Columns

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.

Foreigners and Mexican city folk driving on “secondary highways” between pueblo-sized communities this time of year often complain of horses and cattle grazing on rainy season-born wild grass and weeds along the sides of roadways.

The unrelenting nemesis of journalists and editors is a twined one: Space and time.

Time means deadlines, space dominated by journalism’s commercial engine, advertisements, determines how long a story can be. August 4, a discussion here about the cultural and emotional cost of illiteracy in modern societies, used the eye-opening German novel, and film, “The Reader” — and got its tail cropped by space considerations. This lead some readers to believe that in both novel and film forms, “The Reader” attempts to defend an illiterate woman who became a SS guard during World War II. If that were the case, “The Reader” wouldn’t have found a home here.

Guillermo (Memo) Sanchez was a handsome, rather short, muscular young man who had been carried as an infant on his mother’s back into the mountainside above Jocotepec as she and his father worked the family milpa there. In 1972, a good number of local residents, though they resided in the pueblo of Jocotepec, were still actually cerro Mexicans, living primarily by cultivating and harvesting domestic and wild flora and fauna from the northern mountainsides.

The name of Carlos Salinas de Gortari began showing up in political discussions and news reports even before the social media and mainstream news outlets here confirmed vote purchasing by the once dominant — still powerful — Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) for its candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto. Peña Nieto won the July 1 presidential election with 38.21 percent of the vote, followed by leftist Democratic Revolutionary Part candidate Manuel Lopez Obrador with 31.59 percent.  But many voters, even citizens who sold their votes to the PRI,  have been protesting Peña Nieto’s “imposed” presidency.

As the victory by Enrique Peña Nieto, presidential candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), seemed a much surer thing that it turned out to be, many of Mexico’s political analysts, scholars, former office-holders and veteran news hawks began murmuring the name of former president (1988-1994) Carlos Salinas de Gortari.