Land without chimneys; or, the byways of Mexico

by Alfred Oscar Coffin

Being the only city of importance near the Pacific and never having had a railroad till 1888, it is strictly a Mexican city without foreign tendency. The city is exceedingly beautiful, with streets crossing at right angles and lined with orange trees for shade, the rarest of innovations in this country. There are a score of public parks with music stands, fourteen portales or arcades covering the sidewalks for many squares, and fourteen bridges spanning the San Juan River.

The Degollado Theatre is the largest on the continent, with the possible exception of the Metropolitan in New York. The only academy of fine arts in the country outside the capital is here. It is a great manufacturing city, but not a column of smoke or the noise of a wheel breaks the Sunday quiet. It is entirely what the word means—manufactures, hand-made. Pass across the little river among the humble adobe dwellings and every house is a work-shop for cotton and silk and wool and leather and musical instruments. Seated upon the dirt floor with a distaff in her hand, I saw Penelope weaving rebosas after the manner of the ancient Greeks. Two doors further I saw young girls with foot-power looms weaving cotton goods, and hard by were a score of young women weaving hosiery with small hand-worked machines. Leather and straw hats and baskets were all done by hand, and what a busy city! For squares and squares, every doorway revealed a hive of busy workers, for Guadalajara must supply the country a hundred miles around, and forever, and forever, the pack-trains from the Pacific country and the mountains come and go with the exchange of commerce. It is the busiest city I have yet found here and the people are happy. Saddles and hats and hammocks and baskets and pottery and shoes are made by the thousand tons and all by hand or the crudest of foot-power machinery. It is wonderful to see the skill of mere boys, who seem to inherit the trades of their ancestors, like the watch-makers of Switzerland or the wood-carvers of Germany.

Of necessity, hand-made articles come high in price, and that forces other thousands into the trade to make rather than to buy. A manilla hat will sell for four dollars right in the shop where it is made, and woolen sombreros without ornament are from four to ten dollars, and a pair of French suspenders costs a dollar and a half. A curious custom is the grouping together of all similar industries. In seeking a pair of shoes I was sent to a quarter of the town where for an hour every open door gave forth its leather odor, and the wall outside was lined with leather articles. There is no mooted question about shop-made shoes. Every workman sits in front of his door with his kit of tools on the sidewalk and works and waits for custom, and if he does shoddy work it is done under your gaze. All the rope and hemp dealers and workers in sisal are grouped in like manner, and the far-famed Guadalajara pottery can be found all in one square. Guadalajara is the home of the chocolate industry. The botanical name of the chocolate tree is Theobroma cacao, and on account of the theobromine the seeds contain, it is one of the most nourishing foods in the country. The cacao tree grows about 20 feet high. The leaves are large and the flowers small, and the fruit is a long purple pod similar to the yellow locust pods of our forests. The pod contains from twenty to forty beans, each very similar in size and color to the shelled almond. Butter made from these beans has an agreeable taste and odor, and rarely becomes rancid. The principal constituents are stearin and olein, and is much used in surgery, and in France is used in pomade. The chocolate of commerce is prepared by roasting the seeds, which establishes the aroma and changes the starch into dextrin. The seeds are then crushed, winnowed and molded, and are ready for export. For instructions in the art of preparing the steaming beverage, consult your cook. I do not know.

The most noted point in the city is the Hospicio de Guadalajara. This building covers eight acres of ground, and within its walls are twenty-three patios or open courts where fountains play and flowers bloom in the open air, and mangoes, oranges and bananas grow in the very doors. This is a public institution for foundlings and orphans and the deaf, dumb and blind. Girls and boys occupy opposite sides of the building, and are grouped according to age. A matron in white cap led me through the entire establishment, beginning with the nursery with its long rows of cribs with infants of all ages and in all stages of humor. Some are orphans by necessity and some by desertion, but they have a better home than thousands with healthy parents. Life here is not a sinecure and the children are all taught valuable trades. Crippled and deformed little girls were embroidering and embossing laces and silks upon patterns so intricate it looked impossible to follow without machinery. I shall never again believe that the Irish and Venetian lace-workers have a monopoly of this wonderful and painfully intricate knowledge. There is a bazaar in the front where these finished articles are offered for sale, and that is the main channel through which they receive gratuities. A direct gratuity would be respectfully declined as it is a state institution and well supported, but you would be told that to purchase these articles would be directly helpful to the poor unfortunates who were weaving their lives into those wonderful patterns.

I asked the matron as to their final disposition. She said that the afflicted ones would of course stay still death. The healthy girls would be helped to places of self-support, and the boys would all go to the army, if they had not mastered some trade. The children have a beautiful chapel in an open court and decorated in the most pleasing manner. I learned more of the nobler side of the Mexican people by a day spent here than in all my wanderings elsewhere. Sorrow and affliction are like to bring us in a more sympathetic union, and the hundreds of patient and afflicted children trying to solve the problems of life under difficulties, force home the truth that all human nature is the same. Except for the Spanish language, these neatly dressed attendants and wards could not be told from any similar institution in our own land, and they will compare as favorably in any line of conduct or results achieved, and the moral tone and timbre of the institution is a paragon of excellence. The Hospicio San Miguel de Belen is a similar institution for afflicted adults with hospital, lunatic asylum and school attached.

I suppose penitentiary life is never pleasant, but prison life here is the most pleasant I have seen. The outer walls look grim enough, but within there must be two acres of flower plots all under care of the prisoners. The guards are all upon the walls and can see all that goes on below. The penitentiary is arranged like a turbine wheel, or rather like a wagon wheel, with avenues from all parts of the ground converging to a central arena without roof, and where the prisoners may be all assembled under inspection if need be. There is here also a reformatory for boys with dungeons for refractory ones and books and lessons for the ignorant ones. While it is called a penitentiary, there are no long term men there; they are all in the army, where they do all the drudgery work of the barracks. They wear a distinctive uniform and would be instantly shot if they attempted to escape. It is very easy to gain admission here, because the visitor is on the wall forty feet above ground and every part of the wall is traversed by narrow bridges across the amphitheatre over which the guards constantly travel. The prisoners are allowed to come to the office and sell anything they manufacture, and their friends may bring them the raw material, so a man may be a prisoner and yet support his family. The building contains a court of justice and prisoners from the patrol wagon are brought directly here and tried and turned into their wards.

Monopolies have no chance here; the government controls everything. The slaughter house is a model of cleanliness and water is freely used. A hundred or more animals are slaughtered daily and the butchers buy as the animals are quartered. Prices go according to the grade of meat and as it is a state affair there is no swindling and no bidding on prices. The animals are slaughtered without cruelty. One is drawn up a gangway by a windlass and fastened so it cannot struggle, and a knife is driven behind the horns, severing the medulla oblongata, and another into the heart, and the blood drawn off by a conduit while the carcass falls into a car and is drawn to the skinning room and in six minutes is quartered and sold. The city market is a wonder all by itself. It covers an entire square and the roof is supported by 196 arched portales on the outside, and the number within the mazy interior are too many to count. Underneath is sold everything that is common to the country.

Across the San Juan River, five kilometers away, is the suburban town of San Pedro. The tramcar passes through the city gate under a huge arch and enters a beautiful avenue of giant elms and camphor trees, and finally stops at a shaded plazuela in the midst of the little town. The town for the most part consists of mud-colored adobe huts with no comfort or convenience, but you soon discover that this is a residence town of the merchants of Guadalajara. You discover this by the lofty stone walls shutting out the eyes of the vulgar. One of the first indications of wealth is a desire to be seclusive, and to wall the great world out from one’s own little selfish world. Even the church is walled in and the cemented coping stuck with jagged glass, and the entrance guarded by heavy iron gates.

But San Pedro is known by one thing alone worth notice—pottery. Guadalajara pottery is known all over the world. Here is found a peculiar clay that gives it a priori advantage, and for generations the making of pottery has been the business of the town, and the knack of the thing is inherited. The delicate and artistic painting is done by people who never had a lesson in art or pigments. Everything in the shape of a vessel is made in San Pedro, from the huge urns that hold your largest lawn plants to the minute toy that may be covered with a button. Not only vessels, but every thing the Mexican has ever seen he can reproduce in clay, be it horse or man or procession or bull-fight or building, and he will make it as true to life and color and purpose as a photograph. But in San Pedro they do more than that. You can sit for a statue or a bust, six feet or six inches, and the workman will take his clay and produce a likeness your own mother would know. They are absolutely true to life in every respect, and will be colored as to eyes and clothes to the fractional part of a division of a tint, and I refuse to abate one jot or tittle of the statement.

But everybody in San Pedro can do that, so we have not yet reached the celebrity. To find the artist of Mexico, of Guadalajara, of San Pedro, you must walk two squares east on the street that leads from the southeast corner of the plaza, turn down to the right half a square till you come to a little tumble-down adobe house on the left. The latchstring is on the outside and you are always welcome. Within is Juan Pandero, the Indian sculptor, a genius if there is one. To be exact there are two, father and son. If you want a statuette of your beautiful self it is made while you wait, or will be built and sent to your hotel, or he will go to your room and do it. But more than that, send him your photograph and he will do the same, and herein lies his genius. Only these two can produce statues from photographs, and they will be as true to life as though he made them from models. And the tools. Such tools! Seated on the floor with a lump of clay and an old case knife, and the outfit is complete.