VARIED PRODUCTS AND HOW THEY ARE SOLD
To the average stay-at-home American, Mexico is only a sun-scorched
desert. He usually knows only about the northern section of it, so much
like the thirsty parts of Texas and Arizona. His imagination pictures
great stretches of half-desert framed in purple mountains.
In reality, Mexico has a great variety of natural features and
corresponding variety in climate and products. It has great snow fields
which never melt, sandy wastes, highlands swept by cold winds,
delightful temperate valleys, tropical jungles dense with vegetation.
Although snow falls on the mountain tops, there is really no winter.
There are two seasons, the wet and the dry. The dry season (during our
winter months) is generally the pleasanter. But the rainy season is not
unpleasant, for it seldom rains long at a time. From June to September,
there is a shower almost every night, and in the morning the sky is a
brilliant blue, every leaf and flower fresh and fragrant, as if the
whole universe had been freshly washed. From October to May there is
almost no rain. The great plateau has a kind of perpetual spring, except
that the nights are cold. After sunset the policemen of Mexico City, and
many other inhabitants of the high places, wrap a cloth about their
throats and over their mouths, believing the night air to be bad for the
lungs. A visitor from the north enjoys the air, day or night.
[Illustration:
Rochester Photo, Mexico City
A collection of the wonderful fruits of Mexico—oranges as big as our
grapefruit, luscious figs, bananas, and some other fruits which we
in the United States never see.
]
Mexico Has Many Products
Almost everything can be grown in Mexico, because its elevation varies
from sea level to a height of more than two miles. Wheat is grown in the
highlands, two crops a year in some places. Most of it is brought to
threshing mills in great fiber mats, usually on men’s backs. But corn,
rather than wheat, is the Mexican “staff of life.” Some scientists think
that Mexico is the original home of the maize or Indian corn; certainly
this is Mexico’s chief agricultural product. It grows not only in the
highlands, where there are evergreens and oaks, but also in the hot
lands. Beans and barley, tobacco, cotton, sugar cane, coffee, sisal
hemp, cacao, and many kinds of tropical fruit are grown in Mexico.
Cattle and sheep are raised, timber is cut, precious metals and oil are
obtained from the ground.
From sisal hemp, which grows best in Yucatan, are made ropes, hammocks,
and much of the binding twine used in our wheat fields. Cacao comes in
the form of large, flat, brown beans contained in pods that hang from
the lower branches of a big bushy plant. The beans are dried in the
sunshine, ground up, and mixed with sugar to make chocolate and cocoa.
Like the Chinese, the Aztecs used no wool until they learned to do so
from Europeans. But they grew and used cotton, and they wove henequen,
maguey and cactus fiber centuries before the Spaniards came. Henequen, a
variety of sisal hemp, has the longest fiber and is therefore used for
binding twine. From the cactus Mexicans take a thorn, with a long fiber
attached, to use for rough sewing. Such a natural needle and thread has
been common since before the days of Montezuma. Even after they learned
the advantages of wool, the Mexicans wove by hand cactus fiber or hemp
_sarapes_ and blankets with strange designs and colorings, as did the
Indians of our Southwest. Now such things are rarely handmade, even in
Mexico.
In the tropical parts of Mexico are great forests containing enough
mahogany to make that wood as cheap as oak, if it were not so difficult
to transport. The most valuable hardwood logs are too heavy to float
downstream, and building railroads to bring them out is expensive. On
the coasts are many kinds of palm trees, and large plantations of
coconuts. The coconut meat, called copra, gives us a valuable oil.
Excellent oranges are grown in the valleys; bananas, olives, indigo, and
the chicle from which we make chewing gum are produced in the hot parts
of the country.
In the United States we can buy the same things in cities and towns
which are far apart. That is because we have great companies sending
their products all over the country. But in Mexico, as in China, each
village has its particular product, which sometimes cannot be bought
anywhere else. Irapuato is noted for strawberries. Celaya makes a kind
of fudge, which is sold in tiny wooden boxes. At Querétaro opals from
the mines near by are peddled on the streets and at the station. Lariats
and ropes are the specialty of San Juan del Río. The bad roads prevent
towns from exchanging products, and so does the _acabala_. This is a tax
levied by local officials on what is brought into a town to be sold.
The Spaniards taught the Mexicans, partly or entirely, how to make many
things. But one art that is genuinely Indian is the making of pottery.
Coming down directly from Aztec times, Mexican pottery to-day has almost
the same forms and colors as the pottery found in prehistoric mounds.
Much skill is shown in the modeling of _tipos populares_, little painted
earthenware vases shaped like the human figure and often as small as our
smallest dolls. They are complete, even to the tiny sandal thongs.
A Land of Markets
Many Mexican products are sold in public markets. When Cortés came to
Mexico, he and his followers were amazed at the size of the Mexican
markets; and so is the traveler of to-day. The tiniest village has its
marketplace, where business is sometimes still carried on by barter,
that is, by trading one thing for another without using money. In
Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, where Mexico City now stands, Cortés
says he saw sixty thousand people in the markets four days out of five
and on every fifth day a hundred thousand.
[Illustration:
Rochester Photo, Mexico City
A warehouse in a Mexican sugar mill. The juice of the sugar cane is
boiled down and run into molds of this shape, after which it may be
refined until it becomes the snow-white sugar that we use on our
tables.
]
Native markets are interesting sights in any part of the world, and very
decidedly so in Mexico. Though there are stores much like ours in all
the larger towns and cities, the common people do most of their buying
in the market. This is usually a stone-paved yard covered by a
sheet-iron roof. As it is seldom big enough to hold all the sellers and
buyers, especially on the chief market day (often Sunday), the streets
all about the market swarm with queer-looking people. One sees much
vivid color and all manner of goods.
Ragged men and women squat on the narrow sidewalks or even in the
street. Spread out before them are gay blankets, _sarapes_, clothing,
old shoes, new sandals, rawhide thongs, lassos, native saddles,
drygoods. For block after block are displayed sweetmeats, fruits, food
(cooked and uncooked), native fabrics, precious stones and other stones
that are merely pretty, matting, shells, feathers, baskets with colored
designs, native herbs and medicines. Sections of the cobbled floor and
street are covered with Indian pottery—jugs, pots, earthenware kettles.
There are big round cakes of what looks like maple sugar, though it is
really ordinary sugar—what the Indian gets when he boils down sugar-cane
juice in one of his crude kettles. We see a coarse kind of flour (it
looks as if it had been mixed with gravel!), lumps of rock salt, a kind
of native spaghetti, red and green peppers, red and black beans, ears of
corn, shelled corn, corn meal, corn cakes, slabs of meat, fish which
looks none too fresh. Chickens, their wings broken or their legs
hobbled, lie forlornly on the stony ground. Ducks and turkeys are tied
to the posts that support the roof. The turkey, by the way, is a native
of Mexico. The Aztec name for it was _guajalotl_, a word which, as you
might guess, came from the sound made by the gobbler. The Mexicans still
call it _guajalote_ instead of using the Spanish name.
Every market has its babies, crawling about under foot or carried
papoose-fashion on the mother’s back. Dogs, flies, noises, confusion do
not increase the visitor’s pleasure, but the Mexican of the lower
classes does not mind. He loves excitement. Everything is sold by count
or measure instead of weight, just as in Aztec days, when almost the
only money consisted of transparent quills filled with gold dust,
T-shaped pieces of tin and copper, and cacao beans. Bundles of corn
husks are used as wrapping paper. Many of the purchases are very
small—ten peanuts bought for a cent, a handful of tiny potatoes, slices
of squash and pumpkin, a cent’s worth of cabbage, eggs by the _mano_ (or
“hand”) which means five at a time. If you wish to buy five dozen eggs,
you will have to buy a dozen “hands,” paying for each “hand” at a
time—for the Indians are not good at arithmetic.
About the streets wander peddlers of fowls, almost hidden beneath a
dozen or more cages of chickens. Gamecocks are carried in little
cigar-shaped baskets so that they cannot get hurt or hurt one another.
Other peddlers have parrots, screeching parakeets, and canaries; still
others oranges, bananas, mangoes, pineapples, pomegranates, and the
large, oblong, pulpy fruit called papayas.
An Indian, driving his flock of turkeys to market with a long whip (much
like the whip used by a Chinese duck herder), may sell one or two
turkeys along the way, but he will not sell them all at once, even in
the market. He seems to feel that this would cheat him out of his day in
town. I know an American who tried unsuccessfully to buy all the broom
corn in a market, at a higher price than the sellers could get for the
finished brooms. They said that if they sold it all they would have no
work to do for the coming month!
The Mexican Market Is a Queer Place
If you stop to buy a _tortilla_, all the other _tortilla_ sellers will
begin to shriek that the _tortillas_ you are looking at are very poor
ones, and that theirs are better. Beggars wander about. An old woman
stoops to pick up three or four grains of corn that someone has dropped,
and tucks them carefully away. You stop at an open-air restaurant in the
market, where you perch on a narrow wooden bench and eat from a very
rough table. But being a foreigner, you attract so much attention that
you decide to dine thereafter at a hotel.
Then there are “readers.” Because most of the people cannot read, men
and women who can are scattered through the crowd to do so. They read
very fast indeed, usually from strips of cheaply-printed colored paper.
Sometimes the strips are political arguments, sometimes poetry,
sometimes stories. The readers are paid for their work by selling copies
of each sheet after they have read it. Now and then a couple of
musicians, one with a rude harp, another striking a steel triangle, sing
mournful songs.