Because of the many fables he wrote, there are those who may wish to compare José Joaquin Fernández de Lizardi to La Fontaine. Such a comparison fails to do justice to both writers. Apart from the Contes, skillfully etched narratives of casual romance published in 1664, La Fontaine is chiefly known for his animal fables […]
Continue ReadingRevolution is the ultimate test for survival of the fittest. In times of stormy social change, intense competition is generated among leaders of forces seeking that change and, inevitably, one man emerges alone at the top. Sometimes this process is peaceful but that is the exception rather than the rule. By the time Napoleon assumed […]
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 […]
Continue ReadingIn 1958, the year Adolfo López Mateos became president of Mexico, the world was relatively tranquil. The Korean War was over and Vietnam was in a lull between the defeat of the French in 1954 and the formation of the National Liberation Front (Vietcong) at the end of 1960. In France, Charles de Gaulle had […]
Continue ReadingFrancisco Madero was a man who was too good for his own good. Naive, trusting, merciful toward those who deserved no mercy, he was in the end betrayed and murdered by those in whom he had mistakenly placed his trust. A rich man’s son whose following included bandits and killers, a teetotaler and spiritualist in […]
Continue ReadingOf the leaders of the Mexican independence movement, the one who most resembled Nicolás Bravo was Ignacio de Allende. In my coverage on Allende, I described him as a “law-and-order” rebel, one who believed in independence from Spain but rejected radical transformations of society and detested mob violence. Nicolás Bravo was in the same mold, […]
Continue ReadingRebels, we know, can range from wild-eyed anarchists to sober and judicious opponents of an established order who make a considered decision that the system under which they live is no longer viable. If there ever was a “law-and-order” rebel, it was Ignacio de Allende y Unzaga. Where many who rose against the Spanish crown […]
Continue ReadingProbably the individual in history who most resembled Agustin de Iturbide was Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the French statesman who managed to hold high positions in the pre-revolutionary ancien regime, the revolutionary government, the court of Napoleon, the restored Bourbon dynasty and the bourgeois monarchy of “Citizen King” Louis Philippe. Talleyrand, who made opportunism into […]
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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 ReadingWith the possible exception of André Malraux, no individual associated with the arts has been involved in direct political action more than David Alfaro Siqueiros. Student agitator, soldier, leader of an assassination squad — Siqueiros was all of those things. Yet he is also considered one the artistic masters of the twentieth century, a member […]
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