From Xico

Popocatepetl acting up again, but we weren't there...

2013-06-18T12:56:25-05:00

Popocateptetl sent a big burst of steam, gas and ashes out today. It is reported to have been two kilometers in height. You can read about it in this article which also offers a good explanation of what is happening as well as having a good video of the event. Unfortunately, we weren't on the bus to see it, and even if we had been, we'd have had to time the ride carefully to see it. The article refers you to CENAPRED, Mexico's Center for Protection from Disasters which has even more information and still pictures. I didn't realize it before, but there are actually links for info on the volcano on the site in English. This page is in English. You should explore the site even where it's in Spanish because there's enough illustrative material to interest you even if you don't speak Spanish.

As the article explains, these explosions release pressure and are not (necessarily) signs of an imminent vast explosion. The alert status at Popo remains yellow, level 2.

Mexico in North America: A Sort of Correction and a Major Correction*

2013-06-13T12:00:36-05:00

Yesterday I said without qualification that Mexico was in North America because it lay on the North American Plate--the plates constituting the hard crust of the earth. Jim, mi esposo, said he wouldn't say that: plate tectonics didn't exist when Mexico was first considered part of North America. And when was that? Hmmmm....Long before plate tectonics were theorized about and studied.

So how did Mexico come to be part of North America? This is a nice, messy topic to research by shuffling through google.

By the way, North America is not just Mexico, Canada and the US. It is also Greenland, Bermuda, Clipperton Island, and Saint Pierre and Miquelon. Huh?

Anyway, Mexico is shall we say geographically part of North America because it is mostly on the North American plate. Apparently some geographers consider the part of Mexico below the Isthmus of Tehuantepec to be in Central America. The Isthmus is the narrowest part of Mexico.

Certainly above the Isthmus, Mexico just looks like part of North America (although many Europeans do, in fact, consider it part of Central America):

(map from The Encyclopedia Britannica)

"People" tend to want to lump Mexico with Central America because Spanish is the dominant language in both, and, except for the giant exception of Brazil, in South America. But as was pointed out here, that's kind of stereotyping. though calling Mexico along with the other countries of Central and South America Latin countries isn't. French, Portuguese and Spanish, spoken in Latin America, are all Latin languages. (So maybe Quebec should be in Latin America as well as those two French islands).

I have another idea about why Mexico is in North America. And started there even before the US did. Here is a map of the part of New Spain which lay in North America at the start of the Mexican Revolution in 1810:

You can see, even excluding Central America, that New Spain on the eve of its becoming Mexico occupied more of North America than did the United States.

The map below makes this even clearer (You have to include Mexico in your mind here):

The US as STATES in 1810 was the orange part. The blue part included territories and the green part was the Louisiana Purchase. (Don't forget to include Mexico -- or New Spain -- south of the current US in your mind.)

Independent Mexico in 1824 was no different:

The first big change (and everything Texas is big) came as the result of the Texas War for Independence from Mexico fought in 1835-1836, resulting in the Republic of Texas. While I'm not going to go into it here, this was no simple thing. *Santa Ana´s defeat of the Texans at the Alamo seems to have been a catalyst leading a sufficient number of men to join the Texans for them to finally defeat the Mexicans at the Battle of San Jacinto. Of the original defenders of the Alamo, 13 1 were native-born Texans [Texians] with, according to Wikipedia, 11 of those being of Mexican descent. One of them at least, Juan Seguín, still has descendants in San Antonio including my former boss at the University of Texas Health Science Center who was quite clear that he wasn´tof Mexican descent (except insofar as the area had become Mexican) but of Spanish descent, one of the people who came from the Canary Islands. You might also like to know that at least until the 1990s -- maybe no longer-- there were Mexican descendants of the owners of what became the King Ranch still in court trying to reclaim their land. Slavery was banned in Mexico, and when Texas gained its independence from Mexico, it legalized slavery.

Mexico and the US disputed the border of the State of Texas with Mexico claiming that it was the Nueces River, the US claiming it was the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo in Mexico).

In the map below you can see that the Nueces River cuts the lower bump from Texas, more or less.

The dark green section (Texas today) is divided from the light green section (Mexico today) by the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo).

As a result of US insistence that the Rio Bravo be the boundary, Mexico broke diplomatic relations with the US. And this pretty much marks the beginning of the First War of United States Intervention in Mexico, or as the US says, the Mexican American War.

The two countries have noticeably different ideas about this war, and it is really worth learnig about them. A short piece in English talking about the Mexican version can be found here. In fact the PBS site covering the US-Mexico war is very good and has quite a number of Mexican and Mexican American authorities as well as a good list of resources. It is really worth looking this stuff up and unlearning some of the history at least I was taught.

The result of the First US Intervention in Mexico (you have to know the US also directly invaded Mexican territory, including Mexico City) is that Mexico lost about 55 percent of its territory and ended up in the shape it is today. This was not only a result of the battles, but of the US rewriting, on its own, the treaty the two countries had agreed on. The map below shows the negotiations over the Mexican border from 1845-1848.

The last little bit, between the red line and the dotted-dashed line to the south, representes the Gadsden purchase of an area called La Mesilla. The US bought it for ten million dollars, threatening Mexico with more war if it wouldn't sell it.

Obviously, the Mexican-US war is another topic on which I could go on forever. For the purposes of the original discussion, however, which was over why Mexico was in North America, as you can see that it only was reduced to its current size in 1848. So it was part of North America in its combined role as Mexico and part of New Spain, established in the 16th century, for longer than the United States was even the British colonies.

Bus Trip to Mexico City, Second Segment -- a Little Bit of Mexican geography plus Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl

2013-06-12T12:32:27-05:00

A few geographical notes.

Mexico is considered part of North America because it lies on the North American Plate, NOT for cultural reasons. Some of Baja California also lies on the Cocos Plate and the Pacific Plate, but by far the largest portion is on the North American Plate. It is the rubbing together of these plates, as well as its related volcanic activity, which makes the country particularly earthquake-prone.

Although Mexico City is in a valley, when we go there from our house, we go up even after we go down a bit. We are never as low, on the whole trip, as we are at home. Xalapa has an altitude of roughly 4000 feet, although it varies from place to place. Our house in Col. Ursulo Galván, about eleven miles more or less south from Xalapa, is at 3800+ feet. The top of the Colonia is also about 4000 feet. Our area of Veracruz is on the eastern, down side of the Sierra Madre Oriental, on its corner with what is called the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, or the Sierra Nevada (Nevada means snowy--these mountains are or were snow-capped either all year or part of the year). We are in the faldas, or skirts, of Cofre de Perote, to our west, which, along with Pico de Orizaba, makes the corner of the two mountain ranges. The trees in these mountains are mostly oak and pine having, surprisingly for people expecting something more tropical. They have an appearance not unlike the mountains of the US west. to me they look somewhat Oregonian.

So the bus from Xalapa climbs through the Sierra Madre Oriental and then on to the Altiplano de Mexico, or the high plains or plateau of Mexico which extends from the southern US border to the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt. In the southern area, its altitude averages about 6600 feet above sea level. It is quite uneven because Mexico City itself is in a valley of the altiplano (called the Valle de México) and is 7350 feet above sea level. In the bus we go down into Mexico City from the altiplano. The site of Mexico City was originally a lake. The Aztecs built on an island in the lake, but the Spanish filled it in. The people of the area farmed on man-made islands in the lake. Interestingly, Tlaxcala (see previous post) was one of the regions in which people lived who came to actively oppose the Spanish during the Conquest.

Well. I could go on, but this post is supposed to be about what we saw on our bus trip.

Anyway, after Malinchin, the next spectacular sight is of Popocatepetl(17,800 feet) and Iztaccihuatl (17,160 feet), the second and third highest mountains in Mexico after Pico de Oriaba. You see Iztaccihuatl first on the bus trip. It is not an active volcano. The name means white woman because it is snow covered, and its four peaks are said to look like a reclining woman. I think it looks as much like the profile of a face as of a body, but no matter.

The picture below (stolen from Wikipedia) is pretty much how it appeared to us.

You drive a bit further before Popocatepetl appears a bit to its south. The two are separated by the Paseo de Cortés and are linked by a Nahuatl legend of thwarted love between a princess and a warrior, Iztaccihuatl being the princess, Popo, the warrior. Popo was not the name of the warrior, however, at least I don't think it was. Popocatepetl means smoke-covered mountain. In the 1990s the glaciers on Popocatepetl shrank noticeably, apparently partly because of warmer temperaturs, but also because of increasing volcanic activity.

Popocatepetl is the more famous probably because it is still an active volcano (and is easier, at least for me, to say). In fact, it was more than normally active on the 22 of May when we went past it for a visit to Jim's opthalmologist. I wrote about that here. The government has a series of warning notices about the severity of volcanic activity which seems a bit like the US's warning system for terrorism danger, but where the volcano is concerned, it is more useful and accurate. The three stages are green, normal; yellow, alert; and red, alarm. It has been on yellow for awhile now, though since our last trip, things have quieted down and it is has been at a low yellow.

It looked pretty much like this last Wednesday when we drove past, except it also had a very, very thin stream of steam coming out to the left.

This image is from the CENAPRED website. CENAPRED is the Centro Nacional de Prevencion de Desastres. It has an excellent page on Popocatepetl and information on a lot of other stuff as well.

Today, after a relatively quiet few weeks, there has been an uptake in volcanic earthquake activity with a cluster of seven of about 2.4 on the Richter scale occuring this morning. I found this information on the site called Volcano Discovery which says it may (or may not be) an indication of an uptick in activity. This as well as the CENAPRED site offer all kinds of up-to-the-minute information on volcanoes, the former world-wide, the latter Mexican.

Back on the bus, Popo and Izti (their nicknames) fade into the horizon behind us, and soon we find ourselves slipping down the broad, curving highway to Mexico City.

Mexico City Bus Trip Yet Again: First segment

2013-06-11T12:54:29-05:00

If she had to take the eight or nine hour round trip bus ride to Mexico City yet again, a sane person, like Jim, would say, "The best part is when it's over." But I continue to find it captivating. I am stepping into another existence. Some of the strange appeal is the sensation of being in yet not in the landscape. All the outside sounds are mute on the bus. Instead there are the movies: usually silly comedies or cartoons or infomercials or strange documentaries. You can turn the sound over your seat off so that a blur of Spanish from a bit of distance sinks into a monotonous hum, a kind of white noise. The bus starts out on route 140 going through the clutter of Xalapa highway life, and then it seems as if the bus magically lifts itself onto the new cuota, or toll highway, an impossibly smooth ribbon of road gliding up along sweeping curves that pass through densely green evergreen forests crowding steep hillsides.

You can mark the trip's segments by the tollbooths: there are five of them. After the first one, the land flattens and becomes distinctly dryer. You go through true badlands, Joshua trees growing out of broken-up lava flows that have not yet turned to soil. The trees have been badly burned on one side of the road. Last time we passed by, their blackened arms and trunks, had twisted grotesquely, their spiky leaves sad scorched crowns topping them. Jim thought they were all dead. I noticed some green shoots and thought maybe a few had survived.

There isn´t always an unhappy ending. This trip, Jim and I saw that many had survived, that strong green shoots had pushed through the tops of most of the plants.

You can also see the snow-capped peak of Pico de Orizaba off to the south during this segment of the trip. Pyramid-shaped, snow-covered, it seems small.

Closer to us and a little further on, the mountain the Spaniards named Malinche or Malintzin rises into view. She was named after Cortés´s Mexican translator and consort who came from the current state of Tabasco which Veracruz neighbors on the north. Indigenous people, the Tlaxcaltecs called (and still call) the mountaain Matlalcuéyet. According to a good article in Wikipedia, she is a "a goddess of rain and song." It is located mostly in the state of Tlaxcala and a bit in the state of Puebla. Its brown and rocky mass takes a long time to pass.I think we come at it from the northeast, the road from xalapa veering southwest at the edge of Tlaxcala, or maybe a little further east. When the rains come, the slopes will turn greener, I think. Tlaxcala is the smallest state in Mexico and is surrounded on north, east and south by Puebla and on the West by the state of Mexico. Somewhere it is also edge by a tiny bit of Hidalgo.

The new cuota crosses Tlaxcala, bypassing to the north (I'm pretty sure) the city of Puebla that the old route traversed. On our first trip to Mexico perhaps 26 or 27 years ago, there was very little fancy road once we left Mexico City. The bus bumped its way into the downtown Puebla bus station and then made its way on small roads, old ones, sometimes not paved, to Xalapa. More recently, the bus bypassed downtown Puebla but went past the Puebla airport which we don't do now. If I sound confused,it is because I am. New cuotas are everywhere and are now linking with each other. At one place, you have to cross over the unfinished road to get on another. Thus I am not really sure of how it all fits together.

The scenery changes before Tlaxcala. You see irrigated fields now starting to show their crops, more and more buildings, more traffic. In Tlaxcala, the bus goes through what I think are the edges of the town of Huamantla and, later, the capital city also called Tlaxcala. Although the smallest state, it is rich in history, both mesoamerican and post-Cortés and is a relatively prosperous state. We had a friend who did his year of community service in Tlaxcala after finishing med school. Much more recently, one of the physical therapists who treated me after I had injured my shoulder was from Tlaxcala. When she told me where she was from, I said, "Oh, that's the smallest state in Mexico." It was not a tactful thing to have said, and from then on she was somewhat chilly towards me.

If you are interested in learning more about Tlaxcala, here and here are a couple of sites in English. This is the google.com.mx site for pictures. I'd start with it. Now that Jim's trips west to see the ophthalmologist are less frequent, we really would like to explore this area to DF's east.

A hike on Cofre de Perote at around 11000 feet

2013-06-04T10:26:31-05:00

Mountain climbers mostly like to get to the top of mountains, but this is hardly necessary to do in order to envelope yourself in the majestic and sometimes strange landscapes of Mexico. I myself will probably--no, certainly--will never hike to the top of Pico de Orizaba. I have hiked to the top of Cofre de Perote where you find a tiny village of workers and a small forest of antennae. There are any number of at-least-as-interesting things below.

Having never been to the top of Pico de Orizaba (Citlatépetl in Nahuatl), I can't swear the same is true, but I do know that trips lower down are filled with their own beauty. Several months ago, we drove to Nuevo Potrero,about 32 miles south-southwest of where we live, on the eastern flank of the mountain to walk just a little way up to the peak five miles away.

Here is a map of the area from Coscomatepec where you leave the road for Pico showing Potrero Nuevo. Remember, you can click on it to make it bigger.

We did not spend much time in Potrero Nuevo, but you can find some stuff about it by googling Potrero Nuevo, Vereracruz, including some nice YouTube videos. It is, I believe, the highest town in the State of Veracruz at 10,637 feet. We parked at the edge of town near the church which is either under construction or being rehabbed and set out with our dogs. Below are some photos from our hike. It is arduous, not only because it is a sometimes rocky, sometimes sandy steep trail, but even more because of the altitude.

You can just see the summit through the clouds here.

The road up from Potrero Nuevo

Jim and Jocko. Jocko's mountain heritage shows when we go hiking at high altitudes. He loves it.

We passed a man going down with his burro dragging some wood. This wasn´t a recreational trip for him or his beast.

Jocko posing on the trail.

The trail goes into a leafless forest.

A view across the top of Mexico, more or less.

Just some more of the trailwith mist drifting through.

Jim has some pics of the little town which I will post perhaps someday. I am hesitant because there are about ten thousand things I mean to post.

Yoga in Xico with Luana

2013-05-29T10:05:39-05:00

I kept thinking I was too old to start yoga. I thought this for years. During the time I thought I was too old for yoga, I ran a 5 k (and came in last) and took pilates for quite a while and tai chi for a couple of years. But yoga kept calling, so finally, after my friend who is ALMOST my age told me how much she liked it, at age 69 and almost 8 months I wandered into Luana's studio. It is a comfortable white space with some colorful 8x10 Mexican-type banners strung across the ceiling which is high, old, wooden and beamed. And I'm not too old. And I love it, even after just a couple of weeks. I had taken dancing lessons for years -- serious ones -- and I've never stopped missing them: the feeling that you and your body (to be corny) are one: the feeling of your muscles working and stretching and lifting you, the sweat pouring down your back as you push just a little harder and a little harder, the music coursing through you.There isn´t any piano music in yoga, though there are some chants, and it isn't as hard (or rather Luana won't permit old bones and muscles to push as hard), but it is still thrilling to be back making my body work in this way. In the classes, the movement alternates with meditative periods where you stay in a position (for me, mostly reclining positions) for extended periods of time. I've done breathing on and off for years, and in my years as a therapist with severely mentally ill patients I taught mindfulness which involves breathing, so I´m not new to it. In Luana's studio, it seems that my experiences are a bit different. Lying on my back, (I don't think I'm psychotic) it seems as if I am somehow a very thin shell, with the world flowing through me. Even better, I notice the sounds and smells of the neighborhood outside: roasting coffee, bus exhaust, garlic in oil, trucks with their home-made wooden sides rattling down the cobblestones, a light hint of piano music or the sound of a clarinet in the distance, women gossiping and laughing, a radio playing norteño.

Anyway, now a plug for Luana's classes. She is very flexible (mentally as well as physically) and adjusts the movements according to the level of the student. She is completely fluent in both English and Spanish. She follows the Lyengar method. Weekdays, she teaches Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 9:00 am to 10:30 am and Monday and Thursday, from 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm with a a class for children on Wednesdays from 5:00-6.00. Obviously I recommend her highly.

Classes are 50 pesos a piece.

The address is Hidalgo 100, Xico

The phone is cel 228 111 7647

And she is on facebook at Yogatlán.

Wear shorts or comfortable clothes.

Popocateptl -- I saw steam coming out of it! I really did!

2013-05-25T11:01:26-05:00

Last time we went for a check-up for Jim's eyes in DF, I SWORE to him that I saw Popocateptl fuming. He was unconvinced. Later I read in the papers that indeed, the volcano was spewing forth steam (en español, exhalaciones). And a few days later than that, it actually spewed forth flame. People in Puebla were sweeping ash from the streets.

The volcano observers maintain their watch status at 3, or yellow, and haven't raised it for several weeks, but they haven't lowered it, either.

Here are photos from Aristegui Noticias on the 22 of May. The one on the right looks exactly like what I saw. The one on the left is from a different perspective:

We head for Mexico City again this upcoming week so I can renew my passport. I will bring my camera and see if it is at all possible to take a picture through the bus window.

This, too, Is México

2013-05-24T18:14:32-05:00

This is a link to a captivating post on a museum in the midst of what is now desert between Chihuahua City and Cuahtémoc in northwestern México. Linda, Eric and families in New Mexico, you really, really ought to go see it. It is MUCH closer to you than to us. I was surprised to read that the Mennonite farmers in the area (who are leaving now in sizeable numbers) are not organic or near-organic farmers and that they do not work to conserve water. As my brother-in-law Ivan says, when water-table water is gone, it's pretty much gone.

But, but...this is NOT a gloomy article: it is joyful. Enjoy it, the pictures, and Elizabeth and Eliseo, and celebrate two original and resilient human beings.

Harley Davidsons in México Today with an air pollution alert and in the Mexican Revolution

2013-05-11T20:52:23-05:00

We've been going to Mexico City with some regularity recently to visit Jim's opthalmologist. We haven't stayed overnight except following his surgery, but even our short stays have intrigued me and have made DF seem like a place I'd really like to explore. We arrive by bus at TAPO and take a taxi to El Hospital Angeles del Pedregal in the very most southwestern edge of the city. Sometimes our taxis go through the streets, sometimes on the highways. For weeks, jacarandas were in bloom, filling the air with clouds of beautiful purplish blossoms. Our next trip is this coming Wednesday. For many of our visits, the air has been remarkably clear and free of pollution, but now there is an ozone alert and people are supposed to avoid driving.

However, it is also the 110th birthday of Harley Davidson motorcycles and a grand procession of them took place en El Zócalo, Mexico City's heart.

In spite of the alert, Miguel Ángel Mancera, mayor of Mexico City, has justified the incursion of all the motorcycles for economic reasons: hotel reservations and so forth.

Harley Davidsons weren't so friendly to México during the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, more or less. According to today's La Jornada, "There is a history of Harleys in the midst of the Mexican Revolution. It's said that when Francisco [Pancho] Villa was angered by US support for Porfirio Díaz, the dictator overthrown during the Revolution,he crossed the frontier with his men to sack various towns in New Mexico. The government in Washington wasn't too thrilled with this and so authorized the US army to attack Villa in Mexico. The US sent twenty thousand men to follow him and his followers mounted on Harley Davidsons, many of them equipped with machine guns. The foreigners didn't succeed in defeating Villa and had to return to the US on their motorcycles.

If you read Spanish, the article in La Jornada about Harleys is definitely worth your time. The material in this post comes from the La Jornada article and from Notimex via Aristegui Noticias. The first photo is from the latter, the second from the former.

Save our Planet

2013-05-11T11:36:11-05:00

A good friend who denies global warming, at least, did again in response to my facebook post linking to the NYTimes article about the truly frightening changes in CO2 in the atmosphere. I wrote this in response:

I think we should say climate CHANGE not warming. I think if you constructed a simple"biosphere" -- there's another name for it. We used to construct them in high school -- and then changed the composition of the gases in it you'd see what climate change means. It means that things can't live the way they do now, and some, perhaps not at all. It is such a thin layer of stuff that we survive in, so unusual. Why would we want to threaten it more than other forces of nature do? What if temperatures don't, on average, change, but fish are wiped out from their homes, birds fall dead in some areas, butterflies don't make it to Michoacan. There is a beautiful short film with various people who have seen earth from space speaking here: http://vimeo.com/55073825# I really think it might sway you a bit.