Getting Cultured

In the last few days, we have taken in (or at least been exposed to) as many manifestations of "culture" as any time since we visited 8 museums in 3 days in Paris 4 years ago. The first of the series was during our day-long stopover in Villahermosa, the capital of Tabasco, in between overnight bus rides on our way from Isla Mujeres to Mexico City. Although Villahermosa as a whole was a strikingly unlovely city, it was home to a unique and interesting site, Parque-Museo La Venta. Part of the park is a zoo containing only animals native to Tabasco, and peppered with reminders about the human responsibility to prevent extinction. The other half is a jungly walk that incorporates 30 or so Olmec sculptures, found earlier in the century at La Venta, and indicating that it was actually the central Olmec city during the time of their civilization, many years before the Maya. These were the oldest artifacts we have seen in Mexico, and are all that physically remain of the Olmec, whose language has still not been interpreted by modern scholars. Arriving in Mexico City, we followed up on La Venta by visiting the Templo Mayor, located in what is now the center of the country`s capital, and in what was at the time of the Mexica (Aztecs) the center of Tenochtitlan, their city in the middle of Lake Texcoco. The museum is very well set up, with a walkabout first to see all of the excavated temple, and then an indoor museum with extensive explanations of Mexica society. Unlike Rome, where large sections of the city feel to me to be permeated by ancient history, most of Mexico City feels quite removed from the Mexica past; the Templo Mayor is a moving exception.

The next day, we turned to art, spending the morning at the Palacio de Bellas Artes and the afternoon at the National Museum of Art (Munal). As the name suggests, the Palacio is a soaring Beaux-Artes building where every part is at least as much form as function. It houses several famous murals by Diego Rivera, as well as Siquieros and other artists. The temporary exhibit we saw was of contemporary Latin American art, which I am ashamed to say did no more for me than contemporary art ever does. The art at Munal, though, spoke to me strongly. That museum is arranged chronologically, from colonial religious art of the 16th century through Mexican art of 1950ish. While a dedicated post-modernist wouldn`t have liked the museums historical, contextual presentation of artisitc movements and works in Mexico, I certainly did. The development of a sense of nationalism in Mexican art, the continuing struggle over the last 200 years with the meaning of religion in Mexico, and the search for a definitive sense of Mexican identity were themes that particularly stood out.

Still on our feet, the following day we spent the morning at the incredibly expansive National Museum of Anthropology, which was quite as impressive as its reputation had promised. Each room of the museum is dedicated to the indigenous people of a certain area of Mexico. On the ground floor, the archeological record of the group is presented, with an incredible collection of artifacts complemented by some stunning larger pieces, both originals and reproductions-- murals, altars, carved walls, and the like. The top floor rooms take more of a modern-day anthropological perspective on each group, considering current traditions and economies, the effects of larger sociopolitical movements, and the like. Although by the end we were doing no more than walking through each exhibit, too worn out to read any more descriptions, the museum made quite an imprint. We followed that, rather discordantly, with an excellent tour of the Trotsky house, where he lived after being exiled from the USSR by Stalin, survived one massive machine gun attack, and was finally murdered with an ice axe in his study. The extent of Stalin`s global network, as described in the exhibit, was shocking to learn, and the unanswered questions that remain about Trotsky and his family were also intriguing. Also, our guide invited my sister Karen to give a lecture there when she finishes her research in the gulag this summer, which was tickling! We followed that up with an evening show of the Ballet Folklorico. It had a pretty Disney-ish feel, particularly after having spent even a little time in indigenous communities in the south, but nonetheless, it was a fun show.

We were prepared in our planning for all the museums to be closed on Monday, but did not expect that to include the large central park, Bosque Chapultepec. So we contented ourselves with watching "Miami Vice" and sitting around at Starbucks all afternoon.

Finally, on our last full day, we resumed our cultural endeavors with a flourish, taking the commuter rail out to the gorgeous Dolores Olmeda Museum. Like the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the museum is composed of Olmeda`s private collection and is located on the grounds of her estate, which includes peacock-filled lawns and a stone hacienda with flowers climbing the walls. The permanent collection consists of room after room of Diego Rivera works, which exhibited a range of styles that I had never before associated with him; many indigenous artifacts, obtained who-knows-how; a fun collection of popular art, such as Dia de los Muertos skeletons and painted vases; and a room of Frida Kahlo paintings, which were unfortunately out on loan when we were there. There are also three of Olmeda`s "private" rooms open for touring, which were filled with probably 25 elephants' worth of carved ivory, and literally 100 photos or painted portraits of the ever-humble Dolores Olmeda herself. We followed that up with a walk through the now-open Bosque Chapultepec and around the zoo, where most of the animals seemed to be in hiding. And on our last evening in Mexico, we capped off our cultural experience the only way that seemed fitting: at the Coliseo, for a lucha libre. For the uninitiated, the lucha libre is a sporting event in which muscly men with waxed chests and backs, wearing colorful or skeleton-covered lycra pants and matching masks, pretend to fight with each other in a highly choreographed series of moves, while the crowd jeers and chants and blows noisemakers. The acting was pretty damn unconvincing, and after three fights that were all pretty much the same we cut out, but even so, it was definitely worth seeing. And now, with these many visions of Mexico floating in our heads, we prepare to fly out.