But apparently the Aztecs were running low on human hearts. Their entire kingdom has dwindled to a mere handful of Aztecs. So it was a good thing some conquistadors came along when they did. Rex was getting hungry.

The conquistadors are lead by none other than Hernan Cortes, the Spaniard famous for squashing the Aztec Empire. This movie chronicles his first unsuccessful attempt. (NOTE: Fans of Beverly Hills 90210 will recognize backstabbing shape-shifter Steve Sanders as Cortes!)

He and his six men are soon captured. The Aztecs waste no time humiliating their prisoners, making them squat in a holding pen made of fine straw and towering approximately one foot high.

If they want their freedom, they must do battle with Tyrannosaurus Rex.

What follows is one very lengthy battle of multiple skirmishes. We get cannonballs, arrows, gunfire. Lots of blood...a conquistador gets his leg bitten off while he's asleep! And then there are duels between squabbling humans. Plus…during the action we get a wedding followed by a quick honeymoon!

But be warned, a honeymoon Aztec Rex is most certainly not.

Other Prehistoric Favorites:

10,000 B.C.
Adventure, history, magic!

Sabretooth
Sawyer from Lost vs. Prehistoric Beast!!

Warbirds
Female Fighter Pilots in World War II battle pterodactyls!

The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep
Boy becomes father to a baby Loch Ness!

It's time for the annual reaming out of the city's storm sewers, which will clear an estimated 150 tons of accumulated trash (leaves, litter, dead cats...) that builds up every year, and needs to be cleared out before the rainy season.

Mexico City's geographical position -- on a lake with no natural drainage, has always made waste-water a challenge.  The Aztecs carted off human and animal waste for fertilizer in the chinapas (the floating gardens built on giant rafts that still exist in a few parts of Xochimilco).  The poet-engineer-emperor Nezahaucoatl (Leonardo da Vinci, though never a ruler,  was the other multi-talented guy of the time) designed a series of dikes and drainage systems to keep the city dry and drain off waste.  Alas, because the Spanish urban planning was used to dry plains, the system was abandoned.

In the 1620s, serious consideration was given to moving the capital of Nueva Espagna to Cuernavaca, especially when Mexico was underwater for over a year (priests conducted canoe-in services from church towers), and flooding was a regular problem until the late 1800s.

Building Mexico City's sewers was one of the great engineering marvels of the late 19th century. The Anglo-Mexican firm, S. Pearson and Sons, finished the project in 1901, ending centuries of annual flooding in the Federal District.Porfiro Diaz' inaugural flush (attended by a brass band), followed by the diplomatic corps' witnessing of sewage spewing out in the Lerma River (the system has been much improved since then) was spectacular enough to make Pearson a serious contender for the next big engineering project of the time... the Panama Canal.

The uncovering of an 800-year-old pyramid built by the Aztecs in what is now central Mexico City seems to indicate that the ancient settlement is at least 100 years older than was previously believed.

The 36-feet-high ruins were discovered in the Tlatelolco area, which was once a focal point of Aztec culture. Historians had long believed that the Aztecs founded Tlatelolco at the same time as its ancient twin city, nearby Tenochtitlan.

However, the newly discovered pyramid suggests that the Mexico City area was being developed by the Aztecs as early as 1100. "The (Aztec) timeline is going to need to be revised," said an archaeologist who participated in the research.

I'll wait til the first edition comes out before I start a second one...  Porfirio Díaz was right -- again:

In the odd even I find myself back in the age of disco (hey, calendars were circular for a reason ... everything old is new again), I know what to say when asked:

Ome-Ozomahtli -- which translates: "Hey, hey, we're the monkeys..." (well, literally it's "two monkey..." but same diff...)

There's a handy-dandy calculator for those of us a little challenged by the conversion process... or just curious about our own Tonalli:

(... as to my Xihuitl -- birth year -- non of ya bizness!)

Unless you ran a tavern (and in those days, Geneva, pop. 17,000 .. being half blue-collar and half college town had at least about 50 of 'em) Mormons are sort of the ideal tourists. They spend money and you never see em. We'd all be at Cosies', or Pinky's, or the Twin Oaks, or the Kashong Inn, or the Knights of Columbus,

or ...

I've seen the Pageant a few times, but I was very little at the time, so other than there were a bunch of colorful "Indian" rituals (followed by the appearance of Jesus), I don't remember much. But hey... you don't get too many spectaculars coming though small upstate New York towns, and the drive to Palmayra for a free show sure beat the drive to Syracuse or Rochester for some third-string "Holiday on Roller Skates" or whaterver was offered to us upstate yahoos.

So, while Burro Hall gets snarky what the hey... it's more yankee dollars:

PHOENIX (AP)- In a corner of ancient ruins, not far from the towering Pyramid of the Sun, a small group of Mormons sat among the milling tourists in Teotihuacan, Mexico, and gazed across what they believe to be their holy land.

"This is just what it says in the Book of Mormon about the Jaredites," Bill Welsh of Provo, Utah, said excitedly as an archaeologist described how internal strife sped the downfall of Teotihuacan.

For the world's 13 million Mormons, the ruins of Mexico and Central America are hallowed ground, a place where Old Testament tribes settled after traveling across the ocean and where Jesus came to preach after his Resurrection. Although archaeologists say there is scant evidence to back up such beliefs, a growing number of travelers are paying thousands of dollars to search for connections on Mormon-themed tours and cruises.

...

Mormons believe that three groups of people - the Jaredites, the Mulekites and the family of a Hebrew merchant named Lehi - sailed from the Middle East and settled in the Americas hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus.

The descendants of Lehi split into two camps, the Nephites and the Lamanites, and were visited by Jesus after his Resurrection around A.D. 34, Mormons believe. The Nephites kept records of their history on gold plates.

The Nephites were destroyed by rival tribes around A.D. 385, the church says. One of the last surviving Nephites wandered through the Americas and eventually buried the plates in New York.

Hugo de Groot, may have been a great 17th century thinker and humanist, but he had his eccentric opinions. The best of them was that there are rules to warfare (he was responsible for the first interantional laws, which centuries later George W. Bush and company were so eager to break). The oddest, based on his conversations with a Dutch rabbi who had somehow been in Peru, was that because the Incas were circumcised, it followed that the Native peoples of the Americas were the lost tribe of Israel.

The Aztec legends of having wandered in the desert for several years (though Huitzilopochtli wasn't quite the same as a "pillar of smoke by day, and of fire by night") led a few Spanish priests down the primrose path as well. Joseph Smith wasn't the first to develop the idea.

And, besides, what's a few thousand Mormon religious pilgrims? I lived within a couple of blocks of the Basilica of Guadalupe, which gets more visitors than any other religious site in the Americas, and more than even Saint Peter's in Rome. 14 million or so a year, and it may be chump change, but it's not a bad business to be in.

"It is more blessed to give than to receive" I'm sure, but I wish I could afford to keep giving you the Mex Files. I'm $1500 in debt, and have been running this site on hit-or-miss free-lance writing which isn't paying the bills.

I'm not counting on a miracle, but I have faith that people are willing to keep the Mex Files alive.

I always had a problem with Gary Jenning's “Aztec” (though the series is worth reading, if just to enjoy quibbling with the author's interpretations of events, and to see how he manages to fit in everybody and everything into one person's life). The “cuinlotín,” are a modern "gay" couple -- artists, of course.

Jenning's treatment of the two artists is a 20th century projection of his thinking and culture (Jennings was an Englishman) based on something alien to Aztec thinking -- and that of modern Mexico.

Artists were not considered rarified creatures in Aztec culture, nor are they seen as some exotic species by the Mexicans today is beside the point. Artsy = faggy to us, so if you're going to have a gay couple, they have to be artists. Not farmers, not warriors, but ... something queer.

Not that romantic friendships or even sodomy are anything new... or that there weren't effeminate men (even among the Aztecs) before the 19^th century. But until the Germans, and then the English, got on their catagorizing kick, no one thought of making a clear distinction between gender preference and behavior... or that certain types of behavior said anything about one's sexual orientation.

Consider these two photos of homeless people... the Mexicans on the right are comfortable with each other's bodies and don't read anything into it. The gringos (even the probably Hispanic guy) space themselves, preserving their autonomy.

I hadn't really thought about it, but I have noticed before that Mexicans – and Latins in general – are much more comfortable around each other than we gringos. I've been amused before by the clueless (by choice) gringos who assumed every man they saw with his arm around another man's shoulders was a gay couple (or, when they'd see what was probably a padrino and ahijido, assumed the younger man was a prostitute). And, I got a perverse pleasure out of hearing a tableful of very nasty old queens on the Zona Rosa trying to figure out my relationship with a Mexican friend I properly greeted with an abrazo... we just don't do that.

According to a California scholar named John Ibson, we did at one time. Ibson put together photos of U.S. men in groups from the 1880s to the 1950s – which sounds interesting – and wrote a semi-interesting (but also, semi-academic, i.e., pretentious) essay about his own research. His theory is that “homosexual,” a word that didn't exist in English until about 1900 has changed the way we relate to each other, and we're so conscious of how men are supposed to relate to each other, that we unconsciously adopt a “manly” pose.

Take a look at these two soccer teams... on the left, a college team from the U.S., on the right, the 2006 Mexican national team...

Mexicans – and Latins – don't play by those rules, though maybe the Catalans do. This next photo is from a website for latina girls. How many male rock bands (this happens to be “La Lay” from Chile) in the U.S. pose like this?

When I first looked at the "issue" in 2004, I only looked at half the equation:

“gay” means effeminate men or masculine women. Behaviors we consider gay (good manners, cultural interests like the opera or women’s fashion, concern or body image and appearance) are neutral or positive values here.

 

But... Pancho Villa openly cried like a girl at Madero's funeral. Obregón wrote morose poetry and had a biting wit. Zapata was a snappy dresser and very, very polite. And, if you've ever heard a tape of Francisco Franco, or read anything about the old dictator, he sounded "nelly" and was a fussy old queen... and hardly gay.

Citius64, who is hip and trendy, but not pretentious, wrote recently about Catalan scholar Oscar Guasch, who recently published a study called “La crisis de la heterosexualidad”. Citius, citing Vin Diesel and “World of Warcraft” has it over Prof. Ibson in the readablity department. Guasch, whose work I don't know (I can't read Catalan, and can't afford the book anyway, even if it is in Spanish), makes the point that the late 19^th century also saw the birth of “heterosexuality” as a concept

But, both Gausch and Prof. Ibson make the same point... we've got outselves into a situation where we act... consciously or unconsciously... according to some arbitrary set of rules. We assume the rules are universal, or at least the same throughout the Americas... they're not.

Is it that Latin America is Catholic and communal and the North is Protestant and individualistic? Is it the Napoleonic Code (which never said a word about consensual sex)? Is it just that the Latin Americans just don't give a shit what people think? Or is it something different about us? Friends of mine criticize us gringos for psychologizing everything... but we seem to be trapped in the psychology of 1900, and it's where -- or rather HOW -- we stand.

The upshot is we really have no clue as to how far back Mexican civilization goes.  It seems that the whole country is one giant pyramid, built on top of whatever was there originally.  Everywhere you dig, you come up with something (an entirely unknown civilization was discovered a few years ago when the water company was laying lines in Aguascalientes).  And we keep pushing back the timeline. 

Oh well, what's another millenium or so?

From UPI, via Earth Times:

TALLAHASSEE, Fla., April 10 U.S. anthropologists have found evidence of ancient maize farming in the Gulf Coast region near Tabasco, Mexico.

Pohl conducted an analysis of sediments in the region and concluded people were planting crops in the "New World" of the Americas around 5,300 B.C. "These are significant new findings that fill out knowledge of the patterns of early farming," said Pohl. "It expands on research that demonstrates that maize spread quickly from its hearth of domestication in southwest Mexico to southeast Mexico and other tropical areas in the New World, including Panama and South America." The results of Pohl's study -- conducted with Dolores Piperno of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington; Kevin Pope of Geo Arc Research; and John Jones of Washington State University -- appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Copyright 2007 by UPI  

xxx

This fellow showed up Tuesday at Templo Mayor, where he's been hiding in plain sight on Mexico City's Zocalo since 1524 or so. (Photo: AP)

Religion and cuisine aren't the only places in Mexico where tradition and modernity co-exist...

The Unapologetic Mexican did a great job putting together a memorial to the fall of Tenochtitlán, which, as the memorial at Tlatelolco reads in Spanish and Nahuatl -- neither a triumph or a tragedy, but the birth-pangs of the Mexican people.

Nov. 14, 2004,
Mexico's 'original' sport faces threat of extinction
Outside forces, lack of supplies speed its demise
By JO TUCKMAN Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle Foreign Service

LOS LLANITOS, MEXICO - Luis Lizarraga ran toward a large, rubber ball hurtling toward him from the other end of the field.Dressed in a leather loincloth, his face contorted in concentration, the young sportsman let the ball bounce once and then leaped into the air. With a powerful flick of his hip, he sent the dense, black sphere spinning back toward the opposing team.

The subsequent volleys of shots, always with the hip, sparked a loud cheer from spectators watching a recent match of ulama de cadera, or hip ulama, in this tiny village in northwestern Mexico.Among the most attentive fans was Manuel Aguilar, an art history professor from California State University, and a handful of graduate students who had come to study the game.

An ancient tradition

"Ballgames like ulama were played all over Mesoamerica before the Spanish conquistadors came," explained Aguilar, who is overseeing a book about the sport that will include articles by his students. "Now they only play them here."

"Here" is Los Llanitos and a handful of other villages scattered around the Pacific port city of Mazatlan, where a few dozen players, almost all of them men, keep the ancient game from dying out.

Ulama... then... notice the goalposts

The human sacrifices that often accompanied ulama (a word derived from the Nahuatl, or Aztec, word for ballgame) before the Spanish arrived were dropped long ago.

"They say it is the original Mexican sport, and I'm very proud of that," said Fito Lizarraga, 57, Luis Lizarraga's uncle and a mentor of most of the players in Los Llanitos, a village of 151 people.

Still, he is pessimistic about the future of the sport played long ago by the Aztecs, Toltecs, Maya and other pre-conquest civilizations.

Until recently, teams from villages around Mazatlan played one another from fall through spring in weekend matches. Now, there are not enough players to keep such a schedule. During the ulama season, there is usually an informal game on Sundays."People prefer baseball, volleyball or soccer," said Gerardo Rodriguez, 47, whose father was a well-known ulama player half a century ago. "Nobody plays ulama anymore here."

A major problem facing the game is the cost of replacing the natural rubber balls, which weigh about 9 pounds. Drug traffickers now control the region where people traditionally bled rubber trees for sap, and expert ball-makers are getting scarce. Aguilar said the price of a single ball has soared to about $1,000 — far more than the ulama teams can afford.

'Double threat'

Attempts by the Mazatlan historical society to make balls from cheaper, synthetic rubber have had little success. Players complain they are too hard and lack the proper bounce.

Today, many of the game's enthusiasts are concerned about its purity.

A Maya theme park about 1,400 miles away in the Caribbean resort city of Cancun hires ulama players from the Mazatlan area.

Park managers deck them out in feather headdresses and body paint for exhibition games that shamelessly flout traditional rules. Some of the players are bringing the new way of playing back home."Ulama is facing a double threat," local historian Jorge Macias said. "If it doesn't die out because there are no players left, the trips to Cancun will corrupt it forever."

Still, ulama is a survivor. The original point of the games was to attain equilibrium, said Aguilar, the art historian. Because death was believed necessary for life to continue, losers frequently were decapitated, ensuring the sun would rise the next day and the corn would grow tall.



Ulama now: These games can go on for days. The loser
buys dinner. In the good old days, the losers WERE dinner.
(photo: ¡Gracias a "sparks"!)

Echo of history

The Spanish conquerors stamped out the game in most of Mexico after defeating the Aztecs in 1521. But ulama survived in the country's Pacific northwest — minus the bloodletting and overt religious references that once characterized the sport.

Today, many of the players around Mazatlan have little knowledge of the game's roots.

Aguilar insists, however, that the echo of the ancients is audible.

He noted that a 2,000-year-old clay model of an ulama court shows men dressed in knotted loincloths similar to those worn by players today. Animal bones buried under parts of the field in Los Llanitos hark back to the time of the Aztecs, who used skulls to mark the court's central line.

But Aguilar pointed to the game's scoring system as the clearest evidence of its "life-and-death" quality.

The purpose of the game is to win points by getting the ball to the opponents' end of the field, with the first team to score eight points winning. Under a complex set of rules, however, a team can lose all of its points if the game becomes tied."Let's say my team is winning 4-3 and the other team reaches us in the score. We automatically lose all our points and drop to zero, and the score would then be 0-4," Aguilar said.The result is a match that can last for days with the specter of sacrificial victims and an oscillating score that mimics the constantly changing forces of the cosmos.

As the monument reads: "This was neither a tragedy nor a triumph, but the painful birth of the Mexican people". Whatever young Cuauhtémoc thought about the birth-pangs of Mexico, he kept to himself. And he kept his mouth shut when Pedro d'Alvardo, who'd already looted everything of value in the City (he even stole the gold parrot toys out of the zoo) questioned him about what might have happened to any gold treasures that were somehow overlooked. If there was any gold left, it was buried under the rubble, which was carted out to the city dump... which is now my neighborhood. It's here somewhere, but I don't know any more than Cuauhtémoc. Who wasn't talking -- Alvardo, the stinker, gave him a hot-foot.

Young Cuauhtémoc never even whimpered, which took all the fun out of sadism. Even when he limped off he never said a word. When Cortés "invited" the ex-emperor to join the hunt for the "rebel" Cristobel Olid (much as Cortés went AWOL from Cuba to invade Mexico, Olid went AWOL from Mexico to invade Honduras), it was with the understanding that Cuauhtémoc must have known something about fighting the Castillians. If he did, he wasn't about to rat on Olid. He wouldn't talk -- so Cortés hanged him, 28 February 1525.

The Last Emperor still isn't talking. The Monument to Cuahtémoc, built in the 1880s, has been the middle of a traffic circle where Reforma crosses Insurgentes since the 30s. It was risky, but worth it, if you were into Greco-Aztec 19th Century Revival to try crossing 8 lanes of always moving traffic. The infamous toe-toasting is modeled on Jacques-Louis David's Death of Socrates , though the buff young Greek body with an Aztec face looks more like he's doing body-builder poses than being tortured -- but then Socrates doesn't exactly look like a 73-year old philosopher either.

Worth the risk, but for the Aztec's risks were simple things like smallpox and Spaniards and having your heart torn out by your enemies. They never had to deal with rutas and crazed Volkswagen drivers, mega-manifestiones and traffic cops. So... the traffic circle is being turned into a regular stop-light with turning lanes and silent Emperor is moving to the corner -- at least he finally conquors one enemy of the Azteca. He's taking over the Parque Austria, which was partial repayment for the damages done by that incompetent usurper, Maximiliano von Hapsburg, who claimed to be Emperor of Mexico.

This is one of the largest statues in the Americas, so moving it is no easy task. It took four cranes a whole weekend to take the Bronze Emperor off his base and nearly a week to move the pedestal. Before he's plucked back on 11 December, he's been undergoing a cleansing (something all good Aztecs liked) and checked over for damages. He's not going to talk, but some time during the 1910 Revolution, or the 1912 counter-Revolution, or the 1914 counter-counter Revolution, or the 1915-21 counter-counter-counter Revolutions, or the 1968 uprisings... or a wild Saturday night sometime between 1880 and now, somebody winged him. He's not going to talk, but --

SOMEBODY SHOT HIM IN THE ASS