December 1920
IT would be useless to deny that a man throws dice with death when he becomes president of Mexico. “He plays blind man’s buff with La Muerte” says a Mexican writer. It is a high adventure, not to be undertaken lightly. Tremendous inner compulsion forces a man into the presidency of the Mexican Republic. In the past, this official has been infallibly one of these things—an egoist without horizons, an adventurer who loves danger, an idealist with a self sacrifice complex, a steel nerved dictator sure of his butchering strength. Once or twice it has been a fantastic combination of these qualities. But in all of them, the flair for personal magnificence, has made one-half of the formula. All things considered Mexico has borne with her presidents leniently, a divine patience has marked her dealings with her chance-appointed Chiefs. Some of them were aristocrats and all of them were opportunists. There was a dreamer once, hands raised in ineffectual blessings, dictators more than once, and the beautiful gold laced seekers of glory were the most numerous of all. But they shared ineluctably one glittering assortment of qualities—a baffling self sufficiency that blinded them to the importance of pacific international relations; a racial arrogance that made them not fusible with their neighbors; a personal pride that forbade them to learn the practical problems of their country; a startling ignorance of the conditions of labor and commerce and economics and industry that are the very life fluid of a nation.
It was high time Mexico had a simple working president with his feet firmly set in his native soil. After the scintillating procession of remote and inaccessible rulers, there came up from the land a farmer, Alvaro Obregon, prosperous and well acquainted with his country in its working dress; a man of straight literal mind, with a detached legal passion for setting disorder to rights. He became a soldier when the need for an honest fighting man became all too plain. He kept himself clear of the intricacies of professional diplomacy and politics through several years as general when Carranza was Chief of the Army. Later he became minister of War with this same Carranza as president, and somehow stood straight in this post too, not once fooled or circumvented by the devious methods of the President and his group of flattering shadows.
And now it is December 1st, 1920, and here is General Obregon about to become President of Mexico, after spectacular events, and a series of stupendous tragic blunders on the part of the fleeing Carranza. At twelve o’clock at night provisional President de la Huerta is to give over his office to General Alvaro Obregon. Preparations are all very festive, for everybody shares in a fiesta in Mexico. The city is strange with the voices of foreign people—we hear the shrill American voice, the tinkling Mexican voice, the gurgling Indian vocables, a scattering volley of French, truncated British speech, Spanish spoken in twenty different accents, for the South Americans are here in force. Here are the city Mexicans, rancheros grandiose in buckskin charros and great embroidered sombreros, Indians with sandaled feet and softly woven blankets luminous with color. They are all fearfully alive, fearfully bent on getting somewhere—the narrow sidewalks will not do, everybody takes to the street center, and disputes rancorously for place with the outraged drivers of cars.
Plainly, Obregon becoming President has a definite interest for all parts of the world, each part nursing its particular interest, its personal hope. Mexico is a mine unexploited, and all the riches to be had here shout from the gray earth, speaking all tongues, heard and understood of all men. Here are soils fit to grow anything human beings can use. Here are silver and gold, coal and oil—the air is redolent with the sound of these unctuous words. Men mouth them lovingly, and stare at vague and varied horizons.
Beauty is here too—color of mountain and sky and green things rooted in earth. Beauty of copper colored human things not yet wholly corrupted by civilization. Those things are well enough in their way, but business first. And our immediate business is getting this new President inaugurated, and finding out what he means to do with all the power vested in him.
Hours before the time of taking the oath the Camara is filled. The boxes of the ambassadors blaze with gold lace and glinting ceremonious swords and the jewels around the necks of the women. Next door are the governors’ boxes, not quite so impressive, but gay with the gowns of the governors’ ladies. Below, the diputados come in, leisurely, one at a time, each man uniformed in black dress suit, gleaming white shirt front, imperturbable dignity of demeanor. On the right hand side the aristocrats seat themselves. You notice a great many long Bourbon faces, with hair rolled back from thin brows. They are men with several centuries of power back of them, and they love the accepted order of things. What they think of this occasion no one knows. For Alvaro Obregon’s face is not in the least Bourbon. He is Mexican, and a soldier, and a farmer, and a business man. On the left wing one notes a curious assortment of folk, evidently there by right, and vastly interested in the proceedings. One of them is Soto y Gama, thorn in the side of the old government, a man of wide education and culture, who rode his native mountains for seven years with a copy of Karl Marx, and another of the Bible in his pocket. Near him sits a wiry little nervous man, with an intrepid face, eyes tilted a bit at the corners. He is trim in his magpie uniform. His fingers drum the arm of his chair. He shifts about impatiently and crosses his legs repeatedly. He is Luis Leon, educated for an agricultural engineer, who could not work with the Carranza government for his conscience’s sake, and therefore became a bull fighter—one of the best in Mexico. When Obregon came in, Leon came in also, and was elected diputado. So we see him sitting there, his plain black and white a long step from the silver embroidered splendor of his torero’s cloak. And a longer step still, from the time he fought nine black bulls in a pen in Vera Cruz for the benefit of Zapatista revolutionists who mistook him for a spy. He did not have a torero cloak that day. He killed bulls, one at a time until there were no more bulls to be killed, and the revolutionists were convinced of his vocation as he had declared it to them. They let him go, in order, as you see, that he might sit tonight with his wing collar chafing his chin, waiting for Obregon to come in and be made president. There is Felipe Carrillo, poet, friend of poets, champion of the Indians in Yucatan, who is also here on grave business.
There are others, on both sides of the house, who are worth watching. There is not an interest in all Mexico unrepresented by these seated men. They arrive in small groups, with the look of folk who have dined in peace and are now prepared carefully to consider the business of state. The diplomatic boxes and the governors’ boxes are now rivaled by the society boxes, where ladies fling off great cloaks and sit bare shouldered in the chill spaces of the Camara. We in the Camara are growing a trifle nervous. Two minutes until midnight. One minute. Half Minute. “My God,” murmurs a man sitting next, “Something must have happened!” They are so accustomed to things happening at inaugurations in Mexico, they doubt if even so civilized and dignified a procedure as this can pass without exciting and untoward events.
A blare of trumpets sounds in the streets. Nearer. A great muffled shout, a sustained mellow roar soaks through the walls of the Camara. Another and milder roar inside, as the people rise to their feet. The clock hands point straight to twelve. The main portal swings back ponderously, and two men in plain dress suits, one wearing a white and green and scarlet ribbon across his chest, enter. The man wearing the ribbon has only one arm. The other has been left by the wayside between the farm and the President’s chair.
The top gallery folk shout “Viva Obregon! Viva de la Huerta!” while the others applaud. President de la Huerta walks a step ahead of General Obregon. Presently, in not more than three minutes, they go again, and this time President Obregon walks a step ahead of citizen de la Huerta. But before this Mr. de la Huerta steps forward and embraces the new President. It has every evidence of heartiness and good will. And the incident is remarkable for being only the second of its kind recorded here. The old and the new have not been distinguished for amiable relations to one another.
Once again Mexico has a duly installed constitutional government. Splendor, pomp, militarism, democracy, and internationalism have combined in one grand pageant to do honor to the new regime. It has begun with a thick surface layer of good will and gayety, a hopeful way for a new government to begin. The jubilation and applause was an indication of harmony at the moment at least—a sincere, deep down desire for a better and more livable Mexico; an obliterating psychological moment when personal desires, ambitions and private interests sink into the common weal and an unbreathed hope that this nation will take its rightful place in the commonwealth of the world.
Being part and parcel of this grand spectacle, yet removed in sort of an impersonal observant way, one is compelled to pause and wonder. What will history say of this new man? What symbolism will designate the new order upon the destiny of the nation—this conglomerate and but little understood people?
An unenviable position certainly is that of President Obregon. There are those who do envy, but surely from the point of personal ambition and aggrandizement and not from high minded service to country or as the solvent of the innumerable problems that hang over and wind about the presidential chair. He stands at the head of a nation that for a long time has been at utter discord with itself and its neighbors. Unharmonizing causes date back to the Spanish conquest and beyond. Republican form of government has never been successfully engrafted upon the Aztec and other primeval roots. There has been a steady oscillation between despotism and revolution. Constitutions have come and gone between volleys of musketry.
It has been well remarked that there never was a country for which God did more or man did less. Its very richness is its danger. Personal ambition and private self interest of those who constitute themselves the chosen few is rampant in Mexico today. It only exceeds the same virulent species of other nations in its tendency to subvert the ballot and the constitution by the rifle and the cannon, and by the richness of the prize sought. Neither does the exploitation by the arrogant few confine itself to Mexican citizenry. They are here from every point of the globe and the conflict for riches and prestige rage between race, color, and creed of every known angle and combination. There are plots for prestige, there are plots for political preference, there are plots for graft, great business interests are at stake, international problems of growing importance, an interweaving of selfish, private and governmental problems without end. Not hopeless to be true, unless the whole world is hopeless, for it may be truly said that for every problem of Mexico the rest of the world has a bigger one. Yet like the naughty boy in school, all eyes are on this turbulent one. For these great problems Destiny has handed the text book to President Obregon.
“Mexican Sovereignty must be kept inviolable.” This is his answer to the first question on the first page. To this, every right thinking man of every nationality agrees. Only those who believe their own personal interest could be better served otherwise, can raise any objections to this and then only in whispered words in secret places. However the president has intimated by his public utterances that he does not consider sovereignty and provincialism as synonymous, that narrowness does not build a nation and that national rights as well as those of humans must work two ways, to the mutual best and equal division of interests and benefits—a sort of a national golden rule. If this policy is maintained as well as spoken, it will make the rest of the problems easy and many of them will disappear as corollary to the major premise.
Carrying for some years the title of General is the policy of the new man to be militaristic? Is the iron hand of Porfirio Diaz again to rule? The enormous mass of Mexican people, like all other nations, detest the tyranny of an army. The president’s answer was given long ago. “I would rather teach the Mexican people the use of the tooth brush than to handle a rifle. I would rather see them in school than on battle fields. I prefer any day a good electrician, machinist, carpenter, or farmer to a soldier.” A modern statement of “And their swords to plowshares beating, nations shall learn war no more.” Yet this must not be taken for a high sounding platitude. President Obregon has his critics and severe ones but he is not accused of being unpractical and a dreamer of dreams for dreams’ sake. He has method and is a disciplinarian—nerve if you please—as has been shown on many occasions. He hates and distrusts professional diplomacy and politics. He is a man of action primarily. He has a curious suddenness in action very disconcerting to the professional politician, accustomed to weaving situations deftly and slowly.
Granting he is right on the two great problems of sovereignty and citizenry the rest is comparatively easy. With a nation granting complete recognition of all rights legitimately acquired, it will soon be right with the other nations at issue whether to the North or more remote. With order, cleanliness, industry and labor established, Mexico with its riches would bound to the front. The capital of the world would come to its aid and capital is the one and only material need of this retarded, stunted and potential giant. With its great natural resources under development, debts would soon be paid, confidence restored, economic conditions adjusted, and bankruptcy turned to credit balances at the ports of the world. Being a farmer from the farm the land question should find easy solution at the president’s hands.
To be right with his neighbors an individual must be right within himself. So it is with Nations. Possessed of brilliant mind, seasoned along the hard road of experience within his own land and broadened by travel without, President Obregon indicates by his words and actions that he has grasped the great principle of right dealing. At his first cabinet meeting he impressed most emphatically upon his collaborators the necessity of absolute morality in government. The English language employs the hard fibered word integrity, yet morality is broader and expresses the profundity of feeling of the new man for the desire to make the “Inner Chamber” of Mexico fit for the inspection of the world. Mr. Obregon knows, and the world will know, that he has enemies—many of them—strong and capable of deep hate, stopping at no thing to accomplish his downfall. Some will tell you he has done this or that discreditable thing in the past; others will say he will never stand to the end of his constitutional term. Yet strange to say none accuse him of stultifying official position to personal gain or placing personal ambition above his country’s good. Close observation would lead one to the conclusion that he is the choice of a great majority of his people and that he is the strongest available man to fulfill their need and longing for peace. They want room for expansion of their business, freedom and opportunity to manage their own affairs in their own country, and in their own way. These rights they claim with a calmness of men standing on their own solid earth. The great majority, peace loving by nature, want that prosperity that comes from stable conditions and they see in their new president a man who sincerely and with only the personal interest of real service, desires that they have these rightful inheritances and their God given dominion. Others, only luke warm, wish him well for they too want peace and the other things that go with it. His antagonists, when asked to name a better man, either admit it can not be done or by a national shrug of the shoulders refuse to nominate. Some go so far as to claim that with Mr. Obregon the last card has been played. If he can not bring about and maintain order in this troubled land, Mexico does not have a son capable of the task. This however, is only heard where zealous partisanship is strong or personal interest is involved. However two supremely important and terse questions arise and will not down wherever and whenever the possibility of failure from any source of Mr. Obregon’s administration is discussed. These are the questions. Who? What?
Yet perhaps the new president’s greatest distinction is in his knowledge that of his own self he can do nothing. He has frankly told his people this and given them the admonition that only by their co-operation could Mexico take its rightful place. He can guide, direct and counsel; give the most useful service, stamp out evil practices, and put down incipient revolutions, yet if the public conscience is not attuned, General Alvaro Obregon must bow before defeat unavoidable though undeserved.
So in its last analysis the new order which is beginning with every evidence of permanence and stability rests with all the people of Mexico, from president to peon, each responsible according to his own degree and station in the scheme of destiny.
No better words can be found than those used by Waddy Thompson, Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Mexico, in a book written in 1846, which were as follows: “God grant them success, both on their own account as well as for the great cause in which they have so long struggled, and under circumstances so discouraging.”
December 12, 1920
I followed the crowd of tired burdened pilgrims, bowed under their loads of potteries and food and babies and baskets, their clothes dusty and their faces a little streaked with long-borne fatigue. Indians all over Mexico had gathered at the feet of Mary Guadalupe for this greatest fiesta of the year, which celebrates the initiation of Mexico into the mystic company of the Church, with a saint and a miracle all her own, not transplanted from Spain. Juan Diego’s long-ago vision of Mary on the bare hillside made her Queen of Mexico where before she had been Empress.
Members of all tribes were there in their distinctive costumes. Women wearing skirts of one piece of cloth wrapped around their sturdy bodies and women wearing gaily embroidered blouses with very short puffed sleeves. Women wearing their gathered skirts of green and red, with blue rebosos wrapped tightly around their shoulders. And men in great hats with peaked crowns, wide flat hats with almost no crown. Blankets, and serapes, and thonged sandals. And a strange-appearing group whose men all wore a large square of fiber cloth as a cloak, brought under one arm and knotted on the opposite shoulder exactly in the style depicted in the old drawings of Montezuma.
A clutter of babies and dolls and jars and strange-looking people lined the sidewalks, intermingled with booths, red curtained and hung with paper streamers, where sweets and food and drinks were sold and where we found their astonishing crafts—manlike potteries and jars and wooden pails bound with hard wrought clasps of iron, and gentle lacework immaculately white and unbelievably cheap of price.
I picked my way through the crowd looking for the dancers, that curious survival of the ancient Dionysian rites, which in turn were brought over from an unknown time. The dance and blood sacrifice were inextricably tangled in the worship of men, and the sight of men dancing in a religious ecstasy links one’s imagination, for the moment, with all the lives that have been.
A woven, moving arch of brilliant-colored paper flowers gleaming over the heads of the crowd drew me near the gate of the cathedral as the great bells high up began to ring—sharply, with shocking clamor, they began to sway and ring, their ancient tongues shouting notes of joy a little out of tune. The arches began to leap and flutter. I managed to draw near enough to see, over the fuzzy poll of sleeping baby on his mother’s back. A group of Indians, fantastically dressed, each carrying an arch of flowers, were stepping it briskly to the smart jangle of the bells. They wore tinsel crowns over red bandanas which hung down their necks in Arab fashion. Their costumes were of varicolored bits of cloth, roughly fashioned into short skirts and blouses. Their muscular brown legs were disfigured with cerise and blue cotton stockings. They danced a short, monotonous step, facing each other, advancing, retreating, holding the arches over their crowns, turning and bowing, in a stolid sarabande. The utter solemnity of their faces made it a moving sight. Under their bandanas, their foreheads were knitted in the effort to keep time and watch the figures of the dance. Not a smile, and not a sound save the mad hysteria of the old bells awakened from their sleep, shrieking praise to the queen of Heaven and the Lord of Life.
Then the bells stopped, and a man with a mandolin stood near by, and began a quiet rhythmic tune. The master of ceremonies, wearing around his neck a stuffed rabbit clothed in a pink satin jacket, waved the flagging dancers in to line, helped the less agile to catch step, and the dancing went on. A jammed and breathless crowd and pilgrims inside the churchyard peered through the iron fence, while the youths and boys scrambled up, over the heads of the others, and watched from a precarious vantage. They reminded one irresistibly of a menagerie cage lined with young monkeys. They spraddled and sprawled, caught toeholds and fell, gathered themselves up and shinned up the railings again. They were almost as busy as the dancers themselves.
Past stalls of fruits and babies crawling underfoot away from their engrossed mothers, and the vendors of images, scapulars and rosaries, I walked to the church of the well, where is guarded the holy spring of water that gushed from beneath Mary’s feet at her last appearance to Juan Diego, December twelve, in the year of grace fifteen and thirty-one.
It is a small darkened place, the well covered over with a handsomely wrought iron grating, through which the magic waters are brought up in a copper pail with a heavy handle. The people gather here and drink reverently, passing the pail from mouth to mouth, praying the while to be delivered of their infirmities and sins.
A girl weeps as she drinks, her chin quivering. A man, sweating and dusty, drinks and drinks and drinks again, with a great sigh of satisfaction, wipes his mouth and crosses himself devoutly.
My pilgrimage leads me back to the great cathedral, intent on seeing the miraculous Tilma of Juan Diego, whereon the queen of Heaven deigned to stamp her lovely image. Great is the power of that faded virgin curving like a new moon in her bright blue cloak, dim and remote and immobile in her frame above the soaring altar columns.
From above, the drone of priests’ voices in endless prayers, answered by the shrill treble of boy singers. Under the overwhelming arches and the cold magnificence of the white altar, their faces lighted palely by the glimmer of candles, kneel the Indians. Some of them have walked for days for the privilege of kneeling on these flagged floors and raising their eyes to the Holy Tilma.
There is a rapt stillness, a terrible reasonless faith in their dark faces. They sigh, turn toward the picture of their beloved Lady, printed on the garment of Juan Diego only ten years after Cortes had brought the new God, with fire and sword, into Mexico. Only ten years ago, but it is probable that Juan Diego knew nothing about the fire and sword which have been so often the weapons of the faithful servants of our Lady. Maybe he had learned religion happily, from some old gentle priest, and his thoughts of the Virgin, ineffably mysterious and radiant and kind, must have haunted him by day and by night for a long time; until one day, oh, miracle of miracles, his kindled eyes beheld her, standing, softly robed in blue, her pale hands clasped, a message of devotion on her lips, on a little hill in his own country, the very spot where his childhood had been passed.
Ah well—why not? And I passed on to the steep winding ascent to the chapel of the little hill, once a Teocalli, called the Hill of Tepeyac, and a scene of other faiths and other pilgrimages. I think, as I follow the path, of those early victims of Faith who went up (mighty slowly and mighty heavily, let the old Gods themselves tell you) to give up their beating hearts in order that the sun might rise again on their people. Now there is a great crucifix set up with the transfixed and bleeding heart of one Man nailed upon it—one magnificent Egoist who dreamed that his great heart could redeem from death all the other hearts of earth destined to be born. He has taken the old hill by storm with his mother, Mary Guadalupe, and their shrine brings the Indians climbing up, in silent groups, pursued by the prayers of the blind and the halt and the lame who have gathered to reap a little share of the blessings being rained upon the children of faith. Theirs is a doleful litany: “In the name of our Lady, Pity, a little charity for the poor—for the blind, for the little servants of God, for the humble in heart!” The cries waver to you on the winds as the slope rises, and comes in faintly to the small chapel where is the reclining potent image of Guadalupe, second in power only to the Holy Tilma itself.
It is a more recent image, copied from the original picture, but now she is lying down, hands clasped, supported by a company of saints. There is a voluptuous softness in her face and pose—a later virgin, grown accustomed to homage and from the meek maiden receiving the announcement of the Angel Gabriel on her knees, she has progressed to the role of Powerful Intercessor. Her eyes are vague and a little indifferent, and she does not glance at the devout adorer who passionately clasps her knees and bows his head upon them.
A sheet of glass protects her, or she would be literally wiped away by the touches of her devotees. They crowd up to the case, and rub their hands on it, and cross themselves, then rub the afflicted parts of their bodies, hoping for a cure. A man reached up and rubbed the glass, then gently stroked the head of his sick and pallid wife, who could not get near enough to touch for herself. He rubbed his own forehead, knees, then stroked the woman’s chest. A mother brought her baby and leaned his little toes against the glass for a long time, the tears rolling down her cheeks.
Twenty brown and work-stained hands are stretched up to touch the magic glass—they obscure the still face of the adored Lady, they blot out with their insistent supplications her remote eyes. Over that painted and carved bit of wood and plaster, I see the awful hands of faith, the credulous and worn hands of believers; the humble and beseeching hands of the millions and millions who have only the anodyne of credulity. In my dreams I shall see those groping insatiable hands reaching, reaching, reaching, the eyes turned blinded away from the good earth which should fill then, to the vast and empty sky.
Out upon the downward road again, I stop and look over the dark and brooding land, with its rim of mountains swathed in layer upon layer of filmy blue and gray and purple mists, the low empty valleys blackened with clumps of trees. The flat-topped houses of adobe drift away casting no shadows on the flooding blue, I seem to walk in a heavy, dolorous dream.
It is not Mary Guadalupe nor her son that touches me. It is Juan Diego I remember, and his people I see, kneeling in scattered ranks on the flagged floor of their church, fixing their eyes on mystic, speechless things. It is their ragged hands I see, and their wounded hearts that I feel beating under their work-stained clothes like a great volcano under the earth and I think to myself, hopefully, that men do not live in a deathly dream forever.
December 16, 1920
Under a brilliant morning sky, clean-swept by chill winds straight from the mountains; with busy people thronging the streets, the vendors of sweets and fruits and toys nagging gently at one’s elbow; with three “ships” circling so close above the trees of the Alameda one could see the faces of the pilots; with the air live with the calls of bugles and the rattle of drums, the Minister of War, General Hill, passed yesterday through the streets of the city on his final march, attended by his army.
Life, full and careless and busy and full of curiosity, clamored around the slow moving metallic coffin mounted on the gun carriage. Death, for the most, takes his sure victories silently and secretly. And all the cacophony of music and drum and clatter of horses’ hoofs and shouts of military orders was merely a pall of sound thrown over the immobile calm of that brown box proceeding up the life-filled streets. It sounded, somehow, like a shout of defiance in the face of our sure and inevitable end. But it was only a short dying in the air. Death, being certain of Himself, can afford to be quiet.
March 1921
Xochimilco is an Indian village of formidable history, most of which I learned and have happily forgotten. It is situated near the city of Mexico, and is in danger of being taken up by rich tourists. Spared that fate, no doubt it will continue as it is for a dozen generations longer. The name Xochimilco means in Aztec “the place of flowers.” In a way, the village is a namesake of Xochitl herself, the goddess of flowers and fruit.
There are flat roofed houses in it that have resisted destruction since the days of Cortes. The silver blue skyline is jagged with crosses and tiled domes of churches, for these Indians have suffered the benefits of Christianity to an unreasonable degree.
Some one tells me there are seventeen churches here—or more. A hospitable patriarch leads us into a small church dedicated to San Felipe, its portals open to the roadside, elbowing a pulque shop on the one side, and shows us a fiesta in progress, honoring the patron saint. The church is merely a quadrangle of walls, the roof having been blown off, whether by accident or design, in a revolution. They are collecting money for a new roof, and in the meantime a tent of white canvas clarifies the stone walls, dappled with mold and shell-powder. The lilies on the altar glitter like tinsel.
The saints support ponderous plush robes on their flattened chests, and the patron himself leans slightly to the wall. His face is yellowed with age and fatigue. They are all untouched, the man points out carefully, by the hail of bullets which swept the holy place. The patron is rich and generous, and moreover, the church is protected by four Virgins, the Virgin of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Pity and Our Lady of Help (de Los Remedios). If one Virgin did not answer a prayer, it was always simple to turn to another—and in this way it was often quite possible to get blessings from all four of them.
Quite incidentally he added, as we left, that the great Reina Xochitl was also a patroness of this church, and was often more abundant with her favors than all the others together. . . . Xochitl is the legendary Aztec goddess of the earth, of fruit, of abundance, who discovered pulque—especially the strawberry flavored kind!—and also made known the many other uses of the maguey plant, by which the Indians can live almost entirely.
“Xochitl?” we ask, for we cannot quite place her among this assembly. The Indian makes a slow gesture about the church; his pointed finger pauses a moment before each saint—“This one gives health after sickness, this one discovers lost things, this one is powerful to intercede for the Poor Souls (in Purgatory), this one helps us bear our sorrows—”
“What about Xochitl?” we must interrupt for eagerness.
He turned and flung his arm toward the wide portal, where the smell of the clean open world defied the grey mold of centuries prisoned in damp stones. “Xochitl sends rain. Xochitl makes the crops grow—the maguey and the maize and the sweet fruits and the pumpkins. Xochitl feeds us!”
He remembers that food is not spiritual. We see the thought in his face. “She is a saint of the body,” he adds, apologetically. “These are saints of the soul.” We detect the inflection of piety. It is most annoying. It is a good heathen putting on a starched shirt. Unendurable!
Of all the great women deities from Mary to Diana, Dana of the Druids to Kwanyin of the Buddhists, this Xochitl has been endowed with the most cleanly, the most beneficent attributes. In a race where the women sowed and reaped, wove and span and cooked and brewed, it was natural that a goddess should be fruitful and strong. We looked with intense sympathy and interest at the decaying and alien stronghold where Xochitl had set her powerful foot, there to compete with usurping gods in caring for her strayed family. We did not contribute to the roof fund, fearing influences other than hers at work in this business.
My memory of Xochimilco is always a drowsy confusion of wet flowers on the chinampas, the taste of cold sweetened pulque flavored with strawberries, the sting of the sunshine scorching my neck, the silent Indian girl in the wide straw hat, working with her bees, lifting the tops of the hives to find me a comb of honey; an Indian baby, in shape resembling a pumpkin, wrapped in red fibre cloth, kicking up dust in the road ahead of me. . . . things of no importance whatever, except that I love them. The pumpkin shaped baby is joined by several others, all friendly as chipmunks and as alert, who will walk with you, and smile at you, but will not speak or come nearer than arm’s length.
At a turn of the road a band of Indian boys clad in white cotton, wild heads crowned by prodigious straw hats, leap howling upon us. They clamor one question repeatedly. “Do you wish a canoa?” We do, but the choosing of it is the adventure of the day. It is not in our plan to be seized and propelled, with courteous finality, into just any sort of boat. A few visits to the gardens develop in one a discriminating taste in flower decoration. With smiles and dumb arm wavings and shouts above the shouting, we finally disperse all of them but one. There is a brown determined youth who lags along with us, his eyes fixed upon us hauntingly. He insists in low tones that his “canoa” is the most beautiful one in the gardens. It is also to be had for an absurdly small price.
We resign ourselves. It is written that we are to have a boat, and it will be rowed by this boy.
We are in the midst of a spare forest of straight tranquil poplars, lining the banks of the canals. The sunshine falls in long strips between these trees, and gardens grow luxuriously in the midst of them. It is March, but the foliage is lush as midsummer, the pansies and cabbages and chrysanthemums and lettuce glowing and drowsing in the benign air.
The earth is swept clean and bare before the thatched huts that line the waterside. They are contrived of sheaves of maize stalks bound together flatly, burned golden and sweet with year long sunshine. The leaning fences are also of maguey stalks and maize, woven with henequen fibre, dry and rattling in the slight winds.
In the enclosed places are placid children, playing inconsequently, without toys or invention, as instinctively as little animals. Women on their knees sweep their thresholds with a handful of split maguey leaves. Men sit, their legs straight before them, tinkering with boats or mending their rude farming implements.
Everywhere is a leisurely industry, a primitive cleanliness and rigor.
These Xochimilco Indians are a splendid remnant of the Aztecs. They are suspicious of strange peoples, with good reason. They have maintained an almost unbroken independence of passing governments, and live their simple lives in a voluntary detachment, not hostile, from the ruling race of their country. They get all material for their needs from the earth; vegetables and flowers from the chinampas are their wares offered to the outer world. The freshest pansies in Mexico are brought from the chinampas—a word that means an island with flowers. These islands do not float, but are moored substantially, girdled with woven branches.
Our “canoa” is decorated with chrysanthemums and cedar, the flowers woven into a flat background of the sweet smelling greenery. The awning is supported by arches of poplar, bowed while the wood was full of sap. We sit in benches along the sides, looping up the curtains back of us. There is something Egyptian, we decide, about this long, narrow barge of hand sawed wood, with legends carved along the sides. There is something darkly African about it, too with the boy standing in the prow, bending slowly as he rows, the long tapering pole sweeping through the water, disturbing the loosened blossoms floating with us.
It is early, and the small boats of the Indian women are still moored to stakes before the thatched huts, while the women and their children are washing and dressing at the water’s edge. They are lovely creatures, the color of polished brown stone, very demure and modest. They spread their long hair on the rocks to dry, their heads thrown back, eyes closed before the light.
A child is bathing her feet, standing on a wet stone. We pass almost near enough to touch her. Mary throws her a few pansies. Her eyes are vague and gentle, the color of brown one sees in the native pottery. She is too amazed at the sight of us to pick up the pansies. She turns her head away, and blushes—arms, legs and curved neck suffuse. She stands fixed in a trance of instinctive modesty, one foot standing over the other, toes in.
The heat of the day rises in slow waves. Singly, the women come out in their tiny narrow boats, pointed at prow and bow, so shallow the rim is only a few inches above the water. They kneel before their braseros, small furnaces for burning charcoal, and cook their complicated foods, which they serve hot to the people in the be-flowered barges. In this limited space, the woman will keep her supplies, her cooked food and dishes. She will serve any number of customers, without haste or nervousness, in competent silence. Her face will be smooth and untroubled, her voice not edged. Primitive woman cooks the greater part of her time; she has made of it, if not a fine art, then a most exact craft. There are no neurotics among them. No strained lines of sleeplessness or worry mar their faces. It is their muscles, not their nerves, that give way in old age; when the body can no longer lift and strain and tug and bear, it is worn out, and sits in the sun a while, with the taste of tobacco in the mouth. It counsels and reminisces, and develops skill in tribal witchcraft. And dies. But the nerves did not kill it.
Nearly all the women in the boats are young; many of them adolescent girls. One of these wears a gay pink reboso, and thick gold hoops quiver in her ear lobes. She sits in the midst of a great bouquet of violets, pansies, sweet peas, and delicate pale roses. Her slender oar barely touches the water. She darts forward in response to our nod, her shallop runs along the barge, her brown hand, gleaming and wet, grips the rim. Under the parted sleekness of her carbon colored hair, her round innocent eyes speculate. We are openly pleased with her. She charges us twice the usual sum. We pay it, and receive an armload of flowers, done into tight little bouquets, bound with henequen fibre, arranged in long loops whereby one may trail them in the water to keep them fresh.
The sun is blazing with noonday fervor. The canals are alive with barges and the darting shallops, swift as swallows. A ponderous boat, overflowing with cabbages and celery and onions, drifts out and floats downstream guided casually by an old man whose white cotton garments are rolled up at shoulders and knees, his hat shading him as completely as an umbrella. He drags his pole through the water with a tremendous gesture, then rests leaning upon it, staring out across the chinampas, past the valley to the mountains. His face is massive, hugely wrinkled, not happy nor unhappy. He lives as a tree lives, rightly a part of the earth.
A tall girl washes clothes in a hollow of bushes matted into a shadowed cave. She rolls the garments on a slanted stone, and scoops up fresh water with a Oaxaca bowl splashed with blue and green and orange. Her blouse, almost sleeveless, is embroidered in an Aztec pattern. Her full crimson skirts are looped over bare ankles. Her braids, tied together in front, dip in the water when she leans forward. There is a trance like quality in her motions, an unconsciousness in her sharpened profile, as if she had never awakened from the prenatal dream.
“She should live for a century,” says Michael, who is tormented with neuroses. “Fancy her inner repose!”
Another girl, her shallop brimming with lettuce and celery massed in fragile shades of cream color and pale green, rows swiftly down a side canal. She sits perfectly straight, her wide hat almost obscures her face, all save the pointed chin and calm, full lipped mouth.
Her oar sends faint ripples out to lap the banks and stir the broadleafed lilies. We read, cut along the curving side of weathered wood, “No me olvide, Lupita!” (Do not forget me, Lupita.) One imagines the giver, whittling and carving before his hut, making a pretty boat for Lupe to carry her vegetables in. He offers his work and his thought, but humanly cannot forbear his one request—“Do not forget me, Lupita!”
This sentimental discovery sets us on the watch for other like mottoes. At once we read this, carved in a cumbersome craft draped with willow branches—“I was once a beautiful tree in the mountains of Cordoba, but a strong axeman cut me down, and now I live to serve his friends.” A strange, ironical cry out of captivity. It is the Indian who speaks. He tells a tragic story in a few words, without complaint. “Remember lovely Elena, with the sweet mouth and the green eyes,” entreats another, passing to the laughter of young voices and the muted whine of mandolin strings. A line of boats keeps the eye busy searching for inscriptions. . . . “For remembrance of dear little Pancho,” says one. “For the daughter of Pepe Gonzalez,” reads another. A boat about four feet long, very old, unpainted, is christened “La Fortuna de Juan Ortega.” Juan himself stands in this battered shell, plying up and down the canals with a few heads of lettuce, and cabbage, seeking that fortune, but without haste or greed. Juan is small and shabby, his shirt is faded, his hat is a ruin. He smiles at us, and offers lettuce, slightly wilted. He accepts our coin with a fine air of indifference, makes a grand bow, and is away. Juan could go to town and be a servant in a rich house, but depend upon it, he will not. It is the fashion among town people to go to the country for Indian servants. Many of them are docile and hardworking. But the Xochimilco Indians do not make good servants. They are apt to return on the second day to their chinampas, and finding them again is hard work.
We face a fleet of barges coming in from the side canals. They are majestic and leisurely, grouped with charming effect, their arches as individual as human faces. One is slightly pointed and woven of yellow maize, studded with chrysanthemums and pale green stalks of corn. Another is made of purple tinted henequen with small bouquets of jasmines set at intervals. Yet another is lovely with cornflowers and cedar. Each man has decorated his boat in the manner that pleases him and one cannot choose which is the most beautiful.
Under the awnings small parties of young Mexican people, attended by their chaperones, eat fruit and throw flowers to each other; in every second barge, it seems, there is a gifted youth with a guitar or mandolin, and they all strum in the careless manner of the true amateur of music. There are many types of Mexican youth and age—young school teachers and clerks, stenographers and shop keepers, with a scattering of the more wealthy folk; there is every type of girl from the modern young person in the flannel walking skirt, to the more reactionary type who wears a fluffy dress with a pretty scarf over her shoulders. It is the Mexico of industry and work and sober family virtues, the respectable, comfortably well off people whom we see here for the most part; all of them happy, bent on a day of leisure and recreation in their incomparable playground.
We are about to pass under a low stone bridge, built before the days of Cortes in Mexico, and the fleet of boats approaching meet us here in a narrow passageway where it will be a problem for two boats to pass each other. One barge has swung in under the bridge already, and we are also in the shadow of the arch. It has the look of an imminent collision. One expects mutual recrimination, a crash of boatsides, much talk.
Nothing of the sort, each boatman makes way. Each steers carefully, running his own boat almost into the bank in his effort to make room for the other. “Have a care, comrade!” says one, when he is crowded a little too closely. “Pardon me!” says the other, and somehow in the midst of the work he finds a hand with which to doff his shaggy hat, and to make a bow. The other bows in turn, good days are exchanged, the occupants of the boat smile at us as we glide through, and the flying garden of flowers fills the air between boats once more. The waiting barges form in a line and pass under the arch in a quiet procession, the awnings casting wavering shadows deep in the clear water.
From the shadowed recesses of the pavilions along the bank the native orchestras play gay tunes. Guitar, mandolin, violin, flute make scattered harmony. A medley of airs comes mingled to us on the water. “La Adelita,” “La Pajarera,” “La Sandunga,” “La Norteña,”—all of us hum the music we prefer, with curious tonal results. The young people are dancing in the pavilions. Children play in the swings and rope trapezes. Parties sit at long tables in the shade, having luncheon festively. It all has the look of a huge special fiesta, though it is merely the usual Sunday holiday.
Toward the end of the main canal small boys run up and down the bank, or stand holding patient small horses, saddled disproportionately in leather contrivances very elaborate and heavy. The ponies are for hire by the hour, and the boys shout the attractions of their mounts. One of them leans fondly on the neck of his steed, and says, “Muy bonito, muy fuerte caballito,” (Very pretty, very strong little horse!) stroking the ragged mane, while the small creature sleeps obliviously.
“Your pony looks cynical even in his sleep,” we told the boy. “As though he doubted your motives.”
“What does he expect?” asks the boy. “To be loved for himself alone? It does not happen in the world.”
We decide not to ride the pony. “He will have his supper anyhow,” says Mary. “He will lose nothing by it.”
“What about me?” the owner wants to know.
“We cannot pity you—you are a philosopher!” Michael tells him.
We stop in the shade of a wide willow tree near the bank. Our boatboy seats himself crosslegged in the prow. He has the composure of a young idol, his eyes slanted and meditative. His scarlet cotton sash is knotted twice and hangs with a definite air of smartness. His feet are bound with thonged sandals of leather. We admire him immensely as he sits, eating peanuts in a remote, lordly way, placing the shells in the upcurving brim of his hat.
A flower girl passing in a slender boat throws him a bunch of purple and yellow pansies. He smiles, makes a grandiose acknowledging gesture the full length of his arm and places the flowers in his hat brim also.
He stretches on the mat, his face to the softening afternoon sky, arms under his head. The hat is by his side. He whistles “Adelita” gently, and smiles to himself. It is a pity to disturb him, but we must be going.
July 1921
Uneasiness grows here daily. We are having sudden deportations of foreign agitators, street riots and parades of workers carrying red flags. Plots thicken, thin, disintegrate in the space of thirty-six hours. A general was executed today for counter-revolutionary activities. There is fevered discussion in the newspapers as to the best means of stamping out Bolshevism, which is the inclusive term for all forms of radical work. Battles occur almost daily between Catholics and Socialists in many parts of the Republic: Morelia, Yucatán, Campeche, Jalisco. In brief, a clamor of petty dissension almost drowns the complicated debate between Mexico and the United States.
It is fascinating to watch, but singularly difficult to record because events overlap, and the news of today may be stale before it reaches the border. It is impossible to write fully of the situation unless one belongs to that choice company of folk who can learn all about peoples and countries in a couple of weeks. We have had a constant procession of these strange people: they come dashing in, gather endless notes and dash out again and three weeks later their expert, definitive opinions are published. Marvelous! I have been here for seven months, and for quite six of these I have not been sure of what the excitement is all about. Indeed, I am not yet able to say whether my accumulated impression of Mexico is justly proportioned; or that if I write with profound conviction of what is going on I shall not be making a profoundly comical mistake. The true story of a people is not to be had exclusively from official documents, or from guarded talks with diplomats. Nor is it to be gathered entirely from the people themselves. The life of a great nation is too widely scattered and complex and vast; too many opposing forces are at work, each with its own intensity of self-seeking.
Has any other country besides Mexico so many types of enemy within the gates? Here they are both foreign and native, hostile to each other by tradition, but mingling their ambitions in a common cause. The Mexican capitalist joins forces with the American against his revolutionary fellow-countryman. The Catholic Church enlists the help of Protestant strangers in the subjugation of the Indian, clamoring for his land. Reactionary Mexicans work faithfully with reactionary foreigners to achieve their ends by devious means. The Spanish, a scourge of Mexico, have plans of their own and are no better loved than they ever were. The British, Americans and French seek political and financial power, oil and mines; a splendid horde of invaders, they are distrustful of each other, but unable to disentangle their interests. Then there are the native bourgeoisie, much resembling the bourgeoisie elsewhere, who are opposed to all idea of revolution. “We want peace, and more business,” they chant uniformly, but how these blessings are to be obtained they do not know. “More business, and no Bolshevism!” is their cry, and they are ready to support any man or group of men who can give them what they want. The professional politicians of Mexico likewise bear a strong family likeness to gentlemen engaged in this line of business in other parts of the world. Some of them have their prejudices; it may be against the Americans, or against the Church, or against the radicals, or against the other local political party, but whatever their prejudices may be they are pathetically unanimous in their belief that big business will save the country.
The extreme radical group includes a number of idealists, somewhat tragic figures these, for their cause is so hopeless. They are nationalists of a fanatical type, recalling the early Sinn Feiners. They are furious and emotional and reasonless and determined. They want, God pity them, a free Mexico at once. Any conservative newspaper editor will tell you what a hindrance they are to the “best minds” who are now trying to make the going easy for big business. If a reasonable government is to get any work done, such misguided enthusiasts can not be disposed of too quickly. A few cooler revolutionists have been working toward civilized alleviations of present distresses pending the coming of the perfect State. Such harmless institutions as free schools for the workers, including a course in social science, have been set going. Clinics, dispensaries, birth control information for the appallingly fertile Mexican woman, playgrounds for children—it sounds almost like the routine program of any East Side social-service worker. But here in Mexico such things have become dangerous, bolshevistic. Among the revolutionists, the Communists have been a wildly disturbing element. This cult was composed mostly of discontented foreigners, lacking even the rudiments of the Russian theory, with not a working revolutionist among them. The Mexicans, when they are not good party-revolutionists, are simple syndicalists of an extreme type. By party-revolutionists I mean the followers of some leader who is not an adherent of any particular revolutionary formula, but who is bent on putting down whatever government happens to be in power and establishing his own, based on a purely nationalistic ideal of reform.
The present government of Mexico is made up of certain intensely radical people, combined with a cast-iron reactionary group which was added during the early days of the administration. In the Cabinet at the extreme left wing is Calles, the most radical public official in Mexico today, modified by de la Huerta at his elbow. At the extreme right wing is Alberto Pani, Minister of Foreign Relations, and Capmany, Minister of Labor. The other members are political gradations of these four minds. The pull-and-haul is intense and never ceases. Such a coalition government for Mexico is a great idea, and the theory is not unfamiliar to American minds: that all classes have the right to equal representation in the government. But it will not work. Quite naturally, all that any group of politicians wants is their own way in everything. They will fight to the last ditch to get it; coalition be hanged!
The revolution has not yet entered into the souls of the Mexican people. There can be no doubt of that. What is going on here is not the resistless upheaval of a great mass leavened by teaching and thinking and suffering. The Russian writers made the Russian Revolution, I verily believe, through a period of seventy-five years’ preoccupation with the wrongs of the peasant, and the cruelties of life under the heel of the Tsar. Here in Mexico there is no conscience crying through the literature of the country. A small group of intellectuals still writes about romance and the stars, and roses and the shadowy eyes of ladies, touching no sorrow of the human heart other than the pain of unrequited love.
But then, the Indians cannot read. What good would a literature of revolt do them? Yet they are the very life of the country, this inert and slow-breathing mass, these lost people who move in the oblivion of sleepwalkers under their incredible burdens; these silent and reproachful figures in rags, bowed face to face with the earth; it is these who bind together all the accumulated and hostile elements of Mexican life. Leagued against the Indian are four centuries of servitude, the incoming foreigner who will take the last hectare of his land, and his own church that stands with the foreigners.
It is generally understood in Mexico that one of the conditions of recognition by the United States is that all radicals holding office in the Cabinet and in the lesser departments of government must go. That is what must be done if Mexico desires peace with the United States. This means, certainly, the dismissal of everyone who is doing constructive work in lines that ought to be far removed from the field of politics, such as education and welfare work among the Indians.
Everybody here theorizes endlessly. Each individual member of the smallest subdivision of the great triumvirate, Land, Oil, and the Church, has his own pet theory, fitting his prophecy to his desire. Everybody is in the confidence of somebody else who knows everything long before it happens. In this way one hears of revolutions to be started tomorrow or the next day or the day after that; but though the surface shifts and changes, one can readily deduce for oneself that one static combination remains, Land, Oil, and the Church. In principle these three are one. They do not take part in these petty national dissensions. Their battleground is the world. If the oil companies are to get oil, they need land. If the Church is to have wealth, it needs land. The partition of land in Mexico, therefore, menaces not only the haciendados (individual landholders), but foreign investors and the very foundations of the Church. Already, under the land-reform laws of Juárez, the Church cannot hold land; it evades this decree, however, by holding property in guardianship, but even this title will be destroyed by repartition.
The recent encounters between Catholics and Socialists in different parts of Mexico have been followed by a spectacular activity on the part of the Catholic clergy. They are pulling their old familiar wires, and all the bedraggled puppets are dancing with a great clatter. The clever ones indulge in skillful moves in the political game, and there are street brawls for the hot-heads. For the peons there is always the moldy, infallible device; a Virgin—this time of Guadalupe—has been seen to move, to shine miraculously in a darkened room! A poor woman in Puebla was favored by Almighty God with the sight of this miracle, just at the moment of the Church’s greatest political uncertainty; and now this miraculous image is to be brought here to Mexico City. The priests are insisting on a severe investigation to be carried on by themselves, and the statue is to be placed in an oratorio, where it will be living proof to the faithful that the great patroness of Mexico has set her face against reform.
The peons are further assured by the priests that to accept the land given to them by the reform laws is to be guilty of simple stealing, and everyone taking such land will be excluded from holy communion—a very effective threat. The agents who come to survey the land for the purposes of partition are attacked by the very peons they have come to benefit. Priests who warn their congregations against the new land-laws have been arrested and imprisoned, and now and then a stick of dynamite has been hurled at a bishop’s palace by a radical hot-head. But these things do not touch the mighty power of the Church, solidly entrenched as it is in its growing strength, and playing the intricate game of international politics with gusto and skill.
So far, I have not talked with a single member of the American colony here who does not eagerly watch for the show to begin. They want American troops in here, and want them quickly—they are apprehensive that the soldiers will not arrive soon enough, and that they will be left to the mercy of the Mexicans for several weeks, maybe. It is strange talk one hears. It is indulged in freely over café tables and on street-corners, at teas and at dances.
Meanwhile international finance goes on its own appointed way. The plans that were drawn up more than a year ago by certain individuals who manage these things in the United States, are going forward nicely, and are being hampered no more than normally by upstarts who have plans of their own. Inevitably certain things will have to be done when the time comes, with only a few necessary deviations due to the workings of the “imponderables.” The whole program has been carefully worked out by Oil, Land, and the Church, the powers that hold this country securely in their grip.
Spring 1922
Let me first repeat to you a story about Carranza told to me by a young Spaniard, Mexican born, who had identified his fortunes with that regime which ended with the sorry flight and death of its chief executive in the month of May, 1920.
A civilized creature was this Spaniard, suffering with a complication of spiritual disgusts. He maintained a nicely ironic tone of amusement in relating his adventure, wherein he had followed the high promptings of a fealty that led him into a situation gravely dubious, false, and pitiable. Because of this, he permitted himself an anodyne gesture of arrogance.
“Be as Anglo-Saxon, as American, as you like, madame, but try also to understand a little.”
“I do not know whether this is understanding,” I told him, “but whatever you may tell me, I promise you I shall not be amazed.”
“That is good. I ask you to regard it as a macabre episode outside of all possible calculation of human events. I desire that you may be pleasantly amused at the picture I shall make for you. Here is a wide desert, harsh with cactus, the mountains glittering under the sun-rays like heaps of hewn brass. Hot! O Dios! our early summer! Many trains of coaches crowding upon one another in their gaudy and ridiculous colors, a little resembling the building-blocks for children, miles of them, you understand, attached to busy engines madly engaged in the ludicrous business of dragging a Government, equipped and encumbered, into exile.
“As Carranza goes, driven out by one of his own generals, he takes the matériel of government with him, and means to reestablish it in Vera Cruz. There are gold bars and coins, guns and ammunition, soldiers and women and horses, furnishings and silver from the castle, postage-stamps, champagne, jewels, a confusion of things seized in frantic emergency.
“His cabinet, his personal friends, were with him. I had the honor, having been recalled suddenly from Washington, to share this calamity with my chief. We numbered in all sixteen thousand people in those trains, officials, soldiers, friends—and enemies. How could a president fail to have enemies among sixteen thousand persons?
“Lupe Sánchez, general in the Federal Army, was waiting for us with his men along the way. Later there would be little Candido Aguilar, son-in-law of the chief. We were not without hope.
“If for a moment, madame, we thought escape possible, put it down, please, to that persistent naïveté of faith in the incredible which is in the heart of every Mexican. La Suerte will not fail forever! And still la Suerte betrays us, and still we are faithful to her. It is our happiest fidelity.
“Some one performed the simple feat of disconnecting the air-brakes of the first train. While we waited many hours on account of this, we smiled, for we had wondered what the first treachery would be, and it was this—trivial and potent, anonymous and certain. When we moved on slowly, revolutionary troops were stationed, waiting for us. We ran through a gantlet of bullets. We listened to the noise of firing, and drank champagne. The chief was silent, composed. We had nearly ten thousand effective soldiers. If he doubted them, no one knows to this day.
“The attacking forces were defeated, though our soldiers were disconcerted by rifle-shells refusing to explode. It was not surprising to discover that nearly half the shells were filled with sand and pepper. Who did it? It was convenient to blame it on the Japanese munition-makers.
“On the third day we met Lupe Sánchez, who had changed his mind, and had diverted his troops to the defense of the revolution. We had a battle with him all day, and in the morning he was joined by the troops of deserted little Candido, left armyless in some village to the south. Trevino came also with a fresh army. They attacked together.
“That was all. Now we were certain of failure, and we did what we could toward the destruction of the train we must leave with the enemy. We dynamited and set fire to the coaches, and all of us gathered what gold we could for flight into the United States and Europe. My brother and I had each a satchel of gold, thirty thousand pesos, maybe; not much. Only for the moment, you see.
“All of us who had arms joined the soldiers for a while. Two little revolvers and a belt of shells do not go far. We were beaten, and the chief gave orders for each man to go for himself. He released them all from their loyalty to him. He knew how to value it, you see.
“I found a small horse, very lean, standing with his saddle on, a dead man hanging by one heel to the stirrup, head down. I rode with a group of soldiers. They were trying to desert to the enemy. I said to the leader:
“‘Why do you desert the chief? I shall kill you!’
“‘If you are not a fool, you will come with us,’ he replied very amiably. ‘This is a lost day.’ I let him go. Well, it was his own affair. A man’s honor is his own, no?
“The soldiers spread flat over the earth behind cactus and hillock, firing at one another, no man knowing whether the other was friend or enemy. Carranza was riding away on horseback, followed by several hundred of his men. I gave my brother place behind me in the saddle, and we set out after the party. Our bags of gold were too heavy for the little horse; so we buried them under a boulder (I could never find that place again!) and later we joined the old man.
“I remember him in this way, riding always ahead of us, without a word, his white beard blowing over his shoulder. I loathe all causes, madame, and all politics, but the man inspired admiration. At dark we stopped before a hut to buy tortillas, and mind what I say, the old man had not a centavo. One of us loaned him the few pennies needed. We made a dark camp that night, and all the next day we rode between hill and cactus.
“Men were falling away from the party. One or two at a time, they saluted and left him, or turned back with no sign at all, or pleaded fatigue and promised to overtake us. But not one came back.
“In the early evening we entered a friendly hacienda and there slept. At midnight I heard a continuous tramp of horses passing the outer wall under my window. I stood listening. I felt some one breathing beside me in the dark. One of the other men stood listening also.
“‘They are bandits hunting for the Old Man,’ he whispered, ‘on their way into the mountains.’
“‘We should wake the chief and tell him,’ I said.
“‘Let him sleep,’ said the man. ‘What is the good of disturbing him now?’
“In the morning my brother and I decided to go no farther. The chief was a dead man; well, we would not be implicated in his death. So we saluted, and turned back also on our one little pony.”
His eyes fixed themselves steadily upon me, a bitter regard of inquiry.
“Madame, it was a desperate little jest, played out. There are, no doubt, causes worth dying for, but that was not one of them.”
“Who killed him?”
“It could have been any one of that group who went on with him. It could have been the bandits I heard passing in the night. Maybe an enemy who made this his special mission, or a friend who found himself in a situation he did not care for. He might, you see, go back to the new people in power and say: ‘See, here I am, your servant. I have just escaped from the bandits of Carranza.’ A poor chance, but an only one. Maybe the newest chief would believe him, maybe not. A President of Mexico can trust no one.”
That final corroding phrase is the point of a cynical truth: a hundred years of revolutions have taught the President of Mexico that he can trust no one except his enemies. They may be depended upon to hate him infallibly; they will be faithful in contriving for his downfall.
In Mexican revolution the cause and the leader are interchangeable symbols. A man has his adherents, who follow him in the hope of arriving, through him, one step nearer to the thing they want, whatever that may be. Obregón is the leader, and his followers are the proletariat. The proletariat being for him, naturally the other classes and subdivisions of classes are opposed to him, acting on the curious theory that what is good for the laborer must logically be very bad for everybody else. Obregón’s proletarian recalls that what was good for everybody else was very terrible for him, and he has set about evening up scores with more enthusiasm than justice, probably. Obregón has difficult work on hand. Himself a man of hardy good sense, an intellectually detached point of view, and civilized instincts, he must deal with the most conflicting welter of enmities and demands, surely, that ever harassed a holder of the executive office.
His Indians, his revolutionist mestizos, are filled with grievances and wrongs, suffering cruel exigencies; they turn the tragic, threatening eyes of their faith toward him, and wait for him to fulfill his promises to them. Those promises mean realities, immediate benefits, if they have any meaning at all: land, work, freedom. He must deal with these honestly and without delay.
As an Indian, exceedingly insular in his political views, he must deal in the subtleties of international finance and diplomacy with foreign politicians and capitalists who think in terms of continents and billions, and who are leagued powerfully with his chief enemies of his own country, the landholders, the church. These in turn may be divided again into delicate classifications: the aristocracy, the wealthy upper-class mestizo, the middle-class shopkeeping folk, and the great body of Indians who cling to their religion. For the sake of sufficient identification, they may call themselves reactionary or conservative or liberal. It does not signify. They have also a label for this present governing group. They call them bandits. It means nothing, and has a disreputable sound.
The chief complaint among the anti-Obregón factions is that the new Government is acting on the theory that the lands of Mexico belong to the Indian, and that it is to the interest of the country to care first for this prodigious majority of its population. This is true, and it is revolutionary enough, indeed. But all the men now concerned in the Government are frankly nationalists. Only three of them have ever had a glimpse of Europe or this country. They studied in text-books the forms of government in other countries. But when the time came, they went about their business with their eyes fixed on their native earth. Only afterward their international point of view, such as it is, was formed, when they had come into power.
For the first time they found themselves dealing not with the fervent episodes of battles fought out with personal minuteness of detail, where a general lay in ambush and fought beside his men, but with the gigantic and implacable facts: Mexico, a backward and menaced nation, dangerously rich in resource and weak in defenses, was in actual relation with a world of hostile, critical governments, all more powerful than Mexico herself, all more than a match for her in organized pillage, more nicely adjusted in a cynical freemasonry of finance, diplomacy, and war, the three Graces of civilization.
In selecting his cabinet Obregón announced his belief that de la Huerta, radical philosopher, would work harmoniously with Alberto Pani, friend of the American Senator Fall. That Calles, Sonora revolutionist, would somehow make his terms with Capmany, millionaire reactionary. That Vasconselos, radical minister of education, and Villarreal, revolutionary minister of agriculture, could both be counted on not to be too extreme in moments of crisis. As an act of faith, this was magnificent. Faith in what? Watching Obregón’s methods of disposing of his enemies each according to his degree, I believe his faith is in himself.
With this cabinet he set about the gigantic task of bringing order to a country in which order has been the least regarded of all laws. He had against him four tremendous opposing forces, the reactionaries against the radicals, the foreign against the native, an inextricably tangled mass of conflicting claims, any one of which he cannot afford to ignore. With a treasury virtually empty, he shouldered a national debt which, though not hopelessly large, is still enough to be a weapon in the hands of his opponents. And when he set about dividing the land, as he had promised, and collecting funds from the oil products to add to the national treasury, he cited Article Twenty-seven of the Mexican Constitution as amended by Carranza in 1917, and announced that it should now be made effective.
That has caused all, or nearly all, of his trouble. It delayed recognition from the United States. It has been the peg upon which to hang many promising little counter-revolutionary schemes. It may yet prove fatal to his Government.
Briefly, Article Twenty-seven gives to the Mexican Government full title to all the lands of Mexico, both surface and subsoil. It empowers the Department of Agriculture to break up unwieldy landholdings, and to divide the acreage among the Indians. It provides for a tax on all subsoil products, and thereby diverts to the national treasury and to the common life the fruit of the nation’s labor and products.
This was the ideal which Obregón as President of Mexico designed to carry out. It had the noble simplicity of a hermit’s vision of beauty, and it was about as sympathetically related to practical politics.
The oil interests were unanimous in opposing this article. Oil should be Mexico’s greatest asset, but the Guggenheims and Dohenys have made of it a liability almost insupportable to the country. It is the fashion now to blame all the present difficulties between Mexico and the United States on the Obregón regime; but it was Carranza who redrafted the Mexican Constitution, aside from a detail or two, to its present form. It was his administration that set the tax of ten percent on the selling price of oil, with a fifteen-percent royalty payable in produce on all oil obtained. The land partition had been one of his political plans. He did not carry it out, it is true. It is one of the reasons why he is not now President of Mexico. But Obregón inherited all his problems, dead ripe.
El Aguila petroleum, a British company, and the Guffey interests made their peace, and announced their intention of complying with the national regulation of oil export. The Doheny interests, most implacable of all Mexico’s interior enemies, together with other companies, have side-stepped the payment in this way: they admit that the tax is nominal; they will pay taxes cheerfully on the price paid them for oil by the boat companies, which they allege is about forty cents a barrel. The boat companies claim they buy the oil outright, and, once loaded into the tanks, Mexico has no further claim of interest. The price they sell for in foreign markets is their own affair.
This would be quite simple if the oil-producing companies and the oil-transportation companies were separate interests. But the case being what it is, the Government says pipelines shall have meters, the oil shall be measured as it flows into the tank-boats, and the amount shall be taxed at the selling price of oil, which fluctuates with the market. And there the matter sticks.
The Doheny interests are the source of eternal unrest. They want Obregón out, and nothing less will please them. A man of the old guard, say Esteban Cantu, is the choice of the Doheny faction. A good man, Cantu. Enormously wealthy, mixed upper-class blood, interested in oil. “Emperor of Lower California” they used to call him. When Obregón became president, Cantu was required to disband his standing army, was given to understand his vast estates would be repartitioned when the time came for it. Now, sporadically, he makes counterrevolution, designed to keep the oil and land question prominently before the eyes of the American public, or, I should say, the American politician.
That much for the subsoil controversy. The surface lands are needed for agricultural purposes. The country must be fed on its own fruits. The drain of import is too heavy. The farming lands are held almost exclusively by Spaniards who have held the grants for centuries, by oil companies, and by the church. These three are in effect one. If the Government continues to carry out its drastic plan, it means that the old haciendas will be destroyed, church lands confiscated, and every foot of earth will be subject to government control. The entire question of recognition hangs on this one sword’s point.
In the meantime, so far as the oil people are concerned, they cheerfully admit it is cheaper to keep a few minor revolutions going than to pay taxes. So Pablo Gonzales and Esteban Cantu and all that restless body of Mexicans with political ambitions and no love of country can be sure of a measure of support and aid in their operations.
You see what Obregón has in the way of organized opposition. Even in the Chamber of Deputies he has a minority. In his own cabinet he can with difficulty strike a balance in his favor at moments of crisis. Yet he has held the Government together for two years, and appears to be growing steadily in strength. The currency exchange is at par; gold is the circulating medium; business is good; banks are steady. What is the source of his power?
He has, as I have said, the organized proletariat, the labor-unions. They are for him exactly as long as he is for them. He encounters no obscurities of motive there. His influence has wavered precariously at moments when he was threatened from foreign sources. His followers watch him, and criticize him savagely when he decides on compromise as preferable to extermination.
The unorganized proletariat follows, as a rule, the organized. There are his federal troops, a loose body of men not given to loyalties. As soldiers they follow the leader. They followed him at a time when they were theoretically loyal to Carranza. He has them—maybe.
There are the Yaqui Indians, a fierce and evil tribe who fight like demons lately unchained from hell. Obregón is the only man who has ever succeeded in taming them to regular warfare. His humanizing mediums were land and food and decent treatment. He has them—maybe.
The socialist bandits of Morelia are his. They are the most promising of all the radical groups, a fantastic mixture of doctors and lawyers and poets and teachers who took to the high roads against Carranza, soldiers who detached themselves from the army without leave and engaged in a personal pursuit of glory, plain road-pillagers converted to the revolutionary ideal. They were the remnants of Zapata’s horde, those fanatic highwaymen who used to make speeches to their victims after this manner, poking them in the ribs with revolvers to emphasize the moral points of their discourse:
“In giving up your gold to us you are honored in contributing to the cause of freedom. These funds shall be used to further the revolution, to bring to our downtrodden brothers justice and peace and liberty. Be happy, brother, that we do not blow out your capitalistic brains.”
These men are now engaged in running the state of Morelia on an outright socialist program. The state is at peace except for May-day battles between Catholics and Socialists and an occasional riot on feast days.
Yucatán, also a revolutionary state, is loyal to Obregón. It is a nation by itself, removed by language, by tradition, and custom from the rest of the country. The last of the Mayas are there, a spectacular, insular people, up to the eyes in social and economic grievances, who make their state a battle-ground. Felipe Carillo, a Maya, was elected governor by sixty thousand majority, and if he lives to take the chair, we shall see revolutionary theory practised freely in Yucatán.
From high to low, this is the strength of Obregón. He works quietly, slowly, holding his ground as he gains it with a tenacity that cannot be stampeded into action even with his mob of revolutionists growling at his heels, demanding that he ignore the claims of foreign capital and politics.
He gives personal interviews to all manner of strange persons who track him down indefatigably: reporters and magazine-writers from the United States; delegations from chambers of commerce; representatives of every type of promotion scheme under heaven, all designed to benefit Mexico; walking delegates from the labor-unions; unofficial diplomats and businessmen who wish to establish some sort of trades relation with Mexico.
Take this sort of thing to illustrate: Mexico has a body of lawmakers known as the Chamber of Deputies, which functions somewhat in the manner of our House of Congress. On one occasion the conservative faction went openly to war with Carillo, then deputy from Yucatán. The disturbances became a riot. For three days the lawmakers went on a debauch of dissension. A committee of deputies appealed to the president to put an end to the disgraceful episode. Acting through the governor of the district, Obregón ordered that the riot be quelled after the ordinary procedure against disturbances of the peace. Whereupon the city fire department went down to the white-pillared Chamber of Deputies, turned on high-pressure hose through the open windows, and the disorderly deputies were drenched to the bone. The disturbances stopped.
It would be absurd, comic, if death were not in it. The role of dictator is strangely associated with a civilized perception of government. Wherever generals playing the counterrevolutionary game are captured, there they are executed, usually within twelve hours. Pablo Gonzales has escaped so far, but only one of his numerous small forays recently resulted in the execution of five men, two of them being generals in the president’s army.
If the revolutionists were all Mexicans, it would be, possibly, a local business. But Mexico has been hospitable to political refugees from all parts of the world. They have come making mischief each after his own taste, arrogantly bringing their diverse doctrines to a land already overborne with doctrines. A sudden flurry of antiradical sentiment resulted in a few of the more obviously annoying of the aliens being set gently over the borders of their native lands, in accordance with Article Thirty-three of the Mexican Constitution, which provides that a too impossible guest may be thrown out.
The foreign radicals, bereft of the security of government toleration, declared the Mexican Government was betraying its highest revolutionary ideals by way of currying favor with the United States. They accused the cabinet of taking orders from the American chargés d’affaires. Maybe so. Oddly enough, it did happen that most of the deportees were received hospitably by the American jails on their return from exile. But one might believe also that the long-suffering Mexican Government had grown humanly sick of gnat-stings, and had rid itself of a few minor curses in order to concentrate on greater ones.
Every foreign opportunist with a point to make can find the support of other opportunists in Mexico. The result is a hotbed of petty plotting, cross purposes between natives and foreigners, from the diplomats down to the unwashed grumbler who sits in the Alameda and complains about the sorrows of the proletariat. In all this the men in present power are struggling toward practicable economic and political relations with the world.
Psychologically, we are as alien to them as we are to the French, and in much the same way; for the Mexican upper class social and business customs are to-day more French than Spanish.
The hope of the Labor party is to establish an interdependent union with the South American states, leading naturally to clear avenues of trade and communication with Europe. It is the logical sequence of events, and would be a tremendous source of strength to Mexico. But if the union is established, it will be an achievement of finesse which Mexico may take pride in; for the idea is rankest treason to our high financial rights in that country.
Luis Morones, present chief of munitions for the Government, is the leader of this Labor party. He is wholly Indian, a leader by temperament, executive, and powerful. His pride is in his factories and plants, where the working conditions are ideal, and the wage is the highest paid in the republic.
In the educational work Vasconcelos, minister of education and president of the National University, has begun an intensive program of school founding among the Indians, with special attention to industrial and agricultural schools, his intention being not to oppress the Indian with an education he cannot use, but to fit him for his natural work, which is on the land.
Vasconcelos is, despite what we would call radical tendencies, a believer in applied Christianity. He might be called a Tolstoyan, except that he is Mexican, and the doctrine of nonresistance does not engage his faith. He claims in his calm way that the true purpose of higher education is to lift the souls of men above this calamitous civilization. We cannot outwear it until we have fixed the aspirations of our souls on something better. He publishes a magazine of religion, philosophy, and literature in Mexico City, giving translations from the works of Tolstoy, Rolland, Anatole France, and Shaw.
Other men, in no wise connected with politics, are each in his own individual manner deeply concerned with the rebuilding of his country. Widely separated as they are in caste and political sympathies, they are strangely of one mind with the others in their will to be of service to their shattered nation. There is Manuel Gamio, archaeologist and writer, wholly Spanish, but born in Mexico, whose research work and restoration of the Teotihuacán pyramids is sponsored and financed by the present Government. Mr. Gamio is studying race sources in Mexico with the sole aim of discovering the genuine needs of the Indian, and the most natural method of supplying them.
Jorge Enciso, also Spanish, is an authority on early Aztec art and design, and is making a comparative study of motives used by the early and widely separated tribes. Adolfo Best-Maugard, a painter, has spent eight years in creating a new manner of design, using as a foundation the Aztec motives. He has done valuable work in reviving among the Indian schoolchildren the native instinct for drawing and designing. His belief is that a renascence of the older Aztec arts and handicrafts among these people will aid immeasurably in their redemption.
Redemption—it is a hopeful, responsible word one hears often among these men. Strangely assorted are the true patriots of Mexico, and few as numbers go. But what country has many faithful sons? These men are divided as only social castes can divide persons from one another in a Latin-minded country, and yet they share convictions which, separately arrived at, are almost indivisible in effect.
They all are convinced, quite simply, that twelve millions of their fifteen millions of peoples cannot live in poverty, illiteracy, a most complete spiritual and mental darkness, without constituting a disgraceful menace to the state. They have a civilized conviction that the laborer is worthy of his hire, a practical perception of the waste entailed in millions of acres of untilled lands while the working people go hungry. And with this belief goes an esthetic appreciation of the necessity of beauty in the national life, the cultivation of racial forms of art, and the creation of substantial and lasting unity in national politics.
As a nation, we love phrases. How do you like this one? “Land and liberty for all, forever!” If we needed a fine ringing phrase to fight a war on, could we possibly improve on that one? The tragic, the incredible thing about this phrase is that the men who made it, meant it. Just this: land, liberty, for all, forever!
They fought a long, dreary, expensive revolution on it. As soon as they had it fought, they began to translate the phrase into action. Their situation today is as I have described it to you.