Columns

The second people of great significance preceding the Aztecs into the Valley of Mexico were the Tepanecs.  Their key city was Azcapotzalco which then dominated the valley and had a cultural tradition prior to the Tepanecs of nearly a thousand years.  A bit before A.D. 1300, the people we know today as the Aztecs (they called themselves Mexica – me-shee-ka – until a Spanish historian prompted the use of “Aztec” in the 18th century) arrived and settled in what now is Chaputlepec.  They were not welcomed.  Noted as perversely savage trouble-makers, who tended to slaughter neighbors, the Mexicas had a rough time there and were expelled twice. This is where today’s Mexican presidents reside.  Some of those presidents have sworn the old gods jinxed the place. Today, several 21st century political and cultural observers suggest that if that were true, those ancient gods are tweaking the Republic of Mexico’s present leader, Enrique Peña Nieto, with a canastafull of testing.

When Concha Rosales was 16 she did something she hated.  She asked someone to help her without getting angry about it.  Something she hadn’t done since she was six or seven, she later said.  Her false siblings were too surprised to make fun of her. Chema and Guadalupe Rosales, the man and woman who had (unknown to Concha) informally adopted her, gave each other quizzical glances and later agreed it was just another odd bump along the road to growing up. 

This new century began with Mexicans’ average consumption of books scored at less than one a year.  Mexico subsequently was tagged by some as “the country that stopped reading.”  Yet today books offering impolitely well-documented assessments of the rulers of the Republic are breaking records, popping into being like popcorn.  But truth’s a risky business. Today’s rulers tolerate truth no happier than their New Spain forebearers in Father Miguel Hidalgo’s time.  Take for instance Anabel Hernandez’s investigation of government officials’ allegedly profitable relations with the nation’s raft of drug gangs.  Her book, published in English this month, is titled “Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers.” 

Setting out to check on the local pueblo celebration of Miguel Hidalgo’s 1810 grito launching Mexico’s war of independence, was a stormy errand. True, it was a mandatory national celebration, and one that the corps of folk who waveringly operated the local cabecera (county seat) vehemently promised to conduct — despite a long-running series of rainstorms of Tlalocian persistence. The downhill dirt road was steep and as slippery. Much of the citizenry believed local officials, despite their strutting and loud words, would call the game due to weather. Such citizens decided to forego this example of frail patriotism. My own chance to observe this bit of weak-heartedness was foiled by a late evening version of Chuma Chavez’s cow-lot cabaret. Chuma’s cow-lot in the mornings as he milks his small herd, offers laborers on their way to work a clay cup — or three — of freshly warm milk spiked with straight alcohol, for an easy price.

Not long ago a large group of leading Mexican scholars, educators, and cultural analysts assembled by the nation’s Colegio de Mexico published a report on “the nations most pressing issues.” Among these at that time was the fact that the number of books read per capita in Mexico was less than one per year. This year the subject was doleful enough to prompt Mexican author David Toscana to write about “The country that stopped reading.” He asked: “How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back some one who is basically illiterate.”

When Fray Martin de Valencia, tireless organizer of the Franciscan effort to educate the survivors of Hernan Cortes’ destruction of Tenochtitlan, died on the wharf of Ayatzingo, August 31, 1534, the “indians” of the Aztec Empire lost a valuable ally, though many didn’t know who he was. Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, was in ruins, and there was a slightest pause in the Spanish Catholic Church’s first religious order to answer Cortes’ request for a group of friars to convert the people whose civilization he was in the process of destroying.