Viva Mexico!

by Charles Macomb Flandrau

Attached to the grounds is a house—a succession of cool rooms on one floor, and in passing the open doors and windows of the long, denuded sala as one begins to descend the main terrace, it is impossible not to remember for a moment that the place was lived in by Maximilian and Carlotta. It is impossible, too, especially if the white roses and jasmine of the arbor are in bloom, not to pay the unfortunate lady and gentleman the tribute of a sentimental pang. In Mexico one often finds oneself thinking of Maximilian and Carlotta and, on the whole, with a kindliness springing, I am sure, chiefly from the facts that they were young and in love. For politically they were but a pair of stupid mistakes. History has been kind to Maximilian—far kinder than he deserved—but standard and respectable history is so timorous of leaving a wrong impression that it often fails to leave any impression at all. History to be interesting and valuable should be recorded by persons of talent and prejudice or by chambermaids who listen at keyholes.

As it is difficult to believe Maximilian a scoundrel, the other belief most open to one in view of his brief career, is that he was a dull, ignorant, and fatuous young man who thought it would prove more diverting to be a Mexican emperor than an Austrian archduke. His portrait, indeed (the famous one on horseback now in the National Palace), expresses just this with unconscious cruelty. History often speaks of him as handsome—an adjective that even the idealized portrait in question quite fails to justify. Without more chin than Maximilian ever had, one can be neither handsome nor a successful emperor. He was amiable and “well disposed,” but his fatuity revealed itself from the first in the mere fact of his being able to see in himself a logical claimant to the throne of Mexico in the far-fetched and absurd reason that led Napoleon III and the Roman Catholic Church to select him. For he was chosen to adorn this precariously fictitious seat because Mexico had formerly been a Spanish possession and the house of which he was a representative had ruled in Spain before the accession of the Bourbons! Napoleon III naturally was not giving away empires to Bourbons, and Maximilian was supposed “to reunite the Mexico of 1863 with the monarchical Mexico of 1821.” To the party of intelligence, progress, and reform there was about the same amount of right and reason in this as the inhabitants of France would find in a sudden demand on my part to be made their chief executive because my name happens to be a French name.

Maximilian “accepted” the crown on two conditions. That he was pathetically ignorant of at least the subject on which he ought to have been best informed is clear from one of them, and that he was dull becomes almost as evident from the other. The first provided that he should be elected to the throne of Mexico by popular vote; and the second, that the Emperor Napoleon should give him armed aid as long as he required it. Now anyone with the most rudimentary knowledge of Mexico knows that a popular election there is an impossibility and always has been. No one in Mexico is ever elected by popular vote, or ever really elected at all. It cannot be done at the present time (1908) any more than it could have been when Maximilian and Carlotta were crowned in the cathedral in 1864. The inhabitants of Mexico, incredible as it may sound, speak more than fifty totally different languages and many of them have never learned Spanish. Some of them in fact—the Yaquis in Sonora and the Mayas in Yucatan—do not even recognize the Mexican Government, are still at war with it and are being for this reason rapidly exterminated, although not as rapidly as would be the case if the military exterminators did not receive increased pay while engaged in the congenial pursuit of extermination. When one considers that two years before the proposed taking of the census in 1910, the Government is planning a gradual and elaborate campaign of enlightenment in the hope of allaying the suspicions of the superstitious lower classes and making a more or less accurate census possible, it is clear that not even a political dreamer could seriously consider the feasibility of a genuine popular election. From what I know of many of the inhabitants, from what I have seen of their complete indifference to anything outside of their villages and cornfields, I think it highly probable that many thousands of them tilled their land throughout the entire, futile “reign” altogether unaware of Maximilian’s existence. Maximilian was not elected Emperor of Mexico by popular vote, although before he learned something about his empire, he no doubt thought he had been.

As to the second condition—when Maximilian staked his entire hope of success upon a promise of Napoleon III, who had on various occasions somewhat conspicuously shown himself to be as dangerous an adventurer and as unscrupulous a liar as most of the other members of his offensive family, Maximilian did something that may be recorded as trusting and unfortunate, but that is only adequately described as dull. Fatuous, ignorant, and dull, he not only failed to pull out Napoleon’s chestnuts, he proceeded to fall into the fire. Except just at first, he was not wanted in Mexico even by the clerical party responsible for his being there; for his refusal to abolish the Reform Laws and restore the power of the Church bitterly disappointed the Church without, however, gaining for him adherents among those who had fought so long to establish a republic. Everything he did was preordained to be wrong. He went without a definite policy and was incapable of evolving one after he arrived. His three years in Mexico were unproductive of anything except an enormous debt incurred largely by the silly magnificence of his court, a great deal of bloodshed and his own execution. He died bravely, one always reads, but so do hundreds of other persons every day. Before an audience composed of the entire civilized world, to die bravely ought not to be a particularly difficult feat. As Alphonse Daudet somewhere says of Frenchmen, “They can always be brave if there are enough people looking.” Life was not kind to the young Austrian, but history has been.

And yet, on the sad, silent terraces of the Jardin Borda one always thinks of Maximilian and Carlotta, and pays them the tribute of a sentimental pang.

XV

TRAVELERS sometimes complain that “Mexican towns are exactly alike; if you see one you’ve seen them all,” and while I cannot agree with the bromidically couched observation I can understand why it is made. They are not alike, but they are so startlingly different from Northern towns that one is at first more impressed by this fundamental difference, in which they all naturally have a family resemblance, than by the less striking but delightful ways in which they often differ from one another. Without exception, they are, as art critics used to say of certain pictures, “painted in a high key,” and where the nature of the site permits, their rectangularity is positively Philadelphian. In their center is a public square with a garden, rather formal in intention but as a rule old enough and luxuriant enough to have lost its original stiffness. Here there are paths and benches, trees, fountains, flowers, and a flimsy looking iron and tin band stand one learns at last to like. At one side is the most important church; the other three are bounded by shops and arcades. This is the plaza. Every town has one, many of them have several. But there is always one that more than the others is a kind of pulsating, civic heart, and it is interesting to note how in their dimensions they observe the scale of their environment. Big towns have big plazas, small towns have small plazas, villages have tiny plazas. In addition to the plaza there is often, in a quieter, more distant quarter of the community, a park—a tangled, shady, bird-inhabited spot, with high and aged trees, massive seats of stone or cement, and a tranquillity that exerts a noticeably benign influence on all who go to walk or sit there. Whether the houses and buildings are built of stone or mortar or, as is customary in the smaller places of the plateau, of sun-dried mud bricks, their effect is the same, for they are all given a coat of smooth stucco and then calcimined white, or a pale shade of pink, blue, yellow, buff, or green. Rarely are they of more than two stories; most of them have balconies on the upper floor, all have long, heavily barred windows on the lower, and if it were not for their gayety of color, the perpetual fascination of their flower-filled patios of which the passer-by gets tantalizing glimpses through open doorways, and the intellectual interest of the signs on the shops—their uniform height and the square simplicity of their design might be monotonous. As it is, a Mexican street, even when empty, is never monotonous.

Besides the plaza and the park, there is the market place—sometimes merely an open square in which the venders, under rectangular homemade parasols, spread their wares upon the ground, but more often an inclosure equipped with long counters and protected from sun and rain by a roof. Except in the City of Mexico, Guadalajara, and Merida, one is not conscious of “residence quarters.” The “best families” (a term almost as meaningless and as frequently employed in Mexico as in the United States) live where they please, and they please to live as deeply as possible in the thick of things. The largest and most elaborate houses are often scattered between shops and saloons along the busiest streets, and when one becomes intimate with the country and its inhabitants it seems natural and agreeable that they should be. For one cannot live in Mexico without consciously or unconsciously regarding the superficialities of life from something very like the local point of view. There is about it an infectious and inevitable quality, and I have often been both amused and depressed by the manner in which foreigners who accept the best of everything in Mexico—who grow strong, and revel in one of its several climates, who make a good living there, who enjoy its beauty and adopt many of its customs—stupidly deny its attraction for them, repudiate their sympathy with it. It is customary, almost a convention, to do so, and one is appalled by the tenacity of convention’s grasp upon the ordinary mind—by the impregnable dullness of the normal intellect. I know, for example, Americans who have lived happily in Mexico for many years. They have, among Mexicans, friends whom they both respect and admire. Almost all their interests in life are focused somewhere in the country, and when they are away from it they look forward with gladness to the time of their return. Yet, apparent as all this is to one who associates with them, they seem incapable of translating experience into consciousness and conversation. You see them leading contented and successful lives, at peace with their adopted land and almost everything in it; but when they undertake to discuss their environment, to formulate their opinions, their remarks are rarely valuable and never appreciative. Instead of simply trying to give one something of the Mexico they have day by day, month by month, and year by year met and succumbed to, they appear to take a pride in parading the old geography, guidebook and tourist dicta that in their cases, one sees at a glance, are not justified by facts.

“All Mexican servants are thieves and liars,” is the characteristic pronouncement of an American woman whose household for sixteen years has been admirably and economically run by the same devoted and honest cook.

“What a filthy lot they are!” exclaims her husband (who observes the good old custom of taking a bath every Saturday night whether he needs it or not), as we ride through a Yucatecan village in which most of the Indian inhabitants scrub from head to foot and put on clean clothes every day.