Según cuentan las personas que viven en Teotitlán del Valle, Crecencio llegó a vivir a Teotitlán como un mozo* que ayudaba a criar ganado y animales domesticados en esta comunidad. Pasaron los años y el arduo trabajo de esa época obligaba a las personas a recolectar cáscaras de los árboles para curtir la piel. En […]
Continue ReadingAnglo and Mexican sayings are often subtly different. For starters, consider your pet cat. In Canada or the U.S., cats are considered to have nine lives; in Mexico, however, cats only have seven (siete) lives. Perhaps they used up two lives as kittens just getting to be old enough to be a cat? Or perhaps the difference […]
Continue ReadingClicking on the book title will take you to more about the book at amazon.com People’s Guide to Mexico: Wherever you go… There You Are Carl Franz, Lorena Havens, Steve Rogers A different type of guidebook — anecdotal, instructive, personal and very informative/educational. It is written from a narrative or story telling point of view. […]
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Cogan’s Reviews Mexico, a Traveler’s Literary Companion by C. M. Mayo I’ve reviewed over a hundred books for MexConnect. These have covered the gamut of topics, all related to this country – fiction, travel, history, living in Mexico, moving to Mexico, biographies, city profiles and a few volumes difficult to categorize. I thought I had […]
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It seems that one can never take anything for granted in the academic world, at least because there is always someone somewhere waiting to contradict everything that has been said previously. This is especially true of revisionist history. Of course new evidence and different ways of interpreting the “facts” of history may justify revising standard […]
Continue ReadingLike Saint Augustine in the 5th century we all know what time is until somebody asks us to define it exactly. Likewise, the idea of literature seems clear enough until we begin to ask people what they regard as literature. Is it Shakespeare, the Bible, the morning newspaper, or what? In a complex society such […]
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To Part One Mesoamerican epic poetry and saga: What is epic? * * * * * Epic poems and sagas are a world-wide phenomenon from very early times to the present. Formerly, some cultures were thought not to possess any form of epic poetry and saga but this was often due simply to the lack of […]
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In Historia de la Literature Nahuatl (Mexico, D.F. 1971), the late Mexican scholar A. Garibay included a chapter entitled “Poesía Épica” (Epic Poetry) in which he gave a list of texts in Nahuatl (Classical Aztec) that he believed represented authentic Mesoamerican epic poetry and saga. Garibay was attacked on the grounds that he attempted to make the […]
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Our knowledge of ancient Aztec civilization comes from many different sources: archaeology, codices or painted books, comparative ethnological studies and the like. But it is not until the advent of writing that a clear picture of past history begins to emerge. That is not to say that historical accounts did not exist before the Conquest. […]
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The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards under Cortes in the sixteenth century brought to an abrupt end the developing civilization of the ancient Aztecs. With the destruction of their capital of Tenochtitlan (now modern Mexico City) much of Aztec religion and culture was destroyed in a catastrophic cultural holocaust. However, within a few decades […]
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