Choose your hero: Emiliano Zapata and November 20

November 20 marks the anniversary of the Mexican Revolution. What? Wasn’t that September 16 and all the Miguel Hidalgo business? No way Jose; Mexico has had both a war of independence and a revolution (and various conquests, a few invasions and now a war on drugs). Officially the Mexican Revolution began in 1910 and ended in 1920, although there have been and continue to be revolutionary relapses spawned by the first bloody revolution.

Throughout the revolution a series of rulers succeeded one another in Mexico, always requiring at least a  little military force to make it into, and to stay in power. Most of these figures, as with my of the prominent figures of the revolution, would be eventually assassinated by the factions of their rivals.

Two of the most beloved folk-heroes of the revolution are Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, the Centaur of the North and the Tiger (or the Attila, depending on who you talk to) of the South. Neither of them ever became top dog, but both of them were decisive generals who helped topple the other top dogs of the revolutionary period.

While Villa launched his raids and courted Hollywood, Zapata had the more definite agenda to his struggle. Villa was a career bandit who took up the banner of the revolution. Zapata was a dandy and talented horseman who took up arms slowly when it became clear there would be no other way to continue the struggle for land rights for the impoverished serfs of his region.

Eduardo Galeano (author of Open Veins of Latin America) unsurprisingly calls Zapata “purest of the revolutionaries, most loyal to the cause of the poor, most determined to right the wrongs of society”. Certainly Zapata was the most radical of the revolutionaries, and this made him utterly uncompromising. Three consecutive rulers of Mexico were comrades-in-arms to Zapata, until they came into power and did not do enough to address land reform. Ultimately there could be no place in the newly emerging Mexico for Zapata; the new order was one of compromises, of moderation, perhaps of vacillation. It was the last ally-turned-ruler, Venustiano Carranza, whose underlings deceived, ambushed and assassinated Zapata in 1919.

Zapata’s Plan de Ayala was a rambling manifesto, full of spelling errors. It helped characterise Zapata as an illiterate brigand whose movement had been co-opted by radical city intellectuals. The plan was also the most revolutionary document in Mexico at the time; it was printed in newspapers to discredit Zapata, but instead drew thousands upon thousands of disillusioned peasants to his cause. It also demanded that Zapata’s military adversaries be considered traitors and not prisoners of war, and summarily executed en masse. As was written in the Plan, Zapata was “resolved to struggle against everything and everybody”.

Zapata died at the same age as Che Guevara, and like Guevara it required his death to bring him into the mainstream. Both men found they couldn’t live with the systems they had in part established, that the results of their revolutions weren’t sufficient, and that there would be always and forever a need for more guns (even though neither men had started out with a gun in his hands). In death though Che found a place on t-shirts everywhere, the poster boy of the  left. Zapata found a place on the now out of circulation 10 peso note, and became one of the heroes of the Revolution, poster boy for a system he had rejected and died still fighting. Although times have changed in Mexico the fundamental inequality has not; the poor are still as voiceless, as trampled as ever.

Zapata has become a hero, though, and not just a hero to jungle revolutionaries or downtrodden peasants. Contemporary Mexico was born out of Carranza’s government, out of his constitution; Zapata is celebrated today by the offspring of those who arranged his murder. Perhaps he had to die for Mexico to find a way forward, perhaps there is no place for an uncompromising, die-on-our-feet-instead-of-living-on-our-knees mentality. Galeano paints a picture of the state Zapata was creating in the wake of his military victories; it is a socialistic utopia. It sounds very much like what Mexico needed and needs. But it doesn’t sound much like something that could ever be allowed to exist; such a society couldn’t be made by a dissenting faction; only the consent of everyone could build such a society and see it thrive. That or a lot of guns.

So finally Zapata is a hero to all, but only in death. In life there was no place for him and his ideas. The only safe way to deal with him was to betray and kill him, so he could be safely printed onto the lowest denomination of paper money; a fitting location for one who sought to raise the lowest common denominator in his country.

I had a Pancho Villa t-shirt once…

I had a Pancho Villa t-shirt once and I loved it intensely. It went where I went, and occupied the designated ‘white t-shirt’ place in my pack, even after it was turning yellow and pilling uncomfortably and shrinking further and further up my midriff. Before it was retired the tee travelled with me through Europe, North America and Asia.

I bought the tee in Zacatecas, where a thundering equestrian statue of Pancho Villa overlooks the city. It (the tee) read ZACATECAS / Pancho Villa / Centauro del Norte / Mexico. Zacatecas was the site of one of Villa’s most significant victories.

Wherever I went with my Pancho Villa tee, I could be relatively sure of finding at least one Mexican who wanted to congratulate me (ok maybe not in Korea, but certainly in Europe and the US). When I started living in Spain I made sure to wear the tee in the presence of potential Mexican friends. If I couldn’t speak Spanish I could at least speak cool. Pancho Villa is definitely cool.

I’ve written before about the conundrum of wearing Che Guevara tees. These days it’s cooler to decry Che shirts as a betrayal of his revolutionary dreams than it is to wear a Che shirt. The other incendiary revolutionaries of the twentieth century haven’t quite progressed that far in popular theory yet.

Villa was, in any case, a very different kind of revolutionary. He took no stance as broad and untenable as the downfall of capitalism. He fought more or less consistently against a string of military rulers during the Revolution (some of whom had been former comrades-in-arms), but made no grand manifestos declaring his motives. Land reform was if not one of Villa’s goals, then certainly one of his methods, as he appropriated hacienda lands and pressured the wealthy into funding his campaigns with generous loans.

Villa was no communist; if anything he was closer to a rogue entrepreneur. Aside from expropriating the wealth of the upper classes, he raised money with train robberies, by printing his own money, and by signing film deals with Hollywood, which brought camera crews into his camp. He would have sold t-shirts to fund the cause if they were in vogue back then.

The Mexican Revolution was the era that forged Mexico’s international image. It was from this time that the image of the gunslinger wearing a wide sombrero and wrapped in bandoliers originates. Pancho Villa was the archetypal gunslinger of the time; there are many photos of him on horseback, haughtily posed and with ample moustache, armed and defiant. He was a capable general known for recklessness, for leaving a trail of destruction and controversy that other politicians and general were forced to clean up. He would have made a terrible president, but he made a great desert caudillo, storming fortresses, torching cities and evading capture.

The revolutionary era in Mexico took a long time to end, but as it began to dwindle away Villa and other revolutionary generals found themselves outlawed and cut off from their funds and supplies. There was really no place for Villa in the new Mexico. As successive governments slowly returned stability to the country the old firebrand generals needed to disappear so that new structures of power could emerge. Villa retired to a hacienda in the north, and as with all the figures of the revolution, was assassinated by the underlings of one of his rivals (even though his power was already broken). A late spasm of violence in the tail of the revolution.

I bought my Pancho Villa t-shirt because it looked cool. It didn’t make as strong a statement or counter-statement as a Che tee. I suppose I could say that the shirt represented the fight against oppression, but really it just represented the fact that Pancho was supremely cool, a figure that managed to make a dirty business look glamorous. Villa is known as a hero of the revolution today, I think, more because of his charisma and his eminently t-shit-worthy image than because of his politics or his methods or his results.

While Guevara and probably others sit awkwardly on their t-shirts, their revolutions betrayed to consumerism, Villa sat comfortably on my shirt and sits comfortably on others (though not all that many). The t-shirt is perhaps his proper realm; a fitting place to remember a Hollywood rogue, a revolutionary who ran out of revolution, a sly entrepreneur and a Mexican icon.

 

Bruce Chatwin and the Mylodon

The story goes that while working for an English newspaper, Bruce Chatwin interviewed the designer Eileen Gray. They discovered a mutual fascination with Patagonia, and the 93 year old Gray told Chatwin to go there for her. Two years later he arrived in South America, quitting his newspaper job with a telegram; “Have gone to Patagonia”.

Chatwin makes no mention of this story in In Patagonia, the book spawned by the trip. Instead he chooses for his mythic start a piece of Brontosaurus skin (which actually came from a Mylodon, some sort of prehistoric giant sloth) in a cabinet in his grandmother’s dining room. The skin was from Patagonia, and among other things he was going to Patagonia to claim his own scrap of Brontosaurus.

These multiple origin myths are pretty characteristic of Chatwin’s storytelling. He doesn’t try to resolve his narrative into a series of certain events; he’s not too concerned with definite facts (which is probably why he has been accused of distorting and fabricating details of the book). Instead he explores possibilities, gathering local myth and opinion and adding his own theories. He traces, for example, the path of Butch Cassidy through Patagonia, visiting the cabin he lived in, talking with people with hazy memories of the outlaw. Eventually the path starts bifurcating; perhaps Cassidy died in Bolivia (the official line), perhaps he survived, perhaps he returned to the US, perhaps the whole fatal shoot-out was fabricated. The possibilities multiply and Chatwin explores them all, leaving them side by side, a whole Patagonian mythology.

There is an immense amount of research and reading behind the novel. Chatwin very rarely speaks of himself (somewhat ironic given the personal mythology he built for himself), but it’s clear that he is a tireless explorer and investigator. Aside from knowing of virtually every book, poem and journal ever to mention Patagonia, he chases down a wealth of extra colour and detail for every one of his stories and characters. Even the most minor figures, mere asides within the stories, are fastidiously researched: “The rest of Harry’s career was predictable. He went to the war, joined a fast set, married three times and ended up in England, the secretary of a golf club”.

Chatwin apparently adored Jorge Luis Borges (more mythology), and although Borges gets no mention in In Patagonia, his influence is thick within Chatwin’s style, particularly within some of the stories. Like Borges, Chatwin explores an idea and then begins to twist it, taking it to extremes, probing the possibilities. Writing of a a secret cabal of male witches in Chile, he finishes with “No one can recall the memory of a time when the Central Committee did not exist. Some have suggested that the Sect was in embryo even before the emergence of Man. It is equally plausible that Man himself became Man through fierce opposition to the Sect. We know for a fact that the Challanco is the Evil Eye. Perhaps the ‘Central Committee’ is a synonym for Beast”. Borges would have been proud of such a paragraph.

In between the witches and the mylodons, Chatwin manages to weave interpretation of Shakespeare (“into the mouth of Caliban, Shakespeare packed all the bitterness of the New World”), a Patagonian genealogy for Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, political intrigue, isolated Welsh communities, plenty of murders, noble savages, an El Dorado myth, Charles Darwin, water tigers, a Patagonian unicorn, Francis Drake and Ferdinand Magellan; the whole Patagonian pantheon.

In another of his books (Utz), Chatwin writes about collecting and obsession. Certainly with In Patagonia he is collecting the stories of Patagonia, going to great lengths to uncover them, studying and pursuing them obsessively. This is not your standard travel writing, Chatwin is telling other stories instead of his own. Perhaps he is stealing them too, or at least re-appropriating them. Still, his fascination with Patagonia makes for brilliant reading. Chatwin lived a vibrant life, full of adventure and controversy, but he knew enough to know that he didn’t have to create his own stories in order to write a great book. There are enough myths and stories preserved like that scrap of brontosaurus, that just need to be unearthed in order to enchant again and again.

Chatwin eventually tracks down his Mylodon cave, finds a site still littered with perfectly preserved evidence of the ancient beast. The cave is, like all of Chatwin’s subjects, and perhaps like all of Patagonia, a strange place where reality and myth overlap. Chatwin pilfers a few impossible Mylodon or Brontosaurus hairs and it is hard to know whether this is myth or history or possibility or fancy, but that is the whole point. Whatever the Mylodon was, it exists today as many possibilities, as a series of forking paths. Wandering these paths doesn’t bring much resolution, but that doesn’t really matter. It is in the possibilities that the fascination lies.

 

Everything you always wanted to know about Mexican girls #2

Yes I am aware of the irony of serialising a post that begins with ‘everything you always wanted to know’ (part one is here). In time I promise to really provide you with everything; it’s just quite a big topic is all. Far better covered in installments. Here’s some more of your everything.

1. It’s pretty safe to dismiss the myth of the green card husband. Mexican girls are not after you for your citizenship. They might be after you for a few free drinks (but even that isn’t certain), or a story to tell to their friends. They are not expecting a wedding ring, nor a family. They might be expecting a commitment; they might expect you to not expect one in return.

2. Expect to pay for her. Not because Mexico is some sort of traditionalist backward, but purely because you still believe in chivalry. And perhaps because enough Mexican dudes expect to pay for their girl that if you don’t do the same you will be placed at a distinctive disadvantage, your exoticness cancelled out by your shabby egalitarian stingyness. Anyway, expecting to pay for her is not the same as paying for her. And paying for her is no guarantee of your seducing her – in fact the inverse might be true. The more traditional the girl the more you will pay for and more time you will spend desperately hoping that tonight is the night she lets you hold her hand during the movie, or walk her all the way to her front door.

3. She is not expecting a wedding ring or a family, partly because she already has a family, which probably includes very protective parents, grandparents, brothers, cousins and uncles. Unless she is from another city and is in your city to study or work. In which case she will not live with her family, will not have a curfew, will not be worried about the neighbours or fish wives gossiping about her, and will thus be trying to do all the things she couldn’t while under the stern gaze of her hometown.

4. She is not expecting a wedding ring or a family, but if you are getting ’serious’ (whatever that means), and are planning on turning your Mexican girl into your Mexican partner, then consider that Mexico has great weather, great food, great art, great beaches, great people, and the family of your Mexican significant other. So why would she want to move back to your crummy hometown? There’s a reasonable chance you’ll end up being the one marrying early for the sake of a visa. Note: Mexican visas are expensive, so factor these into your Mexican girl/significant other budget.

5. She is not expecting a wedding ring or a family, but that doesn’t mean she’s doing anything much to prevent these things either. You may or may not end up paying, but you will be the one providing the prophylactics. She is not on birth control. This is a Catholic world still, and there is a reasonable chance that the pharmacist knows her sister’s boyfriend, or her cousin’s wife or something. Also note: prophylactics are expensive enough in Mexico that it may be worth reconsidering your interest in Mexican girls. Considering exploring Mexican food, or Mexican cinema instead. They’re both pretty good.

Happy creeping…

Finally Day of the Dead

There were two absolutely must-experience events in Mexico for me, and they fell on consecutive weekends.

Four years ago I had arranged my round-the-world schedule to allow me to be in Mexico for Dia de los Muertos, Day of the Dead. On the day I had taken a road trip into Copper Canyon in the north, where we saw one kid trick-or-treating and a lot of heavily-armed police, and nothing more.

So as with Cervantino I was determined to do it right this time. No matter how many hours I had to spend in transit.

Day of the Dead is a millennia-old tradition in Mexico. It was adopted by the Aztecs and later mixed with Catholicism. The essential idea has always remained the same though; that on one day of the year the spirits of the dead can return to earth, and that they need to be welcomed, attracted and guided with offerings. Today November 1 is known as the Day of the Innocents, when the souls of children return to their families, and November 2 as Day of the Dead, when everyone else returns. The hours leading up to these days are the most active part of the festivities, as graves are cleaned and prepared in the hours before midnight, and the arrival of the spirits.

Although every region has its own approach to Day of the Dead (such as ignoring it in Copper Canyon), some images are ubiquitous. Mexico is festooned with (decorative) skulls at the best of the times, but in the lead up to Day of the Dead skulls and calaveras (skeleton figures) appear everywhere. Market stalls are stacked high with colourful chocolate or sugar skulls. Pan de Muerto, or sugar-coated bread is everywhere (and is sorely missed as soon as Day of the Dead passes).

One of the best known Day of the Dead celebrations takes place on Janitzio, an island which might seem kind of Mediterranean, with its mess of twisting alleys and slope-hugging houses, if it wasn’t isolated in a reedy lake in highland Mexico. This entire region (Michoacan state) was at the heart of colonial Mexico, and is strewn with enormous churches brooding over tiny villages. The people of this region were never subdued by the Aztecs, preserving their own language and traditions, which are still remembered and practiced today.

Arrived in the village of Uruapan just after rain had doused the prepared altars, preventing candles from lighting and drenching the flower arrangements, leaving the town square awash in limp Marigold petals. By morning though, new altars were being assembled. I had assumed this was a tradition most keenly observed by the venerable old folk of the town, but the town plaza was full of teams of teenagers, arranging flowers, laying out food and drink offerings, colouring and sculpting sand, lighting candles, rigging the wooden lattices that serve as portals for the dead. Marigolds are the flower of choice for Day of the Dead, good for luring wayward souls. Petals were heaped and scattered over the altars. The flowers are infectiously bright; how can anyone not be cheerful when surrounded by so much colour?

Moved on to Patzcuaro, towards the heart of Day of the Dead. Previously a the heart of the Tarascan state and later an important colonial centre, Patzcuaro today seems to serve no other purpose than as a jumble of well-preserved and restored colonial buildings, studded with churches and plazas. The entire town had been taken over by street markets, food stalls and alfresco cafes. The hippies had descended in force, mingling with the local artisans to sell their wares. The fancy gringos reclined at shaded outdoor seating. The earnest photographers stopped traffic, capturing every angles, nook and corner of the city. Merchandise and paraphernalia were everywhere, hokey t-shirts and elaborate calavera figures, wrought crucifixes and candied skulls.

It was all just a prelude to Janitzio though, or whatever I had built Janitzio up into. Brochures and guide books spoke of traditional butterfly boats and candlelit processions across the water to the island, but these would have been hopelessly ineffective. This was a serious tourist event, and the lake resembled a multi-lane highway of boats, overtaking one another as they shuttled the endless stream of people to and from the island.

Undoubtedly something has been lost in the popularisation of Day of the Dead. The island itself was flooded with people. Every house and building had become a restaurant or souvenir shop. Alongside the relevant souvenirs were the ubiquitous tit-shaped mugs, the naked elf pin-ups, the bongs and psychedelic mushrooms. Like much in the region, Janitzio stays afloat through tourism. This was not a once-a-year market; this is Janitzio. Enough souvenirs to last for decades were accumulated in the narrow alleys and passageways.

Still, there was something about the island. The restaurants festooned with flowers and colours, the steep, crooked streets, the reedy waterways, the men paddling their boats, bringing their nets home as a full moon turned the lake to silver.

The hordes of people pitched leaning tents all over the island and began demolishing its ample beer supplies. They bought wooly hats to ward off the famous cold of the lake and hunkered over fried fish stalls. And then they – we – all descended on the cemetery.

Janitzio’s cemetery, cut into the side of one of the cliffs, and looking out over the waters towards the lights of Patzcuaro, is genuinely tiny. An arch at each end admitted the constant stream of visitors, and between the arches the graves were arranged in a ragged patchwork which left no space for walking, or setting up your monster lens on its tripod. It was very apparent for very early on that no matter how grand the island’s reputation, it was going to be swamped by visitors, and that there would be no hiding from this.

Reading accounts of years past, it sounded like people pilgrimed in from far and wide to attend to the graves of departed family members. It sounded like a vigil was kept by every grave, and that the festivities were foremost for those remembering the dead and only afterwards for the tourists. This certainly has changed. There must be those of the island community that feel imprisoned by Day of the Dead. During the festivity that become cooks and waiters and bar staff, salespeople and hustlers. Children carry jack-o-lanterns through the crowds, asking for money and posing obediently while photographers position them correctly. Those that can come to the cemetery must jostle to reach their plots. They must ask people to stop using their flashes and must ward off the drunk and the clumsy. Once they have arranged their altars they must sit silently and be photographed, or try to pray and sing over all the clamour.

Still still still, there is something extraordinary about Day of the Dead on Janitzio. I spent hours in the cemetery, arriving while it was still empty enough to feel alone in, and staying until it was impossible to move without bustling through other people and disrupting carefully arranged photos.

Some of those that arrived to clean up the graves and prepare altars arrived as a clan, bringing their marigolded scaffolds with them, and their many offerings and candles and their incense and their blankets. Others arrived silently and were barely seen, and planted re-used candles around tiny graves, sweeping away the grit and disappearing quickly. Some arrived in mid-conversation and were jovial and casual. Some arrived with solemnity. Some arrived and left alone.

When I arrived there were flowers upon graves and a few candles already lit against the darkening sky. By the time I left there were covered baskets of bread, and tall candles flickering throughout the cemetery, and many huddled forms crouched around graves keeping their vigils through the night. When cameras flashed the white light made the cemetery look ghoulish, but when they stopped the warmth of the candles and the flowers enriched the darkness but also brought an intimacy to the graves.

I spent a long time alone with three candles. They were each surrounded by a pile of stones and set over unmarked graves. When the candles guttered out they were not re-lit. They made me cry. Each dignified candle lit to help a lost soul find its way home, each flame lit by hands that needed to express that life without you was so much harder, each tiny light a yearning to be with you again, a prayer for togetherness.

The poignancy of the night, and of the candles that multiplied into the darkness, so that as the night grew deeper the cemetery grew brighter, was enhanced in a twisted way by the crowds. There was something beautiful in the old ladies sitting alone by the graves, in the old man singing tunelessly over the chatter. While these took place within the clamour, and among the camera flashes though, they assumed a greater gravity. There were thousands of people in the tiny cemetery, but these ladies wrapped in their blankets still sat utterly alone by cold, blue graves, lighting candles and remembering. To be alone in a crowd of such volume is not easy. Especially when the crowd is taking your photo again and again. That the rituals and vigils continue, that it is worth rebuilding toppled rock walls and sweeping away the bootprints, that it is worth scattering petals that will be trampled, and lighting candles that will be lost in the pallor of flash photography, says something of the faith and desire at the heart of Day of the Dead. That these people can still muster their dignity while drunks stumble over century-old graves and piss in the dark corners of the cemetery speaks of resilience, and slow-burning passion.

It was strange to me, to surround myself with a festival essentially about missing people. I choose to miss everyone by moving on and being always-leaving. I decide, every time I change location, that it is worthwhile to miss people if it means finding something new. I don’t have much concept of real yearning, of missing something unrecoverable. I choose to miss the people that matter. Those that light candles in the cemetery remember people that are irreplaceable, that they would never choose to live without. How can I explain how I choose to live? How can I ever feel lonely when I have chosen to be so? I have never been the one left behind, to keep vigil over a trampled grave.

So finally, despite what Day of the Dead has become, there is something profound here, something that swallows up the absurd crowds. As more candles were lit and the old man raised his tuneless song over the cemetery, and as the bell shuddered into the night, there was hush over the cemetery, or as much hush as a crowd of thousands can muster. Whatever communing with the dead takes place, and whatever need to commune with the dead drives this whole tradition, they are bigger and older and more patient than whatever crowds might quickly come and quickly go.