Guadalajara after the Conquest of the Aztecs

Guadalajara: Aztec symbols, the flame that doesn't consume and the Quetzalcoatl, the serpent bird.

Note: A correction to my last travelogue post where I said Guadalajara had 10 million residents. I’m now told it’s closer to 5 million. My apologies to the 5 million whom I led to believe were Guadalajarians and now discover they’re not . . . or worse yet, that they may not even exist.

“Guadalajara,” he said, “is a name imported from Spain and is Arabic, dating back to the Moorish rule of Spain. It means ‘stony river.’” We are six in the van plus our driver/interpreter: two male couples and Agnes and me, and we’re a jolly, curious bunch with non-stop banter from Ajijic to Guadalajara and back. “Airrrmahn” (Herman) is both a competent, careful driver and a consummate teacher; before the day is over we’ll have a much better grasp of the history of both Mexico and Jalisco province—at least if we remember to listen between bouts of picture-snapping.

Our first destination in this sprawling city in the highlands is downtown Guadalajara. In short, it’s magnificent in its ‘Catholic’ beauty. No fewer than 5 cathedrals attest to the Franciscan and Augustinian presence in the city at its establishment—he says—in 1542. Guadalajara was actually relocated at that time, the present site chosen because of the availability of fresh water and for strategic reasons; the wars of conquest, the subjugation of the indigenous population was still very much a consideration.

Central Guadalajara has been reworked considerably in the last half century. The result is a centre including no fewer than five large plazas of fountains, statuary and, of course, cathedrals. The plazas are arranged in the form of a cross, the largest, longest being the trunk of the cross and smaller ones being the arms and the top of the cross with the central, Cathedral of the Assumption of Our Lady at the juncture of the cross’s arms. The interior of this cathedral has to be seen to be appreciated; a second-rate depiction can be had here.

We visited the vaults beneath the cathedral where bishops and cardinals of Guadalajara rest. The most recent was buried here in the 1990s, possibly caught in the crossfire between drug cartels or else assassinated by them; autopsies showed that he died in his car from shots fired at close range. It reminded us of the violence that accompanies the drug trade around the world and definitely here in Mexico. The north shore communities of Lake Chapala are not exceptions in this case, the Guadalajara Reporter tells us; a shootout happened in Jocotepec just down the road a few days ago. One man was killed and a woman seriously injured.

And then there was the governor’s palace and the old congress hall and the murals depicting Mexico’s history and a wonderful pottery museum and finally, an all female Mariachi band performance and a bowl of Mexican soup that Herman assured me would be only poquito spicy, but which went down like varnish remover . . . with flavour!

We ended the day at Cosinart Restaurant in Ajijic, I had a very good Indian Chicken Curry and a glass of red wine.

Just checked my step counter . . . seeing Guadalajara took about 7 km of walking. Should have stopped at one of the leather shops (of which there are many; Guadalajara is known for its pottery and leather goods) and bought a pair of hand crafted shoes for Cdn $30 or so.

A side-note. Mexicans don’t generally wear shorts and sandals. So if you don’t want to stand out as a tourist, jeans and oxfords or sneakers are a better bet. Police and military wear black top to toe with heavy boots plus guns and radios strapped all over them; don’t know how they survive May, for instance when, I’m told, 40 C isn’t uncommon.

Tequila: (tequila is made in Tequila!)

Amante, musico y tequila. Ole!  Y si, un gallo Tambien!

It’s curious how one’s perception on arriving as a visitor at a place that is home for others . . . and probably has been for centuries . . . can be that the people and place were given birth when one (this one, at least) landed. (That may be the worst sentence I’ve ever written.) I think it’s a case of inflated self-importance: this store opened just for me; this restaurant wouldn’t exist except in anticipation of me; this town has only ever been awaiting my arrival; I’ve never been in this museum before so it must be new.

My home has never been a tourist destination but I’m thinking if visitors speaking little English streamed through Rosthern year-round, they’d begin to look alike and my courtesies would probably be in the interest of their spending more than in them personally. And if they stayed for a week—exploring all the sights and amenities, trying every restaurant—forgetting them would be an exercise of minutes. (Mind you, testing every restaurant in Rosthern takes five days only.)

I could imagine that a weary waiter in a hot and crowded restaurant is not nearly as happy to see me come in as I might hopefully expect. “Here comes another pain-in-the-ass tourist with stupid questions and impossible demands spoken in broken Spanglish. Whoopeeo dinga!” Actually, courtesy and friendliness characterizes best the people of Mexico who’ve waited on us.

An increasing number of national and local economies rely on tourism these days. Tourists bring in money, often into communities left impoverished by global “progress” including technologies that displace jobs. But it surely must be a Faustian bargain; to be a tourist-friendly town where you were once a traditional community has meant monumental cultural change; how could it not? Churches remain sparsely-attended places of worship, but become tourist attractions as well; menus in restaurants are in a language amenable to visitors; children mix into the melee of strangers and pick up who-knows-what habits (not excluding the art of begging and fawning for handouts, we’ve observed in some places); locals compete for craft and food stall sales. And possibly the most telling: tourism and expat settlement drive up the prices of things, and visitors--not locals--become the demographic for which business caters, for which municipal planning often bends both money and attention. 

In the plaza in Tequila, men with “información turistica” on their shirts walk about to help visitors find the sites they’ve come to see. Up and down the hills of Tequila, meanwhile, the blue-green fields of Agave signal that others must toil under the hot sun to support the export industry that now pays for their living. Agave here produces nothing nutritional, just juice for tequila, fiber for construction and fertilizer for the next crop of the same.

We’re told the town of Tequila was founded in ca. 1525; that’s only two decades and a bit after Columbus “discovered” the “New World.” Rosthern was founded—kind of—in 1893 at which time Tequila as a town already had about 270 years of community behind it. In both cases, the area had likely been inhabited for ten or more thousand years: by the Cree in Rosthern’s case, by Aztecs in Tequila’s.

I had a bowl of Sopa Azteca in the Plaza in Tequila with no illusions that the name was more than cultural appropriation for the tourist trade. It was very good soup.

Downtown Tequila is a visual feast.

We tasted a sample of a smooth, flavoured tequila not unlike Bailey’s Irish Cream. Wonderful. I bought a small bottle of it: 180 pesos; $10 Cdn.

The Guadalajara Freeway loop circles 3/4 of the city of some 10 million. It’s a state-of-the-art highway with only light traffic; we paid $30 in tolls driving from Ajijic to Tequila and back. Locals, we conjectured, would travel on free roads. Speed limit on the freeway: 110. Same as the Louis Riel Trail.

In the Tequila Museum we wandered into the archive room where an older man (Manuel) and a college-age companion were eager to show us the assemblage of old documents chronicling the history of Tequila and tequila. Our daughter’s Spanish is better than ours, and so the conversation limped along with general understanding. What we gathered is that a mass of letters, documents, declarations have been collected with great effort from all over the world and are being meticulously catalogued and preserved here in this small room. My archive/history juices flowed with an envy equal to the glow in these archivists’ eyes as they revealed their monumental achievement.

Friday, we take a tour introducing us to historic Guadalajara.

Carved Christ, Tequila and Sun

A crucifix with a difference

Long, leisurely mornings in a foreign country provide a good time for reading, and what better reading would there be when you’re up under a Mexican morning sun than the history of Mexico. I did some of that this morning, and now I know enough—probably—to get myself into trouble in any serious argument. 

A few gleanings from Wikipedia and similar sites seem indisputable:

• Mexico’s history has been fraught with turmoil, colonial exploitation, genocide, civil wars and near-miraculous economic achievements.
• It’s history has significant relevance for today, particularly as regards Mexico-USA relations. The uniqueness of the Mexico-USA border and the current debate about its defense can’t really be understood without reference to several hundred years of past interactions.
• Much of what is southwestern USA was Mexico until the Spanish-American war.
• The border loosened substantially during the World Wars when Mexican workers were welcomed to take work places vacated by American men serving in the military.
• Around forty-million persons living in the USA are Mexican or Mexican-American.
• Nearly a million US expats live in Mexico.

One site detailed the immigration into Mexico over the last few centuries, mentioning in passing that some enclaves of alien settlement exist as un-assimilated communities—including Mennonites. Also that in certain areas, indigenous nations have persisted as cultural, traditional communities but the vast majority of the population falls into the Mestizo category, having mixed ancestry and speaking Spanish as the first language. The website opined that the trend for a long time has been to homogenize the population, and I imagine that the obliteration of ethnicity and languages would therefor be part of that trajectory. (I was thinking Canada as I read this; I can’t verify the truth of it in Mexico’s case.)

We took the bus from Puerto Vallarta to Guadalajara and were picked up at the terminal in Zapopan, a suburb of Guadalajara. The trip takes you from the seaside and up on a winding course into the highlands of Jalisco State. The route passes through the agave-growing, red earth region around the city of Tequila, where the juice of the agave is turned into—you guessed it—tequila. (We naively thought we were passing through pineapple fields until we were straightened out on that account.) 

The hills and valleys of Jalisco are brown and lifeless right now, except for the agave fields; it’s the dry season and as we passed pastures with cattle and no sign of feeding facilities, I thought of bovines suffering through winters in Canada and on dry pastures in Mexico. 

Here Comes Tequila

Perhaps the ground-travel observations from a bus window would have to go under the category of “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” but I felt as sorry for the horses and cattle scrounging to find food through a hot, dry season as I do for animals suffering -30 days in Saskatchewan. We’ve been here a week; I said I’d like to be a TV meteorologist here because the forecast—high 30, low 15, calm and sunny—would apply daily. Not really any good reason to go to work on a regular basis; tape the forecast and show it all the time, eh?

Chapala-Ajijic (pronounced ah-hee'-heeq') has become home to many retired Canadians. We met some of them in church and they fill some restaurants in the evenings. Worship leader Dave at the Lakeside Community Fellowship moved here from Vancouver area; his wife grew up in Melfort, Saskatchewan. Filmmaker John Friesen from Manitoba has just completed a feature film focused on US/Mexican relations at the personal level—Pat y Paco; we’re having coffee this afternoon.

The influence—positive and negative—of expats and tourism on local economies and cultures has been a topic on which our daughter and son-in-law have been able to “go to school” in Panama and now in Mexico. Maybe Friesen should do another film about that.

An “expat” Canadian quipped yesterday about the traffic congestion, “Darned gringos!”

I said, “Don’t worry, Mexico is gonna build a wall; US and Canada are gonna pay for it!”