VI Republicans and Sinners 1767 -- 1853
OSVALDO ZAVALA is a millionaire hacienda and mine owner with airs of a grandee, his ostentatious show of wealth and power making him appear more Spanish than the Spaniards. Still unmarried at twenty-five, Osvaldo travels to Spain to find a bride of "pure blood." He wins the hand of URSOLA DE MONTEMAYOR, daughter of a noble of Seville. Osvaldo's quest is further blessed in arranging a fine match for his sister, GERTRUDIS. His brother-in-law is DON PEDRO RUIZ ESCALONA, Conde de Terremacha, a young fop without a peso to his grand name and overjoyed at the prospect of being a lord among the "savage" Americanos. When Osvaldo is presented to Charles III, he achieves his ancestor Pascual's deepest longing, though has to be content with a knighthood from his sovereign. Don Ozvaldo's fortune is large but not big enough for bestowal of the highest royal favors purchased by other Mexicans. – At the end of the eighteenth century, a hundred millionaires live in Mexico, including the eighteen wealthiest men in the New World. – Still, Osvaldo returns triumphantly to Hacienda Santa Barbara de Cuipopan with Dona Ursola, a formidable spouse with an insatiable appetite for sweetmeats. Osvaldo also maintains splendid homes at Guanajuato and Mexico City, where he spends half the year, a glorious round for a knight of the ancient order of Santiago, who has little cause to heed the great currents moving against the old regime. DOMINGO ZAVALA , two years younger than his brother, is a rough diamond who runs La Esperanza , northern jewel of the Zavala empire. The family's cattle ranches and sheep farms now cover two million acres in Chihuahua, Coahuila and New Mexico. Primitive by comparison with Hacienda Santa Barbara, the main house at La Esperanza is built like a fortress and large enough to accommodate a hundred peons and their families in the event of an Indian attack. There are seven Zavala ranches in all, each under a majordomo, all but two being Zavala kin. A rift opens between the brothers over the fate of their uncle, ANDRES ZAVALA , one of six hundred Jesuit priests who face expulsion from New Spain in 1767. Domingo wants Andres to go into hiding at La Esperanza. Osvaldo insists that Andres obey the decree of banishment and avoid a confrontation with royal officials. When Padre Andres leaves Patzcuaro to begin his exile, the Jesuits' Tarascan supporters launch an insurrection that spreads across northern Michoacan into Guanajuato. One of the leaders is POMPOSITO CRUZ , boyhood hunting companion of Domingo. The rebellion is crushed by a new Visitador-General, José de Galvez, later Minister of the Indies, “the most powerful man of his time, some trembling at mere mention of his name, so stern was he with everyone, so formidable to evildoers.” Galvez hangs eighty-five plotters, puts seven hundred in jail and banishes a hundred more. Domingo aids Pomposito in fleeing to La Esperanza, where the Tarascan and his sons serve as vaqueros. These Cruzes become renowned for bravery fighting an enemy they call “Sons of Dogs,” Apache and Comanche raiders who take the place of the Chichimeca of the past. Between 1771 and 1776 in the province of Neuva Vizcaya alone, Indians kill 1,674 people, take 154 women and children captive, plunder 116 haciendas and steal 66,155 cattle. In 1786, Viscount Galvez declares war without mercy by every means possible: “… undermining their health with subtle distribution of fiery liquor, and creating a desire for luxuries that can be obtained only in peaceful intercourse with settlers... Firearms and powder of inferior quality should be sold to them without fear, for it's an error to suppose a gun in the hands of an Indian to be more deadly than the bow and arrows… Different tribes are to be incited in every possible way to a warfare of extermination.” (Viceroy Galvez, Instruccion , 1786) Galvez's Machiavellian policies don't deter the Apache leader, Pedro Antonio, who carries out thirty-seven raids against haciendas on the Rio Conchos, including twelve attacks on Zavala ranches. Pedro's Mexican wife, Larena, rides at his side, as bold and murderous a warrior as her lover. On and off for fourteen years, Domingo, his son, Fernando, captain of a presidio , a frontier fort, and the Cruzes hunt for Pedro Antonio and his band. Only in 1799 do they finally trap and gun down the rebel. When he falls, Larena refuses to surrender, fighting to the death with her two young sons at her side. The La Esperanza Zavalas also enjoy little peace with their neighbors, the Mendezes, with whom they have a long-standing fight over a seasonal tributary that irrigates both properties. The feud is complicated by Fernando's courtship of LIBERATA MENDEZ , a daughter of the hacendado, GUILLERMO MENDEZ . Their marriage in 1800 brings only a temporary respite in the often-bloody strife over water. In 1786, a famine that claims 300,000 lives stalks the colony. This time government officials act against hacienda owners who hoard grain. Don Osvaldo cannot stop an invasion of Santa Barbara by royal soldiers, who force him to open his stores. The assault on Zavala power is witnessed silently by members of the Cruz tribe, among them Pomposito's brother, EUCARIO CRUZ and his son, MODESTO , then six years old. Domingo and Fernando make a cattle drive from La Esperanza to Mexico City, where they witness the full impact of the famine among thousands of destitute mestizos called leperos , lepers, a homeless half-naked horde mostly born of rape or concubinage and numbering 20,000 in a population of 130,000. EL GANCHO, The Hook is the nickname of LUPE ROMERO, a descendant of Martino Romero, who squandered the muleteer Jacinta's fortune. E1 Gancho is leader of a gang at the Mexico City slaughter-house who operate in league with corrupt butchers distributing tainted meat to city markets. They also prey on the stream of country vaqueros who come to the capital. El Gancho's victims frequently end their lives in the abbatoirs, their bodies tossed in with the carnage. When El Gancho assaults a Zavala vaquero, he meets the justice of Domingo and Fernando, who lash him to ribbons. Romero is carried home to his natural wife, CORA , a mestiza from XANTEPEC , a village in the present-day state of Morelos, five miles off the road to Acapulco. The lepero's son, FAUSTINO , lives with his mother and works as a laborer, a boy who unlike The Hook has never picked one pocket or stolen a single peso and never will. Domingo and Fernando see more than the slaughter-houses and leperos of Mexico City, for they've come to the Paris of the New World, no quarter more enchanting than the willow-fringed Paseo by the fountains of Alameda Park. It's denizens would never know that the country was in the grip of famine: Every evening at five, the Paseo is lined with the carriages of wealthy ladies dressed in silks from China, while in front of them passes a procession of cavaliers, whose horses are adorned with bridles and saddles heavy with silver, their silk jackets braided with gold, their breeches decorated with silver buttons. In the evening after a complete change of costume, the ladies and their cavaliers meet at the theater or at a masked ball. (Henry Bamford Parkes) In December 1803, Alexander von Humboldt and his traveling companion, Amie Bonpland, the French botanist, are guests of OSVALDO ZAVALA. Almost three centuries since Pascual Zavala settled here, Hacienda Santa Barbara de Cuipopan has a magnificent lakeside casa grande, private church, granaries, mills, stables and workers' quarters. The nearby Indian village of Cuipopan is a squalid, impoverished hovel where the prolific Cruz family predominates amid abject poverty. The brilliant young German is near the end of a five-year journey through the New World. Humboldt doesn't minimize achievements of the conquistadors and their descendants, but he has a passionate hatred of slavery and serfdom. Traveling with Don Osvaldo's son, ALONSO GARCIA ZAVALA , Humboldt and Bonpland make an adventure-filled trek through Zacatecas to Chihuahua and back to Cuipopan. Deeply shocked by the life of the Indians and mestizos and the gulf between Mexico's races, Humboldt notes in his journal: Mexico is the country of inequality. Nowhere does there exist such a fearful difference in the distribution of fortune, civilization, cultivation of the soil, and population ...How can any great changes take place when the Indians are kept segregated in villages where the whites dare not settle, when the difference of language places an almost insurmountable barrier between them and the Europeans, when they can expect moral and civil improvement only from a man who talks to them of mysteries, dogmas and ceremonies of which they're ignorant. (Alexander von Humboldt) OSVALDO is seventy in September 1810, when Padre Miguel Hidalgo exhorts his congregation at Dolores, northeast of Guanajuato: “Long live our Lady of Guadalupe. Death to bad government! Death to gachupines!” Hidalgo initiates Mexico's struggle for independence, the small band setting out with The Fox, as the padre is called, quickly swelling to eighty thousand and bringing a reign of terror to the countryside. The conservative royalist Osvaldo is already deeply troubled by events in Spain, where Joseph Bonaparte seized the throne of Ferdinand VII. Closer to home, Osvaldo watched a disaster unfold on the island of Hispaniola, as a mass slave revolt engulfed Haiti and Santo Domingo. Spanish, English and French armies in turn failed to restore order, France alone losing forty thousand soldiers to battle and disease. Eighteen months before Hidalgo's “Cry of Dolores,” the Spanish re-took Santo Domingo finding the colony in total ruin, the few remaining settlers reduced to eating roots and wild fruits. Fearing the same outcome, Osvaldo prepares to defend Hacienda Santa Barbara de Cuipopan as the revolutionaries spread across Michoacan. Alonso Garcia Zavala, Osvaldo's son, knows Miguel Hidalgo through his membership of the Literary and Social Club of Queretaro, a venue for clandestine meetings of disaffected creoles. Alonso Garcia's enmity toward the Spanish-born gachupines, “men with spurs,” is intensified by personal rancor toward Don Pedro Ruiz Escalona, his aunt Gertrudis's husband. Alonso Garcia quickly loses his ardor for revolution, as he witnesses the Mexican jacquerie roar through the countryside, burning, looting and murdering. Preventing the plunder of the Zavala hacienda, he breaks with the Hidalgo insurgency but continues plotting against Spanish rule in a Masonic lodge. Though strongly anti-gachupine, Alonso Garcia favors a Mexican assembly governing in the name of King Ferdinand the Beloved. Don Pedro Ruiz, the penniless Count of Terramacha, has prospered with the Zavalas. He lives in a mansion at Guanajuato and owns a silver textile factory and mine. Pedro Ruiz and Gertrudis are at the center of Guanajuato society, which is headed by Don Juan Antonio Riano, one of the most enlightened officers in the colony. Sixty-year old Pedro Ruiz has developed a genuine love for his adopted land and an appreciation of the good fortune showered on him and his family, despised as his class is by men like Alonso Garcia. On September 28, 1810, as Hidalgo's forces take up positions around Guanajuato, Pedro Ruiz and Gertrudis join five hundred refugees in the Alhondiga de Granaditas, The Granary, a massive building in the heart of the city. One of two heroes of the day is Pipila, a miner in the insurgents' ranks; he straps a stone slab on his back to deflect bullets and rushes to torch the granary doors. The second hero is Gertrudis Zavala who sees Diego Ruiz hacked to death, picks up his weapon and leads a desperate fight: In vain those who surrendered begged on their knees for mercy. Some tried to hide in Bin Number 21 with the dead bodies of Intendant Riano and others but they were discovered and mercilessly slaughtered. The building presented the most horrible spectacle. The food stored there was strewn about, naked bodies lay half-buried in maize or in money, everything was spotted with blood. (Lucas Alaman) At Chihuahua in July 1811, the Zavalas of La Esperanza, DOMINGO and his son, FERNANDO, attend the trial and execution of Hidalgo, following the defeat of the rebels and capture of their leaders. Up till now, the men of La Esperanza have stayed out of the fight having long enjoyed their own brand of independence, the great men of the earth whose rule is absolute. The insurgency is revived under Padre Jose Maria Moreles, a muleteer on the “China Road” between Mexico City and Acapulco before entering the priesthood. FAUSTINO ROMERO dates his first meeting with Morelos from the time he was working as a carter in the village of Xantepec. His second encounter with Morelos was at Valladolid in 1797, when the newly-ordained priest confessed his father, LUPE ROMERO, the notorious EL GANCHO, just before he was hoisted upon the hanging hook for banditry. In 1811, forty-six-year-old Faustino and his son DANIEL ROMERO, twenty-five, join Morelos' guerillas in the hills above Acapulco. In November 1812, Faustino is shot at the sacking of Oaxaca. Daniel lives through the four-year Morelos insurgency and rises to the rank of major under rebel general, Vicente Guerrero. This time, Fernando Zavala, a cavalry major, takes the field against the insurgents. The conflict is waged without quarter, prisoners on both sides summarily executed. In 1814, Fernando is serving with a young officer, Agustin de Iturbide, when he's captured at the battle of Valladolid in Michoacan. Iturbide's forces win the day but the victory comes too late to save Major Zavala, who is killed by a rebel firing squad on the retreat. GUSTAVO ESCALON, a son of Diego Ruiz and Gertrudis, also serves with Iturbide, exacting a savage and relentless retribution for the massacre of his parents. At the pueblo of Cuipopan, EUSEBIO CRUZ and his family take no part in the insurgencies. Indians in cities and towns were more likely to join up with the mestizos whose culture they adopted. Rural leaders like Cruz stand aside from the fight between creoles and gachupines, their aristocracy passionately loyal to the Spanish Crown. Eusebio will do nothing to disturb the peace of Don Osvaldo, great knight of Santiago, loyal servant of King Ferdinand. When Morelos is captured and executed in December 1815, the rebellion is largely suppressed, except for sporadic attacks by bands under men like Daniel Romero who follow General Vicente Guerrero. In 1820, Guerrero makes a pact with Agustin Iturbide joining their forces in an Army of the Three Guarantees – of independence, equality between Spaniards and creoles, and supremacy of Catholicism. On September 27, 1821, Iturbide takes Mexico City and finally proclaims the nation's independence. When Iturbide becomes Emperor Agustin I two years later, his accession is further cause for dissension between Alonso Garcia and Gustavo Escalona. The republican Alonso Garcia is active in a conspiracy to overthrow Agustin I and replace his empire with a federal republic. Gustavo believes that three centuries of despotic rule has left the Mexicans unprepared for democracy; a monarchy is needed to preserve Spanish traditions, unite the country and win over the Indian masses. Without centralized rule, Mexico will be weak and factional and powerless against the growing ambition of the United States. On this both men agree, Alonso Garcia seen earlier at a meeting between Secretary of State James Monroe and a delegation sent to Washington by Miguel Hidalgo in 1811. Monroe told the Mexicans that the United States was inclined to give aid to the rebels “provided they saw to it that they got a good constitution based on that of the United States . . . My country will then be willing to admit Mexico into the confederation." Alonso Garcia and his fellow emissary, Gutierrez de Lara, take Monroe's suggestion as an insult and leave the room. When Emperor Agustin is forced to abdicate in 1823, among the men rejoicing with Alonso Garcia is General Antonio Lopez a Santa Anna, the nation's future president. “It's true that I once threw up my cap for liberty,” Santa Anna says later, “but very soon found the folly of it. A hundred years to come my people will still be unfit for liberty.” A decade on and the rivalries between Alonso Garcia and Gustavo Escalona are passed to their sons and daughters. ANTONIO ZAVALA is educated by the Franciscans at Valladolid, Michoacan and considers the priesthood; his liberal, anti-clerical father discourages him and he studies law instead. ANSELMO ESCALONA attends the Valladolid seminary at the same time as Antonio. The Franciscans have often to pull the pair apart, their fisticuffs marking the first blows in a long and bitter battle. Anselmo embraces the church taking holy orders and rising swiftly in the Michoacan hierarchy. At La Esperanza, SATURNINO ZAVALA was still a boy when Morelos executed his father Major Fernando Zavala. Saturnino now heads the Zavala dynasty at Chihuahua. The fortress-like house has evolved into a classic casa de hacienda of the north built of stone and roofed with red tiles, splashes of color in the flower gardens adorning the large open patios. A high wall surrounds the double-storied house, beyond which stands a church with a burying ground, stores and workshops. There are huts for six hundred peons who owe their livelihood to El Supremo , as they respectfully call their patron. El Supremo has an enormous appetite for life. He is a great horseman, hunter and bullfighter, as well as loving husband and father and passionate adulterer. He has numerous bastards with daughters of his cattlemen and shepherds. Twelve years old when he killed his first Commanche, he has lost his right eye and the first joint of his left thumb bitten off by an Indian. Saturnino took compassion on one marauder, an eleven-year-old Comanche captured in 1830, who he comes to treat like a son. LUIZ ZAVALA , as the boy is named stays at La Esperanza for twenty years serving as scout for Saturnino. In his thirtieth year, “Bad Eagle” leaves the hacienda with his protector's blessing going to seek his own people across the Rio Bravo del Norte. In 1836, Saturnino rides on his first campaign against the “rabble of wretched adventurers and outlaws” in Texas. A militia colonel, his company is attached to the cavalry of General Ramirez y Sesma at the Alamo. It's to Saturnino's credit that he stands with officers vehemently opposed to the slaughter of Davy Crockett and six others: Santa Anna ordered Crockett's execution. The officers were outraged and hoped that once the fury of the moment had blown over, the men would be spared. Others who hadn't been present during the battle thrust themselves forward to flatter their commander. With swords in hand, they fell upon the defenseless men just as a tiger leaps upon his prey. I turned away horrified in order not to witness such a barbarous scene. ( Lt. Col. Jose Enrique de la Pena.) In 1838, Antonio Zavala leaves Cuipopan and goes to Europe to study law at the Sorbonne. He lives in the Paris of Louis Phillipe, who has failed to meet the expectations of the French people. Ten attempts on the life of "The Pear," Louis Phillipe's nickname from the cut of his jowls, prompts the draconian September Laws of 1835, driving all opposition underground. Antonio's involvement with the radicals of Paris provides an experience of royal despotism that will profoundly influence Zavala's attitude toward Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph, Prince Imperial and Archduke of Austria, when he comes to claim the crown of Motecuhzoma. Antonio's intrigues are interrupted in 1841, when Saturnino Zavala and his daughter, Natividad, arrive on a grand tour of Europe. Saturnino comes directly from Spain where he roamed Andalusia in the midst of a rebellion, avoiding the bullets to round up prize bulls for the ring at La Esperanza. The brilliant and beautiful “Nati” is the toast of Paris society that summer, an exotic gem feted by Honore de Balzac at Les Jardies, where the lovesick writer waits impatiently for a summons to St. Petersburg and his beloved Madame Hanka. In 1842, when Antonio leaves Europe, he sails to America planning a short visit to the United States. Instead, he stays seven months at Boston, where he falls desperately in love with Emily Ann Cole. Emily belongs to a family of Beacon Hill Brahmins, her father Caleb Cole making his fortune in the Asian opium trade before building textile mills at Lowell. Antonio faces frustration and anger when his love for Emily meets the violent opposition of Caleb Cole, a rabid anti-Papist who scorns "half-civilized Mexicans,” even a brilliant young man with honors from the Sorbonne. It breaks Antonio's heart when he turns his back on cold roast Boston and leaves for Mexico. Even as the ship carrying him home docks at Vera Cruz, he gets news that Emily Ann is engaged to a Bostonian, a lawyer like himself but of the right blood and breeding for proper Brahmin society.
In 1846, Saturnino Zavala takes the field against los gringos for the second time. He fights at Monterrey and Buena Vista, where he's wounded. He makes it back to Chihuahua which is occupied by Alex Doniphan's Missourians, the city treated to the spectacle of naked invaders bathing in the public fountains, chopping down trees in the plaza, and committing more serious outrages against residents. The occupation lasts fifty-nine days before the Missourians are withdrawn to Saltillo, "as rough and ready and ragged as ever." Saturnino's son, RAMON ZAVALA, is a cadet at the Mexican Military College at Chapultepec in Mexico City. After a twelve-hour artillery barrage on September 12, 1847, the college is stormed and taken the following day. Ramon is bayoneted and left for dead but survives, one of the immortal Niños Heroes , the Young Heroes. At Cuipopan, Antonio takes charge of the hacienda upon the death of Alonso Garcia. Almost forty and still single, Antonio becomes infatuated with fifteen-year-old SERILDA CRUZ from the pueblo of Cuipopan. His interest spurs an effort to learn the Tarascan language and know more about a people with whom the Zavalas have lived as neighbors for three centuries. When Antonio finds that Serilda's family still hold ancient Tarascan ceremonies worshipping idols of their old religion, he is tolerant and accepting. Not so, his childhood enemy Bishop Anselmo Escalona who chooses Cuipopan as site for a new crusade to reduce the Indians to the true Faith. Bishop Anselmo rouses the pueblo to a religious frenzy that almost ends with the death of Serilda, when she is pointed out as a heretic by a jealous sister. Antonio intervenes to save the girl, their relationship deepens and they become lovers. When Antonio asks Serilda to be his wife, Bishop Anselmo vehemently refuses to personally bless their union. In 1852, Antonio and Anselmo are involved in a new clash when the curate of Cuipopan refuses to bury a peon whose widow can't pay the sacramental fee. The fights between the pair foreshadow the strife between Church and State that bedevils Mexico for decades. A year later in the last presidency of Santa Anna, Antonio is arrested on trumped-up charges of plotting an insurrection, an accusation leveled by Bishop Anselmo. Held for six months in the rotten dungeons of San Juan de Ulúa, Antonio is banished from Mexico. He goes to New Orleans, where he shares his exile with a fellow Michoacan, Melchor Ocampo, and a Zapotec Indian, Benito Juarez. Hacienda Santa Barbara de Cuipopan is seized for default of a Church loan. Bishop Anselmo Escalona triumphantly occupies the patriarchal seat of the Zavalas. He wastes no time in ordering Serilda Cruz Zavala, pregnant with Antonio's firstborn, expelled from the casa grande. The witch is cast out and forced to walk miles back to her family's house in the pueblo. VII The Great Misadventure1855 - 1875
Antonio Zavala's exile ends in 1855, when a coup ousts Santa Anna from the presidency. Antonio is reunited with Serilda and sees his son EPITACIO ZAVALA for the first time. They make their home at Valladolid, capital of Michoacan, where the recovery of hacienda Santa Barbara de Cuipopan becomes a personal crusade. Bishop Anselmo Escalona rises to the battle. When Antonio pushes for “confiscation” of Santa Barbara, his cousin brands him as an anticlerical Reformist and threatens him with excommunication. Zavala can have no more powerful ally than his fellow exile, Benito Juarez, who is Minister of Justice in the new government. The Zapotec was a shepherd boy of twelve when he walked forty miles from his village of San Pablo Guelatao to the capital at Oaxaca, finding work with a Franciscan lay brother and doing chores in return for his tuition. He worked his way through law school and entered politics, rising to governor of Oaxaca before he clashed with Santa Anna and was banished. A dark, small man, quiet and self-possessed, he is known affectionately as "the little Indian." As Minister of Justice, Juarez strikes at two pillars of the conservative state: Church and Army. He sponsors laws abolishing ecclesiastical courts and restricting ecclesiastical estates to churches, convents and essential buildings. One third of the entire country was owned by various church bodies. Hacienda Santa Barbara is officially confiscated, but to gain possession Antonio has to bid at a government auction. He seeks financial help from the Zavalas of La Esperanza, taking Serilda with him on his trip north. Saturnino Zavala is willing to aid his cousin in restoring the ancestral home, even though he rejects Antonio's “liberal madness” and “Mohammedism,” as he calls it. El Supremo shares a common misunderstanding of the anticlerical motives of Juarez, a devoutly religious man. Saturnino's son, Ramon, the Young Hero, is twenty-seven and married to ISABEL ZAVALA . The couple spent their honeymoon in Paris, where they dined with Empress Eugenie. They were introduced to the court by Mexican aristocrats seeking to interest the Empress and Napoleon in a restoration of their ancien regime. Antonio's visit to La Esperanza is clouded by prejudice against Serilda by Ramon and his wife, who consider her lacking in “pure blood” and refinements denied by nature to “savages.” Antonio's bitter experience in Boston exacerbates his anger at their treatment of Serilda. By contrast, Natividad Zavala is kind and tolerant and prevents a blow-up between the cousins, doing all she can to make Serilda feel at home. Nati is a widow whose husband was killed by bandits in Sonora two years earlier. Her daughter Carmen is fourteen, as charming and lovely as her mother when she enchanted Balzac in Paris. Backed by Saturnino, Antonio and Serilda reoccupy hacienda Santa Barbara, but their happiness is short-lived: Juarez's Mexico is plunged into a cataclysmic civil war that embroils every faction and race and rages from 1857 to 1860. For the first time, the two branches of the Zavala family are on opposite sides. The liberal Antonio supports Juarez though has no stomach for battle. Ramon equips himself with a tailored French-style uniform and enthusiastically sets out to shoot “heretics.” He rides with General Leonardo Marquez, El Tigre , notorious for butchering wounded soldiers captured at Mexico City and for good measure, sending eight medics attending them to face a fusillade. Juarez's men are not above the madness. SEBASTIAN CRUZ , a brother of Serilda, endured persecution by Bishop Anselmo who suspected him of being a curandero , which indeed he was. The medicine man's remedies in the ranks of General Jesus Gonzalez Ortega are extreme: When General Jesus Ortega expelled the priests from the Apostolic College in Zacatecas, a protesting multitude was met with gunfire. Many more were hanged from trees in the plaza. To celebrate this event, Jesus Ortega gave a bullfight. He dressed the bulls and horses to represent the most venerated popes. Bullfighters appeared as respected bishops and Conservative generals to the huge delight of the rabble. (Francis Clement Kelly) Bishop Anselmo flees Mexico and joins other refugees in Rome. The Vatican breaks relations with the Mexican government. – They will not be restored until 1990. – Bishop Anselmo tours Europe preaching a new Reconquista to save Mexico from an enemy worse than the Moors. On December 22, 1860, the guns fall silent after the defeat of a Conservative army under the young creole general, Miramon. The following March, Juarez is elected president of a bankrupt nation that owes millions to European creditors. France, Spain and England send their gunboats to the Gulf of Mexico to seize the debtor's customs houses. Spain and England withdrew from the expedition when it becomes clear that Louis Napoleon Bonaparte has more in mind than an old debt. The defeat of a French army at Puebla on Cinco de Mayo in 1862 is a glorious but brief respite. Napoleon III responds with thirty thousand battle-hardened Crimea veterans who reduce Puebla to rubble and drive Juarez out of Mexico City. The royal road is open for Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph of Habsburg and Marie Charlotte Amelie Leopoldina to fulfill Napoleon's dream of an empire in the New World. In 1863, the French consolidate their grip prior to Maximilian's arrival and invade Michoacan. Antonio Zavala is forced to flee north and joins Juarez in the mountains of Chihuahua. He later crosses the border to San Antonio and travels to Washington, New York and Boston seeking support for the republicans. At Boston, he meets his old love, Emily Ann Cole, now a Cabot, who spearheads a Committee of Brahmin ladies for Benito Juarez! The “Great Misadventure” of the tall, blonde prince, another mystical Quetzalcoatl, and his ambitious princess doomed to madness begins with a six-month fiesta of seventy luncheons, twenty state banquets, sixteen balls, twelve receptions and the merry twinkling of glasses with one hundred thousand dollars poured out on wines alone. Saturnino Zavala makes a fatal miscalculation in throwing his support behind Maximilian. Admitted to Maximilian's inner circle on a Council of Notables, Saturnino's most conspicuous role is his opposition to the German priest-adventurer, Agustin Fischer. Formerly a Lutheran notary's clerk in Texas, a gold prospector in California, a convert to Catholicism at San Francisco, a Jesuit in Mexico, a secretary to the bishop of Durango fired because of bad morals, Fischer rises from court chaplain to Maximilian's private secretary, the Rasputin of Chapultepec. Saturnino fights in vain to stop Maximilian's assenting to a notorious decree encouraged by Fischer that orders armed republicans to be tried and executed within twenty-four hours of capture. Ramon Zavala has no qualms about shooting Juaristas. Promoted to colonel by El Tigre , General Marquez sends Ramon on a secret mission to the U.S. Confederacy aimed at settling Confederate veterans in Coahuila. They are to serve as a buffer against a possible U.S. invasion in support of Juarez. The Zavala women, Ramon's wife, Isabel, Natividad and Carmen quit dusty Chihuahua for the gilded splendor of the halls of Chapultepec. They enjoy a brilliant moment at the center of the royal fantasy, where the sons of Paris and Vienna waltz and dream. Gorgeous Carmen is a frequent guest at La Borda Quinta in Cuernavaca invited by the emperor himself. Carmen becomes one of Maximilian's lovers. The barren Empress Carlotta spends hours on her knees before the Virgin of Guadalupe identified by the Indians as a Goddess of Fertility. Carlotta adopts more earthly measures in steering Carmen away from “Max'l” and into the arms of a down-at-the-heels Austrian baron, Fritzi von Kallenbach. They are married in late 1865, a disastrous union cut short by Fritzi's cowardly flight from Mexico on the eve of Maximilian's defeat. Alone at Cuipopan, Serilda is redoubtable in managing the hacienda and preventing its plunder by an imperial garrison quartered five miles from Santa Barbara, a mixed troop of adventurers commanded by a Cossack. Sebastian Cruz makes a friend of the Cossack, for whom he procures a steady supply of Cuipopan maidens. The Cossack has a deep influence on the medicine man making him change allegiance and come to hold a messianic view of “Maximilian-Quetzalcoatl.” In the final days, Sebastian leads forty Indians from Cuipopan who join the Cossack and his men in the defense of Queretaro. Sebastian's entire outfit is wiped out by a Juarista squad led by Porfirio Diaz, a young brigade commander who was one of the victors against the French at Puebla in 1862. With Diaz at Puebla that May was a thirteen-year-old drummer boy, ROBERTO ROMERO , from the Xantepec Romeros of Lupe, The Hook. Since then, Corporal Romero has been with Diaz waging a guerilla war against the enemy in Oaxaca. Antonio Zavala returns to Mexico from the U.S. in 1866 and is present for the final scenes at the Hill of Bells outside Queretaro, where Maximilian and his generals, Miramon and Mejia face a firing squad. Two hundred women beg for Juarez's mercy: I am grieved, Madame, to see you thus on your knees but if all the kings and queens of Europe were in your place, I could not spare that life. It is not I who take it, it is the people and the law. (Princess Felix Salm-Salm) Ramon Zavala flees to the empire of Brazil, staying in Rio de Janeiro until President Juarez declares an amnesty in 1870. Five years earlier, the northern Zavalas had already begun to pay the price of collaboration with Maximilian, when the Juarez government-in-exile ordered the confiscation of properties belonging to the Imperialists. One by one, Zavala haciendas were seized and sold to deserving Liberals, among them members of the Mendez family with whom the Zavalas have been feuding for a century. Ramon returns to Chihuahua city where he finds seventy-year-old Saturnino, Nati and Carmen living in genteel poverty in their town mansion. Taking advantage of a law substituting fines instead of outright confiscation, Ramon begins to recoup his patrimony. He is never more ruthless or avaricious, characteristics that will be inherited in full measure by his sons, SANTIAGO and MAGDALENO. By 1880, Ramon has put his "royal mistake" behind him. He is a convert of a new religion of Positivism. In this year, the Zavalas recover hacienda La Esperanza, a restitution made possible by the mysterious assassination of Gregorio Mendez and his sons by unknown bandits
VIII La Revolución 1885 - 1920
EPITACIO ZAVALA is one of the young Mexicans called cientificos , disciples of Comtean positivism with its credo of Progress and Order regulated by an aristocratic elite. Educated in Mexico, France and the United States, where he went to Harvard, the thirty-one-year-old light-skinned mulatto has little patience or sympathy for his mother's people, “a lazy, shiftless burden on society.” Epitacio heeds none of the warnings in an unpublished manuscript written by Antonio Zavala, which he found five years after his father's death. Withdrawing to the hacienda, Antonio studied the Tarascans and their past, intrigued by Bishop's Vasco Quiroga's attempt to establish a Utopia at Cuipopan. Antonio concludes that the present generation of Tarascans are worse off than their ancestors in the sixteenth century, a plight shared by Mexico's six million Indians, two-thirds of the population. Ninety-six percent of rural families are landless, their life expectancy thirty years. Epitacio's views reflect the racism of the man he most admires: Porfirio Diaz, president of Mexico for twenty-seven years from 1884. The dictator oversees a spectacular boom that wipes out the nation's debt, turns four hundred miles of railroads into fifteen thousand, quadruples gold and silver output. The bonanza is at the expense of the Mexican masses for whom the positivists' plan is simple: Pan, o palo, Bread or the stick. Diaz's enemies find a label from the past for the tyrant: Porfiriopoxtli. His admirers call him Don Perpetuo, few more adulatory than Elihu Root, U.S. secretary of state: If I were a poet, I would write poetic eulogies. If I were a musician, I would compose triumphal marches. If I were a Mexican, I should feel that the steadfast loyalty of a lifetime couldn't be too much in return for the blessings that President Diaz has brought to my country. I look to Porfirio Diaz, the president of Mexico, as one of the great men to be held up for the hero worship of mankind. Events at Cuipopan involving NICOLAS CRUZ and his son, JOSE JAVIER CRUZ, show why Antonio Zavala became despondent about the future of Mexico. The Tarascans first occupied Cuipopan with no concept of ownership; the place was then "granted" to them by the Spaniards; later encroached upon by the Church and the Zavalas; then the communal ejido was "freed" by the Reform Laws and passed back to its ancient occupants. In 1898, Cuipopan's common land is "denounced" because the Indians lack proof of title. This action is part of the most fantastic land grab in history. Diaz-backed surveyors are personally entitled to one third of all property denounced as “idle.” The remaining two-thirds, they can buy at bargain prices. Within five years, sixty-eight million acres or one fifth of Mexico's territory falls into the hands of speculators. Antonio's widow, SERILDA CRUZ ZAVALA , the mother of Epitacio and aunt of Nicolas, is proud of her Tarascan roots. In her seventies, she spearheads the community's land battle in the courts at Valladolid. Epitacio is mortified seeing his mother lead her barefoot tribe to the palace of justice, but Serilda and Nicholas lose their bitter court struggle and the Indians' property rights are extinguished. Serilda refuses to give up the fight and takes a deputation to the governor of Michoacan. It seems that their appeal will succeed, when henchman of the land survey company instigate a disturbance at Cuipopan that's quickly magnified into a “rebellion.” Nicolas Cruz is arrested, found guilty of subversion and sentenced to five years in the Valley of the Nation. Fifteen thousand inmates perish annually at this penal colony in Oaxaca. With the Tarascans' final appeal lost, Epitacio makes the winning bid when the communal lands are sold. The property becomes part of hacienda Santa Barbara de Cuipopan. Approaching eighty, Serilda still champions the interests of Cuipopan's Indians, more than half employed by the nine thousand acre hacienda. Many peons are in perpetual debt to the tienda de raya , the hacienda store, with obligations inherited from their parents. Unconcerned, Epitacio advances his positive remedies for uplifting his primitive cousins: hard work, fines for tardiness, wages in the form of metal discs redeemable only at the tienda de raya. Nicolas Cruz returns from the Valley of the Nation, with a deep hatred for his cousin and other “criollos,” a loathing passed on to his son, Jose Javier Cruz.
At La Esperanza, Ramon Zavala has recouped the family's losses during the Empire. The clan has ten haciendas of two million acres total, La Esperanza the largest with four hundred thousand acres and eight hundred peons. The family owns a hundred thousand cattle, sixty thousand sheep, five thousand horses and a thousand mules. They have textile mills, mines, railroads, a telephone company, sugar mills and a meat packing plant. Don Ramon's landholdings alone are valued at $15 million. Unlike old Saturnino who twice took up arms against los gringos , Ramon is a partner in a Guggenheim silver mine and chief investor in an oil exploration company owned by the Englishman, Weetman Pearson. As jefe politico , political boss of Chihuahua, Ramon spends most of the year in the state capital leaving La Esperanza in control of OTON QUINTERO, a Spanish-born supervisor detested by every Mexican underling. Quintero's arch-rival is ALEJANDRO CRUZ, head vaquero, a descendant of Pomposito Cruz who fled here from Cuipopan in the eighteenth century. Alejandro's brilliant horsemanship is a special delight to Ramon, El Patron betting huge sums on Alejandro at rodeo contests and winning more money than his faithful cowboy can earn in a dozen lifetimes. Once every year, Don Ramon's family and a swarm of hangers-on pack an entire train that steams down from Chihuahua City to the siding at La Esperanza. The five-day fiesta celebrates the jefe's birthday. El Patron is the guest of honor but the days are owned by eleven other Zavalas, Ramon's rambunctious grandsons, his favorite being Santiago's son, VICENTE ERNESTO. A sturdy, handsome boy with curly brown hair and eyes and that ancient Zavala lip with its deep groove, Vicente rides beautifully, struts around the patios in his charro costume, recites French poems in the hacienda's enormous ballroom. The boy and his siblings are schooled by a French governess, Madame Elisabeth Corbineau, and two assistants. The Empire is dead but Francophile Mexico stands triumphant, society's upper echelons celebrating Bastille Day with more fervor than their nation's own Independence Day. Vicente Ernesto spends the summer months at La Esperanza, where he rides with the Cruz "gang," the sons of Alejandro. His compadre PRIMO CRUZ is two years older, a devil in the eyes of Madame Corbineau struggling to make a gentleman of Monsieur Zavala. Ramon sympathizes with the governess but won't stop his grandson running wild in the arroyos. “My little Apache,” El Patron calls him fondly, without a clue about the strange twists ahead in the life of Vicente Ernesto Zavala.
No man is more devoted to Dom Perpetuo than ROBERTO ROMERO, who was personally commended by Diaz at Puebla and in the overthrow of Maximilian. At Xantepec, Oaxaca, Roberto and his son, TOMAS ROMERO serve in the rurales , their duty to enforce the pax porfiriano. Proud of bandit ancestor Lupe the Hook, father and son are notorious for the number of “brigands” shot dead while trying to flee their custody. They're only following Diaz's personal recommendation for dealing with subversives: Matelos en caliente! Kill them on the spot! Roberto's unit serves in a dirty war against the Yaqui Indians of Sonora. The Yaquis refuse to sell their fertile lands to creole planters who provoke a rebellion under Cajeme, a Yaqui who fought for Juarez. The Indians defeat every army sent against them until they're starved into submission. Cajeme is shot and the uprising ended. Roberto escorts the first batch of Yaqui prisoners transported to the Yucatan henequen plantations, where they are sold for seventy-five pesos a head, despite the abolition of slavery half a century earlier. Back in Oaxaca, the Romeros join the land rush buying several "denounced" Indian properties for a pittance. In 1910, GUADALUPE ROMERO, Roberto's second-born, attempts to seize an "idle" forest belonging to a small pueblo. The seizure is blocked by an armed delegation led by a short, wiry man with hypnotic eyes. – Emiliano Zapata warns Senor Guadalupe to keep away from his neighbors' trees or face the consequences.
Santiago Zavala becomes hacendado of La Esperanza in 1910, following Ramon's death that September amid the spectacular centennial celebrations of Mexican independence. More money is lavished on the extravaganza than the entire education budget. In November, the first shots are fired and the revolution takes flame in the north under Pancho Villa and Pascual Orozco. In the south, Emiliano Zapata's peasants capture Cuatla and Cuernavaca. On May 25, 1911, six months later, the eternal rule of Porfirio Diaz, Don Perpetuo, ends forever. To save La Esperanza, Santiago makes a perilous double-deal with Villa and Victoriana Huerta at a terrible price: The machinations cost the life of Santiago's brother, Magdaleno, betrayed by Oton Quintero, the hacienda's Spanish born majordomo. Subsequently, Colonel Quintero serves with Victoriano Huerta and his successor, Carranza; Quintero is the last of the gachupines, overbearing and brutal through seven years of relentless conflict, only succumbing in the flu epidemic of 1918. Unlike Quintero, the vaquero Alejandro Cruz is unswervingly loyal to the Zavalas, partly personal, partly deeply-rooted Indian conservatism. His son, Primo, twenty-three on the eve of the revolution, is imbued with a hodge-podge of ideas about freedom and a personal rancor toward his father's nemesis, Quintero. Primo joins the cavalry of Pancho Villa in whose ranks he is reunited with his boyhood friend, the little jefe, Senor Vicente Ernesto. Vicente, a medical student at the University of Guadalajara, is drawn into the revolutionary vortex serving under Villa's private physician, Raschbaum. One day, Vicente is called away from the medical train to attend a wounded rebel lying in a farmhouse. When he examines the unconscious soldier, he finds that his patient is a woman: Dominica Browne – “Minica” – the daughter of Washington Browne, a confederate veteran from Mississippi who joined Juarez's army and settled in Mexico after Maximilian's defeat. A handsome young woman, her blue eyes filled with a mystic radiance, Minica is a soldadera , one of thousands of woman serving the revolution at the side of their companeros. – For thirty-nine months, Minica and Vicente share passion and hope and danger, their love both glorious and tragic amid the fiesta of bullets. Vicente's disgust at Villa's atrocities including the massacre of two hundred innocent Chinese at Torreon makes him quit the Division of the North. He joins Alvaro Obregón and takes part in the battle of Celaya Fields in April 1915. Villa attacks with twenty-five thousand men, hurling his best cavalry headlong at barbed wire entanglements where four thousand men perish. At Cuipopan, the Tarascan Nicolas Cruz shelters a man who spent five years with him in the notorious Valley of the Nation, the death camp for foes of Porfiriopoxtli. OCTAVIANO ALVARADO is a Zapata agent carrying the message of “Liberty and Land” and a call to free hacienda Santa Barbara de Cuipopan. The uprising fails when Nicolas cannot bring himself to kill Epitacio Zavala, held back by a powerful presence in the casa grande: the memory of Dona Serilda always there to protect the weak and helpless. Nicolas and his son, Jose Javier, leave Cuipopan and follow Alvarado to the mountains of Morelos where they join Emiliano Zapata's army. In 1918, General Nicolas Cruz is killed in the last major campaign of the revolution as the Carranza government sends thousands of troops against the Zapatistas. The Romeros of Xantepec, Roberto and his son, Tomas, change sides several times, first shifting allegiance from Porfirio Diaz to Francesco Madero, then to Victoriano Huerta during the Ten Tragic Days at Mexico City in February 1913. The alcoholic Huerta knowingly sends a corps of rurales on a suicidal assault against the machine-guns of his “enemies.” The latter are in reality fellow-plotters in a bloody exhibition to convince Madero that Huerta is doing his best for him. Robert Romero is killed in the charge. Tomas deserts Huerta's army to join Zapata. In April 1919, Tomas is in Zapata's personal escort, when the revolutionary leader is lured to a hacienda by the promise of a government division's defection. A thousand soldiers lie in ambush to assassinate Zapata, Tomas dying beside his hero. These ideas represent a sampling of plot lines that carry the Zavala, Cruz and Romero men and women thorough the violence, contradictions, hypocrisy, pathos, humor, life and blood of La Revolución.
IX. Plaza of the Three Cultures 1921 - 1968
The 1920s see VICENTE ERNESTO ZAVALA in a new battle for the minds of a generation of young Mexicans brutalized by a decade of civil war. He works in the Ministry of Education serving as peacemaker with the hydra-headed Syndicate of Revolutionary Painters, Sculptors and Engravers. Vicente's days and nights are plagued by violent outbreaks among the geniuses of Mexico's Renaissance, among critics raging against “apocalyptic monsters,” and well-to-do Catholic fathers storming the artists' seraglios to save their daughters from the devils. Foremost among the artists is Diego Rivera, "The Mexican of Montparnasse," who returns to his birthplace in 1921 after a voluntary exile of fourteen years. A bulky, genial man with protuberant, frog-like eyes, over six feet tall and three hundred pounds, everything about thirty-four-year-old Rivera seems heavy, slow-moving and cumbersome, except his vivid intelligence and alert prehensile senses. And his sensitive hands, unexpectedly small and tapering off, despite their pudginess, into slender fingers. Diego is at the railing as the ship bringing him back from Europe steams into Vera Cruz harbor. He watches dockworkers in sun-bleached white pajamas catch the ship's mooring lines. It's as if he's seeing the sharp Mexica-Aztec profiles for the first time, coppery brown in the warm, humid light, so unlike pallid visages of Europe. An antiquated carriage rolls up to a customs shed, a lone occupant sitting back in the shadows. A great man of the earth humbled by the Revolution? Diego's gaze shifts to peons, tumplines around their foreheads, hefting mighty loads. He senses a new dignity among proud, strong-limbed workers, no longer mere beasts of burden! Diego travels the route taken by Cortés from Vera Cruz to Mexico City, the contrasts startling as the train climbs eight thousand feet from the steamy tropics to terra fria . Bursts of color flash between foliage-laden trees; stony gray earth bristles with cacti; deep fecund valleys lie black in the shadows of the flooding sun. In the eyes of the artist, the inexpressible beauty of a rich and severe, wretched and exuberant land. I was reborn into a new world. All the colors I saw seemed sublime, clearer, richer, better, more filled with light, the black tones with a depth never attained in Europe. I saw a potential masterpiece in each and everything – the masses of people, the marketplaces, the fiestas, the battalions on the march, the laborers in the workshops and fields – in each splendid face, in each luminous child. Vicente Zavala's initial contact with Diego Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros comes when they paint murals on the walls of the National Preparatory School in Mexico City. Diego's nudes are decried as an affront to the school's Jesuit founders. Siqueiros's angels are “demons.” Orozco's beardless Christ setting his own cross on fire is the last straw. The Preparatoria students attack the heretics spitting on them and scrawling graffiti on the walls. The artists strap revolvers to their hips, throw up barricades and get on with their work. When a barrage of stones and water bombs flies against them, they put down their palettes and fire a round of warning shots. Vicente is instrumental in Diego's employment on frescoes in the Ministry of Education's three-story high patio. Diego's Court of Fiestas celebrates Mexico's ancient deities and the secular religion of the class struggle. Implicit is a message that Mexicans can find grace without the Church. Modernist and intellectual, Vicente still faces a profound personal conflict wrestling with old and new beliefs, a struggle in which he isn't alone as ancient rivalries between the Mexican Church and State reach boiling point. Vicente's own nephew TORIBIO ZAVALA, is a priest in northern Michoacan. One day, Diego's work on the Court of Fiestas is interrupted by a girl of eighteen, with thick dark eyebrows “like the wings of a blackbird, their black arches framing two extraordinary black eyes.” She asks him to look at three of her paintings. Diego is impressed by touches of a true artist. She asks one more favor. “I've done other paintings I'd like you to see?” Could he come her place the following Sunday? “I live in Coyoacán, Avenida Londres, 126. My name is Frida Kahlo.” Vicente moves warily between Frida and Lupe Marin, Diego's estranged wife, and other lovers of the “Frog Prince.” Their circle includes RITA MATTOS-O'SHEA, the daughter of an Irishwoman in the suite of Emperor Maximilian. Rita, a vivacious Paris-educated sculptor, sweeps Vicente off his feet and toward a new minefield sown by her father, General GREGORIO MATTOS-O'SHEA, arch-enemy of the Frog Prince and his “Red” Court. The Church-State strife explodes when the Archbishop of Mexico declares a strike in 1926. No open services are held in the country for the first time since the Conquest. The government responds with additional curbs on the clergy. With a battle cry of Viva Cristo Rey! , Long Live Christ the King!, Catholic guerrillas launch a violent rebellion. Vicente, his nephew Padre Toribio and General Mattos-O'Shea are caught up in the insurgency. Vicente is on a Mexico City-Guadalajara train dynamited by Cristeros in April 1927 with the loss of one hundred lives. Priests are executed, churches razed in retaliation. Teacher-disciples of the charismatic education minister, José Vasconceles, are hacked to death in their classrooms. The violence continues for two years before peace is negotiated in 1929, partly at the intervention of U.S. Ambassador Dwight Morrow. Even as the rebellion rages, Vicente shares the conception of Diego's Rivera's grandest project. One night the pair go secretly to the National Palace in the heart of Mexico City. Diego's excitement rises with every ponderous step on a grand staircase to the bare walls of a vast corridor. His walls! He hurries from one end of the corridor to the other and back and forth, breathlessly describing his vision. His walls! To paint the epic of Mexico! The work begins. Ten, twelve, sometimes fifteen hours at a stretch on the beams of a scaffold, a squad of plasterers, color grinders, tracers and laborers assisting Diego. The plaster remains wet for six to twelve hours. Diego covers it with paint, not once but twice. Day's end and he climbs down, his bulging eyes squinting in the fading light. He heaves himself back to make changes, a deepening of color, an alteration in line or form. Often, he is dissatisfied. "Clean it off! Fresh plaster! I'll be back at six!" To Vicente falls the task of seeing Mexico Through the Centuries to completion. He begs, he pleads, cajoles, coaxes, and threatens to bring another pintorcillo (“dauber”) to finish the job. But Vicente is filled with wonder, too, seeing his people's past, present and "future" come alive on the palace walls. All Diego knew of his land and its history, all he could learn by study and taking thought, he put into his work; not merely all he knew, but all he felt and sensed, gloried in or thought worthy of contempt or shame. When at last he finished, it was not a painting but a world on a wall. (Bertram D. Wolfe) Before dawn on a January day in 1936, SERGIO CRUZ walks three miles to the post office at Cuipopan. Sergio, grandson of General Nicolas Cruz, squats against the white-washed wall of the one-roomed building, greeting other peons who come to wait beside him. Postmaster Senor Martinez arrives forty minutes late. The Indians file inside patiently, their eyes on the wall clock. Just before nine, Cruz hands Senor Martinez a painstakingly penciled message to be telegraphed to Mexico City. Martinez begins the transmission, the clatter of the telegraph the only sound in the building. Some peons remove their hats as a sign of respect. The message is going directly to President Lazaro Cardenas, who has decreed that for one hour every day the telegraph be available free to the poor to contact him personally. The Cuipopan villagers ask Lazaro Cardenas to help them recover their common lands stolen from them before the revolution. One year later, a soft-spoken man with a dark mestizo face, walking with slightly awkward movements from old battle wounds comes to Cuipopan to celebrate the renewal of the community's ejido. The guest of honor is President Cardenas, Michoacan-born and with Tarascan blood, joining Sergio Cruz and the villagers at a fiesta in the Escuela Epitacio Zavala . An ironic name for the school honoring an unrepentant cientifico who to his last breath railed against “Stalinists and Jacobins” turning Mexico into the ante-chamber of Satan. Epitacio's son, GUILLERMO ZAVALA, whose property was expropriated for the restored ejido, makes a discreet appearance to pay respect to the president before fleeing back to hacienda Santa Barbara. The lakeside casa grande built by Osvaldo Zavala in the nineteenth century is much the same as when Alexander von Humboldt visited here in 1803, but a genteel decadence pervades the halls and patios filled with ghosts of the past. Guillermo and his wife, CONCEPCION, still enjoy extended visits to Europe, their 1936 tour taking them to Hitler's Germany where Guillermo enthusiastically embraces the regime's “progress and order.” He will remain a Nazi sympathizer until 1941, when Mexico severs relations with the Axis powers the day after Pearl Harbor. Guillermo's son, EMILIO, is educated in the U.S. at Notre Dame University and Princeton, where he earns a doctorate in science. He marries ANNE BERMAN, a fellow Princetonian and a Jewess . Their union is deeply troubling to Guillermo whose Nazi leanings fuel the same prejudices that encouraged Zavalas of the past to persecute Conversos and Judaizers. Emilio rejects his father's anti-Semitism and for a long time there is rift between them, Emilio and Anna living in the capital and making rare visits to the hacienda. In his work, Emilio becomes a world expert on maize and sees the staple as much of a miracle as did Ome Coatl, high priest of Teotihuacán. Like that ancient, Emilio also comes to recognize a peril in Mexico's “Fragile Land,” its soil and water threatened with exhaustion as the population explodes. In the north, the fortune of the Zavala dynasty of La Esperanza soars during the "Golden Decades" of the Forties and Fifties. Cardenas's nationalization of foreign-owned oil companies brings a surge of Mexican pride and precedes a World War II boom. Only one Mexican squadron sees action in the war, flying with the U.S. Fifth Air Corp in the Philippines, but an army of three hundred thousand marches to support the allied war effort. The braceros harvest crops in twenty-five states critical to the North American home front. Mexico's own wartime industries propel a second revolution that brings thousands to the cities every day. When his father Santiago Zavala dies in 1936, VICENTE ERNESTO inherits the major part of La Esperanza. He quits his post as deputy-minister in Mexico City and returns to Chihuahua, where he runs the family empire with his cousin, ARTURO , the son of Magdaleno. Their sons, HECTOR and CARLOS JAVIER partner with Texan bankers to push Zavala interests far beyond Chihuahua, especially in the Monterrey area. Carlos Javier is a regional power-broker in the PRI, the Institutionalized Revolutionary Party founded in 1929 and dominant in Mexican politics for seven decades. Vicente Ernesto remains faithful to the ideals of La Revolución and land reform. Of course, giving Mexico's peasants a place in the sun has never called for carving up the latifundia of the semi-arid north. La Experanza emerged from the revolution intact, paying hefty “taxes” to Villa and his generals, sometimes in gold, sometimes a herd of cattle to feed insurgent armies. At war's end, veterans like PRIMO CRUZ returned to their jobs as vaqueros. Life went on exactly as in the past. By contrast, VICTOR ROMERO , the Zapatista leader Tomas Romero's son, rises from organizer of an insignificant Morelos trade union representing mule-drivers to a national union boss. Victor and his brother, DANTE ROMERO , nicknamed “ THE MULE, ” amass a fortune from graft and bribes. Like their enterprising ancestor, JACINTA ROMERO, the brothers regularly travel down to Acapulco, not to meet the "China Boat" but to revel with a new aristocracy of gilded socialists. They keep twin mistresses at a cliff-side mansion, FRANCISCA BECERRA – 'KIKI' – and MARITZA BECERRA – 'ITZA' – beauty queens whose favors the brothers fraternally exchange. Venal and violent, Victor and Dante the Mule make a mockery of the reforms with a level of corruption not seen since the days of Santa Anna. They were taken from their villages as barefooted youngsters who had slept on the floor and could barely read, and after a few years spent on the battlefields found themselves tossed into high office and great responsibility. This new world was filled with a thousand temptations they had not dreamed of: gold, women, houses, carpets, diamonds, champagne. They had arrived on the scene in the big city with their boots muddy and their faces unshaven, their manners uncouth, and the memory of their friends and families in little mud huts, living on tortillas and beans. Here, at no price at all, just for a nod, all their hearts desired was offered to them in return for a favor, a signature, a gesture, a word. It was a world of fable, and in their innocence or hunger – or greed, it doesn't matter—they succumbed to it. (Frank Tannenbaum) DELIA ZAVALA , daughter of Vicente and the sculptress Rita Mattos-O'Shea, is a fiery, spirited eighteen-year-old who in 1948 gives a hint of things to come when she joins five women who chain themselves to the old horse-railings in Chihuahua's central plaza protesting the lack of women's suffrage. – Only five years later do Mexican women win the right to vote. – In 1956, Delia has an affair with MIGUEL ROJAS , an exile from Batista's Cuba. The pair plan to join Fidel Castro's uprising but Rojas is stabbed in a union fracas at Vera Cruz. Two months after her lover's death, Delia gives birth to a son, DAVID ZAVALA. Delia's struggle for women's rights subsequently leads to direct conflict with two presidents, the Catholic church, and the entrenched ideals of Mexican machismo . Her greatest crisis comes when she founds a pro-choice, pro-contraception group in an era when President Luis Echeverria declares bluntly: “Mexico has no need for family planning.” – When the novel ends in 2006, Delia will be seventy-six and still fighting the same battles in a country where twelve is the legal age for consensual sex in most states, teenagers raped by family members are forbidden abortions, a million backstreet procedures take place annually with fifteen hundred women perishing and one hundred thousand suffering major complications. Delia's brother, Professor Emilio Zavala, is as vocal on issues related to Mexico's exploding population that soars from fifteen million in 1930 to fifty million in 1965. (107 million in 2006.) The exhaustion of Mexico's resources poses a threat of ecological catastrophe on a scale immeasurably greater than the destruction of Teotihuacán. Nowhere is the evidence more stark than at Cuipopan, where Emilio fights to save the watershed. Hacienda Santa Barbara lies in the Rio Lerma basin. To supply the increasing thirst of Mexico City, the Lerma Aqueduct is built siphoning off sixteen hundred gallons of water a second from the river's tributaries. What happens at the fictional Cuipopan mirrors the actual fate of Lake Cuitzeo in Michoacan: Around that ancient lake there were not long ago nine Tarascan villages of some six thousand families in all, living by fishing, agriculture, and weaving mats from the rushes. Lake Cuitzeo was fed by two rivers flowing north from Michoacan. The engineers looked at the rivers and shook their heads over the waste. The rivers were dammed and Lake Cuitzeo dried up. The fish died and swarms of mosquitoes took over the sickly puddles. Malaria and unemployment killed the nine villages quite dead. (Lesley Byrd Simpson) The end of Lake Cuipopan comes four and a half centuries after the day in March 1522, when the battle-weary conquistador, Pascual Bezerra Zavala, rejoices in The Place Where the Flowers Blossom and vows to make it his paradise forever. On October 2, 1968, the guns that have been silent for so long shatter the night at Tlatelolco in Mexico City. The Plaza of Three Cultures is the site of a Mexica-Aztec market, a Spanish colonial church, and a shining complex of modern Mexico. Five thousand students gather in a mass meeting against the government of President Diaz Ordaz, protesting the closure of the National Autonomous University and iron-fisted suppression of student and union opposition on the eve of the 1968 Summer Olympics. At sunset, tanks and armored cars advance on the plaza, army and police firing into the demonstrators, many present with their wives and children. The massacre continues throughout the night with the slaughter of three hundred people whose bodies are carted away in garbage trucks. “Four dead, 20 wounded,” is the official count. – Among the slain students is nineteen-year-old JOSE ZAVALA, grandson of Vicente Ernesto, who lived through the fiesta of bullets in the fight for the soul of Mexico.
X Woman of Tepexpan II1985 – 2006
The house of GUADALUPE CRUZ stands on the same lands where her ancestor Iuitl, Feather, and her band hunted in millennia past. If Guadalupe lifts her eyes to the west, her gaze falls on The Hill and just beyond the ancient Texcoco lake bed where Iuitl's remains were unearthed in 1949. In that year, Guadalupe was born at Cuipopan where she lived until she was twenty-three, a servant in hacienda Santa Barbara from the age of twelve. When her brother CLAUDIO CRUZ and his wife left the dying village to seek work in the Valley of Mexico, Guadalupe went with them. Two decades on, Claudio owns a small farm between Texcoco and San Salvador Atenco, where his family grows flowers for local markets. Guadalupe was never officially married though has had two husbands, one who went to the U.S. and wasn't heard from again, and one who works as a waiter in Mexico City and still sees her occasionally. She has no children of her own but has been a second mother to six nephews and nieces, the small tribe's most beloved aunt. When Claudio bought the piece of land, his first inclination was to plant corn but Guadalupe said, no, they'll be just as poor as they were at Cuipopan : it was her idea to grow roses on the rich loamy soil at the foot of The Hill. Season after season, Guadalupe has tended row upon row of glorious blooms, her success winning the admiration of her neighbors and not a little envy when they see customers make a bee-line for the “miracles” of Guadalupe Cruz, the rose queen of Texcoco. On a morning in May 2006, Guadalupe rises at five a.m. and goes to select flowers for the market, filling a basket with red and yellow roses, every stem carefully inspected before she cuts it. At seven, she's on her way to Texcoco riding in the back of a neighbor's pick-up; she joins seven other women at their usual spot just outside the market entrance. There's an air of determination around the vendors, for they've been told that they can no longer sell their flowers on the street, a ban they've ignored for weeks. This May morning, the state police have orders to clear the sidewalk and drive away Guadalupe and her friends. Within an hour of their setting up, the mayhem begins. It's not the first time Guadalupe and her family have clashed with authorities. In 2002, the men and women of San Salvador Atenco stood their ground to block a new international airport for the Mexico City metropolis. They were offered seventy-five cents a meter for their “useless wasteland,” a sum one campanéro waggishly compared to six hundred dollars spent on luxury towels for President Vicente Fox's bathroom suite, His Excellency's furnishings only a meter or two more than a patch of Atenco soil. The farmers picked up their machetes and marched to Mexico City to make their point, their protests ringing with the century-old battle cry: “Viva Zapata!” On this day in May 2006, TV Azteca's news cameras roll as fifty-seven-year-old Guadalupe Cruz is savagely clubbed by police and her red and yellow roses crushed under their boots. Atenco's “rebels” retaliate bludgeoning a policeman and taking others hostage. Over the next forty-eight hours thousands of state and federal police flood the area, arresting two hundred people, dragging others out of their beds and thrashing them, carting forty-five women off to jail where twenty-six are sexually violated. In the melee, a shot rings out and fourteen-year-old Javier Cortés lies dead in the street, a sacrifice in the “Flower War” of a new millennium.
The Cruzes, the Zavalas, the Romeros, all have paths that flow through Mexican history, their destinies shaped by acts and beliefs of their forbears, and naturally, too, by events and influences beyond their kin or control, a collective memory of thousands of years down to the dawn of the twenty-first century – from a New Fire to a New Age. The story of Guadalupe Cruz is one of many ideas for the finale of Mexico showing the weight of the past pulling against the magnet of the future. There are Cruzes who travel the Turquoise Road to cross the border and work in Gringolandia, an escape valve to the Mexican oligarchy who see the painting on the walls in pueblos where the hungry and the angry live, Zapata in a gas mask, Benito Juarez with a Mohawk, a woman's clenched fist, a boy aiming a slingshot at a helicopter. There are Romeros who make bad Lupe the Hook a saint by comparison, Refugio and Isidro, sons of the gilded socialists: the pair are bosses of a drug cartel running mules very different from the beasts green-eyed Jacinta drove down the China Road and other animals called Zetas, U.S. trained special commandos turned narco-terrorists known to decapitate the competition and roll their heads onto dance floors for sport. There's Carlos Javier Zavala II of La Esperanza and his polo-playing brother Hector raking in money from maquilador-sweatshops proliferating in Chihuahua, so much profit that when a call comes to aid the old party, the brothers join thirty plutocrats at a “Billionaire's Banquet” and pledge $25 million each to succor the PRI and secure their loot. There's Emilio Zavala and Lazaro, a scientist like his father, worrying over the fate of millions of small farmers whose Middle Age livelihoods are challenged by agribusiness giants like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland and devastated by soil-exhausting seeds with names like “Terminator.” There's Delia Zavala who believes Mexican women deserve a better choice than butchery in backstreet hovels, and her son, David Zavala, a doctor, Subcomandante David to his fellow Zapatista revolutionaries in Chiapas, Guerrero and Oaxaca. Men like Subcomandante David and Lazaro Zavala see a country of astounding wealth where four in ten citizens live in abject poverty just as they did two hundred years ago when Alexander von Humboldt visited the Zavalas. Ya Basta! Enough, the pair say! Will others hear them, they wonder, or will it take an eruption like La Revolución to wake up Mexico. In Oaxaca in the summer of 2006, the tinder is lit during a teacher's strike that grew into an insurgency against the despotic governor Ulises Ruiz. The Oaxaca Intifada smolders on into the New Year and despite the whitewash job, the writing on the wall is perfectly clear. “I'm not a guerrillero yet,” lilts Fernando Guaddarrama on stage at the Neuvo Babel, “but we shall see. We shall see.” (John Ross) In my novel Brazil , I used the final passages to carry the Cavalcantis and da Silvas through the closing decades of the last century and bring them to Porto Seguro in April 2000, where the Brazilian nation celebrated its quincentennial. The same sands where Aruaña the Tupinquin first lifted his gaze and saw tiny puffs of cloud that had fallen to the end of the earth … In Mexico , too, the great themes of past and present will be interlaced, the painting on the wall writ large in the future. ©2007 Errol Lincoln Uys |