Welcome to an occasional dispatch from the bookshelf of Julian’s, where we recommend our favorite books that inform our travel research into Mexico City and beyond. If you've enjoyed the book below, or have others you'd like to recommend, let us know in the comments!
Life in Mexico (1839) by Frances Erskine Inglis
Mexico is always in the process of being discovered.
The land was hidden in mountains and jungle. The people were hidden behind hundreds of languages. And for three centuries after the conquest, Spain forbid foreigners from entering the Mexican territory. What the rest of the world did learn, and slowly, arrived on European shores via the accounts of soldiers, friars, and priests.
A Venice of the New World, said Bernal Díaz, writing in his dotage of things he’d barely witnessed.
So wondrous as to be scarcely believed, said Cortés, along the way to occulting the land under an extractive Spanish rule.
Mexico was so prohibido that it took a hundred years for the first non-Spanish chronicler to publish a book, and to get here he had to sneak his way aboard a caravel inside a wine barrel. Hard to imagine anything being so unfamiliar these days, when you can learn about the latest restaurant openings via TikTok. Who would’ve thought that Mexico’s modern-day conquistadores would be the Chinese and white girls in sundresses!
But somehow the territory retains its mystique. Not in the nightlife, I mean, listicled on every bright dot com, but in the feeling when walking the city’s root-cracked sidewalks beneath a looming jungle of jacaranda and ahuehuete, which also leafs and thrusts its way between churriguerresque mansions, and fluorescent Oxxo stores, and skyscrapers. Rascacielos, they’re called. Scrape heavens.
There’s a lot of texture here. I mean, downtown there’s not a hundred yards between an Aztec temple, a baroque cathedral, and a Spanish national palace. Quite a difference from the consistently manicured lawns of my hometown on the East Coast. It would be as if, on the Great Lawn of Washington D.C., only a few yards from the colonial facade of the Capitol Building, you could tour a collection of Powhatan yihakans while buying corn husks from a street vendor who only spoke Algonquian.
But it’s that kind of unexpected texture that compelled Frances Erskine Inglis when she wrote Life in Mexico, her travelogue and memoir published in 1842, considered by historians as one of the most influential Latin American travel narratives of the 19th century.
I love a good epistolic. Inglis, a Scot, was married to a Spanish diplomat (whom she met in, of all places, Staten Island). She accompanied him to Mexico on his posting, where she wrote letters to her sisters and mother on Long Island over the course of two years. What she captured, during a chaotic time between Mexico’s Independence and Second Empire, gorgeously accounts the country’s land and people, dress and manner. It reads a bit like a precursor to that show The Gilded Age, but the green screen here is actual Mexican flora.
Here’s Inglis on seeing Mexico City for the first time in 1839:
The innumerable spires of the distant city were faintly seen. The volcanoes were enveloped in clouds, all but their snowy summits, which seemed like marble domes towering into the sky. But as we strained our eyes to look into the valley, it all appeared to me rather like a vision of the Past than the actual breathing Present. The curtain of Time seemed to roll back, and to discover to us the great panorama that burst upon the eye of Cortes when he first looked down upon the table-land; the king-loving, God-fearing conqueror, his loyalty and religion so blended after the fashion of ancient Spain, that it were hard to say which sentiment exercised over him the greater sway. The city of Tenochtitlan, standing in the midst of the five great lakes, upon verdant and flower-covered islands, a western Venice, with thousands of boats gliding swiftly along its streets, long lines of low houses, diversified by the multitudes of pyramidal temples, the Teocalli, or houses of God—canoes covering the mirrored lakes—the lofty trees, the flowers, and the profusion of water now wanting to the landscape—the whole fertile valley enclosed by its eternal hills and snow-crowned volcanoes—what scenes of wonder and of beauty to burst upon the eyes of these wayfaring men!
You can that Fanny was a bit of a romantic.
But aside from putting herself in the conquistadores boots, she also captures quotidian qualities of 19th century Mexico City that are today, almost two hundred years later, still constant — not least of which, the street noise:
There are an extraordinary number of street-cries in Mexico, which begin at dawn and continue till night, performed by hundreds of discordant voices, impossible to understand at first; but Señor ——- has been giving me an explanation of them, until I begin to have some distinct idea of their meaning. At dawn you are awakened by the shrill and desponding cry of the Carbonero, the coalmen, "Carbón, Señor?" which, as he pronounces it, sounds like "Carbosiu?" Then the grease-man takes up the song, "Mantequilla! lard! lard! at one real and a half." "Salt beef! good salt beef!" ("Cecina buena!") interrupts the butcher in a hoarse voice. "Hay cebo-o-o-o-o-o?" This is the prolonged and melancholy note of the woman who buys kitchen- stuff, and stops before the door. Then passes by the cambista, a sort of Indian she-trader or exchanger, who sings out, "Tejocotes por venas de chile?" a small fruit which she proposes exchanging for hot peppers. No harm in that.
She could also get a little spicy. For years Mexican scholars considered Life in Mexico judgmental and mean-spirited. Here she is on the nature of her shabby rental home, contrasted against the valley scenery:
The great defect in all these houses is their want of finish; the great doors that will not shut properly, and the great windows down to the ground, which in the rainy season will certainly admit water, making these residences appear something like a cross-breed between a palace and a barn; the splendour of the one, the discomfort of the other. I will not inflict upon you the details of all our petty annoyances caused by procrastinating tradesmen. Suffice it to say, that the Mexican manana (to-morrow), if properly translated, means never … Then the sun sets behind the snow-crowned mountains with a bright fiery red, covering their majestic sides with a rosy glow, while great black clouds come sailing along like the wings of night; and then is the hour for remembering that this is Mexico, and in spite of all the evils that have fallen over it, the memory of the romantic past hovers there still.
Maybe you can detect a slight patronizing tone!
Still, if you can set aside her ethnocentrism and moneyed petulance (the latter of which, at least, is honestly fun to read), you’ll enjoy the way she describes what is, today, the enduring virtue of Mexico City:
And if in the plains below there are many uncultivated fields, and many buildings falling to ruin, yet with its glorious enclosure of mountains, above which tower the two mighty volcanoes, Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl, the Gog and Magog of the valley, off whose giant sides great volumes of misty clouds were rolling, and with its turquoise sky for ever smiling on the scene, the whole landscape, as viewed from this height, is one of nearly unparalleled beauty.
Life in Mexico is available via The Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, Amazon, and various booksellers.
📕 What is Julian’s?
Julian’s is a handbook for curious travelers written by Steve Bryant, who lives and works in Mexico City. Julian’s is named for his grandfather, a very handsome southerner who never traveled anywhere, but who now has a travel newsletter named after him, so who knows where his namesake will end up. The wordmark for Julian’s is designed in Frustro, a typeface inspired by the Pemrose Triangle, and which represents impossible objects—appropriate for Mexico City, which Salvador Dali once described as more surreal than his art. Come visit us soon, we’d love to meet you.