Jeanine Kitchel writes about Mexico, the Maya and the Yucatán. Her travel memoir, Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, details how she bought land and built a house in a small fishing village on the Mexican Caribbean coast. Her debut novel, a narco lit thriller, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, is available on Amazon as is book 2 in the trilogy, Tulum Takedown.
Newspapers are going out of business. As the pandemic unfolds, it’s believed that 80 percent of US newspapers will shut their news rooms. Prior to the pandemic, papers were already in free fall. The pandemic promises to place the final nails in the coffin.
As the US began to require stay at home regulations in March, newspaper advertising began to fail. Due to the upstart of craigslist and similar websites offering free advertising in the past several years, papers were already on the ropes and losing ad revenue, especially in classified listings. But news “deserts” were already a thing—geographic locations with no newspaper at all— long before the coronavirus appeared. According to the University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Media, in the past 15 years, one out of five US newspapers has either disappeared or become a ghost of themselves.
I worked for a small town weekly in northern California years ago, The Chico News & Review. Unfortunately it stopped printing six weeks ago after 45 years. That 80 percent death rate just got personal. Thankfully, it still has an online presence. With crowd sourcing and a new subscription request from the publisher, I’m hoping it can hang in there.
In a recent podcast of On the Media, commentator Brooke Gladstone delved into the dearth of papers. She spoke with Rachel Dissell, former reporter for Cleveland’s Plain Dealer, which has been publishing since 1842. In 2000, it employed 350 reporters; today, just 14. Dissell, who’d been with the paper since 2002, gave up her position two months ago so another reporter could have a job. Recently, after 80 years of union membership, Plain Dealer journalists lost their backing with the Newspaper Guild and the unit will dissolve May 17.
But smaller communities suffer the lack of reliable journalism most, according to UNC’s 2018 study. Almost 200 of the 3,143 counties in the US don’t have a newspaper at all, and the southern US suffers more than other regions. Stats show that people who live in emerging news deserts are generally, poorer, older, and less educated than other Americans. They’re overlooked because low-income areas tend to not purchase subscriptions to news services.
The lack of newspapers oftentimes means people in a vicinity that lacks media coverage have no idea what’s happening in their community—from city council coverage to local school board information or even elections. Local papers produce more local content for their communities than TV, radio and online outlets combined.
Will newspapers be one of the many industries that bite the dust due to the virus, along with retail shops, small restaurants, and mom and pop services? Only time will tell, but the forecast looks stormy.
We’re living in the 21st century. Western civilization is far removed from the jungles, the plains and the tundra – so why is the equinox important to us today? Often associated with the first day of spring, the vernal equinox – when day and night are equal in length all over the world – occurs on March 20th this year.
At equinox, the sun crosses directly over the equator and the earth tilts neither away nor towards the sun. Because the equinox is based on the earth’s movement around the sun, there’s a three-day window in which the spring equinox can occur – as early as March 19, and as late as March 21.
WHY THE INTEREST?
But why do we take interest in the equinox? Could be because we humans have always been stargazers. Early on in our coming of age, the ancients made up the constellations and stories about the sky. Today, we’re still gazing at the same sky but with a little more oomph. We’re sending out advanced satellites, telescopes, and Rovers to bring back information from the stars and planets, and we’re writing scientific documents, basically new stories, extolling what lies outside our atmosphere.
So even though we’re in a sophisticated, high tech world, we still celebrate the importance of the relationship between our sun and our planet, the earth. In agrarian times, spring was ushered in by the equinox, which meant it was time to plant crops. That may not be so important to us today, but have you ever wondered why Easter is a floating date rather than the same day each year?
EASTER
Easter’s date, even in these modern times, is the first Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox. This year that full moon is April 6, and Easter falls on April 9. So even though we may consider ourselves far removed from any consequences of the equinox, we are still rooted in a pagan cycle of historic events due to the date of that celestial occurrence. Because the spring equinox has ties to Christianity’s most important event, Easter, many believe it centers on the theme of resurrection, and not only of the earth’s waking call from a dark winter.
One of the most famous equinox ceremonies in North America takes place at the Maya pyramid site of Chichen Itza in Mexico. If you’ve had a chance to be there during spring or fall equinox, you’ve witnessed an astounding performance. About 4 p.m. the sun casts a remarkable shadow onto the looming Temple of Kukulkan due to its placement in the sky, the building’s position, and the Maya’s precise mathematical calculations prefigured more than a millennia ago for this event. The shadow slithers down to the bottom of the staircase and ends at the serpent’s mouth. This spectacular feat was made possible by the Maya’s ability to calculate the sun’s effects on earth at equinox.
THE ANCIENT MAYA AND THE EQUINOX
In the Maya world there are many buildings built to specifications that coincide with the equinox. Some scholars believe the importance placed on it relays to the resurrection of the Maize God, Hunahpu, and the turning from the darkness of winter towards the light of spring, ushering in planting time. The fall equinox no doubt pays homage to the harvest.
WORLD CIVILIZATIONS
On the other side of the globe in Egypt, the equinox also represents a time of resurrection, for the god Osiris. Because of this it is said, the Great Sphinx of Giza is positioned to look directly at the rising sun of the spring equinox. In Cambodia, where scholars say the equinox represents the winning of the forces of light over darkness, the main temple Angkor Wat also aligns with the equinox sun. This seems to be the universal meaning of what is represented by the equinox: rebirth, awakening and light overcoming darkness, exactly what happens as we tilt into spring.
So even though we may be entrenched in this modern world, über-connected with our smart phones and computers and all forms of social media, it’s important to remember there’s a bigger picture out there, and it affects all humanity on our green earth.
It is a thing as simple as how the sun and the earth relate, two days a year, on the equinox.
I always knew that Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, would be a trilogy, documenting the life and adventures of Layla Navarro, sitting head of Mexico's most powerful cartel. Truth be told, the writing came fairly easily, and the characters and plot evolved well.
However easy the writing may have been, that was only the beginning of the self-publishing process. The rest can be quite daunting. Though the second time around was a little easier, it was still no cakewalk.
After finishing the manuscript, finding a good editor is key. Luckily, I hit it off with my editor, Jennifer Silva Redmond, from my first novel, and she came through again. Receiving criticism is part of a writer's life, so it's best to develop a thick skin. I gave myself a few days to let her ideas percolate, and then tackled what I could on a daily basis, folding in her changes. Usually, cutting words, sometimes paragraphs, at times entire chapters, is required to make the book a better read.
Did you know that different fiction genres have different suggested word counts? For my genre, thriller, the norm is seventy thousand words. Literary fiction can go quite a bit longer, but with thrillers, it's important to keep the story moving, and shorter tends to make a better read. In my first novel, I clocked in at an unwieldy ninety thousand words! Jennifer asked me to cut twenty thousand. I must admit I cried a little, thinking that one over, but after I slept on her suggestions, I got out my mental scalpel, and went to work.
Jennifer went over my changes a couple times. I sent it off to a proofreader, and then Jennifer had one more look. Next came sending the manuscript to a text formatter and a cover graphics designer. I was lucky to know fine artist Jill Wyatt Logan from Todos Santos, Mexico, and she allowed me (again) to use one of her incredible paintings for the cover. My graphics designer added the title and author name and the back cover blurb design.
From there, it was time to put everything together. And here's my cover reveal of Tulum Takedown. I hope you like it as much as I do. The book will be out the end of March. Please sign up for my newsletter through my website, www.jeaninekitchel.com, to receive info on the publication date. It will be available in e-book on Amazon for $3.99 and paperback $13.95.
Photo of Mexico's most famous narca, Queen of Cocaine, Sandra Avila Beltrán. Courtesy of The Guardian.Last year, fellow thriller author Carmen Amato and I co-authored this article on The Women of Narco Noir.
They are cops and robbers. Do-gooders and badass babes. They are the women of narco noir, the crime fiction category fueled by today’s drug cartel violence and official corruption in Mexico, Colombia, and Central America. In narco noir novels, real events and real people blur into unforgettable fictional characters.
Read the latest thriller by Don Winslow, stream Narcos on Netflix, or hit the theater to catch a showing of Sicario: Day of the Soldado or Miss Bala and you’ll see why narco noir is the mystery genre’s new It Girl.
GENDER ROLES IN NARCO WORLD
Plot drivers in narco noir tales are generally male: El Chapo-like druglords, relentless federal agents, fearless journalists. But female characters are increasingly dominating the storyline with an array of complex personalities and fateful decisions. These women create memorable moments that leap off the page.
There are four prominent female character archetypes in narco noir. Each type appears in every narco noir book, while some, like Don Winslow’s The Cartel, pack them in all at once.
In no particular order, there’s the female narca, the cop, the civilian caught in the crossfire, and the woman who becomes the chess piece or victim who is used to create allegiances or satisfy an itch. Like the women on whom so many of these characters are based, all of the character archetypes are shaped by the war on drugs. It controls what they do, where they go, who they love, and how long they live.
The women of narco noir don’t live behind white picket fences, have BFFs, or join book clubs. Dinner doesn’t materialize nightly at seven. Narco noir women tend to be loners with no husband or significant other to come home to because the drug war has claimed their emotional lives. They’re as tough and as hardboiled as the tales they inhabit.
In an ironic twist of female solidarity, however, these women are bound together by one simple element.
The need to survive.
THE NARCA
Claudia Ochoa Felix, rumored to be El Chapo's main assassin, dead at 32. From Instagram.
The female druglord is a powerful character, competing for smuggling routes and ruthlessness with male counterparts. Amid the paranoia, backstabbing, and shifting alliances of Narcolandia, she’s fighting for a place at the table, a chance to wear the crown, and the respect of partners more used to using women than working with them.
In many cases, circumstances forced their hand due to the loss of a powerful male drug lord. A husband, father, or brother was taken out of the mix due to an unexpected death or incarceration. Females were forced to either step up or be killed by rivals seeking to snatch the spoils—drugs, smuggling routes, and allegiances.
For example, in Don Winslow’s Savages, Elena “La Reina,” the queen of the Baja Cartel, inherits her position after her husband dies. Isabella Bautista, a character in the Netflix series Narcos: Mexico, is also a female narca to be reckoned with. And who can forget Arturo Perez-Reverte’s thrilling saga The Queen of the South in which Teresa Mendoza escapes to Spain after facing certain death in Mexico when her boyfriend is murdered. She goes on to run a European drug-running empire. The Queen of the South became a hugely popular small-screen series in Spanish starring Kate del Castillo and in English with Alice Braga. The Kate del Castillo version is returning to Netflix in 2019. This time Mendoza has a daughter to protect, upping the survival game.
Likewise, in my novel (Jeanine) Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, anti-hero Layla Navarro rises to the top of the fictional Culiacan Cartel—Mexico’s most powerful—when her notorious drug lord uncle is recaptured. Because her older brother, heir apparent, died in an ambush and the other brother isn’t up to the task, Layla must step in to carry on the family business. When she runs afoul of a dubious cartel jefe during a dangerous delivery of drugs from Guatemala to Mexico, she faces a kill-or-be-killed dilemma.
All of these narca characters are inspired by real-life female narco-trafficker Sandra Avila Beltran, known as ‘La Reina del Pacifico.’ Avila served seven years in prison for trafficking and money laundering, scored an interview with Anderson Cooper, and published a book of her prison interviews.
The Italian mafia provides inspiration as well, with the phenomenon of women as drug lords known as “the rise of the godmother.” Italian women began to face a survival problem after their mafia husbands were jailed, sometimes for life, or killed.
“There’s a growing number of women who hold executive roles,” Gen. Gaetano Maruccia, commander of the military police in Naples, told the Associated Press. “They’re either widows of mob bosses or wives whose husbands are in prison. They hold the reins.”
Survive or die, with either salsa verde or clam sauce.
THE COP
Like the narca, the female cop or federal agent battling the war on drugs operates in a male-dominated atmosphere. Paranoia is a constant companion. Who is a dirty cop? Who can be trusted?
Unlike the narca, however, the cop earns a relative pittance. She’s on the clock. Her location is fixed and her hours are long. There’s little glamour in her life. The work is brutal and often dehumanizing.
In Sam Hawken’s stunning 2013 novel, La Frontera, Texas Ranger Ana Torres may not have wholly lost her soul but she is blunted by the violence she encounters every day along the U.S.-Mexico border. In one strangely disturbing scene, Torres sits and waits for several hours, doing nothing. She is too numb and devoid of inspiration for even simple things like reading a book or drinking coffee to pass the time.
In my (Carmen) noir detective series, Emilia Cruz is the first female police detective in Acapulco, grappling with drug cartels, official corruption, and Mexico’s culture of machismo. Starting with Cliff Diver, Emilia is a woman unafraid to confront the violence in the iconic Pacific coast city, which in 2018 became Mexico’s homicide capital. At the same time, however, Emilia stands to lose her soul in the wreckage. I used my 30-year career with the Central Intelligence Agency to infuse the series with authenticity. Emilia’s perpetual hunt for women who have gone missing—referred to as Las Perdidasor the Lost Ones—was inspired by the hundreds of women missing from the Juarez area. The most recent novel in the series, 43 Missing, is based on the 2014 mass disappearances from the Ayotzinapa teacher’s college not far from Acapulco.
THE CIVILIAN
Female civilian characters in narco noir fiction are often journalists and healers—people attempting to provide honest civil authority. They occupy a tenuous landscape, without the narca’s money or influence, or the firepower and law enforcement authority of the cop or federal agent.
These women have little more than a steel backbone with which to confront the war on drugs.
María Santos Gorrostieta Salazar, the assassinated mayor of Tiquicheo, a small town in the Mexican state of Michoacán, has inspired a number of female characters whose courage serves as a literary tribute to the late physician and politician. Gorrostieta Salazar became mayor upon the assassination of her husband who was the incumbent mayor. During her three-year tenure, she survived three assassination attempts that left her with severe scarring and a colostomy bag which she famously showed to detractors. Gorrostieta Salazar was kidnapped and assassinated by suspected drug traffickers in late 2012.
Federales by Christopher Irvin was a poignant and fictional retelling of her kidnapping and murder from the point of view of her bodyguard.
Marisol Cisneros in Winslow’s The Cartel also bears similarities to Gorrostieta Salazar. Marisol, also a doctor, is wounded in a cartel assassination attempt yet becomes mayor of a small town desperately in need of fearless civil authority.
Real-life journalists have also inspired a number of female characters in narco noir, such as the female journalist played by Rachel Ticotin in the 2004 film Man on Fire.
Anabel Hernandez of Mexico City is best known for her non-fiction book Narco Land and more recently, A Massacre in Mexico: The True Story Behind the Missing Forty-Three Students. But before penning these bold treatises about cartels and corruption, she worked as a crime reporter in Mexico City. Her investigative reporting became so abrasive that members of one cartel, falsely identifying themselves as federal police agents and armed with AK-47s, shut off her Mexico City neighborhood to track her down after de-activating security cameras in the area. Luckily she wasn’t home at the time of the manhunt. She was assigned a bodyguard soon thereafter and left Mexico for the U.S. where she taught investigative journalism for two years at UC Berkeley. Eventually, her fame caught up with her, and word has it that she is once again undercover.
The same thing happened to journalist Lydia Cacho. Cacho, described by Amnesty International as “perhaps Mexico’s most famous investigative journalist and women’s rights advocate,” reported tirelessly on sexual abuse against women and children. In her 2003 book, Demons of Eden, Cacho exposed a pedophile and child pornography ring in Puebla, Mexico, that included the top tier of politicos in its membership. Cacho, who lived in Cancun and wrote for Por Esto, was kidnapped and tortured by Puebla authorities two years after the book’s publication. They put her in the trunk of a car and drove twenty hours from Cancun to Puebla where they planned to arraign her. A network of friends and activists sprung into action and bailed her out. When asked how she managed to survive, she stated, “I don’t scare easily.”
Unfortunately, Cacho too had to flee Mexico to remain safe. Her writings are the very basis of narco noir: lurid real-life stories that sound like the stuff of legend, but which in fact are the genre’s backbone.
THE CHESS PIECE OR THE VICTIM
This female character archetype is generally a secondary character and her ability to survive is much more fragile than any other. These characters are prostitutes, girlfriends, child brides, informants, or someone caught in the crossfire. Often resigned to her fate—or too clueless to realize what is happening—a chess piece is used and abused by narcos and cops alike.
As plot devices, they serve to paint a picture of the user/abuser, forge alliances between cartels like European royalty of days long gone, and/or supply information. Especially with regard to the latter, they provide twists that other characters cannot.
In Winslow’s The Cartel, legions of girls pass through the beds of cartel types as the classy Laura Amaro acts as a courier and a recruiter for her husband. The main cartel character marries the teen-aged Eva in order to cement a relationship with her father, in much the same way that real-life head of the Sinaloa Cartel, El Chapo (Juaquín Guzman Loera) married Emma Coronel Aispuro, a Sinaloa beauty queen.
In Cliff Diver, hookers become informants able to reveal the sordid sex life of a crooked cop. Think narco pillow talk. And in the later Pacific Reaper, women are lured into a human trafficking net supplying the narcos.
In Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels, and Survival, a key plot twist turns on narca Layla Navarro’s discovery of a 12-year-old girl, trafficked by her own cartel unbeknownst to herself or her drug lord uncle. The girl is kidnapped from her Guatemala City barrio to be used as a chattel in the lucrative sex trade, one more victim of cartel dominance wreaking havoc on the lives of average citizens.
While perhaps a sharp stick in the eye to the feminist movement, narco noir mirrors true life when it comes to this character archetype, perhaps more so than for any of the other three.
In reality, cartels use women as sex workers, prostitutes, and mistresses, and in Narco Land, Anabel Hernandez describes in detail what became of three women whom El Chapo used for sex while in Puente Grande, Mexico’s maximum-security prison near Guadalajara. During his first incarceration, El Chapo became fixated with 23-year-old fellow inmate Zulema Yulia Hernandez. She became pregnant twice and was forced to abort both times. When El Chapo tired of her, he passed her around like a piece of merchandise to prison managers and inmates alike. While in prison, Hernandez attempted suicide twice, was released in 2008, and was later found dead in a car trunk with the letter “Z” etched into her buttocks, stomach, and breasts.
The second victim of El Chapo’s prison flings was inmate Diane Patricia, who had been charged with murder. In prison, she was repeatedly gang-raped and attempted suicide. El Chapo was called “an animal” by the president of the Jalisco Human Rights Commission which eventually intervened before the rape culture claimed Patricia’s life.
El Chapo’s third victim was Yves Eréndira Moreno who cooked in the prison’s kitchen. Guzman propositioned the single 38-year-old mother many times and for a while, she managed to avoid his advances. Perhaps because she was a little older than his previous prison sex-mates, she survived the sex games he required of her and outlived his stay at the prison. He escaped in 2001, and she had managed to live through it.
In Guzman’s recent trial in New York, various mistresses detailed how they met and were wooed by the drug lord.
These women were decades younger than Guzman, and often served as mules or go-betweens in his various drug dealings. One mistress, a teary-eyed Lucero Guadalupe Sanchez Lopez, explained one of his many close-calls with the law. The two were holed up at one of his remote mountain hideaways when Mexican military helicopters flew overhead.
He disappeared down a tunnel hidden underneath a bathtub, naked, and onto a waiting motorcycle below. She followed behind and they escaped the authorities, for the moment. Guzman, age 61, moved on to Mazatlan where he met up with his third and current wife, 29-year-old Emma Coronel Aispuro and their twin two-year-old daughters.
Just days later he was apprehended, incarcerated for a second time, and eventually extradited to the U.S. to face charges.
A CRACK IN THE ARCHETYPAL CEILING
Joaquin "El Chapo: Guzman and his wife, Emma Coronel, wearing matching burgundy velvet smoking jacket in court in NYC. (Courtesy: Jane Rosenberg).
Emma Coronel Aispuro was the picture of the loving wife during the infamous trial of El Chapo in New York City earlier this year. Every day, she brought him a new outfit to wear at the trial and one day they even wore matching burgundy velvet blazers, making the media swoon over the apparent sign of solidarity between husband and wife. As the trial closed each day, they blew each other kisses.
With her husband guilty on all counts and locked away in prison for the rest of his life, what will become of Emma Coronel Aispuro?
Will it be worth fictionalizing?
According to numerous reports, she’s going into business, selling El Chapo-branded jeans, dress shirts, sombreros, shoes, accessories, and liquor via an online store. Supposedly, the site describes El Chapo as a “humble seller of oranges with many goals and great ambition.” The fashion venture is already in competition with a similar business set up by one of Guzman’s adult children.
Does this mean that Coronel Aispuro won’t become a narca in her own right? Or be the dutiful chess piece any longer? Will she instead set the wheels turning for another narco noir character archetype?
“Only liars and damn fools say they like the jungle.”Anonymous Yucatan Explorer
While I sat in our little bookstore Alma Libre Libros in
Puerto Morelos, Mexico, in those early years when there was barely a tourist to
be found, I had plenty of time to read about the Maya civilization and the
explorers who stumbled onto their majestic pyramids. We sat within 100 miles of four major Maya sites, and I had become addicted to the Maya. I began compiling notes on
the early explorers and their adventures, and at the time thought I’d write a book called Explorers of the Yucatan,
but that idea was shelved. Now, finding those notes I realize how much I
enjoyed the adventure of reading about their adventures. So this is Part One of
that series. I’m beginning with my favorite explorer, Sylvanus Morley.
Alma Libre Libros
Since 1839 adventurers, explorers and archeologists have attempted to unveil the
mystery of the Maya and their pyramids.Although each of these mavericks deserves a stellae in the Maya hall of
fame, rising to the top like Venus on a new moon is Sylvanus Griswold Morley.
Rumored
to be Spielberg and Lucas’ inspiration for unforgettable archeologist Indiana
Jones, Morley worked nearly three decades deciphering Maya glyphs and
excavating ruins in Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala.He was born June, 1883, in Baldwinville, Massachusetts.
SANTA FE
Morley
began his studies in civil engineering and then attended Harvard where he
developed an interest in archeology. Harvard’s Peabody Museum had recently
received Edward H. Thompson’s treasure trove of artifacts after he famously
dredged the sacred well at Chichén Itzá in 1904. This ignited Morley’s interest
in ancient civilizations.
His
degree along with his involvement in antiquities first took him to Santa Fe, New
Mexico, where he cut his teeth on researching and exploring Native American cultures.
Morley’s influence in Santa Fe was so great that later on, he and a group of
his contemporaries, including Georgia O’Keefe, would define what has come to be
known as the “Santa Fe” style of architecture.
Between
1909 and 1914 Morley did field work in Central America and Mexico for the
School of American Archeology.During this period his early archeological expeditions were used as a
cover for espionage activities for U.S. Naval Intelligence during World War I.According to one source, although his
wartime activities have been largely forgotten, he laid the groundwork for
modern U.S. intelligence efforts.
After
the war, Morley became a research associate for the Carnegie Institution where
he applied for the position to head up explorations in Southern Mexico,
Guatemala and Honduras.In 1915,
he presented a proposal for funding a restoration project at Chichén Itzá.
RESTORATION
Morley’s
proposal was a 20-year plan to restore Chichén Itzá, now one of the New Seven
Wonders of the Modern World, to its former grandeur and to invite tourists to
become a part of that mix. He chose Chichén Itzá because it was close to Merida
and easy to reach, thanks to progressive governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto’s
efforts at building a new road that connected Merida with the soon to be famous
site.
Before
Morley’s excavation, Chichén Itzá was merely clumps of grassy mounds as was
common with all Maya sites in the early days of exploration. Morley would labor
at excavation there for 18 years, until 1940.Shortly after his work was complete, he published The Ancient Maya in 1946, the first
comprehensive account of the Maya civilization.
NO GLAMOUR
The
rain forest held no glamour for Morley, nor did spending the night in a
flea-infested palapa, eating canned goods, fighting insects, fearing snakes,
taking water from a filthy water bag, nor running the risk of contracting
serious tropical infections. Nicknamed the little hummingbird by Native
Americans on one of his first expeditions to the southwest, Morley always
dressed the part of the archeologist, looking more like Bill Gates than
Harrison Ford, complete with pith helmet.
He
said he hated the jungle because he dearly enjoyed the comforts of
civilization. But even the ill health that plagued him over the years in no way
diminished his enthusiasm for advancing the knowledge of the Maya. His
biography by Robert Brunhouse details how, at every turn, his good health was
sabotaged by numerous illnesses. Seasickness seized him on entering a boat; he
contracted malaria in the early years of his explorations, threw it off for
several decades, only to contract it again. He suffered from colitis in 1924
and was continuously in and out of hospitals for tests.
The
following year amoebic dysentery forced him to leave Chichén Itzá and spend
weeks in a New Orleans hospital. On returning to the site, he felt his energy
was too great for his emaciated 109-pound body and was quoted as saying he had
a Rolls Royce engine in a Ford Motor body.
MAYA TIES THAT BIND
After he had established himself at
Chichén Itzá, Maya leaders asked him to help convince Queen Victoria to form an
alliance with the Maya to drive the Mexicans out of Yucatán once and for
all.(This was before the final
truce had been signed for the Caste War of Yucatán which lasted nearly one
hundred years). After explaining that Queen Victoria was long dead, he became
the unofficial spokesman for the Yucatec Maya from 1923 until his death in
1948.
Inauguration
of the Chichén Itzá project was his greatest contribution to Mesoamerica
archeology. Financed fully by the Carnegie Institution, he continued hard at it
until 1940. In the 1930s he discovered he had heart trouble but continued to
travel, now by plane rather than mule or boat. His overall emphasis soon
expanded into a vast multi-disciplinary study of the entire Maya area.At Chichén Itzá, his work opened a new
chapter in the history of archeology. On completion of the project in 1940,
when he departed, he said he would never return and he never did. But his love
affair with the Maya culture lasted a lifetime.
He
was scholar, explorer, informal diplomat, secret agent, planner, author and
educator.His explorations and
excavations put the Maya and Chichén Itzá on the map.
B.
Traven was long a cult figure by the time I stumbled onto his legendary
adventure novels about Mexico when I traveled the gringo trail in the 70s.It seemed everyone on the road in those
days had a copy of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre stuffed into their backpack
alongside a Spanish-English phrase book.
B.
Traven’s books were required reading for anyone traveling south. Most of his novels,
written between 1926 and 1952, were set in Mexico.His themes paralleled what was happening in that country
during those traumatic, revolutionary times.
The
tales were part adventure, part historical fact, couched in fiction, all taking
place south of the border in a very different land.Secondly, his Mexico was
a place where abandoned gold mines and bandits still existed. His Mexico was
peppered with anarchy and rebellion. His Mexico had spice.
MAN OF MYSTERY
Best
known to American audiences because of the film The Treasure of the Sierra
Madre, Traven most likely would have remained unknown if John Huston hadn’t
turned the iconic greed and gold novel into a silver screen classic starring
Humphrey Bogart as down-on-his-luck prospector Fred C. Dobbs.Two scenes come to mind: Bogart going mad, and the other sports one
of cinema’s immortal lines, shouted by bandits on horseback imitating
federales, “Badges?We don’t need
no stinkin’ badges!”
By
the 1930s, Traven’s work was published everywhere else in the world but England
and the US, in dozens of languages, but not a word in English until Alfred
Knopf republished The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in 1935. His body of work
wasn’t published in the US until the 60s.Today, Traven’s books have been translated into 30 languages, sold more
than 25 million copies, and are required reading in Mexico’s schools.
Because
he lived in Mexico 35 years, Traven’s work evolves the grit and reality of
Mexico: He watched his adopted country adapt to a string of dictators and
revolutions.His tales dish out
depth and emotion, with a sizeable serving of the oppression of the lower
classes thrown in.
His
epics read as though inspired by stories he could have heard while sitting in
some outback cantina in a dusty pueblo anywhere in Mexico; or maybe he drew on
his own slices of Mexican life that occurred while living there till his death
in 1969. Or his supposed death . . .
TRUE IDENTITY
At
this point, I must explain that B. Traven was as much a character as those he
created in his novels. The jury is
still out on his true identity. B. Traven was a pen name.At a Traven conference just 20 years
ago at Penn State, scholars still debated what the “B” stood for, and if his
nationality was German, English or American.
Traven’s
biographers consider several possible identities:Either he was born in Chicago in 1890, to Swedish parents,
and spent his youth in Germany where he started writing anarchist literature
under the pen name Ret Marut, moving to Mexico in the 20s.Or he was Otto Feige, born to a German
pottery worker.After traveling
widely in his youth, he worked as a manual laborer and actor, and then edited
an anarchist journal in Germany before heading to Mexico. In the most recent scenario,
presented by professor Michael L. Baumann, Traven was neither Marut nor
Feige.Baumann suggests, in his
1997 book, Mr. Traven, I Presume, that Traven could have usurped the real
Traven’s identity and continued on with this man’s work, since his German published
books were written in two distinct handwritings and full of
“Americanisms.”Baumann also
asserts that given what background was known of Traven, he should have been a
much older man than the corpse claimed to be his after his 1969 death in Mexico.
In
his biography, John Huston adds another question mark to the Traven identity
search. While filming The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Huston invited the
author to come to the set, but he declined, sending instead his “agent,” Hal
Croves.
“Croves,”
Huston wrote, “was a small, thin man with a long nose,” and carried a letter
for the director explaining that Traven could not show up; Croves would answer
all pertinent questions. “He had a slight accent. It didn’t sound German but
certainly European.I thought he
might very well be Traven but out of delicacy, I didn’t ask.”
It
wasn’t until Traven’s death in 1969 when a photo of the author was published
that Huston confirmed Croves was, in fact, B. Traven.
On
Mexican government immigration documents from the 1930s, Traven claimed to have
entered Mexico through Ciudad Juarez in 1914.He settled first in either Tampico or Chiapas—there are
mixed accounts on this—writing stories he sent to German publishers under the
name B. Traven.His first
published book was The Death Ship, a story of an American sailor who loses his
birth certificate and with it his identity and is forced to take a job
shoveling coal on a ship destined to go down for insurance money.
THE WRITER’S WORK
According
to one biography, Traven wrote about social justice, cruelty, and greed from
the very beginning.In the 1930s
he moved near Acapulco. Around this time his books were banned by the
Nazis.Between 1931 and 1940 he
published six of his Mahogany, or Jungle, Series, which included: The Carreta, Government, March to Monteria, Trozas, The Rebellion of the
Hanged and General from the Jungle.
These
books chronicled the Mexican Revolution between 1910-1912 and lamented the
plight of the indigenous people of Chiapas who worked like slaves in the
mahogany forests.In Rebellion of
the Hanged, he tells how one man is duped into working in the monteria where
mahogany is harvested when his wife becomes ill.Before it’s over, the
man’s wife has died but the he has signed a contract with the mill—a deal with the devil.His
struggle to stay alive in hellish conditions is duly recorded in Traven’s
prose.
Upon Traven’s death in 1969 his
ashes were scattered over Rio Jatate in Chiapas, and his widow, (translator
Rosa Elena Lujan) was instructed to reveal that B. Traven was in fact Traven
Torsvan Croves, born in Chicago in 1890 and naturalized as a Mexican citizen in
1951.However, in a later
interview with The New York Times in 1990, his widow stated Traven told her he
had been Ret Marut but she could tell no one until after his death due to his
fear of extradition to Germany for his anarchist leanings.
Traven’s true identity is not
important.He said so
himself.But in reading his novels
about a very real Mexico, truths are uncovered through his gripping adventure
tales.The original anarchist, it’s
easy to see why he was so embraced by the 60s generation.
Who was B. Traven?As he said himself, “My life belongs to
me—only my books belong to the public.”According to his widow, he said, “I am freer than anyone else, free to
choose the parents I want, the country I want, the age I want.”
No matter who the real B. Traven
was, his works—still relevant decades after publication—speak for the man
behind the mystery.
Were they pyramid builders? Astronomers? Lords of the jungle? High priests and shaman? Mathematicians?
After years of studying the Maya, I believe—aside from those glorious pyramids— they’ll most be remembered for their stargazing abilities. The Maya were called naked-eye astronomers.
Say what?
STARGAZERS AND MATHEMATICIANS
The Maya were stargazers for a reason. First and foremost they were mathematicians who painstakingly followed and kept detailed records on the position of the stars and planets day by day, year by year, century by century. Without the use of anything other than the naked eye, they recorded these precise calculations for more than a millennium. They kept track of the night sky in paper-bark books called codices. (Sadly, all but three were burned by Spanish priests in an effort to purge the Maya of their “pagan” beliefs). And through this precise nightly recording of the sky’s movements, they were able to simulate what we today can do in the blink of an eye with a telescope. The Maya viewed the Milky Way as the world tree, their Ceiba. The Ceiba was considered the Maya tree of life—the tree that holds up the world.
THE MILKY WAY
But to the Maya, the Milky Way was more than that familiar smudge across the sky we see each night. The Milky Way was also the Sac-be or road to the underworld for dead souls as well as the path for those souls to the sky. It was their River Styx. Without the Milky Way, dead souls couldn’t find their way and would be caught in a forever limbo.
So Maya astronomers were left with the weighty job of deciphering how each star and planet would align. It was their destiny to forever record the nightly movement of the stars so that those departed could find their way to the underworld.
PAKAL'S TOMB
Even though all but three of their paper-bark books were destroyed, additional proof in this theory of the Milky Way and the world tree’s importance is carved onto the glorious sarcophagus lid of Pakal, Palenque’s greatest ruler.If you've never been to Palenque, go. To me, it is the most spiritual and mystical pyramid site, off the beaten track and not an easy journey. But once there, it’s like Hawaii with pyramids in a lush jungle setting with a smattering of near Asian style structures. The Asian influence makes one wonder. But back to the sarcophagus lid—it shows the king descending down the world tree into the jaws of the underworld, or Xibalba, to his death. Descending the stairs to Pakal’s musty tomb is a journey in itself. And as an aside, Pakal’s tomb was discovered by accident in 1952 by famous archaeologist Alberto Ruz when a worker noticed holes in a floor slab. When lifted, it showed a stairway filled with rubble that took three years to clear. But Pakal’s tomb, and the discovery of the king’s bejewelled death mask, made those efforts worthwhile.
Palenque was also the site of the famous Palenque Roundtable in the mid-1970s where more than twenty of the world’s foremost archaeologists came together and broke the Maya code. At that meeting, they deemed that the greatest portal to the underworld was found in the night sky, and it related back to the Maya creation myth. Now having the ability to read the Maya stelae (carved concrete like slabs placed in front of every pyramid), these archaeologists decided the myth portrayed the Milky Way, as a tree, to be the centre of their universe, dating back to their creation myth in the Popul Vuh.
Have I lost you yet?
VENUS FOR ACTS OF WAR
But not only did the Maya gaze at the stars so that they and their rulers could find the starry path to the underworld, They monitored the planet Venus to decide when to make war on fellow Maya city-states, and when to plant their crops, specifically maize.
So determined were the Maya to follow this star-earth continuum that many pyramid sites, such as Chichen Itza’s Temple of Kukulkan, are aligned to certain astronomical specifics. Each spring and autumn equinox, the sun casts its shadow onto this Chichen Itza temple due to its place in the heavens, the building’s position, and the Maya’s precise calculations, configured centuries ago, for for this event. The sun’s shadow creates the illusion of the serpent’s body (the temple sports a huge serpent on each of its four corners) slithering down to the base of the staircase, finishing at the serpent’s mouth at ground level. Again, if you’ve not yet been to Chichen Itza, go. Other sites also are clearly aligned with these spectacularly coordinated spectacles, not unlike sunrise at Stonehenge. One wonders, how on earth did they do it? But they did.
WHO WERE THEY?
So who were the Maya? To me, they will always be stargazers who tamed the night skies long before modern man/woman would have thought it even be possible to do so. Had any more than three of the thousands of paper-bark Maya books burned been saved for posterity, what other wonders would we have discovered? Though they were an early civilization, they were one with extraordinary powers to delineate not only the position of the planets and when full eclipses would occur, but they also created an intricate system of calendars (twenty-eight in all) that, some scholars say, coordinate as accurately as our calendar does today. When the Maya calendars were compared for exactness against a modern day computer, scholars found only a slight difference in accuracy. All done without a slide rule, calculator or telescope.
Naked eye astronomy.
It worked for the Maya. And if this article doesn’t inspire you to go to the nearest pyramid site and stare at in wonder, I have failed to do my job.
