Still other wise and just provisions of the same excellent document are that no person may be obliged to work for another person without freely consenting so to work, nor without receiving just remuneration, and that imprisonment for debts of a purely civil nature is prohibited. But as your Spanish gradually improves and you are able to have more sustained talks with the natives, you learn that the entire lives of a great number of peones working on haciendas contain two alternatives, one of which is practical slavery and the other imprisonment for debt to his employer.
A young man goes to work on, say, a sugar plantation for the magnificent wages of thirty-six Mexican cents a day. In the course of time—usually a very short time—he acquires a family. If he acquires it after certain preliminary formalities, such as a marriage ceremony and its attendant festivities, his employer has loaned him the forty or fifty pesos—unpayable sum—necessary to defray the costs of the priest and the piper, and the young man’s eternal indebtedness begins from the beginning. If, however, there are no formalities, the financial burden is not assumed until the birth of the first child.
Mexicans of every station adore their children, and even when, as frequently happens among the lower classes, the parents are neither civilly nor religiously married (in Mexico only the civil ceremony is recognized by the law) nothing is too good or too expensive for the offspring. They are baptized and, if the informal union of the parents lasts long enough, they are confirmed. But in Mexico, as elsewhere, the kingdom of heaven costs money, and this money the young man’s employer cheerfully advances. Then in the natural march of events some one dies. Death, of course, all the world over, has become one of our grossest extravagances. Again the employer delightedly pays.
Now he has the young man—no longer so young—exactly where his sugar plantation wants him. On thirty-six cents a day there is no possibility of a laborer’s paying a debt of a hundred or more pesos and moving away, and if he attempts to depart without paying it, a word from the hacendado to his friend the jefe politico would suffice to land him in jail and keep him there. It is impossible to deny that on some haciendas, perhaps on many, this form of slavery is a happier, a more comfortable arrangement than would be the freedom so energetically insisted on in the constitution. Still, slavery is neither a pretty word nor a pretty idea, and yet, in spite of the constitution, the idea obtains in Mexico quite as it obtains in the United States.
Then again you read with satisfaction that among other forms of freedom—“freedom of education, freedom to exercise the liberal professions, freedom of thought,” and so on—the freedom of the press is guaranteed; guaranteed, that is to say, with the reservation that “private rights and the public peace shall not be violated.” The manner in which this reservation can be construed, however, does not occur to you until you read in El Imparcial or in the Mexican Herald—the best Spanish and American daily papers—an account of, let us say, a strike of the mill operatives at Orizaba, and then, a week later, chance to learn what actually happened.
“I see by the Herald that you had a little strike at Orizaba the other day,” you remark to the middle-aged British manager of a large Orizaba jute mill, with whom you find yourself in the same swimming pond at the baths of Tehuacan. “The Herald said that in a clash with the troops several strikers were killed and twenty-five were injured.”
“Did it indeed?” remarks the manager dryly, and later, when you are sitting together in the sun after your bath, he explains that the strike was an incipient revolution engineered by a junta in St. Louis, that the Government sent down a regiment from the City of Mexico, that in an impromptu sort of way six hundred strikers were immediately shot, and that the next morning thirty-four were formally, elaborately, and officially executed. This prompt and heroic measure, he informs you, ended both the strike and the incipient revolution, and as you compare what you have read in the papers with what is the truth, you can tell yourself that it has also ended your illusions as to the freedom of the Mexican press.
In fact you begin to realize why, when you ask American residents of the country for information, their replies are usually so vague, so contradictory, so uninforming. It is not, as a rule, because they know too little, but because they know too much. Theoretical Mexico—the Mexico of constitutions, reform laws, statutes, and books of travel—has ceased, long since, vitally to concern them. It is Mexico as they day by day find it that interests them and that in the least counts. And practical, every-day Mexico is an entirely different, infinitely more mysterious, fascinating affair.
“Does it rain here in summer as much as it does in winter?” I once asked a Mexican lady in a saturated mountain village in the State of Vera Cruz.
“No hay reglas fijas, señor” (there are no fixed rules), she replied, after a thoughtful silence, with a shrug.