Vamos! Revolutionaries in Mexico City

In which Sid and Doris visit the revolutionaries in Mexico’s Hampstead Village.

Doris made a fine route to Coyoacan to include a ride on the metro to visit the houses of Leon Trotsky and Frida Khalo.

Lev Bronstein (aka Trotsky) was a Ukrainian Jew and prominent member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. In 1898 he was arrested by the Tsarist police and exiled to Siberia, whence he escaped to London and met Lenin. After the failure of the 1905 revolution he was sent east again, from where he rose again on the third day to tour Europe and go on to the USA. When the February 1917 revolution held he returned, was one of the leaders of the October Revolution, became foreign minister and then architect of the Red Army victory over the White Russians, British and twelve other foreign forces. After Lenin’s death Trotsky lost out to Stalin, went abroad and was able to settle in Mexico because Rivera and Kahlo had asked the President to grant Trotsky asylum. He lived with the artists until getting his own house.

However, David Siquero one of the revolutionary mural painters whose work we saw at the Bellas Artes and some time collaborator with Diego Rivera was now a Stalinist. He and a band of fellow travellers went to shoot Trotsky, putting 200 bullets into the house but failing in their mission. Still it must have caused a few raised eyebrows at the Arts Club. The house was fortified so as to be safe from external attack.

Trotsky continued to write against Stalinism until 1940. He was eventually murdered by the NKVD who had an agent worm his way into the inner circle and kill Trotsky in his study.  The house is now behind a tall wall and in any case was shut. The director of the museum is Esteban Volkov Bronstein.

Trotsky has not been rehabilitated in Russian history books. Once the revolution has thrown up a new status quo the new incumbents don’t want to encourage that sort of thing and may send agents abroad to prevent it. If you do not know www.bellingcat.com please have a look.

So on to the next, which is open. Frida Kahlo had a German father and Mexican mother grew up and lived in La Casa Azul, the blue house, which is now her shrine. She had polio as a child and was in a bus accident as a youth so lived with pain and frailty. She met artist Diego Rivera as a child and married him when she was 21.

She lived in the house all her life. The curators have set out the rooms to explain different aspects of her life and painting. The water melon picture that we saw in an early room was her last, daubed with Viva la vida. Her painting and clothes (in the bottom picture) brought together the new Mexico with the indigenous culture. We have pictures of a portrait of Frida, her studio with wheelchair in front of the easel and a view to the garden.

 

Walking around Coyoacan we saw suburban streets and while it is not Hampstead does have cafes. What to see? Well, Inca doves, black squirrels and some russet backed robins.

Sid will usually pick out a conveyance of the day. There was a VW shaped like a Golf Mk1 but rear engined. That was winning until we found a classic car workshop where Sid got chatting and Dois took pictures. A lot of their work is on Beetles that were built here until 2003. To our delight we saw a BMW Isetta with a sun roof and drop back rear window in its original paint. On a ramp was a tidy Mercedes 230SL with anachronistic Mexican Hat wheels which our guide told us was for sale at $260,000.  If you have one spare get it to Mexico. Oh, we do.

[While they chatted I climbed over various bits of equipment to see the Isetta close up – D.]

 

Here is a picture from the Metro carriage.  About 5% of the population cannot read so each station has a picture. We went to Coyoacan so looked out for the coyote picture and got off at the right place.

We decided it was time to have a margarita and chose to go to the terrace of the Grand Hotel. This was mostly a ruse so we could go inside and marvel at the Tiffany stained glass dome that covers the open central lightwell around which all the rooms are arranged. Even the lift is elegant.

On the terrace we paid for the view over the square and two margaritas. They were rather large, tasty and had plenty of active ingredient. We finished them but Sid’s finished him.

 

 

 

 

 

Which meant that when he ordered cocopaches for dinner (described as nut sauce, squash blossom, smoked chilli and hola santa)  and we said “what are those black things” and the waitress replied “those ARE the cocopaches, they are beetles”, Sid crunched them down with gusto.