Guy Mavor

I wrote this introduction to a guidebook highlighting Mexico's links with Britain

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For a certain type of British traveller, the world falls into two categories: places where you can get a decent cup of tea, and the rest. Mexico is undoubtedly, richly in the latter camp. It is a place for immersion, so if you are intent on looking for tea you are probably missing the point. Let it go, or convert to coffee in its many guises, or to cacao, or aguas when it's warm (try the deep purple agua de jamaica, a hibiscus-flower water). After a certain hour, you could also sample pulque or mezcal, two very different alcoholic drinks from the agave plant. Resistance is futile—your loyalty will eventually be found wanting, so you may as well dive in.

 

Mexico is a country where following your nose will take you to food experiences unlike any other, past colours, shapes and sounds which add up to a sensory feast. And there is a depth of history to accompany this banquet, a collision between two separate branches of humanity five hundred years ago whose reverberations are still being felt and worked through. The culture which has arisen—or risen again, many will tell you—from the chaos and destruction of this encounter has a plurality and diversity to it, but it is held together by an overarching sense of identity which comes from a shared, ancient history, from food, from family, music, faith, ritual, and the landscape itself, and probably football too, as with everywhere else (though nowhere else has its most high-profile footballer of the last 25 years, Cuauhtémoc Blanco, been named after the last Aztec emperor).

 

As for the people, it is strange now to read DH Lawrence's 1924 descriptions of impassive indigenous faces in The Plumed Serpent, whose apparent unreadability Lawrence ascribes to their hidden, malevolent intentions rather than his own cultural membrane. In his more lyrical and attuned Mornings in Mexico, a series of sketches on life in the country written alongside the novel, he puts his finger on the difficulty of reconciling distinct “ways of consciousness”; indeed, Mexicans are no more reserved or unknowable than the British, though you should forgive the many who face daily struggles which rather cuts down on the time available to make themselves known to curious visitors.

 

British travellers to this part of Mesoamerica have changed over the last century too too. Oliver Sacks' 2002 Oaxaca Journal is as immersed and enchanted as Aldous Huxley's Beyond the Mexique Bay, which emerged from a 1924 visit to DH Lawrence in Oaxaca, is detached and supercilious. In between the two, Sybille Bedford's beautifully written A Visit to Don Otavio, published in 1953 (though it is an account of a journey made in the late 1940s) is more open to the country and its people, though its musings on the totalitarian nature of pre-Columbian architecture speak of a post-war frame of mind. There are many other British narratives of Mexico, some fictionalised, some rendered faithfully, and they chart changing British mindsets as much as they do the places they describe.

 

Probably the first British visitor to Mexico was also after a taste of its riches. Thomas Blake, a Scotsman, arrived in New Spain in 1534 or 1535, having taken part in the conquest of New Granada (now Colombia) in 1532. There is not much record of what he got up to, but treasure-seeking can be assumed. A more famous visitor, in 1568, was Francis Drake. A hero to Britons but a villain across the Hispanic world, 'el Draque' is seen by Mexicans as no more than a destructive, opportunistic pirate. The Spanish imperial system was designed to enrich the colonial power only, and British involvement in the region was therefore 'fringe' and unofficial in the colonial period. It gradually moved from conflict into trade of sorts—raiders to smugglers—over two centuries, but even with the ascendancy of the British fleet in the late 18th and early 19th century, during its global war with Napoleon's navy, New Spain was largely bypassed by Britain. The post-Napoleonic demobilisation of navy and army saw many British adventurers travel to Latin America to fight for independence movements, though few came to Mexico.

 

It was a British foreign secretary who foresaw the benefits of the soft-power option: trade. George Canning established Britain's relationship with Mexico with commercial treaties in 1825, making Britain the first country to establish diplomatic relations with the new countries of the old Spanish empire. The Industrial Revolution, a thirst for raw materials from the mercantile class, scientific curiosity, and a need for exoticism and adventure among the more leisured classes, saw Britons arrive in greater number during the Victorian era.

 

The contribution of British workers to the development of Mexican industry during this period, and also its modern leisure habits, should not be ignored either. As is the case in so many other countries, football came to Mexico with the British, in this case Cornish miners who first arrived in 1824 to exploit abandoned seams of silver ore around Pachuca, in Hidalgo state, with new technology. The first recorded football match in the country was played there in 1889, and they founded Pachuca FC in 1901, the first Mexican football club in the country, and brought with them that most singular of food items, the Pasty, or paste. It remains a local speciality, still recognisable to a Cornishman, though nowadays with more Mexican fillings such as mole or beans. And in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, the tireless industrialist, Weetman Pearson, the 1st Viscount Cowdray, would becomebecame virtually synonymous with a number of large infrastructure projects across Mexico.

 

It is curious that a country so far from our own, but with a shared history and border with the United States, should not be experienced by us through the filter of its larger English-speaking neighbour, but it is certainly the case. This is true in so many fields, and the Victorians' simultaneous urge to explore and classify the world is only the start of it. We can thank the masterful 1840s sketches of Maya sites in the Yucatán by Frederick Catherwood, and subsequent studies by Alfred Maudsley in the 1880s, for recovering so much of what we know of Maya civilizations, and Frances Erskine Inglis, or Madame Calderón de la Barca, whose letters provided an early chronicle of independent Mexico, where she spent 1839-42 recording the life of an ambassador's wife, and the country in general. In the 20th century, Mexico inspired Graham Greene to write his masterpiece, The Power and the Glory, Malcolm Lowry his own, Under the Volcano, which Mexicans rate above all other works on their country by foreigners. British historians are also highly-esteemed in Mexico: Hugh Thomas and Alan Knight have each devoted half a lifetime to the study of Mexico, both earning the Order of the Aztec Eagle, the highest distinction which can be bestowed on a foreigner. And John Lennon, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, to name but a few, didn't always look east for their gurus. They all came to Oaxaca in the 1960s to find enlightenment of sorts with María Sabina, a curandera, whose healing work with psychoactive psilocybin mushrooms had come to the attention of counter-cultural hedonists.

 

In the 21st century, Damien Hirst was inspired by a turquoise Aztec mosaic mask in the British Museum to create his work For the Love of God. London architects such as David Chipperfield, Norman Foster and Richard Rogers are reinventing the Mexico City skyline, while restaurants such as Thomasina Miers' Wahaca are finally bringing some of the riches of Mexican cuisine to wider publics here. It feels like the beginning of something: chefs, food writers and mere mortals alike all return from Mexico with wide eyes and altered palates. Mexican actors and directors call London home, British artists do the same with Mexico City. This, surely, is a Special Relationship too.

 

And Mexico is as enriching to a neophyte as a lifelong obsessive. A final, improbable, example, of someone whose life has been enriched by, but who has also enriched the country: Diana Kennedy, once of Loughton in Essex, has spent the last six decades criss-crossing the country, amassing recipes and a vast know-how, which might have been lost but for her efforts. She is credited as the authority on Mexican cuisine, and a catalysing figure in the resurgence of Mexican cuisine, in the renewed pride Mexicans take in it, in all its rich diversity. UNESCO even declared it an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2010. This recognition reflects how seriously people in the country take their food, whether it’s served at a high-end restaurant or a street food stall. Listen, if you can, to the conversations that drift around an aeroplane as it approaches Mexico City. It is all about the anticipation of a taco, a quesadilla, a tlacoyo—an impatient longing infused with excitement at the first taste of home.

 

Ultimately, there is only so much of Mexico that you can get from books, or exhibitions, or London food stalls. In this book [this essay was written as an introduction to a guide book to the country], we have pulled together old favourites and new highlights, to give you an up-to-the-minute glimpse of the country's glories, from ancient history to a resurgent cultural scene. If you are reading this, you are thinking of going. And you must. You would be following in the footsteps of so many from these isles who have been captured by Mexico. Its aromas, its tastes, its colours, its people, indeed its long, tumultuous history, are unlike those of any other country. As Graham Greene wrote in The Lawless Roads: "Mexico is a state of mind".