"Travel is intensified living-maximum thrills per minute and one of the last great sources of legal adventure. Travel is freedom. It's recess and we need it."

Both international and local travel are very important to me. I like to travel "close to the ground." I try to meet and communicate with people in their native language and not just rely on a taxi or purchased smiles. I like to seek the authentic side of a culture and not the pristine, manicured, sanitized side made palatable for western tourists. It is important to give culture the benefit of an open mind and to see things as different but not better or worse. I think that any culture has much to share.

Of course, travel, like the world, is a series of hills and valleys. I try to positive and optimistic. Even an adverse situation can turn into a good story or learning experience in the end. If something is not to my liking, I change my liking. Travel can make one a better citizen of the world. Our earth is home to six and half billion equally important people. I think that encountering other cultures and a smattering of these other six and half billion people is humbling as well as empowering.

I think the most important part of travel is that it has the ability to destroy ethnocentricity and damaging stereotypes. It helps one to understand and appreciate different cultures. By engaging in thoughtful travel and then subsequently engaging in provocative and critical discussions, one can work to breakdown harmful cultural barriers. One can use multi-cultural experiences and perspectives as tools to change narrow-minded conversations into a learning experience. Travel engages one with the world and I think it is more important then ever to understand different perspectives and points of views.

Travel has certainly changed me and drastically altered my world view. I would love to live and work in every place that I travel, become fluent in the language and make long lasting friendships. I have yet to find the perfect way to do this...have a meaningful experience without taking away a job from a local or otherwise adversely affecting the local culture. Travel can often times be as harmful as it is helpful. However, the positives, at this point, outweigh the negatives for me. Travel broadens perspectives and teaches new ways to measure quality of life. Rather than fear the diversity on this planet, travelers and knowledge seekers can celebrate it. It is necessary to look beyond one's hometown norms. The experiences and ideas that one can bring home and share are knit into their own character and those people that they interact with. To look outside is to look inside and find a whole new plane of existence where tolerance and understanding work to disciminate hurtful stereotypes and dehumanizations that lead to violence and ubstruct peace. (some of these ideas are paraphrased from Rick Steves' Travel Guide to Italy)


In February, I went on a short trip to Mexico, as my previous posts may have revealed. I went to my mom and a close friend. Both my mom and her friend have studied Spanish and pre-Hispanic Mexican history. Their interest in history really dictated the course of the trip and we visited a ton of museums and historical sites. The short time that we were there really made us need to capitalize on our time and every day was packed. I would have liked to pause for a while longer in one place to get a deeper understanding, but as it was, I was able to blast many of my stereotypes out the ceiling as well as learn a lot history that was never touched in school.

Travel in Mexico was a fascinating encounter with a unique mix of ancient civilization, gorgeous colonial architecture and deep-rooted pre-hispanic and post-hispanic traditions. Mexico has an ever present past! Which is in sharp contrast with the United States. Where Mexico is a mix of traditional pre-Hispanic and Spanish cultures, the USA has shoved almost all of it's native culture and tradition onto reservations.

I was able to visit the center fo Teotehuacan Civilization which flourished from 0 to 150 AD. People originally migrated to this area in 60000 to 8000 BC and agriculture began in 1200 BC. The site at Teotehuacan is especially intriguing because so little is known about the culture that built the center with two giant pyramids, a grid neighborhood system and water systems. The pyramid of the Sol is the third largest pyramid in the world and I was fortunate enough to be able to climb up the narrow steep steps and enjoy the amazing view of valley. Anthropologists believe that the the civilization collapsed in the 8thalmost as quickly as it built up. The Aztecs discovered the site and adopted it as a sacred place of ceremonies where their revered ancestors had once lived. The Aztec gods closely mirror those of the Teotehuacan Civilization. Quetzacoatle and Tlaloc are two gods whose image I saw im many museums and carved into the stones of many ruins. Quetzacoatle is a feathered serpent and Tlaloc is the god of rain.

Another ruin that I visited was called Xochicalco. It flourished briefly and is known as the cult of the feathered serpent. The ruins were astounding. Unlike Teotehuacan, the place was devoid of tourists and remarkable devoid of locals pandering trinkets and souvenirs. The persistent pressure of sellers at Teotehuacan made me feel uncomfortable and completely destroyed any spiritual or otherwise sentimental feelings that I might have felt in the awesome presence of such ancient and monumental structures. At Xochicalco, the structures were less grandeur but held much more mystery and intrigue. The grounds were so quiet it was easy to imagine the way things might have been like when the civilization was at its peak. Their were several in tact ball courts and an astronomer's cave that they used to track the constellations and the sun. They also had a great museum with an English audio guide, which was a huge bonus for me.

In 1325, the Aztecs, also known as the Mexicas, settled in a place called Tenochtitlan and current day Mexico City. The Aztec civilization had been wandering tribes awaiting the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy: They would find the destined site for a great city whose location would be signaled by an eagle eating a snake while perched atop a cactus. The wandering Aztecs saw this vision on what was then a small swampy island in Lake Texcoco. This vision is now on the Mexican flag. The Aztecs, were able to overcome the swampy nature of the land they were to build their city on by incorporating a system of chinampas for agriculture.

Chinampas were stationary artificial islands that usually measured roughly 30 by 2½ meters, although they were sometimes longer. They were created by staking out the shallow lake bed and then fencing in the rectangle with wattle, a woven lattice of wooden strips daubed with a sticky material usually made of some combination of wet soil, clay and sand, animal dung and straw. The fenced-off area was then layered with mud, lake sediment, and decaying vegetation, eventually bringing it above the level of the lake. Often trees such as willows were planted at the corners to secure the chinampa. The primary chinampas crops were maize, beans, squash, amaranth, tomatoes and chilies.It is estimated that food provided by chinampas made up one-half to two-thirds of the food consumed by the city of Tenochitlan. Chinampas were separated by channels wide enough for a canoe to pass. This system dried and expanded the land. There is a place in Mexico City, called Xochimilco, where one can ride canoes through still existing chinampas but the place is largely overrun with tourists and has a disturbing carnival feel to it.

As the Aztec continued to thrive and develope, it dominated other tribes all around Mexico. They perpetually enlarged Tenochtitlan which grew to become the largest and most powerful city in Mesoamerica with around 215,000 inhabitants. Templo Mayor was excavated in Mexico City and I was able to visit it. The temple was rebuilt every sixty years because it continued to sink into the ground. The Aztecs didn't tear down the previous temple, they simply added another layer to the outside like frosting. In its current state, one can walk through the temple and see the different layers. The Temple is in the very center of Mexico City and surrounded by the giant square, state buildings and the biggest catholic church in the world. The surrounding buildings, especially the church are sinking into the silty soft ground and I had a silly sense of vertigo as I walked about because all the buildings leaned at kaddywompus angles to each other.

While the Aztec Empire expanded in meso-america, Spain was rapidly expanding and looking for new trade routs and conquests. In 1942, Spanish Christian armies finally completed a 700 year long reconquest to recovery territory from the islamic rule. Spain was rapidly expanding and looking for new trade routs and conquests. Christopher Columbus arrived in America followed by the conquistadors. The nearly 3000 year old ancient Mexican civilization was shattered in two short years by them.

Hernan Cortes led an expidition to initiate trade relations with the natives in 1519. Cortes was invariably driven by personal gain and became obsessed with the search for gold. After conquering several coastal areas, Cortes arrived at Tenochitlan and was, according to some accounts, accepted by Moctezuma as the reincarnation of their diety Quetzacoatle. While Cortes was initially well-received, the Aztecs eventually drove him out.

Cortes returned a year later in 1521 with the help of 100,000 natives from other areas and after three months captured Tenochitlan. The conquest continued and by 1605 the indigenous population declined from 25 million to a little over 1 million due to small pox among other new diseases.

The indigenous people were enslaved, exploited and indoctrinated with catholicism. During the colonial period, Spain exploited Mexico to finance the wars taking place in Europe. As the decades passed, many Spaniards put down roots in Mexico and those born and bred in the colony began to develop their own identity and a growing alienation from the mother country. It was criollos (people born of Spanish parents in the new colony) who engineered the separation of New Spain from Spain. The cri0llo discontent with Spanish rule really began to stir following the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Spanish Empire in 1767. When the Spanish crown confiscated church assets in 1804, the church had to call in many debts. This hit the criollos hard. The catalyst for rebellion was in 1808 when Napoleon occupied Spain and direct control evaporated.

In 1810, Hidalgo launched a war for independence and mobs massacred the peninsulares. After 11 years of fighting Mexico gained independence and equal rights for peninsulares, criollos with a constitutional monarchy dominated by the catholic religion.

A person's place in colonial Mexican society was determined by skin color, parentage, and birthplace. At the top were peninsulares, Spanish born colonists. Next were criollos, then mestizos, those of mixed decendency and finaly the indigenous and african slaves.Social stratification follows similar patterns in Mexico today with, broadly speaking, the 'pure-blooded' descendents of Spaniards at the top, with mestizos in the middle and the indigenous people at the bottom. I tried to engage a Mexican man who spoke French in a meaningful conversation about his heritage the the current social issues in Mexico. Unfortunately, our language barrier created issues and I learned little from him. He did give me good advice about the local neighborhood and made me an awesome sandwich, so all was not lost.

I didn't really learn a lot about the period following the war for independence. But the period from 1821 to 1860 was marked by the loss of territory to the USA, corruption, the Mexican American war and the Alamo as well as the War or Reform and the election of the first indigenous president, Benito Juarez. The 1900s were marked by revolutions led by Poncho Villa and other liberal reformers and radicals such as Zapata. In the 1920s, Mexico underwent a land ownership distribution which put land into local communal landholdings called ejidos. The ejidos were successful until the 1960s, when much of the land was sold to corporations. More recently, however, ejidos and other forms of communal agriculture are being resurrected. I learned about ejidos in a community agiculture class. I will try to dig up some more info on them when I get home.

Catholicism plays a huge role in current day Mexico. Catholic churches were everywhere as was the image of the Lady of Guadalupe. She is the patron saint of Mexico. She is also a manifestation of the virgin Marry. She is the archetypal mother and the pre-eminent focus of Mexican spirituality. I think that current spirituality is a complex mix of catholicism and that of pre-Hispanic civilizations. Elements of ancient religions survive alongside and are integrated into Catholicism. This is evident in the fact that many Mexicans still give great importance to omens, portents, coincidences and other curious happenings. It is also evident in the way that the ancients' obsession with death is accentuated in the catholic church. The day of the dead is a prime example of an ancient tradition revamped into a catholic celebration. I was in Mexico during the two weeks preceding Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. In the United States, many towns have parades and parties in the weeks leading up to Mardi Gras and most places have some kind of party for Mardi Gras, an opportunity to binge and get it all out of our system before the restrictions and abstinence of Lent set in. In Mexico, the two weeks before Lent is characterized by indigenous song and dance and crazy traditions that began as indigenous but evolved into a rite all its own.

In Tepotzlan, the tradition of the Chinelos is strongly upheld. All the history that I have found on Chinelos is poorly translated. But I think that essentially, it began with a group of young people who felt excluded from carnival festivities because of the restrictions of Lent. They disguesed themeselves old clothes and covered their faces with a handkerchiefs and began to shout and jump up and down the streets of the town. They were apparently making fun of the Spaniards. Their actions were a great success and they organized such a display the next year. Year after year, the dancing and jumping became more and more popular and the celebration grew into a two week ordeal where troupes of dancing Chinelos gather with brass bands to celebrate and revel. The costume became more and more elaborate. Currently, they look like lace-lined velvet judge robes. They wear a tunic with elaborately embroidered scenes of indigenous people fighting the conquistadors. They wear a wire mask with a pointed and up-curled beard, white gloves and tall hat with beaded Aztec gods. The Chinelos dance from early morning to late night. Different troups rotate in and out and the entire dance is punctuated by brilliant fireworks, carnival rides and a spicey beer and chili drink called a michalada. I tried chapulines while I was in Tepotztlan. Chapulines are crispy grasshoppers. I had them in a blue tortilla with cheese. After I overcame my initial revulsion, they were kind of tasty and the crunchy texture was not unpleasant. I did manage to get a leg or a thorax stuck in the soft tissue of my pallet and spent most of the night hacking. I also had some psychologically induced stomach flutters and aches where I felt like grasshoppers were jumping up and down in there.

While much of this crazy revelry was going on, I took time to visit the 2nd and 3rd highest mountains in Mexico. We tried to climb Mount Itza but we were thwarted by inadequate shoes and very foggy cloudy weather. The very high altitude proved to be a problem as well. Mount Popo was not open to hikers because it has been active recently and constantly spews smoke. I also did a very steep climb up a cliff to get to a little temple nestled in its crags. The temple afforded a great view of the city below and was quite peaceful despite the hordes of high school students that flooded it.

There are a lot of other little details about the trip that made it unforgetable, like how much I loved buying tamales and freshly squeezed carrot juice from street vendors or how much Jo loved to get a coffee and a muffin in the mornings. Or how I inadvertantly stole and then subsequently bought a bag of tortilla chips in a local market and Mom bought yucca cactus salsa for my stolen tortilla chips. Our bus and metro rides were also notable as well as one nearly fatal taxi ride. The smog and pollution was also very notable and Jo suffered from daily nosebleeds and mom and I had horrible eye issues. I enjoyed the cute little Europeanish town of Taxco with the Christ statue looming over it nestled into a hill. The cathedral there was truely stunning with pink stones. I think the most tantalizing food for thought that I cam away with was the contrast between current Mexican society and the incorporation or dis-incorporation of indigenous cultures versus that of the United States and Canada. I hope to do more research into this topic and report on it later.