Mexico South

Covarrubias, Miguel Covarrubius

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000149661
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book deals with the modern, northern half of the Isthmus, its social struggles and its varied problems in adapting a backward region to the need and ways of industrial civilization. It presents a view of the modern Isthmus Zapotecs, living around Juchitan and Tehuantepec.

PART I
THE ATLANTIC SLOPES

CHAPTER I
SOUTHERN VERA CRUZ: THRESHOLD OF THE TROPICS

Zocalo, Vera Cruz

FOR FOUR HUNDRED YEARS the port of Vera Cruz has been the front gate to Mexico. There in 1519 on a deserted sandy beach, Cortés and his gang of adventurers landed from their fleet and built the first European city on the American mainland, through which were later to pour the Spanish colonizers who came to settle New Spain. Trade was discouraged during the colonial period, and the fear of pirate raids prevented the establishment of additional ports; only two — Vera Cruz on the Gulf of Mexico and Acapulco on the Pacific — served to handle the small but steadily growing volume of traffic between the Orient and Europe across the Mexican half-way clearing-house. It was through Vera Cruz that the Spaniards who survived the War of Independence of 1810–21 evacuated the country. There a fleet of American warships landed marines and troops in 1847; they returned in 1914, bombarding and occupying the town during the heyday of the Big Stick era. Maximilian van Habsburg disem-barked at Vera Cruz in 1864, invited by Mexican conservatives and protected by the French fleet, to find the streets empty and the houses shut, an evil omen for what was to be the last, short-lived attempt to seat a European puppet Emperor on an American throne.

The port of Vera Cruz, metropolis of the state of Vera Cruz, is today a gay and colorful town, a typical Latin-merican port that saw better days before the advent of railways, motor highways, airlines, and world crises. Its weather-beaten waterfront is a classic of its kind: breakwaters, piers, warehouses, customs guards in wrinkled whites and stevedores in faded blue overalls, the food stalls and oyster bars where the strictly “shore dinner” menu includes fried fish, crabmeat pies, and such exotic dishes as octopus and cazón (baby shark), served to the tune of monumental juke-boxes blaring forth the latest musical hits. Popular bathing beaches, fenced in against sharks, are patronized by timid mothers in outmoded bathing suits, who splash awkwardly close to shore and flutter with apprehension when their young daughters, in modern one-piece suits, venture beyond the breakers with a handsome lifeguard. The steel skeletons of rusting ships, wrecked along this treacherous coast, lie beached like decaying monsters, providing fantastic playgrounds for the children.

The city itself, like all Mexican towns, centers in the square where on Sunday evenings the police band gives impressive concerts of danzones, the local dance music, alternated with operatic arias, while the youth of Vera Cruz parades round and round the little park, the boys in one direction, the girls in the other, to the accompaniment of flashing coquettish glances. The plaza is flanked on two sides by the cathedral and the municipal hall, both built in the eighteenth century, their stone faces now incongruously renovated with cement. The other two sides are long arcades harboring the booths of money-changers, cigar stands, beer joints, cafés and restaurants, and curio shops filled with sea-shells, reptile skins, and a few left-over pearl-shell gewgaws from Germany and celluloid knickknacks overlaid with a mother-of pearl veneer from Japan, cynically inscribed “Souvenir of Vera Cruz.”

The unruffled, nonchalant life of Vera Cruz flows under the arcades and over the marble-topped tables of cafés and restaurants glittering with white tile and chromium plate, cooled by the great propeller blades of antique electric fans suspended from lofty ceilings. Veracruzanos enjoy good food and like their drinks ice-cold and their coffee black and strong as they sit in the café consummating a business deal, reading their favorite political sheet, or simply cultivating the art of inconsequential conversation, ignoring with the facility of long practice the importunate shoeshiners, the peddlers of lottery tickets, local cigars, fake tortoise-shell combs, live monkeys and macaws, surreptitiously displayed silk socks, American cigarettes, and English woolens (supposedly smuggled) at “half” price.

Downtown Vera Cruz is made up of tall stuccoed houses painted in mellow pinks, blues, or ochers, with long, overhanging balconies of turned wood (because iron rusts too quickly in the tropical sea air). The side streets are clean and picturesque, incongruously frequented by bald-headed black vultures, tame as chickens, that go about unmolested except by dashing motorcars, which they avoid with clumsy skips. They constitute a valuable addition to the street-cleaning department, and an old law imposes a five-peso fine on anyone who kills one of the repulsive birds.

On hot nights one may board the open tramcar to Villa del Mar for a breath of sea air, riding jerkily through picturesque suburbs — minute houses of clapboard and tile roofs, painted in unusual shades of pale salmons, ochers, or cerulean blues, with emerald-green doors and wooden grilles, set in the midst of little gardens crowded with almond trees, oleander, hibiscus, taro, acacias, flamboyant, and casuarina. Sundown will find the family of each house seated on rocking-chairs and low stools before the wide-open door, which reveals a brilliantly lighted interior of gaudy, overfurnished rooms, heavy wooden wardrobes with full-length mirrors, and enormous beds draped with crocheted counterpanes interwoven with bright silk ribbon.

Villa del Mar, or rather what the hurricanes have left of it, is a half-ruined boardwalk facing a great dance hall where the whole of young Vera Cruz gathers on Sunday evenings to dance American swing between danzón numbers. The danzón, the regional dance of Vera Cruz, is nationalized rather than native, for it came from Africa by way of Cuba, but it has acquired a strong local flavor — intense, self-confident, and full of erotic grandeur — that is wholly characteristic. The laughing, rather banal antics of the jitterbugs are swept away and forgotten as the danzón begins with a triumphant blare of brass, accompanied by the acrid wood-winds, intricately beaten rhythms on two differently pitched booming kettledrums, and the obstinate rasping of the güiro, a notched gourd. It is an exuberant and heady primitive music adapted to modern instruments; tropical phrases unfold into variations, following one another in an enticing succession of sound-textures, creating intoxicating, sensual rhythms by their mere juxtaposition.

The dancing couples take the floor with an almost religious solemnity. Slick young men in shirt sleeves and dark girls with burning eyes, brilliant short dresses, bare legs, and high-heeled sandals-move leisurely with precise small steps outlining the four sides of an invisible square, their shoulders still, faces frozen, and a barely perceptible rhythm of the knees and hips. A melodious interlude minus brasses and percussion instruments, the

Danzón

introduction to the main theme, is a signal to the dancers to halt and separate. The boys look bored and the girls fan themselves and rearrange their clothing and hair until the renewed blast of brass and pounding drums sets them dancing again in the short, slow, graceful steps. Gradually the music grows more poignant, more passionate, harsher, to come suddenly to a full stop. But the couples knowingly dance on. A short phrase follows, a more richly orchestrated version of the underlying theme and the persistent, compelling rhythm. More beating of the drums, hysterical scraping of the güiro; the brasses grow ever more blatant, the clarinets shriller, as the tempo increases and the dancers quicken their steps. But they maintain their poise, and their poker faces betray nothing of the strongly animal undercurrent of sex in the dance, which ends abruptly on four ponderous beats. The couples dissolve, the girls returning to their places, the boys to crowd the entrances to the dance floor, waiting for the next danzón to resume the orgy of rhythm.

The danzón is essentially a dance of the tropics — passionate, precise, yet cool and serene, a synthesis of sexual complicity that achieves the miracle of being at once tempestuous and discreet, licentious and dignified.

Vera Cruz has a reputation as the most consistently liberal state in Mexico and has been the home of famous poets, historians, journalists, statesmen, leaders, and patriots of all sorts, but it also has endured the exploits of despotic caciques, notorious gunmen, and ruthless bandits. Vera Cruz has always taken the liberal side of every armed conflict, has been the seat of progressive governments on the run, and has been heroically defended against imperialistic aggressions from Spain, France, and even the United States. Indian leaders sprang from there, such as Felix Luna and Serafín Olarte, full-blooded Totonacs who kept the royalists at bay in the War of Independence from Spain. After everyone else had given up the fight, with the exception of the insurgent general Vicente Guerrero, Olarte fought for eight years (1813–21) at the head of three or four thousand Indians armed with bows and arrows tipped with stone arrowheads. Vera Cruz saw the clownish antics of Dictator Santa Anna; it supported steadily the reform cause of the Mexican Lincoln, Benito Juárez, and it sowed the first seed of revolution against the dictatorship of Díaz. In 1907 the workers of the great textile mill of Río Blanco held the first strike, only to be mercilessly shot down by the federal troops, with so many casualties that the corpses of workers had to be piled on flatcars, taken to Vera Cruz, and dumped into the sea. Vera Cruz saw the peasants rally around the leader Ursulo Galván, now buried in a mausoleum dramatically situated on top of a mountain near Jalapa, and witnessed the sensational rent strikes of some twenty years ago when the poor middle classes of the port formed a Union of House Tenants who simply put red and black flags on their doors and refused to pay the exorbitant rents. Their leader was a lame shoemaker, Herón Proal, who was hounded by the authorities and eventually deported to Guatemala, supposedly his native home. There he was denied admittance and was sent back to Mexico, where he mysteriously vanished from the public eye. There are many workers’ co-operati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part I The Atlantic Slopes
• Part II The Pacific Plains
• Mexico South
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index