By mid-century Europeans and North Americans were completely in the thrall of Mexico’s ancient cultures. In 1850 the Louvre’s curator Adrien de Longpérier convinced the director of the museum to expand the Louvre’s collections to include the pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas. At his urging the museum purchased and exhibited for the first time a collection of ancient American artifacts.
Eugène Boban owned a manuscript copy of Longpérier’s catalog of the exhibition (Leavitt 1886b: 150). The catalog presented countless sculptures in “basalt, jasper, granite, and jade” as well as numerous “terra cotta figures,” including animal and human depictions. There were necklaces, bracelets, and plaques made from a wide range of materials, such as jade, agate, obsidian, and crystal. Household objects included mirrors, needles, and weights (Longpérier 1850). In the years to come Boban would search for and collect many of these same artifact types.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, scholars in Mexico, Europe, and North America had built a solid foundation of knowledge about Mexico’s precontact cultures. Public and private collections were being formed at an unprecedented rate. Scholarly investigation had opened up to people of all backgrounds and classes, and there was a growing business in the sale of ancient artifacts. The increased demand for such objects engendered a corresponding increase in the manufacture of “ancient” artifacts. The stage was set for a man of Eugène Boban’s diverse interests and talents to succeed in this stimulating and promising New World.
Notes
1. Eighty-one plates, measuring 21–22 in. by 17 in., accompanied by a twenty-six-page catalog in French, are in the British Museum in the Anthropology Library and Research Center (Am2006-Drg128-208-Fra.).
2. Castañeda’s drawings in the Royal and Pontifical University later became part of the collections of the Museo Nacional (Fernández 1988:109). According to Charles Rau, curator of the Department of Antiquities at the Smithsonian Institution, copies of these drawings were purchased by Latour Allard, a French collector, who sold his own pre-Columbian collection to the Louvre. These copies were recopied by Augustine Aglio and published in 1830, some two years earlier than the Barradère edition, by Lord Kingsborough (Rau 1879: 9).
4
MEXICO AT MID-CENTURY
In the spring of 1857, after four years exploring California, Eugène Boban started a new life in Mexico City. His entry into the country is documented by his first visa, which is dated 1 April of that year (AGN, Movimiento Marítima, Vol. 201, Exp. 135, f. 24). The last of these archived letters is dated 22 February 1859. Perhaps regulations for foreign visitors changed in 1860, or the documents for subsequent years were lost as a result of the country’s political turmoil. Whatever the case, we know for certain that Boban lived in Mexico City for more than a decade—until 1869.
Now known simply as Eugenio Boban, he arrived in Mexico City at a time when the newly reformed republic provided boundless opportunity for a young French émigré. The country had struggled to achieve a relatively peaceful business and political climate at mid-century but would continue to cope with the effects of Spain’s long colonization and other nations’ encroachments for decades to come.
By the middle of the nineteenth century the capital was an urban center bustling with more than 200,000 inhabitants—about half the size of Paris at that time (Ciudad de México 1976: 778). The metropolis was surrounded by numerous small towns and villages, all nestled within the magnificent Valley of Mexico, encircled by high mountains and snow-peaked volcanoes.
When the Spanish conquistadors first saw the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, in 1519, the valley was covered by a series of fresh- and saltwater lakes. The streets and walkways were crisscrossed by canals and surrounded by floating gardens. The high plateau sheltered by the mountains provided a near-perfect climate, and the valley brimmed with flowers, wildlife, and possibility.
Much of Mexico City’s natural beauty remained in the 1850s. The Spanish colonial city built atop Tenochtitlan made use of the canals that the Aztecs had constructed for traversing their floating domain, and many of these ancient waterways could still be seen when Boban arrived. So, too, could the stone aqueducts that the conquerors had built to bring fresh water down from the hills of Chapultepec. And, of course, the valley’s majestic volcanoes—Popocatépetl (Smoking Mountain) and Iztaccihuatl (White Woman)—and their related peaks were a constant presence on the horizon.
Along the Calzada de la Viga, now a high-speed motorway, there were then four graceful stands of enormous trees bordering a broad canal, which meandered among the streets of the city. Accounts from the nineteenth century describe afternoon and early evening paseos (processions) of horse-drawn coaches and horseback riders parading along these avenues throughout the seasons, particularly Easter season, which was just about the time of year Boban first entered the city. The Viga Canal connected the center of the city with the outlying chinampas, or floating gardens. At dawn the canals were filled with barges and canoes overflowing with fruit, vegetables, and flowers, a floating Mexican market (Calderón 1970: 167).
Frances Calderón de la Barca, the Scottish wife of a Spanish diplomat who lived in Mexico in the 1840s, ten years before Boban’s arrival, described the principal features of the city and its splendors while looking down from Chapultepec castle.
The whole valley of Mexico lies stretched out as in a map; the city itself, with its innumerable churches and convents; the two great aqueducts which cross the plain; the avenues of elms and poplars which lead to the city; the villages, lakes, and plains, which surround it … the whole landscape, as viewed from this height, is one of nearly unparalleled beauty. (1970: 116)
Figure 4.1 The vegetable market on canoes along the Viga Canal, ca. 1860 (Smithsonian Institution Archives, Nelson-Goldman Collection, RU 7364).
Not only were the ancient waterways still evident at mid-century, so were some of the astounding archeological features of the Aztec past. The description of the capital in 1850 by Alexander Clark Forbes, writing under the name A. Barrister, captures the sense of multilayered history available to visitors.
In the heart of the city is the Grand Square (Plaza Mayor) [or Zócalo], perhaps as large as Lincoln’s Inn Fields. On one side of this stands the Cathedral, on another the Palace. … The Cathedral is a large handsome church, standing upon exactly the same spot as stood the chief temple (Teocalli) of the Astecs [sic] before the conquest. Into one side of it is built an enormous circular stone, about twelve feet in diameter, covered with hieroglyphics, and purported to be a perpetual calendar used by the original occupants of the city. Its ancient name is Kellenda [sic], and it is popularly called Montezuma’s watch. (Barrister 1851: 66)
He is actually describing the Aztec Calendar Stone, which had been mounted on the wall of the sixteenth-century cathedral in the center of the main square after its rediscovery in 1790.
Despite the natural beauty of the capital, the years preceding Boban’s arrival in Mexico in 1857 were anything but serene. The country had been in an