THE PEOPLE WHO BUY
A bamboo hut with a clumsy thatch of grass, a hovel of sundried
bricks, made, as the Israelites made them, of straw and clay, a shack
of unfinished lumber or rotting railway ties topped with a roof of
laminated sheet-iron--these are the symbols of the social level of
Mexico. Within them all a dirt floor, a box filled with earth for a
brazier, two or three earthenware pots, a _metate_ over which the woman
bends at her endless task of grinding meal for the family cakes of
unleavened corn, a few rush mats for beds and a tawdry shrine with a
dim light before it--the inert millions of Mexico live to-day as they
have lived for a thousand years.
Their minds untutored, their thoughts and desires confined literally
to the animal plane, their religious instincts almost entirely
superstition, their government the support of rulers upon the vast
misery of the lowly, Mexico finds her parallels only in China and in
Turkey. And Mexico is at our own back door, the cynosure of our most
hopeful tradesmen!
Up until ten years ago, there was an aristocracy in Mexico counting in
its make-up many able men, groups of able men, devoted as far as their
lights allowed them, to a paternalistic care of the Indians and peons,
and to the development of Mexico as a great, modern state. Under Diaz
there was also a slow building of a material civilization, looking, in
the future, to the filling of the peon stomach and the lifting of the
peon mind through education to the light of the white man’s world, to
a place in the white man’s commerce. It has been the common usage, in
this past decade since Diaz fell, to excoriate that aristocracy, to
blame it for all the evils of the country, to point with bitter scorn
at its wealth, at its material monuments of churches and palaces and
mines and railways. And yet, although these ten years of revolutions
have been devoted most effectively to the elimination of the Mexican
upper classes and of their materialism and its monuments, the condition
of the lower classes has not been alleviated by one tiny burden, nor
has it been lifted by one hair’s breadth.
The Mexicans of to-day are worse off than they were in the days of
Diaz; they are worse off than in that wild revolutionary period before
Diaz; I am not so sure that they are not in worse condition than they
were under the Spaniards, for they seem literally to be sliding back to
an era of barbarism like only to that misery which was theirs before
the Spaniards came.
We lose sight of the essential fact of Mexico, commercially as well as
socially, if we lose sight for one moment of the lowest of the Mexican
people. They present to us our first and greatest problem, whether
we are traders, missionaries, or those who seek to develop Mexico’s
resources or to sell her our goods.
It is they who must buy our merchandise or aid our work or operate our
factories, mines and oil wells. They were, and are, a vast potential
market, a great, slow-moving force for us to re-shape by education into
an advanced people, civilized, progressive, using the products of the
world and pouring their own products back into the stream of commerce.
They offer us an immense, a wonderful well of labor, perhaps a greater
contributant to the nation’s future wealth than anything else in all
Mexico. Because of these potentialities and because of our inability to
understand why such possibilities do not find their development, it is
vital that we look, clear-eyed and sympathetically, on the one great
and overwhelming factor in that hopeless inertia--the ignorance of the
mass of the Mexicans.
Mexico is a land of innumerable children. A land where there are twice
as many children under ten years old as there are in the United States
(in proportion to population). And a land where not one child in six
has even the chance to go to school, because there are no schools for
them.
The depth of Mexico’s ignorance, in childhood and in adulthood, in life
and in business, literally passes comprehension. The active, curious
minds of the Indian youngsters grow quickly into sodden stupidity; the
keen and vivid intelligences of the children of the middle and upper
classes expend their growing forces in sensuality and plunge themselves
and their country into debilitating excesses--because there is no
training to give them a life above the animals.
I have seen, in the seats of government in Mexico, men who know less
of world history than a boy in an American high school; I have talked
with “experts” of government departments who knew less of their special
subjects than did I, a layman. I have seen in the presidential chair
men who believed, literally, that the shrunken, sick Mexico of to-day
was one of the great, advanced countries of the world--because they had
no conception of the development of world civilization.
I have seen, in Mexican homes, the slow murder of Mexican babies,
because neither I nor any one else could change the round of tradition,
unrelieved by training of any sort, which takes an annual toll of child
life in Mexico that is perhaps not surpassed even by the toll of the
famine in China.
The chain of tradition links Mexico together, and links her, too, to a
past which goes back into the furthest reaches of prehistoric legend.
The ways of modern agriculture are those of the early Aztecs, and
modern tools, even, are introduced with the greatest difficulty. The
round of life is a brief cycle of dull days, unlivened by any thought
or knowledge beyond the confines of a village or a township or a few
blocks of a city. The schools, such as they are, are patterned after
models long abandoned everywhere else in the world, and are stifled
by a traditional belief that war and revolution and the erection of
imposing buildings are more important to the progress of the country
than the education of its youth.
All this has driven Mexico on through the years handicapped with a load
of illiteracy that can well be recognized as the most potent factor in
the degeneration that marks her every manifestation to-day.
Only figures can tell, even in part, the depths of that ignorance. Back
in 1895, the Mexican government reports (which one must always remember
speak as favorably as they dare) showed that only 2,000,000 out of
a population of 12,500,000 could read and write! This means that 82
per cent of all the people of Mexico were without these rudiments of
learning. By 1900 this percentage had been reduced to 80 and in 1910
the Diaz government claimed that it had been reduced to 78, in other
words that of the 15,000,000 population of that year, a little over
3,000,000 could read and write, while nearly 12,000,000 remained in
the depths of their ignorance. In 1919, the Carranza government issued
a report claiming but a slight advance over these figures in the nine
years since the fall of Diaz.
It is literally true that not a tenth of all the people in Mexico have
what we would call a common school education, and three out of four
cannot read a street sign or scrawl their own names. Indeed, one great
British mining company reported that of its 595 Mexican employees,
including scores of what we would call skilled workmen, only six, or
about one per cent could sign a receipt for the money they were paid.
To those of us who look on through foreign eyes, this condition
explains much of Mexico’s dilemma, and the point is further clarified
when we know that the greatest claim ever made for Mexican education
showed but 12,000 schools, with 850,000 pupils enrolled--while the
population of children of school age was more than 4,000,000! No single
issue is greater or more pressing than education. Yet education waits,
as everything in Mexico waits, on peace and better times, on food
and on health. And these wait--and more than all, from our selfish
interest, business and commerce wait--on education! Around and around
the problem swings, and each issue is dependent upon another, and that,
then, upon the first.
Of all the complicated, interwoven factors of Mexican life and of
the tendencies, this very day, of Mexican business and trade none,
however, offers so true an understanding as race. The basis of Mexico’s
ignorance and the basis of her steel-bound traditions is Indianism.
For Mexico’s 15,000,000 people include 6,000,000 pure-blooded Indians,
of some fifty tribal strains, literal aborigines in their life and in
their thoughts. There are, as I have noted, 8,000,000 mixed-bloods,
three-quarters of whom are virtually Indians in their way of life and
in their outlook upon the world. And there are only 1,000,000 of white
strain, mostly Spanish, a group which is to-day without voice in the
affairs of the country. Two-thirds of Mexico is Indian, and most of the
other third a mixture of Indian and white, a mass with the dark Indian
sea below it and virtually no light coming to it from above.
To-day there sifts into the Mexican ruling classes--these same
mixed-bloods--hardly a ray of culture, hardly a gleam of a truly
broader outlook, to lift them and their people out of the dull cavern
of their circumscribed life, or to lead them to the better things of
modern civilization and commerce. We talk of the heathen of China, of
the darkness of ignorance and superstition in Africa, but in Mexico
the churches and the foreign industrial concerns seem to me to face a
greater need than in any other country in the world.
For Mexico is at our door, and the cultural traditions of Mexico are
those of our own world, the white. For 300 years she was a subject
state of Spain, and for all the mistakes of the Spaniards and the Roman
Catholic Church, the foundation-stones they laid are as the foundation
stones of our own life.
The Indian mass was the great problem of Spain; it was the great
problem of Diaz; it is the great problem of all those who would lead
her to the ways of the world of to-day. For the past ten years it has
been forgotten, lost in the struggles of individual men for personal
power. But always those individuals have been swallowed up, without
their realizing it, in the mire of Indianism, for Indianism, the
very epitome of ignorance, lies there always beneath the Mexico that
the world sees, waiting to engulf its own masters and to destroy all
social and business progress. The Spaniards and Diaz built above these
shifting sands, ever conscious of them, providing against them always.
Diaz fell because after he built his foundations he did not reach
down into the Indian mass to up-raise them. He fell in his old age,
forgetting, as old men forget, the dangers which have been with them
through all their life. But before he fell he had laid the foundations,
building upon those of the Spaniards and erecting new ones of his
own, among them foundations of foreign business, of foreign missions,
of foreign schools, business and missions and schools which by their
own enterprise and perhaps as much by the examples which they set for
Mexican business, Catholic churches and native school teachers, were
beginning the great uplift of that vast, inert Indian mass.
The brief rule of Madero (1911-1913) was the link between Diaz and the
upheaval of radicalism and Indianism which was to begin with Carranza,
in 1914. Then commenced the process of casting away, bit by bit, all
the slow-built civilization, all the shallow foundations of commercial
prosperity, of Diaz. With Carranza began the upsurgence of the Indian,
the terrific push upward of the long-hidden forces of destruction which
had been held in check, not only for the thirty years of the Diaz
peace, but for all the four centuries since the Spaniards had first
come to Mexico.
Primarily, this destruction was marked by the wiping out of the fabric
of the promising Mexican educational system--for Diaz had made sound
beginnings toward raising the Indians out of the depths of their
ignorance. His rule was building a foundation for business and for
progress by creating an intelligence which would demand and would
develop the better things which white civilization had to offer.
Under Carranza the ideal was not of slow uplift by education and the
creation of a substantial economic existence which would make life and
peace worth striving for. Carranza and those who followed him under the
banner of the revolution have thought little of solid progress. Their
ideal has been revolution--the political remedy for the economic ills
of the land.
So, despite all the sweeping promises of Carranza and his immediate
successors, education and the progress of business, of trade and
of development have gone into the discard. With the pressure of
the needs of the revolutionary “generals” for greater and greater
appropriations for their armies (and for the graft which ate up most
of such appropriations), with the ever-widening circle of vampires who
fattened on government patronage in every other conceivable way, the
money available for education as well as for industrial advancement
shrank steadily. Where under Diaz the total annual budget of the
government was $50,000,000 a year, with a total appropriation for
schools, federal and state, probably less than $4,000,000, Carranza
had nearer $100,000,000 and spent less than $2,000,000 a year on
education. For Carranza, when the demands of his “generals” for their
“share” increased, shut off the federal support of the schools of the
City of Mexico and its neighboring villages, and also the sums which
in other days had gone to help the poorly provided state governments.
He threw the school systems on the hands of absolutely bankrupt cities
and towns, with the result that in the City of Mexico alone some 120
schools, half the former number, were closed, and 25,000 children,
despite crowding into other buildings, were deprived of education. All
this is history. And statistics do not show that there has been any
recovery since that day.
The Obregon government, on paper, re-established the federal department
of education with a cabinet officer at its head, which was abolished
by Carranza as an economy measure. There was some more of the endless
Mexican discussion of systems of education, but so far as can be
found, no increase in appropriations or in plans for better support
of the public schools. All those wait, perhaps, as I have said, on
the improvement of business conditions, as the final solution of the
business problem waits, I believe, upon them.
But they all wait on something else, which I have mentioned above,
and that is the improved physical condition of the Mexican people.
Comfort, food and health are as important to mental and moral
development as the training of the mind by education. The misery of
Mexico is so profound, her crashing inertia so deep-rooted and so
self-perpetuating, that it sometimes seems that she can never be cured
from within herself. Some outside force must break the circle and this
I believe is the great opportunity of the American missions, working in
conjunction with the great civilizing energies of American business.
Already something has been done, by great American business concerns,
and by American trade unions along the northern border and even within
Mexico itself, to improve living conditions. But the terrific chasm of
the Mexican mass remains utterly unplumbed, and the childhood of Mexico
and the manhood and womanhood of Mexico wait, hungry because their food
does not feed them; in discomfort because their long traditions do not
let them even desire comfort; in sickness because of utter ignorance of
the foundations of human health.
Of this last a word must be written here. I have compiled,
elsewhere,[4] the astonishing figures bearing upon this question, and
have found, in the mass of Mexican official statistics, that the death
rate of Mexican babies under one year is nearly twice that of the
United States; between birth and ten years, three times that of this
country, and that clear through the whole range of Mexican life, from
two to four times as many Mexicans die in each thousand as die in the
United States at the same ages. The average life of every Mexican born
is but 15 years, while in the United States it is about 35 years, and
half of the Mexicans born this year will be dead before they are 7
years old, while in the United States half of all the babies born will
live to be 42 years old.
High death rate means sickness. Experts estimate that for each death in
the United States there are 300 days of severe illness and 6,000 days
of indisposition or slight illness, spread over the average 35 years of
American life. But in Mexico the average age of death is 15 years, so
that the days of sickness must be crowded into less than half the space
of time they cover in the United States.
In Mexico, almost no care, as we conceive it, is given to the sick.
The government reports show that only one-quarter of all the deaths
reported in the country are listed as “classified by the doctor”--in
other words, there is no medical attendance at all in three-quarters
of all the fatal illnesses in Mexico. It is well known to those who
know that unhappy land that in the case of illness, the priest and the
doctor are sent for at the same time, the priest to administer extreme
unction, the doctor to do what he can with a dying patient.
This factor of ill-health in Mexico is one of the most terrible of
all the pictures of her misery, perhaps the most potent element in
the national ineptitude. No one who is continually ill can be greatly
interested in progress, mental, or moral, or industrial, for illness
is the greatest force working against the material advancement of the
people and of the country. And upon material advancement, upon the
increase of income and the increase of needs physical and cultural (as
the money comes to procure them) we must build the solidity of the
Mexican people that are to be, as well as the trade which we seek to
gain from them.
Out of this picture of darkness, then, comes opportunity and with
opportunity the dawning of a new day in Mexico. Because ill health is
so great a factor as it is, there is something that we can attack and
can conquer. Because education is at the low ebb that it is, there is
something which we can do that is direct and tangible, when the means
are put into our hands.
There is hope in Mexico, and that hope is tied up with the opportunity
for foreign help, which is actually, and even more potentially, the
most disinterested and direct force working on conditions in Mexico
to-day. The land is so torn by personal politics, so nearly ruined
by the exactions of unthinking government, so much the football of
well-deserved calumny, that this single ray of clean, clear light can
be recognized by all as one of the great hopes in the horizon to-day.
That hope must be made to dawn, and it is well for us to consider how
that dawn may be assured, and how the day which must follow may be
firmly grounded on economic permanence, on social stability and on
the comfort, health, education and industrial progress of the Mexican
people.
This is the field wherein I believe that the coöperation of the
American companies established in Mexico and the American missions
operating there will bring about a solution of the ultimate Mexican
problem. For the companies, ready and anxious as they appear to be to
serve, would, through the missions, find a means wherein their money
and the great force of their prestige would have efficient direction.
The foreign oil, mining and railway corporations will not hesitate,
I believe, to place their resources and their opportunities at the
disposal of workers whom they are convinced can truly improve the
morale and thus the productive capacity of the workers upon whom their
business depends. Heretofore there has been mutual misunderstanding.
The companies have not always found the mission workers as efficient as
they would like, and the missionaries have been quite ready to suspect
the companies of representing “predatory capital” with the ambition,
not merely of making their business profitable, but of putting down the
“devoted” leaders of the people or of forcing American intervention at
once.
I have faith in both the companies and the missionaries, and I believe
that in the new political crisis which Mexico is bringing upon herself
as this is written (and which she may have tumbling about her ears
before it is printed) these two must reach out, and will reach out, to
clasp hands and go on together.
Both have done wonderful things for Mexican education, the missions
through the conscious development in Mexico of the ideal of education
for service, and to the end of raising and training leaders for the
Mexican masses, and the companies through isolated examples of truly
constructive welfare and educational work.
Probably the most outstanding example of the educational achievements
of American corporations was that of the trade schools which were
organized and operated by the National Railroad between 1890 and
1912, under the direction of E. N. Brown, president of the National
Railways--one of the “pernicious foreigners” who were exiled under
Carranza’s “nationalization” of the railway properties in 1914. These
railway schools trained between 15,000 and 18,000 Mexican mechanics
and engineers, taking boys of 14 and 15, paying them first 62 cents a
day and gradually increasing that until, after four years’ training,
they were receiving three and a half pesos a day. They were then
ready to take positions as skilled workers in the railway shops or on
the locomotives or, if they chose, in other industries. The railway
placed no limitation on them, holding that the company benefited in the
increase of the efficiency of the Mexican worker wherever he might be.
The whole scheme of this work, including the paying of apprentices
while learning, was the broadest kind of educational service, taken
up, to be sure, because the railway company needed mechanics and
trainmen, but with an effect on Mexico and on the creation of the
so-called Mexican “middle class” (the buying and building as well as
the elevating element in any population) which is still felt through
the chaos of revolutionary destruction.
To-day the greatest industry of Mexico is the production and refining
of petroleum, and foreign companies, of course, control it. Much
genuinely helpful welfare work is being done by them, including not
only schools for children but training schools for workers as well. In
addition the very conscious plan of increasing wages until unskilled
labor now receives a minimum of $2 a day is having a remarkable effect
upon the standard of living and upon the buying capacity (as well as
upon the efficiency) of the Mexicans of the Tampico oil section. There
is much undigested prosperity, and agitators are creating trouble as
far as they can for the foreigners, but on the whole the effect on the
material well-being of the peon has been advantageous. It is inevitable
that a continuation of this attitude should bring forth a vastly
increased civilization at least in this one section of Mexico.
Education has been pushed forward by the companies, and in the model
villages such as the town of Terminal (across the river from Tampico
on the property of the Doheny companies) really excellent schools are
maintained with Mexican teachers under American supervision.
Conditions in the oil country outside the private company towns are,
however, deplorable, presenting a contrast which is not without its
mighty lesson for us all. The graft and incompetence of the present
ruling classes of Mexico have regarded the prosperous oil towns only as
the most luxurious of posts for influential favorites. The educational
conditions of Tampico, where in a city of more than 100,000 people
there are only twenty government primary schools with an attendance of
4,500 pupils, beggars description. Yet the foreign companies have been
called on regularly to support the Tampico schools, just as they are
called on to pay for pavements, sanitation, etc. And this money has
gone, hardly a single dollar into the work for which it was collected,
but countless thousands into the bottomless pit of revolutionary graft.
But for all the unfortunate conditions of the moment, the possibilities
of the foreign corporations aiding in the uplift of the Mexican
mass throughout the country is one of the encouraging phases of the
Mexican trade and business problem. It links up definitely with the
solution (on which we shall touch, in later chapters) of the parts of
the question which deal with other elements than the human equation.
The beginning which has been made in Tampico, chiefly by the great
American companies, carries with it an import far greater than the
mere contrast between their trim little company villages and schools
and the ugly squalor of the Mexican towns. Somehow, out of the dark
present, American business has learned how closely it is linked with
the welfare of the human element in its scheme. They have learned how
the simple man, how his happiness and prosperity, are wrapped up with
the prosperity and success of every enterprise which remotely touches
him.
Until these recent years, and through these American corporations,
there has never been scientific welfare work in Mexico, there has
never been considerate treatment of the workers, little study of
their weaknesses and their needs. If we contemplate that, in its bare
truth, we can begin to understand something of the importance of even
the relatively little work which has been done of late. Perhaps the
greatest potentiality of the future of the human side of the Mexican
market lies in the broad extension of that genuinely American attitude
toward the masses of the country.
I have advocated the union of the forces of American missionaries and
American corporations in Mexico. I believe that this will bring great
good and will eventually, as it has done in this country, bring a
higher efficiency of labor and a larger market for the things which
this country can export to Mexico. The desertion of the masses by the
revolutionary government and the exile of the natural aristocracy, have
brought the human problem of the country home with tremendous force to
the foreigners. It lies to-day almost solely in their hands, and seems
likely to wait long for a rescue or aid from any other source whatever.
For the missionaries, education and improved economic conditions
amongst the workers is indispensable--they are the tools and the signs
of their great plan of regeneration. For business, the encouragement
of religion and education which the mission schools give promises that
improvement in the laboring population and in the buying capacity of
that population which is demanded by the advancement of their business.
Somehow that buying population which I have set at 3,000,000 must be
increased. Somehow the efficiency of the laboring group (which numbers
little more than the buying public) must be increased. Only one way
is open--to make the masses better men, happier men, more cultured
men. The ignorance of Mexico, the inefficiency which results from that
ignorance, the low standard of living which keeps the people from those
“wants” which make luxuries into necessities and so improve trade by
widening the eddies of demand--all these affect us all in Mexico.
Trade follows education. It follows the missionaries of business and
of religion. It thrives alone on the prosperity of peoples. To-day
these factors of trade in Mexico are only depressants--in the future
they must and surely will be changed slowly into booming creators of
trade. But so long as the chief item of import is food and so long as
the productive capacity of the Mexicans is only half developed, so long
will the market in Mexico swing at its lowest ebb.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] _The People of Mexico._ Mexican health is treated directly in the
chapter on “Vitality,” pp. 86-109, and indirectly in the chapter on
“Climate,” pp. 131-151.