Conscripts of the Bolivian army practicing their first manoeuvers in the central plaza of Santa Cruz. All who have reached the age of nineteen during the past year are obliged to report at the capital of their province on New Year’s Day
In the outside world the climate of Santa Cruz is reputed obnoxious to whites; about its name hover those legends, common also to India, of Europeans being worn to fever-yellow wrecks. As a matter of fact, the temperature does not rise higher than in southern Canada in July, and a cool breeze sweeps almost continually across the pampas about it. Mosquitos are rare, fever all but unknown. It is not loss of health, but his energetic view of life which the Caucasian immigrant risks. Especially during this hottest season of January the heat was humid and heavy, and I found myself falling quickly into the local mood of contentment just to lie in a hammock and let the world drift on without me. It took an unusual length of time to make up my mind to do anything, and then required more will-power than usual to force myself to get up and do it, particularly to keep on doing it until it was finished. But it is perhaps as largely due to environment as to the climate that Santa Cruz is visibly lazy. The region roundabout is so fertile that almost every staple except wheat and potatoes grow, and the slightest exertion earns sustenance. There are sugar plantations and sugar- and alcohol-producing establishments scattered here and there; the province of Sara to the north supplies food not only to the city but to the rubber districts as far away as the Acre; coffee, rice, and tobacco can be produced in abundance; hides already constitute an important export; the region to the west is reputed rich in oil. Yet Santa Cruz makes small use of her possibilities, languidly waiting for the arrival of a railroad and the influx of foreign capital to develop them.
The rumors that seep up out of Santa Cruz of her beautiful pure-white types are largely of artificial propagation. It is true that she has a larger percentage of Spanish blood than any other city of Bolivia, but this is rarely found in its unadulterated form. Some negro and considerable Indian ancestry has left its mark, and while there is not a full-blooded African, or perhaps a full Indian, in town, and Spanish is the universal, if slovenly, tongue, genuine white natives are few in number. As to the beautiful girls and women of popular fancy, they do exist, but certainly in no larger proportion than pearls in oysters. The overwhelming majority are coarse-featured, with heavy noses and sensual lips, crumbling teeth that hint at degeneration, and little attractiveness beyond the quick-fading physical one of youth.
Some cynic has said that a wall set about Santa Cruz de la Sierra would enclose the largest house of ill-fame on earth. So broad a statement is unkind. Yet not merely are the majority of cruceños born out of wedlock—that much can be said of all Bolivia—but those who are accustomed to investigate such matters agree that the seeker after feminine favors in Santa Cruz need never leave the block in which he chances to find himself. Plain-spoken foreign residents put it baldly that virginity never survives the twelfth year, but this is no doubt an exaggeration. The causes of this lack of social tautness are several. The overstock of one sex, due largely to the migration of the young men to the rubber forests of the Beni, often never to return; a widespread poverty and the lack of any independent means of livelihood for women; and a tropical apathy, even of character, are perhaps the chief. Then, too, there is a marked absence of good example. The higher officials and more wealthy men have, with rare exceptions, at least one irregular household; not a few have only irregular ones. The story is current of one of the chief political powers of the department who decided to visit his daughter at school in Germany. Forewarned, that startled young lady hastened to write: “If you and mama are coming to Germany, you must get married first.” The father yielded good-naturedly to this quaint whim of a favorite daughter, and during the weeks before his departure, spread the story far and wide as one of his best after-dinner witticisms. The native priests almost invariably have concubines. Some, using the transparent subterfuge common to all Latin-America, refer to their families as “housekeeper” and “nephews.” Not a few frankly speak of “the mother of my children.” With rare exceptions this runs to the plural. Among the masses, naturally, these conditions are not improved upon. Marriage, troublesome, expensive, and conspicuous, hardly bringing even the advantage of neighborly approbation, is apt to be looked upon as a nuisance; and it is always hard to go to useless trouble in the tropics. The nineteen-year-old son of an American resident was pointed out by both sexes as a curiosity, because he was still without natural children. The laws of Bolivia recognize three classes of offspring,—legitimate, natural, and unnatural. The second are inalienable heirs to one fifth the father’s property. The third division comprises those born out of wedlock to parents who could not marry if they wished,—that is, one or both of whom is already married, or has taken the priestly vows of celibacy. The town has little notion of the viewpoint of the rest of the world on this subject. Like an island far out at sea, all but cut off from the rest of mankind, it has developed customs—or a lack of them—of its own, its individual point of view; and, like all isolated groups, it is sure of its own importance in exact ratio to the lack of outside influence; so that barefooted cruceños are firmly convinced that their ways are vastly superior to those of the rest of the world, which they judge by the few sorry specimens thereof who drift in upon them bedraggled by weeks on wilderness trails. The term “Colla,” used to designate the people of the Bolivian highlands, and passed on by the masses to the world at large, is here a word of deprecation.
With few exceptions the foreign residents soon fall into this easy, tropical way of life. The two “Belgian” firms bring in scores of young German employees trained in the European main house; and there are normally some 250 Teutonic residents. The percentage of these is low who are not established within a month of their arrival in any part of the region with their own “housekeepers.” The recruit is shown the expediency of this arrangement by both the precept and the example of his fellow-countrymen. Celibacy is alleged to be doubly baneful in the tropics; there are no hotels or restaurants worthy the name; the pleasure of forming a part of the best native family would soon wear threadbare, even if the Moorish seclusion of these did not make admittance impossible. To live with even a modicum of comfort in these wilds the white man must have a home of his own. The frail walls thereof are slight protection against theft. Unless he will reduce his possessions to what he can carry to and from his stool or counter each day, a “housekeeper” is imperative. Though a neighbor might be induced to provide meals and such housekeeping as she has time for, the cruceña brings her personal interest to bear only on those things of which she is genuinely, if temporarily, a part. To her, wages are neither customary nor attractive; the reward for her labors must be a temporarily permanent home. Hence the “servant problem” is most easily solved by adopting the servant. Whatever principles contrary to this mode of life the youthful Teuton brings with him from his native land, they quickly melt away under the tropical sun, and there is commonly little resistance to the new environment.
Let it not be understood that there is unusual betrayal or persecution of innocent womanhood in Santa Cruz. Rather the contrary is true. It is the man who runs the most constant gauntlet of temptation. The arrival of a new clerk is sure to cause a crowding of young women about the door of the establishment, and to swamp it with pretended purchasers. Report has it that a daughter of almost the “best families” may be won by the employee who will remain a few years and buy her a house or leave her a small income at his departure. With the poorer classes the usual procedure is to open negotiations with the girl’s family, to give her mother a present, or win her consent through her taste for strong drink. In the wilder regions of the interior the gift of a rifle, or something equally coveted, to the father is usually sufficient. Daughters are easily acquired, but rifles are scarce. Coming under short contract, the recruit, grown to a darker-skinned bookkeeper or sub-manager, goes his way, or is transferred, and leaves behind whatever family may have befallen him, frequently recommending his “widow” to a newly arrived compatriot. Though there is said to be less taking of “housekeepers” than formerly, in a given group of thirty Germans, twenty had female companions, six had German wives, and four, legal cruceña wives. At the time of my stay in Santa Cruz, 49 native women were calling monthly upon the cashier of a single commercial house for the pension granted them for the rearing of their from one to six half-German children; and these were the abandoned mates only of such as were still employees of the firm elsewhere, or of the rare few who had themselves left some stipend for their offspring. The point of view of the Teuton on this subject is that he is no worse, but merely more free from “hypocrisy” than the Anglo-Saxon. Even the German women accept the condition with little protest, often joining in the celebration at the baptism of the illegitimate infant of a compatriot. In an isolated corner of the department I found a well-educated, likable German keeping house with a jet-black negro girl; and not only was his wife in Germany aware of the arrangement, and amused by his letters concerning his companion, but advised him to keep her as long as he remained in Bolivia, that he might have “some one to look after him and keep him in health.”
Were the results of these attachments an improved human stock, there might be less to condemn. For in its present stage of progress, tropical Bolivia is more amenable to economic than to “moral” improvement; and the country is sorely in need of population. But the foreign blood injected into cruceño arteries is as nothing against the environment. The sons of Europeans may be an improvement upon the natives, at least in those rare cases where the father has remained to add the vigor of his training; but the succeeding generation is only too apt to degenerate quickly into the most native of natives. The assertion of scientists that new blood must constantly be brought to the tropics if these regions are to progress, is plainly demonstrated in Santa Cruz. Throughout the department may be seen to-day in the flesh those conditions which, centuries ago, followed the coming of the Conquistadores without their own women or the Puritan’s point of view, which have made Latin-America from end to end the abode of a chiefly mongrel race.
Attempted improvement of the status quo meets with as little approval as in all other centers of the universe. The American directress of the government girls’ school found herself balked at the outset in the simplest matters. Her edict that pupils must not come to school without some other nether garment than the customary skirt was bitterly opposed both by mothers and by her assistants, on the ground that “it is so hot in Santa Cruz.” Cruceños blame the heat for most of their shortcomings, as the gringo miners of the Andes sweepingly “lay it to the altitude.” In the school in question there were 300 girls of the “best families” of Santa Cruz. One in every four of them was of legitimate birth. The teachers were in many cases decrepit grand-dames, yet no one with a relative or a friend in the government offices could be removed, because these saw to it that no report against their protegees ever reached higher officials. In the faculty meetings it was impossible to criticize a pupil, whatever her delinquency, for she was sure to have at least one relative among the teachers to precipitate an uproar.
On New Year’s Day I had taken up my abode with the only permanent American resident of Santa Cruz. “Juan” S. Bowles, born in Ohio—a cavalry troop of which state he had commanded from Atlanta to the sea—had come to Brazil nine years after the war and ascended to Santa Cruz by way of the Amazon, in the years when 80 days of hard labor were required to cover the 280 miles now served by the Madeira-Mamoré railroad. He had never since seen his native land. His ice-plant was for many years the only producer of that exotic commodity in tropical Bolivia, where, in the early days, it ranked as a luxury at 25 cents a pound. Under his unwilted American energy and indifference to local caste rules the plant still produced its daily quota, if at something less than that regal reward. On his back veranda stood a leather bed—an ox-hide stretched on a wooden frame on legs—just the place to spend a cruceño night, and his stories of “Johnny Rebs” alone made the week I spent there well worth while.
Sometimes, though with difficulty, his reminiscences could be staged in Bolivia. After Santa Cruz had drunk and died of swamp water savored with dead cats for some three centuries, this energetic new resident imported machinery and drove an artesian well, coming upon excellent water some fifty feet below the surface. This he offered for sale, putting out of business the friars who, watching the barometer, successfully prayed to the Virgin for rain. The first woman to arrive with her cántaro on her head asked the son in charge if he were not “ashamed to sell the water God gave.”