On October 25, 2002, one hundred years after her birth , the Mexican painter Maria Izquierdo was declared a Monumento Artistico de la Nación by Mexico City’s National Commission for Arts and Culture. This guarantees that her work will be protected, catalogued, studied, and conserved to ensure that her legacy will be there for future […]
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Never conquered by the Aztecs and despite being defeated by Mexican armies, the Tarahumara still consider themselves an independent nation. So strong is this conviction that in the Fifties they more than once took complaints directly to the United Nations. Perhaps the purest and most unmixed of any Indian tribe in Mexico, so little is […]
Continue ReadingOne of the great romantic stories of Mexico concerns Felipe Carrillo Puerto, a Governor of Yucatan, and Alma Reed, an American newspaper columnist in San Francisco. Back in the early 1920’s, Alma Reed wrote a column under the byline “Mrs. Goodfellow” that was devoted to answering questions for people who sought legal advice but could […]
Continue ReadingModern Mexican cooking is considered by culinary historians to be a fusion of three cuisines – indigenous, Spanish and French. This column has covered pre-Hispanic ingredients and techniques in the past, and last month focused on Mexican colonial-period cooking, characterized by the introduction of Spanish ingredients, notably animal products, citrus and other fruit, olives and olive […]
Continue ReadingIt is a tribute to the sincerity and strength of the faith of the Mexican people, that Catholicism, is still the dominant religion in this land south of the Rio Grande. Time after time, the Catholic Church has narrowly escaped destruction and survived only because of popular support that defied the law of the land. […]
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The art and attitudes of the two great Mexican muralists, Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco could not be more different. Rivera was a classicist, Orozco an expressionist. Rivera was optimistic, Orozco was a pessimist. Rivera was an indigenista who idealized the Indian segment of Mexican society and glorified pre-hispanic culture. Orozco was a hispanista who admired the Spanish […]
Continue ReadingJust as corn was called “the gift of the gods” in ancient Mesoamerica, the same phrase was used for rice in what is now Southeast Asia. In several Asian languages, the word for rice and food is the same, and rice was part of the creation myth of many Asian cultures, as corn was in […]
Continue ReadingThis month’s Did You Know column highlights the pearl, the beautiful birthstone associated with the month of June. The history of pearl collecting in Mexico goes back a very long way. When Spanish explorers sailed into the Sea of Cortés (Gulf of California) in the early 1530s they encountered Pericú Indians wearing necklaces strung with red […]
Continue ReadingMention liberation theology and images that immediately come to mind are those of 1960s-style antiwar, anti-establishment priests like the Berrigan brothers or, more recently, Bishop Samuel Ruiz García and his obvious sympathy with the downtrodden Indians and Zapatista rebels in Chiapas. Liberation theology didn’t begin with the Berrigan brothers or Bishop Ruiz. As far back as […]
Continue ReadingThe most extensive documentation for the native historical tradition in Mesoamerica comes from the Valley of Mexico and surrounding area. This is hardly surprising, for the main thrust of the Spanish Conquest was aimed at the Aztec empire and its capital of Mexico-Tenochtitlán. Other conquests followed in the Petén and Guatemala, but the spectacular Conquest […]
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