Symbols of the Presidency

Three years ago today Enrique Peña Nieto was sworn in as president of Mexico. In photos of that event, many of which will be re-printed today, he’ll be shown with the presidential sash (banda presidencial) worn over his suit coat.

Law dictates that the sash is green, white and red and has the national seal embroidered on it. It also defines how the president wears the sash — over his right shoulder, with the red on top.

It is to be worn under his suit coat unless it’s his first or last day in office — on those days he shares it with his predecessor or successor. Transfer of power is symbolically represented by the outgoing president handing the sash to his successor.

Though Mexico’s president may wear the sash at his discretion, there are days on which law specifies he must wear it. He wears it when giving the president’s annual report to Congress, he wears it on the night of the 15th of September when presiding over the commemoration of the Grito de Dolores (the Shout of Independence), and he must wear it when he receives letters of credence from foreign ambassadors.

The sash is one of two political emblems in Mexico that are synonymous to the presidency. The other is a chair.

The President’s high backed armchair is probably the grandest chair in Mexico. Referred to as La Silla Presidencial (The Presidential Chair), it has the eagle from the shield of Mexico at the top of its arched backrest.

The official photograph of President Peña Nieto that hangs in all federal government offices shows him sitting in the Presidential Chair wearing the sash.

The most famous photograph of the chair is probably one taken when it was occupied during the Revolution, fleetingly, by one who was never president — Pancho Villa. Emiliano Zapata sits beside him in a much simpler chair.

Photography historian John Mraz refers to this photograph as one of three iconic photos of the Mexican Revolution. Another is the full-figure portrait of Emiliano Zapata, leader of the Liberating Army of the South, wearing what appears to be a presidential sash – but isn’t.

The third iconic photo of the Revolution has neither a sash nor a chair. It’s an unposed and stunning photo of a woman leaning out of a train car with a rifle over her shoulder.

In 1914, Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata converged on Mexico City with their respective armies. They occupied the National Palace and posed for a photo with their officers. There was only one Presidential Chair but two leaders of two armies — Villa’s División del Norte and Zapata’s, Ejercito Libertador del Sur.

The oft-repeated story is that Villa offered Zapata the Presidential Chair. Zapata refused saying he didn’t want to sit in the chair so recently vacated by Porfirio Diaz. “It’s too tainted by corruption.”
Not only did Zapata refuse to sit in the Presidential Chair but he is reputed to have said he did not aspire to the presidency. Yet, his bestknown photographic portrait — a black and white photograph taken in 1911 — shows a dapper Zapata dressed as a charro, wearing a five-striped sash draped over his left shoulder. Diego Rivera copied from that photo when he portrayed Zapata in his murals in Cuernavaca’s Cortez Palace.

However, Rivera added color. He gave the photographed five-striped sash the presidential colors. He painted Zapata’s sash with red stripes at the top and bottom, a green stripe in the middle and white stripes between. The presidential sash has only three stripes.

From John Mraz, I learned Zapata was actually wearing a state of Morelos sash. By wearing it, Zapata was indicating he was the authority in the state with the right to appoint government officials.
The sash is no longer used in Morelos and I haven’t been able to determine what colors were on it, but even if they were the same as the national green, white, and red, when Zapata wore them they were state colors — hence it was not a presidential sash.

According to Mraz, the sash is the one worn by Revolutionary General Manuel D. Asúnsulo when he, with Emiliano Zapata at his side, peacefully entered and occupied Cuernavaca in 1911. After General Asunsolo’s death Zapata assumed the sash.

Though General Asúnsulo was photographed with the sash over his right shoulder, Zapata wears it over his left shoulder in his famous portrait.

Did Zapata not think that was a matter of importance? Or did he put on the sash while looking at himself in a mirror thinking he was wearing it just as General Asúnsulo had? Or is the photograph reversed left to right?

I like tradition. Today would be a good day for President Peña Nieto to wear the sash – on the third anniversary of his inauguration. Under his suit coat, of course.

Maya art at the National Palace

Mexico’s National Palace is hosting the grandest Maya exhibit I’ve ever seen. Mayas: Revelation of Time Without End brings together 470 pieces of ancient Maya art as well as a smattering of colonial and contemporary Maya art. Half the items on display are of recent discovery, many being displayed for the very first time. Many other items come from collections of Mexico’s various museums of Maya archeology. I was delighted to see so many pieces from museums I thought I knew well but where I never had access to what was in storage.

“They came out of storage rooms and have been cleaned and restored for this exhibit,” said Mercedes de la Garza, curator of the exhibit. Foremost among the storage rooms was the basement of the National Museum of Anthropology, which holds more items than are on display.

Every visitor will certainly leave with favorite pieces in mind. Stellar is the Tablet of the Throne, discovered in 2002 in Palenque’s Temple XXI. The exquisite detail, accompanied by hieroglyphic text, shows two deities along with Pacal Kin (the Palenque ruler buried in the tomb under the Temple of the Inscriptions) and two other governing dignitaries in a ceremony of blood-letting self-sacrifice.
I’m haunted by the life-sized sculpture in limestone of a man who has just offered his heart in sacrifice. It is on loan from the INAH’s regional museum in Campeche.

I was most intrigued by two figurines, each about six inches high, portraying a god embracing a woman. They are so similar that they must have come from the same potter’s workshop. However, one belongs to the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s (UNAM) Tlatelolco museum and the other to the Canton Palace museum in Mérida. They made me think of the technique developed by Dorie Reents-Budet of using neutron activation to determine if two pieces of pottery came from the same workshop or even from the same ball of clay.

A welcomed warming of international relations was palpable in last month’s inauguration ceremony as well as in the exhibit itself. French ambassador Elisabeth Beton sat on the speakers’ platform with President Peña Nieto, governors of states in the Maya area, and the heads of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) and Council of Culture and Arts (Conaculta). It was a subtle way to underline a warming in Franco-Mexican relations under Peña Nieto’s presidency. 

In his remarks President Peña Nieto said the Maya exhibit will travel to Brazil and France before returning to tour Mexico. I was pleased to hear President Peña Nieto recognize the importance of Mexico’s ancient history when he said: “This exhibit — along with all the other work we are doing — will be a stimulus projecting Mexico to the rest of the world. More importantly it will make Mexican’s pride in our roots and our identity flourish.”

Approximately 20 percent of the pieces on display are on loan from three Guatemalan museums. This confirms a thawing of relations in archeological circles where a longstanding irritant has been the display in Mexico’s Templo Mayor museum of the Nobel Peace Prize medal won by Guatemalan Rigoberta Menchu. Menchu deposited it there in 1992 saying: “It will be transferred to Guatemala when conditions of respect of human rights and peace exist. They do not exist at the present time.” The medal is still on display but that text has been removed from the plaque.

The National Palace is a wonderful place to house this magnificent exhibit. You enter and leave through side-by-side narrow doors, spanned by a single arch, between two of Diego Rivera’s murals in the National Palace’s central courtyard. Set in what seems like a rabbits’ warren of spacious galleries, with no view to the outside, the exhibit winds around another of the palace’s many courtyards not even visible to the visitor until the very end of the exhibit.

Rafael Tovar y de Teresa, President of Conaculta, described the layout of the exhibit’s division into six sections: the Maya relationship with nature; Maya community and daily life; the ceremonial heart of the Maya cities; the Maya relationship with time and astronomy; and Maya sacred forces — in which two burials are exhibited just as they were found. The exhibit ends with colonial and contemporary textiles, musical instruments, and items of religious nature produced as the Mayas blended with Christianity.

Tovar also gave us the wonderful news that this exhibit is the first of a series that will be held in the National Palace during this presidential administration. It will be followed by equally impressive exhibits of Mixtec and Zapotec cultures, Teotihuacan, the Aztecs, cultures of Northern Mexico, and the Totonacs. 

Mayas: Revelation of Time Without End lives up to Mexico’s enviable reputation for the quality of its museums — in content, quality of the displays, as well as a logical progression in the presentation of the displays. It exceeds other Mexican museums in its friendliness. Admission is free for all visitors and photography is welcomed (without flash or tripods). Its schedule brackets Mexico’s busiest family vacation times. It opened last month before the year-end holidays, and will close April 27, 2014, after Holy Week. Open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Closed Mondays.

Neighbors, but distant or close?

Late last month, only a week before President Obama set off on his trip to Mexico and Costa Rica, recently appointed U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry referred to Latin America with one of the most offensive and unfortunate phrases in diplomatic lexicon: "our back yard."  Nevertheless, Secretary Kerry's faux pas may have led to speechwriters working overtime to compensate for it in President Obama's message to students in Mexico City as well as opening the door for President Peña Nieto to revert the insensitive remark by quoting another Massachusettes politician, John F. Kennedy. 

  

Traditionally when U.S. and Mexican presidents visit each other's countries, the U.S. president quotes from Benito Juarez in his speech and the Mexican quotes from Abraham Lincoln.  Presidents Juarez and Lincoln each served their countries as presidents at the same time and they are each held in high esteem in their respective countries.  Both are known for being concise and to the point in their public speeches--Lincoln for his pithy statements as well as his Gettysburg Address, Juarez for his "Among individuals as among nations, the respect of the rights of others is peace."

In his stellar speech to students in the courtyard of Mexico's National Museum of Anthropology last Friday, President Obama quoted from several Mexicans including Benito Juarez -- although when he quoted from Juarez, it was not the frequently quoted phrase about peace.  Mr. Obama instead praised Juarez for saying "democracy is the destiny of humanity."  The most extensive quote Mr. Obama used came from Octavio Paz in which, in his characteristically esoteric and convoluted way, Paz based Mexico's hopes for the future on its long history:  "Modernity is not outside us, it is within us.  It is today, as well as the most ancient antiquity.  It is tomorrow, and the beginning of the world.  It is a thousand years old and yet newborn."

Paz's view contrasts with Alan Riding's view in his best-selling book "Distant Neighbors" -- published in 1984, six years before Paz received the Nobel literature prize. In it New York Times correspondent Riding refers to a three thousand year old Mexico held back by its past while the United States, barely two hundred years old lunges toward the 21st century.  

Is it all a matter of perspective?  

Last November, in an effort to encourage U.S. colleges to reinstate study-abroad programs in Mexico, I toured through New England speaking in colleges about my prediction that as soon as the new administration took office in Mexico on the first of December there would be a change in perspective of Mexico in the U.S. mainstream media -- a shift towards a much more positive view of Mexico.   It is marvelous to see the transition occurring as I expected it would -- now even to the point of having the U.S. administration joining the change in perspective.  Last Friday at the Museum of Anthropology President Obama announced a program titled "One Hundred Thousand Strong in the Americas," in which 100,000 Latin American students, including Mexicans, will be invited to study in U.S, colleges and universities and an equal number of U.S. students will be encouraged to study in Latin America "because when we study together, and we learn together, we prosper together."

At presidents' Obama and Peña Nieto's joint press conference held in the National Palace last Thursday Mexico's president closed his remarks by quoting President Kennedy to whom he attributed having said, in that same building, 51 years ago, "Geography has made us neighbors.  Tradition has made us friends.  Let us not allow anyone to separate what nature has brought together."