Uniting for change

Last Thursday, I spoke at the University of Alabama at the School of Social Work. As I gave my noontime talk, Mexico City’s Zócalo was being prepared for the convergence of three huge marches in support of the 43 missing students from the Rural Teachers’ School in Ayotzinapa. I made ‘understanding’ the topic of my talk.

I explained to the students that Mexicans have the right to demonstrate peacefully in public places without the need for any type of permit. This is a coveted and frequently exercised right that springs from the 1917 Constitution. In sharp contrast, U.S. law requires permits for any large gathering.

I told the students that what was unusual about the recent demonstrations is that many sectors of society are coming together in solidarity with the plight of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa. Much of the organizing is happening at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). This is where many middle class students study. Students from wealthy families who attend private universities are also joining the fray.

And they are protesting in support of poor, rural students. Rural teachers schools such as Ayotzinapa are where students from poor families can receive an education sufficient to obtain a teaching position.

Neither UNAM nor the college in Ayotzinapa charge tuition. But you don’t see a lot of students from poor families at UNAM because only people with sufficient family support can pay the other expenses tied into a college education – textbooks, food, lodging and transportation. In Ayotzinapa, students from poor families figure out how to make do with what they have.

Last week the University of Alabama’s stunningly beautiful campus of elegant colonial architecture modeled on Jeffersonian design was being readied for its homecoming game. A tower of lumber was in place in the center of the quad for a bonfire. Tradition dictates it be lit after the Friday night pep rally.

After the talk I walked around the corner from Little Hall with Ellen Csikai, PhD, the host of my visit. We stepped into Malone-Hood Plaza in front of Foster Auditorium and gazed at the Autherine Lucy Clock Tower.

This is the site where actions by college students had a profound impact on society during the Civil Rights movement. Autherine Lucy was the first African-American to attend the University of Alabama. She enrolled in 1956 and was suspended three days later because of campus unrest.
Vivian Malone and James Hood were on their way into Foster Auditorium in 1963 to register for classes when Governor George Wallace blocked the doorway. To get them through, President Kennedy “federalized” the Alabama National Guard, who persuaded Governor Wallace to get out of the way.

Bronze plaques commemorating the first three African-American students flank the new clock tower. The open doors in the tower are in invitation to all who seek to enter – a fitting tribute to a tense but peaceful step on the path towards justice.

The 1960s U.S. Civil Rights movement has much in common with happenings in Mexico today. To be successful, the movement required the participation of not just the oppressed but those of goodwill with commitment to social justice.

Beginning in 1961, Freedom Riders, young white men and women from all over the United States, courageously traveled to the segregated south to work with African American men and women. They helped register voters and integrate transportation, public restrooms and eating establishments.

Too young to join the Freedom Riders, I used a shortwave radio to follow their progress as best I could from my home. Last Thursday I, and much of the world, followed Mexico’s demonstrations by smartphone.

Technologically, much has changed in the intervening years and so has the University of Alabama – now 12 percent black. Together blacks, whites, Asian, Native American and Hispanic students celebrated homecoming (they won!); and hopefully my talk added to their understanding of their Southern neighbor.

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.

A one-stop mural shop

The areas around the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s (UNAM) Rectoría (administration building) offers a unique view, where one can see monumental art by different artists, all of it created in the same time period: 1952.

Five years ago this grand array of art and architecture was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site as "an outstanding example of the application of the principles of 20th Century modernism merged with features stemming from pre-Hispanic Mexican tradition . . . . one of the most significant icons of modern urbanism and architecture in Latin America".

Approaching the Rectoría from the south on Insurgentes Avenue, David Alfaro Siqueiros' tile mosaic is the first of the artistic statements to come into view.  Be it on canvas or murals, Siqueiros liked texture in his art.  On the south side of the Rectoría he took a bold step towards his goal of producing three-dimensional mural art by including curved surfaces of faces, arms, hands, and pencils emerging from the wall.

Three-dimensional mural art sounds like a contradiction in terms, but Siqueiros achieved it a decade later in the Siqueiros Polyforum, when he incorporated metal sculpture into his mural art.

An untiled smaller Siqueiros mural on the north side of the Rectoría is less attractive, but has a clearer message.  The hand, fingers, and pencil point to a list of dates:  1520, 1810, 1857, 1910, 19??, referring to the conquest of Mexico, proclamation of independence, laws of reform and new constitution, revolution, and the next social upheaval.  Back in 1952 who ever thought we would live to see the year 2000?  The open-ended date has been restored many times after students painted in the date of the next upheaval. 

Just north of the Rectoría is the library building designed and decorated by architect and muralist Juan O'Gorman.  As it was a library building, O'Gorman put in very few windows.  Except for vents in the stairwells and translucent onyx in the lower-floor reading rooms, the entire building is covered on the outside with natural stone mosaic.

The west and south sides of O’Gorman’s library are visible from the Rectoría.  The west portrays the university shield and university life.  At first glance, the shield appears to be framed by a double-headed eagle; however, it is two different majestic birds. The Aztec eagle of the Mexican shield and the South American condor are on either side of a map of Latin America--the western hemisphere sans Canada and the United States.  The letters BN and HN in the top corners are abbreviations of the collections housed in the building:  Biblioteca Nacional (national book library) and Hemeroteca Nacional (national periodicals library). 

On the south side of the library building O'Gorman gives us views of European life.  In two large circles he presents the European views of the universe.  Ptolemy's theory positions the earth in the center of the universe, contrasting with Copernicus' revolutionary theory where the earth is one of many planets in the solar system, all part of a much larger universe.  

The opposite side of the library building portrays the Aztec view, with the island of Mexico-Tenochtitlan as the center of the universe, connected by canals to the rest of its known world. 

Each side of the library building is a perfect rectangle.  A cardboard box could have been the maquette for its design.  It has become the emblematic building on the university campus, photographed in every Spanish language textbook you've ever had.  

When proud Siqueiros -- upset over being eclipsed by young upstart Juan O'Gorman – was asked what he thought of the library building, he replied "Juanito has given us a "gringa vestida de China Poblana,"”  He implied it could have been a building taken from Manhattan and just dressed up Mexican -- as the China Poblana.  (The China Poblana wasn't Chinese at all, but likely a captive slave brought from India as a child, who, because of her intellect and beauty, became a sensation in Puebla during the viceroyalty period.)

Across Insurgentes Avenue lies the university stadium.  Its stone mosaic is Diego Rivera's rendition of the university shield flanked by athletes.  Under it all is Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent.  The stadium was refurbished for the 1968 Olympic games and a dish for the Olympic flame was added above Rivera's mosaic.  The shallow chromed dish always makes me think of another artist; James Metcalf.  

Born in New York, Metcalf died earlier this year in Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacan.  As a sculptor and metallurgist his search of ancient techniques led him from Paris to Mexico where he found them in Santa Clara.  Craftsmen there were using a pre-hispanic design of bellows and technique for shaping copper ingots heated in charcoal fires to produce the copper kettles used throughout Mexico known as "cazos de Don Vasco".  

Shortly after the conquest Vasco de Quiroga allowed copper production to continue in Santa Clara, but insisted it be to produce a Spanish designed kettle.  By applying ancient techniques to produce modern design, Metcalf put Santa Clara del Cobre "on the map" of artistic metallurgic production and was commissioned to make a hand-hammered copper bowl for the flame in Olympic stadium.   

Hopefully you’ll be on the UNAM campus someday soon.  Enjoy seeing these very different works by three of Mexico’s great muralists.