Chapter III: Part II

When the Spaniards came to Mexico in the year 1519, the Mayas had long since abandoned their splendid cities and were building no others of like beauty. The Pyramides at Teotihuacán were mounds of earth which the strangers regarded incuriously as natural hills. Nahoa civilization had reached its height two centuries before and declined with the death of the poet King Nezahualcoyotl of Texcoco. From thence it was gradually absorbed by the Aztec dynasty, and the city of Tenochtitlan became the center of wealth, power and culture of the race.

The Zapotecas and Mixtecas, ancient allies, occupied the present state of Oaxaca; they were divided in language, the customs and arts that once were one had diverged slightly, the Zapotecas toward the Aztec, the Mixtecas toward the Maya. Though both nations possessed the richest languages and picture writing in Mexico at this time, the Mixtecas were superior in civilized arts. They were settled in the South and West of the state, a gentle and tranquil people given to cultural development. The Zapotecas were objective, warlike, militaristic; they helped the Mixtecas to conquer the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and held their ground by force of arms. In spite of this, it is the Mixteca spirit in art that survives in the state of Oaxaca today.

It was with the newer, intensely warlike Aztec in the city of Tenochtilán that the invaders were to deal. The Conqueror has always the first word. Centuries must elapse before the defeated peoples can find a hearing for themselves. According to the Spanish writers, they found here a race curiously civilized, but atrociously savage in war; lovers of beauty, worshippers of mystical gods, in spiritual and physical bondage to a religion founded on ritual sacrifice. Nearly all of the historians that followed accepted without question the Spanish point of view that the benefits of civilization had been righteously bestowed upon barbarians by the bitter charity of the sword. Having achieved a substitution by force of their ideals over those of the Mexican, they rested in arrogant certainty of their right to impose their own half-developed culture, derived from a mixture of Europe and the Orient, upon a people whose blood was pure, and whose culture was grown evenly in one soil.

There ensued a collision of antipathies shocking to the imagination. It must have been as if two alien planets struck and fused. The story has been told many times, by makers of legends, by later historians groping among confused and conflicting legends. Yet they somehow achieve unity when considered as a whole. It seems that only a day elapses between that half-legendary ancient world of the Nahoa and the Maya, to the founding of New Spain that suddenly identifies Mexico with the modern world.

One steps from the half light of the centuries before the Conquest into the year 1519, and thereafter we have a record of events insufficient, fragmentary, but comparatively clear. However obscured with personal and religious and political motives, distorted occasionally with belief in the miraculous, seen through the eyes of prejudices incomprehensible to us now, since we are bound by different prejudices, the story still has form and outline; it lends itself to the truth.

After the shock of conquest there began the making of a new nation in Mexico, a slow series of rebirths, a gradual absorption of colors and fibres from many sources; Mexico became New Spain, a nation torn from its old gods and inborn visions, thereafter to take on the forms of faith of the conqueror, the laws of an alien world, the customs of strangers.

Teocallis were razed, and churches set over the places where they had been. New arts were added to the old, and were amalgamated with them. These arts came by way of the Spanish crown, but they were borrowed from the greater and older nations of France and Italy....

The Mexican arts amazed and delighted the strangers, who praised them in their chronicles--those extravagant documents that are such curious blendings of religious fervor, curiosity, appreciation and rapacity--and long descriptions of the native crafts remain as the pleasantest stories brought out of that dolorous period.

They tell of the goldsmiths of Azcapotzalco, who wrought in gold and silver filigree, chains and necklaces and earrings and bracelets, in feathery and lace-like designs as minute and painstaking as those of the Chinese. It is as different from Chinese filigree as the Chinese is distinct from the Neapolitan silver work. The potters of Cholula were then renowned for making vases in a form resembling the classical Greek urn, but decorated with designs in that thick, vivid, unmixed paint they invented and used so perfectly.

The painters of Texcoco, the mat makers of Quautitlán, the stone cutters from Tenajocan, all brought their wares to the markets of the throne city of the Aztecs. The florists of Xochimilco fashioned flowers into decorative shapes with a long patience of execution which is still the most remarkable thing about the flower arrangement of the Mexican.

Plume work, a special craft developed by these people to the dignity of a fine art, was then in its fullest beauty. Entire mantles were contrived of feathers woven in color compositions and patterns intricate as tapestry. On their simple hand looms they wove exquisite cloth in cotton and a finely spun fibre made from the maguey or henequen plant. Garments and curtains were made of this material, as well as their breast-plates, tightly woven and quilted, a stout and durable armor against their own weapons, but not, as Prescott reminds us, proof against the musketry of the Spaniards.

Temples and houses were ablaze with light and color, curtained with woven feathers and dyed cloth, their temples adorned with carved panels and the images of their gods. Even while they praised the beauty of the new country and its social structure, the fanaticism that accompanied the spirit of conquest conspired in the minds of the Spaniards, and prompted them to blot out invaluable records and monuments. They were not interested in the subtleties of research among peoples whom they considered merely as advanced savages, inhabiting a rich and desirable territory.

Their purpose was to exterminate the rebellious, establish the church and the power of Spain, and to amass wealth for the Spanish crown. Art was left to grow or perish of itself.

Silently, ceaselessly, the Mexican spirit renewed and expressed itself in the making of beauty. It ran like a dark flood of dreams into all channels of Colonial life. It stained every idea, every physical manifestation of the slowly changing Mexican race.

The churches were the first and most important imported expressions of art in New Spain. They were designed, in the main, by Italian and French architects, built and decorated by native artists. Whereupon strangely they are Mexican; because an Aztec ground the colors and executed the designs, and carved the wood and the stone, and made the tiles for the domed roofs. His inalienable beauty-wisdom had the final triumph.

Writers of that period are accustomed to declare that civilization progressed in Mexico more rapidly within the first eighty years of the Spanish occupation than in any other country of North America or Europe during the same period.

It is true that they brought their crafts, taught them to the natives, utilized and commercialized them with modern practical thoroughness. A book was printed for the first time in Mexico City in 1536. The printer was Juan Paoli from Brescia, Italy. He was brought here to publish ecclesiastical works, and his press flourished. The first University in America was founded by the Jesuits in Mexico City in the year 1533, a building now used as a Preparatory School to the National University.

Weaving and ceramics were developed rapidly. In Puebla and Oaxaca splendid silks and wools were woven from raw materials got from the markets of Asia, and exported in great quantities. Wool was introduced in Mexico by the Spaniards, and took the place of the fine hair of rabbits, and plumage which the Aztecs had hitherto used for weaving warm garments.

An immediate and perfect use was found by the native for the more substantial wool of the sheep. He wove serapes and rugs in orderly, geometric patterns after the old style, that gave to them a classical permanence of value. The first ones were sober and dark, but gradually they grew into brilliance, with designs of birds and flowers and stylised figures of animals.

They developed a genius for leatherwork, especially in saddle making, a craft essentially Spanish, since the Mexicans had no horses previous to the Conquest. Under their hands, the saddle and all appurtenances of horsemanship became elaborated beyond anything known in Spain, and today the Mexican saddle is a marvel of costly workmanship in tooled leather and chased silver.

The characteristic Mexican faculty to imitation of design and method, combined with an entirely alien feeling for color and execution brought about a subtle shifting of surface expression. His ability to adapt and use strange forms, under curious conditions, was the foundation for his new art, destined to become racial and genuinely expressive.

The primary use of his imitative faculty was commercial. The native, out of his soul’s necessity, made his wares first things of beauty. But he must also use them, and sell them. They must be beautiful and useful objects, not costly, for the use of an impoverished people. In a very limited way, they worked in bronze, silver, gold and stone, but mostly they wrought in clay and wood. They transposed and recreated everything that came to their notice, from whatever source and in whatever material it might appear.

Out of the influences that surrounded them they selected those things most in accord with their own ideals of beauty, those designs not too violently opposed to their own conception of form, in effect those patterns that resembled their own previously accepted motifs. For three centuries the Mexican was influenced by art expressions from Spain, through Spain from the Moors, from the Orient; from Japan, Persia, the Philippines, above all, China.

The results are happily still apparent in designs wherein are commingled, in a strange harmony, pomegranates, lacy leaves from Spain, peacocks from Persia and mandarins from China, traced on jicaras, bowls and pots. In the Puebla pottery of that period, and on the painted and lacquered chests, knights on horseback, ladies in enormous skirts, birds as large as the trees they perch in, strange animals from the weird other-worlds of the Oriental imagination, foregather amiably with an effect of loveliness.

That sense of the grotesque which we have noticed took hold of these foreign emblems. In the religious sculpture executed by the first Christianized Mexicans, distorted Aztec Christs bleed from wounds, not the legendary sacred five, but from as many as a human form can support and still be recognizable. In Manú, Yucatán, there exists an outdoor shrine, a cross roughly hewn from stone, and the hanging figure is wholly Aztec, resembling images found in the older ruins.

The grotesqueries began changing in form, but they were still distinct, still quite other in feeling than the demons and gargoyles of Europe, far removed from the squat, sly humor of the Chinese figures.

Those sixteenth century merchant crafts plying between China and Mexico brought not only merchandise, but ideas. Lacquer, black and red, and blue porcelain jars were left here by the sailors, and immediately the Mexican began making boxes lacquered in all colors, encrusted, or painted in flat designs over the smooth foundation.

In Puebla, then a newly founded city, the making of a certain kind of pottery became the chief industry. The first Potter’s Guild in New Spain was chartered there: an organization of pure Indian and Spanish craftsmen, with a strict clause declaring that no negro or person of mixed blood could be a member. Puebla Talavera ware was during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a synonym for excellent pottery.

The story of Puebla pottery has happily been written, and serves as an example of the methods used by the Spaniards in introducing their crafts and arts to the Mexican. Puebla de los Angeles was founded about the year 1532, and the first account of the new industry centered there was given by Fray Geronimo de Mendieta in his “Historia Ecclesiastica Indiana.” I quote from the translation given in “Maiolica of Mexico” by Edwin Atlee Barber:

“After they (the Mexicans) became Christians and saw our images from Flanders and Italy, there is no altar ornaments or image, however beautiful it may be, that they will not reproduce and imitate. There were artisans in pottery and vessels for eating and drinking purposes, and these were very well made although the workmen did not know how to glaze them. But they soon learned from the first craftsman who came over from Spain in spite of all he could do to guard and hide the secret from them. And finally this may be understood as a general rule, that nearly all the curious and beautiful works of every class of trades and arts are now (1596) being carried forward in the Indies (at least in New Spain or Mexico) are being done and finished by the Indians.”

Who this ungenerous craftsman was no one seems to remember. But sometime within the first half century of the new regime, it is certain that a small group of friars from a Dominican monastery in Talavera de los Reyes (Spain) came out to join their brethren in Puebla and instructed the natives in the making of the famous Talavera ware. This pottery had its first inspiration from Persia through the Moors, and later from China: transplanted to Mexico, it followed the same line of development until the end of the seventeenth century, when the Italian influence crept in, and changed small details of design and color.

The Mexicans absorbed everything, and grew slowly away from their teachers. The transition in this particular instance was slow. Almost two hundred years elapsed before the Puebla ware became a completely Mexican thing. Gradually, the flowers and foliage became bolder, the designs were taken from native plants; the blue coloring became heavier, the patterns were raised in high relief, and the tattooed effect now so familiar came into popularity. The shapes reverted slightly to the primitive, and from simple blue and white the native potters used their own varied and exuberant schemes of color. A Puebla bowl now often rivals a batea (wooden painted tray) from Tehuantepec for gayety and vividness.

The history of Puebla tile is not so well known, but they probably date from about 1550. They were called Azulejos, from a word meaning blue, and were at first literally blue tiles. They changed in character rapidly, and were for two hundred years a most characteristic form of decoration for houses and chapels, fountains and patio pavements. In many old houses there are large panels relating legends in the manner of European tapestry, picturing episodes in the lives of saints and warriors, or used simply as decorative motifs filled with birds and animals and figures imitating the Aztec designs.

Until the beginning of the nineteenth century these tiles were used lavishly all over Mexico. The most famous examples of tile work are the Casa de los Azulejos in Mexico City, the Holy Well in the Chapel at Guadalupe, the Tepozotlan Convent in the State of Mexico, and several churches in Guanajuato, especially the exquisite small church called La Compaña, as well as the Church of San Francisco de Acatepec near Puebla.

The imported forms of architecture became, in the hands of the Mexicans, a separate creation. The early churches of Mexico are full of this Aztec strength and heaviness. Even roses and Cupids and emasculated saints become virile and significant--they are not the roses and saints and Cupids of Spain. Later, the Mexican-born Spaniards who designed in all the arts, guided by some vague tradition of classical proportion, produced merely another Barrocco style, coincidental with a similar decadence in the old country. But whereas in Europe two white and civilized forms merged and decayed, in Mexico the fusion was Spanish and Indian: and Mexican Barrocco, “the Churrigueresco,” amazingly genuine and alive, is the curious result.

The only vivid and quick artistic impulse of this country grew in the soul of the native. The Spanish artist who maintained the foreign traditions painted merely after the style of his own country, imitating without adapting, lacking inspiration of his own, growing each generation farther away from his sources, until at the close of the eighteenth century the so-called aristocratic art was a puerile childish copy of the European seventeenth century manner.

Aside from this academic school, however, a national spirit was developing among the Mexican-born Spaniards, and a tremendously increasing class of Spanish-Indios who were genuinely Mexican in feeling. During the later Colonial times, they called themselves Mexicans and followed native customs as a patriotic duty. This period was fruitful in the production of the native crafts. Everybody made use of the rugs and bateas and serapes, the painted boxes and furniture, the saddles and potteries. They adopted a highly individualized native costume entirely Spanish in design, called the Charro. It was usually made of finely dressed leather, embroidered in silver and colors. The hats and saddles designed to complete this horseman’s equipment were splendid and very costly.

The dresses for the women, especially the country costumes, were of gaily dyed silks weighted with bead embroideries and native lace. The most beautiful of these dresses originated in Puebla and was called the China Poblana. It has latterly passed into disuse, but is still seen during fiestas and in the Mexican theatre. As early as 1840 Madame Calderon de la Barca noticed that it was no longer used by ladies of the better society--a pity, for it is most graciously feminine and becoming.

After the Independence of Mexico from Spain was established, the national psychology shifted, and it became once more the fashion to imitate Europe. All architecture and aristocratic art since 1825 degenerated into the European manner, and that manner mostly second rate French. The epoch of Maximilian completed the havoc, with wholesale importations of French furnishings and styles at the lowest period of taste known since the decadence of Greece. Mexican art disappeared from popularity, a thing admired only by students and collectors, and used only by the Indio.

During these changes, political and social, the native has remained racially and spiritually static. In common with all peasantry, he derived his ideas from the fine arts--not only the imported and foreign arts, but from his own magnificent traditions, filtered them through his own understanding, translated them into his common speech: the result is a thing of superb beauty and strength. He grew each generation a step further away from the object he had imitated--like the Mexican-born Spaniard who copied the methods of Spain--but with this difference, that the native added always more and more of his own feeling and psychic reaction, until at once the thing was his own, an interpretation of beauty, national, personal--even more, absolutely individual.

For he works after his own fashion, and creates each smallest object as a unique thing, and does nothing twice alike. Each object has its own incorruptible character, even to the pattern on the jug in which he draws his water, the serape which serves him both as cloak and bed.