Tag Archives: Deborah Van Hoewyk

Musical Genres in Mexico

By Deborah Van Hoewyk

Banda

As you might guess from the name, banda uses a lot of brass instruments, and just like brass bands anywhere, banda groups play almost any kind of music. Dating back to the 19th century, when piston brass horns arrived Mexico, banda first took off in Sinaloa; however, almost every little town soon had its own banda, usually with brass, woodwinds, and percussion – es.

Want to listen? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-nO5meXGHs

Conjunto

Conjunto can just mean a musical ensemble, but it’s also the distinct Tex-Mex music of the northern border, specifically tejano or norteño. Border music usually features the accordion, brought to the border by 19th-century German, Czech, and Polish settlers in Texas, combined with Mexico’s 12-string bajo sexto guitar. Eminently dance-able, especially if you can do the polka!

Want to listen? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCjLTXVCd1s

Cumbia

Cumbia (pronounced kum-bee-yah) made its way up to Mexico from Colombia. Very popular by the 1980s, it combines Colombian influences with Mexican norteño and ranchero styles, as well as African, Amerindian, and European sounds. Instruments usually include accordions, drums, flutes, and maracas.

Want to listen? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXRyZtJ9c2E

Ranchera

Ranchera music, a traditional Mexican form, got a boost with the Mexican Revolution (1920-21), and played a part in developing a new national identity. Land reforms and job opportunities brought rural people into cities, and they brought with them the rural folk songs and the nostalgic memories they recalled – themes emphasize nature, love, patriotism. By the 1940s, ranchera music was made even more popular by the rise of ranchera movies – Mexico’s version of the westerns on America’s silver screen. Ranchera, like country music in the U.S., is still with us and probably always will be.

Want to listen? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6fvKOC8LDM

The Mexican Houses of Luis Barragán

By Deborah Van Hoewyk

At any given point in its 5,000-year history, Mexican architecture represents a chronicle of cultural change. From ancient Mesoamerican ruins and Spanish colonial buildings, followed by Spanish and French styles (mostly reflections of European Baroque and Neoclassical), through a series of modernist/brutalist approaches that work to incorporate Mexican themes and traditions, Mexican architecture has reflected external influences and tried to integrate them with native themes. These styles are all represented by well-known public buildings, many in Mexico City – think the Metropolitan Cathedral (1813), the Palacio de Bellas Artes (1934), the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadeloupe (1976), and the Museo Soumaya in Plaza Carso (2011).

Mexican Modernity, Mexican Houses

It is the Mexican house, however, that created a true Mexican modernism that synthesizes international modernist influences with Mexican architectural traditions. And the architect (and engineer) who accomplished this synthesis was Luis Ramiro Barragán Morfín (1902-88), largely through the houses he designed in the 1950s and 1960s. Barragán is the only Mexican to have won the prestigious Pritzker Prize, often referred to as the “Nobel prize of architecture.”

Born in Guadalajara, Barragán graduated from the Escuela Libre de Ingenieros de Guadalajara in 1923. He would complete coursework elsewhere that qualified him as an architect as well. Two years later, and again in 1931, he toured western Europe, where his observations led him to see landscape as integral to architecture. He also met modernist European architects, saliently Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, the Swiss-French architect known as Le Corbusier, from whom Barragán learned to appreciate clean, simple lines; open, sculptural spaces; deftly handled color and light; and gradually, a softening of the mechanical relationship between the architecture and its purpose.

According to Andrés Casillas, who worked with Barragán, the “rules” of the Modernist movement had a functionalist tendency to make the house “a machine for living,” and Barragán had moved on to a more “emotional architecture.” Barragán claimed that “any work of architecture which does not express serenity is a mistake.” Furthermore, Barragán felt that “In alarming proportions, the following words have disappeared from architectural publications: beauty, inspiration, magic, sorcery, enchantment, and also serenity, mystery, silence, privacy, astonishment. All of these have found a loving home in my soul.”

The Houses of Barragán’s Soul

Barragán is usually referred to as a modernist, and his buildings do use clean lines and raw, natural, and simple materials. What sets his houses apart, however, is the use of color and light, along with a surprising use of space – both interior and exterior – to create a flowing, connected, or self-contained spatial composition.

Casa-Jardin Ortega, Tacubaya, CDMX, 1942: Tacubaya is an old working-class neighborhood in CDMX; Barragán bought several lots there and built this house as his own. He lived there from 1942 to 1947, when he sold the house to a silversmith named Alfredo Ortega to raise money for another landscape project. Barragán started with the jardin (garden) part with a wandering multi-level garden, but the casa (house) gradually emerged in the form of a large, T-shaped house. While little-visited today, the Casa-Jardin Ortega is considered the first of Barragán’s mature works, and a primary example of his ideas about uniting the setting with the house. About Casa-Jardin Ortega, Barragán said, “In 1941, I created my first garden in Mexico City. I acquired a piece of land with various slopes, complemented and leveled various platforms to create a garden in compartments, recalling the beauty of the patios and gardens of the Alhambra and the Generalife [palaces Barragán had visited in Granada, Spain].”

Casa-Estudio Luis Barragán, Tacubaya, CDMX, 1948: Recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004, Barragán’s studio is considered a remarkable regional adaptation of the international modern movement in architecture, achieved through Barragán’s integration of modernist design with traditional Mexican vernacular architecture. The casa-estudio has three stories and a private garden.

According to UNESCO, the house and studio “represent a masterpiece of the new developments in the Modern Movement, integrating traditional, philosophical and artistic currents into a new synthesis.” Of specific importance are “the profound dialogue between light and constructed space and the way in which colour is substantial to form and materials.”

Cuadra San Cristóbal, Egerstrom House in the Los Clubes subdivision northeast of CDMX, 1968: Accomplished in collaboration with his colleague Andrés Casillas, Cuadra San Cristóbal is perhaps Barragán’s best-known work. Formerly rural agricultural land, Los Clubes offered the architects the opportunity to echo the ranches the subdivision replaced. Cuadra San Cristóbal features a huge swimming pool (sometimes used to cool the horses), an architecturally integrated fountain (Fuente de las Amantes, or Lover’s Fountain), stables, gardens, plus a large house defined by a typical Barragán palette of pinks, purples, other bright accent colors grounded with earth-toned elements.

Casa Gilardi, San Miguel Chapultepec, CDMX, 1977: Casa Gilardi is Barragán’s last house, designed as a “bachelor pad” for two friends who ran an advertising agency; it is now occupied by the family of one of the friends. The commission had two requirements. First, the house had to surround an old jacaranda tree in the center of the lot, and second, there had to be a large indoor pool. In somewhat of a departure from his other houses, Casa Gilardi works to preserve the privacy of its residents, rather than allowing spaces to flow together; on the other hand, Casa Gilardi may be the epitome of Barragán’s use of color to define the architecture.

In Search of Diana Kennedy’s Huachinango Veracruzana

By Deborah Van Hoewyk

In 1979, seven years after British-born Diana Kennedy published The Cuisines of Mexico, I went to Veracruz, both the city and the state. I thought the food was extraordinary.

The culinary website Serious Eats describes “Jarocho” (the colloquial term for being native to Veracruz) cuisine as “one of Mexico’s simplest,” but “one of its richest.” It was on the shore of Veracruz where Hernán Cortés first set foot, and Spanish cooking – already Mediterranean and Moroccan in its heritage – was quickly adopted and adapted to Jarocho ingredients and techniques, followed by West African influences. (Cortés brought the first six African slaves to Mexico; eventually, over 200,000 Africans came through the port of Veracruz, to be sold in the town of Antigua, about 28 km [±17 miles] west of the port).

The food of coastal Veracruz thus offers all kinds of fish and seafood, cooked in all kinds of ways, served with all kinds of sauces – and Huachinango Veracruzana – Red Snapper a la Veracruz – was the queen of all the dishes I tasted there.

On returning to the States, I went out and bought the Sunset Mexican Cookbook. My copy was from 1977, and was subtitled Simplifed Techniques, 155 Classic Recipes. The American palate of the 1970s was not yet familiar with Mexican cooking, but the Sunset Mexican cookbook sold over a million copies, through 20 printings, with at least five updates between 1969 and 1983.

And one of its recipes, from Diana Kennedy but adapted to American ingredients, was “Snapper Veracruz (Huachinango a la Veracruzana).”

Loved that recipe. Loved especially the green olives, orange juice, golden raisins, cinnamon, and capers. After six moves to three states, I lost my Sunset Mexican cookbook – not that I don’t have others, but none has that exact recipe. That, according to Diana Kennedy, is because the recipe is anything but exact!

The Woman Who Wrote My Remembered Recipe

Culinary anthropologist, cookbook author, chef by default, Diana Southwood was born a hundred years ago (March 3, 1923), in the town of Loughton, England, about 20 miles north of London. The daughter of a kindergarten teacher and a salesman, she lived to be 99, dying at her home in Heroica Zitácuaro, Michoacán, on July 24, 2022. In her twenties, she was a “Lumber Jill” with the Women’s Timber Corps, replacing the men who had gone to fight in WW II, and a housing manager in Scotland, working with mining families. When she was 30, she emigrated to Canada and worked in a film library and sold Wedgewood fine china. She loved to travel, and loved to explore new cuisines; from Canada she started visiting the Caribbean.

On a 1956 trip to the Caribbean, she stopped over in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on her way home. Staying in the same hotel was American journalist Paul P. Kennedy, the New York Times chief correspondent for Latin America. Kennedy was covering civil unrest in Haiti, where the people were using strikes and demonstrations to force their dictatorial president, Paul Magloire, out of office. She was 33, he was 51 – apparently the attraction was instantaneous; Diana described it as un flechazo, an arrow “shot straight to the heart.” She followed Paul and his “half-promise of matrimony” to his home base, Mexico City; they were married within the year.

The ever-versatile Diana Kennedy took up Spanish and worked as a typist at the British consulate in Mexico City. The Kennedys were popular in the English-speaking community in Mexico City, entertaining and being entertained on a frequent basis; when they ate dinner at the homes of friends, Kennedy as usual was taken with foods they were served. When she asked her hostess (this was the 1950s, people) about a dish, they usually replied that the maid or the cook knew about it.

When she asked the maid or the cook, they replied they made it the way they did it back home in their village. Off Kennedy would go to find out just how they did it back home in the village. This was the process that became Diana Kennedy’s hallmark in researching Mexican cuisine in all its regional variations: ask about the recipe, go to where it came from, ask questions, and learn how to make it with authenticity. All her recipes identified who made them and where they made them.

Her trekking about the rural villages also led her to the cookbooks of Josefina Velásquez de Léon (1899-1968), who had visited church groups in the countryside to document regional cooking. (One might call Velásquez de Léon the first celebrity chef – she cooked on radio in the 1940s and television in the 1950s, published cookbooks, opened a cooking school, and set up her own cookbook publishing house; her papers are in several archive collections, but one of them is the Special Collections of the University of Texas at San Antonio, alongside those of Diana Kennedy.)

One of the Kennedys’ guests in Mexico City was Craig Claiborne, who had joined the New York Times in 1957 as its food editor and off-and-on restaurant critic. When Diana offered to buy him a Mexican cookbook, he is supposed to have said “Not until you have written one!”

Diana Kennedy in New York

But the cookbooks came later, and Craig Claiborne would have a hand in that. Paul Kennedy fell victim to cancer, aggressive prostate cancer. In 1966, the couple drove North to New York City for his treatment. In Nothing Fancy, one of Kennedy’s most personal cookbooks (1984) and a 2019 documentary of the same title by filmmaker Elizabeth Carroll, Kennedy tells a story of that last trip. Eating takeout in some motel somewhere in Texas, “Paul laid his knife and fork down soon after he had started his meal. ‘I don’t know whether to thank you or not,’ he bellowed. ‘Most of my life I could eat anything anywhere, but now look what you have done to me. This damned rubbish!’ and pushed his plate back in disgust.”

Paul Kennedy died on February 2, 1967. Diana was left alone in their apartment on the upper west side of Manhattan. Although all the apartment offered was a galley kitchen, Claiborne had featured Diana’s work on regional Mexican cuisine in the New York Times, and suggested that she could teach authentic Mexican cooking classes. Word got out that Diana’s classes were great, and when Frances McCullough, a poetry editor at Harper & Row, took a class, she told Kennedy that a cookbook was in order. Not that Diana Kennedy knew how to write, but McCullough shepherded her through the process and Kennedy’s first cookbook, The Cuisines of Mexico, came to life in 1972.

It was a struggle to get it published as a quality cookbook, however – Harper & Row thought it would never sell, said they had no money to print it with pictures, and sent a cover design that featured a sombrero sitting on a cactus. Kennedy was furious but McCullough said, “OK, Diana, let’s invite them to lunch. We’ll give them a great meal and lots of margaritas.” It worked. After the publishing executive finished, they started looking at Diana’s slides of the dishes they’d been served, and started saying, “Well, we have to have THAT one … and THAT one,” and so on. “I ended up with a great designer,” Diana recalled.

McCullough would edit the next five cookbooks Kennedy wrote, and remained a friend for life.

Diana Kennedy Moves to Michoacán

Diana went back to Mexico repeatedly to gather the recipes in Cuisines of Mexico, but continued working professionally in the various cooking schools popping up in the U.S., returning to Mexico to hunt up more authentic recipes and culinary techniques in the summer. It took until 1976 to leave New York permanently. According to Kennedy, she told herself, “My God, I’ve got to get out. What am I doing with all these smells, the doggie odors, the exhaust from the restaurants in my face? It’s all so artificial.”

The contrast of authentic and artificial would epitomize the rest of Diana Kennedy’s life. When she went back to Mexico in 1976, she stayed; in 1980, she bought three hectares (just under 7½ acres) about 130 km (about 80 miles) west of Mexico City in Michoacán. There she designed and built Quinta (country house) Diana, her Mexican home and culinary research center. Quinta Diana was supposed to be just a little food museum for Diana’s collection of cooking tools, but the idea that museums were of “dead things” was anathema to Kennedy. She hired an architect and ecological engineer and started a house that incorporated large boulders on the site, rambling up and down a steep hillside, amply graced with perforated walls to encourage fresh breezes through the house. Down the slope is her eco-garden full of local Mexican herbs and vegetables and home to a motley collection of livestock and bees. Quinta Diana is mostly off the grid; Kennedy eventually used it to establish the Diana Kennedy Center, a place for research, teaching, and sustainable living – with sustainable native foods at its heart.

For fifty years or so, Kennedy led a busy professional life from Quinta Diana. She wrote more cookbooks; before leaving New York, she produced her second, The Tortilla Book, in 1975. The rest included Recipes from the Regional Cooks of Mexico (1978), Nothing Fancy: Recipes and Recollections of Soul-Satisfying Food (1984), The Art of Mexican Cooking (1989), My Mexico (1998), From My Mexican Kitchen: Techniques and Ingredients (2003), and Oaxaca al Gusto: An Infinite Gastronomy (2010).

She taught cooking classes and participated in events devoted to international cuisine. She won awards – from the James Beard Foundation, from Mexico (Order of the Aztec Eagle), from Britain (Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire).

The Perils of Authenticity

Always a stickler for doing things in just the right way, all the time, Diana Kennedy has had her detractors. There are those who think that cuisine changes and adapts over time, that it was not a “fly preserved in amber.” Kennedy has even castigated the Mexican cooks who took her recipes and evolved them.

There were those who feel her insistence on using lard and lots of crema is unhealthy, and her notion that you should read all the explanations and notes before attempting a recipe – a recipe that might take five days to make all the salsas and bases – is antiquated. Kennedy, on the other hand, says “It’s difficult to educate a whole public … Americans were raised to expect that horrible combination plate – the quick cheap fix.”

Tejal Rao, a New York Times restaurant critic and food writer, believes that Diana Kennedy “changed the way millions of people perceived Mexican Food.” On the other hand, when Kennedy taught Martha Stewart to make Oaxacan tamales de frijol on television, “Wasn’t something lost?” Kennedy would say no, but Tejal Rao pointed out that perhaps a Zapotec cook should have been serving as the expert on her own tamales. Rao also faulted Kennedy for never backing down “from her ludicrous position of dismissing Tex-Mex, California Mexican food and all of the rich, regional cuisines that grew from the Mexican diaspora.”

Nonetheless, after spending more than half her lifetime in grass-roots scholarship across the kitchens of rural Mexico, bouncing around in a beat-up pickup truck with a revolver in the glove compartment, Diana Kennedy made an immeasurable contribution to our understanding of and appreciation for Mexican gastronomy. With her attention to regional differences in Mexican dishes, she laid much of the foundation for the United Nations’ designation of Mexican cuisine as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Will I still look for the “right” recipe for Huachinango Veracruzana? Even though Diana Kennedy told me that it’s more likely made with orange juice and raisins in the mountains of Veracruz, maybe in Jalapa? Of course I will.

It Came from Outer Space –and the Dinosaurs Were No More

By Deborah Van Hoewyk

A long time ago, in an asteroid belt – or maybe a comet cloud – but definitely far far away … a “space rock” escaped its orbit and slammed into Earth. It was the end of an era.

An Astronomical Event
A long time would be 66 million years ago (mya), apparently on a day in the northern-hemisphere spring. The impact marked the end of a geological period called the Cretaceous, which ran from 145 to 66 mya). The Cretaceous followed the Triassic (237- 201 mya) and Jurassic (201-145 mya); these three periods comprise the Mesozoic Era, or the age of dinosaurs. The dinosaurs, except for those that could fly, were pretty much instantaneously over as well.

There is not yet agreement on whether the “space rock,” 9.6 km (±6 miles) in diameter, was an asteroid, basically a giant rock, or a comet, made of ice, rock, and dust. Whether it came from the asteroid belt, a donut-shaped collection of debris left over from when the planets of our solar system were formed, or from one or another of the more distant debris clouds that generate comets, doesn’t really seem to matter. Either way, Jupiter got into the act and set the space rock on course for a place named Chicxulub (chicks-oo-loob) on the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico.

What did Jupiter do? Exerted gravity. Jupiter is about 318 times the mass of Earth, and its gravitational pull is about 2.4 times that of Earth. As astrophysicist Amir Siraj, a student at Harvard when he did his research on the “Chicxulub Impactor,” explains, “the solar system acts as a kind of pinball machine,” and “Jupiter, the most massive planet, kicks incoming long-period comets into orbits that bring them very close to the Sun.” The complicated interaction of these “sun grazer” comets with solar tidal forces makes them smaller and faster, and increases the chance they’re headed straight for earth.

What Happened the Day the Dinosaurs Died?
About a thousand species of dinosaurs inhabited the earth. From ancestors to extinction, they lasted about 230 million years, with the age of recognizable dinosaurs running for about 165 million years. They originated when the earth had a single land mass, called Pangaea; as Pangaea split into areas we now know as the seven continents, the dinosaurs went along for the ride on most of them.

Mexico hosted a range of dinosaurs, with most fossilized remains coming from northern Baja California and Coahuila. There were horned dinosaurs like the Cohuilaceratops, 4 meters (±13 feet) long and weighing just over a ton – but its horns were 1.2 meters (±4 feet) long. There were some of the largest duckbilled hadrosaurs – remains of Tlatolophus galorum were just unearthed in Coahuila, as well as smaller duck-bills like Velafrons and Latirhinus. Tlatolophus was 8-12 meters (26-39 feet) long, weighing in at about 3.6 tons. There were the “apex predators,” the tyrranosaurs, who preyed on the hadrosaurs; Mexico’s best-known tyrranosaur was the medium-sized Labocania, only 7 meters (23 feet) long and weighing in at a ton and half.

Mexico’s dinosaurs were the first to go when the Chicxulub Impactor hit the tip of the Yucatán peninsula with the equivalent of a 100-million megaton blast – 60,000 times the energy of all the nuclear weapons now in existence – hollowing out a crater ±150 km (90 miles) wide.

The impact generated a core of super-heated – over 10,000 degrees – plasma, i.e., matter that has reached a fourth state, beyond solid, liquid, and gas, basically a gas “soup” of charged ions (positive) and electrons (negative).

This thermal pulse lasted for only a few minutes, but it sent out an air blast, a shockwave of air pressure that created winds well over 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) per hour. The air blast radiated across the seas, sending raging wildfires through ancient forests and bringing tsunamis with waves 100-300 meters (±330-990 feet) over the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico.

The impact also produced a seismic pulse equal to a magnitude 10 earthquake, causing landslides on the sea floor, which was already deeply eroded by the backwash from the tsunamis. The seismic pulse radiated far from Chicxulub, with tremors gathering surface water and pushing it up the Western Interior Seaway, an inland sea that split what is now the United States in two.

All terrestrial flora and fauna, along with marine life, within a 1,500-1,800 km (900-1008 miles) radius was roasted or buried alive. And all of this occurred before any debris ejected from the crater could fall back to earth. Within minutes, however, the debris – mostly rocky rubble and “ejecta spherules” (tiny glass beads called tektites, composed of melted rock and dust) – began falling over the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, covering the end of the Yucatán Peninsula and the adjacent sea floor several hundred meters (±800 feet) deep; 350-600 kilometers (210-360 miles) away in Campeche, at the base of the Yucatán, the ejected debris was 50-300 meters (165 to 980 feet) thick.

Chicxulub and Mass Extinction
The gas, dust, and “geologic shrapnel” flung up by the Chicxulub impact did far more than fall to earth in Mexico. It followed global air currents to create an “impact winter,” in which the entire earth was plunged into darkness and freezing cold as the ejected material circled the globe and blocked out the sun. It was a winter that lasted three years. Hot fragments set off wildfires around the world. Acid rain poured down. Plants died. Animals that ate plants died. Animals that ate the animals that ate the plants died. In what is now called the “Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction Event (K-Pg),” three-quarters of all species then on earth – including and especially the dinosaurs – went extinct.

Not everyone agrees that Chicxulub is the whole story. After studying over a thousand dinosaur-egg fragments, Chinese scientists have argued that in the two million years before K-Pg, dinosaur diversity was dropping. They conclude that the “end-Cretaceous catastrophic events [saliently massive volcanic eruptions in India that would also have caused climate change] probably acted on an already vulnerable ecosystem and led to nonavian dinosaur extinction.”

There were survivors. Some of the avian dinosaurs, ancestors of today’s birds (not the pterosaurs, though, pterodactyls were actually flying reptiles); early small mammals that lived in burrows; small amphibians like frogs and salamanders; and reptiles – snakes, lizards, alligators, crocodiles, turtles – made it through.

Researchers in evolutionary biology at Cornell University have been studying the ancestors of primates (that’s us!) and marsupials (kangaroos and possums). Before the K-Pg extinction, these mammals had been arboreal, living their entire lives in the trees, not a good place to be as incredibly high temperatures sent wildfires tearing through forests. Right around the time of the impact, however, these mammals were making an evolutionary transition out of the trees and a few survived.

It should be noted that we are now in the “Holocene Extinction,” in which human activity – increasing population, overconsumption, and pollution – threatens the extinction of over a million species in the next ten years; the World Wildlife Fund calls it the “largest mass extinction event since the end of the dinosaur age.”

How Do We Know All This?
You could spend time struggling through academic analyses to gather all this information, but there’s an easier way. David Attenborough, the British dean of natural history documentaries, has just released his latest work, a 90-minute film titled Dinosaurs: The Final Day with David Attenborough (premiered April 15, 2022, on the BBC; in the U.S., May 11, 2022, as a two-part special, Dinosaur Apocalypse, on the PBS show Nova).

The documentary shows Attenborough walking with dinosaurs as the Chicxulub impactor is gathering speed in space (the dinosaurs were created by the animators of The Lion King and The Jungle Book). Surprisingly, the documentary starts out not in Mexico but in Hell Creek, North Dakota, about 3000 km (1800 miles) from Chicxulub. Attenborough spent three years with the researchers at the Tanis dig, and devotes most of the documentary to exploring their findings.

The key? The “K-Pg boundary,” a sharp demarcation between life before, during, and after the impact. At the actual boundary there is a concentration of iridium, a hard, iridescent mineral rare on earth but known to occur in meteorites (meteors are “space rocks” once they have entered Earth’s atmosphere, and meteorites are the post-impact remains of the meteors). In 2016, a group of international marine scientists drilled a thousand feet into the edge of the Chicxulub crater about 30 km (18 miles) northwest of Progreso, Yucatán, extracting a core sample that showed iridium at the point of impact.

The Tanis dig shows this even more clearly. British paleontologist Robert DePalma, working with an international team, found large, astonishingly well-preserved fossils below and in a crumbly layer of rock full of the ejecta spherules. Fossils from the Tanis dig are so well preserved because the post-impact inundation of watery mud engulfed living creatures, preserving them much as volcanic lava preserved the victims at Pompeii in the year 79 CE.

Among these fossils are saltwater fish, obviously not native to North Dakota, with gills full of spherules chemically identical to ones found at Chicxulub, indicating that the fish came with the water that rushed from the Gulf of Mexico up the Western Interior Seaway. It is thought that the spherules may have taken as little as 13 minutes after impact in Mexico to fall in Hell Creek.

Chicxulub and the Future
Will Chicxulub happen again? Probably. But definitely not in our lifetime. Amir Siraj, who identified the sun-grazer comets, has determined that, even though the chances of a similar impact are 10 times greater than previously thought, it’s only projected to occur every 250-730 million years.

In the meantime, Chicxulub has lessons for the future. The crater was open on its northeast side to the Gulf of Mexico, allowing nutrient-rich water to circulate in the crater. Life started up very quickly in the form of microscopic marine life, perhaps within 200 years. A consortium of scientists who study the return of life to Chicxulub say it offers lessons for restoring the oceans, threatened today by oxygen deletion, ocean acidification, and rising temperatures. According to Christopher M. Lowery, of the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas (Austin), Chicxulub “might be an important analog for the recovery of biodiversity after we finally curtail carbon dioxide emissions and pollution.”

What in the World is a Water Rabbit? Plus – Your Pet Rabbit Does NOT Want to Go Swimming!

By Deborah Van Hoewyk

When I was told it was the year of the water rabbit in the Chinese zodiac, I was a tad miffed. What was wrong with the regular rabbit I’ve examined on countless red-and-white paper placemats in the Chinatown restaurants of New York? Would having a water rabbit instead of a regular rabbit change the way the year of the rabbit went?

Not to worry. The rabbit is the same as always, but the Chinese zodiac is more complicated than we think. It is governed by ideas and forces, some of them deeply embedded in Chinese philosophy, that beg for further study. The forces that characterize the twelve zodiac animals, however, are pretty straightforward.

The Yin and the Yang

First, each animal has either a “yin” or a “yang” identity. Yin and yang, if you’re not familiar with them, are the polarities of energy that together shape existence. Yin energies are considered to be feminine, intuitive, and receptive, while yang energies are masculine, logical, and giving. Everything has both yin and yang, and yin and yang work together, but one type of energy will be dominant.

The rabbit, along with the rooster, the ox, the pig, the snake, and the goat (or sheep), are the yin signs of the zodiac. The yang signs, then, are the monkey, the horse, the dog, the tiger, the rat, and the dog. Both the yin and the yang animals have related personality traits. The rabbit (yin), for example, can be described as “quiet, elegant, kind, responsible”; the other two animals in the rabbit’s “compatibility triangle” (determined by the positions on the zodiac circle) are the goat (yin) and the pig (yin) – described as “calm, gentle, sympathetic” and “compassionate, generous, diligent,” respectively.

The Five Elements

The zodiac is also built on wu shing – the five elements: wood, fire, earth, metal (gold), and water. The idea is presented in that popular classic for 1960s college students, the I Ching (the Book of Changes). Originally written as a how-to book for divination sometime between 1000 and 750 BCE, and morphing into a cosmological text sometime before 200 BCE, the I Ching contains the roots of both yin/yang and wu shing.

The elements govern the interdependent and interactive relationships among all things; relationships are a balance of creation and destruction, just as ying and yang balance energy. When elements interact, progress – positive or negative – occurs. The five elements move in a cycle; when it’s positive/creative, the cycle goes like this: wood starts a fire, fire creates earth, earth holds metal, metal carries water, water feeds wood. When it’s negative/destructive, the cycle goes like this: fire melts metal, metal chops wood, wood separates the earth, earth absorbs water, water puts out fire.

Combining the Cycles

The zodiac animals rotate in a 12-year cycle, and the zodiac elements in a 5-year cycle. This of course, does not match up. The “regular” rabbit years are 1939, 1951, 1963, 1975, 1987, 1999, 2011, and this year, 2023.

Since the elements go in the same order every cycle, the element-rabbit cycle has been:

1939: earth rabbit
1951: metal rabbit
1963: water rabbit
1975: wood rabbit
1987: fire rabbit
1999: earth rabbit
2011: metal rabbit
2023: water rabbit!

And what does the water rabbit portend for 2023? The year starts on January 22, 2023, and goes through February 9, 2024. If you were born in any of the years of the rabbit, this will be a year of hope, and your life will take a turn for the better. You will be lucky in love and career, although you should stick with the job you have now. Your lucky colors are red, pink, purple, and blue; your lucky flowers are hostas and jasmine; and your lucky numbers are 3, 7, and 9. Of course, other Chinese horoscopes list completely different colors, flowers, and numbers. Fortune cookie, anyone?

Are Water Rabbits Real?

No, and somewhat yes. Can rabbits swim? All rabbits can manage to swim, usually under extreme duress. The same fluffy coat that makes rabbits cute and cuddly also absorbs water, adding weight and dragging the rabbit down. Rather like trying to swim in your winter coat and boots. Should you have a pet rabbit that likes the water, make sure it swims in a very shallow pool. A foot of water would be the max, and there should be an easy exit.

There are two types of rabbits that do swim regularly, swamp rabbits and marsh rabbits – they have fur described as “sparse.” The swamp rabbit (Sylvilagus aquaticus) is largest of the cottontail rabbits. It lives in the south-central United States (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama) in cypress swamps, marshes, and river estuaries. The swamp rabbit is the most hunted rabbit in the United States, and is also prey for domestic dogs and alligators. When threatened, they sink down in the water with only their noses showing so they can breathe.

The marsh rabbit (Sylvilagus palustris) is a small cottontail found in the coastal southeast United States. It favors freshwater marshes and brackish estuaries. The largest current population of marsh rabbits is in the Great Dismal Swamp, located on the border between Virginia and North Carolina. They are more prone to swimming than the swamp rabbits. Their worst predators are the great horned owl and the marsh hawk.

Writing in Mexico:
Female Authors, Fantasy, and Femicide

By Deborah Van Hoewyk

Last month, the New York Times profiled a “new vanguard” among the women writers of Latin America (October 9, 2022, “For Latin American Women, Horror and Fantasy Capture Everyday Struggle”). Make no mistake, though, book critic Benjamin P. Russell, warns – the fantasy he’s talking about is not the magical realism we have known and loved from Columbian Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967), Chilean Isabel Allende (The House of the Spirits, 1982) or Mexico’s own Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate, 1990).

Magical realism integrates the magical or supernatural into a realistic setting (although you can easily argue that the magic overtakes the real in Like Water for Chocolate!). The magical elements serve to comment on how the real world works – often very badly. In Like Water for Chocolate, Tita falls in love at first sight with Pedro; however, Tita is her mother’s youngest child, and is expected to stay single and care for her mother until she dies. Mom makes Pedro marry Tita’s sister. Esquivel uses Tita’s magical ability to incorporate her emotions into the food she cooks to comment on the injustice of her loneliness. While magical realism can include death and destruction, the very fact that it combines magic and realism, that it makes the magic “real,” means that it does not lend itself well to depicting true horror and evil.

From the Magic to the Unusual

But there are women writers who have no qualms at taking on true horror and evil. Russell points out that a “conspicuous number of women writers are using fantasy, horror and the unfamiliar to unsettle readers and critique social ills” throughout Latin America, with half a dozen authors from Mexico. The critic finds the trend unsurprising, given the widespread “frustration against restrictions on women’s rights and rising gender violence.”

Russell quotes the work of literature professor Carmen Alemany Bay, from the University of Alicante in Spain, in defining this work as the “narrative of the unusual” (narrativa de lo inusual). Fantastical and horrific elements are presented realistically, Bay says, but leave the reader to decide “what is possible and what is not.” Calling these novels magical realism is “a big, big mistake,” she says. “They may contain elements of magic, but that isn’t the foundation.”

For the most part, evil is possible in the narrative of the unusual. And what is more evil than femicide, the killing of women because they are women? Half of all femicides happen in Latin American countries; homicide is the leading cause of death for Mexican women aged 15-25. In absolute numbers for 2020, Mexico ranked second with 948; Brazil was nearly double, with 1,738. (The Eye has regularly covered domestic violence and femicide in Mexico.)

Among the female Mexican authors of novels of the “unusual” are two who have directly addressed femicide, violence against women, and systematic abuse and discrimination. Their themes are remarkably similar, the integration of what is fantasy and what is reality is seamless, and they both have a talent for depicting their settings and characters in extraordinary language redolent of place and time. For your reading pleasure, each has been rendered in English by remarkably skilled translators.

Brenda Lozana: Witches (2022)

Brenda Lozana, born in Mexico City in 1981, was recognized in 2015 by Mexico’s National Council on Culture and the Arts (Conaculta), the annual Hay Festival of Literature & Arts (held at Hay-on-Wye in Wales), and the cultural promotion organization the British Council as one of Mexico’s most important authors under the age of 40. By 2017, she made the Hay Festival’s list Bogotá 39, the most important new authors from Latin America.

Her novel Witches, translated by Heather Cleary, is really two intersecting stories – that of Feliciana, a curandera (healer) modeled on María Sabina, the Mazatec traditional healer and shaman from Huatla de Jiménez in the Sierra Occidental in northern Oaxaca, and Zoe, a Mexico City journalist who has come calling to report on the death of Feliciana’s mentor and cousin, Paloma. Paloma is a muxe, a man who takes on the appearance and obligations of a woman; referred to as the third gender, they are widely accepted in Zapotec culture, especially in the Isthmus. Paloma, originally a curandero named Gaspar, has transferred to Feliciana the family’s healing abilities, in particular healing through the use of language. The healing power, however, is usually handed from male to male, leaving Feliciana – like Paloma – in an ambiguously gendered position.

Since neither Feliciana nor Zoe speaks the other’s language, the story proceeds in two different voices. Here is what Feliciana sounds like:

It was six at night when Guadalupe came to tell me they had killed Paloma. I don’t remember times or dates, I don’t know when I was born because I was born like mountain was, go ask the mountain when it was born, but I know it was six at night when Guadalupe came to say they killed Paloma as she was getting ready to go out, I saw her there in her room, I saw her body on the floor and the shine for her eyes on her fingers and I saw her hands they were two in the mirror and the shine was on both like she had just put it on her eyes, like she could get up and put some on mine.

Zoe, of course, sounds completely different:

I agreed to write the article about Paloma’s murder because gender-based violence sends me into a rage. I couldn’t take the unending stream of news stores about femicide, rape, and abuse anymore—or the sexist jokes I’d hear around the office, for that matter. Any situation or remark that targeted a woman or someone who identified as one would set me off, and I wanted to do whatever I could from the trench I’d dug at the newsroom. Plus, I wanted to meet Feliciana. I was fascinated by her. When I took the assignment, I didn’t know any more about her than anyone else did: I new she was the legendary curandera of the Language and the most famous shaman alive. I knew that the words she used in her veladas, the ceremonies she performed, had miraculous healing powers, and I knew the stories about the artists, writers, directors, and musicians who’d traveled halfway around the world to meet her. The professors and linguists from other countries who’d gone to see her in the mountains of San Felipe. I knew that books, films, songs and paintings had come out of these visits—I didn’t know exactly which ones, but I knew they existed. I received a photo of Paloma lying on the ground in a pool of blood next to a bed draped with a peacock throw.

Together, Feliciana and Zoe tell each other their stories, their worries and fears, their traumas with violence against women, their desires for independence.

Fernanda Melchor: Hurricane Season (2020)

Fernanda Melchor, born in Veracruz city in 1982, was, like Lozano, named one of the most important Mexican authors under 40 in 2015. Hurricane Season won the Anna Seghers literary prize and the International Literature Award of the Haus de Culturen (both given by Germany), and was short-listed for the International Booker Prize in 2020.

Hurricane Season tells of the murder of the Witch of a tiny, cinder-block town called La Matosa, outside the city of Villagarbosa (Melchor’s stand-in for the city of Veracruz). The story is told by four people who know Luismi, an ex-lover of the Witch who also happens to be a trans woman who does traditional healing. Luismi’s cousin Yesenia thinks of him as a sexual deviant; Brando is a porn addict who can’t decide whether he wants to have sex with Luismi; Norma is a pregnant (by her stepfather) 13-year-old; Luismi’s mother takes Norma to the Witch for an abortion, which turns out poorly. These four voices surround the murder with clues to the crime, the identity of the Witch, and the abysmal context of life in La Matosa. Melchor’s language ranges from the brutal to the languid, it piles up in ever-lengthening sentences, and is never less than precise and deeply evocative. Here is the opening of Hurricane Season:

They reached the canal along the track leading up from the river, their slingshots drawn for battle and their eyes squinting, almost stitched together, in the midday glare. There were five of them, their ringleader the only one in swimming trunks: red shorts that blazed behind the parched crops of the cane fields, still low in early May. The rest of the troop trailed behind him in their underwear, all four caked in mud up to their shins, all four taking turns to carry the pail of small rocks they’d taken from the river that morning; all four scowling and fierce and so ready to give themselves up for the cause that not even the youngest, bringing up the rear, would have dared admit he was scared, the elastic of his slingshot pulled taut in his hands, the rock snug in the leather pad, primed to strike anything that got in his way at the very first sign of an ambush, be that the caw of the bienteveo, perched unseen like a guard in the trees behind them, the rustle of leaves being thrashed aside, or the whoosh of a rock cleaving the air just beyond their noses, the breeze warm and the almost white sky thick with ethereal birds of prey and a terrible smell that hit them harder than a fistful of sand in the face, a stench that made them want to hawk it up before it reached their guts, that made them want to stop and turn around. But the ringleader pointed to the edge of the cattle track, and all five of them, crawling along the dry grass, all five them packed together in a single body, all five of them surrounded by blowflies, finally recognized what was peeping out from the yellow foam on the water’s surface: the rotten face of a corpse floating among the rushes and the plastic bags swept in from the road on the breeze, the dark mask seething under a myriad of black snakes, smiling.

An Eye on the Women of The Eye

By Marcia Chaiken and Jan Chaiken

Deborah Van Hoewyk

Deborah joined The Eye writers in January 2012 and more recently took on the role of copy editor. Her articles often focus on fund-raising activities of local nonprofit organizations and Mexican culture. Deborah has been actively involved with small community activities since her childhood. Although she was born in Providence, Rhode Island, she was raised and educated in Cumberland, Maine, starting with a one-room schoolhouse. Her first high school years were spent at a local co-ed high school until her parents arranged for her transfer to an all-girls high school. After that, she attended Wellesley College, a prestigious women’s educational institution in Massachusetts, where she first majored in Latin and then English. Having met and married the requisite Harvard man, she left Wellesley after three years and followed her new husband to New York City.

The marriage lasted 10 years, during which Deborah completed a BS degree in English at Columbia University and launched her career in writing and editing, working for a number of organizations including the Foreign Policy Association, Columbia University, New York City agencies, and (Stanley) Kaplan, Inc. After leaving her husband to live on a barge moored in the Bronx, Deborah continued her writing career and earned an MA degree in English from Queens College of the City University of New York. She also met John, her second and current husband, at a cafeteria at CUNY.

After 20 years in New York and a brief hiatus back in Maine, Deborah moved to Detroit and a job writing materials for the auto companies to support their training and development programs. She then enrolled in the urban planning Ph.D. program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, first concentrating on socio-technology and then switching to the field of microenterprise. To support her studies, she taught technical communication in the UM College of Engineering for 18 years. John followed Deborah to Ann Arbor and found a long-term position as a statistician conducting social survey research at the university. They were married in 1986 and in 1987 bought a 40-acre farm on which they raised sheep, goats, pigs and poultry for over 20 years. They retired to Maine in 2010.

Deborah’s first trip to Mexico was in 1979 to visit a friend in Jalapa. After a number of later short visits to various parts of Mexico, in 2004 she and John visited Oaxaca City and decided to also see Huatulco, since it looked “so close” on the map. Even though the road trip was much longer than expected, once here they knew they would return. They bought a house in Huatulco in 2007 where they spent every vacation, renting it out between their stays. Once they retired, their Huatulco time increased until currently they are here about 5.5 months each year. Deborah’s busy life includes belonging to two book clubs but doesn’t allow much time to read other books. She devotes much of her time to writing grant proposals for nonprofit organizations, often gratis, and helping other worthy organizations raise funds. And of course, copy-editing and writing for The Eye is a substantial commitment. Her favorite contribution to the Eye is “The Wisdom of Maíz –Will It Lose Its Voice?” (September 2012).

Monarchs Butterflies Migrate, Marigolds Bloom: Myths, Legends, and Politics of the Day of the Dead

By Deborah Van Hoewyk

If you spend time in Oaxaca, you’ve heard of El Día de los Muertos, or the Day of the Dead. Maybe as a snowbird, you’ve even arrived in Mexico in time to watch or participate in the celebrations; The Eye has published any number of articles on it. This year’s Day of the Dead – it’s really two days – takes place on November 1 and 2, 2022.

The general idea is that the border between the world of the spirits and the world of the living dissolves, allowing the departed souls to return and celebrate with those they left behind. People prepare altars (ofrendas) at grave sites or in their homes, decorated with mementos of their loved ones, along with food and drink for the celebration and return journey. November 1 is thought to be when the souls of children come back to visit, and November 2 is the return of the souls of adults.

The Disputed Origins of the Day of the Dead

Past historians have mostly proposed that the holiday is “syncretic,” a combination of the traditions of two (or more) cultures. In this case, the synthesis combines the pre-Hispanic Day of the Dead, intended by various ancient indigenous peoples as a remembrance of the dead, with the imported Catholic traditions of the conquistadores, All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. This is the way the Day of the Dead is taught in schools, and how it has been listed in Mexico’s “Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity,” a program of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization).

Today, however, Mexican historians are less likely to agree that what we see now is genuinely a product of any classic indigenous culture (dated generally from 500 BCE – 1521 CE, when the Aztec empire fell to Cortés), or even of the synthesis between indigenous and colonial events. In a special issue (2006) of Cuadernos Patrimonio Cultural y Turismo (Notebooks of Cultural Heritage and Tourism), a publication of the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y los Artes (National Council for Culture and the Arts, now the Secretariat for Culture), fifteen academics of various disciplines, mostly history and anthropology, explore the issues involved in understanding the Day of the Dead.

Maybe it was syncretic. Maybe it came from similar celebrations in Europe, brought over by the Spaniards. Its importance may lie in the rituals that “tame death” and ensure continuation of life as it was. Maybe it’s a 20th-century evolution of President Lázaro Cárdenas del Río’s program to promote nationalism and national pride through indigenismo, the valuing of all things indigenous, which is a story in itself for some other time.

Mythic Origins of El Día de los Muertos

Despite the disagreements on how the Day of the Dead came to be, there is no doubt that Mexico’s ancient peoples saw life and death as continuous, and had their own version of Day of the Dead. In the high plains of south-central Mexico, it was believed that death destroyed the body but the soul was indestructible. Many of these tales of the afterlife share common ideas with the mythologies of other cultures.

People who died natural deaths entered the afterlife in Chicunamictlán, a nine-level underworld of the Land of the Dead. Depending on the cause of death, there were other destinations for the dead. Children went to Chichihuacuauhco, where they were fed by the Tree of Milk – they waited there to repopulate the world after the human race was destroyed (not sure why that was supposed to happen!). Warriors killed in battle and women who died in childbirth went to Ilhuuicatl-Tonatiuh, the Kingdom of the Sun. Those who died by water, including rain and lightning, went to Tlalocán, the Mansion of the Moon.

Souls bound for Chicunamictlán were cremated with a sacrificed dog who served as a guide and companion on the arduous, four-year journey to the last level, Mictlán. The dog was a red xoloitzcuintle, or xolo, the ancient hairless dog of Mexico. The xolo was created by a dog god called Xolotl, a dog-headed man whose province was fire and lightning and whose job it was to accompany the sun each day from dawn to dark, the “dark” representing the death of the sun. Xolotl bears a striking resemblance in appearance and responsibilities to a similar Egyptian dog-god called Anubis.

The dog was first tasked with carrying the soul across the great river Apanohuaya, counted as the second level. The remaining levels of the journey presented horrendous challenges – giant underwater lizards, flying arrows, paths paved with slashing obsidian shards, mountains crashing together. On the sixth level, for example, the defunct soul had to cross Tecoylenaloyan (the land of a thousand fierce wild beasts); if a beast caught the soul, the soul had to throw open its chest and let the beast eat its heart – reminiscent of the Greek myth of Prometheus, whom Zeus punished for giving fire to humans by chaining him to a high mountain rock and sending eagles to eat his liver every day.

Upon reaching Mictlán, the soul finally could achieve eternal rest or be condemned to suffer further. Eternal rest was darkness, a great commingling into a single common soul.
Back on earth, the families of departed souls celebrated Hueymiccaylhuitl, the great feast of the dead intended to help the soul on its journey to Mictlán. The families offered up food, water, and tools to help meet the challenges; the holiday also allowed the souls to return and visit with their families. Sound familiar? Perhaps those who downplay the ancient roots of Day of the Dead have been unduly influenced by the commercially constructed holiday we now see.

Marigolds and Monarchs

When you think of El Día de los Muertos, what color comes to mind? Could it be … orange??? The color of marigolds, the color of monarch butterflies, of candles to light the way through the darkness of the graveyard. Those orange marigolds and monarch butterflies are linked to Day of the Dead through several ancient legends and beliefs.

Because the annual migration of the monarch butterfly ends in the fall in central Mexico, often in the Reserva de la Biosfera de la Mariposa Monarca in Michoacán. Monarchs have long been associated with the Day of the Dead, providing the means for departed souls to return to their families. Legend has it that the souls of the departed travel in the wings of the monarchs, and those wings shed their orange color on the marigolds. Mexican marigolds (Tagetes erecta) are members of the aster family, and in ancient times bloomed in the fall, just in time to take their colors from the monarchs.

There is an Aztec tale of two young lovers, Huitzilin (humming bird) and Xóchitl (flower), who celebrated their love by climbing to the top of a mountain to leave offerings to the god of the sun, Tonatiuh. When the couple is torn apart by war, and Huitzilin dies in battle, Xóchitl climbs the mountain to beg Tonatiuh to reunite them for eternity. Tonatiuh turns Xóchitl into a beautiful flower, the color of the sun – that would be orange, people – and who should arrive but a hummingbird, who carried the soul of Huitzilin. When the hummingbird touched the flower, it opened its 20 petals and gave off a wonderful scent. Thus marigolds, called cempasúchil, lead the returning souls both with their color, so bright it lights their way, and their unmistakable, pungent scent.

Day of the Dead in the 20th Century – Politics and Economics

Before President Cárdenas started promoting the Day of the Dead as indigenous tradition, there was La Calavera Catrina (the elegant skeleton). She was created in 1910, amid the opening salvos of the Mexican Revolution, by the political cartoonist José Guadalupe Posada (1851-1913). Posada created her to satirize both the poor women street vendors who had left off selling corn in favor of chickpeas, all the while wearing French hats, and the Mexican elites who fawned over all things European, especially fashion and culture, and patronized the empolvacas garbanceras (sellers of chickpea powder, used to lighten complexions). The elites were much encouraged in their European aspirations by the dictator José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori (ruled off and on from 1876-80, then from 1894 to 1911).

At the time, Posada’s Catrina received a bit of attention from the politically inclined, but got a big boost in 1947, when the renowned artist Diego Rivera painted the mural Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central (Dream of a Sunday afternoon in Alameda Central Park) on a wall in the muy-muy upscale restaurant in the Hotel Del Prado, one of Mexico City’s Art Deco masterpieces (after the 1985 earthquake, the mural was moved to Museo Mural Diego Rivera, adjacent to the Alameda).

As usual with Rivera’s work, the mural was nothing if not political. About 400 characters from the panorama of Mexican history parade through the Alameda, showing the brutalities of the conquest and colonialism, wars and revolutions, cruel dictatorships. The center of the mural shows La Catrina on the arm of her creator Guadalupe Posada, Frida Kahlo and a young Rivera, Porfirio Díaz (shown higher than an angel), all intended to be observed by elite patrons of the Hotel del Prado’s restaurant. What is notable about Rivera’s Catrina, and is perhaps the root of her popularity thereafter, is that Rivera gave her not fancy European fashion to wear, but a simple white dress from the Isthmus, much like one of Kahlo’s own. He blots out the fancy hat with huge white feathers – featherwork, particularly for headdresses, was a major art form for the Aztecs. These attributes ensured that La Catrina became a heroine to the Mexicans, fit for a starring role in the Day of the Dead.

The researchers who disagree on the origin of Day of the Dead do agree that commercialization, particularly tourism promotions, presents a great threat to the authenticity of Day of the Dead celebrations. However, accounts of New Spain written by Diego Durán (1537-88) and Bernardino Sahagún (1499-1590), Dominican and Franciscan friars, respectively, tell us that markets held in advance of the Day of the Dead in Tenochtitlán were bustling – Duran was “astounded” to see what local people spent to offer food, drink, and other goods to the souls of their dead. By the 1700s, that market had become so frenzied that the government had to step in with regulations for market operations and requirements for vendor permits.

Commercialization of the Day of the Dead has continued apace ever thereafter; by the early 20th century, both Mexican and U.S. anthropologists discovered holiday markets in rural villages, basically commercial regional fairs attracting shopers who traveled long arduous distances to sell their wares or make their purchases. By mid-century, Mexico’s tourism apparatus was promoting Day of the Dead to tourists from the U.S. and Europe, pointing out which regional celebrations offered the most authentic experience for the tourist. Ruth Heller-Tinoco, an associate professor of music at the University of California-Santa Barbara, investigated the commercialization of the Day of the Dead on the island of Janitzio (corn silk) in Lake Patzcuaro, Michoacán. The festival is that of the Purépecha, an indigenous group the Aztecs never managed to subjugate, so their celebration was considered the “purest” example. Heller-Tinoco concluded that “selling” Day of the Dead on Janitzio transformed what was a small community ritual into a tourist spectacle drawing over 100,000 tourists a year. You, too, can go – just Google it.

Of course, all this commercialization has ensured that Day of the Dead has survived, and even transformed, has been handed down to younger generations. In the last “normal,” i.e., pre-pandemic, Day of the Dead in 2019, Secretary of Tourism Miguel Torruco predicted that 829,000 Mexicans would travel, they would spend about $2 billion pesos (±US $104 million), and hotels in Mexico City would see an occupancy rate of nearly 90%. In 2021, when the pandemic showed signs of abating, about US $5 million was spent on marigolds in Mexico City.

Think Coco, the 2017 Pixar Animation Studios film released and promoted by Disney, in which the young Coco, in a “vibrant tale of family, fun, and adventure,” ends up in the Land of the Dead, learning from his departed ancestors the stories behind his family’s prohibitions on music – Coco wants to be a musician. All ends well, and Coco ranks in the top 20 highest grossing animated film ever – streaming today on Disney+.

In the Cradle of Corn, Farmers Go Broke and People Go Hungry

By Deborah Van Hoewyk

Maybe nine thousand years or so ago, corn was “born and bred” by the early peoples of the modern states of Oaxaca and Puebla, most probably in the Valley of Tehuacán. It took centuries of careful selection to turn a grass called teosinte into corn, but farmers in even the most remote areas developed hundreds of corn varieties adapted to different growing conditions. Although there are only about 60 strains of corn still grown in Mexico – Oaxaca is the origin for well over half of them – this genetic diversity should make corn a reliable food source even when natural or man-made disaster wipes out some types of corn.

(The Eye has published a number of articles on the history and cultivation of corn, go to https://theeyehuatulco.com/ and use the search box.)

Over time, corn has shaped the cultures and the lives of the indigenous peoples of Latin America; indeed, the Popol Vul, the sacred book of the people we now call the Maya (fl. c. 1800 BCE – 900 CE), reports that the gods tried to create humans first from mud and then from wood, but they failed. When the gods tried to create humans from corn, they succeeded, and the Maya became “the Children of the Corn.” Corn is thus way more than elotes y esquites sold from street carts – it is life itself. But the capacity of Mexican corn to sustainably support its people has faded almost entirely away.

How we think about hunger

People go hungry all the time. Drought here, famine there, and people in poverty have nothing to eat – we send money to food banks and hope for rain. That, however, is a response that only provides immediate relief. Growing and distributing food is by no means solely a natural phenomenon, and treating hunger as an unfortunate failure of nature is useless.

In 1981, the economist Amartya Sen, who notably also studied philosophy, published Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation – one of those books that changed the way we think about something. In 1943, when Sen was nine years old and growing up in Bengal, three million Bengalese starved to death, ostensibly due to famine. (Bengal is now divided into the state of West Bengal, India, and the country of Bangladesh.)

Analyzing the Bengal famine, as well as multiple famines in other countries, Sen argued that people do not go hungry for lack of food. In fact, there were adequate supplies of rice in Bengal to prevent people from starving. But starve they did, because the system that provided food did not provide equally for everyone. In 1942, in the midst of WWII, Japan took Burma (now Myanmar) and Singapore, cutting off their rice exports. The Indian military overreacted, stockpiling large quantities of rice, which led the public to panic buying, hoarding, price increases and then price gouging. People in Calcutta (now Kolkata), which was the capital of British India, could still pay the price – but three million people in marginal occupations and rural areas, where wages were stagnant and resources were few, could not.

Hunger in Mexico

For a country with a history of rebellion and revolution on behalf of its “ordinary people,” Mexico has a complicated, century-long history of poverty and hunger. The latest statistics on hunger, food insecurity, and nutrition indicate that overall, about 1 person per hour starves to death in Mexico; about 1 in 5 kids under age 6 is morbidly malnourished; about a quarter of Mexico’s population is food insecure (lacking access to basic foods); and a quarter of the population is obese. Mexico is the largest Latin American consumer of highly processed, “hyper-caloric” food products – raising the incidence of diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease.

In rural areas, where poverty is endemic, food is available but people can’t pay for it; on average, over 40% of the populations of Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Chiapas suffer from “food poverty.” (Statistics on Mexico’s social development status are collected by CONEVAL [Consejo Nacional de Evaluación de la Política de Desarrollo Social], which in 2008 developed the first multidimensional – both social and economic deprivation – poverty measurement protocol in the world.)

However, as both Amartya Sen and CONEVAL would point out, the connection between poverty and hunger is not simply a matter of whether you can afford to buy healthy food. For millennia, corn was the main staple in the Mexican diet, and it was a healthy food for the Mexican families who grew it. Tortillas made from native corn (maíz criollo) provided over 40% of a day’s protein requirement, they prevented rickets in kids, and offered lots of fiber. Between 1982 and 2018, however, tortilla consumption dropped by over half, and tortillas were “industrialized,” made from commercially grown and ground masa harina (corn flour). What happened?

NAFTA and the collapse of Mexican corn

A lot of things happened – agricultural, social, and political – but most significantly economic, starting with the promotion of free trade policies in the 1980s. Mexico, like other Latin American countries, had borrowed internationally to support modernization and industrialization. On August 12, 1982, Mexico defaulted on its debt. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailed Mexico out with a loan that required, among other things, reducing trade barriers, deregulating industry, and

liberalizing foreign investment. These conditions, along with other measures to facilitate international trade, especially with the U.S., led a decade later to Mexico’s participation in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA, signed in 1994), renegotiated in 2020 as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). On the surface, NAFTA seemed to convey great benefits on Mexico’s ability to trade with the U.S. and Canada.

But NAFTA didn’t work out all that well in relation to agriculture and domestic food production, particularly the native corn. Concurrent with NAFTA, and required in part by the agreement, Mexico shuttered the few agricultural support programs it had in place, some of which were considered anti-poverty programs as well. The Mexican government made strenuous efforts to acquire imported grain, mainly corn, from the U.S. Scads of American corn arrived in Mexico, and was sold more cheaply than the more nutritious native corn. The impact on Mexico’s food system and people at the economic margins was profound.

By 2003, nine years after NAFTA, the zócalo in Mexico City was crammed with machete-wielding campesinos – farmers demonstrating against the impact of NAFTA on their ability to make a living growing corn. An additional clause took effect in 2003 – Mexico would no longer impose duties on agricultural imports from Canada and the U.S. That meant even more foreign corn, cheaper than ever; 900,000 farming jobs in Mexico had disappeared by 2003.

By 2004, the U.S. had quadrupled its corn exports to Mexico, and prices of native corn had dropped by 66%, driving many mid-sized corn farmers – the ones who were producing corn for sale, not subsistence – out of business.

By 2011, two million small and mid-sized farmers had left their land because they couldn’t support themselves; the land most of their farms occupied was rough and rocky, and couldn’t be adapted to compete with larger farms in flatter territory. For at least five years now, Mexican agricultural production has been shifting to export crops popular in the U.S., notably berries and avocados. Neither crop is integral to the Mexican diet, and small farmers do not have the resources to switch to such export production.

By 2016, corn was Mexico’s #1 agricultural import from the U.S. Mexico became the #1 export market for the U.S. not only for corn, but for dairy products, soybean meal, and poultry – all basic foodstuffs. It was the #2 export market for highly processed food from the U.S.

By 2018, Mexico was importing 45% of its food, ranking it 7th in the world as a food-importing nation.

In Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies, and the Destruction of Mexico (2018), author Alyshia Gálvez argues the food-system case against NAFTA’s “unintended consequences,” finding that a global and financial definition of “food security” has been more valued than subsistence agriculture, that commercial development has been more important than sustainability, and that market participation outweighs social welfare, particularly in relation to the Mexican diet. Galvez saw little chance for changing these outcomes.

On a more hopeful note, tortillas to the rescue

Just as healthy, protein rich tortillas made from heirloom corn seem to be a thing of the past, they may be back, ironically rescued for their potential to offer a gourmet food experience, albeit with a social purpose.

In May 2018, the Alianza por Nuestra Tortilla (Alliance for Our Tortilla), a collaboration among 75 or so businesses, food producers, corn farmers, and researchers, was formed to ensure Mexico can recover “la buena tortilla,” the ideal tortilla, made from native corn that has been nixtamalized (processed in an alkaline solution that unlocks nutrients and enhances flavor and scent). The corn will have no agricultural toxins or additives, and will not be genetically modified.

One member of the Alianza, businessman Rafael Mier, had founded the Fundación Tortilla in 2015, and its main program, Tortilla de Maíz Mexicana, a year later; the goal was to promote the “culture and consumption of corn and the tortilla as fundamental elements of national wellbeing.” Mier’s program works on public policy to revitalize native corn; preserve the traditional “three sisters” (corn, beans, squash) method of corn cultivation; and generate and disseminate knowledge of native corn and how to use it.

Taking a non-tortilla approach, the Scorpion Mezcal company launched Sierra Norte Native Corn Whiskies in 2016, made from 15% malted barley and 85% maíz criollo. Although the new product was driven by the burgeoning popularity of mezcal, which in turn caused a shortage of agave, owner Douglas French sees it as a way to help keep Oaxacan “native cultures and traditions alive,” specifically by buying endangered heirloom corn produced by small family farms at a fair price.

New tortillerías have opened in Mexico City that specialize in traditional tortillas, which have started appearing on the menus of upscale restaurants, e.g., Pujol; the first, Maizajo in Azcapotzalco, opened in 2016 and is “dedicated to the research, production, and commercialization of native corn products.” Cintli, opened in 2017 in the La Roma neighborhood, likewise focuses on native corn, uses nixtamalization in its processes, and practices social justice in its relations with corn producers. You can take a tour of Cintli, and try out their tortillas (and other heirloom corn products).

You don’t even have to go to Mexico to experience tortillas made from maíz criollo. In 2014, Jorge Gaviria, originally from New York, founded Masienda in San Francisco; now located in Los Angeles, Masienda aims to “elevate the everyday tortilla through a return to its origins,” which Gaviria found in Oaxaca. By now, Masienda has relationships with over 2,000 smallholder Oaxacan corn farmers, and produces traditional tortillas from their native corn. You can purchase Masienda’s Corn Tortillas (pink bag) and their Blue Corn Tortillas (blue bag) from Whole Foods in New York City for $4.49 US each.

Whether creating a market for gourmet tortillas will create enough demand to help small farmers in Oaxaca is an open question, though. If you’re in Mexico now or even a couple of years from now, that corn tortilla under your taco will most probably have been “born in the USA.”

Immigration to Mexico – Emigration from Where?

By Deborah Van Hoewyk

According to the 2020 decennial Mexican census, the population of Mexico was 129,932,753 people, of whom 1,212,252, or less than 1%, were officially counted as immigrants. In the United States, which has the highest number of immigrants in the world (nearly 50 million), they comprise about 15% of the population; in Canada, it’s 21.5%. The vast majority of immigrants arrive in Mexico from the United States, mostly in the form of retirees and snowbirds who hold temporary or permanent residency; the next largest groups come from Central and South America.

Although the numbers of immigrants to Mexico may be very small – every year, more Mexicans leave the country than foreigners arrive – immigrants have exerted a fair amount of impact on Mexican life and culture. Immigration to Mexico started, of course, with the conquest; during the colonial period, the Spanish rulers were not eager to have immigration from any place besides Spain. After independence (1821), however, Mexico sought to attract other foreigners, who brought their purchasing power and businesses with them. The General Colonization Law of 1824 allowed foreigners to buy land in Mexico, as long as it was farther than the border than 20 “leagues” (60 miles), and farther from the sea than 10 leagues (30 miles) – the General Colonization Law is the ancestor of the trust system, painfully familiar to home-owning residents from abroad.

The law, with a hostile hiatus for the U.S. Mexican War (1846-48), which finally defined Mexico’s northern border, gave impetus to immigration to Mexico, particularly in the 20th century. People came, and continue to come, for religious freedom, to escape unfavorable political conditions, to improve their economic situation.

German immigrants started coming in the 19th century, and were quick to start mercantile/manufacturing and agricultural businesses, in particular coffee and henequen and sisal plantations. Cubans boosted the performing arts, including film production, in the mid-nineteenth century. Tacos árabes and Carlos Slim Helú? Lebanon. Look elsewhere in this issue for short profiles of immigrant contributions to Mexico.