CHAPTER X MEXICANS OF NEW MEXICO
New Mexico is the only Catholic State in the Union. Maryland has the tradition of Catholicism, but New Mexico has the verisimilitude of a Latin country in Europe. When, in 1848, it was annexed to the United States, or, let us say, in 1850, when it was organized as a territorial possession, or, in 1863, when it was reshaped,—it has had many birthdays—it was entirely Spanish-speaking and Catholic. The population now is five times as great as it was then. The Mexicans have prospered and multiplied; the Texans have colonized the South and East. State consciousness is remarkably undeveloped. Those of Texan origin are proud of Texas. No Anglo-Saxon or German-American seems ready to call himself a New Mexican. It is the Spanish-speaking people who are the real New Mexicans—and they do not care to be confounded with real Mexicans. The visitor, therefore, has a sense of being in a foreign State and one decidedly Catholic.
The atmosphere is rather that of Spain than of Mexico. For Mexico has been exposed to sixty-five years of anticlericalism wherein the Church has been fought by the State, shorn of its possessions, and greatly reduced in pride and power. It has meant much to the New Mexican that his Church has not been humiliated. In Mexico also the strain of race is much more mixed. Almost every Mexican has Indian blood, and the onslaught on the power of the Church was obtained by her great Indian President, Benito Juarez. The converted Indian is a much less faithful son of the Church than the Castilian, and it may be that the spirit of revolt in Mexico derives more from the aboriginal strain than from the Spaniard. In what is now New Mexico, however, there has never been much crossing with Indian blood. The Navajos, the Apaches, the Zunyis, and the rest, were never subjugated in the way the Aztec tribes were. Deserts lay between these races and the main bodies of armies; their wealth was not enough to tempt great numbers of adventurers. The Spaniards who settled were mostly peaceful colonists. They set up churches, they built new villages, they tilled the soil or herded cattle, and they were content to forget higher ambitions. They lived to themselves.
There is now a remarkable difference between the Mexican proper and the Mexican who has become a United States citizen. And that, although New Mexico only became a State and was admitted to the Union in 1912. It is not simply the moderation of the size of his sombrero and his abandonment of tight breeches, nor the disappearing of the mantilla as a headdress of the women. It seems first of all to be a difference in soul. The faces of the Mexicans are furtive, restless; their round, staring eyes tell of a primitive nature, simple, stupid, and violent. The New Mexican is of a much calmer countenance; he is steady, he does not fear his neighbors, he has civilized ambitions, and he does not drink. As Mexico and the United States might be called the Jungle and the Park, so the Mexican has the restlessness of wild nature, and the New Mexican the calm of an ordered and domestic life.
Prohibition has doubtless had a beneficent effect in New Mexico, but even before the "dry" régime the drinking of pulque had almost died out. But pulque, the juice of the maguey cactus, is a curse of Mexican life. In its effect it is more like a combination of alcohol and cocaine, and has a highly destructive effect on nerve and mental organism. Like tequila and mescal, the other cactus drinks, it is a strong provoker of violent lusts and is reputed to have destroyed whole civilizations before the Spaniards came. Legend tells of a virgin who brought some of it to the eighth King of the Toltecs, who took both it and her and had a "cactus-born" child, and all his people took to the new drink and were then fallen upon by the Chichimecs and destroyed. It was working havoc among the Aztecs in Cortes' time and is responsible for much from then until now. But from that evil power the Mexican of New Mexico is surely protected.
Blood is thicker than water, and it is therefore surprising that there is so little sympathy between the New Mexicans and their kindred over the Border. One must seek reasons not only in the better life under American rule but in the sparsity of the Mexican population on the other side of the line. There is no flood of people in Chihuahua or Coahuila or Sonora ready to overflow into what is now American territory. New Mexicans do not seem to have kith and kin on the other side. They do not read Mexican papers or take an interest in Mexican affairs. In the case of a new war with Mexico they would prove as loyal as the bold Texans themselves. The word "gringo" is not on their lips. They, for their part, show a marked dislike of being referred to as Mexicans, and if they must be "hyphenates" they would rather be called Spanish-Americans. They are proud of their citizenship, and are imitators of Anglo-Saxon America so far as their natural conservatism permits. They have fallen into the ways of American business, and have seized upon American politics with great enthusiasm, canvassing Republicans or Democrats with the same fervor as the most ardent politicians of the North.
In their religious life, however, they are not inclined to change. The piety of the State might be a pattern for the Church. The New Mexicans preserve the religious solemnity of Burgos or Seville. All the villages and little towns have beautifully kept churches. And the homes, mud built as they are, are all adorned with sacred pictures. Here one may see the remarkable "Santos"—pictures of Saints painted on wood, not unlike some of the domestic ikons of the old Believers in Russia, at least in their weird and strange conceptions of Godhead. Painted without art, smudged on to wood, these Santos nevertheless convey the deeply seated religiosity of a race.
In New Mexico there is not the extent of superstition that is to be found in Old Mexico. That is because Indian converts have been fewer. The Indians in Mexico have imported all manner of pagan ideas into current piety. That is natural, because they possessed elaborate nature rituals, fetish worships, diabolisms; and the missionaries seldom denied practice or belief if they could change its name to Christianity and induce the pagans to be baptized. But the Northern Spanish people kept their religion fairly pure. One remarkable phenomenon, however, in the State is the widespread prevalence of asceticism. Lent is observed with a rigor unknown elsewhere in America. There are thousands of people living in the mountains who practice self-flagellation and beat their bare backs with cactus or with whips till they are streaming with blood. They carry heavy crosses in procession. They even permit themselves to be tied in crucificial attitude and hung on a cross till they are exhausted. These are called the "Penitentes," apparently an offshoot of the Third Order of St. Francis, which was inaugurated in Mexico in the first year of Cortes' conquest. These are no longer safely in the bosom of Mother Church, neither are they excommunicated except by their own choice, but they are without priests, and practice their rituals in windowless chapels called moradas. Of these there are many on the mountain sides of the country near Santa Fe. The Penitentes cannot be considered popular—and they for their part do not ask the interest of outsiders. They are secretive, and some of the Texans are all for "cleaning them up." There is no "hundred per cent Americanism" in their practices, perhaps not one per cent, and I doubt that they can long endure. They are likely to be forced into the conventional orthodoxy of the Church within the century.
Santa Fe is in one way remarkable for its religious processions. Open-air rituals, ceremonies, processions, are forbidden in Mexico proper, and the monasteries and convents have mostly been dissolved. A monk is a rarity in Chihuahua, but a common figure in New Mexico. Sacred images repose in the churches in Old Mexico—but here nothing so usual as to bring them out into the streets in grand parade! When they carried out the little white De Vargas Madonna in memory of the succor given to the Spanish troops in the seventeenth century in the recovery of Santa Fe from the Indians who had risen, killed their priests, razed their churches, and sacked the country—the procession may easily have been a mile long. Brass bands, sacred banners, mounted candlesticks, choir boys and clergy, knights of Columbus led by some one with a long, bared sword. Indians wrapped in their blankets, squaws with black hair hanging in a cloud to their waists, children carrying garlands of flowers, Mexican men in their clumsy clothes, women in long array of black,—such a procession is a memorable and moving sight. It has a missionary power also, and draws converts who thirst for color and emotion in the dullness of the Protestant sects.
I was urged by some Americans to think that Romanism without the Pope might become the new religion of America, and that it might start its great evangelism and revival from Santa Fe itself. Perhaps I am too much of a European, but the idea of Romanism without a Pope seemed that of a tree without a root. "I used to go to the church of the Paulist Fathers in New York every day of my life," said Vachel Lindsay, who comes of an ardent Free Church stock. "I am seventy per cent with them. Get rid of their politics and the Pope, and I would be with them heart and soul."
Possibly as America swung free of England and Mexico of Spain, and as the whole of America to-day with its Monroe Doctrine has cut adrift from European politics, so also its Catholicism might one day say—We will build Rome afresh in the New World and put away the old Rome of Europe as something which has been outlived. There might be a religious war of Independence. The Roman adherence of the United States with its Irish, its Poles, its Czechs, its Southern Germans, Austrians, and Italians, and its Spanish-speaking peoples, is an enormous multitude. They obtain an increasing hold upon the control of America, and they are regarded at present by Protestants as an increasing danger. But that is due, not so much to the religious expression of Romanism as to what it implies politically.
Of course there is a very telling reproach to Catholicism, and that is, that in Catholic countries one always finds what Protestants call "backwardness." It is a common objection in New Mexico, where it is difficult to get enough money to carry out an advanced educational program, where natural ambition seems somehow thwarted by a satisfying religion, where the men do not think that their women can have opinions or use a vote, where ethical standards are low, and the conscience seems to be encased in proof. Inter-marriage is regarded with disfavor by Americans. Many are ready to say that these Spaniards are not Americans, that they cannot be till they become Methodists or Presbyterians and speak the language properly. Even those who emotionally admire the processions and rituals go home to cool off and become disparagingly critical of the people, as of foreigners. For such, a trip over the Border into Old Mexico would be the best medicine—that they might see how far New Mexico had progressed from what it used to be when it was part of New Spain.