Thursday, July 28, 1921. Mexico City.
Punctually at 3 o’clock, and true to his word, de la Huerta fetched me in his car. Mr. Malbran was of the party, and as also Mr. Rubio, the good-looking young man who interprets for him. To my great joy he told the chauffeur to drive to El Disirto. It is one of the places I want to see. If the expedition was meant to show me the poverty of Mexico, one did not have to go far, the outskirts of the town are as sordid, dirty, and miserable as can be. But out in the open road, (and a beautiful road it was) we met almost a procession of Indians, one behind the other, walking into the town with their loads. These loads consist chiefly of terra-cotta pots and cooking utensils, piled up, in and around a wooden case, the whole weight of which is carried by a strap round the forehead. Thus, barefooted and bent double, heads straining forward against the weight, muscles of their necks swollen, lips sometimes blue, and bulging eyes focussed on the ground immediately in front, the Indian man, woman and boy will walk twelve kilometres. De la Huerta, pointing to some Indians on burros, said: “Those are the privileged classes.”
“How are you going to better the conditions of these people?” I asked....
“Caramba!” he exclaimed with a gesture of perplexity, and this needed no interpretation.
“What is your motive in showing me ‘La misere’ of Mexico...?”
He said: “Your bourgeois friends have shown you what they had to show,” and he referred laughingly to yesterday’s Haripeyo and the description in the newspapers of the smart people present. “Each of us shows you his own side...”. He went on to tell me that in olden days, the poverty and distress was hidden from visitors as much as possible, but that times had changed, and to-day everything was open for anyone who wished to investigate. “It is good that foreigners should see what we made our Revolution for.” I was a little bit perplexed, and remarked: “But how has it helped, if the people are still in this condition?”
He explained that things were slowly progressing, that the development was from the coast towards the centre, he said proudly, that the State of Sonora, of which he is Governor (elected by a tremendous majority) has no such conditions, and he expressed the desire that I might see his State—“But these people” and he waved towards the patient procession, remarking as he did so upon the expression of suffering in their faces—“these people are better off even than they were. In the days of Porfirio Diaz they worked as they are worked today, but they worked for an employer. They were whipped to work. They were slaves. They had even to marry according to their employers’ selection. Today they are doing the work for themselves, they do it of free choice, and whatever small gain they make, it is theirs.”
I quoted what a friend had told me, that the Indians would rather sell bananas in the gutter, than own a bit of land and have to cultivate it. De la Huerta’s face took a savage expression: “Try and take away a piece of land from the Indian who owns it and see what happens ...” he said.
Under the thirty years peaceful reign of Porfirio Diaz, a handful of people prospered, a propertied class and a rich leisured class sprang up, “But the working people were as you see them here on the road. Are you surprised they rose in revolt?”
I told him that Russia seemed to be concentrating all her propaganda on the next generation, and that the obsession of the moment was education. De la Huerta said in reply, that after he became Governor of Sonora, he increased the schools from eighty to four hundred and twenty-seven in one year. The man is evidently full of ideas and ideals, but he has not a free hand. He referred to the criticism of the world, and said it was necessary to show what effort and what aims there were. I told him that what was far more convincing than seeing conditions was meeting people. Of himself, for instance, I had heard great criticism, from a certain class. But it was only necessary to meet him to see that he was a sincere idealist, and not in the least as the world described him. De la Huerta turned to the mobile-faced Malbran, and said: “There! Let your diplomatic mind take in all this....” I said laughingly, that I thought the Argentine Minister would make a very excellent Ambassador to Russia, when his time was up in Mexico, but the others said his initiation had only just begun, and he would not be ready for quite a while!