Down Mexico way

Travelling through the cities 16th century Spain founded leaves one stunned. Cities like Morelia, Patzcuaro, Guadalajara, Guanajuato and S...

Travelling through the cities 16th century Spain founded leaves one stunned. Cities like Morelia, Patzcuaro, Guadalajara, Guanajuato and San Miguel de Allende in central Mexico reflect the cultural intrusiveness of the Spanish conquest which left indelible imprints on the social fabric. Most cities here are mining towns. Since the Catholic Church was at the vanguard of Spanish political expansion into the â€˜New Worldâ€™, Spanish miners, conquerors and missionaries worked in tandem in the conquered territories. While the miners often laid the foundation of cities they also prepared the ground for the missionaries.

The beautiful city of Guanajuato, for instance, was founded by a Spanish miner Obregoâ€™n y Alcocer. He considered the discovery of silver in the region a miracle of God and promptly set up a church and a cathedral around which the city grew. Most central Mexican cities have such origins and share a common format: European baroque style cathedrals and plazas surrounded by double-storied haciendas. Today, these mining cities are preserved for tourists as the â€˜â€˜colonial jewels of Mexicoâ€™â€™ a label that eloquently reflects how postcolonial Mexico relates to its past.

Mexican history has a layering of traditions that span from its Aztec past, to the 16th century Spanish conquest, to the 19th century wars with America and finally the revolution of 1912 that gave the country a legal constitution and formalised the separation of Church and State. Of all these phases the one that left its imprint most forcibly on the physical and cultural landscape of the country was the Spanish conquest. This is reflected in the fact that every Mexican village, even a remote one, is Spanish speaking and devoutly Catholic.

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The religious zeal of the ordinary Mexican blinds them to the histories that have made their once rich mines empty and the irony of having rich, ornate, European-style cathedrals in the midst of their utter poverty. Indeed the serenity of the people amidst the imposing churches that dwarf them physically gives an impression that they have happily come to terms with their often bloody past.As one travels through central Mexico, one wonders if the force of religion dilutes memory of colonial atrocities. There are no simple answers. These cities were also the core areas of the Mexican war of independence against the Spaniards.

Statues of the three most important independence leaders of Mexico dot their landscape: Jose Maria Morelos (1765-1815), Miguel Hidalgo Costilla (1753-1811) and Miguel Allende and his helper Pipila. But the Mexicans seem to revere both the cathedrals and the statues of their heroes. One canâ€™t help but think that in the Mexican psyche the Spanish colonial past is hardly an evil spot. Indeed it is a legacy that is unproblematically intertwined with their own national leaders who fought the Spaniards. An enmeshing that is possible because both are distant memories.

More than the Spanish, it is the Americans who are the villains for the average Mexican. In the big cities like Guadalajara and Mexico City, there are city squares with statues of brave Mexican soldiers who laid down their lives fighting the Americans. These monuments to national pride invoke far more emotional outbursts than those dedicated to Morelos or Pipila. This is perhaps because USA, by its very existence, serves as an everyday reminder of a historical past in which Mexico was forced to concede its oil-rich territories to it.

The Mexican sense of their past leaves one with some questions: Does linguistic and religious affinity with an erstwhile coloniser make a postcolonial society forget its colonial past? Does a culturally more intrusive colonialism make the economic and political inequities of colonial rule less obvious? There are no easy answers.

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The writer is a visiting professor at the University of Texas