists.” Sánchez concludes: “It’s just a strategy, an excuse to dismantle the cultural tianguis, or market, because it stands in the way of their project to privatize this whole area. They want to do away with all the small businesses. . . . I don’t think they’re done conquering us yet. It just keeps happening.” A woman who has been listening intently now speaks up about the dire economic and political reality of the four indigenous ethnic groups in the Pacific coastal region of Guerrero, a state with high unemployment and drug trafficking violence. Trained as a legal anthropologist and hired by the former Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI), she helped defend members of indigenous communities accused of crimes. The national legal system allows individuals from indigenous communities to plead their innocence based on traditional “usos y costumbres.” For the plaintiffs to be successful, they often need a knowledgeable anthropologist and legal consultant. After three years, she had helped exonerate almost a hundred prisoners. Ultimately, however, she could not sustain the eighty-hour work weeks, which required extensive travel to remote communities, and could not survive on a salary of $360 a month. In addition, her position was phased out. Under President Fox’s administration, the INI was replaced with the new National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples, which she believes “is absolutely no use. They don’t help the indigenous people any more, they only build infrastructure, which is only a tool for government officials to rob people. So they just build bridges, dams, roads—but they’re roads that even they don’t want anymore. The roads are no good [for the indígenas]. They don’t even have money or a way to go anywhere. So they discontinued the program

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of legal anthropology.” Now she sells, at fair-market prices, brightly colored straw purses made by seven indigenous families in Guerrero. Each of the families has a valuable wage earner in prison. The closing of the Coyoacan market, she argues, “is a link in a chain that goes far beyond the cultural tianguis alone.” Esteban Ramírez García, a father of seven, dressed in a traditional Otomi undyed cotton shirt with an embroidered belt, huarache sandals, and a palm hat, speaks next. Thirty years ago, he left his life as a campesino in the north-central state of Querétaro and became one of the first vendors at the Tianguis Cultural de Coyoacan, selling traditionally dressed cloth Otomi dolls with dark wool skirts and bright handwoven quexquemetl shawls. He explains, “The land is dry, so if it rains, we sow, and if it doesn’t, we don’t.” He immigrated to Mexico City in search of a better livelihood. He says that the government’s plan to move vendors to a commercial space in Xochimilco, far from the tourist center, is shortsighted: artisans are part of a diverse cultural scene and should be part of a cultural setting like central Coyoacan. Local officials, he complains, have not honored their written agreement with the licensed, tax-paying artisans, nor have they honored their legal obligations to foster ethnic diversity: “We see that the authorities are unwilling to resolve this. They don’t have the slightest idea of what’s affecting the merchants and artisans. Here at this sit-in there are several ethnic groups, Otomi, Mazahua, Huichol, so it’s not just us Otomies among our fellow artisans who are here.” Two years later, when I return to the Coyoacan plazas on a Sunday, the fences are gone and so are the artisans. A jazz band plays on a large temporary stage and park benches overflow with families and young adults, often snacking on tamales or peeled mango with chile bought from authorized street vendors. A set of speakers attached to another Casa Cortés, a sixteenth-century municipal building, invites people into the interior patio, a designated space for artisans. Inside, a circle of about seventy-five people laugh as a clown plays a vampire attacking the crowd. Eight jewelry booths attract about twenty other people. The largest of the three official artisan spaces, part of the deal that was struck between the government and the collective, is a two-story building across the street. A line forms as people wait their turn to enter. A man peers out from a banner hung from the top of the stairs announcing that the fight continues. None of the people that I interviewed two years ago seems to be here. The overhead costs, explains one vendor, are too high for many of the former artisans who sold their wares in the plaza. She doesn’t know if any of them moved to Xochimilco. Around the edges of the plazas, a few indigenous vendors still sit on traditional blankets or small stools selling a box or two of their crafts. One Otomi woman outside the cathedral sells me a cloth doll dressed like herself, with dark braided hair in pink and red ribbons. She kindly declines an interview and a photograph: “I don’t want my picture to be far away from me.” While the city has banished street vendors from plazas and streets, ostensibly in order to open up public spaces for easier access, a few small-scale indigenous vendors slip through the cracks of the new system and still sell their crafts in spaces that require no overhead. The complexity of fostering Mexico’s rich popular arts challenges city

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Figure 3.5.  After a year of demonstrations, hundreds of artisans were removed from Coyoacan’s main plaza. Several dozen were given space in the courtyard of this sixteenth-century municipal building called La Casa Cortés. (Photograph by author.)

officials. The conflict between the need to provide accessible markets for both vendors and buyers and the need to protect access to public space has become an urban battleground. National identity and traditions are increasingly commodified on a global scale, yet the state curtails the artisans’ direct access to tourist markets, and the demands of urban investors—and foreign interests—mount. Meanwhile, the very presence of indigenous ethnic vendors from all over the country on the streets of Mexico City bears witness to the often untenable situations in their home communities.

Rina Lazo and Arturo García Bustos, Coyoacan, La Casa Malinche Malinche can’t be a heroine as long as the Mexican people feel wounded by the conquest and keep being discriminated against. —Rina Lazo

Just down the street, I ring the bell of a large colonial house built of volcanic rock, the legendary Casa Malinche. According to popular myth, Cortés lived here with a series of women that included Malinche, his first wife, Catalina (“La Marcaida”), and

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Isabel Moctezuma (the daughter of Moctezuma II and young widow of Cuauhtemoc). The current owner, a petite woman, graciously invites me in. Three-foot-deep windows overlook a plaza with a ten-pew church commissioned by Cortés in honor of the Virgin of the Concepción. “People say that the house is haunted; that Cortés had a tunnel built from Malinche’s house to the church so that he could meet secretly with her even after his Spanish wife arrived (and many say he murdered her in Coyoacan and buried her under the church). . . . Really what you hear on a quiet night are the footsteps of people walking in the plaza; it echoes because of all the volcanic rock.” She explains that she and her husband bought the house from José Vasconcelos’s daughter, when his project to restore the house as a symbol of mestizo Mexico came to a halt on his death in 1959. We move into a light-filled studio, made brighter by a series of strategically placed mirrors. The faces of colonial Mexico’s great intellects, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, appear on easels. A ten-by-twelve-foot canvas with a sketch of the Mayan inframundo covers an entire wall. It turns out that my host was a disciple of the great muralist Diego Rivera. Her husband is Arturo García Bustos, once a student of the painter and longtime Coyoacan resident Frida Kahlo, and now a celebrated lithographer, painter, and muralist. “Art can really move and teach,” says García Bustos. His famous 1980s mural in the Palacio de Gobierno in Oaxaca depicts the conquest through innuendo. The conquistador gives orders while indigenous leaders are tied up. Nooses hang close by. Friars carry crosses in one hand and whips in the other. Upon reflection he wonders whether he “should have painted a crueler Cortés.” While he considers painting another mural focusing on the “hellish enslavement of Indians in nearby mines,” the muralist quietly acknowledges that violent, larger-than-life-size mural figures “torment me.” He prefers to focus on Oaxaca’s beautiful colonial churches: “Even as their world was razed to the ground, indigenous peoples reconfigured sacred carved stones in a labor of love.” Lazo herself believes that the worst legacy of the conquest was to crush indigenous culture. Heavy gold replicas of pre-Hispanic Maya earrings brush against her golden shawl as she talks about her work, which depicts “the mother culture, the Mayan culture.” A Guatemalan from a region with a large Maya population, she paints ancient Mayan culture as a model for Mexicans to appreciate their own culture. The artist believes it will help them see a common past and help “Mexicans’ personality, so that the Mexican people feel more secure, more self-aware. . . . Mexico no longer owns its land, or its life, or its customs. The twenty-first century has done away with many traditions and is doing away with the indigenous languages that lasted for the previous five or six hundred years.” Lazo dwells on the uncomfortable legacy of La Malinche in most Mexicans’ minds. According to popular legend, Malinche is seen as a person who betrayed her race and betrayed her country. Lazo argues, however, that Malinche “didn’t understand well the world that was behind all this. They only knew their own culture and their own world . . . she couldn’t foresee what [her actions] would mean in the

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Figure 3.6.  Trained by Diego Rivera, the muralist Rina Lazo works on her canvas of the Maya underworld in her studio in the Casa Malinche. (© Steve Raymer.)

future.” As the painter of Maya culture talks about the Maya-Nahuatl translator who played a key and controversial role in the conquest, she explains, “Malinche can’t be a heroine as long as the Mexican people feel wounded by the conquest and keep being discriminated against. I think that’s the reason why I paint . . . because I paint the people with all the dignity they deserve.” Seeing Maya culture on canvas, she hopes, will help Mexicans understand indigenous cultures and will combat the impulse to denigrate them.

María del Pilar Mancio Abarca, San Pablo Tepetlapa [The conquistadors] wanted gold, which we had. But here, for the Aztecs, for us, our gold was the corn that was produced, that’s what there was. Here, precious stones, gold, and things like that didn’t matter. Here, what we wanted was to produce corn, the main crop base here in this part of Mexico.

“They don’t ask anyone from the popular classes,” remarks María del Pilar Mancio matter-of-factly as she talks via Skype from a studio-bedroom in an apartment in the upscale neighborhood in Polanco, where she works.11 Thirty years ago she began working there as a laundry maid, and later worked as a nanny who became part of

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the family. Now the nine-year-old daughter of her former charge feigns sleep on the daybed, listening intently as Mancio talks about life in the Nahua town where she lived until age forty. Now she lives on the other side of the city in Tlahuac, a middle- to lower-class neighborhood. Her heart remains in her native town of San Pablo Tepetlapa, which has been incorporated into the Federal District, enveloped by “el Monstruo” as urban sprawl spreads past Coyoacan. The barrier of the Skype session melts away under Mancio’s warm smile as she eagerly offers the story that she emphasizes is “my own experience, what I’ve lived.” The words “indio,” “indigenous,” “comunidad indígena” are never used. Instead her narrative lens for interpreting history and contemporary Mexico is what she calls the “pueblo,” which refers to her native town and its inhabitants as well as to common working-class people. The interaction of a group of people who identify firmly with where they live—or lived—comes alive in her account. The pueblo is the foundation for a history of experiences that are not recorded, but they are experiences that she says reflect the continued conquest legacy: “They don’t value us as they should.” María grew up in San Pablo, a town of about five hundred inhabitants a dozen kilometers from downtown Mexico City. For centuries, pueblo life revolved around cultivating maize, working on the local hacienda, and observing frequent annual traditions. María’s family was at the heart of community life. Her father cultivated his plot and held the revered post of mayordomo for decades, organizing festivals that included those for the local patron saint, Christmas, and Holy Week. His wife and their twelve children helped with the preparations. María’s paternal grandmother was a curandera healer. Three times a week she left at dawn to gather medicinal herbs in el monte—arnica for inflammation, dandelion for circulation, and canary grass (alpiste) for blood pressure, among others—to sell to clients in the zócalo, about an hour’s train ride away. “They say she had a cure for everything,” Mancio recalls. One of her grandmother’s specialties was preparing ritual temascales (sweat lodges) and cleansing baths for postpartum mothers. When Mancio’s father was diagnosed with stomach cancer in the 1980s, he, his mother, and daughter all moved to be near a medical clinic. The farm plot was left to Mancio’s six brothers; her six sisters had already married or found work in the city. The grandmother lived to be 105 years old and passed on the art of herbal medicine, cooking, and the pueblo’s history and traditions to her granddaughter. As Mancio talks, suffering and loss—the realities of poverty and rampant emigration—permeate her story. Her family’s story is fairly typical: her mother’s Nahua parents died young, and her mother was raised in an aunt’s Spanish-speaking household in Guadalajara. Her paternal grandfather switched to speaking only Spanish when his first wife died young and he remarried. The need to integrate and emigrate changed the town. When Mancio herself married, the father of her first daughter crossed over to the United States looking for work and later took the daughter with him. The father of her second daughter also emigrated without papers. Mancio stayed in the pueblo waiting for his return, but he died within a year, of hepatitis

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contracted in the United States. For the last twenty years, she has lived in her own apartment in Mexico City with her second daughter and now granddaughter. Mancio never learned Nahuatl. When I ask about traditional language and about Nahuatl speakers in San Pablo, she says that was in “another time.” San Pablo was once considered a “pueblo indígena,” she says, but it is now just another colonia, or borough of D.F. And yet “the people stay the same, the traditions remain.” Mancio’s attachment to San Pablo remains strong; she and the next two generations, her daughter and granddaughter, return more than a half-dozen times a year, pulled back by a few relatives, traditional celebrations, including pilgrimages to towns nearby, and her own place in the family burial plot. “They’re traditions that haven’t died because even now we still keep them.” Her eyes twinkle as she describes her mother’s Día de los Muertos altars: “My mom would make her altar big, big, big. . . . She’d set out flowers, fruit, food, an altar at least this big, with real big church candles, there were no little votive candles, only big church candles. It was a very beautiful thing because it left us, her daughters, many traditions. And I keep doing it. It’s not very Catholic. They’re pueblo traditions.” When I ask about her ethnic identity, Mancio instead recounts a family legend about an Italian soldier named Mancio who fought against the French in the Battle of Puebla (May 5, 1862—the origin of the Cinco de Mayo celebration). With the exception of Día de los Muertos, she links San Pablo’s traditions to the Spanish conquest, but with a subtle nuance, which she notes, smiling again: Cortés “made us religious because we weren’t ‘believers’ [i.e., Christian]. We believed in the gods and all that, but we weren’t ‘believers.’” According to Mancio, pre-Hispanic peoples had gods, but did not hold strong beliefs. Like the mayordomo in Cholula, she points to ritual tradition as the basis of community and self, and avoids academic and political identification categories, such as indigenous, mestizo, and pre-Hispanic. But she laughs easily when asked about reviving pre-Hispanic traditions: “But they made human sacrifices, many human sacrifices, and, well, no. . . . Back then, there were gods for rain, for sicknesses, and I really don’t care for all that.” Although the Spanish did bring “things we’d never seen,” she observes, it was not an “exchange.” Cortés “didn’t know how to appreciate what was here . . . here what was most valued was corn because it was what fed us.” Instead, he plundered the land and brought deadly diseases, which still plague small towns and poor communities. She personalizes the legacy of European disease with the story of her daughter’s grave bout of chicken pox, a disease that did not exist in Mesoamerica. In the end, “He left us with almost nothing.” Mancio learned about the conquest in her pueblo’s “escuela completa,” which included instruction in planting, sewing, and embroidery as well as reading and writing through sixth grade. It had been established in the former hacienda after the Revolution. But life itself corrected this state-sponsored history: “As time goes by, one realizes things. And, well, what Hernán Cortés had was a lot of ambition.” People now have access to more information about the conquest and see more injustices in

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the system they have inherited. But in the end, Mancio believes things have changed “very little for el pueblo.” While Mancio holds tightly to the traditional concept and practice of a pueblo being the interaction of place, people, and tradition, all that physically remains of San Pablo today, she says, is a cluster of homes; the hacienda building, which still houses the local church and school; and the Museo Anahuacalli, which showcases Diego Rivera’s outstanding collection of pre-Hispanic culture. She notes that forty hectares of the land once liberated from hacienda owners and given to the pueblo—one hectare became the family plot—was bought by the navy. The state, she suggests, is the newest usurper of land around San Pablo as Mexico City continues to expand, and it has contributed to the continued loss of lives, families, and community. While a 2008 government campaign to refurbish and revive the town drew on San Pablo’s traditional town governance system of usos y costumbres to paint the adobe houses picturesque colors, it did nothing to alleviate poverty. One town member complained, “Now we’re all pretty on the outside, but inside, when’s that going to happen?”12 Mancio speaks with conviction when she insists that the pueblo should be consulted and respected: “Look at us all as equals. We’re all the same; there’s a lot of discrimination, a lot of poverty.” The recent corn crisis has caused further emigration from many communities. What Cortés “didn’t know how to value” has been the staple of life and community for millennia, but it continues to be threatened by the lifting of corn tariffs, the changes in the ejido system, and foreign investment by such companies as Walmart, which has become the biggest producer of tortillas in Mexico. Mancio laments that now “there are towns that are being left all alone, without people.” Most of the townspeople have to work elsewhere. And she emphasizes again: things have changed since the conquest, but only a little; there is a long way to go. Yet she holds out hope: “Now we defend ourselves more, we fight, we struggle for our country, so everything doesn’t go abroad, so they’ll value what we have. . . . We can have an exchange that goes both ways: some people bring, some people take.” At first, Mancio is reluctant to criticize changes by the government and the initiatives of the Zapatista movement. She says simply, “I don’t like it.” Later, however, her criticism becomes more pointed: The Zapatistas “don’t respect us. They go all out, and then they do nothing. . . . Marcos just put up his camp and everything was for him. I know that everything they sent to Chiapas, all the aid that was sent, they grabbed it for themselves.” She doesn’t like how a regional political movement like EZLN has been the most recent group to exploit the image—and also the name—of the Revolutionary war hero Emiliano Zapata for its own agenda. By way of contrast, Mancio shares a glorious moment in her family’s and the pueblo’s history. Her grandmother often spoke of how Zapata (whose name was also employed for the name of her borough when her native town was incorporated into the city) entered San Pablo with his troops. He sequestered the local hacienda, the owners fled to Coyoacan, and Zapata sacked the hacienda. He redistributed

Figure 3.7.  In a photograph taken around 1936, María Mancio’s grandmother Silveria Limón poses at the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which she visited weekly. (Courtesy of María del Pilar Mancio.)

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riches and food to “a town full of people dying of hunger.” Later, the land was also redistributed so that households could have their own plots. Mancio’s grandmother, known for her delicious mole, cooked for the troops during their month of encampment in San Pablo. The town supported Zapata, but from bitter experience with past conquests, they hid their adolescent girls in nearby caves. When Zapata marched on to Veracruz, he invited Mancio’s grandmother to join the army. She declined, but one of her two sons joined. Within months they lost contact and never heard from him again. Mancio quotes Zapata from her grandmother’s story: “We’re going to keep fighting until we can fight no more to make Mexico free.” Unlike the Zapatistas today, Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa brought significant change to the pueblo, Mancio argues. “Even if it didn’t turn out how they wanted,” land was redistributed to the poor, and the hacienda was permanently closed. For her, it was the Revolution, not Cortés and the conquest, that served as the catalyst for the birth of the Mexican people. This is a view I hear with some frequency among older, urban, working-class people. They return to another moment in history, idealized in its own way, as a time when the pueblo was given land and more opportunities.

Mauro Luis Barrón López, Los Reyes Acaquilpan, El Estado de México The conquest of Mexico is happening to this day. . . . Politicians are traitors to their country.

The conquistador “set it up for us to fight among brothers. . . . [T]hat was the tragedy . . . of the Mexican people,” asserts Mauro Luis Barrón, a jack-of-all trades who lives in Los Reyes Acaquilpan (pop. 83,000) on the western outskirts of D.F., in what he calls the “poor side,” past Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl. The grandfather of ten works parttime as a chauffeur for the same family as María Mancio and talks via Skype from their living room. On other days he works at whatever job comes along. Disillusioned, yet emanating a warm strength, Barrón flashes an occasional shy smile across his weathered face as he describes “Mexico’s sadness”: “Suffering is people’s reality.” He explicitly links the current economic crises to Mexico’s history of elitism and the successful manipulation of el pueblo through “illusions, or smoke and mirrors, like they’ve done since the conquest.” Like Mancio, he wants to record this story of “who’s living the crises: the common people.” Injustice is “an uneasiness that you carry in your heart, in your thoughts.” His perspective, however, is more directly critical of government policy and its impact on the pueblo. Barrón is a second-generation Chilango with no ties to anywhere but the city. Both of his grandmothers had been forced to flee their native villages after family and monetary disputes left their husbands dead (one in Jalisco, the other in Hidalgo). It is all too easy, he says, for small towns to become divided with long-term resentments

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between families. Barrón’s mother was just seven and his father ten when they moved to vacant lands outside Mexico City, a land of opportunity in the 1940s. His paternal grandmother from Hidalgo spoke Nahuatl, but had to leave it behind when she moved to Mexico City: “They lost their roots.” Both Barrón’s parents grew up in these makeshift towns, and later met and married. As the second eldest of thirteen children (only nine survived infancy), Barrón began working at age eight in a crib factory. His family crowded into one- or two-room rentals, and he learned that “suffering makes us strong.” When he turned fifteen, the family acquired a small house with a garden plot and room to raise chickens and pigs. His father was a truck driver, and his mother ran a small storefront that sold brooms and other basic household goods. “We had to fight,” he recalls. Only the strongest survived the extreme poverty of those early years: “When you don’t have anything, natural selection is stronger.” Later he finished high school and studied accounting, but never pursued it as a career. With palpable sadness, Barrón recalls his mother’s dream to travel to the sea one day. It was a dream they could never afford. By the mid-1980s he had four children of his own to support, and like so many young fathers, he crossed over to Texas. He worked for several years at any job he could find: as a chauffeur, electrician, construction worker, and gardener. He ironically recalls his “opportunity to know another culture” by telling the story of the “good” jealous coworkers unwittingly did him when they blamed him for stealing equipment that they themselves had taken. When the company owner discovered the truth of the matter, he hired Barrón to work for his own family, even asking him to wash the family dog. Today the chauffeur, smiling gently, describes himself as satisfied and at ease. His children are grown with families of their own, and he isn’t afraid of unemployment. He’ll do any kind of work not to have to cross over again: “You can’t be in two places and neglect your family.” Yet he recognizes that he has “a lot of family members I don’t know.” His roots were cut off. The only link to old traditions in his life is the use of herbal medicines to help fight off the viruses and “bad genes” that he believes Mexicans inherited from the conquest. The “Aztec people were very strong.” Like Mancio, Barrón links the devastating diseases that have killed many people in his family with the conquest. But in general, he lives in the present as a person whose family assimilated as “Mexicans,” leaving behind regional and ethnic identities during the first massive wave of immigration to Mexico City in the mid-twentieth century. He consistently steers the conversation away from family and ancestry and back to his preferred topic: the ills of contemporary Mexico. Unlike Mancio, who traces her roots back to her pueblo and keeps them alive through ritual traditions, he talks about “patria” and Mexico as a nation. But it is a Mexico quite distinct from state-sponsored discourse. His views of history are based on experience—his own observation of contemporary political and cultural processes. Raised in an era when the conquest was painted in broad strokes as a glorified struggle of heroic Aztecs versus evil conquistadors, Barrón does not refer to recent

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ideological campaigns about multiculturalism, pluriethnicity, or cultural diversity. Instead, he traces the modern divisions between people back to Cortés’s clever manipulation of indigenous rivalries. Since the conquest, the country has been divided by ambition, materialism, and the selling of Mexico to foreigners. Using a term made popular by Octavio Paz, Barrón argues that Cortés initiated a fivehundred-year history of malinchismo, the sacking of Mexico’s rich resources. After Cortés it continued with Benito Juárez, who sold national interests to foreigners, and later with the assassination of the Revolution’s leaders and the unraveling of the new constitution and gains by the pueblo. Even today, INAH, the national guardian of archaeological sites, has succumbed to bribes from Walmart, and the newly elected PRI president is attempting to change the law and allow foreign companies to drill for oil. This former member of the Mexican Workers’ Party (Partido del Trabajo) believes that two hundred elite Masonic groups from all three major political parties rule the country. Every democratic movement, including the Revolution and the 1968 student movement, has been taken over by the political elite, he argues. They are “Mafia circles” whose greed and betrayal “hit the country hard.” Everyone has been “contaminated,” he continues; they sell pre-Hispanic artifacts found on their land to foreigners, take beach vacations instead of celebrating Holy Week, or never return to Mexico after being sucked into U.S. material culture. Both cultural and economic poverty have become acute, especially since the 1980s economic crises that spurred massive emigration from rural Mexico to cities and the United States. “Our people are living through a very crushing situation.” He places part of the blame on the state educational system, which encourages ignorance because “an educated public doesn’t do the government any good.” In a system that he describes as highly controlled, eager learners like himself aren’t encouraged: “Imagine a plant that they don’t let germinate or flower.” Barrón echoes the Mexican banker from Los Angeles I met in Antigua when he states that the government offers “crumbs” and “bread and a circus” to the impoverished pueblo, manipulating them with “song and dance” as a diversion while selling the country’s rich resources to line their own pockets. “What world are we going to leave to our children, to our grandchildren?” Barrón asks. Government programs are a farce, Zapatismo has made only a few local gains, and he sees no other viable initiatives. “There’s what Subcomandante Marcos is doing in Chiapas, there are Zapatista groups in Morelos, but these groups are not increasing much because it’s not what the government wants; the government doesn’t want the people to rise up.” Instead, the Chilango who has made his own peace living in one of the world’s largest cities—cut off from traditional culture and extended family—suggests that people take personal responsibility to “respect the country.” Talking half jokingly about “overthrowing the government,” the wellinformed chauffeur looks to models like Brazil and Chile, with their recent economic upturns, and Cuba, with its high literacy rates despite low incomes. But he returns to his basic belief: Mexicans need to “work with each other” in order to

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overcome the “bad genes” of “brothers fighting against brothers” and the selling of Mexico that began so many years ago.

Rodrigo Martínez Baracs, La Condesa People are disappearing. . . . I’m not only referring to the Indians, but Indians and peasant farmers.

In a fashionable neighborhood near Chapultepec, the huge forested park often called the “lungs of the city,” where Moctezuma’s gardens once stood, I seek out a historian’s point of view. In 1990–92 José Luis Martínez published a landmark five-volume biography of Hernán Cortés, which included dozens of archival documents. The late author’s son, and a historian in his own right, Rodrigo Martínez Baracs says that his father “tries to show Hernán Cortés from a balanced perspective, as neither villain nor hero.” As Martínez Baracs settles into the couch next to his dog, with a wall of books behind him, he attempts to give historical nuance to the conquest story and its legacy. He cites his own recent book about the sixteenth-century anti-Cortés camp led by Juan Cano de Saavedra (ca. 1502–72). Cano first fought against Cortés, later allied with him during the conquest of Tenochtitlan, and finally joined anti-Cortés campaigns, especially after his marriage to Isabel Moctezuma. Cortés had given doña Isabel the valuable encomienda of Tacuba (Tlacopan), making her doubly powerful as a wealthy owner of an encomienda in addition to being, according to the legal campaign led by her husband Juan Cano, Moctezuma’s only legitimate heir to be recognized in the new colonial order. Martínez’s archival research reveals the complex power struggles among Spaniards and among different indigenous ethnicities and factions. One eyewitness account describes Cortés taking matters into his own hands and burning indigenous rebels alive in Mexico City (1531).13 In a legal petition to the king of Spain (1552), Tacuba authorities depict doña Isabel as a tyrant and even a traitor: “Though she had our blood and was from our homeland, she still proved to be so far away from showing her humanity that instead of pity and natural love that people have for each other from the same land, she acted like a tyrant, and she used us, those who were born of noble and illustrious parents, as servants.”14 Martínez brings to light a more diverse narrative than the one promoted in the national conquest story. He also critiques two popular ideas in Mexico concerning the conquest: first, that a conquest by the English would have been worse. Citing the historian J. H. Elliott, Martínez notes that by the seventeenth century indigenous populations along the colonial American eastern coast had been decimated by disease, so the English could not exploit large indigenous populations. Furthermore, there were no silver mines, which would have required an extensive labor force to mine. If the English had arrived first in Mexico, they would have followed a pattern similar to

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that of the Spanish conquistadors. Elliott maintains that historical circumstance rather than differences between Catholicism and Protestantism explains conquest patterns. Second, Martínez questions the view that the spiritual conquest was entirely horrific. Nationalist discourse idealized pre-Hispanic culture and overlooked the aggressive Mexica practice of human sacrifice. As a religion without human sacrifice, he argues, Catholicism may have appealed to native peoples, especially since the identity of the Christian saints could be transposed onto pre-Hispanic deities. Official historiography is constrained by a powerful taboo: “you can’t speak ill of the Indians.” But the historian notes that, in practice, post-Independence policies have not protected indigenous communities. Dependence on cheap labor to compete in the world market, and lack of opportunity for indigenous peoples and campesinos to change their social class through education and work, are the worst legacies of the conquest. The constitutional reform of Article 27, the adoption of NAFTA, and other neoliberal reforms actually accelerated the loss of indigenous lands and created a class of people “deprived of their indigenous culture whether as peasant farmers or mestizos not only very poor economically, but also culturally . . . people who might well disappear. . . . I’m not only referring to the Indians, but Indians and peasant farmers.” The solution, as many see it, is to set aside the paternalistic idea of trying to remedy five centuries of exploitation through government handouts. “The point is to incorporate the Indians as Indians . . . not forcing them to renounce their heritage.” But Martínez Baracs has no concrete solutions. Even as a trained historian dedicated to a family ideal of studying the conquest from a balanced perspective, of accepting the good with the bad, Martínez finds it hard to ignore its devastating legacy on contemporary Mexico.

Malinalco Dance Group, Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mount Tepeyac They never took anything away, because it’s still here to this day. We’ve never lost it, ever.

Following the lead of many informants who mention the key role of the spiritual conquest in historical memory, I travel to the other side of the city, about a half hour north of the zócalo, to Mount Tepeyac, the spiritual heart of Mexico which hosts millions of visitors annually. It is the site of the miraculous appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe to the Nahua Juan Diego in 1531. Families pose for oldtime photographs along the steps leading to the historic shrine, against backdrops of the Virgin surrounded by burros. In the modern circular basilica below, moving walkways transport thousands of worshippers a day past the miraculous imprint of the Virgin on Juan Diego’s legendary tilma, or cloak. Today, just outside the basilica, trumpets and drums sound as about thirty people dance the popular chinelo,

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skipping in a large U shape and wearing masks and beards in imitation of Spanish conquistadors. The danza del chinelo is often danced during carnival in Morelos and other municipalities swallowed up by Mexico City, such as Xochimilco. These dancers wear tall top hats and long brilliant robes bearing the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the front, but they have added images of a serpent and crocodile on the back of these traditional chinelo outfits. Struck by the curious animal symbols, I ask a woman about the dance. She tells me that she lives in San Diego, but explains that the group is from her native pueblo, Malinalco, which is separated by just a few dozen kilometers from Mount Tepeyac and is an important religious site in its own right. Malinalco, originally associated with the deity Oxoteotl, the Dark Lord of Chalma,15 is home to the Sanctuary of Chalma, where in 1537 the image of the Black Christ is said to have miraculously appeared in the place of Oxoteotl. Today Malinalco and Tepeyac are two of most visited sacred sites in all of Mexico. A middle-aged man, Abel García Guadarrama, an engineer for the electrical company, steps up and eagerly recounts how his mother and brother decided to “reinstate” the traditional chinelo dance in 1999. He recounts that Malinalco had successfully preserved its traditions for centuries, hidden from their Spanish rulers, but when it was annexed to the state of Mexico it lost many traditions, including the chinelo. Now seventy-two people form “a rather large family” and gather bimonthly to practice twenty different dances. Once a year they make a pilgrimage to the Basilica of Guadalupe. The group’s cofounder proudly pulls out a hundred peso bill that depicts the dance, but explains that their version is “really the danza azteca.” As the engineer talks, his friend, a landscaper who prefers to remain anonymous, joins the conversation. He recounts his own role in reawakening Malinalco’s rich indigenous heritage. He explains that an “authentic descendant of the Aztecs” came to town to teach Aztec dance, establish a traditional woodcarving workshop, and perform traditional ritual purifications, including a temascal. After nearly a year of trying to meet the teacher, the landscaper participated in a temascal with him and experienced a profound dream filled with crocodiles and serpents. Using one of Malinalco’s early colonial-era codices, the teacher followed Nahua tradition and deciphered the dream, saying that it foretold the revitalization of Malinalco’s pre-Hispanic past: “The great serpent was asleep and he woke it up. It had been asleep for five hundred years. Then it came out dancing.” The landscaper attended workshops about the area’s history and worked with the teacher to transpose his dream imagery onto banners for dancers. For over a decade now, the landscaper’s family has danced at the basilica, while he takes “care of the dancers by tying shoes, helping with the masks and feathers, or whistling to spur them on.” This year, a grandchild joined them. It is a process he calls “footprints that keep on walking,” a tradition that will continue. “We’re taking back the tradition, but our version,” he emphasizes. The brightly colored robes with pre-Hispanic symbols of the snake are mixed with the multivalent

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Figure 3.8.  Malinalco’s ancient pyramid and archaeological zone has become a symbol of the city’s efforts to distinguish its pre-Hispanic past from Aztec-centered national and regional projects. (Wikimedia Commons.)

image of the Virgin of Guadalupe to emphasize the renewal of traditional beliefs without a lot of concern for authenticity. Performers wind along in a single long line to symbolize the coiled serpent at the entrance into the House of the Eagle and Jaguar at Malinalco’s important Cuauhtinchan archaeological site, built over an existing ceremonial site in the 1470s, when the Mexica conquered Malinalco. “What’s important when you dance is not the image, but what you see below . . . the shadow.” On the dancers’ robes, he continues, the rays behind the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe represent the sun behind their own pre-Hispanic deity: “So you always worship the sun; you give thanks to the sun and where it comes up.” The bearded masks, he says, mock the Spanish conquistadors, while the long robes imitate those of Spanish friars: “They found a way to mock them and continue keeping their tradition. So it’s been five hundred years and the tradition continues. . . . They haven’t conquered us.” A complex layering of traditions and beliefs, the result of past and present political and cultural conquests, emerges through the landscaper’s storyline. Malinalco was first annexed to the Aztec Empire, then came under colonial Spanish rule, was

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later incorporated into the state of Morelos, and finally was annexed to the state of Mexico. The more modern state and national cultural conquests continue today, he argues. Malinalco’s prized pre-Hispanic drum, the teponaxtle (huehuetl), used every October 12 for dances at the city’s great archaeological site, has been expropriated for a long-term exhibit in the state capital. I am reminded of Rene Bonilla’s fight to have the Ixtacamaxtitlan jaguar returned from the state capital in Puebla. The Malinalco dance group is actively creating a new tradition by drawing on past symbols and using them in a new performance context. Their practice mirrors the municipality’s attempts to refocus local identity as neither Aztec nor Spanish, but as its own pre-Hispanic ethnic altepetl, consciously fighting both the original and the contemporary dominance of Aztec culture. A decade before the dance group formed, the municipal government rejected the common use of an Aztec glyph for its coat of arms; instead it adopted a logo that combines the national seal of Mexico with a malinalli flower and a mountain, accompanied by “Malinaltepetl” and the motto “Your archaeology is proof of our race, culture, and work.” Revisionary histories and cultural revival are all based on the texts of conquest and colonization, but they unfolded differently over centuries in distinct geographical locations. Dancing in front of Mexico’s premier national religious symbol to reclaim and even reinvent a local cultural identity reveals a fluid process about history that mirrors Malinalco’s archaeology of the significance of its pre-Hispanic pyramid and culture.

Figure 3.9.  As part of an archaeological team that excavates areas around the Templo Mayor, Gabino López Arenas has uncovered several important Aztec monoliths since the 1990s. (© Steve Raymer.)

Back to the Center The Historic District

Gabino López Arenas, Archaeological Offices of El Templo Mayor It’s odd. On one hand, they like to see the ruins. You can go to archaeological sites, but do you see anybody there from the indigenous community? You don’t see them.

I head back to the heart of Mexico-Tenochtitlan to visit the city’s archaeological offices adjacent to the Templo Mayor. A tall, lean man whose mustache half hides his mouth offers to see me. Gabino López is part of the Urban Archaeology Program team in the Templo Mayor area, sponsored by INAH. Before any remodeling or construction project can begin in the eight-square-block area around the Templo, López and others carry out meticulous archaeological investigations. From 1989 to 2006 they excavated more than forty sites. In 2006 they unearthed a stone monolith that measured 4 by 3.5 meters and weighed twelve tons. Larger even than the monolith of the deity Coyolxauhqui found in 1978, which led to the initial rediscovery of the Templo Mayor, the stone carving depicts Tlaltecuhtli, an earth deity. López explains with quiet understatement, “The spectacular deity was placed face down toward the most important part of the universe, the inframundo.” López and his coworkers are digging up the past stone by stone. Since the quincentennial—and even more since the bicentennial of Independence (2010)—public support and government funds for excavations have increased dramatically. People want to see their own past, explains the archaeologist, so viewing windows into the buried layers of Mexica civilization have been installed all over the central historic district, including at subway stations, the National Palace, and the Archbishop’s Palace. Attendance at the Templo Mayor Museum has quadrupled in recent years. But even these efforts have their critics: some argue that the focus on the Templo Mayor is yet another example of the Aztecization of all things indigenous, or another government move to consolidate power in the capital city. Gabino López’s interest in pre-Hispanic cultures started early. As a boy, he collected arrowheads and shards from ceramic pots that he found in the fields near 217

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his home in the northern coastal state of Nayarit. More than twenty years ago, López left Nayarit to study in Mexico City. Now he carries out archaeological research, diligently recording every layer of civilization—pre-Hispanic, colonial, post-Independence, and contemporary—despite a political climate that “encourages archaeologists to overlook evidence from the colonial era.” Worse yet, he argues, the idealization of pre-Hispanic societies blinds people to the importance of Mexico’s indigenous populations today. People have been trained to see indigenous Mexico as frozen in stone, notes López. INAH itself was founded during the same post-Revolutionary ideological period that sponsored Rivera’s murals, the creation of INI, and the new educational system established by Vasconcelos. INAH’s founder, Manuel Gamio, proposed that archaeology serve as a building block for good government.16 I recall how the INAH researcher in Xalapa, Guy Rozat, argued that, by controlling archaeological interpretation, the state—and PRI in particular—created a hegemonic national history with the monumentalism of pre-Hispanic pyramids as its centerpiece.17 Since the 1980s the Mexican government has pushed to register these archaeological sites with UNESCO’s Patrimony of Humanity program, since registered sites bring in foreign monies and tourists.18 López argues that Mexicans ignore the fact that the heirs of pre-Hispanic peoples still use the same metates, eat the same maize and beans with chile, speak the same languages, and, in small towns, still follow ancestral spiritual traditions that are incompletely blended with elements of the conquistadors’ religion. He concludes, “Instead of valuing these things, they take their land.” Even archaeologists, he notes with a smile, sometimes have difficulty knowing if the metates they unearth are from the pre-Hispanic or the modern era. In one publication, López details Mexica ritual offerings (ofrendas) found at the base of the first cathedral (1525–50) in front of the Templo Mayor.19 Today visitors to the “new” cathedral glimpse these sites through Plexiglas that covers the ten-footdeep layers of the past. There are maguey spines that were used for self-mortification, skeletons of sacrificed children, decapitated skulls, and ceremonial pelotas. López reflects: “We have to remember that the most dramatic and cruel changes resulted from religious imposition . . . to suddenly have their beliefs taken away, their gods toppled and replaced by others. Just imagine. It was very hard.” But his study of the ofrendas revealed a telling fact: Mexica cultural and religious practices, including human sacrifice, did not disappear with the conquest; they continued for at least several decades afterward, in spite of the Franciscan friars’ efforts to eradicate them. Like many Mexicans, López sees Cortés as an astute manipulator of pre-Hispanic alliances who adapted the existing system of tribute for his own ends. Yet he compares the conquistador to politicians who promise tax relief but never intend to make good on their campaign promises. The archaeologist argues that although Spaniards brought the potential for a less socially stratified society, in the end they sought only to “impose [Catholic] religion and invented reasons to get riches.” It is Corpus Christi, and the sound of an Aztec dancer’s conch shell penetrates the four-foot-thick walls of the colonial building adjacent to the Templo Mayor. Just beyond the dancers, the zócalo fills with toddler inditos. López points out, “You

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see right here people like the concheros and inditos of Corpus Christi who create their concept of an Indian as either exotic or humble.” As an academic trained to document physical evidence meticulously, he is skeptical about popular impulses to reinterpret the past. To him, these popular cultural phenomena do not address the real legacy of the conquest, and ignore the real indigenous people still living today. The idealization of the indigenous masks underlying prejudices. López’s point of view, along with those of others such as Rigoberto Nopalteca in the Zongolica, Yolanda Sánchez and Juana Ramírez in Cholula, Gerardo Pérez in Puebla, and María Mancio, challenges any idealization of identity and history.

Judith Santopietro, Meeting of the Escritores en Lenguas Indígenas I’m not willing to lose our deepest and most ancient possession [our indigenous languages], the only thing that endured after the conquest. It would be like accepting inferiority.

Just down the street from the zócalo is the House of the First Printing Press in the Americas (Casa de la Primera Imprenta de América), where in 1539 Bishop Juan de Zumárraga imported the first printing press to produce European-style books. Nearby, the national organization of Indigenous Language Writers (Escritores en Lenguas Indígenas) gathers for its annual conference. More than half the participants are native indigenous language speakers, and a handful wear brightly colored ancestral dress. I’m here to meet Judith Santopietro, who in 2004 founded Iguanazul, a literary magazine dedicated to publishing indigenous authors in their own languages with accompanying Spanish and English translations. The editor, a twenty-three-year-old woman stylishly dressed with thick dark glasses and a white fitted jacket, laments, “I don’t see myself as a mestiza . . . because being mestizo is like being in the middle of nowhere; to me you’re neither European nor indigenous.” A poet in her own right, Santopietro has just delivered a paper about politics, poetry, and oral tradition. When the panel finishes, a lively discussion ensues about the marketability of writing in an indigenous language versus “selling out” with a Spanish translation. Santopietro promotes Mexico’s rich linguistic traditions—las lenguas originarias—while also exploring her own cultural identity: “One way to really liberate yourself from the cultural pressure generated by the genocidal conquest is to accept that Mexico is a multilingual country.” At first, Iguanazul had limited funding and visibility. But as the journal has evolved and received national and international recognition, it has become widely accessible through hard copy and electronic distribution, including Cambridge University’s electronic World Oral Literature Project. Today it is one of the few literary journals that publish in multiple lenguas originarias. Accustomed to being interviewed, Santopietro guides us out of the conference center, through the crowded zócalo lined with book vendors. The annual book fair has just opened. It will host performances by various traditional indigenous music

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Figure 3.10.  After founding Iguanazul, a prominent literary journal that publishes in several of Mexico’s indigenous languages, Judith Santopietro now identifies strongly with her grandmother’s “silenced” Nahua heritage. (Photograph by Itzel Pereda and Fernando Robles.)

and dance troupes as well as talks by two mestizo authors, Miguel León-Portilla and Carlos Montemayor, who have worked to recover and promote Mexico’s indigenous poetry. We settle into a quiet patio off the zócalo and Iguanazul’s editor talks easily about the magazine’s gestation, its success, and its critics. The editor’s tenacity is evident as she describes her fight against labeling indigenous languages as “dialects” as well as a more recent campaign to make Nahua culture the dominant indigenous culture. She resists a new “paternalist vision” as well: the idea that “I’m doing you a favor by granting you a [cultural] space, which is a kind of dependency.” Yet she recognizes that ethnic diversity is complex and difficult. How do you promote more than sixty official languages and 364 linguistic variants, she asks, if you have few resources and a national history of declassifying indigenous communities?

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Santopietro’s search for meaning and self-definition has unfolded alongside Iguanazul’s success. She tells the story of her childhood in Córdoba, Veracruz, home to a large population of both European and Nahua immigrants. While she was told often about her Italian grandparents, she never heard about her Nahua grandmother. “My own indigenous roots were hidden for years.” Upon turning nineteen, she traveled to Nahua comunidades in the Zongolica mountains. She had never seen Nahua customs firsthand. The experience provoked an identity crisis, which ultimately led to her involvement in the lively political-literary scene based in Mexico City that revolves around visibility and rights for Mexico’s indigenous populations. Working to break down racial stereotypes, in particular the concept of the mestizo as the “cosmic race” and the “indio as either folkloric or ignorant,” Santopietro champions individuals’ right to define what ethnicity and culture mean for themselves. While she recently decided to self-identify as india (see plate 1.10), her Zapotec friend, the poet Macario Matus, she says, describes himself as a “citizen of the world.” He enjoys great European classical music, but firmly maintains his indigenous identity.

Mardonio Carballo, Historic City Center I think we have to keep fighting, not making agreements. . . . [S]ome people say we must settle, just accept it. Yes, but first you have to listen to me because my demands are valid.

A vibrant man in his thirties walks into the restaurant where I have been interviewing Santopietro. He comes to our table and asks her about the indigenous writers’ conference that is taking place. He is Mardonio Carballo, a Nahua poet and actor, one of Mexico’s most vocal, visible critics of government indigenous policies. Santopietro invites him to join us and asks him as many questions as I do. When she asks why he didn’t attend the conference, he comments, “I’m tired of intellectuals talking to themselves.” He jokes around a bit, but then delves into his more radical, militant, and direct experience of being indigenous. He has chosen not to attend the conference, although his Nahuatl poetry is well respected. He believes that indigenous writers “have to be tougher, that is, they have to be more critical. But seriously, it’s like we have to be critical . . . [and stop] repeating the same clichés that the big names have told them to use, you know: flowers, birds, Montemayor, León-Portilla.” He elaborates: “We, the indigenous peoples, are fed up. . . . And what we should do, as indigenous intellectuals, is to get into it fiercely . . . call things by their name, because it’s reasonable, because it’s not crazy, but a matter of justice, which I think they sometimes fail to see. They tone down everything.” New paradigms are needed, and change requires a commitment to a “daily, lifelong fight.” Indigenous peoples should not be treated like “the dog that got used to being beaten with the newspaper,” he continues. They should not have to “hang their

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heads in shame.” He pulls out his laptop and shows us the transcript of a recent journalism piece he broadcast on Carmen Aristegui’s commercial radio show (October 12, 2007): a sharp critique of government policies regarding legislation of media, which prohibits indigenous communities from owning their own radio station. He is just as critical of government protesters. Although Mexico stopped observing a holiday on October 12, a date known since 1928 as the Día de la Raza (also the Día de la Hispanidad, and of course as Columbus Day in the United States), Mexican radicals still use the symbolic date to inspire reflection and to launch critiques and protests against what they see as racist government policies and practices. But when they throw eggs at the statue of Columbus every year, Carballo calls this “a pointless waste of time . . . a cathartic moment.” Carballo was raised in a Nahuatl-speaking community in northern Veracruz. He recalls the fascination of waking at dawn to the voices of his mother and father recounting their dreams to each other and interpreting them. His campesino father, considered the scholar of the family (with a third-grade education), spoke Spanish to his children. “He didn’t want us to speak Nahuatl because of the implicit discrimination.” But it was his Nahuatl-speaking mother who taught him that “no one is better than [you] . . . they all go to the bathroom just like you.” At age fourteen Mardonio left home to study, and by age eighteen he had moved to Mexico City to work in the theater. He soon returned to his early experiences and used them to inform his work. The 1994 EZLN/Zapatista uprising changed Carballo’s life. He joined the movement and adopted the Zapatistas’ militant use of la palabra, words, as a weapon, to force government not just to help the indigenous but also to make good on their promises. Carballo compares his mission to the Zapatistas: “I go back to Zapatismo, which uses words as its weapons.” In large public spaces he recites his poetry in his native Nahuatl and Spanish, a bilingualism that carries an inherent political message, and performs improvisational theater that he also writes and directs. In a current show at the National University, the activist-actor-poet plays the part of a tlacuache (opossum), “a sacred animal, a sort of fool, but godlike,” to satirize social norms. He also broadcasts critiques of national policies on indigenous rights. When Televisa failed to renew Aristegui’s contract in 2007, citing lack of viewers just as the audience was growing rapidly (her show had been picked up by CNN by then), TV 22 (XEIMT, owned by Conaculta) hired Carballo to research, produce, and host a weekly thirty-minute show, Raíz de Luna. The series opened with the controversial topic of the violence inflicted on indigenous peoples. Subsequent shows have delved into all aspects of life in comunidades indígenas throughout Mexico. His programs increasingly give more comunidades direct access to the viewing public: Carballo’s own research-based show now alternates weekly with documentary footage created by indigenous groups. Some Mexicans believe the Zapatista movement never really changed indigenous Mexico and even that it has died out.20 But Carballo insists that it has wrought significant change. When he visited San Cristóbal in Chiapas in 2005, once the

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epicenter of Zapatismo, young people who were four years old in 1994 knew their rights. Today, he says, “the rats have left [the Zapatista movement] . . . now comes the hardest work.” Mexicans must not be content with a few public concessions. The EZLN base is the “awakened” Mexicans who recognize the injustices in their country and are ready to work hard. The activist tells of being invited to a key government summit on indigenous policies, the Congreso Nacional de Comunicación Indígena, but then not being allowed to give a position statement. He walked out. It was like being invited to dinner but not treated well, he says. “Many people detest me because I’m radical, I’m radical and I fight.” While the activist sees a growing reappraisal of the “indio,” he criticizes attempts to reconcile conflicts before indigenous concerns have truly been heard. Like other informants, he condemns the “nahualización” of all indigenous peoples that re-creates the cultural—if not political—domination of the Aztec Empire. Carballo sees the government doing the same thing again when it recently sent a Nahuatl teacher to a Zapotec-speaking community and claimed it had observed the letter of the law to protect linguistic diversity. “This is the time to face our obligations and confront things,” he says. At the heart of Carballo’s work and success as a poet, journalist, and critic is his belief in the power of the spoken word. Ever since the Spanish imposed the written word to project their secular and sacred authority, indigenous forms of expression have been marginalized.21 Carballo argues that even though today’s world privileges the written word, indigenous expression is the vanguard for cultural and political change. His recent work, in fact, combines Nahua poetry performed along with a band and a video backdrop. Although León-Portilla’s and Jorge Montemayor’s publications from the second half of the twentieth century opened the door to valuing indigenous poetry past and present, Carballo argues that their work is not enough. These mestizo authors borrowed themes and texts from indigenous traditions; now, a new generation of indigenous artists is creating work based on their own experiences. Their poetry moves beyond the stereotype of indigenous poetry as being about flowers and birds. They do not need to tone down their reality. They are defining the future. The poet-activist learned from his mother that “spoken words are people talking, and people talking are a bundle of emotions and feelings.” The spoken word “strikes the heart.” When Carballo’s mother died several years ago, the loss was devastating. She was his closest link to the Nahua world. But he smiles, imagining his mother’s delight at his “crazy schemes” to recite Nahuatl poetry to hip-hop music. Mexico’s political and cultural vanguard, he repeats, is indigenous. By working on the front lines of mass media communications, Carballo reaches a wide audience. His critiques are not academic, hypothetical, contradictory, or ambiguous. As he sees his country turning increasingly to violence for solutions—which only gives the conservatives more power to censor and control—he follows the example of the Zapatistas: “Who can defeat words?”

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Lilian Álvarez Arellano, Offices of the Secretariat of Public Education As a methodological principle we consider everything else [like the Bernardino de Sahagún text] that talks about what’s Mexican, or lo mexicano, to be suspicious, regardless of how interesting it may be. Why suspicious? Because the Spaniards probably didn’t understand or the indigenous didn’t want to tell them everything.

The dominance of the written word is on display a short walk from the zócalo in the Plaza de Santo Domingo, where scribes for hire have congregated under the shade of the colonnade since colonial times, ready to provide writing services for private and public clients. Just beyond the plaza is the massive former convent that now houses Mexico’s national Secretariat of Public Education (SEP), the institution responsible since 1958 for producing the mandatory primary-school history textbooks. At the entrance, I meet by chance a tall, thin brunette with a pale complexion. She overhears my question to the guard and offers to see me. She reads one of the refrains illustrated by Diego Rivera on the walls: “Let him who wants to eat, work.” José Vasconcelos, who founded SEP in 1921 and was its first secretary, commissioned Rivera to depict these images of the new post-Revolutionary Mexican. As it happens, my guide is Dr. Lilian Álvarez, coordinator of the new textbook series on civic education. After receiving interdisciplinary training in Mexico and a doctorate in education from Harvard University in 1984, Álvarez worked with Mexico’s Human Rights Commission as well as for UNAM, where she specialized in national identity formation in Mexico in the nineteenth century. In 2005 she began coordinating a team of ten people and sixty-four institutions to produce the first new SEP texts for civic education in thirty years.22 The textbook went to press in 2008 and has gone into multiple subsequent editions. Álvarez defines civic education as “the basic knowledge that a citizen must have to function as a citizen.” This no longer means simply memorizing the constitution and reciting the names of government institutions. Throughout much of the twentieth century, textbooks focused on “transmitting a notion of history, of patria, of identity.” Now “the focus is not on just three or ten people. We made them very plural, which was what was needed.” For example, when it came time to write about human rights in the new textbooks, she asked, “What are children’s rights?” Then she asked the head of the Human Rights Commission to write this section. She holds the strong conviction that citizens need to know about everything, including “AIDS, gender, pollution . . . today’s citizen has to know a great deal, even if he’s six years old.” The textbooks provide both verbal and visual commentary on ethics in a historical context. Visual imagery at the bottom of the page conveys a chronological view of Mexico’s history, while the narrative text focuses on the issues arising in each historical period that have an impact on children today. Second graders, for instance, read

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about the diversity of Mexico’s indigenous groups in the past and present through a presentation of the key role of maize over the millennia. Third graders read briefly about the Spanish conquest and the great racial and class divisions during the colonial period, while focusing on “the new life”: the hospitals, educational systems, and shipping industry brought by Spaniards. A photograph of the hospital founded by Cortés carries the comment: “During colonial times, institutions of health were created that were precursors of those that protect us today.”23 Álvarez summarizes the approach to the conquest: “This country was taken by force of arms. There were abuses of human rights. There was a whole population who lost their rights and were exploited . . . a language was imposed.” But, she continues, the textbooks also show how this exploitation has been overcome. First graders, for example, read about respect and justice for everyone while the visual narrative depicts pre-Hispanic cultures and then jumps to a mural of Miguel Hidalgo, with the text: “With the conquest, all life [of your indigenous ancestors] was subjugated for many centuries. Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla proclaimed freedom for Mexico.”24 There is still a tendency, inherited from post-Revolutionary nation building, to treat the colonial period very lightly. Álvarez’s college-age daughter is reading another standard text, Visión de los vencidos, Miguel León-Portilla’s 1959 compilation of indigenous codices about the conquest as a counterpoint to Spanish conquistadors’ accounts. But Álvarez remarks,

Figure 3.11.  Archaeologists clean an Aztec monolith near the Templo Mayor. (“The Aztec earth mother goddess Tlaltecuhtli” © Kenneth Garrett/National Geographic Society/Corbis.)

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“What I don’t like is how they’ve sold this idea of those who’ve been conquered, or ‘vencidos.’ That’s what I don’t like. The texts are worthwhile, but they can’t be taken like that’s the way it was either, because they have major translation problems, they’re out of context, they’re fragmented.” Most extant codices are postconquest creations and, therefore, Hispanized to varying degrees. She notes that “only the monuments are completely reliable,” the carefully carved stones that tell the stories of deities and creation. She reaches for a notebook and excitedly sketches a cross with the letters h, s, f, and a in each quadrant, explaining that many monumental stones, from the Olmec to the Nahua era, display these iconographic axes: hombre (man) + serpiente (serpent) + felino (cat, jaguar) + ave (bird). With the aid of a document found at the National Library in Paris, a seminar at UNAM, “The Decolonization of Mexico,” is applying the iconographic schemas established in the mid-twentieth century by Erwin Panofsky and developed fully by Ruben Bonifaz Nuño to decode the meaning imbedded in many pre-Hispanic carved stones. Recently Álvarez helped mount a bilingual virtual museum, which moves viewers through a reading of the symbols carved into stones.25 In essence, Mesoamerican cosmogonies reveal “gods to human beings. In the ancient culture, human beings are responsible for preserving and perfecting creation . . . [it is] a humanism in which man appears as the engine-source of creation because when they [the gods] see him they feel the urge to create, so he is the motive but also the raw material, because it’s done with his body. So it’s a very different way of relating to the earth, to creation.” Looking at her watch, Álvarez hurries off to the nearby Templo Mayor to view the newly discovered monolith of Tlaltecuhtli, a female earth deity that Gabino López helped uncover, the largest archaeological find since the initial discovery of the stone that led to the unearthing of the Templo Mayor. She wants to see the historic find before attending an afternoon banquet to commemorate the life of her son’s late teacher: “A year ago my son’s teacher was walking in Mexico City when pieces of a jet landed on top of him and three other people—one was a politician fighting the drug lords. All four people were killed.” Álvarez is a devoted mother. As we walk to the Templo Mayor, she talks about leaving tomorrow to settle her eldest daughter into architecture school in New York City. She recalls her own departure to study at Harvard University years ago. We make our way through the thousands of people in the zócalo as they watch a triplicate set of huge TV monitors broadcasting a World Cup soccer game, Ghana vs. Uruguay. A hundred people have set up camp outside the seat of the national government to protest the construction of an electrical plant in Mexico. Dozens of armed guards look on. As we leave the intense midday sun and enter the dimly lit museum, Álvarez objects that the museum makes the pre-Hispanic objects appear “dark, mysterious, and exotic.” Some years ago, the museum received another complaint, from her mentor, Bonifaz Nuño, who suggested that they remove an anachronistic twentiethcentury stained-glass window of Cortés; the museum complied. Álvarez mentions that her childhood nanny, a woman who died without offspring, was a descendant

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of Cortés. Like everyone else I ask, she doesn’t know of any other descendants still living in Mexico. But she guesses that, given Cortés’s many wives, mistresses, and offspring, there must be many. The researcher’s eyes widen and her voice lowers with intensity when she sees the colossal Tlaltecuhitli for the first time. It is sculpted much like the most famous Mexica stone, Coatlicue, discovered in 1790 here in the zócalo. This figure is an anthropomorphic female deity with bird-claw feet, tight curly hair, and large hanging teeth and breasts. As an educator whose vision of civic history affects millions of Mexican schoolchildren every year, Álvarez, in her own intellectual journey to discover original meanings, has come a step closer to the material culture of society.

Marcelino Hernández Beatriz, Center for Indigenous Education The moment I stop feeling what I feel for what is mine, I stop being indígena.

Following the great central Avenida Cuauhtemoc south from the zócalo to the Dirección General de Educación Indígena, founded in 1978 after a battle over bilingual education, I ask a guard if someone might talk with me about indigenous education; he recommends Marcelino Hernández. I meet with Hernández in his office, empty except for a single table with two straight chairs, with the pounding sounds of a Friday rush hour on the busy Avenida Cuauhtemoc outside. The forty-year-old is preparing materials for Nahuatl elementary teachers and finishing his master’s thesis on the recent influence of Spanish on spoken Nahuatl. As he talks in a fluid style, responding to questions with entire paragraphs of information and stories, the dynamic world of Nahuatl speakers in the Huasteca region in the eastern state of Hidalgo unfolds in stark contrast to the glaringly white, windowless office we sit in. Hernández fondly recalls his mother’s refusal to use the color black in her rich, symbolic embroidery, and likens her work to their native Nahuatl language. Nahuatl is an agglutinative language, creating new words by combining two or more existing words, he explains. For example, “Yollo” means “heart,” the essence of human life: thinking comes second. Dozens of Nahuatl words are built on yollo: “I am brave” is nimoyolchicahua (yollo + chicahua [strengthen]) and “anger” is nan niyollocuitlamiqui (yollo + cuitlatl [excrement]). So a brave person strengthens his heart, while an angry person covers his heart in waste. “Language is culture itself. I learn through language. Because of language I am who I am. Because of language I think like I think. Because of language I live,” Hernández continues in a deep, steady voice. Born to Nahuatl-speaking parents in a Nahua town of five hundred inhabitants (Cruzhica, in the state of Hidalgo), Marcelino was forced to complete his primary education in Spanish, in an era before bilingual and now intercultural education

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Figure 3.12.  María Leonor Beatriz Vega photographed by her son in front of her house in Cruzhica, Xochiatipan. (Courtesy of Marcelino Hernández Beatriz.)

(which includes using educational materials from another culture, not just its language) were offered. He followed tradition, speaking Nahuatl only in his family and community, and did not learn Spanish very well. But he found that outside his own village, Nahua people usually spoke Spanish with each other because of the dozens of dialects among Nahuatl speakers and the discrimination against speakers of indigenous languages. At age twelve, Marcelino sought a better life and left his family to stay with relatives in Mexico City. However, unlike Mardonio Carballo, who adjusted readily to city life, Marcelino found daily life traumatic. He recalls eating strangely prepared foods, wearing city trousers, and enduring unbelievable levels of noise, while being unable to say more than “sí” or “no.” Disillusioned, he

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returned to his native town. There a high-school teacher asked the young Marcelino why he didn’t write in his native Nahuatl. This simple question set in motion a decades-long transformation. He finished school and left his comunidad again, this time to study linguistics. Soon afterward, he initiated a seven-year project in a Nahuatl-speaking region to train young people—who often had just an elementary-school education—to teach Nahuatl in the many Nahua communities there.26 To his surprise, the teachers had to overcome a communication barrier. Nahuatl speakers often didn’t understand each other. Differences in local dialects were compounded when indigenous movements in the 1980s founded new towns with people from other Nahuatl linguistic groups. Members of a new community often didn’t understand each other’s native Nahuatl or the local Nahuatl of the area. The diversity of dialects can be a problem, but Hernández believes it can be solved. He trains Nahuatl speakers to be flexible in “hearing” linguistic variation so that they don’t resort to using Spanish with each other. In 1988 Hernández returned to the Huasteca region for three more years. Now fluent in Spanish as well as Nahuatl, he observed that his Spanish automatically placed him in a position of power both within and outside the community. This new elite status provoked another existential crisis. “If I speak Spanish to a Nahuatl speaker, I’m making a bad mistake . . . if I don’t feel I’m part of them, I’m an outsider without roots.” Thus he began a lifelong commitment to speak Nahuatl to other Nahuatl speakers, regardless of dialect differences. By his example, he hopes that other indigenous people can overcome their linguistic differences in order to value their shared heritage. In 1992 Hernández published a Huastec Nahuatl dictionary, now in its second edition, which is used in bilingual classes throughout the state of Hidalgo. Laughing, he recalls years of collecting vocabulary by taping—at times in secret—his Nahuatl monolingual mother and others as they told regional Huasteca stories. The linguist posts examples of these on his blog in order to reach a wide audience.27 By the mid-1990s Hernández and his wife had left Cruzhica to settle in the state of Mexico, but they hope eventually to retire back in their comunidad. In the meantime, the linguist speaks Nahuatl at home with his children. While he allows them to reply in Spanish, he requires two things of them: they must learn Nahuatl grammar “because it’s your language,” and they must never say, “‘I don’t come from indigenous parents,’ because you can’t deny who you are.” But he also recognizes that city life is all-absorbing: “I fight to avoid being eaten up.” Hernández recalls interviewing an elderly Nahua man whose children had emigrated from Cruzhica. The father was happy that his children spoke Spanish because “it means they have another world, another life.” But like Hernández, the father insisted, “they can learn Spanish, they can go wherever they want, but their language, I don’t want them to forget their language.” Indigenous parents, Hernández notes, often want their children to learn Spanish and to leave the comunidad. They are loath to see their children suffer as they have. If they leave, however, the children face severe discrimination and often respond by attempting to erase differences in language, dress, and customs. “That’s

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precisely why I say that identity gets lost when you no longer feel you’re part of that [indigenous] group. But we don’t belong to this other group either. Therefore we’re sort of undefined, in between.” As we’ve heard from other informants, an urban immigrant risks living in a no-man’s-land. A continuing theme of suffering and loss runs through the linguist’s story: the toll of hundreds of years of terrible discrimination against indigenous peoples and the increasingly rapid destruction of their heritage. While conquest and colonization began this process, the existence of repúblicas de indios and the preservation of Nahuatl allowed for a degree of continuity. The recent urbanization of Mexico since the 1950s has accelerated the loss: “I don’t blame those who leave and lose their roots completely because you feel a terrible pressure when you’re outside, and if you don’t have a very clear identity, you get lost; it’s just like you’re being bombarded from all sides.” Like Carballo, Hernández sees the “parting of the waters” in the wake of the Zapatista uprising. Legislative reform, in particular the 2003 constitutional reform that grants every officially recognized indigenous Mexican the right to education and government services in his or her native language, has made Hernández’s work far more wide-reaching and influential. In addition to creating bilingual materials, he develops intercultural primary-school resources—an effort parallel to the efforts of the Intercultural University attended by Gabriel Mazahua and Roberto Nopaltecatl in the Zongolica. It is an effort to “strengthen their [schoolchildren’s] culture . . . the child sees that what he’s being taught in the classroom is really grounded in his community.” Still, the huge gap between legislative reform and daily practice continues. Many indigenous communities have no library; if they do, only one book in a thousand is in their local language. The constitution, the linguist continues, has been translated into Nahuatl, but six out of ten Nahuatl speakers are illiterate in their own language. Even with all the changes, many indigenous youth just do not want to be identified as indios. Undaunted by these challenges, Hernández continues to expand his efforts. He pulls out a stack of note cards and shyly talks about a series of short stories he is planning. Each story dramatizes the complexity of indigenous experience, particularly when in conflict with urban, Hispanized society. In “Kept Promise,” an indigenous town jails the mestizo mayor and only releases him after a public gathering in which he agrees to make good on his campaign promises to the community. As he talks, I recall René Bonilla’s real-life story of a six-month takeover of the municipal government in Ixtacamaxtitlan for similar reasons. In another story, an indigenous peasant gives up his voting card in exchange for food, but years later, as an immigrant in Mexico City, he begins to question, “Who am I? Why do I act in such a way? What am I teaching my children? Am I incapable of deciding for myself? What have I become? What can I pass on to my children? [Are they learning] to be fooled in the same way or to sell themselves to the highest bidder?” The Nahua linguist and educator yearns for an even deeper engagement with indigenous culture. He dreams of a revival for all Mexicans of their most sacred shared heritage: a belief in the harmony of nature, human life, and community.

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“I am sun, soil, tree, animal, therefore not an outsider. Depending on how I care for it, on how I coexist with it, I can be in harmony, at peace with everything that surrounds me.” Whereas María Mancio and Mauro Barrón attended school before the era of bilingual and bicultural education, Hernández, as a recent immigrant to Mexico City, works to affect the younger generation, both in his native region and in the national primary educational system. Through his writing and by his example, Hernández works to reverse centuries of loss.

Pilar Moctezuma González, Museo de Arte Popular If a member of the Moctezuma family does something wrong, he drags us all down.

Mexican and international tourists wishing to see Mexico’s increasingly popular traditional arts, like the embroideries of Hernández’s mother, can now visit the fivestory Museo de Arte Popular, which showcases Mexico’s rich indigenous cultural diversity by region. In the heart of the historic district, just off the popular tree-lined Alameda that in colonial times was reserved for the elite—and across the plaza from the nineteenth-century Hotel Cortés, renamed Hotel del Cielo a few years ago—the rich colors, materials, and creative designs on display are also for sale in a shop adjacent to the museum. I ask to interview a shop employee. Twenty-two-year-old Pilar Moctezuma González, a purchaser for the museum, agrees. As she tells me her name, she admits, “Moctezuma is a strong last name.” She explains, “Foreigners ask if you are a princess, and Mexicans call you a traitor. Worse yet, if a member of the Moctezuma family does something wrong, he drags us all down.” Wearing a bright blue blouse with a traditional handwoven scarf, Moctezuma is forthcoming about her family’s history and her own views. Two generations ago her architect grandfather, Pedro Moctezuma Díaz, worked hard to change the negative association of the family name. He contributed to the modernization of the country, helping to build the airport in Acapulco and the Torre de Pemex skyscraper. He also instilled in his eleven children a respect for their paternal surname. According to “the stories grandparents tell you,” the family is descended from Isabel Moctezuma’s first marriage to one of Cortés soldiers, Pedro Gallego de Andrade, and not from her long marriage to Juan Cano, with whom she later lived in Spain.28 The family tackles the label of traitor by reinterpreting the enigma of Moctezuma’s death. “The Spaniards killed Moctezuma, inserted a pole through him, and then held him up on his balcony, making him look as if he were alive. Then his own people stoned him, thinking he had sided with the conquistadors.” Although no historical account corroborates this exact version of the family’s story, there is no consensus among scholars about the truth surrounding his capture and death.29 Another difficulty contemporary Moctezumas have with their surname is that for centuries it was often associated with a Spanish heritage. The emperor’s heir, Isabel

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Moctezuma, and some of her descendants lived in Spain, while others became governors in Mexico. As the historian Martínez Baracs’s archival work suggests, indigenous authorities accused doña Isabel of cruelty in the administration of her extensive encomienda in Tacuba. And yet her last will and testament requested that her indigenous servants be set free. As in the case of Malinche, no modern label of traitor or indigenous does justice to the complexity of a powerful indigenous woman working within the new colonial order. Her father’s generation, Moctezuma explains, reacted to government repression after the 1968 massacre at Tlatelolco and began a search for identity. The search ended in “rancor and hate” toward everything Spanish and an embrace of the other (the indio). Her numerous Moctezuma uncles learned Nahuatl, studied Mexica culture, and now work on behalf of their pueblo. “They’ve made their last name and everything that comes with it a part of their life. In fact, all of them have worked hard for their people. What I mean to say is that I do feel that it is indeed in their blood, because Moctezuma was, well, someone who worked for his people.” In contrast, Pilar Moctezuma’s generation has enjoyed the freedom to “appreciate both sides without leaning toward either.” She is proud of being Mexican, an identity she recognizes as part of a historical process that is a combinación rather than the “mestizaje they teach you to speak about.” Her term “combination” allows for a layering of differences rather than the homogenous blend implied by the term mestizaje. She even proposes the possibility of a radically different—and surely not very popular—conquest story: “Maybe some Spaniards fell in love with Mexican women, got married, and had children.” This was the beginning of respect for native cultures—at least for individual indias. She argues, “They didn’t know the extent of their differences.” In an effort to distance herself from the family tradition of public service, she studied textile design for the fashion industry. On completion of her degree, Moctezuma fulfilled a national social service requirement by working at the Museo de Arte Popular. At the end of the year, she accepted the position of purchaser for the museum store. She recalls: “I said, I’m going into design, where I won’t be a public servant or an intellectual . . . [but] I ended up doing the same thing as [my uncles], even more so.” Now, following a family tradition of service, she works for “el pueblo mexicano.” She fights the tendency to “despise indigenous products” by locating marketable crafts to sell at fair market prices. At times, she suggests to the artists that they might “modify the design, but not the technique, to make [the products] more commercial and more profitable for the artisan. The point is for the technique to endure, but to change the design or the color combination a little.” Traditions, like the people themselves, endure by adapting to new conditions. Although Moctezuma feels an obligation to live up to her paternal surname, her mother’s parents are both Spaniards. Pilar grew up hearing Spanish lullabies, learning the popular sevillana dance from southern Spain, and socializing at a Spanish country club in Mexico City. Every Sunday the family still gathers at her maternal grandparents’ house to eat paella, Spain’s national rice dish (but made with Mexican chiles), or Spanish-style octopus served in warm corn tortillas. When she visits

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Figure 3.13.  A Mazahua vendor, who preferred not to be named, outside the Museo de Arte Popular. (Photograph by author.)

Spain, “I feel right at home. . . . My given name, Pilar, is as Spanish as Spain itself.” In the end, Moctezuma enjoys her upper-class status while working to help create a fair market for traditional artists. As I leave, a traditionally dressed Mazahua woman enters the museum with a bundle on her shoulders. The four contrasting layers of the woman’s dress match those on the cloth dolls she unwraps to sell to the museum shop. Remembering the Coyoacan artisans protesting the citywide ban on selling directly in the streets, I conjecture that museum shops may help traditional artisans reach more markets and achieve sustainable incomes even as the shops become another intermediary capitalizing on the growing popularity of Mexico’s traditional arts.

Anonymous, Museo de Arte Popular Cortés came to an organized place . . . but he wanted to profit from it, he wanted to show off. It happens to all of us, but more to Spaniards.

The daughter of a Mexican diplomat and his wife, whose family dates back to early Spanish colonizers, sips coffee at the Museo de Arte Popular, where she volunteers.

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A cultural promoter who spent much of her early childhood and young adult years in Montreal and France, she returned to work in Mexico City’s vibrant cultural scene in the mid-1960s. She worked first in the Mexican Pavilion for the 1965 World’s Fair, then at the first-ever Cultural Olympiad, and later opened her own business, giving tours to visiting dignitaries ranging from the Rockefellers to the Prince of Wales. Describing the racial and social stereotyping both among Mexicans and outside Mexico, she tells the humorous story of having to dye her blonde hair black in order to fulfill the unwritten requirement to “look Mexican” to foreigners attending the World’s Fair in New York City. She explains, “I grew up being proud of being Mexican—there are other Mexicans who look like me, even though we are a minority . . . but I speak their language; I speak their ways.” While she enjoys being from Mexico’s most privileged class (“I have servants and trips to Paris”), she acknowledges that these very privileges come from a long history of oppression. Indigenous peoples—regardless of class or ethnicity—have been “lumped together and become the poorest people, living in villages without basic necessities or as domestic help and day laborers in urban areas.” The legacy of a hierarchical Spanish colonial system and Mexico’s long history of tlatoanis, inherited from pre-Hispanic societies, contributes to the problem, she argues. Every barrio has a tlatoani, whether it’s the local priest or a political leader, and national-level politics have been dominated by tlatoanis. Worse yet, “drug lords, such as El Chapo Guzman, are the new tlatoanis.” The division among social classes has contributed to a now untenable situation, she concludes. People of indigenous heritage “are reconquering Mexico; they want a place in this country that is theirs. . . . How long can we last the way we were? Even icebergs melt. Things cannot remain the same. There has to be movement. ”

The Retreat Toward Cuernavaca

Vicente López, San Miguel Xicalco Let’s just say the good thing the Spaniards left us is that we’ve kept our beliefs, our traditions.

Wondering to what extent local identities are still strong just outside the D.F. city limits, in towns with strong Nahua heritage, I follow the direction of Cortés’s retreat from the devastation of Tenochtitlan and travel to San Miguel Xicalco in the foothills leading to Cuernavaca. This town, based on the ejido and comunidad traditions, is celebrating its fiesta patronal for San Miguel the archangel, the sacred image promoted in early colonial times as a symbol of ethnic integration. The saint continues to be the most popular patron saint in indigenous communities throughout central Mexico.30 Old rural Mexico is still alive here: there are no wide streets, no McDonald’s, no big-box stores. Instead, a few streets lined with small shops and houses lead to open fields and garden plots with chickens and fig trees. At the highest point, a small sixteen-pew colonial church built out of volcanic rock has come alive. The front façade is a wall of intricately woven carnations, palms, and lilies. In the church plaza, ten men hammer boards together, building two-story-high frames in the shape of castles and bells to which they will attach fireworks for the evening’s events. An eight-piece band from Mexico City strolls around in tan uniforms, waiting to play before Mass at 1:00 p.m. after beginning the day at 5:30 a.m. by playing “Las Mañanitas” as townspeople processed from San Miguel to the church. Later, after a fireworks show, they will play for a dance concert in the church plaza. Inside the brilliantly colored church, a two-foot-high colonial-era statue of San Miguel Arcángel presides over the main altar and is surrounded by white lilies. The crucifix has been relegated to a side altar. Another San Miguel, “the pilgrim,” dressed in white and placed in the central aisle, arrived last night after a year of visiting a different household each week. Families with young children enter, men remove white straw hats, and indigenous 235

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women kneel and pray as a group of parishioners, including the fiscal Vicente López, prepare the altar and the musical instruments for the celebration of Mass. Like many other small towns, for centuries San Miguel has had only itinerant missionary priests (the current one is from Congo). The community itself runs the church. Despite his many duties on the town’s feast day, the fiscal agrees to an interview. Sitting in the back pew as the church begins to fill, López explains that he is serving a two-year term and takes weeks off at a time from his job as a petroleum chemical engineer in order to oversee fund-raising and organize committees for festival flowers, fireworks, music, and dances. Town unity depends on his active participation in, and good leadership for, its four most important religious holidays. The Feast of San Miguel is second in importance only to the Via Crucis, the reenactment of Christ’s Passion during Holy Week, when townspeople process to their sacred cerrito about a mile away and raise three crosses with men tied to them. The fiscal says that these traditions have made their community strong: “The parish where we belong keeps us together.” When one itinerant priest tried to change San Miguel’s traditions, to “make the church like others [ . . . ] to change everything overnight, he wasn’t going to be able to. You just can’t.” Many evangelical Protestant groups have gained new members in surrounding towns. There is a huge new church just five miles down the highway, and my taxi driver, who grew up there, talks about the divisions it has caused. But the other churches haven’t been successful in this town. A small Protestant church just a half a block from the Church of San Miguel is gated, chained, and locked. The only sign of life there is a woman outside the gate selling polyester sweat suits and blouses. She comes from a nearby town on feast days. While her religion forbids her to take part in any Catholic feast day, she is allowed to sell her wares. The vendor doesn’t mind the limitations: “My pastor is from Maryland, U.S. He helped me find Christianity and overcome alcohol and tobacco addictions. Our family has been blessed and has prospered” (Anonymous, interview). López describes his family and village of Nahua heritage, but insists, “Saying I’m Aztec or something like that . . . well, it’s not that way. It’s a mix.” Yet like the mayordomo from Cholula, he asserts that “the good thing the Spaniards left us is that we’ve kept our beliefs, our traditions.” With a smile, he says “tlahzocamati” (gracias) and “hasta moztla” (hasta mañana). Everyone in town has family members who still speak Nahuatl. His grandmother, who spoke only Nahuatl, as a baby was carried on her mother’s back when the comunidad retreated to its cerrito and successfully repelled the government forces led by a gachupín (a derogatory term for Spaniards) by rolling boulders down the hill to block their advance. Later, she joined Zapata’s troops as one of the soldaderas, women who accompanied his army. The Revolution was a great moment for “the country’s recovery.” But the fiscal also notes that the revolution contributed to the loss of Nahuatl: his own father was raised to be fluent only in Spanish. When he talks about the conquest, there is no ambivalence. Cortés “was a pirate . . . [he] brought nothing but pirates with him, don’t you agree?” López’s great sorrow, though, is the loss of the central valley’s lakes and water channels. An

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Figure 3.14.  Vicente López describes his grandmother’s role in the Mexican Revolution. This archive photograph shows women soldaderas who fought. (Wikimedia Commons.)

affinity for natural beauty marks his personal experience of change, conquest, and continuity. His sense of place, the natural world, and its people resonates with don Lupe’s story of his cerrito and Lorenzo Bonilla’s fight for el bosque. San Miguel’s own cerrito played an important role in town history and religious tradition. Yet like so many towns, it too is threatened by the modern conquest of urban sprawl. Talk of conquest, revolution, and loss of cultural heritage quickly moves into a discussion about imperialism and the role of the United States today. López lists contemporary ills: Bush’s politics and the Halliburton petroleum case with Pemex; the U.S. demand for illegal drugs and the violence it spawns; and schoolchildren who come home speaking English instead of using (mandatory) Nahuatl as a second language. There is resignation in his voice as he echoes the popular refrain: “If the U.S. sneezes, we get pneumonia.” He recognizes, however, that all empires throughout history are destroyed from within. China will be the next “monster that will eat us up.” As the interview winds down amid deafening bells and fireworks, López adds a last comment: the Zapatista movement is not strong enough to combat Mexico’s ills. “They wave the flag around” and not much else. He doesn’t believe current Zapatismo will change anything: “We need another Zapata or Pancho Villa.” Like the Nahua activist Mardonio Carballo and the cultural promoter we interviewed in Mexico City—arguably on nearly opposite sides of the cultural and political spectrum—and his urban working-class counterparts, María Mancio and Mauro Barrón, López hopes for change at a structural level. Although Vicente López lives in a relatively pristine rural setting that has kept many of its traditions alive, he nevertheless advocates for even more radical change—a new revolution. Poverty and inequality are so ingrained in the system that some working-class Mexicans like him look back to the ideals of the Revolution as a model for progress.

Interview Selections, Part III

Blanca Luz Pulido If we could talk about your perception of the conquest . . . In Mexico, there’s a deep sense of the mixing of races, but there’s also a lot of ambivalence, I think, regarding the value of the Spanish part of the culture. Many people still talk about the gachupines, or the pure Spaniards. When the anniversary of the discovery [of America] comes around, there are people who still make the association . . . as if something terrible happened, and there was plundering, and we should all speak Nahuatl instead of Spanish. Then, there are those who . . . but in a country with so many millions of people it’s also reasonable that not everyone thinks the same way about it. . . . There’s something almost ambiguous about the perception of Cortés in particular because, supposedly, he was the conqueror. And so, it’s like people don’t want to think much about it; they don’t want to analyze it; they don’t see that it has much merit. It’s something that in some way is still contradictory because we still have some racism in Mexico too. Racism against the Spaniards or against the indigenous people? Internal [racism]. In other words, I think it’s also part of the contradictions that we’re made of and that sometimes hold us back, unfortunately. For instance, the comments you hear even if your friends aren’t, how should I say it, openly racist. You hear a comment now and then. For instance, standing in line to get a passport, I heard a casual conversation of some people who were standing near me, and one says, “So-and-so had a daughter who turned out really pretty because she’s güerita, you know, fair complected.” What does that mean? Did she mean to say that she wouldn’t be as pretty if she’d turned out morenita, or dark skinned? That exists in Mexico a lot, though you don’t talk about it; you just don’t acknowledge it. People

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who still say, “That’s very Indian.” And on first glance, a person’s skin tone means a lot . . . if they’re dark skinned or not . . . Even though we know we’re all very mixed, someone who is light skinned, let’s say, is favored or considered more beautiful. . . . I think it must be something that keeps coming through, something subconscious, perhaps because of all the advantages the Spaniards who came over from Spain had in colonial times or even the criollos—those Spaniards who were born here. So even today, in spite of our diversity, we continue to repeat patterns that have been around since the colony. As much as we complain and don’t name streets after Cortés, etc., a part of us goes on repeating the same pattern of the Peninsular upper class that looked down on people with dark skin. What is your own opinion of Cortés? Cortés or someone else would have come here, would have conquered one way or another, with more or less the same cruelty, with more or less the same barbarity and massacres. That is, it’s certainly possible to have an opinion and discuss whether Cortés was out for blood or not. I think he was quite bloodthirsty. I think he’s a character that has both a light and a dark side, a character who’s very hard to get away from because, no matter what, he had children here. He left his seed. He began a process of conquest that others continued. But I think that given our ambiguity as a country, perhaps one day, who knows, this will get resolved by bringing together all the elements that shape us; things like not fully accepting what’s indigenous about us; things we still see in racist contradictions today. If we don’t fully accept what we are, as a country, how can we possibly accept Cortés? Let me put it this way, the contradictions are there, and they still need to be worked on. We have to work toward accepting the indigenous people, at giving them real opportunities in life, at not changing them. There’s all that, which is a big problem. Do you change them or not? Do you modernize them completely? They’re no longer indigenous. Do you support them completely? Fine, but there are some things you have to ask if they should keep doing like their ancestors did because they had social mores like, I don’t know, oppressing women and things like that. So, it’s complicated. What’s your opinion of Malinche? Well, I think she found a way to survive, don’t you? Perhaps she found certain advantages. Besides, she was a born translator. She liked languages. In that sense, I understand her very well. I don’t think she was any more of a traitor than . . . Naturally, Cortés would’ve found someone, if not Malinche, someone else to be his translator, to help him with the conquest. The Tlaxcaltecas also made pacts with the Spaniards in order to survive, to gain certain advantages. To this day they still carry around the stigma of being traitors, but in any given town the Spaniards could have made pacts with the locals. The Aztecs were also awful to the people they were also subjugating. So you have such a big country, with so many different groups who didn’t see

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themselves as a single country; there were different cultures that waged war against each other, just as in Europe and in so many other places. Then, somebody comes along and offers you an advantage, so you betray the rest. There wasn’t a notion of nation. Nobody knew what was going to happen later, that they were all going to be hurt. They weren’t people who could’ve had that foresight. I mean, in comparison with Europe, we were behind for X reasons, because of something, let’s just say, not for lack of merit but for having developed differently. So, what would the Latin American peoples have accomplished without the conquest? We’ll never know. Where would we be now? Who knows? Others would’ve come, perhaps the Vikings, or the Irish.

Rina Lazo Are your own paintings inspired by the Maya world? I wanted to paint that history, which is at the root of Mexico, because I feel that painting Mexico’s history and the Mexican Revolution contributes something . . . something for the Mexican’s personality, so that the Mexican people feel more secure, more self-aware. . . . You have to look at the country’s roots. Because Maya culture is a mother culture: it didn’t come from any other culture, but rather it flourished here in Mesoamerica, independently from other cultures. So I became very interested in affirming those roots, and I’ve been interested in painting indigenous characters, indigenous faces, and indigenous traditions ever since. When the Maya room [at the Museum of Anthropology and History] was remodeled in 1997, I was commissioned to paint something inspired by the Popol Vuh. I did a painting based on traditional forms of sowing, growing, and harvesting corn that still exist today—all of those pre-Hispanic traditions that we still have and live with today. What are your thoughts on what Malinche did? As I see it, she was able to do what she did because she didn’t understand well the world that was behind all this. They only knew their own culture and their own world. So she probably wasn’t able to understand the situation; she couldn’t foresee what [her actions] would mean in the future: the fact that we are still suffering from discrimination, and discriminating against the indigenous people. And the poor indigenous people are still suffering from the outcome of a conquest that wasn’t harmless but tried to wipe out Mesoamerican culture—and throughout the Americas, in Peru also—by destroying codices, destroying culture. For example, at the time, the Mayas used the zero and had a more sophisticated calendar than the conquistadors. In other words, they destroyed a very advanced culture, even if they say that they were naked and wore feathers—and to think people still repeat that. I think that Malinche can’t be a hero as long as the Mexican people feel wounded by the conquest and keep being discriminated against. I think that’s the reason why I paint . . . because I paint the people with all the dignity they deserve.

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Artisan Protestors Why does the Coyoacan government want to close the cultural tianguis, or market? hugo sÁnchez:  It’s just a strategy, an excuse to dismantle the cultural tianguis, or market, because it stands in the way of their project to privatize this whole area. They want to do away with all the small businesses. Restaurants and all are going bankrupt; many are closing down. Their sales have gone down 70 percent. People have left because they can no longer pay. . . . They’re proposing a place out by Xochimilco for us, but it’s a closed-in space with a parking lot. What they want is to dismantle the cultural tianguis, and they want to assign us to . . . to drive us out of here. What’s happened to street vendors in downtown Mexico City? It’s the same strategy, but the context is different because they don’t have a cultural tianguis there. They’re street vendors who are organized, and their leaders back or represent up to 3,000, 2,000, some 1,000 people. A few leaders control all those people. But they’re there illegally because they take up the street, without permits or anything. They just bribe the police, the street cops, but they don’t have any kind of paperwork that backs up what they’re doing or says they’re working in an organized way. They don’t have nonprofit associations, only trade associations. Here we have nonprofit organizations, there are twenty-three nonprofits, and we all have statutes; we’re all legal; we have papers saying that we have been here legally for twenty years; we pay taxes. We’re constantly working with the authorities and signing agreements that now they want to disavow. . . . They’re going to build hostels, bicycle trails, underground parking lots, everything that’s targeted toward international tourism. They only want people who can afford to pay to have access, instead of having a public plaza. . . . They’re thinking like businessmen. What are you doing now? marÍa de la cruz martÍnez:  We’re trying to sell, when we can anyway. We use this space because we’ve paid our taxes on time and our sales permits are current. We’re defending our right to work when we can because the street cops and the riot police are bothering us all the time. They make it their job to make sure nobody sells anything, even though they know us and all. It costs a lot to have a police operation like this because they send sixty riot police; they’re not regular police, they’re riot police, or granaderos, the ones that use violence to put a stop to demonstrations. They come with shields, helmets, batons, sometimes tear gas. They haven’t used it here because we haven’t given them cause. They stand there with their shields, scaring us. But what we think is that they’re really not there for us. They’re more for the people who come here every day. It’s more for them because they don’t scare us; we haven’t done anything for them to attack us. But the people . . . the people who come to visit ask us if they’re going to hit us. No,

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they’re just there to scare us, from fifty to sixty each weekend; they always do it. It’s a standard operation, so they can have a visual presence. Are the other vendors usually from Mexico City? Not really. Not so much now. The ones who are here in Coyoacan come from many places. We have indigenous people who come from Querétaro, from Puebla, from Nayarit, Zacatecas, Jalisco. Let’s just say there are a lot of people who find decent work here. They come from all over the country. And they’re not even telling the full extent of the job loss to this work force, because sometimes they’re jobs the whole family does. All the family joins in, although only the dad or the mom comes to sell. They’re family workshops. It really has an enormous effect on the earning ability for all these people. What do you think about the coming of the Spaniards? We’ve even done some . . . or some studies have been done where they show that the tianguis has been around since pre-Hispanic times. So, they’re disappearing thanks to the Spaniards and thanks to reorganizing things and building churches on top of the markets, on top of temples or things like that. Now we’re going through exactly the same thing: they’re making the people who work on the street disappear and taking over the markets. What do you think about the conquest? hugo sÁnchez:  In fact, I don’t think they’re done conquering us yet. It just keeps happening. Right now the wave of investors is mainly from Spain. All the banks, the energy industry, they’re all Spanish. They’re taking back all that in the past was left to the United States, the Europeans, the English, all that. They’re taking it back. They talk about the reconquista, or the reconquest. In fact, it seems a little inconsistent that Mexico’s Secretary of the Interior is Spanish, he has dual nationality. Secretary Muriño, Camilo Muriño, is Spanish, from the Office of the Interior, which is a very important office in charge of internal political affairs. María de la Cruz Martínez:  [Muriño] is second to the president and he’s Spanish; he has a fake birth certificate. Hugo Sánchez:  And all that’s bought and paid for because in Mexico you can buy everything, even that. So he represents Spanish interests in the energy industry, the banks; he’s defending them fiercely. That’s why he’s there. But it just keeps going, the struggle that is. It goes on and on. The resistance does too, you know? Anonymous, Antropóloga jurídica:  Besides, [families] are broken up. In the communities, it’s almost always the head of the household who leaves, which is the

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father. So, the children are orphans. Sometimes the mother has to leave as well, and then the children stay with their grandparents and they leave their land behind and abandoned. Or, for example, here we have whole families that come together so the family isn’t broken up. The family ties stay strong, which is so important in indigenous communities. They’ve migrated here with the entire family, that is, grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren are now here, and those who are here right now are a very good example. But, well, most of those who migrate to the U.S. break up the family unit, because the husband leaves; he often doesn’t even come back. He gets married to a gringa or another Mexican woman up there and begins to rebuild his life and forgets about his family completely. There are many communities where no men are left, only women and children. This is happening a lot, all over the country. It’s an epidemic that’s happening precisely due to ill will and lack of economic means . . . That’s when traditions . . . customs, are lost, and the loss of place too . . . people lose that too. It’s very sad. Esteban Ramírez García:  My name is Esteban Ramírez García, I’m from the state of Querétaro. I came to Mexico City, the D.F., thirty years ago, but I’ve been selling here in the gardens [of Coyoacan] for twenty years. Twenty years displaying and selling my handicrafts. I’m here because the fact is that jobs don’t pay well, and in the town where I’m from there aren’t any. Our fields depend on the rains. The land is dry, so if it rains, we sow, and if it doesn’t, we don’t. We plant corn, beans, fava beans, lettuce, all that. That’s why we come to the city to show our town’s traditional handicrafts. Now, Mr. Heberto Castillo has not respected our space. We have a signed agreement that he has not respected. He made us buy new stalls, change our image—here in the middle of Coyoacan—but he still doesn’t respect us. Over on the other side there are some transformers that we used to light up our stalls so we didn’t disturb the residents; we pay for using this space and all that. Now the authorities haven’t given us any options . . . no other place where we can keep displaying our handicrafts. And we have no choice but to join our fellow vendors as an ethnic group in this struggle. We see that the authorities are unwilling to resolve this. They don’t have the slightest idea of what’s affecting the merchants and artisans. Here at this sit-in there are several ethnic groups, Otomi, Mazahua, Huichol, so it’s not just us Otomies among our fellow artisans who are here. Is moving to Xochimilco a viable option? No, it’s not viable. I mean, it’s not viable for us because, as you were saying, this is almost like a cultural center with a lot of richness, diversity, and culture. The center at Xochimilco isn’t like that, it’s just commerce. And here the difference is between culture and commerce, a different kind of commerce. Since January we’ve been asking for a meeting . . . meeting after meeting. We have a whole lot

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of forms and paperwork, like fifteen pages of written requests. Not a single one has been granted since January. Five months ago we requested a meeting to propose a solution, an alternative to keep working, to keep selling. And he [Mr. Castillo] will not face us and he keeps his . . . All they say is the construction work is almost finished, but in the mean time we have children, older family members, ethnic groups, fellow vendors. . . .

María del Pilar Mancio Abarca What do you think about the conquest? In part it was good because they came to colonize, to teach us more, but on the other hand it wasn’t because they took away all the traditions we had, and they brought diseases that weren’t here . . . slavery. Religion, we had our religion, our beliefs more than anything else, and they made us take another religion, to get into Christianity or evangelism, the Jesuits, everything that came at the time of the Spaniards, everything they brought. They brought us things we’d never seen, but at the same time they took advantage of us and took many things away from us here . . . from Mexico. Do you think they also learned from you? Well, yes, they did learn a lot from us, but they were very ambitious. . . . They wanted gold, which we had. But here, for the Aztecs, for us, our gold was the corn that was produced, that’s what there was. Here, precious stones, gold, and things like that didn’t matter. Here, what we wanted was to produce corn, the main crop base here in Mexico. What do you think about reinstating preconquest traditions? Hmmm . . . but they made human sacrifices, many human sacrifices, and, well, no . . . Back then, there were gods for rain, for sicknesses, and I really don’t care for all that. What do you think about the Zapatista movement? Since the beginning of the [Zapatista] revolution we’ve been badly informed. I base my opinion on what my grandmother used to tell me. Now as I see it, things are not well: the way the Zapatistas, the Villistas, are going about doing things—looking out for themselves and not for the people. Because it used to be that Zapata fought for the people, for the land, so there wouldn’t be so much poverty; well, he did fight and he did a lot, but it didn’t turn out as he hoped. So, that’s what my opinion is based on, and now, for what I’ve seen, I don’t agree, speaking from my point of view. I think many people are against it, but they never get asked. They don’t ask anyone from the common people.

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What about the original Zapata? When Zapata came to where we lived, in San Pablo Tepetlapa, there was a hacienda there, and when they found out the Zapatistas were coming, they closed everything up and left for Coyoacan. When Zapata got there, he opened it up and took everything out—corn, beans, milk—and fed the people. He stayed there for about a month. My grandmother would go to the hacienda because there was corn. Zapata gave corn to everyone, and rice, beans. So Zapata asked my grandmother if she could help cook for his whole regiment. My grandmother said yes, and she and several others who lived there cooked for Zapata and his whole regiment. When Zapata left, he asked my grandmother if she wanted to go with him, to the war; and my grandmother said no, because she had children and didn’t want to leave them. So Zapata thanked her and told her that he was fighting for the people not for the hacienda owners, not for the government. And he told her: “We’re going to keep fighting until we can fight no more to make Mexico free.” Then Zapata left and didn’t come back. You talked about learning about the conquest at school and about things that did not match your own experience. . . . The basic thing is that Hernán Cortés came to conquer, to bring us new things. But then, as time goes by, one realizes things. And, well, what Hernán Cortés had was a lot of ambition; what he wanted was to take away the gold, all the treasure we had, but here what was most valued was corn because it was what fed us. He didn’t know how to appreciate what was here. He came to conquer for his own benefit, to take away what was ours. And what he brought were diseases that weren’t here: chicken pox, measles. He brought the very things that didn’t help us, that we didn’t know about. And there are still many people who die from them. My daughter got chicken pox on her insides, not outside on the skin; it’s a disease that doesn’t go away. My daughter was very ill. So, yes, Hernán Cortés left, but it all went back to being the same. He brought religion. He made us religious because we weren’t “believers” [i.e., Christian]. We believed in the gods and all that, but we weren’t “believers.” And when he came, things advanced a little bit: religions, names. They changed our names. We no longer had Aztec names; they called us Juan, Lupe. Things changed a lot in that sense. On one hand, that seems good to me because many things evolved; we learned about new things and all that, but then he left us with almost nothing— in my opinion, that wasn’t right. What was it like when you left San Pablo? You miss the traditions, you miss the town, you miss the people, but you’ve got to change too. But you keep the traditions. As long as you don’t forget them, they’ll go on. On the Día de los Muertos I set up an altar; my daughter helps me, now my granddaughter does too. We go to church, we go to the festivals and street fairs. Everything that’s a tradition: pilgrimages, everything. We do a little of everything.

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. . . We left San Pablo, but the church there has a cemetery and we have a plot in perpetuity there. If anything happens, there we’ll stay.

Mauro Luis Barrón López What do you think about the conquest? Look, Mexico City is the cradle of the Aztec Empire. The Aztecs had the power in Mexican territory, the Mexica lands, Mexica territory. So, there really weren’t a lot of Spaniards. I think there were only about seventy something Spaniards. So how could they have conquered a country as big as Mexico? How’d they do it? Well, they came better prepared, with a more advanced culture, and they used the surrounding peoples to help them conquer. In other words, they set it up for us to fight among brothers. All the indigenous people turned against each other, and that was the tragedy of the Mexican territory, of the Mexican people. Just imagine. I find it a little outrageous because we’re very cultured. We have a lot of cultures here: we have the Maya culture, we have the Aztec culture, the Teotihuacan culture. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Mexican territory. It’s a cradle of cultures. And it has a people of many resources. Even all of Texas was Mexican, and California. So that speaks badly of Mexicans because, well, they continue to sell off the country. The conquest of Mexico is happening to this day. Now they’re making deals with the Chinese! We’d like to produce everything ourselves to avoid depending on the outside world, and, look, our own government puts us in a compromising position. Hernán Cortés’s conquest was something similar because they turned us against each other, and they were the big winners, they came out winning everything. You have no idea how they looted the country. Even the English ended up with treasure because English pirates attacked Spanish ships and stole treasure and all. In many ways— culturally, moneywise—Mexico is a source for endless riches. Today, they continue looting, they continue taking pre-Hispanic artifacts. It’s a very sad deal for me. Do you think the conquest left a lasting legacy in terms of language, tradition, or ways of thinking? Well, a pre-Hispanic legacy . . . we’re very attached to natural remedies . . . plants. On the Día de los Muertos we make little offerings, we have the languages of our ancestors that are still spoken on the outskirts of the city. Religion, viruses, epidemics, the genetics [the Spaniards] passed on to us and made us weaker, because the Aztec people were very strong. So, yes, there’s a legacy.

Rodrigo Martínez Baracs Even to this day the neo-Zapatistas in Chiapas keep pursuing the vindication of the indigenous people. What’s bad about it is that they still do it with the logic of the

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“poor little Indians”: “We’ve been exploited for five hundred years, now they have to give back all they’ve taken away from us, by giving us hospitals, houses, roads, Internet.” Well, this logic may work for a little while, but not for long. The point is to incorporate the Indians as Indians, but using a logic based on business, work, and life, starting with understanding their resources and not forcing them to renounce their heritage. Do you think that line of development is currently being pursued? Very partially. The discourse about the “poor little Indians” who should be preserved as a museum piece, who should be given this and that because we owe them, has intensified lately. Look at what President Salinas de Gortari did. He was the one who reformed Article 27 on land tenure, and with the free trade agreement [NAFTA], the basic means of support of indigenous peasant farmers has continued to decrease in such a way that they not only lose their economic means but also their indigenous culture. Mestizo farmers as well, the rancheros, who are also very important, lose that indigenous-Catholic tradition, that good farming culture. They abandon their towns and go to the city, where they become economically and culturally impoverished. Their only options are to go to work in the U.S. or in the service industry, to become street vendors, or delinquents, drug dealers, because they are very poor and uneducated both economically and culturally. What else should I take into account for my project? Perhaps another very important difference between the New World and the Old was the great religious difference, something that nobody’s willing to discuss too much, for instance, the topic of human sacrifices. In spite of being greatly exploited throughout Mexican history, post-Independence and post-Mexican Revolution liberal historiography justifies what the Indians did. As a result, you can’t say anything bad about them; you can’t talk about human sacrifice. The Spanish conquest and even the Christian conversion of Mexico were relatively easy because pre-Hispanic religion practiced human sacrifice, cannibalism, and extreme forms of state terrorism, while the Christian religion is about love, consolation, forgiveness, and joy. Spanish terrorism was gentle compared to what existed before. Mexican historians are only slowly accepting this because of liberal historiography, which is based on indigenist discourse. To a certain point, even foreign historians feel obligated to be politically correct and speak well of the Indians, of resistance, of the decolonization process and all that. There’s a whole discourse that I believe prevents many things from being understood.

Gabino López Arenas Given your views about Mexica and Spanish cultures, what do you think of the conquest?

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[The Spaniards] brought their own culture. Here people had a certain level of culture. The Spanish come; they impose a different ideology, another way of thinking, for example, different technologies. Here people lived mostly from agriculture. I mean, [the indigenous people] were innovative, obviously. They had numerous techniques such as the tools they used. They had a wooden stick they used a lot for sowing . . . planting seeds. But the Spaniards said, no more, and they introduced and even increased product variety with new seeds: wheat, rice, barley, other fruits they introduced that didn’t exist here. It changed especially as far as that goes. There was a change, but here in Mexico, though they’re losing some things from the original culture, others are being enhanced. It’s normal, you know, some things get destroyed. True, at times the change was very drastic, very sudden. It’s hard to imagine. We have to remember that the most dramatic and cruel changes resulted from religious imposition. In fact, that was the argument, right? It had to have been very hard for autochthonous communities to suddenly have their beliefs taken away, their gods toppled and replaced by others. Just imagine. It was very hard. So, that was what was most difficult, the religious aspect. Because other cultural changes got better assimilated, I think. Do you think that something of the original beliefs still influences the interpretation of Catholicism? Well, in any culture there’s what they call syncretism, the mixing of imposed and already established beliefs. Here in Mexico, very little of that can be seen in the cities, very little. However, in the country you see the combination of ancient and imposed beliefs more. It’s syncretism. In fact, the saints’ names, for example, that become part of a town’s name. Huejotla is an ancient name, a pre-Hispanic name; then, they added on to it. Now the town’s called San Luis Huejotla. Before, the pre-Hispanic town had a particular deity, now it has a Christian saint whose church was built on its temple. Previously they worshipped a local pre-Hispanic deity, now they’ve built a church. The temple remains underneath, and the church is constructed in a European style. For the local people it’s the same place of worship, but a different god. What do you think of Hernán Cortés? Well, Mexico was an empire. It kept people under strict control; it demanded tribute taxes from all the provinces, which caused great resentment among the people. It’s the same thing with Hacienda, or the Department of the Treasury, nobody wants to pay taxes. You want to be a successful politician? Lower taxes, just like in the U.S. You want to lose an election? Raise taxes. Obviously, the whole region had had it up to here with having to pay so many tribute taxes. There was another precedent as well. Here they were used to political alliances and intrigue. Cortés was smart; he inquired about the political situation, what was going on around him. Tenochtitlan had many enemies. It had friends but also enemies. You were mentioning that in

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other communities they had even more enemies. He did what he did by making alliances. He only suggested the idea because the source of power was already here in Mexico. We all know from written history that the conquest was accomplished by a handful of Spaniards and thousands of indigenous people. What do Mexicans in general think about the conquest? It’s odd. On one hand, they like to see the ruins. You can go to archaeological sites, but do you see anybody there from the indigenous community? You don’t see them. Here in Mexico, that’s how the government does it. On one hand, they promote archaeological zones, our indigenous past, but they keep the indigenous people marginalized. They live isolated in their communities, as you know. There are no roads. They’re physically isolated from all services. You go to those communities, and in the first place, there’s no access road. They’re not connected. They keep them isolated. They take away their lands. They live in indigenous communities generally. They’re increasingly seen as more and more marginalized. Their territory keeps diminishing and becoming unlivable. They live lives that change very little, I imagine. They’re worse off than their ancestors. There aren’t any services; they don’t have access to health care, housing, education. The government keeps them marginalized. It does nothing. On one hand, “Mexico, Teotihuacan, the Templo Mayor,” but for the indigenous people who live right now, it marginalizes them. It’s wrong. Why are they marginalized? Because the authorities are deranged! They think that they are second-, third-class citizens; that’s how they classify them, like they’re not worth anything. The only thing that’s worth something is their ancestors, not them. Everybody says, “Oh, the Maya were intelligent; they were astronomers and astrologers; they knew the movements of the stars; they had a who-knows-what type of calendar; the cycles; they were wise; mathematicians.” But [today] you wouldn’t buy a bag of fruit from them. They’re the same Maya who are here in the region. The so-called Marías, or indigenous women, who they don’t let into the subway because they smell bad, because I don’t know what . . . Obviously, they don’t have the means to. . . . They’re marginalized. Does anything still remain of pre-Hispanic culture? In everyday life there are still many things, as you know. Their food, their household goods are still the same. Go to the country; their diet is still based on corn, the tortilla. Oh sure, they do eat bread, in the cities, and even in the country, but generally, even in Mexico City, tortillas. The tortilla hasn’t gone away, the Mexican taco, chiles . . . certain foods . . . chiles, beans . . . anyone will grab and eat them. A Mexican doesn’t know how to eat without hot chiles, hot and spicy and all that. Even sometimes it’s just tortillas, chile, and salt, you know. The diet is reflected in their household items: the metate, or grinding stone, is still used. In some remote regions, like I was telling you, where they’re not connected, there’s no electricity, there’s no automatic,

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mechanized system to grind corn, the women still use the metate for grinding, and the metates haven’t changed much. When you’re out in the country, this is something interesting, you sometimes find houses that have been abandoned for two or three years or sometimes very recently where they’ve left their metate, it’s heavy, you know. You always find these metates, and at times it’s confusing because the shape of the metate hasn’t changed much since then. Sometimes the houses don’t last long, they’re made from reeds that decay, but the metate, after a few years only the metate’s left and the rocks around the fire pit. That’s all the same. The metate hasn’t physically changed. In its shape it’s the same.

Judith Santopietro How did you become interested in indigenous-language poetry and publishing? There are many anthologies of Latin American poets . . . of Latin American writers. I’ve been invited on many occasions to many meetings, but there was always something that struck me as funny and made me think. Where were the indigenous poets who are also part of Mexican literature? There wasn’t a space for them. It’s hard for young poets to find a venue for publication—because it’s always tied to certain groups—as an indigenous poet writing in another language it’s extremely hard. So there was a sort of segregation. That’s when I decided to get started again [on the journal]. And, after talking it over with a lot of poets, I got their support—especially now from the Association of Indigenous Language Writers. They are very, very interested and have played a big role. What is your background? Let me tell you my story. I was born in Córdoba. Córdoba is a mestizo city with a very strong Nahua presence. It’s very near Zongolica, in the sierra, which is one of the most important Nahuatl-speaking regions in the nation. But I grew up in a culture that was completely mestizo and racist because anyone who was indigenous was always seen as the “poor little Indian” who speaks in a dialect. Throughout this entire process, until I was nineteen or twenty years old and in spite of it being a Nahuatl-speaking area, in the city only Spanish was spoken, or Italian, or French, but mostly Italian because there are many Italian immigrants. My great-grandparents came from Potenza in Italy, which was something that carried more weight in the end. I now know about my other grandparents. I don’t know . . . it kind of makes me very sad that we were never told that my grandmother and my great-grandmother were Nahua, but they never told us. Not until now, after I looked into it, asked questions, and found out. So I never got to hear any other language until I was nineteen or twenty years old. Then one day some friends invited me to Zongolica. I went and heard Nahuatl. I found out there were Nahua people whose roots were there, who had totally different customs, who perhaps didn’t even

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speak Spanish, and who weren’t inferior to me because of it. It wasn’t until I got to Puebla when I discovered that there are over sixty-two languages in Mexico. I had a big cultural shock. I have many friends who are poets, and we talk about it. I tell them, “I don’t see myself as a mestiza.” I’ve got a big identity crisis, because if I’m asked, “What are you?” I say, “Well, I was born here . . .” but I don’t feel totally mestiza because being mestizo is like being in the middle of nowhere; to me you’re neither European nor indigenous. If you had to define your ethnicity, what would it be? I would say that I’m made up of a mixture of a lot of little things. One day I talked about this with a Zapoteca poet named Irma Pineda, and I was telling her, “After hearing you speak and all you said in your lecture, I swear I don’t know what I am.” She said to me, “Well, the fact is you can be from any nation you like. That is, you can adapt to what that means, but you can also take on something that means something else and not see it only as an object of study, but think of yourself as part of it.” And then, well, it’s been a very, very long process, because I’m only beginning to tackle the issue, but some people will say, “I don’t know why she feels that way if she’s mestiza . . . she is mestiza.” But I don’t think of myself as completely mestiza. What can we learn from the conquest and it’s legacy? Look, syncretism is now regarded as the legacy of the conquest. Now they say that there was no other way, and now we’re a mixture of Spanish, with a little Italian, with a little indigenous, but more Spanish than Italian, and more Spanish than indigenous; they always make sure of that. And we have to learn Spanish because indigenous languages mean poverty, backwardness, very little technology. But I think there’s little awareness of what the conquest really was: the greatest genocide, the greatest holocaust in the world. Why? Because from what I’ve seen, people in Mexico, myself included, lack historical memory; we don’t know what our memory is.

Mardonio Carballo What do you think of the indigenous-language poetry conference taking place now? I think our compadres suddenly got very romantic, no? I believe they have to be tougher, that is, they have to be more critical. But seriously, it’s like we have to be critical from the moment we start writing. We can’t call ourselves writers if we write so badly. I’ve said it before, the literary quality is very rudimentary. Besides, they keep repeating the same clichés that the big names have told them to use, you know: flowers, birds, Montemayor, León-Portilla. But, I tell ’em, that’s not me . . . No, I want [the government] to follow through on its obligations to me. I’m not asking for any favors. No, that irritates me, and I think that time has past. I think we have to keep fighting, not making agreements. It’s very easy. I’ll put it this way: some people

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say we must settle, just accept it. Yes, but first you have to listen to me because my demands are valid. How did you start working with the Zapatista movement? I was already in Mexico City. When Zapatismo began it was wonderful because you found out that you had more things in common than differences with them—the languages, the racism you had experienced in the city, and all that. So, when you ask for justice and justice is really on your side, I believe you have to fight. I’m not one of those who just want to settle and accept what’s happened. No, no, no. We’re going to fight; we’ll see about settling later, which sounds terrible, just terrible. But, for example, it’s unbelievable that when you’re asking to be heard, the president of the Cámara de Diputados [Chamber of Representatives] says he has to leave. Then, you go for broke and say, “No, I’m sorry, you’re staying.” That’s what I was talking about on my radio segment: I already know what’s going on in my community. I already know how many people die. I already know how many people lack access to clinics, to education. I already know. And you don’t. And you’re in charge of legislating. You’re the one who has to be here, right? Here’s an analogy: if I invite someone to my house, I stay, I cook a meal, I serve it, they leave, I wash the dishes, that’s what I do. I don’t just open the door and say, “Help yourselves” and that’s it. “I’m leaving, I have something else to do.” No. But as long as we don’t demand it, they’re not going to just give it away. Do the recent presidential elections [2006] and politics affect your work? I think we should’ve had a little more . . . it should have been smoother, less violent because what I see coming is a very violent Mexico, in every aspect. How many guerrilla groups are starting to appear? The EPR [Ejército Popular Revolucionario/ Popular Revolutionary Army] sets off bombs in one place and then later in some other place, far away. The narco . . . Anyone can see that this is a very violent moment in Mexico’s history. The problem is this: in Mexico’s institutional system, who profits when there’s violence? The institution, the right wing. That’s what happens when there’s violence; it’s terrible. You justify repression. You justify censorship. You justify everything. Look at Zapatismo, I go back to Zapatismo, which uses words as its weapons. That’s why the work of poets and writers is so important. That’s why I get so angry when I see them being so weak and lukewarm. How do you relate to your indigenous background? My mother died a year ago. It was terrible: I lost a whole world . . . all the Nahuatl world. It was like . . . to me it was a world that went away because with her I learned about plants, the old names of things. I’d follow her around with a notebook, taking notes. And it’s her strength that’s inside of me. I mean she’s the one who taught me that no one is better than me. She’d use more eschatological terms. In her bad Spanish she’d say, “College graduates, doctors, lawyers, they all go to the bathroom

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just like you.” She was very wise; I learned everything from her. My father, well, let’s just say he looked more toward Western things, I think, but my mother took refuge in her strong indigenous side. That’s why they call them “mother tongues,” because a mother gives you the whole universe through language. That’s why the ties to language are so important. It’s incredible. Yeah, I do believe that if she saw me doing all this crazy stuff, she’d be happy. It isn’t nonsense, right? Right. Like I always say, I don’t mind mixing poetry with rock, jazz, huapangos, hiphop, or whatever. Or like I was just telling you, I feel that an open culture is a living culture; if a culture closes itself up, it dies. This reconciliation or settling of issues that Natalio Hernández [Nahua intellectual and poet] talks so much about, yeah we’re getting to find some solutions, but it should also mean opening up as a human being, which also means not bowing down, you know? People think you have to do that to get somewhere, but you don’t. It’s degrading. It’s not worth it, because you’re assuming you’re inferior. No, no, no. You always have to walk around like you’re worth something, always, which isn’t arrogance. That’s something else. But always like you’re worth something. That’s what I think. We have to learn to do that. I’ve said it with an ugly metaphor: it’s like the dog that got used to being beaten with the newspaper. But if we’re talking about a democratic society that claims to be multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual, dude, you don’t need the newspaper. No, that’s just mean and unfair. And that needs to be pointed out. It needs to be condemned, but I don’t think it’ll be easy; I think it’s going to take a long, long time.

Lilian Álvarez Arellano How did the SEP textbook project consider conquest-related issues? How? Well basically, in terms of civic education. . . . This country was taken by force of arms. There were abuses of human rights. There was a whole population who lost their rights and were exploited and denied education. And with Independence and the Revolution, this changed; they were given equal status under the law. It will be a long time before this becomes a reality, but it’s the law. It addresses language issues. For example, it literally says that a language was imposed; however, Mexicans made it their own to free themselves, to create their own literature, their own laws, and their own culture.

* * * It’s funny. My daughter is currently doing social service work in Chiapas. She studies architecture, so she hasn’t studied history; she hadn’t read León-Portilla. She said to me, “Mom, I bought several books: Rosario Castellanos, León-Portilla. I know you

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don’t like them, but I’m going to read them.” “Of course you have to read them,” I said. What I don’t like is how they’ve sold this idea of those who’ve been conquered, or vencidos. That’s what I don’t like. The texts are worthwhile, but they can’t be taken like that’s the way it was either because they have major translation problems, they’re out of context, they’re fragmented. [León-Portilla] tried to get a toltecayotl, or Nahua philosophy, from them that has no substance. I studied philosophy, and if that’s philosophy then there’s no philosophy. That’s not philosophy.

* * * Our position at the seminar [for the decolonization of Mexico] is that the [only] texts that are undoubtedly Aztec or Maya are the stones and the codices. As a methodological principle we consider everything else that talks about what’s Mexican, or lo mexicano, to be suspicious, regardless of how interesting it may be. Why suspicious? Because the Spaniards probably didn’t understand or the indigenous didn’t want to tell them everything. We don’t treat them as completely reliable sources. Only the monuments are completely reliable.

Marcelino Hernández Beatriz Can you tell me about your work and the constitutional change regarding indigenous languages? The fact that indigenous groups didn’t speak the same language as everybody else, in this case Spanish, has always been seen in some way as a step backward for the country’s development, which made it hard for our country to move ahead. That’s why there was an effort to teach Spanish, which resulted in what I believe was a serious struggle for the defense of languages and cultures in our country, and some hard-fought battles kept coming. I think the watershed moment in this struggle, which came as an important step and better defined it, was nothing less than the uprising of the indigenous people in Chiapas. I think it’s the most significant event that’s happened because, though it may have already been coming, it resulted in a change in our laws. Article 2 of Mexico’s constitution now talks about respecting all of our country’s languages and cultures. And, not only is it recognizing them, but they must be promoted and disseminated. I think those are the important issues. Then comes Article 3, which deals with education and has to do with the impact we have under the General Education Law that asks the Secretaría de Educación Pública to make sure children in indigenous communities are taught in their mother tongue. All those are definitely important steps. Now we can say that all indigenous languages are considered national languages. That means that now I can write in my own language. I can petition the different governmental branches and other

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departments in my own language and they must respond, whether orally or in writing, but now those are some of the things that I can do. As an indigenous person, I have the right to do it. Now the government must also provide services in my language. That is, when I go to a government agency, if I decide to speak in my language, no one can deny me the freedom to do so, to use my language. And the agency is required to provide an interpreter if whoever I’m talking to can’t understand me. So important gains have been made in these areas, but I think that’s not enough. Laws, legal issues, court issues, are one thing, and what is actually happening is another. The indigenous communities are not necessarily aware that those laws even exist. It would seem they’re going against these laws that finally exist. From what I’m seeing in the communities, those of us who can read and write in our original languages have a responsibility. Because when you go into these communities, in spite of the recent laws intended to promote indigenous languages, it still seems to show that in the ten- or sometimes five-year national censuses, which include a question about language, the number of speakers is dropping. So it would seem that we’re losing ground in spite of the advances made on the legislative or legal side. In practice, we still see some adversity. And there’s a reason. I think this issue, and it’s something I still grapple with, is that indigenous groups have historically been mistreated, humiliated, and somehow forgotten—treated as a group set apart from the rest. So, sometimes in the big cities there were radical transformations toward progress while the communities were completely abandoned. It’s also true that government institutions paid the least attention to the indigenous people who came to do any kind of business; they were the last to be seen or were stepped on the most because they had practically no knowledge of their rights, of legal matters. They were the ones who not only weren’t familiar with the laws that govern our country, but who as indigenous people had to deal with serious racial discrimination. And now, suddenly there are laws to prevent it, but sometimes we suddenly feel that it’s still not real. After so many years of radical isolation, suddenly there were these issues. And although we hear about them a lot through different print and audiovisual media, and although there’s a lot being published, we still need to understand that perhaps what has been written still hasn’t reached the population that actually uses indige­ nous languages because in some places, in the poorest, most remote indigenous communities, there’s still a 30 percent literacy rate, which means we can’t read it in Spanish and much less in the local languages. Even though we have all these promotional materials, they don’t reach the communities, or even if they do get there, they can’t be used. We know, for example, that the constitution already exists in several languages, at least in Nahuatl. It’s also true that those who can read those versions are the bilinguals who speak and write in Spanish and can also read indigenous languages. But, let’s say, a large percentage of the population, where this should

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be directed, has a high percentage of illiteracy; they simply can’t make use of such materials. I think we’re at a stage where we’re going to have to teach Spanish or perhaps I should say teach literacy so as not to use the term Spanish. Teach literacy or at times mention the second language you’re dealing with.

* * * I think many of us who’ve lived through a different era have had a harder time identifying with our culture. But now we should take advantage of certain gains made in our favor to promote and give that identity to our children. It’s wonderful when children use both languages without giving more prestige to either one; they simply know how to use them both. That is, if I go and speak to them in Nahuatl, they speak to me in Nahuatl; if I go and speak to them in Spanish, they speak to me in Spanish. This means they don’t have any sort of complex about using either one, about which one is more important or which one is least important but that they would know how to use them because, in the end, what we want is for them to feel in some way free, independent, like themselves. If they want to use their language in Mexico City, they should be able to do it without the slightest difficulty; if they want to go to their town and use Spanish, they should be able to do it without giving up their roots, without feeling different, but rather like they belong. I think the ultimate goal is for people to be truly bilingual and live harmoniously in both cultures, so to speak, without sacrificing their roots. That’s not what’s happening right now, this cultural mastery. Instead, we take on a culture that’s different from our own, and suddenly we feel different from our own culture. We’re no longer a part of it because we even start thinking differently. We act differently, so we think differently. So when we go back to where we’re from and see there are regional dances and music bands, traditions, and how they celebrate them, we don’t feel like we belong. That means we’ve lost our roots. Many who have left lose them completely. That’s precisely why I say that identity gets lost when you no longer feel you’re part of that group. But we don’t belong to this other group either. Therefore we’re sort of undefined, in between.

* * * I think it leaves a mark on you when you come from extreme poverty. Suddenly you can wear different pants, a different shirt, have access to other ways of doing things, and perhaps more money. Then, when you go back to your town, it just so happens that now you have money or you’re able to make money. You know more than the others, you’re someone who’s been to cities, and now you speak better Spanish, and you even begin to have a certain power, of course. Mastering Spanish represented power over others. So all of a sudden you’ve become the example of the person who gets more respect, whose opinion is considered more valuable because he can speak

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Spanish well, which somehow is a sign of power. I think that changes many of us because, well, now that I have respect, I can act this way or that, and we begin to have a mind-set that’s different from the group. That’s what happens to many of us. Ultimately, we feel different. [After living in Mexico City,] I returned to my hometown and lived there full-time for three years. All of a sudden I was like an authority in the presidencia municipal, or municipal district offices, and I began to visit all the towns in the district, or municipio. This was from 1988 to ’91. When I began to visit the towns was when I realized I wasn’t using Nahuatl, only Spanish. All the towns in the municipio of Xochiatipan use Nahuatl. There is no Spanish. So all of a sudden I said to myself, what am I doing here? They can’t understand me if I speak to them in Spanish. I have to do something. I’m making a very big mistake, speaking to them in Spanish simply because I can. I don’t feel like I have anything to do with them, and I’m not being one of them. But in reality, I am one of them. And that’s when my concern for my language began. At first it was about language. I wasn’t very concerned about culture, but about my language. I figured that if I mastered the language, there was no need to worry about culture because language is part of everything. That is, it can’t be isolated. Language is culture itself. I learn through language. Because of language I am who I am. Because of language I think like I think. Because of language I live. Something dawned on me, and I thought that language was what was important to analyze and perfect. Then I began this journey to learn to write in my own language. I don’t really know how long it took, but I learned to write in my language. Then I went to college, where I studied in the department of philosophy and literature in order to improve my knowledge of Spanish, which, fortunately, I did. Then I used that knowledge to make a dictionary in my language, let me reiterate, MY language.

* * * There’s a man I talked to, he must be, I don’t know, in his seventies, all his children speak Spanish, and his grandchildren speak Spanish. When I went to his house and spoke in Nahuatl, he was as happy as he could be, of course. We talked in Nahuatl, and I said to him, “Let me ask you a question, Abel” (his name is Abel). “Do you like seeing your children do well and leave the community?” “Yes,” he said, “Of course, I’m very happy to see them leave. Look, what would have happened if they’d stayed here? One did stay, but I have three. The others left. One got married, but it would’ve been fine if they’d all gone because in the end nothing grows on this land. What can I give them here? What I have is for me, so I can work. If my children stay here, I don’t have any land to give them so they can work. So if they go somewhere else, they’ll have a better life because there’s nothing for them here.” Then I asked him, “Do you feel anything or worry or, I mean, how do you feel, or what does a father feel when suddenly he sees his children speaking Spanish?” “Fine,” he said,

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“It feels good.” “Why?” “Oh well, because when someone speaks Spanish, it means they have another world, another life; and it’s not only about being from here. They can leave. It’s good.” Then I asked, “What if they come back and no longer speak to you in Nahuatl because they’ve been away for so long, and all the time they’re away they’ve been speaking Spanish? Would you like it if they lost Nahuatl?” Without thinking twice he said, “No, definitely not.” I expected him to say that it didn’t matter. “No, no, no,” he said emphatically, “no, definitely not. I mean, they can learn Spanish, they can go wherever they want, but their language, I don’t want them to forget their language.” What do you think about the concheros, the danzantes? I’d look at it in two ways. First, people get into it because they like it, because they’re passionate about it. Ultimately, they do it out of love. In some cases, the groups are independent and don’t have sponsors; they just enjoy doing it for pleasure. But then, I don’t agree with it when it becomes a case of exhibitionism, of cultural onesidedness, so to speak. We say that this is Mexico’s culture; no, this is its folklore. It’s just that it shows so little; that’s not all there is. Perhaps some people like to dance, and they do, but what about all the rest? There are people here who dance, but don’t speak Nahuatl . . . whose language isn’t Nahuatl. Some people like it because they like to dance . . . others because they’re into the folklore, the show. That’s nice, and I don’t want to take away its value because in the end it’s a part of the picture, but really, what we want to make clear is that ultimately, that’s not what we want to show. That is, Mexico has a lot more to show. And much of what we may have lost is precisely the richness of the indigenous peoples’ worldview; the way they have a relationship with nature that has also been pushed aside little by little because we no longer think the same way. If we could get that back, for me, that part really has value. That feeling that I am not separate from nature, but part of it.

* * * When they go to peasant farmers, and they offer them projects that are going to produce a lot, that are going to change the world and change their lives and the way they live because they’re going to generate income, sometimes they turn around and say suddenly, “I’m not interested.” Then, they’re called lazy, or huevones, as they say here. I think what we haven’t asked ourselves is why? Why aren’t they interested? Perhaps it’s because they’re not thinking about getting rich. Perhaps they don’t even understand the full extent of what they’re hearing, which is that in one year you’re going to get all this money and be able to get what you can’t even imagine. They just can’t imagine it because they’re barely making a living. In some places where they work collectively, where money isn’t the most important thing, all the rest is secondary. When I help you, you help me; someone helps me, I help him. We’re going to build the house, and we get together to build it, and the next time I’ll help

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you. There’s no money involved, just the fact that we’re going to help each other. Then all of a sudden they want you to dream, and you can’t dream like others because we’re not connected to things in the same way. I mean, we don’t want to be poor, but we don’t understand. We can’t think like others because our world is different, and our way of seeing things is different. So that’s what I think we’re not understanding. Then suddenly we say we need to invest more money, and they give the peasant farmers money and, in the end, that makes them less productive because they say, if they’re going to give it to me, I’ll take it, but if I don’t need it to live, I’ll just spend it. In fact, they have no greater ambition because if they’re in a situation where they just needed to survive and live more or less okay, then they’re not thinking like someone who says, “No, I already have some, and now I’m going for more . . . I’m going for more.”

Pilar Moctezuma González Can you tell me a little about your last name? My family is from Ciudad del Maíz near San Luis Potosí. They say it’s where Moctezuma used to live, the central region. So, what little is known, because there’s no physical proof, comes from the stories our grandparents and parents tell us. They tell us we’re from Ciudad del Maíz and that we’re descendants of Isabel Moctezuma, Moctezuma’s daughter. She had two men in her life. My branch of the family comes from a mix of a Spanish conquistador and Isabel. There’s another branch because, when all the trouble started, Isabel left for Spain, where she met another man and they have descendants there in Spain. There are several members of a Moctezuma lineage in Spain from Isabel’s second marriage. The other branch comes from the very same Isabel who married a Spanish soldier who came as part of the conquest. But then she went to live in Spain. That’s what’s said, . . . the stories grandparents tell you. But, my family, for example, is made up of eleven Moctezumas: the father Moctezuma who had eleven children. All of them are soaked in this culture. And since they haven’t let the current situation take that away, several of them speak Nahuatl; they know a lot about glyphs, drawings. In short, they know the culture very well. And they’ve made their last name and everything that comes with it a part of their life. In fact, all of them have worked hard for their people. What I mean to say is that I do feel that it is indeed in their blood because Moctezuma was, well, someone who worked for his people, right? My family has worked for their people . . . for their roots. They haven’t wanted to detach themselves from that. What do you think about the conquest and about Cortés? I think it was a process. I also have a Spanish side, so I’m not like a lot of people who say “damned conquistadors” either. No, because I think these are historical processes

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that happen and have happened everywhere in the world. I think they enriched us a lot and we enriched them. There was an important mixture. I think our mixture is very strong in the world, and I hate it when they say, for example, “Moctezuma was a traitor.” Many Mexicans think they burned his feet, and it wasn’t even him; everyone says the Spaniards burned Moctezuma’s feet, and it’s not even true. He died differently. It was worse. From what I know, it was, like, a very brutal death. How did he die? Well, the story I know—the one they told me—was that the Spaniards put him on a balcony on a . . . I mean, it sounds kind of bad, but they used a stick to hold him up—but he was already dead—to make it look like he was saying he was with the Spaniards, calling for everyone to relax, that it was over, that we were now New Spain, and that all the Mexicas were now . . . , but they threw stones at him. But he was already dead, that is, he was just out on the balcony. That’s the story I’m familiar with; I don’t know if it’s true. What do you think were the Spaniards’ and the indigenous people’s contributions? Well, the Spaniards, they contributed in all areas: religion, language, everything. They were very important. For instance, the Talavera ceramics we have today come from the Moors, from the conquest of the Moors over the Spaniards, and in our conquest we get Talavera. So they even contributed to our artisanry. They gave us the knowledge of metal work, silver, and all that, which is very valuable in Mexico today. So, I think they contributed in every aspect, including the human one. The Spaniards are portrayed as aggressive conquerors and perhaps some were like that, right? But, in fact, many did stay; they fell in love with indigenous women, and formed families. So I think they found a way to complement each other and ended up respecting each other. Many things from our Mexica culture, or Maya, or Nahua still exist today because there was respect. It’s true that there were prohibitions, for instance, related to religion. Their rituals were forbidden, but they persisted. We still know our sun and rain gods. So there really was respect on the part of the Spaniards. And I believe they found a way to complement each other and come out with better things. So much so that, for instance, Mexico is 90 percent Catholic and that comes from them. So, faith. That was a combination because the Mexicas, well, our ancestors were people with a lot of faith, drenched in faith. So even though apparently a new god came, faith endured and persists. I believe they made a good combination, as opposed to what happened in other places that have been conquered, where it didn’t happen. Do you feel more Mexica, Spanish, or Mexican? I’m Mexican. For me being Mexican is that combination of Spaniards and Mexicas. I can’t tell you that I’m 100 percent Mexica because I’m not. I also have a strong Spanish background, right? But I think that here in Mexico we’re all Mexicans and

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we’re all that combination. I don’t even think there’s anyone 100 percent Mexica. However, it’s certainly a fortunate combination, if you can put it that way. Being Mexican, I think it’s . . . well, just saying you’re Mexican enriches you because you have so many things, from the flora and the fauna, to the people and your culture, everything is enriching. I am proud of being Mexican and of what comes with it.

* * * I feel that Mexicans are also, I don’t know, hurt by all this: the Spaniards, the conquest. But I feel you can’t feel hurt anymore by something you didn’t experience and that, if you had, it might have seemed great to you, nothing like what the books describe: just massacre, blood, and oppression. Perhaps it was just the opposite: fusion, a pleasant and healthy union, right? So, I feel that there are many Mexicans who feel this resentment toward the Spaniards and all. I know for a fact that some of my uncles like everything that’s Mexica more. But I think these are things that just happen, a process, and surely it was something that was very good, something so nice and so good that there are no remnants of a terrible hate, you know. I think it turned out like it would have with any human being. It was a human episode. I don’t think they even knew of their own differences. Now we look back, and we say we were different, totally different, but I really don’t think so . . . I don’t think we were that different in their eyes.

Anonymous, Museo de Arte Popular [speaking in English] It’s so important that people understand that Mexico has roots and Mexicans have roots, and that one should go back to them without wanting to recover the past, what can I say? You have to know where you come from; you have to be proud of who you are; you have to know that that was good, that that was a very good, organized way of living, but they should not be ashamed. What’s the legacy of the conquest today? That Mexican people unfortunately are not very sure of themselves. It’s been a millenary thing, I don’t know why, but they lost. They don’t believe in themselves too much; that’s a big problem. They always think the other one knows better or that the foreigner is going to know better and that they have to fool themselves and the people around them in order to be somebody. Because they don’t think they can make it on their own. If they tell the truth, they won’t be believed. If they give an opinion, it must not be the right one. So I better lie or I better take something from somebody else. They are very insecure. I’m sure that it was the fact that we had the different layers of people, that there were the lords and the tlatoani.

* * *

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How successful are indigenous communities? It’s people who used to live here, I mean they owned this place. They had their rights and they believed in them. But now you go to the pueblos and all these feasts and things. They’re so run-down. Some are still alive but it’s like having three Mexicos, not even two. Three Mexicos or four or five. And the Indians don’t want to be Indians, they want to be masons or they want to be workers, and it’s terrible because they live so much more dignified where they come from, even if they are poor. They’re poor here, and they live in these dumps. But in the country if they remained there, it’s so much better. So what would you say the three, four, or five Mexicos are? Well, I’d say one is the one that is influenced 100 percent by the U.S. That’s one . . . The other Mexico is people who don’t want to live in their towns anymore, who want to go to the cities and live very badly and at the same time don’t understand that they should not leave the country, but at the same time, what do they eat? And then there are the city people that have been here for generations, that have not gone anywhere . . . and they have no real expectations. And then there are people—there are so many of them—people who live in the lost [cities,] las ciudades perdidas, in the city, cardboard houses. So many people, so many. They live in the outskirts, but more than outskirts. I mean it’s really bad. Horrible. And then there is the middle class.

Vicente López What do you think about the arrival of the Spaniards? Is there anything left of the original peoples? Well, our race comes from them, because saying I’m Aztec or something like that . . . well, it’s not that way. It’s a mix. But let’s just say the good thing the Spaniards left us is that we’ve kept our beliefs, our traditions. Because the truth is that—I mean, and don’t take this the wrong way—but for example the Anglo-Saxons who got to North America did away with all the different racial groups and put them in restricted zones, but they did away with them. If they had conquered us, well, they’d have wiped out all the Aztecs. I don’t know. We don’t know how good or how bad it would’ve been, but that’s the way it is. Here, the one who conquered us was a pirate, a thief. Columbus, I mean Cortés, brought nothing but pirates with him, don’t you agree? Hernán Cortés brought nothing but pirates. So, for example, in the city’s downtown museums, near Chapultepec, there’s one called the Natural History Museum [Museo de Historia Natural]. There you can see pictures of how things used to be. Images of how the pyramids were before. There were big avenues, but on a real lake, a lake fed by a river that flowed from the hills through this community. It was very

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beautiful and an enormous treasure. I think it could be compared to Egypt, because a river also went through there. But here, in the middle of Mexico . . . that’s where they came . . . it was just beautiful. Well, because they wanted to start colonizing and all that, they ordered the river blocked off so it no longer fed the lake. And that’s how it started. Obviously, with the water gone, only dirt and soil were left. And they built there, and now that’s Mexico City. But, just imagine seeing from here a lake with a city there in the middle and all that. It would have been extremely beautiful. But, you know, if it wasn’t for the Spaniards, we wouldn’t be here.

Figure 4.1.  General Winfield Scott followed part of the Ruta de Cortés when he invaded Mexico with the U.S. Army in 1847. (Courtesy of the University of South Florida Maps Project.)

Figure 4.2.  Photography was in its infancy when this record was made of a U.S. regiment in New Hampshire preparing to leave for the Mexican-American War, ca. 1846. (Beinecke Library, Yale University.)

Part IV

El Otro Lado Mexicans in the United States The conquest is still going on today. The only issue is that we’re blind to it. —fred diego

Each time I returned home to the United States from the Ruta de Cortés, I became more aware of the increasing presence of Mexicans and Mexican Americans living and working in my own hometown. Relistening to the many interviews I collected, I heard informants again and again emphasize the continuing conquest operating within Mexico’s diverse cultural and ethnic landscape, and between Mexican and U.S. interests. I began to gain an appreciation of the complexity of the conquest paradigm as it is applied to the ideological cultural and geographic relationships that have evolved over many centuries outside Mexico. I also recognized the key role played by “El Otro Lado,” the Other Side, as Mexicans frequently refer to the United States. Therefore, in this final section we leave the Ruta de Cortés to interview Mexicans residing in or passing through the midwestern university town where I live. Entire fields of study, such as border studies and immigration studies, examine the issues we will touch on here. But this section is not another story of border culture. The informants are visitors or immigrants to a university town, Bloomington, in rural Indiana. And yet the topics raised in the interviews highlight themes that run through many of the earlier interviews and underscore a central premise of my book: the story of the Spanish conquest continues to be reworked and reframed in different historical, geographical, and class settings, even in new transnational and transgenerational contexts today.1

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Conquest is not a single event but rather a centuries-long process, which predates the Spaniards, starting with the Aztec imperial conquests, intensifying with post-Independence, post-Revolution, and neoliberal programs, and continuing today with state policies about indigenous populations and pluriethnic agendas. Narrator informants also draw parallels between the Spanish conquest, the MexicanAmerican War, and contemporary Mexican-U.S. relations. They emphasize a relationship between the violence of the Spanish conquest, the loss of half their land

Figure 4.3.  Makers of the Swedish vodka Absolut ran this advertisement in Mexico using a map with pre-1848 Mexican national boundaries.

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in 1848, and the violence on the U.S. border today. Violence from the drug cartels spiraled upward past sixty thousand deaths and over twenty thousand missing people in the six years (2006–12) of my project. Mexicans experience the loss of economic sovereignty, of cultural traditions (through the invasion of U.S.-based consumerism), and of family and friends to a new empire (through emigration). The facts are these: one in ten Mexican-born people lives in the United States. Remittances from family members living in the United States were valued at an estimated $23 billion in 2012,2 and one in ten Mexican families depends on remittances to sustain it.3 Mexicans wonder what will happen to traditions like the Día de los Muertos as more children carry plastic pumpkins and celebrate Halloween. They often return to a conquest metaphor as they reflect on the pervasive use of English, the economic effects of free-trade agreements, and the dangers (and attractions) of American culture. As the popular saying goes, “If the United States sneezes, Mexico gets pneumonia.” “The conquest didn’t happen; it’s still happening,” argues a twenty-year-old Mexican immigrant (Fred Diego, interview). And change is happening in both directions. There are fifty million U.S. residents of Hispanic or Latino origin, and more than thirty-three million of those identify as Mexican. They are the “majority minority” today, and it is estimated that by 2060 they will make up 30 percent of the U.S voting population.4 In 2008, a century and a half after the 1848 Mexican-American War and the treaty settlements that followed, which resulted in the loss of over half of Mexican territory to the United States, the Absolut vodka company ran an advertising campaign in Mexico that played on the persistent historical memory of conquest among Mexicans. The campaign caused a furor in the United States. The ads displayed a pre-1848 map of Mexico (including much of what is now the U.S. Southwest and California) with the superimposed slogan “In an Absolut World.” Media outlets in the United States picked up on the Mexican ad, and amid widespread U.S. criticism, Absolut canceled the campaign. The official company website stated that the ad does not “advocate an altering of borders . . . it harkens to a time which the population of Mexico may feel was more ideal.” The Swedish vodka company cleverly played upon Mexicans’ continuing sense of injustice for its own commercial ends. From Veracruz to Mexico City, as people discuss the conquest, they often turn to the more recent U.S. conquests of Mexico—geographical, cultural, and economic. Below I outline a few of the key historical turning points before turning to the interviews.

Mexico and the United States of America

The term “El Otro Lado” implicitly refers to a whole: the United States and Mexico are two halves that really belong together. What is now a border between the United States and Mexico has been crossed continuously for centuries, even after new national boundaries were established in 1848. But the term also highlights the separateness of parts that once were integrated. Beginning with the legendary origins of the Aztecs from the north, a mythical place called Aztlan that some Mexicans believe was located in what is now the southwest United States and continuing through the colonial and early Independence periods, the populations of these northern lands have been linked to Mesoamerica. Yet they were always in a category of their own. Under Spanish rule, in some cases thousands of miles from Mexico City, “El Norte” was peripheral to the central Viceroyalty of New Spain. In newly independent Mexico, people living in the area were nominally Mexican, but continued to identify more strongly with local community life than with the emerging national culture.5 When U.S. forces occupied Mexico City in 1848 the Mexican commanding officer, Antonio López de Santa Ana, agreed to the Treaty of Guadalupe, which ended the two year Mexican-American War but ceded one-third of Mexico to the United States. Within six years, with the Gadsden Purchase and the incorporation of the Republic of Texas into the United States, Mexico had lost more than half of its territory.6 One informant exclaimed, “The U.S. stole a million square kilometers by declaring a nonexistent war!” (Marlene Ehrenberg, interview). From the beginning, some Mexicans viewed the war and related treaties as unjust and therefore not legally binding, and they continued to move across to El Otro Lado.7 The antagonism over U.S. border policies increased over the course of the twentieth century. During the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) nearly one million Mexicans emigrated to the United States, further complicating debates about history and national affiliation between Mexicans on both sides of the border as well as between U.S. nationals.8 As we have seen, post-Revolutionary campaigns sought to 269

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strengthen nationalism by rewriting the history of the Spanish conquest and the role of indigenous ethnicities. But revolutionary rhetoric also treated the United States more harshly, as the new conquistador and invader of Mexico.9 The U.S. response to post-Revolution Mexican immigration was the establishment of the first U.S. Border Patrol (1925) and, by the time of the Great Depression, the backlash Operation Wetback (1929). Throughout the remainder of the twentieth century, Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals living in El Otro Lado experienced increasing conflict between acceptance and marginalization, between cultural reinvigoration and cultural loss, between integration and racialization. State-managed guest labor migration programs, such as the 1942 Bracero Program (which allowed limited seasonal migration) were established, abolished, and then reconstituted as de facto policies.10 With the end of the guest labor system in the late 1980s, the 1994 NAFTA influx of cheap agricultural products into Mexico—and the resulting catastrophic loss of jobs—led to increased tensions on the border. Since September 11, 2001, with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, both the militarization of the border and deportations have increased as national debates have intensified and often polarized Mexicans and Americans. Reactionary policies, such as the 1994 California Proposition 187 (which blocked unauthorized immigrants from access to public services), the 2005 H.R. 4437 (which made undocumented immigration a felony), and a 2010 Arizona law seen as encouraging racial profiling, have been proposed by politicians, supported by some voters, and overturned in Congress or in federal courts. These trends have alienated many Latino citizens of the United States, and the Republican Party, seen as the main perpetrator of unjust immigration policies, lost a huge percentage of the Latino vote in the 2012 presidential elections. Since this watershed event, bipartisan support for immigration reform has become stronger, yet proponents have still been unable to bring any legislation to the floor. Yet, as the border becomes increasingly dangerous and expensive to cross, more Mexican nationals are stranded in the United States, cut off from easy return to families and their home communities.11 As a result, Mexican immigration patterns are changing. The traditional short-term, seasonal migration of a single male in search of agricultural work because of economic necessity is becoming long-term, often permanent, migration for work in a service industry. Once established, the male immigrant may then bring his whole family to El Otro Lado. At the same time, as more adult undocumented immigrants are being actively deported, more Latino families in the United States are left with one less wage earner. Mexican immigrant families are increasingly part of many U.S. communities, and their U.S.-born children are now citizens. As an unauthorized Mexican living in the United States put it, “For me, it’s really important that my two boys are going to be able to vote and make their voice be heard . . . I know something is going to happen. We are the biggest minority” (Anonymous mother, interview). Attitudes on both sides of the border change depending on local, national, and, increasingly, global situations.12 In 1990, after years of near silence on the topic, the

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Figure 4.4.  After the signing of NAFTA, Mexican-born Chicano Guillermo Gómez-Peña teamed up with artists Enrique Chagoya and Felicia Rice and drew on iconography about the Spanish conquest to convey the effects of U.S. imperialism today. (Reproduced from GómezPeña’s Codex Espangliensis with permission from Felicia Rice of Moving Parts Press.)

Mexican government created the Program for Mexican Communities Abroad and began a series of initiatives to bring Mexican nationals living in the United States into a broader concept of Mexico or of being Mexican, one that included immigrants and transnationals living on El Otro Lado. More recently, new electoral laws have allowed Mexican nationals living abroad to be eligible for political office in Mexico. At the grassroots level, Mexicans and Mexican Americans have created hundreds of formal committees to organize and pay for fiestas patronales in their Mexican hometowns. These committees transmit elements of their birth country’s identities to first- and second-generation Mexicans living in the United States. At the same time, their intervention in local Mexican festivals is beginning to alter traditional gender and ethnic roles and identities as women become more independent in the

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United States and bring these role models back to Mexico. Immigrants who might have self-identified as mestizos in Mexico often adapt identities more strongly tied to their original local town or to a more general indigenous ancestry.13 The once lightly celebrated Cinco de Mayo, the commemoration of the defeat of the French in Mexico, has become the premier celebration of “Mexicanness” in the United States. The defeat of foreign invaders in the nineteenth century has been rescripted as a unifying symbol for contemporary Mexican American life in the “new empire.” Notions of history, culture, and citizenship affect policies and practices in both the United States and Mexico.14 The traditional American foundational myth of the United States as a “melting pot”—a process that, like the mestizo narrative in Mexico, implies integration and even uniformity—is contradicted by the real experience of Mexican immigrants, some of whom prefer, when possible, to move back and forth between current national boundaries to combine work in the United States with family life in Mexico. Discriminatory practices often do not encourage assimilation even if it is desired. Below, two Mexican immigrants from vastly different social classes both remark on this in-between status and their attempts to create new spaces. “I am like a floating point,” remarks Fred Diego, while Rocío Cortés states, “I am like a chameleon.” As informants visiting or living in the United States talk, they reject the stereotype of Latinos as an invading force, bent upon reconquering lands that were once theirs.15 They counter U.S. political and cultural agendas that paint them as a threat to national security and the economy. They balk at being labeled “illegals,” a code word that has encouraged and attempted to justify racial and ethnic discrimination. They describe the dire situations of millions of Mexicans in both the United States and Mexico who live in poverty and violence. Many also describe the promise they see in proposals for new guest-labor systems, new pathways to citizenship, and the potential of pluralist responses to concepts of national sovereignty. They point to the demographic realities of a new generation of U.S.-born Latinos who are already coming of age and voting. The injustices of historic U.S. imperialist practices as well as current U.S. economic-political policies are fresh in all the informants’ minds. But many hold out hope that the rift between Mexico and El Otro Lado can be healed. Below we hear from Mexicans visiting the United States and working-class people who have immigrated to there. As institutional and cultural authorities, the spokesmen who visit Bloomington are highly visible and re-present Mexico to U.S. audiences in a practiced verbal performance. They recognize and play upon an insideroutsider dynamic, as authoritative voices within an academic setting. On the other hand, many Mexicans who have “crossed over” as immigrants to the United States often face more urgent needs. The challenges of economic and cultural survival permeate their stories. Their lived experiences demonstrate how European-IndioAfro-Mestizo identity classifications break down even further in a country that often has painted Mexicans with a single brushstroke as low-class invaders. U.S. popular discourse levels the differences that Mexicans have arrived at among themselves over

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Figure 4.5.  This iconic border-crossing sign has circulated widely on the World Wide Web and been adapted for a number of protests.

the centuries. Immigrants of all classes who arrived as children or as young adults are often surprised by the racial discrimination they experience. Their accounts weave their own stories into a larger narrative of a search for place and meaning that highlights the challenges—and opportunities—of El Otro Lado and often brings them back to a consideration of their Mexican roots and history.

Anonymous Immigrant, Housekeeper, and Mother Maybe because people like me moved from Mexico and lost contact, we have a sense of “where are our people who started everything?”

A mother of three boys passionately contends, “We are all citizens of the world and this is where I need to make a difference, this is what I have right now.” As she looks back on her life in a phone interview, preferring to speak in English, she reveals the emotional upheaval, struggle, and difficulty of integrating into U.S. society. In 1993, as a young wife with a five-month-old baby, she crossed the U.S.-Mexican border without a visa. She relates the harrowing story of handing over her baby to strangers at the border, experiencing the isolation of being a young mother who didn’t speak English and couldn’t work outside the home, and finding the courage

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to leave an abusive relationship and move to a shelter with three young sons. She also recounts the satisfaction of finding work, learning English, and establishing a healthy household. Her story follows the pattern of many undocumented Mexican immigrants of her generation—separation from community, transition to a new life, and incorporation into U.S. society.16 Since childhood, she has understood the intimate “dual connection” between the United States and Mexico: the United States offers opportunities for family members who cross over, even as it represents oppression. As the youngest of ten siblings born in a small town (population 5,000) in the state of Michoacan, the woman experienced few modern amenities. Her father died before she was born, but she was able to finish the ninth grade. By age eighteen she was married and had a son. Her husband had first worked in the United States after the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City that killed thousands. After a year or two back in Michoacan, he wanted to return to his extended family in the States. The young mother had a difficult decision to make: to stay with her own family and community in Mexico or to join her husband. She chose to keep her new family together. But things fell apart. After years of feeling isolated and overwhelmed, never really learning English, and finally leaving her husband, she found she couldn’t return to Mexico. Her mother had died, and there was little economic or emotional support for her and her children in the rural town she came from. She enrolled in a high school for teenage mothers, but the isolation and frustration of being the only nonnative English speaker led her to drop out. “I just needed to learn how to survive. . . . I just wanted to work,” she explains. She applied for a tax identification number (ITIN, which allows noncitizens to work) so she could find employment. Now she has a flourishing housecleaning business and is raising the boys to be good citizens. You need to be “willing to just say, ‘Okay, if this is where I want to be, I need to make sense of this. I need to embrace this. I really need to learn how to live.’” She laughs as she reflects on the degree to which she now has roots in the United States and has embraced diversity. After years of working along with her sons on homework projects and talking with their teachers, speaking English is now more natural to her than speaking Spanish. But the struggle of incorporation into U.S. society as an undocumented immigrant continues into the next generation. While her two youngest boys were born in the United States and are citizens—with rights to Social Security numbers, driver’s licenses, and work—the son that was just five months old when he came to the States has been blocked from the privileges of citizenship, which in many cases are also rites of passage into adulthood. Friends have teased him because he cannot apply for a driver’s license or most jobs. But she says that he considers himself lucky to have received a scholarship to attend a community college. Still, when she suggested that he look for work in Mexico, his face became “confused and uncertain like mine when I came to the States. He doesn’t know any other life than in the U.S.” His life is here, but how will he become a full citizen, she wonders. She holds out hope that the federal government will somehow help unauthorized immigrants’ children.17 She

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is more certain about her two younger sons and their friends, who will make their voices heard as voters in the next few years. She knows the power they will have as the largest minority in the country. She is very familiar with the history of discrimination against immigrants: “The U.S. has always been prejudiced against certain groups: the Irish, the Italians, the African Americans, and now in these times it’s the Hispanics. Why is that? I know something is going to happen. We are the biggest minority, and I just feel this fire in my belly because the next generation . . . we need to tell them they are going to make a big difference in the world.” Her life story, as she “recalls it and makes sense of it,” reveals a personal awareness of multiple layers of identity. She feels that she has successfully adapted to life in the United States as a worker and a mother of the new Hispanic generation. She is comfortable with her identity as a Hispanic in the United States, but she also feels a deep-rooted connection to a Mexican, even pre-Hispanic, identity: “I define myself as a Maya and Aztec descendant. That’s in my blood. I am Mexican American because . . . America [is] the whole continent.” She speculates that “maybe because people like me moved from Mexico and lost contact, we have a sense of ‘where are our people who started everything?’ I know we are talking many, many years ago, but we have to look back.” She recalls a transformative experience as a teenager. She was part of an Aztec dance group. When they traveled to a coastal area populated by indigenous people, “I felt deep inside of me . . . this is where we come from, our origins. I got close to where things started.” Now she believes that all Mexicans, even in the United States, need to understand their roots and to make a decision: “Is it for us really in our hearts to say that we feel so proud of being Mayan and Aztec descendants? Or do we feel ashamed because we know what happened to our people?”

Karina Zazueta, Indiana University Law School We live in the shadows, without protection.

“We need another conquest,” states Karina Zazueta, a thirty-nine-year-old woman originally from Ciudad Juárez in the northern state of Chihuahua. Zazueta’s paternal grandparents had immigrated to Mexico in the 1940s, when they lost their land in Spain’s Basque country. Caught by the economic crises and devaluation of the peso in the 1980s, Zazueta’s parents lost their financial independence and needed money. She says matter-of-factly, “My marriage was supposed to help the family’s financial crisis.” She was encouraged to marry at age fifteen into a powerful, corrupt family who believed that “marriage was the most important school for a woman; for them, women are ornaments and servants.” She dropped out of high school and had two children before the age of twenty. She sought to escape from the violent, patriarchal drug culture in Ciudad Juárez by fleeing to the imagined refuge of El Otro Lado. Instead, her in-laws continued to threaten her. She fought for fifteen more years before she achieved real safety by leaving El Paso and receiving a U-visa, which

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Figure 4.6.  Karina Zazueta talks with a newspaper reporter about immigration and violence. (Photograph by Chris Howell. Courtesy of the Bloomington Herald-Times.)

allows victims of violence to remain in the United States for four years. The visa gives holders the right to employment and education and to seek a pathway to citizenship. In exchange, they must agree to help in the investigation and prosecution of the individuals who victimized them. Zazueta is grateful to the United States for helping her find safety. But she is also aware that U.S. drug policies have helped maintain the violent drug culture she sought to escape. For example, the notorious “gun-walking” program sponsored by the U.S. government (Operation Fast and Furious) actually sold guns to border intermediaries in the hope of tracing the weapons back to drug kingpins. The program was ultimately suspended when border patrol police were murdered with those very guns. No higher-level traffickers were ever prosecuted. “I don’t know why the U.S. doesn’t intervene somehow, seeing as how we’re neighbors. . . . maybe it’s not in the U.S. government’s interest to act against Mexico because the drugs that are used here move through Mexico.” Now a law student at Indiana University, she focuses on the role of gender in a violent border culture. A theme runs through her interview: women live “in the shadows, without protection.” Their anxiety is threefold: they fear for their own safety, for their children’s future, and if they flee to El Otro Lado, they risk deportation. The once-thriving Ciudad Juárez is now a militarized “ghost town and a war zone,” where people stay sequestered in their houses. When schoolchildren in the city were asked recently what they wanted to be when they grew up, some responded “doctors,” but others answered “sicarios,” hired assassins. Life is no easier on the other side of the border. Undocumented immigrants endure a constant struggle to gain access to work, education, and health care, and they face deportation, which

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further breaks up families and communities. In such a situation, reflects Zazueta, gender-based violence often increases as socioeconomic and patriarchal structures become stressed to a breaking point.18 When I ask about her Mexican heritage and the Spanish conquest, Zazueta quotes the wildly popular Televisa character la india María: “I’m neither from here nor there.” Like la india María, an indigenous Mazahua campesina who works in the United States and endures racism with remarkable good humor, Zazueta tries to define for herself who she is in this new context. The law student doesn’t remember when she first learned about the conquest in Mexico, and once in the States felt ashamed that she didn’t know her own history. As she read about her roots, she found herself identifying with La Malinche, a woman who, like her, worked between cultures and who reflects her own sense of a divided heart: “I love the U.S. because here I’ve found protection, and I’ve had the opportunity to grow as a person and to protect my family . . . [but] I also love my country, my patria, my homeland.” Even as she pursues her dream of becoming a lawyer, Zazueta’s sense of a divided self has become more acute in the heartland. She explains that after moving to the United States, where she first lived in the border town of El Paso, she didn’t experience much culture shock. El Paso is “occupied Mexico. Eighty-seven percent of the population is Mexican and you hear Mexican music and Spanish everywhere.” Southern Indiana, however, has been a “shock; no one speaks Spanish. . . . Nobody likes to be

Figure 4.7.  A federal agent guards the scene where a Mexican woman was murdered in Ciudad Juárez during Calderón’s drug war. (“Corbis LT Mexico Drug War” © Rodrigo Abd / Corbis.)

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in a place where people don’t speak your language, eat your food, and don’t listen to your music. So we immigrate because we have to survive.” Zazueta struggles to find a cultural balance as she raises her two youngest daughters, both born in the States and therefore U.S. citizens. She insists on speaking Spanish at home and teaches her daughters about famous Mexican women, such as the colonial poet and nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the twentieth-century artist Frida Kahlo. As secondgeneration immigrants living in a non-Mexican community, her daughters are themselves caught between nations and heritages. Acknowledging that they may not be well accepted in the United States, even as American-born citizens, nor well accepted in Mexico, Zazueta believes that her daughters will create a new transnational identity, one that will break down border and patriarchal violence while embracing their identity as American daughters of a “100 percent Mexican mother.”

Alejandro García Moreno, The Center for Latin and Caribbean Studies, Indiana University The deepest trauma in Mexican history was the war against the U.S.

“The trouble with interviewing me is that I am very nationalistic,” jokes Alejandro García Moreno, Mexico’s representative to the Organization of American States.19 “If you ask me what I am, I’ll say, ‘Well, I’m Mexican.’ And if you insist, I’ll tell you, ‘I’m 100 percent Mexican,’ no? And if you ask, ‘Are you of Spanish origin?’ I’ll say, ‘I’m Mexican, period!’” He then tells a story about a European visitor to his office who repeatedly asked, “But where is your family from?” The diplomat finally replied, “Like everyone else, we came from Africa.” When the tall, blue-eyed statesman visited Indiana University, he began his lecture by displaying a map highlighting his country’s unique position: the only Latin American country on the North American continent. García Moreno studied foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University and wrote his thesis on U.S. foreign relations with Guatemala. His passion for Mexico— and its role in the world—emerges in his every sentence. The statesman thrives in his role as an official interpreter of Mexico for a U.S. audience. When I interview the seasoned statesman the next day at a coffee shop near campus, he cites the historian Josefina Zoraida Vázquez’s influential thesis that contemporary Mexican history and identity have been shaped since the mid-nineteenth century in response to foreign intervention—and in particular, to conflicts with the United States. As we talk about things close to his heart, he turns to Spanish: “The Spanish conquest was traumatic . . . a brutal crash,” but he insists that “the deepest trauma in Mexican history was the war against the U.S., in which suddenly, overnight, you see half your country’s gone. That’s the real trauma. So, this clash with the U.S., repeated during the [Mexican] Revolution, again reaffirms Mexican identity. The clash is deeper than the one with Spain.” Foreign conflicts and invasions “forced

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us to have our own identity; they defined us all as Mexicans. The state didn’t promote nationalism as an aggressive foreign policy, but rather as a defensive one.” García Moreno articulates an underlying theme in many Mexicans’ ideas about conquest. There were multiple conquests, which become intertwined and reinterpreted over time. He underscores how just twenty-five years after Independence from Spain, Mexico lost half of its territory to a new empire. Because Mexico ultimately triumphed over Spain, he argues, the Spanish conquest is easier for Mexicans to talk about and has become iconic of all conquests. When the United States intervened in the Mexican Revolution, that event further solidified a post-Revolutionary response to foreign intervention in Mexican politics and a strong national agenda to politicize its citizens through education and culture. In essence, the Revolution said, “‘Goodbye to all things European’ and ‘let’s reaffirm what we are.’” Since then, national education, culture, and legislation all promote the idea that “we were Mexicans before the Spaniards came.” Pyramids once left in ruins throughout central Mexico are now vivid, glorious symbols of its pre-Hispanic past and its present Mexicanness: they’re our “greatest pride.” As García Moreno considers the lasting shock people must have experienced at seeing sacred pyramids destroyed by the Spanish, his affability changes to anger. Several years ago he witnessed the archaeological dig under Mexico City’s cathedral. He pounds his fist on the table as he describes seeing “the wooden beams that the Spaniards used to build the cathedral. There you see the strong clash, that imposition. How strong it was, and that it existed, you know?” The 1990s were a watershed period that inaugurated a renewed “national debate about who we are and what we ought to be,” observes García Moreno. Even though the 1996 Acuerdos de San Andrés sobre Derechos y Cultura Indígena, the San Andrés Accords, the agreement between the EZLN and the Mexican government on indigenous culture and rights, were never signed and the Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos “disappeared” from the scene for a time, the diplomat argues: “Mexico didn’t stagnate. Mexico evolved, and with increasingly more dynamism than expected.” He sees adequate progress in legislation where others—in particular those like Mardonio Carballo who are fighting on the front lines for indigenous rights—still see serious gaps between government policy and practice. García Moreno argues that the national government established effective programs in response to indigenous demands. In addition, the century of being taught “you’re Mexican, period” has changed. Although García Moreno still says, “I’m 100 percent Mexican,” he acknowledges that the neoliberal official state term of “mosaic” is a better description of contemporary Mexico: “It’s no longer about making all Mexicans fit a single model, but understanding that all Mexicans are part of different models and societies. . . . I believe that today’s most important concept is accepting diversity as an enriching reality, as a positive reality, and as something that we have to safeguard.” While many people perceive internal contradictions in this relatively new official tolerance for diversity, they fear even more that their traditions and identities will

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disappear because of the impact of NAFTA and globalization in general. García Moreno counters both the need for new identity narratives in Mexico, as new movements challenge twentieth-century state discourse, and the idea that increased economic and cultural contact with the United States will undermine his country. Citing the ambassador he worked with, he argues that people don’t have an “identity conflict” but rather a strong sense of identity as 100 percent Mexican: “We’re not insecure about our identity; we don’t have to look for it anywhere else in the world. . . . We are Mexico.” He recalls the national debate that erupted over twenty years ago when McDonald’s established its first chains in Mexico: “What’s going to happen with this McDonald’s? Are we going to stop eating tacos and start eating hamburgers? Well, we eat both. You want a hamburger, you’re gonna eat a hamburger. You want a taco, you’re gonna eat a taco. But you didn’t lose your values, your traditions, and the access to the things you had because of the addition of new ways, new habits, or new preferences; they don’t exclude each other. It isn’t as if globalization comes in one door and your traditions or identity go out the other. You can have globalization and keep your identity. . . . Go to the cemetery on the Día de los Muertos and you’ll see that there’s no way the plastic ‘Halloween’ pumpkins you find in the streets are going to undermine our traditions.” The best way to protect cultural heritage as globalization takes place is education. “There has to be awareness about what your culture is, a definition of what you are.” García Moreno’s ideas of conquest, identity, and culture emerge from his understanding of the power of politicizing education and highlighting new conceptual maps of North America as a place that includes both Mexico and the United States. In his own life, he moves easily between the United States and Mexico: as a diplomat for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs he often lives for extended periods of time in the States and has family living there. He wishes that all Mexicans could have the same ease of movement. Through “deeper historical awareness,” change is possible. An expert in illustrative anecdotes, he argues that the United States owes a great historical debt to Mexico. The English colonies borrowed Mexican doblones (doubloons) to help fund the War of Independence. García Moreno affably recounts hearing a Texan sum up a general sentiment among Mexican Americans: “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” A history of foreign intervention and a complex relationship between the United States and Mexico fuel García Moreno’s nationalistic interpretative framework of conquest as imperialism. But he remains heartily optimistic that his country can successfully absorb, without significant loss of cultural identity or sovereignty, further foreign invasions of all kinds. Both García Moreno and Karina Zazueta use the same phrase, “100 percent Mexican,” to express two profoundly different life experiences. Zazueta’s views reflect years of racial discrimination and violence on both sides of the border, while García Moreno’s life story reflects the nationalistic discourse of a powerful statesman. Both have spent many years living in the United States, an experience that has helped to solidify their historical memory.

Conquest Through the Centuries

Plate 2.1.  The sixteenth-century Codex Mendoza illustrates the submission of altepetl to Tenochtitlan. (Bodleian Library.)

Plate 2.2.  Diego Durán’s early history of the conquest depicts the clash between Spanish conquistadors and Mexica warriors. (© Steve Raymer.)

Plate 2.3.  This codex attributed to the Jesuit Juan de Tovar richly illustrates each month of the Aztec calendar. This page is for the month of Cancer, represented by corn and beans. (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.)

Plate 2.4.  Woodcuts of angels and saints for private devotional books were popular throughout the colonial period. Images of the warrior archangel San Miguel, like this one by Francisco Toledo, prevailed throughout rural and indigenous communities in central Mexico. His feast day is still important today.

Plate 2.5.  By the eighteenth century New Spain’s caste system was so elaborate that paintings like this one by Miguel Cabrera portray the results of ethnic mixing and the labels given to them.

Plate 2.6.  Part of the post-Revolutionary muralist movement in Mexico City, Orozco painted this iconic image of Malinche with Cortés on the walls of the National Preparatory School at San Ildefonso College. (© Bob Schalkwijk.)

Plate 2.7.  Guillermo Gómez-Peña teamed up with artists Enrique Chagoya and Felicia Rice to create a codex that casts U.S. imperialism as a new conquest. The artists drew heavily on iconography about the Spanish conquest to convey their message. (Reproduced from Gómez-Peña’s Codex Espangliensis with permission from Felicia Rice of Moving Parts Press.)

Plate 2.8.  Another image from Codex Espangliensis. (Reproduced with permission from Felicia Rice of Moving Parts Press.)

Plate 2.9.  Retablo of border crossing, by Jesús Gómez G., 1981. (Reproduced with permission of the University of Arizona Press.)

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Gustavo Gordillo, The Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University The way each Mexican wants to present himself, even in the small community of their own family, borders between Cortés and Cuauhtemoc. At some point, I don’t know, people want to be heroic, or at some point people want to be conquerors.

In a nearly empty office at an institute for political theory at Indiana University, on the eve of his return to Mexico, Gustavo Gordillo describes the core of his working philosophy. In fluent English, with an easy, steady voice, he asserts, “I would say to any one of us, you have to recognize which were your own problems, in your own culture, in your own period, in order to understand your history. Because if not, then history is just about the good guys—which are us—and the bad guys—which is everyone else. That doesn’t help us understand anything.” The grassroots organizer, former Mexican government official, ex-director of rural development at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, and author of dozens of books believes that change is possible and has dedicated his life to it. Gustavo Gordillo was born into a ranchero family, who raised a small herd of cattle and had a long tradition of crossing to El Otro Lado. For over a century, people traveled from his rural town near Guadalajara in western Pacific Mexico to work in Los Angeles. After making some money, they would return to the pueblo. Prejudice against campesinos and rancheros is so strong in Mexico, he explains, that his parents took him as a newborn to Mexico City, where they applied for his birth certificate, hoping to erase the stigma of being born in the rural north. Later Gustavo lived with his parents for several years in Boston and attended elementary school there before returning to Mexico. His coming of age was the 1968 massacre at Tlatelolco. “I arrived late, so I was not imprisoned, and the French consulate helped get me to France, where I studied and received a PhD.” Years later, he was in the States again—at the University of California–San Diego, writing a book about his fifteen years organizing campesinos in Mexico—when President Salinas de Gortari invited him to serve in his cabinet as vice minister of agriculture (1988–94). Today Gordillo critiques some aspects of a reform that he helped to mastermind: Mexico’s most profound land reform policy since the Revolution. The controversial 1990s constitutional amendment dismantled the ejido system, a centuries-old system of common lands and house parcels that had been reinstituted in Article 27 of the constitution after the Revolution. Largely government controlled, the system had been relatively successful until the economic crisis of the 1980s. Salinas’s neoliberal reforms, notes Gordillo, sought to decrease government involvement in order to help stimulate production through private investment in the self-governing (in principle) ejido. Instead the reforms opened the way for black markets. Now many people blame the policy, which affected 20 percent of Mexico’s population, for

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greatly accelerating the loss of community and tradition in rural and indigenous communities. Gordillo himself does not back away from self-criticism; his current research explores new paradigms for revising a broken system. Before Mexico can move forward as a country, Gordillo argues, it must first come to terms with its own authoritarian past. Countering the point of view we heard from the statesman García Moreno, he says, “The problem is we can’t blame external enemies to avoid taking responsibility. That is part of our relation with the Spanish and with the conquest, and partly related with the U.S. as well. In both cases we have suffered a lot in terms of conquest, in terms of losing part of our territory. . . . But it has prevented us from doing a deep revision of our own relations, in one case with the indigenous communities, and in another case with other citizens and the government.” He continues, “We tend to analyze the brutality of the conquest of the Spanish when they came, and we tend to forget that the Aztecs were a very, very strong, ferocious, and very murdering empire.” His country has “very little experience with democracy.” As the man who suggests that every community has its own archetypal Cortés and Moctezuma or Cuauhtemoc, he smiles and jokes: Mexico’s authoritarianism “pops out like . . . Peter Sellers’s arm making the Nazi salute in that film by Stanley Kubrick [Dr. Strangelove].”20 Yet he holds out hope. Like many of our informants, he notes that the Zapatista uprising was a catalyst for a dynamic younger generation: “We thought we were a country that was mixed, that we didn’t have any racial problems, that that was not in Mexico, that was either in the north or down in South America, but not with us. And we found out that we were very, very racist in Mexico. . . . [It was a] crude lesson, but it’s a lesson and it’s very crucial for us. . . . I’m not sure we all understood the lesson.” Former president Fox’s own party—as well as the liberal party—rejected the president’s proposal to recognize the Zapatistas’ demands. “So the issue of how to treat indigenous communities goes across the board in terms of political and ideological options in Mexico. . . . It is still an unsolved, very important problem.” The issue of emigration, both within and without Mexico’s borders, is connected to the issues of indigenous communities and campesinos in general. Although Gordillo points out that his country has had a culture of migration for millennia, the frequency and number of people migrating rose radically in the last decade, from two to four million people, although it has tapered off since the 2008 recession. Migration within Mexico often leads to even greater inequality. More distant migration, such as to Alaska, has led some people “to defend themselves from that radical change by going back to their more hidden or buried traditions. . . . They bring back all those [pre-Hispanic] rites.” Yet even as he acknowledges the many people hurt by NAFTA and the constitutional change to the ejido system, the policy adviser advocates a community of North American nations, akin to the European Union, that would allow people to work wherever they found opportunity. Ultimately, this would decrease the amount of border violence and immigration issues: “The main dilemma we’re having, I

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think all countries [are having], . . . is how to cope with globalization. It is clear that globalization is something that has come to stay, hopefully for a long period. Because every time we [retreat into] our own countries . . . it ends in terrible wars.” People should not just “suffer through a paternalistic, deterministic globalization,” but should learn to find its benefits. But in order to see the benefits, he argues, first “you need to understand your relations with others, with other cultures, with other persons, with diversity, [which] makes you better understand how you can insert yourself in the globalization that’s now taking place.” He believes the new generation will usher in this new era. They are “curious about other cultures” and are holding Mexico’s political elite accountable. They are ready to “recognize that the reality of sovereignty in the world has changed. . . . Sooner or later we’ll end up having a community of nations. . . . How long will it take politicians to understand that [it] is in the best interest of all the countries? It will probably take a lot of time. But on the other hand, societies move more rapidly than political elites . . . especially young people.” Gordillo’s sense of urgency about Mexico’s crisis is a common thread throughout most of the interviews on El Otro Lado; but his view, as a former policymaker and observer, is that the United States, Mexico, and Canada must enter into a more binding legal, economic, and cultural relationship, a true community of nations.

Gustavo Esteva, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Indiana University Imagine a world in which multiple worlds are possible.

I believe in “one ‘no’ and many ‘yeses,’” explains a man dressed in a traditional guayabera who worked with the Zapatistas and now lives in a Zapotec comunidad. A group of Indiana University students listens attentively as Esteva talks about the need to mobilize people in a fight to unilaterally reject oppressive policies and to accept multiple strategies for change. As examples he cites two grassroots collectives that he helped organize, the Oaxaca Commune and the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca. Esteva describes how the groups were born out of the violent encounters in 2006 between state and federal police and striking teachers that left twenty-six dead, and how they mobilized for the July 2010 elections to oust the authoritarian PRI governor of Oaxaca. He believes in the resilience and power of collective organizations: “Right now, we’re obligated to find pluralist myths capable of incorporating the different currents in order to make living in harmony a possibility. Therefore we must seriously challenge black-and-white visions that scorn or celebrate everything wholesale.” Later, when I ask Esteva about his thoughts on the conquest, he gazes out from under bushy, graying eyebrows and answers in a soft, engaging voice with a seamless

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Figure 4.8.  Gustavo Esteva (far left) consults with a collective in Oaxaca. (Courtesy of Zapateando.)

twenty-minute narrative that he has polished over the years. Growing up in Mexico City, Gustavo witnessed how his mother forced her own Zapotec mother to use the back door, like an indigenous servant, just so that neighbors would not see an “indio” coming in the front. His parents cultivated an “aristocratic nostalgia,” a focus on their Esteva ancestors who had come from Spain two centuries earlier. But even as a child, Gustavo asked to spend summers in his grandmother’s Zapotec village in Oaxaca. Although she was not allowed to speak Zapotec to her grandson, she nevertheless passed along many Zapotec ways. His experiences of overt discrimination, even within the family, contrasted with his summers living in an indigenous community and became the starting points of his unusual professional journey. Esteva calls himself a “deprofessionalized independent writer and grassroots activist.” After receiving a middle- to upper-class Western education and working for fifteen years in both the private and government sectors (1961–76), Esteva felt “lost” and “dropped out.” He began working increasingly with nonprofit and civil society

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organizations, ranging from the United Nations to local collaborations. By the late 1970s he had become prominent in Mexico’s new civil society movement, which was inspired by the hope of strengthening democracy. He also began publishing landmark books, such as The Struggle for Rural Mexico (1980) and Food Policy in Mexico (1987, with James Austin). In 1989 he moved to a Zapotec village in Oaxaca to complete his “dewesternization”: “I stopped seeing through the lenses of all my education, all my categories; I began trying to use my own eyes, and it was then that I began to see other worlds, other possibilities.” Esteva continued his personal transformation by working as an adviser to the Zapatistas in their negotiations with the Mexican government in the mid-1990s.21 He currently helps lead initiatives for radical change, such as the Cultural Regeneration of Indigenous Communities and Peoples in Chiapas, Guerrero and Oaxaca, and helps direct the agricultural campaign with the memorable slogan “Sin maíz, no hay país” (No corn, no country). Esteva sees the conquest (in which, he emphasizes, only one person out of ten survived) and the 1824 Constitution (in which “two out of every three Mexicans are seen as foreigners”) as the major factors in the creation of a divided Mexico. Drawing on Guillermo Bonfil Batalla’s thesis, he seeks to unseat the México imaginario— the elite whose “hearts and minds [are] in the U.S.” and who attempted to educate the indios to extinction, a soul-killing cultural genocide. He also hopes to fortify the México profundo, indigenous and rural communities that have historically allowed “a search for interaction among cultures, for intercultural dialogue.” With a play on words, he argues that “one of its best traditions is the tradition of changing tradition in a traditional way.” Indigenous movements since Zapatismo are broad-based and not “black-and-white,” nor are they “reverse imperialism.” Rather, “what matters most is, as the Zapatistas say, to be able to learn to live together.” His critique of dominant paradigms and ideas for radical democracy and social transformation are framed as a need to “imagine a world in which multiple worlds are possible.” This pluralist solution to the México imaginario necessarily extends to the United States. “We’re affected and infected by our proximity to the U.S.” The antagonism of the “ugly American” period in which Esteva grew up has been repaired, but the repair was sorely tested during George W. Bush’s presidency. The outpouring of sympathy for the United States after 9/11, he argues, was an opportunity to strengthen the relationship between the United States and Mexico. Since then “all sorts of mistakes are being made, human rights violations, but at the same time, we have friends and family here, and we’re neighbors. So we’re able to show this support and solidarity, we’re able to distinguish one thing from another.” He continues, “These are the lessons we learned that had to do with Spain; now we should apply them to our relationship with the U.S. Work needs to be done on both sides. It’s not only us; it isn’t just here. Instead, we need to do many things on both sides in order to understand each other in a different way.” Esteva uses his own experience to illustrate how individuals, communities, and nations can allow for more inclusive categories of identity, beliefs, and interactions,

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what he refers to as “pluralistic myths.” Although he was raised in the Western tradition, he consciously dewesternized himself and now lives in a comunidad. But he warns, “I may live like a Zapotec Indian, but I know that I am not a Zapotec Indian. I also don’t hold and follow all the Zapotec beliefs and myths. So today I could not tell you who I really am. . . . But inside of me, something else is emerging. Other people will have to tell me who I am. I can live and understand the contradiction quite clearly.” In Esteva’s view there is no longer a need for a divided Mexico, created and sustained through centuries of class conflict. Mexicans and Americans can choose their own multiple, more nuanced, and even outwardly “contradictory” identities and ways of living and viewing the world.

Rocío Cortés, Latin American Studies Conference Now when people ask me about the name Cortés, I underline “yes,” but not related to the conquistador.

When I meet up with a colleague whose surname is Cortés and whose area of expertise is colonial Mexico, I’m curious and ask her for an interview. She immediately recalls that, as a child being educated by Catholic nuns in the 1960s, “I wanted to feel related to Cortés; we saw him as a great hero . . . a savior.” She was disappointed when her father said there were too many branches of the Cortés family and too many years had passed to know if they were related. Raised in a large well-to-do family in the small colonial city of Guanajuato, Rocío Cortés grew up understanding that her paternal great-grandmother was “100 percent Purépecha, but an india ladina, completely acculturated to European ways.” The other side of the family was “completely Moorish from southern Spain, not even mestizo.” The twelve children, however, “spent more time with our [live-in] Otomi nanny than with my mom. She was like my mother for twenty-five years.” Two full-time maids helped run the household. Cortés recalls her nanny’s traditional cures, such as healing sore throats by putting banana peels on the soles of the feet, and the traditional—even sacred—daily ritual sweeping of the whole house. Now Cortés wonders if being raised by an Otomi nanny planted the seeds for her later desire to understand the experience of conquest from the indigenous point of view. Years later she moved with her American husband to the United States, where she experienced overwhelming internal changes: “I lost faith in God, religion . . . Everything I learned in school and my family I questioned.” While attending graduate school in the States, she began to read voraciously about the “other side of the conquest story.” Rocío Cortés talks of a dual journey: a literal emigration from her hometown, Guanajuato, to the United States, and a figurative journey, a “painful, but wonderful intellectual exploration.” She likens her experience to that of the colonial mestizo chroniclers, who wrote about being part European and part

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indigenous. “There is a lot of negotiation, a lot of splitting, a lot of camaleónicas [chameleonlike changes] . . . typical of someone who has a hybrid culture.” Now a Mexican with U.S. citizenship, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh, and the author of studies about indigenous and mestizo chroniclers, Rocío Cortés speaks as another insider-outsider, someone who first learned Mexican history in Mexico, studied extensively outside Mexico, and now teaches others.22 Her research strives to understand “the other side.” She says, for example, that the historical portrayal of Moctezuma as a coward and traitor fails to recognize a system of representation in which the leader symbolized the end of a historical cycle. His persona is “built into a complex system of how a tlatoani, governor, worked with gods and supernatural forces.” She draws on David Carrasco’s theory that Moctezuma was “probably way more valiente (courageous) than he is portrayed. . . . Maybe he was just more curious, because Moctezuma knew that he had a lot of power and maybe he just wanted to wait and see who these people were rather than fear [them].”23 She argues that Moctezuma’s grandson, Tezozomoc, postconquest author of the Crónica Mexicayotl, a Nahuatl-language history, holds the key to understanding the first stages of colonization. Born just after the conquest, to Diego de Alvarado Huanitzin (a nephew of Moctezuma and governor of Tenochtitlan) and Francisca de Moctezuma (a daughter of Moctezuma II), Tezozomoc was of noble lineage and one of the earliest indigenous chroniclers born during the colonial period. His writing about the migration from Aztlan to Mexico-Tenochtitlan, for example, demonstrates the flexibility of Nahua culture as it adapted to the colonial system while still maintaining an “in-between” place (neplantla), a new space between the old and the new. Rocío Cortés calls it an “epistemology that the conquest could not kill.” The professor feels an affinity for authors like Tezozomoc who led a “divided existence.” As part of a privileged class in her home country, she did not experience racism firsthand. As a Mexican living in the United States, however, she has been surprised by the intensity of the hate. Moving to California thirty years ago “was an eye opener to see how Hispanics were labeled.” Today she also experiences racism at second hand. Her American-born teenager, who “has blue eyes and could pass for European,” was called a “wetback” when his friend found out he had Mexican heritage. Cortés reflects on a gap between her own self-image and Americans’ view of her: “I am Mexican, but not the Mexican I was in Mexico.” But when she returns to Mexico, her “in-between” status is also apparent. “When you are there, you are there, but there is something missing. And when you are here, you are here, but there is something missing. . . . It’s like [a] pendulum.” No one else in her family or circle of friends has emigrated to the United States: “They all think I’m different, that being in the U.S. has changed me.” While Rocío Cortés’s crossing over to El Otro Lado was neither risky nor illegal, her intellectual and emotional journey from being part of a privileged class in Mexico to the object of racism in the States parallels a more basic struggle for survival experienced by the housekeeper and Karina Zazueta. For each woman, the journey became a catalyst leading to a reflection on her place on both sides of the border.

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Alejandro Springall, Indiana University Student Union We have no reason to reject either [heritage], because then what happens is that we reject ourselves as a nation. So maybe your grandparents were bastards, but they’re your grandparents, and they weren’t bastards either.

Alejandro Springall, the director of a feature film, Santitos (1996), that portrays and critiques popular Mexican Catholicism, is touring the United States to screen his 2007 movie, My Mexican Shiva (Morirse está en hebreo), a poignant character study of a Mexican Jewish family observing shiva, the ritual mourning for a recently deceased family member. Dressed in jeans and an oxford button-down shirt, the forty-two-year-old director curls up in an overstuffed chair in the lobby of the Indiana University student union and talks about pitching a favorite project to Hollywood: the conquest of Mexico. “They gave me a terrible answer that I want to prove wrong. The problem, they said, is that ‘there is no happy ending.’ No, no. No, wait a second: Mexico is born. I think it can also be told with a happy ending. I love my country.” He speaks with the clarity and passion of someone who has thought long and lovingly about his country. He moves easily between Spanish and English, but prefers Spanish when talking about the conquest: “It’s a traumatic event, comparable to a holocaust.” Although Hollywood flatly turned down his idea, the director still dreams of retelling the story “from a positive point of view, without making it up.” Like many of the informants in this project, Springall wants to combat “a national schizophrenia about the conquest. . . . We urgently need a full reconciliation in Mexico.” We need “strong symbols to ignite this reconciliation with reality,” he argues. There are statues of the kings and queens of Spain and of “false heroes” like the nineteenthcentury dictator Porfirio Díaz, he argues, but there are none to Cortés. Even the statue to Cortés in the conquistador’s hometown of Trujillo, Spain, continues the Black Legend: “Cortés is stepping on an indio.” Springall unabashedly proposes erecting a statue of the conquistador as “founding father” and another of Cortés and Malinche as “the father and the mother of the nation.” The project, he argues, would help people accept historical reality and overcome centuries of “resentment and self-loathing.” Springall acknowledges that his idea is controversial: “Maybe it’ll start a revolution.” In the 1980s protesters in fact attempted to topple the bust of Cortés at the Hospital de Jesús, and a statue built to pay tribute to an early “mestizo family” in Coyoacan was moved because of violent protests.24 Mexicans have made Cortés into a “caricature,” the director argues, but he was a “tragic figure: a Renaissance man who initially respected Moctezuma, but died alone and in poverty.” He concludes: “Why condemn it [the conquest]? That’s where we come from. That is Mexico. We’d better begin to [reconcile] because that will solve a lot of our problems, but it’s very radical. My position is very clear-cut: We must reach an agreement.” Springall attributes his acceptance of the conquest to his privileged upbringing. He is the offspring of liberal European immigrants (English,

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Lebanese, and Spanish) who love their adopted country and often discuss its history at the dinner table. As a graduate of the elite Modern American School in Mexico, he was also exposed to alternative views. On turning eighteen, he left Mexico to live in Europe and later study at the London Film School. The years abroad “gave me enough distance to understand and reconsider what Mexico is . . . its complexity, its trauma, [its] failure to recognize its roots. Although we come from a bad lineage . . . corrupted, not good, I believe we must begin to realign this lineage that we come from.” The visions of intellectual leaders such as Octavio Paz and Miguel LeónPortilla are “black-and-white, but Mexico is not black-and-white, it’s purple combined with red, blue, yellow, and orange; that’s what is very beautiful to me.” While the change must come within Mexico, he continues, it must also come from the United States. The ties between the two countries need to be mended. In the end, like Gustavo Gordillo and many other informants, Springall places his hope for Mexico’s future in building a better relationship with the United States and empowering the new generation: “We want a new country. The hope is in the kids. Let’s give everything to the kids and they’ll drag their parents [along].”

Fred Diego, Latino Cultural Center, Indiana University The Conquest is . . . masked. . . . This whole concept of new colonialism is pervasive. It’s not a man by the name of Cortés. It’s not Cabeza de Vaca. It’s none of them. It’s a multinational corporation that’s mining and displacing the Zapotec population.

“The conquest didn’t happen; it’s still happening,” declares Fred Diego, a cognitive science major at Indiana University and an undocumented Mexican immigrant. Sitting in the student union and speaking in a low voice filled with intensity, Diego explains in eloquent English that the conquest is no longer carried out with “a sword and a musket. It’s with devaluation, inflation; it’s with controlling the price of corn. It’s the same thing. Let’s look at NAFTA.” Put out of business in Mexico, farmers emigrated to the United States, provided cheap labor, and are now being sent back. “How is that different from slave labor? The conquest is still going on today. The only issue is that we’re blind to it.” Diego speaks out on a subject that affects him personally: the recent U.S. legislative action—or lack of it—affecting immigrants like himself, such as President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (2012) or the failed Dream Act (2010), which would have granted qualified undocumented minors who had completed two years of college or military service a path to citizenship. “I’m a thorn in their side,” remarks Diego, referring to U.S. “nativists,” who argue that the immigrant is an “invader . . . a threat to the nation.” In “Faces of Immigration,” an interview in the local newspaper,25 Diego’s remarks set off conservative bloggers throughout

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Figure 4.9.  Fred Diego at the Latino Cultural Center, Indiana University. (Photograph by Bobby Ellis. Courtesy of the Bloomington Herald Times.)

the country. They protested—often in hateful language—that Diego’s “full-ride” scholarship at Indiana University was taking away opportunities from U.S. citizens. A similar wave of anti-immigration attacks hit the Internet when Diego received a statewide award and college scholarship for outstanding minority high-school seniors. Ultimately, however, the monies for Diego’s education came from a private source—a move that Indiana University had to make when the governor signed into law the controversial legislation (H.B. 1040) banning undocumented immigrants from being eligible for in-state tuition and state-funded scholarships. Now Diego studies critical discourse analysis. “I want to know why poor people don’t feel empowered enough to say something. I want to know why the immigrant was forced to emigrate, and . . . to unmask institutions that pretend to be neutral.” The Latin American immigrant is construed as “subhuman . . . an animal, the horde of immigrants. . . . The discourse sheds light on . . . the top-down relationship between power and socioeconomic status, oppression, and poverty.” The injustice he has personally experienced drives his academic studies and current activism. Diego’s parents met as children in San Nicolás, Guerrero, near Acapulco. His maternal grandmother, of Filipino descent, had been a “kidnap bride,” abducted while she was doing laundry, raped and impregnated, abandoned a week later, and

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left to find a new family. His father’s side of the family is of Afro-Mexican descent. His parents married in their late teens. Just before Diego’s third birthday, he and his mother, a traveling nurse administering to rural indigenous areas in the Sierra Madre, crossed over to the United States to join his father, who had found work in an upscale restaurant in Chicago. For five years, Diego lived on the near north side of Chicago and attended a prestigious school. This soft landing on El Otro Lado fell apart when the family moved to a basement in Section 8 housing in a tough neighborhood of the steel-mill city of Hammond, Indiana. He recalls seeing divisions among ethnic and social classes and experiencing an uncomfortable sense of isolation. “Even at a young age I remember this feeling of dissonance. Of course I could not have articulated it that way, but I’m pretty sure that’s what it was. . . . It didn’t seem like the natural order to me, but I didn’t understand why it had to be that way.” The family had no relatives in the United States, and they left the Catholic Church, which often helps Mexican immigrants rebuild community and keep their traditions, to become Baptists. His father drove a truck while his mother stayed home with his U.S.-born brother and sister. Diego recounts how on turning sixteen he was ineligible for a driver’s license or a work permit, and on graduating from high school he had to struggle to gain access to higher education. His academic success, his “tangible ladder to a way out”—a phrase he uses with self-conscious irony—has only deepened his sense of being “a floating point.” He describes himself as “a statistical anomaly,” having escaped the fate of many inner-city classmates who now are incarcerated or dead. Now the college student is “in the process of constructing” his heritage, which he defines as “an amalgam of the diasporas that burgeon within the borders of this nation.” But he has a sense of living between worlds but belonging to none—at times, not even to his tight-knit family. “I can talk to anyone, but I am not part of any community.” He is an immigrant but does not identify closely with other Mexican immigrants, who often celebrate shared traditions and have close ties to extended family living in the United States. He recalls with nostalgia traveling in his mother’s white jeep in the sierra, with his pet parrot and even a ninja toy, but he lacks the rights of U.S. citizens and cannot return to Mexico for fear of never being let back into the States. His younger siblings, natural-born U.S. citizens, do not seem to share his strong desire to see Mexico again or to speak Spanish. When I ask how he prefers to self-identify, Diego first responds “Mexican,” then, “first-generation immigrant.” For him, El Otro Lado is Mexico, “the land that holds the family we left behind in order to build a better future for the families we are to build. . . . But as long as we wear the label of ‘illegal,’ we cannot return to nuestra tierra [our land].” He feels connected by what he calls “genetic memory” to the conquest. When he first learned about the Spanish invasion as a schoolboy, he accepted the official explanation of an expanding empire’s need for more resources. But later, after reading more broadly, he found himself reacting strongly to the “visceral violence”—of rape, of feet being chopped off—and felt its impact on his own life. “When order was

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Figure 4.10.  With Indiana’s growing Hispanic population, Indianapolis has become a center for demonstrations against recent anti-immigration legislation. (© Jeremy Hogan.)

established by the Spaniards, they created me, they created what I am, they created the Mexican, the mestizo. . . . We are the product of the violence and rape of our ancestors. So you think that doesn’t live in our genetic memory? It does. It lives in us today. Our land is [still] being conquered, not as violently, but the violence is still there,” through discriminatory practices in land distribution, exploitation of the labor force, and lack of access to health services and education—both in Mexico and in the United States. Living the “brown experience” means that “you literally live in this borderland, this very nebulous, very tumultuous place where your life is governed by uncertainty.”26 Many Americans live in an illusory world. “My iPhone tells me the weather, and my laptop is a very pretty machine. We have . . . the illusion of wealth and well-being. . . . So where does this prosperity come from? It comes from the maquiladoras,” the undocumented Mexican and Central American immigrants who work for low wages under poor working conditions in factories along the border. He repeats, “So the conquest didn’t happen. Conquest is happening.” Although the honors student hopes to attend graduate school, he recognizes the reality of his situation: both his parents are undocumented immigrants, ineligible for work permits and Social Security. His younger brother suffers from asthma, a condition made worse by living near the steel mills, and needs medicine, which

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they cannot afford. Diego doubts that he will be able to follow his dream. Indeed, he sees the death of Dream Act legislation and the subsequent stopgap measure that resulted in the deportation of children in 2012 as more evidence of the growing anti-immigration climate in the United States. For Diego, who longs to see the land he barely remembers, El Otro Lado is both a symbol and a reality. It represents a “false dichotomy, the solidified state of an arbitrary line [the border], once porous and free to breathe, [now] a jagged scar across the desert face.” But it is also the “dual existence of the immigrant, who lives in fear, constantly looking over his shoulder while here, but longing for the warm embrace of the sunbaked earth on the other side; he is unable to find peace here and longs to return to a home that is torn by strife.” As we end the interview, Diego directs an urgent plea to me: beware of academic imperialism. The book should help initiate change, not just use people as an academic resource, he says. “Just think about your position in this world and how everything you have comes from somewhere, and a lot of the time it comes from people in Latin America. It comes from their work. The sugar you’re eating; the bananas you’re eating. All the cheap food that is on your table, all the cheap clothes. . . . It comes to your table, into your closet, into your wardrobe, onto your feet, into your car at a very low price to you . . . but at a very high price to these people’s livelihoods. I hate saying, ‘these people’; . . . they’re not a separate identity; they’re not another category of people.”

Interview Selections, Part IV

Anonymous Housekeeper [speaking in English] What was the journey of crossing over to the U.S. like, especially with a small child? Looking back, I am wondering, “How did I do that?” I just remember being really, really afraid. I don’t know what I was afraid of, but I had a lot of these feelings and emotions in my mind, my body, my whole being, because . . . for once I was living away from my family . . . my Mom and everything I knew up until then. I was almost eighteen years old, and I was living in a small town with my family, most of all my Mom. I knew she was there to protect me. So I remember having all these mixed feelings, but most of all this fear of the unknown . . . not knowing how . . . at some point it seemed almost unreal that I was going to travel because I had never traveled. You know, I had traveled to Mexico City to visit my brothers and my sisters in my past when I was younger, and I had traveled to Morelia, but never anything further out than four hours of travel in a bus . . . so that was also a challenge to me, wondering, “How long am I going to travel, I am traveling with a baby, is everything going to be okay?” so I was feeling some kind of emotions. I remember I had the great opportunity that one of my brothers who is still down in Mexico . . . he was able to travel with me because I think he probably saw the uncertainty on my face now that we talk about it. He was probably like, “You are not quite eighteen and with a baby and you decided to travel across the border, that was not a very smart move just to do it on your own.” He was somehow able to afford to come with me to the border and just be there for me, wait for me until the people who were going to help me cross the border, and also take care of my child in terms of crossing the border as well, because I didn’t have my baby with me crossing the border. He was with some other people. That was also . . . you know, once I got to the border, I think, that’s when I completely just, probably my whole mind and heart was just concentrated on like . . . am I going to leave my baby to somebody else? . . . just hoping for the best, just praying. I remember my brother was also very nervous, but just knowing that he was there by my side and I knew the whole time that we 294

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traveled, I knew that . . . I mean, I felt a sense of relief, but right at that moment when you are giving your baby to somebody else, that’s when . . . I think that was probably the hardest decision for me, just to make sure that, not to make sure, but to try to calm myself and think that it’s going to be okay and I’m going to see my baby again . . . I think a wife and a husband took care of my son, and they put him in their car, and they crossed the border with him. Since you have come to the United States, it sounds like you have really made a life for yourself. Can you tell me about that? You know, from my personal experience, I think that it took me . . . I was determined to have my family. I think that was the biggest thing for me. Just like I have seen in past generations, I wanted to have my husband, my kids, I wanted to be part of a family, and I just started concentrating on that, but then, you know, you start to see that there is more to being here in the United States. You need to learn the language; you pretty much need to be willing to survive in a different world. So I think for the first couple of years of me living in the United States, I struggled with that. I’m like, “Do I really want to be here?” And there were times when I doubted myself and I thought, “Maybe I am just going to go back because I miss my family too much.” I missed my Mom, you know, I felt very lonely. I did have my friend’s dad, all of his cousins were up here, you know. Some of my neighbors were Spanish speaking, and you make some friends at the park, but you just feel so away from your loved ones because back in Mexico that’s pretty much all you know. Because you come from a very big family, you do make friends in the school and everything, but that’s all you know, that’s what you have for sure, you know, your family, your Mom, your brothers and sisters. So I was feeling really homesick for the first couple of years and I was just thinking that maybe I was not going to be able to . . . , you know, not feeling completely happy, because I was missing my family so much. I think after two years I just started to make a little more sense of being part of this country. Part of me was like “If I am going to stay here, I should learn the language and I should learn how to survive. I should accept the fact that I am here for now, and I need to learn how to get around.” And that’s how I decided to start learning English and I went to school and tried talking to people around me. I learned about a high school for teenage moms and “Oh, that might be a good fit for you,” and “Yes, you can make it.”

* * * Everybody spoke English and I was the only one who spoke Spanish. And I just felt like crying every single day I was in the school because I did not understand anything. I wanted to understand things so badly, and I just felt like, “This is not going to work for me, I am just going to fail. There is no way I can learn English here.” You know, “This is too hard for me.”

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But somehow, you know, I stayed there for about a year and a half. I was trying to make sense of things. The teachers were able to tell they needed to be less . . . that they couldn’t expect so much of me. I just remember really great people at the school. They used to come to me to tell me, “We know you only speak Spanish, but we are here to help you. We are going to try to help you make sense of things.” Then I found along the way, I think about six months after I started going to this school, there was this girl who had been born here, but she was from Hispanic parents, and I remember quite well . . . I think that her Mom was from Mexico. I am not sure about her Dad, but she spoke a little bit of Spanish and she helped me a lot, you know, just trying to make sense of what I was learning at school. Looking back, I don’t think I was learning so much about school stuff. I was learning more about how to, you know, communicate with people. You know, that was what I was learning more than anything, and making sense of the school. I tried, and I tried, and I tried. Has life has gotten easier since then? Yes, you know, I think it is just the tools for surviving that you don’t know, but you are getting them along the way. It is not only the tool of learning a different language, you know, but also being willing to just say, “Okay, if this is where I want to be, I need to make sense of this. I need to embrace this. I really need to learn how to live.” I don’t know if I am going to be here forever and ever, but part of me is a fan of me staying here in the United States, and in the years that have passed . . . I do feel I have some sort of roots here. I have roots here [so] I decided to like the idea of being here, of being part of the United States despite the challenges, as challenging as this has been . . . even though you sometimes hear in the United States about, like, us, because we crossed the border the way we crossed it, and because we broke some laws, we don’t belong here, you know, that kind of stuff. Deep in my heart I just felt like, “This is where I wanted to be, now more than ever, because this is where my kids are growing up. It’s all they know.” From a mother’s point of view, what sort of opportunities and challenges do your sons face? He [my oldest son] doesn’t have an ID; he doesn’t have a driver’s license. You know, most of the jobs said that maybe somebody who understands our situation, then maybe they want to give you a break, but most of the people who have their own business, they say they don’t want to get themselves into trouble with the law, and they don’t want to give jobs to someone that . . . We have gone to immigration counseling here, and I have been there probably about four times. We think that with him being here for eighteen years and being here all his life, but it doesn’t work that way. That’s what they say. It doesn’t work that way. You know, we can go ahead and file the application, but there is a more than 90 percent chance that they will deny it and they will ask him to leave the country. So we haven’t really filled out an application. You know, the people that I had asked at immigration counseling,

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these people I met at the shelter, they came in and gave us a talk, and then I went in and had an appointment with them. They said that because of the way we got here without the visa. . . . If we were to fill out an application and ask for a visa or green card, they would definitely deny it unless the laws changed and there was an amnesty, and they said, “We are now taking applications from people who are here and who have been here for ten years or five years.” It is hard—really, really hard—because it has impacted my son way too much. You know, I was talking to him the other day about . . . He said, “Mom, are we going to be able to get an ID?” And I said, “Not for now, unless something changes and President Obama can do something about it, but not for now,” and I said, “Did some of your friends ask you about if you have an ID?” He said, “Sometimes.” And I say, “Do they make comments about it, do they make fun of you?” And he said, “Sometimes, but I don’t care.” And that was it.

* * * One of the most important things for me is also that my other two boys . . . I talk to my fifteen-year-old boy . . . when they are eighteen, they are going to be able to exercise their vote. And even though my oldest son and I have lived here for so many years, but we can’t say anything about it. . . . For me, it’s really important that my two boys are going to be able to vote and make their voice be heard. For me, that is one of my goals. If I ever have an opportunity to be a citizen here, I will do that just because I want to be able to vote, and I want my son to do the same, but for now, that seems very unattainable. What did you learn about the Spanish conquest? I do remember learning about it in school. My mother did not talk about this. Like I said, I had always been interested in history since I was in school. Let’s see, how can I . . . I have mixed feelings toward that . . . I know that the Mayans and the Aztecs tried to fight back, but it seems like they still somehow made us lose part of . . . our identity or traditions. Since then, most of us . . . I just still want to speak for myself, you know, there is this sense of maybe not completely understanding . . . 100 percent of our roots in terms of Mayans and Aztecs. I know that’s where our roots are. Is it for us really in our hearts to say that we feel so proud of being Mayan and Aztec descendants? Or do we feel ashamed because we know what happened to our people? Well, it has been around the world . . . the color issue. You know, Mayans and Aztecs were pretty dark skinned, but you have people in Mexico who are . . . some of them are really light skinned. Somehow in our country in Mexico we think that light-skinned people are better, I don’t know if that’s how it started, because the conquistadors were light skinned compared to the Mayans and the Aztecs. I remember learning about these and feeling the need to try to embrace more. You know, I define myself as a Mayan and Aztec descendant. That’s in my blood. I am

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Mexican American because I don’t think that America is just the United States. It’s the American continent, all the way from Alaska down to Chile and Argentina. That’s America, that whole continent.

Karina Zazueta What about immigration? This is the deal. Many people immigrate for different reasons, for example, the economic situation, violence in the city. Look at how things are now. It’s a terrible situation, and unfortunately the big majority of us come without papers. Then what happens? Well, you think, as I did, that we’re going to have some protection by being here, but it isn’t true. Why? Because now we have to deal with being undocumented, and our voice doesn’t . . . we live in the shadows. That’s what happens. By now the large majority of us have children, families, so the situation gets even more complicated. And now with the economic problem, it’s just chaos. Do you see a way out of that? The situation is very complicated. Truthfully, I don’t see any immediate solution. Personally, it makes me sad now that I’m more aware of the political situation. In Mexico, even though it’s a country with so many resources, such a beautiful country and so many resources and things to take advantage of, the situation is getting worse. We, as Mexicans, don’t have the support of Mexican authorities. Now things have gone down so fast that, as citizens, we are afraid of going to the authorities there. Why? Because they’re the same authorities who are involved in extortion and kidnapping. So, we citizens are left at the mercy of the people running the drug cartels. And we have no protection as citizens. The political situation in Mexico is terrible. I don’t know if you’re familiar with everything that’s happening with the electoral process. There is no law. So I really don’t know what has to happen for things to get better, because they’re going from bad to worse. What’s the situation like now? My dad died in 2000. My mom stayed in Juárez. It really is a very strange phenomenon. At first, about five years ago when all this explosion of violence and murder began, people were terrified. It was very weird how Ciudad Juárez, which had been such a vibrant place, suddenly became a ghost town. By seven or eight in the evening there were no cars in the streets because there were murders in broad daylight. It’s a very strange psychological phenomenon, because I’m obviously worried for my mom, who’s there, but all the people that I talk to keep saying, “Things are getting better.” It’s sort of a survival mechanism for them. I have talked to my mother though. They’ve tried to extort money from her. She has received calls at home. She gets scared. She can stay home for a while, but then

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she has to get out to work and to get on with her life. So the situation there is very difficult. Shootouts are common. In the area where my mother lives, police officers once closed my mom’s neighborhood because there was a dead body lying in the street. But people get used to it. As incredible as it seems, people get used to this violent kind of life. About a year ago, they were interviewing elementary schoolchildren; they asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up. And they were in shock when they saw the results of the survey. The children were saying . . . were answering they wanted to be hired assassins. The situation is incredibly bad, so it’s like a process people go through where they evolve and adapt to the situation. If you talk to someone who lives in Juárez, in Monterrey, or in any of those places, it’s the same. They’ll tell you things are getting better, but it isn’t true. We need another conquest. What sort of conquest are you thinking about? I don’t know. We need something radical, something drastic. I know there are many interests and many things involved, but I don’t know why the U.S. doesn’t intervene somehow, seeing as how we’re neighbors. The situation on the border is strange. There’s weapons trafficking, drug cartels, extreme violence on the streets; it’s an incredible situation. So maybe it’s not in the U.S. government’s interest to act against Mexico because the drugs that are used here move through Mexico. It’s a vicious circle without rhyme or reason. It’s very hard because many people in Mexico are forced to immigrate to the best place they can get to. Most of them, like me, have the good fortune to immigrate to the U.S., but it’s still very hard because in spite of the fact that this is a great nation, a land of opportunity, and a prosperous place in spite of the economic situation, nobody likes to be in a place where people don’t speak your language, eat your food, and don’t listen to your music. So we immigrate because we have to survive, whether because of violence or for whatever reason, but it’s very hard. How do you see your own identity? That’s a very good question. Now I feel . . . I don’t know if you’re familiar with “la india María,” who used to say, “I’m neither from here nor there.” She’s a Mexican comedian who immigrated to the U.S. and faced a . . . an identity problem. I feel . . . I have lived in the U.S. for many years, so you could say that I’ve fully adapted to this country’s culture. I like the lifestyle. My children were born here. But, in spite of all that, I’m Mexican, I really am. My heart is torn. I love the U.S. because here I’ve found protection, and I’ve had the opportunity to grow as a person and to protect my family. I’ve found many opportunities and I love this country, but I also love my country, my patria, my homeland. And it really hurts me to see that we’re, like, in the time of . . . that we’ve gone back to the time of cavemen, when everyone killed each other. Now we have technology, weapons, bombs, but we’ve gone backward quite a lot, and it hurts me, it really does.

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How do your children feel about Mexico? That’s a very good question. I’ve noticed it more since we’ve been here [in Bloomington]. I started to see a dynamic, not so much with my fifteen-year-old daughter, but with the little one. She’d speak to me in English, and I would answer in Spanish. I didn’t get it at the time, but I finally started to notice when I told her to talk to me in Spanish, and she struggled more to speak Spanish. Then I said, “If you speak to me in English, I won’t answer until you say it in Spanish.” That’s how it started; I’m making her speak Spanish. I try to chat with them now. It’s something I didn’t do before, probably because in El Paso you don’t miss it so much, but here it’s been very different. We sit down to watch TV in Spanish, which we didn’t do in El Paso. I talk to them a little more about history, about Frida Kahlo; I do try to keep the May 10th [Mexican mother’s day] tradition. It’s important to me, although I want them to have traditions from here too. But I don’t want them to lose their identity in the process. They are American citizens. They’ve studied here. They’ve grown up here. It’s important to know the culture and values here too, but their mother is 100 percent Mexican. That’s another situation that makes me very aware of what’s happening here in the U.S., especially at the border. It’s a common phenomenon among second-generation Mexicans. The children start off that way. They don’t speak Spanish; they start to lose their identity. Then they don’t feel American; they don’t feel Mexican either, because they feel like they don’t belong here; they’re not well accepted. They go to Mexico, and they speak English. You’re not from Mexico either. I don’t want that to happen to my children.

Alejandro García Moreno What’s your view of the conquest and how it has influenced present-day Mexico? The conquest is what made Mexico. Or I should say, you can’t talk about Mexico without the conquest. It’s the foundation that leads to the creation of the Mexican nation and to present-day Mexico. It’s . . . the conquest is the birth of Mexico. That, I’d say, is my view. The official view when you’re a kid in school—I’m not so sure now—but in my day, it was that we, the Mexicans, were direct descendants of Mesoamerican cultures and that the Spaniards were the invaders who came to impose their conquest on us. That’s the simple way you learn your history. In reality, Mexico is the fusion of both. Or you could say you can’t explain Mexico without Spain, and you can’t explain Mexico without Tenochtitlan. Why is that version taught? So you can have an identity you can be proud of, one that defines you. We come from a great past. We are the heirs of a great past, and it’s our responsibility to preserve it. That’s one part, but the other part has to do with foreign invasions that have done a lot of damage. So, you’ve got to consider the very first one as a foreign invasion. The

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Spaniards came; they hurt us; they enslaved us; they exploited us; they conquered us; and they lorded over us; and then, other nations came to do the same. So that’s why that clash with something outside our borders was so costly for Mexico. You feel it from the very first moment. It may be a little simplistic to put it that way, but the object was to establish a certain identity, yes, a certain identity, a Mexican identity.

* * * We’re the descendants of all the indigenous peoples, and on the other side of the coin, that’s what’s given us a sense of pride. You can see a pyramid in Mexico, in Teotihuacan, or in Yucatan and say, “This is ours.” Here’s where we come from. That’s where you get your greatest pride. You see it as something that’s yours, not something that’s separate from you or that wasn’t yours before, you know. But I would strongly insist on not viewing the indigenous communities as anything but Mexican, on the contrary. That is, we acknowledge their customs; there’s more awareness about what they are; and the state has a different attitude toward them. Will the celebration of multiculturalism or pluriethnicity change the notion that Mexicans have about their identity? Well, I think our identity, or that we are descendants of these peoples and cultures, has never been in doubt. Or rather, when I say I’m Mexican, I’m saying I’m the descendant of all that past. I think there’s greater awareness of that diversity. Because, look, let me put it this way, maybe a hundred years ago the goal was to base Mexican identity on the fact that we’re all Mexican, period. So in order for us all to be Mexicans, we should all speak Spanish, period, that’s it. Let’s finish up the conquest process. We’re all Mexican and that’s it. And now there’s more awareness that we Mexicans have great diversity among us, that Mexican indigenous communities have their own characteristics. You have the Tarahumaras and other cultures of nomadic origin in the north of the country and a completely different type of community in the south and the center of the country. Now we realize, for instance, that a million Mexicans still speak Nahuatl. You didn’t think about that before. So, is there more awareness? Yes. Will that change our identity? I don’t think so. Will it strengthen it? I think so. It’ll strengthen it in any case, regardless. Will it divide it? What about the notion of mestizaje? That most of the country is mestizo? It’s not that it is or isn’t. It’s a matter of reality. If you go, for instance, to Chapultepec on a Sunday, what will you see? People who are not going to say, I’m criollo, I’m mestizo, I’m indígena; they won’t tell you that. If you asked them whether they are mestizos, they may not even know what it means. It’s a mistake to think . . . to simplify things and say, “These are the good guys, and these are the bad guys. The Aztecs are the good guys, and the Tlaxcaltecas and the Spaniards are the bad guys.” That’s not it. Mexico is all that. That is, today’s Mexican

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comes from that whole process. It’s an intense historical process that lasts a long time and it’s here to stay. Is that the key to Mexican nationalism? I think that when you study Mexico’s history, when you have at least some awareness, you see immediately how Mexican nationalism is by definition a reaction to the clashes with the U.S. That is, it’s what makes us different from the rest of the Latin American countries. They didn’t have a confrontation with the outside world after their independence. So, I think that’s still there, and, yes, it runs very deep. I don’t know whether people will talk about it or not, but it’s clearly reflected in our historical essays, our historical texts, absolutely.

Gustavo Gordillo de Anda [speaking in English] We could start with a little bit about the project. The problem is we can’t blame external enemies to avoid taking responsibility. That is part of our relation with the Spanish and with the conquest, and partly related with U.S. as well. In both cases we have suffered a lot in terms of conquest, in terms of losing part of our territory. But it has many times prevented us . . . I mean the general public, not the historians, many very good historians who have really come to the deep facts of both episodes, one could say; the episode of the conquest and the episode of the war with the U.S. in the nineteenth century. But it has prevented us from doing a deep revision of our own relations, in one case with the indigenous communities, and in another case with other citizens and the government. So we tend to analyze the brutality of the conquest of the Spanish when they came, and we tend to forget that the Aztecs were a very, very strong, ferocious, and very murdering empire. And it had an incredible amount of enemies and conquests . . . it was a very . . . I mean, one thing we must obviously say and continue to say is the multiplicity of cultures, and regions, and etnias [ethnic groups] that we have in Mexico. We have had that from the very beginning. And it’s something we cannot forget. And we cannot forget also that diversity has not necessarily been recognized in terms of equality, but mostly in terms of control over some people. So the conquest of the Spanish came in a moment when the Aztec Empire was suffering internal . . . very strong internal conflicts, based on the resistance of the leadership of the Aztecs to recognize not only the multiplicity of people who [were] under their empire, but the rights that those peoples had. So it was not something really to be surprised [about] that when the Spanish came and entered Mexico, they did obtain some important and crucial alliances with other people. So since that part of the story is not so much in favor of the idea of a Mexican nationality, we tend to forget that and then put all the blame on the Spanish. I mean, I’m not . . . A conquest is a conquest, which means it’s bloody, it is brutal, it attacks

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not only the physical aspects but the, let’s say, the moral essence of the cultures. It did a lot of that at the beginning, the first years of the conquest. Then the Spanish had a very ambivalent story toward the cultures, especially with Peru and with Mexico. Ambivalent because on one side they did control, they did exploit, they did take out all the gold and things they had there. Speaking about Mexicans today, I think the problem we need to overcome is how to understand the presence of the foreigners that have conquered or have attacked Mexico, and at the same time understand our own context. You would not . . . you could not . . . you cannot understand the American war with Mexico, or the Mexican war with America, if you don’t understand the incredible amount of divisions that you have in the Mexican elite in that period. And that is a crucial aspect to understand what was the war about with the U.S., what were the consequences. Of course, there is the official story in Mexico, which is the official story in reverse in U.S., that there was a . . . they were trying to expand, they were trying to take more territory, which is partly true. But there is the other part too which is each country needs to take care . . . each people needs to take care of that. And I’m speaking in this case of Mexico, but I would say of any one of us, you have to recognize which were your own problems, in your own culture, in your own period in order to understand your history. Because if not, then history is just about the good guys—which are us—and the bad guys—which is everyone else. That doesn’t help us understand anything. How do you see the role of the new multicultural laws and programs? That’s very important. I think still the most important lesson we obtained in recent years in Mexico about understanding differences, and I’m not sure we all understood the lesson, is the Zapatista uprising, because the Zapatista uprising, among other things, told one very crucial thing. We thought we were a country that was mixed, that we didn’t have any racial problems, that that was not in Mexico, that was either in the north or down in South America, but not with us. And we found out that we were very, very racist in Mexico. We still are in our relations with the indigenous communities. And that’s what the Zapatista movement told us in a very dramatic way, and obviously I don’t think that’s the best way of learning this crude lesson, but it’s a lesson, and it’s very crucial for us. So everything that makes us understand and work better with other cultures within Mexico is going to help us work better with other cultures outside of Mexico as well. What’s your opinion of Cortés? He’s a really fascinating personality. I mean, there are three very fascinating personalities in that drama, I’d say, probably four, but three. Cortés, then you have Moctezuma, and then you have Cuauhtemoc, no? But Cortés is very fascinating. I mean, he has incredible things. He is much more human than how he is depicted in the official history. I mean, the guy . . . a guy who says, we are going to burn the ships because we are not going to go back. I mean, it’s part of anecdote, not necessarily

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truth, all that. But it does imply a resolve. And that is the type of persons who came in the first group of Cortés, no? People say that there were always people who were very murderous, and people who robbed, and that’s why they went from Spain to . . . , but I don’t think that’s accurate. It’s basically people who were adventurers, who wanted to know more, for scientific or personal reasons, or whatever. And they were good at fighting, very good at fighting. And the men had incredible resolve. Then the other image we have of Cortés is Cortés crying. That story of the Noche Triste, which is . . . again, might be part of an anecdote and all. But it’s not so much that. It is . . . you see the human there. I mean, he’s a conqueror, he has . . . he did incredible murders, and so on. On the other hand, he has those reactions. But more importantly than that is how he acted afterward. And the thing is that the Spanish administration created from the very beginning a leeway for much of the persons and the authorities from the Aztecs; they recognized that authority. They didn’t disband it, everything. They absorbed it. And because of that they had the possibility of governing better. Then you have Moctezuma, who’s completely trapped into an existential dilemma, no? The existential dilemma is how much are these Spanish really reflecting . . . I mean, there’s a lot of fantasy there. But the real truth is how much is this Spanish reflecting what our gods had said that our period of decline was going to start with the beginning of whatever symbols you want to put there. So for him it’s, are we in the decline? Are we really in the decline? Should we then define ourselves vis-à-vis them as a declining empire? And, I mean, think of any empire. Think of any elite of that empire. When will they be really saying, we’re in decline? And when they say [it], what is the tension, their internal tension doing? So he is a very tragic figure. And the other tragic figure, but much more heroic, is Cuauhtemoc, no? Because Cuauhtemoc is the guy who has to say, I’m going to stand against the conquest, and I’m going to accept the sacrifice of myself because people need to know that their leaders are going to the end. Again, it’s very much idealized. I’m not sure how much of the burning of the feet of Cuauhtemoc is completely . . . and there’s a lot of discussion on that . . . historical discussion on that. But it’s the image of a person who resists. So that’s the figures I find interesting in relation with the conquest.

Gustavo Esteva What do you think about the conquest and its legacy in present-day Mexico? I think your question is directly related to my personal experience. When I was a child, I experienced the conflict of my parents’ differing backgrounds. My Zapotec grandmother was not allowed to enter my house in Mexico City through the front door because she was Indian. My mother, like many people of her generation, thought the best thing she could do for her children was to separate us completely from anything related to our indigenous past. So I lived with my mother’s decision, which, for example, was to forbid my grandmother to speak to us in Zapotec, as well

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as the aristocratic nostalgia experienced by my father, who claimed we descended from a Spanish family named Esteva that had come to Mexico two hundred years earlier and that there was a whole lineage of Estevas who came from that background. I adored my grandmother, and for vacations I asked them to send me to her in Oaxaca, where she had a market stall. I was happy staying with her, and she taught me many lessons even though she didn’t talk to me in Zapotec. So I can appreciate the contradiction very clearly because I’ve lived it. I would say that the colonial enterprise did savage and terrible damage and gravely harmed every Mexican. Basically because, first, nine out of ten people died as a result. That’s a very, very, very, very high mortality rate when only one out of every ten survived. And those who survived were left with a very grave stigma. Some even wondered, how can we still be alive if our gods are dead? Second, we have this well-studied phenomenon of what you call survivor’s guilt, which is when you say, “I’m still alive, and all my loved ones are dead.” This is something that clearly marked the surviving Mexicans, who, in spite of everything, began to fight to reclaim what was left in what Bonfil [Batalla] has called the México profundo [deep Mexico], the Mexico of the social majorities, not only indigenous people. It was born there with the indigenous Mexicans who struggled to reclaim what was left.

* * * The break and Spanish heritage clearly mark Mexico’s birth. The invention of Mexico was rather unfortunate. Mexico was invented as a state before it was a nation, when we were many nations. It was invented without considering either the realities or the aspirations of Mexicans. It was invented as an imitation of other countries; a few things from France, but most things from the U.S. Even the name was copied: the country’s official name is Estados Unidos Mexicanos, or the United States of Mexico. At the time, Indians made up two-thirds of the population, but they are mentioned only once in Mexico’s first constitution (1824), where congress is authorized to negotiate trade agreements with foreign countries and Indian tribes. Two of every three Mexicans are seen as foreigners. That’s Mexico’s first constitution. A constitution in which when the founding fathers presented it to the Mexican people, they said, “In this, as in everything else, we’ve done nothing but follow the example of the happy Republic of the United States of North America.” This defines what Bonfil calls “imaginary Mexico,” this elite who think about the Western model and about how to make Mexico and Mexicans more Western, make them more like people in the U.S. A few years later, this same group of people said formally to congress, to our eternal shame . . . it was a group of representatives . . . and they said, “Well, if we’re imitating everything they do in the U.S., why not imitate the way they solve their Indian situation? They’re up there killing them and putting them in small reservations. Why don’t we do something similar here?” But there were some forward-thinking and distinguished people

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in congress, who were the liberal base and who later created the republic, and they said, “We cannot kill the indigenous population.” But they also said something that marked the country’s history. They said: “We have to educate them. Educate them to extinction. Educate them so that they cease to be Indians.” Instead of genocide, it was culturecide. It’s that we’re going to kill their soul. I would say that this is still a copy of the U.S. It’s exactly what was done in the U.S., and it was clearly said, written, and done. When the Native Americans were sent to school, as the founder of the school system put it, it’s in order to take the Indian out of them; at the end of school, they should come out without any trace of Indian in them. They should no longer be Indians. That’s exactly what they did when they created the Mexican educational system. I would say that [the conquest] hasn’t stopped even now. It will be a scar forever. In 1997, at the state forum for indigenous people in which everyone participates, the Indian communities of Oaxaca said it publicly after a year of reflection and debate among themselves, really. What the sixteen Indian communities in Oaxaca thought was—and they said it publicly—that “schools had been the government’s principal means of destroying the Indian communities and that the teachers’ union was an accomplice of the state in this task.” This means that the Indian communities continue to recognize that historical fact. The Mexican school system has been a system that has been clearly oriented to changing the indigenous people into Mexicans and the Mexicans into people like those in the United States. That has basically been their position. It’s an imaginary Mexico, shaped from the Western matrix and, I would say, reaching a degree of Western fundamentalism that’s not found in the U.S. or in Europe. This always happens with imitators, right? So there’s a group of Mexicans, the Mexicans from the intellectual, economic, and political elite, who, as described by the great Mexican intellectual Carlos Monsiváis, were the first North Americans born in Mexico, because although they were born there and had a Mexican nationality, their hearts and minds were in the U.S. And they may even have dreamed of becoming another star or stripe.

Rocío Cortés [speaking in English] What is the legacy of the conquest? You know, I think the twenty-first century is becoming more of a time to reevaluate the presence of the indigenous people. I don’t know if it’s the influence of the new left in South America or if it’s the influence of globalization. I don’t know what it is, but I think there is more consciousness about preserving indigenous languages, studying indigenous cultures . . . and the same in Mexico. I mean the revolution brought out this kind of . . . I think it was a little bit of a push for the identity of bringing the indigenous . . . maybe the neoaztequismo or something like that, you know with the muralists and with the artistic movement, but I think right now it is more

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from the bottom . . . a lot of groups of indigenous people who are actually starting to think, “You know what? I think we can do what we were doing five hundred years ago, a little more logically with our own languages, and learning our history and trying to . . . you know, of course, the conquest and colonization is not something we can kill, but within that see what are the identities now within the legacy of the colony in independent Mexico.” And I am telling you this because with all this . . . I am trying to bring distance learning with Nahuatl here at UW, and there is this program that is fantastic at the University de Zacatecas, and they are actually starting to think in Nahuatl from within; not just as a tool to help to translate documents from the colonies, or to do everyday Nahuatl, but to think more within the language and understand the culture with the language and not just as a tool. And this is a movement that is going on, not only in Zacatecas, but also in the Mayas. Was it your father’s grandmother who is Purépecha? Did he keep any of the traditions or have any stories? No, my grandmother was completely acculturated. She never wore any type of . . . she was what I would call india ladina because in all the pictures I see of her she is dressed in a Mexican European type of thing, never like Frida Kahlo. You knew that she wanted to make a statement with a certain clothing and Mexican identity. No. My grandmother never wore anything like that. But on the other hand, we had a nanny, a nanny who would be more like an Otomi. You know, she comes from sort of the group of that indigenous people in Irapuato, which is more Otomi than anything else, but she didn’t really . . . she was very Catholic. She didn’t have a lot of the culture and the rituals, but she did know about certain . . . medicines, not medicines, but hierbas [medicinal herbs], stuff like that, that would cure in certain ways. She would say, “Banana peel with blah, blah, blah, if you put it on the . . . it’s good for the throat,” stuff like that, and my Mom would say [something] . . . but my nanny was . . . I think had more contact with this other side of Europeanness that was more indigenous, and she was like my mother. I mean, she worked for us for twenty-five years, and she was like a second mother to us, I mean she is still alive. My mom and my dad have died, but she . . . I call her still and we all take care of her because she is like a mother, a second mother. She is ninety years old right now. You mentioned current U.S.-Mexican relations. Would you like to comment further? Well, the funny thing for me, and this has been as long as I can remember, when people would ask me, “Do you miss Mexico? How do you feel living here?” And I always tell them, “The United States is my adoptive country.” You know, I always want to feel like a Mexican. You know, there are a lot of things that are part of me, for instance, my family is there, but on the other hand when people ask me, “Are you going home?” I say, “My home is here.” Maybe I have two homes. Actually, Mexico is not my home anymore. It is the country I come from; it is the country that maybe I want to go there when I retire some of the time, but I don’t think I am

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going back permanently because I am part of here, too. I mean, especially for me, my intellectual growth was in the United States. You know, when you are there, you are there, but there is something missing. And when you are here, you are here, but there is something missing. I mean you have this chameleonic aspect. You are here, and you become this part. On the other hand, you can go over there, and also [laughs] . . . You know what I mean. It’s like this pendulum that’s in-between . . . that is typical of somebody who has this hybrid culture. I don’t know, but I myself feel okay in the United States. I know some people are less . . . I think it depends on the type of life you have. I can’t imagine not being able to work in what I can and what I like, what I have prepared for, but having to work to survive. I have never done that, so I cannot imagine people who have no papers and who are working here and don’t have a family. I think that would be very difficult for me. I mean I am fortunate that I have never had to deal with that, but when I see the stories of a lot of immigrants here who are not able to work to their full capacity. They are just surviving. I can’t imagine that. To me it is such a difficult situation . . . of people losing families and losing lives, losing somebody who is working next to them, because something fell on top of them. And what do they do? They don’t have papers, and the person who hired them doesn’t care about that. I cannot imagine being in that situation . . . and that is why, whatever I can do to help, you know, people who are here and Hispanic, I do. There is a Hispanic center here, where sometimes I volunteer. You know, when the consulate comes with a group of people to give passports to people who are here. And, you know, I have helped them read the forms and put their thumb prints and all this stuff, and sometimes there are like [many] people. . . . And I do know people who are illegal and who are working in certain parts, and it is so hard for them. One of them, she was doing laundry and somebody stole her wallet, and she had her driver’s license in it, and it is so hard for her to get that, because she doesn’t have a Social Security number. And you think, “How can this happen?” but anyway . . .

Alejandro Springall [words spoken in English appear in italics] What do you think about the conquest? It was really a tremendous massacre, and what’s very traumatic is that it was not just a mass killing of human beings but the imposition of one worldview over another that wasn’t necessarily the opposite. Then, there’s the black legend, and that, from my point of view, hasn’t allowed Mexican self-esteem to be very high because, besides, the black legend, as far as I know, is not even a legend that comes from Mexico, or even from Spain. The black legend comes from the court of Elizabeth I in England when she was having trouble with Felipe II, and they had to discredit the Spanish Empire completely. So, that trickles down to the American continent, and it just so happens that all the conquistadors were bastards, really savages, which isn’t true.

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What do you think about Hernán Cortés? To me Hernán Cortés is one of the most fascinating people there is. From what I’ve read, and I’ve read quite a bit; there are conflicting opinions, but I think Hernán Cortés is one of the first romantics and truly a man of the Renaissance. He was an educated man, though some of the ways he got out of scrapes might not have been totally ethical, right? But he was a guy who did respect indigenous cultures, he [made friends with] some of them because, besides, the reputation of the Mexica Empire was terrible because it was a truly imperialistic and cruel empire, no? There were certain circumstances that Cortés found along the way, and in the end he conquered. But he’s often been portrayed as an ambitious man who craved gold and power but, in fact, he was much more spiritual than the caricature that’s been made of him. It seems to me he’s a tragic character. I like the Cortés character a lot, and I think he’s tragic because, besides, he died in deep poverty and all alone back in Spain. I’m of the opinion that we have to change the concept of the black legend so that Mexico as a nation can have more bridges, like, a better footing, more foundations for Mexico’s self-esteem because the black legend makes the nation—and here come the bad words—the product of a bastard and a bitch, Malinche. But no! Ultimately, they are Mexico’s founders. In the end we come from both sides and, so, there’s this enormous and constant contradiction because, yeah, people in Mexico say, “Conquest . . . those damned Spaniards, horrible!” But in reality they don’t tolerate the indigenous people as part of their daily life. So, it’s an enormous contradiction.

* * * I’ve always wanted to make a movie about the conquest of Mexico, and I’ve discussed it with studio people in Los Angeles, and they gave me a terrible answer that I want to prove wrong. The problem, they said, is that “there is no happy ending.” No, no. No, wait a second: Mexico is born. I think it can also be told with a happy ending. I love my country very much, and I respect it and think we’re a very interesting nation and very strong. I want to make the movie of the conquest with the happy ending because that’s what Mexico is. But there’s always this idea about the conquest, therefore Mexico’s a disgrace. It’s not true. We do come from Spain and from the Olmecs, unlike the rest of Latin America, except for Central America, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, that also have their . . . Peru has it’s own problems, but the rest of Latin America . . . We do come from the Olmecs as a nation; the rest came from ships. So we have a very privileged combination that should be regarded as a totally positive thing. No one can stop Mexico. It’s very strong. It has a very, very strong people. However, there’s this schizophrenia.

* * * That’s why I think the great symbol of reconciliation would be to make a statue of Hernán Cortés and Malinche and not of Fernando VII, Isabel la Católica, because

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we have kings and queens of Spain, but not the father and mother of our country who are Hernán Cortés and Malinche. The Indian woman is regarded as a whore, a traitor, just like Malinche. Enough already! Those are the historical circumstances, nothing else. We fed the black legend; that’s an English legend. It’s so pathetic.

Fred Diego [speaking in English] Why do you think the conservative papers picked up your story? They like to draw distinctions, and they’re staunchly nativists, so I am a thorn in their side, so to speak. . . . Here their label for me is “illegal.” So in their mind an illegal is not a student, is not an academic, is not scholarly in any sense of the word and is an invader. Therefore, their response, in their mindset the nation is a home, the nation is a body that they must protect. And I am foreign material that it must be protected from. So when this paper picks it up, it’s all vitriolic and very strong. The one thing that surprised me was that instead of outright attacks, a lot of them were defensive like, “Why don’t I . . . ?” The general notion is the uneven distribution of resources toward individuals in my situation. So that’s why conservatives pick things up like that.

* * * Part of that has made it very easy for me to make friends and meet people and talk to very varied groups of people. I can talk to you the same as I can talk to people in Hammond [Indiana], but there are hardly any similarities—socioeconomically and educationally—between you and them. So I can speak to both of you, but at the same time it has also made me not a member of any in-group in any place. So I get this privileged position as a floating point, and I can observe and interact with everything, and yet at the same time I am always detached from everything to a certain extent because of a lack of total integration.

* * * For the most part when you hear about the “brown experience in America,” the fact that it is called the brown experience and is talked about in English states what it is. It’s the brown experience in America, and my brown experience in America is very new. I’m an immigrant; my parents are immigrants. Our brown experience here starts now. Then I see my neighbors that have family that goes back a couple of decades in the U.S. They come back and forth freely. And their brown experience predates ours. So I see the differences between them and us; their level of assimilation and our staunch desire not to assimilate to certain things that they have. That also makes me different.

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You are willing to speak out about your situation as an undocumented immigrant. So could you talk a little bit about that? And has that changed since President Obama took office? It hasn’t really changed. The background of Obama’s thing is that there were these undocumented kids, these dreamers. The issue is that these promises have already been made. Napolitano and Obama said, “No more low-priority deportations.” The issue is that they’re separating families and deporting people who are not criminals. His alleged emphasis on high-priority deportations is a farce. He’s deported more people in one term than Bush did in two . . . and deportations are going on. . . . The redistribution of everything to DHS [Department of Homeland Security] has facilitated that. So in my mind, and this is my humble opinion and my humble opinion only, this was just damage control. He was trying to appease dissidents momentarily until something else could be figured out. The thing is that it looks great, but that’s politics. Obama was on Reddit yesterday. Who is on Reddit? Mostly young males with liberalish tendencies. Obviously it’s going to be a big whoop. Same thing with this. It’s a highly politicized move, and I don’t praise it. It was long overdue and even then it’s not enough. And it’s not a reason for celebration, it’s an insult. It’s an insult to think that someone expects it’s going to appease us when families are being broken up and children are being left fatherless and motherless. Children who are U.S. citizens are being left motherless and fatherless because of his actions. And you think you’re telling a bunch of young kids, “This will help you in the future.” So it’s a highly political move. I mean it’s like Lincoln liberating the slaves. It’s not that big of a deal, but in history it’s already been recorded. How did you learn about the conquest of Mexico? What do you think about it? European conquest, because the conquest is still taking place today. It’s just masked. . . . This whole concept of new colonialism is pervasive. It’s not a man by the name of Cortés. It’s not Cabeza de Vaca. It’s none of them. It’s a multinational corporation that’s mining and displacing the Zapotec population. That’s what it is now. During the conquest, there were these indigenous groups that sided with the conquistadores for political reasons. I mean, what are the cartels? They’re ruling by terror the same way the conquistadores conquered by terror. And for what? For their own profit. And who brought the dollar to the status it has today? Who brought the peso to the status it has today? What role did the IMF [International Monetary Fund] play? So these power structures, these hard dynamics that exist between these institutions and this country [Mexico], they reflect conquest. The conquest is no longer with a sword and a musket. It’s with devaluation, inflation; it’s with controlling the price of corn. It’s the same thing. I mean let’s look at NAFTA. It displaces so many farmers that are now immigrating to the United States, providing cheap labor that allows us to recover from the financial deficit. And now what? Now they’re all being deported again, so how is that different from slave labor

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or forcing these individuals to cut and slash and burn their land, and then farm it? It’s no different at all. So the conquest is still going on today. The only issue is that we’re blind to it. So in the U.S. we have this illusion of quiet and calm, and everything is fine with the world. My iPhone tells me the weather, and my laptop is a very pretty machine. We have all that gives us the illusion of wealth and well-being, and we have these clothes that are inexpensive. So where does this prosperity come from? It comes from the maquiladoras in Mexico, that’s where it comes from.

* * * I’ve always read a lot, but I didn’t start reading until I was in high school. I was a sophomore. I started reading . . . just books. We had a library, it has books, which was a good thing. Funding is being cut, but it’s no big deal, you know. But I read . . . I don’t remember the name of the author. I just remember these facts that 90 percent of the indigenous population was wiped out due to disease. Something I learned in class here was how the politics worked with the conquistadores and the indigenous tribes and how the Aztecs . . . I mean, let’s not romanticize, they were douche bags. . . . They had everyone subservient under them, under tribute, and I learned about that as well. It’s not a problem that someone was conquering someone else. It’s just a problem when they use guile. So I learned just how clever and how ingenious these conquistadores were and also the violent truths of their actions. Who was the guy who cut off the foot of a soldier in southwest Mexico, in southwest U.S., in Arizona? This guy, these indigenous folks kill some clergy. So he wipes out this village of three thousand, and captures all these warriors and every day he chops off one of their feet. First, I understood it’s political. When I was in school, I was like, “Obviously, you need to expand, you have a country, you need resources, you need gold, you need money, you need whatever you need over here.” I knew that they were harvesting up north for masts and ships. I understood that, but I didn’t understand why it had to be so violent, why it had to be so brutal. So when I learned about the visceral brutality and division between both, the ruling class and the subservient, and the conquistadores and the conquered, that’s what really got me, just how visceral the violence was. How all of South America was killed in a genocide. When order was established by the Spaniards, they created me, they created what I am, they created the Mexican, the mestizo; half-Spaniard, half-indigenous. I mean, we are the product of the violence and rape of our ancestors. So you think that doesn’t live in our genetic memory? It does. It lives in us today. Nowadays it’s still reflected. Our land is being conquered, not as violently, but the violence is still there. South America is still in trouble, not as obviously, but Lima, look how violent that city is. Sorry, I stray a lot when I talk.

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What else do you think I need to know for my project? What would you like to see in it? If I were doing this project I would ask myself how it benefits the people I studied. I’m sure we’ve all heard of academic imperialism, American hegemony. So does this study bring something to light that these people benefit from in the long run? You know how that goes. That’s the question. How is that any different from the conquest? You’re extracting a resource. That is their knowledge and their information. How is that being returned to them in some fruitful way? If it’s not, then it’s just a reflection of that struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed. If that’s reflected even in a study of them, then it doesn’t really initiate any change, which is necessary. I can say the change is necessary. It is. I am sick and tired of seeing these Honduran people come over here and be treated so poorly by Mexicans themselves and then being treated poorly here. I’m sick and tired of walking into local restaurants and seeing these Mexicans working there or these Hondurans or Salvadoreños working there for salaries so low that it makes me . . . It’s infuriating to see how these people are exploited. I see this exploitation in every corner of my life. I see how my father works for so little and how my parents live below the poverty line, and I see how these people in these kitchens live below the poverty line. So that’s exploitation on an economic scale. And it benefits them ever so slightly. How would a study like this one benefit them? What issues does it bring to light, what issues does it bring into the discourse, what angles, what data does it bring into the discourse that can be used to establish a new conversation? I am sick and tired of these words “establish a new conversation,” “bring it into the discourse,” because discourse happens, but they are not the ones who are talking. It’s always someone talking about them. So it should address that or at least . . . it doesn’t have to do anything, it just has to say something about the fact that it should in some way affect them in a positive way, because . . . of course, it’s unrealistic, it’s just ideal.

Conclusion

The Spanish conquest narrative has been refashioned many times over the centuries to serve official, regional, and personal ends. The narrative initially served the purpose of separating conquerors from conquered. But the “conquerors” could be Spanish or a specific indigenous group, such as the Tlaxcalan allies of Cortés. In the ensuing years, colonial perspectives, based on the casta system, the evolving alliances, and evangelization projects, redefined and reconstituted pre-Hispanic groups within the new colonial order. By the Independence period, a new narrative cast Spain as tyrannical. By the Revolution, the official identity narrative of Mexico increasingly reflected the concept of all Mexicans as mestizos, to better support a nation-building agenda. Throughout much of the twentieth century, Mexican identity was based on a racialized notion—a mixing, a mestizaje, of Spanish and Indian—as official history promoted assimilation projects. More recently, the homogenization implied by mestizaje itself has been reformed or rejected in favor of a reconnection with a real or imagined pre-Hispanic past, which itself is subject to periodic revision. Today all along the Ruta de Cortés Mexicans take seriously issues of cultural identity and social equality associated with the conquest narrative. While some informants self-consciously create alternative stories in search for personal meaning, others begin retelling the state-sponsored narrative only to deviate from it to conform to contemporary experience and local interpretations. At the heart of these negotiations with the conquest story there is conflict about “who gets to talk” and “whose story this is.” I heard both strong discontent and a proud satisfaction with how the narrative is taught in school and upheld by government officials. The activist in Puebla, Gerardo Pérez, accuses the Mexican state of a “schizophrenic” practice, a hypocritical discourse that idealizes the “indio” and a “pluriethnic” nation while working actively to marginalize these very people. A housekeeper in Mexico City, María del Pilar Mancio, complains: “They don’t ask anyone from the common people.” She associates the birth of the pueblo with the Mexican Revolution and how land was redistributed. Yet both the activist and housekeeper believe there has been a degree of change in Mexico. Others see more 314

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hope in what several informants referred to as a “parting of the waters,” the new gains in government policy dealing with rural and indigenous Mexico in the wake of the 1992 quincentennial debates and the 1994 Zapatista uprising. They believe that the last twenty years have brought meaningful changes to society and the official narrative. The statesman Alejandro García Moreno explains: it used to be that “in order for us all to be Mexicans, we should all speak Spanish, period, that’s it. Let’s finish up the conquest process. . . . [N]ow there’s more awareness that we Mexicans have great diversity among us, that Mexican indigenous communities have their own characteristics.” A Mexican-born college student living in the United States, Fred Diego, uses the tools of discourse analysis to understand how Mexican immigrants are part of a new conquest story, but he observes that “they are not the ones who are talking. It’s always someone talking about them.” The Spanish conquest is more than a set of historical events: it has become a shared “site of memory.”1 Individuals, communities, and the state reinvent a past to redefine present experience. People and place serve as the most basic coordinates for mapping these practices. Within these parameters the imprint of the history and the practice of ethnic/racial discrimination is central to most every individual’s narrative about Mexico and his or her own role within its history. Unlike in the United States, where the notion of race has been interpreted largely along (pseudoscientific) biological lines, in Mexico ethnicity and race and identity have often been socially constructed, based on participation in local history, social class, and group traditions. Social memory and the role of history within it depend on a common past and practice, which is then used to define the present. People either assimilate local or group practices or reject them and create their own labels, depending on situational contexts and audience. They are actors in their own life stories, and for some, there is a good deal at stake. Informants analyze the authority—and validity—of official policy changes and practices and how these intersect with their own lives. Nahua furniture maker René Bonilla is publishing his own interpretation of Ixtacamaxtitlan’s place in history while Pedro Nájera, another man of Nahua heritage, believes local indigenous myths provide a piece missing from the national story. Two college-age men living in Nahua communities, Rigoberto Nopaltecatl and Gabriel Mazahua, work in a collective to gather their communities’ stories and traditions, while also speaking out against discrimination. Mardonio Carballo, who grew up in a Nahua community in Veracruz, now recites Nahuatl poetry to hip-hop music on YouTube and directs a weekly public television series on indigenous communities. Yet, even as these men create new avenues to disseminate indigenous cultures and denounce discrimination, a group of Nahua market women observe that the younger generations, their own children and grandchildren, no longer want to speak Nahuatl or wear traditional dress. They don’t want to be labeled as “indio.” After decades developing methods to encourage the use of Nahuatl among diverse communities with different dialects, Marcelino Hernández is forced to balance his own “all-absorbing” urban lifestyle with the Nahua heritage he tries to teach to his own children. Economic realities and

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generations of discriminatory practices have led to rampant emigration, both inside and outside the country, and contributed to the loss of cultural heritage The historical process of labeling native cultures as “indio” in relation to invaders is an open-ended process. There is no simple association of the indio with a life of misery, or as an “exotic” in need of preservation. Indigeneity today has many faces— individual, local, national, and global.2 International organizations such as UNESCO are developing ways to reevaluate material and immaterial cultural heritages. The Mexican state officially recognizes its ethnic diversity, based on the diversity of its original peoples as well as imported cultures, both European and African. There are new debates brewing about pluriethnicity, intercultural education, national patrimony, and economic rights.3 In addition, debates about the commodification of indigeneity and resources have come to the fore.4 Increasingly, as more urban individuals, families, and communities, often without direct family of indigenous heritage, search for deeper roots to overcome a sense of lost inheritance: “We’re all something, and we all have value. Those are the traumas; those are the limitations that we must overcome to get ahead” (interview with Arturo Muñoz). As we have seen, Paz’s midcentury narrative about Mexican mestizo identity as based on a violent rape influenced the formulation of many people’s ideas. And yet, they creatively formulate their own responses in keeping with new circumstances and places. A poet who began an indigenous languages poetry journal, Judith Santopietro, posits: “Being mestizo is like being in the middle of nowhere.” She recently decided to reject her own family’s Italian immigrant origins story and now identifies herself as indigenous, returning to her grandmother’s silenced Nahua heritage. Internationally renowned intellect and activist, Gustavo Esteva, traveled a similar path yet with a significant difference. He left Mexico City to live in a Oaxaca Zapotec community like his grandmother’s, but he argues: “I may live like a Zapotec . . . but . . . I am not a Zapotec. Other people will have to tell me who I am.” In Veracruz, Lucia Fortuno Hernández revives another nearly silenced ancestry: the African heritage of her family and region. Her “cultural experiment” brings AfroCuban music and cuisine to her restaurant. Academics, in particular anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, also seek new ways to confirm or alter the national narrative of victors and vanquished and mestizaje. Turning to the archive for new documents, the historians Rodrigo Martínez and Rocío Cortés shed light on the multivalent colonial roles played by Moctezuma’s daughter and grandson. Likewise, the general editor of the newly revised state textbooks, Lilian Álvarez, has altered how millions of Mexican elementary schoolchildren first encounter their national history. And her own personal path of discovery has recently led her to studying pre-Hispanic stone carvings in order to interpret this past. The archaeologist Gabino López Arenas warns, however, that state archaeological campaigns often ignore colonial and contemporary continuities. A basic kitchen implement in many regions of Mexico, the metate, is the same now as it was five hundred years ago. People overlook these continuities in daily life and

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prefer to focus on the exotic “difference” of the indio of the past, which all too often, he argues, leads to a commercialization of a stereotypical or folkloric indio. This trend has become so widespread that a recent advertising campaign for the “Indio” brand of beer promoted the product as “more Indian than ever.” Some Mexicans with strong ties to a European ancestry or education reformulate social memory from the viewpoint of an “outsider” looking in. Marlene Ehrenberg, the founder of the tourist Ruta de Cortés, says she is a “güera ranchera,” or countryside blonde, who promotes Mexican history and culture through responsible tourism. A woman well connected to the political elite voices an insight that few other Mexicans offer: although Mexico’s political and social systems originate with the highly stratified pre-Hispanic societies, they are no longer viable and need to change. “Even icebergs melt,” she concludes of the millennium-long system of tlatoani bosses. Real outsiders, foreign-born citizens who have adopted Mexico as their home, take the history of the conquest less personally. And yet, many passionately dedicate their professional lives to the study of conquest issues. The French scholar Guy Rozat holds an annual international seminar, “Rethinking the Conquest,” in an effort to correct what he calls a prevailing “antihistory,” an ideological tendency that hides the real conquest and its aftermath. The U.S.-born photographer John O’Leary documents Cholula’s traditional celebrations even as he recognizes he will never gain complete access to these practices. He decries what he sees as INAH’s destruction of archaeological sites and the hegemonic construction of Mexico’s indigenous history. Native Guatemalan and muralist Rina Lazo follows the footsteps of her mentor Diego Rivera and has reinterpreted Mexican history for half a century, hoping to help Mexicans “feel more secure, more self-aware.” The conquest paradigm extends well beyond the Spanish conquest and its aftermath. It is used to describe current projects of “Nahuatlization” of all indigenous groups, even those with little connection to the Aztec legacy. It is used to discuss U.S.-Mexican relations since the War of 1848. Even the 1980s economic “structural adjustments” that lead to the elimination of the ejido system of land tenure and the adoption of NAFTA—and the resulting massive change in Mexico’s traditional agricultural society—are characterized as part of a continuing conquest. The resilience of the narrative and its remarkable ability to be reconfigured for current circumstances became apparent even during the course of my fieldwork, during the six years of Felipe Calderón’s presidency (2006–12). As Mexicans experienced a dramatic escalation of the drug war, the final lifting of protective agricultural tariffs with the adoption of the last NAFTA measures, the crackdown on illegal immigration along the U.S.-Mexican border, and the fallout from the 2008 global recession, they often incorporated an ongoing sense of invasion and violence into their narratives: loss of sovereignty and family members, and loss of economic control over its maize crop, the spinal column of Mexico. My own trajectory of discovery in the “contact zone” began with leaving the archive, the written word of the past, for the oral interview in the present. I left the

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illusion of a fixed past for an evolving complex present influenced by the past. In addition to accepting a variety of narratives and inconsistencies, I also learned to face my own limited perspective and prejudices. I am a midwesterner, born and raised in a region without significant diversity, and an academic who had worked mostly with historical sources. I was surprised, for example, to discover my own exoticization of the “indio” and my own ignorance of the enduring impact the nineteenth-century U.S. conquest of half of Mexico has had on Mexicans. Nor had I considered the serious disconnection between academic and political discourse and grassroots and individual experiences. I recall, in particular, my surprise at Gabriel Mazahua’s exclamation as he reflected on his life in a Nahua community today: “The word ‘conquest’ for us, and for me in particular, is something very different, you understand? How could they have conquered me?” The importance of the conquest narrative in the lives of Mexicans today challenges the idealization of identity and history. New local, national, and global initiatives, such as the PRI’s return to power in 2012 and its extensive political, fiscal, and educational reform initiatives, the reemergence of the Zapatista movement in 2012, China’s increasing dominance of world markets, UNESCO’s creation of new categories of immaterial patrimony, and the revival and refashioning of local festivals, guarantee that the narrative will continue to evolve. This is Mexico’s story, but a similar process is happening throughout the world as people grapple with the simultaneous processes of globalization and ethnic differentiation. The legacy of the state textbooks and cultural programs has given Mexicans a strong sense that history matters and that knowledge of their history demonstrates good citizenship as well as local identity.5 There is much at stake: “who gets to talk” and who is listened to can decide very real issues of privilege and access to power.

Appendix A

Glossary of Cultural Terms

altepetl

In pre-Columbian and preconquest Nahua society, a Nahuatl word used (in the same form for both singular and plural) to refer to a local, ethnically based political entity.

ayuntamiento

City hall.

Aztec

Originally a term used to refer to multiple ethnic groups (with different linguistic and cultural traditions) that claimed heritage from the same mythic place of origin, Aztlan; however, it was not a term used by any indigenous community as a self-descriptor. In the nineteenth century, this term acquired its present-day meaning of referring solely to the people linked by culture and language to the Mexica state, the Nahuas and the Triple Alliance.

Aztlan

The mythical ancestral place of origin for the Nahua people. Believed by many to have been geographically located in the present-day U.S. Southwest (territory that formed part of Mexico until it was annexed by the United States after the U.S.-Mexican War), Aztlan became a central symbol in the twentieth-century Chicano nationalist movement in the United States.

cabecera municipal

Capital of a district (municipio).

calidad

A concept of caste that included not only skin color but also place of origin, occupation, wealth, purity of blood, honor, even integrity and virtue.

calzada

Causeway. Four causeways connected the city of MexicoTenochtitlan to the lakeshore.

campesino/a

Peasant farmer; often used as a euphemism to avoid the derogatory term “indio.” 319

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colonia

A neighborhood or borough of a large metropolitan area in Mexico (lit., colony).

concheros

Used to refer to the groups of dancers that perform religious dances that mix elements of pre-Hispanic religious ritual with Spanish religious symbolism and music. The term comes from a type of stringed instrument played by the musicians/dancers, which is traditionally made from an armadillo’s shell, or concha.

criollo

An ethno-social class in the caste system of the Spanish colonies in the Americas (starting in the sixteenth century); individuals born in the Americas but of pure Spanish descent. Although criollos usually ranked above individuals of mixed race within this caste system, they ranked below peninsulares, those of pure Spanish ancestry born in Spain rather than the Americas.

crónica

A literary genre that narrates historical events in chronological order, often through first-person or second-person eyewitness accounts.

curandero/a

Traditional healer.

danzantes

Traditional dancers; the term is often used to refer to concheros.

danza de moros y cristianos

A costumed dance representing the centuries-long conflict between Spaniards and Moors (Muslims) in Spain known as the Reconquista.

ejido

Communally owned lands with shared use rights; a system that was common among many indigenous communities in Mexico throughout the colonial period and became fundamental for Cárdenas’s land reforms after the Revolution.

encomienda

Labor system used in Spanish colonies after the conquest. Under the encomienda system, the Spanish Crown granted an individual a set number of indigenous workers. The grantee was responsible for educating the natives in the Spanish language and Catholic faith. The natives, in return, were expected to give tribute to the receiver of the grant. This tribute could take the form of gold, labor, food, crops, or other items.

evangelista

Protestant preacher.

fiesta

Along with its meaning in English as “party,” in Spanish it also carries the meaning of “festival.”

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fiesta patronal

A yearly celebration of a community’s patron saint on his or her feast day.

fiscal

City attorney, in civil cases, or prosecutor, in criminal cases.

flower wars

Pre-Hispanic ritual battles fought between the members of the Triple Alliance (Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan) and enemy communities.

gachupín

Spaniard, colloquially; it can be derogatory.

guayabera

A traditional men’s shirt that is worn untucked; in Mexico, it is considered typical of Yucatan and Veracruz.

güero/a

Light skinned; fair complected; light haired.

herbolero/a

A healer that uses medicinal plants.

Huitzilopochtli

Aztec deity, “hummingbird of the south”; god of war, sun, fire, and sacrifice; patron god of the city of Tenochtitlan and the Mexica.

indígena

Autochthonous, native; an original inhabitant of a region.

indigenismo

Proindigenous ideology.

indio

Indian; the term is generally regarded as derogatory, implying laziness, ignorance, and other shortcomings.

jarocho

From Veracruz; a native of Veracruz.

junta auxiliar

In Mexico, a municipio, or district, that has been absorbed by another. Since there cannot be two cabeceras municipales (district capitals), the lesser one becomes a junta auxiliar.

ladino

An indigenous person who has adopted Spanish and non­ indigenous ways of living. The term can also imply craftiness or even deviousness.

malinchista

A traitor to Mexico. A term based on Malinche, Cortés’s interpreter during the conquest of Mexico.

mayordomía

Church stewardship, caretaking. A mayordomo is a churchwarden or steward.

Mesoamerica

The territory inhabited by distinct ethnic groups that share some cultural characteristics; it includes much of modern-day Mexico and Central America. By the time of the conquest, Nahuatl had become the lingua franca for the region.

mestizo/a

A person of mixed (some combination of indigenous, European, or African) rather than “pure” ancestry. The term can carry deep-seated ideological meanings.

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Mexica

The Nahua people who founded Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco; in the nineteenth century, the term Aztec became synonymous with the term Mexica (and is currently the term used by the general public), although “Aztec” was never used by the Mexica to describe themselves.

(lo) mexicano

Relating to “Mexicanness” or being Mexican.

(el) monte

Hill; wilderness; in indigenous communities it also carries the connotation of all the natural resources in the community and their role in a broader worldview.

mulato/a

A person of mixed African and European ancestry.

municipio

In Mexico, a district comprising a district capital, or cabecera municipal, and a number of smaller towns and villages.

Nahuatl

Language spoken by the Nahua and also the lingua franca in Mexico at the time of the conquest.

Nezahualcoyotl

A famed tlatoani, or ruler, of Texcoco, one of the three polities that made up the Triple Alliance; he is celebrated as a great legislator, builder, philosopher, and poet.

(La) Noche Triste

“The Night of Sorrows,” June 30, 1520. After losing favor in Tenochtitlan and with Moctezuma dead, Cortés and his troops were forced to flee Tenochtitlan, suffering many casualties and nearly halting their conquest of Mexico.

Padre (Padrecito)

Father, priest (dear father).

paisano/a

Compatriot, fellow countryman or -woman.

peninsulares

A social class in the caste system of the Spanish colonies in the Americas (starting in the sixteenth century) that refers to Spaniards born in Spain but residing in the Americas. Peninsulares outranked all other social classes in this caste system owing to their “pure” blood and birth in mainland Spain.

pulque

A fermented alcoholic beverage made from the agave plant. It was considered sacred in pre-Hispanic times but became widely popular during colonial times.

Quetzalcoatl

Aztec deity, the “plumed serpent” or “feathered serpent”; the god of creation, fertility, and wind; patron god of the Aztec priesthood and god of learning, knowledge, and intelligence.

ranchero

Rancher, a person who owns or works at a ranch or a farm; timid; crude.

relación

A first-person historical account that describes an event or a voyage.

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repartimiento

An indigenous group allotted to a Spaniard for forced labor draft.

son

A popular late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century musical style.

tata

Father, from the Nahuatl tahtli; used as a title for elders and Catholic priests.

temascal

A ceremonial sauna of purification, from the Nahuatl word temascalli, “house of heat” or possibly “bathhouse.”

Teotihuacan

An ancient city in Mexico where the Temple of Quetzalcoatl and the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon are found. Now an archaeological zone, at times it is confused with Tenochtitlan, where Cortés arrived and where present-day Mexico City is built.

Tenochtitlan

The capital city of the Mexica, which is now Mexico City’s historic district.

teponaxtle (huehuetl)

Nahua log drum (large drum).

tercera raíz

Lit. “third root”; the idea that there are Mexicans of African descent (in addition to indigenous and Spanish descent).

tianguis

Market, from the Nahuatl tianquiztli.

tilma

An indigenous man’s garment fastened on one shoulder.

tlacuilo (pl. tlacuiloque)

Scribe, in Nahuatl. Refers to a group of specially trained scribes and painters.

Tlaloc

Aztec deity, “he who makes things sprout” or “he who is made of earth”; god of rain, water, lightning, thunder, and fertility.

Tlatelolco

Located in present-day Mexico City, but once the center of a pre-Hispanic Nahua altepetl. Also known as the Plaza of the Three Cultures, so named for the three cultures represented there by an Aztec excavation site, a colonial church, and modern buildings.

tlatoani

Nahuatl word for supreme leaders of preconquest Nahua communities in Mexico.

toltecayotl

In Nahua tradition, civility, spiritual refinement, and intellectual sophistication in reference to the Toltec civilization. The notion was popularized by Miguel León-Portilla as “Aztec philosophy.”

Tonantzin

A generic name for an Aztec female deity.

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Totonaco

Totonac, an indigenous ethnicity of eastern Mexico (currently the states Hidalgo, Puebla, and Veracruz); the Totonac language.

transculturation

A term originally coined by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz to describe the cultural result of colonialism when two cultures clash and converge, but elements of both cultures survive in a new culture.

Triple Alliance

Also known as the “Aztec Empire,” this term refers to the alliance (at the time of the conquest) between the three Nahua city-states of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan, with Tenochtitlan assuming the dominant role in the alliance. When Cortés arrived, the Triple Alliance controlled most of central Mexico.

Virgin of Guadalupe

Mexico’s patroness since the colonial period and still its most popular cultural image.

voladores

Flyers; those who perform the Totonaco ritual of slowly descending head-first in a circular fashion from a tall pole with a rope tied around their waist.

xochitl

Flower, in Nahuatl.

xochitlaliz

A Nahua crop fertility ritual, from the Nahuatl xochitlalia, “to lay flowers.”

zócalo

A town or city’s main square.

Appendix B

Suggested Further Readings

Hundreds of books and articles have tried to unravel the exact events and meaning of the conquest. The best brief modern introduction to the military campaign is Ross Hassig’s Mexico and the Spanish Conquest (2006). It draws on the monumental work of Hugh Thomas, The Conquest of Mexico (1993), and other scholarly sources. A good overview of Mexico from pre-Hispanic times to the present is Brian Hamnett’s A Concise History of Mexico (2006). Four other key works present valuable interpretations of the military-religious conquest: Serge Gruzinski’s The Aztecs: Rise and Fall of an Empire (1992) and The Conquest of Mexico (1993), Robert Ricard’s The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico (1966), and George Baudot’s México y los albores del discurso colonial (1996). There are a wide variety of primary sources about the conquest of Mexico, each source providing a unique perspective that reflects the author’s circumstances and goals. The two most widely known and translated sources from the Spanish perspective are Hernán Cortés’s Segunda carta de relación (1520), and Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (1568). Soon after, an indigenous account recorded a very different version of the conquest in Anales de Tlatelolco. In 1547 the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún began to compile oral accounts from Nahuatl-speaking eyewitnesses of the conquest (Florentine Codex, book 12). By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a variety of mestizo and indigenous individuals and groups wrote their own versions of the conquest—often to establish rights within the new colonial order. Among the most influential are Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s “Thirteenth Relation” (1608); Diego Muñoz Camargo, Historia de Tlaxcala (1585); the Lienzo de Tlaxcala (before 1585); Alvarado Tezozomoc’s Crónica mexicáyotl (ca. 1598); and Juan Bautista Pomar, Relación de Texcoco (1582). Selections from these and other sources have been widely distributed in Miguel León-Portilla’s The Vision of the Vanquished (1959, Spanish; 1962, English) and James Lockhart’s We People Here (1993). More recently, 325

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other editions have been published of the entire works or further selections, such as Mesoamerican Voices (2005), edited by Matthew Restall, Lisa Sousa, and Kevin Terraciano; Laura Matthew and Michael Oudijk’s Indian Conquistadors (2007); and the Codex Chimalpahin (ca. 1605–31) in Chimalpahin’s Conquest (2010), edited by Susan Schroeder et al. Franciscan, Dominican, and Augustinian missionaries also wrote general and natural histories of Mexico. Some of the most notable include Diego Durán, History of the Indies (1581); Toribio de Benavente Motolinía, Historia de los indios de la Nueva España (1536); Jerónimo de Mendieta, Historia eclesiástica indiana (1596); Juan de Torquemada, Monarquía indiana (1615); Augustín de Vetancurt, Teatro mexicano (1697); Francisco de Burgoa, Geográfica descripción de la parte septentrional del polo ártico de la América (1674); and Juan de Grijalva, Crónica de la orden de N. P. S. Augustín en las prouincias de la Nueva España (1624). To better understand the complex amalgamation of cultures and processes that emerged from the conquest—in particular, the Hispanization of the Aztec world— see foundational texts by Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule (1964); Enrique Florescano, Memoria mexicana (1994); and James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest (1992). More recent studies include Louise Burkhart’s introduction to Holy Wednesday (1996); William F. Connell, After Moctezuma (2011); Viviana Díaz Balsera: The Pyramid Under the Cross (2005); Max Harris, Aztecs, Moors, and Christians (2000); Laura Matthew, Memories of Conquest (2012); Amos Megged and Stephanie Wood, Mesoamerican Memory (2012); Barbara Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain (1996); José Rabasa, Tell Me the Story of How I Conquered You (2011); and Stephanie Wood, Transcending Conquest (2003). These processes have been studied as interactive and even performative, as Diana Taylor argues in The Archive and the Repertoire (2003), and Patricia Ybarra elaborates in her study Performing Conquest (2009). Although segments of the exact location of Cortés’s first march from Veracruz to Tenochtitlan are still debated, both scholarly and general publications about the Ruta de Cortés are popular. In 1992 Carlos Fuentes narrated a series sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute, The Buried Mirror, which follows part of Cortés’s route and discusses the larger meaning of the conquest. In the late 1990s the BBC sent journalist-narrator Michael Wood to make the journey, documented in the TV series Conquistadors (2001). Companion books for both these series continue to sell well. The popular Mexican magazine Arqueología mexicana has published a series of articles by scholars about the route—in particular, Bernardo García Martínez’s “La ‘Ruta de Cortés’ y otras rutas de Cortés” (2001) examines the conquistador’s multiple trips from the coast to Tenochtitlan and back again and the important pre-Hispanic routes exploited by the Spanish. Within years of the conquest, Hernán Cortés became a focal point for histories, essays, and literary works. The most extensive modern biography based on a wealth of archival materials is José Luis Martínez’s monumental Hernán Cortés (1990–92).

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More recently, the American author Buddy Levy has published the popular Conquistador (2008), which dramatizes Cortés’s military campaigns from 1519 to 1521. Another key figure in the conquest, Cortés’s concubine and translator Malinche (known also by the honorific Nahuatl name Malintzin, and her Spanish baptismal name, doña Marina) has caught the eye of the public. Throughout most of the twentieth century, she was a symbol in nationalist discourse as both the mother of the mestizo nation and the traitor of Mexico. Several recent collections and books attempt to sort out the process of mythmaking: Feminism, Nation and Myth: La Malinche, edited by Rolando Romero and Amanda Harris (2005); Margo Glantz, La Malinche, sus padres y sus hijos (2001); and Camilla Townsend, Malintzin’s Choices (2006). The figure of the Mexica (Aztec) emperor that met Cortés’s army, Moctezuma II, has recently captured the attention of the general public in both the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds. Archaeologist Eduardo Matos Moctezuma has published books in Spanish and in English with U.S. historian David Carrasco, including Moctezuma’s Mexico (1992) and Breaking Through Moctezuma’s Past (with Carrasco and Leonardo López Luján, 2007). Matos Moctezuma also published Aztecs (with Felipe Solís Olguín, 2002), which accompanied an exhibit at the London Royal Academy of the Arts. A blockbuster exhibit, Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler (2009), opened at the British Museum, and the accompanying catalogue continues to be popular. More recent creative works about Moctezuma are in the process of being translated for publication in English, including the novel El penacho de Moctezuma, by Mario Moya Palencia (2000), and poet Carlos Montemayor’s Guerra en el paraíso (1991). Indeed, over the years, all the historical characters, as well as the conquest itself, have been the inspiration for dozens of novels, short stories, plays, and movies. Laura Esquivel, author of Like Water for Chocolate, published a well-received novel Malinche (2006). Anna Lanyon has published novels on both Malinche, Malinche’s Conquest (1991), and Martín Cortés, The New World of Martin Cortes (2003). Additional works include, to mention only a few, Ignacio Solares, Nen, la inútil (novel, 1994); Víctor Rascón Banda, La Malinche (play, 2000); Salvador Carrasco, La otra conquista (film, 1998); and Santiago Parra, Guadalupe (film, 2006). Carrie Chorba’s Mexico, from Mestizo to Multicultural (2007) offers a thought-provoking analysis of many of these works and their relationship to conquest and identity. The Spanish conquest is the foundational event in a subgenre of essays about Mexico that has antecedents in colonial chronicles about New Spain but that flourished after the Mexican Revolution. Numerous scholars, authors, and politicians have taken up the pen to describe Mexico to themselves and their compatriots. The Nobel Prize–winning author Octavio Paz wrote about Mexican identity in his landmark El laberinto de la soledad (1950), in particular the chapters “Los hijos de la Malinche,” and “Conquista y Colonia.” The late Mexican author Carlos Fuentes wrote extensively about the topic, including sections from his A New Time for Mexico (1994) and his story “Las Dos Orillas” (in El naranjo, 1993), which examines

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Appendix B

the notion of mestizaje. During this same period, the well-known anthropologist and ethnologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla wrote México profundo (1987) an extensive critique of Mexicans’ insistence on the cultural homogeneity of mestizaje; he argued that Mexico was divided between a European imaginary and a pre-Hispanicinfluenced underlying reality. Recently, a new generation of authors is moving these analyses of social identities and historical memory in new directions, such as Analisa Taylor’s study, Indigeneity in the Mexican Cultural Imagination (2009), and Ethelia Ruiz Medrano’s Mexico’s Indigenous Communities (2010). On the other side of the border, U.S. popular authors have written for decades about our “neighbor to the south.” Among the older, more popular are L. B. Simpson, Many Mexicos (1941); Alan Riding, Distant Neighbors (1985); and Todd Downing, The Mexican Earth (1940). Judith Hellman, in Mexican Lives (1994), interviews people about their work and life. More recently, John Mack and Suanne Steines interview and photograph many of Mexico’s cultural icons, Revealing Mexico (2010); and John Ross’s reflective essay focuses on the national center, El Monstruo (2009). More recently, authors such as Peter Laufer, Calexico: True Lives of the Borderlands (2011), Lynnaire M. Sheridan, “I Know It’s Dangerous” (2009), and Robert Smith, Mexican New York (2006), are exploring the acute situation along the U.S.-Mexican borderlands and the effects of immigration. Ramón Saldivar examines this borderlands culture through the writings of Americo Paredes in The Borderlands of Culture (2006). In 2010 Mexico celebrated its bicentennial of the War of Independence from Spain (1810–2010) and the centennial of the Mexican Revolution (1910–2010). The quincentennial of Cortés’s fateful conquest is not far behind (2019). The coming decade will bring a renewed national and international focus on Mexican history, heritages, and identity politics. On this side of the border, the politics of Mexican drug wars, violence, and immigration have come to the forefront of U.S. politics. These broad topics will surely continue to evolve as the effects of globalization and the loss of cultural heritages affect more and more people in Mexico, the United States, and abroad.

Notes

Introduction 1. Gascón Mercado, Breve historia del hospital de Jesús. 2.  These were painted by the “Three Greats” of the mid-twentieth-century Mexican muralist movement: José Clemente Orozco, Cortés y Malinche (Escuela Nacional Preparatoria); Diego Rivera (Palacio Nacional); and David Siquieros, The Torture of Cuauhtémoc (Palacio de Bellas Artes). 3.  The radical revisioning of ethnicity, heritage, and identity in Mexico came to the attention of U.S. audiences, for example, in the 2010 PBS special When Worlds Collide. The program guides viewers through the complex history of race and ethnicity in Latin America, but repeats official historiography. A year later PBS aired a history of blacks in Mexico and Peru titled Mexico and Peru: The Black Grandma in the Closet. 4.  Nora, ed. Les lieux de mémoire. Laura Matthew finds a similar phenomenon in Guatemala. See Memories of Conquest, 6. 5.  See Ricard’s La conquista espiritual de México. 6.  Carrera, “Touring Mexico: A Journey to the Land of the Aztecs,” in Traveling from New Spain to Mexico; see also Craib, Cartographic Mexico, which documents nineteenth-century state efforts to map historical and social landscapes. 7.  Carrera, “Touring Mexico,” 102–3. 8. Craib, Cartographic Mexico, 65. 9.  Paz and Santí, El laberinto de la soledad. 10.  García Loaeza, “La historia al servicio de la patria.” 11.  See Brading, The First America; and Pagden, “Identity Formation in Spanish America.” 12. Earle, The Return of the Native, 79–80. 13. Peña, “A New Mexican Nationalism?”; Navarrete Linares, Los pueblos indígenas de México. 14.  Quoted in Chorba, Mexico, from Mestizo to Multicultural, 31. 15. León-Portilla, Visión de los vencidos; Gruzinski, The Conquest of Mexico. 16.  Amendment to Article 2 of the Constitución política de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos. 17.  Peña, “A New Mexican Nationalism?”; Navarrete Linares, Los pueblos indígenas. 18.  The second article of the Mexican constitution grants rights such as the use of customary law, use of traditional language, organization of internal community structures, and election of representatives to local municipal government. 19.  Cadena and Starn, Indigenous Experience Today. 20.  The term “mestizo” has a long history dating back to the colonial period and has changed over the course of the centuries. Magnus Mörner mentions a letter written around 1585 from the governor of Chile to the king citing mestizos (printed in Toribio Medina, ed., Colección de

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Notes to Pages 11–23

documentos inéditos para la historia de Chile). See Mörner, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America, 28. The Diccionario de autoridades (1734 ed.) cites part 1, book 9, chap. 30 of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Comentarios Reales de los Incas (1609–17) in its definition of mestizo. Serge Gruzinski uses mestizo to designate sixteenth-century “mélanges between individuals, imaginative faculties, and lifestyles originating on four continents (America, Europe, Africa, Asia).” See The Mestizo Mind, 31. 21.  Lewis, “Home Is Where the Heart Is”; Bennett, Colonial Blackness. 22.  Barstow and Bertrab, “The Bribery Aisle.” 23.  Matos Moctezuma and Carrasco, Moctezuma’s Mexico. 24.  Cadena and Starn, Indigenous Experience Today, 8. 25.  In some Latin American countries indigenismo refers to current indigenous movements, not the state and cultural ideological campaigns initiated after the Mexican Revolution. In one or two cases in the interviews that follow, indigenismo is used in this way. See, for example, René Bonilla’s interview in the Nahua town Ixtacamaxtitlan. 26.  Jacobo Romero, cited in Chorba, Mexico, from Mestizo to Multicultural, 20. The heated debate that emerged in 2013 when Christian Duverger proposed that Hernán Cortés, not Bernal Díaz, was the true author of the True History of the Conquest of Mexico serves as a case in point. 27. Rabasa, Tell Me the Story of How I Conquered You. 28.  Carrera suggests that the visual arts in nineteenth-century Mexico “produced, reproduced, and circulated” components of an imagined space as it fabricated a new identity and moved from being colonial New Spain to independent Mexico. See Traveling from New Spain to Mexico, 4. 29. Chorba, Mexico, from Mestizo to Multicultural, 18. 30.  Álvarez Arellano, coord., Formación cívica y ética, 38. 31.  As indigenous populations declined dramatically in the sixteenth century, both the Crown and evangelizers sought increased control; dispersed indigenous groups were “reduced” into a congregación or reducción, which were ad hoc communities often founded in valleys and intended to facilitate both evangelization and administration. See García and Myers, “Spanish Catholicism in the Post-Columbian New World (1500–1680s).” 32.  See in particular landmark studies by Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination; Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest; and Schroeder, Chimalpahin and the Kingdoms of Chalco; as well as more recent works, such as Connell, After Moctezuma; and Don, Bonfires of Culture. 33.  Matthew and Oudijk, Indian Conquistadors. 34. Martínez, Genealogical Fictions. 35. Bennett, Colonial Blackness. 36.  Fisher and O’Hara, Imperial Subjects. 37. Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest; and Gruzinski, The Conquest of Mexico. 38.  See Burkhart, Holy Wednesday; Díaz Balsera, The Pyramid Under the Cross; S. G. Wood, Transcending Conquest; Gruzinski, The Conquest of Mexico; Baudot, México y los albores del discurso colonial. 39.  O. F. Pardo, The Origins of Mexican Catholicism. 40.  J. Lara, City, Temple, Stage; Núñez, Arvizu, and Abonce, Space and Place in the Mexican Landscape. 41. Arizpe, El patrimoinio cultural inmaterial de México; Navarrete Linares, Los pueblos indígenas de México. 42.  This image is a carryover from the colonial period. Chimalpahin describes it in his Diario entry for October 4, 1593. October 4 is the feast of Saint Francis. See also Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest, 236. 43.  Even Mexico’s most sacred image today, the Virgin of Guadalupe, who is said to have appeared to the indio Juan Diego in 1531, reflects multivalent original meanings. While the sixteenth-century criollo elite promoted the apparition as a unique phenomenon that signified

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New Spain’s chosen status, many others link the Virgin of Guadalupe to pre-Hispanic religious practices. Juan Diego’s legendary cloth tilma that bore the image of the Virgin, for example, reflects ideas about the sacredness of textiles in both Christian and Nahua traditions. JudeoChristian belief held that garments touched to a holy relic or image could themselves receive transformative powers. In Nahua practice, ritual offerings were wrapped in sacred bundles with cloth. Whether deliberate or not, this cultural amalgamation gave sacred significance to both traditions while also creating something new. In The Untranslatable Image, Alessandra Russo suggests this process be called “untranslatability,” an “ongoing process of making images” that goes beyond identifying them as European paradigms or pre-Hispanic practices or syncretic transculturations. 44.  Bonfil Batalla, México profundo. 45. Guardino, The Time of Liberty; and Ruiz Medrano, Mexico’s Indigenous Communities. 46.  Navarrete Linares, Los pueblos indígenas de México. 47.  The ejido program established in Article 27 of the Constitution of 1917 gave indigenous communities access to lands historically belonging to the pueblos de indios. These were often based on colonial-era documentation. See Navarrete Linares, Los pueblos indígenas de México; Ruiz Medrano, Mexico’s Indigenous Communities; Hart, “The Mexican Revolution, 1910–1920”; and Benjamin, “Rebuilding the Nation.” 48. Vasconcelos, La raza cósmica. 49.  García Loaeza, “La historia al servicio de la patria.” 50.  Quoted in Earle, The Return of the Native, 208. 51. Townsend, Malintzin’s Choices, 77–78. See also Lanyon, Malinche’s Conquest. 52.  Townsend, “Glimpses of Native American Historiography”; Esquivel, Malinche. 53.  Sahagún, “Book XII of the Florentine Codex.” 54. Ibid. 55. Carrasco, To Change Place. 56.  See British Museum, Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler. See Carlos Fuentes, El naranjo, as well as other works. 57.  Isabel Moctezuma, whose original name was Tecuichpoch, had been married as a young girl to Moctezuma’s successors, including Cuauhtemoc. She was then married several times to different Spanish conquistadors and briefly taken as Cortés’s concubine before finally marrying Juan Cano and moving to Spain. Cortés awarded her the valuable encomienda of Tacuba. Cano had fought with Cortés but became part of the anti-Cortés camp after the conquest. See interviews with Rodrigo Martínez Barac and Pilar Moctezuma González in part 3 (Mexico City). 58. Gillingham, Cuauhtémoc’s Bones. 59.  Hernán Cortés, Cartas de relación; López de Gómara, Historia general de las Indias y vida de Hernán Cortés. 60. Cortés, Cartas de relación, 313. 61.  Díaz Balsera, The Pyramid Under the Cross. 62. Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias. 63.  Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias (1548). See Myers, Fernández de Oviedo’s Chronicle of America. 64.  See Díaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España. 65.  The Archive of the Indies in Seville houses many of these documents. See Martínez, Hernán Cortés, 535–660. 66.  Born to a relative of the Pizarro family (Francisco would later conquer Peru) and an infantry captain, Hernán Cortés left his home in Medellín, Spain, at age fourteen. By age eighteen, he set sail for America. Trained as a notary, Cortés agilely worked the Spanish legal system and participated actively in the emerging imperial administration in the Spanish Caribbean. Granted an encomienda and appointed to positions as magistrate and as secretary to the governor of Cuba,

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Notes to Pages 29–35

Cortés was a man of substantial wealth and leadership for fifteen years before his mutinous expedition to the mainland of America. In the first decades after the fall of Tenochtitlan, the conquistador fought to impose Spanish structure onto the Nahua capital and to ensure his own power, even as he mounted expeditions to Michoacan, Honduras, Baja California, and the Pacific coast of Mexico (1520s–30s). The disastrous expedition to Honduras, the anarchy in Mexico-Tenochtitlan upon his return, and the efforts to block Cortés’s ambition by his numerous enemies in New Spain and Europe ultimately led to his banishment from the city. More significantly, he was denied the coveted title of viceroy of New Spain. Instead, the conquistador was granted the title of Marqués of the Valley of Oaxaca, a title that included over 23,000 subjects in one of the wealthiest regions of New Spain. Cortés chose to build his palace just thirty miles from Mexico City, in Cuernavaca where he held an encomienda. See Martínez, Hernán Cortés, for a full biography. 67.  Ibid., 795. 68.  Pagden, “Identity Formation in Spanish America,” 54–56. By the seventeenth century the title of Marqués del Valle belonged to an Italian branch of the family, the Pignatellis. When the Constitution of 1814 abolished hereditary titles in Mexico, the title became dormant for most of the next century and a half. In the late twentieth century members of the Pignatelli family attempted to reinstate the title. The majorat that details the succession of the title requires all Marqueses del Valle to take the surname and coat of arms of Cortés. See Martínez, Hernán Cortés. 69.  One example is the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) politician from Jalisco, Hernán Cortés Berumen. Lanyon, however, interviews an ancestor of Cortés’s mestizo son in Tepoztlan and follows popular memory about him. See The New World of Martin Cortes, 242–50. Just one informant recalled a direct connection: her late Nahua-speaking nanny, Ana Cortés, was a descendant of the conquistador but died without offspring (Lilian Álvarez, interview). 70. García, Crónica oficial de las fiestas del primer centenario de la independencia de México. 71. Lockhart, We People Here; Townsend, “Glimpses of Native American Historiography.” 72.  Asselbergs, “Recovering Forgotten Memories.” 73.  The importance of space, memory, and naming are often noted. See, for example, Earle, The Return of the Native, 48; Megged and Wood, Mesoamerican Memory, 7–8; and Craib, introduction to Cartographic Mexico. 74.  My thanks to Travis Williams for this valuable insight. 75.  Patricia Ybarra argues that Tlaxcalans perform a certain conquest using “the power of history in Mexico as an explanatory tool for understanding the present and shaping the future”; these interpretations of conquest history help shape their group and individual identities. See Performing Conquest, 11. 76.  J. Lara, City, Temple, Stage. 77. Lomnitz-Adler, Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico, 165–96. 78.  Asselbergs, “Recovering Forgotten Memories,” 33. 79.  See also Ruiz Medrano, Mexico’s Indigenous Communities, 211–73. 80.  Klor de Alva, “Religious Rationalization and the Conversions of the Nahua.” 81.  EZLN’s first manifesto (January 1994) did not use the word “indigenous,” but it appeared more than two dozen times in a subsequent manifesto (March 1994) (Peter Guardino, personal correspondence). In 2006 EZLN launched “La otra campaña” to work with other indigenous and international groups. After a period of more limited visibility, EZLN reemerged in December 2012 with a massive demonstration (about 40,000 people), the largest mobilization of the EZLN since 1994, and Subcomandante Marcos released several more “comunicaciones.” 82.  Ruiz Medrano, Mexico’s Indigenous Communities; Cadena and Starn, Indigenous Experience Today. 83. Ross, El Monstruo.

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84. Ybarra, Performing Conquest, 10. 85.  Barstow and Bertrab, “The Bribery Aisle.” 86.  C. S. Pardo and Gispert, “El fraude electoral en favor del PRI.” 87.  Ruiz Medrano discusses the effects of NAFTA on land reform. See Mexico’s Indigenous Communities, 213–16. 88. Chorba, Mexico, from Mestizo to Multicultural, 1. 89.  Frequently, however, local Spaniards did not honor these privileges. See Gibson, Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century. 90. Ross, El Monstruo. 91. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain; Matthew, Memories of Conquest; S. G. Wood, Transcending Conquest. 92.  Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone.” 93.  In his work on Mexican folklore and interview processes, John McDowell notes a similar pattern. A tension emerged between two modes of exposition: the recitative, based on a set narrative framework, and the exegetical, based on lived experience to explicate a set narrative. He concludes that the personal story ultimately overshadows the official narrative. See “Rethinking Folklorization in Ecuador,” 187. 94.  Russo suggests this process was not transculturation, colonial semiosis, or hybridity, but rather “untranslatability,” a visual language in continual transformation, a result of tensions, “extreme conflicts and even disorientation.” See Russo and Emanuel, The Untranslatable Image, 4. 95. Carrera, Traveling from New Spain to Mexico. 96.  See, for example, the Chicano artist and author Guillermo Gómez-Peña.

Part I 1.  Sahagún, “Book XII of the Florentine Codex.” 2.  The Crown had overruled Cortés’s recommendation to establish the government seat in Medellín, just outside the port of Veracruz, where Cortés had a house. 3.  By 1570 only two hundred Spaniards lived in Veracruz, beside six hundred slaves of African heritage. See Landers and Robinson, Slaves, Subjects and Subversives, 118. 4. Burns, Into the Archive. 5.  Rodríguez Alvarado, Los Tuxtlas. 6.  The Chamulas have an important highland presence. See anthropologist Gary H. Gossen’s Four Creations. 7.  For more on the history of Afro-Mexicans, see Lewis, Chocolate and Corn Flour. 8. Russo, The Untranslatable Image. 9.  Faustino Rodríguez’s mesa, or group, was based in the rural state of Mexico, Tepetlixpla. He successfully carried out what concheros call “conquistas” by increasing the number of followers in his mesa. See Rostas, Carrying the Word, 152–57. 10.  Garner, “Aztec Dance, Transnational Movements.” 11. Stevenson, Music in Aztec and Inca Territory, 87–89, 118, 224. 12.  Many groups travel to at least one of the five religious sites that form a sacred circle around the valley of Mexico, each a sacred site in both pre-Hispanic and Spanish times: Santiago Tlateloco at the center, with Guadalupe to the north, Remedios to the west, Chalma to the south, and Sacromonte to the east. See Garner, “Aztec Dance, Transnational Movements”; Rostas, Carrying the Word; Bonfil Batalla, México profundo. 13.  Stresser-Péan, “El volador”; Urcid, “Antigüedad y distribución de la danza de los Voladores.” 14.  Rozat Dupeyron, Indios imaginarios e indios reales en los relatos de la conquista de México. 15.  See Rozat Dupeyron, Memorias del seminario de historiografía de Xalapa.

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Notes to Pages 79–142

16.  Academia Veracruzana de las Lenguas Indígenas, “Catálogo de las lenguas indígenas y sus variantes lingüisticas del estado de Veracruz.” 17.  Aguirre Beltrán, Regiones de refugio.

Part II 1.  Yúdice, “La reconfiguración de políticas culturales y mercados culturales”; Williams, “Reading and Rereading the Conquest.” 2.  Cadena and Starn examine core elements of these newer tendencies in globalized indigenous movements in Indigenous Experience Today. Ruiz Medrano studies the role of land and indigenous community in Mexico’s Indigenous Communities. 3. Ybarra, Performing Conquest, studies this performative role in Tlaxcala. 4.  My thanks to José Rodríguez. 5. Cortés, Cartas de relación, 178–79. 6.  García Quintana and Martínez Marín, introduction to El lienzo de Tlaxcala. 7. Hassig, Mexico and the Spanish Conquest, 21. 8.  For more on sixteenth-century Tlaxcala and its government, see chaps. 2 and 3 of Gibson, Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century. 9. Ybarra, Performing Conquest. 10.  Ruiz Medrano studies the historical context for the continued link between sacred lands and histories in Mexico’s Indigenous Communities. 11.  García Quintana and Martínez Marín, El lienzo de Tlaxcala. 12.  For competing accounts, see Díaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España; Cortés, Cartas de relación; Sahagún, “Book XII of the Florentine Codex.” 13. Villa-Flores, Dangerous Speech, 132–33. 14. Taylor, Indigeneity in the Mexican Cultural Imagination. 15. Hamnett, A Concise History of Mexico, 68; Gruzinski, The Conquest of Mexico. 16.  There has been extensive scholarly debate about the meaning of “sincretismo” and its ideological role. See, for example, McNally, “The Practice of Native American Christianity.” 17. Rostas, Carrying the Word, 89. 18.  Ibid., xv–xviii. 19.  See Ashwell and O’Leary, Cholula, La Ciudad Sagrada = Cholula, The Sacred City. 20.  As mentioned in the introduction, many of these were recognized as ejidos, or communal lands, after the Revolution. An official registry of indigenous communities (Registro Nacional de Pueblos y Comunidades Indígenas) was only approved in 2011, to be administered by the Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas (CDI). See CDI, “Dictámenes de la Comisión de Asuntos Indígenas en la Cámara Baja.” 21. Hassig, Mexico and the Spanish Conquest, 78. 22.  Margarita Piña Loredo and Mónica Alejandra Rosales Salazar argue that when Calpan was established as a district capital, or cabecera, with a vicariate, or vicaría, it had seven pueblos de visita, or secondary towns, San Mateo Ozolco among them. See “El Archivo de San Buenaventura Nealtican.” 23.  Kilpatrick, “Mi Casa, Su Casa.” 24. Thomas, The Conquest of Mexico. 25.  Cuadriello cites Mendieta’s Historia eclesiástica, 2:122–23, to recall the friar’s emphasis on the Indians’ special “sensual perception of the ineffable,” which “made the Indians the ideal first witnesses of the angelophanies that began to spread throughout New Spain. The first and most important of these was the famous apparition of St. Michael to the Tlaxcalan Indian Diego Lázaro, whose precise purpose was the expulsion of the devil and the extirpation of his idolatries.” See “Winged and Imagined Indians,” 229.

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26.  For more on the significance of cabeceras, see Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest, 47–58. 27.  Asselbergs studies the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan, also known as the Lienzo de Huaquechula, which depicts this conquest history following conventions that still closely adhere to preHispanic pictorial practices. See “Recovering Forgotten Memories,” 36–46. 28.  Gidwitz, “Cuauhtinchan,” 26–29. 29.  Ruiz Medrano’s study of a town in the state of Oaxaca is illustrative of how the use of community history aids in contemporary quests for land rights; see Mexico’s Indigenous Communities, 211–73. 30.  Carrasco and Sessions, Cave, City, and Eagle’s Nest; Gidwitz, “Cuauhtinchan,” 26–29. 31.  Asselbergs, “Recovering Forgotten Memory,” 50–51. 32.  J. Lara studies the construction of Puebla as a new Jerusalem. See City, Temple, and Stage, 104–7. See also Arvizu’s study of colonial Queretaro, Space and Place in the Mexican Landscape, for the role of Spanish cities as a metaphysical spiritual community. 33.  I thank Pablo García for this observation. 34.  Aguirre Beltrán, Regiones de refugio. 35.  The Ley Federal de Radio y Televisión (last amended September 4, 2012) does not mention indigenous communities per se, but articles 4 and 5 characterize radio as a “publicinterest activity” that has the “social function of strengthening national integration and improving human coexistence.” This could be interestingly interpreted vis-à-vis separate radio programming for indigenous communities, especially the language bent toward national, moral, “harmonious” development of youth, and family matters. Article 8 places everything relative to radio under federal jurisdiction. See T. Lara, “Nueva ley de radios indígenas favorece al duopolio de televisoras en México,” and Fregoso and Gaytán, “México,” for the 2004 revisitation of the Ley de Medios in a critical context, asking what happens when society is engaged as an active agent in filtering the social messages broadcast through radio.

Part III 1. Ross, El Monstruo, 15. 2.  See Cué, Herrera, and Mondragón, Todo cabe en una cuenca. 3.  Ibid., 29. 4.  Matos Moctezuma and Carrasco, Moctezuma’s Mexico, 33. 5. Cortés, Cartas de relación. 6. Connell, After Moctezuma. 7. Curcio-Nagy, The Great Festivals of Colonial Mexico, 27–29. 8.  Beginning with the marriage of Cortés’s great-granddaughter (the heir to both the title of the Marqués del Valle de Oaxaca and the hospital) to the Italian Pignatelli family, the hospital was run from overseas. In 1932, after Mexico’s post-Revolutionary government demanded that the Cortés heirs live in Mexico or forfeit their claim to the hospital, they turned it over to the Mexican state. In 1962 Julián Gascón became the second hospital director outside the Cortés family. To honor the founder, he placed the replica of the Pignatelli y Cortés family’s bust of the conquistador in the hospital courtyard. The hospital was the first in the Americas to practice dissection (1640s) and require medical residencies (1700). See Gascón Mercado, Breve historia del hospital de Jesús. 9.  According to legend, the Mexica came from Aztlan, someplace to the north; for some it is the area that is now the U.S. Southwest. 10.  Julián Gascón, Aztlán (2008). Gascón has published dozens of books, ranging from histories of the hospital to studies of Nayarit campesinos and Huichol indigenous gods, as well as collections of his political letters, poetry, and short stories.

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Notes to Pages 203–231

11.  As I discuss in the introduction, when it proved difficult to conduct an interview in an informant’s home or a public place, select interviews were conducted via Skype. 12.  Of the 112 households, 40 report extreme levels of poverty. See Bolaños Sánchez, “San Pablo Tepetlapa, de entorno amenazador a sitio pintoresco.” 13. Martínez Baracs, La perdida ‘Relación de la Nueva España y su conquista’ de Juan Cano, 19. 14.  Ibid., 25. 15.  The city has long been associated with sorcery: it is the legendary home of the sorceress Malinalxochitl, sister to the patron deity of Tenochtitlan, Huitzilopochtli. 16. In Forjando patria, Gamio declared: “It is evident that anthropology, truly and broadly conceived, must be the basic knowledge for practicing good governance, since it is the means for knowing the population, which is the raw material for governing and the object of governance.” 17.  Matos Moctezuma also notes this trajectory in Mexico’s archaeology. See “Las corrientes arqueológicas en México.” 18.  The most recent trend, however, has been to register a newer category, Intangible Cultural Heritage, such as the voladores. See Higelin Ponce de León, “La idea del México en el siglo XX y XXI.” 19.  López Arenas, “Decapitación y desmembramiento en rituales del recinto ceremonial de Tenochtitlan.” 20. This interview took place in 2006, about the time the EZLN began “La otra campaña,” in which they were trying to establish ties with other indigenous groups. In late 2012 there was a massive mobilization of EZLN, and Subcomandante Marcos reappeared and released several documents. See El Pais: http://internacional.elpais.com/tag/ezln_ejercito_ zapatista_liberacion_nacional/a/. 21.  See Rama, La ciudad letrada; Rabasa, “Pre-Columbian Pasts and Indian Presents in Mexican History.” 22.  Before 1992, textbooks combined history and civics, but with increased input from organizations such as the powerful Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (SNTE), SEP decided to separate the two subjects. 23.  Álvarez Arellano, Formación cívica y ética: Tercer grado, 7. 24.  Ibid., 25. 25.  See www.bigbangmex.unam.mx. 26.  The Huasteca region in eastern Mexico includes six indigenous ethnic groups and about a quarter-million native speakers of indigenous languages, with Nahuatl being the dominant language (70 percent Nahuatl, 20 percent Huastec, 6 percent Otomi, about 3 percent Pame, Tepehua, and Totonac). See the Academia Veracruzana de las Lenguas Indígenas, “Catálogo de las lenguas indígenas y sus variantes lingüísticas del estado de Veracruz.” 27.  See www.mhernandez95.wordpress.com. 28.  Isabel Moctezuma’s marriage to Gallego Andrade produced a son, Juan Gallego Andrade Moctezuma. The Cano-Moctezuma palace still stands in Cáceres, Spain. 29.  See Patrick Johansson’s article “The Death of Moctezuma” for a good summary and ample bibliography for the accounts of Moctezuma’s death. Johansson’s sources include the Anales de Cuauhtitlan, in Bierhorst, Codex Chimalpopoca; Tezozomoc, Crónica mexicana; Durán, Historia de las indias de Nueva España e islas de tierra firme; and Cervantes de Salazar, Crónica de la Nueva España. The Codex Moctezuma in the Biblioteca del INAH (Matrícula de tributos, ed. Berdan and Durand-Forest) shows an image and text alleging that Moctezuma was killed by strangulation, in the same manner as Cacamatzin, a tlatoani of Texcoco, and Ytzcu­auhtzin, governor-general of Tlatelolco. Alva Ixtlilxochitl (Obras históricas) writes that the Spaniards say he was killed by a rock, while indigenous informants say he was speared in the groin. See book 12 of the Florentine Codex, in Lockhart, We People Here.

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30.  Fernando Cervantes notes that Juan de Palafox recommended in 1645 that the king change the municipal coat of arms to include an image of an angel bearing a cross, and argued that indigenous devotion to Saint Michael would “help the process of ethnic integration throughout the diocese.” Michael also appears in various roles—as judge, jailer, and herald, for example—in Nahuatl theater of the colonial period. See Cervantes, “How to See Angels,” 94, 104–6, 108, 112.

Part IV 1.  Recent studies note similar tendencies with nineteenth-century U.S. expansionism and with the adoption of NAFTA. See Saldivar, The Borderlands of Culture, 25–29; Carrera, Traveling from New Spain to Mexico; Ybarra, Performing Conquest, 3–5; Craib, epilogue to Cartographic Mexico. 2.  Ratha et al., “Migration and Development Brief 20.” 3.  According to one report, “remittances are second only to petroleum in generating foreign exchange for Mexico.” See Julia Preston, “Fewer Mexican Immigrants Are Sending Money Back Home” (New York Times, August 9, 2007, A10), cited in Sheridan, “I Know It’s Dangerous,” 10. In 2009 the flow of foreign remittances into Mexico constituted 3 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, outpacing direct foreign investment by a ratio of more than 1.5:1. See the Migration Policy Institute, “The Global Remittances Guide.” 4.  P. Taylor, “Politics and Race”; P. Taylor et al., “An Awakened Giant.” See also http://www .pewhispanic.org/2013/02/15/hispanic-population-trends/ph_13–01–23_ss_hispanics1/. 5.  Gutiérrez, “Migration, Emergent Ethnicity, and the ‘Third Space.’” 6.  As Gutiérrez notes, about 100,000 Mexican inhabitants living in these territories were officially cut off from the nation of their cultural roots. They became “doubly marginalized.” Ineligible for Mexican citizenship and blocked from full integration into the United States, they developed urban barrios and rural colonias where they had relative autonomy. See ibid. 7. Sheridan, “I Know It’s Dangerous,” 16. 8.  Gutiérrez, “Migration, Emergent Ethnicity, and the ‘Third Space.’” 9. Vázquez, The United States and Mexico. 10. Cadava, Standing on Common Ground. 11.  The National Foundation for American Policy reports that more than 4,000 men, women, and children died attempting to cross the border between 1998 and 2009, with more than 417 deaths reported in 2009 alone. See Anderson, “Death at the Border”; Sheridan, “I Know It’s Dangerous,” 22. 12.  “Latinos” is the grassroots term used for Hispanics, the U.S. official government term used since 1977. The politics of race/ethnicity is clear from the 2010 U.S. census. When the category of “Hispanic” was changed to an ethnicity rather than a race, there was a dramatic growth in the Hispanic population self-identifying as “white.” 13. Smith, Mexican New York. 14. Chavez, Shadowed Lives; Oboler, “Redefining Citizenship as a Lived Experience.” 15.  The image of Latinos has become increasingly polarized in U.S. media and popular culture—as seductive icons or dangerous thugs. See Nieto-Phillips, “Echoes of Colonialism,” 249–55. 16. Chavez, Shadowed Lives, 8. 17.  Just a year after the interview, President Barack Obama signed into legislation a pathway to citizenship, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (2012), for which her oldest son will be eligible. 18.  Women often personify social change in traditional family structures as they themselves begin to change. As women find work outside the home and men can’t, traditional family roles are disrupted. Women in these situations are therefore often seen as a threat to patriarchy in borderland, immigrant situations. See Corona and Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, “Gender Violence.”

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Notes to Pages 278–318

19.  García Moreno stepped down from his position as ambassador in 2007, but continues serving in government roles. 20.  Doctor Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). 21. Esteva, Celebración del zapatismo. 22.  Cortés is currently preparing a book that examines the writings of the Tepanec leader: “Proyecciones y reflexiones mexica-tenochca en la colonia: El caso de Hernando de Alvarado Tezozómoc” (Mexica-Tenochca Projections and Reflections in the Colonial Period: The Case of Hernando de Alvardo Tezozomoc). 23.  See Carrasco, “Myth, Cosmic Terror, and the Templo Mayor.” 24.  See Cascante, “Cortés y sus 9 entierros.” 25.  Ison, “Faces of Immigration.” 26.  Quoted in ibid.

Conclusion 1. Nora, Les lieux de mémoire. 2.  Cadena and Starn, “Afterwards, ” Indigenous Experience Today. 3.  Peña, “A New Mexican Nationalism?”; Higelin Ponce de León, “La idea del México en el siglo XX y XXI.” 4.  Yúdice, “La reconfiguración de políticas culturales y mercados culturales en los noventa y el siglo XXI en América Latina.” 5.  Trevor Stack makes this observation in his more local oral history project, “The Skewing of History in Mexico.”

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. academics: and imperialism, 293, 313; and national narrative, 316 Acuerdos de San Andrés sobre Derechos y Cultura Indígena (1996), 279 Afro-Hispanic heritage: erasure of, from Mexican textbooks, 17, 20; increasing recognition of, 10–11, 20, 316; informants on, 61, 90; limited Mexican awareness of, 20; Veracruz and, 37, 54, 56, 61, 63 agriculture, traditional, replacement with monocultures, 79–80 Aguilar, Gerónimo, 25 Alianza por México, 35 altepetl, 31, 85 Alvarado, Jorge, 145 Alvarado, Pedro de, 25, 56, 58, 191 Alvarado Huanitzin, Diego de, 287 Álvarez Arellano, Lilian, 224–27, 253– 54, 316 Antigua de la Veracruz, 67–69; Cruz de Mayo celebration in, 31–32, 37, 69–76; historical sites in, 66–67; history of, 50, 66; identification with local indigenous customs, 72; informant interview excerpts, 87–92; informant profiles, 67–70, 72–76; limited impact of Spanish conquest in, 75; loss of tradition in, 68–69; modern life in, 66; pride in Spanish heritage in, 66; religion in, 75; voladores ceremony in, 72–75, 73, 74 archaeology: increased support for, 217; political uses of, 218; state use of, to fossilize indigenous culture, 78

Aristegi, Carmen, 222 authoritarian tradition in Mexico, 282 Aztec calendar, plate 2.3 Aztec dance: codex depictions of, 71; competing schools of, 133–34; Cortés’s interest in, 70; at Cruz de Mayo celebrations, 69–70; efforts to revive, 132–34, 133, 175, 213–15; evocations of Cuauhtemoc in, 28; and experience of origins, 275; history of, 70–71; in Mexico City zócalo, 191, 193, 218–19; modern observance of anniversary of fall of Tenochtitlan, 191; nonindigenous interest in, 70; renewed interest in, 10, 11, 78, 258 Aztecization of pre-Hispanic cultures, resistance to, 214–15, 217, 223, 317 Aztecs: battle against Spanish, plate 2.2; conquered peoples’ preference for Spanish over, 197–98, 239, 282, 302; empire of, 190–91; legendary northern origins of, 269 Barrón López, Mauro Luis, 208–11, 231, 246 Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, 212–13 Beatos Niños Mártires (Hernández), 112 Beltrán, Aguirre, 160 bicentennial celebration (2010), 193 Black Legend, 19, 20, 114, 288, 308–10 Bloomington (Indiana), Mexicans in, 265, 272; informant profiles, 272–93; interview selections, 294–313 Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo, 35, 162, 285, 305 Bonifaz Nuño, Ruben, 226 Bonilla, Lorenzo, 34 Bonilla López, René, 101–4, 106–7, 138, 163–65, 230, 315 Bracero Program, 270

347

348 

Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Las Casas), 29 Bush, George W., 285, plate 1.11 caciquismo, ongoing, in rural areas, 81–82, 85 Calderón, Felipe, 23, 193, 317 calidad system, 20–21 Calpan, 139–40 Cano de Saavedra, Juan, 211, 231, 331n57 capitalism, as ongoing conquest, 35, 210, 289, 311–12 Carballo, Mardonio, 31, 221–23, 237, 251–53, 279, 315 Carrasco, David, 150, 287 La Casa Cortés (Antiqua de la Veracruz), 66, 67–69, plate 1.1 casta system: and calidad, 20–21; categories in, 13, 19–20; in 18th century, plate 2.5; long history of, 234 Castellanos, Rosario, 253 Catholic Church, 21, 54, 60, 193, 291. See also religious conquest Catholicism, 76, 83, 89 cattle ranching, as Spanish heritage, 144 Cave, City, and Eagle’s Nest (Carrasco), 150 centennial celebration (1910), 27, 30 Centro de Derechos Humanos Toaltepeyolo, 82–85 Cerro de Metate, 65, 66 Chagoya, Enrique, 271, plate 2.7 Chichimecateuctli, 107, 165 chinelo dance, 212–14 Cholula: Aztec dancers in, 132–34, 133; as colonial república de indios, 39, 118; conquest as living memory in, 120, 125; cultural life in, 39, 120, plate 1.5; history of, 118; image of as victim, 119, 123; indigenous market in, 122, 125–27, 126, 170–72; informant interview excerpts, 167–77; informant profiles, 122–35; layers of culture in, 119, 120, 131, 174; local focus of identity in, 120, 130, 173; massacre at, 15, 16, 39, 57, 118, 122, 123–24, 167–68, 171; mix of cultures in, 134; neglect of indigenous culture in, 119–20; sites of memory in, 36; Tlachihualtepetl pyramid in, 12; young people’s desire for modern lifestyle, 122, 127, 170–71 Cholula, La Cuidad Sagrada (O’Leary), 134–35

• Index

Cholula, pre-Hispanic culture in: efforts to revive, 122, 132–34, 174–75; limited public interest in, 176–77; sites of, 118, 120; survival of, 122, 130–31, 132, 173–74 Cinco de Mayo, 39, 77, 141, 151, 205, 272 City of Mexico Museum, 189–90, 195 Ciudad Juárez, drug-related violence in, 276–77, 277, 298–99 civic education, textbooks and, 224–25, 253 Codex Espangliensis (Gómez-Peña), 271, plate 2.7, plate 2.8 Codex Mendoza, 186, plate 2.1 codices: functions of, 13–14; as post-conquest creations, 226, 254 Colibrí (periodical), 162 Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas (CDI), 9, 199–200 comunidades indígenas: Cuauhtinchan efforts to become, 150, 178–79; difficulty of obtaining recognition as, 185; ejidos system and, 334n20; in Puebla-Tlaxcala valley, 138 conchero movement, 41, 69–71, 91–92, 132, 174–75, 258. See also Aztec dance Congreso Nacional de Comunicación Indígena, 223 conquest narrative: broad use of by Mexicans, 35, 265, 266–67, 317, 318; repeated refashioning of, 314 The Conquest of Mexico (Thomas), 102 Constitution of 1824, 23–24, 285, 305 Constitution of 1917: and erasure of indigenous cultures, 23–24; and indigenous rights, 8–9, 80, 254–55, 329n18; and land reform, 23, 247 Cortés, Hernán, x, 3–5; as archetype in Mexican imagination, 29–30; association with Quetzalcoatl, 26, 168; burial of, 3, 29, 189; descendants’ refusal to identify with, 29, 226–27, 332n69; life of, xviii, 3, 25, 29, 49–50, 141, 167–69, 331–32n66, 332n68; on massacre at Cholula, 118; and mestizaje, 19; and Mexican foundational myth, 78; modern commemorations of, 30, 67, 153, 195, 226, 288, 309–10, 335n8, plate 2.6; modern name recognition of, 42; offspring of, 19, 25, 29, 115; in 16th century codex, 16; in Tepeaca, 144; varying accounts of, 28–29. See also Noche Triste

Index 

Cortés, informants’ views on: as adventurer, 304; as clever, 87, 88; contradictory accounts of, 238; criminality of, 58, 87–88, 123, 159, 183; cruelty of, 56, 57, 58, 87, 110, 122, 202, 211, 239, 312; determination of, 303–4; as great man, 115, 159, 167, 183, 286; as human, 110, 239; as manipulator, 57, 130, 172–73, 218, 248–49; as man of his times, 130, 172–73; need for positive assessment of, 288, 309–10; as one of several possible conquerors, 239–40; as pirate, 236, 262; as Renaissance man, 288, 309; as tragic figure, 288, 309; as traitor, 123, 168 Cortés, Rocío Navarro, 272, 286–87, 306–8, 316 Cortés’s palace (Cuernavaca), 29, 45 Coyoacan, 197; artisans’ expulsion from public square, 198–201, 201, 241–44; Casa Malinche in, 201–2, plate 1.7 creole, as term, 13 criollo, as term, 13 Cristo Rey festival, in Xochiojca, 83 Crónica Mexicáyotl (Tezozomoc), 287 Cruz de Mayo festival, 31–32, 37, 53, 64, 69–76 Cruz Velázquez, Romeo, 58–60, 87–88, 89–90 Cuauhtemoc, 17, 18, 25, 28–30, 36, 133, 169, 175, 303, 304 Cuauhtinchan, 137, 138, 148, 149, 150, 155, 177–78; codices from, 34, 148, 149, 149, 150, 178; efforts to become comunidades indígenas, 150, 178–79; informant interview excerpts, 177–79; informant profiles, 148–50 Cuetzalan, 104, 158–59, 182–83 Cuizpalli, Ernesto, 132–34, 133, 174–75 cultural homogeneity, as goal, 13, 34, 41, 103 dance: chinelo dance, 212–14; danza de los quetzales, 157; danzas de moros y cristianos, 63–64; and ethnic identity, 71; of the “negritos,” 33; pre-Hispanic, impossibility of recovering, 91–92. See also Aztec dance; conchero movement de la Cruz Martínez, María, 199, 241–42, 242–43 Día de la Raza celebrations, protests against, 222

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349

Día de los Muertos, 80, 107–8, 145–47, 146, 147, 205, 245–46, 267, 280 Díaz, Bernal, 25, 29, 39–40, 56–57, 110, 118, 187–88, 192 Díaz, Porfirio, 8, 23, 192, 288 Diego, Fred, 265, 267, 272, 289–93, 290, 310–13 drug violence in Mexico, 277; death toll in, 267; informants on, 267, 275–76, 298–99; social stratification and, 234; as type of conquest, 311, 317 Durán, Diego, xviii, plate 2.2 economic crises, as conquest, 35, 208, 317 education: in indigenous communities, 155– 58, 179–82, 230, 285, 306; indigenous desire for, 179–80, 181; informants on, 169, 210, 212, 314; intercultural, 227–28; in native language, right to, 230, 254. See also textbooks on conquest Ehrenberg, Marlene, 6, 269, 317 ejido system, 23, 35, 40, 79–80, 82, 206, 281–82, 317, 331n47, 334n20 El Cerro de Tzompantepec, 108, 110, 111–12 elites: efforts to unseat, 285; imaginary Mexico created by, 35, 285, 305, 306; and Mexican-American War, 303 Elliot, J. H., 211–12 encomienda system, 17, 19, 137–38 English language, and U.S. imperialism, 267 Escritores en Lenguas Indígenas, 219 Esteva, Gustavo, 34, 283–86, 284, 304–6, 316 ethnic identity: calidad system and, 20; changes in terminology, 13; Constitution of 1824 and, 23; in contemporary self-narratives, 21; dance and, 71; as Eurocentric, 13; flexibility of, 21; indigenous, accounts of, 7–10; movements to reframe, 10–11, 36. See also identity, individual; Mexican identity ethnocide, politics of, 23 EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional). See Zapatistas Feast of Corpus Christi, 192, 193, 218–19 fiesta de la tlahuanca, 174 fiestas patronales, 23, 31–32, 33, 63–64, 76, 91, 103, 144, 235–36, 271–72 Flores Bautista, Cynthia, 158–59, 182–83

350 

Fortuno Hernández, Lucía, 54, 61–62, 62, 90–91, 316 Fox, Vincente, 199, 282 Franciscans, 21, 22, 23, 28, 128–30, 138, 148, 156, 172, 178 Francisco de Asís monastery (Tepeaca), 144 Fuentes, Carlos, 8, 13, 26 Gadsden Purchase, 269 Galicia Muñoz, Gilberto, 130–31, 173–74, plate 1.4 Gallego de Andrade, Pedro, 231, 336n28 Gamio, Manuel, 218, 336n16 García, Alberto, 155, 156, 157, 179–81 García, Ernesto Figueroa, 5, 122, 123, 167–69 García, Isabel, 122–23, 124–25, 169–70 García Bonilla, Lorenzo, 138, 148–50, 177–79 García Bustos, Arturo, 202, plate 1.7 García Guadarrama, Abel, 213 García Moreno, Alejandro, 11, 35, 278–80, 300–302, 315 Gascón, Julián, 36, 195–96, 335n8, 335n10 General Law on Linguistic Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 9, 254 globalization, 35, 164, 212, 279–80, 283 Gómez, Jesús, plate 2.9 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 271, plate 2.7 Gordillo de Anda, Gustavo, 8, 21, 30, 280–83, 302–4 Les grands voyages (de Bry), 20 Guardianes de la Memoria Oral, 80, 81 guerrilla groups, proliferation of, 252 hacienda system, ongoing use of, 81–82, 85 Hermitage of the Virgen del Rosario (Antigua de la Veracruz), 66–67, 67 Hernández, Isaac, 67–69 Hernández, Sergio, 106, 112 Hernández Beatriz, Marcelino, 227–31, 254–59, 315 Hernández Xochitiotzin, Desiderio, 107, 112–15, 113, 116, 166 Hidalgo y Costilla, Miguel, 8, 18, 225 history of Mexico: complex manipulations of, 30; and critique of Indians, 212, 247; cultural layers in, 11–13, 41, 138; and cultural revival, 215; difficulty of erasing, 196; lack of, informants on, 78,

• Index

93; local alternative forms of, 46, 102, 108–10, 112, 113–14, 115–17, 160, 184; Mexicans’ yearning for true contact with, 77–78; objective, importance of, 163; power of interpretations of, 13; younger generation’s views on, 184 Hospital de Jesús (Mexico City), 3, 29, 36, 195–96, 288, 335n8 Huaquechula, 137, 143, 145–47, 146, 147 Huejotzingo, 141–43 Huejotzingo Codex, 142, 143 Huitzilopochtli, 190, 191 human beings, role in pre-Hispanic cosmology, 226 identity, individual: cultural layers within, 112; of Mexicans in U.S., 272–73, 275, 277, 278, 286–87, 291, 292, 293, 299, 307–8; negotiation of, 315. See also ethnic identity; Mexican identity identity narratives, Mexican, resilience of, 280 Iguanazul (periodical), 219, 220, 221, plate 1.10 immigrants, undocumented: challenges faced by, 273–74, 276–77, 291, 294–99, 308, 310; dislike of “illegal” label, 272, 310; and education funding, 290, 310; establishment of U.S. life by, 270, 274, 275, 295–96; legal plight of children of, 274, 296–97; profiles of, 273–78, 289–93 INAH. See Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia indigenismo movement, 8, 13, 24, 330n25 indigenous, as term, 13 indigenous ceremonies: authentic, lack of, 78, 93; declining use of, 80; for tourists, 90–91 indigenous communities: education in, 155–58, 179–82, 230, 285, 306; ejido system and, 281–82; emigration from, 10, 80, 83, 86, 141, 184, 193, 204–6, 208–10, 228–30, 243, 245–47, 257–58, 262, 315–16; evolving narrative of, 318; growth of, 185; increased political activism by, 155, 162, 164, 180, 183–84, 221–23, 234, 251–53; ineffectiveness of government aid to, 89, 94, 199–200, 206, 210, 212, 255–56, 258–59; key issues for, 34; lack of respect for, 60, 62, 86, 91; loss

Index 

of control over resources, 85, 111–12; marginalization of, 77–78, 249, 254; and medical care, 83–85; poverty in, 201, 204–5, 206, 262; pressures faced by, 10, 79–80, 138; as “real” Mexico, 35; religion in, 21, 153, 156, 202, 218, 236, 247, 248; special legal status for, 101; survival of, 79–86, 90, 126–27; in Veracruz state, 79. See also other indigenous-specific topics indigenous communities, degree of autonomy: as issue, 60, 85, 90, 160–62, 179, 185; under Spanish rule, 19, 34, 60, 82, 90 indigenous cultures: emigration and, 243; iconic historical figures representing, 25–28; losses of, 158, 164; many faces of, 316; modern efforts to erase, 8, 23–25, 34; music in, 90; and paternalism, 220; policy on as issue, 239, 282, 316; recent government recognition of, 9–10, 184, 185, 230, 301, 314–15, 316; recent revival of interest in, 8, 10, 64, 232, 306–7, 315; as “vanquished,” 34–35, 42, 77. See also pre-Hispanic cultures indigenous cultures, preservation of: economic model and, 185; efforts toward, 69, 101–4, 149–50, 164, 213–15, 227–31, 284–86, 285, 316; rhetoric vs. reality of, 127, 160, 185, 222, 255, 314 indigenous languages, 79, 220; declining use of, 122, 127, 141, 170–71, 184, 230, 254, 315; efforts to preserve, 10, 219–23, 250, 251, 256, 257, 315; and identity, 227, 257; official recognition of, 5, 9, 80, 254–55; stereotyping of, 223, 250, 251, 254; value of, informants on, 219 indigenous people: bilingualism in, as goal, 256; different worldview of, 92, 154, 160, 258–59; difficulty of access to, 44; elite manipulation of, 208; identity, accounts of, 7–10; illiteracy among, 255–56; loss of roots by, 209, 229–30, 256–57, 261, 275; modern failure to value, 217, 218, 249–50, 316–17; modern lifestyle of, 334n25; ongoing exploitation of, 143, 156, 158, 170, 180, 199, 222, 234, 254, 313; resentment of government by, 60, 89; self-perception as ignorant, 122, 125, 126, 127, 170, 171; stigma attached to, 122, 125, 127, 153–54, 164, 170, 183,

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351

197, 218–19, 221–22, 229–30, 240, 246–47, 249, 250, 251, 252–53, 284, 304–5, 317; young people’s desire for modern lifestyle and, 122, 127, 141, 170–71, 184, 230, 315 indigenous rights: indigenous people’s lack of knowledge about, 255–56; legal aid and, 199–200; need for full recognition of, 185 indio: exoticization of, 318; as term, 13, 23–24, 316 Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), 35, 100–101, 108, 177–78, 210, 217, 218, 317 Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI), 9, 199 interviews: dominant narrative sequences in, 34–36; methodology, 42–45 Ixtacamaxtitlan. See San Francisco de Ixtacamaxtitlan Ixtepec, fiesta patronal in, 103 Juárez, Benito, 151, 210 Kahlo, Frida, 202, 278, 300, 307 land: expropriation of, 17; indigenous rights and, 23, 32, 34, 35; Revolutionera reforms in, 23, 206–8, 247. See also ejido system law, rule of, Mexico and, 176, 298–99 Lazo, Rina, 201–3, 203, 240, 317, plate 1.7 León-Portilla, Miguel, 34, 77, 132, 220, 221, 223, 225–26, 251, 253–54, 289 Ley Federal de Radio y Televisión, 335n35 Lienzo de Tlaxcala, 16, 114 López, Vicente, 193, 235–36 López Arenas, Gabino, 216, 217–19, 226, 247–50, 316 López Portillo, José, 111, 185 Lorenzo, Bernardo (Nayo), 51–53, 54 Macuilca, 79–82 Malinalco, 213–15, 214 Malinche, 16, 19, 25, 70, 110; as archetype in Mexican imagination, 25, 29–30; Casa Malinche (Coyoacan), 201–2, plate 1.7; informants on, 114, 197–98, 201–2, 202–3, 239, 240, 277, 288, 309–10; modern commemorations of, 3–5, 67, 107, 114, 288, 309–10, plate 2.6

352 

Mancio Abarca, María del Pilar, 10, 203–8, 219, 231, 244–46 Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2, 149, 150 Marcos, Subcomandante, 8, 188, 188, 193, 206, 210, 279, 336n20, plate 1.9 Martínez Baracs, Rodrigo, 211–12, 232, 246–47, 316 Mazahua, Gabriel, 10, 43, 79–82, 85, 94, 138, 162, 230, 315, 318 media outlets, indigenous right to, 185, 222, 335n35 medical care, indigenous access to, 83–85 mestizaje: cultural homogeneity, as goal, 13, 34, 41, 103; as historical process, 301–2; textbooks on, 19–20; views on, 8, 24–25, 102–3, 163 mestizo, as term, 13, 329–30n20 mestizo identity: muralist movement and, 113; Revolution and, 314; views on, 56, 58–59, 61, 88–89, 197, 219, 221, 251, 262, 288, 316 Mexican-American War: Mexican elite and, 303; Mexican resentment about, 35, 40; Mexican territorial losses in, 35; and U.S. invasion, 51, 52, 53, 53, 56, 58, 63, 92. See also Mexican territory lost to U.S. Mexican government: broadened of Mexican identity to include U.S. residents, 271; as copy of U.S. model, 305; corruption of, 298; engagement with indigenous cultures, 9–10; ineffectiveness of aid to indigenous communities, 89, 94, 199–200, 206, 210, 212, 255–56, 258–59; nationalist project of, 40, 41, 60, 77–78, 90, 93–94, 106, 314; needed restructuring of, 210, 237; as newest conqueror, 206, 208, 215; paternalism of, 220; political uses of archaeology by, 218; responses to indigenous demands, 279; unaccountability of, 210 Mexican identity: academics and, 316; Black Legend and, 308–10; government nationalist project and, 40, 41, 60, 77–78, 90, 93–94, 106, 314; history of, 7–9; lack of history and, 93; and marginalization of indigenous peoples, 77–78; multiculturalism and, 301; and multiple Mexicos, 262; ongoing evolution of, 23; as victims, 7, 93 Mexican territory lost to U.S.: Mexican inhabitants of, 337n6; ongoing

• Index

resentment about, 266, 266–67, 269, 278, 279, 282, 302, 318; as only nominally part of Mexico, 269 Mexico: as cradle of cultures, 246; secularization process in, 21 Mexico City: arrival in, 187–89; commemorations of Cortés in, 3–5; festivals and celebrations in, 187, 218–19; growth of, 195; indigenous immigration to, 200, 208–9, 210; informant interview excerpts, 238–63; informant profiles, 197–215, 217–34; layers of history in, 3, 40, 188, 189; rising importance of pre-Hispanic culture in, 189; and self-knowledge, complexity of, 190; strong sense of history in, 189. See also Tenochtitlan Mexico City, zócalo of: building surrounding, 189, 190, 192, 193; colonial rule and, 190, 192; and continual redefinition of Mexican culture, 190; history of, 190; Templo Mayor in, 11, 11–12, 12, 190, 192, 195, 216, 217; uses of, 188, 191, 192–93, 194, 218–19, 226 México imaginario, 35, 285, 305, 306 México profundo (Bonfil), 35, 285, 305 migration culture of Mexico, 282 Moctezuma, 26; as archetype in Mexican imagination, 25, 29–30; life of, 3, 25–26, 49, 231, 260, 336n29; textbook accounts of, 15, 17; views on, 26, 27, 30, 166, 168, 231, 260, 287, 303, 304 Moctezuma, Isabel (Tecuichpoch), 26, 211, 231–32, 259, 316, 331n57, 336n28 Moctezuma González, Pilar, 231–33, 259–61 Moctezuma II, 145, 190 Montemayor, Carlos, 220, 221, 223, 251 Mora Beltrán, Luz María, 155–58, 179–82 Morales, Francisco, 128–30, 129, 134–35, 138, 172–73 Morales Pérez, Pedro, 72–75 Morón, Pedro de, 107, 165 multiculturalism of Mexico: government efforts to promote, 79–80; and history of inequality, 302; importance of recognition of, 303; informants on, 219, 279; and Mexican identity, 301; new focus on, 41 multinational corporations, conquest by, 289, 311–12 Muñoz Camargo, Diego, 22, 110

Index 

Muñoz Mota, Arturo, 10, 36 muralist movement, 14, 24–25, 45, 112–13, plate 2.6 Muriño, Camilo, 242–43 Museo de Arte Popular, 231, 232–33, 233 NAFTA: as conquest, 35, 267, 271, 289, 311–12, 317; impact on Mexico, 141, 193, 206, 247, 270, 279–80, 289, 311–12; Mexican opposition to, 35, 40, 141, 193, 212, 271 Nahua culture: efforts to save, 101, 127, 132, 220; resilience of, 287. See also Zongolica mountains, Nahua communities in Nahuatl language: characteristics of, 227, 236; communities using, 140, 170, 250–51, 257; declining use of, 80, 122, 127, 147, 149, 170–71, 178, 205, 209, 222, 236; efforts to preserve, 101–2, 117, 122, 127, 221–23, 227–31, 230, 258, 307; numerous dialects of, 228–29; renewed interest in, 10, 232; use of under Spanish rule, 19 Nájera, Pedro, 115–17, 166–67, 315 nationalism, Mexican, 40, 41, 60, 77–78, 90, 93–94, 106, 302, 314 National Palace (Mexico City), murals depicting Spanish in, 24, 45 natural resources, indigenous loss of control over, 85 nature: indigenous harmony with, 230–31; modern lack of respect for, 94 neoliberalism, controversy about, 35, 212 Noche Triste, 15, 52–53, 123–24, 165, 168, 169, 304 Nopaltecatl, Rogoberto, 82–86, 94–95, 138, 162, 219, 230, 315 North American Community, advocates for, 282–83 Obama, Barack, 289, 297, 311, 337n17 O’Gorman, Edmundo, 88–89 O’Leary, John, 134–35, 175–77, 317 Orozco, José Clemente, 3, 24–25, 113, plate 2.6 Oxoteotl, 213 Pacheco, Pílar, 147, 153 Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), 35, 78, 210, 318

• 

353

Paz, Octavio, 7, 174, 210, 289, 316 Pérez Muñoz, Gerardo, 42, 138, 159–62, 161, 183–85, 219, 314 Pilar Mancio, María del, 3, 314 pluralist myths, need for, 283–84, 285–86 pre-Hispanic cultures: complex Spanish interaction with, 17–19, 304; cosmology of, 226; disrespect for knowledge of, 124; idealizing of, 8, 114, 212, 217, 218, 249–50, 304, 316–17; organization around altepetl, 31; re-creation of traditions from, 36; responses to Spanish conquest, 60; revival of interest in, 5, 7, 10, 36, 56, 59, 78, 189, 258, 314; as source of pride, 44, 59, 279, 300, 301; sources of information on, 95, 169, 225–26, 254; survival of, 23, 35, 36, 124–25, 240, 246, 249–50, 260 pre-Hispanic objects, removal of from local sites, 100–101 pre-Hispanic religion: efforts to revive, 214–15; informants on, 205, 244; missionaries’ reinterpretation of, 74; modern practice of, 72–76; Spanish suppression of, 72; survival of, 218, 248. See also religious conquest pre-Hispanic sites: cultural layers covering, 11–13; as sites of cultural renewal, 11, 12 Prescott, William, 6, 120 PRI. See Partido Revolucionario Institucional Puebla: city center in, 152, 152–53; as colonial república de españoles, 39, 151, 153; efforts to help indigenous peoples, 155; growth of, 138, 145, 151; historical sites in, 36, 151, 152; history of, 151; informant interview excerpts, 179–85; informant profiles, 155–62; modern life in, 39, 183, plate 1.6 Puebla-Tlaxcala valley, 137–38 pueblo: as basis of indigenous culture, 204; hybrid names of, 31 pueblos originarios, as term, 13 Pulido, Blanca Luz, 197–98, 238–40, plate 1.8 pyramid of Quetzalcoatl (Cholula), 118–20, 121, 123, 132–34, 133 Quetzalcoatl, 26, 131, 168, 174. See also pyramid of Quetzalcoatl (Cholula)

354 

racism: in Mexico, 198, 238–39, 282, 303; as social construct, 315; in U.S., 277, 287 Ramírez, Juana, 125, 219 Ramírez García, Esteban, 200, 243–44 Ramos Flores, José Guadalupe , 34, 107–12, 109, 111, 165–66, plate 1.3 religious conquest, 22; cruelty of, 218, 247–50, 279; and indigenous resilience, 202; intra-Christian disputes and, 21, 23; and layering of religious traditions, 21–23, 138, 143, 145, 212, 248, 262; limited success of, 23, 128–30, 138, 170, 174; survival of indigenous religion despite, 218, 248; textbooks on, 21; views on, 5, 168, 212. See also Franciscans religious festivals: commercialization of, 90–91, 140–41, 147; layered culture of, 138, 192; as means of popular control, 76; and multiculturalism of Mexico, 23 Rendón Bello, Isidro, 56–58, 87 repartimiento, 19 repúblicas de indios: and preservation of indigenous culture, 19, 230; in PueblaTlaxcala valley, 138 Revolution, Mexican: appropriation of pre-Hispanic past in, 7–8; conquest narrative in, 314; and emigration to U.S., 269–70; indigenous cultures and, 8, 23–25, 306; land redistribution in, 23, 206–8; as still-contested event, 193; U.S. and, 270, 279; and visual culture, 14; women in, 236, 237 Rice, Felicia, 271, plate 2.7 Ríos, Graciano, 140, 141 Rivera, Diego, 24, 24–25, 113, 202, 206, 224, 317 Rodríguez Alvarado, Antonio Francisco, 58–60, 89 Romero, Fausta, 127, 170–71 Rozat Dupeyron, Guy, 77–78, 218, 317 Ruta de Cortés, xviii, 5, 6, 36, 38; informants’ interest in, 56–57, 87–99; media and tourist interest in, 6, 145–47; as structuring trope for interviews, 6, 36–40, 38, 127; as symbol, 5–6; U.S. invasion and, 264 Ruta Franciscana, 23, 39, 130, 139, 139–40, 143, 145, 148–49 Sahagún, Bernadino de, 25, 128 Salinas de Gortari, Carlos, 8, 247, 281

• Index

Sánchez, Hugo, 199, 241, 242 Sánchez, Yolanda, 126, 127, 171–72, 219 Sánchez de García, Isabel, 123, 124 Sanctuary of the Virgin of Remedios (Cholula), 118, 122, 130–31, plate 1.4 San Francisco de Ixtacamaxtitlan, 99–100, 100, 102, 155; efforts to restore indigenous culture in, 101–4; informant interview excerpts, 163–65; informant profiles, 101–4; pre-Hispanic history of, 99, 102; Tepeyollotl statue discovered in, 99, 100, 102, 164–65 San Gabriel Monastery (Cholula), 118, 128 San Juan Bautista Monastery (Cuauhtinchan), 148–50 San Juan de Ixtacamaxtitlan, 101, 102 San Martín de Huaquechula. See Huaquechula San Mateo Ozolco, 140–41 San Miguel Arcángel Monastery (Huejo­ tzingo), 142–43 San Miguel Archangel (saint), 235, 337n30, plate 2.4 San Miguel Xicalco, 235–37 San Pablo Tepetlapa, 203–8, 206–8 Santopietro, Judith, 219–21, 220, 250–51, 316, plate 1.10 Segunda carta de relación (Cortés), 28– 29, 144 Sierra Norte de Puebla: culture of, 33, 100, 103, 154, 157, 157, plate 1.2; flight of indigenous groups into, 160, 183 Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de, 7, 9 Siqueiros, David, 28, 113 slave trade, Mexico and, 50, 68, 88, 143 son jarocho music, 61 Spaniards: modern, efforts to reconquer Mexico, 242–43; use of visual imagery by, 13–14, 45; views on, 44, 59, 153 Spanish conquest: allegorical representations of, 63; as better than English conquest, 37, 51, 88, 167, 211–12, 262; depopulation following, 17, 19, 34, 88, 285, 305, 312, 330n31; impact of, 5, 8; and Mexican identity, 36; recent efforts to reinterpret, 36; as site of memory, 315. See also textbooks on conquest Spanish conquest, accounts of: history of, 7–9; political motives in, 7; standard account, 14–23

Index 

Spanish conquest, informants on, 34; as abuse of human rights, 225, 253; ambiguous interpretation of, 165–66, 245; as birth of Mexico, 300, 309, 312; as blending/meeting of cultures, 81–82, 82–83, 90, 94–95, 114, 115–16, 167, 239; and brutality of ruling classes, 312; as Christianization, 59–60, 89, 110, 122, 124, 127, 165, 218, 244, 245, 248, 260; as cruel and brutal, 122, 123, 124, 163, 169, 174, 175, 302–3; as derailment of indigenous development, 149, 168–69, 178; as destruction of indigenous culture, 58, 65, 88–89, 120, 124, 177, 202, 240, 242, 279, 297; as destruction of indigenous identity, 175; as destruction of natural beauty, 262–63; differences of opinion about, 238; dwindling influence of, 174; efforts to reverse impact of, 102–4; as exploitation, 300–301; as historical process, 259–60, 261; as imposition of foreign language, 225, 253; as imposition of Spanish culture, 171–72, 247–50; and indigenous peoples’ preference for Spanish over Aztecs, 197–98, 239, 282, 302; individual points of view in, 34; as inevitable event, 68; as less traumatic than Mexican-American War, 278; limited impact of, 75, 175–76; local history as focus of, 34; as looting, 120, 123, 149, 165, 168, 174, 205, 210, 218, 233, 236, 245; as massacre/genocide, 175, 251, 285, 288, 305, 308–10, 312; and Mexican self-image, 261, 288; as mutually beneficial exchange, 260, 261; need for positive view of, 288–89; and need to restore Tlaxcalan reputation, 105, 106–7, 110, 112–13, 113–14, 166; and new information on, 205–6; as one among series of conquests, 214–15; as ongoing process of exploitation, 199, 210, 212, 214–15, 242–43, 246, 306, 313; as origin of civilization in Mexico, 110, 165; as origin of deadly diseases, 205, 209, 244, 245; as origin of discrimination, 125, 169–70, 198, 238–39, 240, 285; as origin of internal conflict, 208, 210–11, 246; as origin of mestizaje, 56, 58–59, 88–89, 291–92; and political fragmentation of pre-Hispanic period, 197–98; as rape,

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355

163, 291–92, 312, 316; and slavery, introduction of, 88, 244; as source of new knowledge, 244; suffering caused by, 103, 163; and suppression of Nahuatl language, 149, 178; and survivors’ guilt, 34, 305; and textbook accounts, 167–69, 300; as triumph of more advanced culture, 246. See also Cortés, Hernán; religious conquest Spanish culture, rejection of after 1968 massacre at Tlatelolco, 232 Spanish language: efforts to teach in indigenous communities, 155–58, 179–82, 254, 256; superior status implied by, 229, 256–57 Springall, Alejandro, 288–89, 308–10 syncretism, 90, 131, 145, 248, 251 Telleriano-Remensis codex, 98 Templo Mayor, 11, 11–12, 12, 190, 192, 195, 216; Tlaltecuhitli monolith discovered at, 217, 225, 226, 227 Templo Mayor Museum, 217, 226 Tenochtitlan: Cortés’s campaign to retake, 39, 137, 191–92; Cortés’s march to, 187; empire ruled from, 190–91; founding of, 9, 186, 190; map of (1524), 191; modern observance of surrender date, 191; razing and rebuilding of, 40, 192; ruins of beneath Mexico City, 3, 40, 188, 189; Spanish descriptions of, 39–40, 187–88; Spanish massacre of nobles in, 190, 191; submission of altepetl to, plate 2.1; in textbooks, 15–17 Tepeaca, 137, 143–44, 144–45 Tepeyac, 137, 143–44, 212–13 Tepeyacac, 137, 143–44 Tepeyollotl, 98, 99, 100, 102, 164–65 la tercera raíz movement, 10–11 terrorist attacks of 9/11, and U.S. border controls, 270 Texas, incorporation of into U.S., 269 textbooks on conquest: on abuses, 225; and Black Legend, 19; idealization of pre-Hispanic cultures in, 8; indigenous cultures in, 5, 8–9, 17, 21, 78; informants on, 159, 167–69, 300; on mestizaje, 19–20; new series on civic education, 224–25, 253; and religious conquest, deemphasis of, 21; standard account in,

356 

14–23, 18; on Tlaxcalan alliance with Cortés, 106; use of in primary grades, 123 Tiro, Adolfa, 125, 170–71 tlacuilo: as modern inspiration, 112, 115; uses of codices by, 13, 45 Tlaltecuhitli, 217, 225, 226, 227 Tlatelolco: history of, 17, 28; massacre at (1968), 192, 232, 281 Tlaxcala: history of, 105, 106, 115; informant interview excerpts, 165–67; informant profiles, 107–12; legacy of conquest in, 31; modern culture in, 35, 105, 106, 107–8; oral recountings of history, 110–12; Palacio de Gobierno murals in, 112, 112–16, 116, 166; sites of memory in, 36; under Spanish rule, 39, 106; statue to Xicotencatl in, 105; views on Cholultecas in, 120 Tlaxcalans: alliance with Cortés, 106, 167; child martyrs of, 112; and conquest, 16; fluctuating reputation of, 114; labeling of as traitors, 39, 105, 106, 123, 124, 166–67, 239; local efforts to emphasize resistance to conquest, 105, 106–7, 110, 112–13, 113–14, 166; and massacre at Cholula, 118, 122–23, 124; resistance to conquest, 52–53, 106; in textbook accounts of conquest, 15, 19 Todd, John, 65 Toledo, Francisco, plate 2.4 Tonantzin, 119, 131, 174 Torres Hernández, Rolando, 54, 56, 62–63, 68, 91–92 Totonaco Indians, 103; alliance with Cortés, 49–50, 65; archaeological sites of, 65, 66; efforts to preserve language of, 69, 72; limited impact of conquest on, 37; renaming of places by, 184; in textbooks accounts of conquest, 15 tourism: indigenous ceremonies performed for, 90–91; support for indigenous communities through, 103–4, 158–59, 182, 317 Tovar, Juan de, 26, plate 2.3 Toxqui, Susano, 120–22 UNESCO, 72, 73, 120, 152, 218, 316, 318 United States: and Cinco de Mayo, 141, 272; as El Otro Lado, 35, 265, 269, 272; Hispanic population in, 337n12; as melting

• Index

pot, 272; number of Mexicans working in, 35; remittances to Mexico from, 267. See also Mexican-American War United States, informants on: abuses of indigenous peoples in, 305–6; animosity toward, 135, 176; blaming of, 282, 302, 303; as conquerer/exploiter of Mexico, 34–37, 40–41, 53, 58, 127, 159, 175, 182, 210, 237, 265–67, 271, 272, 278–80, 289, 292, 311–12, plate 2.7; debt owed to Mexico by, 280; desire to work in, 68, 127; irresponsible behavior of, 76; as land of opportunity, 274, 299; preference for free access to, 272, 280, 293; relations with, 285, 289; as source of Mexican nationalism, 302; as symbol of oppression, 274; wealth of as product of Mexico, 292, 293, 312 United States, Mexicans living in, 35, 122, 125, 141, 204–5, 209; and assimilation, rejection of, 310; challenges faced by, 272, 273–74, 277–78, 291; children of, challenges faced by, 278, 300; discrimination against, 272; divided identity experienced by, 270, 275, 277, 286–87, 291, 292, 293, 299, 307–8; efforts to retain Mexican culture, 278, 300; informant interview selections, 294–313; informant profiles, 272–93; as majority minority, 267, 270, 275; number of, 267, 282; perception of as invading force, 272, 289, 310; and sense of identity, 272–73; transition to English speakers, 274; U.S.born children of, 274; as voting block, 270, 272, 275, 297. See also immigrants, undocumented United States border controls, 273, plate 1.12; alienation of U.S. Latino citizens by, 270; history of, 270, 281; impact of, 270, 276–77; and migration patterns, 270; resentment of, 269, 272, 280, 293, 311, 317. See also United States immigration policy United States immigration policy: Mexican opposition to, 35, 135, 176; under Obama, 289, 297, 311, 337n17; protests against, 292. See also United States border controls urbanization, and indigenous culture, 230, 237

Index 

Vasconcelos, José, 8, 24–25, 202, 218, 224 Veracruz: and Afro-Caribbean culture, 37, 54, 56, 61, 63; commemorations of Cortés in, 51, 53, 57–58, 87; Cortés’s landing in, 49; Cruz de Mayo celebration in, 37, 53, 64; focus on more recent conquests in, 31, 37; fort on San Juan de Ulúa, 48; history of, 49, 50; indigenous groups in, 63; informant interview excerpts, 87–92; informant profiles, 56–64; mix of cultural traditions in, 51, 56, 63; modern life in, 37, 50–52, 51, 54, 59; pragmatic views on past in, 51; religion in, 53–56, 55; role as port city, 63, 92; Santo Cristo del Buen Viaje Church in, 54, 55, 69–70; schoolchildren visiting fort in, 14; and Spanish conquest, limited impact of, 37, 49, 53, 56, 63; El Tajin pyramid as symbol of, 50, 51; and U.S., emigrants living in, 75–76; and U.S., views on, 53, 58; U.S. invasion of (1914), 51, 52, 53, 53, 56, 58, 63, 92 Veracruz (state), indigenous communities in, 79 Villa, Pancho, 208, 237 Villa Rica de la Veracruz, 50, 65–66 Virgin of Guadalupe, 14, 212, 330–31n43 Virgin of Remedios (Cholula), 118–19, 120, 122, 125, 131, 134–35, 173, 175–76 Visión de los vencidos (León-Portilla), 34, 78, 82, 93, 225–26, 254 visual imagery: methodological approach to, 45–46; Mexican tradition of, 13–14, 45, 330n28 voladores, 72–75, 73, 74, 124 Walmart, 11, 35, 176, 206, 210 war on drugs, Mexican opposition to, 35, 40. See also drug violence in Mexico

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357

women: U.S. immigration policies and, 276–77, 337n18; U.S. influence in Mexico and, 271–72; and violent border culture, 276 Xalapa, 50, 77; informant interview excerpts, 92–94; informant profiles, 77–78 Xaltipan, efforts to modernize (1940s), 155–58, 179–82 Xicotencatl, 16, 37, 39, 105, 106, 110, 113 Xicotencatl the Elder, 106, 107, 110, 124 Xochiapulco, 33, 154, 154, plate 1.2 Xochiojca, indigenous community in, 82–85, 84 Zapata, Emiliano, 206–8, 236, 237, 244, 245 Zapatismo, 222, 252 Zapatistas: associates of, 285; and awareness of indigenous cultures, 8, 34, 184, 315; and government aid to indigenous communities, 89; history of, 332n81; influence of, 5, 318; informants on, 60, 94, 153–54, 184, 206, 210, 222–23, 230, 244, 246–47, 252, 254, 279, 282, 283, 303; and new multiculturalism of Mexico, 41; ties to other indigenous groups, 336n20 Zapotecs, capitalist exploitation of, 311 Zazueta, Karina, 275–78, 276, 280, 287, 298–300 Zongolica mountains, Nahua communities in: economic pressures on, 79–82; focus on more recent conquests in, 31; informant interview excerpts, 94–95; informant profiles, 79–85; key issues faced by, 85–86; and natural resources, lack of control over, 85; ongoing vitality of, 82–86, 250–51

About the Author

Kathleen Ann Myers is Professor of Spanish and History at Indiana University. She has published four books about colonial Mexico and the early modern Hispanic world (1993, 1997, 2003, and 2007) and has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Ministry for Cultural Cooperation between Spain and the United States, Spain’s Ministry for Education and Science, and the Lilly Foundation through Indiana University. Her current research explores the intersection of memory and living history through the dynamic interplay between word and image. Her exhibit with the photographer Steve Raymer, In the Shadow of Cortés: From Veracruz to Mexico City, has been traveling to venues throughout the Midwest since 2008.