Anahuac : or, Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern

by Edward B. Tylor

We met some arrieros, who had brought up salt from the coast; and they, seeing that we were English, judged we had something to do with mines, and proposed to sell us their goods. The price of salt here is actually three-pence per lb., in a district where its consumption is immense, as it is used in refining the silver ore. It must be said, however, that this is an unusual price; for the muleteers have been so victimised by their mules being seized, either by the government or the rebels (one seems about as bad as the other in this respect), that they must have a high price to pay them for the risk. Generally seven reals, or 3s. 6d. per arroba of 25 lbs. is the price. This salt is evaporated in the salinas of Campeche, taken by water to Tuzpan, and then brought up the country on mules’ backs—each beast carrying 300 lbs. Of course, this salt is very coarse and very watery; all salt made in this way is. It suits the New Orleans people better to import salt from England, than to make it in this way in the Gulf of Mexico, though the water there is very salt, and the sun very hot. The fact, that it pays to carry salt on mules’ backs, tells volumes about the state of the country. At the lowest computation, the mules would do four or five times as much work if they were set to draw any kind of cart—however rough—on a carriageable road. It is true that there is some sort of road from here to Tampico, but an English waggoner would not acknowledge it by that name at all; and the muleteers are still in possession of most of the traffic in this district, as indeed they are over almost all the country.

It was mid-day by this time; and, as we could not get to the Rio Grande without taking our chance for the night in some Indian rancho, we turned back. The heat had become so oppressive that we took off our coats; and Mr. Christy, riding in his shirt-sleeves and holding a white umbrella over his head, which he had further protected with a turban, declared that even in the East he had not had so fatiguing a ride. We passed through Soquital, and there the natives were idling and drinking spirits as before, and seemed hardly to have moved since we left. This plateau of Atotonilco el Grande, called for shortness Grande, is, like most of the high plains of Mexico, composed mostly of porphyry and obsidian, a valley filled up with débris from the surrounding mountains, which are all volcanic, embedded in reddish earth. The mountain-torrents—in which the water, so to speak, comes down all at once, not flowing in a steady stream all the year round as in England—have left evidences of their immense power in the ravines with which the sides of the hills, from their very tops downward, are fluted.

These fluted mountain-ridges resemble the “Kamms” (combs) of the Swiss Alps, called so from their toothed appearance.

We had met numbers of Indians, bringing their wares to the Sunday market in the great square of Atotonilco el Grande; and when we reached the town on our way home, business was still going on briskly; so we put up our horses, and spent an hour or two in studying the people and the commodities they dealt in. It was a real old-fashioned Indian market, very much such as the Spaniards found when they first penetrated into the country. A large proportion of the people could speak no Spanish, or only a few words. The unglazed pottery, palm-leaf mats, ropes and bags of aloe-fibre, dressed skins, &c., were just the same wares that were made three centuries ago; and there is no improvement in their manufacture. This people, who rose in three centuries from the condition of wandering savages to a height of civilization that has no equal in history—considering the shortness of the time in which it grew up—have remained, since the Conquest, without making one step in advance. They hardly understand any reason for what they do, except that their ancestors did things so—they therefore must be right. They make their unglazed pottery, and carry it five and twenty miles to market on their heads, just as they used to do when there were no beasts of burden in the country. The same with their fruits and vegetables, which they have brought great distances, up the most difficult mountain-paths, at a ruinous sacrifice of time and trouble, considering what a miserable sum they will get for them after all, and how much even of this will be spent in brandy. By working on a hacienda they would get double what their labour produces in this way, but they do not understand this kind of reasoning. They cultivate their little patches of maize, by putting a sharp stick into the ground, and dropping the seed into the hole. They carry pots of water to irrigate their ground with, instead of digging trenches. This is the more curious, as at the time of the Conquest irrigation was much practised by the Aztecs in the plains, and remains of water-canals still exist, showing that they had carried the art to great perfection. They bring logs of wood over the mountains by harnessing horses or mules to them, and dragging them with immense labour over the rough ground. The idea of wheels or rollers has either not occurred to them, or is considered as a pernicious novelty.

It is very striking to see how, while Europeans are bringing the newest machinery and the most advanced arts into the country, there is scarcely any symptom of improvement among the people, who still hold firmly to the wisdom of their ancestors. An American author, Mayer, quotes a story of a certain people in Italy, as an illustration of the feeling of the Indians in Mexico respecting improvements. In this district, he says that the peasants loaded their panniers with vegetables on one side, and balanced the opposite pannier by filling it with stones; and when a traveller pointed out the advantage to be gained by loading both panniers with vegetables, he was answered that their forefathers from time immemorial had so carried their produce to market, that they were wise and good men, and that a stranger showed very little understanding or decency who interfered in the established customs of a country. I need hardly say that the Indians are utterly ignorant; and this of course accounts to a great extent for their obstinate conservatism.

There were several shops round the market-place at Grande, and the brandy-drinking was going on much as at Soquital. The shops in these small towns are general stores, like “the shop” in coal- and iron-districts in England. It is only in large towns that the different retail-trades are separated. One thing is very noticeable in these country stores, the certainty of finding a great stock of sardines in bright tin boxes. The idea of finding Sardines à l’huile in Indian villages seemed odd enough; but the fact is, that the difficulty of getting fish up from the coast is so great that these sardines are not much dearer than anything else, and they go a long way. Montezuma’s method of supplying his table with fresh fish from the gulf, by having relays of Indian porters to run up with it, is too expensive for general use, and there is no efficient substitute. It is in consequence of this scarcity of fish, that Church-fasts have never been very strictly kept in Mexico.

The method of keeping accounts in the shops—which, it is to be remembered, are almost always kept by white or half-white people, hardly ever by Indians—is primitive enough. Here is a score which I copied, the hieroglyphics standing for dollars, half-dollars, medios or half-reals, cuartillos or quarter-reals, and tlacos—or clacos—which are eighths of a real, or about ¾d. While account-keeping among the comparatively educated trades-people is in this condition, one can easily understand how very limited the Indian notions of calculation are. They cannot realize any number much over ten; and twenty—cempoalli—is with them the symbol of a great number, as a hundred was with the Greeks. There is in Mexico a mountain called in this indefinite way “Cempoatepetl”—the twenty-mountain. Sartorius mentions the Indian name of the many-petaled marigold—“cempoaxochitl”—the twenty-flower. We traded for some trifles of aloe-fibre, but soon had to count up the reckoning with beans.

I have delayed long enough for the present over the Indians and their market; so, though there is much more to be said about them, I will only add a few words respecting the commodities for sale, and then leave them for awhile.

There seemed to be a large business doing in costales (bags) made of aloe-fibre, for carrying ore about in the mines. True to the traditions of his ancestors, the Indian much prefers putting his load in a bag on his back, to the far easier method of wheeling it about. Lazos sold at one to four reals, (6d. to 2s.) according to quality. There are two kinds of aloe-fibre; one coarse, ichtli, the other much finer, pito; the first made from the great aloe that produces pulque, the other from a much smaller species of the same genus. The stones with which the boiled maize is ground into the paste of which the universal tortillas are made were to be had here; indeed, they are made in the neighbourhood, of the basalt and lava which abound in the district. The metate is a sort of little table, hewn out of the basalt, with four little feet, and its surface is curved from the ends to the middle. The metalpile is of the same material, and like a rolling-pin. The old-fashioned Mexican pottery I have mentioned already. It is beautifully made, and very cheap. They only asked us nine-pence for a great olla, or boiling-pot, that held four or five gallons, and no doubt this was double the market-price. I never so thoroughly realized before how climate is altered by altitude above the sea as in noticing the fruits and vegetables that were being sold at this little market, within fifteen or twenty miles of which they were all grown. There were wheat and barley, and the piñones (the fruit of the stone-pine, which grows in Italy, and is largely used instead of almonds); and from these representatives of temperate climates the list extended to bananas and zapotes, grown at the bottom of the great barrancas, 3,000 or 4,000 feet lower in level than the plateau, though in distance but a few miles off. Three or four thousand miles of latitude would not give a greater difference.