Reflecting on Porfirio Díaz

Thursday is the 100th anniversary of the death of President Porfirio Díaz, who ruled Mexico for thirty years between 1876 and 1911. With only one exception, he was re-elected every four years during that time. However, he is not a president you see honored by many statues or street names.

For most of the 20th century Díaz was called a dictator or tyrant. He has been described as heavy-handed, iron-fisted or sometimes both. His long rule is the reason for Mexico’s fierce constitutional ban on re-election to public office. For this Díaz did get streets named for him. Nearly every town in Mexico has a street named “No Reelección.”

Faced with the armed insurgency of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Díaz presented his resignation to the Chamber of Deputies on May 25, 1911. In a four-paragraph, single-page typed letter, he even used the word “revolution” as the reason for his resignation.

Though there is little public adulation of Díaz, there is recognition of him in strange places.

General Porfirio Díaz is one of the officers listed as being taken prisoner by the French on an oval-shaped monument in Puebla’s Zócalo. The monument honors the “exemplary surrender of the Army of the East under the command of General Jesús Ortega,” to French General Élie Frédéric Forey on May 17, 1863. Díaz somehow escaped from the French army and continued fighting against the French Intervention under President Benito Juárez.

Though the Mexicans did not defeat the French, Díaz emerged a military war hero. He remained loyal to President Juárez through Maximilian’s reign but had developed presidential ambitions of his own.

In an 1876 coup, soon after death of Juárez, Díaz assumed the presidency and was president for 30 of the next 34 years the period known as the Porfiriato.

Despite having made his military fame fighting the French during Maximilian’s short-lived Mexican Empire, Díaz was a great admirer of everything French. Think Porfiriato when you see the French- style buildings in downtown Mexico City. 

Their steep metal roofing was a 19th century European design to assure snow would slide off easily — hardly necessary in tropical Mexico.

In fact, the most spectacular and beautiful buildings in Mexico City’s Centro Histórico were either built or started during the Porfiriato. The domed Monument to the Revolution was really meant to be the dome over the center of the legislative palace the opus magnus Díaz was constructing.

Porfirio Díaz is one of the most easily recognizable figures in Mexico’s 20th-century murals. I have no doubt Díaz would have been delighted with his portraits as immortalized by Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Both were members of the post-revolutionary mural art movement. They intentionally ridiculed Díaz’ vanity; the satire would have been lost on him.

Rivera portrayed Díaz prominently in the murals in the National Palace’s central staircase his chest covered with medals and wearing a white-plumed hat just as Díaz portrayed himself in his official presidential portrait.

Siqueiros’ mural in Chapultepec Castle would certainly have filled President Díaz with pride sitting in the presidential chair seemingly oblivious to the swooning crowd of top-hatted members of high society pressing in around him while swirling women dance in front of him.

The railroads became the signature trademark of the Porfiriato. Twenty thousand kilometers of track were laid during his tenure. Telegraph lines, paralleling the tracks, served as the long arm of the Díaz administration’s control over the rest of the country.

Reliable, scheduled long-distance transportation became the norm during the Porfiriato. The president himself traveled the length of the country in the presidential railroad coach. He personally inaugurated public works projects of French design, many of them railroad related. Any city on a railroad line has buildings dating back to the Porfiriato ― if only the train station.

Though there was very good material progress during his tenure, pressure built up in society. Díaz’s long term in office meant little turnover at all levels of government and left little opportunity for young lawyers to advance in government positions. A closed dictatorial system left middle-class professionals and business owners increasingly marginalized and in search of alternative forms of government.

Rapid capitalist transformation of the rural countryside meant increasing the size of the haciendas and mass dispossession of land, water and traditional rights of Mexico’s rural villages.

The ensuing Revolution was one of the first wars in which trains served as troop transports. In fact

a steam locomotive and a coal car are an outdoor display at the Museum of the Revolution.

And, it was aboard a train that Díaz would set off on his exile to Paris. Díaz rode the train from Mexico City to Veracruz where, after having coffee at one of my favorite restaurants, La Parroquia, he departed aboard the Ypiranga into exile to France. He died at 85 years of age on July 2, 1915, and is buried in Paris’ elegant Mountparnasse. General Gustave León Niox, who Díaz had fought against in Mexico, walked in Díaz’s funeral procession.

How the Indigenous saw themselves after the conquest

Chapultepec Castle is one of my favorite places and I was delighted to hear it would host the exhibit titled "Compared Views in the Viceroyalties of America, Mexico and Peru" (Visiones comparadas en los virreinatos de America.  Mexico y Peru).  Though scheduled through October 7, there is good reason to visit it today or tomorrow.  The most fragile pieces will not be on display for the duration of the exhibit. This touring exhibit, curated by Ilona Katzew, opened in 2011 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as "Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World".  

Though its name changed when it moved to Mexico City the exhibit is essentially the same, bringing together 170 items from collections in Peru, Chile, Spain, France, United States, and Mexico

In naming the exhibit, Los Angeles referred to Spanish colonial rule, Mexico uses the more correct reference to viceroyalty government in which, from a legal standpoint, New Spain and Peru were integral parts of Spain. 

At the exhibit I serendipitously encountered Salvador Rueda Smithers, Director of Chapultepec Castle’s National History Museum.  He told me “calling the exhibit 'Contested Visions' in Spanish would not have honored the purpose of the exhibit.  Compared Views encompasses finding opposing ideas as well as similarities inspired and compared through Indigenous eyes.  The exhibit focuses on the Indigenous as they saw themselves -- not as Criollos or Mestizos saw them.  This exhibit is basically the seed of ethnography… art and ethnography at a moment in time before they separated."

Through art, "Compared Views" gives us insights into the way Spain imposed itself on two powerful short-lived empires, Inca and Aztec, which, though unlinked, perhaps even unknown to the other, existed for less than two centuries prior to Spanish conquest.  

It is mainly through oil paintings on canvas or magnificent screens (biombos) that we are drawn into the rigid caste system of both cultures.  Paintings document the machinations families of influence undertook to preserve privilege.  Elaborately painted genealogies trace Indigenous ancestry in efforts to conserve property rights and to recall agreements and promises made by the conquerors.  Text on the paintings includes Indigenous names written in the Spanish style using first and second surnames.

This exhibit does not deal with the horrors of the conquest, smallpox, starvation, and slavery.  It is an exhibit of the view of survivors, mostly those of privilege who successfully adapted to the new order.  A particular 1734 portrait sticks in my mind.  Juana María Cortés Chimalpopoca is shown wearing an elegant huipil, taking vows in Mexico's Corpus Christi convent established ten years earlier for noble Indians or "Cacicas" (female Caciques).  Juana is portrayed alongside the shield of nobility awarded by Phillip II to Antonio Cortés Totoquihuaztli, governor of Tacuba (1550-1574).  Juana's father, José, thus documented his claim as a descendent of a prehispanic governor of Tacuba through the portrait of his daughter's entry into a convent for Indigenous nobles.

Interspersed in the exhibit are pieces of prehispanic art from Peru and Mexico -- three are special treats. On the back wall of the exhibit's first room is a Chimalli, an Aztec shield, decorated with feathers.  Along with Moctezuma's headdress Hernan Cortez sent it to his sovereign, Charles I, who marveled over how "brilliantly the use of feathers replaced that of the brush."  Emperor Maximilian returned the Chimalli to Mexico in 1864.  According to Professor Rueda, Maximilian wished to bring the headdress back as well but his brother Emperor Franz Joseph refused permission. 

If you go left from the Chimalli around the other side of the display case two dimly lit cases form a corner.  One contains a marvelous cotton Xicolli (ritual vestment), the other a mask covered with bark paper -- the only prehispanic bark paper other than in a codex that is still conserved.  Professor Rueda exclaimed, "I had never seen these before!  They have never been exhibited and they'll only be on display during the exhibit's first two weeks."  Hence my suggestion you drop what you're doing and visit the exhibit quickly.

About the mask, Professor Rueda went on to say, "I imagine the priest wearing a sacrificed person's skin, hands covered in blood, the mask over his face, thorns in his bleeding ears, holding in his hands the bloody heart of a still living sacrifice.  Though refined in many ways, the Aztecs were very cruel.  The demand for blood was high; this is a chilling piece."   

The Xicolli, with a black and white repetitive design of circles and squares, according to Professor Rueda, "is the only prehispanic textile design known to survive to our time.  We knew the varied designs from codices but had never seen a real one until this was found.  You can see the precision in the design, the importance of their geometry.  We realize it expresses something not yet understood about their technology, about prehispanic Mexican thinking…  Though we may not know how they thought, we do know their designs were done with great exactitude, geometrically perfect and with proportion.”

I hope you’re lucky enough to run into Professor Rueda on your visit.  Either way I’m sure you’ll be glad you went.  

Cruising the Castle's interior

Last Tuesday was the anniversary of the heroic defense of Chapultepec Castle by the Niños Heroes on September 13, 1847.  Though an important event which has shaped Mexico's thought, there are many more reasons to visit that historic place.  

The hill on which the Castle is built was known as Grasshopper Hill, sacred to the Aztecs, a favorite retreat of their emperors; its spring a source of water for Tenochtitlan, later to be Mexico City. Mexicans use the Nahuatl derived word for grasshoppers -- chapulin; hence Chapultepec -- rather than the Spanish saltamontes -- hill jumper.  

In 1785 Viceroy Bernardo de Galvez built what was to be the first component of a sprawling Castle that has grown as it has gone through different uses.  During two extended periods it housed the Military Academy; for more than 50 years the Presidential residence, and since 1944 the National History Museum.  

Despite the Castle’s extensive history, it has become identified with French imposed Emperor Maximilian and Empress Carlotta even though Maximilian did not build the Castle and only lived there a brief two years. Chapultepec is the only Royal Castle in North America used to actually house sovereigns.

In keeping with Mexico's museumography the displays are excellent and follow a theme.  Once inside the building you'll choose a route to follow.   One area contains National History exhibits.  As to be expected there are swords and military uniforms, but exhibits of historical periods also go into surprising depth. Murals by O’Gorman, Orozco, and Siquieros are history lessons in themselves.  Another route takes you through the living quarters portion of the Castle looking northeast along Paseo de la Reforma.  As palatial as any European castle, and kept in excellent condition, the rooms are decorated as they were by different occupants.  Some are as Maximilian and Carlotta may have used them, others furnished as they were when Porfirio Diaz lived in them; the last room is furnished as it was under President Lazaro Cardenas.  Cardenas felt it inappropriate for a revolutionary president to be living in such opulence and moved the official residence to Los Pinos, also located in Chapultepec Park.   

Over the years The Castle has gained prestige as a setting for dialog.  Is the open feeling of the glass enclosed space with the buffering effect of the forest and the secure feeling at the top of the promontory conducive to understanding?  The 1992 Chapultepec Peace Accord put an end to the civil war in El Salvador.  This year meetings have been hosted in the Castle for dialog between the movement headed by Javier Sicilia and the highest ranking members of both the executive and legislative branches of the federal government. 

Most visitors walk a wide path that spirals around the hill and soon has them above tree level looking out over Chapultepec forest, the largest urban park in Latin America.   A few visitors with special needs or VIP status are allowed to ride the elevator from the base of the hill and step out inside the Castle at the top. 

I rode that elevator once -- in the company of a U.S. high-school student with extensive knowledge of the 1846-47 war and a desire to see the parapet where Juan Escutia jumped to his death.  Remembering my previous visit on a windy day, when the French doors in the residential palace area were banging between the walls and the ends of chains attached to their doorknobs, we took forty rubber doorstoppers purchased from a street vendor on Tacuba street.  Once inside the building I asked to see the director of the museum.  "Not available," we were told, "perhaps later."  Upon finishing our visit I asked again and got the same reply.  I told the security guard I'd try another day, and that the reason for my query was to make a gift to the museum. 

Benjamin Weems, his aunt and I proceeded to walk down the long exit path.  Just as we reached the bottom a guard came running down the walkway calling after us.  In the absence of the Director, the Administrator would see us!  We were hustled, like dignitaries, through a tunnel, to the elevator, escorted by two guards to the Administrative Offices.  Perhaps they thought I had a valuable artifact to contribute.  I suddenly was struck by the possibility the administrator might think my doorstops irreverent or worse, irrelevant and a waste of his time.   With some trepidation we were ushered into the presence of the Administrator where I had to finally open my bag and present my matching rubber doorstops.  I was afraid that what had seemed like such a wonderful idea would appear to be mere silliness.  

The Administrator betrayed neither amusement nor annoyance.  He expressed appreciation and charmingly explained that rubber doorstops, made in China, would not be in keeping with 19^th century doors; he agreed that something along their lines was necessary and graciously accepted our gift. 

Benjamin maintained perfect decorum until we were once again descending the walkway and were out of earshot of the guards.  The three of us broke into relieved and sustained laughter.  Since then we have referred to this visit as the Doorstop Caper.

I highly recommend a visit to this enchanting Castle.  If you go, please let me know if rubber doorstoppers are in place, or even better a 19^th century rendition.

Patriotism in Chapultepec

Entering Mexico City from the south, signs point off to the right to the military academy.  The name of the institution is always preceeded by the capital letter H, for Heroic -- an award given to it by Congress after the heroic defense of Chapultepec Castle on September 13, 1847, during what the U.S. refers to as the Mexican-American War, known in Mexico as the North American Invasion -- 164 years ago today.  

Though the H. Colegio Militar's campus abuts the highway, the first indication it is an army installation is not a sign but six eagles on a rocky ledge found just north of the toll booth.  These eagles never fly away.  They are concrete eagles representing the Niños Heroes, six heroic cadets who died in defense of the Military Academy when it was attacked and seized by U.S. soldiers and marines.  The current location of the Heróico Colegio Militar dates from 1976.  In 1847 the institution was located in Chapultepec Castle, atop Chapultepec Hill, considered by ancient Mesoamericans to be one of the four sacred mountains in the Valley of Mexico (the others being the Cerro de Tepeyac, location of the Basilica of Guadalupe; the Peñon de los Baños overlooking the Mexico City airport; and the Cerro de la Estrella in southern Mexico City).  

Accounts of the battle for Chapultepec Castle vary, not just from the points of view of the opposing sides, but also in the way each side remembers the battle.  The account I prefer is that upon being told that an attack by the U.S. Army and Marines was imminent, six cadets signed entered into solemn pact to never surrender.  If necessary they would offer their lives in defense of both their institution and their nation.  Other cadets also fought heroically but were either killed in battle or taken prisoner.  When the last of the six heroes realized he couldn't possibly hold off the enemy by himself, he lowered the flag, wrapped himself in it and jumped off the cliff.  

Mexican school children know the names of the six heroic cadets by heart. Los Ninos ranged in age from 14 to 20.  School children know who the oldest and youngest were; they know it was Juan Escutia who wrapped himself in the flag.  

The Mexican-American War is glossed over in US elementary and secondary educational textbooks, probably for the same reasons President Grant expressed in his memoirs, writing of the war as a massive land grab.  “For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the [annexation of Texas], and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.”

Nevertheless U.S. school children do learn the Marine Anthem though I would be very surprised if many of them know the “Halls of Montezuma” is, in fact, Chapultepec Castle. To this day, tradition maintains that the bright red stripe running the length of the outside of the trouser leg of the U.S. Marine dress uniform is a reminder of Marine blood shed at Chapultepec Castle.

Each September 13th the Mexican President, along with representatives of the Mexican legislative and judicial branches of the federal government, accompanied by H. Colegio Militar cadets, lay wreaths to honor the Niños Heroes at the Altar a la Pátria monument  located at the base of Chapultepec Hill.  The monument includes six marble columns, each topped by an eagle with outstretched wings.  In fact if you see six of any type of monument in Mexico -- columns, obelisks, flagpoles -- it is likely to be a symbolic representation of the Niños Heroes.

Visiting heads of state often lay wreaths at the monument.  Understandably, it isn't common for U.S. Presidents to do so.  Nevertheless President Truman, in 1947, and President Clinton in 1997, included wreath laying ceremonies in their schedules.  U.S. Ambassador Patrick Lucey, appointed by President Carter, earned goodwill, making his first official act placement of a wreath in honor of the Niños Heroes. 

Rumor has it that the new U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Earl Anthony Wayne, will present his credentials today at the National Palace.