Mexico – the heart thrills

THE ONE THAT NEARLY GOT AWAY

Vienna, 20 February 2023

I’m normally quite good at writing posts about the wonderful experiences which my wife and I have enjoyed as we pass through this Autumn of our lives. Sometimes, though, they escape me. We get carried along by the River of Life as it rolls remorselessly on and soon something else has happened which becomes the topic of my next post. That experience disappears from the rear-view mirror and is gone for ever.

This post is about one such experience, which I am determined will not wriggle free of my electronic pen, because it was simply too wonderful not to document. It’s been eight years since it occurred but it has never quite disappeared from my mind’s eye. Every time the memories resurface, I castigate myself for my laziness and vow to write That Post. I am finally making good on that vow.

As I said, I have to take my readers back eight years, when we went to spend the Christmas break in Mexico with our son and daughter – he was working there, and she flew down from New York where she was working. As a last trip before we went back to Bangkok, where I was stationed at the time, the two of us along with our son (our daughter had had to go back) flew down to the state of Chiapas, which borders with Guatemala. We had arranged for a car and driver to pick us up in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, from which we were to take a one-week tour. The itinerary was put together by an agency, with limited input from our side; we were happy to go along with their recommendations. And so we found ourselves going to the Sumidero Canyon, San Cristobal de las Casas, Palenque, a couple of Mayan ruins in the Reserva de la Biósfera Monte Azules down by the Guatemalan border, and finishing off in Villahermosa in the neighbouring state of Tabasco (I had to check our photos floating around in the i-cloud to remember where we’d been).

Ever since my wife and I, together with my mother-in-law, had toured central and southern Mexico back in the early 1980s, I have had an enduring fascination for the ruins of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican civilisations. On that earlier trip, we had visited Palenque, so I looked forward to revisiting the site. Alas, the intervening years have not been kind. The site was in good shape, I hasten to say; that wasn’t the problem. Actually, the site was in too good a shape, very much tamed, with the surrounding semi-tropical vegetation cut back and kept under control, a far cry from my memory of Palenque as a place where the ruins poked out of the jungle. And it was terribly crowded! The curse of having been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, I’m sure. So I’m afraid to say I felt slightly deflated after the visit.

The next day, the driver announced that we would be visiting two other Mayan sites today. They were quite remote, requiring us to drive a good long way down to the Guatemalan border. It all sounded very intriguing, but after Palenque I, for one, was game for a little adventure. So off we went, down this rather minor road, with our driver doing some alarming overtaking along the way. After a while, we reached the first site, Bonampak, which lay just off the road.

Its main claim to fame are its murals, which are indeed quite remarkable. I thought of inserting here some of our photos of these murals which are adrift in my i-cloud, but I find that other photos available on the internet are much better, so as is my habit I have instead shamelessly lifted these two photos, showing some of the murals.

On we drove, until finally we reached a river (I later learned that Guatemala started on the other side). Our driver parked the car and we got out. Where was the site, we asked, looking around. Oh no, he said, you could only get to the site by boat. We would be taking one of the boats (rather frail-looking, I found) pulled up on the bank, and it would take us about 40 minutes to get there.

And with that, he handed us over to the skipper of one of the boats and brightly informed us that he’d be waiting for us. Right, we said, and took our seats somewhat gingerly in the boat. As the skipper roared off upstream, I was feeling quite like Indiana Jones setting off into the jungle to discover a long-lost temple stuffed with gold.

A sudden squall of rain dampened the thrill, especially as our trousers and shoes began to get seriously wet. But the rain left mist trailing romantically through the increasingly thick jungle on the Mexican side of the river.

Finally, our skipper pulled up to a jetty and motioned us to take a path which disappeared off into the jungle. And so we climbed up through thick vegetation until we finally entered some moss-covered ruins jutting out of the jungle.

The path led us to a dark, creepy corridor, which we felt our way along

until we finally exited back into the light.

We walked into a clearing, where we could see other ruins peaking out of the surrounding jungle.

We had entered the ancient Mayan city of Yaxchilán.

I find any ancient ruin fascinating – the pull of a place once the centre of a vibrant life but now just a tumbled pile of mouldering stones. Others before me have captured this melancholy fascination of ruins in words much better than mine. Sultan Mehmet II, the Ottoman conqueror of Constantinople, is said to have murmured a distich by the Persian poet Ferdowsi as he surveyed the ruins of what had been the Sacred Palace of the emperors of Byzantium:

The Spider has wove her web in the imperial palace,
The Owl has sung her watch song upon the towers of Samarkand.

While an anonymous Anglo-Saxon penned these lines about Roman ruins he encountered somewhere in Britain:

Wondrous is this wall-stead, wasted by fate.
Battlements broken, giant’s work shattered.
Roofs are in ruin, towers destroyed,
Broken the barred gate, rime on the plaster,

Walls gape, torn up, destroyed, consumed by age.
A hundred generations have passed.
Earth-grip holds the proud builders, departed, long lost,
In the hard grasp of the grave. How often has this wall,

Hoary with lichen, red-stained, outlasted the passing reigns,
Withstanding the storms; the high arch now has fallen …

(At this point, there is a gap, for the parchment on which the poem was written has itself suffered badly from the passage of time).

But there is something very special about ruins like Yaxchilàn immersed in jungle. It has to do, I think, with Nature much more obviously reclaiming what is hers, a powerful reminder of the warning uttered endlessly by the catholic priests of my boyhood on Ash Wednesday as they crossed your forehead with ash, “Remember, man, that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.” That sense of Nature slowly growing back and smothering men’s foolish dreams in stone is overpowering in Angkor Wat, of which this one photo, endlessly reproduced, is a potent example.

But it was also there in Yaxchilàn, all the more so since the overcast weather gave the site a brooding feel.

And so, with the site more or less to ourselves, we wandered from ruin to ruin.

Finally, we climbed a long flight of stairs that disappeared up into the surrounding vegetation.

At the top of which there was this structure.

And beyond which rolled away to the horizon the thick jungle of the Reserva de la Biósfera Monte Azules.

As we walked around we came across carved stone steles showing the proud rulers of this once thriving city state.

Looking at them, it was hard not to murmur Shelley’s Ozymandias:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away

And so we travellers walked back down to the river, got into our boat, and skimmed along the river to our waiting driver.

VANILLA

This post is dedicated to my dearest wife,

the most faithful of my readers

Vienna, 4 September 2021

Some months ago, I was asked by the Student Sustainability Committee of a school in Wales which I’m involved with to help them estimate the carbon footprint of the food eaten in the school. In the case of prepared food, which made up a substantial portion of the food consumed at the school, this exercise required me to plough through a lot of recipes to understand what were the raw ingredients of these prepared foodstuffs (so as to calculate the carbon footprint of each ingredient). Apart from this being a hell of a lot of work, as my wife will testify (“have you still not finished that stuff?!”), I discovered with surprise that many, many prepared foodstuffs of the sweet variety (biscuits, cakes, chocolate, and various sundry others) have vanilla extract as one of their ingredients (and as a side note, I was very surprised to see that these sweet foodstuffs made up a large portion of all the food consumed in the school; it didn’t seem to be a very healthy diet).

These constant references to vanilla extract intrigued me, and I decided that one day I would investigate vanilla a bit more. This decision crystallized into action over the last few weeks, because it so happens that my wife is very fond of vanilla. In the Bad Old Days, before we started our rigorous dieting, she consumed a fair amount of vanilla-based ice creams, normally those covered with a chocolate casing (I will not give free publicity to her favourite brand by naming it; I will leave my readers to guess). Now, in these more virtuous times, diet-wise, her vanilla consumption mainly takes the form of vanilla-flavored yogurt, and this only for lunch on our hikes (which these summer days has meant quite frequently). For the sake of complete transparency, I should state that she still consumes a chocolate-covered vanilla ice cream from time to time, whenever a hike is judged to have been particularly strenuous.

The brand of vanilla-flavored yoghurt which my wife generally favours is this one – I should add that she favours it simply because our local supermarket offers it, at a very reasonable price.

Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed the flower on the tub. This is the vanilla orchid, Vanilla planifolia. Here’s a photo of the Real Thing.

And here is the plant more or less in its natural state (readers will note that this orchid is a type of vine; in Nature it will grow up trees, like the pepper vine).

It’s really a very pretty flower, but it is only of passing interest to the vanilla aficionado. She or he is after the “fruit”, a seed pod really, that the flower creates once it has been pollinated. The three dark-coloured stringy things pictured behind the flower on the yoghurt tub are these seed pods. Again, here is a photo of the Real Thing.

But even the seed pod, if in its natural state, just picked from the vine, does not interest the vanilla aficionado, because it contains very low levels of vanilla flavour and aroma (these, by the way, come mostly from the chemical vanillin, although there are a number of other chemicals present which it is claimed enhance both flavour and aroma). It is only once the seed pod has been cured that the vanilla aficionado becomes interested, because now the levels of vanillin are considerably higher, high enough to add that distinct vanilla flavour and aroma to foods and drinks.

The curing of vanilla seed pods is a rather complicated, months-long process, whose purpose is to bring about an enzymatic reaction in the pods which turns the glucovanillin they contain into vanillin proper (in case any readers were asking themselves, glucovanillin has no flavour or aroma). Curing consists of four basic steps: killing, sweating, slow-drying, and conditioning. In the killing step, the seed pods are generally heated (in hot water or in an oven or by exposing the pods to the sun).

This stops any further vegetative growth in the pods and initiates the necessary enzymatic reactions.

In the sweating step, the pods are kept at temperatures of 45–65°C and at high humidity levels by stacking them densely and insulating them in wool or other cloth. The pods are subjected to this Turkish bath regime for 7 to 10 days, possibly with a daily exposure to the sun or a dip in hot water.

The desired enzymatic reactions love these conditions, so by the end of the sweating step the seed pods have attained much of the desired vanilla flavour and aroma. However, they still have a high moisture content. Which brings us to drying.

To prevent the pods from rotting and to lock in the vanilla aroma, drying is required. And so, over a period of three to four weeks, the pods are exposed to air and to periods of shade and sunlight.

In the final, conditioning step, the dried pods are stored for five to six months in closed boxes, where the fragrance further develops.

The end result looks like this.

This is what vanilla aficionados lust after, what they dream of incorporating into their dishes, from soup to sweet dishes. And they are willing to pay top money. Vanilla is the second most expensive spice, after saffron. Those wrinkled-up beans can set you back anywhere from $50 to $500 per kilogram.

When I look at these kinds of convoluted processes, I always ask myself, “How on earth did anyone discover this process?” I mean, really, how did the first vanilla producers stand in front of those aroma-less and flavour-less seed pods and figure out that this long and complicated process would eventually lead them to seed pods with a wonderful aroma and flavour of vanilla? I would have to ask this question to the ancestors of the Totonacs, an Amerindian people who live on the east coast of Mexico. It was they who first “made” vanilla-flavoured seed pods from the vanilla orchid – the orchid’s natural habitat is in this part of the world. Here, we have Diego Rivera’s take on the Totonacs, as part of one of his murals in the National Palace in Mexico City.

Unfortunately, I’m sure today’s Totonacs have no idea; I just have to accept that the answer is lost in the mists of time.

Readers might think that since the vanilla orchid is natural to Mexico’s eastern seaboard, that country would be a major producer of vanilla. Alas, not so! The reason for that is the great Columbian exchange, that massive movement of plants, animals, humans – and diseases – which took place between the New and Old Worlds after the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus. The vanilla orchid was part of that exchange. The Conquistadors, like the Totonacs (and like the Aztecs) loved the flavour and aroma of vanilla and figured that people back home would love it too. They exported the pods back to Europe, where they caused a sensation, at least among the elites, who had the money to burn on this rare and expensive novelty. They put it in everything, from chocolate (also a product of Mexico) to soup. They adopted the Spanish name for it (vanilla is a corruption of the Spanish vainilla, meaning “little pod”). Other Europeans looked on enviously. Eventually, the French laid their hands on some exemplars of the plant and took them to their colonies which had similar climates to Mexico’s eastern seaboard, namely those in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean, especially the islands of Madagascar, Réunion, and Mauritius.

For a while, Mexico continued to be the main global producer of vanilla, because this transplant of the vanilla orchid to other places was a failure. The plant flowered alright, but it never produced pods. The reason for this is an exquisite example of specialized evolution: vanilla flowers can only be pollinated by this little critter, Eulaema meriana, one of some 25 species of orchid bees.

No other insect is attracted by the sex pheromones emitted by the flower, nor can any other insect successfully navigate the orchid’s complicated geometry and pollinate the flower along the way.

Once non-Mexican wannabe vanilla producers realized the problem, they tried the obvious thing, which was to transplant the vanilla-pollinating orchid bee along with the orchid. But it didn’t work; the bee couldn’t survive outside of its native habitat. The wannabe vanilla producers were stumped. Until 1841.

In that year, a 12-year old slave called Edmond (no surname, he was a slave), who had been born into slavery on the Island of Réunion, came up with a quick and easy way of pollinating the vanilla orchid flower by hand. He had been lent out by his master to a botanist by the name of Ferreol Bellier-Beaumont, to help him out. Beaumont had shown him how to hand pollinate a watermelon plant and the boy went off and successfully applied his new skills to the vanilla orchid. (For anyone considering hand-pollinating a vanilla orchid flower, here’s what you do: with a small sliver of bamboo or wood (or even a stem of grass), lift the membrane separating the flower’s anther and stigma; then, using your thumb, transfer the pollinia from anther to stigma.)

Edmond never got anything out of his discovery. Who did were all the the slave-owning planters on Réunion who now got into vanilla growing: for a while, Réunion became the world’s largest producer of vanilla. But the French authorities made sure the method was transferred to its other island colonies in the Indian Ocean and in the Caribbean. Since then, Madagascar has dominated world production (Indonesia, which muscled into the market in the 1980s, is now second in the producers’ league table). Mexico, on the other hand, has pretty much vanished from the scene, which is a crying shame.

As for Edmond, seven years after his discovery, at the age of 19, he got his freedom; the French government finally outlawed slavery in its colonies in 1848. He left the world of plantations to work as a kitchen hand in the island’s main city, and adopted the surname Albius, from the Latin alba or white, in reference to the vanilla orchid’s colour. Beaumont tried to get the governor of Réunion to give Edmond a stipend or at least a reward for his great discovery but the governor ignored the petition. No doubt, he didn’t think it was worth spending public monies on a black ex-slave.

Unfortunately, Edmond fell in with a bad crowd in his new life and got involved in a theft of jewelry. He was caught and sentenced to 10 years in jail, which, after an appeal by Beaumont to the governor, was reduced to five. After doing his time, Edmond moved back to a village close to the plantation and got married.

Edmond’s travails were not over. It seems to have been an irritation in certain quarters that where white professional botanists had failed, a black slave, and a child to boot, had succeeded. Some time in 1860s a well-known French botanist and plant collector by the name of Jean Richard claimed that actually, he had come up with this revolutionary pollination method in the late 1830s, that he had taught it to some planters in Réunion, and that Edmond must have sneaked into the meeting and heard his explanation. Luckily, Beaumont and a few others vigorously defended Edmond’s primacy to the discovery, although Richard’s false claim did get some traction for a while. May Richard’s name be damned forever …

Edmond died in poverty in 1880, at the age of 51. Luckily, he left a physical trace of himself in history, rare for ex-slaves. Here we have a rather grainy photograph of him when young.

And here we have a lithograph of him from a book published in 1863, standing gravely in front of a vanilla orchid vine.

Wonderful story, the vanilla story, no? Except that as far as the vanilla in my wife’s yoghurt is concerned, it is all a big red herring.

I’m afraid to tell her, and any other readers who might be vanilla lovers, that the vast majority of the vanillin used commercially in the world is fake – well, artificial might be a less inflammatory word. Most of the world’s vanillin is produced from crude oil derivatives in chemical plants: benzene is alkylated with propylene to form cumene, which is then oxidized to phenol. Phenol is hydroxylated into catechol, which is further methylated into guaiacol. Finally, guaiacol is reacted with glyoxilic acid by electrophilic aromatic substitution to produce vanillylmandelic acid, which is converted to vanillin by oxidative decarboxylation. The remainder of the world’s artificial vanillin is made from a waste stream generated in the sulphite process to make paper pulp.

Yes, I know, very disappointing. And the worst of it is that when Cooks Illustrated ran some taste tests which pitted natural vanilla against artificial vanillin used in baked goods and other applications, tasters could not tell the difference! Don’t know what the world is coming to … Luckily, the tasters could tell the difference where ice cream was concerned, with natural vanilla winning out; l’onore è salvo, honour has been saved, as my wife might say.

ANIMALS

Milan, 25 April 2020

Nine days to go before – maybe – we’re let out onto the streets again …

Well, I’ve gone for another wander around the apartment, this time looking for pieces involving animals – that seems to me a suitable way to follow up the last two posts devoted to humans.

I should start by pointing out that neither my wife nor I are really animal people. My wife’s parents never had any pets when she grew up. My mother used to tell me that we had a dog in the house when I was very young, but I have no memory of it. My wife used to go riding as a child and liked it. I used to go and hated it. We never had pets when the children were growing up – apart from a goldfish which our daughter brought home triumphantly after a field trip somewhere and which very rapidly died. We still don’t have any pets. As a result, I think, we don’t really have that many pieces in the apartment that have to do with animals. But let me show readers what we have!

As usual, I start this wander in the living room, with a piece we bought – once again – in the Museum Art shop in Vienna (several pieces I mentioned in the last two posts were also bought in the shop; there was a time when I visited it very often).

Like all the pieces we bought in the Museum Art shop, it is a modern copy of a very old original, which in this case is in the Louvre Museum in Paris. My copy is made of resin, but the original is in terracotta covered with a red slip. It comes from the Iranian plateau and dates from the 12th Centry BC. The Louvre’s website has this to say about the piece: “their terracotta objects were highly original. Used for funerary libations, they were often in the shape of animals, the most remarkable being the hump-backed bulls with a “beak” for the ritual pouring of water”. I love it for the simplicity of its lines, while still portraying the power of the animal. Here’s a photo of the real thing, a magnificent Zebu bull.

The next piece takes us to Africa.

It was once again bought at the Museum Art shop, by my son and wife, as a birthday present for me. It is also, once again, a copy. The original, a Chi Wara Bamana headdress made of wood, hails from Mali. It is held in the Musée des Arts Africains et Oceaniens in Paris. The blurb which the shop gave us states: “Originally fixed to a wicker cap, this sculpture is a headdress that is used in the agricultural rites of the Bambara, organized by a society of initiates called Chi Wara, “champion of cultivation”. This figure is a combination of three animals that inhabit the bush: the antelope, the pangolin, and the anteater.” Here is a photo of one of them in use.

My wife and I bought the next piece during a trip we made (with my mother-in-law) to Mexico in the early 1980s.

I definitely don’t like cats (I tolerate dogs), but I’ve always been fond of this ceramic stand-in. We’ve had him quietly sit on a shelf wherever we’ve been.

We bought this next piece at the UN in New York, back in the mid to late 1980s.

At the time, there was a shop in the building well stocked with “ethnic art”. It’s a delightful piece, from Peru if I remember correctly. Formally it is a candlestick, and we have used it for that purpose a couple of times. But really it’s just a wonderful piece of art, with a cheerful bird as its crowning figure (which is of course the reason why I include it here).

We move on to the kitchen, where we have several animal-themed knick-knacks on our shelves. My favourite is this one.

It is a ram with extremely long fleece standing on a pile of rocks. My wife and my mother-in-law bought it when they went for a holiday to Scotland in the mid to later 1970s. It stayed with my mother-in-law and we inherited it when the good woman died. It is signed “P. Nelson” on the bottom, but who he or she is I have no idea.

My mother-in-law bought the next two pieces.

For obvious reasons, we have the two rabbits sitting on the same shelf. Interestingly, they both serve the same function, as a receptacle. The rabbit to the right is ceramic, but I’m not sure what the rabbit to the left is made of. Could it be zinc? My wife thinks it’s silver; if it is, it must be alloyed with something else. Rabbits are animals I’m quite fond of. My French grandmother had a number of them in a hutch, and I would go and stroke them. I was shattered when one of their babies died of myxomatosis. I remember still my wails when the poor thing was taken out and buried. Of course, my grandmother didn’t keep rabbits because she was fond of them, she kept them to eat. And I have to say that rabbit is very yummy.

These next two cups were a gift – along with two other cups – from a friend of my wife’s. There was one cup for each member of our family. The two seen in the photo are the cups of our children.

They were made by the Hadley Pottery Company, which is based in Louisville, Kentucky. My wife’s friend chose the duck for our son and the lamb for our daughter (their names are on the other side of the cups, that’s how I know). I let readers guess what might have been the reasoning behind the choice, although I suspect that it might be something as prosaic as the lack of any other suitable animals to choose from. The cups are too precious a memory for us to use them now. In fact, one them (mine!) fell to the floor one day and broke. I glued it back together again, but there are pieces missing.

Gluing things back brings me to the last piece (sharp-eyed readers will notice that the beak has been glued back on).

It is a loon, a common bird on the lakes of North America, and one with a wonderfully haunting cry. I remember it vividly from my little canoe trip on Lake of the Woods (which I wrote about in an earlier post). It was made by an Inuit artist, although which one I don’t know. Because of this Arctic connection, I insert here a photo of an Arctic loon.

I bought it as a Christmas present for my soon-to-be-wife in the same shop, the Snow Goose, where some six months later we bought the much larger Inuit piece which kicked off my post on the human face. In fact, it was because I had bought this piece there that we went back to that shop. Fate then led my wife to the Face Spirit.

Well, that completes that tour. I let my readers guess what the subject of my next post will be.

PRICKLY PEAR AND THE COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE

Bangkok, 23 January, 2015

One of the most far-reaching effects of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the Americas was the so-called Columbian Exchange, the exchange of plants and animals (and bacteria and viruses) between the Americas and the rest of the world. This map shows some of the major crops and livestock which made the journey in either direction between the Americas and Europe.

We see, for instance, that the tomato crossed to Europe from the Americas, along with the turkey and corn (and possibly syphilis), while the cow, the horse, and the onion, went the other way, along with smallpox, measles, typhus, and a whole series of other diseases (the diseases nearly wiping out the Amerindian populations).

But I want to focus on a plant which normally doesn’t get mentioned in discussions of the Columbian Exchange: the prickly pear, a plant whose history is very much centered on Mexico. Here, we have an exemplar standing guard, as it were, at the site of Teotihuacan.

In fact, the prickly pear is so centered on Mexico that it graces the Mexican flag as part of the latter’s central emblem (for those with “mature” eyesight like mine, it’s what the eagle is grasping with its talons at the same time as it grasps that snake in its beak).

Maybe the prickly pear’s low profile in Columbian Exchange discussions is because it’s such a nasty, spiny plant, which really doesn’t endear itself to anyone.

Or maybe because it’s not much of a commercial crop; the Food and Agricultural Organization, which collects global statistics on some 160 crops, collects no statistics on the prickly pear, for instance.

Whatever the reason, I wish to right this injustice and pay tribute to the prickly pear and its role in the great Columbian Exchange. It may perhaps have played a modest economic role, but it helped to fill many an empty stomach, and it sure as hell has played an important ecological role, sometimes wreaking havoc in the ecosystems into which it was thoughtlessly thrust.

I first met our prickly friend in the country of my birth, Eritrea. Here, you see a specimen in front of the delightful little train which runs from Asmara down to the seaport of Masawa on the Red Sea.

I have a vivid memory of taking that train to go down to the coast for a holiday on the beach.

It was the Italians who, as colonial masters

introduced the prickly pear (please note the plant waving at us from behind the colonial troops and their Italian officer). The Italian colonialists brought it from the mother country, of course, where it grows in profusion in the more arid southern regions of the country. We have here an example gracing the ruins of Agrigento in Sicily.

But southern Italy was just a later stop on the prickly pear’s journey out of Mexico. It must surely have reached Italy from Spain, which was the first port of call for many of the biological journeys out of the Americas. Here we have a Spanish prickly pear, nudging its way into a photo of Sagunto castle in the province of Valencia.

In truth, I have chosen pictures which show off the prickly pear to advantage, but normally the plant is much more unprepossessing. This photo of a ragged, messy patch of prickly pear in a village of Ethiopia is much more typical of how the plant presents itself

especially when its population levels begin to explode out of control in some foreign ecosystem which has no natural biological defenses against it. The Global Invasive Species Database lists several countries where the prickly pear is now considered an invasive species. Eritrea is one of them, along with the neighboring countries of Ethiopia and Somalia – the Italians, who colonized all three countries had little idea of the damage they were wreaking. But South Africa also considers it an invasive species (here is a picture of prickly pear invading the Kruger national park).

And Australia had a catastrophic invasion. The prickly pear was initially introduced as an ornamental plant for gardens. Then some bright spark thought of using the plant as natural fencing (sensibly enough, cattle and other animals desist from pushing through breaks of prickly pear because of the nasty spines, and they don’t eat them for the same reason) and to start a cochineal dye industry (the little beasties from which the dye is extracted munch the prickly pear’s pads). But the prickly pear went crazy. It eventually converted some 260,000 square kilometers of farmland (which for those readers, who like me don’t think in square kilometers, is more or less equivalent to a square 500 km by 500 km) into an impenetrable green jungle. Farmers were driven off their land by this “green hell” and their abandoned homes were crushed under the cactus growth.

The authorities finally managed to get the plague under control in the 1920s by introducing a South American moth, the Cactoblastis cactorum, whose larvae feast on prickly pear. This led to a crash in prickly pear populations, and while the plant has not been eradicated from Australia it has been brought under control (the Australians were lucky, by the way; there is always a risk in this kind of biological control that the agent will find another native plant much more to its liking and wipe that out instead, or once it’s dealt with the original pest will turn its hungry eye on to something else and become an invasive species in its own right).

Why did some Spaniard ever bring the prickly pear back to Europe in the first place? Because, as far as I can tell, he thought he could brighten up a Spanish garden somewhere. But it cannot have been because of the beauty of the plant itself. More likely it was the flowers, for indeed the web is full of pictures of the flower of the prickly pear. Here are a few of the more pleasing examples.

At some point, though, people, especially the poor with bellies to fill, began to also focus on the fruit, the “figs” of the prickly pear

These had been enjoyed by the Mesoamericans for millennia before Hernan Cortes and his conquistadores arrived and have been enjoyed by the Mexicans ever since.

I add here a close-up of the fruit

first because it’s a nice photo, but second because the sharp-eyed reader will notice the hair-thin spines which nestle lovingly around the crown of the fruit. Their scientific name is glochids. They are the nastiest little buggers imaginable. They come off easily and lodge under the skin of the unwary picker, where they cause exquisite and unending agony as the said picker tries and tries and tries again to extract them, always in vain. Bloody little bastards … Readers may have gathered from this little burst of ill humour that I have personally experienced this exceedingly painful trial. It was in Eritrea as a matter of fact, where as a young and foolish lad I tried picking the fruit. I then ran to my Mummy to get the horrible little things out, which she eventually did after much wailing on my part and cross admonitions on her part for me to keep still. I had tried picking the fruit because my mother had earlier bought some, perhaps from a lady like this

and I had liked them – a little too many seeds perhaps but nicely fresh and sweet.

Personally, while I like the taste, that early brush with glochids has always made me wary of the fruit. The pain in the hands was bad enough but the thought of those things getting stuck in your tongue or gums because the fruit was badly cleaned is dreadful. And the thought of them getting stuck in your throat is simply too horrible to contemplate.

But others around the world consume the fruit without a second thought, especially around the Mediterranean rim. Here, we have some cheerful young lads selling the fruit in Egypt

While here we have a more solemn Moroccan doing the same

And here a smiling Sicilian ditto

As readers can imagine, over the centuries people in the countries where the prickly pear was introduced eventually got around to putting the fruit into alcoholic drinks – at least in those countries where such drinks are tolerated. Thus, we have a prickly pear-flavoured liqueur called “Ficodi” in Sicily, we have a prickly-pear flavored herbal liqueur called “bajtra” in Malta (another country, by the way, where the prickly pear has been declared an invasive species), out in the lonelier reaches of the Atlantic, on the island of St. Helena (where Napoleon Bonaparte was banished), the potent “Tungi Spirit” is produced with the fruit, while prickly pear fruit is the main ingredient of a popular Christmas beverage in the British Virgin Islands called “Miss Blyden”. Looking at how all these various drinks are made, I think I would plump for Miss Blyden: prickly pear steeped in rum and sweetened with sugar. Mmm, sounds good …Yohoho, and a bottle of Miss Blyden, is what I say.

But actually, these drinks are all derivative, if I can put it that way: you just plunk prickly pear fruit in an alcoholic medium; it could actually be any fruit that is plunked. The Mesoamericans, on the other hand, came up millennia ago with colonche, an alcoholic drink using just the juice of the prickly pear fruit, fermenting it over a number of days. I have read that it is a sweet, fizzy, red beverage. Here’s a photo of a glass of colonche, together with the fruit from which it is derived.

I regret to say that I did not try the drink while I was in Mexico. However, I have asked my son to try it and report back. If the feedback is good, we can discuss about getting into the business of exporting it!

What I will not promote, through export or otherwise, is the eating of the pads (that is to say the fleshy leaves) of the prickly pear. They eat them in Mexico – and in New Mexico too (and perhaps some of the other southwestern States of the US). The original peoples of Mexico were eating them when Cortes burst in on the scene, and it’s still quite popular. I saw them sold in the supermarket around the corner from where we were staying in Mexico City and took a photo, but I prefer this more sympathetic photo of a Mexican lady on the street selling them.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had tried the pads, cooked and with melted cheese, in a taco. I also tried them, with cheese but without the taco. It didn’t change the taste much.

I’m all for trying things once (with the exception of insects). But not necessarily more than once. Pads of the prickly pear fall into the latter category.

But who knows? As the Mediterranean countries slowly go down the economic drain, and more generally as we 99 percenters slowly get poorer, perhaps we will join our Mesoamerican friends and start eating prickly pear pads – as the poor of the Mediterranean lands turned to the fruits of the prickly pear some three hundred years ago to fill their empty stomachs.

_______________
Columbian exchange: http://globerove.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Columbian-Exchange.jpg (in http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/cbgobble/columbian-v-triangle)
Prickly pear in Teotihuacan: https://farm1.staticflickr.com/214/444712763_0a91a8353e.jpg (in https://www.flickr.com/photos/eternal_sunshine_of_the_spotless_mind/444712763/
Mexican flag: http://www.freepressers.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/mexican-flag-640.jpg (in http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/WTARC/2011/k1302_10_21.asp)
Prickly pear: https://seekraz.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/prickly-pear-cacti-in-tucson-desert.jpg (in https://seekraz.wordpress.com/tag/prickly-pear-cactus/)
Prickly pear by Asmara-Masawa railway: https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8633/16089064905_44b9e68e48_b.jpg (in https://www.flickr.com/photos/dave-hill/16089064905/)
Italian colonial masters: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/it/6/6c/Ascari_penne_di_falco.jpg (in http://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regio_corpo_truppe_coloniali_d’Eritrea)
Prickly pear in Sicily: https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8299/7826141194_33f0e36a8d_b.jpg (in https://www.flickr.com/photos/mari-mora/7826141194/)
Prickly pear in Spain: https://themostbeautifulplacesineurope.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/dsc_0048.jpg (in https://themostbeautifulplacesineurope.wordpress.com/tag/castle/)
Prickly pear in Ethiopian village: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YutF1G9Qjbo/Up44cIZUf_I/AAAAAAAAMPA/fydBOTfLCNY/s1600/00041775.jpg (in http://jhodgesagame.blogspot.com)
Prickly pear in Kruger National Park: http://academic.sun.ac.za/cib/news/images/20120611_opuntia_stricta_impacts_fig1.jpg (in http://academic.sun.ac.za/cib/news/20120611_opuntia_stricta_impacts.htm)
Prickly pear in Australia – the green hell: http://chinchillalibrary.chinchilla.org.au/Images/Local%20History/johnty%20turner’s.jpg (in http://chinchillalibrary.chinchilla.org.au/HTML/HeritagePricklyPear.html)
Prickly pear in flower-1: http://www.fotothing.com/photos/4aa/4aa38f6709881bcb9b0dc2f7bce87dea.jpg (in http://www.fotothing.com/AzViper/photo/4aa38f6709881bcb9b0dc2f7bce87dea/)
Prickly pear in flower-2: http://photosbygarth.com/travels/DesertGardens4-23-11/prickly_pear_cactus_flowers_0887.jpg (in http://photosbygarth.com/wordpress/)
Prickly pear in flower-3: http://www.summitpost.org/prickly-pear-cactus-flower/294673
Prickly pear fruit-1: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_NFH_ZhWJCU/T1kjB-HTOWI/AAAAAAAAA84/rBf30_8f5qg/s1600/5.jpg (in http://docsfitnesstips.blogspot.com/2012/03/prickley-pear.html)
Mexicans selling prickly pear fruit:
http://i.gonoma.net/i/destinations/1106/zacatecas-images/prickly.jpg (in http://gonomad.com/destinations-xxx/3205-zacatecas-mexico-rsquo-s-overlooked-colonial-gem)
Prickly pear fruit-2: http://cdn.c.photoshelter.com/img-get/I0000O2m8f8jI.vU/s/600/600/PPCA-021548.jpg (in http://rolfnussbaumer.photoshelter.com/image/I0000O2m8f8jI.vU)
Ethiopian lady selling prickly pear: http://jamminglobal.com/2012/05/ethiopia-part-6-historical-axum-and-mountainous-twisties.html
Prickly pear seller Egypt: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/Media/NewsMedia/2013/7/16/2013-635095893366005272-600_resized.jpg (http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/News/3357/25/The-fruit-beneath-the-thorns.aspx)
Prickly pear seller Morocco: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Prickly_pear_seller.jpg (in http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opuntia_ficus-indica)
Prickly pear seller Italy: http://www.fotografieitalia.it/foto/3126/3126-08-20-44-1557.jpg (in http://www.fotografieitalia.it/foto.cfm?idfoto=65383&idfotografo=3126&crono=1)
Colonche: http://173.236.14.43/fotos/nota/2014/9/18/4d68094af571428.jpg (in http://www.am.com.mx/aguascalientes/especiales/espiritus-de-la-republica-144117.html)
Seller of cactus pads: http://holeinthedonut.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Nopal_Cactus_Seller_Mercado_Hidalgo_Guanajuato.jpg (in http://holeinthedonut.com/2010/06/01/mexico-food-nopal-cactus/)

Cactus pad and cheese: http://s3.amazonaws.com/foodspotting-ec2/reviews/846163/thumb_600.jpg?1315336866 (in http://www.foodspotting.com/150802-amandahugnkiss)/)

MEXICO: PAINTED SIGNS

Bangkok, 13 January 2015

It was at Tlaxcala that I began to notice it.

We’d taken a bus from Mexico City to visit this small town, since it was described as a nice example of colonial Mexican architecture and town planning. It certainly was pleasant enough, as were Chiapas de Corzo and San Cristóbal de las Casas, two other colonial-era towns which we visited later. The latter two have been declared “pueblos magicos”, magic towns, a slogan dreamed up by the Mexican tourism authorities (clever branding, although I do feel duty-bound to whisper that the pueblos in Tuscany, for instance, or any number of pueblos which my wife and I have visited in Spain, are more magico than Tlaxcala and the two official pueblos magicos that we visited).

In any event, my point in mentioning the visit to Tlaxcala is another. What I began to notice as we walked around the town was the lack of modern signage on the shops. To understand what I mean, let me insert here a picture of the shopping street in Vienna, the Graben, where we often went for a stroll and coffee when we lived there.

Notice the abundant use of neon shop signs, tacked onto the shop fronts. For better or for worse (and in my opinion for worse; it drives me crazy in this age of climate change to see all those illuminated shop signs blazing out into the night), this is now the accepted and expected type of design for shop signs.

So it was with great interest that I saw in Tlaxcala that shop signs tended to be of the old-fashioned type, painted by hand

Alerted to this phenomenon, I made sure to get some close-ups of such signs in San Cristóbal

I began to notice that advertisements were often painted too. The following style of painted advertisement was definitely my favorite, with this particular example coming from San Lorenzo Zinacantán.

These types of advertisements, to be found on otherwise bare walls, seem always to be announcing some upcoming event. Notice the large, rounded, friendly, inviting font, but placed at a slight angle denoting future excitement, and with a very pleasing colour scheme which starts with a dark colour and shades off into a lighter one. I throw in here some other signs of this genre that I spotted from buses or trains flashing by.

It would seem that the honorable profession of sign painter is alive and well in Mexico! (this reminds me of a wonderful novel from India, another country with a great sign painting tradition, “The Painter of Signs”, by R.K. Narayan; great novelist, by the way, I highly recommend him to my readers).

Of course, painting on walls has a long and noble tradition in Mexico. This art form must have reached its apogee with the great Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, José Orozco, and David Siqueiros. Already 35 years ago, when we first visited Mexico, we had reverently visited a number of the murals by these artists. This time around, we visited Rivera’s murals in the Secretaría de Educación Pública, just behind the cathedral on the Zocalo in Mexico City. As was his style, they are very political, very “leftie”; they made me and my wife smile as they brought back memories of the excited discussions of our youth. These two murals, “The Capitalist’s Dinner” and “Death of the Capitalist”, epitomize them all.

In San Cristobal, up some back streets, I saw what I fear are today’s inheritors of Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros

It’s sad really. All that grand, elevated talk of our youth has degenerated into the childish babble of these cartoons. But the rot doesn’t finish there, for Mexico suffers from the same mindless graffiti which defaces so many of our cities

“Fuck you. I exist”

What are our civilizations reduced to?

__________________

Mariahilfestrasse 1: http://austriacazare.ro/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/mariahilfer-strasse.jpg (in http://austriacazare.ro/shopping/mariahilferstrasse/#photoGallery%5Bgallery-503%5D/3/)
Calle 20 de noviembre , Tlaxcala: http://www.mexicoenfotos.com/estados/tlaxcala/tlaxcala/MX13379190432534&album=01&province=tlaxcala&city=tlaxcala&pagina=6
Avenida Vicente Guerro, Tlaxcala: http://www.mexicoenfotos.com/estados/tlaxcala/tlaxcala/MX13362760603306&album=01&province=tlaxcala&city=tlaxcala&pagina=6
Shop signs, San Cristobal: my photos
Painted advertisement signs: my photos
Cartoon wall paintings, San Cristobal: my photos
Graffiti, Mexico City: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hsTD7FnkGKs/UIEueVASNkI/AAAAAAAAAQs/PJ0N-K0omig/s1600/150559_545018925524744_786800387_n.jpg (in http://thevilgang.blogspot.com/2012/10/el-graffiti-de-la-ciudad-de-mexico.html)

MEXICO: MUSEO DE ARTE POPULAR

Bangkok, 10 January, 2015

While in Mexico City over the Christmas break, my wife and I visited two museums, the Palacio de Bellas Artes and the Museo de Arte Popular. The Bellas Artes is the more Worthy of the two, having vast panels by Great Mexican Painters such as Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, José Orozco, and others. When we visited, it also had some Worthy exhibitions, one of these being on modern art from cubism onwards, which mixed global titans like Picasso and Pollock with Mexicans. I have mentioned in a previous post how so much of the world looks the same everywhere nowadays, especially where clothes are concerned: everyone, everywhere, dresses the same, particularly the young. I was struck by the same sensation in this exhibition of modern art. Everyone’s modern art was the same everywhere: Diego Rivera’s cubism looked just like Braque’s, Frida Kahlo’s surrealism was indistinguishable from Magritte’s, Gunther Gerzso’s abstract expressionism is no different from Willem de Kooning’s or Mark Rothko’s. In a word, there was nothing particularly Mexican about any of the art on show from Mexican artists. Another, depressing, effect of globalization.

So you can imagine my relief when we visited the Museo de Arte Popular (which I think we can translate as the Museum of Folk Art) and saw pieces which were quite typically Mexican, pieces I would not find in a museum of folk or other art in Europe or the US or Japan or even Thailand where we currently live. (In truth, I’m sure I would find similar pieces in the other Latin American countries, but that’s OK; these countries do after all share a fair amount of cultural history, Hispanic and pre-Hispanic).

So it is with pleasure that I can share with readers photos of some of the pieces I most liked. I hope I will be excused their generally poor quality. They are all taken with my iPhone, and in many instances through the glass of the exhibition cases which often created irritating problems of reflections.

I start with that typical form of folk art, ceramics. Here are some pots and a plate I particularly fancied:

with this one being my favorite of the genre

There was also a lot of woven rattan and similar objects. I’m not a big fan of this art form, but I do add here a picture of a container made with a mix of bark and fibres, which had a certain attraction

Not particularly Mexican all this, you might argue, so let me continue with a subject very close to the average Mexican’s heart, religion. In the museum collection, it was captured for the most part with that typically Mexican (or perhaps Latin American) fondness for little set scenes. So we have a crucifixion

a last supper – but why are they eating watermelon??

and a last judgement

while the Tree of Life was a very popular motif, made into a lovely candelabra in this example

Then there were several examples of ex-votos, that exceedingly popular genre of folk religious painting (and not just in Mexico; Italian churches are littered with them, as are churches in Austria and probably every other Catholic country). Normally, they record a person being saved from some catastrophe or illness, but in this particular case a certain Mr. Jesus Gomez Reyez was thanking the Good Lord for getting his American passport regularized back in 1962, a touching commentary on so many Mexicans’ yearnings to escape to America

Religion has much to do with death, and the Mexicans have turned death into a high art, especially that most striking vision of the death which awaits us all, the skeleton. The museum has a particularly rich collection of this art form, of which I show a small selection, starting with this wonderful variation on that insipid form of religious art, the statues of saints in churches

I must say, despite the grimness of the topic these skeletons are always remarkably cheerful. Here we have a bunch of skeletons thoroughly enjoying a huge meal – echoes of the last supper?

another happily kicking a football around

yet another, a child’s skeleton, blowing us a raspberry

while here we have an earnest swain declaring his undying love to a simpering and blushing maiden

and finally, a very popular character in the skeleton cast of characters, a “Catrina”, a female skeleton dressed to the nines in a 19th Century style

We loved these Catrinas so much that we bought a ceramic version and carried it back to Bangkok, where it now stands on our dressing room table.

Keeping to the broad religious theme, devils are also a popular topic. I include three, one blowing a raspberry, something which I have never particularly associated with devils (but a common theme it would seem; does blowing raspberries have some deeper meaning in Mexico?)

another showing a bunch of devils taking part in a last-supper type of meal – eating watermelon again! (what’s with this business of watermelon?)

and a grimmer scene, a devil rapist (I suppose rape is as bad a problem in Mexico as anywhere else).

The little scenes which seem such a popular subject spill over into normal, day-to-day life. We have here a seller in the market (watermelon-eating again …)

Fairgrounds seem a popular topic, especially Ferris wheels

while here we have a grimmer scene from life, a fire. Many escape from the doors of these towers but one person has had to throw himself off the top.

This large needlework piece wonderfully captures the myriad activities of daily life

I add one close-up of the many scenes on this piece

The final theme is animals, which are a popular subject for folk artists. I feel I should start with a turkey, which was first domesticated in pre-Hispanic Mexico.

I continue with a cat, because my wife reminded me that when we were last in Mexico 35 years ago we bought a ceramic cat, which currently faithfully sits in storage in Vienna waiting for our return to Europe.

But I also add a dog, in this case in the form of a teponatzle (a type of musical instrument),

continue with what appears to be a brightly coloured hedgehog

and finish with a couple of birds: what looks like a macaw, fashioned as a handle of a jug

and this truly magnificent peacock

On the topic of animals, I feel I have to include a picture of this monster

The Mexicans seem to have a great fondness of such monsters, which we saw in a number of places, on a much larger scale, being used as floats of some sort.

Well, I don’t want to give everything away about this museum. I hope I’ve persuaded some readers to visit it if they happen to be in Mexico City: Calle Revillagigedo 11, Cuauhtémoc, very central; open every day except Monday.

___________

pictures: all mine

MEXICO: BASHING THE PIÑATA

Mexico City, 4 January, 2015

As my wife and I wandered around Mexico City this last week, we were struck by these strange ornaments which we saw hanging in many places. This particular one, for instance, was hanging in a street somewhere

while this one, somewhat incongruously, swung over the cars in a gas station.

Intrigued, I asked our son what they were. Piñata, he told us.

Ah. I had never heard of them.

Undeterred, I rolled up my sleeves and did some research (i.e., browsed the web). I am now ready to report my findings.

What we have here is an example of the strategy used by the Catholic church in the early years of the Spanish conquest of Mexico to christianize the local populations. The church adopted, with the necessary adaptations, those local religious traditions which happened to have similarities with Catholic traditions. The thinking was that this would make Catholicism more familiar, more “user friendly” for the local populations, who would therefore convert more readily (and if necessary, a little gentle pressure from the sharp end of a sword could no doubt be used to help along in the decision-making process).

In the case of the piñata, the local religious tradition in question was part of the Aztec festival for their patron god Huitzilopochtli, sun god, god of war, and god of human sacrifice.

The whole of the Aztec month of Panquetzaliztli, which ran from 7 to 26 December in today’s calendar, was dedicated to this festival. The people decorated their homes and trees with paper flags, there were ritual races, processions, dances, songs, prayers, and to top it all off there were human sacrifices.

Only one of the festival’s activities is of interest us here. In it, priests would place a clay pot on a pole in front of the statue of the god. The pot was filled with tiny treasures inside and decorated with colorful feathers outside. The pot would be ritually broken with a stick or club, and the treasures would fall to the feet of the statue as an offering.

It so happened that the Spaniards had a very similar custom, the Dance of the Piñata, which took place during Lent. There, too, a decorated clay pot, the piñata, was suspended and during some kind of dance routine got broken with a stick. Quite what the religious significance of this was is unclear to me, nor do I know if there was anything in the pot.

The canny Franciscan monks who were spearheading the conversion efforts in Mexico (along with Dominicans) figured that they could harness this Lenten custom from Old Spain to a new Christmas custom in New Spain and in so doing help to draw away the indigenous people from their old, “pagan”, “idolatrous”, “devil-worshipping”, etc. religion. They also borrowed from a superficially similar Mayan custom. The Mayans had a game rather like blind man’s buff, where a player was blindfolded, perhaps spun around to disorient him, and then left to try and hit and break a suspended clay pot. No doubt his blundering misses made spectators roar with laughter. Again, I don’t know if there was anything in the pot.

The Franciscans used all these threads to weave together a new, fun custom which the indigenous people were encouraged to practice, in the church grounds no doubt, in the run-up to Christmas. A clay pot, filled with sweets and other goodies, and decorated on the outside, was suspended. The “players” were blindfolded, and guided by the onlookers, would try and bash the pot and release the goodies. If successful, everyone would throw themselves on the goodies. But of course the Franciscans gave the whole thing a religious twist, using the new piñata “game” to inculcate in the locals some Christian catechism. Thus, the clay pot represented Satan, with the outer decorations now transmuted into seven colorful cones or horns representing the seven deadly sins (for those of my readers who have momentarily forgotten which these are, we have, in alphabetical order: envy, gluttony, greed, lust, pride, sloth, and wrath). The outside was made beautiful to remind the viewer that evil is tempting, and the goodies inside the pot represented the temptations of wealth and earthly pleasures. Once the game started, it became a morality play for demonstrating the three theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity. The blindfolded players represented Blind Faith, groping their way towards salvation. The piñata now represented Hope. The onlookers looking up at the hanging piñata were actually gazing towards Heaven, yearning for the salvation that would come from the smashing the pot and the triumph of Faith over Evil. The sweets and other goodies that showered forth now suddenly became the rewards of maintaining the Faith. But everyone shared in the goodies, thus symbolizing Charity. After this dose of religion, it seems to me only correct to include this statue of a Franciscan monk having a bash at a piñata.

If any of the players impatiently waiting to have a go at smashing the pot understood any of these theological subtleties I take my hat off to them. If my own youthful experience of catechism is anything to go by, I would guess that they quietly let the priest blather on about whatever he wanted to blather on about and then they got down to the serious business of having some fun. These two photos, which I took in the Museo de Arte Popular (about which more later in a future post), capture nicely the fun aspect of this religious game.

I’m sure it is the jolliness of smashing something and scrambling around for goodies that makes older Mexicans remember piñata with fondness rather than the catalogue of the seven deadly sins and the triumph of Faith over Evil. In fact, at some point it seems to me that the piñata lost much of its religious connotations and simply became a game to play at parties, and at the same time there was a switch from a ceramic pot to hold the goodies to one made of papier-mâché or cardboard – no doubt fond mothers were worried about having their dear ones and those of their neighbors showered with pottery shards during the children’s parties they organized.

Indeed, I have this vague memory of a similar game being played at the birthday party of one of my son’s friends years ago in Italy. By the way, for those of you who like me are fond of useless facts, the Spaniards borrowed the piñata from the Italians, where it was called pignatta. And it seems that the ultimate source of the custom was China, although how it got from the Middle Kingdom to Italy is a bit of a mystery to me (my sources suggest Marco Polo, but he gets mentioned whenever no-one has a good idea how things got transmitted from China to Europe).

In any event, it now looks like the piñata is morphing into a simple Christmas decoration. I certainly don’t think that all the piñatas we’ve seen hung up are there to be bashed vigorously with a stick. In this new identity they have become the equivalent of those stars which seem such a popular Christmas street decoration.

Soon, they will morph once more, becoming tame Christmas tree decorations. Indeed, if this Christmas tree at one of Mexico City’s bus stations is anything to go by, the morphing has started already.

From reverent offering to the sun god to cheesy decoration on a Christmas tree, the fall has been long and hard.

_____________

Piñata: my photo
Huitzilpochtli: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Huitzilopochtli_telleriano.jpg (in http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huitzilopochtli)
Franciscan monk hitting piñata: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piñata#/image/File:MonkPiñataAcolman1.JPG (in http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piñata)
pix from the museo de arte popular: mine
Children hitting a piñata: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Posadas#/image/File:Las_Posadas_Pinata.jpg (in http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Posadas)
Christmas street decorations: http://wallpaperest.com/wallpapers/street-outdoor-christmas-decorations_074228.jpg (in http://toplowridersites.com/iphone-5-38528-christmas-christmas-street-decoration-jpg/)
piñata on Christmas tree: my picture

MEXICO: BOUGAINVILLEA

Mexico City, 25 December, 2014

My wife and I are spending Christmas in Mexico City. Parental love is what draws us to Mexico. Our son has his business here, and this year it is his turn to hold the fort over the busy Christmas period. As the Turkish saying goes, “Dağ sana gelmezse, sen dağa gideceksin”, “If the mountain won’t come to you, you must go to the mountain”. These last few days, together with our daughter (she has been able to escape from her job in New York, but at the price of being often on FaceTime and email with her colleagues), we have been roaming the city and appreciating its delights, both visual and gastronomic. Yesterday, for instance, we visited Frida Kahlo’s house, La Casa Azul, which presents a compact collection of her paintings (including one which I’ve mentioned in a previous post) as well as of paintings by her husband Diego Rivera. And while we stood in the long, long line to get in, we tucked into an assortment of delicious tacos, including one where the filling was a mix of cheese and cactus pads. Cactus pads! That was a first for me.

Everywhere we have been in the city, we have been delighted with great clouds of bougainvillea, mauve

red

orange

white

clawing their way over roofs, snaking along balconies, tumbling over walls, strangling trees, or simply sculpted into staid bushes.

I’m very fond of bougainvillea. It’s an old friend which I’ve run into in various parts of the world, always places with the sunny, warm climates which I feel very comfortable in, like Eritrea where I was born

or Liguria which my wife introduced me to nearly 40 years ago and to which we return again and again

or Thailand where we live at the moment.

This latest meeting with bougainvillea in Mexico has moved me to use my free time during this holiday period, between visits to the sites and shopping for Christmas lunch and dinner, to explore this beautiful plant’s history. I had always known that its rather fancy name came from the French Admiral Louis Antoine, Comte de Bougainville.

France’s response to Britain’s James Cook, Bougainville was the first Frenchman to circumnavigate the globe, in the late 1760s, and it was during this trip that bougainvillea was discovered (by Europeans; the locals knew it already of course). It was actually Bougainville’s on-board botanist, Philibert Commerson, who discovered it.

The discovery occurred during an enforced stopover in the Bay of Rio de Janeiro, where Bougainville had decided to regroup and carry out urgent repairs to his two ships. Like most European botanists of the time, Commerson was dazzled by the huge biological diversity he found in Brazil: “this country is the most beautiful in the world”, he wrote home. Something of what he found before him can be gathered from this more-or-less contemporary painting.

Commerson took advantage of the stop in Rio to go out botanizing along the coast and islets of the bay. As he reported to a friend in a letter home, one day he stumbled on this vine, “a wonderful plant with big flowers of a sumptuous violet colour”. He decided to honour Bougainville by naming the plant after him (Bougainville also gave his name to a couple of islands, a couple of straits between islands, and a town in the Falkland Islands). Commerson’s dried sample eventually made it back to France, where it can still be viewed, faded but nevertheless recognizable.

We can leave the story of bougainvillea there; suffice to say that the first period of globalization which came with European colonialism spread the pretty plant far and wide. But its discovery in the Bay of Rio de Janeiro gives me pause. That wonderful botanical diversity which so took Commerson’s breath away has been sadly depleted. Before the arrival of the Europeans, the bay of Rio de Janeiro was enveloped by the Mata Atlântica, the Atlantic Forest. This mighty forest stretched unbroken from north-east Brazil all the way down the Atlantic coastline as far as Uruguay, and spread into north-eastern Argentina and eastern Paraguay. It once covered some one and a half million square kilometres, but three hundred years of deforestation for logging and farming have seen it become the second most threatened biome in the world, after Madagascar. Today, less than a tenth of the original forest area remains.

There is some light in all the gloom. Despite all the loss and habitat fragmentation, the region is still ranked in the top five of the world’s biodiversity hotspots. It is particularly remarkable for its bird species. In 2001, wanting to preserve what was left if not reverse some of the damage (to which his own ancestors had contributed), a farsighted owner of farmland at the base of the mountains, in the valley of the Guapiaçu river, some 80 kilometres north-east of Rio, established an ecological Reserve, the Reserva Ecológica de Guapiaçu (REGUA). REGUA’s objective is to protect the remaining forest and biodiversity from deforestation, hunting, and over-extraction of natural resources. With funds from the World Land Trust and others, REGUA has bought land to consolidate and extend the Reserve. Over 100,000 trees, all native species, have been planted, wetlands have been recreated, some animal species have been reintroduced, hunters have been turned into guides, and visitors are encouraged to come and share in this wonderful effort. If I know all this, it is because my wife and I financially supported the planting of a modest number of trees and stayed at the Reserve’s lodge for several days, going out on a birding expedition, inspecting our tree seedlings and the-then nascent wetlands, and just generally enjoying ourselves.

We hope to go back there one day, to see how our trees are doing. And maybe we’ll spot some bougainvillea in its natural state, ruthlessly climbing over some unfortunate tree, choking the life out of it.

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Mauve bougainvillea: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Starr_030418-0058_Bougainvillea_spectabilis.jpg (in http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bougainvillea_spectabilis)
Red bougainvillea: http://www.boethingtreeland.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/1440x/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/B/o/Bougainvillea-Temple-Fire.jpg (in http://www.boethingtreeland.com/bougainvillea-temple-fire.html)
Orange bougainvillea: http://pics.davesgarden.com/pics/2007/02/01/htop/a25dea.jpg (in http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/showimage/139848/#b)
White bougainvillea: http://www.phytoimages.siu.edu/users/paraman1/7_13_09/Upload13July09A/BougainvilleaWhite1.jpg (in http://www.phytoimages.siu.edu/imgs/paraman1/r/Nyctaginaceae_Bougainvillea_spectabilis_16879.html)
Eritrean highlands: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iNSpfNcQ0Sg/SmH-m6Qdw7I/AAAAAAAABk0/m6818sz2DR8/s1600-h/asmara+114.jpg (in http://www.concretegardener.com/2009/07/glimpse-of-massawa-eritrea.html)
Liguria: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Vernazza.JPG (in http://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vernazza.JPG)
Thailand: http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwtravel/624_330/images/live/p0/15/w6/p015w6lz.jpg (in http://www.bbc.com/travel/feature/20130304-the-perfect-trip-thailand)
Bougainville: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Antoine_de_Bougainville#/image/File:Louis_Antoine_de_Bougainville_-_Portrait_par_Jean-Pierre_Franquel.jpg (in http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Antoine_de_Bougainville)
Commerson: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philibert_Commerçon#/image/File:Commerson_Philibert_1727-1773.png (in http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philibert_Commerçon)
Brazilian jungle: http://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philibert_Commerson#/image/Fichier:Rugendas_-_Embouchure_de_la_riviere_Caxoera.jpg
Commerson’s dried sample: http://dsiphoto.mnhn.fr/sonnera2/LAPI/scanG/G20090518/P00169376_a.jpg
REGUA: http://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/06/3f/61/18/regua-reserva-ecologica.jpg (in http://www.tripadvisor.com.au/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g954096-d2557905-i104816920-REGUA_Reserva_Ecologica_de_Guapiacu-Cachoeiras_de_Macacu_State_of_Rio_de.html)