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The birthplace of modern Mexico is a humdrum little town 130 miles north of Mexico City. It was called Dolores until September 15, 1810, when a local priest, Miguel Hidalgo y Costillo, performed the famous grito - or cry - of "¡Independencia!". It has been Dolores Hidalgo, the "Cradle of Independence", ever since. Even today, a mansion is kept permanently empty, solely to accommodate the president when he arrives on the night of September 14 to re-enact the grito.
My visit coincided with the run-up to this fiesta, so Dolores Hidalgo was awash with red, white and green bunting. At the church I stopped to chat to Don Lupe, a wizened octogenarian who was ringing the bell that Hidalgo had used to summon the people to revolt. After his session, Don Lupe told me he had been rehearsing for the main gig - and that although he did it every year, he was still excited about the celebrations.
As we talked, another man introduced himself as "Don Federico Acatorre Martínez, son-in-law of the famous singer-songwriter José Alfredo Jiménez". I thought at first he was touting for business as a guide, but he just wanted to show me round his town out of pride and a liking for company. After we had glanced inside the church and had an icecream on the plaza - Dolores is famous for its ices, which are made from tropical fruit, vegetables and even sea food - he took me to the Museo Casa de Hidalgo. "This," he said, pointing, "is the bill of rights signed by all the revolutionaries on that fateful day. This is Hidalgo's pen, and here are his chair and dog-collar."
With its priestly furniture and genteel façade, at first the house seems an unlikely revolutionary vipers' nest. But Hidalgo and his fellow freedom-fighters were middle-class liberals and, as in other independence movements in Latin America, it was bourgeois Creoles who led the way.
To get the background to the revolution I had to travel to the towns of Guanajuato and San Miguel de Allende. These are Mexico's famed "silver cities", built on the riches that were discovered in the 16th century and mined for the next two centuries at the behest of the Spanish crown.
Guanajuato is a Unesco World Heritage Site, and on a sunny day its narrow streets heave with tourists (most of them Mexican) and locals out shopping. Architecture buffs can't get enough of the colonial buildings and elegant plazas, but I tripped out to the Museo de las Momias on the edge of town. I was not disappointed. The mummies, with their gaping mouths and rigor mortis poses, were straight out of a zombie nightmare.
Their display is not related to any ethnological pursuit, they are there because Mexicans are fascinated by death. Pasted up between the cabinets were grim cartoons about the after life. One showed a skeleton smiling and warning "Como te ves me ví, como me ves te verás" or "As you see yourself I saw myself, as you see me you shall see yourself". Another featured a young girl coyly eyeing a handsome youth and telling her mother, "Mama, I'd die for him". She is, of course, already a corpse.
On the outskirts of Guanajuato is the Hacienda San Gabriel de Barrera, where you can see how a 17th-century Spanish silver baron lived. The heavy wooden furniture from Spain, France and England, vast reception rooms and close attention to detail throughout suggest that the relocation fantasy was well established by colonial times.
But it is in San Miguel de Allende that contemporary barons - including oil billionaires from Houston - prefer to live out their Hispanic fantasies. To middle-class Americans, this is one of the best-known towns in Latin America. George W Bush even namechecked San Miguel, along with Santiago and San Juan, in a speech to Latino voters. It is viewed Stateside as authentic Mexico without any of the hassles.
The town lends itself to this idealism. Its ochre and rose façades are artfully distressed, its streets are quaintly cobbled, and it manages to be both chic and traditional. Aromas of coriander and lime ooze from cool eateries, and shops selling organic coffee from Chiapas - the tropical southern province better known for Comandante Marcos and his Zapatista followers - share the pavements with emporia piled with religious artifacts. After dark, bars stage jazz and mariachi concerts, and you can dine out on sushi and pizza as well as Tex-Mex standards.
SUVs. My guide, Horacio, said San Miguel would never become an American theme park because it had a Beatnik heart.
"Artists came to study alongside the likes of David Alfaro Siqueiros [a leading muralist and friend of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo ] in the 1930s and '40s. Then came the Beats. Both groups were fascinated by the magical, chaotic, Catholic soul of the place."
Instead of discontent and cultural friction, he said, the period "gave rise to a mutual empathy and admiration between local people and gringo intellectuals".
Horacio took me through the muraled galleries of the Instituto Allende, still a centre of learning for aspiring artists. Neal Cassady - Jack Kerouac's co-driver and the inspiration for Sal Paradise in On the Road - died in San Miguel in 1968: he is said to have walked under a train while on a bender.
The Beats had also come to explore the spirit-freeing potions and guidance provided by local healers. Nowadays, going to a curandero (healer) is as normal as popping to the dentist, and this applies to middle-class urbanites - and expats - as well as to the peasant classes. An American woman who ran a local spa recommended her curandero, Jesús, and though I was sceptical - and a little uneasy - I went for a session.
Horacio joined me, partly to protect me from any spells, but also out of curiosity. He told me he had a regular shaman, a woman, and wanted to compare Jesús's style with hers. Expecting a hirsute warlock, I was disappointed to be met by a tall man in his forties wearing a denim shirt and a mobile phone headset. I noticed some Dan Brown books amid the piles of dodgy literature, and when he asked me to feel some forces coming from the table, I was sure carefully placed magnets were generating the otherworldly currents.
We were soon deep in lively debate. Subjects under discussion included the bad energies that flowed down certain streets in San Miguel and how many of our seeming woes are simply the ghosts of lizards holding on to our shoulder blades. Horacio complained that he was routinely pestered by malevolent ghosts and Jesús said this was because he had many past lives. In contrast, he said that I was "young on this planet", so enjoyed little intercourse with the spirit world, but suffered the constant shock of the new.
It was time, then, for me to get some ghosts. I drove 200 miles through a cactus-strewn desert to a higher, drier, brighter hamlet that enjoys legendary status in Mexico. Real de Catorce is often described as a "pueblo mágico". After the silver ran dry and the land proved too hostile for cultivation, the town remained empty for decades. Many of its stone buildings are still bereft of their windows and roofs, making the back streets resemble a film set. The only solid-looking building in town is the church, which you can see in all its girth and grandeur from any of the streets further up the hill.
Sunday in Real was buzzing: a market had been set up around the church, where you could buy everything from kitsch clocks decorated with images of saints to native handicrafts and tasty maize pies. The older cowboys sat round a small plaza, the younger guns shot pool in a dusty saloon that stood at one side. We shared some bargainrate mezcal liquor. They told me about the time Gene Hackman and Julia Roberts came to town to make a film; how Brad Pitt had come too, and been friendly with everyone; and how mezcal was great, but if I wanted the real thing I'd have to join the Huicholes natives and get hold of some hallucinogenic peyote cactus. . .
As we got further down the bottle and opened the next, the narrative blurred into a stream of semi-consciousness. On Monday morning I woke to a ghost town: not a soul on the streets, no shops open and my hotel restaurant closed. I hired a horse and guide, and rode to a "pueblo fantasma ", a true "ghost village" to the east of the town. On the way, I saw the stone vats where the silver ore was once washed, as well as what had once been corrals and accommodation for the workers. The small wagons used in the mine lay abandoned beside a broken track, keeled over and rusting. The village itself was a ruin, left to a few goats and skinny vultures.
As we descended, by way of another abandoned site, a storm was rumbling over Real. The light was cold and eerie, and the few souls around had retired for the siesta. It is said that the Huicholes use peyote to commune with their ancestors. But out in that loneliness, under the black and turbulent sky, I didn't need anything to imagine spirits. Perhaps the natives look up their forbears in druggy dreams for company and consolation.
If Real is a font of ancient Indian wisdom, Zacatecas is the primary source of Spanish wealth. With another well-preserved Unesco site at its centre, it is the only "silver city" that actually feels like a city - big, bold and full of smart shops and restaurants. It was here that the first seam of silver in the Americas was discovered, in 1546. Real's vast mine, El Edén , is open to visitors, so I put on a hard hat to explore the veins of the mountain. The dank, cold pit was a potent minder of the brutal effort required to power Spain's imperial machine. If death and sacrifice had dominated the rituals of so many Meso-American tribes, European rulers had brought no reprieve, continuing to offer up human life for the benefit of God and Mammon.
Back above ground, the sun was setting on the churrigueresque façade of the cathedral - a homage to late Mexican baroque and an embodiment of the ecclesiastical grandeur available in the 18th century when your pockets were full of silver. Dancers were practising their steps for the grito celebrations and couples were strolling out on their evening paseo. Zacatecas, like Dolores, San Miguel and Guanajuato, seemed idyllic. In many ways these small, convivial towns constitute the visible riches left by centuries of colonisation. It was also the constant stream of silver that spurred less materialistic men to stake a claim on the destiny of the nation. As I left Zacatecas, they were crying "¡Independencia, Viva Mexico!" to remind themselves of that other great prize.
First published in the Daily Telegraph on March 15, 2006 under the title "Rich and restive"
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