Columns

Last week a brief story appeared in the United States and Mexican media reporting the September 19 death of Ruben Zuno Arce, brother-in-law of former Mexican President Luis Echeverria Alvarez and son of a former JaIisco Institutional Revolutionary Party governor, Jose Guadalupe Zuno.  Zuno Arce was 82 years old and died of lung cancer and cardiovascular disease at the U.S. federal prison in Coleman, Florida.

A lot of journalists, already set to write a piece on the United States’ two presidential candidates this week, got their boats overturned by life’s habit of swamping such well laid plans. Events — riots and killings in the Middle East, surprising remarks by Mitt Romney — drowned the early patchwork of details journalists begin, almost unconsciously, to mentally bank for such coming stories. And in Mexico, these folk were already fielding rough questions about the tangle muy excéntrico that today passes for a presidential showdown in the U.S.

Both modern Mexico and current “popular” foreign sources have a hard time figuring out who the instigator of Mexico’s great War of Independence, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, was.  This is not a new problem, but one worsened by a lack of present-day historically well-tuned analysis.  The “dusty” pueblo of Dolores (in the intendency of Guanajuato), where the 50-year-old priest was assigned in 1803, has been said by one Hidalgo aficionado to be a “coveted parish.”  It brought in a handsome sum – eight-to-nine thousand pesos a year, he contended.  Yet the majority of its parishioners were described by contemporary Mexican sources as “illiterate, poor indios,” a description that included the mestizo population also.  Hidalgo’s constant efforts to create, and train his parishioners to manage numerous small enterprises were aimed, by all evidence, at improving thin family economies.  These included a pottery business, the forbidden production of grapes to produce forbidden wine, planting and nourishing forbidden olive trees to produce forbidden olive oil, beekeeping, a tannery and a silk-making industry, among others.

For three weeks rolling displays of the Mexican flags for sale in all sizes and materials have been plying local streets, announcing the September 15-16 national celebration of the beginning of Mexico’s bloody 11-year struggle for independence from Spain.  Thousands of people were killed just in the first months of the 1810 uprising.  And for the most part, the rebellion was led by disillusioned criollo  and mestizo Catholic priests.

In 1995, a campesino named Jose (“Pepe”) Peredo married into the large extended Hernando Diaz family, which was big enough, and generally self-sufficient and insular enough to possess the aura of a clan.  He was an unlikely candidate to be accepted by his wife’s many kinfolk because he was both poor and so promiscuous in his personal life that he had two gringo friends.  Despite her family’s early skepticism, it was this social adventureness that first attracted the 17-year-old girl who was to become Pepe’s wife.  Younger members of the clan were the first generation to become “more broadly socialized,” said a gringo permitted past the rancho’s tree-trunk anchored front gate.

It is June 24, 1524. Hernan Cortes kneels before twelve ragged and barefooted men, and kisses the soiled, frayed hem of the habit of their leader, Martin de Valencia. At that moment the Spiritual Conquest of Mexico began.