OUR PORTO RICO
“When the queen asked for a description of the island,” says an old
chronicle, “Columbus crumpled up a sheet of paper and, tossing it upon
the table, cried, ‘It looks just like that, your Majesty!’”
If we are to believe more modern documents, the intrepid Genoese made
that his stock illustration for most of the islands he discovered. Even
the firm head of Isabela must have wobbled under its crown as one after
another of the misnamed “West Indies” were pictured to her in the same
concise fashion, and brushed off into the regal wastebasket.
Fortunately, paper was cheaper in those days. Or was it? Perhaps it was
the wrath born of seeing her last precious sheet turned into an island
that soured the queen’s gratitude, and brought the doughty discoverer to
dungeons and disgrace.
Questions of wanton waste aside, there could be no more exact
description of Porto Rico. The ancient jest about quadrupling the area
of a land by flattening it out all but loses its facetiousness when
applied to our main West Indian colony. Barely a hundred miles long and
forty wide, a celestial rolling-pin would give old Borinquen almost the
vast extent of Santo Domingo. Its unbrokenly mountainous character makes
any detailed description of its scenic beauties a waste of effort; it
could be little more than a constant series of exclamations of delight.
For all its ruggedness, it is as easy to get about the island as it is
difficult to cover the larger one to the westward. There is not a spot
that cannot be reached from any other point between sunrise and sunset.
A railroad encircles the western two thirds of the island, with trains
by night as well as by day. When the Americans came, they found a
splendidly engineered military road from coast to coast, with branches
in several directions. If this sounds strange of a Spanish country, it
must be accounted for not by civic pride or necessity, but in the vain
hope of defending the island from armed invasion. To-day there are
hundreds of miles of excellent highway covering Porto Rico with a
network of quick transit that reaches all but the highest peaks of its
central range. It is doubtful whether any state of our union can rival
this detached bit of American territory in excellence and extent of
roads, certainly not in the scenic splendor that so generally flanks
them.
[Illustration: Ponce de Leon’s palace now flies the Stars and Stripes]
[Illustration: Thousands of women work in the fields in Porto Rico]
[Illustration: Air-plants grow even on the telegraph wires in Ponce]
[Illustration: A hat seller of Cabo Rojo]
Automobiles flash constantly along these labyrinthian _carreteras_, many
of them bearing the licenses of “the Mainland.” If the visitor has
neglected to include his own car among his baggage and trembles at the
thought of the truly American bill that awaits the end of a private
journey, there are always the _guaguas_, pronounced “wawas” by all but
those who take Spanish letters at full English value. Scarcely a road of
Borinquen lacks one or two of the public auto-buses each day in either
direction, carrying the mails and such travelers as deign to mix with
the rank and file of their fellow-citizens of Spanish ancestry. My
tastes no doubt are plebeian, but I for one gladly pass up the haughty
private conveyance for these rumbling plow-horses of the gasolene world.
They have all the charm of the old stage-coaches that prance through the
pages of Dickens, except for the change of horses. In them one may
strike up conversation with any of the varied types of rural Porto Rico,
and the halt at each post-office brings little episodes that the
scurrying private tourist never glimpses.
“We divide the people of Porto Rico into four categories for purposes of
identification,” said the American chief of the Insular Police,
“according to the shape of their feet. The minority, mostly
town-dwellers, wear shoes. Of the great mass of countrymen, those with
broad, flat feet, live in the cane-lands around the coast. The coffee
men have over-developed big toes, because they use them in climbing the
steep hillsides from bush to bush. In the tobacco districts, where the
planting is done with the feet, they are short and stubby. It beats the
Bertillon system all hollow.”
The man bent on seeing the varying phases of Porto Rican life could not
do better than adopt the chief’s broad divisions of the population; for
our over-crowded little Caribbean isle is a complex community, as
complex in its way as its great stepmother-land, and one that defies the
pick-things-up-as-you-go method. Small as it is, it contains a diversity
of types that emphasizes the influence of occupation, immediate
environment, even scenery, on the human family.
San Juan, the capital—to give the shod minority the precedence—is
compacted together on a small island of the north coast, attached to the
rest of the country only by a broad macadam highway along which stream
countless automobiles, and strictly modern street-cars and their rival
auto-buses in constant five-cent procession. It was a century old when
the Dutch colonized New Amsterdam. Small wonder that it looks upon its
scurrying fellow-citizens from “los Estados” as parvenus. Palaces and
fortifications that antedate the building of the _Mayflower_ still tower
above the compact, cream-colored mass, most of them now housing high
officials from the North. Casa Blanca, built for Ponce de Leon—the
younger, it is true—now resounds to the footsteps of the American
colonel commanding the Porto Rican regiment of our regular army. The
governor’s palace, almost as aged, has an underground passage that
carried many a mysterious personage to and from the outer sea-wall in
the old Spanish days, and through which more than one American governor
is said to have regained his quarters at hours and under conditions
which caused him to mumble blessings on Castilian foresight, though it
is hard to give credence to this latter tradition, for how could he
escape the all-seeing American chief of police who occupies the lower
story? The Stars and Stripes still seem a bit incongruous above the
inevitable Morro Castle, while the tennis-court in its moat and the
golf-links across its grassy parade-ground have almost a suggestion of
the sacrilegious. Of the cathedral with its green plaster covering there
is little to be said, except that the solemn Spanish dedication over the
bones of Ponce de Leon loses something of its solemnity in being signed
by Archbishop Monseñor Bill Jones. The mighty sea-wall that holds the
sometimes raging Atlantic at bay, and massive San Cristobal fortress at
the neck of the town are worth coming far to see, but they have that in
common with many a Spanish-American monument.
For after all, San Juan is still a son of Spain, despite the patently
American federal building that contains its post-office and
custom-house. Its architecture is of the bare, street-toeing façade,
interior-patio variety, its sidewalks all but imaginary, its noise
unceasing. Beautiful as it looks from across the bay, heaped up on its
nose of land, it has little of the pleasant spaciousness of younger
cities, and withal no great amount of the Latin charm with which one
imbues it from afar. Its Americanization consists chiefly of frequent
“fuentes de soda” in place of its bygone cafés, and a certain reflection
of New York ways in its larger stores, whose almost invariably male
clerks sometimes know enough English to nod comprehendingly and bring an
armful of shirts when one asks for trousers. Something more than that,
of course; its dressier men have discarded their mustaches as a sign of
their new citizenship, and many a passer-by who knows not a word of
English has all the outward appearance of a continental American.
Base-ball, too, has come to stay, though the counter influence may be
detected in the custom of American schoolmarms of attending the
bet-curdling horse races in the outskirts of the capital on Sunday
afternoons.
The central plaza on a Sunday evening has a few notes of uniqueness to
the sated Latin-American traveler. It is unusually small, a long, narrow
rectangle with few trees or benches, cement paved from edge to edge, and
burdened with the name of “Plaza Baldorioty.” The Porto Rican seems to
like free play in his central squares; more than a few of them have been
denuded of the royal palms of olden times, and are reduced to the bare
hard level of a tennis-court. A few years ago a venturesome American Jew
conceived the plan of providing concert-going San Juan with
rocking-chairs in place of the uncomfortable iron _sillas_ that decorate
every other Sunday-evening plaza south of the Rio Grande. Strangely
enough, the innovation took. Now one must be an early arrival at the
weekly _retreta_ if he would exchange his dime for even the last of the
rockers that flank the Plaza Baldorioty four rows deep on each side.
While the municipal band renders its classical program with a moderate
degree of skill, all San Juan rocks in unison with the leader’s baton.
All San Juan with the color-line drawn, that is; for whether it is true
that the well-groomed insular police have secret orders to ask them to
move on, or it is merely a time-honored custom, black citizens shun the
central square on Sunday evenings, or at most hang about the outskirts.
There is no division of sexes, however, another evidence perhaps of
American influence. Señoritas sometimes good to look at in spite of
their heavy coating of rice powder trip back and forth beside their
visibly enamored swains as freely as if the Moorish customs of their
neighboring cousins had long since been forgotten. For the time-honored
promenade has not succumbed to the rocking-chair. One has only to turn
his rented seat face down upon the pavement, like an excited
crap-player, to assure his possession of it upon his return from the
parading throng, whose shuffling feet and animated chatter drown out the
music a few yards away, and no great harm done. In that slow-moving
procession one may see the mayor and all the “quality” of San Juan, a
generous sprinkling of Yankees, and scores of American soldiers who know
barely a word of English, yet who have a racial politeness and a
complete lack of rowdyism that is seldom attained by other wearers of
our military uniform. Then suddenly one is aware of a tingling of the
blood as the _retreta_ ends with a number that, far from the
indifference or scorn it evokes in the rest of Latin America, brings all
San Juan quickly to its feet, males uncovered or standing stiffly at
salute—the Star-Spangled Banner.
From the sea-wall one may gaze westward to Cabras Island, with its leper
prisoners, and beyond to Punta Salinas, “poking its rocky nose into the
boiling surf.” Ferries ply frequently across the bay to pretty Cataño,
but it is far more picturesque at a distance. From San Juan, too, the
tumbled deep-green hills behind the little town have a Japanese-etching
effect in the mists of the rainy season that is gradually lost as one
approaches them, as surely as when the sun burns it away.
But there is more to modern San Juan than this old Spanish city huddled
together on its nose of rock. It has grown in American fashion not only
by spreading far beyond its original area, but by boldly embracing
far-flung suburbs within the “city limits.” Puerta de Tierra, once
nothing more than the “land gate” its name implies, is almost a city of
itself, a pathetic town of countless shacks built of tin and drygoods
boxes, spreading down across the railroad to the swampy edge of the bay,
where anemic babies roll squalling and naked in the dirt, and long lines
of hollow-eyed women file by an uninviting milk-shop, each holding forth
a pitifully small tin can. It is far out across San Antonio Bridge,
however, that the capital has seen most of its growth under American
rule. More than half of its seventy thousand, which have raised it,
perhaps, to second place among West Indian cities, dwell in capacious,
well-shaded Miramar and Santurce. Time was when its people were content
to make the upper story of the old town its “residential section,” but
it is natural that the desire for open yards and back gardens should
have come with American citizenship.
* * * * *
Ponce, on the south coast, gives the false impression of being a larger
city than the capital, loosely strewn as it is over a dusty flat plain
and overflowing in hovels of decreasing size into the low foot-hills
behind. It is the most extensive town in Porto Rico, and, like many of
those around the coast, lies a few miles back from the sea, for fear of
pirates in the olden days, with a street-car service to its shipping
suburb of Ponce-Playa. Air-plants festoon its telephone wires, and its
mosquitos are so aggressive that to dine in its principal hotel is to
wage a constant battle, while to disrobe and enter a bathroom is a
perilous undertaking.
It was carnival time when we visited Ponce. By day there was little
evidence of it, except for the urchins in colored rags who paraded the
streets and the unusual throngs of gaily garbed citizens who crowded the
plaza on Sunday afternoon. At night bedlam broke loose, though, to tell
the truth, the uproar was chiefly caused by automobile-horns. The
medieval gaieties of this season have sadly deteriorated under the staid
American influence. What there is left of them takes place chiefly
within the native clubs, each of which has its turn in gathering
together the élite of the city and such strangers as can establish their
ability to conduct themselves with Latin courtesy. We succeeded in
imposing ourselves upon the Centro Español. But there were more
spectators than spectacle in its flag and flower-festooned interior.
Toward ten the throng had thickened to what seemed full capacity, but it
was made up chiefly of staid dowagers and solemn _caballeros_ whose
formal manners would have been equally in place at a funeral. Only a
score of girls wore masks, and these confined their festive antics to
pushing their way up and down the hall, squeaking in a silly falsetto at
the more youthful oglers. Even confetti was strewn sparingly, evidently
for lack of spirit of the occasion, for the mere fact that a small bag
of it cost $1.50 seemed no drawback to those who would be revelers. At
the unseemly hour of eleven the queen at length made her appearance,
escorted to her throne by pages, knights and ladies-in-waiting, while
courtiers flocked about her with insistent manners that could be called
courteous only in Latin-American society. But her beauty was tempered by
an expression that suggested bored annoyance, whether for the tightness
of her stays or the necessity of avoiding lifelong disgrace by choosing
one of these pressing suitors before a year had passed there was no
polite means of learning. The most aggressive swain led her forth and
the dancing began. It differed but slightly from a dance of “high
society” in any other part of the world. I wandered into the “bar.” But
alas! I had forgotten again that I was in my native land. There was
something pathetically ludicrous in the sight of the score of thirsty
Latin-Americans who gazed pensively at the candy, chewing-gum, and “soft
drinks” that decorated what had once been so enticing a sideboard, for
after all they were not of a race that had abused the bottled good cheer
that has vanished.
* * * * *
Mayagüez was more like the ghost of a city than a living town. Its ugly
plaza was a glaring expanse of cracked and wrinkled cement across which
wandered from time to time a ragged, hungry-looking bootblack or a
disheveled old woman, dragging her faded calico train, and slapping the
pavement in languid regularity with her loose slippers. On his cracked
globe pedestal in the center of the square the statue of Columbus stood
with raised hand and upturned gaze as if he were thanking heaven that he
had not been injured in the catastrophe. Of the dozen sculptured women
perched on the balustrade around the place several had lost their lamps
entirely; the rest held them at tipsy angles. The massive concrete and
mother-of-pearl benches were mostly broken in two or fallen from their
supports. Workmen were demolishing the ruined cathedral at the end of
the square, bringing down clouds of plaster and broken stone with every
blow of their picks, and now and then a massive beam or heavy,
iron-studded door that suggested the wisdom of seeing the sights
elsewhere. House after house lay in tumbled heaps of débris as we
strolled through the broad, right-angled streets, along which we met not
hundreds, but a scattered half-dozen passers-by to the block. The
majority of these were negroes. The wealthier whites largely abandoned
the town after the disaster. Spaniards gathered together the remnants of
their fortunes and returned to more solid-footed Spain; Porto Ricans
began anew in other parts of the island. The sisters of St. Vincent de
Paul have a bare two hundred pupils now where once they had two
thousand. It was hard to believe that this was a city of teeming,
over-crowded Porto Rico.
Eighty years ago earthquakes were so continuous in this western end of
the island that for one notable six months the population ate its food
raw; pots would not sit upon the stoves. But the new generation had all
but forgotten that. Guide-books of recent date assert in all sincerity
that “Porto Rico is as free from earthquakes as from venomous snakes.”
Then suddenly on the morning of October 11, 1918, a mighty shake came
without an instant’s warning. Within twenty seconds most of Mayagüez
fell down. The sea receded for several miles, and swept back almost to
the heart of the town, tossing before it cement walls, automobiles, huge
iron blocks, débris, and mutilated bodies. Miraculous escapes are still
local topics of conversation. A merchant was thrown a hundred yards—into
a boat that set him down at length on his own door-step. A great tiled
roof fell upon a gathering of nuns, and left one of them standing
unscratched in what had been an opening for a water-pipe. Scientists,
corroborated by a cable repair-ship, explain that the sea-floor broke in
two some forty miles westward and dropped several hundred fathoms
deeper. Lighter quakes have been frequent ever since; half a dozen of
them were felt all over Porto Rico during our stay there. The
inhabitants of all the western end are still nervous. More than one
American teacher in that region has suddenly looked up to find herself
in a deserted school-room, the pupils having jumped out the windows at
the first suggestion of a tremor.
Mayagüez is slowly rebuilding; of reinforced concrete now, or at least
of wood. Little damage was done on that October morning to wooden
structures, which is one of the reasons that the crowded hovels along
the sea front have none of the deserted air of the city proper. A still
more potent reason is that this class of inhabitants had nowhere else to
go. By Porto Rican law the entire beach of the island is government
property, for sixty feet back of the water’s edge. As a consequence,
what would in our own land be the choicest residential section is
everywhere covered with squatters, who pay no rent, and patch their
miserable little shelters together out of tin cans, old boxes, bits of
driftwood, and _yagua_ or palm-leaves, the interior walls covered, if at
all, with picked-up labels and illustrated newspapers.
One can climb quickly into the hills from Mayagüez, with a wonderful
view of the bay, the half-ruined city, with its old gray-red tile roofs,
rare now in Porto Rico, and seas of cane stretching from the coast to
the foot-hills, which spring abruptly into mountains, little huts strewn
everywhere over their crinkled and warty surface as far as the eye can
see.
* * * * *
Its three principal cities by no means exhaust the list of important
towns in Porto Rico. Indeed the number and the surprising size of them
cannot but strike the traveler, the extent even of those in the interior
astounding the recent visitor to Cuba. There is Arecibo, for instance, a
baking-hot, dusty place on a knoll at the edge of the sea, with no real
harbor, but a splendid beach—given over to naked urchins and foraging
pigs—and a railroad station that avoids the town by a mile or more, as
if it were suffering from the plague. San Germán, founded by Diego
Columbus in 1512, destroyed times without number by pirates, Indians,
all the European rivals of Spain, and even by mosquitos, which forced
its founders to rebuild in a new spot, has moved hither and yon about
the southwestern corner of the island until it is a wonder its own
inhabitants can find it by night. Or there is Cabo Rojo, where hats of
more open weave than the Panama are made of the _cogolla_ palm-leaf of
the palmetto family.
Yauco, a bit farther east, is striking chiefly for the variegated
haystack of poor man’s hovels resembling beehives, that are heaped up
the steep hillside in its outskirt and seen from afar off in either
direction. Guayama is proud, and justly so, of its bulking new church,
which is so up-to-date that it is fitted with Pullman-car soap-spouts
for the saving of holy water. Maunabo, among its cane-fields, lies out
of reach of buccaneer cannon, hurricanes, and tidal waves, like so many
of the “coast” towns of old Borinquen, and does its seaside business
through a “Playa” of the same name. It still holds green the memory of
the stern but playful young American school-master who first taught its
present generation to salute the Stars and Stripes, but though it boasts
a faultless cement building now in place of the hovel that posed as
_escuela pública_ in those pioneer days, it seems not to have learned
the American doctrine of quick expansion as well as some of its fellows.
Beyond Maunabo the highway climbs through huts and rocks that look
strangely alike as they lie tossed far up the spur of the central range,
then past enormous granite boulders that suggest reclining elephants,
and out upon an incredible expanse of cane, with pretty Yabucoa planted
in its center and Porto Rico’s dependent islands of Vieques and Culebra
breaking the endless vista of sea to the southward. Humacao and Naguabo
have several corners worthy a painter’s sketchbook, and soon the
coast-line swings us northward again to sugar-choked Fajardo, with its
four belching smokestacks, and leaves us no choice but to cease our
journeyings by land or return to San Juan. There we may dash across or
around the bay to Bayamón, a “whale of a town and a bad one,” in the
words of the police chief, but also the site of the “City of Puerto
Rico” that afterward changed its name and location and became the
present capital. Of the towns that dot the mountainous interior the
traveler should not miss Caguas and Cayey, Coamo and Comerio,
Barranquitas and Juana Diaz, Lares and Utuado, and a half-dozen others
that are no mere villages, including Aibonito (Ai! Bonito!—Ah! Pretty!)
set more than two thousand feet aloft, and famed for its _fresas_, which
in Porto Rico means a fruit that grows on a thorny bush beside the
little streams of high altitudes, that looks like a cross between a
luscious strawberry and a mammoth raspberry and tastes like neither.
But it is high time now to descend to Coamo Springs for the one
unfailingly hot bath in the West Indies—when one can induce the servants
to produce the key to it.
Some eighty years ago a man was riding over the breakneck trail from
Coamo to Ponce to pay a bill—there is a fishy smell to that last detail,
but let it pass—when he lost his way and stumbled by accident upon a hot
spring. Making inquiries, he found that the region belonged to a
druggist in the southern metropolis and that his own broad acres bounded
the property on the left. He called on the druggist and after the
lengthy preliminaries incident to any Spanish-American deal, offered to
sell his own land to the apothecary.
“It’s of no use to me,” he explained, “and as you have the adjoining
land—and—and”
“Why,” cried the druggist, “my own _finca_ is not worth a peseta to
_me!_ Why on earth should I be buying yours also?”
“Well, then, I’ll buy yours off _you_,” suggested the horseman; “there
is no sense in having two owners to a tract that really belongs
together. Let’s settle the matter and be done with it. I happen to have
two thousand dollars with me. I was going to pay a debt with it”—the
fishy smell was no olfactory illusion, you see—“but—”
The druggist jumped at the chance, the titles were transferred, and the
horseman rode homeward—no doubt giving his creditor a wide berth. He
built a shack beside the hot spring, carved out a bath in the rock,
invited his friends, who also found the strange custom pleasant, and
gradually there grew up around the place a hotel famous for
its—gambling. Clients willingly slept in chairs by day, when rooms were
full, if only they could lose their money by night. By the time the
Americans came Coamo Springs was synonymous with the quick exchange of
fortunes. A more modern hotel had been built, with a broad roofed
stairway leading down to the baths, and rooms enough to ensure every
gambler a morning siesta. Then one day—so the story goes, though I
refuse to be hauled into court to vouch for it—an American governor who
was particularly fond of the attraction of the place, betook too freely
of the now forbidden nectars and ended by smashing up most of the
furniture within reach, whereupon the proprietor sent him a bill for
$1000 damages. Two days later the governor learned officially, to his
unbounded surprise, that gambling was going on at Coamo Springs! The
place was at once raided, and to-day the most model of old ladies may
visit it without the slightest risk of having her sensibilities so much
as pin-pricked.
* * * * *
I came near forgetting entirely, however, what is perhaps the most
typical town of Porto Rico. Aguadilla, nestling in the curve of a wide
bay on the northwest coast, where the foot-hills come almost down to the
sea, and with a pretty little isle in the hazy offing, has much the same
proportion between its favored few and its poverty-stricken many as the
island itself. A monument a mile from town commemorates the landing of
Columbus in 1493 to obtain water, though Aguada, a bit farther south,
also claims that honor. The distinctly Spanish church, too, contains
beautiful hand-carved reproductions in wood of Murillo’s “Assumption”
and “Immaculate Conception,” noteworthy as the only unquestionably
artistic church decorations in Porto Rico. The merely human traveler,
however, will find these things of scant interest compared to the vast
honeycomb of hovels that make up all but the heart of Aguadilla.
The hills, as I have said, come close down to the sea here, leaving
little room for the pauperous people of all Porto Rican suburbs. Hence
those of Aguadilla have stacked their tiny shacks together in the narrow
rocky canyons between the mountain-flanking railroad and the sea-level.
So closely are these hundreds of human nests crowded that in many places
even a thin man can pass between them only by advancing sidewise. Built
of weather-blackened bits of boxes, most of them from “the States,” with
their addresses and trademarks still upon them, and of every conceivable
piece of rubbish that can deflect a ray of sunshine or the gaze of
passers-by, they look far less like dwellings than abandoned kennels
thrown into one great garbage-heap. Of furnishing they have almost none,
not even a chair to sit on in many cases. The occupants squat upon the
floor, or at best take turns in the “hammock,” a ragged gunnysack tied
at both ends and stretched from corner to corner of the usually single
room. A few have one or two soiled and crippled cots, but never the
suggestion of a _mosquitero_, though the mosquitos hold high revel even
by day in this breathless amphitheater. For wash-tubs they use a strip
of _yagua_ pinned together at one end with a sliver and set on the
sloping ground beneath the hut to keep the water from running away at
the other. The families are usually large, in spite of an appalling
infant mortality, and half a dozen children without clothing enough
between them to properly cover the smallest are almost certain to be
squalling, quarreling, and rolling about the pieced-together floor or on
the ground beneath it.
For the hovels are always precariously set up on pillars of broken stone
under their four corners, and the earth under them is the family
playground and washroom. There is no provision whatever for sewerage;
water must be lugged up the steep hillside from the better part of the
town below. Break-neck ladder-steps, slippery with mud and with a broken
rung or two, connect ground and doorway. The poverty of Haiti, where at
least there is spaciousness, seems slight indeed compared to this.
Yet this is no negro quarter. Many of the inhabitants are of pure
Caucasian blood, and the majority of them have only a tinge of African
color. Features and characteristics that go with diligence and energy,
with success in life, are to be seen on every hand. Nor is it a
community of alms-seekers. It toils more steadily than you or I to be
self-supporting; the difficulty is to find something at which to toil.
Scores of the residents own their _solar_, or patch of rock on which
their hut stands; many own the hut itself. Others pay their monthly
rental, though they live for days on a handful of plantains—pathetic
rentals of from twenty to thirty cents a month for the _solar_ and as
much for the hovel, many of which are owned by proud citizens down in
the white-collar part of the town.
For all their abject poverty these hapless people are smiling and
cheerful, sorry for their utter want, yet never ashamed of it, convinced
that it is due to no fault of their own. That is a pleasing peculiarity
of all the huddled masses of Porto Rico. They are quite ready to talk,
too, on closely personal subjects that it is difficult to bring up in
more urbane circles, and to discuss their condition in a quaintly
impersonal manner, with never a hint of whining.
I talked with an old woman who was weaving hats. She lived alone, all
her family having died, of under-nourishment, no doubt, though she
called it something else. The hat she was at work upon would be sold to
the wholesalers for thirty cents; it was almost the equal of the one I
wore, which had cost five dollars,—and the material for two of them cost
her twenty cents. She could barely make one a day, what with her cooking
and housework. Cooking of what, for Heaven’s sake? Oh, yams and tubers,
now and then a plantain from a kind friend she had. One really required
very little for such labor. She smiled upon me as I descended her
sagging ladder and wished me much prosperity.
A muscular fellow a bit farther on, white of skin as a Scandinavian, was
“a peon by trade,” but there was seldom work to be had. He sold things
in the streets. It was a lucky day when he made a profit of fifteen
cents. His wife made hats, too. With three children there was no help
for it, much as he would like to support his family unassisted. The
house? No, it was not his—yet; though he owned the _solar_. The house
would cost $32; meanwhile he was paying thirty cents a month for it.
A frail little woman in the early thirties looked up from her
lace-making as I paused in her doorway. In her lap was a small, round,
hard cushion with scores of pins stuck in it, and a wooden bobbin at the
end of each white thread. She clicked the bits of wood swiftly as she
talked, like one who enjoyed conversation, but could not afford to lose
time at it. Yes, she worked all day and usually well into the
night—nodding at a wick in a little can of tallow. By doing that she
could make a whole yard of lace, and get eighty cents for it. It took a
spool and a third of thread—American thread, _mira usted_—at ten cents a
spool. Fortunately, she was young and strong, though her eyes hurt
sometimes, and people said this work was bad on the lungs. But she had
her mother to support, who was too old to do much of anything—the
toothless crone, grinning amiably, slouched forward out of the “next
house,” which was really another room like the incredibly piece-meal
shack in which I stood, though with a separate roof. The rent of the two
was thirty cents; they were worth thirteen dollars—the lace-maker
mentioned that enormous sum with a catch in her breath. Then she had a
little girl. There had been four children, but three had died. Her
husband was gone, too—Oh, yes, she had been really married. They had
paid $3.75 for the ceremony. She had heard that the Protestants did it
cheaper, but of course when one is born a Catholic.... Some women in the
quarter were “only married by God,” but that was not their fault. She
never had time to go to mass, but she had been to confession four times.
There had been no charge for that. Her daughter—the frizzly-headed
little tot of six or seven had come in munching a mashed _boniato_ in a
tiny earthen bowl, with a broken spoon—went to school every day. She
hoped for a great future for her. She had gone to school herself, but
she “wasn’t given to learn.” She couldn’t get the child the food the
teacher said was good for her. Even rice was sixteen cents a pound, and
those—pointing to three or four miserable roots in the burlap
“hammock”—cost from one to four cents apiece now. And clothing! Would I
just feel the miserable stuff her waist was made of—it was miserable
indeed, though snowy white. Then she had to buy a board now and then for
two or three cents to patch the house; the owner would never do it. Once
she had tried working in a warehouse down by the wharf. The Spaniards
said they paid a dollar a day for cleaning coffee—because the law would
not let them pay less, or work women more than eight hours a day. Yet
the cleaners _must_ do two bags a day or they didn’t get the dollar, and
no woman could do that if she worked ten, or even twelve, hours. Clever
fellows, those _peninsulares_! The little basket of oranges in the
doorway? Oh, she sold those to people in the gully, when any of them
could buy. Some days she made nothing on them, at other times as much as
four cents profit. But “that goes for my vice, for I smoke cigarettes,”
she concluded, as if confessing to some great extravagance.
Down in the plaza that night a score of ragged men lolled about a cement
bench discussing wages and the cost of food. Beans cost a fortune now;
sugar was sixteen cents; coffee, their indispensable coffee, thirty-two.
They did not mention bread; the Porto Rican of the masses seldom
indulges in that luxury. And with the sugar _centrals_ in the
neighborhood paying scarcely a dollar a day, even when one could find
work! “I tell you, we working-men are too tame,” concluded one of them;
“we should fight, rob....” But he said it in a half-joking, harmless way
that is characteristic of his class through all Porto Rico.
* * * * *
It is time, however, that we leave the towns and get out among the
_jíbaros_, as the countrymen are called, from a Spanish word for a
domesticated animal that has gone wild again.
The American Railroad of Porto Rico was originally French, as its
manager is still. Though it is narrow-gauge, it has a comfort and _aseo_
unknown even in Cuba, a cleanliness combined with all the smaller
American conveniences, ice water, sanitary paper cups, blotter-roll
towels—prohibition has at least done away with the yelping trainboy and
made it possible to drink nature’s beverage without exciting comment.
Its fares are higher than in the United States,—three cents a kilometer
in first and 2¼ in the plain little second-class coaches with their hard
wooden benches that make up most of the train. The single first-class
car is rarely more than half filled, for all its comfortable swivel
chairs. Automobiles and the lay of the land, that makes Ponce less than
half as far over the mountain as by rail, accounts for this; though by
night the sleeping-car at the rear is fully occupied by men, usually men
only, who have adopted the American custom of saving their days for
business. The sleeping compartments are arranged in ship’s-cabin size
and run diagonally across the car, to leave room for a passageway within
the narrow coach. These two-bunk cabins are furnished with individual
toilet facilities, thermos bottles of ice water, and electric lights,
and many Porto Ricans have actually learned that an open window does not
necessarily mean a slumberer turned to a corpse by morning. The trainmen
are polite and obliging in an unostentatious way that make our own seem
ogres by comparison. In short, it is a diligent, honest little railroad
suiting the size of the country and with no other serious fault than a
tendency to stop again at another station almost before it has gotten
well under way.
For nearly an hour the train circles San Juan bay, the gleaming,
heaped-up capital, or its long line of lights, according to the hour,
remaining almost within rifle-shot until the crowded suburbs of Bayamón
spring up on each side. Then come broadening expanses of cane, with
throngs of men and women working in the fields, interspersed with short
stretches of arid sand, or meadows bright with pink morning-glories and
dotted with splendid reddish cattle. Beyond comes a fruit district.
Under Spanish rule scarcely enough fruit was grown in Porto Rico to
supply the local demand. The Americans, struck with the excellency of
the wild fruit, particularly of the citrus variety, began to develop
this almost unknown industry. But among the pathetic sights of the
island is to see acre after acre of grape-fruit, unsurpassed in size and
quality, rotting on the trees or on the ground beneath them. While
Americans are paying fabulous prices for their favorite breakfast fruit,
many a grower in Porto Rico is hiring men to haul away the locally
despised _toronjas_ and bury them. Lack of transportation is the chief
answer—that and a bit of market manipulation. Not long ago the discovery
that the bottled juice of grapefruit and pineapple made a splendid
beverage led a company to undertake what should be a booming enterprise,
with the thirsty mainland as chief consumers. But the promoters quickly
struck an unexpected snag. The available supply of bottles, strange to
relate, was quickly exhausted, and to-day the company manager gazes
pensively from his windows across prolific, yet unproductive, orchards.
The pale-green of cane-fields becomes monotonous; then at length the
blue sea breaks again on the horizon. Beyond Arecibo the railroad runs
close along the shore, with almost continuous villages of shaggy huts
half hidden among the endless cocoanut-grove that girdles Porto Rico,
the waves lapping at the roots of the outmost trees. These without
exception are encircled by broad bands of tin. During an epidemic of
bubonic plague the mongoose was introduced into the island, as into
nearly all the West Indies, to exterminate the rats. The rodents
developed new habits and took to climbing the slanting cocoanut trees,
which afforded both food and a place of refuge. The bands of tin have
served their purpose. To-day both rats and snakes are scarce in Porto
Rico, but the inhabitants discovered too late that the chicken-loving
mongoose may be an even greater pest than those it has replaced.
Cocoanuts brought more than one Porto Rican a quick fortune during the
war. Now that the gas-mask has degenerated into a mural decoration,
however, immense heaps of the fibrous husks lie shriveling away where
the armistice overtook them, and even the favorable state of the copra
market seems incapable of shaking the growers out of their racial
apathy.
Several pretty towns on knolls against a background of sea attract the
eye as the train bends southward along the west coast. Below
Quebradillas the railroad swings in a great horseshoe curve down into a
little sea-level valley, plunges through two tunnels, and crawls along
the extreme edge of a bold precipitous coast, past mammoth tumbled
rocks, and all but wetting its rails in the dashing surf. A few tobacco
patches spring up here, where the mountains crowd the cane-fields out of
existence, women and children patiently hoeing, and men plowing the
pale-red soil behind brow-yoked oxen. Crippled Mayagüez drags slowly by,
new seas of cane appear, then the splendid plain of San Germán, with its
vista of grazing cattle and its _pepinos gordos_, reddish calabashes
clinging to their climbing vines like huge sausages. Beyond, there is
little to see, except canefields and the Caribbean, until we rumble into
Ponce, spread away up its foothills like a city laid out in the sun to
dry. On the southeastern horizon lies an island the natives call Caja de
Muertos—“deadman’s box,” and it looks indeed like a coffin, with the
lighthouse on its highest point resembling a candle set there by some
pious mourner. Local tradition has it that this is the original of
Stevenson’s “Treasure Island.”
The train turns back from Ponce, but the railroad does not, and one may
rumble on behind a smaller engine to Guayama. Some day the company hopes
to get a franchise for the eastern end of the island and encircle it
entirely. A private railroad covers a third of the remaining distance as
it is. But the traveler bent on circumnavigating all Porto Rico must
trust to _guaguas_, an automobile, or his own exertions through this
region, and swinging in a great curve around the Luquillo range, with
the cloud-capped summit of the island purple and hazy above him,
eventually fetches up once more in sea-lashed San Juan. By this time, I
warrant, he will long for other landscapes than spreading canefields.
* * * * *
Sugar was shipped from Porto Rico as early as 1533, but the Spaniards
gave it less attention than they did coffee. For one thing their methods
were antiquated. Two upright wooden rollers under a thatched roof,
turned by a yoke or two of oxen, was the customary cane-crusher. Here
and there one of these may be seen to this day. The big open iron
kettles in which they boiled the syrup are still strewn around the
coast, some of them occupied in the plebeian task of catching rain-water
from hovel roofs, many more rusting away like abandoned artillery of a
by-gone age. All the coastal belt is dotted with the ruins of old brick
sugar-mills, their stocky square chimneys broken off at varying heights
from the ground, like aged tombs of methods that have passed away. They
do not constitute a direct loss, but rather unavoidable sacrifices to
the exacting god of modern progress, for barely sixty per cent. of the
sugar contents was extracted by the contrivances of those ox-gaited,
each-planter-for-himself days.
It is natural that combinations of former estates, with immense central
_engenios_, should have followed American possession. To-day four great
companies control the sugar output of Porto Rico, from Guánica on the
west to Fajardo in the east. Like the mammoth _central_ of Cuba, they
reckon their production in hundreds of thousands of bags and utilize all
the aids of modern science in their processes. Their problem, however,
is more complex than that in the almost virgin lands of Cuba and Santo
Domingo. The acreage available for cane production is definitely
limited; virtually all of it has been cultivated for centuries. Charred
stumps and logs of recent deforestation are unknown in Porto Rican
canefields. Instead there is the acrid scent of patent fertilizers and,
particularly in the south, elaborate systems of irrigation. After each
cutting the fields must be replanted; in Cuba and the Dominican Republic
they reproduce for eight to twelve years. A few areas never before
devoted to cane have recently been planted, but they are chiefly small
interior valleys and the loftier foothills well back from the coast. For
the Porto Rican sugar producer is forced to encroach upon the mountains
in a way that his luckier fellows of the larger islands to the westward
would scorn, and his fields of cane are sometimes as billowy as a
turbulent Atlantic.
[Illustration: There are school accommodations for only half the
children of our Porto Rico]
[Illustration: The home of a lace-maker in Aquadillo]
[Illustration: The Porto Rican method of making lace]
Porto Rico was in the midst of a wide-spread strike among the sugar
workers during our stay there. All through this busiest month of
February there had been constant parades of strikers along the coast
roads by day and thronged _mitines_ in the towns each evening. The
paraders were with few exceptions law-abiding and peaceful despite the
scores of red flags that followed the huge Stars and Stripes at the head
of each procession. When the authorities protested, the strike leaders
explained that red had long stood as the symbol of the laboring class in
Spanish countries. They were astounded to learn that to people beyond
the blue sea that surrounds them, the color meant lawlessness and revolt
by violence, and they lost no time in adopting instead a green banner.
When this in turn was found to have a similar significance in another
island somewhere far away, they chose a white flag. It was not a matter
of one color or another, they said, but of sufficient food to feed their
hungry families.
Negro spell-binders from the cities, evil-faced fellows for the most
part, whose soft hands showed no evidence of ever having wielded a
cane-knife, harangued the barefoot multitudes in moonlighted town
streets. When the head of the movement was taken to task by neutral
fellow-citizens for not choosing lieutenants more capable of arousing
general public sympathy and confidence, he replied with a fervent, “I
wish to God I could!” But the ranks of Porto Rican workmen do not easily
yield men of even the modicum of education required to spread-eagle a
public meeting. Held down for centuries to almost the level of serfs,
they have little notion of how to use that modern double-edged weapon,
the strike. They do not put their heads together, formulate their
demands, and carry them to their employers. Inert by nature and
training, they plod on until some outside agitator comes along and tells
them they shall get higher wages if only they will follow his
leadership, whisper to one another that it would be nice to have more
money, and quit work, with no funds to support themselves in idleness or
any other preparation. It is the old irresponsibility, the lack of
foreplanning common to the tropics. Then, that they may not be the
losers whichever side wins, they strive to keep on good terms with their
employers by telling them that only the fear of violence from their
fellows keeps them from coming to work, being so docile by nature that
they would not hurt even the feelings of their superiors.
This time the strikers had been encouraged by what they mistook to be
federal support. The American Federation of Labor had sent down as
investigating delegates two men of forceful Irish wit who were naturally
appalled to find their new fellow-citizens living under conditions
unequalled even among their ancestral peat-bogs. What they did not
recognize was that all over Latin-America, even where land is virtually
unlimited and there are no corporations to “exploit” the populace, the
masses live in much the same thatched-hut degradation. Their
familiarity, with the Porto Rican environment was as negative as their
knowledge of the Spanish language; they made the almost universal
American mistake of thinking that what is true of the United States is
equally so of all other countries, and their straight-forward national
temperament made them, no match for the wily, intricate machinations of
native politicians.
Porto Rico had not been so lively since the Americans ousted the
Spaniards. I had an opportunity of hearing both sides of the case, for
with the privilege of the mere observer I was equally welcome—whatever
the degree may have been—in the touring car of the delegates and at the
dinner-tables of the sugar managers.
“These simple fellows from the States,” said the latter, “think they can
solve the problem of over-population by giving $2.50 a day to all
laborers, good or bad, weak or strong. The result would be to drive the
best workmen out of the country, and leave us, our stock-holders, and
the consumers, victims of the poorest. Like the labor union movement
everywhere, it would give the advantage to the weakling, the scamper,
the time-killer. We have men in our fields who earn $3.50 a day, and who
will tell you they do not know why on earth they are striking. Men who
can cut six tons of cane a day on piece-work will not cut one ton at day
wages. Then there are men so full of the hookworm that they haven’t the
strength to earn _one_ dollar a day. We _centrals_ insist on keeping the
_ajuste_ system that has always prevailed in Porto Rico—the letting of
work by contract to self-appointed gang leaders; and we will not sign a
minimum wage scale because there is no responsible person to see that
the terms are carried out on the laborer’s side. We refuse to deal with
the strikers’ committees because we cannot listen to a lot of bakers and
barbers from the towns who do not know sugarcane from swamp reeds. There
is nothing but politics back of it all any way. This is a presidential
year; that explains the sudden interest of politicians in the poor
down-trodden laboring class. Our men earn at least $1.75 a day—and they
seldom work in the fields after two in the afternoon. Besides that we
give every employee a twenty per cent. bonus, a house to live in if he
chooses, free medical attention, half-time when they are sick, and the
privilege of buying their supplies in our company stores at cost. Cuba
pays higher wages, but the companies get most of it back through their
stores. We run ours at a loss; I can prove it to you by our books; and
we give much to charity. Hungry indeed! Do you know that our biggest
sales to our laborers are costly perfumes? They may starve their
children, but they can always feed fresh eggs to their fighting-cocks.
There is hardly a man of them that is not keeping two or three women. If
we paid our men twice what we do, the only result would be that they
would lay off every other day. Let them strike! We can always get
hillmen from the interior or men from Aguadilla who are only too glad to
work for even less than we are paying now.”
I found Santiago Iglesias literally up to his ears in work at the
headquarters of the Socialist-Labor party, a few doors from the
governor’s palace. About him swarmed several of the foxy-faced
individuals he had himself privately deplored as assistants. A powerful
man in the prime of life, of pure Spanish blood, the radical Porto Rican
senator was quite ready to recapitulate once more his view of the
situation. If he was “playing politics”—and what elective government
official is not every time he opens his mouth or turns over in bed?—he
gave at least the impression of being genuinely distressed at the
condition of Porto Rico’s poverty-bred masses. We had conversed for some
time in Spanish before he surprised me by breaking forth into a vigorous
English, amusing for its curious errors of pronunciation. The minimum
wage demanded, for instance, which recurred in almost every sentence,
always emerged from his lips with the second f transformed into an s.
That is the chief trouble with Santiago, according to his opponents—his
methods are “too fisty.”
“There has been a vast improvement in personal liberty in Porto Rico
under American rule,” he began. “But the island has been surrendered to
Wall Street, to the heartless corporations that always profit most by
American expansion. Moreover, American rule has forced upon us American
prices—it always does—without giving our people the corresponding
income. Formerly all our wealth went to Spain. Now it goes to the
States, but with this difference,—under Spanish rule wages were low but
the employers were paternal; they thought occasionally about their
peons. At least the workers got enough to eat. The corporations that
have taken their place are utterly impersonal; the workmen who sweat in
the sun for them are no more to the far away stock-holders than the
canes that pass between the rollers of their sugar-mills. When they get
these magnificent returns on their investment do the Americans who hold
stocks and bonds in our great _centrals_ ever ask themselves how the men
who are actually earning them are getting on? No, they sit tight in
their comfortable church pews giving thanks to the Lord with a freer
conscience than ever did the Spanish conquistadores, for they are too
far away ever to see the sufferings of _their_ peons.
“The sugar companies can produce sugar at a hundred dollars a ton; they
are getting two hundred and forty. The common stock of the four big
ones, paid from fifty-six to seventy dollars last year on every hundred
dollars invested, not to mention a lot of extra dividends, and their
profits for this _zafra_ will be far higher. The island is being pumped
dry of its resources and nothing is being put back into it. In the
States not twenty per cent. of the national income goes out of the
country; the rest goes back into reproduction. In Porto Rico seventy per
cent. goes to foreigners, and of the thirty left wealthy Porto Ricans
spend a large amount abroad. We do not want our land all used to enrich
non-resident stock-holders; we need it to feed our own people. There is
not corn-meal and beans enough now to go round, because the big sugar
_centrals_ hold all the fertile soil. They have bought all the land
about them, even the foot-hills, so that the people cannot plant
anything, but _must_ work for the companies. Stock-holders are entitled
to a fair profit on the capital actually invested—_actually_, I say—and
something for the risk taken—which certainly is not great. But the Porto
Ricans, the men, and women, and the scrawny children who do the actual
work in the broiling tropical sun should get the rest of it, in wages.
We should tax non-resident sugar companies ten per cent. of their income
for the improvement of Porto Rico; we should borrow several millions in
the States and give our poor people land to cultivate, and pay the loan
back out of that tax. But what can we do? The politicians, the high
officials are all interested in sugar. They and the corporations form
the _invisible_ government; they are the law, the police, the rulers,
the patriots. Patriots! The instant the Porto Rican income-tax was set
at half that in the States the corporations made Porto Rico their legal
residence. When the federal government would not stand for the trick and
forced them to pay the balance they cried unto high Heaven. Porto Rican
law forbids any company or individual to own more than five hundred
acres. They get around the law by trickery, by dividing the holdings
among the members of the same family, by making fake divisions of
company stock. The Secretary of War and other federal officials come
down here to ‘investigate.’ They motor across our beautiful mountains,
have two or three banquets in the homes of the rich or the _central_
managers, and the newspapers in the States shout ‘Great Prosperity in
Porto Rico!’ I tell you it is the criminal lack of equity, the same old
blindness of the landed classes the world over and in all ages that is
driving Porto Rico into the camp of the violent radicals.
“You admire our fine roads. All visitors do. You do not realize that
they were built because the corporations needed them. And did we pay for
them by taxing the corporations? We did not. We paid for them by
government bonds—that is, we charged them up to the children of the
peons. You have probably found that we have inadequate school
facilities. The corporations, the invisible government, do not want the
masses educated, because then they would not have left any easily
manipulated laboring class. Nor do I take much stock in this
over-population idea. At least I should like to see the half million
untilled acres turned over to the people before I will believe
emigration is necessary. Sixty per cent. of Porto Rico is uncultivated,
yet eighty per cent. of the population goes to bed hungry every night in
the year. Then there is this cry of hookworm. Do not let the Rockefeller
Foundation, a direct descendant of the capitalists, tell you lies about
‘anemia.’ The anemia of Porto Rico comes from no worm, but from the fact
that the people are always hungry. It is the sordid miserliness of
corporations, bent on keeping our peons reduced to the level of serfs,
in order that they may always have a cheap supply of labor, that is the
fundamental cause of the misery of Porto Rico, of the naked, barefoot,
hungry, schoolless, homeless desolation of the working classes.”
The calm and neutral observer, neither underfed nor blessed with the
task of clipping sugar-stock coupons, detects a certain amount of froth
on the statements of both parties to the controversy in Porto Rico. But
he cannot but wonder why the sweat-stained laborers in the corn-fields
should be seen wearily tramping homeward to a one-room thatched hovel to
share a few boiled roots with a slattern woman and a swarm of
thin-shanked children while the Americans who direct them from the
armchair comfort of fan-cooled offices stroll toward capacious
bungalows, pausing on the way for a game of tennis in the company
compound, and sit down to a faultless dinner amid all that appeals to
the aesthetic senses. Least of all can he reconcile the vision of other
Americans, whose only part in the production of sugar is the collecting
of dividends, rolling about the island in luxurious touring cars, with
the sight of the toil-worn, ragged workers whose uncouth appearance
arouses the haughty travelers to snorts of scorn or falsetto shrieks of
“how picturesque.”
* * * * *
The problem in Porto Rico, as the reader has long since suspected, is
the antithesis of that in Santo Domingo. In the latter island the
difficulty is to get laborers enough to develop the country; in the
former it is to find labor enough to occupy the swarming population.
Barely three-fourths of a million people are scattered through the broad
insular wilderness to the westward; the census of 1920 shows little
Porto Rico crowded with 1,263,474 inhabitants, that is nearly four
hundred persons to the square mile. There are several reasons for this
discrepancy; for one thing Santo Domingo has been fighting itself for
generations, while Porto Rico has never had a revolution. The obvious
solution of the problem has two serious drawbacks. The Dominicans do not
welcome immigration; they wish to keep their country to themselves. The
Porto Rican is inordinately fond of his birthplace. Send him to the most
distant part of the world and he is sure sooner or later to come back to
his beloved Borinquen. Emigration from the island can reach even
moderate success only when entire families are sent. The letters of
Porto Rican soldiers no nearer the front than Florida or Panama were
filled with wails of homesickness that would have been pitiful had they
not been tinged with what to the unemotional Anglo-Saxon was a
suggestion of the ludicrous.
There is a Japanese effect in the density of population of our little
West Indian colony. When the traveler has motored for hours without once
getting out of sight of human habitations, when he has noted how the
unpainted little shacks speckle the steepest hillside, even among the
high mountains, when he has seen the endless clusters of hovels that
surround every town, whether of the coast or the interior, he will come
to realize the crowded condition. If he is a trifle observant, he will
also see everywhere signs of the scarcity of work. Men lounging in the
doors of their huts in the middle of the day, surrounded by pale women
and children sucking a joint of sugar-cane, are not always loafers; in
many cases they have nowhere to go and work. While the women toil at
making lace, drawn-work, or hats, the males turn their hands to anything
that the incessant struggle for livelihood suggests. The man who spends
two days in weaving a laundry basket and plods fifteen or twenty miles
to sell it for sixty cents is only one of a thousand commonplace sights
along the island highways.
A job is a prize in Porto Rico. If one is offered, applicants swarm;
many a man “lays off” in order to lend his job to his brother, his
cousin, or his _compadre_. Naturally, employers take advantage of this
condition. The American labor delegates told the chief of police that he
should be the first to lead his men on strike, for certainly he could
not keep them honest at forty-five dollars a month.
“Oh, yes, I can,” retorted the chief, “for while we have barely eight
hundred on the force, there are twelve thousand on the waiting-list, and
every policeman knows that if he is fired, he will have to go back to
punching bullocks at a third as much.” _Mozos_ and chambermaids in the
best hotels seldom get more than five dollars a month. Street-car men
get from sixteen to twenty-five cents an hour, depending on the length
of service. In a large clothing factory of Mayagüez, fitted with
motor-run sewing-machines, only a few of the women get a dollar a day;
the majority average fifty cents. The law, of course, requires that they
be paid a minimum wage of a dollar; but what is a mere law among a
teeming population which the Spaniards spent four centuries in training
to be _manso_ and uncomplaining? The favorite trick is to pay the
dollar, and then fine the women fifty cents for not having done
sufficient work. Among the regrettable sights of the island are groups
of callous emissaries frequenting the leading hotels who have been sent
down as agents of certain American department stores to reap advantage
from the local poverty. These _comisionistas_ motor about the island,
placing orders with the wretched native women, but by piece-work, you
may be sure, to avoid the requirement of paying a dollar a day. American
women who are paying several times what they once did for Porto Rican
lace, blouses, and drawn-work, may fancy that some of this increase goes
to the humble _mujeres_ who do the work. Not at all. They are still
toiling in their miserable little huts at the same ludicrous prices,
while their products are being sold on the “bargain” counters in our
large cities, at several hundred per cent. profit. So thoroughly have
these touts combed the country that the individual can nowhere buy of
the makers; their work has all been contracted far in advance.