The Republic of Mexico is a very large country, boasting a total area of almost 1,978,000 square kilometers (760,000 square miles) and a population of 103,400,165 (July 2002 estimate). With its central government located in Mexico City, Mexico has a national culture, held together by the Spanish language, which is the primary means of communication […]
Continue ReadingMillions of Americans today look to the Mexican state of Zacatecas as their ancestral homeland. But it is very difficult to locate historical information on Zacatecas in the English language media. As a result, many Zacatecanos know little or nothing about the region in which their ancestors lived for thousands of years. If you look […]
Continue ReadingFrom Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Catholic cleric who is also a poet is an unending subject of interest. Given the poet’s traditional role as a free spirit and the Church’s tradition of rigid intellectual discipline, the term poet-priest (or poet-nun) may seem to some an oxymoron. And there […]
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A great ideological struggle is never a day at the beach. Whether its matrix is race, nationality or economic inequality, the fight of the oppressed against the oppressor is always a somber affair. Nobody realized this better than José Clemente Orozco. Born at a time when Mexico was ruled by a seemingly revolution-proof dictator, Orozco […]
Continue ReadingIt is inevitable that comparisons will be drawn between José Morelos y Pavón and his mentor and predecessor, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla. Both were Roman Catholic priests of casual vocation who fathered illegitimate children, both were intensely drawn to political activism and both were charismatic leaders of Mexico’s independence movement. Yet it would be unfair to […]
Continue Reading1877–1945) President: 1924-28 Mexico is a land of intense faith. The cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the saints on automobile dashboards, the vast crowds making pilgrimages on their knees — all attest to the depth of religious feeling in a land where the culture of the Spanish conquistadores clashed and then melded with that of terrifying […]
Continue ReadingThe term “Utopia” generally has the connotation of a society that is hopelessly visionary and impractical. This is because most of these societies — Plato’s Republic, St. Augustine’s City of God and Sir Thomas More’s Utopia — never existed outside the minds and published works of their creators. However, a real-life Utopia existed in Mexico […]
Continue ReadingIf Diogenes, wielding his famous lamp, ever came into a gallery of Mexican presidents, he wouldn’t come away completely empty-handed. In his quest for an honest man, he would snare at least two for his collection: Benito Juárez and Lázaro Cárdenas. Since Juárez is the subject of another profile in this series, the focus here will be on […]
Continue ReadingIn 1984, his epic indictment of Stalinism, George Orwell writes that totalitarian man exercises power over others by making them suffer. Arthur Koestler, another great analyst and foe of Soviet communism, has the interrogator in Darkness at Noon declare that previous tyrants erred in failing to sufficiently blacken the character of their victims, thus enabling […]
Continue ReadingAmong critics of the Roman Catholic Church in a country where a vast majority of the citizens are nominal Catholics, the charges most frequently heard are those of worldliness and hypocrisy. Anticlericals point to the Church’s wealth, its reluctance to use that wealth to alleviate the sufferings of the poor, and of priests counseling chastity […]
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