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

by Edward B. Tylor

We rode over great beds of gravel, cut up in deep trenches by the mountain-streams; then along the banks of the river, among plantations of tobacco, looking like beds of lettuces. As we were riding along the valley, we saw before us a curious dark cloud, hanging over some fields near the river. Our men, who had seen the appearance before, recognized it at once as a flight of locusts, and, turning out of the high-road, we came upon them just as they had settled on a clump of trees in a meadow. They covered the branches and foliage until only the outline of the trees was visible, while the rest of the swarm descended on a green hedge, and on the grass. As for us, we went and knocked them down with our riding-whips, and carried away specimens in our hats; but the survivors took no manner of notice of us, and in about ten minutes they left the trees mere skeletons, leafless and stripped of their bark, and moved across the field in a dense mass towards some fruit-trees a little way off. For days after this, when we met with travellers on the road, or stopped at the door of a cottage to get a light or something to drink, and chatted a few minutes with the inhabitants, we found that our descent of the mountain-pass had brought us into a new set of interests. News of the government and of the revolutionary party excited no curiosity,—talk of robbers still less. At every house the question was, “¿De donde vienen, Señores?” “Where are you from, gentlemen?”—and when we told them, “¿Y estaban allí las langostas?” “And were the locusts there?” The whole country was being devastated by them; and the large rewards offered for them to the peasants, though they caused dead locusts to be brought by tons, seemed hardly to diminish their numbers. Firing guns had some slight effect in driving off the swarms of locusts; and in some places the reports of muskets were to be heard, at short intervals, all day long. Some idea of the destruction caused by the locusts may be formed from the fact that in six weeks they doubled the price of grain in the district. Fortunately, they only appear in such numbers about once in half a century.

We had ridden a hundred miles over a rough country in the last forty-eight hours, and were glad to get a rest at Orizaba; but on the morning of the third day we were in the saddle again, accompanied by a new friend, the English administrador of the cotton-mill at Orizaba. Until we left the high-road, the country seemed well cultivated, with plantations of tobacco, coffee, and sugar-cane; but as soon as we turned into by-paths and struck across country, we found woods and grassy patches, but little tilled ground, until we arrived at the Indian village which we had gone out of our way to visit, Amatlán, that is to say, “The place of paper.”

In its arrangement this village was like the one that I have already described, with its scattered huts of canes and palm-leaf thatch; but the vegetation indicated a more tropical climate. Large fields, the joint property of the community, were cultivated with pine-apples in close rows, now just ripening; and bananas, with broad leaves and heavy clusters of fruit, were growing in the little garden belonging to each hut. The inhabitants stared at us sulkily, and gave short answers to our questions. We went to the cottage of the Indian alcalde, who declared that there was nothing to eat or drink in the village, though we were standing in his doorway and could see the strings of plantains hanging to the roof, and the old women were hard at work cooking. However, when Mr. G. explained who he was, the old man became more placable; and we were soon sitting on mats and benches inside the hut, on the best of terms with the whole village. The life of these people is simple enough, and not unsuited to their beautiful climate. The white men have never interfered much with them; and it has been their pride for centuries to keep as much as possible from associating with Europeans, whom they politely speak of as coyotes, jackals. The priest was a mestizo, and, as the Alcalde said, he was the only coyote in the settlement; but his sacred office neutralized the dislike that his parishioners felt for his race.

These Indian communities always rejoiced in being able to produce for themselves almost everything necessary for their simple wants; but of late years the law of supply and demand has begun to undermine this principle, and the cotton-cloth, spun and woven at home, is yielding to the cheaper material supplied by the factories. Though so averse to receiving Europeans among them, they do not object to go themselves to work for good wages on the plantations. Those who leave their native place, however, bring back with them tastes and wants hitherto unknown, and inconsistent with their primitive way of life.

Another habit of theirs brings them into contact with the “reasonable people,” not to their advantage. They are excessively litigious, and their continual law-suits take them to the large towns where the courts of justice are held, and where lawyers’ fees swallow up a large proportion of their savings. There is a natural connexion between farming and law-suits; and the taste for writs and hard swearing is as remarkable among this agricultural people as it is among our own small farmers in England.

Theoretically, the Indians in their villages live under the general government, like any other citizens; for, since the establishment of the republic, the civil disabilities which had kept them down for three centuries were all abolished at a sweep, and the brown people have their votes, and are eligible for any office. Practically, these advantages do not come to much at present, for custom, which is stronger than law, keeps them under the government of their own aristocracy, composed of certain families whose nobility dates beyond the Conquest, and was always recognized by the Spaniards. These noble Indians seem to be pretty much as dirty, as ignorant, and as idle as the plebeians—the ordinary field-labourers or “earth-hands” (tlalmaitl), as they were called in ancient times,—and a stranger cannot recognize their claims to superiority by anything in their houses, dress, language, or bearing; nevertheless, they are the patrician families, and republicanism has not yet deprived them of their power over the other Indians. In early times, when men of white or mixed blood were few in the country, it suited the Spanish government to maintain the authority of these families, who collected the taxes and managed the estates of the little communities. The common people were the sufferers by this arrangement, for the Alcaldes of their own race cheated them without mercy, and were harder upon them than even their white rulers, just as on slave-estates a black driver is much severer than a white one.

Near some of the houses we noticed that curious institution—the temazcalli, which corresponds exactly to the Russian vapour-bath. It is a sort of oven, into which the bather creeps on all fours, and lies down, and the stones at one end are heated by a fire outside. Upon these stones the bather sprinkles cold water, which fills the place with suffocating steam. When he feels himself to have been sufficiently sweated, he crawls out again, and has jars of cold water poured over him; whereupon he dresses himself (which is not a long process, as he only wears a shirt and a pair of drawers), and so goes in to supper, feeling much refreshed. If he would take the cold bath only, and keep the hot one for his clothes, which want it sadly, it would be all the better for him, for the constant indulgence in this enervating luxury weakens him very much. One would think the bath would make the Indians cleanly in their persons, but it hardly seems so, for they look rather dirtier after they have been in the temazcalli than before, just as the author of A Journey due North says of the Russian peasants.

To us the most interesting question about the Mexican Indians of this district was this, Why are there so few of them? There are five thousand square leagues in the State of Vera Cruz, and about fifty inhabitants to the square league. Now, let us consider half the State, which is at a low level above the sea, as too hot and unhealthy for men to flourish in, and suppose the whole population concentrated on the other half, which lies upon the rising ground from three thousand to six thousand feet above the sea. This is not very far from the truth, and gives us one hundred inhabitants to the square league—about one-sixth of the population of the plains of Puebla, in a climate which may be compared to that of North Italy, and where the chief products are maize and European grain.

In the district of the lower temperate region, which we are now speaking of, nature would seem to have done everything to encourage the formation of a dense population. In the lower part of this favoured region the banana grows. This plant requires scarcely any labour in its cultivation; and, according to the most moderate estimate, taking an acre of wheat against an acre of bananas, the bananas will support twenty times as many people as the wheat. Though it is a fruit of sweet, rather luscious taste, and only acceptable to us Europeans as one small item of our complicated diet, the Indians who have been brought up in the districts where it flourishes can live almost entirely upon it, just as the inhabitants of North Africa live upon dates.

In the upper portion of this district, where the banana no longer flourishes, nutritious plants produce an immense yield with easy cultivation. The yucca which produces cassava, rice, the sweet potato, yams, all flourish here, and maize produces 200 to 300 fold. According to the accepted theory among political economists, where the soil produces with slight labour an abundant nutriment for man, there we ought to find a teeming population, unless other counteracting causes are to be found.