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.

Economics of street vendors

While stuck in traffic, I watch the “vendedores ambulantes” weave their way through the cars and trucks. My mind frequently flashes back to my college accounting professor. He taught me terms like FIFO, LIFO, overhead costs, and value added. At the time I had decided to file all that information in my brain’s category of “when is this going to be of any use to me?” Yet right in front of me I see those economic terms played out in real life.

“Vendedores ambulantes” are vendors who set up a stall at the beginning of every workday and take it down at night. They pack up all the merchandise and store it for the night in some other location, frequently in a nearby parking lot. Some vendedores ambulantes staff a stall while others look like walking display counters.

They exemplify low overhead. They don’t pay for a building and all the intendant costs in order to make profit even if they sell a meager amount.

My favorite low-overhead sellers are the silver jewelry vendors at Xochimilco. They work their way up and down the canals through the “floating gardens”, but not by paddling their own boats. They skillfully step from boat to boat, timing their movements to show their wares to the boat’s passengers and then make a graceful exit onto another passing boat. Essentially they are walking on water.

Most vendors buy their inventory wholesale and then simply sell them at higher retail prices. But some have figured out how to add value to what they sell. A good example are the Castro brothers at Teotihuacan who sell postcards.

Postcards? You might have thought they went the way of travelers’ checks and public telephones, but the Castros do a brisk business selling postcards of the pyramids – 10 cards to a packet. Their father, the late Paciano Castro, came up with one of the most marvelous marketing schemes I’ve ever seen. Buying postcards from him became a history lesson.

During the viceroyalty period cochineal dye was the second (after silver) most important source of wealth for Spain from Mexico. Paciano Castro would demonstrate where the dye came from by smashing cochineal insect eggs infesting a flat leaf cactus paddle. He then would rub the bright red die on an envelope containing 10 postcards. Then he would take sap from the cactus and use that to seal the dye on the paper.

Visitors wanting a souvenir of cochineal buy a packet of postcards from one of the Castro brothers. The Castro sons have ratcheted up the value added by selling the envelope inside a bag made from century plant fiber.

Managing the amount of inventory is key for vendors. I remember learning about two strategies for moving inventory in that same college class—LIFO (Last in First Out) and FIFO (First in First Out). Those are helpful concepts when waiting in line too. While waiting in line in a bank or government office you definitely want to be FIFO. In these queues I move quickly to get to the head of the line.

However there are some queues that are best to think of as LIFO – such as when boarding the shuttle bus from the airport terminal to the car rental depot. It’s best to be the last one to board those shuttles to be first on line at the car rental counter.

Sometimes businesses want to hold no inventory. Just-in-time production is the catch-phrase. The parts arrive at the assembly plant just as they are needed. It takes skillful coordination or an assembly line can come to a halt for lack of a part. Today’s package express companies with guaranteed delivery times are an essential part of this manufacturing concept.

But you don’t need a big assembly plant to take advantage of just-in-time inventory. I found it on the beach at Chachalacas, Veracruz.

Far from town, close to the hill-sized sand dunes, with a spectacular view of the Gulf of Mexico, was a six-table restaurant with an extensive menu. The structure over the tables and the adjacent kitchen were all made with palm fronds—low overhead.

I figured out the inventory system when a member of my party asked for an uncommon soft drink. The grandmother first said it wasn’t available and then corrected herself. Out of the corner of my eye I’d seen a young man who I thought was a customer nod affirmatively. When our orders for fish and soft drinks had been placed the “customer” got up, walked around behind the kitchen and departed on a motorcycle. From the kitchen came chips and salsa, and before they were finished I heard the motorcycle returning. Immediately after its arrival, the soft drinks came from the kitchen. Soon I could hear fish sizzling on the grill.No inventory. No waste. Everything just in time.

The best coffee in Veracruz

There are plenty of things to see and do in Veracruz, but a trip to the port of Veracruz isn’t complete without having coffee at La Parroquia.

Visitors of all nationalities, presidents and heads of state make sure that La Parroquia is on their itinerary. Even in his haste to leave Mexico to go into exile in 1911, deposed-President Porfirio Díaz had time for coffee at La Parroquia before boarding his ship to France.

The original La Parroquia was located in one of the portales (porticoes) facing the small city plaza.
The café opened in 1808, taking its name from the building across the street — the parish church. As protection against pirates, Veracruz was a walled city and space was at a premium. The church with its bell tower and the government building with a lookout tower took up two sides of the plaza. Shops and businesses occupied the other two.

The café and its offspring have been owned and operated by a succession of Spanish immigrants for whom Veracruz was their port of entry to Mexico. One who made a lasting stamp on it is Fernando Fernández. On Jan. 12, 1936, as a 14-year-old boy, he disembarked from a steamship at the Veracruz pier. It had been a three-week trip from Santander with a stopover in Havana.

An itinerant photographer took Fernando’s picture wearing his Sunday best as he walked down the gangplank.

Fernando worked his way up in his uncle’s business and eventually bought it. But it turns out that he purchased the business but not the real estate. The day Fernando Fernández lost a lawsuit with his cousins over the real estate his waiters carried the two large, shiny Italian coffeemakers to the new location on the Malecón (sea wall) four blocks away and rechristened it the Gran Café de la Parroquia. The tables, chairs, waiters’ uniforms, even the tiles on the floor are the same as at the original location.

As it has been since the nineteenth century, the favorite type of coffee served is café lechero. The waiter delivers the patron a tall glass on a saucer accompanied with a spoon. The glass is only quarter-filled with thick black coffee.

Protocol calls for the patron to clank on the glass with the spoon to alert the lechero (milkman) to come and fill the glass with steaming-hot milk.

The lechero arrives with both hands occupied — one with a kettle of coffee and the other with a kettle of hot milk. He first asks the patron if the amount of coffee is to her or his satisfaction. If it is, he puts the spout of the milk kettle to the edge of the glass and starts pouring as he lifts the kettle high up above the patron’s head. Just as the frothy milk swells over the top of the glass, he brings the stream of milk back down. It is all done with such skill the dome of milk foam stays put and does not flow down the side of the glass.

At the Gran Café de la Parroquia on the Malecón the two tall espresso coffee makers from Turin, Italy, are where everyone poses to have their picture taken. Last week Fernando’s son Felipe told me “They still have 80 percent of the original parts. They were designed to use alcohol as fuel, we’ve converted them to electricity.”

I asked Felipe about the peculiar payment process that I had noticed on one of my first visits. He told me that was also his father’s innovation. “He streamlined the bottleneck high volume restaurants all share — the payment process. While in Belgium he saw this process and he put it into effect here.”
The way it works is upon leaving the kitchen each waiter puts his tray on a counter in front of the cashier. She totals the sale price of all the dishes and the waiter pays for it, on-the-spot, in cash. After that it is the waiters’ responsibility to collect from their customers. The waiters total up the bill right at the patron’s table and make change from their pocket. There is no waiting for the bill or for one’s change. Quite marvelous.

Felipe Fernández told me that at the beginning of their shift each waiter is given a 1,000-peso fund with which to work. They return it at the end of their workday. I always like streamlining financial transactions and enjoy watching the efficiency with which this one works.

When in Veracruz, make sure to have a frothy café lechero at one of La Parroquias — the Gran Café de la Parroquia on the Malecón, at La Parroquia de Veracruz next door, or at the Gran Café del Portal in the original location. All are run by the extended Fernández family. You’ll see why Porfirio Díaz made it his last stop before departing Mexico.