Mexico City’s Story Etched in Murals of Epic Struggles

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Regional History, Travel
Museo Frida Kahlo, Coyoacán

For the artistically and culturally-inclined no trip to Mexico City is complete without a taste of its monumental art. Regrettably, due to a combination of a double-booking in the tour itinerary and the distance from our hotel, I wasn’t able to fit in a visit to the Frida Kahlo Museum during my few days in the capital…its location in Coyoacán (“place of coyotes”) was down in the southern afueras of the city. I had hoped to redeem the omission on my return to Mexico City after our stint in Cuba, however I found myself doubly thwarted as my only full return day in the capital was on a Monday (the day of the week all museums, in this city with the most number of museums in the world, is closed!✱).

Stairway triptych on the Conquista

Having missed out on seeing Frida’s brightly azure casa made me more determined to at the very least take in a truly representative sample of her partner Diego Rivera’s public and very political art. Before the trip I had promised myself to try to get a glimpse of Rivera’s famous mural at the University of Mexico, but I gave that up when I discovered it was located a bit too far away in the opposite direction. As a compromise (but a very good compromise as it turned out) we opted to stay around Centro and make for the Zócalo, the mayor square of CDMX. On one side of the Zócalo sits the imposing fortress-like Palacio Nacional where visitors can view Rivera’s great “History of Mexico” mural series. Palacio Nacional or the grounds on which it lies in Cuauhtémoc has been the seat of power in Mexico since the Aztec Empire.

Palacio jardens

Entrance into the National Palace was free but queues coupled with heavy security held things up and made the process a bit of an obstacle course. Passports had to be shown and tourism police were en mass at the entrance and liberally sprinkled all over the complex. To reach the colonnaded central courtyard of Constitution Square✥ we first passed through a spectacular and varied Mexican desert garden, a botanical bonanza full of agaves, cacti, yuccas and other hardy desert plants intersected by circular and diagonal pathways.

The murals took up huge slabs of wall space on the first floor of the palace, each mural depicted different phases of Mexican history starting with a scene from life in Pre-Columbian indigenous society. Rivera’s murals are all about social commentary, especially articulating the attitude of the conquerors towards the indígena peoples after contact – the mistreatment and abuses exacted on the Aztecs and other Meso-American Indians. One of the politically committed Rivera’s societal concerns in the mural project was to express through his art a counter-view to the prevailing European perception at the time which tended to wholesale denigrate the mestizo and native populations.

On the staircase between the ground floor and the second floor a very large mural is devoted to Rivera’s take on 20th century Mexico, his summary of society in the first-third of the century…the vast canvas is peopled by an eclectic mix of historical characters with portraits of his beloved Frida, Mexican political figures, American capitalists like Rockefeller, powerful revolutionary warlords Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, and in accord with the artist’s communist allegiances, Karl Marx. This panel is in fact part of a ‘triptych’ of murals which on the stairway – the other monumental sections, reaching up to the ceiling almost, convey the ferocity of Cortes’ assault on the Mexica and the indigenous determined attempts to resist the Conquistadors.

The history murals are a very large body of work undertaken on a massive scale, a monumental project which took Rivera around six years (ca 1929-35)…the murals were intended to encompass all four open corridors of the square building but he never found the time to complete it. There are other large-scale panel paintings by Rivera (does he ever do small-scale?) on the third floor of the building, but the mural depiction of Mexico’s course of history from pre-Hispanic period through the Conquista up to the 20th century are the principal attractions of this magnet for tourists wanting to experience more of CDMX’s distinctive cultural ethos.

On our way out we popped into a side wing of the palace which houses the chamber of the Parliamentary Assemblies, a vacant spatial entity whose sanitised condition and sombre burgundy, claret and vermillion colours give it a feeling of sterility. Revisiting the Mexico jardines on route to the exit for a final glance and picture we noticed some unofficial residents of the palace, a couple of sleek looking cats who, unperturbed by our presence, seemed very much at home in the garden grounds.

⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤
✱ missing out on the Kahlo house also meant I missed the house (now also a museum) of Leon Trotsky just a block away (where he was assassinated on the orders of his rival communist leader Stalin in 1940)
✥ this open courtyard with a central fountain, from which the Diego Rivera murals look down from the second floor balcony, is a favourite place for visitors to the palace to take selfies against a backdrop of elegant white arched columns

Turismo Mexico City 1: A Taste of the Capitalino Nightlife, Mezcal, Mariachis and Luchadores

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Regional History, Travel

Having really enjoyed my first organised tour around the city markets and food outlets I opted to follow it up with one or two other city tours in the couple of days we had left in the capital. First, Urban Adventures’ night walking tour. We met up at six with our guide for the night, a relaxed, amiable guy with the unhispanic-sounding name of Milton, at a small design museum just down from the Zócalo. Milton took us first to nearby Cinco de Mayo (5th of May Street), a street notable for its restaurants, cantinas and drinking houses with names like Pata Negra, Sálon Corona and La Popular.

Cinco de Mayo

We stopped outside a fairly upmarket- looking establishment with velvet curtains and shimmering chandeliers called La Opera Bar whilst Milton explained the story of its particular fame. During the 1910s when Mexico was gripped by revolutionary fervour, the cantina had been the scene of a celebrated meeting between revolutionary bandit leaders Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. At La Opera bar, Villa and Zapata, Mexico’s two powerful warlords got together to discuss their plans to carve up the strife-racked country. Villa immortalised the occasion by shooting a hole through the bar’s ceiling which is still visible today. Another more recent celebrity who frequented La Opera as a favourite watering hole was Columbian expat and literature Nobel laureate Gabriel Gárcia Marquez.

The tour then took us to Avenida Juárez and an elevator ride to the top of Mexico City’s tallest building, Torre Latinoamericanos, where we sipped cool cocktails (I had a frozen strawberry margarita) whilst admiring the 360° views of Mexico City from Level 37. Over drinks Milton talked about his environmental work for Greenpeace and mentioned that Mexico City had an ongoing major water problem (he hinted that one of the more affluent areas of the city has some sort of monopolisation of potable water which affects supply to the rest of CDMX!).

Dali-surreal piece

Back down at ground level, we strolled through the small garden park next door, the area had been given over to a public exhibition of 23 bronze sculptures by Spanish surrealist painter and celebrity oddball Salvador Dali. The famed Catalonian artist’s most famous/notorious paintings of warped clocks, burning giraffes and women with implanted drawers were on display as sculptural representations in a nice garden setting. Rejoining Calle Francisco I Madero I ask Milton about the various guys I have seen on the street wearing military style uniforms, playing organ grinders (sans monkeys!) and asking for money. Milton says it’s an old tradition of the city dating back to around the 1930s when ex-army officers were given permission to do this, and it became an established convention. It’s so widespread that it seems to me that this is another variant of begging so common in the city, but with a bit more structure and embellishment to it.

Two mariachis looking for their instruments?

The next chapter of our tour linked up mariachi bands, cantinas, tequila and mezcal. We sampled some of the legendary hard liquor made from the agave plant to the accompaniment of raucous mariachi bands…in between songs Milton explained how a lot of the city’s many, many mariachi groups work. The mariachis congregate around Garibaldi Plaza, musical bands comprising violins, trumpets and guitars,who play randomly for people who turn up to hear them so as to hire a group for an upcoming wedding, party, etc. The musicians are effectively auditioning for jobs in the plaza! Mariachi band members are usually distinguished by their charro style dress (upmarket garb of Mexican horsemen), usually but not always in white, tight-fitting outfits with the broad-brimmed sombreros.

Upstairs after the tequila and mezcal sampling we explored a little Tequilia y Mezcal Museo/Tienda, finding out about the complex process of making these drinks (involving several stages of fermentation and distillation). The museum highlight for me was the staggeringly immense range of tequila and mezcal bottles and containers on display (characteristically the Mexican fatalistic obsession with skulls and the symbolising of death comes through strongly in the design of drinking vessels).

Trios match

We topped the evening off with a bit of a cross-country hike via the Mexico City Metro…travelling on a uniquely colour-coded network of lines following Milton as he went confusingly from the Pink Line following an alternate colour line that took us to a separate platform in the opposite direction, so that we eventually about 10pm reached Arena Mexico across town in time to catch the last few bouts of Mexico’s other national obsession, professional masked wrestling. Known in Mexico as Lucha Libre (Sp. “Free fight”), this took place in a huge, cavernous old stadium. The dyed-in-the-wool, rusted-on Lucha Libre-obsessed fans (just about everyone else here!) cheered on their masked favourites…the most popular type of contests are trios contests (three-man tag teams). However I was more intrigued with the reactions of the fans themselves, their unrestrained enthusiasms for their heroes and equally unchecked abuse for the luchadors (wrestlers) assigned to be villains. They all just seem to buy it, 100 per cent! Most venom and opprobrium on the night was reserved for a luchador called Sam Adonis, introduced to the crowd as an American (interestingly “US Sam” at the end of the bout grabbed the microphone and harangued the crowd in fluent Spanish for a full five minutes!)

We made a slightly premature exit from Arena Mexico – nothing was spoiled, we weren’t psychic but somehow we sensed the “good guys” would triumph in the deciding third fall (tres caídas) – to avoid the end-of-night rush. Back at Colonial Doctores station, clutching our cheap souvenir luchador mask, we boarded one of CDMX’s strange box-shaped carriages for another zig-zagging journey on the Metro to Centro. When we alighted at our nearest Metro station, the obliging and ever affable Milton walked us back to our hotel near the Almeida Park.