|
000725 Visit since November 1, 2005
| TRIUMPHS and TRAGEDY... A history of the Mexican people CHAPTER III, The Forefathers (44th part.continues..) |
| By Prof. German Estrada - November 2005 |
...To subjugate, church and crown endeavored to destroy the beliefs, customs, and traditions of the past. The Conqueror bestowed Spanish names on rivers, mountains, bays, oceans, and forest, thus claiming them for himself. The Indian lost out because they were no longer his. True, the Spaniard made concessions, adding to villages and town his own names but also keeping the old. Teotihuacán; Tlatelolco, Santiago Tlatelolco, and so on. Beyond that, the Spaniards banned the songs and dances of old, thinking they kept alive memories of pagan idols. They disrupted pre-Hispanic community activities, supplanting them with European ones, placing the emphasis on individual performance.
The Spaniards brought their music and, more significant, their instruments, particularly the stringed ones; the guitar, now a Mexican standby, evolved from one of them. Spanish music made its debut with Cortés, among whose soldiers Benito Bejel, Cristobal Rodríguez Dávalos, Sebastián Rodríguez, and Diego Martín played the trumpet, kettledrum, and drums. One soldier, nicknamed Canillas because he was so thin, played the fife. Some of them became teachers of music after the Conquest; Bejel, for example founded a studio of music and dance in Mexico City. But playing for solitary enjoyment made no sense to the Indian. Sales to the Indian of stringed instruments, as one anthropologist points out, measured necessarily "the breakdown of communal aspects of native music." Happily, the friars ignored native crafts; no missionary bothered to teach ceramics to Indians. As a result, the ancient art of pottery making survived, as did things largely Indian, because Spaniards had no use for them, among them the metate, a curved stone for grinding corn for the tortilla.
VII
With the razing of Tenochtitlan, a distinct architecture replaced the old temples, palaces, and abodes of the nobility. Influenced by the Moorish, the imported blueprints introduced remnants of medieval Spain to the New World. To cite Manuel Toussaint, a venerable Mexican art authority, it was the Spanish world, "the last gasp of the Gothic style" and of the Middle Ages. The Franciscan monastery of Tepeaca, built between 1530 and 1580, a prototype of edifices on the horizon, wrote Toussaint, was exclusively of the Middle Ages. Yet its design, paradoxically, was largely homegrown. Few, if any, blueprints arrived from Spain, although surely the memories of temples left behind inspired local designs.
The Franciscan style of the early sixteen century, a conglomerate of angles and straight lines, came to be known as the fortress church, where strategic considerations superseded priestly needs. Solitary towers rising above the wilderness, these forts, religious shrines by function and aggressively masculine, were majestic yet simple, with walls topped by parapets, where soldiers might take cover when under attack. Utility rather than aesthetics took precedent. They were massive, with thick walls of stone, these monasteries, convents, and churches, designed the last ages and to withstand, among other dangers, the earthquake of the Valley of Mexico.
The Franciscans were pioneer architects, at Tepeaca, Tula, Texcoco, Tlaxcala, Tlatelolco, and Atlixco. Not limited by the vow of poverty, the benchmark of the Franciscans, the Augustinians erected more-sumptuous temples, at Actopan and Acolman, to name two. The Dominicans, who built in southern Mexico, put up grandiose buildings, among the finest in New Spain. Aided by the Mixtecs, a people with a long history or working in stone. As the Dominican monasteries of Oaxtepec and Oaxaca demonstrate, the technical ability of the local Indian population, as well as its resources, controlled the design for buildings, whether they were simple or elaborate.
|
Cathedral of Oaxaca around Christmas time
|
In the next issue we'll continue with Chapter III of this fascinating book: A NEW SPAIN
Prof. Germán Estrada
E-mail: estradanav@yahoo.com
Source: : From the book Triumphs and Tragedy, a History of the Mexican People by his author Ramon Eduardo Ruiz, and with his authorization. (W.W. Norton & Company. New York-London).
Prof. Germán Estrada is the author of the best selling book, México Mágico: Everything You Wanted To Know About... But Nobody Told You..." available in Puerto Vallarta at The Net House, Mail Boxes, Etc., Books, Books as well as directly from his website.
Archives
by date |
Current
Weather Report
