NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MAXICO

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NOTES

FOR A BOOK

AEOUT MEXICO

NOTES

FOR A BOOK
ABOUT MEXICO

By HOWARD VINCENT O'BRIEN

WILLETT, CLARK & COMPANY
CHICAGO NEW YORK

1937

Copyright 1937 by
WILLETT, CLARK & COMPANY

Manufactured in The U.S.A. by The Plimpton Press
Norwood, Mass. La Porte, Ind.

To
FRANK KNOX

Contents

STRICTLY TOURIST * ;i

TOWARD THE HOT TAMALE 3

SERIOUS BUSINESS 6

LAND OF MANNERS 9

ON BALL BEARINGS 12

BEEF EN BROCHETTE 15

CONTRADICTIONS 18

BEADS FOR THE NATIVES 21

SHADOW AROUND THE BEND 24

THE SEAMY SIDE 27

GREENER FIELDS 30

CONFUSED AND CONFUSING 33

MAKING NIGHT HIDEOUS 36

SPEAKING OF MONEY 39

FROM PRINTER TO PRESIDENT 42

CHURCH AND STATE 45

A GREAT EXPERIMENT 49

FIESTA OR CARNIVAL? 52

BANDIT OR PATRIOT? .......... 55

OREMUS 58

THE LITTLE ONES 62

WHAT A WOMAN! 65

Vll

viii CONTENTS

MORE FIREWORKS 68

LAND OF EXTREMES 71

REACHING FOR LIGHT 74

PIG IN THE ROAD 77

SWEET DO-NOTHING 80

ALLO! ALLO! 83

REVOLUTIONARY WEAPON 87

EMERGING FROM DARKNESS 90

ACCURATE BUT UNTRUE 93

ATROCITIES 96

THE MODERN TOUCH 99

CROOKS AND CRACKPOTS 102

MINGLED YARN 105

MEMORABLE AFTERNOON 109

THE HAND OF FATE .113

NOT THE CUSTOM 116

LEARNING TO LOSE 119

GAS-TANK CAPS AND CYPRESS 122

UNDER THE RED FLAG 125

Lo, THE POOR INDIAN 128

GOING Too FAR 131

LUCKY ENCOUNTER ......... 134

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 137

HAPPY LANDING 140

SOCIAL SECURITY 144

ASSORTED VEXATION 147

CONTENTS ix

WISE OLD OWL 150

PAINT AND PROPAGANDA 153

SCHOOLMASTER 156

DIVIDING THE LAND 159

No ILLUSIONS 162

BOOTS AND SADDLES 165

ESCORTED BY THE POLICE 168

ALONE AT LAST 171

Foreword

Before writing a book about a country, one should study its
history, geography and language. Then, after taking a course
of lectures in its art, archaeology and economics, one should
arm himself with letters to leaders of thought and, finally,
take up residence for" at least a year.

I have done none of those things. I came to Mexico wholly
unequipped, having read little about it and forgotten most of
that. I knew only a few words of Spanish mostly irrele
vant,

I met few important people, my contacts being chiefly with
clerks, porters, policemen, taxi drivers and small children.
I came with no convictions, except that the Mexicans were a
gay and lazy lot, likely to be disagreeable to Americans. I
left with no conclusions except that the Mexicans were the
precise opposite of all I had feared they would be.

What follows in these pages was written for newspaper
publication, and I have resisted the temptation to benefit by
hindsight. It remains what it was a day-by-day record,
often hastily composed, of two months below the Rio Grande.
It is, of course, notably inaccurate, superficial and repetitious.
I only hope it proves sufficiently irritating to make its readers
want to go and see for themselves.

THE AUTHOR
London, May i, 1937

NOTES

FOR A BOOK

ABOUT MEXICO

Strictly Tourist

Already I speak English with a faint accent and address my
consort as senora. Already the sweetbreads which serve me
as a brain are slightly addled by the effort to remember how
many pesos make or should make a dollar. Already
the busy fretful life of the north seems strangely remote and
my natural aptitude for indolence is ready to show what it
can do.

I am assailed by grave problems. There is, first, the ques
tion of what guise shall be mine on my visit to Mexico. Val
entine Williams, author and international gadabout, was just
in for a chat, and he assured me that it was fatal to travel any
where with papers revealing the carrier as a journalist. " I al
ways go as ' gentleman/ " he said. " That may err slightly
on the side of accuracy; but it saves time and red tape. No
body loves a journalist."

Mexico presents a peculiar problem. Once a tourist has
obtained a card stating that he is a tourist, he is " expressly
unable to change his tourist status while he is in the republic
of Mexico/* Once he deviates from being occupied solely
with pleasure, he will, says the card, " be subject to an adequate
punishment."

That, of course, settles it. If anyone wants to know why
I am going to Mexico, the answer is given in no uncertain
voice PLEASURE. As part of my pleasure I shall ^write
a daily letter about what I see and hear; but I want it distinctly
understood that I write only for fun, and that at all hours of
the day and night I am strictly a tourist.

2 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

Thinking that my managing editor should understand
this, and not be troubled should any of my letters fail to
arrive, I told him all about my resolve to cease being a journal
ist and become a tourist, if not a " gentleman/' He took it
lightly, assuring me that as far as he had been able to judge
I had always been a tourist, and that the word " journalist "
gave him visceral pains, anyway.

That problem settled, there remains only the problem of
letters of introduction. I hesitate to use them, but hesitancy
is always overcome by the reflection that one of my best f riends
was made by this means. And I shall try to visit all the quaint
spots that people have recommended. Most of all, I shall
establish contact with a police official, to whom I have a letter,
and with a couple of newspapermen. Guided by a cop and
a pair of newshawks, one can't go far wrong.

And now for the final sweep of papers from the desk and
the packing of the battered old suitcase. This last will entail
a slight domestic scene, it never having been settled in our
home which of us takes the most stuff that is never used.
Then, while the taxi clicks at the door, there will be the usual
last-minute effort to cram into a bag more things than it was
designed to hold; and the inevitable strap or buckle will give
way. Also, as usual, there will be the discovery that one's
careful listing of the number of pieces of baggage does not
include the extra parcels. And finally, with the usual sinking
feeling, and the certainty that something important has been
forgotten, we shall be off.

All aboard for New Spain! See you at Sanborn's.

toward the Hot *famdc

As I speed swiftly over the flat wet plains, sage green and
russet, of the incredibly vast empire we stole from Mexico,
my thoughts are again on the endless conflict between our
principles and our habits. We ride in Pullmans, but much
of our thinking is still at the oxcart stage. And no sooner
do we catch up with one piece of machinery than another is
devised to plague us.

Consider, for example, the electric razor. Seduced by
advertising, one tries it; and then, hardly knowing it, one
becomes a slave to progress. Smooth the addict's way, and
smooth his features, as long as he has access to an electric
circuit into which he can plug. But woe to him when he
boards a railroad train. His gadget, so excellent in the domes
tic scene , will not work on the lower voltage of a Pullman. He
must either buy one specially designed for this purpose, which
is extravagant and silly; or he must revert to the razor which
cuts instead of clips, the brutal edge which bites into flesh as
well as hair. Tenderly caressing a face which smarts and
stings from treatment to which it has long been unaccustomed,
I sit pondering the reputed advantages of invention. I
am not sure that they are what they are said to be.

With baggage piled high on the opposite seat, my type
writer on my lap, other bags underfoot and the surplus flowing
in a disordered stream into the aisle, I meditate also on the
inventive genius of Mr. Pullman. Progress seems to have
ceased with him, and the upper berth is practically as he left

4 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

it. Oddly enough, the uppers fetch less than the lowers,
though they are demonstrably less uncomfortable. The
springing is better, there is some ventilation, and the feat of
inserting legs into trousers can be performed with somewhat
less hazard.

There is one notable change in railway travel. This is
the " smoking " now called the " club " car. Women
have invaded this domain, and with their usurpation has come
a striking change in outward appearance. Cretonnes and
chromium have replaced mahogany and brown leather. The
conversation has changed, too, and the so-called smoking-car
anecdote has vanished under the pressure of what Dr. Johnson
called " the endearing elegance of female companionship/ 7

The railroads, after being badly mauled by competition,
seem to be getting a second wind. Attacked on one flank by
the airplane and on the other by the motorcar with its lusty
nephew, the trailer the railroads are making a counter-
offensive of some vigor. They are now offering more speed
and comfort, and asking less for them. Among many novel
ties, they are taking the first steps toward the checking of mo
torcars as baggage; and they are giving the trucks something
to think about in their free pickup and delivery of freight. In
all this they are hampered by three things: government regula
tion some of it wise and necessary, some of it a nuisance;
the crushing burden of bonded indebtedness; and the un
compromising attitude of labor. Meanwhile one thing is
certain railway travel is rapidly increasing. For safety
and certainty it is still tops in transportation.

So much for the thoughts that flit through an empty head
as the telegraph poles dance by on their way to the lana of the
hot tamale.

In the next car are a soda fountain and the latest magazines.

TOWARD THE HOT TAMALE 5

For those who insist on keeping up with events, there is a
radio. I am not a customer. I am content to recline, doze
a little, dip occasionally into my Spanish phrase book, and
congratulate myself that I have no tires to change, no way to
lose and no doubts as to where I shall spend the night. I feel
rather sorry for the motorists I catch glimpses of on the high
ways.

Serious business

Practically everything I have heard about the difficulties of
entering Mexico proves to be false.

In San Antonio a supposedly well informed person re
counted horrendous tales about the ingenious pestiferousness of
the Mexican customs. He assured me that baggage must be
taken from the train at Nuevo Laredo, and that after being
meticulously examined it was sealed, not to be opened again
until the next morning. He also gave alarming details of the
perils of money-changing.

Having been maltreated by the customs inspectors of many
lands notably my own I was resigned to the worst.
However, nothing happened. First a courteous immigration
officer summoned us to the lounge car, where tourist cards
were signed and stamped. Then the customs inspectors came
through the train. Fate gave us a businesslike young woman
dressed in pale blue rayon, who, after a briefly expert appraisal
of our effects, affixed the Mexican equivalent of o. k. and
passed on.

Not so fortunate was a Mexican across the aisle. His
examination lasted an hour or more and his bill was consider
able. As he explained to us sadly, if you carry female gar
ments in your bags but have no wife with you, you are pre
sumed to be a smuggler, and pay accordingly.

I have been in Mexico only a few hours, but I have already
learned one lesson. Nowhere does politeness pay such divi
dends. The Mexicans are extremely sensitive to ridicule or
patronage. Treat them respectfully, offering no affront to

6

SERIOUS BUSINESS 7

dignity, and distinguished consideration will be yours. Treat
them with condescension, indicate your belief that you are o
a superior breed, and thorny will be your path. From my
observation so far, pretty-please and gentle manners smooth
all roads, while curtness and derision make for a course
exceedingly rough.

Strange as it may seem, the Mexican official has high regard

O J O D

for his uniform and the position it symbolizes. He resents
what he considers impropriety. A woman on our train was
sharply rebuked for smoking a cigarette while her passport
was being examined. To the tourist, puffed up with vainglory
at being that noblest of the works of God, an American, these
formalities may seem the humorous play of children; -but to
the Mexican, remembering ancestors who were important
centuries before the Pilgrims were heard of, they are serious
business, to be treated as such.

I have spent the morning in talk with an American busi
nessman who lived for many years in Mexico and still has a
home there. From him I gleaned some interesting things
about this land which is so near to us geographically, yet so
far away in all other respects.

It is a mistake to think of Mexico as a Latin country, merely
because its language is Spanish. It is an Indian country, over
which has been laid a thin veneer of European architecture
and custom. A handful of Spanish adventurers conquered
it, and until something over a century ago Spain ruled and
plundered it. But the Spanish domination never bit deep
into the fiber of the people, and today there is a lively renais
sance of the Indian way of life.

A large part of the population lives primitively now, but
their ancestors were masters of a high degree of civilization
when Plymouth Rock was just a rock. When you are tempted

8 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

to speak of Mexicans as " spiggoties " or " greasers," just re
member that books were printed in Mexico at least a hundred
years before they were in what is now the U. S. A.

The present trend of things is said to be communistic, and
one is told that this is of Russian origin. In fact, however,
the communistic trend dates from a far more ancient model.
The Indian society has always been communal, if not com
munistic, and the economic program of the present govern
ment is an outgrowth of something that was old long before
Trotzky and Lenin made their appearance.

Here is the battlefield of great forces. Here the law of the
Romans and the law of the Anglo-Saxons come to grips. By
the former, for example, one can own only the surface of land,
and whatever can be dug or pumped from it is the property of
crown or state. You can see what that means to the claims of
oil and mining interests.

But it is too hot for such weighty thinking, and my siesta
time is here. Outside, the desert bakes in the hot sunshine,
and the natives the few to be seen doze in shadowed
doorways. Far away the Cordilleras shimmer faintly against
the pale blue sky. Even the cattle and the pigs are at rest, and
no buzzard is to be seen a-wing. The porter, dreaming no
doubt of Iturbide and Montezuma, is asleep in one corner of
the car, the conductor in another. There seems to be no move
ment in the world. Only the train keeps pounding along,
at what appears to be slower speed each hour.

I hope the engineer is not taking a siesta, too!

and of

The last miles were the hardest for our train and it was well
past midnight when we arrived in the capital of the Aztecs.
With vague ideas of the city of Mexico as a town of narrow
streets, paved with cobbles or not at all, through which strolled
picturesque figures in sombrero and serape, with perhaps a
cathedral and an opera house and a tram line to give a touch of
modernism, it was disconcerting to find stoplights and neon
signs and office buildings towering against the sky, and to see
that the people on the streets were for the most part dressed
precisely as they would be on Broadway or Piccadilly.

The capital of Mexico is a big city larger than Atlanta,
Chattanooga, Dayton, Syracuse and Omaha rolled into one.

But figures mean little and, in the case of this amazing city,
neither do words. It must be experienced. As I dropped off
to sleep this morning, in as completely equipped a hotel as
one may find in this world, I could hear, above the squawking
of the motor horns on the boulevard outside, the crowing of a
cock from somewhere near by. Thus the old and the new live
contentedly side by side.

If I were asked to specify what has struck me most forcibly,
so far, about life in Mexico, I would answer promptly: its
superb manners. From the bootblack upward the courtesy
encountered has been notable. The amiability of the Mexi
can is not servile. A servant will accept a tip, but he does not
act as if he expected it. Those who fetch your water and carry
your bags do everything with dignity. Even the ragged
creatures who try to sell you things on the street exhibit the

9

io NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

same gravity. They are neither persistent nor obsequious.
It is difficult to explain, but you cannot be here an hour without
feeling it.

If the mahogany-colored peon in cotton drawers and sandals
made of discarded tires is a model of gentle manners, one
simply breaks down when one tries to find words for the polite
ness of the educated upper class. It makes a Norteamericano
acutely and uncomfortably conscious of his own brusque ways.
It makes him feel crude and loutish, and no matter what a
boor he may be by nature it is amazing to see how quickly he
yields to the example set him by Mexicans, high and low.

I suppose I should wait to blow the trumpet for Mexico
until I have seen more of it. But at the moment I want to
urge everyone who can afford it to buy a ticket. And it is
worth mentioning that the rate of exchange makes a trip to
Mexico a real travel bargain. At the present rate the peso is
worth about twenty-eight cents. And for life in Mexico the
peso buys about what a dollar does in the U. S. A.

That is, if you buy goods made in Mexico and do not go
in heavily for luxuries, you can live well on little. The Mexi
cans, however, believe in soaking the rich. Thus meals on
our dining car carried a io per cent tax. According to the
economic philosophy of Mexico, anyone who can afford to
eat in a dining car can afford to pay a stiff tax. So it is that if
you can do with cotton stockings you can have them for little,
but if you demand silk stockings you pay through the nose.
If you insist on American cigarettes you must pay dearly for
them, but you can have a Mexican cigarette, the " Vir-
heenya," to spell it phonetically to my dull palate in
distinguishable from the American sort for only five cents
a package.

The city is full of Americans, yet they say the season has

LAND OF MANNERS n

not yet really started There is a convention of lady horti
culturists, a convention of hotel managers, a gathering of
serious-minded folk intent on a study of Latin America, and
heaven knows how many others besides. Yet the city seems
able to absorb any amount of tourist traffic without losing a
particle of its individuality.

A friend who has lived long in Mexico scoffs at the notion
that Mexico will soon be " ruined " by the great influx of
tourists which is sure to come when the charm of the country
becomes better known. " You don't know the Mexicans, 3 J he
says. " True, they see the latest movies, attend the opera, drive
the same cars we do, and commit approximately the same sins.
But they remain Mexicans. And what the conquistadors
couldn't do the Yankee will do no better."

What will happen, I hope, is that the tourist will go home
a gentler-mannered person for having met the Mexicans, and a
saner person for having experienced the slower tempo of Mexi
can life; and that the Mexican will increase the present rapid
rate of his social and economic progress through his growing
intimacy with the more energetic north.

Of one thing I am sure, and that is the advantage to all
concerned which will come of good relations between the
nations of this continent. The greatest door of American
opportunity stands open to the south, and if I were a boy in
school I should immediately start studying Spanish.

On Hall Hearings

You will observe that one does not say , * * Mexico City. ' ' One
says, "Mexico, D. F." (The " D. F." stands for "Federal
District.") That point cleared up, let us proceed to further
rhapsodies on this most charming of capitals.

Years ago, when I was first beginning to dream of a visit
to Mexico, a friend gave me a summary of his own experiences.
Fortunately I kept it. With this, a phrase book, a map t>f the
town and, above all, the universal helpfulness of the Mexi
cans, life rolls on ball bearings.

I must confess that I am thoroughly bewildered by the
Mexicans. So far in my experience of them they are the
most amiable folk I have encountered in 'my journeyings about
this globe. Yet from what I read and hear they can be as (
ferocious as any species of the human family. Having said^
this, however, one has only said what can truthfully be said
about any people. In all of us the animal is close to the surface.
We shall do well to remember that even in the land of the free
occasionally called God's country there have been civil
war and insurrection, homicide and lynching, banditry and
numerous other forms of behavior not considered civilized.
And the United States is a veteran in the struggle for democ
racy,

I am obviously not competent to render any appraisal of
the Mexican character, but I must insist on reporting that I
have never seen a better behaved people. I spent Sunday rub
bing elbows with them, and it was an experience that calls for
adjectives!

Our first visit was to an exhibit of horsemanship, put on by

12

ON BALL BEARINGS 13

the Association of Charros a group of substantial and blue-
blooded citizens who array themselves in the colorful costume
worn by the gentry of days gone by and, with their sons,
dressed as replicas of themselves, fare forth to show the com
mon folk what a gentleman ought to look like, and how a
gentleman of Mexico can still ride a horse.

The arena being already jammed with respectful proletari
ans, we proceeded on to the castle of Chapultepec, a crag of
breathtaking beauty where once lived those blundering Bour
bons, Maximilian and his wife, Carlotta. Here, too, Monte-
zuma could look down upon his Aztec empire and find it
good, at a time when all to the north was wilderness.

We had a little trouble explaining to the taxi driver that we
wished to tarry here. Nothing in our phrase books seemed
to cover the situation, and in our panic we fell to babbling such
obvious irrelevancies as " We are thirsty " and " Where can I
find some oil for my lamp? " However, the taxi driver had
met gringos locos before. He quickly settled matters by call
ing a soldier, who called a policeman, who called an interpreter,
and all was well.

We stood on the historic balconies of the palace, discon
certed by the fact that while every prospect pleased man
appeared not to be at all vile. Music floated from everywhere,
mingling with the perfume of the mimosa. In the park below
were brass bands and a symphony orchestra, and from near
by came the soft melancholy of the marimba. Spread before
us like something from the Arabian Nights, the monumental
white buildings of the city sparkled in the hot sunshine. And
beyond was the unreal loveliness of the mountain background.

Motorcars passed in an endless stream, directed by traffic
officers in smartly tailored khaki and gleaming brass. Stroll
ing on the paths or sitting relaxed on the stone benches were

14 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

people o every sort, from those m dark suits and derby hats
to peons in sombrero and scrape, with their solemn barefoot
children.

There was no noise. Through the furnished apartments
of the palace the people walked hat in hand, speaking in low
tones, careful never to step off the strip of carpet provided for
visitors. There were no guards in evidence. Here and there
were signs: "Do Not Touch." Occasionally there was a
sign: " You Are Supplicated Not to Touch."

Nobody touched. Nobody picked flowers. Nobody
threw orange peel or scraps of paper on the lawns. I have
never seen public decorum at a higher level.

One picture remains in my memory. Over the main stair
way was a huge mural depicting scenes from the revolution,
with figures carrying banners inscribed " Land and Liberty."
Looking wistfully up at it, almost indistinguishable from
the figures in the mural, was a peon family dressed literally in

Here, outlined in flesh and pigment, was the Mexican
dream. Rash the prophet who says it will not come true.

ISeej en ISrochette

At last I have seen a bullfight! What with the numerous
tourists in town, plus the fact that twenty-two year old
" Armillita," the Dizzy Dean of bullfighting, was on the
card, the show was a sellout. However, there are ticket scalp
ers here as everywhere; and for four dollars and seventeen
cents each (twice the box-office price) we secured places on the
fifth row of the sunny side.

It is a commentary on the steadiness of the climate here that
tickets marked " Shady " cost nearly twice what those marked
"Sunny 31 do. The demand for tickets is a puzzle. The
cheapest places on top of the roof cost two and a half
pesos. General admission on the sunny side costs three and a
half pesos. In terms of purchasing power, that is at least three
dollars. Yet all around me, in seats of seven pesos and more,
were men and women who looked as if a square meal would
have interested them more than a seat at a bullfight. I am
told, however, that so ardent is the passion for this ancient
sport that people will go hungry and pawn their clothes in
order to buy a ticket.

Each to his taste. For myself, I found the proceedings
rather on the dull side. Before the last of the six bulls had
met his Maker and had been dragged not in triumph but in
honor around the ring, I had had enough.

Bullfighting is a sport for connoisseurs. So refined is its
technique and so rapid its action that the layman cannot hope
to understand or appreciate what is going on. He cannot even
tell whether the crowd is cheering the bull or the toreadors.

15

16 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

The waving of handkerchiefs, for example, is for the bull; and
when hats, coats and other valuables are flung into the ring
they are for the matador though custom seems to require
that they be flung back to their owners.

The brutality of bullfighting has been exaggerated. Its
most unpleasant aspect has been eliminated by the Mexicans,
and the messy spectacle of gored horses no longer affronts the
sensitive. The horses wear heavily padded armor, and, in
stead of being killed by the dozen, now suffer no apparent
damage.

The whole business is a ritual, elaborately formalized.
The overture is a parade by the entire cast to the march from
Carmen. Behind the principals comes a crew of redcoats
with rakes, shovels and wheelbarrows, highly suggestive of
the Ringling Brothers circus.

Then a gate opens and in charges a bull, almost" visibly
breathing flame from his nostrils. He is baited by a crew
of capadors agile fellows with red cloaks who jump behind
prepared barriers or over the fence when the bull gets too close.

When the bull shows signs of tiring there is a blast of
trumpets, indicating that the judges have ordered scene two.
On come two well padded horses, with riders bearing spears.
These are the picadors. Three times they prick the bull,
meanwhile being well pushed around, and occasionally being
knocked from their mounts. When this happens the cape-
bearers create a diversion while the horseman is dragged to
safety.

The picadors give place to the banderilleros, who dance in
front of the bull until he charges, and then, by a miracle of
deft timing, plant their beribboned darts in his shoulder.
This also is done three times. When the bull is decorated
like a chop en brochette he is ready for the matador the

BEEF EN BROCHETTE 17

star who gets as much as five thousand dollars for a per
formance and earns it. Few last beyond their twenties
at this game, and many die horribly on the horns of an in
furiated bull.

The matador begins by tossing his hat to some fair lady or
prominent politican, or into the center of the ring, indicating
his dedication to the crowd. Then, with his cloak, he pro
ceeds to annoy the bull further. He uses a variety of passes,
each with its name and literature. When a charge of the bull
comes especially close the crowd roars with delight.

Finally, when the bull's head has lowered in fatigue to
just the right point, the matador strikes a graceful attitude,
poises his sword and, with a skill easier described than under
stood, plunges it into the bull's heart. Usually he misses
on the first try and has to call for a second even a third
sword. It is a home run with the bases full if he scores the first
time up.

The bull dies instantly. The redcoats come in with a team
of horses and drag off the carcass. The ring is swept and the
performance is repeated. If the matador has done an espe
cially good job he is showered with flowers, money and otljer
evidences of approval, and is carried around the ring on the
shoulders of his admirers. If he hasn't rung the bell he slinks
off like a mere capador.

I must say that the crowd showed no greater excitement
than can be seen at any American ball park during a close
game.. Certainly there was no bottle-throwing or threat to
kill the umpire. I suspect that the patrons were no thirstier
for blood than are Americans who pay their money to hear the
anguish of a wrestling bout, or in the secret hope of seeing
heads cracked at a hockey game.

Contradictions

It is small comfort to me that others have tried to write about
this contradictory land, and made themselves no less ridicu
lous than I sometimes suspect I am making myself. Try as
one will to walk soberly in the middle of the road, being
objective and truthful, there remain pitfalls of ignorance and
emotion into which one inevitably falls.

I wax lyric, for example, about the gentle manners of the
people, and a cynical Mexican reminds me that half of them
have guns or knives concealed about their persons. I attend
a bullfight and am impressed by the orderly behavior of the
patrons. Yet I am obliged to note that there was a police
man at the gate frisking the customers for weapons.

I sit at my typewriter burbling about the charm of the
streets, and in comes a friend to report that, while visiting one
of the quaint native markets and being aware of nothing un
toward save a slight jostling, he had been relieved of his
watch, fountain pen and spectacles each, it may be said, in
a separate pocket. He was torn between dismay at his loss
and admiration at the consummate skill with which the job
had been done. I reported this episode to a widely traveled
police official He was regretful, but suggested that while
Mexico may as yet have more than her share of pickpockets
the species is not unknown in New York and Chicago. He
immediately set the machinery of the police in motion,
Meanwhile, he agreed that it might be a good idea to remind
tourists coming here that they should be careful in crowds,

18

CONTRADICTIONS 19

that they should carry only small amounts of money, and
that the best place for jewelry and other valuables is the hotel
safe.

One might with equal justice offer this warning to anyone
visiting London or Paris. One might also add that in those
cities as in all others one is occasionally short-changed
by the natives, and that such people as taxi drivers have a way
of gypping the sucker if they can. None of these things is
peculiar to Mexico. Indeed, it has been my experience so far
that this sort of petty swindling is rather less prevalent here
than in certain other localities of my acquaintance.

Mexico has the disadvantage of being comparatively new
to the tourist business. It is only a couple of years since
visitors have been coming here in any great numbers. Yet
the strides which have been made toward satisfactory enter
tainment of the foreigner are far more noteworthy than the
occasional lapses encountered. Occasionally one hears a
visitor complaining that things are not done as well as they are
at home. Such people, of course, could be happy nowhere,
and why they insist on traveling is a mystery I shall never
fathom. The great majority, however, seem well pleased
with what they find. And as long as the present stability of
the government continues I am confident that the coming
years will see things even better managed than they are now.

Today, for example, I had an interview with a high official
of the government. After discussing weighty questions of
state I brought up a matter I considered of great importance.
This was the habit taxis and motorcycles had of racing
down the streets with cutouts open at three in the morning.

The high altitude of the city, I said, made it difficult
enough for the foreigner to sleep especially the first few
nights. I suggested that international relations would be

20 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

improved if the traffic could be made to pipe down a trifle. He
agreed heartily, though he added, smiling, that from what
he had heard a little piping down of traffic might go well even
in American cities. All Americans will concede this point,
but the Mexicans will do something about it. They don't
want the tourist to be annoyed, however slightly. The odds
are even that before long it will be a serious offense to make
undue noise in the vicinity of hotels where Americans sleep.
While the Mexicans work night and day putting up hotels,
building filling stations and cutting red tape in an effort to
encourage visiting and no less important to improve
social relations with their great neighbor to the north, Ameri
cans might pause to reflect that Mexico is not " foreign "
they are.

Tleads for the Datives

I am not sure that Mexico is any more difficult to under
stand than is any other land, but it is difficult enough. I am
almost as ignorant of Mexico, historic and contemporary, as
was the American woman whose baggage was opened at the
border and found to contain glass beads, whistles and bits of
brightly colored calico. Asked what she purposed doing with
this merchandise; she replied, " Why, Fm going to trade with
the natives."

I am perhaps a step beyond that, but only a step. How
ever, as a journalist I must maintain a front of reasonable in
telligence. I must, at least, be able to ask questions. And
so, hat m hand, I proceed to the newly created information
department of the government and go through the silly ritual
that I have gone through in so many of the world's capitals.

Mexico, EX R, is exactly like Washington, D. G, in this
respect. You stand in an anteroom. You wait endlessly.
You are ushered into the office of an undersecretary who, after
an exchange of amenities, ushers you into the office of a secre
tary. You ask questions the answers to which you know per
fectly well. The secretary, knowing perfectly well that what
he says will be discounted up to a hundred per cent, solemnly
answers your questions and gives you reams of mimeographed
balderdash which he is well aware you will never read. You
shake hands, bow, and proceed on your weary way of trying
to extract an occasional grain of truth from the chaff of official
propaganda.

I am interested in the stability of the present Mexican gov-

21

22 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

ernment. Is the government socialistic or communistic, or
merely another administration bent on lining its pockets
while it has the chance? I am interested in the present status
of the Catholic Church. Has the church been unjustly
treated? Have the Mexicans turned infidel? Or is what
goes on merely the normal progress toward separation of
church and state that other nations have made? I am inter
ested in the future that American capital and American busi
ness may expect to face in Mexico. Does " Mexico for the
Mexicans " mean isolation or does it mean a greater oppor
tunity for American enterprise than ever existed before?

It is not easy to get answers to these questions. Mexico,
like all countries, is divided. I talk to one man about the
present government and his eyes flash with the same fire that
one saw in Republican eyes before the election of Roosevelt.
Being careful to check what I say against the fact that I have
chatted with only a handful of people in a single city, you may
mark it down that big business, landowners, clericals, the
middle class generally, and perhaps the higher officers of the
army, are hostile to the Cardenas administration. Their
hostility is due not so much to the motives of the administra
tion as to its methods. They appear to think that Cardenas
is an idealist, an impractical dreamer and the tool of unscrupu
lous radicals.

On the other side, considerably divided, are the people
the Indians, the peasants and the working classes. Even labor
is divided, as in the United States, between craft unionism
and the less conservative spirit of syndicalism.

It perhaps simplifies matters too much, but I should say
that Mexican opinion divides along almost the same lines that
American opinion does. There are several differences, how
ever. One is that the two-party system has not yet become

BEADS FOR THE NATIVES 23

an actuality in Mexico. Another is that Mexican opinion
tends to take more violent form than does American
opinion. A third is the church problem. In the latter
connection it is w^ll to remember that, while the church has
been dispossessed o its lands, the dispossessing was not done
by the present government. It was, in fact, done in 1857.

It was refreshing, after days of weary effort to sift the false
from the true, to sit in the cool, lofty-ceilinged study of our
ambassador to Mexico and swap yarns as one newspaper
man with another.

If it is the function of an ambassador to maintain good will
between governments, the incumbent of our Mexican em
bassy is notably successful. From what I have heard, Mr.
Daniels appears to be no exponent of dollar diplomacy. And
I suspect that economic royalists are not now as much at home
in the embassy here as I have heard tell that they were in
days gone by.

Shadow <Around the TSend

It being my trade to comment on the noteworthy or what
seems to me to be so I wish to make mention of Sefior Leon
Luzo. He is a maitre d'hotel in Paolo's restaurant, and the
first waiter I ever met who, when asked about a dish, did not
instantly reply, " Oh, very nice." His answer is different.
He shrugs his shoulders and says: " I do not know. How can
I when I do not know your taste? " Incidentally, if you
ever come this way, drop in at Paolo's and ask for chicken
Parmesan. For dessert have zabagione. Your bill unless
prices have risen since last night will be seventy-seven
cents.

The rate of exchange makes Mexico a bargain for the
traveler with a slender purse. But let me warn anyone who
is tempted to come here to secure hotel reservations in advance.
The principle industry in Mexico just now seems to be hotel
building. New hotels spring up overnight. But tourists
spring up faster.

This afternoon, under the tutelage of an archaeologist of the
department of education, I visited the pyramids built by the
Toltecs somewhere about the third century A.D. Near by
are the ruins of a city or of a succession of cities, built on
top of one another which must have housed at least a
million people. What made these people disappear no one
knows. It may have been volcanoes, drought or disease. One
guess is as good as another. All we know is that these people
attained a high degree of what we call civilization and that

24

SHADOW AROUND THE BEND 25

they built on a scale so vast as to awe even those of us who are
used to skyscrapers.

One has melancholy thoughts as he stands amid these
empty ruins and gazes up at pyramids larger even than
those of Egypt. If there is any moral to be drawn from
them it is that when men become too intelligent they are
conquered by men who know nothing except how to fight.

The Toltec, who knew mathematics and practiced the
peaceful arts, was conquered by the Aztec, who knew how
to wield a sword and was no slave to comfort. In turn, the
Aztec bowed to the gunpowder and the still greater toughness
of the Spaniard.

From the pyramids, drowsing in the eternal sun, it was
an easy step to what were once the floating gardens of Monte-
zuma and are now the canals on which are floated the fruits
and vegetables of Mexico City. Here repair the natives for
their Sunday afternoon diversion. In gaily decorated boats
they float along, with singers and marimba players drifting
beside them.

It was pleasant to recline comfortably, hearing nothing
but the nostalgic music of the Mexicans and the soft whisper
of the water against the paddle of the boatman. Here one for
gets the clamor of the city and Mexico, D. F., is a pecul
iarly noisy city.

These ancient canals seem to murmur with the fatalistic
calm of the Indian. They have seen all manner of cataclysm
flood, drought, earthquakes, pestilence, volcanoes and the
ravages of war. They have seen one race of man come after an
other, killing and burning. Yet still, they seem to whisper,
life drifts on. Take the sunshine when you have it, say these
dark waters. There is shadow just around the bend.

Back from the pyramids and the gardens of the ancient

2.6 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

emperors, and to a brightly lighted hall for an exhibition of
pelota a game, it is said, which was much favored by the
hardy Aztecs. Certainly, if they favored it, they were a
hardy lot. Never have I seen a sport which calls for such
speed, skill and stamina.

It is played in a court which I should guess is two hundred
feet long. The players usually four in number wear
curiously curved baskets strapped to their right hands. With
these baskets they catch and hurl the ball in a confusing vari
ety of angles against the walls of the court. The ball must be
thrown as soon as it is caught. And rests are few and fleeting.
At the end of nearly two hours of steady play the contestants
were just barely able to get off the court on their own steam.

All during the play there was a constant shouting by men
scattered through the audience. These men wore red berets,
and were, I found out, betting commissioners. The system of
betting was carefully explained to me but it still remains a
mystery. All I know is that the betting is heavy and that it
goes on until far into the night. Like everything else in
Mexico, I see only the surface. And there is so much more
than meets the eye.

The Seamy Side

I have said and felt so many pleasant things about this
land that it might be well to give a look at the seamy side.

First off, there is the prevalence of beggary. Despite the
fact that Mexico seems not to have suffered from the depres
sion as most other countries have, and the fact that today it
has relatively much less unemployment than prevails in its
neighbor to the north, the streets of its capital are infested
with beggars.

They are not importunate. They do not follow you. Their
voices are soft as they beg for alms. They rarely seek to make
capital of deformities. As beggars go, they are the least
objectionable I have ever seen. But they tug at the heart
strings especially the women and children.

The government is well aware that tourists dislike being
reminded of such things as hunger and poverty and disease.
As fast as possible beggary will be abolished at least where
the traveler can see it.

The second unpleasant fact which must be recorded is the
prevalence of thievery. The visitor will be well advised to
carry as few valuables as possible and to be on the alert in
crowds. He will be well advised, too, to keep tight hold of
such things as cameras and handbags. I am told by those
who have lived here long enough to know that one should
never leave anything in a parked car.

In short, the visitor must remember that Mexico is in a state
of transition between a primitive society, with small regard for
property rights, and the society of higher development in

27

28 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

which, if there is not greater regard for property rights, there
is more protection for them.

The Mexican government is keenly alive to the situation
and is doing all it can to combat it. For one thing, the city
of Mexico is now adding a thousand men to its police force,

I do not know how much banditry there is; but I suspect
that there is less than the scaremongers would have you
believe. None the less, the main highways are regularly
patrolled, and on the road to Cuernavaca, for example, almost
every hilltop has a military observation station.

It must be understood that Mexico consists of a highly
civilized nucleus surrounded by an outer husk of the primitive.
There is a deep gulf between the inhabitant of Mexico, D. F.,
and the natives of remote and sometimes actively hostile
Indian villages.

The problems of Mexican life are not, obviously, to be
disposed of in a paragraph or two. The traveler must
remember that while in some parts of Mexico he will be as
safe as he would be at home, in other parts he had better stop,
look and listen.

The same thing can be said of the roads. The road from
the capital to Cuernavaca is as well engineered and paved
as anything in the United States. So is the road from Cuerna
vaca to Taxco. But the road from Mexico City to Teotihua-
can, where the pyramids are, and which passes the shrine of the
Virgin of Guadalupe perhaps the most hallowed spot in
all Mexico is a very bad road indeed. When a Mexican
road is good it is as good as any road* in the world. But
when it is bad it makes a proving ground seem like a boule
vard!

If you have no great zest for adventure you will probably
be happier if you stay on the main roads. In a year or two

THE SEAMY SIDE 29

the picture will change enormously as it has changed in
the last two years. But at this writing the motorcar finds
limited scope for its usefulness.

And that seems to exhaust all the unpleasant things I can
think of to say about Mexico. As fast as I encounter new
ones I shall report them. Until then I must say again that
Mexico is a beautiful land, peopled by the pleasantest-
mannered, most hospitable and generally agreeable human
beings I have encountered on this planet. The Mexican
character, like all others, undoubtedly has its unpleasant as
pects, but thus far I have been spared sight of them. Perhaps
if I knew the Mexicans better I should not like them so well.
Meanwhile, I am content to take them for what they appear
to be the most gracious hosts of my experience.

Qreener Fields

We are carefully taught that a straight line is the shortest
distance between two points, but it is a lesson that few of
us ever learn.

Consider, for example, my efforts to arrange an interview
with Leon Trotzky. I began with local journalists, who
assured me that it was quite impossible. So, stubbornly, I
moved on to police headquarters. There I submitted to an
examination, gave the Christian names of my grandparents,
and had my height, weight and girth, the color of my eyes,
and distinguishing marks, if any, recorded. I was then ad
vised to return to my hotel and await developments.

There was a little time left over after doing these things, and
this time I devoted to the embassy, influential private citizens
and various officials of state. Diligently I pulled wires in
every direction and, although not encouraged, did not alto
gether lose hope of ultimate success.

Meanwhile, a Chicago businessman had also got the idea of
having a talk with Trotzky. He had not been trained in the
technique of interviewing celebrities, but he had learned that
lesson about the shortest distance between two points. So he
merely went to the headquarters of the local Rotary Club and
expressed a desire to meet Mr. Trotzky.

Was he laughed at? Was he told it would be impossible?
I regret to say that he was not. In five minutes he was on his
way and spent the rest of the afternoon with the uncle of the
Russian revolution.

Was my face red when I heard about it! And is it still red!
I haven't yet succeeded in interviewing Trotzky.

30

GREENER FIELDS 31

Ah, well so many things have gone otherwise than
as planned. Among them is the automobile which was
shipped weeks ago and has not yet arrived. It is reported as
having left Laredo and moving south, but the boom in Mexi
can business has created a shortage o freight cars, and so my
jaloppy moves toward me at about the speed of the polar ice
cap.

I can wait no longer. We have hotel accommodations
reserved in Taxco and Acapulco and I have had it clearly
demonstrated that in this country a hotel room is not lightly
to be given up. We could take train to Cuernavaca, some
forty miles away, but this would consume at least ten hours.
As for Acapulco, we could fly, or motor. There is no rail
road. So, joining with friends, we hire a car and driver.

As a matter of fact, we have not missed our own car at all.
Taxis are cheap in Mexico City. You can go nearly any
where for fourteen cents no tip expected. Or you can
hire a car for only fifty-six cents an hour.

Though I must hasten to say that driving behind a Mexi
can tends to harden the arteries. The native has to pass a
most rigorous examination before he can get a license, and he
drives extremely well. But his attitude toward an automobile
is that of his vaquero forebears toward a mustang. He likes
to go fast and to stop with the wheels in the air. A curve is a
challenge, and a narrow street, crowded with small children,
is an opportunity for a display of dexterity.

Not least among the difficulties of motoring in Mexico is
the word for slow. It is despacio precisely the opposite of
what it should be. When you want to say, " Drive slowly,"
you say, " Drive with dispatch." It is very confusing.

I do not know what the word for fast is. I have had no
occasion to use it!

32 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

There is a widely credited legend that this is a land of easy
going indolence where time means nothing and the inhabit
ants sit around all day playing guitars. Nothing could be
further from the truth. Life in Mexico, D. F., goes at a
brisk clip. Appointments are kept. Our driver said he
would be at our door at ten thirty, and at ten thirty there he
was. Mariana may be the watchword of the rural regions,
but here in the metropolis things move as rapidly and effi
ciently as they do in any American city of my acquaintance.
There is not, however, the crowding that obtains in New
York and Chicago, except in certain markets, where vendors
use the streetcar right of way for display tables.

Our driver took us through these quarters at forty miles
per hour, but without a casualty. When we reached the
open country his foot went down on the throttle in earnest.
Timidly, I said, " Despacio." He merely gave me an in
dulgent smile and the carburetor more gas. So I commended
my soul to the Virgin of Guadalupe and tried to enjoy what
I could see of the landscape.

Confused and Confusing

The Mexican government is at present in a quandary about
amateur photographers. It does not want the tourist to go
around snapping pictures of beggars and thatched huts and
crumbling ruins. It wants him to take wireless towers and
office buildings and beautiful scenery. It has even made the
mistake of establishing regulations as to what may or may
not be photographed, and while some of these regulations
have been rescinded there is still plenty of confusion about
the matter,

Mexico in transition is confused and confusing. A sample
of this puzzling state of affairs was the glass factory I visited
the other day.

Its proprietor was not happy. The volume of his business
had increased so rapidly, he said, that it had become impos
sible for him to do the really artistic work for which he had
been trained and which he loved to do. Uncertainly, he
balances between handwork and quantity production. He
is neither wholly ancient nor wholly modern. His shop is
equipped with oil-burning furnaces and a few pieces of crude
machinery. Most of his work is still being done as it was done
by his ancestors, but the individual is no longer self-sufficient.
Into his establishment has crept the division of effort which
marks the modern factory system.

He no longer works alone. He has a number of men and
small boys on his pay roll He is, in short, caught up in the
quantity-production process, and fundamentally the only dis
tinction between his ill-lighted, awkwardly arranged, crudely

33

34 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

equipped shop and a Toledo glass plant is that his is not as far
advanced. The principle in both is exactly the same.

He is melancholy at the distance he has drifted from hand
craftsmanship, but there is nothing that he or anyone else
can do about it. Sentimentalists wax mournful over the decay
of artistry which (they say) must inevitably follow the intro
duction of machinery. But from what I can learn the modern
Mexican does not share their sorrow. He is realistic, and it is
his belief that too much craftsmanship is the result of methods
which are clumsy if not dangerous and needlessly tiresome.
It is his qpinion that art can survive and even profit by scien
tific method and those magnifications of the senses which we
call tools. He sees no reason why the artist should be limited
to muscle power when electric motors are available.

Modern Mexico is not satisfied with being quaint and
picturesque. It is eager for the new not the new as we have
offered it, but the new as forward-looking Mexican minds
conceive it. To this aspiring Mexico the newness of the
United States is already old. It looks to something beyond
anything we have produced.

Above all things the new Mexico craves education. No
village is too mean, nowadays, to be without its school. In
cidentally, English is a required subject in the secondary
schools. In ten years many Mexicans will speak English.
Today surprisingly few do. If you are coming down here by
all means bring along a pocket dictionary.

Mexico values its art, its scenery, its colorful costumes and
the rich historicity of its buildings. But it is not content to
remain a museum. It is reaching out for sanitation, communi
cation, transport and quantity production. Casting off the
peonage, spiritual no less than economic, in which at least 80
per cent of its population has always lived, it is plunging

CONFUSED AND CONFUSING 35

ahead on a course o radical democracy which will lead it to
glory or maybe to disaster. (The answer depends on
whom you ask about it!)

Incidentally, I am told that a movie in which the hero was
a Mexican peasant and all the villains were Americans did
more to make the Mexicans feel friendly toward the United
States than all the ambassadors and felicitous sentiments that
have crossed the Rio Grande.

Score one for much abused Hollywood!

Night Hideous

Everybody said, " Oh, you must see Taxco! " And for once
everybody was right.

Taxco proves to be a number of places in one. First, it is
probably the oldest mining community on the continent, and
from its silver mines wealth still flows. Second, it is a mecca
for artists real ones and also the sort which infest Green
wich Village, the Rive Gauche in Paris, and Taos, New
Mexico. These folks wear berets, speak a sort of Spanish,
and have violent love affairs with one another. Between times
they paint or sculpt or make pottery.

The third aspect of Taxco is its most remarkable. This
ancient town, perched picturesquely on a mountaintop, is
being kept by the Mexican government as a sort of open-air
museum. Practically all the traffic is on rubber-tired wheels,
but the streets remain paved with cobbles and the houses,
almost meeting over the narrow streets, are as they have always
been.

No misguided householder is allowed to modernize his
property or even to make changes without permission of the
authorities. Beggary is suppressed, and no vendors of post
cards are allowed to make hideous the ancient, laurel-shaded
square.

It is the Carcassonne of Mexico, and no one has been able
to exaggerate its beauty.

After we had climbed and climbed, waxing ecstatic at the
landscape bathed in the rose and gold of the setting sun, and
had reached the Taxquenia hotel, we cried with one voice,
" Here, at last, is peace! "

36

MAKING NIGHT HIDEOUS 37

And truly I have never experienced such a sense of tran
quillity as when I sat in the garden quaffing the golden brew
of Orizaba and gazing off at the slowly purpling hills. And
never have I encountered a ruder disillusionment!

We had decided that the city of Mexico had raised noise-
making to the plane of a fine art. We were sure that no other
place could match its ability to keep a person awake at night.
But we had not tried to sleep in Taxco.

No sooner had our heads touched pillow than the cacopho
nous symphony began. It started with the barking of dogs
two or three of them, faint and faraway, like the French horn
in a Wagnerian opera. More dogs took up the theme
hundreds . . . thousands of them. They barked and
howled and made sounds for which there is no word, and in
every tonal scale, including the Chinese.

Other sounds swelled the tornado of discord. Bands
marimba, brass and indefinable contributed their portion.
The guitar, hitherto unheard in Mexico, broke into full cry.
Singers male, female and inhuman poured oil on the
conflagration of noise. There were what sounded like fights
to the death between lions, tigers, leopards and" elephants. In
this magnificent din the squawking of motor horns was hardly
audible.

At this point I think I slept. It seems hardly possible,
but I did. The sleep, however, did not last long. The
life with which Taxco vibrates is content with little re
pose. Long before dawn the racket recommenced. And
to the extraordinary, the incomparable variety of sound
that had marked the night was added the ringing of church
bells. There must be a hundred churches in Taxco, each
with a thousand bells and all of them cracked. And the
bell ringers of Taxco are not content with the usual method

38 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

of bell ringing. They do not leave the business to gravity.
There is nothing negative about their bell ringing. It is the
most definitely positive thing I ever experienced. The com
ment of my consort was to the point: " What must it have
been like in Mexico before the church was dispossessed! 5>

All things end even a night in Taxco. And an excellent
breakfast in the sunny patio of the Taxquenia completely
obliterated all memory of the assault upon our ears. And be
fore we had been long on the hot and dusty road to Acapulco
we were wishing we were back in Taxco, forgetful of its noisy
nights.

It is only a hundred and eighty-six miles to Acapulco, and
the road is fairly well paved. But it is a road consisting almost
exclusively of sharp curves, and although our chauffeur did
his best to heed our entreaties for a little more despacio, our
hearts were not far from the larynx most of the way.

The scenery is monotonously beautiful, towns few and
dust-covered. As we drew nearer the Pacific it became hotter
and moister. When, at last, we caught a glimpse of it through
the sage-green hills we cried like the soldiers of Xenophon,
" The sea! The sea! " and were very glad.

It is a long journey eight hours, with a decent amount
of despacio. But when you stand, as we did, on the balcony
of our cabana in the Mirador, perched high on the rocks over
the foaming sea, I think you will say, as we did, that it was
well worth it.

Speaking of

Acapulco, one might venture to prophesy, offers unrivaled
opportunities for real-estate speculation. It has a deep, land
locked harbor, comparable, say those who have seen both,
only to that o Rio de Janeiro, and there are two marvelous
beaches, one for morning, the other for afternoon. Also,
there is fishing that ranges from the tasty little creatures that
can be caught off the dock without bait to that elusive battler
of the deep, the sailfish.

Inland is a paradise for the huntsman, with a wealth of
flying prey, and deer and wildcat for those who seek bigger
game. For the eye that is content to see and do nothing about
it, there is a beauty of scene equaled only by the Cote d' Azur
of France.

In a year or two, I suspect, the drive to Hornos beach will
be called " Ocean boulevard." It will be lined with luxurious
villas, tennis courts and private swimming pools. Not far
away will be golf courses and polo fields; and multicylindered
cars, driven by uniformed chauffeurs, will line the streets.

Only two things stand in the way: (i) Transportation;
(2) climate.

By airplane Acapulco is reached from Mexico, D. F., in less
than two hours. By motorcar it takes the better part of two
days. There is no railroad.

The climate is rather on the warm side, though a virtually
steady breeze tempers it. What nothing seems to temper is
the humidity. This, however, may be more noticeable to the
transient than to those who stay long enough to become
accustomed to it,

39

40 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

At the present rate of exchange Acapulco is a bargain in
winter resorts. You can live at El Mirador, the town's best
hostelry, with a private room and bath on the cliff edge, with
excellent meals served in an open-air dining room, for three
dollars and a half a day. Taxis take you anywhere for twenty-
eight cents. Motor-driven fishing boats, with bait thrown in,
cost about one dollar an hour.

Life in Mexico is very cheap for the American. Even in
the capital, first-class hotel accommodations can be had for
two and a half dollars a day, and the Ritz serves a table d'hote
of extraordinary proportions and quality for seventy cents.

The difference in exchange is a blessing for Americans
not so good for Mexicans. Prices are rising faster than in
comes. It is the purpose of the present government to make
Mexico self-sustaining, and it insists that the peso will now
buy in Mexico about what the dollar buys in the United
States. This is only partly true. Even when prices corre
spond the quality is likely to be inferior. A box of matches,
for example, costs five centavos a cent and a quarter. But
they are not as good matches as are given away in the United
States. Gasoline costs nineteen centavos the liter (eight, gas;
eleven, tax) . This figures out to twenty-one cents a gallon
about what we pay at home. To a Mexican, however, the
sum amounts to about half the daily wage of a laborer.

The money question thus becomes one of the major bones
of contention in Mexican politics. And it is a question that
is just as hard to understand in Spanish as it is in English.
The average tourist is content with the fact that life in Mexico
is pleasant and cheap, and leaves it to the native to figure out
whether the steadily rising tide of tourist traffic is worth the
increased cost of living that it causes.

Whether the tourist is a blessing or a curse is a debatable

SPEAKING OF MONEY 41

subject with Mexicans. He brings money no doubt of
that. But he brings disturbing ideas, too especially when
he tosses pesos around as if they were small change. And
some tourists are to use plain language swine. There
was one I saw yesterday a loud-mouthed lout who stretched
himself on a pile of serapes in a shop and made wisecracks
about the people whose guest he was.

It will be interesting to see whether the gentle courtesy of
the Mexicans is destroyed by the churlish swagger of such
visitors, or whether the tourist takes home with him, among
his loot of shells, hammered silver and basketry, a new concep
tion of politeness.

The Mexican may be as lazy, treacherous, inefficient and
cruel as his detractors say he is. But I will shatter lances with
anyone who says he is not amiable and agreeable to live with.
Months here might change 'that opinion old-timers say
with vehemence that it would. I am content with my ex
perience of weeks. I insist, also with vehemence, that Mexi
cans are nice people. Especially the children. I could write
pages and not do justice to the little folk of this land. I think
they are its outstanding feature.

From Trinter to "President

Learning that the president of Mexico, Lazaro Cardenas
(accent on the first syllable, please) was in this embryo
Monte Carlo on a combined rest and inspection trip, I resolved
to favor him with a call.

So I wrote his chief of staff, asking for an appointment.
I handed my note to a porter at the rusty old gate of the wire
less station, where the president was staying, and hoped for
the best.

In an hour there was a soldier at my hotel with word that
el presidente would see me at noon the following day.

I presented myself at the time appointed and was met by
the president's adjutant. I was taken to a chair under a grove
of trees, beside the water's edge, where the adjutant, in ex
cellent English, inquired what I wished to see el presidente
about. I replied that I merely wanted to learn from el presi
dente* s own lips what he was trying to do.

We moved then to a table some fifty feet away, where a
man was seated, busy with a litter of papers. He rose at our
approach, a stocky figure in well worn army shirt and a pair
of ancient khaki trousers now almost white. This was the
president of Mexico, once a printer by trade, long a soldier,
and now the hope of the masses " a guy," said one of them,
" that Mexico has been hungry for a straight guy/ 1

His face, dark brown in hue, was impassive as he held out
his hand. He has, I suspect, more than a trace of Indian
ancestry, and the gravity of his manner is that of the Indian.

42

FROM PRINTER TO PRESIDENT 43

But it was soon evident that this serious man has a sense o
humor, and the lips under the thick, close-cropped black
mustache often twitched in whimsical smiles.

Forty years old, he gives the impression of being an idealist
of the rare sort that is capable of energetic action. While he
talks readily, he does not insist upon doing all the talking. He
is assured yet modest. When I said that we were members of
the same craft, he answered with that deprecating little smile
of his that he had been only a hand typesetter accompany
ing the words with illustrative gestures.

I succumbed completely to the charm of this man when in
answer to my question what would he like my American
readers to know about Mexico he replied that he would
prefer to have me report what I saw and heard myself. Our
conversation was all as informal as that. It lasted an hour
or more, and would have lasted longer if I had not had the be
lated decency to terminate it myself.

He asked as many questions as I did. He was especially
curious to know why there was so much poverty and dis
content in the United States when we had had so much time to
achieve liberty. I couldn't answer that, so I asked him about
the future of American capital in Mexico. His reply was
that there was a great future in Mexico for the foreign in
vestor if he would be content to abide by Mexican law and not
be too greedy. The one thing Mexico would no longer toler
ate, he said, was exploitation of the masses.

That led me to ask about communism. There were a few
communists in Mexico, he said, but their influence was small.
Mexico was experimenting with ideas which might be called
socialistic, but in essence its political philosophy did not differ
materially from the American.

"And what about Trotzky? " I inquired.

44 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

" A tired old man, 15 was the answer, "to whom Mexico
has given refuge. His stay here has no political significance
whatever/*

Did Mexico want tourists, I asked. Indeed it did, he said,
adding earnestly that it wanted them not so much for the
economic advantage as for the cultural gifts they brought.
That led to talk of education the subject obviously closest
to his heart. The present federal budget for education, he
said, is sixty times what it was in 1910.

" Is compulsory education new with you? " I asked.

The answer was accompanied by a flashing smile. " Oh,
no education was always compulsory only there were no
schools! Now there is or will be a school in every
village."

We talked a little then about the curiously vexing question
of photography. Mexico, he said, did not want people
snapping pictures of disease and poverty. I asked him if he
had ever heard about our noble experiment in prohibition, and
I suggested that the best answer Mexico could make to people
who photographed the wrong things would be to send a
battalion of photographers to the United States.

"Surely," he said, with the suggestion of a lisp there is
in his soft voice, "you have no such poverty in the United
States as we have in Mexico? "

I could only shrug my shoulders and suggest that some
time he visit the United States.

(Church and State

Here are some remembered fragments of the conversation I
had with the president of Mexico, Senor Cardenas, as we sat
under the trees in the wireless station of Acapulco, with the
mountains and the blue water of the harbor and a British
warship shimmering in the sun for background.

As I said, there was nothing cut and dried about our talk.
It flitted easily from one topic to another, and if there are
errors in my report of it they must be ascribed to the fact that
the conversation was managed through an interpreter. Senor
Cardenas has about the same command of English that I have
of Spanish.

We discussed the expropriation of wealth, about which so
much has been said and written. He said, if I understood
correctly, that while the law permitted expropriation, the
right had been seldom exercised. The only actual expropria
tion of lands had been for the use of the state for sanitary
and similar purposes. That is, there had been condemnation
proceedings, such as were a commonplace in the United States.
As for the breaking up of great estates and the giving of land to
the small farmer, this had not been expropriation at all. The
owners of the great estates had learned what our southern
planters were beginning to learn before our civil war that
slave labor really does not pay. These great estates had
simply not made money. They had not paid their taxes.
Their lands had therefore reverted to the state, exactly as they
would in the U. S. A.

45

46 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

That is my impression o what he said. It is a complicated
subject at best, and it will probably be some time before I get
below the surface of it.

Even more complicated and difficult to understand is the
church problem. We discussed that problem at considerable
length.

Mexico, said the president, sought to exercise no control
over religion. The state made no effort to interfere with the
observance of faith. All it objected to was interference of the
church with government.

"You must have seen for yourself/' he said, "that the
practice of religion is unhampered. There are church services
everywhere, and feast days are celebrated in the ancient
manner. But priests are not allowed to make political propa
ganda, and religious instruction is not permitted in the public
schools. Mexico has been and remains predominantly Roman
Catholic. It is not to be denied, however, that for an in
creasing number of Mexicans there is a new religion. It is the
religion of work and mutual service."

" That is your side of it," I said. " I shall now hunt up
some ecclesiastic who will give me the other side of the pic
ture."

" I hope you will," said Cardenas simply. " Every ques
tion has at least two sides. But in this case I am confident that
you will find our side to be the right one."

I reserve my verdict on this controversy. Its many con
tradictions are not to be resolved by a few days of superficial
investigation. Like so many questions, its complexities are
by no means confined to Mexico. They are world-wide.
Only here are they made so visible. Here there are no religious
orders. Clerical garb is not permitted on the streets. The

CHURCH AND STATE 47

church cannot own property. The number of priests that
a community may have is limited. Priests may not officiate
outside their own parishes. Many and varied are the regula
tions. Yet in the many churches, so Spanish outside and so
Mexican inside, the people seem to worship as they always did,
and on feast days the children, dressed in white, carry candles
as they march in the streets just as if this struggle of church
and state had never been.

It is enormously difficult to reach any dependable con
clusions about it all. But from what I have seen and heard
the church has definitely been shorn of its temporal power and
there is small likelihood that it will ever regain that power.

As for the Mexicans who are deserting orthodox religious
faith for this new religion of " work and mutual service," one
enters the danger ground of prophecy when he attempts to
discuss them. I asked such a Mexican if it were possible for
any nation to endure without a belief in God.

" What is ' God '? " he answered. " And does it matter
how we define the word if the life we lead is good? "

In Mexico every yea has its nay, and nothing is as it seems.
Rash is the visitor who comes too easily to conclusions.
Cardenas himself typifies these contradictions. A revolution
ist all his life, he neither smokes nor drinks and frankly laments
the impracticability of prohibiting liquor and gambling.

Well, there were people waiting common people,
for he sees everybody so I rose to go. I left with the
feeling that there is no stuffing to the shirt of the man who
is now boss of Mexico. He has charm, modesty, deter
mination, and his dark eyes smolder with faith in his dream of
a new Mexico.

Whatever the outcome, this new Mexico is an experiment

A% NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

that is enormously interesting. If it continues to advance as
is has advanced in the last two or three years it will take its
place in the front rank of civilization. If it does not ...
many prophets will have been proved right.

<A Qreat Experiment

It was the opinion of President Cardenas, expressed with
some vehemence, that the banditry of Mexico had been
overadvertised. Banditry, he said, was disappearing. It was
disappearing not so much because of more determined repres
sion as because of the increasing prosperity of the people.

Another Mexican with whom I talked agreed that banditry
was disappearing, but gave another reason for it. It was the
tourist, he said, who was making Mexico safer. Banditry
was bad for the tourist business. Hence the country was
refusing to tolerate banditry.

This same man spoke frankly about what was really going
on in Mexico. He is or was a man of enormous wealth.
In the old days his income was sometimes a million dollars a
year. He is a man of culture, has traveled widely and speaks
several languages fluently. He is a man of the world, as highly
civilized an individual as one may encounter.

" Still, I am a half-breed," he says. " I do not look it or act
it, but I am. Few Mexicans of the upper class will admit
this, but if they come of families that have been in Mexico a
hundred years or more they are half-breeds, too.

" The half-breed seems to acquire all the worst qualities of
his mixed ancestry. He loses both the nobility of the Indian,
who is essentially a man of culture and wisdom, and the solid
ity of the white race. He is alert but deceitful, resourceful but
dishonest, suave but treacherous.

" On the other hand we observe that the mongrel dog
can be taught the most tricks. Here in Mexico we are

49

50 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

attempting the great experiment of making a civilized nation
out of a pack of mongrels. It remains to be seen if we can
do it. And we shall not know the answer for at least a
hundred years."

Here, I think, is a laboratory of social experiment strangely
like the Russian, in which one may witness the birth pangs of
a new civilization. One wavers between awe and exaspera
tion. If one listens too much to the theorists one becomes
starry eyed himself. If one listens too much to Americans
domiciled here he will grow unduly pessimistic. One hears so
many tales of shiftlessness and deceit, of graft and incompe
tence, of gravely courteous Indians turned by the acquisition
of a few words of English into creatures surly and impudent.

That, however, is what one hears in every land where the
docile farmer becomes a city dweller, losing the honest simplic
ity of the countryside before he acquires the real merits of
urban life. Mexico is in a state of transition, with the Middle
Ages and antiquity struggling to keep step with today. It is
typified by the sight I saw this afternoon an Indian, almost
the color of charcoal, a straw sombrero jammed down on his
flowing hair, his serape flying in the wind, bounding along
an unpaved road on a motorcycle!

The native dislikes the tourist, or, rather, is bewildered by
him, and vice versa. The reason is that the tourist is interested
only in hammered silver, sixteenth century altar pieces and
the crumbling ruins of old haciendas, while the native is in
terested only in motorcycles, radio, the movies and all the long
list of gadgets which constitute "civilization" and which
have become so burdensome that the tourist struggles expen
sively to get away from them.

What to the native constitutes an improvement, " spoils "
or " ruins J> a place for the tourist. The tourist is delighted

A GREAT EXPERIMENT 51

with burros and cobblestone pavement; the native wants
motorcars, and macadam. The tourist knows all about
Maximilian and never heard of Cardenas. What he sees as
beautiful and snaps with his camera the Mexican is ashamed
of.

The tourist's interest is in a life which has vanished, never
to return, while the native's interest is in a life yet to be. The
one lives in yesterday, the other in tomorrow. They cannot
possibly understand each other.

Speaking of tourists, let me hasten to give a piece of advice
good, if not likely to be followed. Carry a large Mazda
bulb with you if you like to read at night. It is a peculiarity of
hotelkeepers the world over to provide a minimum of light in
their rooms, but the Mexican hotels break all records. In a
land where most of the people retire when night falls, one small
and dusty bulb high against the ceiling is considered almost
violent illumination. Though an even better plan than bring
ing light with you is to do as the natives do go to bed early
and rise with the dawn. The reason is that the noisiest part
of the night is from five A.M. to eight A.M. That is when
the church bells ring, and it is a stout sleeper that can resist
their clamor, Mexico's best time for sleeping is the middle
of the day.

Fiesta or Qarnival?

The fiesta part religion, part fun fades from the Mexi
can scene, and carnival scientific merrymaking promoted
and publicized by the state and financed by the businessmen
is supposed to take its place.

If what I saw last night in Chilpancingo is a fair sample the
change is not for the better.

The village square was jammed with merry-go-rounds,
ferris wheels and flying turns. No senoritas in black mantillas
with roses in their hair sat strumming their guitars, but from
loud-speakers blared the voice of a Mexican crooner.

Bombs went off in the distance and the sky reddened with
an occasional rocket. Here and there a firecracker popped.
Gangs of boys, hooded and robed, paraded solemnly around
the square, bearing sugar-cane torches. Barefooted Indians
wrapped in their serapes stood impassively watching the
catchpenny shows. Others shuffled endlessly to and fro, their
women carrying their babies, while small children walked be
side them carrying still smaller children.

There was nothing exciting about it no noise, no rowdy
ism, and, at a guess, not much fun. The people rode the
flying horses, tossed rings at sticks, bought trinkets from the
stalls lighted with gasoline flares, or sat silently on the benches,
seeming to wonder what it was all about.

Here, I thought, was the religious question brought into
sharp focus. Here church and state were subject to compari
sons, and I am sure that in the minds of the people the state
came off a poor second,

52

FIESTA OR CARNIVAL? 53

The Mexican, be he pure Indian or mestizo, is a serious if
not melancholy person, and religious ceremonial is to him
what sport is to the Anglo-Saxon. And when the church
put on a ceremonial it did it with a pomp and circumstance, an
order and dignity, to which the Mexican soul was and still
is, I think attuned.

Whatever may be said of the fiesta on rational grounds, as
showmanship it was superb. It had a rich background of
tradition, it had meaning in itself, the gorgeous costumes
were hallowed by antiquity. By contrast the carnival half
commercial, half political is cheap, vulgar, tawdry and
tiresome. I may jump too quickly to conclusions, but I am
convinced that it is not in the Mexican to make whoopee.
Our feverish ways of amusing ourselves are to him dull and
childish. He has neither our vigorous contumacity nor the
gay abandon of the Latin. He lives in a world we know not
of, and he has, as yet, small taste for ours.

As we sat on a bench, pondering these things, a small and
ragged boy sat down beside us. He was rubbing his arm, and
he explained, with gestures, that he had been lassoed and hurt
a little. But, he said, with a ravishing smile, es nada. What
was a little pain to a fellow of eleven years?

We asked him if he wouldn't like a ride on the flying
horses, but he shook his head. They made him dizzy, he
explained. We suggested other forms of entertainment,
but he was not to be tempted. Most of our talk was in panto
mime, his English being limited to " hello " and " o. k." and
"thank you," and our Spanish being even less extensive.
However, it is astonishing what can be done with smiles and
gestures and emotions which mysteriously need no vehicle of
expression.

He finally consented to try target-shooting three shots

54 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

for a penny and knocked down three pigeons, for which he
was awarded a bit of cheap candy. This he insisted on our
sampling first. Then, with that enchanting smile of his, he
pointed down the street, and gave us to understand that there
was something there he would like to show us. It began to
dawn on us that he was accepting our generosity only to be
polite; that his real desire was to show us a good time.

As we walked along he fumbled in his ragged pocket
and brought out two marbles. These he pressed shyly into
my hand. They were, I suspect, his sole worldly possession,
but the only means he had of keeping his end up. My
throat still aches a little when I think of those marbles.

We took him then to a shop and bought him a false face.
We thought this would please him, but it was plain from
the way he accepted it that he was indulging us in a childish
fancy. If we wanted him to wear a false face, wear it he
would, regardless of what it did to his dignity.

There were other things more worthy of our attention, he
tried to tell us or at least that was the way we interpreted
his gestures and the few words we could understand. So we
walked with him, round and round the square, until finally
we said we were tired and wished to return to our hotel. We
were not tired, but the pathos of that friendly little waif was
more than we could longer endure. He offered to guide us
home, and seemed really surprised when I gave him the few
pennies I had in my pocket-
He stood on the corner, watching us go away. Each time
we turned around he waved his hand. Always, when I think
of Mexico, I shall remember that small figure, outlined
against the lights of the carnival, waving his farewell.

"Bandit or Tatriot?

There are moments when I wish I were a simple tourist, travel
ing comfortably in a conducted tour. How agreeable it would
be to find a car waiting each morning to take one to an ap
pointed place, to hear an expert summary of what the guide
books say about it, to see all the notable places in exactly the
right amount of time, and at the day's end to have the assur
ance of a bed.

Rockier is the road of the independent traveler. And if
to his weak craving for independence he adds the vice of
curiosity his confusion grows at compound interest.

Churches, ruins, beautiful scenery, stay put from year to
year. There they are. You ooh! and ah! them, and nobody
contradicts you. But people the twisted skein of motives
ancL reactions that make human beings change their color
from minute to minute. There are no absolutes. You cannot
say of a man that he is so many yards long by so many wide,
or that he was built at a cost of so many pesos. He is this to
one authority and that to another, and the more questions you
ask about him the less, in the end, you know.

There is, for example, Zapata. To me he was just one of
the many bandits with whom Mexican history has been so
richly supplied. I knew, vaguely, that he had played some
sort of part in the revolution of 1910, and that his achieve
ments in laying waste the countryside had been notable.
Nothing in what I knew of him prepared me for the fact that
the street on which my hotel stands is Zapata street, or for the

55

56 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

fact that he is one of the two main figures in the famous
Rivera murals of Cuernavaca.

From the collapsing fabric of my misinformation emerges
the disconcerting fact that to a large part of the Mexican
population Zapata corresponds to George Washington. Peas
ants speak of him reverently and with a sweep of their brown
hands to the distant hills echo his battle cry, " Land and
Liberty."

Zapata, it appears, was not a bandit, though he did go in
for considerable rapine and pillage. He was a patriot, and
the present Mexican government is one of the fruits of his
labor.

And what of the present government? Cardenas, said my
taxi driver, was an honest man but a fool. The present
government, said a man of affairs, had achieved new records
in plain and fancy graft. The Indians, said a foreigner of long
residence in Mexico, were farther from control of their des
tinies than they had been under any regime of Mexican
history.

Dining in the home of upper class Mexicans I mentioned
that I had had a talk with President Cardenas. Instantly a
chill settled over the conversation. It was as if I had said I had
a touch of leprosy.

In the United States there are many who don't like Roose
velt. But I cannot imagine the keeper of a hotel in a small
American town rejoicing over the fact that Roosevelt had
spent the night in his town and had not stopped at his hotel.
Yet President Cardenas spent two nights in a provincial town
recently, and when I asked the proprietor of the leading hotel
if the president had graced his establishment the reply was not
printable.

This maze of contradiction is thickest when we come

BANDIT OR PATRIOT? 57

to the conflict of church and state. Consult a politician and
he will assure you that the church, as a social force, is definitely
through in Mexico. But travel the countryside at dusk of a
Saturday afternoon and you will not be so sure.

The politician will tell you that only the women cling to
the church. But men with brooms are sweeping the dusty
road in front of the village church. They reverently remove
their hats as they pass its entrance. Other men come, carry
ing pottery filled with flowers for the decoration of the altar.

Inside the church are children cleaning and arranging for
the services of the morrow. Weakened, perhaps, is the hold
of the church on these people, but not broken by any means.
And if there is any lesson to be learned from history it is that
what women cling to is not soon dislodged. Women are
conservative by instinct, and they have forgotten more about
the power of passive resistance than men will ever learn.

As in the rest of the world, great forces are contending for
mastery in Mexico. The chief conflict, I think, is between
reason and emotion, between planned economy and inherited
tradition. The man drawing blueprints has against him the
woman beating out tortillas on a flat stone. The new and the
old jostle each other on every street. What is more, they
jostle each other in the soul of every individual What the
antagonists seem to overlook is that religion can take new
forms just as government can.

The churches are crumbling away now, but it would go
counter to the evidence to assert that what built those churches
is wholly dead.

Oremus

Across the way a neon sign burned hotly red over a movie
theater, announcing Tom Mix. On the street under festoons
of electric lights (paid for by householders along the line of
march) dragged the slow length of the carnival procession.
At the head marched a solitary drummer. No ruffles or flour
ishes came from his sticks just a monotonous thump,
thump, thump, to which a company of school children in red
jackets and white pantaloons kept listless step.

There were a few floats, to which costumed figures clung
precariously and uncomfortably. On one of them two men
dressed as bawds did an obscene version of the fandango. A
group of Indians, on their way home from a two days' trek
to a religious festival in a mountain village, stared bewildered
and disapproving from under the wide brims of their straw
sombreros. Their women and children, half-buried under
their bundles, pressed closer to their burros and watched in
grave wonder as a truck with signs advertising a patent medi
cine rolled by, the strains of " It's a Sin to Tell a Lie " thunder
ing from its loud-speaker.

Here was the new Mexico an austere, reserved, fatal
istic, not very humorous people, doing their best to make
whoopee in the modern manner, and not doing a very good job
of it.

Vendors of confetti wandered about, with buyers scarce.
Children in masks and dominoes flitted through the crowd

58

OREMUS 59

like dragonflies on a pond, giggling and cheerful never
rowdy. The women of the town, surrounded by their broods,
each child tending one smaller than itself, stood on the side
walks, waiting. The procession had been advertised for three
o'clock. It did not begin until after sundown. Nobody
seemed to mind. As one said, it was not to be expected that
processions would be held while the sun was overhead.

There was no excitement and almost no noise. Once or
twice the crowd along the way clapped politely. A country
man dressed in the white suit of the Indian, sandals on his
feet and a scrape over his shoulder, and overfull of pulque,
bumped and stumbled his uncertain way toward a forgotten
destination. A policeman in a smart uniform of whipcord,
with a pistol in a new leather holster, took him gently in
charge.

Try as they would, these people could not quite achieve
modernity. All the outward trappings were there jazz,
blare, lights and color, but the ancient habits of decorum were
hard to lose.

From the barracks across from the movie theater came the
bugles blowing retreat. From the steeple of the cathedral
came the brazen clangor of the never silent bells. And from
the church built by the son of Ferdinand Borde two centuries
ago came the soft throb of an organ.

It was, literally, a step from 1937 to an ancient past.
Moved by some instinct of flight from an unreal reality, I
took that short step.

Only a handful of people was in the church mostly old
women in black shawls, and children. I counted only two
men, outside the priest and the acolytes. The congregation
sat clustered in die front pews. Nearly all bore lighted

60 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

candles which cast dancing and grotesque shadows on their
bowed shoulders.

Presently they rose and in slow procession made the Stations
of the Cross, singing in antiphonal chorus an Ave Maria that
would send chills down the spine of even the most pagan.
One by one the lights on the altar were extinguished, and one
by one the candles of the worshipers followed suit. The priest
disappeared. The church was dark and silent. The doors
opened and, over the sound made by the sandaled feet of the
congregation as they shuffled out, one could hear the amplifier
of the patent medicine truck roaring, " It's a Sin to Tell a Lie."

Shall I deny that my eyes were moist? No, I shall not.
But why were they moist? Perhaps it was in pity for myself
the nostalgia a " civilized " man feels for simple and primi
tive faith. We who are bewildered by the vast and unused
riches of our knowledge have moments of envy for the un
lettered who, accepting their own helplessness, acquire a peace
that is beyond the sophisticated understanding, by commend
ing their souls to God.

I felt, as I emerged from that dark church, that I had
experienced something like a revelation. I had suspected that
the ultimate destiny of man was not in confetti and festoons
of light and worship at the throne of the goddess of reason.
The French tried that and failed. Now I was certain of it.
Symbolic, the candles of the church had been put out, and
the neon sign on the movie theater still burned. But the
candles would be lighted again. All through man's history
the candles of faith have been extinguished, but they have
been relighted.

Or is history no longer to be trusted? The vestments of
the priest were tattered, the very walls of his church were

OREMUS 61

crambling in decay. Those who knelt before him were lame
and halt and poor and very old. They must soon die. And
then what?

I do not know. But man hungers for beauty as for bread,
and I doubt if motorcars, electric light and a chicken in every
will content him. The forms of his faith may change,
ut faith he must have, Oremus.

The ittle Ones

The traveler should keep always before him that shrewdest o
the maxims of La Rochefoucauld: "All generalizations are
false including this one." It is so easy to jump to the
general from the particular and usually with such unfortu
nate results.

Nonetheless, I must set down the observation alono-
with the indisputable one that in nearly a month there has
not been a day without sunshine or one cool enough to call
for an overcoat that I am yet to hear a Mexican child cry,
except in extreme pain, and not very hard then.

I must report as a fact that the only child I have heard cry
ing was an American child and a very spoiled and badly
behaved child he was at best.

Making allowance for my superficial observation, please
accept my assurance that Mexican children treat one another
with the most extraordinary consideration, and are treated by
their elders with a kindness I have not seen exceeded any
where on this heartless globe.

To a person with undue respect for sanitation and excessive
respect for that branch of voodooism known as psychology,
the conditions under which Mexican children live would seem
deplorable indeed. They eat with the most serene disregard
of vitamins, enzymes or the desirability of a balanced ration.
They pay no heed to the elementary principles of hygiene.
They wear the wrong clothes or none, and they keep dreadful
hours. Infant mortality is undeniably high, and something
should certainly be done about it. As a matter of fact, the

62

THE LITTLE ONES 63

Mexican government is doing something about it, and with
considerable rapidity conditions are changing.

Meanwhile, though death may overtake him sooner than
our actuaries think reasonable, and though he may suffer from
ailments from which modern science might protect him, the
Mexican child seems to have an amazingly good time. His
may be a short life, but from what one can see of it it is indeed
a gay one.

He eats when and what he likes. He comes and goes as
he chooses. He stays up until sleep overcomes him. And
when American children are wistfully playing at being grown
up the Mexican child takes on the responsibilities of an adult.
The tourist may feel sorry for the ragamuffins scampering
about in the germ-laden dust, but the ragamuffins certainly do
not seem to feel sorry for themselves.

The Mexican home is one of the many reasons why this
land is difficult to understand. Yesterday I visited a character
istic example. The way led through what the visitor would
assume was a slum. That is, the streets were unevenly paved
with small cobbles and the sidewalk was hardly more than
a gesture. Most of the people one met were dressed in the
simple garments of the peasant, and not a few were barefoot.

Presently we turned off from the "street" a narrow
canyon between houses with iron-barred windows and
turned into a lane. At its end was a door with a grilled peep
hole in it. The stone threshold was crumbling and the door
was in sore need of paint. Beside it was a pushbutton, but
after trying that for some time we revetted to the rusty iron
knocker. This brought a servant, and in one short step we
were in the luxury of Long Island.

Behind that ancient and forbidding door, with its iron-
barred Judas, was a palace. It had I don't know how many

64 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

rooms at least twenty, I should say; a huge swimming pool
with heated water, set in a grove of mango trees and sur
rounded by a wealth of fruit and flowers; and birds sang in the
trees as if we were in the heart of the jungle. In the house
itself were all the triumphs of modern plumbing, and furni
ture that would have made a museum curator drool with
ecstasy.

That is or was the Mexican's way of living. To
the world his house presented a forbidding face, and only
true friends could pass the great door that gave on the street.
Once past that barrier the guest was of the household.

A home was not for show; it was to be lived in. In the
great haciendas of the past, now mostly in ruins, this love of
privacy reached its apex. Under one roof, surrounded by
fortified walls, lived the patriarch and his descendants and all
their retainers.

All that is changing now. The parvenus the brisk
fellows who have caught on to our quick ways of making
money the politico* and the speculators and the Levantines
whose clever fingers are garnering the riches of Mexico, are
building homes that suggest the boulevards of Hollywood.

Not for privacy are these homes; they are as showy as
money and bad taste can make them. When you fly past
them in your sight-seeing coach the guide tells you how much
they cost. That is about all he can say about them.

What a Woman!

Skipping a car to Mexico is, like smoking in bed, possible
but not recommended. Some day it will be the thing to do.
At this writing it demands more patience and fortitude than it
is worth.

We shipped ours well in advance of our own departure.
For a time there was silence. Then telegrams began to come,
and special delivery letters enclosing documents that had to be
signed in the presence of officials who either did not exist or
were out of the country.

From this blizzard of paper one fact emerged. The car
was stuck at the Texas border. After much signing and
swearing (legal and profane) and communication by tele
phone and telegraph Mexican law was appeased, and the last
lap of the journey began.

There was, however, miscellaneous baggage in the car.
This, we learned from the telegrams which followed us all
over Mexico, and which gradually lost all semblance of sense
as they were copied and recopied by operators who understood
no English, had been removed from the car and shipped
separately by express.

Meanwhile, as we drove to Acapulco and back in a hired
car, we were well pleased that our own vehicle was comfortably
sheltered in some provincial freight house. There are some
excellent Mexican highways, well provided with filling
stations, but there are not many of them yet. And the
Mexican roads that are not good are roads over which one
will do well to travel in somebody else's car.

6s

66 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

Nearly four weeks had elapsed when we returned to the
capital and made inquiries about our car and baggage. By
this time our fame had spread throughout the land, and our
mere appearance in a railway office was the signal for all hands
to bow their heads in pain. Early and late toiled the local
agents of the Illinois Central as helpful friends as a way
farer ever encountered. How they must have cursed fool
Americans who ship motorcars instead of riding in them! But
their courtesy never wavered.

The Southern Pacific was also involved, so one day I
dropped in to return the call of F. V. Stark, resident traffic
manager of that system. Having got into the habit of asking
all whom I met if they had heard about my car, I asked him.
"No,** said this amazing Englishman, born in Malta,
master of Arabic and heavens knows how many other lan
guages, and for thirty years a resident of Mexico. " But if
you will come back at three o'clock I shall have all the inf orma-
tion."

Whereupon began the most astonishing afternoon I have
experienced in this astonishing country.

By three o'clock car and baggage had been located in vari
ous parts of the city, and in charge of Jesus Moya, Oaxaca
Indian and worker of magic, we set out to get it.

After standing for an hour before various counters of the
freight yard Senor Moya discovered that we could not have
the car without certain papers which we did not have. Ac
cording to the textbooks, this should have been the end of the
matter. This is a land of manana and red tape, as anyone who
has not been here can tell you. But Senor Moya refused to
quit. An hour more of telephoning and conferences and
shaking of heads and the car was ours to take out if we could.
The machine was located at the end of a mile-long freight

WHAT A WOMAN! 67

house. It had been there for days, but no one had known of
its existence because it was buried under bales of hay and other
merchandise. Extricating it, we started the job of getting it
through an eight-foot doorway, making a right-angle turn to
a platform eight feet wide, and again, at right angles, down
a pair of planks to the street. It can be demonstrated mathe
matically that this is impossible. But with a dozen stevedores
acting as jacks, and with the Little Corporal at the wheel, the
miracle was performed.

There were moments when I was less than an inch from
losing both car and wife, and the faces of all concerned were
dubious. And when, at last, the car was on the ground,
right side up, it was clear from the faces of the onlookers that
all were in hearty agreement with the remark of one of the
stevedores, who said to me fervently, " Senor, truly you have
a woman! "

The express office was now closed, but no barriers exist for
Senor Jesus Moya. There were more conferences, and pres
ently our baggage was in our hands with neither loss nor
damage. The sun was setting as we headed for Cuernavaca, "
and the snowy face of Popocatepetl was a sheet of pale gold,
the sky behind him a brocade of silver and turquoise and
flame unforgettable ending to an unforgettable day,

Night overtook us as we entered the mountains, and I
remembered that we had no jack in the tool box. I am still
wondering what we would have done if we had had a flat tire!

ore Fireworks

Until last year there was nothing but a burro path to the
mountain town of Tepotzlan, nestling in the shadow of
pyramids as yet hardly touched, even by archaeologists. Now
there is a road, passable for motorcars; and tourists, on their
way to or from Taxco, are beginning to appear, guidebook in
one hand, camera in the other*

Still, however, it remains largely a mystery to the visitor
even to the sophisticated Mexicans of nearby Cuernavaca.
The other day I spent an afternoon in Tepotzlan watching
the dress rehearsal of an amateur bullfight. Not satisfied, I
jolted over the washboard road again yesterday and stood in the
sun for hours trying to understand what I saw.

From one corner of the square came a group of elaborately
masked and costumed figures, dancing aimlessly in the dust.
That is, the dance seemed aimless; but presently one realized
that it had a definite pattern, indefinitely repeated. Behind
these figures marched a band of music, the players dressed in
everyday clothes. Their tune, like the dance, was a simple one
and it was repeated endlessly.

After this group of dancers and musicians had proceeded
around the square at least a dozen times without a pause, a
second group of performers, playing the same tune and doing
the same steps, added themselves to the proceedings. In one
corner a couple of solemn-faced Indians held a cord stretched
between them, to which was attached a pack of firecrackers.
Stolidly they held the string until the crackers exploded.

68

MORE FIREWORKS 69

There was no excitement. The faces of the Indians, sitting
or standing at every available vantage point, were impassive.

On went the dance and the music, never changing. The
sun sank with tropic abruptness over the mountains; and we
went away wondering what it had all signified. Until we
were out of earshot we could hear the monotonous thumping
of the drums.

In the evening in the plaza of Cuernavaca there was more
bewilderment for the observer. The week of carnival was
drawing to its close and the excitement real or synthetic
was more evident. A man carrying a set piece representing
a bull dashed erratically through the crowd. From his flaming
burden came a shower of sparks, lighting the faces of the
crowd of small boys who pressed close at his heels in venture
some delight. Occasionally a ball of fire would shoot from
the bull's head and the crowd screamed in mingled terror and
amusement. This, of course, was dangerous. Oh, yes,
certainly if the ball of fire hit anyone he would be badly
burned. But then it seldom hit anybody. Your Mexican
friend shrugs his shoulders and lights another cigarette.

Danger, disorder, delight these three were strangely in
terwoven. A steeple of flaming pinwheels had been erected
squarely in the middle of the street and a line of motorcars
honked their way under a cascade of falling sparks. Bombs
went off under the feet of the close-packed crowds. Indian
women, with children on and all about them, gazed at the
tempest of sound and light as woodenly as I had gazed at the
dancers of Tepotzlan.

And an American, flat on his face seeking shelter from the
balls of fire cast off by the gunpowder bull, muttered hoarsely:
" I thought Mexico was a place where the people did nothing
but sleep. I'm going back to Broadway for a rest! "

70 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

Tipping is a problem in any land; but in Mexico the prob
lem is insoluble. Its complexity was illustrated by what
happened when I was getting my car out of the freight yard.
A half-dozen stevedores had sweated in the hot sun for an
hour, heaving until I thought their backs would break. I
put my hand in my pocket, but one of them raised a dissenting
hand. " It is not necessary to pay us extra/ 5 he said in a broken
but understandable English. * 4 We are paid our wages by the
railroad. This is part of our duty."

There spoke the social revolution, the voice of the new, self-
respecting Mexico, the Mexico which is trying to return to the
dignity of the Indian. In between is the Mexico which has
learned too well the American gospel of " get the money."

Mexico is a melting pot; and, as in all melting pots, there
is dross on the top.

and of Extremes

This was and is a land of extremes. Great riches and
great poverty live side by side. Elegance and cultivation are
next door to ignorance, disease and filth. It is said that in the
days of Diaz 95 per cent of the population could neither read
nor write. Today illiteracy is estimated at 60 per cent, and
falling fast.

Modern Mexico is fired with a passion for education. The
masses are being awakened from a sleep of centuries, and
what will come of their awaking no man can tell. For the
first time in Mexican history a free and secular education is
being made available to the poor. And that education begins
with the very young.

This morning I visited a kindergarten, accompanied by the
local director of education. Here, in schoolrooms with roofs
but no walls in this matchless climate one goes indoors
only for the shade I found as bright and happy a group of
children as I have ever seen.

Some wore shabby clothing and some were barefoot, but
all were clean. They were of all colors, from the deep choco
late of the pureblood Indian to the pale pink of a little girl with
blue eyes and blonde curls who, it was said, was of Polish ex
traction.

There was the same degree of racial variation in the teachers.
The one thing they had in common was zeal for their work and
an obviously warmhearted sympathy for their small charges.
These teachers are paid from eighty to a hundred pesos a
month say twenty-five dollars, American money.

71

72 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

In one room a group of children were making pictures of
fruit, using colored crayons. In another room they were mak
ing designs with red beads. In the garden, beside a pool in
which swam ducks and geese, a third group was planting twigs
to which they fastened colored tissue paper to represent fruits
and flowers. These last were preparing for what corresponds
to our Arbor day and were studying roots and trees.

Later in the morning the whole school a hundred or
more tots from three to five years old marched to their
assembly hall, where, under the direction of a young teacher,
they sang and danced. Two youngsters not over four
executed a fas de deux with perfect poise and rhythm. In
no American school are morning exercises more beautifully
conducted.

On this day, it happened, the doctors arrived for their
regular inspection, and we watched a group of small children,
each armed with a cup and toothbrush, demonstrating what
they had learned of oral hygiene.

Mexican educators are deeply concerned with funda
mentals. The child is therefore scarcely out of the cradle be
fore it begins to receive instruction in the principles of sanita
tion and good health. The first step is to make the child
conscious of its physical self. The second is to make it aware
of its relations to the group. As fast as it learns to talk the
child is introduced to the idea of self-government. Before
it can read it is looking at pictures painted on the walls of its
schoolrooms pictures which carry the message, in simple
terms, of the " social revolution/'

This particular school was in a fairly good neighborhood,
and the children were not of the poorest. So, in order that I
might have a broader understanding of the school system, I

LAND OF EXTREMES 73

went next to a rural school. This school was in a poor neigh
borhood, and was primitive indeed a mere group of huts on
a rocky hillside with a muddy ditch running past it. But the
same earnest spirit was evident, both among pupils and
teachers. It was no surprise to learn that much of the furniture

rude chairs and tables had been built by the parents, and
that the money for what little equipment there was had been
contributed by people of the neighborhood wage earners
who make only two or three pesos a day.

There has been hostility to the new school system the
authorities admit it frankly. Also, there have been mistakes
in its administration. Zealots and theorists have at times gone
too fast and too far. But from what I have seen of the children

who, after all, are the final test of any educational system

the hostility born of ignorance and fear will not last long.
Parents, accustomed to other ways and doubtful of in
novation, may purse their lips and shake their heads at what
is being done with young Mexico; but young Mexico is
clearly well pleased. The difficulty with young Mexico, say
the teachers, is not getting him to come to school, but getting
him to go home.

Incidentally, I might mention that the two schools I have
described have been in operation only a little over a year.
Rapid is the rate of change in Mexico these days.

Caching for ight

Having visited a city kindergarten and a rural primary school,
I went next day to a grade school with several hundred pupils
and a waiting list!

As in all the schools the classrooms are shelters from the sun
rather than rooms and, as in all the schools, the walls are
illustrated lectures on the " social revolution/* Here, as else
where, I found the same mixture of racial strains, the same
predominance of coarse clothing, the same personal cleanli
ness, and the same enthusiasm for going to school. Here, too,
was the same emphasis on self-government.

For example, the appearance of the director of education
was the signal for a rush of boys and girls who had evidently
been waiting for him. They clustered about him, presenting
a paper for him to read. This, I learned, was a most formally
worded request for a one hundred days' trial of a radio set.
It went on to say that both pupils and teachers had benefited
so much by the newspapers and magazines which the authori
ties had sent to them that they felt a radio would be equally
instructive. This document was covered, front and back,
with the signatures of boys and girls.

On another day I visited what is said to correspond to one
of our junior high schools. The visit, like the others, was
made without warning, and nothing, therefore, was staged for
my benefit.

Morning exercises were beginning as I arrived, and I sat
to one side with the principal another zealot whose en
thusiasm for his job was as great as his skin was dark while

74

REACHING FOR LIGHT 75

the chairman for the occasion was selected. This job fell to
a lad in overalls, who mounted the stage and called for sug
gestions. Many o these came from a girl of fifteen an
Indian with skin that shone like polished ebony and strong
white teeth that sparkled in a ready smile. I was not surprised
to learn that she was one of the school leaders.

There was much discussion, all managed in the best parlia
mentary manner. The principal offered no suggestions. He
sat quietly smoking a cigarette, explaining to me that the
children must practice the forms of democracy if they were to
be good citizens later. I could close my eyes and imagine my
self at home, listening to an exponent of progressive education.

Finally it was decided that one of the girls give an address
of welcome in English. This she did, without embarrass
ment and with a surprisingly good accent and choice of words.
Then a boy in tattered dungarees came to the platform and,
most movingly, recited a ballad, " Quien sabe? " There were
other divertisements, and after I had expressed my thanks,
which were rendered by the principal into a Spanish that
sounded far more eloquent than my own English, the whole
school clapped politely, and then sang the school song, the
Internationale and the national anthem.

When the hall was cleared I was shown the murals, exe
cuted by a pupil of Rivera. They depicted the old life of the
haciendas peons being plied with drink by the wicked
overseers, as one way of holding them in peonage. Another
depicted the old-fashioned school, with miserable pupils being
whipped by a hatchet-faced old woman in a black dress with
significant touch a cross at her bosom. The other
pictures dealt with the new age happy-faced workers
marching side by side toward the light, with test-tubes and
gear wheels symbolizing truth and power.

j6 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

" Work and honesty/' said the principal. " That is what
the world needs/'

The day in this school begins at six A.M. for the boys,
seven A.M. for the girls. Hygiene and physiology are studied
until breakfast. The period from nine to one is devoted to
academic studies. From four to six thirty the time is devoted
to manual training pottety, carpentry, ironwork for the
boys; sewing and domestic science for the girls. The work
is practical and they make goods for sale. The profits are
divided in proportion to the amount of work performed.

Just so the teachers won't feel time hanging heavy on
their hands there is night school from seven to ten.

This school, too, has been in operation only a little over a
year. Much of its equipment has been made by the pupils.
In the laboratory I saw a homemade microscope, a sterilizing
oven made from an old oilcan, a centrifuge constructed en
tirely of wood, and test-tubes fashioned from discarded electric
light bulbs.

I left that school with awe in my heart. And when, out
side, a beggar, diseased and repulsive, cringed whining at my
feet, I felt less of the shame than is usually mine when
I see the abasement of man. From rime immemorial the
masses of Mexico have been in darkness, inert and fatalistic,
but they are reaching for the light. Hope is breaking through
the clouds of this somber land and the sun is beginning to
shine in the hearts of its people.

Tig in the

We were told that in the hamlet of Jiutepec we would see a
real fiesta native life entirely untouched by modernity.
We were also told that a good time to see the fiesta would be in
the evening. I forget what else we were told, but this is
enough to account for our visit to Jiutepec.

This hamlet was said to be just a little way from the high
road. Well, perhaps it is in miles. But the little way has
the largest number of bumps, chuckholes, stray animals and
natives in all stages of inertia, from the merely somnolent to
the advanced alcoholic, to be encountered anywhere. Further
more, the dust and jagged rock, which for want of a better
word is called a road, is the width of two cars with a sheet of
paper between, and drops to deep ditches on both sides. It
would be an affliction in broad daylight and with no traffic
stirring. By night, alive with all forms of animal life, it is
material for endless nightmares.

As we pitched and careened through this inferno, the
suspicion deepened in my mind that no sensible person would
visit Jiutepec by day, and that to visit it by night especially
a night of fiesta was clear proof of insanity.

Suddenly the night air was rent by hideous squealing, and
out of the darkness loomed dark brown faces pressing close
against the windows of our car. It was obvious that the
owners of these faces were not pleased. We had, it appeared,
run over a pig.

What to do? If we left without doing something about it
we were hit-and-run folk, subject, no doubt, to the severest

77

78 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

penalties. On the other hand, if we stayed we were likely to
be torn limb from limb by a crowd which seemed to grow

if O

larger and angrier every moment* So, with a frightened bleat
from our horn, we drove on.

It turned out that the slaughter of the pig had taken place
just outside Jiutepec, and the muttering mob was still with us
when we reached the town. There it was enlarged by sym
pathizers from the crowd in the plaza; and when we got out
of the car it was to face the dark scowling of agraristas armed
with rifles.

I am sure that the square, crowded with celebrants of the
fiesta, must have been very quaint and picturesque. But at
the moment we had eyes only for those angry men with guns.

We offered to pay roundly for that accursed pig; but from
the rumble of talk it appeared not to be a question of money.
We were where we weren't wanted, at best; and to have killed
a pig on top of it well, I gathered that only our blood would
expiate our effrontery.

Masklike faces, gleaming red and black in the flicker from
gasoline torches, pressed close to mine; and a woman, baring
long white teeth, pinched me vigorously. All, I decided, was
lost. And then, out of the darkness, came the welcome
khaki of the Mexican police may their shadows never grow
less!

The two officers listened for a moment to the recital of our
crimes and misdemeanors, and then chased the crowd away.
They also dismissed our offer of reimbursement. People
should not let their pigs lie in the road, they said. Roads were
for travelers not for pigs. Whereupon, without saying
anything but gently easing us onward, they escorted us toward
the church. Subtly but clearly they made us understand

PIG IN THE ROAD 79

that we were where we should not be, and that the sooner we
got away the sooner a load would be off their minds.

Inside the candle-lighted church little girls in white were
solemnly dancing to the scratch of a fiddle. " Very interest
ing no? " asked one of the policemen, lighting a cigarette
from a candle borne by a kneeling old woman.

Yes, it was very interesting. Also very quaint and pictur
esque. One of our party was so enthralled by it that he was
unaware his hip pocket was being slit and his wallet deftly
removed. My own thoughts, I fear, were less on the pictur-
esqueness of the scene than on the problem of getting home.
I thought it more than likely that those men with rifles would
be waiting for us.

Some such thought seemed also to be in the minds of the
policemen; for one got into the car with us, and the other
stood on the running board, blowing his whistle when any
one got in the way. The two rode with us all the way to the
highroad. Both seemed visibly to exude relief when they
waved us farewell.

The moral of this tale is: Don't go to fiestas at night if you
are going to run over pigs on the way. There may not be
any of those friendly Mexican policemen around to take care
of you.

Sweet Do-Hothing

In 1716 a young Frenchman named Joseph le Borde set sail
to seek his fortune in New Spain. History records that he
found it in the silver mines of Taxco, and here in Cow's Horn
(to translate the inaccurate Spanish translation of the Aztec
word for Cuernavaca), where stout Cortez had spent his
vacations, Borde built a retreat suitable for such a millionaire
as he had become.

Time has laid a heavy hand on the Borda Gardens. Walks
and walls are crumbling and broken. The mangoes joy
of le Borde's heart have fought a losing battle with the
fruit fly. But not even the pressure of two hundred years has
been sufficient to obliterate the incredible tranquillity of this
place.

Tourists stream endlessly past the chamber where Maxi
milian took his ease; and around the pool where Carlo tta
paddled in the moonlight is a litter of black paper from the
film packs of amateur photographers. But the red berries of
the coffee plant still burn against the tropic green, the foun
tains still trickle if they do not splash, the birds still sing in
the branches of the laurel, and the purple mountains still
smile through their collars of cloud.

An Italian named Giacomini, assisted by his Mexican wife,
" the Little Duchess," now operates a hotel in what was the
palace of le Borde and what a strange hotel it is! There is
no dining room, all meals being served outdoors on the porch
which, through the years, has acquired a decided list to
starboard.

80

SWEET DO-NOTHING 81

There are only a few rooms and the turnover among the
permanent boarders is not great. People have a way of
coming to spend a few days, only to linger on for months. It is
so easy to get the habit of sitting for hours, doing nothing
except watch the changing shadows on the pool, or listen to
the mournful chant of the gardeners as they sweep the lawns
fre^ of leaves.

Breakfast, and for an hour afterward one lives in exquisite
indolence. Then the tourists begin to arrive, en route to or
from Taxco; and the Borda Gardens become a cross between
Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon and the lunchroom of the
Grand Central.

With twilight peace comes again, and soon after dark
the great doors on the street are closed. Then there is quiet,
broken only by bugle calls from the nearby barracks, the cast-
iron bells of the cathedral tolling the hours, and the singing of
mosquitoes.

After a period of probation in which we occupied a bathless
chamber we were moved to a bungalow-apartment in a garden
of our own. Here, with the most modern plumbing, the
lastest thing in mattresses and the most solicitous attention of
a smiling, soft-voiced Indian chambermaid, we slip into
languorous desuetude, and the question of how many justices
there should be on the Supreme Court seems as remote as any
thing on Mars.

The cost of this luxury, I might mention, is six dollars and
seventy-two cents a day for two persons, and includes three
excellent meals. And if you weary of quaint markets, old
churches and views, there is a golf course of spectacular beauty
and first-class golfing quality near by, for which the greens
fee is eighty-four cents caddies, twenty-eight cents a round.

There are some peculiar aspects about life in the Borda

82 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

Gardens. One, which from the expression on their faces has
been most disturbing to the tourists who have observed it, is
the fact that the only access to our bungalow is through a door
marked "Ladies." This sounds and is peculiar, and
can be fully explained only by a diagram.

This morning I was asked by a tourist droll how we old-
timers of three weeks look down on the fretful newcomer!
what I did with my rime. When I told her she pursed her
lips and returned to studying her guidebook. She seemed to
think I had gone native. As a matter of fact, she was more
than half right.

Ho hum! It is noon now, and the sun rides hot in the
heavens. The birds have sought shade and there is a clatter
of crockery from the kitchen, indicating that the personally
conducted tours are beginning to arrive. A stray intruder in
my garden has already caught sight of me in my pajamas.
The world is with me once more, and I must dress the part.
It gets harder every day. I think I must leave the Borda
Gardens soon or I shall never leave them at all.

<Attol

Have I mentioned the climate of Cuemavaca? Well, it is
worth mentioning again. In fact, it is worth mentioning
several times a day. It is the most notable climate of my
experience* When the sun is high it is warm and enervating,
and all but mad dogs and tourists seek the shade. When
night falls it is cool enough for two blankets. There is sun
shine every day, and practically no rain at this time of year,

Also, may I again mention the subject of banditry? One
of my home town newspapers has caught up with me, and in
it is a letter advising travelers to Mexico to provide themselves
with bulletproof vests and an arsenal of submachine guns.
In the same newspaper is an account of a holdup on my home
town's principal thoroughfare.

Now there is banditry in Mexico. But from all that I have
been able to learn there is less per square mile and per thousand
of population than there is in the United States. And
banditry in Mexico is ceasing to be the pastime it was once
said to be. A year or so ago, for example, an American was
kidnaped. The story is that the criminals were promptly
captured and as promptly shot. Not only that, but every
male inhabitant over fourteen of the village where the crime
took place was also shot.

I cannot vouch for the whole truth of that story, but I can
attest to the fact that any sort of maltreatment of tourists is
severely dealt with in Mexico today.

To the plaza, last night, and stood for an hour watching
the crowd walk slowly round and round the bandstand

83

84 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

men on the inside, going in one direction, women on the
outside, going in the other. One young Indian mother, her
baby wrapped tight to her breast, made the circle eleven
times by my count. How many circuits she had made before
we arrived, or how many after we left, I do not know.

The band played selections from Victor Herbert, and
between times the radio kept the air filled with sound. The
people alone made no noise. They varied in age from infants
barely able to toddle to crones hobbling on sticks; but all
were solemn. Now and then a venturesome boy might throw
a little confetti, or even go so far as to take a girl from the
procession and get her an ice-cream cone. This was the
maximum lapse from gravity that one could observe. It
was notable when some youngster so far forgot decorum as
to break into a run.

In the other park a crowd had gathered. From its center
came the sound of a marimba. Working through the on
lookers, packed six deep, we found the cause of the excitement.
It was a group of venturesome moderns dancing American
fashion. The Indians gazed at this spectacle wide-eyed, and,
I suspect, disapproving.

At one corner of the Borda Gardens is a little mirador, or
lookout, whence one has a beautiful view of the valley and the
sunset. A dozen feet below runs a dusty road with a couple of
thatched hovels beside it.

To this point comes every tourist who visits Cuernavaca
and that means practically eveiy person who comes to Mexico.
The appearance of visitors looking over the parapet is the
signal for children to spring out of the ground. With one
voice they cry: " Allo! Allo! " their little brown faces smiling

ALLO! ALLO! 85

hopefully up. Without fail there is a shower of coins - and
since, to the new-laid tourist, a peso is only a trifle over a
quarter, the total is considerable.

I should guess that at least a hundred tourists come to the
Borda Gardens every day. On Sundays there are twice as
many. They all visit the mirador, and nearly all toss coins.
In a year or two the owner of that thatched hovel will be buy
ing the Borda Gardens.

Next to " Allo! " the English word which seems to have
struck its roots deepest into Mexico is " o. k." It is in the
vocabulary of every child. A close second is " Watcheka "
which, it turns out, means " Watch your car? " Wherever
you stop a swarm of gamins appears from nowhere, all shout
ing this phrase. You select one or more of the likeliest and
go about your business. It may be after midnight when you
return, but your small guardians will be waiting for you,
politely grateful for the pennies you give them.

Ask an Indian where a place is and he will drop everything
to direct you to it. Offer him money for the service and you
will make an enemy. He will be as insulted as you would be
were the positions reversed. But halt your car in a village
square and there will be a swarm of small boys whining,
" Watch your car? " if they are linguists; or merely " Cen-
tavos, centavos " if they are not.

It is difficult for the American to grasp the fact that a peso
is real money to the average Mexican. But the minimum
wage in Mexico is only two pesos a day, and there are chisel
ing employers who pay less. There are those who fear that
the American habit of tossing money about will " spoil " the
Mexicans. I doubt it. Even in such a tourist center as this
the native goes about his business in complete indifference to

86 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

the visitor. I have never seen people so set in their ways as
are the Mexicans. They are incurious and fatalistic; and I
have a suspicion that under their grave courtesy is an idea that
our behavior is very similar to that of the monkey.

Weapon

Once again let me urge anyone contemplating a trip to this
country to make all hotel reservations well in advance. The
demand for beds exceeds the supply, The same is true of
railway accommodations. For the young and venturesome
and mechanically minded, who besides having a full kit of
tools can speak Spanish, the best way to roam this country
would be by trailer. A few have done it already, and I pre
dict that there will be more in future. Meanwhile, you
would do well to entrust your routing to a railroad, express
company or travel agency. Even then you will have your
troubles. In Mexico telegrams have a way of never arriving,
or of arriving in a form that nobody can read.

Mexico is a paradise for painters, with a picture at every
turn. It is almost as exciting for the amateur photographer.
And here, also, is a word of advice: Take plenty of film with
you. Except in the capital, it is not easy to get.

Speaking of pictures, I had a warm argument last night
with a well known American painter. He took the position
that the function of art was to convey aesthetic satisfaction;
that in mural painting its function was limited to the decora
tive. Art, he said, must exist for itself. When it delivered a
message, when it became propagandist, it ceased to be art.

Now this is a position I have often taken myself. I, too,
have argued that the painter should paint pictures and not
advertisements. But since I have been in Mexico I have begun
to wonder about this.

In Mexico there has been a great renaissance of the fresco.

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88 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

Rivera, Orozco and many capable though less known men
have been doing work that is important socially no less than
artistically. It is significant that the two major " sights " in
Cuernavaca, for example, are the Borda Gardens and the
Rivera murals in the palace of Cortez now the town hall.
These are " musts " for all tourists. It is interesting to note
that the Borda Gardens were built by a mining Icing and
philanthropist of the eighteenth century, and that the Rivera
murals were paid for by an American ambassador, Dwight
Morrow.

The fresco painting of Mexico is not "art" in the old
aristocratic sense. Rivera and Orozco and the others have not
painted for the pleasure of a few rich patrons. They have
painted for the instruction of the masses. In a land where
until recently only a handful of the population could read,
the picture is enormously important. It becomes a powerful
instrument in the teaching of history and social theory.

It is true, of course, that when the painter becomes frankly
propagandist his history may be garbled and his social theory
may be false. Rivera, for example, is a thorough communist,
and in his work shows little reverence for the gods of capital
ism. He is as hostile to the bankers of Wall street as he is to
the conquistadors of Cortez. But in this respect he is less an
influence than a symptom. His art and his ideas are not so
much propaganda as they are the expression of the thought of
the inarticulate masses. In his frescoes cartoons, as they
are scornfully labeled by orthodox painters the unlet
tered peon sees his aspirations and his resentments made logical
and coherent.

Mural painting is not, therefore, a mere incident in the life
of modern Mexico, as most painting is an incident in the life

REVOLUTIONARY WEAPON 89

of modern United States. It is an integral and extremely im
portant part of Mexican life today. It is to be found in com
munities which have no moving pictures, and it stirs the emo
tions of people who cannot read.

It was my American friend's contention that the murals of
Orozco had no place in Dartmouth College, and that
Rockefeller did right when he removed the Rivera frescoes
from Radio City. I am inclined to agree with him, since
the work of these Mexicans is neither of nor for what we
assume to be American culture. On the other hand, what we
assume to be American culture may really be as obsolete as
the pyramids, and the culture which is beginning to emerge
below the Rio Grande may forecast what will one day be ours.

In the schools of the United States there is a little effort
not much to teach appreciation of the fine arts. Here and
there one sees a reproduction of a Rembrandt or a bit of Greek
sculpture. But by no stretch of the imagination could paint
ing be called a subject of vital interest to the American school
child. It is different in Mexico. Here the walls of the school
room are covered with paintings illustrating the cons and pros
of the social revolution. Here the painter has a great and in
tensely interested public. Here his power is recognized.
Here he is honored equally with the man of action.

Cmerging from Darkness

My friend the schoolmaster, Maestro Jose Pedroza, begins his
day's work at six A.M. and ends at ten P.M. When he rests
I do not know. I have never met a man more vital or more
zealous. In repose his face is tired. But so much as mention
education and his eyes burn hot behind their thick spectacles.

Last night I visited the evening school, and I must say that
I never had a more moving experience. Young and old sat
side by side in the classrooms, their flesh weary from the day's
labor (these were all working-class people) , but their spirits
athirst for learning. For them the long night of the Mexican
masses was coming to an end.

For four hundred years Cuernavaca has been a pleasure
resort for the wealthy. Since Cortez built his palace here
elegance and culture from all over the world have come to
bask in its sunshine and inhale the perfume of its flowers. But
until last year there was no high school for the poor, and until
a few months ago there was no evening school for those who
had to make their living by day.

When Horace Mann was preaching the gospel of mass
education in the United States only a few generations ago
many protested, saying that to give the keen-edged sword of
knowledge to the common people would result in trouble.
Today there are not lacking folk who insist that these pro
testers were right that we would not be having so much un
rest if the common man had not been taught to read and
acquire ideas that were not good for him.

In Mexico there are some who look with glum disfavor on
the spread of public schools. They assure me that the Indian

90

EMERGING FROM DARKNESS 91

and the ignorant mestizo were much better off before they
began to study economics and prate nonsense about land and
liberty.

Maybe so. But I prefer to believe that man's ascent from
the primeval ooze has been on the ladder of education. And I
was far from pessimistic about Mexico when I watched a
young instructor, aided by a black Indian and a couple of
these " ignorant mestizos " one hears so much about, taking
microphotographs of the calcium salts in a sliver of onion skin.

This was being done with the crudest kind of apparatus
bits of tin and cloth and wire and an ordinary camera. The
government allowed so little money for equipment, said the
instructor sadly. Except for the microscope recently re
ceived all the apparatus for teaching physics, chemistry
and biology was homemade.

There has been and still is, here and there opposition
among the people themselves to the idea of public schools.
But 'for every tale that one hears about the reluctance of the
peasants to accept modern notions there are a dozen that illus
trate the reverse tendency.

I heard today, for example, of the Indian who trudged afoot
all the way to the capital to ask the authorities to establish a
school in his community. The ministry of education looked
into the matter and replied that since the Indian's community
was not even a village, there could be no school.

Back plodded the Indian to his distant home, where he held
council with his neighbors. If it was necessary to have a vil
lage in order to have a school, a village they would have.
Toiling in their spare time they proceeded to build a village,
even including a hospital. As the final touch of realism, they
cut down trees, stripped them of branches and put them in
holes at intervals along the road to represent telegraph poles.

92 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

When this was all done the Indian walked again to the
capital. ** Now/' he said, " we have a village. May we have
a school? "

Yes, he got the school, and some two hundred and fifty
children attend it.

When you hear tales like this you understand why the men
and women who are working so hard and at such small pay
to open the minds of the Mexican masses are so filled with
exaltation. If Cortez and his friars brought the first torch
of modern learning to this continent, these humble teachers
are spreading its light into corners never reached before.
They are the new conquistadors, and I, for one, salute them.

^Accurate but Untrue

He flitted in at twilight, a dusty moth, worn and weary with
his efforts to keep off the beaten path. Self-righteous was his
disdain for " tourists."

" They roll in a groove," he said, " Three days in the
capital, taking in a bullfight, a pelota game, a trip to the
pyramids and the shrine of Guadalupe, the floating gardens,
the castle of Chapultepec, and lunch at San Angel

" Then to Cuernavaca,* Taxco and possibly Acapulco. If
they aren't entirely exhausted they go back to Mexico and
take a trip to Uruapan or Oaxaca or both* They may even
get to Orizaba, where they visit the market and as many
churches as their tired feet will allow. And so, home, having
*seen' Mexico,"

His voice was scornful as he gave this itinerary and it is
an accurate one of the average visitor. Not for him was
such ordered routine. He has his own car and he goes only
to places that have not been " spoiled " by foreigners. It is
his firm conviction that he is really getting at the heart of
Mexican life.

Somehow he puts me in mind of the Indian agent I once met
in Santa Fe> I asked him if he understood the Indians.
" Well," he said, " the first year I was out here I understood
'em fine. The second year I understood 'em so well I nearly
wrote me a book about Indians. But that was forty years ago.
I wouldn't say, now, that I understood Indians."

This business of getting off the beaten track is to my mind
largely illusion. It is one thing to speak enough Spanish to

93

94 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

get around to be able to ask "how far?" and "how
much? " It is another thing to speak Spanish well enough for
conversation on delicate and abstract subjects. And it is still
a third thing to penetrate the racial barriers which rise high
behind those of language.

This is true in any country. It would take many months
of residence in a Norman village, for instance, before one
could begin to grasp the queer combination of fortitude and
dour suspicion which is the Norman character. It would take
at least a year and hard study of Provencal before one could
be on speaking terms with the soul of southern France. In
Mexico the difficulties in the way of understanding are almost
insurmountable; for Mexico is not European, it is Asiatic.

Most of what a traveler writes is nonsense because he falls
continually into the mistake of drawing conclusions. He
believes too much of what he hears and tends to consider every
conversation typical.

Suppose, for example, that I interviewed three Mexicans
a college professor, a politician and a man of large affairs.
Each assured me that the present government was dictator
ship in disguise; that the ignorant masses were being swayed
by unscrupulous agitators; that communism was rearing its
horrid head in high places; that, in general, the future of the
land was dark.

I would be tempted to dash off an article on the public
opinion of Mexico. I refrain from dashing off that article
because I have lately had long conversations with three Ameri
cans a college professor from Wisconsin, a member of the
Ohio legislature and a California businessman. Each viewed
the trend of American government with undisguised alarm;
each deplored the tendency to mob rule and class conscious
ness; each was admittedly skeptical of democracy. Had a

ACCURATE BUT UNTRUE 95

Mexican journalist interviewed these men he could have
drawn a picture of life in the United States which would have
been as dismally untrue as it would have been verbally accu
rate.

The moral of ail this is that one cannot get the truth by
merely noting the words of one man or a thousand. The
truth if there be such a thing is a composite of what is
seen and heard and experienced, but most of all felt. And no
great part of that truth is ever to be imprisoned in any loose-
woven net of words.

The only conclusion I have been able to reach about Mexico
is that Mexico, like the rest of the world, is split wide between
left and right. The conversation of a Mexican landowner or
businessman is indistinguishable from the conversation of an
American of similar status. The Mexican farmer and artisan
have substantially the same ideas as their American proto
types. In Mexico, as elsewhere, there is the same cleavage
between the haves and the have-nots;" the same cruel, wasteful
struggle for economic democracy; the same tangle of idealism
and political chicane.

I asked one Mexican what he thought of Cardenas and he
answered, " He is like Roosevelt/* I asked another Mexican
the same question and the answer was the same. The differ
ence was in the tone of voice. The difference was enormous.
And there, as the French say, you are.

^Atrocities

Here is an excerpt from a letter, postmarked Chicago:

" I have long hoped that a journalist as discerning as your
self would visit Mexico and tell the truth about it. I had
such high hopes when you started out, but you have let me
down. . . . The real Mexico is so different from your im
pressions of it that those who know it well are chuckling over
the ease with which you have been deceived, and sighing over
your lost opportunity. ... If you have the courage to elude
your official guides and go alone into the country you will see
that what happened in Mexico under Obregon in 1924 is
being repeated under Cardenas and Trotzky in 1937. . . .
I dare you to see the real Mexico and tell the truth about it."

Ah me, I have hunted hard for the "real " Mexico, but
four weeks proves not enough time for the finding of it. True,
I have found Manuel the mozo and Ignacia the maidservant
and Pedroza the schoolmaster and Eduardo the ex-hacendado,
and many more. I have talked to rich men and beggar-
men and men who I suspect were thieves. All " real "
enough, heaven knows, but still Mexico eludes me.

I take some comfort in the experience of Dwight Morrow
when he came down here to be ambassador. He gathered a
group of Americans old-timers here and asked them to
give him the truth about Mexico. Up spake the Nestor of
them all a resident here for forty years. " Ask any tourist
who has been here overnight," said this man. " He can tell
you more than I can."

A visitor like myself deals inevitably with the surface of

96

ATROCITIES 97

things. He may guess that the rich brocade of Mexican life
has a seamy side, but if he is honest he will keep his reports to
what he has seen and felt, and be careful about what he has
merely heard. I repeat, therefore, that what I have personally
experienced of Mexico has been gracious and agreeable, and
at no time has my tour been officially conducted.

If I have been hoodwinked by appearance and have under-
emphasized the uglier aspects of Mexican life, my fault has
been no greater than if I had confined my observations to
poverty, disease, "drunkenness, inadequate hotel accommoda
tions and the crimes of revolution. For to no country do
Shakespeare's words apply so aptly as they do to Mexico
" a skein of mingled yarn, of good and ill together."

Mexico is no paradise. Much of its water is unsafe to
drink. Salads are dangerous and pork is doubtful. I am
told, by people who ought to know, that typhus, dysentery,
malaria and syphilis are widely prevalent. Some doctors say
that Mexico City is no place for anyone with a pulmonary
complaint. Some say that it is no place for people of any
sort. An American bacteriologist assures me that the worst
sanitary conditions in Mexico are found in lovely Xochi-
milco whence come most of the vegetables for the capital.

Poverty -T- hideous poverty is to be seen everywhere
though I must say that I have seen few cases of what seemed
to me malnutrition. Many if not most Mexicans live miser
ably, dress in rags, and have a death rate that must be ap
palling. These people are picturesque, but the charm evapo
rates when you come close enough to see them picking lice
from their hair.

I have never been in India, but a man who has tells me that
there is nothing there to equal the squalor to be seen in Mexico
especially in its capital.

98 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

I have found even the poorest Mexicans to be gentle and
courteous, but I have heard dreadful stories of what they can
do when aroused. I have heard, in detail, what they have done
to priests and nuns and aristocrats, and, lately, what they have
done to government schoolteachers. These are horrible tales,
and true, I have no doubt. But I continue to believe that they
are isolated instances of the sort of savagery which is not un
known even in the enlightened U, S. A.

I have heard many unpleasant tales equally true, I am
sure of men dispossessed of lands or business. But again
it must be remembered that not even the United States has
been guiltless of expropriation. What did we do to the slave
owners? What did we do to the brewers and distillers?

Dear reader, you who dare me to tell the " truth " about
Mexico, please do not forget that Mexico is still in the throes
of social upheaval, and a revolution does not halt to split the
hairs of justice.

Nor is a revolution, awful as it is, ever wholly one-sided.

" The wages of sin is death, even if the sin be economic and
the sinner unconscious of wrong/' says a Mexican who was
once a great landowner and is now a garage mechanic. " The
lands I inherited from my ancestors stretched as far as the eye
could see. I was lord of all therein, the beasts of the field,
the trees and growing things, and the people. I treated them
well or thought I did. I fed and clothed and housed them,
I had schools for them and I cared for them when they were ill.
They produced great wealth for me, which I spent at my ease
abroad. I did not know what my overseers and managers were
doing to produce wealth for me and themselves. The rich
men of your country had better not make the same mistake."

The JWodern Touch

Getting into any hotel is hard enough in Mexico these days,
with a dozen tourists for every available bed. But getting
into the Ref orma is like being listed in the Almanach de Gotha
or being tapped for Skull and Bones at Yale. I managed it
only through the good offices of that excellent travel agent,
Enrique Aguirre. He seems able to manage things that no
body else not even General Motors can manage* (Mr.
Sloan was turned away and, for all I know, had to sleep in one
of his service stations.)

The Ref orma is Mexico's deluxest hotel and it is about
as Mexican as the Ziegfeld Follies. One is startled to hear
Spanish spoken there. In its bathrooms are cloths for wiping
razors and separate faucets for ice water. There are concealed
lights in its closets and you call Room Service on a telephone
lacquered to match the color scheme of your room. Its doors
have buzzers and there is a drugstore downstairs where you can
get ice-cream sodas.

The waiters wear dress suits and the wine steward has a
gold chain around his neck. The rooms are made up while
you are at breakfast and you can buy Time at the newsstand.
It is, in short, as beautifully appointed and well managed a
hostelry as you will find anywhere.

It was instructive, tonight, to sit in the great dining room
and watch the customers. Many of the men wore dinner
jackets and their women even went in for ermine and silver
fox. It was what is known in the trade as a classy crowd.
Also it was a crowd accustomed to getting what it wanted, no

99

ioo NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

matter how much one had to slip into the headwaiter's hand
to get it. The gents, most of them slightly on the paunchy
side, were of the sort that look like Roman emperors, and are
obviously accustomed to command. When they didn't get
the tables they wanted they spoke about it, and in no faint
tone. What the hell, weren't they Americans and spenders?
They didn't care what it cost. They wanted the best.

The entrance looked like the corridor of the Commodore
Vanderbilt when there is a big crowd and only one diner.
Headwaiters scurried about, promising, soothing, whimper
ing about "reservations," and finally demonstrating that to
him who talks loudest and with the most cash shall be given.
Meanwhile the band was playing quaint native folk songs
like " Dancing Cheek to Cheek " and waiters poured cham
pagne and served the four peso table d'hote which is only
a dollar twelve our money, but is tops for Mexico.

Architecturally the Reforma is a triumph of the modern
mode. It symbolizes what is going on in Mexico. The old
folk cling to the colonial, with its patios and great doors barred
tight against the world. The poets and the . idealists favor
the Aztec. The new-rich go in for expensive variants on the
worst of Hollywood. And the forward thinkers build with
glass and aluminum and planished copper in disturbing curves
and angles and great effectiveness.

Before I finish my requiem over the Reforma and return
once more to Mexico I must mention the tearoom on the roof.
There, if you don't mind being deafened by a jazz band, you
can sit and enjoy one of the most notable views in the world.
The city lies spread before you in its ever changing degrees of
whiteness, and for a backdrop there are Popocatepetl and the
maid to whom he was faithless in life, sleeping forever beside
him. That is, you can see them when the clouds and the dust

THE MODEKN TOUCH 101

storms, which are a feature of the winter season, do not get
in the way. In any event, I should star the Reforma roof
garden as one of the sights in Mexico, D. F. Lunch is three
pesos, and it takes as long to get as it does in cheaper places.

This mention of eating suggests Paolo's again. If that
isn't one of the best restaurants in the world, it is certainly one
of the best in this city. It has the rare quality of urbanity. It
is sophisticated and serene. Nothing can disturb its suave
equanimity. Last night, for example, I was feeling the alti
tude and there was no hunger in me. When the headwaiter
himself came to take my order I was a little embarrassed at
ordering only orange juice, despite the fact that it is the Mexi
can custom to eat lightly in the evening. But the order was
taken and served as if it had been for peacocks' tongues and
crepes suzettes and Chateau Rothschild, 1929.

That is what I mean by the urbanity of Paolo's. I am sure
the treatment would have been the same if I had ordered a
single peanut It put me in mind of the time that F. Scott
Fitzgerald won the plaudits of all the gourmets of Paris when
he went into Voisin's, that mecca of epicures, and after long
contemplation of the menu ordered a ham sandwich!

What a man! cried the gourmets. He knew what he
wanted and had the courage to ask for it. Only at Voisin's,
they said, would such a man be honored. (Shortly there
after, I regret to add, Voisin's went out of business!)

Qroofys and

The midnight bells are tolling and besides being dizzy with the
altitude I am a bit sleepy. The irony of this is that once in
bed I shall not be sleepy at all. After one has been in the low
lands, the first few days on the plateau are something of a
strain on the constitution. One's strength is not as great as it
seems; the newcomer will be well advised to rest between his
visits to bullfights, cathedrals, markets and the other sights
that all visitors must see.

Tomorrow I must rise early and be off to Puebla. And as
I trim sails for my voyage overland to the uncharted wilds
southward, I am reminded again of what Prescott said in his
introduction to Life in Mexico, by Madame Calderon de la
Barca letters written in 1839 and still in the front rank of
guides to Mexico:

" Without knowing the language of the lands he visits, a
traveler is as much at fault as a man without an eye for color in
a picture gallery, or an ear for music at a concert. He may see
or hear, indeed, in both, but cut bono? The traveler, ignorant
of the language, may possibly meet a native or two, half de
naturalized, kept to dine with strangers, at his bankers. But
as to the interior mechanism of society, its secret sympathies
and familiar tone of thinking and feeling, he can know no
more than he could of the contents of a library by running over
the rides of strange and unknown authors packed together on
the shelves."

These true words ring in my ears when I attempt to set

102

CROOKS AND CRACKPOTS 103

down my impressions of Mexican politics. The picture is at
best obscured by clouds of conflicting opinion, and it is difficult
to get anyone who knows anything to express himself with
candor. When I asked one man who I knew could tell me
much, he smiled and said, " There is a Spanish proverb that
fools, like fish, are caught by the mouth. 5 *

The men who have something to say will not talk. And
those who will talk have nothing to say worth listening to.
All the reporter can do is keep his ears open, pick up what
unconsidered trifles he can, and, by seasoning his patchwork
of fact with a liberal admixture of intuition, come to some
sort of conclusion.

Though, as one Mexican expressed it, one should never
come to conclusions about Mexico. Conditions change as
rapidly and completely as the cloud formations that are for
ever altering the aspect of the sky. What of the future? The
only answer is a shrug of the shoulders and a fatalistic, Quien
sabe?

Here, perhaps more vividly than anywhere else, one sees
the conflict between idealism and practical politics. My
impression is that Cardenas is an honest man, a sincere man,
with a real faith in the ability of the masses to improve their
condition, become educated and govern themselves. Around
him are men who offer lip service to his proposals but spend
their waking hours quietly lining their pockets.

This, of course, is not unprecedented. Hopelessly mingled
in any land are the aspirations of the crowd and the behavior of
its leaders. The sentimentalist looks only at noble purposes
and takes words at their face value. He is no more foolish than
the cynic who sees nothing but the selfishness of individuals.
Both see only a part of the picture. The visionary is no more
to be dismissed than is the spoilsman, though the extent to

104 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

which each is influenced by the other can never be accurately
measured.

The ideology of the present Mexican government is social
istic and altruistic. It unquestionably has the support of the
mass of the people and is not wholly repudiated even by the
educated minority. If the latter scoff at the government's
attempt to do what they call impossible things, they admit
the government has already done things which seemed im
possible. Everybody agrees that the country is enjoying a
boom, though there are various opinions as to what caused it

But fattening in the shelter of the government's idealistic
program are men who are doing very well for themselves by
serving the republic. There are hangers-on, indistinguishable
in manner and appearance and technique from their brethren
of the United States, about whom tales are whispered and who,
even to the casual eye of the visitor, have prospered rather more
than any services they might render could justify.

Yes, there is graft in Mexico, and money talks, as it does
elsewhere. If one stopped at that and concluded that the
destinies of this nation were in the hands of this tight-lipped
gentry, with their bodyguards flitting about, one might be
pessimistic. But parasites of this sort seem to be part of the
price that democracy has to pay for its progress. They are
annoying, and in time science will find a way to dispose of
them, as it has of other bacteria.

JMingled Yarn

The altitude of the capital is hard on liver and heart. The
visitor should therefore go lightly on liquor and tobacco and
should realize that the energy he feels is a mirage. These
are precisely the things that most visitors don't do. They
spend their days in sight-seeing the hardest kind of work
and, after a heavy dinner, step out to a night club. That they
don't pay a higher price for their folly is only another instance
of how much punishment the human frame can take without
cracking.

While in this advisory mood, let me offer another suggestion
carry your money in bills or coins of small denomination.
Change is the hardest thing there is to find in Mexico, and
it sometimes takes an hour to find someone who can break a
peso. Carrying change, however, is hard on the pockets.
It is no accident that the word " peso " means " weight."

Slowly the complex thing which is Mexican politics begins
to clarify in my mind. As I begin to understand or think
I do my doubts as to the future of the country increase.
Mexico seems, at times, like a vast keg of dynamite which
must some day go off in an explosion similar to that which has
destroyed Spain.

The conditions in the two countries are similar. On the one
hand you have the landowning class cultivated, enterprising
and not so much hostile to political and economic democracy

105

io6 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

as ignorant of it. This group is almost wholly white and of
foreign extraction, more or less remote. As a group it is
sympathetic to the church.

On the other hand you have a group of contrasting ele
ments. At one end are the idealists, men who have read and
traveled and theorized along what we call radical lines. At
the other end are politicians and demagogues who have raised
the art of graft to new levels.

The prize for which these two groups contend is the Indian
population a densely ignorant, superstitious, peaceful,
obstinate mass of human beings who remain as essentially
pagan as their ancestors, and many of whom do not even speak
Spanish.

This great unorganized mass (there is a wide variety of
language, custom and even physical characteristics within it)
has never controlled the country and does not, except in
directly, now. It is merely the raw material with which
agitators fashion thrones for themselves. If today it shouts
"Viva Cardenas! " and votes for land and liberty, it may
tomorrow, yielding to other promisers, vote for someone else.

This, of course, would be in the tradition of our own democ
racy, where from time to time we forge new keys to heaven
and throw the old ones away. But the Indians of Mexico are
not schooled in the give-and-take of politics, as we understand
politics. The Mexicans are intense and without humor.
They cannot lose a political battle and with a grin get ready
for the next one. Politics is a grimmer thing with them than
it is with us. One reason for that, perhaps, is the fact that
they have skipped our stage of pure politics the sham bat
tles of rhetoric which for a generation have passed for politics
with us and have leaped headlong into the pit of economic

MINGLED YARN 107

struggle. Another reason is that in Mexico the minority has
no power.

Those who are disinterested exponents of the present re
gime and defend its socialistic radicalism stake everything on
mass education. Their great weapon is the public school.
They insist that the Indian can be shaken from his ancient
ways, his stubborn individualism, his fatalistic acceptance of
whatever master heaven gives him and, by being taught to
read, write and figure, can be made into a civilized man, will
ing and able to play his part in the collectivism of modern
democracy.

Those who have been despoiled of their lands or are being
hampered in the practice of business by a steadily more arrogant
bureaucracy say this dream can never come true. In support
of their pessimism they point to the many Indians who have
had enough of " land and liberty '* and want to return to the
old ways. Admitting the theoretic desirability of mass edu
cation, they insist that it must move more slowly than the
enthusiasts would have it move.

I talked the other day to an official of the government. He
was urbane, charming and persuasive. As he talked the
suavity left him and his eyes flashed. Today I talked with a
prominent member of the opposition. He was urbane, charm
ing and persuasive, but presently he, too, became violent.

Maybe Mexico can work out a compromise between these
hopelessly conflicting points of view. All Mexicans hope it
can. Some Mexicans think it can. As an observer I cannot
but be dubious. Though, for that matter, I am a little dubious
about the United States. Even that enlightened and homo
geneous country is going to have a tough time, I think, reach
ing an amicable solution of the economic differences which

io8 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

split it now. We have had public schools for nearly five gen
erations, but apparently something more than education is
needed to make such a man as Mr, Lewis of the miners see
eye to eye with Mr. Sloan of the motors.

If the United States is so far from being one big happy
family, it is not hard to understand why Mexico seethes with
volcanic rumblings, and why anyone who attempts to proph
esy its future is foolish to put his prophecies in writing.

J^Lcmorable ^Afternoon

The greatest stabilizing influence in Mexico is the tourist
traffic. Take the case of the Reforma Hotel the finest
establishment of its sort in Mexico and, from the standpoint
of architecture, equipment and location, one of the finest in the
world. In this magnificent caravanserai it took me twenty
minutes to get a chambermaid. I waited nearly an hour for
someone to bring me breakfast.

If you will stand for ten minutes in the lobby of the Reforma
you will hear more Anglo-Saxon profanity than in any place I
know. The air seethes with American anger. You hear one
tale after another of incompetence and mismanagement, and
you groan inwardly at the unfortunate impression of Mexico
these newcomers are getting.

The irony of it all is that the management is not to blame.
The fault is the undigested liberty with which the Mexican
people are now overloaded.

The present government holds power because of working-
class approval. All its sympathies are with labor. The em
ployer and the petty bourgeoisie are for the moment in eclipse.
Unionism is strong, and each day new laws are enacted to
strengthen the position of the proletariat.

Hours and conditions of work are strictly regulated. There
are heavy separation allowances. The person who hires help,
be he an individual householder or a hotel manager, is obliged
to compromise between abstract notions of efficiency and the all
too real power that the employee now wields.

Into this picture comes the tourist, demanding service and

109

i io NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

not giving a whoop for the rights and comfort of anybody but
himself. If the Mexican hotelkeeper can't fire chambermaids
for not answering bells, then the tourist will not come to
Mexico. The thing is quite simple. And so, I think, there
will presently be a compromise. In order to maintain the
flow of tourist gold, a good part of which filters down to pro
letarian pockets, the Mexican workers will consent to trade a
little liberty for a little discipline and efficiency. From a
theoretic standpoint this will be unfortunate, but money talks,
here as well as elsewhere.

If hospitality has anywhere been raised to a higher point
than it attains in Mexico I do not know the address. Sunday
we had a taste of Mexican hospitality at its best when we
lunched with friends in the country* When one passes the for
bidding front door of a Mexican home he becomes one of
the family, and when we sat down to the heavily laden board
of our host we were made to feel that we were of the establish
ment.

And what an establishment! The house must date from
the rime of Cortez, and before the meal we washed our hands
in a bowl that was two hundred years old. The house was
filled with furniture that would make a collector envious,
and in every corner were things worthy of preservation in a
museum.

The sun was high when the repast began, and twilight
was upon us when we finally gave in. There were soup and
strange vegetables with stranger sauces, and a dish to delight
the heart of an epicure mole de guajolote turkey, I be
lieve, drowned in a mixture of peppers and chocolate and sheer
genius. This called for a lesson in the use of the tortilla. One
tears this thin round cake into quarters, and from them fashions

MEMORABLE AFTERNOON m

little scoops with which to catch up the mole. One of the
guests was expert at this pastime, doing it with one hand,
like an old-rime westerner rolling a cigarette. I finally gave
up and used a spoon.

I am sure I did everything wrong. Mexicans are punctil
ious about manners and we Americans must seem brusque
to them. But nothing was ever said about the mistakes I
made, and the nearest thing to a reproach I had was when
one of the guests warned me not to drink milk after eating a
cbirimoya a delicious fruit. He said it made people crazy.

That afternoon was one long to be remembered. Our host
and his four children, ranging from seventeen years down,
all spoke English and, although his wife unfortunately did
not, it was demonstrated once again that warm and friendly
hearts get along surprisingly even without a bridge of language
between them.

Over the coffee and the mamey another fruit new to
me we talked. Our host was a freethinker as to religion
and a liberal as to politics, mistrustful of both communism
and fascism, willing to concede the good points of the present
Mexican government, but fully alive to its shortcomings. He
told tales with an Alice in Wonderland flavor, of property-
being assessed for improvements to an extent greater than the
value of the property, and of the manifold vexations that had
to be endured by a businessman in a society that teetered
uncertainly between socialism and older ways of life.

His wife was a staunch Catholic, but fully aware of the
corrupt ways into which the Mexican church had fallen.
She and the friend who interpreted for her were on the
whole glad that the church had been shorn of its temporal
power. The power of religion was not, she said, in buildings

ii2 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

and lands and the riches of this earth. She felt that out of the
strife of the past would come a better state and a better church.
Yes, a memorable afternoon, and I regret that more Ameri
cans cannot have such an experience. It would give them a
better idea of Mexico than they could get from a whole library
of guidebooks.

the Hand of Fate

This morning, before shoving off for Puebla, I encountered an
American lady just arrived from the north. She was frankly
awed by my intention to penetrate what she called " the
interior/ T In her eyes Dr. Livingston could not have been
more daring when he buried himself in the Congo. As a
matter of fact, the trip from the capital to Puebla is just about
the same in distance, danger and arduousness as the trip from
Chicago to Milwaukee. The driving is considerably easier.
This lady, however, did not know this. All she knew of
Mexico was what she had heard. And some of the tales she
had heard were horrific.

One was particularly delightful. A -friend of hers, a
member of the Garden Club, had told of an experience in
Cuernavaca. It appears that the ladies of the Garden Club
were visiting the Morrow gardens. Suddenly on a nearby
mirador appeared a creature in a yellow serape. He wore an
enormous straw hat tied grotesquely under his swarthy chin,
and he made the most awful faces. Truly a dreadful creature,
she said. And he kept shouting in the most threatening tones :
"Gringo pigs! Gringo pigs! "

Now this stoiy is wholly true. But the dreadful creature
in the serape was none other than Lloyd Lewis, American
journalist and historian, who was a visitor in an American
home next door to the Morrow establishment.

A chair a most ingenious and comfortable chair was
at the bottom of our visit to Puebla. We first saw it far down

1 14 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

in Acapulco, and all we could learn o its origin was that it had
been made by a man in Puebla.

Picturing Puebla as a sun-baked hamlet, we thought that
it would be easy to find the chairmaker. Fancy our surprise
when we found Puebla to be a city of a hundred and fifty
thousand, the third or fourth largest in Mexico and by far the
most modern. It is the only city designed by the Spaniards
all the others having been superimposed on native towns.
It is therefore Andalusian in architecture, with broad, well
paved streets running at right angles to one another and
straight as arrows. The people, too, are better dressed
that is, a greater portion of them wear modern costume.

Baffled by all this, we drew up at a curb, wondering what
to do next. Immediately a guide appeared, assuring us that
he was the best in town, and that he could, among other
things, secure us entree to private homes. This was a bad
mistake on his part; for nothing in this world is more private
than the privacy of a Mexican home. So we returned to our
wondering. At that point fate took us by the hand.

Another young man approached, offering his services as
guide. His name was Alfonso Martinez, and in desperation
we engaged him. This, it turned out, was one of the best
moves we ever made, for the young man, a scholar, musician
and man-about-town and a Methodist who neither smokes
nor drinks, proceeded to make himself invaluable.

He first asked us what we wished to see, and we told him
the truth. We confessed our guilty passion for the chair we
had seen in Acapulco. He did not smile indulgently or look
blank. No! In the excellent English he had learned in the
schools of Puebla he said that he would conduct us to the
sanitarium of Dr. Quintana, where there was such a chair as we
had described. And lo, he was right! The good doctor was

THE HAND OF FATE 115

about to leave for a period of study at the Mayo clinic in
Minnesota. He wanted American currency. We wanted
his chair. Everything was arranged, and convinced now that
we had nothing to do but follow Senor Martinez wherever he
might lead, we drove out to what was once the great Aztec city
of Cholula site of the decisive battle between the Spaniards
and the Indians.

Wherever one looks in this amazing place one sees churches.
The guidebooks say there are three hundred and sixty-five
one for every day in the year. This is an exaggeration; there
are only two hundred and fifty-two about one to a family
would be my guess*

It would be a mistake, however> to attribute this mania for
church building to the conquistadors, for all they did was to
build churches on existing Aztec shrines and temples.
The pyramid merely grew into a church, and the Aztec
symbols of the sun and moon were assimilated by the new
comers and became part of the ecclesiastic architecture of New
Spain. One thing is certain if the Franciscans and the
Dominicans built more churches than would seem to be
necessary they certainly built them well They brought all the
artificial beauty that exists in Mexico today, and no matter how
far off the beaten track the visitor may roam, his eye will rest
contentedly on a poem in stone, bound with consummate
artistry between the covers of cloud and flowing hills.

The years pass, but the folly of men remains. Some day,
perhaps, antiquaries will muse over the ruins of American
towns and marvel that a people so civilized in other respects
should have found it necessary to have so many gas stations.

the Custom

I have always had a prejudice against guides. They have a
set route and a set patter, and any personal alterations are
upsetting. When you take a guide you see what he wants you
to see, and you hear whatever he has memorized, including
several shopworn jokes.

But, like everything else in Mexico, its guides are different.
Most of those I have met are young men of education, and
more than one of them has proved to be the scion of a family
that once ruled the land now taken over by the tourist. Not
every tourist knows the background of the young- man he
pays so much an hour to show him around, and occasionally
one is treated to the droll spectacle of a visitor still at the stage
of eating with a knife being patronizing to a guide whose
ancestors came over with Cortez.

The Mexican aristocracy has had to swallow a lot of pride in
the last couple of decades, and I must say it has done the
job gracefully. These people do little repining and philo
sophically turn their hands to whatever means of livelihood
is open.

Criticism of the tourist does not come from the blue bloods
who tend bar for him, manage his hotels and steer him around
the ruins. The gentleman, reduced by revolution to penury,
is a stoic about it, and if in his heart he feels a legitimate con
tempt for the uncouth barbarians whom fate has made his
masters he says nothing. As a matter of fact, he really
feels less contempt than tolerant amusement. Amazing as
it must seem to a self-satisfied American, the cultivated

116

NOT THE CUSTOM 117

Mexican finds us a rather droll lot. As one of them said to
me, we are " primitive."

The real contempt for us is felt by the Indians. They are
shocked by the way some of us drink, and by the way some
of our women dress. Unlike us, they do not change their
habits from year to year. They cannot understand what we
mean by " fashion." And so when they see an American
woman in shorts they are scandalized. It is useless to point
out to them that the native women wear decollete dresses
which would create a commotion on an American street.

All one can do is shrug one's shoulders and say, as the
French do, " Other lands, other customs."

One Mexican custom that few Americans can understand
is the habit of bargaining. If it is not universal it is so nearly
so that the exceptions are notable. To an American it is a
nuisance. In the opinion of many Mexicans it is one of the
chief barriers to the economic progress of the nation, and there
are many efforts to establish a system of fixed prices.

So far there is no evidence that these efforts have been suc
cessful. When you buy anything from a Mexican you must
bargain for it. The Mexican likes to bargain. The play of
wits, the practical psychology involved, the variance in results,
all conspire to make an amusement out of what would other
wise be a dull routine of trade. How much more fun it is, says
the Mexican, to haggle over a price, gaining a little here and
losing a little there, exercising all the arts of persuasion,
detecting the weak spot in a customer's character, playing upon
his cupidity and nursing his folly, than merely to go through
the day monotonously ringing up the same transaction over
and over.

A friend of mine happened to want a half dozen chairs of
a certain sort. One day a native passed his house leading a

n8 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

burro on which were packed half a dozen chairs of just the
sort my friend wanted.

My friend hurried out to the road and halted the merchant.
ct Go no farther/' he said. " You can spare yourself the long
walk to the market; for I shall buy all your chairs."

To his surprise, the native shook his head.

Thinking it a question of price, my friend raised his original
offer. Still the native shook his head. My friend raised his
price a third time, but with no greater success.

Finally, in exasperation and bewilderment (for he had
offered a price considerably above the market value of the
chairs) , my friend demanded to know why the native would
not consent to a sale. It was odd, he thought; for he was
saving the man the long walk to and from the market and,
besides, was offering more money than he could hope to get in
the usual way.

The native's explanation was quite simple. " It is not the
custom," he said quietly. And with a chirrup to his burro lie
resumed his plodding course to the market in the valley below.

From the native's point of view that answer was sufficient.
What he meant was that if he sold all his chairs at one fell
swoop he would be cheated out of a day's pleasant haggling in
the market place. He had risen before dawn and walked
many miles for that pleasure. It was really rather unkind of
my friend to try to buy it away from him.

Small wonder the American finds Mexico hard to under
stand!

learning to ose

Most visitors to the unique city of Puebla spend only an hour
or two there. They drive from the capital, arriving about
noon. They take a hasty squint at the cathedral in some
respects the most remarkable church in the New World,
with an intricacy of carved stonework that fills one with
awe for the patience and ingenuity of man; then they rush
through the bootleg convent of Santa Monica of which
more anon and about three, after a quick skip through
Cholula's church of the forty-nine domes, they start the drive
back to Mexico, D. E Sometimes they carry box lunches
with them when they might be having jaibas rellenas
crabs of great delicacy cooked by Senora Victoria Gutierez
at the Cafe Ritz as good a restaurant as I have found any
where.

These hit-and-run visitors do not visit the library. They do
not even know there is one. There alone one could spend a
month. There are gathered no fewer than twenty-four thou
sand manuscript books, any one of which would be kept under
glass in an American museum, and priceless incunabula can
be examined more readily than one could examine the tariff
sheet in an American railway office.

Our guide was thoroughly at home in this library the
third oldest on the American continent, the first being in
Lima, Peru, and the second in Mexico City, The one in
Puebla was built in 1648, and the original shelving is still
in use. Even the clock is an old-rimer, having ticked steadily
for one hundred and twenty years.

119

120 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

Time pressed, but it was hard to drag myself away from the
marvels laid before my astonished eyes. One in particular was
an atlas, printed by Christopher Plantin in 1584, which dis
closed some things I had not before known about the United
States.

The southern part was mapped in great detail and with
considerable accuracy. The northern part was blank,- save for
two words "Saguenai," at approximately where Saginaw
stands today; and " Chilaga," at about where the Ohio and the
Mississippi meet. No rivers, however, were shown. And
the great lakes were shown only as an arm of the Arctic ocean.
It was explained in the text that all this territory was the
land of the Chilaga Indians could this have any bearing
on the origin of the word " Chicago "?

There was another map, no less interesting, showing the
missions and settlements in the interior of Africa. From
this one must conclude that the Dark Continent was less dark
in the sixteenth century than it is today.

There had been hundreds of American tourists in Puebla
the preceding week, said the director of the library, and not
one had visited his treasure house. And none, I fear, visited
the school, built in 1932 in honor of Aquiles Serdan, the first
victim of the revolution of 1910.

There are few public schools in the United States to equal
this establishment. Here are modern buildings set in a vast
acreage of garden and ponds laid out to form a map of Mexico.
On the end wall of one of the buildings is a giant map of the
state of Puebla, done in colored tile. The study of geography
is no chore in this school.

Another place visited by few tourists is the public recrea
tional center, with its swimming pool, gymnasium, theater,
dance floor, bandstand and what not all of the most

LEARNING TO LOSE 121

modern construction and all free to the populace. Here
young Mexico is learning to play perhaps its most im
portant lesson. Those who know tell me that the awakening
interest in sports is the most hopeful thing in Mexico today.
These people say that when the Mexican can take a licking
without feeling in honor bound to avenge it violently, Mex
ico will find many of its political problems solved.

There are many people uninterested in churches, but no
one can visit the recently (1934) discovered convent of Santa
Monica without remembering it always. Here was what was
always supposed to be a private home. Then, accidentally, the
police discovered a concealed door which led into a convent.
More secret passages were revealed, connecting the convent
with a church, and probably with other parts of the city.
Here, unsuspected by the world, a large number of nuns
lived and worked and died, just as their predecessors had done
for a century or more.

Today the premises are being used by the government as
a sort of ecclesiastical chamber of horrors and museum of the
work and practices of the religious orders. Here, again, I
could have tarried for many hours, in a mixture of awe at what
asceticism can endure, and admiration for the exquisite beauty
of the things those prayerful hands turned out. But there was
the train for Oaxaca to be caught, not to speak of one quick
glance at the battlefield red with the setting sun, where the last
of the Aztec bronze melted under the steel of Cortez.

Qaps and CyP rcss

Racing to catch the train for Oaxaca (which, incidentally, is
pronounced "Wawhocca") the taxi ran through a stop
light, which brought the law down on us. This involved a
delay while the driver talked himself out of a ten peso fine.
We might have missed the train if it had not been, as usual,
a couple of hours late.

The dim-lit waiting room was crowded with Indians, dozing
in their scrapes or suckling their young, as the sex might be;
but even here there were Americans. One sat down beside me
and asked how I liked Mexico. When I told him he said
he liked it pretty well, too. Then he said: " Just before I
left home I was reading some newspaper articles by a fellow
named O'Brien. He. . . ."

There was only one thing to do. I had to interrupt him
and reveal the truth. At that he held out his hand. * ' I don't
know how right you are about the rest of Mexico, because I've
only seen a little of it. But boy, you certainly were right about
the noise of Taxco! "

The train to Oaxaca has what are called Pullmans, and it is
true that they were built by the Pullman Company. But the
track is narrow gauge, and so are the cars. Furthermore, the
berths are in proportion. I am no giant, but there was only an
inch or so between the top of my head and the wall of the com
partment.

If you ever travel this way, get a compartment if you can.
It is worth the extra cost. And if you win the toss, take the

122

GAS-TANK CAPS AND CYPRESS 123

upper berth. It is no downy couch, but it is downier than the
lower, which is about as downy as a piece of plank.

And when you can't figure out a way of turning out the
light, don't ring for the conductor, as we did, but do the
obvious thing and unscrew the bulb if you can reach it.
Some lights have switches and some have not. Do not ask me
why.

Though the beds are hard and the roadbed harder, the cars
are clean and smell pleasantly of disinfectant. In the morning
the berths will be made up in a fraction of the time required
for an American berth, and one of the several porters will
serve an excellent breakfast, some of which, if you are careful,
you can get down your gullet. Do not, however, attempt to
pour coffee when rounding a curve.

Waiting for us in the bright morning sun we found Carlos
Corres ex-hacendado, whose estates went the way of so
many estates in the revolution. He now gains his daily bread
by showing tourists around Oaxaca. And I can state with
authority that he knows enough about the very considerable
past of that community to satisfy even a schoolmaster. What
is more, he is a psychologist with a sense of humor, and he
understands tourists as well as he does ruins. That is, he
knows just how much ruin any given tourist can take without
indigestion, a rare and precious quality in a guide.

It is irrelevant, at this point, to talk about the caps on gas
tanks, because there is no road to Oaxaca, and if you come
here you will not come by car. But even with the few cars
which have come to Oaxaca by freight, the national vice of
stealing gas-tank caps is enthusiastically practiced.

When you park a car in Mexico you unscrew the cap of the
gas tank and put it in your pocket. You need not worry about
the contents of the tank, for the Mexicans are a primitive

124 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

people not as yet at the cultural level of the United States
and have not therefore thought of siphoning off the gaso
line.

This constant worry about the whereabouts of my gas-tank
cap annoyed me to such an extent that I took up the matter
with a high official of the Mexican government. I said some
thing should be done about it. He agreed with me, and,
turning to a secretary, directed a letter be dispatched to all
state officials and municipalities suggesting that this evil be
forthwith stopped.

Then he turned back to me with the grave assurance that
no more gas-tank caps would be stolen. I could not but
reflect on the comment of one observing Mexican who assured
me that the outstanding weakness of the Mexican character
was its tendency to accept a thing planned as a thing com
pleted. That, he said, was why one saw so many unfinished
buildings in Mexico. And that was why, too, all the altruistic
vaporings of the present government would come to nothing.

Maybe so. Today I visited a sight that fills even a Cali-
fornian with awe a tree said to be six thousand years old.
From time immemorial the Indians have worshiped it as a
symbol of life eternal. This giant cypress has heard the
altruistic vaporings of countless generations of men and seen
them come to nothing. Yet if it could speak, I think it would
say that man has made some progress since it was a sapling.

Under the <%ed Flag

It is the unexpected things that give savor to travel When
we arrived in Oaxaca we found to our dismay that our guide
had a party of tourists in tow. With the tendency that every
tourist has to look down on other tourists, and disliking the
personally conducted tour anyway, we were not pleased. We
bowed coldly when we were introduced to the two couples
from San Francisco who were to share our visit to Mitla, and
resigned ourselves to the worst. Well, they turned out to be
most cultivated, amusing, generally agreeable folk; and our
journeyings about this region would not have been nearly so
pleasurable without them.

Oaxaca is visited for the most part by travelers with a serious
purpose. People whose major interests are night clubs and
the movies stick close to the capital; and flibbertigibbets like
myself, who tire easily of churches and grow quickly saturated
with ruins, stick closer to the beaten path. Oaxaca is a long
way from the capital; and the ruins of Mitla are a long, dusty,
jolting way from Oaxaca.

For the archaeologist and the architect, these buildings con
structed of massive stone blocks by a people who did not know
the use of the wheel are extraordinarily interesting. Even to
such an ignoramus as myself, incapable of distinguishing
between Zapotec, Miztec, Toltec and Aztec no matter how
many times the differences are explained, these relics of a
faraway past, standing alone in the trackless desert, are singu
larly impressive.

Here the civilization of this continent reached one of its

125

126 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

highest points, only to die and disappear why, no one
knows. I climbed dutifully to the top of what once were
majestic temples; and, candle in hand, crawled into what once
were tombs. But I think I was most moved when I stood
on the remains of a wall, gazing off at a gang of laborers work
ing on a stretch of what is to be the Pan-American highway.

The old was silent, but the new echoed to the clang of pick
and shovel. In one year, or two three, maybe if the
money can be found and if politics will concern itself more
with communication and less with definitions of " liberty "
there will be gas stations clustered about the tombs of Mitla
and cars will go whizzing by, rolling down to Rio and beyond.

Today you can drive on a paved highway from New York
to Tehuacan, where the good road ends in a luxurious modern
hotel, all complete with tennis courts and swimming pool.
Tomorrow you can push on to Oaxaca and the ruins of Mitla.
The next stretch will be to Guatemala. And before the paper
on which this prophecy is printed has crumbled into dust there
will be good going for the motorist from Canada to Buenos
Aires.

Coca-Cola is here already there is no town so remote
as not to have it. And basketball follows close behind. One
may travel for days by foot and burro and still come upon
Indians amusing themselves with this importation from the
north.

The leaders of modern Mexico lay heavy stress on games.
They are a substitute for the pulque with which such a large
part of the population has long been accustomed to find
surcease from woe and boredom. They have or it is hoped
they will have a valuable psychological effect. When the
Mexican people have learned to play games, and to lose with
out rancor, they will have taken a long step toward political

UNDER THE RED FLAG 127

stability. Hitherto, elections have settled little, for the de
feated candidate usually felt in honor bound to resort to
homicide.

So it is that you see basketball fields even oftener than you
see the hammer and sickle and the intertwined red flags
around the slogan, " Viva Marx." Mexico has got commu
nism all mixed up with stout lungs and sturdy biceps; and
even the army is busy jumping rope.

Oh, yes, Mexico is very " red." There are signs of that
everywhere. Even far out in the desert we stumbled on the
remains of a Dominican monastery now used as a school for
teachers. Everywhere on its walls were revolutionary paint
ings filled with the red flag; and on one doorway were chiseled
the names of the anarchists convicted, long ago, of the Hay-
market riots in Chicago. Lenin glares down at you, cheek by
jowl with Zapata and other notable burners of haciendas,
indifferent to the incongruous setting for their portraits. Be
yond doubt this center of learning is as red as anything in
Moscow.

But somehow the redness doesn't seem to reach the Indians.
Stubborn fellows, they persist in associating land with liberty;
and land, to them, means the private ownership thereof.
What the Indian wants is forty acres and a mule or the
Mexican equivalent of that, which is a couple of acres and a
burro. That seems to be as far as he has gone toward under
standing the "brotherhood of man."

Intellectually, Mexico may be communist; but at least 90
per cent of the population remains about as communist as
Iowa. And the present Mexican government has its eyes
fixed prayerfully on the 90 per cent.

>o, the "Poor Indian

In the Indian town of Zimatlan, two days by burro from the
railroad, and reached by gasoline only because the Mexican has
not learned that one should have a heart, even with a motorcar,
I am moved to pass on what I have learned about photography
for those amateurs who may come to this deceptive land.

In the first place the light is not as bright as it seems to be.
The sun is more dazzling to the eye than to film. Wear dark
glasses, but open your diaphragm at least twice as wide as you
think you should. If you use a light meter take your reading
close up to the principal object you wish to photograph. Don't
stand off at a distance and take the reading of all outdoors.

Suppose, for example, you want to catch one of the pictur
esque types with which every Mexican street is filled. He
will be on the shady side of the street, because only mad dogs
and Americans walk out in the noonday sun. He will thus
be in a light at least ten times weaker than the light on the
sunny side. Furthermore, his face will probably be shaded by
a big sombrero. And lastly, his skin will be the color of choco
late.

So, fellow. amateurs remember the old rule: Expose for
the shadows and let the high lights take care of themselves.

Certain economists ask us to believe that the Indian is really
happier than the wage worker in our modern industrial system.
One can make a fairly good case for this argument, provided
one does not see too much of the life that the Indians actually
lead.

128

Lo, THE POOR INDIAN 129

The fact is that the life of the average Indian is one of
dxtreme physical discomfort. He is subject to all sorts of
pestilence, of which malaria and syphilis are outstanding.

In one waterless region the natives subsist almost entirely
on the maguey plant a cactus from which they secure
clothing and the thread with which to sew it, materials for
their houses, food for their stomachs and pulque with which
to quench their thirst. And from the pulque they distill
tequila and mescal, with which they get extremely drunk and
forget how essentially miserable is the life of an Indian.

The Indian never knows a bed. He is born, sleeps and
dies on a mat called a petate. He shivers when it is cold and
is wet when it rains. He labors from dawn to dark at a wage
as low as fifteen centavos a day a trifle over four cents. For
the straw hat of bright colors that fetches several dollars when
it reaches the shops of the north, the Indian who makes it gets
five centavos something over a penny. Nothing in our
system of mass production equals the " speedup " under which
these Indians live. They weave steadily, even when moving
from place to place. They hardly dare stop to eat.

If they are farmers they have to trudge miles to a market
to dispose of their produce, getting a few pennies for it if they
are lucky, and nothing if they are not. They are free, now,
many of them working for themselves. They should therefore
be as happy as larks and sing as they turn out beautiful things.
I have not observed that they do.

The more I learn about the Indians the more nonsensical
appear the ideas I formerly had about them. Consider, for
example, their teeth. They seem to have such good teeth.
But a man who has lived among them says that their good
teeth are in front. The back teeth decay early.

Their character, says this same man, presents a similar

contradiction. They look fierce but are not. They drink too
much but are not quarrelsome, even in liquor. They are
skeptical of the white man, especially of his love of gold, and
among the Yaquis, for instance, to go prospecting is to court
suicide. Many of them speak no language but their own,
and this, often, is only a spoken language.

They remain wedded to their ancient faith, and even when
they are professing Christians the churches they attend show
the Aztec symbols of the sun and moon interwoven with the
cross. They are chaste, according to their lights, and their
moral code is rigorous if simple. And, according to my
authority, they are notably honorable. The best qualities in
the Mexican character, he says, are those which derive from
the Indian strain.

I suppose the next authority I consult will contradict all
this. But until I hear a contradiction I am willing to let these
observations stand. They coincide with what I have seen for
myself.

Qoing Too Far

I suppose I should say something about the gorgeous view from
Monte Alban, for it most certainly is gorgeous. I should say
something, too, about the famous Tomb Number Seven
the King Tut's tomb of the Western world whence came
the treasure trove of the Alban jewels. But all this is covered in
the guidebooks, and anyway I must confess that I am more
interested in live Zapotecas than in dead ones even those
who died twenty centuries ago, leaving such interesting ruins
behind them.

Not so gay, the life of the 1937 Zapotec. His amusements
are few and far between. One game he plays consists of two
teams kicking with the bare toes a wooden ball twenty or
thirty miles across country. (From the poultry on which I
have gnawed I gather that some such game must be played
by the chickens.)

The Indian loves music, and it is said that people who can
play a band instrument are in danger of being kidnaped. So
great is this passion for music that the inhabitants of one small
and remote village, none of whom earned over a half peso a
day, scraped together two hundred and fifty pesos to bring a
band across the mountains for an evening concert.

In the plaza of Oaxaca, the other night, I heard a band that
Sousa could not beat. The benches were full of Indians
wrapped in their scrapes and somberly content.

One of the first things an Indian buys, when he prospers, is
a radio. I have yet to visit a community so remote that it
does not have one or more loud-speakers constantly in use. It

132 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

has been only for few and fleering moments during my sojourn
in Mexico that I have been out of earshot of some radio. One
of the significant tales I have heard concerns an industrialist
a printer doing a rather large business. Vexed with constant
strikes and steadily increasing taxation, he resolved to quit.
It seems that the new laws of Mexico forbid an individual or
corporation to liquidate or sell a business. If they want to quit
they have to turn over their assets to their workers or to the
state. So this man kissed his not inconsiderable property good-
by and took on the sales agency of an American-made radio.
He says he is doing as well or better than he did as a printer
with nothing much to lose should the " people " grow more
vexatious than they are now.

I hear his story duplicated on all sides. What has hap
pened, I think, is that the socialistic state, in its reaction from
the too capitalistic state, has gone too far. If the foreign in
vestor was too greedy, so are the " people. " One of these
days, not far off, there will be a reaction and compromise.

Today, at lunch, I heard a tale that any visitor to Mexico
must hear with dismal frequency. It was the story of a family
which for a dozen generations have been landed proprietors.
They paid their laborers well, and besides wages gave them
food, clothing, shelter, medical care and schools. They pro
duced much wealth and the community was prosperous.
Then came the revolution, with its cry of land and liberty.

Without compensation, the lands of the family were taken
away. The machinery of their sugar mills rusted away and
was finally sold to the Japanese government as scrap iron. The
peasants moved in and took possession. They own " the
land now, but in small units they cannot farm it as profitably
as it was farmed before. Production has fallen off. The
farmers some of them make more than they did before,

GOING Too FAR 133

but the purchasing power of their money is less. Many of
them sigh regretfully for the days that are gone, and mutter
of counter-revolution. They are free, they say, but for what?

The landed proprietor with his more or less benevolent
feudalism is gone, and the cacique, or local boss, has taken
his place. The campesino remains exploited as he always has
been, while a few clever rascals get rich. This is the story you
hear everywhere, and I have no doubt that it is largely true.

But it is only part of the story. In some localities the
peasants have recognized the economic fallacy of farming in
small units and have formed themselves into cooperatives.
Their production equals or exceeds the production under the
old system. And if they are not notably better off as regards
income they have something they never had before hope.
The horizon has widened, and they are no longer content to
live and die as beasts of burden. They know as well as anyone
that they are not yet at the promised land, but they think they
descry it afar off.

One of these days, says the ex-landowner, the sensible
people of the country will rise and chase the crooks and the
crackpots out. He thinks that Mexico will then return to
what is was before Madero. I do not think so. I agree with
him that the tide will turn, as it always does, but I am con
vinced that feudalism is dead forever.

X 33

Cncounter

Getting out of Oaxaca is harder than getting in. One of the
peculiarities of Mexican hotels is that there is seldom anyone
at the desk. There will be bootblacks in profusion, vendors
of serapes and basketry, assorted mendicants and a mozo or
two, but the business department is usually busy elsewhere
when you want to do business with it.

This peculiarity is akin to that of the Mexican waiter, who
always answers with an enthusiastic " yes! yes! " to whatever
order you give him, and then immediately forgets about it. A
Mexican restaurant is a place for the development of patience.

Our train was due to leave at seven fifteen this morning.
So when we returned to the hotel last night we tried to pay our
bill. But finding no one to accept our money we retired to bed,
assuming that our affairs could be regulated in the morning.

We had been warned that it would be wise to reach the
station well before train time, so we rose at five. The hotel
office was even more deserted than it had been the night before
and, filled with a consciousness of sin, we stole forth in the
darkness, our bill unpaid, to hunt a taxi.

In most American towns the station or depot is at the center
of things, since the railroad usually came first and the town
grew up around it. The reverse is true in Mexico and the
station is usually in a suburb. So, what with finding breakfast
and a cab and the distance we had to ride, it was six thirty
before we reached the station. The more experienced natives
were already there and we had to content ourselves with seats

134

LUCKY ENCOUNTER 135

on the sunny side which, should you ever take this ride
(and I hope you never do!) is on the right, A.M., left P.M.

There were three cars to the train two second-class, in
which the common people were stuffed like sardines, and one
first-class, for tourists and the more prosperous Mexicans.
The chief difference was in the leather padding of the first-class
seats.

Our train was well staffed. There were two conductors
one, apparently, to take the tickets, and the other to watch
him; an auditor, whose function it was to watch both conduc
tors; a brakeman; a train butcher, who sold magazines and
cigarettes; a sweeper-up, who cleaned out the car at every
important stop; and eight soldiers, who munched sugar cane
and looked extremely bored with their assignment.

The railway unions are among the strongest in Mexico, with
the highest scale of wages* It is not hard to understand why
Mexican railway bonds do not reflect the increasing prosperity
of the country. A considerable part of every ticket goes to the
help.

An interesting commentary on life in Mexico was supplied
by one of the two conductors. He had a small satchel for his
belongings, and when the train started he brought out a chain
and padlock, with which he fastened his bag to one of the seats.
Mexicans, I observe, do not trust one another very much.

The rickety little train crawled jokingly along its narrow-
gauge track, and as the sun rose high the car grew hotter and
the seats grew harder. It looked as if it would be a long day.
The scenery ceased to awe and there was a certain sameness
about the quaint native life of the many stations. Fortunately,
however, we found an extraordinary traveling companion in
the person of Eugene Nida, a young American philologist who
was in the employ of the Mexican government, making a

136 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

study of the languages of the Indians. He had lived in remote
places and knew more about the life of the native than anyone
thus far encountered.

From him I learned anew how absurd it is for anyone to
claim a knowledge of Mexico. For one thing, there is as yet
no such thing as " Mexico.' 5 The idea of national unity is
only just beginning to dawn. The people are still divided into
countless groups, racial and linguistic, with roots in localities
rather than in anything that can be called a nation.

Significant among the tales he told was one about a Mexican
philologist who at a meeting of scholars made a speech in Aztec
about his ancestors. One by one he resurrected forgotten
glories. The only hero he did not mention was the only one
that most of us have ever heard of Montezuma. This one
he did not mention because Montezuma, he said, had made
the mistake, never to be forgiven, of trusting the white man.

There, my friends, is a clew to the depths of the problems
that Mexico faces in her efforts to become a nation in our
sense of the word. To this day the Indian does not trust the
white man, and from the Indian the white man derives all his
strength, economic and political.

So we talked and dozed and ate countless bananas, and
finally saw the sun sink slowly behind the mountains. The
cars emptied and the soldiers yawned less frequently. And a
little after nine the train came jerkily to rest in the dim-lit sta
tion of Puebla thirteen hours to go two hundred and fifty
miles. It would' have been a long trip but for Eugene Nida.

Crime and Punishment

Time, they say, means nothing to a Mexican. Maybe so, but
after some weeks of residence in the land of manana I am
compelled to record that all the Mexicans I have known have
been notably prompt in keeping appointments. Our young
guide, Alfonso Martinez, was no exception to this rule, and
we had no sooner finished our papayas and cafe con leche than
he was at our hotel door, as eager as a setter after quail.

I had to be firm with him about churches. Conceding the
variety, historic interest and beauty of the ecclesiastical edifices
he had to show, I insisted that my interest was strongest on
the modern side. So, after compromising by a second visit to
the sacristy of Santo Domingo and another awed glance at its
exquisite stonework, I let him give me a busman's holiday in
the shape of a call on the local newspaper editor, who inter
viewed me on my impressions of Puebla.

From there we went to the penitentiary as astonishing
a place as I have seen in this land of surprises. The exterior
was forbidding enough, but the sunlit court inside was charm
ing. It was filled with prisoners, all busy at some kind of
work. Some were knitting, some making pottery, some
carving, some tilling little gardens. The warden explained
that the products they turned out were taken away by relatives
and sold.

He suggested that we make some purchases ourselves a
sweater, for example, handmade, could be had for only three
pesos considerably less than a dollar. We had no need for
a sweater, but his suggestion brought forth the interesting fact

137

138 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

that the passion for labor unions which has swept over Mexico
has not been halted by prison walls. The prisoners in the
penitentiaries have their own syndicates, established to regulate
the conditions of labor and, above all, to keep prices up.

Another Mexican passion that for education has also
entered the prisons. There is compulsory schooling for the
inmates and, in the opinion of the management, many pris
oners go out better men than they came in.

There was little about this jail to remind one of similar
institutions in the United States. The prisoners seemed to
come and go as they chose, though a guard explained that
they were locked in their cells after dark. This was the official
locking. During the day the cells were kept locked by the
prisoners themselves. Each cell had its private padlock, not
furnished by the government. Apparently the prisoners did
not wholly trust one another.

Mexicans, it seems, commit the same crimes that other
peoples commit. But their criminality is peculiar in this
respect: Their crimes of violence are usually impulsive
premeditated murder, for example, is less frequent than it is
among people of colder blood, and thievery is for the most part
small scale. The Mexican does not go in much for organized
robbery.

One hears much about Mexican banditry, and the presence
of soldiers on railway trains and armed patrols on the highways
gives color to this legend. But I grow convinced that it is
largely legend. If comparative figures were available I think
they would show life and property as safer in any Mexican
community than in large American cities.

Under the influence of marijuana or pulque the Mexican
may take to knife or gun. But the government is strict in its
repression of the drug traffic, and the pulque shops have also

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 139

felt the heavy hand of the law. The Mexican still drinks more
than is good for him, but he is supposed to do it on his own
premises.

Whether or not drunkenness has been reduced I do not
know. The optimists say it has. All I can say is that I have
seen comparatively few examples of it, and, with the one
exception of a fellow in Tepotzlan, who squealed and made
faces at me, the drunks I have seen have been soddenly peace
able. The Mexican, from what I have seen of him, drinks to
forget not to make whoopee.

The government is trying to make all sorts of changes in
the Mexican way of life. Not content with its efforts to
reduce drinking and to encourage the use of the shower bath,
it has been endeavoring for some time to abolish the practice
of shaking hands. Sophisticated Mexicans no longer take off
their hats, as they once did, but the handshaking goes on,
despite the official pronmciamentos as to its insanitary charac
ter.

In Mexico, as everywhere else on this curious planet, reason
ableness and practicality shatter themselves vainly against
the iron phrase " No es costumbre." Here, as elsewhere,
the fire of improvement burns itself out on the cold shell of
" It isn't done,"

Mexico is not changing nearly as fast as the planners and
the visionaries would like to have it. But it is changing
and much more rapidly than the conservatives want it to. It
is certainly going places but where is anybody's guess.

Happy >anding

When a Mexican gets behind the wheel of a motorcar some
thing happens either to him or on account of him. He
seems to imagine himself a vaquero of the old school, with a
half-broken mustang beneath him. He is calm enough on
the straightaway in open country. But let him reach a
crowded street, or, better still, the curves of a mountain road,
and then he is muy bombre indeed!

One should not reason too generally from the particular, but
on the ninety miles from Puebla this afternoon I saw two cars
go off the road. And that is not a road that one can go off
of with impunity.

I must add, however, that, despite the chance-taking pro
clivities of the Mexican motorist, these two were the only
accidents I have seen. Like so many things in Mexico, the
comparative infrequency of crashes is a mystery.

I hesitate at revealing the name of our hotel in Mexico City.
It is such a pleasant hotel, and the Mexicans who patronize it
are so inexpensively comfortable. If I tell about it Americans
may come more frequently than they do now. Its prices will
go up. The cheerful mozo who now handles the bags and
fetches cigarettes will be put in brass buttons. There will be
a doorman and probably an elevator, and a marimba band to
prevent conversation at meals.

Meanwhile, it is an oasis for those who like comfort and
courtesy and, yes, efficiency messages are delivered more

140

HAPPY LANDING 141

promptly than in some establishments I know at home. Like
so many things in Mexico, it has a story. The story begins
with Francisco Puga, a man of what I should guess was con
siderable wealth. He had a large family and owned several
homes, one of which bore the aristocratic address of Napolis
No. 9.

The social upheaval through which Mexico is passing has
been hard on men of wealth. So, two years ago, Senor Puga
turned his mansion into a hotel the Casa Real. And hav
ing been a good man of business, he is now what I consider
one of the best hotelkeepers in all Mexico!

His sons, Miguel, who is thirty-seven, and Luis, the Joseph
of the brethren, who is only twenty-one, keep the desk and do
everything the mozo doesn't do. They speak English with
an Oxford accent and have the manners of their hidalgo fore
bears. It is an experience to have your taxi fetched by a
gentleman who, before the revolution, probably never laced
his own boots.

My sombrero is off to these Mexican aristocrats. Without
complaining or repining, they have fallen into step with the
new order. If these words of mine bring a customer or two I
shall feel that I have partly discharged the debt I owe them for
their hospitality. What is more, I shall be doing a kindness to
the customers. Though let me add a warning: If you want
lights, swank and lots of cracked ice, better go to some other
hotel.

But whatever you do, don't go to Mexico City without hotel
reservations of some kind. That warning can't be repeated too
often or too emphatically.

Once settled in a hotel, your first port of call in this city will
almost certainly be Sanborn's. This is where all Americans
go, sooner or later, and many of them never go anywhere else.

142 NOTES FOR- A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

It is, first o all, an enormous restaurant, in a historic and
beautiful building, where good American food is served at
reasonable prices and regular Mexican speed. Here is a good
place to begin your education in the art of waiting. After
waiting for your lunch on a crowded day in Sanborn's and,
having got it, waited for the check, all ordinary waits there
after will seem like nothing.

But Sanborn's is more than a restaurant. It is a drugstore,
an emporium of silver, scrapes, basketwork and curios of all
kinds, a bureau of information, and a place to meet your
friends. To the left of the door as you go in there is a counter
behind which stands one of the institutions of Mexico City
Toni Tripis, a young woman who knows everything and seems
never too tired to tell it. Toni will tell you where to get any
thing from postage stamps to tickets for the bullfight.

Across the narrow street which runs past Sanborn's and on
whose sidewalks is always a throng of Americans besieged by
bootblacks, guides and vendors of gardenias, is a place that
few Americans see and still fewer visit. It is a little church
set back from the street. Twilight was settling as I drifted in,
and the figures I passed were only shadows in the ancient
courtyard. Taxis hooted gaily as they raced past. Tourists
jostled one another, telling in loud voices of their visit to the
pyramids or when they were driving to Taxco. Through the
rusted iron fence one could see them as they passed on their way
in little groups to have crepes suzettes at Paolo's around the
corner.

In the little church it was dark and quite still. The only
light was from the candles twinkling on the altar. People
came in, knelt a minute or two with heads bowed, and went
out again. Women, mostly, with shawls over their heads,
but men, too and some of them young.

HAPPY LANDING 143

It was noisy on the street outside. Inside the church, where
came those whose hearts were heavy laden, there was no sound.
The customers in Sanborn's were waiting for their dinners.
These silent figures were also waiting who knows for what?

Social Security

This evening we sat in the quiet patio of a friend, talking
about Mexico. As a veteran of two months I was explain
ing things to a couple of greenhorns who had been here only
a few days. They were filled with forebodings about Mexico.
They had been told that it was a land of violence, where no one
was safe on the streets and where, if one traveled, one must
have guards and artillery, I felt it my duty to disabuse them of
this nonsense, and I was just on the point of succeeding when
the still night air was rent by a peculiar sound just outside
the house.

It was one of those sounds that demonstrate how close
joy and pain are to each other. It was impossible to say
whether it was laughter or a scream. The only certainty was
that it came from a woman.

We waited. For a moment there was silence. And then
came what were unquestionably sobs. Without further delay
we rushed to the door. There we found a woman, an Ameri
can who has lived here for many years. An urchin, she cried
tearfully, had tried to snatch her purse.

I am afraid that the people to whom I had been explaining
the peacefulness of Mexico no longer had confidence in me.
Their faces had the look that one sees on the faces of English
men when you try to tell them that bandits do not stalk the
streets of Chicago.

I think I had better be leaving Mexico. Layer by layer I
have labored to get at the truth behind its contradictions, and

144

SOCIAL SECURITY 145

there are moments when I fancy that I am beginning to suc
ceed. That is a sure sign that I ought to be studying the maps,
preparatory to departure. When one acquires the delusion
that he understands a foreign land he should be on his way
out of it.

One thing, however, does seem reasonably clear: Labor is
in the saddle and riding high, wide and handsome. I have
heard the story so often that I can no longer doubt its truth.
Variations on this theme come to me, from the householder
enjoying the services of a single domestic, to the employer of
thousands.

Mexico has clasped the principle of social security to her
breast and is in some danger of squeezing the life out of it.
She saw that the fear of losing a job was one of the greatest
afflictions in modern life. So with laws and statutes she set
about putting an end to this fear.

In Mexico you don't turn the help out when you feel like it.
Even if an employee is incompetent or dishonest you have
quite a time firing him. You have first to go before a labor
court and prove your charges. This is often difficult, espe
cially when the judges you have to convince are already con
vinced that you are an oppressor of the poor and richer than
you ought to be.

The employer who discharges an employee must not only
prove good grounds for the dismissal but he must pay a hand
some separation allowance, which is based on tenure of service
and may run into important money. The proprietor of a
restaurant whose food is notably good and whose service is
notably bad assured me with a shrug of the shoulders that he
had to employ whatever waiters the syndicate, or union,
chose to send him, and that to fire a bungler cost him, on
the average, about a thousand dollars.

146 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

Efficiency goes by the board, and the man who is accus
tomed to running his house or his business has to grit his teeth
and let the help more or less run him. He blames Cardenas
for encouraging the unions in their unreasonable demands.
He blames Ambassador Daniels for encouraging Cardenas.
He blames Roosevelt for encouraging Daniels. The only
person he seems never to think of blaming is himself. ^

Yet it is quite clear that what is going on is a reaction.
The employer, as a class, always squeezed what he could
out of labor and tossed the rind on the scrap heap. He worked
labor as hard as he could and paid it as little as it would take.
Its health, mental attitude and safety were of concern to him
only in so far as they showed a profit on his ledgers.

The only training in economics or social morality that labor
ever got, it got from its employers. It was a long, hard course,
but labor learned its lesson only too well. When fate put the
whip into its hand it proceeded to crack it. The employers
had always taken what they could out of labor. Now labor is
proceeding to take all it can out of the employers. It is making
precisely the same mistakes. It is just as indifferent to con
siderations of fair play, just as deaf to the pleas of abstract
justice, just as blind to its own eventual self-interest.

In due course there will be another reaction. The golden
goose of prosperity cannot endure too much choking. If
production falls off the worker will be the first to feel it. He
may turn against the leaders of labor and follow new gods.
The possibility of something like fascism is anything but
remote. On the other hand, there are signs of understanding
that, if labor apes the follies of the employers, it will meet the
employers' fate.

Meanwhile, it is no fun trying to run a business in Mexico.

^Assorted Vexation

When you take a taxi in Mexico City you tell the driver where
you want to go and add the word " toston " in a hopeful,
ingratiating tone of voice. The driver is supposed to answer
yes or no. If he says yes, it means that the fare will be fifty
centavos unless, at the end of the journey, he forgets that
he said yes. If he says no, it means that the fare will be one
peso. If, as happens oftenest, he says nothing, it means that
you are likely to have a row when it comes time for settlement.

These arguments are peculiarly unsatisfactory. Filled
with righteous anger you may call a policeman, but all he can
tell you is that one peso is the legal fare, and any discount
therefrom is a matter of arrangement between passenger and
driver. If the driver chooses to deny that a half-fare arrange
ment has been made, there is nothing to do but pay the fare
allowed by law.

The situation grows more exasperating each day, as more
taxi drivers learn how easy it is to soak the unsuspecting
American. In most cases the latter does not even know about
this toston business.

Another cause of vexation here is the existence of two tele
phone systems. The first one was the Mexican, financed by
American capital. Then the Ericson Company, a Swedish
corporation, entered the field. Today they operate side by
side. Business houses subscribe to the two systems. Indi
viduals use the one their friends use. Hotels use the two
systems, but usually have the rooms connected to only one.

147

148 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

Thus, if you have a Mexican phone in your room and some
one calls you by Ericson you have to go down to the office to
answer.

The situation is, of course, ridiculous, and nobody knows it
better than the telephone companies. For a long time they
have been trying to consolidate, but the government won't
let them. That is, the government won't permit the only sort
of consolidation that the companies consider sensible. They
- want to merge the two systems and cut out duplicating over
head. The government insists that this would constitute
monopoly, and demands that the two systems establish a
third system whose function it would be to connect Mexican
subscribers with Ericson numbers, and vice versa.

Matters are temporarily at a standstill, with the government
assessing a heavy penalty for each day's failure to provide the
kind of consolidation the government wants, and the com
panies fighting in the courts for their sort of consolidation.

Even without the telephone to contend with, the transaction
of business in Mexico City calls for nice management of time.
Nobody arrives at his office much before ten.

At one o'clock everything closes and does not reopen until
three thirty. Most establishments remain open until eight, or
even later.

At first you chafe under the exactions of this schedule, but
after a time you follow the native habit of a long and leisurely
lunch, with just a snack in the evening. You find that this
program is a desirable one when you are living at an altitude of
close to two miles.

I have become accustomed to Mexican working hours, but
I shall never become accustomed to Mexican money. I doubt
if even the Mexicans can do that. The problem of making
change is a serious one. I have seen even large establishments

ASSORTED VEXATION 149

collapse before a five-peso note, and in small shops it is often
impossible to get change for even a single peso.

One reason for this situation is the government's habit of
calling in from time to time coins it no longer likes, without
first providing for their replacement. As I write, the rumor
is abroad that after a certain date one of the coins now in use
will cease to be legal tender. The thrifty are losing no time in
converting this coin into more dependable currency, thus
adding to the existing shortage of small change.

A further cause of trouble is the structure of the coins
themselves. Some are hard to tell apart, and on some the
value is hard to determine, even with a magnifying glass.
The peso alone admits of no confusion. With a dozen of
them in your pocket you walk like a man with arthritis. .^

While I am on this subject of vexations I might mention
boiled eggs. I like them boiled four minutes. Allowing for
the altitude I have ordered them boiled five minutes, then
six, eight, ten and, in one moment of frenzy, I begged the
waitress to boil them until I came around the next morning.
It is no use. They always come in a state just bordering on
liquefaction. I have finally solved the problem by ordering
omelets*

Wife Old Owl

A man oddly plagued is Josephus Daniels. He first became
the butt of caricaturists when, as secretary of the navy, he
instructed the commanders of our ships of war to use " right "
and " left " instead of " starboard " and " port." The nation
guffawed at this order but it is said that the order was issued
at the request of naval commanders themselves.

Again he was target for abuse when he forbade the use of
liquor on warships another innovation sponsored by the
navy.

Even when he assumed his present post as ambassador to
Mexico his fate pursued him. The Mexicans greeted him
coolly, for it had been under his orders that the landing at
Vera Cruz had taken place.

Today he is extremely popular among such folk as laborers
and peasants and all those who favor the social revolution. He
is not popular with men of business, social leaders, the clergy
and those who in general do not favor the social revolution.
The latter classes seem to be of two opinions. One is that
Mr. Daniels has instigated all the wicked things that Cardenas
and his gang have done. The other is that he is a kindly
simpleton, the dupe of men whose evil intent he has not the
wit to understand.

I have not known him long or intimately, so I shall not
attempt to say which of these conflicting opinions is the right
one. I shall merely set down my impressions.

First off, I shall say, without fear of contradiction, that the

150

WISE OLD OWL 151

United States embassy in Mexico City is something for Ameri
cans to be proud o. It is housed in buildings that are archi
tecturally satisfying, and the furnishing, the decoration and
the atmosphere are the epitome of dignity and charm.

There is no swank about the embassy. Servants are few
and unobtrusive. Tea is served simply, and the chatelaine
of the establishment, Mrs. Daniels, manages to convey the
impression that the visitor, whatever his rank or fortune or
place in the world, is truly welcome. She is at once the lady
playing the part of hostess in her own home with grace and
distinction, and the custodian of public property.

She and her husband, the ambassador, are what you might
call "folksy" people. Once, when some ladies of social
eminence were in doubt as to how she should be addressed, she
came to their rescue with a laughing, " Why, I'm just Mrs.
Daniels the same old fool I always was."

Make no mistake, there is nothing crude about the am
bassador and his wife. They are gentlefolk, accustomed to
meeting the great of this earth on equal footing. But neither
is there anything about them that suggests the word " diplo
mat." Mr. Daniels is not in the Metternich-Talleyrand
tradition. He is the sort of person I imagine Jefferson and
Ben Franklin to have been.

Make no mistake, either, about our ambassador to Mexico
being a benevolent old geezer who takes what is fed him and
doesn't know what it is all about. It is my opinion, based on
conversations with him and, much more, on the conversations
I have had with others about him, that he has the low-down on
Mexico as well as any American can hope to have it.

He has looked on the Mexican kaleidoscope with a
shrewdly quizzical eye, and he has kept 'his ears open. It may
be that I think him a wise old owl because he has reached

152 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

the same conclusions that I have. Whatever the reasons for
my thought, I think we would be fortunate if we could always
have ambassadors of his sort. He may make blunders, and
I have no doubt that he has made plenty in the past. But,
large and by, he strikes me as a public servant upon whose
service the taxpayers are to be congratulated. From all I can
gather, the interests of the United States in Mexico are safe
in the hands of that soft-spoken old politician, Josephus
Daniels.

He may be the fuddy-duddy his enemies say he is. He may
have had the wool pulled over his eyes by the Mexican reds, as
is claimed. He may be unsympathetic to greedy wealth, as
no one can deny that he is. But I like his slant on things. I
like his indiscreet candor. I like his tolerance. Perhaps it is
because, as my wife says, I always fall for important people
who don't seem to fall pompously for themselves.

Taint and 'Propaganda

Every tourist has to see the frescoes of Rivera and Orozco, so
this morning I set out to do my duty* On the way I dropped
in for a look at the opera house, and there I had a surprise.
The outside of that vast and imposing building is blatant. Its
white marble shrieks to the world that here was to be a structure
that even the passer-by would know was expensive. It is
new-rich and vulgar. But beyond its great bronze doors one
finds an interior (recently finished) that is modern but not
"modernistic," rich yet simple, striking yet restrained. In
my opinion, the world has few public buildings that can
challenge it.

Aside from the main theater this great structure houses
numerous lecture and recital halls and vast galleries for the
display of paintings. Upstairs, rather badly placed, are two
huge murals , one by Rivera, the other by Orozco. The former
is a realistic depiction of modern life by a painter who doesn't
think much of it. The latter is an allegorical castigation of
war, done in howling greens and reds, by a painter with a pro
found distaste for war.

I do not quite understand why the works of these serious
and highly purposeful radicals have come to be one of the
main attractions for the tourist. They are skillfully executed,
of course, but they are cruelly critical of the economic system
by which most tourists live. This was understood by the
management of the Reforma Hotel, which followed the ex
ample of Mr. Rockefeller and had the fresco it had ordered
from Rivera painted out.

154 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

Some say that this action was merely a publicity stunt. My
own opinion is that the management was right in feeling that
a picture showing repulsively jowled men hanging to a stock
ticker, with their arms around scantily draped females leering
lewdly over champagne glasses, was hardly suitable for a
hostelry patronized by affluent Americans.

The fact is that these Mexican painters are not painting for
affluent Americans. They are painting for poor Mexicans,
and they mix dynamite with their pigments.

The art of painting 'has had a rebirth in Mexico. The
painter no longer lives by the favor of the rich connoisseur.
He is supported by the taxpayer. His audience is no longer
limited to the few who can afford to hang pictures on their
walls. Interest in painting is not confined to critics, dealers,
collectors and teachers of art. It is practically universal. The
pictures that the modern Mexican paints are not in museums
or private homes. They are on or, more properly, in
the walls of schools, jails, courthouses and public buildings
generally.

It used to be assumed that the common herd could not
appreciate art. One had to have a guide when he visited an
art gallery, and the ordinary person was afraid to have opinions
in a field which, by common consent, was limited to the
cultivated few. It is a different story in Mexico now. One
needs no assistance in "understanding" the murals that
the Mexican painters have been turning out. One may or may
not ' ' like ' ' them. They may or may not be what the previous
generation meant when it looked down its nose and talked
about " art." But a child of six can get their meaning.

In the ministry of education, for example, is a mile or more
of wall covered with frescoes all depicting the history and the
current life of Mexico. Like all history, this has the basis of

PAINT AND PROPAGANDA 155

the historian. It has more than a flavor of Karl Marx. The
painter-propagandists are anything but abstract. They are
not interested in quiet landscapes or pictures of sheep huddling
against a storm. They are preachers exhorting the common
man to know where he is and whence he came. They are
revivalists haranguing a populace which cannot read or even
understand their spoken words. The extent and profundity of
their influence is apparent even to the most superficial observer.
And I shall venture to predict that their influence will one day
be felt even, in the most economically tranquil regions of the
United States. They have learned die technique of advertis
ing, refined it, and made it one of the most powerful weapons
in the arsenal of politics.

Coming home from my day with the murals I had a demon
stration of the extent to which " local economy " is practiced
in Mexico. Driving in the neighborhood of " auto row " I
was suddenly besieged by a horde of itinerant repair men, who
had observed that my tail light was loose.

Each carried a kit of hammers and wrenches and was pre
pared to begin operations at whatever point in the crowded
street I might care to stop. Apparently there was no job too
extensive for these fellows to undertake, and apparently neither
the police nor the regular service stations had any objections.
It was just another instance of the old and the new living
contentedly side by side. There is the one-price store on the
avenue for those who prefer it, and near by is the market for
those who like to spend a morning in chaffer over centavos.
You can have your car lubricated in a modern greasing palace,
or for a few pennies a ragged but independent urchin will do
the job for you. Mexico is all things to all men.

Schoolmaster

Getting to see Leon Trotzky was the hardest job I have had.
His secretary, Bernard Wolfe (Yale, 1935) , was pleasant but
firm. Mr. Trotzky was too busy to grant idle interviews.
What did I wish to see the exile about?

I replied that I did not wish to see him about anything. I
merely wished to see him. I had seen the pyramids, the
ancient tree at Oaxaca and the thieves' market. To complete
my tour I wished to see Mr. Trotzky and compare notes with
him on Mexico, to which we were both strangers.

Mr. Wolfe said that the only subject Mr. Trotzky would
discuss was the Russian trials. I said that I was unfamiliar
with the trials. Mr. Wolfe then suggested that I submit a
written list of questions about Russia. Mr. Trotzky, if he
saw fit, would answer them in writing, and I could publish
them' just as written.

To this I observed that what Mr. Trotzky seemed to be after
was free publicity, and Mr. Wolfe agreed, adding that when
a man was fighting for his life he had to make evety word
count.

This sort of thing went on for days, and under some diffi
culties, since the Trotzky house was on the Ericson telephone
system and I worked through the Mexican.

Finally I gave in and submitted a list of questions. I asked
him for a statement of his case; what he thought of Stalin
(having a pretty good idea of what the answer to that one
would be) ; whether Russia was heading back to capitalism;

156

SCHOOLMASTER 157

what he thought of the outlook in Mexico; and whether
Walter Duranty was a reliable commentator on things Russian.

The next day Mr. Wolfe called me and said that I could see
Mr. Trotzky at five o'clock. So out I went to 127 London
street, in the suburb of Coyoacan, and gave my name to the
sergeant in command of the dozen policemen lounging at the
front door.

Mr. Wolfe was waiting for me with answers to my
questions dictated by Mr. Trotzky. Glancing over them I
learned that my idea of what he thought about Stalin was
correct; that Russia, after it had overthrown its present re
actionary bureaucracy, would be more communist than ever;
that Mexico was a charming place and its government admira
ble; and that Duranty was not as dependable a correspond
ent as the late John Reed. Having read this and been warned
not to smoke in the presence of Mr. Trotzky, I was conducted
through the patio and into the workroom of the man who has
shaken the world as few men have shaken it.

Trotzky rose from the long table covered with books and
manuscript, and with stiff courtesy took my hand. He was, he
said, at my disposition. He spoke in a strongly accented but
astonishingly accurate English. I asked him if he had learned
the language during his residence in New York. He smiled
at that. " I was only there two months/* he said, " and I saw
only Russians. I learned what little English I know out of
books." He pointed to some books on his table. " I am now
learning Spanish/* he said.

While we talked I made mental notes on his personality,
which is baffling. Of medium height, with the graying hair
and beard proper to his fifty-seven years, he does not impress
you with die forcefulness that is indisputably his. At first
he made me think of an old German shoemaker I had known as

158 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

a boy. There was a benevolent twinkle in the eyes that looked
at me through spectacles, and when his lips parted in a smile I
thought, somehow, of Santa Glaus. I remembered what I
had read of the singular charm that the man had had for so
many people, and for a moment I was ready to join those who
ridicule the unpleasant charges made against him.

Then, as he talked, something of his benevolent exterior
faded away and I had an inward shiver at the cold, implacable
character I felt underneath it. This, I said to myself, was not
a man I would care to have against me.

He spoke freely, politely and with seeming candor. But
I sensed an arrogance beneath his professions of humility.
He was a schoolmaster talking down to a young and rather
dull pupil. His speech was precise, almost pedantic, and
he made me feel that my questions were no less trivial and
ignorant than I was myself. There were moments of panic
when I wanted to raise my hand and cry, " Unprepared! "

We chatted then about his personal safety, his travels in
Mexico and his methods of work. At no time did he direct
the conversation. He answered my leads, but volunteered
none himself. When I rose to leave his relief was obvious.

I went away feeling like a schoolboy who has flunked an
examination. Certainly I knew no more about this sphinxlike
man than I had known before. Is he a scholar devoted to quiet
meditation and the writing of books? Or is he a spider weav
ing a vast and tangled web of discord? Is he, as he says,
through with active part in revolutions, or is Mexico as so
many of its people fear going to rue the day when it granted
refuge to this intellectual tornado?

You can answer these questions as well as I can.

Dividing the and

Comes a letter complaining fretfully that I have not sufficiently
discussed the Mexican climate. Dear me, and I thought I had
mentioned it at least once a day!

It is, to confine myself to a single word, matchless! In the
winter it rains infrequently and then only for a short time
and lightly. For the two months of my acquaintance with the
country the sun has never ceased to shine, except for its oc
casional siestas behind the never absent clouds.

It has been uniformly warm and in the middle of the day,
hot. In Mexico City there is sometimes enough nip in the
air for thin blooded people to welcome a topcoat. For my part
I have found white linen more frequently desirable. Inci
dentally, the Mexicans of the towns do not go in much for
white clothing. The reason, I am told, is that they do not
wish to be confused with the Indian peasants, with whom
white is almost a uniform.

Another notable feature of the Mexican climate is the
absence of wind. I am informed that the season of dust
storms is now approaching, and it is true that of late Po
pocatepetl (accent on the fourth syllable, please) has been
hidden from view. But the air still remains remarkably still.

So, travelers, bring a topcoat if you chill easily, and furs
and woolen undies for insurance. Not all winters, I am told,
are as mild as this one has been.

Another letter complains that I have not done justice to the
land question.

159

160 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

Well, one would have to be here a long rime and know the
language very well before he could even begin to understand
that extremely complicated question. In general the situation
is this: The land was originally granted to individuals and to
the church under such loose specification of boundaries as " the
area that could be seen on a clear day from a given hilltop."
The extent of these private domains can well be imagined.

Eventually the peasants revolted, killed or drove away the
landowners and divided the land among themselves. Then
they discovered that land without tools or money for seed was
not what they had expected it to be. So, gradually, they
gave it back to the returning owners and resignedly resumed
their original state of peonage.

The present revolutionary government is again dividing the
land among the peasants, but this rime has established a
bank which extends credit to the farmer and also aids him in
the practice of scientific agriculture.

Certain weaknesses have already appeared in this plan, and
to a certain extent have been corrected. In the first place,
the distribution of land is in the hands of the local political
boss. Obviously the faithful get the best lands, and no less
obviously the political boss tends to take the place of the dis
possessed hacendado. The peasant merely changes masters,
having a little more theoretic freedom and a little less practical
well-being.

This is the situation at its worst and should not be taken
as typical. Even, however, where the distribution of land has
been accomplished honestly and efficiently, the peasants dis
cover that individual units pf five acres and a mule are not, in
the aggregate, as profitable as the great mass production units
they have replaced. In sugar and cotton, for example, the
big plant is more efficient than a group of small ones.

DIVIDING THE LAND 161

This truth has now been recognized, and producer co
operation has made its appearance. The great hacienda is
reappearing, but this time owned by those who till it and
financed by the government land banks.

All this sounds suspiciously like communism. Certainly
it is socialistic and, to use another word horrifying to Ameri
can ears, collective. But from all I can learn the Mexican
farmer remains stubbornly individualistic. To him the words
"land" and "liberty 11 are interchangeable. He wants a
parcel of land for himself and he wants to be his own boss.
He concedes the necessity of tractors and other machinery,
and to get them he is willing to cooperate with his neighbors
and with the federal government. The suggestion, however,
that he exchange his old condition of peonage under the
land barons for a new one under the state gets no enthusiastic
response from him. A revolution that merely results in a
change of masters is not his idea of revolution.

I hear tales of farmers so disgusted with their new freedom
that they beg for a return to the old feudal paternalism. I
have no doubt that these tales are true. But I also hear tales
of farmers with radios in their homes, automobiles in their
garages and children in school. And I have no doubt that
these tales are true, too.

It is hardly surprising that Mexico has not yet achieved
economic democracy; for it has not yet achieved political de
mocracy. But that it is definitely on the march toward both
is hardly to be denied. That it may stumble and, perhaps,
retrace its steps, is not to be denied either. Meanwhile,
Americans will do well to look upon Mexico as casting the
shadow of their own future.

2S0 Illusions

I was warned that Diego Rivera (hereabouts one gives a " b "
sound to the " v ") was a temperamental fellow, and that if
I bored or offended him he would unceremoniously give me
the gate, I was told, too, that he was a poseur a mounte
bank who professed communism but whose pockets were well
stuffed with pesos. His communism, these people said, was
just another implement in his campaign for personal publicity.

Rivera himself displayed no great anxiety to make my ac
quaintance. However, he consented to meet me in the office
of his agent, Senor Misrachi, a Greek who is Mexico's leading
bookseller.

I was hardly prepared for the reality of the man. His hair
had not recently seen a comb, his old tweed suit was unpressed,
and the faded blue shirt with zipper fastening was open at the
throat. On his feet were heavy work shoes, unshined.

The first impression he gives is of a big man, physically.
He has a chest like a barrel and his fist is the size of a polo
ball. The great bulk of his body made the chair into which
he sank seem ridiculously inadequate. But presently, as he
talked, one became aware of a mental magnitude to corre
spond.

Always with a whimsical little smile playing about his
lips, always in a spirit of half-humorous detachment, he talked
of many things. A well educated man, in the sense of having
good schooling behind him, the variety and exactness of his
information leave one agape. When his talk took him into
American histoty I found him more familiar with the life of

162

No ILLUSIONS 163

Thomas Jefferson, for example, than are most Americans.
It was easy to understand why his murals amaze specialists
with their technical accuracy. Whatever his theme he knows
whereof he paints.

As I listened to him, occasionally intruding with a ques
tion, it became clear to me that here was no wild-eyed dreamer,
no mere rider of an economic hobby. Here, instead, was a
highly civilized man, with a better idea of what modern life
was all about than most of those who bob about like corks on
the turbulent stream of current events.

Rivera has read and traveled and seen the lives of the poor
at close hand. He has been in Russia, an active participant
in the communist experiment. He is a communist now.
But his opinions do not blind him to realities. In Russia, he
says, the fires of revolution have cooled and reaction has set in.
In Mexico, too, there will be the same inevitable turn of the
wheel, and men like himself, their work done, will find them
selves out of popular favor, as now they are so much in it.

He has convictions but no illusions. "The communists
and socialists and radicals generally in the United States," he
said, " have no sense of reality. They do not influence the
average American because they do not understand him. They
argue among themselves over dogmas wholly remote from the
American scene, while the real course of the American revolu
tion proceeds along channels they hardly know are there."

He smiled when I asked him if he thought there would be a
revolution in the United States. "It is already well under
way," he said. " I have an idea that while Russia and Mexico
and Spain and other countries are talking about socialism and
even fighting about it, the United States will quietly make it
a fact accomplished. I think that your country will be the
first actually to practice socialism."

164 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

He chuckled at my surprised response to this remark.
" Don't be alarmed. I think that the American approach to
socialism will be typically American. It will be accomplished
with little or no violence. Some Saturday night you will
decide to have socialism. And Monday morning, without
any noise or excitement, you will be socialists. I think you
will repeal capitalism with just as little fuss as you repealed
prohibition. You Americans are even more pragmatic than
the Romans were. And your working classes have higher
standards of education than the world ever saw before."

I had to ask him, of course, about Rockefeller and the
murals of Radio City. His smile was indulgent at that ques
tion. " Rockefeller was foolish," he said gently. " He did
more for socialism than I think he meant to do. Had he left
the picture as painted only a few thousand people would have
seen it. By removing it he called the attention of millions to
it."

I found it strange that a man whose work is so brutal should
be personally so suave. He impressed me as being less propa
gandist than philosopher, less missionary than reporter. A
man of limitless energy he put in more than three years
on the frescoes in the ministry of education, often laboring
sixteen hours a day and eating his lunches on the scaffold
yet when one meets him he is reposed and tranquil. There
is no venom in his speech. He is as tolerant of financiers as
he is of other schools of painting. But he is as serenely un
shakable as Galileo was in his conviction that the world moves,
and that he knows in what direction.

Even in the afterglow, sitting soberly by the typewriter on
which I have pounded out so many things that were not so, I
think that Diego Rivera is one of the weighty men of our time.

Hoots and Saddles

Today, in celebration of my last hours in this deceptive land,
I drove over many miles of superb concrete highway to a
mountaintop on which are the ruins of an Augustinian monas
tery. It is called the "Desert of the Lions" doubtless
because it is not a desert and there are no lions. As a matter
of fact, the name is not as ridiculous as it sounds. It comes,
literally, from being a deserted place, once owned by a hermit
named Leon.

The concrete highway is the fruit of politics. It is a sort
of PWA project, and was built by a statesman who was also
in the contracting business. It is a beautiful road, and should,
of course, have been built in a region where roads are needed.
Those regions, however, do not have the voting strength of
the federal district.

And so boots and saddles! In this day and age, that
means changing the oil, watering the battery and filling the
gasoline tank. It also means the tourist traffic being what
it is telegraphing ahead for hotel reservations.

The old notebook is full of things still to be seen and done.
But there is no time to do them. The bags must be packed,
and places found for the innumerable bits of impedimenta
which so mysteriously accumulate on any journey.

No time, now, to take another fling at the lottery and
once again test the truth of that giant electric sign on the
town's main street, which plays on the cupidity of the visitor
with the words, " Get Rich While in Mexico."

That sign, and the swarms of people, young and old, who

165

1 66 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

appear to make their living on the sale of lottery tickets, epit
omize the contradictory character of Mexico. Gambling has
been suppressed. The great casinos are closed and shuttered.
The police are supposed to break up small games of chance.
But the national lottery is encouraged and advertised. It is
regarded as a legitimate method of raising funds for the public
welfare.

On the face of it, this is true. People have always gambled
and doubtless always will. Why not, therefore, turn this fool
ish habit to good use? The only answer is that the lottery-
idea has never seemed to work out as well as it theoretically
should. On the one hand it has furnished a warm, moist
soil for the seeds of corruption, and on the other it has over-
stimulated the vice of seeking something for nothing. It is an
excellent way of separating the fool from his money and
putting it to better use than he would; but somehow the de
fects of the method seem in practice to have outweighed its
merits. In my opinion, the income tax is a better method,
though more painful and less entertaining.

My last thought as I tie up the loose ends of this sojourn
is on the foolish methods of language teaching employed in the
United States. I meet so many Mexicans who have learned
in their local schools to speak English. I meet few Americans
who can speak Spanish.

It seems to me that we have somehow put the cart before the
horse. We teach grammar first, writing second, and speech
if at all a poor last. This is precisely the reverse of
what it should be. The child learns his own tongue, first by
imitation of sounds, then by writing and lastly if at all
by the grammar and syntax.

I suppose I am bitter about our methods of language teach
ing because I am a victim thereof. I " studied" Spanish in

BOOTS AND SADDLES 7

college; but what little I learned is now only a handicap. I
know just enough to be afraid of saying the wrong thing.

I wonder, too, why it is that the schools cling to French and
German even to Latin and give such scant attention to
Spanish. Europe was never very close to us, and is now more
remote than ever. Central and South America, on the other
hand, grow daily closer to us, culturally and economically.
Events are forcing this continent into a greater unity than it
ever knew before; and Spanish is spoken from Tierra del
Fuego to the Cimarron Pass.

English, I think, will be the universal language it there
ever is one. Meanwhile, if one can afford only one auxiliary,
I believe it should be Spanish. For those who must travel
through life with no speech but their own, there is the old say
ing that money talks in any tongue.

Escorted by the Police

Never ask anything of a Mexican unless you are prepared to
have him give it to you. Mexican generosity can be discon
certing. Yesterday, for example, in a conversation with an
influential Mexican friend, I observed that the hardest thing
about motor touring was the getting in and out of big cities.

When I returned to my hotel there was a note from him
advising me that the Department of Highways and Public
Works would provide a guide to conduct me from the capital.

This morning, while it was still dark and the sereno was
still blowing his little pipe to warn evildoers away, we were
awakened by the exhaust of a motorcycle in the street below.
It belonged to a captain of police, very smart in spurs, trench
coat and polished brasses, who informed us that he had been
directed to lead us to the highway and a hundred kilometers
beyond. At that point another officer would take up the job.

We protested, but to no avail. Smiling, our captain ex
plained that orders were orders. The Mexican government
intended that a guest so distinguished as myself must have
every consideration. When I insisted that I was not dis
tinguished at all, the captain merely spoke in courteous terms
of my charming modesty.

At each change of guard I made the same protests, and
always with the same absence of result. The answer of the
escorts was invariably the same. I was an individual of con
sequence, and it was an honor to be detailed to my protection.

With siren screaming ahead of us, scattering the traffic

168

ESCORTED BY THE POLICE 169

like frightened chickens, we whizzed off into the early morn
ing fog. It sounds exciting, and it was; but I must say that
driving with a police escort has its drawbacks. There is a
mental strain to it, and a sense of sin. You feel under an
obligation to keep up with your guide, and you soon find
that you cannot stop or even slow down without having him
turn around to see what the matter is.

At Jacala we bade an apologetic farewell to our captain,
and a new man took us in charge. The transfer brought a
crowd of the curious about us. Evidently they thought we
were being deported, and one fellow whispered an inquiry as
to what crime we had committed.

By this time we were getting resigned to a police escort and
could devote our attention to the scenery.

Having heard such horrendous tales about the highway,
we were agreeably surprised by what we found. In the nine
hundred mile stretch from Mexico City to San Antonio less
than 10 per cent is mountainous. It is all perfectly smooth
except a patch of some sixty miles, which is graded and paved
but not yet surfaced.

The grades are easy I don't think we ever used low gear.
Curves are banked and the edges guarded with parapets of
steel or stone. The road is wide and well patrolled. Even a
person who enjoys high places as little as I do will find nothing
to disturb him. Built by Mexican brains, Mexican money
and Mexican labor, it is a superb piece of road-making, and
will have profound effect on the social and economic life of
this continent.

There are filling stations and good hotels along the route.
But, despite what some enthusiasts have said, they are not fre
quent. As conditions are now, I think a traveler would have
more peace of mind with a spare can of gas aboard and

NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

perhaps oil and water, too. There are long walks between
pumps. Also, landslides are likely to be hazards until the
mountains settle down to man's trespassing; and the motorist
may occasionally find his way blocked for a few hours. For
that reason, a thermos bottle and a tin or two of eatables would
come in handy.

I hope I don't give the impression that one who takes the
Pan-American highway goes into an uncharted wilderness.
Nothing of the sort. Even now there is more traffic than one
will encounter on many American highroads, and infinitely
less danger than on most city boulevards. But running out of
gas is never fun even when rarely fatal.

Here in steaming, tropic Valles is a symbol of what is
coming a brand-new hotel, of quite notable excellence,
designed, built, decorated and managed by people who never
before had anything to do with hotelkeeping the Osuna
family. The father, Gregorio, is a general. The son, Carlos,
is a senator. And nephew Tomas, who runs things, was a
college professor in the United States. This hotel, the Casa
Grande, has been open only two months, but already it is best
to wire ahead for reservations.

<Alone at ast

The Department of Communications and Public Works
collapsed on us this morning. Last night, when the police
escort put us to bed, I made the usual unavailing protests at
his unnecessary service, and then, resignedly, stated the hour
at which I would embark this morning.

He saluted crisply and went off to his headquarters, leaving
us alone save for the thousands of American tourists who use
Monterrey as a mecca for week-end whoopee.

This morning, however, there was no policeman waiting for
us. What to do? Should we wait or should we skip? To
skip would be discourteous and might subject us to heaven
knew what; penalties. So we waited.

At nine thirty there was a telephone call from police head
quarters. This day we could chart our course for Laredo un
aided. There would be no motorcycle officer blowing his
siren and opening his cutout to chase cows and pigs off the
road. We were alone at last!

I know the reason. It had been discovered at last that I
was not Pat O'Brien, the movie star just a journalist, and
not much of one at that.

One needs no guide on the Pan-American highway. After
one leaves the rocks and pines of the mountains the course is
flat and straightaway, with no crossroads. One can shoot
through the coffee and bananas and the long stretches of
empty desert as fast as his car will go.

It was not always thus. Last night I listened for an hour
to Colonel " Bill " Furlong, the man who for years preached

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172 NOTES FOR A BOOK ABOUT MEXICO

the gospel of this highway to a skeptical world and now, at
last, sees his dream come true. The recital of his experiences
made little chills run up my back. It must have taken nerve
and plenty of it to drive over this road when it was abuilding.

It is all but finished now, and the thrills are gone. So Fur
long, seeking new worlds to conquer, was on his way to survey
the prospects to Oaxaca and beyond. He believes that he will
live to see the day when one will be able to drive straight
through to Buenos Aires with as little hazard or discomfort as
one faces now in the drive to Mexico City.

Speeding over the flat miles toward home, I have time to
read the mail which has accumulated during these last busy
weeks and remained largely unopened.

Several letters pluck the same strings. Now that I am leav
ing Mexico, getting away from propaganda and the fear of
censorship, will I have the courage to tell the truth about
what I have seen and heard? Once safely across the border,
these friends remind me, I can let go and say what is what.

Alas, I have nothing to add. Nothing has been saved
for revelation when I reach my native soil. Doubtless I have
left much unsaid because there is much I have not seen and
more I have not understood. But of concealment, for reasons
of fear or of favor, there has been none.

And as for my observations having been colored by the
attentions of the government, the only attention the govern
ment has shown me has been the motorcycle escort of the last
two days. I have heard tales of what happens to people who
write what the government does not like, but as far as my own
experience goes these remain only tales.

And so, jN/Texico hasta la vista. You have puzzled and
bewildered me. You have alarmed me, because what you
are doing gives a somewhat disturbing picture of what may

ALONE AT LAST '173

be ahead for my own country. But one statement admits of
no qualification you have been unfailingly agreeable.

I shall wave behind me as I cross the Rio Grande, and I
shall whisper " adiocito *' a little good-by, not a big one;
for I hope some day to return.

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