MadamMayo: Mexico

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John Tutino: "We need Mexico as an other. We can't deal with it as an us."

Slowly but surely the transcripts from my Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project are going on-line. Now available:

#13 “Looking at Mexico in New Ways: An Interview with John Tutino."

John Tutino: "We need Mexico as an other. We can't deal with it as an us." But his whole point is that, in fact, US and Mexico are inseparable. It's a knock-your-huaraches-off interview.

> Listen in to the podcast.

TRANSCRIPT

[MUSIC]

C.M. Mayo: Welcome to Marfa Mondays. I’m your host, C.M. Mayo and this is Podcast 13 of a projected 24 podcasts exploring Marfa and the wider Big Bend region, apropos of my book-in-progress about Far West Texas. So far in the series I’ve interviewed people in and around Marfa and also reported on my visits to some very remote and intriguing places in the Big Bend, most recently, interviews with Dallas Baxter, founder of Cenizo Journal; and with luthier and cowboy poet singing some cowboy songs, Michael Stevens; and a visit to Swan House, Simone Swan’s adobe teaching house, inspired by the legacy of Egypt’s greatest architect, Hassan Fathy. I invite you to listen to these podcasts and all the others anytime at my website, cmmayo.com, and through the website, send in your comments. I’m always delighted to hear from listeners.

[MUSIC]

Now in this podcast I take a big step back to get some perspective— big perspective. Bigger than Texas perspective. Those of you who know Far West Texas know how close Mexico is in every sense. Look at a map and you’ll see, from Marfa it’s only a little more than an hour’s drive to Presidio, which sits on the Rio Grande; cross over and there you are: Mexico. That’s what we’re going to hear about in this interview with John Tutino.

John Tutino teaches the history of Mexico and the Americas in the History Department and School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He’s the author of Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America, which was published by Duke University Press in 2011. Tutino is also the editor of a collection of essays by various historians with the title Mexico and Mexicans in the Making of the United States, and that is available from University of Texas Press. This interview was recorded in his office at Georgetown University.

[MUSIC]

C.M. Mayo: We have Making a New World and the related anthology Mexico and the Mexicans in the Making of the United States. These are closely related, and they are both nuclear bombs!

John Tutino: Thank you!

C.M. Mayo: They’re huge paradigm-busting... across from the beginning when we had the expansion of New Spain in the 1500s to modern day immigration. My head is reeling with all this stuff that’s in these two books!

John Tutino: And I will say, you're right, they evolved together. They were a long time coming, decades in the rumination and a decade plus in the focused production. And yeah, I got to the point where I said, “The whole basic big picture of where we thought Mexico fit in the world is somewhere between wrong and mythical. And you can’t change that by chipping away at the edges and saying, look at this little piece.”

And so I ended up writing Making a New World to just try to say, “New Spain, which is the root of Mexico, was absolutely an pivotal place to the origins of the modern world, modern capitalism, and equally absolutely pivotal to the origins of the United States.” And I was working on one when I figured out the other.

C.M. Mayo: My sense is that in Anglo-American culture, we’ve always had this idea that, here is American history over here, and here is Mexican history over here, and yes, there was war and there was this and there was that, but you could like put a little bell jar on top of each subject, and what you're saying, and I know is true, is that, no, you have to look at them together.

John Tutino: Yeah. I will tell you a story. I, years ago, put together a NEH [National Endowment for the Humanties] Summer Seminar for school teachers on the interrelated histories of Mexico and the United States. NEH, the grant proposal group, approved it. They wanted to fund it, but the staff at NEH refused my title, which was “Inseparable Histories: Mexico and the United States.” They said I could teach the seminar— this was in the early ‘90s— not having the primary title “Inseparable Histories,” and I tactically said, “Well, I want to do the seminar. I’ll negotiate the title.” But that’s the extent that this goes there.

But I will also add that particularly the argument that New Spain was fundamental to the origins of modern capitalism and that it was, particularly in its north, one of the earliest, most dynamic capitalist places on Earth, is equally challenging a lot of Mexican scholars.

C.M. Mayo: Oh, yes.

John Tutino: They have sort of bought into a notion, they have been trained in a notion, that Mexico had its base in great Pre-hispanic societies that were destroyed by Spanish colonialism for three centuries, and then there has been a struggle to reconstitute something positive. And boy, there were destructions in early 16^th century, though I argue they’re more disease driven than anything any human could impose. And yes, there have been struggles, but people have... I don’t fully understand, why not glory in the... You know, it’s a typical history, it’s a history of enormous economic dynamism and thus enormous conflict, change, human greatness, human exploitation, human difficulty, but it sort of puts New Spain and Mexico, I believe, at the absolute mainstream of modern history.

C.M. Mayo: So, in other words is as you call “this enduring presumption” was that capitalism started with England.

John Tutino: With England.

C.M. Mayo: And North America, and this is what we’ve been told in school and Adam Smith, and...

John Tutino: It has been the Anglo American gift to the world.

C.M. Mayo: Would you say gift or plague?

John Tutino: Well, either way. If you ask Anglo Americans, it’s their gift to the world. If you ask people who’ve experienced it without prosperity... And this is part of what I try to do. I think too often we argue that capitalism is easily the most positive thing the world has ever seen or it’s the most dastardly thing the world has ever seen, and I just see capitalism as a dominant historical reality with enormous creativities, positives, productive gains and, linked to it, changing rounds of difficulties, conflicts, human difficulties, exploitations, and we’ve got to quit arguing one against the other. We’ve got to figure out how to maximize one, minimize the other, but as a historian I just want to understand it.

In terms of that I should emphasize, in terms of taking Anglocentrism away from the study of global capitalism, I have jumped on a bandwagon there. It really came out of Asianists. One part, Andre Gunder Frank who started writing on Latin America years ago, then went to China and wrote a book called ReOrient, and Kenneth Pomeranz, who wrote a book called The Great Divergence, and I will say Gunder Frank was more the cage-rattling ideologue and Pomeranz was more the careful historian. He’s currently, it took 10 years after the book, but he’s now president of the American Historical Association. But the two of them together right around the year 2000 said, in 1600 China was the dominant economy in the world, Western Europe was a minor player and they contended for three centuries, and before 1800 nothing made it certain that Europe was going to rise to dominance and Asia was going to fade. It was a historical give and take, and then some particular things happened around 1800 that shift this. They were debating this and they were all recognizing that silver was pivotal to this world economy.

C.M. Mayo: Right. So China was demanding it—

John Tutino: Was the place demanding...the silver that went to Europe ended up in China.

C.M. Mayo: So this is the silver from Peru and from Mexico.

John Tutino: Mexico. Scholars show for most of three centuries two-thirds of it passed east to Europe, but ended up passing through the Middle East, South Asia, and ends up in China. A third of it goes directly to Manila and ends up in China.

C.M. Mayo: Through Acapulco on the Nao de China... [Manila Galleon]

John Tutino: Acapulco to Manila. And people always ask, “Why is Manila part of the Spanish empire?” It was a city of Chinese merchants under Spanish sovereignty who traded goods not just from China but from India, Indonesia, and sent them back. Have you ever been to what is now the Museo del Virreinato in Tepotzotlan on the road?

C.M. Mayo: Yes, just north of Mexico City.

John Tutino: North of Mexico City. There are two rooms there of Chinese-Christian-Asian art that were all brought back by the Jesuits because that was their colonial... It is the best way to see the wealth of China that was brought to New Spain by that silver, is to just go through those rooms in Tepotzotlan.

C.M. Mayo: And this doesn’t fit with the image of Mexico in Anglo-American cultural history or our modern media at all.

John Tutino: As a backward, exploited, crushed environment that Spanish colonialism just ground to nothing! And one of the ironies is... and we have a hard time thinking about it. So New Spain, I argue, was probably one of the three core regions of early modern capitalism, while Spain, its mother country, was in decline. And we’ve just got to learn to get over the presumption that Spain could be in decline as a European power but New Spain could be just flourishing.

C.M. Mayo: What I loved about the opening of your book, Making a New World, was you start talking about...to illustrate your points, the individual biographies of several people in the very important city of Querétaro. And as a bit of digression I want to say, I’m an American and I’ve been living in Mexico all these years, and I come back and forth frequently, and it is very rare that anybody in the U.S. has even heard of Querétaro, and yet Querétaro plays a central role in the development of the Mexican economy from almost the very beginning.

John Tutino: I will note it’s also coming back. It may be the single most dynamic place under the current NAFTA-driven economic revival. And Querétaro really became probably my favorite place in Mexico in the process of writing this book.

I had been introduced to Mexico as a 17-year-old kid going to San Miguel de Allende and I’d lived for a full year in Mexico City, lots of time in other central Mexico places, most of all in Mexico City, but when I started doing this and started spending between two weeks to a month every year in Querétaro, and the mix of its colonial heritage and its modern dynamism just made it. It isn’t a museum like San Miguel. My apologies to the San Miguel tourist bureau. [Laughs] It’s a real dynamic city but with a wonderful historic arc.

The argument is that this dynamism is there and that it is charging north.

C.M. Mayo: Well, can we come back just for a minute to those individual biographies in and around Querétaro, part of the Bajío, which includes San Miguel de Allende.

John Tutino: Guanajuato.

C.M. Mayo: León, Celaya.

John Tutino: Yes.

C.M. Mayo: It’s a group of cities north of Mexico City, kind of in the very heart of Mexico.

John Tutino: It is absolutely the richest agricultural land in Mexico. Historically the richest mines in Mexico were in Guanajuato, and with the mix of those two, Querétaro was the richest trade and industrial city in Querétaro.

C.M. Mayo: Oh, and Zacatecas.

John Tutino: Zacatecas isn’t quite Bajío in Mexican parlance because it’s north, it’s dry, but the Bajío fed it because, precisely, Zacatecas is mining wealth in dry uplands. Where did Zacatecas get its food? So the Bajío is also in a sense sustaining places like Zacatecas.

C.M. Mayo: So when we look at the beginnings of Querétaro and this economic engine that’s going to feed the northward expansion of New Spain, one of the biographies that you talked about was José Sánchez Espinosa. There was another little one in there about an Italian count...

John Tutino: Yes, Colombini. And later in the book there’s huge excerpts from a poem he wrote in honor of Our Lady of Pueblito, the local Otomí virgin who historically and still in many ways centers popular devotions in Querétaro, the way Guadalupe has historically around Mexico City.

Let me quickly go through my favorite vignette. The first one is Connín. Connín is an Otomí trader, frontiersman. He had traded across the frontier into the land of the Chichimecas. When Spaniards came he claimed to have been a lord; we don’t know if he really was but he was able to mobilize followers with a little bit of army, a little bit of settlement, and he, an Otomí trader or lord with somewhere between dozens and a few hundred Otomí friends, relatives, villagers recruited only a couple of Spanish Franciscan friars, and while literally Spaniards are still trying to conquer Mexico City, they go north and found Querétaro. And so Querétaro is actually an Otomí foundation with Catholic Franciscan sanction under Spanish rule. And for the first 30 years Querétaro is an Otomí city. Other than a priest or two there’s nobody else there. They build the irrigation. They build grist mills. They built the town. They distribute the land. And Connín and his pals take large landed estates for themselves, but they make sure their followers all have these incredibly rich irrigated gardens at the core of the city, and of course, he very quickly... he can’t remain Connín, he’s baptized and he becomes Don Fernando de Tapia.

C.M. Mayo: And what amazed me about Don Fernando de Tapia is, you give the little biography and one reads along, da-da, da-da, da-da, he did this, he did that, his daughter...

John Tutino: And you think he’s got to be a Spanish conquerer.

C.M. Mayo: He’s got to be a Spanish conquerer and it turns out, no! He’s an Otomí trader who used to be called Connín!

John Tutino: And it is the perfect example of how indigenous people weren’t always broken. They saw opportunity.

C.M. Mayo: It’s a more complex story than what we’re told at a public level. [CONTINUE READING THIS TRANSCRIPT]

> Listen in to this podcast

> Your COMMENTS are always welcome.

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Cyberflanerie: Mexico Book Edition

I'm presenting my book-- translated by Agustin Cadena-- Odisea metafísca hacia la Revolución Mexicana, Francisco I. Madero y su libro secreto, next week, on the 25th at 7 pm at the Centro de Estudios de la Historia de México CARSO in Mexico City. Presenters include Rose Mary Salum, Luis Cerda, Javier Garcíadiego, Manuel Guerra de Luna, and Yolia Tortolero Cervantes. >>Details here. << I am especially delighted to be able to present the book in this venue because it is the home of President Francisco I. Madero's personal library, very possibly the most important collection of late 19th - early 20th century esoterica in Latin America.

Food historian Rachael Laudan's superb Cuisine and Empire, which has quite a bit to do with Mexico, is now available in paperback.

Nancy Marie Brown recommends Anders Winroth's The Age of the Vikings, so it must be good. I downloaded the Kindle and am avidly reading-- I have this theory (could be solid, could be a marshmallow puff) about raiding by Vikings and Comanches... stay tuned.

(Just an aside: the Vikings smoked pot as early as the mid-9th century.)

Updates on my recommended books on Mexico page include Brian DeLays's The War of a Thousand Deserts. Must reading for anyone who wants to understand the US-Mexican War-- and the Comanches. More about this book anon.

Out in March, looks fascinating: Sharman Apt Russel's YA novel Teresa of the New World.

Out in April, must read: Sam Quinones' Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic.
(>Read my review of his True Tales from Another Mexico for Wilson Quarterly.)

Top of my reading tower: Laila Lalami's novel based on the story of Cabeza de Vaca & Co., The Moor's Account.

>Your COMMENTS are always welcome.

Reading Tonight for PEN in San Miguel de Allende (Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution)

***UPDATE: Podcast recording of this event now available. >>LISTEN HERE<<

This evening in San Miguel de Allende in Bellas Artes at 6 PM I will be discussing my new book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual.

The small admission charge of 100 pesos benefits PEN International San Miguel Center, one of the 145 centers of PEN International, the worldwide association of writers with centers in 104 countries, to promote friendship and intellectual cooperation among writers everywhere, fight for freedom of expression and represent the conscience of world literature.

President of Mexico Francisco I. Madero
and the First Lady, Sara Pérez de Madero

Back in late 2011 for the Author's Sala and again in 2012 for PEN and SOL Literary Magazine, I spoke in San Miguel de Allende about my translation of Madero's Spiritist Manual; this time I'll be talking about much more from my all-new book about that book-- including some revelations about Madero's personal library of esoterica and the mysterious German-Mexican spy Dr. Arnoldo Krumm-Heller, among others on the esoteric scene.

The cover of Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution features San Miguel de Allende artist Kelley Vandiver's "Gerbara and Eye". And another San Miguel de Allende connection: the opening pages of my book, the chapter "Roots, Entanglements, Encounters," are in SOL Literary Magazine's latest issue, (thanks, Eva Hunter).

Herewith, my article for San Miguel de Allende's Atención which, thanks to Huertista duendes, I guess, did not make it into this week's issue:

MADERO’S SECRET BOOK

When Halley's comet, that star with the quetzal's tail, flared across Mexican skies in 1910, it heralded not only the centennial of Independence, but a deeply transformative episode, the Revolution launched by Francisco I. Madero on November 20, what Javier Garciadiego calls “the true beginning of a process, the birth of the modern Mexican state.” The great chorus of Mexican historians agrees. And yet, almost unknown and curious as it may sound, a vital taproot of this revolution lies in the Burned-Over District of New York state.

So opens my book about Francisco I. Madero’s secret book, Manual espírita, which he wrote during the Revolution of 1910 and brought into circulation in 1911 when President-Elect— but under a pen name, “Bhima,” taken from the Hindu holy book, the Bhagavad-Gita. When I happened upon the Manual espírita in Madero’s archive in the National Palace, I knew at once I should translate it. A literal translation was an easy task, but understanding its metaphysics, origins, and rich esoteric context, required years more of reading and archival research— including multiple visits to the remains of Madero’s personal library. That little-known library, housed in Mexico City’s Centro de Estudios de la Historia de México, turns out to be one the most outstanding collections of 19^th century and early 20^th century esoterica in the Americas, comprising many extremely rare volumes from authors such as Annie Besant, Madame Blavatsky, Maestro Huiracocha (Dr Arnold Krumm-Heller), Camille Flammarion, Dr. Peebles, and Swami Vivekananda.

My book about Madero’s secret book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution, is an odyssey in three senses: Madero’s own, from norteño merchant prince to Spiritist medium, gun-slinging revolutionary, President of the Republic and, ultimately, martyr; my own; and the reader’s— for I assume most know little or nothing of Madero’s life and political career, nor of the Spiritism Madero encountered as a student in late 19^th century France, and less of that religion’s roots in Upstate New York.

As Mexican historian Enrique Krauze writes in his seminal 1987 biography, Francisco I. Madero: Místico de la libertad, “Politics does not displace Spiritism: it is born of it.” In other words, we cannot understand Madero and the 1910 Revolution without taking into account his Spiritist beliefs and his mediumship. Neither can we understand his beliefs without reference to his own statement, which is his ardent and thoroughly astonishing Spiritist Manual.

Article for ATENCION, San Miguel de Allende, January 2015, apropos of C.M. Mayo’s reading for PEN International San Miguel Center, January 13, 2015. Her new book, which includes her translation of Madero’s Manual espírita, is Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual (Dancing Chiva, 2014). The book is also available in Spanish, translated by noted Mexican novelist and poet Agustín Cadena as Odisea metafísica hacia la revolución Mexicana, (Literal Publishing, 2014), together with a transcript of the original Manual espírita.

Why Translate? The Case of the President of Mexico's Secret Book

(Talk for the American Literary Translators Association, 2014)

Lifting the (Very Heavy) Curtain on the Leader of Mexico's 1910 Revolution

Arnold Krumm-Heller (1876-1949) and Francisco I. Madero (1873-1913):

Some Notes on Sources

Una ventana al mundo invisible (A Window to the Invisible World):

Master Amajur and the Smoking Signatures

Dr Yolia Tortolero and Her Path-Breaking Work on Francisco I. Madero,

El espiritismo seduce a Francisco I. Madero

Junípero Serra in Mexico's Sierra Gorda

Concá

The Missions of Mexico's Sierra Gorda, in the mountainous state of Querétaro several hours by car north of Mexico City, though physically very distant, are closely connected to those of the Californias. Beginning in the late 17th century, Jesuit missionaries began establishing missions in Lower or Baja California (that story retold in my book, Miraculous Air). In the late 18th century, when the Spanish King, for reasons known only to himself, expelled the Jesuits from the Spanish realm, it was Father Junípero Serra, the Franciscan missionary of the Sierra Gorda, who took over that enterprise, and continued marching north, establishing
missions up the Pacific Coast of what is today the state of California.

> See the Huntington Museum page on Junipero Serra and the Legacies of the California Missions.

This past Easter week, I had the great fortunate of being able to visit the missions of the Sierra Gorda-- to follow, as the Mexicans say, la ruta de las misiones. A delightful synchronicity: my dear friend and fellow writer, Araceli Ardón, recently published a beautiful book on this very subject: Los caminos de Fray Junípero Serra en Querétaro / The Paths of Junipero Serra in Queretaro (Gobierno del Estados de Querétaro / Valverde International / Fundación DRT). Texts are by Araceli Ardón and Andrés Garrido del Torral, with photographs by Gerardo Proal and Gonzalo Alcocer Fernández de Jáuregui. (Other than the museum shop in Jalpan, I do not know where the book can be purchased, but it can be found in libraries at this link. I hope to update this link shortly.)

The five Franciscan missions of the Sierra Gorda are Concá, Tancoyol, Jalpan, Landa, and Tilaco. Herewith a few of my own snapshots:

Concá

Tancoyol

Tilaco

Landa

Tancoyol

The plaza in from of Mission Jalpan

More about Junípero Serra:

> Brief bio on PBS apropos of a series about the West

> Journey to the Sun: Junipero Serra's Dream and the Founding of California by Gregory Orfalea

> And forthcoming this March:
Junípero Serra: California, Indians, and the Transformation of a Missionary by Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz

More about the Franciscan missions:
> UNESCO page on the Missions of the Sierra Gorda
> Misiones de la Sierra Gorda, Querétaro, in México desconocido, an excellent Spanish language Mexican magazine
> Museo Histórico de la Sierra Gorda in Jalpan de Serra

Among the other many sights to see in the Sierra Gorda are the Sotano del Barro in Arroyo Seco, a vast sinkhole with a colony of macaws; El Chuvaje waterfall; and archeological sites including Ranas,

Jalpan

Toluquilla and Tancama. For more about these and others, see:
> www.queretaro.travel
> www.facebook.com/queretaro.travel

Your COMMENTS are always welcome

Visit to Las Pozas, Xilitla, San Luis Potosí

(Poet and artist Sir Edward James' Surrealist Garden,

a place many visit on their way to see the missions)

Guest-blogger Jim Johnston:

5 Things to See with Your Feet Off the Gound in Mexico City's Centro Histórico

Mexico: A Traveler's Literary Companion

(includes a short story set in Querétaro by Araceli Ardón)

Looking at Mexico in New Ways:

An Interview with Historian John Tutino

A Conversation with Novelist and Memoirist Edward Swift

(very interesting throughout; of note,

he mentions his creative retreats into the Sierra Gorda)

A Conversation with Rose Mary Salum

About Making Connections with Literature and Art

In Which Ilán Stavans Explains the Cultural Mega-character that was Chespirito: Roberto Gómez Bolaños (1929-2014)

Screenshot from Wikipedia

This piece in the NYT is must reading for anyone interested in Mexico.

P.S. This blog doesn't cover contemporary politics, but for those of you looking for a good source in English for what's happening in Mexico, I recommend signing up for the free emails from the Wilson Center's Mexico Institute of links to major articles in a variety of media.

Lifting the (Very Heavy) Curtain on the Leader of Mexico's 1910 Revolution

MANUEL GUERRA DE LUNA
C.M. MAYO
ALEJANDRO ROSAS ROBLES
November 18, 2014

Though the recent protests in Mexico City's historic center have made it impossible to continue the lecture series on Francisco I. Madero as originally scheduled in the National Palace, the lectures continue at the same day, same time, right next door in Museo de la SHCP / Antiguo Palacio del Arzobispado, Moneda 4.

I am quite sure the long-ago resident Achbishops must be a-rollin' in their graves, for the topic of this conference is:

FRANCISCO I. MADERO:
DE ESPIRITISMO AL BHAGAVAD-GITA Y OTRAS INFLUENCIAS ESOTERICAS
(Francisco I. Madero: From Spiritist to the Bhagavad-Gita and Other Esoteric Influences)
Free and open to the public
(en español, por supuesto)

This is an watershed of a conference. For those of you foggy on your Mexican history, Francisco I. Madero was the leader of Mexico's 1910 Revolution and President of Mexico, 1911-1913. He was also a Spiritist medium, a leading Spiritist organizer and evangelist, and as "Bhima," the name of a Hindu warrior, the author of a secret book, Manual espírita. A handful of Mexican historians, including Enrique Krauze, have written about Madero's Spiritism and how it was the source of his political inspiration and platform. Yet, incredible as it may sound, most historians of the Revolution, apart from a lickety-split footnote, have almost completely ignored it. As I noted in my talk for the American Literary Translators Association, I believe one reason is that most historians, who know next-to-nothing about it, consider Spiritism mere superstition and so beneath their notice. In my book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution, I have much to say about cognitive dissonance and the rich esoteric matrix from which Madero's version of Spiritism sprang.

This lecture series, sponsored by Mexico's Ministry of Finance-- which, by the way, has a long tradition of stellar cultural calendar with free book presentation, concerts, theater, childrens' workshops, and much more-- and, among other archives, holds that of Francisco I. Madero-- continues with:

Tuesday, November 25
@ 5 PM
CARLOS FRANCISCO MARTINEZ MORENO will talk about "Masonry, Spiritism and Hinduism: Interconnected Strands in Madero's Trio of Mystic Pillars"

Tuesday, December 2
@ 5 PM
Yours Truly, C.M. MAYO, will talk about my book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual [Odisea metafísica hacia la Revolución Mexicana: Francisco I. Madero y su libro secreto, Manual espírita], and IGNACIO SOLARES, an expert on Spiritism, will speak about his acclaimed novel, Madero, el otro [Madero, the Other].

PREVIOUS LECTURES
Previous lectures were by Dr YOLIA TORTOLERO CERVANTES, author of the deeply researched and pathbreaking El espíritismo seduce a Francisco I. Madero, whom I had the very great honor of introducing;

LUCRECIA INFANTE on "Spirits, women and equality: Laureana Wright and Kardecian Spiritism in Mexico";

and most recently, last Tuesday, ALEJANDRO ROSAS ROBLES talked about "The Revolution of the Spirits" and MANUEL GUERRA, the lost Spiritist writings of Madero.

Manuel Guerra de Luna is the author of Los Madero: La Saga liberal, and of the screenplay for the excellent documentary film directed by Alejandro Fernández Solsona, 1910: La Revolución espírita. Alejandro Rosas Robles, a prolific and very popular historian in Mexico, is the author of many books and editor of the 10-volume series of the collected works, Obras completas de Francisco Ignacio Madero (Clío, 2000).

Guerra de Luna's talk was especially fascinating for me, as he talked about Madero's Spiritist notebooks. Madero was a writing medium, and so his method of receiving communication was to go into a trance and allow the spirits to use his hand and pencil. We know from the notebooks that as Madero sat down to work on his political grenade, La sucesión presidencial en 1910, he would first channel the spirits' advice. These notebooks were rescued from a fire into which a relative wanted to consign them. They are held in the Francisco I. Madero archive in the Ministry of Finance (SHCP) and transcribed in Rosas' Obras completas de Francisco Ignacio Madero, volume VI, Cuadernos espíritas. [Spiritist Notebooks.]

(Mexican history aficionados will note that Rosas Robles has confirmed that on his birth certificate Francisco Madero's middle initial stands for "Ignacio," not "Indalecio.")

Madero's channeled writings end abruptly in 1908. Based on a comment in one of Madero's letters, Guerra de Luna believes that at that time, Madero stopped "automatic writing," adopting the method of channeling he considered more advanced: direct telepathic communication.

1910: LA REVOLUCION ESPIRITA
Both Guerra de Luna and Rosas Robles appear in the must-watch documentary film, 1910: La Revolución espírita. > WATCH IT HERE.<

NEXT TUESDAY:
CARLOS FRANCISCO MARTINEZ MORENO
One of the points I make in my book is that Madero's Spiritism was based on was very different from that of mid-19th century Spiritists, for by the late 19th century, thanks to various occult philosophers, Theosophists and others, Hindu philosophy and in particular, the Bhagavad-Gita, had become an important influence. In addition, Madero was a Mason and Rosicrucian. Next Tuesdays' talk by Carlos Francisco Martínez Moreno, an expert on Masonry, will be sure to be especially illuminating.

EMAIL UPDATES ON MEXICO NEWS
As for the recent political tumult here in Mexico, I steer clear of discussing current politics on this blog, but I will go so far as to suggest that a good source of reporting and opinion in a variety of media in English is via the Woodrow Wilson Center's Mexico Institute. The email signup is on their webpage.

Your COMMENTS are always welcome.

Una ventana al mundo invisible

(Window to the Invisible World):

Master Amajur and the Smoking Signatures

Why Translate?

The Case of the President of Mexico's Secret Book

(Transcript of my talk for a panel at

the American Literary Translators Association

conference, Milkwaukee, November 2014)

Dr Yolia Tortolero Cervantes and Her Pathbreaking work,

El espíritismo seduce a Francisco I. Madero

Resources for Researchers

(Madero, Spiritism, esoteric philosophies, history)

Arnoldo Krumm-Heller and Francisco I. Madero:

Some Notes on Sources

Cool Tool for Creating Timewealth:

Why I am A Mega Fan of the Filofax Personal Organizer

(A guest-blog on Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools blog)

A US-Mexico Border Memoir:

Lisa G. Sharp's A Slow Trot Home

(book review)

Over Burro Mesa

(My essay and a podcast about an adventure in a remote area in

Big Bend National Park, near the US-Mexico border)

Why Translate? The Case of the President of Mexico's Secret Book

Just back from ALTA, the American Literary Translators Association conference held this year in (brrr) Milwaukee, which had the theme "Politics & Translation." If you've been following this blog, you've already read reams about my latest book which is, indeed, about politics: Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual.

At ALTA, I spoke on two panels and read an excerpt from my translation of a work by Mexico's great novelist and short story writer Ignacio Solares. (Had the scheduling permitted, I would have loved to have also shared new translations of works by Mexican writers Agustin Cadena and Rose Mary Salum. Here's to ALTA in Tucson, Arizona in 2015!)

Herewith the text of my talk for the second panel, "Why Translate?"

WHY TRANSLATE?

THE CASE OF THE PRESIDENT OF MEXICO'S

SECRET BOOK

A transcript of the talk for the panel "Why Translate?"

American Literary Translation Association (ALTA) Conference

Milwaukee, November 15, 2014

[Slightly edited for this blog]

By C.M. Mayo

FRANCISCO I. MADERO
President of Mexico
1911-1913

I translate for the same reasons that I write. There are many, but we have only a few minutes, so I will focus on two, which are: I want to understand, and I want to share that understanding.

Sharing might just be with myself, as in a diary entry, or with a cadre of of loyal readers and any Internet surfers who happen onto this blog, Madam Mayo. Sharing ramps up, of course, when we start talking about books.

People have many different and varied motivations for writing and publishing books— and for some, one of them is nothing less than to change the world. Or maybe, to change our understanding of some aspect of the world— and so change the world.

TWO SYSTEMS:
THE HEAVILY INTERMEDIATED AND THE RELATIVELY DIRECT
Whether in its original language or as a translation, a book is a vector for a set of ideas, a very unusual and efficient vector, for it can zing ideas from mind to mind, spreading out over great distances and, potentially, far into the future.

Books can travel through two systems, or rather, an array of systems: at one extreme, the heavily intermediated, and at the other, the direct.

Our commercial publishing industry constitutes that first extreme. To give a stylized example, a book comes into the hands of an agent, then an acquiring editor, perhaps a developmental editor, a copyeditor, a book designer, a formatter, a cover designer, the proofreader, the printer, the delivery truck driver, the warehouse employees, the distributor, the sales rep, the bookstore's buyer, and so on and so forth until, finally, the cashier hands the book to its reader. Very possibly multiple corporate entities and dozens of individuals play some role in bringing a book to any given reader.

At the other extreme, I scribble on a piece of paper and hand it to you.

I submit that we tend to over focus on this heavily intermediated system; we often overlook the fact that it is not the only or even necessarily the best way for a book to fulfill its purpose.

TWO BOOKS BY FRANCISCO I. MADERO

The first page of Madero's
La sucesion presidencial en 1910
"To the heroes of our country;
to the independent journalists;
to the good Mexicans"

I'm going to focus on two books, both political, both by Francisco I. Madero.

If you are at all familiar with Mexican history, Francisco I. Madero needs no introduction. If Mexican history is a mystery to you, the main thing you need to know is that Madero was the leader of Mexico's 1910 Revolution and President of Mexico from 1911 to 1913.

His first book, La sucesión presidencial en 1910, or The Presidential Succession in 1910, published in 1909, served as his political platform in challenging the old regime. Though it was after the stolen elections of 1910 that Madero declared the Revolution on November 20, 1910, informally, we could say that the Revolution was launched with this book.

Francisco I. Madero's secret book

Madero's second book is Manual espírita or Spiritist Manual, which he finished writing as he was preparing for the Revolution; it began to circulate in 1911, when he was president-elect. It is this second book which I translated, and my book about that book, which includes the translation, is Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual.

Apropos of Madero's two books and the two systems to bring a book to its readers, the heavily intermediated and the relatively direct, a bit from the opening of chapter 2 of my book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution:

When we talk about a “successful book,” usually what we mean is one that has a brand-name publisher, enjoys prime shelf space in bookstores, and earns its author buckets of royalties. In other words, we talk about it as a commodity—or, if we’re a mite more sophisticated, a hybrid commodity / work of art / scholarship. I say “we” because I am writing and I presume you are reading this in a time and place where books are no longer banned by the government, their authors no longer casually imprisoned—or worse. Lulled by endless streams of made-for-the-movies thrillers and romances, we forget that, as Ray Bradbury put it, “A book is a loaded gun.”

Francisco I. Madero intended his Manual espírita to be a beam of light, to heal Mexico and the world with his consoling concepts of the nature and meaning of life. However, it is a book that stands on the shoulders of his first book that was, indeed, a loaded gun: La sucesión presidencial en 1910, published in the winter of 1909 when Don Porfirio Díaz, the dictator who had stolen the presidency in a coup d’état and ruled Mexico on and off for over thirty years, was about to celebrate his eightieth birthday and, as Mexico’s so-called “necessary man,” take for himself a seventh term.

Madero had no interest in the capitalist concept of a book’s success; he wanted La sucesión presidencial en 1910 in people’s hands, and as fast as possible, and for that he did not need bookstores, he needed a jump-start on Don Porfirio’s police. He paid for the printing himself (a first edition of 3,000, and later more) and, as he noted in a letter:

[T]he first precaution I took was to hand out 800 copies to members of the press and intellectuals throughout Mexico, so when the Government got wind of the book’s circulation, it would be too late to stop it. . .

MADERO'S SECOND, SECRET BOOK
Now when we come to Madero's second book, Manual espírita, or Spiritist Manual, there are two reasons the subtitle of my book calls it his "secret book": First, he wrote it under a pseudonym; second, incredible as it may sound, for the most part, historians have ignored it. A few have begrudged it a footnote; only a very few— so few that I can count them on one hand— have dared to write about it in any depth and seriousness.

The 1924 edition
published by
Casa Editorial Maucci
in Barcelona

In 1911 five thousand copies of Madero's Manual espírita went into circulation, one assumes, among Spiritists. It was reprinted in part by Madero's enemies, the Reyistas, as an attack-- their message being, "Madero is the true author, you see what a nut he is." And I discovered that in 1924 Casa Editorial Maucci in Barcelona brought out a reprint (print run unknown). I do not know what influence the Manual espírita may or may not have had in spreading Spiritism, whether in Mexico or abroad—it would make a fine PhD dissertation to delve into that question— but as far as historians of Mexico are concerned, until very recently, and apart from a very few and very hard-to-find editions published in Mexico, essentially, the Manual espírita disappeared into the ethers.

In 2011, one hundred years after its publication, I published the first English translation as a Kindle. Earlier this year, 2014, I published my book about the book, which includes Madero's book, under the title Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual in both Kindle and paperback editions. And like Madero himself with both his books, I self-published.

THE WHYS AND WHEREFORES OF A PUBLISHING STRATEGY
I hasten to clarify that I did not self-publish after a string of rejections. I have already published several books, two with university presses and two with major commercial publishers, among others, so I know that, with patience and persistence, should those have proved necessary, my work would have found a home. My decision to self-publish was a deeply thought-out strategy, specific to my circumstances and specific to this title. In short, I decided to skip the heavily intermediated system, which for this book probably would have been a university press. My three reasons:

First, I am not an academic angling for tenure, and as I have already published several books, as a writer and a translator I did not see much to gain by going to a traditional publisher, and in fact I had a lot to lose, mainly time and control;

Second, in English, alas (would that it were otherwise) books on Mexico are not particularly commercial, which makes me suspect that, whatever its merits may or may not be, mine would have taken a shoulder-saggingly long time to bring forth a contract I would have been willing to sign;

Third, for many readers, Spiritism is at once disturbing and beneath their notice. Let's say, all this concern with the Afterlife and communicating with the dead creeps them out, as would a book on, oh, alien abductions or crop circles. And I believe this explains why even many of the leading historians of the Mexican Revolution do not know about Madero's Spiritism, or know next to nothing about it. To give you an idea, one major textbook does not deign to mention it, while another textbook, also published by an important university press, blithely labels Madero an atheist, which is rather like calling the Pope of Rome a Protestant.

In our day, what we think of as self-publishing usually includes intermediaries such as amazon.com. In my case this would be amazon.com and Ingram. Ingram's recent move into the realm of self-publishing is really the topic for another panel, but suffice it to say that for traditional publishing, no exaggeration, this is as momentous as Hiroshima. Ingram is a major book distributor and now also an on-demand book printer, and what listing with Ingram means is that all major on-line booksellers can now, on demand, easily source that self-published book. Libraries can order it, just as they order many of their books from Ingram, and while Barnes & Noble as well as many other major bookstore chains and independent bookstores may not necessarily stock it on their shelves, it's right there, as easy to order as any other book, on their webpages—again, sourced from Ingram.

As for getting my book into people's hands, that is a challenge, for without a publisher, I do not have a marketing staff and sales reps. Like Madero with his La sucesión presidencial en 1910, I simply identified key individuals and gave each a copy. These individuals, mainly but not exclusively academics, are experts on Madero, on the Mexican Revolution, Mexican history in general, the history of metaphysical religion, and Masonry (Madero was a Mason).

The process of the book, my little turtle, finding its readers may be a long and winding one, but it is underway [see reviews] and I feel no urge to hurry. Unlike a traditionally published book, which must dash out like a rabbit, digitally available books (ebooks and print-on-demand paperbacks sold on-line) are not so heavily dependent on "buzz" generated to coincide with the fleeting moment when a book, thanks to the efforts of marketing staff and sales reps, might be available on physical shelves in brick-and-mortar bookstores. Like grocery stores, brick-and-mortar bookstores must move their merchandize with the seasons and oftentimes, as with the proverbial cottage cheese, even more quickly. Digital bookshelves, however, are of a different nature; at the click of a button, they can unfurl vast dimensions, additions to which impose a marginal cost approaching, or in fact, zero. Now if, on a Tuesday at 4 am, say, seven months or, say, seven years in the future, someone in Oodnadatta, Australia wants to download my Kindle or order my print-on-demand paperback, with a click, he can do just that.

BLASTING THE SOMBRERO OFF THE PARADIGM OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION
Will my book with its translation of Madero's Spiritist Manual change our understanding of Mexican history? Well, I do think it blasts the sombrero off the reigning paradigm, to consider that Francisco I. Madero, the leader of Mexico's 1910 Revolution— an absolutely transformative episode in Mexican history and the first major revolution of the 20th century—was a not only a Spiritist but a leading Spiritist and a Spiritist medium.

Madero believed that he was channeling written instructions and encouragement from spirits in writing both of his books, and furthermore, in his Spiritist Manual, he detailed his beliefs about such esoterica as astral travel and interplanetary reincarnation, and the moral duty of political action.

For anyone who chooses to open their eyes and look at the overwhelming evidence, the connection between Madero's beliefs and his politics is clear. As Mexican historian Enrique Krauze writes in his seminal 1987 biography, Francisco I. Madero: Místico de la libertad, in the case of Madero, "Politics does not displace Spiritism; it is born of it."

I do not deny other motives and the millions of other participants in that Revolution. But its spark, and the way it played out, and, I believe, Madero's murder, are a radically different story once we take into account his Spiritism.

My aim with my book and my translation of Madero's book is to deepen our understanding of Madero, both as an individual and as a political figure; and at the same time, deepen our understanding of the rich esoteric matrix from which his ideas sprang, in other words, not to promote his ideas nor disparage them, but explain them and give them context.

It is also then my aim to deepen our understanding of the 1910 Revolution and therefore of Mexico itself, and because the histories are intertwined, therefore also deepen our understanding of North America, Latin America, the Pacific Rim, and more— for as long as a book exists, should someone happen to read it, it can catalyze change in understanding (and other changes) that ripple out, endlessly.

Such is the wonder, the magical embryonic power of a book, any book, whether original or in translation: that, even as it rests on a dusty shelf for a hundred years, or for that matter, an unvisited digital "shelf," if it can be found, if it can be read, it holds such potential.

Your COMMENTS are always welcome.