(This is an expanded version of an article that appeared in the October 18-24, 1997 issue of the COLONY REPORTER) In 19th century Mexico, most of the intellectuals were firmly on the liberal side. The scholar-scientist Melchor Ocampo, the law professor Santos Degollado, the historian- essayist Justo Sierra, the poet Guillermo Prieto, the towering Benito […]
Continue ReadingIn a curious irony of history, an epigone frequently becomes better known than his/her illustrious namesake and predecessor. Mention Harold Ickes and most people will think you’re talking about Clinton’s recent adviser rather than about his father, the “Old Curmudgeon,” who was one of FDR’s most dynamic cabinet members. For the sports-minded, the nickname “Sugar […]
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(Synopsis & Photo) Victoriano Huerta was a man almost too bad to be true. Described by one historian as an “Elizabethan villain,” he was a drunkard and repressive dictator who guaranteed himself a permanent spot in Mexico’s hall of infamy by overthrowing and then conniving at the murder of the liberator Francisco Madero. Yet one can go […]
Continue ReadingOn the surface, no two people ever appeared more dissimilar than John Stuart Mill and Juana Inés de la Cruz. One was a great rationalist, an apostle of individual liberty, an enemy of dogma and a believer in empiricism as the source of all knowledge; the other was a Mexican nun who lived her entire […]
Continue ReadingTimothy Dwight, the fervently reactionary and comically pompous head of Yale University, was a strong Federalist supporter who predicted that the accession of Thomas Jefferson to the presidency would lead to “a frenzied dance of Jacobinism.” Jacobinism — the doctrine of the ultra-radical and anticlerical wing of the French revolutionary movement — was as much […]
Continue ReadingWhile most of the leaders of Mexico’s War of Independence were Mexican-born creoles, an exception was Francisco Javier Mina, whose name today appears on street signs and monuments throughout Mexico. Like Burke, Fox and Paine, Mina was a citizen of the mother country who deeply felt the pain inflicted on its colonists. Appropriately for a […]
Continue ReadingIn Norman Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish, the term “chutzpah” is defined as “gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible ‘guts’; presumption-plus-arrogance such as no other word … can do justice to.” As an example of chutzpah, Rosten cites “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy […]
Continue ReadingFew people have ever less fitted the conventional image of a revolutionary than Venustiano Carranza. He was a country squire rather than an intellectual, he had been part of a ruling establishment and he took up revolution at an age when most men are contemplating retirement. Yet history placed him among the leading figures in […]
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José Guadalupe Posada is in the great tradition of cartoonists who double as political and social commentators. That tradition includes Honoré Daumier, whose merciless portraits of bourgeois society caused him to be acclaimed as the greatest social satirist of his day, Aubrey Beardsley, who illustrated Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, and such living political cartoonists as Herbert […]
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Some years ago an Australian TV commercial extolled the virtues of a non-alcoholic substitute called “Claytons.” A famous actor refused his last strong one at the bar, telling the barman: “Make mine a Claytons,” over which the voice over intoned: “The drink you have when you’re not having a drink.” Since then, the word has […]
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