Two Mexican climbers tackling the Seven Summits challenge have left the highest peak in North America in their wake, despite one of them being blind.
The feat has made Omar Álvarez and Rafa Jaime Jaramillo the first Latin American rope team with a blind member to tame Alaska’s 6,190-meter Denali, also known as Mount McKinley.
The Seven Summits challenge involves climbing the highest mountains on each of the world’s seven continents. The 19-day expedition on Denali in low temperatures ended two days ahead of schedule, on June 29. The pair had already conquered 6,961-meter Aconcagua in Argentina in January last year making Denali the second peak of seven.
Both climbers have a story to tell. Álvarez took up climbing to fulfill his father’s dying wish to have his ashes scattered on Mexico’s highest peak: Citlaltépetl, or Pico de Orizaba, a dormant volcano on the Veracruz-Puebla border. Meanwhile, Jaramillo has been blind since he was 18.
The next summit on the list is 5,891-meter Mount Kilimanjaro in East Africa, which the pair plan to tackle later this year, they confirmed to Milenio. Then the highest mountain in the world, 8,849-meter Mount Everest, awaits.
Star of Animal Planet's 'Extinct or Alive' series Forrest Galante in a up-close-and-personal photo shoot with Mexican crocodiles. All photos courtesy Forrest Galante
Wearing an innovatively designed wetsuit, United States biologist and conservationist Forrest Galante in 2016 swam face to face with a crocodile off the Banco Chinchorro. In this region between Mexico and Belize, Galante had a unique opportunity to view American crocodiles in their natural habitat, thanks to a wetsuit that made him look like one of them.
“The more scary something seems to be, the more I’m interested in it,” Galante said. “Crocodiles are at the very top of that list.”
The wetsuit was designed in New Zealand using a strategy known as biomimicry. Different versions make the wearer look like different dangerous species, from sharks to crocodiles — instead of their prey.
This allows the wearer to get up close to these species, as Galante did when he and colleague Mark Romanov made the 2016 short film about the crocodiles, Dancing with Dragons.
“The fear factor gets in the way to have the opportunity to be face-to-face with one in crystal clear water,” Galante said. “Everybody has the misconception that they are totally merciless killing machines. It was a phenomenal, amazing experience, scary and exciting … It was a hands-on moment I live for.”
Galante uses a strategy called biomimicry to get close enough to document wildlife that are elusive or dangerous.
Galante has had many more such moments since then, including an incredible run of turning up living examples of species long thought extinct, on his Animal Planet TV show Extinct or Alive.
His new book, Still Alive: A Wild Life of Rediscovery, details those experiences. The cover shows him holding Fern, a Fernandina Island tortoise found on the Galapagos Islands and considered extinct for over a century.
Regardless of the medium, whether it’s books or TV, said Galante, his goal is “to inspire people to care about wildlife and conservation.”
At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, he was in Indonesia, trying to help a crocodile trapped in a discarded tire. A letter from the president’s office shut down the rescue effort, and he left Indonesia.
Since then, he’s worked on Wet Markets Exposed, a TV show about these markets around the globe, including South America, Europe, Africa and Asia. Some have attributed wet markets as a cause of the novel coronavirus.
“Wet Markets Exposed is not necessarily just about wet markets,” Galante said. “It’s about how we as a species, human beings, decide to treat wildlife.”
And, he added, wet markets “are not evil” but “need to be regulated and managed, with no trafficking in meat” or intermingling of different species’ blood, urine or feces.
“They need sanitation, sterilization, management,” he said. “That’s the message behind Wet Markets Exposed.”
Galante said that the “only commonality, no matter where I was in the world, is my love of wildlife. It doesn’t matter if it’s elephants and lions in Zimbabwe [where he’s from] or newts and fish in California. It all includes a fascination with wildlife, my own story, and our place in the environment and ecology.”
He’s done “tons of work in Mexico all the time,” he said, including in the Sea of Cortés. “I absolutely love Mexico,” he said. “I’m obsessed with Baja [California].”
He is working with a group on conservation efforts related to the endangered vaquita porpoise in San Felipe. His swim with the crocodiles on the other side of Mexico got him wider attention.
“I made this crocodile film,” he recalled. “I had very limited experience in filmmaking. It was the first film I ever made [with] a very, very shoestring budget.”
‘The more scary something seems to be, the more I’m interested in it,” says Galante. ‘Crocodiles are at the very top of that list.’
He knew the risks.
“I grew up in southern Africa,” he said. “I always feared crocodiles, and rightfully so. A million people get killed by crocodiles. A million people fall victim to crocodile attacks. So I was very much taught to fear crocodiles.”
Yet, he pointed out, the wetsuit gave him “a little bit of a competitive edge.”
“I would not completely say I was reliant on the suit,” he said. “[But] using that approach, that technology, gave me a better sense of confidence.”
With his friend and partner Mark Romanov shooting from underwater, Galante focused on the crocodiles. “You don’t have control of the situation,” Galante said. “It was intimidating but also thrilling.”
Several years later, Galante showed the film to the History channel and used it to successfully pitch a new show, Face the Beast. It involved traveling to Myanmar to investigate a report that crocodiles had massacred 1,000 Japanese soldiers during World War II.
Meanwhile, Extinct or Alive has taken him across the globe in pursuit of surviving members of species long considered vanished — including when he found Fern on the Galapagos Islands.
Before that episode, Galante said, “I still hadn’t caught or tracked or found an extinct species,” although he said he had photographic proof of the existence of one such species, the Zanzibar leopard in Tanzania.
On the Galapagos, Galante, his team and local biologists looked for the elusive tortoise while navigating lava flows and “brutal, brutal heat,” culminating in an exciting discovery — “a pile of tortoise poop.”
“Shortly after,” he recalled, “we found a bedding site. Five minutes [after], even less, under a bush, I found Fern … She was like a rock with legs.”
He called her “the rarest animal in the world.”
“There was one of them, no one else except for her,” he said. “It was crazy. It was a wonderful, exciting experience.”
Galante’s new memoir, Still Alive: A Wild Life of Rediscovery, was published by Hachette Books last month.
The find had a large global impact, he noted, with so much important hope for conservation. “She’s the poster child of global conservation, in a way,” he said.
Galante has since increased the number of species he’s rediscovered to eight. Sometimes there have been difficult moments — including what he called “bruised egos” on the Galapagos between his team and local scientists. Yet, he said, “everyone wants the same thing — promote conservation and wildlife.”
One source of frustration is the search for the Mexican grizzly bear, which continues to be classified as extinct.
“We don’t know if the Mexican grizzly bear is gone forever,” Galante said. “There’s some evidence loosely supportive of their existence. We don’t have anything concrete.”
For each extinct species he investigates, he uses a checklist of factors to see whether the conditions suggest hope. “Some of them check all the boxes,” he said. “The tortoise did not. Nobody had seen one for 114 years. It had four of five boxes.”
“The Mexican grizzly bear just doesn’t check too many boxes,” he said.
The bear species was not very abundant to begin with, he said. “It’s not like there were millions of Mexican grizzly bears,” he said. “The likelihood of them still being in existence is pretty small. It does not mean it’s not worth looking at. But the likelihood is already small.”
Yet, his overall quest is not always about the destination, he explained. “It’s about the journey.”
Rich Tenorio is a frequent contributor to Mexico News Daily.
Mexicans working abroad sent US $4.51 billion home in May, a 31% increase compared to the same month of 2020, central bank data shows.
It was the 13th consecutive month that remittances – a key driver of the Mexican economy and the country’s second biggest source of foreign currency after auto exports – increased on an annual basis.
The number of transactions and the average amount of each transfer, most of which were made in the United States, both increased in May compared to a year earlier. The former figure increased 14.5% to 12.3 billion while the latter rose 14.4% to $366.
Bank of México data shows that $19.18 billion was sent to Mexico in remittances in the first five months of 2021, a 21.7% increase compared to the same period last year.
In the 12 months to the end of May, a total of $44.03 billion flowed into the country, a new record for a 12-month period. Remittances to Mexico totaled $40.6 billion in 2020, a calendar year record and an 11.4% increase compared to 2019
The United States government’s extensive support for the U.S. economy amid the coronavirus-induced downturn is cited by many analysts as the main reason for the record remittance levels.
President López Obrador on Thursday thanked migrants for sending so much money home to their families at a time when the economy is still recovering from last year’s 8.5% slump.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you very much paisanas and paisanos,” he said, referring to both Mexican women and men working abroad.
Speaking on the third anniversary of his comprehensive victory in the 2018 presidential election, López Obrador said that remittances and his government’s welfare programs staved off a consumption crisis amid the sharp pandemic-induced economic downturn.
“Thanks to remittances and the support of the welfare programs … that are applied from bottom to top, from the poorest to the peak of the population pyramid, [families] have been able to avoid a lack of food and other essential goods,” he said.
But neither remittances nor welfare programs have been able to prevent millions more Mexicans from falling into poverty. A researcher at the federal social development agency Coneval says the most recent calculations show 67 million people were living in poverty as of March, up 14.6 million since 2018, an increase that is directly related to the coronavirus pandemic.
The increase in extreme poverty has been even worse. An estimated 18.3 million people are in that category, nearly double the number in 2018.
Coneval will release final figures for last year in August.
A black-footed albatross chick on Guadalupe Island. GECI/J.A. SORIANO
An albatross has taken flight on Guadalupe Island, 241 kilometers off the west coast of Baja California, confirming the success of an audacious biological conservation project between the United States and Mexico.
The project led by Mexican nonprofit Island Ecology and Conservation Group (GECI) and U.S. nonprofit Pacific Rim Conservation aims to find a new habitat where the albatross can be safe from the rising sea levels that threaten their survival.
About 95% of the world’s black-footed albatrosses (Phoebastria nigripes) are found on the Hawaiian islands in the north Pacific Ocean. The 3-kilogram seabirds, which nest on low-lying sandy beaches, are particularly vulnerable to sea level rise and flooding: on one island a two-meter sea level rise over the next century would flood up to 91% of nests.
However, Guadalupe Island offers nesting sites on higher ground. It is also familiar territory for the high flyers who were previous residents to the island, which has become a fitting home again after conservationists have worked over the last 20 years to eradicate invasive species.
The first ascent of Snowflake — the bird that took flight on June 16 — was the culmination of a long journey: in January the young albatross was one of 21 eggs flown 6,000 kilometers on a commercial airline from Midway Atoll island. They stopped in Honolulu, Hawaii, before being transferred to San Diego, California, then to Tijuana, Baja California, before finally reaching Guadalupe Island.
In February, 18 eggs hatched on Guadalupe thanks to years of planning, dozens of permits from both countries and half a million dollars in funding from several nongovernmental organizations, not to mention the extra hurdles negotiated through the Covid-19 pandemic.
Julio Hernández Montoya, a conservation biologist at GECI, said the project was spurred on by a sense of urgency: in Hawaii the birds “were destined to drown,” he said.
“[The effort] was quite a feat … It fills us with astonishment and joy,” he added.
Eric VanderWerf, a bird biologist at Pacific Rim Conservation, admitted the plan was a bold one. “The idea [of transporting the birds across the Pacific] was a little bit wild … Doing all that in the midst of the pandemic … I still can’t believe we did it,” he said.
Despite being transferred from a tropical environment to a dry one, the birds are faring fine: “The albatross don’t care … They can do fine in either one,” VanderWerf added.
The team plans to bring 80 more black-footed albatross eggs to Guadalupe Island over the next few years.
Hidalgo has become the third state in Mexico to legalize abortion after a majority of lawmakers voted on Wednesday in favor of allowing women to terminate a pregnancy during the first 12 weeks.
Sixteen Morena party lawmakers voted in favor of legalization while 11 deputies from parties including the National Action Party (PAN) and Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) opposed the legislation but refused to participate in the vote.
One Morena lawmaker formally abstained, while two other members of the 30-seat unicameral Congress were absent.
Mexico City, which legalized abortion in 2007, and Oaxaca, which followed suit in 2019, are the only other states where women can legally end a pregnancy in cases not involving rape, a risk to their lives or fetal anomalies.
Passed amid rowdy opposition from PAN and PRI lawmakers, Hidalgo’s legislation stipulates that authorities must guarantee access to free abortion services for women in their first 12 weeks of pregnancy. The same access must be extended to women incarcerated in prisons in the state, whose capital, Pachuca, is just 90 kilometers northeast of Mexico City.
Women who end a pregnancy after 12 weeks can be fined and imprisoned for up to a year, according to the approved bill.
Pro-choice activists celebrated the results of yesterday’s vote, which came 1 1/2 years after the same Congress rejected a bill to legalize abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.
“One state more in favor of freedom and justice for women. The Marea Verde rises and we’re all very happy,” reproductive rights group GIRE said on Twitter.
The Marea Verde, or Green Tide, is a pro-choice movement that is active in many Latin American countries.
PAN and PRI lawmakers claimed that Morena, which controls the Hidalgo Congress, shut down debate and thus prevented them from presenting their arguments against legalization. They also asserted that the legislative process was plagued by other irregularities.
Morena is violating the law, we’re going to [take the matter to] court,” said PAN Deputy Asael Hernández Cerón.
Abortion is a highly contentious issue in Mexico, where the Catholic Church remains influential and many parts of the country retain traditional customs and beliefs. However, in recent years feminist groups have become more vocal and persistent in their fight for women across Mexico to have the right to access safe and legal abortions.
Abortion activists were hopeful that the Supreme Court (SCJN) would deliver a landmark ruling in 2020 that would pave the way for the decriminalization of abortion across Mexico. However, the court voted against upholding an injunction granted in Veracruz that ordered that state’s Congress to remove articles from the criminal code that stipulate that abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy is illegal.
If the SCJN had upheld the injunction, the decision would have set a precedent that could have led to further court orders instructing state legislatures to legalize first-trimester abortion.
Walmart’s grocery baggers will be allowed to return to their duties after they were sent home last year due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and asked not to come back in December due to a change in customer preferences.
Some 35,000 Mexicans, most aged between 60 and 74, packed groceries for tips through a government-backed volunteer program before the pandemic.
Walmart confirmed that correspondence with the National Institute for the Elderly (Inapam) and the Ministry of Economic Development of Mexico City had helped to resolve the matter. “Where the epidemiological traffic light is green, older adults who are already fully vaccinated are allowed to resume their work as volunteer packers,” it said in a statement.
The supermarket chain had previously announced that the positions were unavailable based on sanitary reasons. “We have observed that our clients want to avoid third parties having contact with the merchandise,” it said at the end of last year.
Dozens of affected seniors marched on the National Palace last week, demanding that the president aid their cause, and customers joined a boycott in support with the hashtag #YoNoComproEnWalmart (“I don’t buy from Walmart”).
Heeding their call, the president said officials would speak to the retailer.
Walmart has assured customers that any assistance from the grocery baggers is entirely optional. “For customers who prefer to continue packing their purchases, they will be able to let our cashiers know,” the retailer said.
The U.S. supermarket giant has 10,526 stores and clubs in 24 countries, operating under 48 different names. In Mexico it sells through Walmart, Walmart Express, Superama y Bodega Aurrerá.
Wednesday's rally by the Pueblos Unidos in Ario de Rosales.
Michoacán avocado producers who have taken up arms to defend themselves against organized crime sent a clear message to authorities on Wednesday after state Security Minister Israel Patrón warned they would be forcibly disarmed if they refused to lay down their weapons.
“Disarm the narcos first,” members of the Pueblos Unidos armed group declared at a rally on Wednesday in Ario de Rosales, one of four neighboring municipalities where farmers and farmhands have taken up arms over the past eight months to defend themselves and their land from attacks and extortion by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) and the Los Viagras crime gang.
Pueblos Unidos members reiterated that they would only disarm voluntarily if authorities can guarantee their safety in Ario de Rosales, Salvador Escalante, Nuevo Urecho and Taretan.
“With complete respect for our governments, they should do the work and we’ll put down our weapons and go and work on our land, which is what we know how to do,” one of the group’s members said.
“They want to disarm us, they say we’re violating the law. Yes, we have high powered rifles but believe me it’s not for pleasure. We did all this out of necessity. The [local security] authorities had been overwhelmed,” a Pueblos Unidos leader told the thousands of people in attendance.
Members of Pueblos Unidos said they would only disarm voluntarily if authorities can guarantee their safety.
The rally attendees signed a petition urging the federal government to deploy the National Guard to each and every one of the more than 50 roadblocks the armed group has set up across the four municipalities to prevent incursions by members of the CJNG and Los Viagras.
If the guardsmen are deployed to the area, located approximately 100 kilometers southwest of Morelia, the members of the armed group said they would be prepared to lay down their weapons.
“We took the decision … to take up arms because my brother was kidnapped on June 13 [2020] and we never heard anything of him again,” one woman told the newspaper Milenio.
Her brother, identified only as Juan Manuel, was an avocado farmer who refused to pay hundreds of thousands of pesos in extortion payments to a criminal group. His family paid a 300,000-peso (US $15,000) ransom but he was never returned.
“If we were criminals, do you think that women would be here? Do you think that children would be here? We’re not criminals, we’re good people, we’re fighting for our rights, for ourselves, for our children,” said Juan Manuel’s cousin.
Rally attendees told Milenio that behind every man who left his avocado farm to take up arms is a story of at least one encounter with criminals.
One woman, identified only as Diomira, lost part of two fingers three years ago when her family was targeted in a shooting perpetrated by a criminal group that wanted to force them off their land.
“Why don’t you have two fingers,” a Milenio reporter asked, to which she responded: “Because of gunshots, they were blown off when I was defending my land, my avocado crops.”
Ario de Rosales Mayor Irma Moreno agreed to the farmers’ request for her to attend Wednesday’s rally but the National Guard official responsible for operations in the zone where the four municipalities are located declined the invitation.
“We want a municipality that is at peace and calm,” Moreno said, adding that the municipal government would do what it could to facilitate a meeting with federal authorities.
Patrón, the Michoacán security minister, said Tuesday that state authorities are planning a joint operation with the army to combat organized crime in the four municipalities but he didn’t indicate when it would start or how many soldiers and police would be deployed.
Mexican and US officials celebrating signing of agreement on Monday.
A new crossing on the Mexico-U.S. border is set to open by late 2024 after an agreement was signed between officials from the two countries Monday.
The US $1 billion Otay Mesa East crossing, also known as Otay Mesa II, between Tijuana, Baja California, and Otay Mesa, California, will have five interchangeable lanes for vehicles and five more for commercial trucks. It aims to reduce waiting times to 20 minutes, representing a significant reduction, and will charge travelers a toll. Toll revenues will be divided between the two countries.
The agreement commits both countries to complete their construction projects, resolve policy issues and establish a framework to share toll revenues.
In Tijuana, a US $186 million investment is contemplated for construction, which is set to begin next year. In the U.S. construction has already begun and the project has received US $565 million in funding.
Deputy Governor of California, Eleni Kounalakis, listed some of the benefits of the new crossing. “This new port of entry will not only spur economic activity, but it will also improve the quality of life for the millions of Californians and Mexicans who frequently cross one of the busiest borders in the world,” she said.
The Mexican Foreign Ministry’s North America representative, Roberto Velasco, said the crossing was symbolically important for the two countries’ relationship. “We believe in building bridges not in building walls, and this is important for us in that sense,” he said.
“This is the future of the U.S.-Mexico relationship that we want. A future where we are more connected, and we allow for the many different possibilities that life on the border offers to both of our countries,” he added.
Plans for Otay Mesa East were first announced in 2014 during the Peña Nieto administration for completion in 2017. Last year, President López Obrador included the crossing among his infrastructure projects.
The area has long been an essential route for cross border traffic. The Tijuana-San Ysidro crossing, only a short distance from where Otay Mesa East will be constructed, is the busiest crossing in the Western Hemisphere, according to U.S General Services Administration.
The mother of one of the victims visits his grave.
The Ministry of National Defense (Sedena) has paid compensation to the families of three young men who were shot dead by the army in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, just over a year ago, but no soldiers have been arrested in connection with the alleged extrajudicial killings.
Soldiers killed 12 people in the early hours of July 3, 2020, after they came under attack by armed men traveling in pickup trucks in the northern border city.
Nine of those killed were dressed in tactical gear and are believed to have been members of a cartel hit squad. The other three victims had been kidnapped by the presumed cartel members and were wearing civilian clothing.
The newspaper El Universal published a video last August showing soldiers firing at one pickup truck on a dark street near the Nuevo Laredo airport. Army vehicles had previously come under fire by armed men in three pickup trucks, two of which fled.
Soldiers fired at least 243 shots at the third vehicle, according to El Universal, which published footage recorded by a camera mounted on a soldier’s helmet.
After the shooting stops, soldiers approach the pickup and see that at least one person in its bed isn’t dead. “He’s alive,” soldiers shout to which someone responds, “Fucking kill him.”
The person to which the unidentified soldier was referring is believed to be one of the three young men who had been kidnapped and were in the bed of the pickup with their hands and feet tied.
Two of the kidnapping victims died after receiving single gunshot wounds to their chests while the third man was killed by a single shot to the head. El Universal said that shot was fired from a distance of just one to three meters.
Given that the nine presumed gang members who were killed all had multiple gunshot wounds and the kidnapped men were only shot once each, it appears that the latter survived the army’s initial onslaught but were killed extrajudicially by soldiers.
In a report published today, El Universal said that 24 soldiers were summoned to make statements about the killings and noted that many of them denied knowing the identity of the soldier who yelled “Fucking kill him.”
One of the three young men killed by soldiers in July 2020.
“The soldiers said they weren’t in the area, they couldn’t see because of the scant light or they didn’t know whose voice it was,” the report said.
It is unclear whether the authorities have established the identity of the army member who gave the order for at least one of the three young men to be killed.
El Universal said the families of three young kidnapping victims were contacted last year by soldiers who offered them a compensation agreement. Citing a lawyer for the families, the newspaper said the agreement was based on article 72 of the General Victims Law, which states: “The obtention of subsidiary compensation doesn’t terminate the right of the victim to demand compensation of any other nature.”
After weeks of negotiation, a compensation amount was agreed upon, El Universal said without saying what the amount was.
(News website Animal Político revealed earlier this year that the National Guard offered 1 million pesos (about US $50,000) to the families of two people killed in Nuevo Laredo in April in exchange for withdrawing charges against the security force. The army also offered 1 million pesos’ compensation to the family of a Guatemalan man killed by soldiers in Chiapas in March. )
Two of the families agreed to accept the compensation soon after the amount had been determined, while the third family agreed months later.
Despite the army’s payment of compensation to the victims’ families, no soldiers have been held accountable for the deaths of the three kidnapped men.
“The soldiers involved will continue with their normal work until their responsibility is proven,” said El Universal, which obtained access to investigation files.
The families of all three victims filed homicide complaints against the army with the federal Attorney General’s Office. It is unclear whether they were required to withdraw those complaints as a condition of receiving the compensation payments.
The director of Centro Prodh, a human rights organization, expressed concern about security forces’ payment of compensation to victims and their families.
“Sedena, the navy and the National Guard are starting to move away from what the General Victims Law established. … It’s an institutional practice that is perhaps going to reduce the number of [criminal] complaints [against security forces] but it won’t be effective in generating deterrents to these human rights violations,” Santiago Aguirre said.
The father of one of the slain kidnapping victims remains incredulous as to why soldiers killed his son when the army was no longer under attack.
Identified only as Héctor by El Universal, the man said that he understands that the soldiers were running on adrenalin and were initially acting in self defense but questioned why they killed a person who was motionless and incapacitated, given that his hands and feet were tied.
While all the churches featured in these photos might look the same, they are in different parts of Querétaro. This is the mission at Concá. Pavel Vorobiev
If you are familiar with the missions that extend from Baja California all the way up to San Francisco, you might very well know the name of Friar Junípero Serra. But his mission story did not begin in the Californias. It began in a forgotten but beautiful corner of central Mexico.
The Sierra Gorda region covers the northern half of the state of Querétaro with bits in the neighboring states of Guanajuato and Hidalgo. Now, as then, the area has been the gateway from Mesoamerica to what is called Aridoamerica (northern Mexico into the United States).
Heading north from the state capital, the region and declared biosphere begins in a municipality called Peñamiller. It is filled with microclimates, ranging from the intensely hot and dry to the pine and holm oak forests that dominate to a tiny area that is rainforest.
The towns and villages that existed before the biosphere declaration still exist and continue with their traditional ways of life. Among these towns are five small Baroque churches that look not too different from rural parish churches in central Mexico. They have highly ornate facades, with spiraling columns, profuse vegetal decoration, saints, angels and other Catholic iconography.
But there are important differences in themes and coloring that give testament to a major shift in how evangelizing monks did their work as they pushed north in the mid-18th century.
Facade of the Mission church in Jalpan de Serra, Querétaro. Alejandro Linares Garcia
In the early colonial period, the Spanish government and Catholic Church simply took over existing Mesoamerican social structures and modified them to their liking. Mesoamerican communities were already “civilized” in the sense that they were accustomed to a rigidly hierarchical, sedentary society where religion and government were intertwined, each justifying the other.
Their cosmology was reinvented but not so much their day-to-day lives.
In Aridoamerica, nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples dominated. What few large cities that existed in this region had disappeared long before the Conquest. The colonial Spanish had no qualms about using brute force, but prior experiences (especially in Michoacán) had shown that such force could actually backfire.
The first Aridoamerican peoples the Spanish encountered included the Pames, Ximpeces, Chichimecas and Huastecos, who strongly resisted domination because it not only meant a religious conversion but a complete change in their way of life.
Without an empire system to co-opt, Junípero Serra and the Franciscans decided to introduce the idea of “sedentary civilization” by creating mission churches as centers of the new order. The first five were constructed in the Sierra Gorda, in what are now the communities of Concá, Jalpan, Tancoyol, Agua de Landa and Tilaco.
The strategies developed here included learning the local languages to preach in, building the mission church and other structures using indigenous labor, making sure that the population was fed and somewhat protected from the worst of Spanish abuses and teaching skills such as farming and trades.
They are similar to those practices promoted by Friar Bartolomé de las Casas in Chiapas and Vasco de Quiroga, the first Catholic bishop in Michoacán, to great success.
These five mission churches look much like their counterparts farther south because Baroque architecture was still in fashion and because mining provided money for more ornate structures. As the Spanish headed north, mission churches would be progressively simpler, including the California mission style that is highly popular in the western United States today.
But these ornate churches demonstrate the layering of Catholic beliefs over indigenous ones that later churches do not.
The facades, in particular, were highly decorated as a means of teaching concepts. In addition to images of saints, angels, demons, etc., these churches also have images important to the cosmology of the original indigenous population, in particular certain animals and plants.
The most important of the five churches was built in Jalpan starting in 1751, and Jalpan is still the most important community in the area today. Its facade contains a two-headed eagle eating a serpent, reminiscent of the eagle and serpent symbol representing both the Aztecs and Mexico today.
The Concá church contains images of rabbits, which were important to the Pames as a symbol of the lunar calendar and the change of seasons. The Tancoyol church’s portal contains the image of a jaguar among the various European mascarons. The Tilaco church is heavily decorated with local vegetation, both wild and cultivated.
Mission church in Landa de Matamoros, Querétaro. credit Nathaniel 7840
Such co-opting is nothing new. Evangelists have used similarities between native religions and Christianity since evangelicalism began.
These five churches, and many more that came after, became the basis of towns and cities in areas that did not have them previously. However, starting in 1770, mission churches came under the control of regular clergy as indigenous populations dwindled and were replaced by those of Spanish and mixed heritage.
No longer needed for evangelization, the churches’ decorations deteriorated. In the tumultuous century following Mexico’s independence, this process accelerated with sacking of churches and other destruction.
The first five mission churches returned to Mexico’s collective memory with work done by researcher Monique Gustín, who published El barroco en la Sierra Gorda (The Baroque in the Sierra Gorda) in 1969. In the 1970s, the National Institute of History and Anthropology (INAH) began to urge the conservation of these Querétaro churches.
In the 1980s and 1990s, INAH collaborated with the state government to restore them, especially the main portals and bell towers. And in the very late 20th century, Dr. Miguel León Portialla of the National Autonomous University began a campaign to have the five declared a World Heritage Site, stressing the missions’ role in Serra’s work.
He succeeded, and the five are listed under the name Franciscan Missions in the Sierra Gorda of Querétaro.
As for Junípero Serra, he worked in Sierra Gorda for eight years before returning to Mexico City and then moving on to the Californias. He died in what is now Carmel Valley, California.
He is honored in many places where he worked and was beatified by the church despite objections by Native American groups.
Leigh Thelmadatter arrived in Mexico 18 years ago and fell in love with the land and the culture in particular its handcrafts and art. She is the author of Mexican Cartonería: Paper, Paste and Fiesta (Schiffer 2019). Her culture column appears regularly on Mexico News Daily.
