Middle American Research November 4, 2021
From the Franciscan friars of yore to the Middle American researchers of late, the story of the people is told by others.
The Dane Frans Blom first came to Mexico in 1919, the year of the Spanish Flu, the 400th year of the Conquest. What was to become his official portrait was a photograph taken in 1922, in which he is dressed in Livingstonian field khakis, holding a map and compass, posing beneath a jungle canopy. Although the phony studio scene is exposed by obvious interior lighting and a linen sheet covering the ground, those dark steely eyes nevertheless project resolve and ambition, much like those of his contemporary heroes—Lawrence, Shackleton, and Roald Amundsen, who disappeared in the Arctic after planting a Norwegian flag on the North Pole. These were the conquistadors of the early 20th-century—undaunted, intrepid, cunning, vain, dignified, and financed by foreigners—their extravagant portraits paint the picture. Conrad’s Kurtz would have started the same way, just trading the Congo for the Lacandón rainforest.
With a solid geographic education and restless spirit, Frans Blom followed in the footsteps of TE Lawrence after the Great War and turned himself into a cartographer for hire. And like many other industrious adventurers in the 1920’s, he went into the American oil business, mapping terrain, ruminating on what might be hidden beneath the surface. In Veracruz and Tabasco, he surveyed antiquities of the Olmec, while in Chiapas and Guatemala he came to know the Maya.
He married and divorced an American in the 1930’s. His drinking may have caused him to leave Tulane University, indeed the United States altogether, but it may have been the war as well. Whatever the cause, the divorce was final. Franz would never go back. In 1943, living in Mexico City, he met Gertrude Duby, a Swiss documentary photographer. They shared an interest in the Lacandón Maya, and after the war they married and moved to Chiapas, a happy couple working together in the Campo, employing a large staff, contributing to the community, extracting a modicum of fame, fortune, respect.
He certainly did not suffer the fate of Diego Mazariegos, the Conquistador of Chiapas, who was discarded and forgotten after just a few years. Pancho Bolom, as Blom affectionately came to be called, enjoyed a rich life in San Cristobal, all the way up to his death in 1963. By then, Gertrude Duby Blom had fashioned the old seminary into a fundraising retreat, raising awareness about the plight of the Selva Lacandón, where the jungle Maya cling to survival.
It is rather depressing to find that the most famous person to visit Casa Na Bolom, according to its own factsheet, is Henry Kissinger, but perhaps this is appropriate. At the academy, Frans Blom called his work Middle American Research, but there is a whiff of Conquest to it. This was still the age of the Great White Explorer, and, one hundred years later, its imperial residue still persists in Mexico. As one local source said, through a translator:
“It’s as if we need the outsiders to validate our own worth. If you say a linguist from Poland is coming to Mexico City to lecture us on Nahuatl languages, we say, of course, we will go listen. Why? Would you want to hear some European come to lecture you about your country? I don’t think so. I don’t think you care what the Europeans thinks about you. But we do. We are almost grateful when someone like Frans Blom comes to our country and tells us who we are, how valuable we are.”