The Other Side: A Fence Away

By Martin Lahiff

Some forty scholarly works, written by historians on both sides of the Border,
form the basis for this non-scholarly attempt to provide a short, simple story
of events between the Spanish conquest of Mexico five centuries ago and
Mexicos dominance of itself since its independence of two hundred years.
Better analysis of events here described in a factually chronologic way can be
found in the writers historical sources. A reader knowing little of Mexicos
history can get a good start with this writers try to show what the large and
beautiful land to the south has met and overcome on the way to what it has,
and what it will become.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483660622

Martin Lahiff

Martin Lahiff can’t explain why he has spent over eighty years under what William Shakespeare might have called the Spell of the Muse. That spell continues to bother us, writers and readers alike, who waste valuable time looking for worth in a world that knows otherwise. His book, Iona, records the raids of the Muse over the course of his lifetime, from his early college enlightenments at a school by that name in New Rochelle, New York, through the civil rights and hippie movements of the Sixties in San Francisco, the misery of Communist Europe, the emergence of Moslems in the East, thirty years deep in Mexico due to another kind of spell that has lasted 53 years, and his job as a U.S. consul.

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Copyright © 2013 by Martin Lahiff.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2013911880

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-4836-6061-5

   Softcover   978-1-4836-6060-8

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Rev. date: 07/01/2013

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CONTENTS

Introduction

I The Eagle And The Serpent

II The End, A Beginning

III The Colony

IV The Conspiracy

V El Grito

VI Independence

VII Empire

VIII The Fall

IX The Republic

X Santa Anna And Reform

XI The North

XII Texas

XIII Pastry Prelude

XIV U.S. War

XV La Reforma

XVI Intervention

XVII Liberal Victory

XVIII The Porfiriate

XIX La Revolución

XX Obregón

XXI Calles, Cristeros

XXII Cardenas, Oil

XXIII Peace And War

XXIV The Institution

XXV Pri, 1958-1970

XXVI Pri, 1970-1988

XXVII Pri, 1988-2000

XXVIII Pan, 2000-2012

XXIX Pri, 2012-

XXX Postscript

Notes

Bibliography

To

Cecilia Rogel

My wife

By the Same Writer

His Way (1996)—New Testament summary

To Build a Cross (1997)—Foreign Service notes

Two Histories (1998)—Gibbon vs. Hughes

Rancho Minovi (2001)—Autobiography

Cien Poemas (2003, Revised 2007)—Spanish poetry

Iona (2004)—Writer’s poetry

INTRODUCTION

I am no historian and have no qualifications for writing a book about Mexico beyond the fact that I have done it. I like to read and write and put those things to work for as long as it took. The books and articles used for its writing are listed in the bibliography. The book lacks volume and page citations that belong in a scholarly work. I ask the reader to believe that I did not just make things up.

Not being there to see and feel what some of the historians recorded, I relied on their work, some more than others—Lucas Alaman, for example—for the early years of Mexico. I relied heavily on Bernard DeVoto and Joseph Stout for much of the Mexican War with the United States. For all sources, I wanted to mix views and versions and avoid plagiarism.

I devoted a single page to the Indians who owned the land for a thousand years. The book begins with the birth of what we know today as Mexico. And one may ask how I managed to forget its distinctive art and music, the magnificence of its mountains and valleys, and the rich life that lives and grows there. I could not do it justice. This book is not about the deep essence of Mexico but about its existence. It is about what happened to it, not about what it is.

I wrote the book because I thought it was needed. Mexican historians, Alaman excepted, tended to write in a patriotic fervor, and American writings tended to concentrate on American concerns. I wanted something impassionately factual. What I came up with falls short of that, warped by my New York upbringing, Irish roots, and Catholic schooling.

Our thirty years in Mexico, my wife’s birthplace, has intruded on this account, but I have avoided naming our mountain town a hundred miles south of Mexico City because it lacks tourist facilities and would not welcome any attention drawn by my writing.

Martin Lahiff

April 2013

I

The Eagle and the Serpent

The Aztecs were one of the seven tribes of Chichimecas, called barbarians by the more civilized south of Mexico, a wild, naked horde of the northern deserts who lived off whatever moved, and had no gods. The tribes shared a common tongue, Nahuatl, but no culture to speak of. They headed south where the land was easier, cool, and watered to plunder what was left of the Toltec, Zapotec, and Maya civilizations: their pyramid temples and their orderly and productive societies, which began to come apart at about the year AD 700 when priests fought priests over symbols, images, and gods, sapping the strength of their people with feasts of victim blood. While Huns and Vandals were finishing off the last traces of the Roman Empire, the Chichimecas did the same to the soft and decadent worshipers of Teotihuacan, who ran at their approach.

Lake Aztlan, maybe today’s Great Salt Lake, was where the Aztecs started and got their name. A voice told them to look for another lake and an island where an eagle would be perched atop a nopal, a broad-leaf cactus, devouring a serpent. That would be their home.

The Aztec search lasted from 1188 to 1325, when they found what they were looking for. They named the place Tenochtitlan, place of wild cacti, a high, cold town that required clothing and a god, Huitzilopochtli, who gave them the name Mejicas, the heart of the needled maguey cactus. Their flag bears the eagle and the serpent, and their entire country bears their name: Mexico.

The Mexican nation that we know maybe began with the Mejicas, but it had a long way to go. The heroism and genius of Hernan Cortez and his white-skinned men had a lot to do with what Mexico came to be, arriving in the New World a century before their Protestant cousins, the Puritans, suffered and survived their first winter in what would be the United States of America. The Spanish and Portuguese established colonies and governments throughout Mexico, Central and South America, and the Carribe, starting when England was still Catholic.

Hernan Cortez was thirty-four years old when, on February 1, 1519, he sailed from Cuba with eleven ships to claim Mexico for Spain at the head of 519 men. He had been a planter in Cuba since his arrival in 1504 at age nineteen, one of the first Europeans in America since its discovery. He became a successful manager of men, so Diego Velasquez, Spanish governor of the New World, gave him the ships and soldiers that departed from the port of Havana and then changed his mind to appoint another man. Cortez ignored the recall; it was too late, and he had gone too far. His mission would take two and a half years.

Earlier, in 1511, a Spanish ship bound for Cuba, where the city of Santiago was the Spanish capital of the New World, was wrecked by a storm off Mexico’s Tabasco coast. Fifteen of its occupants, including four women, were slaughtered by the Indians; two men survived, one becoming a chief’s slave and the other becoming a chief himself. He painted his body, fathered a family, and directed an Indian attack against Cortez when his force arrived in 1519. Cortez ransomed the slave, who served as his translator along with Marina, called Malinche by Mexican history, the daughter of a chief and a chief herself. She was his main voice throughout the Conquest and its defeats, and the mother of their son, Martin Cortez, the best known early mestizo of the New Land, progenitor of La Raza Nueva, the Mexicans of today.

Two other early expeditions to Mexico’s Yucatan and Tabasco, in 1517 and 1518, under Cordova, then Grijalva, were losing ventures, the survivors making their way back to Cuba with only their lives.

Cortez, branded a traitor by Governor Velasquez, burned his eleven ships on his arrival February 18, 1519, to make the ordered return to Cuba impossible. He had a way with men that won their allegiance. They fought up the coast from the Yucatan to what would be Vera Cruz and then up from the hot shore through the mountain reign of Cempoala, where they heard about the Mexicans and their imperial city of Tenochtitlan, the kingdom of the Aztecs and their sovereign, Montezuma.

Hernan Cortez was no saint, but he was the first and probably the most successful of the Christian missionaries that would follow. He and his men, who included a quiet priest for mass, were horrified at what they learned and saw in the Indian religion, which offered human sacrifice as the way to please their gods and fill their own stomachs. Cortez made conversion from such practices a condition for each Indian surrender.

The first surrenders, in Cempoala, Cholula, and Tlaxcala, came with the shock of Spanish horses, cannon fire, and musketry, all unknown to Indian warriors equipped with wooden swords made sharp with flint inlays, long fire-hardened lances, and stones flung by throwing arms made powerful by practice. Their numbers, always far exceeding the Spanish, broke and ran before the tight, coordinated firepower of the Spanish assaults, learned on the battlegrounds of Europe.

Thus, Cortez and his men came through the passes under the snowed peaks of Orizaba, Popocatepetl, and Ixtacihuatl to the high tableland that the Mexicans ruled, except for the tribal lands of Tlaxcala, eighty miles east of Tenochtitlan, near enough to be its enemies. Defeated by Cortez and their chief, Xicotencatl, baptized, the Tlaxcalans saw in Cortez their hope to defeat the hated and feared Mexicans. Their support, with thousands of Tlaxcalan warriors, made the ultimate conquest possible.

On November 8, 1519, guided by the Tlaxcalans, the Spanish saw Tenochtitlan, Mexico, a gleaming white city on a lake, its fifty thousand houses fronting on canals to the rear, broad avenues to their front, its stone temples topped by high towers, and its stone palaces towering over the city.

Four gates opened on the main approaches to the city, and the Spanish and Tlaxcalans entered from the south. They passed Xochimilco and Coyoacan and saw to the west the hill of Chapultepec, whose springs fed drinking water to the city via an aqueduct still there. The route was lined with temples and decorated towers. Most homes were built of adobe covered with white lime, with thatched roofs. Prominent families lived in taller stone structures.

The invaders were welcome because Cortez insisted; Montezuma, who dreamed priest-inspired prophecies that white bearded men would come from the East, had nevertheless discouraged Cortez’ approach. Courteous lies were exchanged with Montezuma’s emissaries regarding the possibility of their meeting, no doubt influenced by what Tenochtitlan knew of the bloody approach with horses, cannon, and musketry.

The four hundred Spaniards who survived the Cempoalan, Cholulan, and Tlaxcalan defenses were housed with Cortez and two thousand Tlaxcalan allies in a huge building complex across the Gran Plaza of Mexico from the Templo Mayor, the great temple of the god Huitzilopochtli, its walls ten bricks wide at the base, sloping to five bricks wide at the tower on top, seventy feet high, with a view of the whole city. Its hundreds of rooms in seventy-eight buildings topped by towers were dedicated each to a different god, with fountains devoted to piety and pleasure. Buildings housed plants, flowers, and animals cared for by servants. Some buildings housed captive children, lepers, slaves due to die, and facilities for cooking them.

Other buildings held evil spirits, lulled by incense and the moans of monks. Birth and fortune were foretold by stone calendars, and priests worked their wonders with astrology, witchcraft, and elegant prayers to the respective gods. They cured toothaches and cast corrective spells. Their captivated flock dined on the human flesh of captive enemies and slaves. Children were preferred.

Untitled-1.jpg

Cortez and His Route

Ruta seguida por Cortés desde la Villa Rica hasta Tenochtitlán

Montezuma, a grave, sober, sad prince as his name says, lived in a nearby castle of a hundred rooms with twenty entrances and three large courtyards within. Precious stones and black and white marble adorned the walls, the black serving as a mirror. Woodwork of finely cut cypress and pine was secured by hard wood nails. One room 150 feet long and fifty wide served as his prayer chapel, lined with finger-thick silver and gold. Rubies and emeralds were embedded in the walls. Huge rooms with pillars of jade were devoted to aviaries, served by clear water tanks and courtyard trees. The birds were fed according to their native appetites, be it seed, fruit, fish, flies, or lizards. Crocodiles had their space, and three hundred servants cleaned the tanks and fed the birds. Other buildings housed deer, rabbits, lions, tigers, and wolves receiving the same care. Their calls for food disturbed the strangers from Spain.

Cortez and his captains met there with Montezuma during their first days in Mexico; then, they took him as an honored hostage to their own quarters when they heard of plans for their death and sacrifice on the nearby great temple of Tlatelolco—once a separate city from nearby Tenochtitlan, now together in a united Mexico. Montezuma met with his chiefs and ran his city and empire from captivity. Doña Marina knew his every move and kept Cortez informed.

In a perilous farce—Cortez pretending to respect the hostage sovereign, Montezuma pretending to like the situation he could not change—both endured for a hundred days. Then, Cortez learned that Panfilo Narvaez had landed near Vera Cruz on March 20, 1520, with nineteen ships and 1,400 men with orders from Governor Diego Velasquez to arrest Cortez and his men as traitors to the Spanish crown. Taking three hundred men and leaving Pedro de Alvarado with a hundred to control Montezuma and Tenochtitlan, Cortez left to take his attack to Narvaez and his much larger force.

Alvarado, a tall red-bearded blue-eyed warrior, was warned to keep the peace, something that was foreign to his nature. While Cortez was away, his men slaughtered hundreds of Indians during a festival, Alvarado later explaining to an angry Cortez that the Mexicans were planning a general uprising.

Cortez needed three months to defeat Narvaez at Villa Rica by winning over the bulk of Narvaez’ troops with messages of good will and promises of riches in Mexico. He left the wounded general in Vera Cruz and headed back to Mexico, arriving on June 20, 1520, with an army of 1,300 men. He found Alvarado under siege; thousands of Mexicans were attacking the Spanish quarters day and night. His new army of 1,400 men would not be enough. He and two thousand Tlaxcalans had to get out.

They asked Montezuma to calm his people from the roof of their quarters, and he tried. He fell dead with a rock to the head. Cortez offered the Mexicans a three-week date for departure, then left after the offer in the middle of the night, to be known as the Noche Triste, the tragic night described in the diary of a common soldier, Bernal Diaz, who was with Cortez from the beginning and stayed with him to the end. All of this account is taken from his story.

Only minutes after the silent column of Spaniards and Tlaxcalans crept out of their gate into the dark summer night of July 1520, heading across the narrow causeway that led out of Mexico toward Tlaxcala, crossing the first of many bridges and canals on their way, burdened by cannon and horses strange to such a passage and by gold they had exacted from the Mexicans, the Aztecs caught them at the first bridge and swarmed their narrow column from all sides.

The fleeing, disintegrating column needed nine miles to get past the bridges and canals to reach the hills of Tacuba, dry, defensible land. The canals filled with drowned horses, men, arms, and gold. Only three hundred Spaniards, including a bloodied Cortez and Marina and Alvarado, got through alive, along with a few hundred Tlaxcalans. They regrouped at Tacuba and made it to Tlaxcala, the survivors all wounded, writer Bernal Diaz with a lance thrust through his throat. For Cortez, it should have been the end.

The Tlaxcalans knew their man, their only hope for victory over their Mexican oppressors. Ignoring their own losses, they welcomed the helpless Spanish survivors. They would provide more Tlaxcalans next time, they assured Cortez. He would wait for horses and riders and cannon and dry powder and a thousand more Spaniards from Vera Cruz. It would take ten more months.

On May 21, 1521, Cortez and the Tlaxcalans were ready again, this time with thirteen sail-driven barges, each manned by fifty Spaniards and Tlaxcalans armed with the firepower needed to clear the lakes and canals of Mexican fighters, who would row against the wind. Cortez and his closest captains (of those, he had lost only Juan Escalante on the Noche Triste) would seal the city of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco, the city of Mexico, stopping up its food delivery and attacking its drinking water sources. Gonzalo Sandoval would approach from the north, Alvarado from Tacuba in the west, Cristobal de Olid from Coyoacan in the south, and Cortez would operate from Texcoco, east across its wide lake from Mexico. Each captain was assigned two hundred Spaniards and thousands of Tlaxcalans.

Progress, recalling the slaughter of the Noche Triste, was slow and careful. Cuautemoc, the youth selected to replace Montezuma, attacked and drove back all four of the pincers designed to starve his people into surrender, tearing down access bridges and creating lagoons that would drown the Spanish in desperate battle. The Spanish retreated to their bases in Texcoco, Tacuba, and Coyoacan, keeping the Mexicans always only to their front, using cannons and cavalry to avoid encirclement, and kept coming back after each retreat. Alvarado’s men got close enough to the great temple of Tlatelolco to see their captive comrades sacrificed atop its tower, their hearts torn out and offered to the gods, their limbs and torsos thrown down to the mob for nourishment, their faces cut and dried into bearded masks carried aloft by the attacking Mexicans.

From four directions, the houses of the city were demolished by the Tlaxcalans and their adobe ruins used to fill the deadly canals. The sailing barges ruled the lake. Cavalry and men could advance over solid terrain where the Spanish could deploy their power as they did in European victories. The four captains met in the great plaza of Tlatelolco and destroyed the idols of its temple. Starving mothers and their children came to ask for food, their hungry men hiding and waiting for what they could bring.

Cuautemoc fled in a small fleet of canoes and was caught by one of Sandoval’s barge captains on Lake Texcoco. It was over on August 13, 1521. Carried to Cortez, the 18-year-old Cuautemoc sobbed in shame and asked for death. Cortez told him he had fought a brave fight and kept him as an honored captive until he had him killed on an expedition to Honduras.

II

The End, a Beginning

A thousand Spaniards claimed the ruins of the city they destroyed, a city and a nation that now belonged to the King of Spain. The Indians died from new diseases and despair, their population in the country down from six million when the Spaniards came to one million by the end of the century, marred by its worst epidemics in 1576 and 1581.

Cortez led expeditions north and south, along the coast of today’s Baja California and down to Honduras and the Tehuantepec peninsula of Mexico. He became the Lord of Oaxaca and Cuernavaca to Mexico’s south, with twenty-three thousand slaves. He gave Marina to one of his captains when his Spanish wife arrived, and Doña Marina thereafter led the life of a lady in a new house built along with many others for the Spanish veterans of war. Indian hands and skill were needed for that.

Slavery was not abolished until 1542; the Indians did not make good slaves. Left to themselves, they did good work, especially using their skill in construction for the Spanish, but they did not respond well to the whip. For a short while, Spanish bosses thought they could form two separate societies, Spanish and Indian, each with its own culture and leadership under overall Spanish colonial control. Indians were to dress like Indians, not to