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MEXICO MAGICO
TRIUMPHS and TRAGEDY... A history of the Mexican people |
CHAPTER IV, The Forefathers (59th part continues...)
By Prof. German Estrada - June 2006 |
Practice, all the same, was something else. Most corregidores took advantage of the Indian, enriching themselves at his expense. They employed Indians to build their homes and to plow their fields and jailed them on a whim. As middlemen, they fixed the price of cotton, cacao, and cochineal and peddled liquor at exorbitant prices because they controlled its distribution. With monopolies over the sale of salt, seeds, and tools, they charged whatever the traffic would bear. When compensated properly, they provided Indians for little or no pay to hacendados or labor contractors. Their petty despotism paved the way for the caciquismo that desolated the countryside after Independence.
5 - BAROQUE YEARS
Silver was the bedrock for what became known as the Baroque Era, the seventeenth century and much of the next. Once a term applied to a style of architecture and plastic arts, Baroque, implying “ornate” or “arabesque,” now defines a way of life of a historical epoch. The flow of silver from the New World, which filled the coffers of Europeans, ignited in Spain, to employ the eloquence of one savant, “a pyrotechnic display of artistic genius.” Some of this Golden Age rubbed off on New Spain. The Baroque centuries, likewise, witnessed the ascend of the criollo, who transformed New Spain into his universe, rich, pompous, and florid, society “eminently aristocratic” but an “aristocracy of money,” lauding the glossy and trivial. Linked with the Counter-Reformation, the Baroque combined, oddly, medieval ideas the spirit of the Renaissance.
II
Nothing captures better the pinch and nub of the Baroque that its luxuriant architecture, which rapidly displaced the vogue of the austere fortress church. The clergy and wealthy colonials, most of them miners who had struck it rich, erected a plethora of buildings, each vying with the others for ornate design and grandiose size. Vast fortunes were spent on them, occasionally as penance for sins. When private entrepreneurs financed their construction, styles varied according with the latest fads. A blend of Romanesque, Gothic, Mudejar, and Renaissance, at times modified by the labors of anonymous Indian craftsmen, architecture begot scores of regional genres, the florid poblano of Puebla among them. Churches of similar design towered over towns and cities of Oaxaca and Jalisco. A lusty and opulent church, completed in 1713, loomed above Durango while another, of approximately identical vintage, looked out on the rooftops of Chihuahua.
The silver age gave birth to the majestic cathedral, the loftiest symbol of the Baroque. Foundations for the huge churches were laid during the latter half of the sixteenth century in Tlaxcala, Oaxaca, Michoacán, Yucatán, Chiapas, and Guadalajara. Along with them, the celebrated cathedrals of Mexico City, the biggest in the world, dated from 1573, when masons put down the first stones. Rebuilt again and again, the Cathedral fronted the Zócalo, rising on the ruins of the Gran Teocalli. The most beautiful of the cathedrals stood in Morelia, the heartland of Michoacán. Begun in 1640, it was completed a century later.
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Cathedral in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas.
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Cathedral in Guadalajara, Jalisco
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Cathedral in Morelia, Michoacán
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In the next issue we’ll continue with Chapter V of this fascinating book, THE BAROQUE YEARS.
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.
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