Battle of Camarón in 1863

In Mexico, Foreign Regiment legionnaires were to support the French troops besieging the city of Puebla. Their main task was to guard French supply convoys moving on Royal Road, an old important road connecting Veracruz (an eastern port city occupied by the French) and Puebla. 

The story of the Battle of Camarón on 30 April 1863, when Captain Danjou lost his life, has become the stuff of legionnaire legend. This battle took place in a Mexican village where a contingent of legionnaires held out against a superior Mexican force. Although the legionnaires lost the battle, it demonstrated their staunch resolution and determination.

In the eight-hour battle, a company of 65 men of the French Foreign Legion faced almost 3,000 Mexican infantrymen and cavalrymen. This action is portrayed as a pure example of bravery and determination of fighting to the finish.

Surrounded by 3,000 Mexicans, Danjou and 64 of his men were given the chance to surrender. Danjou, however, knew that if he held up the Mexicans, a vital convoy of supplies would have time to get through to his men. So, there would be no surrender. His legionnaires swore to fight to the death. Barricaded in the hacienda, they cut down wave after wave of Mexican infantry with disciplined fire.

The murderous fire continued, and the legionnaires continued to drop. Their own disciplined fire inflicted heavy losses on the Mexicans, but there seemed to be no end to the attackers.

Down to their last cartridge, the final six legionnaires standing made a bayonet charge.

Three of the six survived (with hideous wounds) and were protected by a merciful Mexican officer impressed by their bravery. Even then these three gave in only when their terms were met: that they kept their empty rifles and could give an honour guard to escort the remains of Captain Danjou.

French troops arrived days later to find the battleground still littered with the bodies of the legionnaires.
Battle of Camarón in 1863

Battle of the Alamo 1836 CE (February 23 – March 6, 1836)

The Alamo was built as a mission, not a fort. So, the Texans had to work hard to build higher and thicker walls, add cannons, and add high fences made of stakes.

The belligerents were the Mexican Republic—under command of Antonio López de Santa Anna—versus the newly declared Republic of Texas—under command of William Barret Travis.

In December 1835 after the Battle of San Antonio, many Texans thought that the centralist threat to Texas had ended.

On Tuesday, February 23, 1836, General Antonio López de Santa Anna arrived in San Antonio that afternoon with the vanguard of his army. Mexican forces quietly occupy San Antonio and begin surrounding the Alamo.

A bloodred banner was raised atop the bell tower of San Fernando Church, signifying that no prisoners would be taken. Colonel William B. Travis ordered a cannon fired in response. Santa Anna was outraged. The Mexican soldiers fired back.

The Texans were unaware that Santa Anna had decided to lead his army into Texas. They believed that he would wait until spring to launch an attack. As a result, the Texas forces remained unorganized and scattered. Their lack of preparation would ultimately cost them at their next encounter with Mexican troops, the Battle of the Alamo.

The siege of the Alamo had begun. Mexican artillery began to bombard the fort. Santa Anna wanted to smash down the walls. It was to last 13 days. All but a few of the 200 defenders of the Alamo are killed in battle. The prisoners are executed. Santa Anna reports 70 of his men killed, while reports claim as many as 400 men killed.
Battle of the Alamo 1836 CE (February 23 – March 6, 1836)

Vintage Mexico

Aguascalientes, pottery market, 1880-97

  

Corridors of the Hotel Diligencias, Puebla, Mexico, 1880-97

 

The market on the plaza, Tampico, Mexico, 1880-97

 

Water cart, Chihuahua, Mexico, 1880-97

 

Women getting water on the street that leads to the 

Guadalupe Church in San Luis Potosi City, Mexico, 1880-97

Olmecs

The Olmec thrived in the Gulf of Mexico coastal lowlands (in the present-day Mexican states of Veracruz and Tabasco) from around 1500 to 400 b.c.e. The Olmec are one of several interrelated but largely independent cultural formations developing in Mesoamerica during roughly the same time period.

Together with the highland and lowland Maya, the Zapotec and Mixtec peoples of the Oaxaca Valley, and various culture groups in the central highlands and Basin of Mexico, the Olmec were among the first and most sophisticated Mesoamerican civilizations.

Linguists classify their language in the Mixe-Zoquean family, remnants of which survive in various pockets in southern Mexico. Olmec is a Nahuatl word (the language of the Aztec), imposed by U.S. archaeologist Matthew W. Stirling in the 1940s, roughly translating as "people of the land of rubber".


By around 1800 b.c.e. the semisedentary peoples occupying the gulf coast region exhibited cultural traits not dissimilar from their neighbors elsewhere in Mesoamerica. During the next few centuries, a kind of cultural critical mass was reached, prompting the Olmec to create one of Mesoamerica’s first and most distinctive state and cultural systems.

With the Gulf of Mexico providing ample maritime resources and a fertile plateau with the Tuxtla Mountains and their raging rivers looming behind it, the region exhibited many of the environmental attributes necessary for the emergence of complex civilization.

By 1500 b.c.e. the Olmec had built an elaborate ceremonial structure at San Lorenzo, within which the ruling groups resided. It is estimated that some 81 million cubic feet of rock, most probably floated on rafts from mountain quarries nearly 50 miles away, provided the structural foundation for the ceremonial platform, which rose 151 feet high and covered nearly 0.5 sq. mile.

Surrounding the ceremonial center were hamlets and villages inhabited by farmers, artisans, and commoners, covering nearly 3 sq. miles. The magnitude of the construction indicates a high degree of control over surplus labor by members of the ruling elite.

For reasons still not understood, San Lorenzo fell and was abandoned around 1200 b.c.e. Archaeologists have interpreted evidence of ritual desecration of the site’s structures and sculptures as originating in internal rebellion, as a kind of religious cleansing.

Around 1150 b.c.e. and some 50 miles to the northeast, the Olmec successors to San Lorenzo began building an even larger and more imposing urban center at La Venta. For the next six centuries, from around 1150 to 500 b.c.e., the city thrived.

At its ceremonial core was a cone-shaped clay mound rising some 101 feet into the air, a large pavilion, and a sunken rectangular plaza, along with lesser structures. The walls and floors of the pavilion and plaza were decorated with pigmented clays and sands, while elaborately stone-chiseled sculptures, including numerous colossal stone heads, were placed strategically throughout.

The ceremonial center was reserved for the ruling elite, while the vast majority of La Venta’s inhabitants resided in surrounding hamlets and villages. The Olmec built similar urban complexes to the northwest of San Lorenzo, at Tres Zapotes; about midway between the two at Laguna de los Cerros; and elsewhere in the gulf coast lowlands.

The economic underpinnings of Olmec civilization rested on a combination of intensive and extensive agriculture, harvesting of diverse maritime resources, and networks of local, regional, and long-distance trade and exchange.

Long-distance trade and exchange relations extended throughout much of Mesoamerica, including the Maya zones to the south and east; into the central highlands; and far to the west and south, into contemporary Oaxaca and Guerrero States.

The Olmec left no written record beyond petroglyphs, carvings, and paintings, leaving the core features of Olmec cultural, religious, and political systems a mystery. Olmec art was highly stylized, technically advanced, and innovatively crafted and carried a host of religious and cosmological meanings. The Olmec are perhaps best known for their massive stone heads, most carved of basalt.

Some have noted that these stone heads exhibit distinctly African characteristics, with their broad, flat noses and large lips, and suggested African influence in the formation of Olmec civilization.

Most scholars discount the African-influence hypothesis, instead interpreting the Olmec as a distinctly Mesoamerican cultural tradition that emerged from wholly indigenous cultural antecedents.

Other artistic objects crafted by the Olmec include huge and elaborately carved stele depicting various mythological and cosmological scenes, masks and mosaics composed of diverse precious stones and minerals, intricately crafted ceramics and vessels, and small and exquisitely carved figurines made of jade, serpentine, greenstone, and other rare minerals.

Many of the latter exhibit what has been called "howling baby" or "were-jaguar" imagery. Olmec art also includes stylized depictions of snakes, toads, eagles, and many other natural creatures and supernatural entities.

By around 350 b.c.e. La Venta and other Olmec centers were, like San Lorenzo nearly nine centuries earlier, destroyed and abandoned. What the Olmec left in their wake was of inestimable influence in shaping the subsequent history of Mesoamerica.

Teotihuacán

Teotihuacán

Located some 25 miles northeast of Mexico City in the Basin of Mexico, the massive ruins of the great city of Teotihuacán have long puzzled and intrigued observers. Despite more than a century of archaeological investigation, many mysteries remain about the people who built, ruled, and lived in this vast urban complex. The city was founded in the first century b.c.e., just northeast of Lake Texcoco, which lay at the basin’s center.

Its builders were most likely the former inhabitants of the ancient ceremonial center of Cuicuilco, at Lake Texcoco’s southwest corner, which was destroyed in the eruption of the volcano Xitle around 50 b.c.e. Construction on Teotihuacán began soon after the abandonment of Cuicuilco. The city flourished for the next 600 years, dominating most of the central highlands, before its partial destruction and abandonment around 650 c.e.

The city’s civic and ceremonial core was built in stages, from its beginnings in the first century b.c.e. to its completion by 300 c.e. Carefully designed in a grid-like pattern, the core was dominated by several towering structures connected by a broad avenue: the massive Pyramid of the Sun; the slightly less imposing Pyramid of the Moon; the Temple of Quetzalcoatl (Plumed, or Feathered, Serpent); and the large open-air Citadel. Scholars offer varying interpretations of its builders’ intentions regarding its orientation, with the Avenue of the Dead at 15.5 degrees west of south.


Some argue that it is aligned with solar equinoxes; others, with the constellation Pleiades; others, with the nearby Cerro Gordo volcano; still others have proposed mathematical relationships between the city’s orientation and the sacred 260-day calendar. All agree that its exacting alignment carried deep meaning for its designers and builders.

Its largest and oldest vertical structure, the massive Pyramid of the Sun, was built over a series of caves (discovered in 1971) whose interior chambers were modified and used extensively during the pyramid’s construction phase (1–150 c.e.).

In Mesoamerican mythology caves were linked to the underworld, the dwelling place of the gods, and the origin of creation, suggesting that the pyramid’s location held profound cosmological significance to its designers.

Estimates of the city’s population range from a low of 80,000, to a high of 200,000. During its first century its population grew rapidly, reaching perhaps 80,000 by 150 c.e., with many thousands of people from the Basin of Mexico migrating to the city.

Growth slowed in subsequent decades, with the city’s population reaching its height probably around 200 c.e. In the 200s and 300s a series of more than 2,000 apartment or residential compounds were built to house the city’s huge population.

The sizes and qualities of these compounds varied considerably, suggesting an intricate system of socioeconomic stratification based on wealth, occupation, status, and lineage. Most scholars agree that persons claiming a common lineage inhabited these compounds.

Different districts or neighborhoods within the city also varied widely. In some areas, specialized craft or artisan workshops predominated. Elsewhere, distinct ethnic enclaves are evident, most notably, a cluster of some dozen compounds evidently inhabited by Oaxacans from Monte Albán.

A "merchant’s neighborhood" has been identified near the city’s eastern perimeter. Throughout much of the city, however, it is difficult to identify specific qualities that defined its spatial demographics. While the remnants of walls can be found in various parts of the city, there is no evidence that the city as a whole was walled. An estimated two-thirds of the city’s inhabitants worked in agriculture, in the fields surrounding city, with the remainder engaged in various types of craft production.

The inhabitants of Teotihuacán employed a system of notational signs but had no system of writing comparable to the Maya during this same period. Scholars have identified no grammatical or phonetic elements in the notational system and thus do not know what languages its inhabitants spoke or what they called themselves.

Some scholars have proposed that its rulers sought to create a secretive, mysterious symbolism; others suggest that the signs’ meanings were probably clear to their creators and those who viewed them. The artistic style at Teotihuacán is repetitive, uniform, and somewhat stiff, in sharp contrast to the great variability of styles and motifs among the Maya city-states.

Religion was practiced in at least two distinct spheres: at the level of the household and village and at the level of the state. Village- and household-level religious practices focused on ancestors and deities linked to specific lineages. There is no evidence that these household- and village-level religious practices were in conflict with the state or that there was any organized or lower-class resistance to the state or ruling groups.

State religion was very distinct from village-level religion, emphasizing especially the cult of the Feathered Serpent, most graphically expressed in the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, with its hundreds of huge sculpted heads gracing its massive walls and stairs.

Other major state deities included what is commonly called Tlaloc, the rain god (though interpretations differ on whether this was indeed Tlaloc), the storm/war god, various death and underworld gods, and what E. Pasztory has termed the Great Goddess.

State religion focused on legitimizing the dominance of ruling groups and providing ideological underpinning for the state and its political, military, and ideological dominion within the Basin of Mexico and beyond. This was a highly stratified and militarized society with both extensive and intensive military capacities.

The city dominated the Basin of Mexico, though probably not much beyond it, and regardless of the extent of its direct rule, it carried enormous ideological prestige throughout Mesoamerica.

Perhaps providing a template for the later Aztec military, Teotihuacán’s armies were divided into military orders associated with particular creatures, such as the eagle and jaguar. Its military forces consisted of both commoners and elites that fought in disciplined groups and were highly effective in their use of dart- and spear-throwers (atlatl) and obsidianstudded clubs.

The city’s impressive military capacities and ideological prestige worked together to facilitate exchange and trade relations with neighboring polities. Trade routes, as far south as Central America and as far north as the present-day U.S. Southwest, linked the city to all of Mesoamerica’s significant polities.

Long-distance trade was especially active in prestige items, such as shells, ceramics, obsidian, mica, hematite, jade, turquoise, and cinnabar. Marketplaces within the city were especially important, some suggesting that the Great Compound was also the city’s central marketplace, with cacao serving as a form of currency.

Ritual human sacrifice was practiced at Teotihuacán, though the practice is depicted in the city’s artwork principally through portrayals of human hearts, some impaled on knives. Skeletons of sacrificial victims have been unearthed in the Pyramid of the Sun, the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, and other buildings.

The decline of the great city was rooted in longterm ecological crises, particularly water shortages, deforestation, and soil degradation, trends exacerbated by a series of invasions or attacks by nomadic or seminomadic peoples from the north. Between 500 and 600 these deleterious ecological processes had become irreversible.

Around 650 much of the city was destroyed by fire, probably by external assailants, and most of its buildings and compounds were abandoned. The core ceremonial area around the temples saw the greatest destruction, suggesting a conscious effort to incapacitate the city’s ritual and ideological power. By 750 the city was completely abandoned.

Some six centuries later, upon their arrival into the Basin of Mexico from the northern deserts, the Aztec would look upon the ruins of Teotihuacán as the dwelling place of the gods. Today Teotihuacán remains one of Mexico’s most popular tourist attractions.