Chata and Chinita: A Novel

by Laura Preston

These events had followed one another in such rapid succession, and were seemingly so contradictory, that to the onlooker they appeared irrational, childish, even traitorous. But in truth they were the vague, blind outstretchings of a people groping for self-government, for a liberty and peace which they were both by nature and training as yet unprepared to enjoy. The thraldom of Spain had left them madly impatient of fetters, yet they clung to the stake to which they had been chained. Were the prop called King or President, an individual rather than abstruse principles was demanded to uphold them. This it was which in the chaos that followed the war with the United States led them to recall the man whom they had exiled,—the man who had failed them in their greatest need, yet whose unaccountable ascendency over the minds of the masses led them to turn to him again as a deliverer, and whose triumphant march through the land intensified a thousand times the prevailing misery. As one of the historians of Mexico says of Santa Anna,—

“On his lips had been heard the words of brotherhood and reconciliation. The majority had believed in them, because they thought that in the solitude of exile the experience of years and the spectacle of his afflicted country must have purified and instructed the man. It is impossible to say whether his was hypocrisy or a flash of good faith; but certain it is he deceived those who believed, and silenced those who had no faith in his words, and none can imagine the days of distress and mourning which followed.

“His term of office was to last a year; his promises were to redeem his nation from the yoke of slavery, to announce a code of wise and just measures which should insure its happiness and prosperity. A hopeless task, perhaps, in the midst of a nation distracted by years of foreign and civil wars; but at least an attempt was possible. But when once the sweets of power were tasted, all sense of honor and patriotism was lost in the intoxication of personal ambition. Beguiled by promises of protection of their interests, so often and so violently assailed by the Liberal and Conservative parties, the clergy and their adherents in all parts of the Republic secured the passage of an Act which declared him perpetual ruler, with the title of Serene Highness, with his will as his only law, and his caprices his only standard.”

Those not lost in the inconceivable stupor which the deadly upas in their midst cast far and near, opened wide eyes of amaze. A trumpet cry rang through the land! Liberals and Conservatives, even the less bigoted of the clerical party, sprang to arms. The entire nation, grieving and reduced to misery by the loss of ninety thousand men who had been dragged from their homes to support the pomp and power of the tyrant, to become a prey upon the land, and upon the helpless families of whom they should naturally have been the support, had refused long to be dazzled by the spectacle of military pomp, or to be beguiled by the fiestas and processions which in every town and village made the administration one that appeared a prolonged carnival and madness. These continued insults to the public misery; the daily proscriptions of men who dared to raise the voice or write a line against the Dictator or his senseless policy; the oppressions of the army; the cold, cruel, implacable espionage which made life unendurable,—these wrought quickly their inevitable consequences among a people accustomed to disorder and revolutions, and who in their blind, irrational way longed for liberty. Disgust and detestation of the dictatorship became general. As suddenly as it had sprung into being it was met and crushed. Rebellions sprang up on every hand; the populace rose in mass; the statues of Santa Anna were thrown down in the streets, his portraits stoned; the houses of his adherents were sacked, their carriages destroyed. The popular fury culminated in the practical measure of the promulgation of the plan of Ayutla, which condemned to perpetual exile the ambitious demagogue who had disappointed and betrayed all parties, mocking with cruel levity his country’s woes, and which declared for the establishment of a Republic based upon the broadest platform of civil rights. Gomez Farias gave form to this act; but Ignacio Comonfort became its soul when he proclaimed it in Acapulco, and in the almost inaccessible recesses of the South raised the standard of a rebellion, which rapidly extending throughout the land hurled from its pedestal the idol of clay, that for a brief moment had been taken for gold, to place in its stead a new favorite.

Then another exile returned to his country, heralded by neither trumpets nor acclamations. Calm, astute, watchful, he took his place amid the revolutionary forces; but without seeming effort, from a follower he became a leader. His was the brain that was to develop from the imperfect plan of Ayutla liberties more daring and precious than men had learned to dream of to that hour. Comonfort the last President was the figure toward which all eyes turned; but behind him stood the quiet, insignificant Indian, successful general now, Benito Juarez, shaping the destinies of those who ignored or despised him.

Comonfort was daring, impulsive, utterly devoid of physical fear; a man of action, prone to plunge into difficulties, yet ready to compromise where he could not fight, antagonistic to the temporal power of the Church, yet superstitiously bound by its traditions, he was at once the initiator and the enemy of reform. Finding himself in triumphant opposition to the clergy, he recklessly attacked their most cherished institutions; to open a passage for his troops he threw down their finest convent; to pay his soldiery he levied upon their treasures. Yet he trembled before their denunciations,—upon one day sending the bishop into exile; on the next, he cowered before the meanest priest who threatened him with the Virgin’s ire. The terrors of excommunication unnerved him. Scared by his own audacity; unable to quell the storm he had roused; viewing with dismay the reaction that his ill-considered boldness had created in the minds of a people dominated by ghostly fears, even while they groaned under the material oppressions of priestcraft; led beyond his depth by unscrupulous counsellors, or by those who like Juarez had ideas beyond the epoch in which he lived,—Comonfort, while he maintained a kingly state, looked forth upon the new aspect of distraction which his country wore, and vainly sought a method of compromise to evoke order from chaos. He who had dared all physical dangers shrank before a revolution of sentiment. His vacillating demeanor—above all his conciliations of the clergy whom he had so short a time before defied—awoke distrust on every hand.

Such was the political aspect, so far as known at Tres Hermanos, upon the eve when the first straggling band of soldiery crossed the peaceful valley, and its doors opened to receive the first of those armed guests, which in the near future were to become so numerous and so dreaded.

In one far corner of the great house there was a little balcony with its high iron railing; and behind it, scarce reaching to its top, stood two children on tip-toe, looking with wide eyes upon the glory of the purpling mountains, and then with mundane curiosity dropping them upon the more homely attractions within hearing as well as sight. And upon that special afternoon in October these chanced to be of a somewhat unusual character; for across the plain rode one of those predatory bands, which in those wild days sprang up like magic even in the most isolated regions,—the arid mountains and the fertile plains alike furnishing their quota of material, which blindly, ignorantly, but for that none the less furiously, became sacrifices to the ambition of a score or more contesting chiefs. Yet amid the cupidity, unscrupulousness, and barbarity of these chiefs still lingered the spirit of liberty, which though drenched in blood, and bound down by ecclesiastical as well as military despotism, was yet to rise triumphant, perhaps after its years of long struggle stronger, purer, holier than the world before had known it.

But license rather than liberty seemed to animate those wild spirits who, invigorated after a long day’s march by the sight of a halting place, urged their steeds with wild shouts and blows with the flat side of their sabres, as well as with applications from their clanking spurs, across the plain, where scattered at intervals might be seen the laggards of the party, chiefly women, on mule or donkey back, with their cooking implements hanging from the panniers upon which they squatted in security and comfort, nursing their babies or quieting the more fractious older children, as the animals they rode paced quietly on or broke into a jog-trot at their own wills.

It was a cause of great excitement and delight to the children in the balcony to see the soldiers—most of them still arrayed in their ranchero dress of buff leather, but some of them resplendent in blue-and-red cloth, with stripes of gilt upon their arms and caps—stop at the huts along the principal street or lane of the village, and laughingly take possession, bidding Trinita and Francisca and Florencia, and the rest of them, to go or stay as it pleased them. Some of the women were frightened and began to cry and bewail, but others found acquaintances among the new arrivals; and there was much laughing and talking, in the midst of which two personages who appeared to be the leaders of the party, and who were followed by a dozen or more companions and servants, rode up to the hacienda gates, and one, scarcely pausing for an answer from the astonished Pedro whom he saluted by name, rode into the courtyard, whither he was followed by the gate-keeper, who with stoical calm yet evident amazement saluted him as Don Vicente; and holding his stirrup as he dismounted added in a low voice,—