Category Archives: Huatulco

Huatulco

Spanish Lesson

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By Julie Etra

Local Expressions (colloquialisms) and Polite Exchanges

Money: Dinero is broadly used. Lana is synonymous and more common here. Billete refers to the actual bill. Biyuyo is also used here. Moneda is coinage, but slang includes morraya and chincastle.

Bottled water: A big 5-gallon jugs of water is called a garrafón as opposed to a small bottle of water, una botella

Beer: Cerveza is universal, but also known here as a chela. A caguama is the 40 oz version, and a species of sea turtle. A michelada is beer with lime juice, assorted sauces, spices, clamato juice, and chili peppers. It is served in a chilled, salt-rimmed glass. Kind of like a Caesar.

Work: Trabajo is universal but here you will hear chamba (noun), chambear (verb), chambeando (adverb)

Polite expressions for excuse me:
Con permiso: Useful when shopping and you need to get around someone
Perdón: pardon
Discúlpame: forgive me

¡Provecho! Enjoy your meal, said to the adjacent diners upon leaving a restaurant

Boats: Here the smaller fishing boats are lanchas or pangas. Yachts, power or sail, are yates. Big boats are barcos. Sailboats are veleras.

We are even, as in ‘keep the change’ (said when paying a bill): Estamos a mano.

And for fun, here is a pun:
¿Que le dijo un pez al otro pez?
NADA

Huatulco

International Women’s Day, Mexican Style

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By Deborah Van Hoewyk

Over the years, the March issue of the The Eye has observed International Women’s Day (March 8) with articles on the famous, the fierce, the creative, the entrepreneurial – and the murdered – women of Mexico.

Mexican women have been world-class artists, actors, writers and photographers; they fought in their two national revolutions and have played key roles in the Zapatista movement. They are businesswomen and entrepreneurs; they occasionally give men a run for their money in corruption.

Politically speaking, Mexico has just become a leader in gender equity: by law, half the Congress must be women (The U.S. Senate is 24% women, and the House of Representatives is about 28%; in Canada, the Senate recently reached 50% women, but only briefly, while the House of Commons is 34% women.)

International Women’s Day is a worldwide celebration of what has been achieved in terms of women’s social, economic, cultural, and political equity; IWD works to raise awareness of what remains to be done. It emerged early in the 20th century – from labor struggles in the U.S. and Europe, from suffrage struggles in Russia, and in Mexico, from the Revolution of 1910-20. Although the U.S. labor movement celebrated National Women’s Day in 1909, the first International Women’s Day was observed in Europe in 1911. With the second-wave women’s movement of the 1960s, recognition by the U.N. in 1975, and official U.N. designation of March 8 as the date in 1977, IWD became a mainstream, but largely unofficial, holiday throughout the world.

International Women’s Day in Mexico

In Mexico, IWD was first celebrated in the 1930s in Mexico City. Mexican feminism began to emerge in the late 19th century, aimed mostly at achieving education for women; these efforts bore fruit before, during, and after the Revolution, as schoolteachers started entering the workforce. (The right to divorce came during the Revolution, in 1914.) Feminist magazines began appearing in the decades surrounding the Revolution as well, but they did not focus on broad social, economic, and political rights of full citizenship; rather, they promoted the emancipación of women within traditional social structures – they should broaden their intellectual and cultural horizons, and the importance their roles as wife and mother should be recognized.

With the support of progressive forces, including the Communist Party of Mexico, the Frente Único pro Derechos de la Mujer (The United Front for the Rights of Women – Frida Kahlo was one of the leaders), focused directly on national suffrage (there had been local progress on voting rights in the Yucatán and San Luis Potosí). Although the United Front was very active in the late 1930s, women did not win the national right to vote until 1953.

Until recently, there has been little research on mid-century Mexican feminism, but if we look carefully at a 1960 Mexican poster commemorating International Women’s Day and the 50th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution, we can get a picture of just what the emancipation of women meant Mexico.

First, the poster shows the involvement of women in larger revolutionary struggles. The central figure, bearing a torch, is backed by the Cuban flag and has the number 26 emblazoned on her shirt – “26” was the symbol of Castro’s campaign to overthrow the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista (the effort began July 26, 1953). On the right of the poster appear Asian women – the Chinese Revolution that brought that Communist Party and Mao Zedong to power concluded on October 1, 1949. To the left appear three Mexican women, who arguably represent, from front to back, women of direct Spanish descent, mestizos (Spanish and indigenous descent), and indigenous. A Mexican girl releases a dove, symbol of peace, to the flock in the sky. Nonetheless, the idea that women have participated in national revolutions is not the same as promoting a major revolution for the rights of women.

Second, and what is perhaps most interesting – and complicated – is the slogan across the bottom of the poster: LA EMANCIPACION DE LA MUJER ES LA OBRA DE LA MUJER MISMA (The emancipation of women is the work of the woman herself). “Emancipation” is a fraught word, saying more about the condition women want to escape – it reeks of restraint and control, if not slavery. And to say it is women themselves who must do the work of emancipation passes the buck on the long history of Church-influenced social structures and laws, much less the culture of machismo (literally, maleness) that have led to the need for emancipation.

International Women’s Day 2020

The Mexican feminist movement grew, as it did all around the world, during the 1960s through the 1980s. In the 1990s, however, the phenomenon of femicide in Mexico surfaced in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, where hundreds of women went missing, only to be found dead. Evaluations of interventions to quell the violence have shown they have had little effect, due to lackluster implementation or the country’s culture of impunity that favors men.

Thirty years later, with femicide and violence against women only growing, the slogans of the International Women’s Day marches of 2020 and 2021 said nothing about “emancipation.” Nor were the marches merely demonstrations, but serious, and violent, protests about femicide and gender-based violence.

On Saturday, February 8, 2020, Érick Francisco murdered his partner Ingrid Escamilla by stabbing her to death with a kitchen knife, then proceeding to skin and dismember her. This is femicide, which is far more prevalent in Mexico than the official statistics allow. For the murder of a woman to be considered a femicide, the woman must have experienced ongoing domestic, particularly sexual, abuse, and she must have been tortured or mutilated as part of the murder.

In 2018, Mexico registered 3,752 femicides, over 10 a day; in 2019, it was 3,825. Femicides surged 7.7% in the opening months of the pandemic. Feminists have called Mexico the “Femicide State” (Mexico Feminicidio) and cite a “culture of impunity” coming straight from the top.

In March 2020, there were over 26,000 calls to domestic violence hotlines. Mexico’s president, Andrés Manual López Obrador (AMLO) said 90% of them were fake. AMLO has also expressed impatience with feminist protests – they were just a distraction to make sure his airplane raffle failed; the March 8 demonstrations were the work of neoliberal opponents from the last regime “who want to see this government fail,” and “suddenly conservatives are dressing up as feminists” to attack him (reporting from The New York Times, May 31, 2020).

On International Women’s Day, Sunday, March 8, 2020, about 80,000 women took to the streets in Mexico City alone. Femicide and gender-based violence were the major themes: “Fight today so we don’t die tomorrow,” was accompanied by hundreds of posters of murdered women.

On Monday, March 9, the movement sponsored “A Day without Women,” a universal strike by women who stayed home from work (4o%, or 21 million, of Mexico’s women are in the formal workforce, countless more comprise the informal workforce) or did not leave their houses, in particular, they spent nothing to contribute to the economy. Major corporations (Walmart employs 108,000 women) gave women a paid day off to demonstrate.

International Women’s Day 2021

The National Palace – the seat of Mexico’s government and the home of the president – prepared for last year’s march with a barricade running all around the building. AMLO said it was to prevent “damage to historic buildings” (another barrier was erected around the national art museum, the Palacio de Bellas Artes), and to eliminate “provocations” that might be “infiltrated” by people seeking to use the women’s movement. AMLO himself, he said, is not a “male chauvinist” (reporting from BBC News, March 8, 2021).

On Monday, March 8, International Women’s Day saw a smaller number of protestors than in 2020, perhaps due to the pandemic, perhaps because there had been no ghastly femicides recently. Women, however, remained equally outraged. They were outraged by the barricade, which on Saturday night they had painted with a seemingly endless list – actually, 939 – of the names of murdered women.

They were also outraged by AMLO’s insensitivity to women’s issues, expressed this year in his steadfast support for Félix Salgado Macedonia, a candidate for governor of the state of Guerrero accused of rape by multiple women. According to AMLO, the accusations are “politically motivated,” and news-conference questions about Salgado brought a sharp “That’s enough!” (¡Ya Chole!). (Salgado’s daughter, Evelyn Salgado Pineda, is now governor of Guerrero.)

Protestors attacked the barricade with hammers, blowtorches, and their hands. Police threw flash-bang grenades and sprayed protestors with fire retardant; protestors sprayed well-shielded police with fire extinguishers. Injuries were reported by 62 police and 19 protestors.

While not all women in these protests agree that violence should be the tactic of choice, they also recognize that it seems to be the only way to focus attention on the issue of violence against themselves. Violence against women is the most basic way to keep women from achieving equality, and Mexico’s police have been “heavily implicated” in the crisis of violence against women. It should not be surprising that the “new” feminists of Mexico are younger women dedicated to supporting each other in the face of violence, using violent protest themselves when they consider it necessary.

Huatulco

An Extraordinary Collection: The Pre-Raphaelite Paintingsof Mexican Billionaire Juan Antonio Pérez Simón

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By Deborah Van Hoewyk—

In 1946, a five-year-old Spanish kid moved to Mexico. He didn’t come from money, but Juan Antonio Pérez Simón would end up with quite a lot of it. His dad had a middle-class job in the beverage business, and Juan Antonio taught himself finance, starting his career in accounting. As a young man, his path crossed that of Carlos Slim Helú, whose business talents eventually made him the richest man in Mexico, and at times, the richest man in the world.

When they were both 25, Pérez Simón joined Slim as a partner in starting the investment banking company Inversora Bursátil. By the time they were 35, Slim had started the Carso group (“Car” for “Carlos,” “So” for his wife “Soumaya”); Pérez Simón held a 30% minority stake, but through Carso, he would become head of the interests and entities we foreigners call “Telmex” (Teléfonos de México), thus joining the global business class of Mexico and getting really, really rich.

And what did he do with his money? He bought art. He was a collector from his early teens; he and his wife, according to one assessment of the collection, could only afford reproductions and “cheap Mexican landscape paintings” when they started out. Current assessments reveal that Pérez Simón owns important, some very well-known, paintings from the 14th century on, although he finds “modern” (i.e., past maybe 1970) art of little interest – too devoid of emotions, too intellectual.

His collection contains any number of notable paintings, including paintings we might consider classically modern (e.g., American Abstract Expressionism). Among the works that arrived in New York City for a 2018 exhibition at Di Donna Galleries, “A Passion for Collecting: Modern Works from the Pérez Simón Collection,” were two he purchased from Christie’s in New York at the equivalent of a fire sale during the 2008 financial meltdown. Of course, for Pérez Simón, “fire sale” means $1,142,500 for Magritte’s Exercices Spirituels and $962,500 for Joan Miro’s Femmes devant la lune.

Less attention is usually paid to Pérez Simón’s collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, except when, in 2014, he sent 52 Victorian-era paintings to Europe. The exhibition started in Paris, went to Rome, then Madrid, and finally England to be exhibited in the London house of Frederic, Lord Leighton, now the Leighton House Museum.

A Victorian Obsession: The Pérez Simón Collection,included five of Leighton’s own works, four of them painted at the Leighton House studio. Named head of the Royal Academy in 1878, Leighton was a social and political success; he was the only artist ever elevated to the House of Lords – unfortunately, he died at home the afternoon of the next day.

Lord Leighton knew and entertained most of the Pre-Raphaelites and the closely allied Victorian classicist painters; his own work falls more on the classicist side. The exhibit was most lauded for its unique combination of Leighton House – a monument to the wealth, status, and eccentric tastes of a successful Victorian artist – with the sensuous, romanticized paintings, which on closer examination, often showed a dark underbelly. One of the most famous paintings of the era, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadena’s The Roses of Heliogabulus, was painted in 1888, when Victorians saw themselves as heirs to the Roman Empire (remember “The sun never sets on the British Empire”?). The painting shows Emperor Heliogabulus (218-22 CE) indulging in his usual debauchery, amidst a deliciously pink shower of rose petals (history says Heliogabulus used cherry blossoms). Only thing is, the rose petals are smothering the guests, every last one of them, to death. Word has it that the painting, the last as you wended your way through Leighton House, was surrounded by the “scent of seven of the world’s most exquisite roses.”

That was enough to set off reviewer Waldemar Januszczak, who blogged that “Droopy damsels in distress take centre stage in A Victorian Expression.” Pointing out that Leighton was only a year older than Manet, who was busy founding French impressionism, Januszczak condemns Leighton and his contemporaries for engaging in “demented escapism.”

While he makes fun of the Mexican billionaire for collecting this particular movement in art, Januszczak makes no mention of the extraordinary breadth of the Pérez Simón collection as a whole.

We all know Carlos Slim is just as dedicated as his longtime friend Pérez Simón in collecting art – don’t worry, they apparently confer in advance so they avoid bidding against each other.

Huatulco

How the Jacaranda and Blue Hanami Came to Mexico – and the Japanese Paisajista Who Made It Happen

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By Deborah Van Hoewyk

It was an accident, my obsession with the oh-so-blue jacaranda (pronounced hah-kah-RAHN-dah) tree. In February 1997, on a trip to Oaxaca City to run a session for a university conference, I thought, “I got this far, why don’t I just stay and go to the beach? I see this place called ‘Huatulco’ that’s only half an inch away on the Lonely Planet map.” Fortunately, others offered up Monte Alban as an after-conference activity (little did I know how very l-o-o-o-ng and difficult that half an inch would be – Huatulco had to wait until 2004).

So off we went to Monte Alban, which is probably the last time I climbed to the top of an ancient Mexican pyramid. And from there, I saw them. I saw blue-blossomed trees.

There are a few other trees with blue blossoms, and there are supposed to be about fifty kinds of jacarandas, but there is nothing like Jacaranda mimosifolia. They are native to a belt across South America that includes Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil (jacaranda means “fragrant” in the region’s indigenous guarani­ language).

In Mexico City, the jacarandas transform many streets into allées of soothing lavender-blue. While jacarandas are beloved by aphids, whose sticky poop turns fallen blossoms into a major nuisance, they also give the Easter season bloom time hanami, literally translated from the Japanese as “flower-viewing,” the ephemeral experience of enjoying the clouds of blossoms that cover trees before they get on to the business of being green.

The jacarandas seem other-worldly, reminding me of the cherry blossoms at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in New York City; at cherry-blossom time, Japanese families picnic on the petal-strewn lawn, transporting the casual observer to a state of hanami in some quiet Tokyo park. Oddly enough, it was the cherry blossoms that led to the installation of huge numbers of jacaranda trees in Mexico City.

Mexico’s president from 1930-32, Pascual Ortiz Rubio, wanted to symbolize the friendship between Mexico and Japan – with thousands of cherry trees. Considering the complex history of Mexico as a conquered, then independent, then revolutionary country, and the history of Japan as an imperial, then military, then functioning imperial country, it’s remarkable that the two countries have a relationship that goes back over four centuries.

Mexico and Japan – Way Back When

In 1598, the usefulness of a relationship between Mexico and Japan occurred to Tokugawa (Minamoto) Iyeyasu, the first shōgun (military dictator) of the Tokugawa Shogunate. In Yedo, now, centuries later, Tokyo, the shogun observed that the Philippines did a brisk trade with Mexico, and sought out a relationship with the Philippines that would allow their trans-Pacific shipping vessels to stop in Japan before reaching their destination in the Philippines.

Establishing said relationship was a rocky affair, since the Philippines were actually a Spanish colony from 1521 to 1898, and – based on experience – Spain didn’t think Japan had good intentions toward its merchant ships. It wasn’t until 1608, when a new Spanish governor, Don Rodrigo de Vivero, arrived in the Philippines, that negotiations got serious – but not for long. Recall that every European country with a navy was trying to get into Japan, and that the customs of courtesy in Japan were opaque to the Spaniards, which seemed to lead to offense at every turn. By 1636, the Spanish were excluded from Japan (as were the Portuguese, the first European country to trade with Japan). The Dutch, although confined to a small area of Japan, locked up trade with Japan until the mid-19th century.

In 1853, the role of the Japanese emperor was restored to primacy – no more military dictatorships with shoguns. Under Emperor Meiji, Japan began re-initiating diplomatic relations with other countries; the United States brought a great deal of pressure to bear, resulting in an 1858 treaty that basically forced Japan to begin trading with the West.

Mexico, independent from Spain since 1821, sent an expedition to Japan in 1874. The expedition was led by a scientist, Francisco Díaz Covarrubias, ostensibly to see a rare astrological phenomenon, the transit of Venus across the face of the sun. There’s little evidence that the scientific part of the expedition succeeded, but formal relations between the two countries resumed. In 1888, Matías Romero and Munemitsu Mutsu, the foreign ministers of Mexico and Japan, respectively, signed Japan’s first “equal” treaty with another country.

Back to the Cherry Trees . . . Not!

Remember President Ortiz Rubio’s request to the Japanese government to donate the thousands of cherry trees? Japan’s gift to the United States of over 3,000 cherries in 1912 had not been without botanical troubles of its own, so Japan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs contacted a Japanese horticulturalist/ landscape architect, who had been working for “all the right people” in Mexico for decades. Would the cherry trees be right for Mexico City?

Nope, the horticulturalist replied. To flower, the cherry tree would need a much sharper temperature change between winter and spring. The cherries were abandoned. But Tatsugoro Matsumoto (1861-1955) was not without a replacement suggestion – one he had been working on for quite a while.

Tatsugoro had studied to become an ueki-shi, or landscape architect, in Tokyo, and was so good that he never worked anywhere except in the imperial gardens. Japanese gardeners were sought after around the world. In 1888, at the age of 24, he was sent by the Japanese government to Peru to install a garden at a private residence called Quinta Heeren in Lima. Its owner, Óscar Agusto Heeren, the former Peruvian ambassador to Japan, had returned to Lima to work on enhancing relations between Peru and Japan.

En route to Peru, Tatsuguro visited Mexico, and was apparently impressed with the climate, growing conditions, and the national love of flowers and gardening. While working on his commission in Peru, he met José Landero y Coss, a wealthy rancher and mine owner from Mexico. Landero owned a hacienda, San Juan Hueyapan, in Pachuca, Hidalgo, that dated back to 1535 (built by one of the sons of Hernan Cortés); impressed with Tatsugoro’s work, Landero asked him to come to establish gardens at the hacienda.

The story gets a little hazy here, but Landero was influential in seeing to it that Tatsugoro went on to work in Mexico City, mostly for wealthy families. Tatsuguro decided to emigrate permanently to Mexico, although he returned briefly to Japan to say farewell to his family. Sending a shipment of Japanese plant materials from Yokohama to San Francisco to help with establishing himself in the nursery business, Tatsugoro decamped for California. His plants arrived after three months, dead as doornails, but in the meantime, he had received a commission for a Japanese tea garden in Golden Gate Park for a world’s fair in 1894.

The tea garden was so popular, it was almost immediately converted to a permanent garden – but by another Japanese landscape artist, not Tatsugoro, who had moved on in his plan to emigrate to Mexico. His certificate of immigration as a legal resident is a little loose with a few facts and illegible in spots. It is dated August of 1896, and reports that Tatsugoro was a widowed (really?) gardener; the birth date and age suffer from too much ink in the typewriter ribbon, but he would have been about 35. He is described as thin, a little over 5 feet tall, with black hair and eyebrows, brown skin and eyes, and a beard with grande moustache. He was of the “yellow” race and Buddhist religion.

From 1896 on, Tatsugoro worked in the most posh colonias (Roma and Condesa were developed right after the turn of the 20th century). A year after he had arrived in Mexico, Tatsugoro bought a house and set up a flower shop in La Romita, already being gentrified into Colonia Roma. While his immigration papers say Tatsugoro was a viudo (widower), there is other information to indicate that Tatasugoro’s wife had emigrated to join him and was running the flower shop. (Florería Matsumoto is still alive and well at Colima 92 in Col. Roma Norte, and is run by Tatsugoro’s great-granddaughter, Marie Furakaki Matsumoto – arrangements go from $700 to $1,000 mxn.)

The influential Landero may have provided Tatsugoro with a contact to introduce him to President Porfirio Díaz; in any event, by 1900, Díaz and his wife had taken note. Tatsugoro designed and maintained the gardens at the presidential residence, Chapultepec Castle, not to mention all the floral arrangements for inside the castle.

Life was definitely good – according to Tatsugoro’s grandson Ernesto, Díaz paid his grandfather 12 pesos a day, 240 times the minimum wage of 5 centavos. Ernesto says Díaz told Tatsugoro the salary was to enable him “to have a nursery to plant seeds and plants because in Mexico City there are prickly pear cactus and there are no trees.”

Jacarandas Needed

Trees there would be – blue-blossomed jacaranda trees. Tatsugoro certainly had obtained seeds and cuttings from South America well before the cherry-blossom consultation, but his role in introducing new species of flowering trees and shrubs got a big boost when his son showed up in 1910. Although Sanshiro Matsumoto, only about 15 or 16 when he reached Mexico, may never have actually seen his father, and no one has anything to say about why, if she actually did, his mother would hie off to Mexico leaving him behind, son and dad combined forces in the business.

Together, the Matsumotos enlarged the business from flower-shop to nursery, and undertook to import the plant materials needed to establish not just the jacaranda trees, but bougainvillea, camelias, hydrangeas, roses, and azaleas, along with bulbs (narcissus, tulips, gladioli) and chrysanthemums. Not to mention that they hybridized the poinsettia (noche buena) to the short, bushy Christmas-season form and installed the palm trees (not native to Mexico) that line Avenida Paseo de las Palmas in Lomas de Chapultepec. Sanshiro undertook to organize the business administratively, apparently not Tatsugoro’s strong suit, and they were able to buy fields and ranches for nursery properties. They grew on their trees, shrubs, bulbs, and flowers at Rancho El Batán, Hacienda de Temixco, and greenhouses in Tacubaya and San Pedro de Los Pinos.

Not only did Senshiro Matsumoto arrive in 1910, the centennial of the Mexican War of Independence, but Díaz decided to celebrate the centennial by inviting other countries to participate. Japan’s delegation, led by Baron Yasuya Uchida and his wife, coordinated their visit with a major exhibition of Japanese Arte Industrial at the Crystal Palace; beside the Palace (now the Museo Universitario del Chopo), Díaz had Tatsugoro create a small lake surrounded by a Japanese garden, which he himself, along with the Japanese delegation, inaugurated.

For the Matsumotos, 1910 was a good year; not so for Porfirio Díaz. The Porfiriato, while it modernized Mexico, was dictatorially oppressive and had lasted, with one interruption, since 1877. Having declared at one point that he would not run for President again, he reneged. Thus began the Mexican Revolution, which would last eleven years. The Matsumotos, however, were very astute at maintaining their connections with high society and ruling powers, and rode out the Revolution quite handily.

By the end of the conflict, and now amply supplied with jacarandas, Tatsugoro approached President Álvaro Obregón (term 1920-24) about the possiblity of lining important avenues and boulevards with the trees. The idea didn’t really take hold until President Rubio wanted the cherry trees, so the spring hanami in Mexico City and Oaxaca de Juárez turned out to be blue, not pink!

Beyond the Jacarandas

Later in the 20th century, the Matsumoto family, through their connections with Mexican presidents, along with their land holdings, would provide an important, unrelated service to Japanese immigrants during World War II. The United States pressured Mexico to follow its lead in creating concentration centers; Mexico decided that Japanese residents of Mexico City and Guadalajara should be interned. The Matsumotos served as go-betweens between the Mutual Aid Committee of the Japanese and the government of President Manuel Ávila Camacho. They offered up both the Rancho El Batán and Hacienda de Temixco as places for Japanese to live and grow their own food until the end of the war. One presumes the Matsumotos themselves stayed home in Colonia Roma.

Later on, Senshiro was approached by President Adolfo López Mateos (term 1958-64), who was looking for space for a housing complex. Where Rancho El Batán once grew jacarandas, now sits Unidad Independencia with 65 single-family residences, 35 multi-family buildings with 1500 apartments, three towers with 100 luxury apartments, social and educational services, a sports center, a supermarket, a medical clinic, an open air theater, and more. Senshiro’s only request was that no trees be cut down.

 

Huatulco

World Cup Fever!

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By Jed Pitman—

There are moments in history which are coupled with the question, “Where were you when…?”

I’m thinking of the assassination of JFK, the news that Princess Diana had died in a car crash in Paris, the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the USA and, if you are a bit younger, the day Jay Z and Beyonce got hitched. Continue reading World Cup Fever! →

Huatulco, San Miguel de Allende

Mexico’s French Century: A Whirlwind History of the French in Mexico

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By Deborah Van Hoewyk—

Very, very early on the morning of September 16, 1810, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the well-read priest of Dolores, Guanajuato, stood on a balcony in the dark and delivered his impassioned El grito de Dolores (the Cry of Dolores) for independence from the gachupines (Spanish-born oppressors). Hidalgo’s declaration of independence was steeped in the thinking of the French political philosophers Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) and Voltaire (nom de plume of François-Marie Arouet, 1694-1778).

While the American Revolution (1775-83) was philosophically based on Enlightenment ideas, they were largely expressed in English terms; it was the cries of “liberty, equality, fraternity” in the French Revolution (1789-99) that gave life to the Mexican War of Independence (1810-21). Remember that Napoleon had invaded Spain in 1808 and occupied it until 1813, so, courtesy of the French, 1810 looked like a good time to confront Spain. Fighting dragged on for over a decade, but when it was all over, Mexico was an independent constitutional monarchy with Agustín de Iturbide serving as “emperor”; since that was not the outcome most people had been working for, de Iturbide was overthrown a year or so later by Antonio López de Santa Anna, who set up the Republic of Mexico.

The French aura surrounding the War of Independence led to some serious immigration from France (before that, Spanish rulers had prohibited immigration from countries other than Spain). In the 1830s, France tried to set up a couple of colonies in Veracruz; they weren’t all that successful, but a good number of French people settled permanently in Mexico. By 1849, the French were the second-largest immigrant group, after the Spanish themselves.

French entrepreneurship in Mexico brought on the First Franco-Mexican War—also known as “The Pastry War” (Guerre de Pâtisseries). In 1838-39, King Louis-Phillipe sent some ships to blockade the port of Veracruz, cutting off all Mexican trade with Europe. The goal was to impress on Mexico the idea that they needed to cut down on post-war unrest (there were 20 different presidents in the first 20 years of the Republic). All that chaos had led to the looting of a Mexico City pastry shop (an interesting story in itself), and Louis-Phillipe decided it was time France collected for all losses suffered by all French businesses in Mexico, along with some war debts stemming from French aid during wars in what is now Texas. Basically, Mexico lost, Britain negotiated a treaty, and Mexico paid France.

With some detours through a dictatorial presidency by Santa Anna and territory-grabbing by the U.S., Mexico ended up in debt to France again, which, who knows why they would, had once again come to Mexico’s assistance. However, then-president Benito Juárez declared a moratorium on paying foreign debts; France, Spain, and Britain invaded; Spain and Britain dropped out when they learned France was hell-bent to take over the whole country, which they did in 1862. Before they did, though, they suffered a defeat—en route from Veracruz to Mexico City, they were met with resistance. Led by Ignacio Zaragoza, Mexican forces occupied fortifications in Puebla. The French were unsuccessful in their attack, and were routed into complete retreat on May 5 by a young cavalry officer named José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori. Although the battle provided only a temporary halt to France’s victory over Mexico, it became known as “Cinco de Mayo,” and like the battle itself, isn’t a very big deal in Mexico. Porfirio Díaz, however, was a big deal, and more about him later.

By 1864, the French had installed Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph, an Austrian archduke from the Habsburg monarchy, as Emperor Maximilian I of the Second Mexican Empire (Iturbide’s brief rule was the First Mexican Empire). Some stories have it that his wife, the Belgian princess Charlotte/Carlota, pressured him to take the job, which he didn’t want. If so, Maximilian’s instincts were right; in 1867, he was executed by a Mexican firing squad as Benito Juárez led the uprising that liberated Mexico from foreign rule.

Juárez remained as president, defeating Porfirio Díaz in the 1871 election, until he dropped dead at his desk in 1872. Díaz began making moves to return to power. In 1876, he succeeded, and embarked on what was effectively a dictatorship (the “Porfiriato”) until 1911, with a little break from 1880-84 to give the semblance of presidential elections. He managed to maintain office by catering to the conservative wealthy and, not incidentally, the French tastes they developed courtesy of Maximilian. When he was finally overthrown in the Mexican Revolution, Díaz fled to Paris; he died in 1915, and is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery.

Despite their ignominious ends, Maximilian, Carlota, and Porfirio Díaz are responsible for lasting French influences in Mexico.

French Architecture

Maximilian brought 19th-century French urban design to Mexico City. Paseo de la Reforma connects the National Palace with Chapultepec Park, and could have been designed by Baron Haussmann, who laid out the Avenue des Champs Élysées in Paris. Remember the neoclassical Beaux Arts movement? That would be the Palacio de Bellas Artes. In Mérida, the Palacio Cantón was built during the Porfiriato and now houses the Regional Museum of Anthropology and History. In Orizaba, none other than Gustav Eiffel designed the Palacio de Hierro, a Neoclassical/Art Nouveau ironwork structure that was to serve as the municipal palace (today it houses offices and a series of small museums—soccer, beer, flags, ex-presidents, the “Roots of Orizaba,” the geography of Orizaba, and a planetarium). Eiffel also made it over to Baja California Sur to the small city of Santa Rosalia, to design the cast-iron Iglesia de Santa Bárbara, mostly notable for its interior barrel-vault ceiling.

Throughout Mexico, you can also see stunning examples of Art Nouveau architecture, courtesy of France, and the immediately succeeding Art Deco, courtesy of any number of countries, including the U.S.

French cuisine

Mexico’s first classic cookbook, El Cocinero Mexicano, was published in 1831 and is planted firmly in the tradition of classic French cuisine—despite its claims to serving up the best of Mexican food. (No one was going to publish a cookbook for indigenous food—that was for the lower classes and cookbooks were hardly necessary.) The continuous state dinners prepared for Maximilian, Carlota, and guests, would have been indistinguishable from over-indulgent 19th-century French banquets. Today, huitlacoche crepes, various mousses, cream soups (carrot with cilantro, perhaps mushroom with epazote, anyone?), and of course, those pastries and some desserts remind us of the French presence in Mexico.

French Fashion

Even before the arrival of Maximilian and Carlota, French fashion made inroads on Mexican taste. Starting as Las Fábricas de Francia in the 1850s (not the same as the current Fábricas de Francia, which is part of Liverpool), Frenchman Victor Gassier began building the fashion emporium that finally opened as El Palacio de Hierro in 1891. Although that building was destroyed by fire, and the store had problems during the Revolution, it reopened as the Palacio de Hierro in 1920 in a new Art Nouveau building (French architect, of course) in Polanco, complete with two stained-glass ceilings done to match ones in Nancy, France (a center of Art Nouveau architecture).   That building reopened in 2016, boasting a $300 million (USD) renovation and another 594,000 square feet of floor space. As you could during the Porfiriato, you can spend big bucks on the latest fashion from France: Chanel, Hermés, Louis Vuitton.