Cándido Castro, a Tsotsil Indian, his wife, Marcelina de las Casas, and their two little sons, Angelito and Pedrito, lived on a plot of ground in a district of small agricultural holdings called Cuishin, on the outskirts of Chalchihuistán. Cándido’s property amounted to about five acres of arid, powdered, stony soil that required back-breaking work from him if he was to wring enough food from it for his family. The big landlords—called finqueros—of the districts of Jovel and Chiilum had tried several times to persuade Cándido to abandon his miserable piece of land, take his whole family, and go to work on one of the fincas as a peon.
The finqueros were forever on the hunt for Indian families, essential to them for labor on their fincas. They were completely unscrupulous about snatching the Indians from their own villages and districts. The finqueros contested the possession of such families as though trying to establish the ownership of unbranded cattle. Quarrels over the possession of Indian families went on and on, were handed down from fathers to sons, and were prolonged even when the cause had long since been forgotten and no one could guess what had started the deadly hatreds among the finqueros.
The political bosses and other minions of the dictatorship, naturally, were always on the side of the powerful finqueros. When a finquero asked them to deprive some Indian family of its shred of land, declare the Indians devoid of rights, or take advantage of any criminal method whatever, the representatives of the government carried out his wishes immediately, leaving the victims at the finquero’s mercy. He then undertook to pay off the family’s debts and take care of the exorbitant fines inflicted—most often for no reason, but useful for drowning the Indians in debt to such a depth that the finquero could acquire absolute rights over them. That a finquero was related to a political boss or friendly with one or could help to assure some other employee of the tyranny a long and easy existence was enough to guarantee that Indian labor would never be lacking on his finca.
Cándido had been able to preserve his independence and live in freedom thanks to his innate peasant caution, his natural good sense, and the line of conduct he had imposed on himself: to be concerned only with his land, his work, and the well-being of his family.
The small community was made up of five families belonging, like Cándido, to the Tsotsil tribe. Their patches of land were as poor as his. Their miserable hovels were made of adobe and thatched with palm leaves. They led the kind of hard existence that only humble peasant Indians can endure. All the finqueros’ efforts to turn them into peons had failed, nevertheless, as they had with Cándido. The Indians were not unaware that life on a finca would be less harsh for them; but they preferred to stay on their dry and sterile land—because of which the district was called Cuishin, which means “burning”—preferred to live their precarious lives full of the constant anguish of seeing their harvests ruined rather than lose their liberty for an Eden in servitude. They preferred dying of hunger as free men to getting fat under an overseer’s orders.
If the Tsotsils had been asked the reason for their preference, they might have replied like the old Louisiana Negress who had been a slave in her youth, before the Civil War. In the old days the slave’s masters had taken care of her existence. She had eaten as much as she wanted. Now she lived in a miserable shack and in order to make a living had to take in neighbors’ washing. She never knew whether she would be able to eat the next day or would be driven to robbery in order to feed herself and would then be thrown into jail. One day they asked her: “Now then, mammy, didn’t you live better when you were a slave?” And she answered: “Sure, I lived better before—but now I’m happy—a man’s stomach’s not the only thing that makes him happy.”
And in Cuishin the stomach alone did not give orders. If it had, there would be no explaining why those Indians accepted their painful lives instead of turning over the care of their Stomachs to a finquero in return for simply obeying his orders.