amo a zamora

Tour books tend to jump right over Zamora.

My favorite, Eyewitness Travel Mexico, omits any mention of the place -- or its surroundings.

But if you want to make an agriculture business deal, Zamora is your town. There is no mistaking it for one of those places where people want to stop all change. They may be conservative to keep the pace of change deliberative; but change it will.

Even though it is an old Spanish colonial village (founded in 1574), Zamora is distinctly a modern city supporting both industry and the vast agricultural holdings that surround the place.

We often forget that the Spanish did not come to Mexico solely for gold and souls. They also came for land and the prestige that comes with owning it. And they found it in this corner of Michoacán -- in the Tziróndaro Valley.

The city prospered, adding industry to its portfolio during the presidency of Porfirio Diaz, who is fondly remembered by some here.

And in that there is a tale -- a tale of two cathedrals.

No city should have two cathedrals. A church can only be called a cathedral if it is the see of a bishop. If no bishop sits there, it is just a church.

Zamora was not awarded its first bishop until 1862. The little neo-Classical parochial church on the city square was magically transformed into the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. Built in the 1830s, it was not even a colonial era church, though its construction is pleasant enough.

But it was not sufficient for the ever-increasing bourgeoisie of Zamora. They wanted a cathedral worthy of the city's glory.

In 1898, the cornerstone of a stunning new cathedral was laid. Designed in the neo-Gothic style, it was to be huge. But the church that was to be, wasn't.

In 1910 the Mexican Revolution slowed the construction until it ground to a full stop in 1914. During the following years, it sat unfinished and encountered several ignominies.

One of the interior walls (near the altar) was used to execute Catholics during the Cristero war. The bullet holes are still there to mark what can happen when toleration for other beliefs dissipates.

President Plutarco Elías Calles believed he could wrest Catholicism from the minds of the people if he destroyed the church hierarchy by deporting foreign priests and forbidding the clergy from wearing clerical robes outside of the sanctuary.

What he got was another civil war, instead. The Cristero war of the late 1920s. The last battles of the Mexican Revolution. Two private American organizations provided funds in the war. The Ku Klux Klan supported President Calles's anti-Catholic crusade; the Knights of Columbus supported the cristeros.

The number of casualties range from 100,000 to 250,000 Mexican soldiers, insurgents, and civilians dead with another 250,000 fleeing to the United States. After one million Mexicans died in the revolution, numbers started being meaningless.

The United States and the Vatican negotiated a settlement with President Calles -- even though the killing persisted for over a decade. After all that, 83% of Mexicans still identify themselves as Catholic.

The cathedral now has a chapel dedicated to the martyrs of that war. A majority of the Mexicans who have been declared saints were priests executed by the government during the Cristero war.

In the years following both wars, the cathedral's stones were stolen for other purposes, and the unfinished cathedral became in turn a horse stable, an army barracks, a corral for livestock, and a warehouse for garbage trucks.

In 1988 the families of Zamora decided to finish the work. The original blueprints had been burned by the Revolution (maintaining an ancient tradition of conquerors). So, the planners decided to generally copy the facade of the cathedral at Milan.

This is the result.

In my opinion, it was worth the stop in Zamora and the nice walk to get there from our hotel.

We were fortunate enough to see a rather opulent wedding just beginning as we arrived. With those designer gowns, they could have been posing for one of Velázquez's court paintings.

Velázquez would have been just as pleased to paint this pair of flower girls. Probably working them into "Las Meninas."

Both cathedrals tell the tale of this city that is rich in its lands. The only portion of the tale I cannot tell you is what happened to that land following the revolution. And I am sorry I do not know because it has a bearing on the land use dispute between the farmers and tata José, and may have been a factor in the shooting of the two young Purépecha men.

Tata José is concerned that the traditional crops and rotation system of the Purépecha is being squeezed out by the monoculture of berry cultivation and its microclimate-changing plastic greenhouses, even though berries have long been the major cash crop of the Tziróndaro Valley.

The missing piece here is what happened to the land after the revolution. In some areas of Mexico, large landholdings were broken up in favor of creating communal ejidos as part of the land reform system. But not all large landholdings were broken up. Some were simply taken by revolution leaders. Others were left untouched.

In the current dispute, I have no idea who the farmers are who are filling the valley with the plastic-covered fields. Nor do I know who owns the land (other than what applies to every inch of land -- by the Constitution of 1917, it, in theory, belongs to the state).

It is very possible that we were witnesses to another chapter of Mexico's ongoing dispute over who is a Mexican and to whom does any given piece of land belong.

This is a country whose history lies heavily upon its daily existence.

And not everyone can say they have shared a bit of that historical experience -- with all of its glory and warts.