By Ines Keane
Some cities were built on gold. Mérida was built, in large part, on rope.
Wikipedia says the city was founded on January 6, 1542, by Francisco de Montejo the Younger, and named after Mérida in Extremadura, Spain. The article adds that the Maya ruins at Ti’ho reminded the founders of the Roman ruins of Augusta Emerita. Today it is the capital of Yucatán state, about 35 kilometers inland from the Gulf of Mexico coast and only 10 meters above sea level. The article gives the city a population of 921,771 in 2020.
The heat, plainly
The same article classes the climate as tropical savanna. The average annual high is 33.5 degrees Celsius, or 92.3 degrees Fahrenheit. Annual rainfall is 996.5 millimeters, about 39 inches, and the rainy season runs from June through October. The sources give no further advice, and we add none.
The plant
Henequen is Agave fourcroydes. Wikipedia describes a rosette of sword-shaped leaves 1.2 to 1.8 meters long, and says the leaves yield a fiber for rope and twine that is of lower quality than sisal. The rope took its commercial name from the port of Sisal, from which it was shipped. The article on Yucatán says henequen became the state’s chief export, gave an isolated region financial autonomy and made many local families very wealthy.
The avenue
Money has to go somewhere, and in Mérida it went into the Paseo de Montejo. The sources give two versions of its start. Wikipedia says the boulevard took shape in January 1888, during the governorship of Guillermo Palomino, who held office from 1886 to 1889, and that it runs for over 6 kilometers. The Yucatán state tourism site, an official promotional page, says the avenue was built in the late nineteenth century by landowners and businesspeople, took 16 years because of an economic crisis and limited political interest, and was funded by the henequen elite. It also says its outline was inspired by the Champs-Élysées in France. Wikipedia says only that the model was the French boulevard.
Both agree on the look: large mansions of French inspiration, built by wealthy Yucatecans in the henequen years. Wikipedia’s article on Mérida says a pair of houses known as Las Casas Gemelas was completed in 1911. The tourism page also describes the Monumento a la Bandera, a sculpture by Rómulo Rozo that depicts Mexican history from the founding of Tenochtitlán to the middle of the twentieth century.
How much fiber?
The tourism page, citing a 1988 study, gives about 113,250 tons of fiber a year in the early twentieth century and more than 200,000 tons in 1916. It says most exports went to the United States, often from Sisal to New Orleans. We repeat the figures as the page gives them and have not found a second source for either.
Street lights before the capital
Wikipedia’s article on Yucatán says the city’s wealth paid for street lights and a tram system before Mexico City had them. It also says the early twentieth-century city was “said to” have had the largest number of millionaires per capita in the world. We keep the quotation marks, because the article does.
How many haciendas?
Here the sources part, and we show them side by side. The Yucatán article says over 150 haciendas were spread across the peninsula, and that hundreds of prosperous haciendas existed until after the Second World War. A travel blog says “close to a thousand” operated across the state during the boom, and that nearly all are now in ruins. The blog adds that Sotuta de Peón is the only hacienda in the Mérida area that still produces henequen. The numbers cannot all be right, or they count different things, and neither source gives a date or a definition.
The cathedral
Wikipedia dates the cathedral to 1598, and says its walls contain stones from the ruins of Ti’ho. The same page calls it both “the first cathedral in continental North América” and “the oldest cathedral in the mainland Americas.” The two phrases are not identical, and we leave them as written.
The fall of the fiber
Wikipedia’s Yucatán article attributes the gradual loss of the state’s monopoly to synthetic products after the Second World War, to henequen grown elsewhere, and to what it calls self-serving actions by some leading growing families. It gives no end date.
Dates in order
- January 6, 1542: founding, according to Wikipedia.
- 1598: the cathedral, according to Wikipedia.
- 1783: José María Lanz studies henequen in Yucatán, according to Wikipedia’s henequen article.
- 1880s: henequen becomes the main agricultural export, according to the Yucatán tourism page.
- January 1888: the Paseo de Montejo takes shape, according to Wikipedia.
- 1911: Las Casas Gemelas completed, according to Wikipedia.
- 1916: more than 200,000 tons of fiber, according to the tourism page.
Side by side
The two accounts of the avenue agree on the cause and differ on the clock. One gives a month and a governor. The other gives a length of construction, and the page that gives it also says only that the first stone was laid “more than 133 years ago.” Our reading: the sources are describing the same project from two ends, but neither says so.
What kind of sources these are
Wikipedia articles on the city, the avenue, Yucatán and henequen; the Yucatán state government’s tourism page, which is promotional; and one personal travel blog. No museum or archive page was read.
What we left out
We left out prices, hours and tour details. We left out labor conditions on the haciendas, because none of our sources treated them with enough care to repeat. We left out a recorded 1905 contract migration to the haciendas for the same reason. We name no workshop and no maker.
Roam first. Shop later.