entrepreneur born in 1810 Phineas Taylor Barnum, the prince of humbug who, in 1841, bought the Scudder's Museum, located on the corner Broadway and Ann Street in New York City, to become the American Museum. With the help of actor Charles Straton, less than one meter tall, better known as General Tom Thumb, and the Swiss soprano Jenny Lind, the museum was, quickly, an unexpected success and became the center's most famous entertainment the City. Burned in a couple of occasions, in 1865 and 1868, was visited in 1866 by Harriet and Ernestina Larráinzar Mexican who, in the same year, began a trip to Europe and, unaware of where we come, visiting New York, no as a destination, but as a transit. Twin sisters, Henrietta and Ernest were born in 1854. Daughters of lawyer Manuel Chiapas Larrainzar, begin their journey on February 2, 1866 and arrive at the Imperial City on 8 March. There
literary journeys, imaginary and impossible voyages of discovery and conquest, travel to knowledge, religious travel, travel required, forced, in supreme command, and I, after the story of the sisters Larrainzar, add a new category: Travel unconscious , by surprise, unexpected, travel "no go, I have" travel can not be planned in any way, as must be the last trip, the Death, which leads us to Heaven or Hell.
The father of these travelers unconscious but not lack of curiosity and culture, Manuel Larrainzar (1809-1884), also a lawyer, was a writer and diplomat. In 1834 he was judge of the Superior Court of the State of Chiapas, the state also was a member of Congress in 1842 and senator in 1845. Minister of Justice in 1860 and Miramón Attorney General's Office served the Empire as a member of the Board of Notables. As a diplomat, was U.S. envoy extraordinary and Rome, is in one of these trips, which involves their daughters that girls have no way of deciding routes or destinations.
The text that follows is the testimony, written 14 years later, the facts that Larrainzar lived in New York. Introducing this year, we have omitted parties where stories are told to travel outside, for example, the story of Martha, girl he met aboard the ship that first time travelers and whose drama is interspersed with pictures that seem taken from a guide Desk.
The Larrainzar seem unaware of the dark side of the city. Absorbed in the upper-class luxury and consumption that this practice, in the majesty of the buildings that do not give peace to his astonishment and conversation to which, often, are invited, omitted details of his travels and only in Washington Market description Baxter Mulberry or remember the lives of other women who, unlike them, work and provide resources to their homes or even are the mainstay: "you see women of lower classes, with baskets of fish in the head."
In 2003, a century and several decades after Larrainzar family travel, appear in another vision of Mexican literature in New York. This time will be a fictitious woman, created by a man who enters into hotels and luxury shops and shows us that the city has the pace of Hell:
literary journeys, imaginary and impossible voyages of discovery and conquest, travel to knowledge, religious travel, travel required, forced, in supreme command, and I, after the story of the sisters Larrainzar, add a new category: Travel unconscious , by surprise, unexpected, travel "no go, I have" travel can not be planned in any way, as must be the last trip, the Death, which leads us to Heaven or Hell.
The father of these travelers unconscious but not lack of curiosity and culture, Manuel Larrainzar (1809-1884), also a lawyer, was a writer and diplomat. In 1834 he was judge of the Superior Court of the State of Chiapas, the state also was a member of Congress in 1842 and senator in 1845. Minister of Justice in 1860 and Miramón Attorney General's Office served the Empire as a member of the Board of Notables. As a diplomat, was U.S. envoy extraordinary and Rome, is in one of these trips, which involves their daughters that girls have no way of deciding routes or destinations.
The text that follows is the testimony, written 14 years later, the facts that Larrainzar lived in New York. Introducing this year, we have omitted parties where stories are told to travel outside, for example, the story of Martha, girl he met aboard the ship that first time travelers and whose drama is interspersed with pictures that seem taken from a guide Desk.
The Larrainzar seem unaware of the dark side of the city. Absorbed in the upper-class luxury and consumption that this practice, in the majesty of the buildings that do not give peace to his astonishment and conversation to which, often, are invited, omitted details of his travels and only in Washington Market description Baxter Mulberry or remember the lives of other women who, unlike them, work and provide resources to their homes or even are the mainstay: "you see women of lower classes, with baskets of fish in the head."
In 2003, a century and several decades after Larrainzar family travel, appear in another vision of Mexican literature in New York. This time will be a fictitious woman, created by a man who enters into hotels and luxury shops and shows us that the city has the pace of Hell:
New York is like me being in a hurry. To be what? Whatever you want. Or what you do not want, but there will be no middle ground. You can live away from the street and find out and be as miserable you decide, but salt and you will see New York pull you. Come here, bitch. And you say: I do not, you're wrong, how can you believe. But New York always get to your price. What fails to pay the purchase Broadway and Fifth, and Park, with the seventh, with Bowery. What poison looking for? New York will give it away.
are the words of Xavier Velasco in the voice of Violetta, the protagonist of the novel Diablo Guardian.
The Larrainzar, as Violetta, eager to reveal all the mysteries in town will feel it. Eager to go all the streets, walking the same for Broadway that Baxter Mulberry, spend the luxury of Fifth Avenue to the streets where they are "workers without work, idle thieves, drunks of both sexes lead to poor stumbling rooms warmly embracing their bottles desarrajadas creatures and aged prematurely perhaps due to lack of air and food. "
is very likely that, during his visit to the Barnum Museum, the sisters Larrainzar met with several of the phenomena that the employer used to display and that made him famous: the boy dog, a sort of wolf-man, the man with the face lion, the giant of Texas, the missing link that proves the theory of Darwinian evolution-a child with congenital deformities, "the human caterpillar, a man without limbs, and perhaps the most famous of his creatures, the Fiji mermaid-dried trunk of a spider monkey grafted onto the tail of a shark, known today as Barnum mermaid.
Larrainzar The picture that we face in New York in the nineteenth century is not very different from what is presented in the XXI century: "At first I was so scared that I was seeing just the bare ground. Cigarette butts, shoes, bare old and crumpled papers. But I kept hearing the screaming and black merolicos and I went to the sides: coke-and-smoke, coke-and-smoke. As if everyone agreed on terror. " Human phenomena or "normal" set in a circus or on the street, all show human misery surrounded by luxury and glamor in the Big Apple.
But what is most frightening, perhaps, to Larrainzar is religious diversity in New York. Virtuous women, raised in strict Catholic, can not conceive of living of so many different faiths: "Oh! Why nuisance caused us to remain in these temples! Many thoughts assaulted at that moment our mind, and pitied the poor people, lost and walking in the darkness of perpetual night, depriving them of enjoying the beautiful light of the orb of day. "
On his return to Mexico, and Enriqueta Ernestina, to cleanse their minds of all sins facie case Religious Institute Daughters of Calvary and write serious hours of life. Written Reflections (1879), mysteries novels Heart (1881) and The Sound of Music (1883), and the story travels to various parts of Europe (1880-1885).
indelible impressions are those worn by women visiting New York, a city that knows no gender, real or fictitious, men or women, all treated equally regardless of the time. White marble skyscraper, dealers, prostitutes and society ladies, sirens, New York to exhibit their chimeras, who see them, atone for their sins.
The sisters returned from their trip with a new worldview and the desire to write what they lived, what Which leads me to think of a new classification: return trips to Hell with all the sins forgiven, we travel shoring trips to realize that we have not died, as they are, or should be, in the end, all journeys.
* Introductory text to "Travel to various parts of Europe," Harriet and Larráinzar Ernestina, in Republicans Another Empire. Mexiana travelers to New York (1830-1895) , Mexico, DF, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 2009, Back and vuelata the nineteenth century.
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