"At home, my father made me read Mexican history, study Mexican geography, and understand the names, the dreams and defeats of Mexico, a land of Oz with a green cactus road, a landscape and a soul so different from those of the United States that they seemed a fantasy."
—Carlos Fuentes, from Myself with Others: Selected Essays
The history and heritage of Mexico are alive in her city streets and rural towns. The magnificent stonemasonry of the Olmec, Toltec, Zapotec, Maya, and other indigenous civilizations still peeks through the lushness of contemporary Mexico. We know the exact spot where Montezuma first met Captain Hernán Cortés on the morning in 1519, marking the beginning of the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Neither a triumph nor a defeat, the conquest marked the painful birth of a nation's limitless fusion: genetic, cultural, artistic, economic, and architectural.
What was known as New Spain, an immense territory stretching from what is now Oregon down to Central America, would be governed as the jewel among Spanish colonies. The apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the indigenous Mary of Catholic belief, led to the conversion of more than nine million Indians to Catholicism and later became the symbol for independence from Spain. Today, she remains a symbol of cultural and national identity, even beyond the borders of Mexico.
The priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla sparked a movement for independence from Spain in 1810. Influenced by both the French and American Revolutions, Hidalgo laid the groundwork for a new nation he would not live to see. Throughout the nineteenth century, Mexico wavered between the twin pulls of monarchy and republicanism. More than half of her territory was lost in a war with the United States between 1846 and 1848.
In 1858, an indigenous lawyer from Oaxaca, Benito Juárez, became president of Mexico. For a time, he suppressed the struggles between the liberal and conservative factions. Mexico suffered a military invasion by the French in the 1860s; Juárez defeated the Emperor Maximilian in 1867. Juárez and his generation expelled the imperialist French and instituted democratic reforms.
Juárez died in office in 1872; subsequently, General Porfirio Díaz came to power in 1876. An initially popular veteran of the war against the French, Díaz ruled for more than thirty years. Under his dictatorship, Mexico made substantial economic progress and embraced modernity, but at the excruciating cost of widespread hunger and repression.
All this left Mexico ripe for revolution. An uprising culminated in its own institutionalization: the founding of a political party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), that would win every election for the rest of the twentieth century. During this period the PRI governments had no official relationship with the Catholic Church, seen as a symbol of the old political order, although Mexico was undeniably and predominantly Catholic. Those same governments encouraged the work of artists, painters in particular. Twentieth-century Mexico also saw a tremendous flowering of literary talent, nowhere more than in the short-story form.
In 1910, Francisco I. Madero, a young liberal from northern Mexico championing free elections, term limits, and land reform for poor farmers, challenged the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. Madero beat Díaz at the polls, and the Maderistas managed to topple Díaz's government and make Madero one of the youngest presidents in Mexico's history. Yet military officials and aristocrats, longing for the restoration of the Diaz kleptocracy, imprisoned and killed him before he could complete his first term.
The lack of civil liberties (freedom of press, freedom of association), coupled with extreme poverty in many areas, ignited the revolutionary spirit Madero had channeled. Even without Madero, a fundamental change was already palpable in Mexico. The country no longer depended on the imitation or adoption of foreign economic and political models, but instead strove to pursue its own, including farmers' cooperatives and workers' unions.
After Madero's death, three revolutionary leaders attempted to carry the mantle of revolution: Venustiano Carranza, arguing for a new constitution; Pancho Villa, an overwhelmingly popular bandit-general; and Emiliano Zapata, a peasant whose dedication to the downtrodden transcended any theorizing about impoverished masses. All three contributed to overthrowing the government that had killed Madero, and all three took an active role in the disputes and bloodbaths that followed, even among the revolucionados themselves.
The revolutionaries finally laid down their arms in 1917 and established a stable government. Many of its leaders and their followers didn't live to see the Revolution evolve into the political party that would govern Mexico from 1929 until 2000—forty years longer than Díaz had ruled. One at a time, General Carranza, Pancho Villa, and Emiliano Zapata were all ambushed and assassinated.
Only two important generals, Alvaro Obregón and Plutarco Elías Calles, survived to help institutionalize the movement. They accomplished this politically (with the founding of a one-party system), socially (by letting the state absorb all economic activity), and culturally (by making government censors the final arbiter over all artistic production).
Many revolutionary leaders and political chieftains from different factions lie buried in Mexico City in the Monumento a la Revolución. After all their battles, military and political, they rest in peace together—all except for Emiliano Zapata, who was buried in his homeland of Morelos, among his people, and who alone, according to Octavio Paz, truly embodied the ideals of the Revolution.
"Scribbled in green ink on yellowing sheets or set down by the nervous clacking that typewriters used to make, these are stories meant to be read as if you were leisurely drawing out an after-dinner conversation, or narrating mile after mile of a voyage while lost in a purple dusk, or remembering pieces of your life under the spell of the hypnotic insomnia with which subway cars move in Mexico City."
—Jorge F. Hernández, from the introduction to Sun, Stone, and Shadows
The artistic movement known as Surrealism first emerged in France, partly as a reaction to the slaughters of World War I and the advent of Freudian psychology. As an artistic movement, whether in literature, film, or the visual arts, Surrealism tried to recreate the workings of the unconscious mind, especially as it is experienced in dreams. Combining illusion and reality, a loose affiliation of poets, novelists, photographers, painters, sculptors, and filmmakers helped shape Surrealism's haunting imagery of the unconscious.
Considered the father of Surrealism, French poet André Breton visited Mexico in 1938. He returned to Paris convinced he had been to a land that lived and breathed Surrealism on an everyday basis. According to legend, Breton once ordered a table from a carpenter, describing the measurements he needed by drawing it in perspective. Two weeks later, the carpenter delivered a beautiful piece of woodwork in triangular form, with two very long legs on one side and a pair of very short ones on the other. He had built exactly what Breton had drawn and, in his defense, muttered that if the foreigner wanted a table he should have said so in the first place.
Once in Mexico, Surrealism quickly took root in unexpected ways. In literature, Octavio Paz, Juan José Arreola, Jorge Ibargüengoitia, and others avidly incorporated its parallel worlds and striking, often comic imagery into their work. Such painters as Frida Kahlo and Remedios Varo embraced Surrealism as Salvador Dalí had in Spain, granting themselves license to imagine landscapes obedient to dream logic, yet almost photorealistic in their detail. The Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel, who had collaborated with Dalí on the landmark Surrealist film Un chien andalou (1929) in Europe, fled the Spanish Civil War and wound up in Mexico, where he made such classics as The Exterminating Angel (1962).
As depicted in the engravings of José Guadalupe Posada, the phantasmagoric dreams of Kahlo, and the murals of Diego Rivera, Mexico is a land where death matters as much as life. In connection with the Catholic holy days of All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day (November 1 and 2), Mexicans commemorate the dead by bringing food, drinks, flowers, or photographs to graves of their loved ones, a time known as El Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). It is customary to give all living friends and neighbors skulls crafted from sugar, as a reminder of the destiny that awaits us all. No wonder European Surrealism and such gifted practitioners as Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, and Luis Buñuel found their purest expression an ocean away, in Mexico.
Twelve years after Spanish explorers landed on Mexican soil, the miracle of the Virgin of Guadalupe was recorded. In 1531, a dark-skinned mother of Jesus appeared several times to a peasant Indian man named Juan Diego, a Catholic convert. She asked to have a church built on the site. After Diego told a bishop what had happened—only to be turned away—a colorful image of the Virgin was emblazoned on Diego's cloak to validate his story. This miracle led to the conversion of about nine million of Mexico's Indians to Catholicism. The Vatican officially recognized the miracle of Guadalupe in 1745, and the image now hangs above the altar in the Basílica de Santa María de Guadalupe in Mexico City.