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]

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Guest-Blogger Historical Novelist Claudia H. Long on 5 Secrets About the Crypto-Jews of Mexico

Claudia H. Long

Delighted to once again host historical novelist Claudia H. Long, whose latest is The Duel for Consuelo. From her official bio: 

"Claudia Long is a highly caffeinated, terminally optimistic married lady living in Northern California. She writes about early 1700’s Mexico and modern day and roaring 20's California. Claudia practices law as a mediator for employment disputes and business collapses, has two formerly rambunctious–now grown kids, and owns four dogs and a cat. Her first mainstream novel was Josefina's Sin, published by Simon & Schuster in 2011. Her second one, The Harlot’s Pen, was published with Devine Destinies in February 2014. Claudia grew up in Mexico City and New York, and she now lives in California."

From the catalog copy of the new novel, The Duel for Consuelo:

"History, love, and faith combine in a gripping novel set in early 1700’s Mexico. In this second passionate and thrilling story of the Castillo family, the daughter of a secret Jew is caught between love and the burdens of a despised and threatened religion. The Enlightenment is making slow in-roads, but Consuelo’s world is still under the dark cloud of the Inquisition. Forced to choose between protecting her ailing mother and the love of dashing Juan Carlos Castillo, Consuelo’s personal dilemma reflects the conflicts of history as they unfold in 1711 Mexico. A rich, romantic story illuminating the timeless complexities of family, faith, and love."

5 SECRETS ABOUT THE CRYPTO-JEWS OF MEXICO
By Claudia H. Long

As practically everyone knows, the Jews were exiled from Spain in 1492, at the time of the Muslim expulsion. Persecution had gone on for centuries, of course, but Jews, Christians and Muslims had lived in an uneasy peace until the expulsion edicts finally put an end to co-existence.  

But not all Jews left the only homes they had ever known. Contradictory edicts made it impossible to leave, mandatory to leave, requiring conversion, denying the merits of the conversion, all with the drumbeat of confiscation of wealth behind the acts. So not only were Jews required to leave or convert, they often were prevented from exercising either choice. 

Conversos (those who converted to Christianity) and their descendants were fiercely persecuted. Any hint of Judaizing, or secretly practicing their old religion, was ruthlessly ferreted out by the Inquisition, which led Conversos to the practice of haciendo sábado, or "doing the Sabbath." This involved ostentatiously working on Saturday so the neighbors could see them, eating pork in public, and putting on other displays of Christianity. Nonetheless, many continued their Jewish practices in secret. 

If they were "lucky" they converted and eventually got out. Some went to the New World, including Mexico and Peru. Mexico was something of a haven for the secret Jews, or Crypto-Jews at first. With so much novelty there was less time to spend ferreting out Jews, and more emphasis on political alignment.

All that changed in 1642. The Archbishop of Mexico became the Viceroy, his edict brought an end to the relatively safe lives of the Crypto-Jews. 

One of the ways that Crypto-Jews were "caught" was through denunciation by family servants. 

 Clues to Judaizing included reports of special dishes being prepared on Friday before sunset, to be kept warm on banked coals through Saturday, or preparation of meats involving draining all of the blood from the meat before cooking. 

Even cleaning the house on Friday, or bathing by women on Friday before sunset, all could lead to a denunciation.  The meticulous records kept by the Inquisition are a fertile source for recipes and housekeeping customs for Crypto-Jews of the era.

Some Jews only knew one blessing, many knew no Hebrew at all. Knowledge was passed down in the family, and with each generation the practices became more idiosyncratic, further and further removed from their origins. Tortillas and chocolate replaced matzo and wine during Passover. Burial practices, such as adding a pillow of dirt to the coffin replaced a burial in virgin soil. Fasting on particular dates following a death, such as the eighth or thirtieth day, replaced the traditional periods of Jewish mourning. These were examples both of adaptation to the New World and a loss of understanding of the actual rituals and traditions. 

The Duel for Consuelo picks up the thread at this point, in 1711, when Consuelo, who only knows one blessing, is called to account by the Inquisition in its last gasps for power.

-- Claudia H. Long

+ + + + + + + + 

SURF ON:

+ Rose Mary Salum's Visionary Anthology: Delta de las arenas, cuentos árabes, cuentos judíos

+ Archive of all Madam Mayo guest-blog posts

+ Guest-blogger Claudia H. Long with 5 Delicious Links on the Food of Baroque Mexico

+ Guest-blogger Lisa Carter with 5 Tastes of Spain for Armchair Travelers

+ Guest-blogger Jim Johnston with 5 Things to See with Your Feet Off the Ground in Mexico City's Centro Historico

+ Guest-blogger Roberta Rich with 5 + 1 Links to Inform an Historical Thriller

+ FOR MEXOPHILES webpage

Antonio Noe Zavaleta's Niño Fidencio and Curandismo Page and the Just Published Sagradas Escrituras

Another note on Mexico's best-known folk-Catholic mediumnistic healer of the 20th century, Niño Fidencio. (See my earlier posts about El Niño here and here.)

Research, how I relish research; yet, it's endless. When I start a book project, I feel as if I am setting out on a path towards a goal… some final, pile-driven signpost of understanding. But like life, it's a path, the journey is the thing. So I've published my book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual, and over the past several months, I've updated it (it's in Kindle and print-on-demand paperback) several times, fixing typos, fiddling with the bibliography, adding a map, an index, then more corrections to the index, and so on. Minor changes, but very nice for me in this digital age to be able to make at the click of a mouse. But a point comes when one really must say, pencils down. It is what it is. And further corrections must await a new edition, a properly identified one with a new ISBN and an epilogue. And I'm already thinking what will go in there…

One important thing I did not know was just pointed out to me in an email by Antonio Noe Zavaleta, who is Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Texas Brownsville and co-author with Alberto Salinas, Jr of the both excellent and fascinating Curandero Conversations: Niño Fidencio, Shamanism, and Healing Traditions of the Borderlands: Cipriana "Panita" Zapata de Robles, a "cajita" or mediumnistic follower and channeler of the Niño Fidencio, entrusted Professor Zavaleta to publish the Escrituras, or scriptures left by El Niño, who died in 1938, along with further teachers channeled after his death. These Professor Zavaleta published last year, 2013.

It's all in Spanish except for a last section by Dr Zavaleta, "What Is This Book?" The first two paragraphs:

This book contains the original Scriptures or Sagradas Escrituras of José Fidencio Sintora Constanino, known as El Niño Fidencio (1898 1938).

The Escrituras are the scriptural teachings of El Niño when he walked the Earth; they continued to be documented by his followers after his death. The teachings are the basis of his core-belief system which  he left for all of us to read and examine. The Sagradas Escrituras have never been published before.

> Dr Zavaleta's research page on Niño Fidencio
> Universidad Autónomo de Ciudad Juárez webpage on the history of the Iglesia Fidencista Cristiana
> El Niño Fidencio: El Libro de las Sagradas Escrituras (link to amazon.com paperback)
> And Kindle

A further note. For my book about Francisco I. Madero, leader of Mexico's 1910 Revolution and President of Mexico, 1911-1913-- and, yes, a Spiritist medium-- I've been reading about mediums for such an age that sometimes I forget how shocking the subject can be for most readers. So hey, dear reader, if you need to, just take a deep breath. I don't ask anyone to believe this or that, simply that the historical record shows that, indeed, Madero was a medium and his metaphysics had their root in a rich, deep-rooted and international esoteric matrix.

Speaking of international connections, there's a book to write on the relationships among the Spiritist healers / psychic surgeons of Mexico, Philippines and Brazil-- though I'm not the one to do it. I'm back working on the Marfa Mondays podcasts and my book about Far West Texas. Coming soon: a post about the awesome (in ye olde sense of the word) rock of the Lower Pecos.

COMMENTS always welcome.

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SURF ON

Madam Mayo
>Niño Fidencio: De Roma a Espinazo
>José Sintora Constantino, El Niño Fidencio an excerpt from my book 
> Catherine L. Albanese's A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion
> Una Ventana al Mundo Invisible (A Window to the Invisible World): Master Majur and the Smoking Signatures

And over on the home page, www.cmmayo.com 
> My recent book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution
> Excerpts from my translation of Francisco I. Madero's Manual espírita, Spiritist Manual
> Recommended Books on Mexico
> Marfa Mondays: Looking an Mexico in New Ways: An Interview with John Tutino

Captured: The Forgotten Men of Guam by Roger Mansell (my dad)

Just before he passed away in 2010, my dad, Roger Mansell, left the advanced draft of his book, Captured: The Forgotten Men of Guam, to be edited by his colleague, Linda Goetz Holmes, the author of Guests of the Emperor: The Secret History of Japan's Mukden POW Camp, among other titles. I am thrilled and delighted to say that Captured has been published this month by Naval Institute Press.

Full Description:

Prior to the outbreak of the Pacific War, Guam was a paradise for U.S. military and civilian employees stationed on the island. Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, however, the Japanese invaded the tiny island, captured the Americans, and shipped them to Japan. Drawing on interviews with survivors, diaries, and archival records, Roger Mansell documents the mostly unknown story of these American POWs. The men endured horrific hardships, many of which are chronicled in this book for the first time. Also included are moving stories of their liberation, transportation home, and the aftermath of their ordeal.

“In the days of shock and horror that followed Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, another monumental event, occurring almost simultaneously, was largely overlooked: Japan's bloody seizure of the strategically critical island of Guam. For the American troops, civilians and native people captured in the invasion, so began an epic ordeal. The Americans were shipped off to be slaves for the Japanese, while the natives remained behind to endure four years of brutalities under their captors. Roger Mansell, the pre-eminent historian of Pacific POWs, devoted the last years of his life to unearthing and telling this forgotten story, and after his death, the work was completed by his colleague, the esteemed POW author Linda Goetz Holmes. Chronicling a lost chapter of World War II, Captured promises to be an authoritative, fastidiously researched and compelling read.”

—Laura Hillenbrand, author of Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption and Seabiscuit: An American Legend

“Roger Mansell worked tirelessly to research and document the stories of American POWs in the Pacific during World War II. His efforts give us a better understanding of the great service and sacrifice of these heroes. The stories he tells are a tribute to the warriors who defend us.”

—Oliver North

“Roger Mansell’s Captured is a beautifully written, richly researched account of the fall of Guam and a searing reminder of the horrific ordeal suffered by American prisoners of war at the hands of the Japanese.”

—John A. Glusman, author of Conduct Under Fire: Four American Doctors and their Fight for Life as Prisoners of the Japanese, 1941-1945

>>UPDATE: Read Kinue Tokudame's review at US-Japan Dialogue on POWs

>Read more about the book and my dad's research legacy at www.rogermansell.com
>Pick up your copy of Captured: The Forgotten Men on Guam from Naval Institute Press and/or amazon.com