Oenophiles might be surprised to learn that the oldest winery anywhere in the Americas is Casa Madero, formally established as long ago as 1597, located in Parras de la Fuente, a small town in the northern state of Coahuila.
“In 1549 the Spanish priests and soldiers who explored this region discovered native vines growing wild in a valley and chose the spot to found the Mission of Santa María de Las Parras (“Holy Mary of the Vines”),”writes Tony Burton, the editor of MexConnect, Mexico’s top English-language online magazine, in his book Mexico Kaleidoscope: Myths, Mysteries and Mystique. “The early Mission of Santa María soon began to make wine from the local grapes, and a few years later the wines and brandies of the Valley of Parras were being shipped to the rest of the Americas.”
But Mexico’s sophisticated approach to agriculture goes even further back than that.
“The Mexica/Aztecs solved the dilemma of how to supply food to their island capital by developing a sophisticated wetland farming system involving raised beds, or chinampas, built in the lake,” writes Burton about when the city of Tenochtitlan was built, fortress-like, on an island. Though good for defense, it made providing a food source more difficult but there was a solution to that. “Originally these chinampas were free-floating, but over time they became rooted to the lake floor. The chinampas were separated by narrow canals, barely wide enough for small boats or canoes. From an ecological perspective, chinampas represented an extraordinary achievement: a food production system which proved to be one of the most environmentally sustainable and high-yielding farming systems anywhere on the planet! Constructing and maintaining chinampas required a significant input of labor, but the yields per unit area could be very high indeed, especially since up to four harvests a year were possible.”
Burton covers 10,000 years of Mexican culture and history. It’s a compilation of “Did You Know?” columns for MexConnect, which ranks in the top 3% of all Internet sites in the world, registering over half a million sessions a year.
It was his way of presenting and preserving relatively little-known but fascinating information about Mexico to a large number of readers.
“One of my main motivations was that—to the best of my knowledge—no similar book for the general reader had been published in the past forty years,” says Burton. “An incredible amount of interesting academic research had been done on Mexico over that time, leading to reevaluations and reinterpretations of many former ideas and beliefs. I wanted to make readers aware of some of these extraordinary developments, which continually refuel my passionate interest in Mexico.”
This very readable and fascinating book can be read cover to cover, says Burton, noting that it is also designed to allow readers to ‘dip into’ and read in whatever order appeals to them.
“When writing the book, I was trying to engage readers by expanding on, or challenging, some commonly held or overly simplistic ideas, in the hope of offering some ‘food for thought’ about many things Mexican,” he says.“Each chapter has a list of sources and suggestions for those readers who want to explore more.”
The title Mexican Kaleidoscope is a nod to Norman Pelham Wright, a British writer whose own collection of essays, with the same title, was published in 1948.
“That book was an eye-opener for me when I first began to get intimately acquainted with Mexico more than forty years ago,” says Burton. “The subtitle Myths, Mysteries and Mystique came from a suggestion by one of my regular golfing partners—who had read an early draft of the book—as we played the 11th hole at Cottonwood Golf Course on Vancouver Island.”
The book is illustrated by Mexican artist Enrique Velázquez, a long-time friend of Burton’s.
“Enrique has a keen interest in the subject matter and an uncanny ability to portray ideas in just a few lines,” says Burton. “I originally envisioned using small, inline drawings to break up the text, much in the manner of old-time illustrators, but his final drawings were far too good for that, so we changed track and gave them the prominence and space they merit.”
“Every chapter has come to mean far more to me than is expressed by mere words on a page,” says Burton about the 30 chapters. “I really hope some of my enthusiasm comes through to readers. At the very least I’d like the book to cause readers to stop and think, to be occasionally surprised, and perhaps question things that they may have previously thought or heard about Mexico. As I’ve written elsewhere, Mexico is not always an easy country to understand but any effort to do so always seems to bring rich reward!”
About the Author
Burton, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society who was born and educated in the United Kingdom, first visited Mexico in 1977. Returning, he lived for almost two decades in the country where he worked as a writer, educator, and ecotourism specialist. An award-winning author, his other books include If Walls Could Talk: Chapala’s Historic Buildings and Their Former Occupants; Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village; Western Mexico: A Traveler’s Treasury; and Lake Chapala Through The Ages: An Anthology of Travelers’ Tales.
Mexico Kaleidoscope can be found in print and on Kindle through Amazon.
Shelf Life 