Señorita Ruth

Señorita Ruth on: Benito Juárez

Tales from the Old Country

Every Mon­day I will regale you with sto­ries from the old coun­try, my beloved Mex­ico. This weekly effort was moti­vated by my reflec­tions on the his­tor­i­cal fig­ures I learned about in my short time in the Mex­i­can edu­ca­tional sys­tem. Since com­ing to the U.S. I’ve become iso­lated with many parts of my own his­tory and back­ground, and I hope to reestab­lish some con­nec­tion for myself and oth­ers who may also feel there are cer­tain aspects of their self-identity that are murky or miss­ing. For the rest of you, this is a les­son in inter­na­tional his­tory and context.

O~o~O

Ben­ito Juárez: Zapotec lawyer and Pres­i­dent of Mex­ico, 1858 –1872

I imag­ine that the name Juárez con­jures up amongst my south­west­ern broth­ers and sis­ters assorted sor­did tales of a bor­der city where all your car­nal desires (and some not so desired) can come true. Tales of lost week­ends and lost free­dom in Mex­i­can jails have come my way since I was in high school. Not that I’m think­ing of any set in par­tic­u­lar *ahem NMSU*, but en masse migra­tions south of the bor­der to Ciu­dad Juárez dur­ing week­ends and breaks are not uncom­mon, and also not rec­om­mended, but we’ll save that for a future Col­lege Sur­vival in the South­west 101 entry. I myself have spent time in and trav­el­ing through Juárez. Every trip to the U.S. when I was a lit­tle girl required haz­ard­ing the crazy traf­fic, and I went to sum­mer camp at Vino Nuevo Church when I was fif­teen. My fam­ily has long-standing rela­tion­ship ties there, and its sig­nif­i­cance as a land­mark on the bor­der is long-established.

Yet, this ini­tial link between name and city has hid­den in its folds one of the gems of Mex­i­can his­tory. Indeed, Cd. Juárez, along with dozens of other cities through­out Mex­ico, is named after one of the country’s most hon­ored lead­ers, Ben­ito Juárez. He was a states­man and a pres­i­dent, famous for his staunch defense of human rights and his per­se­ver­ance in the face of many adver­saries and ide­o­log­i­cal oppo­nents.

Ben­ito Juárez rose from indige­nous poverty to the zenith of the Mex­i­can polit­i­cal sys­tem in his life. A Zapotec orphaned by age three, he struck out from his home in the vil­lage of San Pablo Gue­latao in the state of Oax­aca at age 12 to ful­fill what at the time was a vague yearn­ing for greater learner and what later would become a legacy. Involved in a polit­i­cal sys­tem that expe­ri­enced a tumul­tuous 19th cen­tury, his career stretched from defend­ing land­hold­ing rights for indige­nous peo­ples as a lawyer at the local and state lev­els begin­ning in 1834 to fed­eral judge posi­tion (1842), gov­er­nor of Oax­aca (1846–1852) and even­tu­ally as the leader of the Mex­i­can nation from 1858 to 1872, the year he died.

While in each of these posi­tions he cham­pi­oned and was the voice for the peo­ple in rural areas. He was respon­si­ble for strip­ping the Catholic Church of its exten­sive land hold­ings, build­ing roads and cre­at­ing schools. He worked in offi­cial capac­i­ties under both Con­ser­v­a­tive and Lib­eral admin­is­tra­tions, turned down posi­tions offered to him as Mex­ico faced the threat of becom­ing part of the French Empire between 1864 and 1867 (more about this on the Cinco de Mayo edi­tion of Tales from the Old Coun­try), and expelled an emis­sary sent by the Con­fed­er­acy in 1861, since sup­port­ing an entity that kept almost half of its pop­u­la­tion in bondage directly con­tra­dicted his phi­los­o­phy and work. He estab­lished reforms and a con­sti­tu­tion that guar­an­teed rights of free speech and press, among oth­ers.

Like any per­son, much less a national leader, his ide­o­log­i­cal stance was com­pli­cated and has since been heav­ily scru­ti­nized. Some his­to­ri­ans con­demn him of abus­ing exec­u­tive power by remain­ing pres­i­dent for nearly twenty years. How­ever, his ded­i­ca­tion can be under­stood as a reac­tion to the many lead­ers, includ­ing Por­firio Díaz and Anto­nio López de Santa Anna, whose ideas of Mex­ico were less demo­c­ra­tic and more dic­ta­to­r­ial. He has been rec­og­nized across the Amer­i­cas and across the world as a cham­pion for causes that res­onate across ethic and national bound­aries. His rela­tion­ship with the U.S. was multi-faceted, as he spent time in New Orleans as an exile under Santa Anna’s rule.

Over­all, he was a man of intel­li­gence and fore­sight, with staunch beliefs by which he stood and acted. It is impos­si­ble to unravel him from the mod­ern incar­na­tion of Mex­ico, which owes him many advance­ments and land­mark turns for the bet­ter. An exam­ple of the deter­mined human spirit, he per­se­vered and returned to his bat­tles, even where oth­ers might have called it quits. A legacy deserv­ing of the honor to have streets and cities named after him. Some which might do well to look to his life for inspi­ra­tion and direc­tion.

Ref­er­ences and fur­ther read­ing:
http://www.elbalero.gob.mx/kids/history/html/sxix/biojuarez.html
http://www.mexonline.com/benitojuarez.htm
http://www.notablebiographies.com/Jo-Ki/Ju-rez-Benito.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Juarez