Speaking of History

Where I live in Mexico is one of the "colonial silver cities" which means one of the cities in Central Mexico that were established by the Spanish in order to mine the extensive silver deposits. By the way, the sending of enormous amounts of gold and silver from South and Central America during the 16th and 17th centuries was one of the main factors that destroyed the Spanish economy and led to its impoverishment right up until, well, a couple of decades ago. Beware easily gotten wealth.

The small city where I live was not a major site during the Spanish colonial times and it was very much neglected after the Mexican War of Independence of 1810 and nearly abandoned after the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Since the 1950s it has seen a rebirth and is now a city of around one hundred thousand and home to around ten thousand American and Canadian expatriates. But the historic center is preserved by law and one still sees historic echoes like this:

That ceramic plaque, which likely dates from the first half of the 19th century, states that this building was one of the sites of the Inquisition when this was part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, an enormous entity stretching from northern South America through Central America to California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Florida and even parts of Wyoming. The buildings in the historic Centro are from two to four hundred years old. My office, which is about twenty yards from that plaque about the Inquisition, is around three hundred years old. We still have nuns and even a nunnery and I saw a procession of Franciscan monks a while back. But don't think we are backward--the whole town was recently connected with fiber optic cable.

Living here it is difficult to be unaware of history. Here is some Baroque guitar music from a 1772 manuscript from New Spain. In 1772 in Europe, of course, Haydn had already been composing in the Classical Style for quite a while.