ASM Scholar Puts Many Mexicos Exhibition in Perspective

In Pre-Columbian Mexico, the frontier was the Gran Chichimeca, a large swath of land with multiple cultures that extended far north from the densely populated central and southern areas of Mesoamerica.  Myriad lifestyles ranging from hunting and gathering to semi-nomadic to sedentary shaped cultural and material expressions of daily life; to those societies in the core, however, it was the place where the people whose face nobody knows resided.  The Mexica, or Aztecs, were simply the last in a long line of northern frontier groups that descended upon the central valley of Mexico; they identified their homeland as Aztlán, located somewhere in the far northwest corner of Mesoamerica.  So strongly has the northern frontier been seen as the source of origins that the term Aztlán continued to resonate in the 20th century, when the Chicano movement adopted it as a historical marker to identify the U.S. Borderlands.

The substantial corpus of Aztec jurisprudence established legal borders in which commerce, religion, and politics played out.  I am drawn to the carefully defined borders of Tlatelolco, the largest marketplace in Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital.  Numerous foods, crafts, textiles, exotica, medicines, and enslaved humans were only a few of the items available there for sale or exchange.  Some 50,000 people visited Tlatelolco on major market days, and there was such an abundance and variety of goods available that Aztec law created commercial magistrates to guarantee fair exchange.  The hustle and bustle of such an enormous marketplace, nestled in the heart of Aztec urbanity, made a strong and lasting impression on the Spanish conquistadors when they first entered the capital in 1519.  Bernal Díaz del Castillo, one of Cortés's foot soldiers, commented: "It was all so wonderful that I do not know how to describe this first glimpse of things never heard of, seen, or dreamed of before."  As my friend Helen Nader has written, fortunately for us, Díaz described it anyway, identifying 65 different types of merchandise, including gold, silver, precious stones, feathers, cloaks, embroidered goods, cloth, slaves, and chocolate.

The arrival of the Spanish marked the end of Pre-Columbian Mexico and the start of the colonial period when indigenous peoples and Spanish colonists lived their lives under las dos majestades, or the two majesties of Crown and Church.  The introduction of Old World diseases decimated indigenous communities throughout Mesoamerica, resulting in a demographic collapse that may very well have taken 80% of the Indian population during the 16th and 17th centuries.  Such human tragedy makes it difficult for historians to explain culture change over time when so many lost their lives to smallpox, the plague, measles, and typhus.  One dimension of culture change on the northern frontier that we can speak of, however, is religious in nature.

One of the largest efforts, if not the largest effort, in world history to evangelize and convert peoples from one religious tradition to another took place in the decades following Cortés's conquest of Tenochtitlán.  European missionaries representing the Society of Jesus, the Order of Friars Minor, and the Order of Preachers fanned out into Indian villages to introduce Christianity and broker the heavy demands placed on indigenous peoples by the Spanish colonial enterprise, while sometimes adding their own demands and burdens.  The northern frontier of New Spain, as Mexico was known, was home to numerous indigenous groups that covered a wide range of lifestyles, from sedentary to mobile.  At one point in the process of establishing missions on the far northern frontier, which included Arizona and New Mexico, one Franciscan friar exclaimed, "The only thing that the Indians want is to be left alone." 

A series of indigenous rebellions erupted against colonial rule and the abuses committed by both lay Spaniards and some clergymen—the Mixtón War of 1540, Tepehuan Rebellion of 1616, Pueblo Revolt of 1680, Tarahumara Uprisings of 1648, 1650, 1652, 1690, and 1697, Tzeltal Rebellion of 1712, and Yaqui Revolt of 1740. The common denominator was that Spanish colonialism either overreached or failed to satisfy indigenous demands, pushing Native peoples living on the northern and southern frontiers to the brink.  On the other hand, the White Dove of the Desert, San Xavier del Bac, stands as material witness to the introduction of Christianity to the northern frontier and remains today a Franciscan-administered parish for many Tohono O'odham people who practice and interpret Catholicism through their own unique cultural lens.

Colonial borders can be seen through the strictures of patriarchal society whereby men defined the boundaries of appropriate behavior for themselves, women, and children.  At least in theory, then, Spanish colonialism exercised some modicum of control over the private and public conduct of women, be they Spanish, indigenous, or mestizo.  One woman in particular punctured those patriarchal borders, much to the chagrin of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.  The convent offered Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz the opportunity to express her Catholic spirituality along with other like-minded women; but conventual life also offered educational opportunities, self-expression in the arts, escape from secular society's expectations of women, and a supportive community.  Often called the Tenth Muse or the Mexican Phoenix, Sor Juana Inés wrote poetry, essays, and plays that combined religiosity with critical social commentary.  Even today Mexican schoolchildren learn the first lines of her famous Sátira filosófica, or Philosophical Satire, which critiqued the patriarchal borders that had subordinated women in colonial Mexico: Hombres necios que acusáis a la mujer sin razón, sin ver que sois la ocasión de lo mismo que culpáis.  Silly men, and I'm being judicious in my translation, silly men, who wrongly accuse women, oblivious that it is you who occasion what you criticize.

Borders shifted when Mexicans struck for independence from Spain in 1810.  Eleven years of sporadic warfare and bloodshed culminated in the birth of a nation-state with unresolved issues and competing interests, which hindered the maturation of political institutions.  I invite you to take some time and review the map in the Forging Mexico section of the exhibition.  It reveals what Mexico and Mexicans had to endure as they tried to create a nation: two secessionist movements, civil turmoil and political intrigue, a three-year civil war, and six foreign invasions in a one-hundred year span, including the war with the United States in 1846 that cost Mexico roughly half of its national territory.  It was during this period that the international border was created, first with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, followed by the Treaty of Mesilla, known in the U.S. as the Gadsden Purchase of 1854.  No wonder Mexican schoolchildren today still recite the words of Benito Juárez, the Zapotec from Oaxaca who became Mexico's only indigenous president: "Entre los individuos como las naciones el respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz."  "Among individuals, as among nations, respect for the rights of others is peace." In another sense, however, a better translation might be: Among individuals, as among nations, respecting what doesn't belong to you is peace.

The frontiers of an independent Mexico are expressed in many ways, of course, and I don't pretend that I'll be able to capture its broader meaning by identifying one dimension of the experience, but I am struck by the moving frontiers of indigenous Christianity in Mexico, particularly during the violent years of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, and the anti-clericalism of the 1920s.  Despite the persistence of poverty, social inequality, and structural imbalance in Mexico's political economy during the 19th and early 20th centuries, indigenous peoples and their cultures endured.  They had created, nurtured, and sustained spiritual and cultural traditions that responded to changing material conditions.  When he was writing his first book, my friend Kevin Gosner excerpted some lines from Graham Greene's work, Another Mexico, which encapsulates so poetically the frontiers of indigenous Christianity. I'm paraphrasing now:

And there was an even older world beyond the ridges—the ground sloped up again to where a grove of tall black crosses stood at all angles like wind-blown trees against the blackened sky.  This was the Indian religion…old ladies might swing back and forth in the rocking chairs of Villahermosa, [non-indigenous] Catholics might be dying out like dogs, but here, in the mountainous strange world of Father Las Casas, Christianity went on its own…way…we are too apt to minimize the magic elements in Christianity—the man raised from the dead, the devils cast out, the water turned into wine.  The great crosses leaned there in their black and windy solitude, safe from the pistoleros and the politicians, and one thought of the spittle mixed with the clay to heal the blind man, the resurrection of the body, the religion of the earth.

We enter modern times, post-revolutionary Mexico, a time of industrialization, feverish cross-cultural contact and exchange, political stability and political storms, and ever closer ties between Mexico and the United States, between Mexicans and Americans, and, conversely, of widening gulfs, of polemical discourse, and ambivalent views.  Frontiers of modernity began to knock loudly on Mexico's door in the 1940s and 1950s, and the great Mexican comedian and film star Mario Moreno, better known as Cantinflas, was there to satirize it all.  As one historian aptly put it, Cantinflas represented the human debris of industrialization, a rootless migrant to the big city who survived by his wit in a bewildering and coldhearted environment.

Cantinflas was the master of physical comedy who elicited sympathy for the lower-class underdog.  Known for his double-talk and rejection of linguistic and social conventions, Cantinflas alternated between deference and defiance in order to undermine the legitimacy of authority.  Take this dialogue, for example, in the film Ahí está el detalle.  After the prosecutor calls Cantinflas "estúpido" out of frustration with Cantinflas’s refusal to give a straight answer, the prosecutor excuses himself and returns to his seat, whereupon Cantinflas replied, "Usted es excusado," You are indeed a toilet!  In 1992, the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language formally acknowledged Cantinflas's status as an institution in the larger Spanish-speaking world by adding to its dictionary the verb cantinflear, meaning to talk a lot without managing to say much.

And finally, we end up at the border.  Mexican immigration to the United States and increased violence over issues of supply and demand in the drug trade have promoted what can only be described as neighbors talking at each other rather than to each other.  Some have suggested that Mexico is at another brink because rural Mexico is empty, with millions having left to find employment in the cities and especially north of the international border, that the narcoviolencia has become extreme enough to cast doubt on Mexican institutions.  Historians interrogate the past and identify patterns of violence that have posed grave challenges to the structural integrity of the Mexican polity, including the Spanish conquest of the Aztec confederation, the wars for independence from Spain, the U.S. invasion of 1846, the three-year civil war, the French occupation, the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, and the Mexican Revolution of 1910—all discussed in the Many Mexicos exhibition.  In each occasion, however, Mexico emerged not quite the same but not altogether different.  Put another way, persistence and malleability accompany reaction and change.

In the end, such efforts to find historical analogies are limited in their ability to explain change over time, which is what concerns historians, because the contexts in which these momentous events unfolded are different.  In other words, 1521 and 1821 are distinct, 1810 and 1910 are distinct, because each period witnessed its own complex interplay of politics, culture, and economy.  When the political rhetoric heats up, however, when the air is not yet clear, when poisoned polemic not only threatens to offend our intellectual sensibilities but also threatens to stymie binational, humane solutions, or worse, break up families and promote dangerous travel through the Sonoran Desert as fathers and mothers search for economic security for their children, I can think of no better way to mitigate such ill-tempered passions than to provide the sobering views of historical context.  But that in itself is not enough.  I end my remarks this evening by posing a rhetorical question to the audience, something for you to think about as you make your way through the exhibition.  And the question is inspired by three lines from one of my favorite poems, Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall.”

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall;”

“Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence;”

And the final words of the poem,
“Good fences make good neighbors.” 

So my question for all of you tonight: Which of these lines best encapsulates the direction you think Mexico and the United States should take?  It is my sincere hope that the Many Mexicos exhibition will help fashion not only your response but the manner in which you respond.  Thank you so much for your kind attention this evening, and I very much look forward to seeing you at the exhibition.  Thank you.