My favorite book about Mexico is Leslie Byrd Simpson’s Many Mexicos, first published in 1941 and gone through many editions since. In addition to what you might expect, there are stories of interesting characters who have been part of Mexican history but of whom we in the North have never heard, such as Doña Catalina de Erazu, the ensign-nun, who drove mules.
Catalina was born in Spain at the beginning of the Seventeenth Century into a pious and respectable family Her parents passed away when she was very young and her aunt forced her into a convent. Bored and finding herself with no talent for the religious life, Catalina escaped from the convent in men’s clothing and made her way to the New World where, in Simpson’s words, “she swashbuckled her way from Spain to Peru and Chile. She became famous as a swordfighter. Sometimes she worked as an arriero (muleteer), sometimes a soldier.” In one hard-fought battle against Indians in northern Chile she recaptured their flag and for this piece of derring-do was made a junior officer. No one thought this unusual for a member of the fair sex, as no one was aware that she was a woman.
As this was her immediate course of action upon leaving the convent, one may infer that her aunt probably had some cause for committing her there in the first place.
The thing about being a famous swordfighter is that you tend to kill a lot of people and even in the rowdy world of colonial muledrivers this attracted the Law’s attention and finally led to her being about to be condemned to death, whereupon she revealed that she was a woman and a virgin and, by the way, also a nun, which would put her under the jurisdiction of the Church.
The authorities in Peru decided that this was above their paygrade, so they sent her to Spain to have her case resolved there. The Spanish authorities, similarly baffled, sent her case to the Pope. While hindsight is said to be a great aid to discernment, infallibility is even better, and the Pope was so intrigued by her story that he gave her dispensation to wear male clothing the rest of her life. Once the Pontiff had cleared the air, King Philip IV, also taken by her story, granted her a pension of 500 pesos, the magnanimity of which was somewhat qualified by the bankruptcy of his government and its consequent inability to pay any of that.
In about 1640, Catalina returned to New Spain and to muledriving, and, Simpson tells us, “became the terror of the Mexico City-Veracruz road”.
At this point, love entered her life and she fell madly for the wife of a young hidalgo. When he proved unsophisticated about the arrangement she challenged him to a duel which was, fortunately or not, prevented, and Doña Catalina died a few years later, in about the year 1650. Were this a novel she might have died of a broken heart, but I somehow suspect Doña Catalina was not that sort of person.
She was, by the way, the subject of the first novel published in the New World, but that is another story.
But what a charming tale. (There are, by the way, other versions of it.) In the North, for various reasons we have the impression that nothing much happened in the vasty realms below of the Rio Grande in those long centuries of Spanish rule. And from the point of view of Whig history, perhaps not; but of human history and adventure there was a fine amount, and I was delighted to catch some glimmer of this in Simpson’s wonderful book.
If you want to know about a place, it could help to know some of the stories that the people who live there know. Stories that are part of their mental and spiritual landscape.
For example, if you are an American, the Mexican you are talking to knows the story of the Heroes of Chapultepec because he was taught it in school, and you, very likely, do not. As he is looking at you, it is some part of what he is seeing. This is unfortunate, as the version he has heard may be unnecessarily anti-American, and should the matter ever come up it could avoid awkwardness and perhaps be helpful to our mutual understanding if you could give an American view of the incident.
No one said going to another country was going to be easy.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Innocents Abroad
Once upon a time, the distinction between tourist and traveler seemed mightily important to me, though it does not much any more, as oafs and boors and sensitive folk can be found in either camp, and we all ought be the sort upon whom nothing -- even tourism -- is wasted. And in any event, I once went a’touristing myself, in the long-ago year of 1964, when my wife and I went to Spain:
It seemed like all the Beautiful People were going to Spain that year, or had been there the year before. We had just been married that autumn and this would be our first summer. I would finish my first year of law school at Northwestern and she would be on summer break from teaching at the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois, and we read the New Yorker and Holiday and who knows what other glossy, upscale magazines and were aspiring Yuppies, avant la lettre.
We bought guidebooks. In Frommer’s $5-a-Day guide to Spain we were delighted to read in the introduction that he thought you could do Spain quite well on $3 a day.
And of course we had both read Hemingway.
The story continues in similar open-faced innocence by clicking on “Spain, 1964,” somewhere in the upper righthand corner of this page.
It seemed like all the Beautiful People were going to Spain that year, or had been there the year before. We had just been married that autumn and this would be our first summer. I would finish my first year of law school at Northwestern and she would be on summer break from teaching at the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois, and we read the New Yorker and Holiday and who knows what other glossy, upscale magazines and were aspiring Yuppies, avant la lettre.
We bought guidebooks. In Frommer’s $5-a-Day guide to Spain we were delighted to read in the introduction that he thought you could do Spain quite well on $3 a day.
And of course we had both read Hemingway.
The story continues in similar open-faced innocence by clicking on “Spain, 1964,” somewhere in the upper righthand corner of this page.
Friday, November 11, 2011
Village Life
In Guatemala, in the beautiful old colonial town of Antigua, I met an elderly Swiss couple. Now retired, they were traveling around the world through the husband's network of contacts built up over many years as a journalist and diplomat. They told me that the purpose of their travel was to see traditional village life before it vanished under the impact of modern communication and culture. They said that the greatest threat of the modern world (aside from nuclear war) was the disruption of traditional values by western education and culture.
They said that in the Third World the great mass of humanity, though they lived in poverty, were content, because they compared their situation to those around them in their village. Those who were better off were not that much better off, and there were always some people who were worse off. And there was no reason to think things should be different, because things had always been this way.
But all this is changing. Today, Third World governments are pressing education into remote villages. Even more disruptive is television, with its vast load of incidental information about life in the outer world -- what they seen in the background in a telenovela, for example -- so that today villagers are be able to compare their life with life in the capital or in the West. When they see what life could be, their poverty will become unbearable. De Tocqueville once observed that people do not rebel because they are oppressed, but because they see that their oppression is not inevitable. When the village people of the Third World see their poverty in comparison to life in the West, then, said my Swiss gentleman, all hell will break loose.
I have no idea how prescient the gentleman was. The process has been on-going for many years and all hell has not yet broken loose, at least in Latin America, and my knowledge of traditional African and Islamic and Eastern societies is too sparse to comment there. And should all hell ever break loose, there is no reason even for persons involved to realize that they are revolting because their life isn’t as good as the people they have been watching in the telenovelas.
What does this have to do with travel? Not much, which I think is a worthwhile point to make, for we travelers do not seem to be much part of the problem. We may be dumb and ill-mannered and otherwise not influences for good, but we’re not one of the big players.
And to save the virtues and stability of traditional life are we to get rid of education and television in traditional societies -- and perhaps demographically-disruptive life-extending western medicine while we are at it -- or do we accept that global values are going to reach into every corner of the world? That young people will be no longer content with the well-stocked larder of the forest, but now want money to buy motor scooters and sneakers? That they will tire of the elder's story about how the crocodile ate the moon and want instead to go to the city where they have clubs and music? Do we call for internal passports in Third World countries to control interchange between the city and the countryside to prevent the spread of destabilizing ideas? Or do we accept that the entire weight of the modern world bears down on traditional life, and travelers like ourselves, however sensitive and well-intentioned, are irrelevant to what is going to happen. That we might as well go now -- however we travel -- to see what is left of what once was before it is gone forever.
Or before all hell breaks loose; whichever comes first.
They said that in the Third World the great mass of humanity, though they lived in poverty, were content, because they compared their situation to those around them in their village. Those who were better off were not that much better off, and there were always some people who were worse off. And there was no reason to think things should be different, because things had always been this way.
But all this is changing. Today, Third World governments are pressing education into remote villages. Even more disruptive is television, with its vast load of incidental information about life in the outer world -- what they seen in the background in a telenovela, for example -- so that today villagers are be able to compare their life with life in the capital or in the West. When they see what life could be, their poverty will become unbearable. De Tocqueville once observed that people do not rebel because they are oppressed, but because they see that their oppression is not inevitable. When the village people of the Third World see their poverty in comparison to life in the West, then, said my Swiss gentleman, all hell will break loose.
I have no idea how prescient the gentleman was. The process has been on-going for many years and all hell has not yet broken loose, at least in Latin America, and my knowledge of traditional African and Islamic and Eastern societies is too sparse to comment there. And should all hell ever break loose, there is no reason even for persons involved to realize that they are revolting because their life isn’t as good as the people they have been watching in the telenovelas.
What does this have to do with travel? Not much, which I think is a worthwhile point to make, for we travelers do not seem to be much part of the problem. We may be dumb and ill-mannered and otherwise not influences for good, but we’re not one of the big players.
And to save the virtues and stability of traditional life are we to get rid of education and television in traditional societies -- and perhaps demographically-disruptive life-extending western medicine while we are at it -- or do we accept that global values are going to reach into every corner of the world? That young people will be no longer content with the well-stocked larder of the forest, but now want money to buy motor scooters and sneakers? That they will tire of the elder's story about how the crocodile ate the moon and want instead to go to the city where they have clubs and music? Do we call for internal passports in Third World countries to control interchange between the city and the countryside to prevent the spread of destabilizing ideas? Or do we accept that the entire weight of the modern world bears down on traditional life, and travelers like ourselves, however sensitive and well-intentioned, are irrelevant to what is going to happen. That we might as well go now -- however we travel -- to see what is left of what once was before it is gone forever.
Or before all hell breaks loose; whichever comes first.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
good travel writing
What does good travel writing look like? I think it looks very much like this:
“I come suddenly into a foreign city, just as the lamps take light along the water, with some notes in my head . . . I try out the language with the taxi driver, to see if it’s still there; and later, I walk to a restaurant which is lurking around a corner in my memory. Nothing, of course, has changed; but cities flow on like water, and, like water, they close behind any departure.”
-- Alastair Reid, Passwords (1964)
Reid is a poet and I think the best writing is poetic prose.
“I come suddenly into a foreign city, just as the lamps take light along the water, with some notes in my head . . . I try out the language with the taxi driver, to see if it’s still there; and later, I walk to a restaurant which is lurking around a corner in my memory. Nothing, of course, has changed; but cities flow on like water, and, like water, they close behind any departure.”
-- Alastair Reid, Passwords (1964)
Reid is a poet and I think the best writing is poetic prose.
Sunday, November 6, 2011
The Kindness of Strangers
Rolf Potts recently posted on vagablogging -- my favorite travel site on the web -- this quote from Paul Theroux:
“Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don’t know and trusting them with your life.”
My own experience conforms, but I worry about it as a general advice, as Theroux and I are both gentlemen of a particular age and sort, and what is true for us may not be so for others. I think neither Paul nor I need be concerned that we might be carried off by white slavers.
With the fall of the Iron Curtain we are now learning that it was also holding in a lot of bad sorts who, having learned their trade under the bare-knuckled police regimes of the old Soviet Bloc are now delighted to find themselves in lush pastures policed by well-meaning liberals. European regimes that can hardly deal with gypsy children now find themselves confronted by ruthless and well-financed Eastern European gangsters.
In most foreign countries that I would go to in the first place I would trust the natives more than my fellow travelers, for while the latter may be more familiar, they are not, as are the people who live there, subject to the same constraint of concern for their reputation.
Years ago in an antique shop in Athens the proprietor saw that I was wearing a money belt and seemed to take offense at it: “You don’t need that in Greece,” he said. I answered that I was not worried about the Greeks, but about my fellow travelers, which he found a more reasonable concern.
And I remember, of course, that horrible little person who stole Patrick Fermor’s notebook at a hostel in Munich and could have cost us one of the most wonderful travel books ever written.
“Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don’t know and trusting them with your life.”
My own experience conforms, but I worry about it as a general advice, as Theroux and I are both gentlemen of a particular age and sort, and what is true for us may not be so for others. I think neither Paul nor I need be concerned that we might be carried off by white slavers.
With the fall of the Iron Curtain we are now learning that it was also holding in a lot of bad sorts who, having learned their trade under the bare-knuckled police regimes of the old Soviet Bloc are now delighted to find themselves in lush pastures policed by well-meaning liberals. European regimes that can hardly deal with gypsy children now find themselves confronted by ruthless and well-financed Eastern European gangsters.
In most foreign countries that I would go to in the first place I would trust the natives more than my fellow travelers, for while the latter may be more familiar, they are not, as are the people who live there, subject to the same constraint of concern for their reputation.
Years ago in an antique shop in Athens the proprietor saw that I was wearing a money belt and seemed to take offense at it: “You don’t need that in Greece,” he said. I answered that I was not worried about the Greeks, but about my fellow travelers, which he found a more reasonable concern.
And I remember, of course, that horrible little person who stole Patrick Fermor’s notebook at a hostel in Munich and could have cost us one of the most wonderful travel books ever written.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Incidents of Travel in the Yucatán, Part 8.
I read and wrote in my journal and sometimes wandered around the village. I met only two foreigners, a young couple passing through. Every so often I check the Lista de Correos for mail at the Post Office and a couple of times find a letter, which I take to an outdoor table and order a cold bottle of Cerveza Negra Leon -- my then current favorite -- and perhaps even a bite to eat, and in general make a great production of reading it. I am not a frenetic traveler and a letter from home waiting for me at the Post Office in a quiet little town is a satisfying amount of excitement for me.
If I have a book that I particularly enjoy, I like to read it slowly. It has always seemed wrong to consume in a few hours what an author may have spent months or years to produce. So for many days I was content to idle around the house, leisurely making my way through John Lloyd Stephens’ Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and the Yucatán, in two volumes, with drawings taken on the spot by Mr. Catherwood. Stephens had come to the Yucatán in 1841, when little was known of the country and essentially nothing was known of the high Mayan culture that had flourished there and had gone into decline hundreds of years before the coming of the Spanish.
Stephens, with Catherwood and a few servants, traveled around the country and by the simple device of asking the Indians if there were any “old walls” about he was led to discover and describe forty-four Mayan sites. His book is a steady narrative of ruins and haciendas and Indians and fevers and wildlife and every other marvel that passed before him, and Mr. Catherwood’s careful drawings show us extravagant gods and mysterious artifacts and monumental temples locked in writhing coils of jungle growth. Even if paradise is boring, books about paradise don’t have to be.
Movie night in Chicxulub Puerto
I saw from signs around town that there would be a movie, though it was unclear where. Apparently since everyone knew where the movies were, there was no reason to say. So that evening I fell in with some children who led me to a large building with a crowd of people. Alberto, the principal of the school, was taking tickets and waved me in, refusing my money. People standing in line smiled and seemed to think it was just fine, though I was embarrassed by the special treatment.
The auditorium was a large room with folding chairs and some old theater seats and large fans on either side that little boys threw things into. It was a Kung-Fu double feature. The predominately young crowd talked and argued and had a fine time. Afterward, I walked home along the beach under a bright moon. I got in about midnight. I was always a little surprised that I was able to find my way home so easily coming back along the beach since none of the houses out there were occupied and there were never any lights.
The place I have been describing isn’t there anymore. Reading about the village online, it seems to have been discovered -- rentals are quite a bit more than the pittance I paid, and life there is now very exciting, at least if the tourist literature is to be believed -- opinion seems to differ as to whether sharks are a problem -- and foreigners are buying houses and there is an ex-pat community. They wouldn’t have re-staged the flag day celebration for me or waved me into the movie if they had been used to foreign visitors. I am pretty sure they don’t do that nowadays as we are no longer the rare birds in Chicxulub Puerto that we once may have been.
[The eight posts of this series are collected in a more convenient form as a single document, which can be accessed by clicking on "Incidents of Travel in the Yucatán" in the upper righthand corner of this page.]
If I have a book that I particularly enjoy, I like to read it slowly. It has always seemed wrong to consume in a few hours what an author may have spent months or years to produce. So for many days I was content to idle around the house, leisurely making my way through John Lloyd Stephens’ Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and the Yucatán, in two volumes, with drawings taken on the spot by Mr. Catherwood. Stephens had come to the Yucatán in 1841, when little was known of the country and essentially nothing was known of the high Mayan culture that had flourished there and had gone into decline hundreds of years before the coming of the Spanish.
Stephens, with Catherwood and a few servants, traveled around the country and by the simple device of asking the Indians if there were any “old walls” about he was led to discover and describe forty-four Mayan sites. His book is a steady narrative of ruins and haciendas and Indians and fevers and wildlife and every other marvel that passed before him, and Mr. Catherwood’s careful drawings show us extravagant gods and mysterious artifacts and monumental temples locked in writhing coils of jungle growth. Even if paradise is boring, books about paradise don’t have to be.
Movie night in Chicxulub Puerto
I saw from signs around town that there would be a movie, though it was unclear where. Apparently since everyone knew where the movies were, there was no reason to say. So that evening I fell in with some children who led me to a large building with a crowd of people. Alberto, the principal of the school, was taking tickets and waved me in, refusing my money. People standing in line smiled and seemed to think it was just fine, though I was embarrassed by the special treatment.
The auditorium was a large room with folding chairs and some old theater seats and large fans on either side that little boys threw things into. It was a Kung-Fu double feature. The predominately young crowd talked and argued and had a fine time. Afterward, I walked home along the beach under a bright moon. I got in about midnight. I was always a little surprised that I was able to find my way home so easily coming back along the beach since none of the houses out there were occupied and there were never any lights.
The place I have been describing isn’t there anymore. Reading about the village online, it seems to have been discovered -- rentals are quite a bit more than the pittance I paid, and life there is now very exciting, at least if the tourist literature is to be believed -- opinion seems to differ as to whether sharks are a problem -- and foreigners are buying houses and there is an ex-pat community. They wouldn’t have re-staged the flag day celebration for me or waved me into the movie if they had been used to foreign visitors. I am pretty sure they don’t do that nowadays as we are no longer the rare birds in Chicxulub Puerto that we once may have been.
[The eight posts of this series are collected in a more convenient form as a single document, which can be accessed by clicking on "Incidents of Travel in the Yucatán" in the upper righthand corner of this page.]
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Incidents of Travel in the Yucatán, Part 7.
Out on a walk around the village I saw Alberto, who reminded me that he had invited me to visit his school. He said today was Flag Day and I promised I would come by to visit the next day. I wanted to come when nothing in particular was going on, in order to be less of an inconvenience to my host. So when I came the next day I was surprised to find the Flag Day celebration in progress, which Alberto explained was being re-staged for my benefit.
It was delightful. It was a grade school and the children were as wonderful as little children always are. They marched around and ran up the flag and sang songs, to all of which I was appropriately appreciative, then they handed me the microphone to say a few words.
On this trip I had been remiss at practicing my Spanish, but fortunately at that moment I received the Gift of Tongues and delivered myself of a long and enthusiastic speech on the glory of Mexico and the great affection we in the North felt for their country. I reviewed their illustrious history from the Aztecs through Cortéz and Benito Juárez and I have no idea what else. The children were enrapt. I had never spoken the language so fluently. I have no doubt that the enthusiasm of the moment caused me to invent my Spanish as I spoke, the words tumbling out in such a torrential flow as to sweep my listeners along and communicate with them directly the emotional sense of my meaning, unmediated by grammar or recognizable vocabulary. Sort of like opera.
The whole experience left us all exhausted and happy.
Alberto said we must do this again sometime.
[The eight posts of this series are collected in a more convenient form as a single document, which can be accessed by clicking on "Incidents of Travel in the Yucatán" in the upper righthand corner of this page.]
It was delightful. It was a grade school and the children were as wonderful as little children always are. They marched around and ran up the flag and sang songs, to all of which I was appropriately appreciative, then they handed me the microphone to say a few words.
On this trip I had been remiss at practicing my Spanish, but fortunately at that moment I received the Gift of Tongues and delivered myself of a long and enthusiastic speech on the glory of Mexico and the great affection we in the North felt for their country. I reviewed their illustrious history from the Aztecs through Cortéz and Benito Juárez and I have no idea what else. The children were enrapt. I had never spoken the language so fluently. I have no doubt that the enthusiasm of the moment caused me to invent my Spanish as I spoke, the words tumbling out in such a torrential flow as to sweep my listeners along and communicate with them directly the emotional sense of my meaning, unmediated by grammar or recognizable vocabulary. Sort of like opera.
The whole experience left us all exhausted and happy.
Alberto said we must do this again sometime.
[The eight posts of this series are collected in a more convenient form as a single document, which can be accessed by clicking on "Incidents of Travel in the Yucatán" in the upper righthand corner of this page.]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)