Readings from Modern Mexican Authors

by Unknown

The most important corroboration of this law was the separation of Texas, political phenomenon, which, thanks to it, has an explanation actually mathematical. In fact, the settlers, who recognized San Antonio as their centre, did not amount to forty thousand inhabitants scattered over an area larger than that of the French Republic, and depended politically upon the State of Coahuila, of which the capital is Saltillo. The distance which separated, by the cart-roads of that time, these two points, was eight hundred and sixty-eight kilometres, which they traversed in sixteen days in the dry season and in thirty-two days in the period of rains, and the distance from Mexico to Saltillo was nine hundred and forty-seven kilometres—or say, twenty days in the dry and forty days in the wet season. If instead of considering the local capitals, we consider the frontiers of the provinces, distances double and difficulties increase.

ATAVISMS.

This phenomenon, moreover, is but the anthropological expression of a more general biological law, in virtue of which human races, in order to adapt themselves to the medium in which they are developed, assume a uniform physical type and character, which persists, or repeats itself anatomically and psychically through the ages, in spite of the external forms of their civilization; in the same way as do other animals, and plants. Thus, for example, since the days of Trajan the bullocks of the Danube have had enormous and diverging horns; in China the cattle are hump-backed, despite cross-breeding with other strains; and, although the first offspring from crossing may be like the foreign parent, in the fifth or sixth generation there appears in the creole calf the hump of the original and native form. Among the ancient castas of the vice-reinal society the negro was seen to reappear in families of white, or even of red parentage, provided there had been blacks in the ancestry. In the waters of the Nile, the lotus yet floats its blue corolla, which the architects of Memphis copied in the capitals of their temples; and the Fellah of Pharaonic days reappears in families crossed with the Macedonians of the Ptolemies; and, in the first centuries of the Arab domination, in spite of the torrents of foreign blood introduced by polygamy. Even today the type reasserts itself in the native regiments of the English army at Cairo—bronzed, titanic, full-chested, a living model, which is copied in the colossi of Isamboul and which is the ethnic brother type of the Rameses and Amenhotep.

In the central tableland of Mexico, arid, hot, and luminous, where the atmosphere keeps the nerves at high tension; where thoughts are clouded by the abuse of tobacco, of alcohol and of coffee; by the irritation of an eternal and fruitless battle for life; and, until lately, by the frightful impossibility, almost age-long, of forming a plexus of social solidarity; character, in the greater part of society has degenerated and the ferocious tendencies of the Aztecs have reappeared. After ten generations, there has returned, to beat within the breasts of some of our compatriots, the barbaric soul of the worshipers of Huitzilopochtl, of those of the sacred springtimes who went, to the lugubrious sounds of the teponastl to make razzias of prisoners in Tlaxcala and Huejotzinco, to open their breasts with obsidian knives, to tear out the heart and eat it in the holocaust of their gods. Three centuries of masses and of barracks have been too little for the complete evolution of character among the people; and if, on the Silesian plain, the Sarmatian of Attila yet appears, so too in our political struggle there has re-appeared, with the indomitable warrior of Ahuitzotl, the sanguinary priest of Huitzilopochtl.

There is, in fact, nothing in our independent history, more lugubrious; even the most illustrious leaders have stained their glory by the shedding, needlessly, of blood. The burning of villages and executions en masse present themselves at the turning of every page like the funeral refrain of an infernal poem; and, if it be true, that there are not lacking some superior souls—as Don Nicolás Bravo, who set at liberty three hundred Spanish prisoners, although he knew the Spanish leader had just shot his father—many other leaders, of that and later epochs, systematically executed all who fell into their hands. The system was converted into a custom and gave such an impress of barbarity to our political struggles as is not to be found even in negro Africa; since there war prisoners are held as captives, whose ransom is the motive of war; slavery redeems them from death.

In Mexico, on the contrary, frequently no account is made of prisoners but only of the killed and wounded; and the latter were shot or knifed in spite of the severity of their wounds. Hidalgo himself not only ordered that those taken in battle should be killed without fail; but in Guadalajara and Valladolid commanded the seizure of suspects and caused them to be stabbed at night, in remote places, that they might not, by their cries, cause a disturbance. In this way six hundred innocent persons perished; and he advised the leader, Hermosillo, to do the same in El Rosario and Cosalá. Morelos, after the battles of Chilapa, Izucar, Oaxaca, etc., shot all his prisoners without mercy; and Osorio did the same in the valley of Mexico, García in Bajio, and all the other insurgent leaders, though usually in the way of reprisal.

In the first insurrection, military ferocity developed to a degree only seen in Asiatic and African wars, without the least regard for humanity and with systematic neglect of the rights of nations. The prisoners surrendered with Sarda in Soto la Marina, for example, were taken to San Juan de Ulúa, on foot, in pairs, shackled together, and in the fortress, were entombed in humid, dark, pestilential, dungeons, hot from the tropical sun of the coast lands. This constant corporal subjection, led to mutual hatreds among the unhappy beings, since the natural necessities of the two members of a couple were rarely simultaneous; and in order to satisfy thirst or any other need it was necessary to beg permission of one’s companion; which led to constant bickerings between them and occasioned sport for the jailors. Orrantia personally struck General Mina, when he was taken prisoner, with the flat of his sword. To hasten the surrender of the Fort of Sombrero, the same leader left one hundred corpses, of those who had fallen in the fruitless assaults, unburied, with the object of causing pestilence. The infirm and wounded of Los Remedios were burned in the building which served them as hospital, and those who attempted to escape were driven back at the point of the bayonet. Liñan forced two hundred prisoners to demolish the embankments of the fortress of their own party; and then tied them to tree trunks in the forest that they might be shot for target practice. Ordoñez in Jilotepec shot one hundred and twenty-three prisoners, including wounded and children, by thirties, at the edge of a ditch, in the Cerro del Calvario; first causing the wounded to be carried thither on the shoulders of the uninjured.

UNCERTAINTY AND GAMING.

This atmosphere, pure and luminous, full of slumberous breezes in the shade and of debilitating heat in the sunshine, capricious and treacherous, not only has an influence upon the physiology, pathology, and life of the Mexicans, but it gives to much of their labor an unstable character. In fact, as permanent rivers are few in those great plains, and as those which exist are due to rain, the sowings of the rainy season, which are the more important, and their fruition, where there are no rivers, demand rains. But since, on the other hand, deforestation, carried on since the vice-reinal days, has been destructive, not only are lacking forests and groups of trees, which, as thermal centres uniformly distributed over the higher plateau, might give shelter to the sowings against the chill of night and early morning, or which, in the guise of fences of foliage, might intercept the cold blasts of northers; but also, through their lack, rains have become rare and irregular, there being regions where they have failed for six, seven, and eight consecutive years; as happened in the Mezquital of the state of Hidalgo, the Llano district of Chihuahua, and the north of the state of Nuevo Leon in the years 1887 to 1895. In 1892 and 1893 the drought was general and desolated a great part of the Central Plateau.

When the season of rains arrives, the fields are transformed in a single week, and where was a barren and arid horizon, there extends itself a mantle of tender verdure with corn-fields and springing wheat, which from day to day develop, open their spikes to the sun, and seem to cast back to it its last rays, as golden oceans, ruffled by the evening breeze. The laborers busy themselves in guarding them; but an unseasonable hailstorm destroys them, or a blast, sudden and nocturnal, from the north freezes them in the very months of August and September; that is to say, when surrounded by summer haze, or under a cloud sprinkled with twinkling stars, the laborers believe their crops secure and slumber, lulled by the most pleasing anticipations. When they wake the corn is lost; in twenty-four hours they pass from wealth to misery; the herd perishes; field labor stops; the laborers go forth to rob on the highways, to swell the ranks of the insurgents, or to beg on the street, according to the character of the government. Before the days of the railroads, droughts were the cause of local insurrections, which today are impossible, because grain may be transported from one district to another—or even to the whole country from a foreign land, as happened in 1894, when $30,000,000 worth of American maize was imported. However, the evil is not easily remediable, and a general drought, or a series of local dry seasons, might, as Búlnes indicates, mortally wound our nascent nationality. Agriculture then, thanks to the droughts of the fields on the one hand, but to the abrupt atmospheric changes on the other, escapes calculation and prevision; and there are converted into an enterprise as insecure as mining, labors which have ever constituted the principal honest means of livelihood for Mexicans.