Tag Archives: Deborah Van Hoewyk

Huatulco

AMLO and the Press: From the Mañaneras to Murder?

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By Deborah Van Hoewyk

When Andrés Manuel López Obrador, better known as AMLO, was elected president of Mexico in 2018, he promised to “fix” many things – from government corruption to cartel violence, from income equality to uneven development. Some have seen progress, some have not.

AMLO keeps Mexicans apprised of his progress with five-day-a-week press conferences that start at 7 am and last 2 hours on average – these are called his mañaneras. Let’s just set aside the question of how the president of the world’s 10th largest population, 12th largest economy, and the 14th largest area, has that much time to spend talking rather than doing. What do the mañaneras contribute to AMLO’s agenda for governing Mexico?

At his daily press conference, AMLO would in theory be discussing the most important issues facing the country, responding to questions from reporters. This represents a sharp departure from previous presidents, who were mostly seen at formal public events if at all – Enrique Peña Nieto, the last president, in particular.

The Mañaneras – How – and What – AMLO Communicates

According to Francisco José de Andrea Sánchez, who holds a doctorate of law from UNAM and serves as principal investigator for UNAM’s Institute for Legal Research, the mañaneras “are the cornerstone of [AMLO’s] communication” with his followers, the people of Mexico, and even members of the government. The mañaneras are a logical outcome of the way AMLO achieved the presidency. Without social media, Andrea Sánchez argues, AMLO would not have been elected – he used social networks to get around “the media monopoly” that would not have argued his case.

The daily press conferences “avoid that same monopoly,” in a way that no other president of a major democracy has managed to do. Andrea Sánchez argues that AMLO’s two previous defeats in the presidential election led him to look for “non-censorable direct communication alternatives” to get around the “monopoly of the written and electronic mass media” that covers Mexican elections. (Earlier, AMLO had staged frequent press conferences as mayor of Mexico City, carried by BBC Mundo.)

In an interview with the LatAm Journalism Review in March of this year, Javier Garza Ramos, an independent Mexican journalist who specializes in security and protection, said the mañaneras “started as an exercise with a lot of promise, a promise of transparency where we hoped that the president would be open and answer questions from the media about important issues. But really within a few months we realized that it had become a propaganda exercise.”

Garza Ramos now describes the mañaneras as “useless,” because they are being used as a “tool of government.” For example, AMLO can put topics on the agenda that turn out “to be so frivolous” that “they absorb a lot of discussion that sometimes we don’t turn to see more important things” – like recent news about corruption or violence: “The president uses [the mañanera] to divert attention” from what he doesn’t want to talk about.

Article 19, an international organization that works to protect freedom of expression, has its hub for Mexico and Central America in Mexico City. They find that the key factor undermining the nature of the morning press conferences is that AMLO only answers questions from journalists seen as favoring his administration.

A Space to Attack Journalists

And what happens when AMLO encounters journalists who ask, when and if they get a chance, critical questions? The mañaneras are widely seen as “favorable spaces for attacking media and journalists, and even for the spread of disinformation.” When a reporter does manage to ask a question that makes AMLO uncomfortable, he is likely to reply “You are vendidos (sell-outs), you are corrupt,” or “You are plotting against the government,” or “You are attacking the government.” He describes his responses as defending the government’s honor and public power.

One of AMLO’s “defense strategies” is “doxing” journalists – that is, he approves of the release of information from personal documents (“dox”), identifying information that, in the case of journalists, encourages harassment and worse. In January of this year, information on all the journalists who attend the mañaneras was released. AMLO said the database was hacked. The New York Times said it was “a troubling and unacceptable tactic from a world leader at a time when threats against journalists are on the rise.”

In 2022, Reuters – in an undignified headline, “Mexican president names salary of critical journalist in row over reporting” – reported that AMLO said the increase from 2021 to 2022 in journalist Carlos Loret de Mola’s salary was because he was paid to do “hatchet jobs” on AMLO personally and his government. Doxing Loret de Mola was a defense of his “political project of ending injustice and corruption … This is not a personal matter. My conscience is clear.”

This winter, on Friday, February 23, AMLO doxed Natalie Kitroeff, bureau chief of The New York Times for Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. The doxing came in tandem with the publication in the Times of an article headlined “U.S. Examined Allegations of Cartel Ties to Allies of Mexico’s President”; note that, although the U.S. spent years on the investigation, they declined to investigate AMLO himself, as (according to unauthorized anonymous sources) the “government had little appetite to pursue allegations against the leader of one of America’s top allies.”

When queried as to whether he was endangering Kitroeff and had broken Mexico’s law of Federal Protection of Personal Data, AMLO said the doxing was not a mistake. He would do it again “when it comes to a matter where the dignity of the president of Mexico is at stake. The political and moral authority of the president of Mexico is above that.” Although he has come very close, even former U.S. President Donald Trump has not said he is above the law.

AMLO went on to say that murders of journalists were overstated, and that critical media outlets and journalists were seeking “economic and political power.” According to the LatAm Journalism Review, he said to the assembled journalists: “You feel you are embroidered by hand, like a divine, privileged race, you can slander with impunity as you have done with us … and one cannot touch you even with the petal of a rose.” One might wonder whether AMLO’s hostility to the press is a matter of deep-seated personal psychology.

Article 19 analysis also focuses on AMLO’s use of disinformation in the mañaneras. The group asked for corroboration on 34 statements AMLO made at the mañaneras or in public speeches; 32 of the 34 statements were not corroborated.

Violence against Mexican Journalists in 2023

The Mexican press, according to, among others, The Guardian (a global English-language news outlet), believes that attacks against the country’s journalists stem directly from AMLO’s mañaneras, which are an “invitation to violence.” Reporting on an open letter from Mexican journalists after an assassination attempt on news anchor Ciro Gómez Leyva in December of 2022, The Guardian asserts that conditions for journalists, which weren’t great when AMLO took office, “have deteriorated dramatically” since then. Although AMLO apparently condemned the assassination attempt, “just 24 hours earlier [he] had been publicly denigrating the journalist, warning Mexicans that if they listened to such people too much they risked developing brain tumours.”

In its 2023 report on violence against the Mexican Press, Violencia contra la prensa en México en 2023: ¿cambio o continuidad? (Violence against the press in Mexico in 2023: Change or continuation?), Article 19 defined three kinds of attacks: direct intimidation and harassment; the illegitimate use of public power to stigmatize or use judicial processes to harass; physical and digital threats. AMLO’s behavior in his mañeras is the second type, the abuse of public power. (According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, part of the John S. and James L. Knight Press Freedom Center in New York City, AMLO has accused Article 19 of “being funded by the U.S. government” to work against AMLO, thus “violating our sovereignty” – he made these accusations on World Press Freedom Day, May 3, 2023).

Article 19 found that there were fewer attacks on journalists and media outlets in 2022, which saw 561 attacks on the press, including 5 murders and 1 disappearance of journalists, than in 2023, when there were 696 attacks on the press and 12 murders.

Of the 561 attacks in 2023, 224 (40%) comprised intimidation, harassment, and threats, while 106 (19%) were abuse of public power. The remaining 41% of attacks were divided into 13 categories, with blocking or changing journalistic content, physical attacks, hacking, destruction of property, and false arrest making up 33% of the total.

Over half the attacks on the press were committed by “officials” – public employees, police, national guard, and other armed forces. The remaining attacks were carried out by individuals (actores particulares, including AMLO in his mañaneras), the cartels (10%), political parties, and unidentified attackers.

Attacks on the press appear to be related to the topics reporters cover: 53% of attacks were on those who report on politics and corruption; 24% on reporters on security and justice; and just under 10% each on those who report on protests/social movements or human rights. About 54% of attacks were on men, 30% on women, and 16% on media outlets.

The reduction in overall attacks between 2022 to 2023 is about 20%, but Article 19 still asks whether this is a real change, or merely a matter of fewer reports of violence. The report covers the next-to-last year of AMLO’s term of office, but Article 19 cites a similar reduction in attacks on the press in the next-to-last year of Felipe Calderón’s term – only to see an increase in the last year.

We will have to wait and see.

Huatulco

Experience Mexico’s Environment through Zapotec Culture

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By Deborah Van Hoewyk

Outdoor adventures in Huatulco? There are many, many, many! Swim, boogie board, surf, or paddleboard at the beaches; float through an alligator-filled swamp in sun-dappled mangrove shade or down the Rio Copalita by moonlight; bump along rural tracks to the waterfalls; go snorkeling, deep-sea fishing, or whalewatching; birdwatch and release baby turtles – just name it, you can get some exercise and explore the natural environment here, no problem.

Oaxaca, however, offers outdoor adventures beyond Huatulco and way beyond a tarde deportiva (sporting afternoon). Among the very best of such adventures is Los Pueblos Mancomunados, a cooperative of eight Zapotec villages high in the Sierra Norte mountains northeast of Oaxaca City.

Los Pueblos Mancomunados

Literally, Los Pueblos Mancomunados means “the joint towns,” but a better translation might be “Commonwealth of Villages.” About thirty years ago, the national Tourism Secretariat, working through state tourism agencies, undertook a program to set up rural ecotourism centers to create jobs and new income streams in the region.

Some of the villages that are now part of the group had already had similar ideas. Starting with the village of Benito Juárez, the most accessible from Oaxaca City, three villages developed a collaborative ecotourism plan in which the activities the towns conducted – both in collaboration and individually – would benefit all the villages. It started small, with forest walks around Benito Juárez and trail-walks to the villages of La Nevería and San Antonio Cuajimoloyas. Visitors were allowed to pay whatever they wished.

Collaboration is a way of life familiar to the indigenous Zapotecs of these mountain villages, often called la gente de las nubes (the people of the clouds) – some of the trails among them have been there for 400 years. The people govern themselves by usos y costumbres, or traditional indigenous customary law, which organizes how all members participate in the work of running their community (see “Governing Oaxaca: The Frontier between the Traditional and the Modern,” The Eye, May-June 2014). Usos y costumbres can be selected as an alternative form of local self-governance by indigenous villages; it has been legally recognized by 417 of Oaxaca’s 570 municipios (a municipio is roughly equivalent to a U.S. or Canadian county) since 1992.

Five more towns have joined the Pueblos Mancomunados; San Miguel Amatlán, Santa Martha Latuvi, San Isidro Llano Grande, Santa Catarina Lachatao, and Santa María Yavesía. Altogether, the eight villages have about 2,400 residents, and cover 24,932 hectares (about 61,608 acres); and the altitude ranges from 100 to 3,300 meters (± 300-10,000 ft). There are over 2,000 species of trees and plants – the “cloudy forests” near the peaks are the largest virgin forests north of the Andes. There are more than 400 species of birds, 350 kinds of butterflies, and wildlife that includes jaguars, ocelots, and other wild felines, along with deer, foxes, and more.

How To Visit the Pueblos Mancomunados

While it is possible to reach any of the pueblos on your own via public transportation and hiking, and you can then make arrangements for activities in the village, it will be difficult, especially if your Spanish is minimal. You will no doubt be better off contacting Expediciones Sierra Norte, a nonprofit organized in 1998 and operated jointly with the Pueblos Mancomunados. Sierra Norte Expeditions is a particular type of nonprofit, a sociedad de solidaridad social (social solidarity society); this class of organizations, established by law in 1976, uses “collective assets to carry out commercial activities” among marginalized Mexican communities.

Sierra Norte Expeditions specializes in setting up hiking/biking itineraries on the trails among the pueblos. They arrange local guides, and maintain a list of the other activities provided in each local village, and can arrange them for you. If you are in Oaxaca anyway, go their office and discuss what you’d like to do.

There are also independent tour companies that arrange itineraries, including horse- and by bike-packing – you can find them by googling, but for most things they need to book with Sierra Norte anyway. Sierra Norte returns 90% of the income from the tourism activities to the villages.

Trails of the Pueblos Mancomunados

Hiking. Sierra Norte Expeditions will organize a hike of any length on trails that run between six villages: San Miguel Amatlán, Santa Martha Latuvi, La Nevería, Benito Juárez, San Antonio Cuajimoloyas, and San Isidro Llano Grande. To hike the entire length takes seven days and six nights (you stay in “comfortable cabins with chimney” – bring your socks and sweaters!). Transportation to and from the mountain starting place, local guides, meals, “local experiences” (these vary by village – see below), and insurance are all included. If you need to have your luggage carried from village to village, that’s extra. At the time this was written, the cost of the pre-set paquete, or package, to hike all six pueblos was $9,450 MXN ($566.30 USD, $763.63 CAD), double occupancy, minimum of 4 people, maximum 12. There are two paquetes of 2 days, 1 night, and a one-day hike; you can, however, arrange a custom hike to include different pueblos. It should be noted that Mexicans run on mountain trails (see “Lorena Ramírez: Top Runner of the Rarámuri,” The Eye, March 2024) – you are free to do likewise.

Horseback riding. Sierra Norte does not have pre-set paquetes for doing the trails on horseback, but horses are available in most of the villages – for this kind of experience, you can look on the Sierra Norte website under nuestros centros ecoturisticos, which sends you to the individual pueblos. In San Isidro Latuvi, you ride to San Miguel Amatlán; if you are not an experienced rider and would prefer not to ride on steep, narrow trails, you can ride half way to Amatlán and hike the rest. For a description of an independent tour by Horseback Mexico: http://www.horsebackmexico.com/rides-2/multiday-rides/ride-the-continental-divide/.

Biking. Making bike-packing arrangements works pretty much the same way as making hiking arrangements, although again, Sierra Norte does not have any pre-set paquetes. However, all of the trails can be done on mountain bikes, and you can arrange a cabin or bring your tent for overnights. For a great description of biking the pueblos:
http://www.stilloutriding.com/2022/11/benito-juarez-and-the-pueblos-mancomunados/.

Village Activities

The six villages included on Sierra Norte trail paquetes have local ecotourism centers where you can add on activities after you have arrived – the price will be the same as if you had arranged it in advance.

Benito Juárez. This pueblo is located in the mountain forest about an hour and a half from Oaxaca City. It has a mirador (viewpoint) that looks out over the Central Valleys, a 150-meter suspension bridge, and three zip lines. You can visit a couple of farms and trout nurseries, and hike, bike, or horseback on the surrounding trails. There are cabins, camping areas, and comedores (family restaurants). There are several community projects to visit or participate in: bread baking, other food workshops, mushroom production, and research on medicinal properties of native plants.

La Nevería (Latzi Belli in Zapotec). Located in a small valley, La Nevería has only about 100 inhabitants. It is called La Nevería because a century or so ago, the people produced ice and transported it by donkey to sell in warmer parts of Oaxaca. There are trails for hiking, biking, and horseback riding. The community hosts a sietes colores del maiz (seven colors of corn) walk to visit their efforts to preserve native, i.e., non-GMO, corn varieties. You can also visit a “productive projects” route that shows off efforts to use local resources to create new income streams. There are cabins, homestays, camping, and a comedor (features a watercress special!), cooking classes, a zip line, and athletic obstacle course.

Santa Martha Latuvi.  Latuvi offers seven trails for hiking, biking or horseback riding, including a trail to El Molcajete waterfall and a trail that follows the historic route of the Camino Real, where Mexican muleteers brought goods from Veracruz to the Central Valleys.  You can visit two women who make pulque and tepache, eat in a comedor where you catch your own trout at the trout nursery, visit various projects to produce marmalade, make bread, and explain traditional medicine.  There are cabins (with hammocks on the porches), homestays, and camping areas. 

San Miguel Amatlán.  One of the larger pueblos, with just over a thousand inhabitants, Amatlán still has some vestiges of colonial architecture.  It is located on the Camino Real, and has a community museum (“Community Museums:  Very ‘Special Ed’ for Indigenous Peoples,” The Eye , Sept./Oct 2013).  Trails for hiking, biking, and horseback riding; cabins, campsites, and a comedor. Workshops and project visits include mushroom farming, bread baking, women artisans, and traditional medicine.

San Isidro Llano Grande.  Founded early in the 1800s by people trying to escape the Mexican Revolution, Llano Grande is the highest of the Pueblos Mancomunados (3,300 meters, or over 10,800 feet at the highest mirador).  Located on a flat mountain-top and surrounded by forest, Llano Grande inhabitants are dedicated to preserving the forest.  Hiking and biking of course, birdwatching, and workshops in cooking, breadmaking, and tortilla making.  Cabins, camping, and comedores; one special treat is to learn the history and legends of the community by visiting “the elders.”

Santa Catarina Lachatao and Santa María Yavesía.  Although these last two villages are part of Pueblos Mancomunados, they do not have their own ecotourism centers.  Lachatao is a very old village, and a recently (2009) discovered archeological site indicates that this was an important Zapotec ritual site, as well as a key stop on trade routes from the north.  It has a community museum with archeological finds.  Yavesía is a small village, less than 450 people, and has lost population since the 2010 census.  Here are the headwaters of the Papaloapan River, which flows to the Atlantic through Veracruz.  There’s a roundtrip hiking trail to the Lotoa waterfall, a trail the Cave of the Virgin, and one to Lachatoa.   

Each of these villages, if you take time to talk with residents, offers more.  To get started on a plan to visit one, some, or all of the Pueblos Mancomunados, contact Expediciones Sierra Norte:

http://www.sierranorte.org.mx

 info@sierranorte.org.mx

Telephone:  +52 951 514 82 71

WhatsApp:  +52 1 951 226 8395.

Huatulco

Mexico’s Mesoamerican Cleopatras

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By Deborah Van Hoewyk

When you think of Mexico before the Spanish conquest (1521), what comes to mind? All those ruined pyramids? Confusion about who were the Aztecs, who were the Maya, who were the Incas? Maybe you think of Moctezuma, the Aztec (Mexica, to be more ethnically precise) the conquered ruler of Tenochtitlán, the seat of the Aztec empire in what is now Mexico City. Odds are, though, pre-Hispanic women didn’t leap to mind, much less women who ruled the pre-Hispanic world.

The Aztecs didn’t cohere as a political or geographical entity until fairly recently, starting in the late 1100s CE – Tenochtitlán was founded in 1325. They did, however, create a massive empire, subjugating most of the peoples of central Mexico. The Incan Empire arose just a little later, in the 1200s, in the area around Cuzco, Peru, and came to dominate northwestern South America. The Inca were conquered by Spanish forces led by Francisco Pizarro in 1532.

The Maya, on the other hand, date back to 7000-5000 BCE, and started to coalesce into a great civilization around 300 CE, eventually covering southeastern Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala. The Maya did not amass an empire, either; they were a federation of independent city states – large urban centers focused on religious activities surrounded by rural communities that supplied food and other resources. (Those cit-states did set about trying to conquer each other.)

Pre-Hispanic Women and Power

In 2018, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City held a special exhibition, “Golden Kingdoms: Luxury and Legacy in the Ancient Americas,” which presented objects from tombs and items of personal adornment. According to curator Joanne Pillsbury, “Had we organized this exhibition twenty-five years ago, we would have spoken primarily of the regalia of men. Over the course of single generation, thrilling discoveries have revealed the power and majesty of high-status women, deepening and enriching our understanding of ancient American history.”

We know that all three of the major pre-Hispanic groups had women in positions of power. Among the Aztecs and the Incas, they ruled as accompaniments to their husbands. The Aztecs required that a ruler have royal blood; a migratory, non-royal-blooded man could marry an Aztec princess to supply the qualifying royal genetics. The Incan king’s primary wife, the quoya (queen), ruled over all women.

The Maya were different. Of course, they had many queens who were the wives of ruling kings, but – even though rare – there were Mayan queens who wielded power on their own. In Mexico, there were a half a dozen or so, including three in Cobá, in Quintana Roo in the Yucatán; two in Palenque, in Chiapas; and one in Toniná, also in Chiapas. In addition, there were three female regents in different Mayan city states in Chiapas – regents ruled until their sons were old enough to ascend the throne, and depending on the age of that son, often served as the de facto ruler for years afterwards.

The Maya were different. Of course, they had many queens who were the wives of ruling kings, but – even though rare – there were Mayan queens who wielded power on their own. In Mexico, there were a half a dozen or so, including three in Cobá, in Quintana Roo in the Yucatán; two in Palenque, in Chiapas; and one in Toniná, also in Chiapas. In addition, there were three female regents in different Mayan city states in Chiapas – regents ruled until their sons were old enough to ascend the throne, and depending on the age of that son, often served as the de facto ruler for years afterwards.

Gender Relations among the Maya

Generations of archeologists, anthropologists, and historians have interpreted Mesoamerican life through the eyes of the Catholic Spanish conquistadors: a Euro-centric gender hierarchy, realized in the male superiority/female domesticity model. It wasn’t easy to even think that the Maya might have had independent queens, while clearly the Aztecs and Incas had only queen consorts, “help-meets” to the male kings, matching the Spanish model.

During the Classic Mesoamerican period (300-950 CE), particularly between 500-700, the Maya were started expanding their reach, usually through warfare. Alliances to control warring parties could be achieved through marriage, giving the bride who concluded the alliance power over the court. Times of war are times of social change, and women began to play more significant roles in upper-class life in general, participating in religious rituals and connecting with the supernatural.

A more fundamental force supporting women’s power was that “the Classic Maya concept of gender was based on a complementary, or balanced, relationship of masculine and feminine.” According to anthropologist Erika Anne Hewitt, now a Unitarian Universalist minister in Maine, and other anthropologists, Mayans thought of gender as “inclusive and reciprocal”; Mayan art seems to assume that the foundation of society is the female-male pair, which brings together different capabilities needed for life. The higher you go in the social scale, gender becomes “exchangeable” – males are shown with female traits and females take on male traits, depending on what their roles required. For kings and queens, this is reflected in the hieroglyphic inscriptions on tombs and monuments. In these inscriptions, identifiable people are mentioned with a string of “appellative phrases” – prescribed sequences of names and titles.

Ordinarily, a woman is identified with the glyph for a female, but for women who ruled independently, no such glyph appears in her appellation. Inscriptions for prominent women who were not independent queens applied the term na bate (warrior) “to accommodate their sharing of status or occupancy of roles that were traditionally masculine.” Moreover, in Mayan art that portrays high-status males conducting rituals, the men wear skirts; portraits of male rulers often included other feminine traits or symbols. It is possible to argue that, without this acceptance of gender fluidity, the Maya, like the Aztecs and Incas, might not have had queens.

The Queens of Cobá

Researchers from INAH (Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico’s national anthropology institute) have identified a dynasty, beginning c. 500 CE, of 14 rulers of the Mayan city-state Cobá – the dynasty lasted until almost 800 CE. The research was complicated, given the deteriorated state of the stonework throughout Cobá. Most of the information was gleaned from study of stelae, stone slabs that recorded important events and the rulers who oversaw them.

Ix Che’enal was a most probably the daughter of Yax Yopaat, king of Dzibanche, a nearby state to which Cobá was no doubt sent to Cobá to rule as Dzibanche desired. She held the high title of kaloomte, higher than the title of her husband, K’ahk Bahlam, and was queen for a short period; based on study of two stelae, she ruled from 565 to 574. At that point, she may have abdicated to her husband; in any event, he succeeded her.

Lady Yopaat is thought to have ruled c. 600-40 CE; she is called a “warrior queen” because she apparently strengthened Cobás position as a regional power, although whether that eliminated the subordination to Dzibanche is unclear.

Lady K’awiil Ajaw (also known as Ix Kʼawiil Ek) was born in 617 and ruled Cobá from 642-82; also a warrior queen, she attacked and subjugated the nearby city of Yaxuná. She promptly built a “white road” (sacbeob) connecting it with Cobá. The white road curves its way through the jungle, connecting the smaller settlements between Cobá and Yaxuná. She commissioned two stelae (#1, #5) in which she is standing atop and is surrounded by captives, a common configuration for stelae showing rulers. She is shown with 14 captives, more than any queen – and most kings as well. There are 5, perhaps a few more, stelae showing her, and she is shown wearing a belt from which hangs a jade net skirt and jade masks, a garment usually shown only on men.

The Queens of Palenque

Palenque flourished through the Early Classic and Classic periods of pre-Hispanic culture, from about 250-900 CE. It is an astonishing place to visit – tourists have been coming to Palenque since 1841, when John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, author and artist respectively, published Incidents of Travel, which covered Central America, Chiapas, and the Yucatán.

Yohl Ik’nal (also Lady Ol Nal) started her 22-year reign over Palenque in 583 CE, when she was 33. She was the daughter, or perhaps the sister of King Kan Bahlam I, who had died without an heir. Like Prince Philip of England, Yohl Ik’nal’s husband never became a king.

Under her rule, Palenque expanded as she built new complexes of buildings. She repelled invaders bent on subduing Palenque, and her reign was considered peaceful and prosperous.

Yohl Ik’nal had two children, a son and a daughter. When she died, she was succeeded by her son Aj Ne’ Yohl Mat, who was apparently an ineffective ruler, bringing on powerful attacks from Kalakmul – both he and his father were killed in 612, and the main temple of Palenque was destroyed,

Lady Muwaan Mat (aka Lady Sak K’uk’), Yohl Ik’nal’s daughter, became queen in 612, and ruled until her son, K’inich Janaab’ Pakal took the throne in 615, at the age of 12. Muwaan Mat (there is some debate as to whether she is the same person as Lady Sak K’uk’) had to lead Palenque through the chaotic aftermath of the Kalakmul attack, a task made more complicated by the destruction of the temple – religious rituals to ensure Palenque’s survival went on hiatus. Muwaan Mat’s son Pakal, however, ruled until his death in 683; he built the Temple of Inscriptions, ushering in a period of prosperity and progress for Palenque.

The Queen of Toniná

The latest of the Mexican Mayan queens was Lady K’awiil Yopaat, daughter of king K’inich Tuun Chapat, who died in 762; he was succeeded by “Ruler 7,” thought to be Lady K’awill Yopaat, who ruled from 762 until her death in 774. She was another warrior queen, making war on and defeating Palenque in 764.

Huatulco

Love, Telenovela Style

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By Deborah Van Hoewyk

When we first arrived in Huatulco, in the winter of 2004-05, we stayed in a long-gone B&B in La Bocana and ate in the next-door restaurant, Los Güeros, which is still there. It was a quiet, magical place – apparently, however, not magical enough for the family that ran Los Güeros, as they gathered every night to watch a TV suspended from the ceiling. Sparsely lit by circular fluorescents, the blue-painted restaurant seemed to pulsate to the flickering movement on the screen.

The family was devoted to telanovelas – prime time, melodramatic, soap operas. Immensely popular in practically all Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking countries, telenovelas are “maxi-mini-series”; unlike U.S. soap operas, they almost always complete their story arc in less than a year, often less than six months. The shorter duration doesn’t keep telenovelas from having complicated plots rife with reversals and revenge, drama and deceit, usually driven by love, be it forbidden or happy-ever-after, or maybe both.

Telenovelas also differ from U.S. soap operas in that they are set in a social, political, and economic framework; they acknowledge poverty, factory layoffs, class differences and conflicts. Indeed, doomed love between an honorable-but-struggling young woman and a wealthy man is a favorite theme, especially in earlier telenovelas. (Don’t worry, they usually get together in the end – think Cinderella!)

How Did Telenovelas Come To Be?

The direct ancestor of the telenovela is the radio-novela, and the ancestor of the radio-novela was born in Cuba, in a 19th-century cigar factory. El lector de tabaco, the tobacco reader, read many things to the cigar-makers, but among them were novels, presented chapter by chapter, day after day. It was thought to entertain the workers, to relieve the tedium of factory work and ensure they would show up to hear more.

Cuba made its first attempt to win its independence from Spain in the unsuccessful Ten Years’ War (1868-78); cigar makers and workers who fled the war moved to Mexico, specifically the state of Veracruz, ideal for growing tobacco, and Florida in the U.S. The tobacco reader came along. Soon there were readers in textile and other factories as well.

Once the lectores began to include labor issues in their readings – seen by some historians as leading to the labor movement (a story for another time), they were on their way out. Factory owners did not like having their workers educated on what they saw as socialist, communist, or anarchist themes. Mexico banned lectores in its factories, although whether that was a total ban is unclear. In the US, the tobacco factories in Ybor City, part of Tampa, staged multiple strikes – the live readings ended with the strike of 1931 – but there are still lectores in Cuba today.

Radios Replace the Readers

As soon as radio became available, it, too, was put to work in factories to entertain workers. In her doctoral work at the Free University of Berlin, researcher Hanna Müssemann studies “every-day media,” and has confirmed that radio broadcasts, and then radio-novelas, were intended to entertain factory workers, among other audiences, and to keep workers coming back for “the rest of the story.”

Radio arrived in Mexico at 8 pm on September 18, 1930, when station XEW began broadcasting from the Olimpia Cinema on Calle 16 de Septiembre, right off the zócalo (main square) in Mexico City. Intended for broadcasting music, XEW also produced theatrical works on the weekend; when XEW put out its first radio-novela in 1932, they followed in the steps of the tobacco readers, and broke up the French novel The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas, 1844) into 15-minute segments.

That there was a cliff-hanger element to the radio-novela was made quite clear when XEW writer Vicente Leñero put together guidelines for creating radio-novelas: the plot should have “mild suspense” (suspensos suaves) before commercials, “disturbing suspense” (suspensos inquietantes) for the end of the episode, and “frightful suspense” (suspensos tremebundos) at the end of the week.

XEW’s radio-novelas didn’t really take off until March of 1941, when they put on Ave sin nido, la vida apasionante de Anita de Montemar (Bird without a Nest, the Passionate Life of Anita de Montemar). Anita de Montemar is a student at a nunnery who falls in love with Carlos Miranda, an engineer who handles the mechanical needs of the nunnery. Carlos and Anita marry, only to discover that Anita cannot have children. Carlos’s old friend Carlota is experiencing hard times, and gives her daughter to Anita and Carlos to raise. It turns out, of course, that Alicia is actually Carlos’s daughter with Carlota, and Anita, destroyed, leaves her family. There you have it – the first radio-novela and all the themes that will become the telenovela: obstacles to love, love realized, poverty, deceit, illegitimate kid, and love in ruins.

with the success of Bird without a Nest, XEW began broadcasting five radio-novelas a day; enormously popular, they were the mainstay of Mexican broadcasting through the 1950s. Radio-novela casts included major stars from the big screen (the 1950s was the “Golden Age” of Mexican filmmaking). As in the US, they were sponsored by domestic products, mostly soap. The sponsors were particularly happy when a soap opera delivered a moral ending that listeners could apply to their own lives.

From the Radio-Novela to the Telenovela

Radio-novelas continued to be produced up until 1983, even though a more congenial medium – television – had arrived. Television actually started in Mexico on August 19, 1946, a mere 16 years after the country’s first radio broadcast. Not that it was an auspicious start – Guillermo González Camerano, an electrical engineer, broadcast the first television signal from his Mexico City bathroom. Nonetheless, on September 7, an experimental television station had started broadcasting artistic programming and interviews. In 1950, XHTV, Channel 4 in Mexcio City, became the first commercial station in Latin America. As other stations formed, they joined together as Telesistema Mexicano; in 1973, Telesistema joined with Television Independiente de México to create Televisa, which became the world’s largest producer of Spanish-language television content, including, of course telenovelas. (Televisa is now 45% of TelevisaUnivision, the largest U.S. producer of Spanish-language content.)

The very first telenovela was created in Brazil in Portuguese in 1951. Sua vida me pertence (Your Life Belongs to Me) contains the first on-screen kiss seen in Brazil. Relatively simple by current telenovela standards, it offered fifteen episodes, broadcast twice a week, and followed the story of a developing love affair between a young woman and an older man. In 1952, Cuba’s initial offering was Senderos de Amor (Paths of Love), which involved a repressed spinster who was in love, did bad things, and represented the evils of urban life as opposed to the morality of the countryside. The next year, Cuba and Mexico collaborated on Ángeles de la calle (Angels of the Street), in which a kindly grandma helps out street urchins (said urchins apparently were a popular theme at the time).

The Mexican Telanovela Industry

Mexico finally got going on its own when, on June 12, 1958, Telesistema started broadcasting Senda Prohibida (Forbidden Path), sponsored by Colgate-Palmolive Mexico. There were no poor-but-innocent heroines in this one – the great Silvia Derbez played Nora, who had been small-town poor and suffered for it, but was now an ambitious secretary who falls for her married boss, and despite his very nice wife and cutie-pie son, suckers him out of big gifts and fancy jewelry, which leads to his financial ruin. The 30-episode telenovela ends with Nora in her wedding dress, crying before a full-length mirror, her plotting unrewarded in the end. Silvia Derbez received hate mail, threats, and people waited outside the studio to curse at her and even attack her for being so evil. (Senda Prohibida was remade [refriteado] in 2023, with an emphasis on Nora’s creating conflict between boss father and now-grown son.)

Televisa went full-on into telenovela production, with 3 more productions in 1958, 8 in 1959, 239 titles in the 1960s, and another 550 through 2019. During and following the 1970s, the melodrama increased, sex (and sometimes nudity) appeared on screen, and crises like murder, incest and drug addiction began to appear. On the other hand, the Cinderella-type stories also appeared with increasing regularity.

One that’s got it all? Los ricos también lloran (The Rich Also Cry) tells the story of Marina, thought to be poor but swindled of her inheritance, who is asked to live with a wealthy family. She falls in love with the spoiled son of the family, and he with her, but he marries someone else; there’s a hit man, a fake pregnancy, a gangster, robberies and murders, a psych ward, real adultery, adultery misunderstood, a lost child, an adopted child – it just goes on and on through 248 episodes, all crammed into the four-plus months between October 16, 1979, and February 29, 1980. There is, of course, a happy ending. Los ricos is considered the first “global telenovela,” dubbed into 25 languages and sent off to Russia, Poland, Greece, Serbia, Japan, as well as English, French, and Portuguese.

Reflecting Culture, Shaping Culture

Recently, the academic community has turned its attention to telenovelas, which had generally been dismissed as “simply another example of the ‘mind-numbing’ mass-media programming” driven by copying American capitalistic and consumerist tendencies. That notion didn’t last too long, and now we have detailed analyses like Mexican Screen Melodrama: Unraveling Mexico’s Sociocultural Expectations and Ambiguities by Sofia Rios Miranda (2020), which looks at social change in Mexico and “Mexico’s ambivalence around socioeconomic background, race and religion, gender and worth, family and duty.”

Telenovelas are used, both indirectly by shaping the way people look at the world, and directly by imparting “public service” messages, as educational tools. A good example of indirect “education” would be how they shape the audience’s ideas about gender (telenovela heroines generally have light complexions, and their dress and makeup reflect upper-middle-class European standards). Health agencies have promoted more direct messages: Encrujiada: Sin salud no hay nada (Crossroads: Without Health, There Is Nothing), a telenovela about Alicia, a psychiatrist who dies of colon cancer. The series, created in 2012 for the Hispanic population in California, emphasizes the importance of early detection of cancer. There have been telenovelas designed to change attitudes toward homophobia, drug addiction, and domestic violence.

Romancing the Narcos

And then there’s the narco-novela. The 1970s were not just the time when telenovelas reached their height, it was when drug cartels became part of the fabric of everyday Mexican life. Popular music, with its narcocorridas (drug ballads), and narco-dramas in film and novels began to show people caught up – willingly or not – in the social and political violence brought by drug production and distribution.

The first narco-novela was a 2006 Colombian production, Sin tetas no hay paraiso (No Boobs, No Paradise). Catalina has a very small bust, which she believes is keeping her from marrying a rich drug lord, so she becomes a call-girl to pay for the breast implants that she sees as her path out of poverty. Needless to say, things do not go well – after participating in all manner of corrupt and murderous narco activities, Catalina arranges her own assassination to escape her misery.

Narco-novelas show drug lords with some admiration, and government and law enforcement as corrupt, inept, and underhanded. Like Sin Tetas, most narco-novelas have made some effort to portray the drug trade in a negative way. That gets a bit lost in the shuffle by the time we get to La Reina del Sur (The Queen of the South).

La Reina del Sur and El Chapo

Based on the 2002 Spanish novel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, La Reina del Sur is the story of Teresa Mendoza, a Mexican woman who becomes the most powerful drug trafficker in southern Spain. Season 1 was produced by Telemundo, NBC Universal’s Spanish-language TV network, with other partners. Seasons 2 and 3 have been made by a Telemundo Global Studios – Netflix partnership. To date, there have been 183 35-minute episodes; there’s no indication there will be a Season 4. Teresa is played by Kate del Castillo, who started out in telenovelas, notably Muchachitas (Young Girls), a 1991 Televisa hit.

Yes, that Kate del Castillo, who arranged an interview for the American actor Sean Penn with Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera – El Chapo – the former head of the Sinaloa cartel. In 2012, del Castillo tweeted “Today I believe more in El Chapo Guzmán than I do in the governments that hide truths from me … Mr. Chapo, wouldn’t it be cool if you started trafficking with the good? Let’s traffic with love, you know how.” Two years later, El Chapo’s lawyers contacted del Castillo to explore putting the drug lord’s life up there on the big screen. They gave her a special phone that could text El Chapo.

So … she texts El Chapo to set up a meeting with Penn, El Chapo checks out Penn, and by October 2015, everyone is good to go. Except … the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency had already tapped all of El Chapo’s communications, including Castillo’s “special phone,” and the Mexican marines were going to take out El Chapo at the same time as the meeting.

Bad weather stopped the marines, Kate del Castillo thinks Sean Penn took advantage of her, Mexican authorities investigated del Castillo to a fare-thee-well, Sean Penn planned to write an article for Rolling Stone, not make a film about El Chapo, the Mexican government was humiliated when the story came out – sounds like a narco-novela, ¿no?

Huatulco

The Lunar New Year: Celebrating the Year of the Dragon

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By Deborah Van Hoewyk

Having spent half a decade or so living in New York City’s Chinatown, I came to think of Chinese New Year as a second chance at the whole resolutions-for-good thing. My dog, on the other hand, thought the fireworks were awful – when we went out early in the morning, the curbs were bordered six inches deep with fluffy blasted paper, and the air still smelled of sulfur. Better than the parades and fireworks, though, I was enamored of the zodiac signs that purported to shape the coming year.

The Year of the Dragon

And 2024 is the Year of the Dragon. It starts Saturday, February 10; the celebration begins on the eve (February 9) and runs through Saturday, February 24, ending with the Festival of Lanterns. (The dates on the true lunar calendar are a bit different.)

If you were BORN in a year of the dragon (this year and 2012, 2000, 1988, 1976, 1965, 1952, 1940, and every 12 years before that), you are intelligent, energetic, and generous, as well as outspoken and impatient, and a perfectionist to boot. But the atmosphere the Dragon brings to its year is for everyone – this year should present us all with possibilities for change and growth, progress and innovation.

Five elements cycle through the Chinese calendar – wood, fire, earth, metal and water; given the 12 signs and five elements, a complete cycle for the Chinese calendar takes 60 years. This year, the element of wood underlies the year of the Dragon, making it a year for growth, imagination, and enthusiasm.

Can you celebrate all this good fortune in Mexico? Yes, indeed! Chinese people, for various reasons at various times, settled in Baja California; the desert area of central Mexico called El Bajío, which covers all or parts of seven Mexican states; Guerrero; Mexico City; the Yucatán; and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The two best places to celebrate the Lunar New Year are Mexicali, the capital of Baja California, and Mexico City.

Baja California

If you go to Mexicali to celebrate Chinese New Year, the event starts with a parade from the Kiosko Chino (Chinese pagoda) in Plaza de la Amistad (Friendship Plaza) at the US-Mexican border. The Plaza, built in 1991, commemorates the sister-city relationship between Mexicali and Nanjing, China; the pagoda was donated to Mexicali by Nanjing in 1995, built by Chinese and Mexican artisans working together, and inaugurated on the Chinese New Year, February 1, 1995. The parade, replete with dragon and lion dancers, starts at the pagoda and goes south to Mexicali’s Chinatown, known as La Chinesca.

The Chinese Presence in Mexicali: The Chinese, as they did in many other places, arrived in Mexicali at the turn of the 20th century to work. They were brought in by the Colorado River company to work on railroad and irrigation projects. Even more Chinese came to northwestern Mexico as part of the “cotton episode,” during which US-backed companies expanded cotton production into Mexico, creating a period of regional prosperity in the area around Mexicali. In 1903, there were 22 Chinese immigrants in the Mexicali Valley; in 1913, a thousand; in 1919, there were 17,000 and they seriously outnumbered the Mexican residents.

Chinese people had also moved west to the Mexicali Valley from the cotton-producing regions of Coahuila and Sonora to escape anti-Chinese sentiment; in mid-May 1911, a faction of Pancho Villa’s revolutionary forces destroyed Chinese homes and businesses and killed over 300 Chinese in the Massacre of Torreón, Coahuila. (Remember that the US passed anti-Chinese legislation [the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882], discriminated against the Chinese, drove them out of any number of towns, and in 1871, massacred 19 Chinese residents of Los Angeles, laying waste to LA’s Chinatown.)

As time went on, more Chinese moved to Mexicali and opened businesses to serve the community; Mexicali and Tijuana host the largest Chinese populations in Mexico, with Tijuana’s share at about 15,000 and Mexicali’s over 10,000; through the 1940s, Mexicali was actually majority Chinese.

Chinese Contributions to Mexicali. Today, Chinese immigrants are considered major contributors to the area’s social, economic and cultural development. There are over 300 (some say 1,000) Chinese restaurants in Mexicali; most serve Cantonese food, but adapted to Mexican tastes – “even the rice is different.” Apparently, it’s quite the thing to eat Cantonese food to celebrate the Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe (December 12).

One of the most interesting Chinese contributions is the La Chinesca neighborhood on the northern edge of Mexicali. Beneath La Chinesca is an area of tunnels, dwellings, and businesses that reaches under the border to Calexico in California. Although they were thought to have been dug to give the Chinese respite from intense heat, which badly affected them, the tunnels proved extremely popular during the Prohibition era in the US (1920-33), connecting the bars, restaurants, hotels, casinos, and bordellos of Mexicali with eager US customers. Excluded from the above-ground “Sin City” activities, the Chinese also excavated casinos, opium dens, distilleries, and bordellos. Chinese residents occupied housing carved out beside the tunnels until the 1970s; today, the connecting tunnels are mostly closed and the houses and businesses are accessed through trap doors in businesses above.

In 2022, Mexicali won the national prize for innovation in tourism in the cultural tourism category, awarded by the federal Secretariat of Tourism at its annual convention, the Tianguis Turístico. The prize was for a historical tour, “Origins and Secrets of La Chinesca,” developed and managed by Rubén “Junior” Hernández Chen, chairperson of the Committee for the Historic Center of Mexicali. (The earliest version of the tour, “La Chinesca,” also won the 2018 prize for diversification in cultural tourism.) You can find information (in Spanish) about the tour on their Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064772856377); the address is Callejon Reforma 306, and you can make a reservation by calling +52 686 150 3694.

Mexico City

If you go to CDMX to celebrate the Lunar New Year, you will have as exciting an experience as you might in Mexicali, but bigger! More and different events and, obviously, more people! But it will be different. The Chinese of Mexico City no longer live in the city’s Chinatown, or Barrio Chino; Barrio Chino is very small, located in the Centro Histórico on a few blocks of Calle Dolores and its callejones (alleys); these streets are closed to cars. At times, the Chinese New Year celebration resembles a street fair, with plenty to eat and many souvenirs to buy; this year, there will be a plethora of golden dragons on the vendor tables.

The entrance to Barrio Chino is marked by an Arco Chino (Chinese Arch) in the paifang style – originally paifang architecture represented the organization of communities, but by now “paifang” has come to mean the gate of a community and is used only in decorative structures.

This being Mexico City, the Arch is not IN Barrio Chino, but on Santos Degollado Plaza immediately to the west (the Arch was too big to fit on Calle Dolores). Part of an ongoing effort to promote Chinatown as a tourist attraction, it was planned cooperatively with the Chinese Embassy. At the inauguration by then-mayor Marcelo Ebrard and Yen Heng-min, China’s ambassador, Ebrard declared the Plaza to be part of Chinatown. A smaller arch was put up in 2018 to mark the actual entrance to Calle Dolores.

The Chinese in Mexico City – Phase 1: On October 8, 1565, after four months and eight days at sea, a Basque navigator-friar named Andrés de Urdaneta sailed into Acapulco from the Philippines, establishing the trade route from New Spain to Asia and back to New Spain. He had left from Barra de Navidad, Jalisco (south of Acapulco and north of Puerto Vallarta), on an expedition led by the explorer Miguel López de Legazpi, also from the Basque region; the expedition was intended to colonize the Philippines, which, along with Guam, the Mariana Islands, and parts of other islands off the coast of southeast Asia, was referred to as the Spanish East Indies.

The round trip had immense implications for New Spain, not just in terms of establishing global trade, but world influence as well, as the Spanish East Indies were mostly governed from New Spain. Immigration from Asia to New Spain began immediately. Those who came were mostly Chinese and Filipino, and practiced many trades, from musicians and scribes, to tailors and cobblers, to barbers and silversmiths. The city’s zocalo (Plaza Mayor) hosted the Parián, an Asian market, where they sold their wares and goods imported from Asia.

This trade network, often called the “Manila Galleon,” included a thriving traffic in esclavos chinos (Chinese slaves), or indios chinos (equating them with indigenous Mexicans), although they hailed from various Asian countries. Goods brought into Acapulco were hauled overland by mule trains along the “China Road,” which ran up from Acapulco to Mexico City, the administrative center for tracking trade. Goods not intended for New Spain were loaded back on the mule trains and went on down the road to Veracruz for shipping to Europe.

The Manila Galleon lasted until early in the Mexican War of Independence (1810-21); Spain declared that the trade route should be eliminated in 1813, and trade ended in 1815, removing its benefits for New Spain.

The Chinese in Mexico City – Phase 2: In the early 20th century, the importation of workers to build railroads and other components of developing urbanization brought the Chinese to Mexico City as well. In 1901, there were only 40 Chinese listed in Mexico City, but by 1910, there were 1,482, many of whom moved from northern Mexico to escape the anti-Chinese (actually, the anti-foreign, or “nativist”) ideas of the Revolutionary forces (the Torreón massacre occurred in 1911).

The Chinese who came to Dolores Street were businesspeople, not construction workers. They opened restaurants, bakeries, laundries, and lard shops – lard was essential to both Chinese and Mexican cooking. Around 1930, when Mexico undertook an expulsion campaign to rid itself of Chinese immigrants, there were about 25,000 Chinese in the country as a whole; by 1940, there were fewer than 5,000.

Beginning shortly after this expulsion campaign, however, both deported Chinese and the Mexican government of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40) made efforts to “repatriate” the deported, and to increase Chinese immigration in general. The 2020 census identified 10,547 Chinese immigrants in Mexico, nearly a 60% increase over 2010; this does not count Mexico’s much larger Chinese-Mexican population, which goes back to the fact that early Chinese immigration was limited to men, who intermarried with Mexican women.

The history of Chinese immigration to Mexico, indeed to countries around the world, is complex and nuanced, involving racism and exploitation, resentment, often violent and deadly, of Chinese financial success, and – finally – an appreciation of Chinese culture and tradition. The Chinese New Year is perhaps the best occasion to do your own appreciating of that culture – have fun, and may your Year of the Dragon be especially rewarding!

Huatulco

Appropriation, Appreciation, Inspiration: The Taking of Mexican Fashion

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By Deborah Van Hoewyk

On Thursday, October 20, 2022, author and Mexican First Lady Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller Instagrammed American designer Ralph Lauren:

Hey, Ralph, we already knew that you’re a big fan of Mexican designs, above all those that work with our ancestral cultures to preserve textile traditions. However, by copying these designs you commit plagiarism, and as you know, plagiarism is illegal and immoral. At least acknowledge it. And I hope you compensate the damage to the native communities that do this work with love and not for million-dollar profits.

Gutiérrez was calling out Lauren for his use of Mexican serape fabric in a cardigan-style jacket in his current line of clothing; she mentioned specifically the weavers from Contla de Juan Cuamatzi in Jalisco and Saltillo in Coahuila as the “authors” of the textile design of the cardigan.

This was not the first time, either. Ralph Lauren has made a mint by refining the looks of the New England preppie, early-Hollywood glamour, and the rough-and-rustic American West. It was hardly a skip or a jump when his collection for Spring/Summer 2013 was described, by The New York Times, as showing there was “no doubt Ralph Lauren was down Mexico way.” Lauren again showed serapes in his Fall 2014 collection, when he added a Polo Ralph Lauren collection for women that included a Mexican-patterned maxi dress and a serape-fabric jacket.

Cultural Appropriation

Gutiérrez clearly sees Lauren’s use of the serape fabric as cultural appropriation. She identifies his work as plagiarism, i.e., an exact copy, and asserts that it has damaged the indigenous communities, whose work is a labor of love that preserves ancient traditions, because Lauren did not acknowledge or compensate them. Lauren no doubt considered it cultural appreciation – if he considered it at all.

A repeat offender like Lauren, Marant included a cape clearly taken from the Purépecha of Michoacán in her 2020-21 Etoile collection. Alejandra Frausto Guerrero, the Mexican Minister of Culture, sought an explanation:

Some symbols [on the cape] that you took have a profound meaning for this culture. These symbols are very old and have been conserved thanks to the memory of the artisans. I ask you, Ms. Isabel Marant, to publicly explain on what grounds you privatize a collective property … and how its use benefits the creator communities.

In 2021, Frausto Guerrero accused several other fashion brands of wrongly appropriating designs from three Oaxacan towns. US-based Anthropologie took embroidery patterns representing the sun, the mountains, and the maguey cactus preserved by the Mixe of Santa María Tlahuitoltepec, and slapped them on fringe-edged shorts no Mexican woman would ever wear. The Spanish retailer Zara made a light green dress with dark green embroidery patterns unique to the Mixtec weaving cooperatives of San Juan Colorado. Internet-based retailer Patowl was selling blouses with elaborate embroidery characteristic of the Zapotec community in San Antonio Castilla Velasco.

Protecting All Cultural Expression

These events foregrounded the need for legal protection of Mexico’s indigenous cultural heritage from the “plagiarism” of appropriation. According to Andrea Bonifaz of the social justice organization Impacto Social Metropolitan Group, which defends the rights of traditional artisanal communities against cultural appropriation, the underlying problem is that “ancestral expressions, like the serape, are collective.” Laws protecting patrimony cover individuals, not communities. “Who or what the community is,” and therefore who can bring suit, is never defined.

However, some progress has been made. In 2020, following the Herrera resort-wear confrontation, Mexico changed the federal copyright law to specify that native communities – if the community has taken the steps to organize as a collective – own the intellectual property rights to craftwork that expresses cultural and local popular tradition. As owners of their work, they can oppose unauthorized use, even when that use altered the original design. In 2021, the Mexican senate passed a federal law that established penalties for taking – by reproducing, copying, imitating, or otherwise appropriating without prior and proper authorization – the designs that represent indigenous cultural heritage, including that of Afro-Mexicans.

These legislative changes set up a legal framework and a registry to recognize cultural expressions, identify the owners of those expressions, and establish the protocols for owners to authorize any permitted use. Mexico’s Institute of Industrial Property (IMPI, manages patents and trademarks) and the Copyright Office (INDAUTOR) give classes for indigenous communities and individual artisans on intellectual property, explaining how to protect their rights to their work. They also give discounts to the artisans or collectives for registering ownership of their work.

From Appropriation to Appreciation

Is it ever okay to use the cultural assets of another people? Vogue India, prompted by Sarah Jessica Parker’s costume in the “Diwali” episode of And Just Like That, asks “How do you know if you are co-opting cultural connotations or innocuously borrowing an aesthetic?”

It’s a longstanding debate, but the answer, actually, is yes, you can appreciate rather than appropriate (see Brooke O’Connor’s article on page 26). Vogue India came up with a rather narrow answer – you have to avoid “demeaning” the culture from which you have taken something. This is a backward way of saying you have to respect, to recognize, to acknowledge the culture that produced it. Vogue India quotes Kelvin Gonclaves, owner of Elkel, an “avante-garde” boutique in the Soho neighborhood in New York City:

If your action disrespects the original idea because of cultural, religious or other customs, then you’ve gone too far. If you claim it as yours without giving credit, you’ve definitely gone too far. There are a few things that should never be done like blackface or dreadlocks on a white person. With taste and acknowledgement, though, most things can be done.

Gonclaves thinks that all art, fashion included, “borrows inspiration from other cultures [to create] new and wonderful things.”

The Gray Area of Inspiration

The designers Mexico has accused of cultural appropriation have said their work is “inspired” by Mexican “ideas.” That may well be so, but it doesn’t determine whether or not they have created something “new and wonderful.”

Take a look at a sweatshirt recently stocked at both Nordstrom and Gonclaves’ boutique:

Billed as a “Gender Inclusive Keith Haring Witches Print Cotton Blend Sweatshirt,” it’s sold out at Nordstrom. According to Nordstrom, the sweatshirt and matching sweatpants were “produced in collaboration with the Keith Haring Foundation” and “creatively showcases the late artist’s iconic designs.” There is no mention that Haring produced the designs forty years ago, or that they were inspired by ancient Mexican hieroglyphic writings and low-relief sculptures.

Keith Haring (1958-90) was a New York “street artist” whose early work, inspired by the graffiti subculture of the early 1980s, was considered pop art, and Haring was very much a part of the pop art scene. In 1982, he was approached by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, who were very much a part of the same scene in England, to prepare designs on the theme of “Witches” for one of McLaren’s albums (Duck Rock) and McLaren/Westwood’s fashion line. By 1983, Haring had produced the Witches series of drawings, but never credited any specific Mexican sources.

Haring was diagnosed with AIDS in 1987; he set up the Keith Haring Foundation to preserve and promote his work, and to raise funds for those affected by AIDS. The Foundation licensed the sweatshirt and pants as a fundraising activity. It can easily be argued that the Witches sweatsuit is “inspired” by Mesoamerican designs, that Keith Haring did not “appropriate” any specific work, and that he created something “new and wonderful.” But a little mention of how he came to use his Mexican inspiration might have been nice.

Huatulco

Who Was That Woman in the Dinosaur Suit?

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By Deborah Van Hoewyk

In December 2022, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) tried to get a constitutional amendment through the Mexican Congress. The amendment would have overhauled the country’s electoral process in such a way that, among many other things, AMLO could have stayed in office after his term ended. (Mexico’s presidents serve a single six-year term.) While AMLO’s constitutional amendment failed, his party, MORENA, continued the effort to reform elections through legislation. (See Randy Jackson’s article elsewhere in this issue on Mexican political parties and coalitions.)

Enter the Opposition

During discussions of the proposed legislation, a lime-green, eight-foot dinosaur took the speaker’s podium in the senate chamber: “Today we introduce the ‘Jurassic Plan,’ … a plan that would bring back ‘the dinosaurs’ of the PRI.” The Institutional Revolutionary Party held unilateral power in Mexico from 1929 to 2000 – at least occasionally through elections deemed fraudulent. The green monster implied that supporters of changing Mexico’s electoral process were out of date, out of touch, and just possibly corrupt.

Inside the dinosaur suit? Senator Bertha Xóchitl Gálvez Ruiz, now 60, who was elected to the Senate in 2018 through proportional representation for the PAN party (National Action Party), and re-elected for the PRD party (Party of the Democratic Revolution). (Three-quarters of Mexico’s senators represent a particular place, one-quarter of the senators proportionally represent the political parties).

There are TWO women running for president in Mexico, and Senator Gálvez is the “other woman” – an article on the better-known candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum, appears elsewhere in this issue. Gálvez is the candidate of the opposition coalition Frente Amplio por México (Broad Front for Mexico), which comprises the PAN, the PRD, AND THE PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party). Sheinbaum is AMLO’s protégé, and is the candidate of the ruling coalition, Juntos Hacemos Historia (Together We Make History), made up of the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), the Labor Party (PT), and the Ecologist Green Party of Mexico (PVEM).

Who Is Xóchitl Gálvez?

Born in Tepatepec, Hidalgo, Gálvez is mostly Otomi – her father was Otomi, and her mother was part Otomi (the Otomi were the earliest indigenous people to appear in the Mexican highlands, around 8000 BCE). Reportedly, she grew up poor, selling tamales in the street or Gelatina de Tres Leches, a “Mexican Jello” dessert, in the market – depending on who’s telling the story. More to the point, her education and work history focus on digital technology.

Gálvez studied computer engineering at UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) and worked as a computer help tech at a call center before returning to UNAM as a research assistant. She finally earned her degree in Computer Engineering in 2010, at the age of 47. In the meantime, she was a programmer and then a systems analyst at INEGI (Mexico’s census bureau); she also served as director of telecommunications at Mexico’s World Trade Center.

In 1992, she set up High Tech Services, a company that developed projects that deployed digital technology to design intelligent buildings, increase energy savings, automate processes, and support security and telecommunications installations. In 1998, she founded Operation and Maintenance for Intelligent Buildings (OMEI). She was named one of the 100 Global Leaders of the World’s Future at Davos in 1999; in 2000, one of the 25 Latin America’s Business Elite by Business Week.

Interviewed by Bloomberg.com news service in 1998, Gálvez said that, amid rapid growth of young entrepreneurial companies, including her own, inequality became an issue for her. “I realized we were creating two Mexicos – one for people with dollars, and one in which people had nothing. The have-nots weren’t going to progress at all if they didn’t have proper nutrition.”

She set up the Foundation for the Future (Fundación Porvenir), which distributes food supplements to indigenous children suffering from malnutrition and works on supporting women in indigenous communities. Gálvez believes that the private sector should work to lessen the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

In her late thirties, Gálvez became interested in politics as another way to strengthen Mexican society. Under President Vicente Fox – the 2000 candidate who overturned the PRI’s unbroken hold on the presidency – she headed up the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples (INPI). In 2010, she was the runner-up for governor of Hidalgo; in 2015, she was the PAN candidate for mayor of Hidalgo, and won. She had served for nearly three years when she ran for the Senate.

Can She Win the Presidency?

Probably not. Apparently, though, the dinosaur stunt stuck in AMLO’s craw. He has definitely increased her name recognition. Mexican presidents are not allowed to comment on candidates for office, particularly when they are running to succeed that president.

In late Spring of 2023, when it became apparent that Gálvez was the likely presidential candidate of the Broad Front coalition, AMLO began castigating her in his daily mañaneras (two-hour press conferences – what national president has time to gab with the press for two hours a day?). According to CNN online (July 23, 2023), he’s called her a “wimp,” a “puppet,” and “employee of the oligarchy.” He has said she didn’t grow up poor; he has released private financial information on her businesses and said their contracts are corrupt. (Gálvez has pointed out that some of those contracts are with the Mexican government.)

The National Election Institute (INE) has ordered AMLO to stop attacking Gálvez; the order has not taken effect, and you should note that the INE is also under attack by AMLO. El Financiero, Mexico’s Wall Street Journal, has said “AMLO is obsessed with Senator Gálvez,” and other commentators have joked that AMLO is the Senator’s campaign manager.

There is no doubt that AMLO’s ill-founded attacks have raised her profile to within striking distance of Sheinbaum. It’s not clear whether that’s enough, but it has definitely put her on the national stage for some time to come. Remember, it took AMLO himself three tries to get elected.

Huatulco

This is Santa Muerte. Or Is It?

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By Deborah Van Hoewyk

Who Is She?

Santa Muerte – Saint, or Holy, Death – is all about death. She IS death, or maybe escaping death. The explanations of how Santa Muerte came to be, what she does, and who is devoted to her worship vary widely. Wielding a scythe, carrying a globe or an hour glass or the scales of justice, and accompanied by an owl, Santa Muerte makes a lot of people nervous.

She isn’t supposed be a particular person, with a beatified life, but those interested in the syncretism of indigenous and Catholic religion think she might be, or that she goes back to the Aztecs. She has nothing to do with Día de los Muertos, although lately, she’s been showing up at the celebrations. She started out male and became female. Her cult is condemned by the Catholic Church, but it’s the fastest-growing religion in Mexico, the US, and Canada; in 2017, the number of worshippers was estimated at 10 to 12 million, and the number “exploded” during the pandemic. (“Cult,” when used in the religious sense, is not a negative, it simply means an unrecognized religious group.)

Is she the “complex, multifaceted folk spirit” described by Rebecca M. Bender, Associate Professor of Spanish literature and culture at Kansas State University? Or is she the narco-saint, a “strange hybrid of the Virgin Mary and the grim reaper” profiled by independent journalist Jake Flanigan in The Atlantic? Did she protect people from COVID-19, or, as the angel of death, send them straight to their graves?

Where Did She Come From?

Anyone who has toured an ancient ruin in Mexico knows that death was an overarching theme – human sacrifice, dead warriors, tombs, maybe even the winning team in a ball game – the stories are painted and carved throughout.

While the cult of Santa Muerte emerged in the mid-20th-century, and had mostly stayed out of sight until the 1990s, some anthropologists and archaeologists see its ancestry among the Aztecs. As noted in articles elsewhere in this issue, the Aztecs (in Oaxaca, the Zapotecs and Mixtecs) had an elaborate construction of life after death, including a 13-level heaven and a 9-level underworld. The god of death, Mictlāntēcutli, together with his consort Mictēcacihuātl, ruled Mictlān, the lowest level of the underworld.

The goddess Mictēcacihuātl is immortal and a shapeshifter – she can change her appearance at will, from benevolent to monstrous. Her charge is to guard the skeletons of the dead and govern the festivals honoring the dead; there is a direct line from Mictēcacihuātl to Día de los Muertos. Over time, Mictēcacihuātl gradually became the personification of death itself, as well as the agent through whom the preserved bones of the dead provided the source of life for the next world – unlike their Christian conquerors, the Aztecs believed death was part of an endless cycle of life. Mictēcacihuātl thus develops a dual identity, associated with both death and life, which becomes healing – much like Santa Muerte. Aztecs appealed to her to promote their health and delay their deaths; the pair of them is shown overseeing scenes of sex, fertility, pregnancy and birth.

There are also those who argue that Santa Muerte derives from a 17th-century figure, Doña Sebastiana de Caso y Paredes, who was the niece of a sainted “virgin penitent” in Ecuador, St. Mariana de Jesus of Quito (a virgin penitent consecrates her life to God, lives usually with her family, and refrains from relations with men).

Robert Nixon, a Benedictine friar from London, based his recent book, The Venerable Doña Sebastiana de Caso: the Original Santa Muerte (2022) on the work of Jacinto Morán de Butrón, a 17th-century Ecuadorian historian. According to Morán and Nixon, Sebastiana’s father tried to force her into marriage, but she prayed to Death to rescue her; apparently Death responded, as Sebastiana contracted a fever and died. People began to venerate Sebastiana, who was born on August 15, the feast day of Santa Muerte; a society known as La congregación de la buena muerte sprang up in her honor.

What Happened Next?

The Spanish Catholic conquerors were having none of the worship of death, the multitudinous native gods and goddesses – if they couldn’t co-opt a ritual or belief, they suppressed it. Santa Muerte went underground. While this has led some to believe that Santa Muerte is a modern phenomenon, academic anthropologists use the theory of “bricolage” to explain the evolution of Santa Muerte (nowadays, they’re more likely to use the more dignified term “syncretism”). Either way, it describes the blending of disparate cultural practices into something new.

Defined in 1960 by the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, bricolage comes from the French word bricoler, or “tinker around.” Generally, you tinker around with unrelated bits and pieces of this and that (bric-a-brac) until you’ve combined them into something new and meaningful to you. “Meaning” is not fixed forever, but depends on your understanding of the bric-a-brac you’ve assembled. For example, when the Spanish arrived, they brought images of the Grim Reaper to “explain” death to the “natives.” ¡¡Listo!! Santa Muerte now carries a scythe.

Before the Spanish arrived, Mictēcacihuātl was the patron of a month (August) of celebrations of the dead. The Spanish arranged to have the Catholic Church exorcize Mictēcacihuātl, since she was obviously inflicting the power of Satan on her believers; they cut the commemorations to two days and moved them to coincide with All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day (November 1-2), which we now know as the Days of the Dead (the first day for children who have died, the second for adults).

There is, however, no doubt that Santa Muerte went underground in the colonial period – failure to adopt Christianity precisely as the Spaniards ordered was a major cause of death at the time. Veneration of Santa Muerte continued under cover, though; records of the Spanish Inquisition (a joint state-church effort to “purify” Spanish Catholicism, 1478-1834 in Spain, 1571-1820 in Mexico) report Santa Muerte worship in Guanajuato in 1797. The Chichimeca

at night gather in their chapel to drink peyote until they lose their minds; they light upside-down candles, some of which are black; they dance with paper dolls; they whip Holy Crosses and also a figure of death that they call Santa Muerte, and they bind it with a wet rope threatening to whip and burn it if it does not perform a miracle.

In 1793, the Inquisition reported that indigenous people of what is now Querétaro worshipped – on the altar during mass, no less – “the figure of a complete human skeleton standing on top of a red surface, wearing a crown and holding a bow and arrow.”

What with the War of Independence (1810-21), the Mexican-American War (1846-48), and the Mexican Revolution (1910-21), not to mention minor conflicts and political contretemps, Mexico was very busy for quite a while. Santa Muerte continued to stay underground.

The 20th Century: Santa Muerte Returns

From the 1940s to the 1960s, anthropologists described Santa Muerte as a saint who could guide matters of the heart, a saint of love. By the 1980s, however, Santa Muerte had a wide repertoire of influence. She was soon appealed to for help with (or hindrance of) issues involved in education, business, legal affairs – pretty much the spectrum of modern life. She is the preferred saint of marginalized people, the destitute and desperate, those who feel are in danger because of who they are (based on their professions, private lives, or sexuality).

You can get an idea of Santa Muerte’s versatility from Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint, by R. Andrew Chesnut, Ph.D., professor of religion at Virginia Commonwealth University (2017 [2 ed]). The first book focused completely on Santa Muerte, Devoted to Death covers her history, her adoption of elements of Catholicism – the whole gamut. Chesnut explains her powers with seven chapters, each covering one of the colors of Santa Muerte’s votive candles.

Red is the most popular single color, and accompanies petitions concerning passion and love. White represents purity and protection, while black is for black magic, and offers support for the “black” activities involved in narcotrafficking. Gold is for financial gain and overall prosperity, and purple represents miraculous healing. Brown is for learning and wisdom, and green offers advocacy to all followers for all reasons, no questions asked. There is also the best-selling seven-color candle, calling on all of Santa Muerte’s powers.

Santa Muerte has kept up with the times, always open to providing new protections on the one hand, and new persecutions on the other hand. Perhaps the most interesting area to adopt Santa Muerte as its saint is narcotrafficking. This is the “black” part of Santa Muerte, and has given rise to her identity as the patron saint of the drug cartels. Santa Muerte can protect you from the narcos and kidnappers, or help the narcos wreak vengeance on their enemies and the kidnappers succeed in capturing their targets.

Even though the black candle apparently sells poorly, statues of Santa Muerte and black candles have been found at sites where narco violence has occurred. When DEA and Mexican police raid drug safe houses, they find altars to Santa Muerte.

Chesnut deplores the concentration on the “black,” violent, and amoral aspects of Santa Muerte the media seem to promote, and says “Most American and Mexican nonbelievers … have little idea that the Skinny Lady [one of her many names] heals sickness, finds employment, and helps alcoholics and drug addicts in their struggles for sobriety.”

The Future for Santa Muerte?

The Catholic Church is generally opposed to “folk saints” – those who, like Santa Muerte, arise from grass-roots veneration. The cult of Santa Muerte particularly offends the Catholic Church – in 2016, Pope Francis called it “satanic,” and explicitly linked it to narcotrafficking. In both the US and Mexico, the church issues warnings against the growing popularity of including Santa Muerte in the second (adult) Day of the Dead celebrations.

Notwithstanding Church opposition, adherents to Santa Muerte are often Christian, if not Catholic. They have no trouble believing in Jesus Christ, or the Trinity, or the Virgin Mary, but Santa Muerte seems to offer a more efficient way to get your prayers answered, regardless of who you are. Moreover, COVID-19 greatly increased the numbers of people, Mexicans especially, who appealed to Santa Muerte to protect them from “the plague.”

Given that life in Mexico can be, depending on where you are, increasingly insecure and violent, that Mexican politics continue to be unstable, corruption remains rampant, and narcotics have thoroughly infiltrated business and government, the need for a saint who can guarantee your safety, encourage your love life, and promote your health and wellbeing, can only grow.

Huatulco

“Cheap and Crappy” Becomes“Sophisticated and Inventive”:The Modernization of Mexican Fine Dining

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By Deborah Van Hoewyk

A while back, I was in La Crucecita, sitting at the Oasis Restaurant (now closed), watching a table of Americans send their nachos back for more cheese. Three times, they sent them back – the chips were drowning in Cheez Whiz. A far cry from Pujol, the famous Mexico City fine-dining restaurant established by Chef Enrique Olvera in 2000. Olvera does not serve nachos – maybe he’s never even seen them.

Nachos were created in 1940 by Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya at the Victory Club Restaurant in Piedras Negras, on the Tex-Mex border in the state of Coahuila, when some women shopping in Eagle Pass crossed over and came in asking for “something different” – Nacho produced nachos. Cheez Whiz was invented in 1952 by Kraft Foods scientist Edwin Traisman and his team at Kraft Foods. While no one seems to know when Cheez Whiz met nachos, it was created for the British market to make Welsh Rarebit (Rabbit) – in the US, that’s Saltines drowning in Cheez Whiz.

According to a 2023 report from Datassential, a restaurant consulting firm, the Tex-Mex and Latin category has surpassed Italian as America’s favorite food. “Cheesy, spicy foods with Latin-inspired ingredients and preparation” are driving demand for nachos, fully loaded nachos, fajitas, burritos, enchiladas and so on (see “From Tex-Mex to Haute Cuisine,” in The Eye, July 2016). Tex-Mex, maybe Cali-Mex, is pretty much the northern picture of Mexican food – something northerners like, with limited and familiar ingredients, tailored to their tastes – ipso facto, not actually authentic.

Regional Authenticity

The first step toward Mexican fine dining came with the recognition of the variety of Mexico’s regional cuisines (see Brooke O’Connor’s article elsewhere in this issue). Diana Kennedy’s groundbreaking The Regional Cuisines of Mexico came out in 1972 (see “In Search of Diana Kennedy’s Huachinango Veracruzano” in The Eye, Feb 2023). Fifteen years later, in 1987, Rick and Deann Bayless of Chicago published Authentic Mexican: Regional Cooking from the Heart of Mexico. That same year, they opened Frontera Grill, arguably the first US restaurant featuring authentic Mexican food. According to the late Molly O’Neill, food writer with The New York Times, “There’s nothing even remotely similar to Frontera Grill … anywhere else in America.”

WTTW, Chicago’s PBS station, did a story on Frontera’s 30th anniversary in 2017. Bayless told quite a tale of being “different.” The very first guests to walk into Frontera took one look at the menu, said “I don’t know what you’re doing, because this isn’t Mexican food. You’ll be out of business in six months,” and got up and left. Frontera Grill is going strong, and Rick Bayless’ Frontera salsas are sold in most American supermarkets.

Two years after the Frontera Grill opened, Bayless founded Topolobampo, also in Chicago (Bayless now has seven Chicago-area restaurants). Zagat, a restaurant rating service based on customer reviews, said the restaurant was an “educational experience” and its “dynamite tasting menus feature food that’s wildly inventive yet still approachable.” Zagat mentioned “an excellent wine list and cocktails that are works of art; knowledgeable, passionate service and a lovely, upscale setting (remodeled with a sculptural ceiling and dramatic lighting).”

Diana Kennedy and Rick Bayless based their relationships with Mexican food on variations in regional cuisine, combined with authentic ingredients and traditional culinary techniques, but Bayless also laid the foundation of fine dining for Mexican cuisine, with that wine, those cocktails, high-end service, and a setting that required architectural, interior, and acoustic design services.

What Is Fine Dining?

It’s definitely not just being famous – one of the most famous restaurants in the US is the raucous, chaotic Katz’s Delicatessen on East Houston Street in Manhattan. It’s famous for the 80-odd-year-old sign “Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army” and the “I’ll have what she’s having” scene in the film When Harry Met Sally. Wonderful as Katz’s may be, fine dining it’s not.

Fine dining isn’t just the food, either. It’s the experience of eating the food. Of course, the ingredients must be of the highest, freshest quality; the flavors unique; and the dishes exotic, abetted with touches of “modernist cuisine”; and the presentation geared to showcase the food with elegance. In a fine-dining restaurant, you might even be told about your experience – one Topolobampo menu divides the dishes into “Vibrant,” “Fresh,” “Ancient,” “Soulful” “Complex,” “Enchanting,” and “Luxurious.” Beyond the food, fine dining requires impeccable, luxurious service. The setting and atmosphere must enrich the experience. And the prices match it all.

Fine Dining Mexican Style

Mexican fine dining has many characteristics, but that touch of modernism seems to be the key. “Modernist cuisine” takes its identity from a six-volume tome of the same name, subtitled The Art and Science of Cooking (2011). Remember nouvelle cuisine of the 1970s? Lighten up elaborate French cooking? “Tender crisp” green beans? Modernist is that, but with science, especially in terms of chemical interactions in cooking and the techniques and elaborate equipment that control those reactions. Baked potato foam? Sous-vide, anyone?

“Modern Mexican,” first officially noted in 2017 by New York Times food writer Julia Moskin (named for Julia Child), is a “movement, inside and outside Mexico, to finally vanquish the rice-and-beans stereotype and to celebrate its vast and sophisticated cuisine.” The 25-year-old movement is led almost exclusively by chefs, both male and female, whose reputations have established multifaceted careers that have disseminated the dishes of modern Mexican cuisine around the world.

Gabriela Cámara
Starting a restaurant to celebrate a cuisine is a massive undertaking, but it began with a simple concept in Mexico City. In 1998, Mexican-Italian Gabriela Cámara, just 22 and finishing up her art history degree, opened Contramar in the Condesa/Roma area of Mexico City. The area was on the cusp of gentrification, still filled with artists.

Cámara and her friends would go on holiday to Zihuatenejo and eat fresh fish, simply prepared, on the beach. She was not so much interested in a fine-dining establishment as she was in those beach dishes made with Mexican fish straight from the sea, rather than the customary frozen European fish. The neighborhood is now upscale and Contramar has become a top fine-dining restaurant. Open only for lunch (in CDMX, that’s noon to 6 pm during the week, 11 am – 8 pm on weekends), Contramar is the modern version of the family lunch table, lunch being the most important, interesting meal of the day.

Cámara opened Cala, a fine-dining Mexican restaurant in San Francisco, in 2015; she closed it in 2019 to join President López Obrador’s administration as a food-policy expert. Her 2019 cookbook, My Mexican Kitchen: Recipes and Convictions, marks her concern with food policy, production, and consumption. And culture: In a 2019 Robb Report article on Mexican fine dining, Cámara said, “People think Mexican is cheap, crappy food. But now Mexican can be super sophisticated. That gives people a cultural pride we didn’t see even just a few years ago.”

Enrique Olvera
Olvera was born in Mexico City in 1976. In high school, he started cooking for friends; word got around that his dinners were superb, and he decided to become a chef – not a glamorous or high-status career at the time. Olvera went to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, north of New York City. He received an associate’s degree in 1997 and a bachelor’s in 1999.

When he went back to Mexico City, he cooked for his parents’ friends, who turned out to be his first investors. He opened Pujol in Polanco in 2000, but it was rocky going at first. Since there had never been a fine-dining restaurant that served Mexican food anywhere, not in Mexico, not in the rest of the world, what it was supposed to be like was unclear. At one point, according to a 2017 article on the travel site Culture Trip, Olvera felt disconnected from the whole enterprise, feeling that he was “using Mexican ingredients, but not to make Mexican food.”

Olvera went to Oaxaca and took a look at their cuisine, quite different from the cooking around Mexico City. It gave him ideas about how to use new-to-him ingredients in unique ways that would still be true to Mexican culture and to the idea that food is a way to be happy, to celebrate. Gradually, Pujol succeeded, to great acclaim.

With Pujol on a solid footing, Olvera went back to New York, assessed the restaurant scene and in 2014, opened a new restaurant, Cosme, on East 21st Street off Fifth Avenue, and then in 2017, the more casual Atla on Lafayette Street in Noho. Interviewed by CNN when Cosme opened, Olvera said, “I want Mexican food to keep moving. I understand that we have beautiful traditions. I feel very proud of those traditions, but I want to keep on building new traditions for the next generations.” Olvera has other fine-dining restaurants in Oaxaca City, San Miguel de Allende, and Los Cabos. Modern Mexican Takes Off In the space of two years, well-known chefs opened four more fine-dining Mexican restaurants in CDMX, all in the posh areas of Polanco and Roma Norte. In 2010, Elena Reygadas, trained at the French Culinary Institute in New York City, opened Rosetta in Roma Norte. She now has four more CDMX restaurants – Panadería Rosetta, Lardo, Café Nin, and Bella Aurora.

Martha Ortiz was a political science/sociology major when she did a study of social mobility in Milpa Alta outside Mexico City and realized the critical role of food in social structure; she went on to cook in kitchens around the world before returning home. In 2003, she opened Áquila and Sol in Polanco as a showcase for regional styles from across Mexico. It was unusual for women to be owner/operators of restaurants, so when, in 2008, the city counted her parking spaces and found only 90 rather than the required 91, they shut her down. Ortiz opened Dulce Patria in 2011 in Polanco, which fell victim to the pandemic. She has moved on to Ella Canta in the Intercontinental Hotel in London (opened 2017), and is now in charge of Tuch de Luna, a restaurant at the Mayan Riviera resort La Casa de la Playa.

In 2012, two chefs who had been with Olvera at Pujol opened restaurants; Jorge Vallejo and his wife Alejandra Flores opened Quintonil in Polanco and Eduardo García opened Máximo Bistrot in Roma (recently moved to the Álvaro Obregón neighborhood). Vallejo graduated from the Centro Culinario Ambrosía in Mexico City; in 2019, he opened Ixi’im in the luxury hotel Casa Chablé, near Mérida in the Yucatán. García trained at the culinary school at the Art Institute of Seattle. With his wife, Gabriela López Cruz, Garcia also operates Havre 77 and Lalo! in Mexico City.

Beyond Mexico City, Baja California has Laja, opened in a renovated hacienda in Ensenada by chef Jair Téllez in 2000. It’s what in the US we would call an organic farm-to-table restaurant. Laja is now run by a Téllez protégé, Rafa Magañez. Malva is also in Ensenada, also a farm-to-table establishment, and was opened by chef Roberto Alcocer in 2014, after working in fine-dining restaurants abroad. Rodolfo Castellanos opened Origen in Oaxaca in 2011, after studying at the Culinary Institute of Mexico and receiving the Turquois scholarship to study in France. Castellanos is able to marry French and Mexican elements in his cuisine – he was Top Chef México in 2016.

Are We All Good with This?

W-e-l-l-l … not everyone thinks that moving from “traditional” or “authentic” dishes toward menu items that “modernize” the cuisine is properly respectful of the culture. New York Times restaurant reviewer Pete Wells, speaking of the newly opened Cosme in 2015, discussed New York’s new obsession with Mexican restaurants. Some empire-building chef decides to open a new restaurant specializing in “some other nation’s food. By the time the news releases are ready, a week’s vacation has become a research trip, and a snack bought with pocket change has become a $13 appetizer.” The resulting restaurants “present, some more convincingly than others, a chef’s south-of-the-border fantasies.”

Wells sees Olvera as using reverse cultural appropriation in creating Cosme. He did his research in Manhattan to see what the menus, the cocktails, the customers, and the settings were like. Cosme shows an “uncannily state-of-the-art instinct for what New Yorkers want when they go out for dinner.” The cooking “sails right over ideas like tradition, authenticity, and modernity,” using underpinnings from Mexico and fresh local ingredients to give diners “a thrill.” Wells would no doubt find echoes of Cosme “deported” back home to Pujol – by the way, he LOVED eating at Cosme!

Huatulco

What in the World Do Demonyms Name?

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By Deborah Van Hoewyk

Back – way back – when Greek was the language of the day, there lots of “nyms,” a suffix that basically means “name.” We all learned about synonyms and antonyms in grade school, and the homonyms were always fun. You remember, different words but pronounced the same? Road/rode, beat/beet, cereal/serial, gate/gait.

It turns out, growing up in Maine, I was also interested in demonyms – the names (nyms) of peoples (demos) – also called “gentilics.” People from Maine were known as “Maineiacs,” and not always in a positive sense. While the World Book Encyclopedia of 1956 did not actually refer to the people of Maine as “Maineiacs,” it did identify us as “hardy fisher folk” who suffered a geographic inferiority complex. Which probably says more about the non-PC world of the nineteen-fifties than anything else.

Understandably, we now go by the more sensible “Mainers,” although the Maine Air National Guard’s 101st Air Refueling Wing is still called the Maineiacs – only right in that one of their talents is air-to-air, high-speed refueling in the Arctic. And Maineiac might well apply to me and my husband personally, in the decade or so we’ve spent driving from the northeast corner of the U.S. to the southeast corner of Mexico – and back again – a path that takes us through 13 of Mexico’s 31 states.

What Are the Demonyms of Mexico?

Of course, over and above the 31 states of Mexico is the Distrito Federal, the Federal District referred to as “Mexico City,” which people used to call “DF” (day-EFF-ay). Since 2016, however, it’s officially been designated “CDMX” (Ciudad de México – City of Mexico); this move was supposed to help devolve power from the federal to the local level, on the path to eventual statehood. Not much progress there to date.

What’s the demonym for residents of CDMX? While residents of the big city can be called mexiqueños/as, defeños/as, or capitalinos/as, they are mostly called chilangos/as, from the Náhuatl chīlān (capital, or “in the center of the moon”). While some travel websites say the demonym is an “affectionate” or “humorous” term, that’s probably a minority view. Originally used to refer to people from the countryside who had migrated to Mexico City, chilango now means those born and bred in CDMX, and specifically contrasts with provinciano – i.e., sophisticated vs. being a hick. However, when chilangos go on vacation, they’re often considered demanding, rude, and generally obnoxious. In vacation areas near CDMX, the saying goes “Haz patria, mata un Chilango” – “Do something for the motherland, murder a Chilango.” Given that Chilangos represent about a sixth of Mexico’s total population, they are largely responsible for Mexico’s domestic tourism. Their lives and limbs are probably pretty safe when they travel!

Here, in alphabetical order, is how to refer to the people you meet in Mexico.

Aguascalientes, capital Aguascalientes: Residents of both the state and the capital city are called aguascalentenses. Notice that the ‘i’ in the “caliente” part of the name drops out.

Baja California, capital Mexicali: State residents are called bajacalifornianos/as. If you live in the capital, you’re a mexicalense.

Baja California Sur, capital La Paz: State residents are also called bajacalifornianos/as, while residents of La Paz are called paceños/as.

Campeche, capital San Francisco Campeche: If you live anywhere in Campeche, you’re a campechano/a.

Chiapas, capital Tuxtla Gutiérrez: A resident of the state is a chiapaneco/a, while a resident of the capital can be called a tuxtleco/a or a tuxtleño/a.

Chihuahua, capital Chihauhua: Both state and capital residents are called chihuahuenses; colloquially, they are norteños/as.

Coahuila, capital Saltillo: Someone from the state of Coahuila is called a coahuilense, while someone from Saltillo is called a saltillense.

Colima, capital Colima: Residents here are called either colimenses or colemeños/as.

Durango, capital Durango: The folks from Durango are referred to as duranguenses or durangueños/as.

Guanajuato, capital Guanajuato: If you’re from Guanajuato, the state or the capital, you are a guanajuatense or a guanajuateño/a. If you come from Moroleón, a large city located in a textile manufacturing area and known for clothes shopping, you’re a moroleonés/esa.

Guerrero, capital Chilpancingo de los Bravo: State residents are called guerrerenses, while residents of the capital are chilpancingueños/as. If you’re from Acapulco, you’re an acapulqueño/a.

Hidalgo, capital Pachuca: Refer to state residents as hidalguenses, and capital city residents as pachuqueños/as.

Jalisco, capital Guadalajara: People from the state of Jalisco are called jaliciences; if you live in Guadalajara, you’re a guadalajarense or a guadalajareño/a. However, if you were born in the city, you’re a tapatío/a.

(Estado de) México, capital Toluca de Lerdo: Live in the state? You’re a mexiquense. In the city of Toluca? Toluqueño/a.

Michoacán, capital Morelia: These people would be michoacanos/as and morelianos/as.

Morelos, capital Cuernavaca: Folks from Morelos are called morelenses, and those living in the capital are called cuernavaquenses. You will also hear them called guayabos or guayabas. One explanation is that there are many guayaba trees in Cuernavaca, often pink, and they scent the streets or even dye them pink.

Nayarit, capital Tepic: State residents – nayaritas (remember, a word ending in ‘a’ can be masculine as well as feminine) or nayaritenses; capital city residents – tepiqueños/as.

Nuevo León, capital Monterrey: If you’re from here, you’re a neoleonés/esa or a nuevoleonés/esa; if you’re from Monterrey, you’re a monterreyense or a regiomontano/a – the latter is related to the name “Monterrey,” which translates as “mountain of the king.”

Oaxaca, capital Oaxaca de Juárez: Both state and city residents are called oaxaqueños/as; however, if you’re from the capital city, you might also becalled a vallisto/a, after the Central Valleys of Oaxaca. If you’re from Huatulco, of course, you’re a huatulqueño/a.

Puebla, capital Puebla de Zaragoza: People from both the state and the city are called poblanos/as, although city residents are also called angelopolitanos/as. At one point the capital city was called “Puebla de los Ángeles,” and is now nicknamed “Ángelópolis” (“City of Angels”), hence the gentilic for people live in the city of Puebla.

Querétaro, capital Santiago de Querétaro: If you live anywhere in Querétaro, you’re a queretano/a.

Quintana Roo, capital Chetumal: People who live in Quintana Roo are called quintanarroenses, while those in the capital are called chetumalenses or chetumaleños/as. If you live in Tulum, you’re a tulumense, and if you’re out on Isla Mujeres, you’re an isleño/a.

San Luis Potosí, capital San Luis Potosí: The demonym for both state and city residents is potosino/a, although if you live in the capital, you might also be called a sanluisino/a.

Sinaloa, capital Culiacán Rosales: State residents – sinaloenses; capital city residents – culiacanenses. If you hail from Mazatlán, you’re a mazatleco/a.

Sonora, capital Hermosilla: State residents – sonorenses; capital city residents – hermosillenses.

Tabasco, capital Villahermosa: State residents – tabasqueños/as; capital city residents are called villahermosinos/as or villermosinos/as.

Tamaulipas, capital Ciudad Victoria: Residents of Tamaulipas are called tamaulipecos/as, while folks from Ciudad Victoria are called victorenses.

Tlaxcala, capital Tlaxcala de Xicohténcatl: Both state and capital city residents are called tlaxcaltecas.

Veracruz, capital Xalapa-Enríquez: If you come from the state of Veracruz, you’re a veracruzano/a, from the city of Veracruz, a porteño/a. If you’re from Xalapa, you’re a xalapeño, which can be spelled with a ‘J’ – just like the pepper. There’s a more colloquial name for the veracruzanos: jarocho/a, which can be translated in many ways – hot-tempered, brusque, chaotic; it is also the word for the long spear used by fishermen along the Papaloapan river.

Yucatán, capital Mérida: If you come from Yucatán state, you’re a yucateco/a, and from Mérida, a meridano/a.

Zacatecas, capital Zacatecas: No matter where you’re from, you’re a zacatecano/a.