January 3, 2019
Mr. Polk’s War, which could really be called “The War of Yankee Aggression”—though “Southern aggression” to expand slavery might be more appropriate for the Mexican War.
We’re staying near Chapultepec Hill, which means “Grasshopper Hill”—and yes, grasshopper snacks are available. They’re not bad with lemon and salt. Read that as not necessarily good. Or maybe an acquired taste.
Chapultepec was one of the major battle sites in the Mexican-American War, one which the Mexicans have naturally a different spin on than we do. About a third of Mexican territory was wrested away—including California, Texas (which had declared itself independent of Mexico, that being one of the casus belli) and much of the American Southwest, for something like 15 million pesos—and a short war. I remember reading something about it in the new biography of Grant, who was one of the many Civil War participants who cut his military teeth on the battles here, including Chapultepec Hill. It was one of the major battles because it is a hill above the city (the city itself is 7200 feet high, with 10-12000 foot mountains, some volcanic, nearby). The city, once an island in a lake, has twin problems—earthquake activity (an 8.1 quake 33 years ago severely damaged the cathedral) and the marshy bottom means that parts of the historic center are sinking.
Roughly, the story we were told is that Chapultepec housed the military academy, and General Santa Ana told his army to stand and fight, then fled when bullets started flying. The 100 academy cadets though, stood their ground and perished. The last 9 became hero-martyrs with a large monument to los nueve ninos in the park.
The castle served duty for the Archduke, who was invited to assume a Mexican throne and put an end to chaos, supported by a French army. Maximilian brought over his own furniture from Europe at the cost of bankrupting the Mexican treasury, which, in part, led to his downfall and execution. The sumptuous furniture remains as a major attraction of what is now the National Museum of History. Among the other items I saw were the banner of Cortes (the Virgin Mary) and the banner of one of the founders of independent Mexico, a priest who rallied the troops with the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, an apparition of the Virgin that is one of the pillars of Mexican Catholicism.
We spent most of the day in the 20th century, in the artistic, political, and intimate triangle of artists Diego Rivera, his sometime wife Frida Kahlo, and the political refugee (friend of Diego, lover of Frida) Leon Trotsky. Rivera went to Russia to study, flirted with Communism, and the circles in which he and Frida traveled steered from socialism to communism. Frida’s bedroom, where she died in the early 1950s, had portraits of Mao, Lenin, and Stalin. Trotsky got Rivera to get him admitted to Mexico (he and Stalin broke after 1924);
Trotsky spent time in Kazakhstan, Turkey, France, and Norway before living in Mexico. Rivera asked him to leave the house when he had an affair with Frida (though they stayed friends) but built a house that was an armed camp with live-in guards (some of them Mexican police). He survived one gang attack, but a Catalan Stalinist got access to Trotsky and stabbed him with a pick axe. He is buried in the compound.
Frida’s house was mobbed—known as the casa azul, the blue house, it, and Trotsky and Rivera’s house/studio, are all in an area of town called Coyote, which had been a small colonial village until overrun by the growth of Mexico City. Before we left, I was reading Howard Kline’s, The United States and Mexico, a 1940s classic; at the time, the population of Mexico was 25 million. Today that’s the population of Mexico City. The neighborhood is still pretty quaint, with some homes including the “Casa Cortes” dating from the conquest. Artists—and tourists—hang out there.
And we did, briefly.