Columns

Canada’s government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper will spend 28 million dollars over three years to call what many Canadians term “surprising attention” to the bicentennial of the 1812 war between a young United States and the British Empire. That war was carried out primarily in Britain’s “North American northern frontier” as it is identified by Jim Guy, professor emeritus of political science and international law at Cape Breton University.  (Note for non-Canadian readers: The word Canada comes from the Iroquois word “Kanata,” meaning “village.”  A Frenchman, Jacques Cartier, transcribed the word as “Canada,” applied first to the village of Stadacona, then to the whole region of New France.  After the British conquest of New France, the colony was renamed the Province of Quebec.  Following the American revolution, New France was split into two parts, Upper and Lower Canada, often being collectively, but not officially, known as “the Canadas.”   The national title  “Canada,” was decided on July 1, 1867, at a conference in London, in which 17 other names were offered, but Canada was unanimously adopted.)

On November 21, 1877, General Porfirio Diaz, military hero of Mexico’s liberals, entered Mexico City after opposing one of the nation’s great liberal presidents, Benito Juarez (primarily out of pique), and then (out of political opportunism) Juarez’s much disliked, much less liberal successor, Sebastian Lerdo de Tejado.  Diaz immediately called for a new election, flourishing his political (and soon to become ironic) banner:  “Effective Suffrage. No Re-election.”  He won by a landslide, one that had been cunningly launched a year earlier by a group of aggressive New York/Texas-based U.S. businessmen.  As early as December 1875 Diaz had visited New York and New Orleans.  In January 1876, he was in Brownsville, Texas, for intensive consultations with the town’s creator, the wealthy and inexhaustibly shrewd New York-born businessman, Charles “Don Carlos” Stillman, and his son James.

In an unusual, disconnected flock of days, there seemed to blossom a series of notable small and large events tagged by one observer as “reach-back days.”  And it was, to younger people, a long reach – touching the Sixties.  For people of a certain age, it was yesterday.  Locally, this coincidence of like-minded events was initially noted with the appearance of the Lakeside Little Theatre’s  September 19-October 7 performance of “Quartet,” an amusing and touching story of four successful, and now aging, opera singers who unexpectedly come together at a musician’s retirement home in England.

Mexico, as most people reading this know, is giving Columbus a pass this week, and celebrating El Dia de la Raza, Friday, October 12. Locally, this “day” is overshadowed by the massive celebration of the Virgin of Zapopan. Yet, for a great many Mexican citizens — and long-time foreign Mexico aficionados — who’ve been taught the importance of La Raza,  October 12 is a useful time to reflect on the Republic’s splendidly complex and contradictory Day of the Race — which was quickly morphed into Day of the People. Those four words (in Spanish or English) inevitably call up the name of the “father” of this Republic’s modern educational system.

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.