| The Streets of Zihuatanejo Part II |
by Michael Janicot
This study is concerned with the origin of the downtown (el centro) and La Madera streets of Zihuatanejo and is the second in a two part series.
Zihuatanejo honors two women who fought in the Independence movement, Antonia Nava de Catalan and Catalina Gonzalez. Nava was born in 1780 in Guerrero and died in 1822. Known as “La Generala”, she gained that title at the battle of Jaleaca in the Sierra of Tlacotepec, Guerrero. During the fighting, food became so scarce that the leaders in charge decided to kill several captured soldiers for food. Nicolas Catalan, a staff officer to General Bravo and Antonia’s husband was ordered to execute the prisoners but cooler heads prevailed, including that of Catalina Gonzalez, wife of a sergeant, who was also participating in the battle. (we have no other information on that woman) La Generala declared that, “We want to be sacrificed in support of the Independence movement.” However, “No one was uselessly sacrificed.” Her husband Nicolas died during the engagement and Morelos offered her his condolences and sympathy for her loss, to which she replied, “Don’t come to cry, don’t come to lament the death of Nicolas…On the contrary, I brought my four sons, three of them could be soldiers and the youngest could be a drummer boy.”
Ejido street refers to land granted by the federal government to the community and held in common by its inhabitants. Famed revolutionary general Emiliano Zapata formulated the concept of Ejido with his slogan “Tierra y Libertad”.
Recognizing the importance of music in the daily life of its residents, the city of Zihuatanejo named one of its streets in honor of one of Mexico’s best known composers and guitarists, Jose Agustin Ramirez, born in San Jeronimo de Juarez (south of Petatlan), he died in Acapulco in September 1957. His death marked “the end of an essential stage of the popular Mexican and Mixteca music.” It is stated that “the ocean, the air, the land and the light of the coast of Guerrero” are the basic elements that permeate each note of his music. An excellent example is the song “Mañanita Costeña” which Ramirez composed in homage to the beauty of the coastal landscape. Other well known compositions include Acapulqueña, Camino de Chilpancingo and Caleta, among others. His songs “remain as permanent as the flowers of the Guerrero coast.”
There are two small downtown alleys connecting Bravo and Alavarez streets, named for 2 poets and writers, Carlos Pellicer and Leon Felipe. Pellicer was born in Tabasco in 1899 and died in 1977. Recognized as the first modern Mexican poet, Pellicer was friendly with many of the writers associated with the influential organ Contemporaneos, which unfortunately lasted but for three years (1928-1931). His biographer stated that from the beginning of his writing career, Pellicer was “attentive to the chromatic light, the sculptural forms and the dynamic energy of the tropical landscape…Pellicer distinguished essential elements of his aesthetic from those of the Contemporaneos group and the Creationists from their verbalism, from their musical and subjective intensity and from their interest in the seductiveness of death as an informing poetic myth.” Some of his poems were translated into English, appearing in New Poetry of Mexico and in Nine Latin American Poets. After being imprisoned for political reasons during the 1930’s, he traveled extensively, both for personal pleasure and as a cultural attaché, for much of his adult life. He was also a professor of poetry and literature and a curator of several museums, including the Frida Kahlo museum in Mexico City.
Leon Felipe was born in 1884 in Zamora, state of Michoacán, from a well-to-do family, his father being a lawyer. His real name was Felipe Camino Galicia de la Rosa. He studied pharmacy and owned a drugstore, but quickly left that occupation for he found it dull and monotonous. Being possessed of an adventurous spirit, he became an actor in a company traveling to Spain where he spent three years in jail accused of theft. He then met his first love, a woman from Peru named Irene Lambarri with whom he lived in Barcelona. The romance was short lived however, and Felipe moved to Madrid with the thought of becoming a poet. There he lived a bohemian existence. He was so poor that he had to sleep in foul and decrepit pensions and he even slept on the floor of a bank where he was temporarily employed as a janitor and night watchman. His first volume of poetry appeared in 1919. After roaming through Spain for three years, he returned to Mexico where he became a teacher. He then met Berta Gamboa, also a teacher, and the couple honeymooned in the United States where he translated works of Waldo Frank and Walt Whitman. With the eruption of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Felipe joined the Republican cause against General Franco, but returned to Mexico disillusioned in 1938. He died in Mexico City in 1968. Spanish critics of his poetry dismissed his work as “of second order” and “failing to develop a personal poetry.” Felipe was finally recognized as “one of the best and most important Mexican poets” in 1953, and his oeuvre was the subject of a symposium in February 1983 in Madrid.
All of the above downtown streets are encompassed by Benito Juarez to the east, Jose Morelos to the north and Cinco de Mayo to the west. Every city in Mexico has at least one of its streets named after this famous trio of Mexican history: Juarez the fiery Oaxacan President of the Republic; Morelos the priest (who lived with a pure blooded indigenous woman, siring a number of children, including Juan Almonte, a future president of Mexico); and General Ignacio Zaragoza, the victor over the French at Puebla on May 5, 1862.
Behind the municipal market lies an area whose streets are named for fruit bearing trees—delightful sensory names: mandarinas, cerezos, ciruelos, palmas, palapas, aquacate, mangos, naranjos, cocos, guayabos, higo and the omnipresent limones.
Just south of that section is the Paseo de la Boquita (“the little mouth”) which runs eastward along the canal which was a lagoon long ago. Women used to wash clothes and kitchen utensils there; and a film, Besos de Arena, was shot there. It is also the site of Zihuatanejo’s first electric plant, installed by one Juan Wemberg.
On the other side of the canal is an area known as La Madera, accessible over a pedestrian foot bridge or over another bridge by the stone-walled Catholic church at plaza Kioto. There are several streets there, but we will mention only three: Adelita, Valentina and Eva Samano de Lopez Mateos. As every student of Mexican history knows, the first two were famous mythical women who followed their men fighting on the front lines during the Mexican Revolution. It is related that Villistas tore loose about Adelita, “green as the sea were her eyes,” and Zapatistas sang Valentina, “If I am to die tomorrow, let them kill me right away.” Another song declared: “If Adelita marries Caranza and Pancho Villa with Obregon, me, I’ll marry Adelita and the Revolution is ended.” Valentina is best known today as a brand of hot sauce. Many years ago, a pied noir labeled Adelita street “the street of gringos” because the tourists who vacation upon the hill overlooking La Madera beach travel that street on their way downtown.
Atop the hill is Eva Samano de Lopez Mateos, named for the wife of Mexican president Lopez Mateos. As the First Lady of Mexico, she devoted herself to raising funds for special projects, schools, hospitals, and the like. Zihuatanejo’s high school is named after her. Her husband Adolfo Lopez Mateos, was the son of a dentist and his mother was the granddaughter of a hero who had fought against Emperor Maximilian in 1865. Minister of Labor, he succeeded Adolfo Ruiz Cortines as president in 1959. When railroad workers went on strike, Mateos ruthlessly ordered the army to break the strike and jailed the leaders. He did the same when teachers refused to return to their classrooms, and he had famed peasant leader Ruben Jaramillo murdered by the army. He also jailed Communist muralist David Siqueros, purportedly for organizing anti-government protests, but later freed the artist. When Castro came to power, Mateos refused to join other Latin American leaders in breaking ties with Cuba’s new revolutionary government. Described as possessing “good looks and a Don Juan reputation,” Mateos traveled extensively throughout South America, Canada and shook hands with Ike Eisenhower at the White House. He also met Yugoslavia’s Tito, India’s Nehru and Indonesia’s Sukarno—all at the expense of Mexican taxpayers.
Many thanks are due to Gregg Thompson and Antonio Urquieta Lopez for their invaluable assistance in helping us translate Spanish information.
March 2003
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