It is a wonder that even the Mexicans can thus work these mines, year after year, and make the smallest profit. The most efficient American manager would find this to be impossible. The Mexican superintendente lives on nothing and his Mexican employes live on less. Eighteen to twenty cents a day Mexican (less than ten cents a day in American) is the miner’s pay. On this amount he must support himself and often a large family. The Mexicans follow the old Spanish theory, that human labor is cheaper than machinery, if you can crush down the human labor to a sufficiently low wage. Hence, the Mexican employing classes discourage both the use of machinery and the education of the peon. Ignorance and the abject poverty of the working class is the Spanish-American ideal. The day laborer in Mexico is little better than a slave. The wealthy mine owner, who lives in luxury in the distant Capital, or in Paris, or Madrid, may exhibit the evidences of culture and refinement, but Mexico can never greatly advance until the masses of the common people shall be enlightened and by modern statesmanship be lifted from this condition of industrial servitude.
Some of the types among these Indians are curious. One man has a head that runs up straight behind his ears, nor has he much brain in front. Another looks like a Japanese. These Indians—they are called Indians, but are many of them half-breeds, for there is much Spanish blood mixed in among them—are pitifully poor and are hopeless in their poverty. They have been hammered and battered for so many centuries by the merciless Spanish overlord, that they have had all spirit long ago knocked out of them. They seem to be unable now to rise. Nor are they a hardy race. When sickness prevails they are too poor to employ a doctor, but rely upon charms and religious rites. I have just acted the part of a physician. I have brought with me a small box of selected medicines sufficient for the common ailments of this land of semitropics. I am now prescribing quinine for Doña Caldina, calomel for Señor Perez. I hear that a crippled man is coming to-morrow to see me and ask whether the white señor can cure him and make him walk. There is a certain childlike quality about these peones. How humbly they accept the superiority of the white man, whom they do not love!
I see many instances of what might be called degenerates, misshapen heads, ill-shaped and deformed bodies, signs of a race too much inbred. They wear white cotton clothes, peaked straw hats and rawhide sandals. The men generally carry blankets (zerapes) folded across the shoulder which they wrap up in, as do their brothers on the highlands, when the air grows cold.
AN ANCIENT DUMP OF COPPER ORE
The coldness of the nights and the burning heat of the day are strange. I slept last night in flannel underwear, a woolen jersey over that and flannel pajamas still outside; then two thick wool blankets and a rubber poncho over all. Early, toward one or two o’clock I woke up chilled to the bone. I put on my corduroy coat. I was just warm, for an icy wind was blowing down from the lofty altitudes of the Tierra Fria. This morning when the sun rose about six o’clock, the air was still cold. In an hour it was pleasantly warm, birds were singing and flying from tree to tree. By nine o’clock the sun blazed like a ball of fire. I am now, at half past nine, going about in slippers, in linen trousers and my thin pajama coat, and even then I hide from the sun. By ten o’clock a silence lies upon the land profound and overwhelming, not a living thing is astir, except only the lizards and the cicadas. The daylight ends precipitately. The day lasts only as long as the sun is up. By half past five the sun hangs above the mountains on the west. Suddenly it is gone. In fifteen minutes it is dark, the stars are out, and such white stars they are! The cold air of the highlands then settles down upon us for the night.
XIII
Some Tropical Financial Morality
Churumuco, Mina el Puerto, On the Rio de las Balsas,