Mexico's old 'cantinas' attempt to survive new trends

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 03:12:00 GMT
Author : DPA

Mexico City - Many of the best-known Mexican songs written by Jose Alfredo Jimenez or Alvaro Carrillo and sung by Chavela Vargas were born after hours drinking tequila at the bar of a "cantina."For over 100 years, the cantinas of Mexico City's historic centre have witnessed key moments in art, history, music and politics, but these age-old businesses are now fighting for survival.

Competition from more modern bars and nightclubs, along with a lack of funds or habit among the young, threaten to turn cantinas into a "lost recreational and alcoholic asset," Armando Ruiz - a historian of the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH) - told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

According to the poet Salvador Novo, cantinas - classic sites for drink and conversation - arrived in Mexico under the influence of the 19th century French and US interventions.

During that period, there were wine shops with a creole and Spanish clientele and pulque shops for indigenous people and the lower classes of society.

The cantinas' heyday came under president Porfirio Diaz (1876- 1911), when only men from the higher classes were allowed access. For decades now, they have been part of everyday life for residents of Mexico City.

Important creations sprung up among drinks in such places.

"The academic and popular worlds are manifestations of cantinas," said Ruiz, who leads cultural tours of cantinas, cabarets and pulque shops for the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

However, many cantinas have disappeared in the last two decades, and Bohemian living started to decline as crime rose from 1990.

In the bygone La Rambla, Ramon Lopez Velarde wrote his poem Suave patria, while Renato Leduc penned several texts at some table in La Puerta del Sol, which still exists.

Armando Jimenez jotted down scores of "albures" - puns with sexual connotations - written in the toilets (including the ladies) to create his famous book Picardia Mexicana, Ruiz said.

Located between the Metropolitan Cathedral and the Templo Mayor, El Nivel is the oldest cantina in Mexico - it obtained a licence to operate number one in 1855.

Its recent closure over legal issues ended a history of 153 years with a long list of customers like former president Benito Juarez, composer Agustin Lara, artists Diego Rivera and Jose Guadalupe Posadas and revolutionaries Fidel Castro and Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

According to Ruiz, Cuban communist and student leader Julio Antonio Mella "took his last tequila in La India" just before being killed on January 10, 1929, while his companion - Italian photographer Tina Modotti - went to the post office.

Many cantinas have become museums. They show photos and antique objects, coins and bank notes, furniture and window panes of different times.

In the cantina La Potosina, founded in 1890, the only reminder of a long history is a 1900 heater, said manager Roberto Solorzano.

Small and hidden close to Plaza de Santo Domingo, this cantina hosted Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata and has been the set for "telenovelas," as Mexican soap operas are known. Its oldest client is Don Armando, 78, who has been going there for nearly four decades "as a family tradition."

Until 1982, when women were allowed in, "the cantina revolved around machismo," writer Carlos Monsivais said in an essay in the magazine Diario de campo. The author described them as "variable sanctuaries in which pathetic, comic, tragic, melodramatic situations are frequent."

"All kinds of people meet there, and we find new customers, such as transvestites," Monsivais said.

In popular folklore, they have been catalogued as places of vice, frequented by the lower classes, but this is not the only myth around cantinas.

La Opera is famous for the mark which - legend has it - Mexican revolutionary leader Pancho Villa left on its ceiling, after storming in, drunk on his horse and shooting left, right and centre.

However, manager Zoraida Escudero, gives a different version of the story.

"They say he went in for a drink and was sitting down. At the next table, some people started to fight, so he fired just one shot in the air to ensure order," she said.

The place is considered a cantina, but not everyone agrees.

"La Opera is the most traditional restaurant-bar in Mexico City," noted Escudero.

She said the bar was founded in 1863 as a cafe that sold cakes in a nearby building.

These places have been the scenes of many films and music videos since the first one featured in Memorias de un Mexicano (1950).

And although there are ever fewer of them, they are an important part of Mexico's social, cultural and historic environment. In the famous words of Jose Alfredo Jimenez, "Who does not arrive in the cantina demanding his tequila and demanding a song?"

The Earth Times