Hermann Bellinghausen: The leader and the chewing gum

OR

cannot be asked Why Antonio López de Santa Anna doesn't have a statue in the United States? A recurring president (six times between 1833 and 1847) and ultimately a dictator, between the wars he lost and La Mesilla, which he sold to the Americans, he endowed his northern neighbor with a good part of his current immense territory. If that weren't enough, and being one of the favorite villains in national history (accused of being a traitor, coward, and corrupt), the French, and by extension the West, can thank him for the delicious opportunity to chew gum, both regular and pump.

History is often misrepresented. The prevailing colonialist version is that chewing gum was invented by Mr. Adams of the popular Chiclets around 1870. This is yet another cultural theft by imperialism. Just as America was discovered , we owe chewing gum to a certain Thomas Adams, his son Horatio, and their future partner William Wrigley Jr. In short, mainstream capitalism.

As is often the case, chicle wasn't invented by anyone. Just as no one discovered that sensational fruit called chicozapote, from whose tree the gum used for real chicle, it was consumed throughout tropical Mesoamerica and Central America at least since the Classic Maya period. It spread to central Mexico, where it was sold at the Aztec market in Tlatelolco. Needless to say, the custom of chewing gum continued throughout New Spain and the independent Republic.

It wasn't the only area of ​​the continent where natives chewed latex or vegetable gums. In the Amazon, New France, and New England, Aboriginal people and settlers chewed vegetable paraffins. But none was as versatile and flavorful as sapodilla, which the New Spaniards brought to the Philippines, and from there spread to Indonesia, India, and Southeast Asia.

Now in season and reasonably priced, chicozapote (from the Nahuatl tzitcli, or gum, and tzápotl, or sapote) is the succulent fruit of a tree from whose sap gum is obtained, and its burned wood provides a pleasant incense. Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero, in his Ancient History of Mexico (1781), explains that from the green chicozapotl (in Mexican) fruit, a glutinous, easily condensed milk is extracted, which the Mexicans call chictli and the Spanish chicle. This milk is chewed by women as a craving and is used for some curious statues in Colima . Chicle figurines are still a souvenir for visitors to Talpa, Jalisco, the failed destination of Rulfo's short story of the same name and Alfredo B. Crevenna's CinemaScope film (1956).

A good, ripe, juicy sapodilla, with its flesh reddened, is among the finest fruits in the world. Chicle, on the other hand, was compared in North America to rubber, that product that gained prominence with the growing need for tires in the late 19th century and that would turn the psychopathic King Leopold II of Belgium into two things: a multimillionaire and a genocidaire, but in the Congo, which he made his private property to torture and decimate its people, enslaved by rubber extraction. For that, it's better to read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness or WB Sebald's The Rings of Saturn.

According to the quirky glossary The Generosity of Indigenous Peoples: Gifts from America to the World (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2003), by French-Canadian researchers Louise Côté, Louis Tardivel, and Denis Vaugeois, whose information is used in this commentary, in 1860, the extravagant and unpredictable General Antonio López de Santa Anna found refuge in New York after being expelled from Mexico by the leaders of the Reforma. He had 250 kilos of chicle in his luggage, which he planned to sell as a rubber substitute in order to earn a little money .

There he met Mr. Adams, hired him as his secretary, and put him in charge of selling the material, with poor results. When his boss returned to Mexico with amnesty (though not for long), Adams kept the package ( hanging , as Canadian historians joke). He insisted on promoting it for tires, but it came across as cheap. Then he remembered that his employer and partner was constantly chewing that gum to calm himself or pass the time. By 1870, when Adams sold it as chewable paraffin with great success, Santa Anna was officially a traitor to the Fatherland in Mexico. With the profits, the following year Adams imported more chicle, cut it into pinky-sized strips, and sweetened it. People were enthusiastic, even more so when Horatio Adams added flavorings. On June 21, 1876, Santa Anna died, poor and forgotten, in Mexico City. In 1885, Horatio launched the most peaceful bomb in history, that pink bubble that adorns our mouths if we blow into it just a little and that brought World War I to Europe.

Chewing gum became an American cultural trait, and as such, it resonated with us. Classic. They came to sell us our own gum, it stuck, and as the bigwig leader might have said, there's no gum at all.