BOUND ABOUT LAKE CHAPALA
With the coming of November I left Guanajuato behind. The branch line
down to Silao was soon among broad plains of corn, without rocks even
along the flat, ragged, country roads, bringing to mind that it was long
since I had walked on level and unobstructed ground. The crowding of the
second-class car forced me to share a bench with a chorus girl of the
company that had been castilianizing venerable Broadway favorites in
Guanajuato's chief theater. She was about forty, looked it with compound
interest, was graced with the form of a Panteón mummy, and a face--but
some things are too horrible even to be mentioned in print. Most of the
way she wept copiously, apparently at some secret a pocket mirror
insisted on repeating to her as often as she drew it out, and regained
her spirits only momentarily during the smoking of each of several
cigarettes. Finally she took to saying her beads in a sepulchral,
moaning voice, her eyes closed, and wagging her head from side to side
in the rhythm of her professional calling, until we pulled into the
one-story, adobe, checkerboard town. All the troupe except the two
"stars" rode second-class, dressed much like peons, and carried their
possessions in misshapen bundles under their arms. If the one
performance I had seen was typical, this was far better treatment than
they deserved.
The express from El Paso and the North set me down in the early night at
Irapuato, out of the darkness of which bobbed up a dozen old women, men,
and boys with wailing cries of "Fresas!" For this is the town of
perennial strawberries. The basket of that fruit heaped high and fully a
foot in diameter which sat before me next morning as we rambled away
westward toward Guadalajara cost _cuatro reales_--a quarter, and if
the berries grew symmetrically smaller toward the bottom, an all-day
appetite by no means brought to light the tiniest. The way lay across a
level land bathed in sunshine, of extreme fertility, and watered by
harnessed streams flowing down from the distant hills. All the day one
had a sense of the richness of nature, not the prodigality of the
tropics to make man indolent, but just sufficient to give full reward
for reasonable exertion. The rich, black, fenceless plains were
burnished here and there with little shallow lakes of the rainy season,
and musical with wild birds of many species. Primitive well-sweeps
punctuated the landscape, and now and then the church towers of some
adobe village peered through the mesquite trees. In the afternoon
grazing grew more frequent and herds of cattle and flocks of goats
populated all the scene. Within the car and without, the hats of the
peons, with all their sameness, were never exactly alike. Each bore some
individuality, be it in shape, shade, material, or manner of wearing, as
distinct as among the fair sex in other lands; and that without
resorting to decorating them with flowers, vegetables, or dead
birds. Some wore around them ribbons with huge letters proposing, "Viva
----" this or that latest aspirant to the favor of the primitive-minded
"pela'o," but these were always arranged in a manner to add to rather
than detract from the artistic ensemble. Many a young woman of the same
class was quite attractive in appearance, though thick bulky noses
robbed all of the right to be called beautiful. They did not lose their
charms, such as they were, prematurely, as do so many races of the
South, and the simplicity of dress and hair arrangement added much to
the pleasing general effect.
As night descended we began to pant upward through low hills, wooded,
but free from the rocks and boulders of a mining region, and in the
first darkness drew up at Guadalajara, second city of Mexico. It is a
place that adorns the earth. Jalisco State, of which this is the
capital, has been called the Andalusia of Mexico, and the city is indeed
a Seville of the West, though lacking in her spontaneity of life, for
this cruder people is much more tempered with a constant fear of
betraying their crudeness and in consequence much weighed down by
"propriety." But its bright, central plaza has no equal to the
north. Here as the band plays amid the orange trees heavy with ripening
fruit, the more haughty of the population promenade the inner square,
outside which stroll the peons and "lower classes"; though only custom
seems responsible for the division. One misses in Mexico the genuine
democracy of Spain. The idea of a conquered race still holds, and
whoever has a strain of white in his veins--or even in the hue of his
collar--considers it fitting to treat the Indian mass with a cold,
indifferent tone of superiority. Yet in the outer circle the
unprejudiced observer found more pleasing than within. One was reminded
of Mark Twain's suggestion that complexions of some color wear best in
tropical lands. In this, above all, the women of the rebozo were vastly
superior to those who stepped from their carriages at about the
beginning of the third number and took to parading, the two sexes in
pairs marching in opposite directions at a snail's pace. The "women of
the people" had more sense of the fitness of things than to ape the
wealthy in dress, like the corresponding class in our own land, and
their simplicity of attire stood out in attractive contrast to the pasty
features and unexercised figures in "Parisian" garb of the inner circle.
Guadalajara has the requisites of a real city. Its streets are well
paved with macadam, and it even possesses garbage wagons. Indeed, in
some respects it has carried "progress" too far, as in the case of the
winking electric sign of Broadway proportions advertising a
_camisería_--a local "shirtery," before which fascinated peons from
the distant villages stand gazing as at one of the seven wonders of the
universe. Beggars are few and there is none of the oppressive poverty of
other Mexican cities. This, it is agreed, is due not merely to the
extreme fertility of Jalisco, but to the kindness of nature in refusing
to produce the maguey in the vicinity, so that drunkenness is at its
lowest Mexican ebb and the sour stink of pulque shops nowhere assails
the nostrils. For this curse of the peon will not endure long
transportation. An abundance of cheap labor makes possible many little
conveniences unknown in more industrial lands, and the city has a
peaceful, soothing air and temperature, due perhaps to its ideal
altitude of six thousand feet, that makes life drift along like a
pleasant dream.
But its nights are hideous. The Mexican seems to relish constant uproar,
and if Guadalajara is ever to be the open-air health resort for frayed
nerves and weakened lungs it aspires to, there must come a diligent
suppression of unnecessary noises. As the evening gathering evaporates,
leaving the plaza sprinkled with a few dreamy mortals and scattered
policemen eating the lunch their wives bring and share with them,
pandemonium seems to be released from its confinement. First these same
preservers of law and order take to blowing their hair-raising whistles
at least every ten minutes from one to another back and forth through
every street, as if mutually to keep up their courage. Scores of the
gilded youth on the way home from "playing the bear" before their
favorite _rejas_ join together in bands to howl into the small
hours their glee at the kindness of life, the entire stock of
street-cars seems to be sent out nightly on some extended excursion with
orders never to let their gongs fall silent, and long before dawn even
the few who have succeeded in falling into a doze are snatched awake by
an atrocious din of church-bells sufficient in number to supply heaven,
nirvana, the realm of houris, and the Irish section of purgatory, with
enough left over to furnish boiling pots for the more crowded section of
the Hereafter. Then with a dim suggestion of dawn every living dog and
fighting-cock, of which each inhabitant appears to possess at least a
score, joins the forty thousand vendors of forty thousand different
species of uselessness howling in at least as many different voices and
tones, each a bit louder than all the others, until even an unoccupied
wanderer concludes that sleep is an idle waste of an all too short
existence.
I brought up a day of random wandering in state's prison. The
_Penitenciaría_ of Guadalajara is a huge, wheel-shaped building in
the most modern style of that class of architecture. The bullet-headed
youth in soldier's uniform and the complexion of a long-undusted carpet,
leaning on his musket at the entrance, made no move to halt me, and I
stepped forth on a patio forested with orange trees, to find that most
of the public had preceded me, including some hundred fruit, tortilla,
cigarette, and candy vendors. Here was no sign of prisoners. I
approached another stern boy armed like a first-class cruiser in war
time and he motioned upward with his gun barrel. The dwelling of the
_comandante_ faced the patio on the second-story corridor. His son,
aged five, met me with the information:
"Papá 'stá dormido."
But he was misinformed, for when his mother introduced me into the
parlor, father, in shirt-sleeves, was already rubbing the sleep out of
his eyes and preparing to light the first after-siesta cigarette. When
my impressiveness had penetrated his reawakening intellect, he prepared
me a document which, reduced to succinct English, amounted to the
statement that the prison and all it contained was mine for the asking.
A whiff of this sesame opened like magic the three immense iron doors
through anterooms in charge of trusties, in prison garb of the material
of blue overalls and caps shaped like a low fez. Inside, a "preso de
confianza" serving as turnkey led the way along a great stone corridor
to a little central patio with flowers and a central fountain babbling
merrily. From this radiated fifteen other long-vaulted passages,
seeming each fully a half mile in length; for with Latin love of the
theatrical the farther ends had been painted to resemble an endless
array of cells, even the numbers being continued above the false doors
to minute infinity. Besides these imaginary ones there were some forty
real places of confinement on each side of each corridor,
three-cornered, stone rooms with a comfortable cot and noticeable
cleanliness. The hundred or more convicts, wandering about or sitting in
the sun of the patio, were only locked in them by night. Whenever we
entered a corridor or a room, two strokes were sounded on a bell and all
arose and stood at attention until we had passed. Yet the discipline was
not oppressive, petty matters being disregarded. The corridor of those
condemned to be shot was closed with an iron-barred gate, but the
inmates obeyed with alacrity when my guide ordered them to step forth to
be photographed.
One of the passageways led to the _talleres_ or workshops, also
long and vaulted and well-lighted by windows high up in the curve of the
arched roof.
These showed the stone walls to be at least four feet thick, yet the
floor was of earth. On it along the walls sat men weaving straw ribbons
to be sewn into hats on the American sewing-machines beyond. In side
rooms were blacksmith, carpenter, and tinsmith shops in which all work
was done by hand, the absence of machinery suggesting to the trusty in
charge that Mexico is "muy pobre" as compared with other lands. Convicts
were obliged to work seven hours a day. Scattered through the building
were several small patios with patches of sun, in which many prisoners
were engaged in making ingenious little knickknacks which they were
permitted to sell for their own benefit. The speciality of one old
fellow under life sentence was a coin purse with the slightly
incongruous device, "Viva la Independencia!"
There was a complete absence of vicious faces, at least faces more so
than those of the great mass of peons outside. I recalled the assertions
of cynical American residents that all Mexicans are criminals and that
those in jail were only the ones who have had the misfortune to get
caught. Certainly there was nothing in their outward appearance to
distinguish the inmates from any gathering of the same class beyond
prison walls. Off one corridor opened the bath patio, large, and gay
with sunshine and flowers, with a large swimming pool and several
smaller baths. The prisoners are required to bathe at least every
Sunday. Within the penitentiary was a garden of several acres, on the
walls above which guards patroled with loaded muskets and in which
prisoners raised every species of fruit and vegetable known in the
region. The institution indeed was fully self-supporting. The kitchen
was lined with huge vats into which bushels of beans, corn, and the like
were shoveled, and like the prison tailor, shoe, and barber shops, was
kept in excellent order. Several short-time prisoners, among them many
boys, volunteered to stand in appropriate attitudes before the heavy
wall at the end of a three-cornered court where condemned men are shot
at three paces in the dawn of many an early summer day. In one corridor
the prison band, entirely made up of prisoners, was practising, and when
I had been seated in state on a wooden bench they struck up several
American favorites, ending with our national hymn, all played with the
musical skill common to the Mexican Indian, even among those unable to
read a note. On the whole the prison was as cheery and pleasant as
fitted such an institution, except the women's ward, into which a
vicious-looking girl admitted me sulkily at sight of the comandante's
order. A silent, nondescript woman of forty took me in charge with all
too evident ill-will and marched me around the patio on which opened the
rooms of female inmates, while the fifty or more of them left off their
cooking and washing for the male prisoners and stood at disgruntled
attention in sullen silence. Their quarters were noticeably dirtier than
those of the men. My guide took leave of me at the first of the three
iron doors, having still to postpone his exit a year or more, and these
again, fortunately, swung on their hinges as if by magic to let pass
only one of the thousand of us within.
On the mule-car that dragged and jolted us out to the "Niagara of
Mexico" were three resident Germans who strove to be "simpático" to the
natives by a clumsy species of "horse play." Their asininity is worth
mention only because among those laughing at their antics was a peon who
had been gashed across the hand, half-severing his wrist, yet who sat on
the back platform without even a rag around the wound, though with a
rope tourniquet above. Two gray and decrepit policemen rode with him and
half way out stopped at a stone hut to arrest the perpetrator of the
deed and bring him along, wrapped in the customary red sarape and
indifference.
The waterfall over a broad face of rock was pleasing but not
extraordinary, and swinging on my rucksack I struck off afoot. The
lightly rolling land was very fertile, with much corn, great droves of
cattle, and many shallow lakes, its climate a pleasant cross between
late spring and early fall. From El Castillo the path lay along the
shimmering railroad, on which I outdid the train to Atequisa station.
The orange vendors lolling here under the shade of their hats gave the
distance to Chapala as fifteen miles, and advised me to hire a horse or
take passage in the stage. This primitive bone-shaker, dark-red in
color, the body sitting on huge leather springs, was drawn by four teams
of mules in tandem, and before revolution spread over the land was
customarily packed to the roof and high above it with excursionists to
Mexico's chief inland watering-place. Now it dashed back and forth
almost empty.
I preferred my own legs. A soft road led between orange-groves--at the
station were offered for sale seedless oranges compared to which those
of California are pigmies--to the drowsing town of Atequisa. Through one
of its crumbling stone gates the way spread at large over its sandy,
sun-bathed plaza, then contracted again to a winding wide trail, rising
leisurely into the foothills beyond. A farmer of sixty, homeward bound
to his village of Santa Cruz on a loose-eared ass, fell in with me. He
lacked entirely that incommunicative manner and half-resentful air I had
so often encountered in the Mexican, and his country dialect whiled away
the time as we followed the unfenced "road" around and slowly upward
into hills less rugged than those about Guanajuato and thinly covered
with coarse grass and small brush. Twenty-one years ago he had worked
here as _mozo_ for "gringoes," my compatriots. They had offered
him a whole peso a day if he would not get married. But "he and she both
wanted," so "qué quiera usté'"? They had started farming on a little
piece of rocky ridge. He would point it out to me when we came
nearer. By and by he had bought another piece of land for fifty pesos
and then _poco á poco_ for forty pesos some more. Then for
twenty-four pesos and fifty centavos he had bought a cow, and the
_vaca_ before long gave them a fine calf and twelve
_cuartillos_ of milk a day. So that he was able to buy another
heifer and then an ox and finally another ox and--
Whack! It took many a thump and prod and "Bur-r-r-r-r-r-o!" to make the
pretty little mouse-colored donkey he was riding keep up with me--and
what did I think he paid for him? Eighteen pesos! Sí, señor, ní más ní
menos. A bargain, eh? And for the other one at home, which is larger,
only twenty-two pesos, and for the one _they_ stole from him,
fifteen pesos and a bag of corn. And once _they_ stole all three of
the _burritos_ and he ran half way to Colima and had them arrested
and got the _animalitos_ back. So that now he had two oxen--pray
God they were still safe--and two burros and three pieces of land and a
good wife--only yesterday she fell down and broke her arm and he had had
to cut sticks to tie it up and she would have to work without using it
for a long time--
Whack! "Anda bur-r-r-r-r-ro!" and once he owned it he never could get
himself to sell an animalito. They were sometimes useful to plow and
plant anyway, and this life of _sembrar_ and _cosechar_ was
just the one for him. The cities, bah!--though he had been twice to
Guadalajara and only too glad to get away again--and wasn't I tired
enough to try the burrito a while, I should find her pace smooth as
sitting on the ground. No? Well, at least if I got tired I could come
and spend the night in his _casita_, a very poor little house, to
be sure, which he had built himself long ago, soon after they were
married, but there I would be in my own house, and his wife--or perhaps
now he himself--would _ordeñar la vaca_ and there would be fresh
milk and--
So on for some seven or eight miles. Here and there the road passed
through an open gate as into a farmyard, though there were no adjoining
fences to mark these boundaries of some new hacienda or estate. From the
highest point there was a pretty retrospect back on Atequisa and the
railroad and the broad valley almost to far-off Guadalajara, and ahead,
also still far away, Lake Chapala shimmering in the early
sunset. Between lay broad, rolling land, rich with flowers and
shrubbery, and with much cultivation also, one vast field of ripening
Indian corn surely four miles long and half as wide stretching like a
sea to its surrounding hills, about its edge the leaf and branch shacks
of its guardians. Maize, too, covered all the slope down to the
mountain-girdled lake, and far, far away on a point of land, like Tyre
out in the Mediterranean, the twin towers of the church of Chapala stood
out against the dimming lake and the blue-gray range beyond.
Two leagues off it the peasant pointed out the ridge that hid his casita
and his animalitos and his good wife--with her broken arm now--and
regretting that I would not accept his poor hospitality, for I must be
tired, he rode away down a little barranca walled by tall bushes with
brilliant masses of purple, red, and pink flowers and so on up to the
little patch of corn which--yes, surely, I could see a corner of it from
here, and from it, if only I would come, I should see the broad blue
view of Chapala lake, and--My road descended and went down into the
night, plentifully scattered with loose stones. Before it had grown
really dark I found myself casting a shadow ahead, and turned to find an
enormous red moon gazing dreamily at me from the summit of the road
behind. Then came the suburbs and enormous ox-carts loaded with
everything, and donkeys without number passing silent-footed in the
sand, and peons, lacking entirely the half-insolence and pulque-sodden
faces of Guanajuato region, greeted me unfailingly with "Adiós" or
"Buenas noches."
But once in the cobble-paved village I must pay high in the "Hotel
Victor"--the larger ones being closed since anarchy had confined the
wealthy to their cities--for a billowy bed and a chicken centuries old
served by waiters in evening dress and trained-monkey manners. The free
and easy old _casa de asistencia_ of Guadalajara was far more to my
liking. But at least the landlord loaned me a pair of trunks for a
moonlight swim in Lake Chapala, whispering some secret to its sandy
beaches in the silence of the silver-flooded night.
It is the largest lake in Mexico, second indeed only to Titicaca among
the lofty sheets of water of the Western world. More than five thousand
feet above the sea, it is shallow and stormy as Lake Erie. Waves were
dashing high at the foot of the town in the morning. Its fishermen are
ever fearful of its fury and go to pray for a safe return from every
trip before their patron St. Peter in the twin-spired village church up
toward which the lake was surging this morning as if in anger that this
place of refuge should be granted its legitimate victims.
Its rage made the journey by water I had planned to Ribera Castellanos
inadvisable, even had an owner of one of the little open boats of the
fishermen been willing to trust himself on its treacherous bosom, and by
blazing eleven I was plodding back over the road of yesterday. The
orange vendors of Atequisa gathered around me at the station, marveling
at the strength of my legs. In the train I shared a bench with a
dignified old Mexican of the country regions, who at length lost his
reserve sufficiently to tell me of the "muy amigo gringo" whose picture
he still had on the wall of his house since the day twenty-seven years
ago when my compatriot had stopped with him on a tour of his native
State, carrying a small pack of merchandise which gave him the entrée
into all houses, but which he purposely held at so high a price that
none would buy.
From Ocotlán station a broad level highway, from which a glimpse is had
of the sharp, double peak of Colima volcano, runs out to Ribera
Castellanos. Sam Rogers was building a tourist hotel there. Its broad
lawn sloped down to the edge of Lake Chapala, lapping at the shores like
some smaller ocean; from its verandas spread a view of sixty miles
across the Mexican Titicaca, with all vacation sports, a perennial
summer without undue heat, and such sunsets as none can describe. The
hacienda San Andrés, also American owned, embraced thousands of acres of
rich bottom land on which already many varieties of fruit were producing
marvelously, as well as several mountain peaks and a long stretch of
lake front. The estate headquarters was like some modern railway
office, with its staff of employees. In the nearby stables horses were
saddled for us and we set off for a day's trip all within the confines
of the farm, under guidance of the bulky Mexican head overseer in all
his wealth of national garb and armament.
For miles away in several directions immense fields were being plowed by
dozens of ox-teams, the white garments of the drivers standing out
sharply against the brown landscape. Two hours' riding around the lagoon
furnishing water for irrigation brought us to a village of some size,
belonging to the estate. The wife of one of the bee-tenders emerged
from her hut with bowls of clear rich honey and tortillas, and the
manner of a serf of medieval times before her feudal lord. The bees
lived in hollow logs with little thatched roofs. For several miles more
the rich bottom lands continued. Then we began to ascend through bushy
foothills, and cultivation dropped behind us, as did the massive head
overseer, whose weight threatened to break his horse's back. Well up we
came upon the "chaparral," the hacienda herdsman, tawny with sunburn
even to his leather garments. He knew by name every animal under his
charge, though the owners did not even know the number they possessed. A
still steeper climb, during the last of which even the horses had to be
abandoned, brought us to a hilltop overlooking the entire lake, with the
villages on its edge, and range after range of the mountains of Jalisco
and Michoacán. Our animals were more than an hour picking their way
down the stony trails between all but perpendicular cornfields, the
leaves of which had been stripped off to permit the huge ear at the top
the more fully to ripen. A boulder set in motion at the top of a field
would have been sure death to the man or horse it struck at the bottom.
The hotel launch set me across the lake next morning. From the
rock-tumbled fisher-town of La Palma an arriero pointed out to me far
away across the plains of Michoacán a mountain of striking resemblance
to Mt. Tabor in Palestine, as the landmark on the slopes of which to
seek that night's lodging. The treeless land of rich black loam was flat
as a table, yet the trail took many a turn, now to avoid the dyke of a
former governor and Porfirio Diaz, who planned to pump dry this end of
the lake, now for some reason only those with Mexican blood in their
veins could fathom. Peons were fishing in the irrigating ditches with
machetes, laying their huge, sluggish victims all but cut in two on the
grass behind them.
Noon brought Sahuayo, a large village in an agricultural district, in
one of the huts of which ten cents produced soup, pork, frijoles,
tortillas, and coffee, to say nothing of the tablecloth in honor of so
unexpected a guest and a dozen oranges for the thirst beyond. The new
trail struck off across the fields almost at right angles to the one
that had brought me. I was already on the hacienda Guaracha, largest of
the State of Michoacán, including within its holdings a dozen such
villages as this, but the owner to whom I bore a letter lived still
leagues distant. Dwellers on the estate must labor on it when required
or seek residence elsewhere, which means far distant. All with whom I
spoke on the subject, native or foreigners, seemed agreed that the peon
prefers this plan to being thrown on his own responsibility.
The traveler could easily fancy himself in danger in this vast fenceless
and defenseless space. Enormous herds were visible for miles in every
direction, bulls roamed here and there, bellowing moodily, cattle and
horses by hundreds waded and grazed in the shallow swamps across which
the dyked path led. All the brilliant day "Mt. Tabor" stood forth in
all its beauty across the plain in this clear air, and the sun brought
sweat even at more than a mile above the sea.
I was in the very heart of Birdland. These broad, table-flat stretches
of rich plateau, now half inundated, seemed some enormous outdoor
aviary. Every species of winged creature one had hoped ever to see even
in Zoo cages or the cases of museums seemed here to live and fly and
have its songful being. Great sluggish _zopilotes_ of the horrid
vulture family strolled or circled lazily about, seeking the scent of
carrion. Long-legged, snow-white herons stood in the marshes. Great
flocks of small black birds that could not possibly have numbered less
than a hundred thousand each rose and fell and undulated in waves and
curtains against the background of mountains beyond, screening it as by
some great black veil. There were blood-red birds, birds blue as
turquoise, some of almost lilac hue, every grassy pond was overspread
with wild ducks so tame they seemed waiting to be picked up and
caressed, eagles showed off their spiral curves in the sky above like
daring aviators over some admiring field of spectators; everywhere the
stilly hum of semi-tropical life was broken only by the countless and
inimitable bird calls.
As my shadow grew ungainly, the dyked path struck across a long wet
field against the black soil of which the dozens of white-clad peons
with their mattocks gleamed like grains of rice on an ebony surface.
Beyond, it entered foothills, flanked a peak, and joined a wide road
leading directly to an immense cluster of buildings among trees. The sun
was firing the western horizon. From every direction groups of
white-garbed peons were drawing like homing pigeons toward this center
of the visible landscape. I reached it with them and, passing through
several massive gates, mounted through a corral or cobbled stable yard
with many bulky, two-wheeled carts and fully two hundred mules, then up
an inclined, cobbled way through a garden of flowers to the immense
pillared veranda with cement floor of the owner's hacienda residence.
The building was in the form of a hollow square, enclosing a flowery
patio as large as many a town plaza. Don Diego was not at home, nor
indeed were any of his immediate family, who preferred the urban
pleasures of Guadalajara. The Indian door-tender brought me to "Don
Carlos," a fat, cheerful man of forty in a white jacket, close-fitting
trousers, and an immense revolver attached to the left side of his broad
and heavily weighted cartridge-belt. I presented my letter of
introduction from an American friend of the owner and was soon entangled
in the coils of Mexican pseudo-politeness. Don Carlos tore himself
away from his priceless labors as manager of the hacienda and took me up
on the flat roof of the two-story house, from which a fine view was had
for miles in all directions; indeed, nearly a half of the estate could
be seen, with its peon villages, its broad stretches of new-plowed
fields, and the now smokeless chimney of the sugar mill among the trees.
The interest of the manager did not extend beyond the cut-and-dried
formalities common to all Mexicans. In spite of his honeyed words, it
was evident he looked upon me as a necessary evil, purposely come to the
hacienda to seek food and lodging, and to be gotten rid of as soon as
possible, compatible with the sacred Arabian rules of hospitality. I had
not yet learned that a letter of introduction in Latin America, given on
the slightest provocation, is of just the grade of importance such
custom would warrant. Not that Don Carlos was rude. Indeed, he strove
outwardly to be highly _simpático_. But one read the insincerity
underneath by a kind of intuition, and longed for the abrupt but
honestly frank Texan.
The two front corners of the estate residence were taken up by the
hacienda store and church respectively--a handy arrangement by virtue of
which whatever went out the pay window to the peons (and it was not
much) came in again at one or the other of the corner doors. Adjoining
the building and half surrounding it was an entire village, with a
flowery plaza and promenades for its inhabitants. The owners of the
estate were less churlishly selfish than their prototypes in our own
country, in that they permitted the public, which is to say their own
workmen and families, to go freely anywhere in the family residence and
its patio, except into the dwelling-rooms proper.
When darkness came on we sat in the piazza garden overlooking the
mule-yard. The evening church service over, the estate priest came to
join us, putting on his huge black "Texas" hat and lighting a cigarette
on the chapel threshold. He wore an innumerable series of long black
robes, which still did not conceal the fact that the curve from chest to
waist was the opposite of that common to sculptured figures, and his
hand-shake was particularly soft and snaky. He quickly took charge of
the conversation and led it into anecdotes very few of which could be
set down by the writers of modern days, denied the catholic privileges
of old Boccaccio and Rabelais.
Toward eight supper was announced. But instead of the conversational
feast amid a company of educated Mexican men and women I had pictured to
myself during the day's tramp, I was led into a bare stone room with a
long, white-clothed table, on a corner of which sat in solitary state
two plates and a salt cellar. A peon waiter brought an ample, though by
no means epicurean, supper, through all which Don Carlos sat smoking
over his empty plate opposite me, alleging that he never ate after
noonday for dread of taking on still greater weight, and striving to
keep a well-bred false politeness in the voice in which he answered my
few questions. He had spent a year in a college of New Jersey, but had
not even learned to pronounce the name of that State. Having pointed
out to me the room I was to occupy, he excused himself for a
"momentito," and I have never seen him since.
Evidently horrified at the sight of a white man, even if only a
"gringo," traveling on foot, the manager had insisted on lending me a
horse and mozo to the railroad station of Moreno, fifteen miles distant,
but still within the confines of the hacienda. It may be also that he
gave orders to have me out of his sight before he rose. At any rate it
was barely three when a knock at the door aroused me and by four I
stumbled out into the black starlit night to find saddled for me in the
mule-corral what might by a considerable stretch of the word be called a
horse. The mozo was well mounted, however, and the family chauffeur,
carrying in one hand a basket of eggs he had been sent to fetch the
estate owner in Guadalajara, rode a magnificent white animal. Without
even the formal leave-taking cup of coffee, we set off on the road to
the eastward. For road in Mexico always read--at best a winding stretch
of dried mud with narrow paths meandering through the smoother parts of
it, the whole tumbled everywhere with stones and rocks and broken by
frequent unexpected deep cracks and stony gorges. My "horse" was as
striking a caricature of that species of quadruped as could have been
found in an all-night search in the region, which indeed there was
reason to believe had been produced in just that manner. But at least it
had the advantage of being unable to keep up with my companions, leaving
me alone behind in far more pleasant company.
We wound through several long peon villages, mere grass huts on the bare
earth floors of which the inhabitants lay rolled up in their blankets. I
had not been supplied with spurs, essential to all horsemanship in
Mexico, and was compelled at thirty second intervals to prick up the
jade between my legs with the point of a lead pencil, the only weapon at
hand, or be left behind entirely. As the stars dimmed and the horizon
ahead took on a thin gray streak, peons wrapped in their sarapes passed
now and then noiselessly in their soft leather _huarachas_ close
beside me. In huts along the way frowsy, unwashed women might be heard
already crushing in their stone mortars, under stone rolling-pins, maize
for the morning atole and tortillas, while thick smoke began to wander
lazily out from the low doorways. Swiftly it grew lighter until suddenly
an immense red sun leaped full-grown above the ragged horizon ahead,
just as we sighted an isolated station building in the wilderness that
now surrounded us on all sides.
A two-car train rambled through a light-wooded, half-mountainous
country, stopping at every collection of huts to pick up or set down a
peon or two, and drew up at length in Zamora. It was a populous,
flat-roofed, ill-smelling, typical Mexican city of checkerboard pattern,
on the plaza of which faced the "Hotel Morelos," formerly the "Porfirio
Diaz," but with that seditious name now carefully painted over. Being
barely a mile above sea-level, the town has a suggestion of the tropics
and the temperature of midday is distinctly noticeable.
Zamora ranks as the most fanatical spot in Michoacán, which is itself
so throttled by the church that it is known as the "estado torpe," the
torpid State. Its bishop is rated second in all Mexico only to that of
the sacred city of Guadalupe. Here are monasteries, and monks, and
nuns in seclusion, priests roam the streets in robes and vestments,
form processions, and display publicly the "host" and other
paraphernalia of their faith; all of which is forbidden by the laws of
Mexico. When I emerged from the hotel, every person in sight, from
newsboys to lawyers in frock coats, was kneeling wherever he happened
to be, on his veranda, on the sidewalk, or in the middle of the
street, his hat laid on the ground before him, facing a high churchman
in flowing robes and a "stove-pipe" hat strutting across the plaza
toward the cathedral. Traveling priests wear their regalia of office
as far as Yurécuaro on the main line, changing there to civilian garb.
Nor is the power of the church here confined to things spiritual. Vast
portions of the richest sections of the State are church owned, though
ostensibly property of the lawyers that control them. Holding the
reins, the ecclesiastics make it impossible for companies to open up
enterprises except under their tutelage. The population of the State is
some eighty per cent, illiterate, yet even foreigners find it impossible
to set up schools for their own employees. The women _of all
classes_ are almost without exception illiterate. The church refuses
to educate them, and sternly forbids any one else to do so. An American
Catholic long resident reported even the priests ignorant beyond belief,
and asserted that usury and immorality was almost universal among the
churchmen of all grades. The peasants are forced to give a tenth of all
they produce, be it only a patch of corn, to the church, which holds its
stores until prices are high, while the poverty-stricken peon must sell
for what he can get. Those married by the church are forbidden to
contract the civil ceremony, though the former is unlawful and lack of
the latter makes their children legally illegitimate. The local form of
worship includes many of the barbaric superstitions of the Indians
grafted on the stems of Catholicism, and weird pagan dances before the
altar are a part of many a _fiesta_. The town has already churches
sufficient to house easily all the population, yet an immense new
cathedral is building. The purpose of its erection, according to the
bishop, is "for the greater glorification of God."
I spent two days with the American superintendent of "Platanal," the
electric plant run by water power a few miles out of town through fields
of head-high maize. The night before my arrival bandits had raided the
establishment and one of them had been killed. The president of Zamora
had profusely thanked the "gringo" in charge when he presented himself
in town with the body. On pay-day the manager went and came from the
bank with two immense revolvers and a loaded rifle.
The current supplied by the rapids of "Platanal" is carried on
high-tension wires to several cities far distant, including Guanajuato,
a hundred miles away. Let the dynamo here break down and the cage of
"Pingüico" mine hangs suspended in its shaft and Stygian darkness falls
in the labyrinth below. In the rainy season lightning causes much
trouble, and immense flocks of birds migrating south or north, according
to the period of year, keep the repair gangs busy by flying against the
wires and causing short circuits through their dead bodies. Woodpeckers
eat away the wooden cross-pieces on the iron towers with disheartening
rapidity. The company is philanthropically inclined toward its
employees. Even the peons are given two weeks' vacation on full pay,
during which many rent a patch of land on the mountainside to plant with
corn. A savings bank system is maintained, strict sanitation is insisted
upon in the houses furnished by the company, and the methods of the
haciendas of the region, of paying the peon the lowest possible wages
for his labor and produce and selling to him at the highest possible
prices at the estate store, thereby keeping him in constant debt and a
species of slavery, are avoided. The result is a permanent force of
high Mexican grade. All attempts of the company to introduce schools,
however, even on its own property, have been frustrated by the powerful
churchmen. A bright young native in the plant was an expert at figures,
which he had been surreptitiously taught by his "gringo" superior, but
he could not sign his name.