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Anahuac written by Edward Burnett Tylor

E >> Edward Burnett Tylor >> Anahuac




Since we left the country things have got even worse. Formerly, all
that the foreign merchants had to suffer were the incidental miseries
of a state of civil war. Now, the revolutionary leaders put them in
prison; and, if threats are not sufficient, they get forced loans out
of them, much as King John did out of his Jews.

Even in times of peace, foreign goods must be dear in Mexico. In a
country where they have to be carried nearly three hundred miles on
mules' backs, and where credit is so long that the merchant can never
hope to see his money again in less than two years, he cannot be
expected to sell very cheaply. But the continual revolutions and the
insecurity of property make things far worse, and one almost wonders
how foreign trade can go on at all.

One of our friends in Mexico had three or four hundred mules coming up
the country laden with American cotton for his mill, just when Haro's
revolution began. He got off much better than most people, however;
for, greatly to the disgust of the legitimate authorities, he went down
into the enemy's camp, and gave the revolutionary chief a dollar a bale
to let them go.

As may be supposed, commercial transactions have often very curious
features here. Strange things happen in the eastern states; but people
there say that they are nothing to the doings on the Pacific coast,
where the merchants get up a revolution when their ships appear in the
offing, and turn out the Custom-house officers, who do not enter upon
their functions again until the rich cargos have started for the
interior.

One little incident, which happened---I think--at Vera Cruz, rather
amused us. When the Government is hard-up, a favourite way of raising
ready money is to sell--of course at a very low price--orders upon the
Custom-house, to pass certain quantities of goods, duty-free. Such a
transaction as this was concluded between the Minister of Finance and a
merchant's house who gave hard dollars in exchange for an order to pass
so many hundred bales of cotton, free of duty. When the ship arrived at
port, however, the Yankee captain brought in his manifest with a broad
grin upon his face. The inspectors went down to the ship, and stood
aghast. There were the bales of cotton, but such bales! They had to be
shoved and coaxed to get them up through the hatchways at all. The
Customhouse officials protested in vain. The order was for so many
bales of cotton, and these overgrown monsters were bales of cotton, and
the merchants sent them up to Mexico in triumph.

To us, Puebla was not an interesting city. It was built by the
Spaniards, and called _Puebla de los Angeles_, because angels assisted
in building the cathedral, which does no great credit to their good
taste. Its costly ornaments of gold, silver, jewels, and variegated
marbles, are most extraordinary. One does not know which to wonder at
most, the value and beauty of the materials, or the unmitigated
ugliness of the designs.

We saw the festival of Corpus Christi while we were in Puebla; but were
to a certain extent disappointed in the display of plate and jewelled
vestments for the clergy, whose attempt to overthrow Comonfort's
government had only resulted in themselves being heavily fined, and who
were in consequence keeping their wealth in the background, and making
as little display as possible. The most interesting part of the
ceremonial to us was to see the processions of Indians from the
surrounding villages, walking crowned with flowers, and carrying
Madonnas in bowers of green branches and blossoms.

At the head of each procession walked an Indian beating a drum, _tap,
tap, tap_, without a vestige of time. The other processions with stoles
and canopies, and the officials of the city in dress-coats and yellow
kid gloves, were paltry affairs enough.

Neither during this ceremonial, nor at Easter in the Capital were any
miracles exhibited, like the performances of the Madonna at Palermo,
which the coachmen of the city carry about at Easter, weeping real
tears into a cambric pocket-handkerchief; nor is anything done in the
country like the lighting of the Greek fire, or the melting of the
blood of St. Januarius.

Puebla pretty much belongs to the clergy, who are paramount there. A
population of some sixty thousand has seventy-two churches, some of
them very large. It is the focus of the church-party, whose steady
powerful resistance to reform is one of the causes of the unhappy
political state of the country. As is usual in cathedral-towns, the
morality of the people is rather lower than elsewhere. I have said
already that the revenues of the Mexican Church are very large. Tejada
estimates the income at twenty millions of dollars yearly, more than
the whole revenue of the State; but this calculation far exceeds that
given by any other authority. He remarks that the Church has always
tried as much as possible to conceal its riches, and probably he makes
a very large allowance for this. At any rate, I think we may reasonably
estimate the annual income of the Church at $10,000,000, or L2,000,000,
two-thirds of the income of the State.

There is nothing extraordinary in the Church having become very rich by
the accumulations of three centuries in a Spanish colony, where the
manners and customs remained in the 18th century to a great extent as
they were in the 16th, and the practice of giving and leaving great
properties to the Church was in full vigour--long after it had declined
in Europe. It is considered that half the city of Mexico belongs to the
Church. This seems an extraordinary statement; but, if we remember that
in Philip the Second's time half the freehold property of Spain
belonged to the Church, we shall cease to wonder at this. The
extraordinary feature of the case is that, counting both secular and
regular clergy, there are only 4600 ecclesiastics in the country. The
number has been steadily decreasing for years. In 1826 it was 6,000; in
1844 it had fallen to 5,200, in 1856 to 4,600, giving, on the lowest
reckoning, an average of over L200 a year for each priest and monk. A
great part of this income is probably left to accumulate; but, when we
remember that the pay of the country curas is very small, often not
more than L30 to L50, there must be fine incomes left for the
church-dignitaries and the monks. Now any one would suppose that a
profession with such prizes to give away would become more and more
crowded. Why it is not so I cannot tell. It is true that the lives of
the ecclesiastics are anything but respectable, and that the profession
is in such bad odour that many fathers of families, though good
Catholics, will not let a priest enter their houses; but we do not
generally find Mexicans deterred by a little bad reputation from
occupations where much money and influence are to be had for very
little work.

The ill conduct of the Mexican clergy, especially of the monks, is
matter of common notoriety, and every writer on Mexico mentions it,
from the time of Father Gage--the English friar--who travelled with a
number of Spanish monks through Mexico in 1625, and described the
clergy and the people as he saw them. He was disgusted with their ways,
and, going back to England, turned Protestant, and died Vicar of Deal.

To show what monastic discipline is in Mexico, I will tell one story,
and only one. An English acquaintance of mine was coming down the Calle
San Francisco late one night, and saw a man who had been stabbed in the
street close to the convent-gate. People sent into the convent to fetch
a confessor for the dying man, but none was to be had. There was only
one monk in the place, and he was bed-ridden. The rest were enjoying
themselves in the city, or fast asleep at their lodgings in the bosom
of their families.

In condemning the Mexican clergy, some exception must be made. There
are many of the country curas who lead most exemplary lives, and do
much good. So do the priests of the order of St. Vincent de Paule, and
the Sisters of Charity with whom they are associated; but then, few of
these, either priests or sisters, are Mexicans.

Among the curious odds and ends which we came upon in Puebla, in the
shop of a dealer in old iron and things in general, were two or three
very curious old scourges, made of light iron chains with projecting
points on the links--terrific instruments, once in very general use. Up
to the present time, there are certain nights when penitents assemble
in churches, in total darkness, and kneeling on the pavement, scourge
themselves, while a monk in the pulpit screams out fierce exhortations
to strike harder. The description carries us back at once to the
Egyptian origin of this strange custom; and we think of the annual
festival of Isis, where the multitudes scourged themselves in memory of
the sufferings of Osiris. A story is told of a sceptical individual who
got admission to this ceremony by making great professions of devotion,
and did terrific execution on the backs of his kneeling
fellow-penitents. Before he began, the place was resounding with
doleful cries and groans; but he noticed that the cry which arose when
he struck was not like these other sounds, but had quite a different
accent. The practice of devotional scourging is still kept up in Rome,
but in a very mild form, as it appears that the penitents keep their
coats on, and only use a kind of miniature cat-o'-nine-tails of thin
cord, with a morsel of lead at the end of each tail, and not such
bloodthirsty implements as those we found at Puebla.

It seemed to us that the great influence of the priests in Mexico was
among the women of all classes, the Indians, and the poorer and less
educated half-castes. The men of the higher classes, especially the
younger ones, did not appear to have much respect for the priests or
for religion, and, indeed, seemed to be sceptical, after the manner of
the French school of freethinking. It was quite curious to see the
young dandies, dressed in their finest clothes, at the doors of the
fashionable churches on Sunday morning. None of them seemed to go to
mass, but they simply went to stare at the ladies, who, as they came
out, had to run the gauntlet through a double line of these critical
young gentlemen. As far as we could see, however, they did not mind
being looked at. The poorer mestizos and Indians, on the other hand,
are still zealous churchmen, and spend their time and money on masses
and religious duties so perseveringly that one wishes they had a
religion which was of some use to them. As it is, I cannot ascertain
that Christianity has produced any improvement in the Mexican people.
They no longer sacrifice and eat their enemies, it is true, but against
this we must debit them with a great increase of dishonesty and general
immorality, which will pretty well square the account.

Practically, there is not much difference between the old heathenism
and the new Christianity. We may put the dogmas out of the question.
They hear them and believe in them devoutly, and do not understand them
in the least. They had just received the Immaculate Conception, as they
had received many mysteries before it; and were not a little delighted
to have a new occasion for decorating themselves and their churches
with flowers, marching in procession, dancing, beating drums, and
letting off rockets by daylight, as their manner is. The real essence
of both religions is the same to them. They had gods, to whom they
built temples, and in whose honour they gave offerings, maintained
priests, danced and walked in processions--much as they do now, that
their divinities might be favourable to them, and give them good crops
and success in their enterprises. This is pretty much what their
present Christianity consists of. As a moral influence, working upon
the character of the people, it seems scarcely to have had the
slightest effect, except, as I said, in causing them to leave off human
sacrifices, which were probably not an original feature of their
worship, but were introduced comparatively at a late time, and had
already been almost abolished by one king.

The Indians still show the greatest veneration for a priest; and Heller
well illustrates this feeling when he tells us how he happened to ride
through the country in a long black cloak, and the Indians he met on
the road used to fall on their knees as he passed, and ask for his
blessing, regardless of the deep mud and their white trousers. However,
this was ten years before we were in the country, and I doubt whether
the cloak would get so much veneration now. The best measure of the
influence of the Church is the fact that when Mexico adopted a
republican constitution, in imitation of that of the United States, it
was settled that no Church but that of Rome should be tolerated in the
country; and this law still remains one of the fundamental principles
of the State, in which universal liberty and equality, freedom of the
press, and absolute religious intolerance form rather a strange jumble.
It is curious to observe that, though the Independence confirmed the
authority of the Roman Catholic religion, it considerably reduced the
church-revenues, by making the payment of tithes a matter of mere
option. The Church--of course--diligently preaches the necessity of
paying tithes, putting their obligation in the catechism, between the
ten commandments and the seven sacraments, and they still get a good
deal in this way.

We sent our horses to the bath at Pueblo. This is usually done once a
week in the cities of Mexico. We went once to see the process while we
were in the capital, and were very much amused. The horses had been to
the place before, and turned in of their own accord through a gateway
in a shabby back street; and when they got into the courtyard, began to
dance about in such a frantic manner that the _mozos_ could hardly hold
them in while their saddles and bridles were being taken off. Then they
put their heads down, and bolted into a large shed, with a sort of
floor of dust several inches deep, in which six or eight other horses
were rushing about, kicking, prancing, plunging, and literally
screaming with delight. I will not positively assert that I saw an old
white horse stand upon his head in a corner and kick with all his four
legs at once, but he certainly did something very much like it.
Presently the old _mozo_ walked into the shed, with his lazo over his
arm, and carelessly flung the noose across. Of course it fell over the
right horse's neck, when the animal was quiet in a moment, and walked
out after the old man in quite a subdued frame of mind. One horse came
out after another in the same way, took his swim obediently across a
great tank of water, was rubbed down, and went off home in high
spirits.

Though slavery has long been abolished in the Republic, there still
exists a curious "domestic institution" which is nearly akin to it. It
is not peculiar to the plains of Puebla, but flourishes there more than
elsewhere. It is called "_peonaje_," and its operation is in this wise.
If a debtor owes money and cannot pay it, his creditor is allowed by
law to make a slave or _peon _of him until the debt is liquidated.
Though the name is Spanish, I believe the origin of the custom is to be
found in an Aztec usage which prevailed before the Conquest.

A _peon_ means a man on foot, that is, a labourer, journeyman, or
foot-soldier. We have the word in English as "_pioneer_" and as the
"_pawn_" among chessmen; but I think not with any meaning like that it
has come to bear in Mexico.

On the great haciendas in the neighbourhood of Puebla, the Indian
labourers are very generally in this condition. They owe money to their
masters, and are slaves; nominally till they can work off the sum they
owe, but practically for their whole lives. Even should they earn
enough to be able to pay their debt, the contract cannot be cancelled
so easily. A particular day is fixed for striking a balance, generally,
I believe, Easter Monday, just after a season when the custom of
centuries has made it incumbent upon the Indians to spend all that they
have and all that they can borrow upon church-fees, wax-candles, and
rockets, for the religious ceremonies of the season, and the drunken
debauches which form an essential part of the festival. The masters, or
at least the _administradors_, are accused of mystifying the annual
statement of accounts between the labourer and the estate, and it is
certain that the Indian's feeble knowledge of arithmetic leaves him
quite helpless in the hands of the bookkeeper; but whether this is mere
slander or not, we never had any means of ascertaining.

Long servitude has obliterated every feeling of independence from the
minds of these Indians. Their fathers were slaves, and they are quite
content to be so too. Totally wanting in self-restraint, they cannot
resist the slightest temptation to run into debt; and they are not
insensible to the miserable advantage which a slave enjoys over a free
labourer, that his master, having a pecuniary interest in him, will not
let him starve. They have a cat-like attachment to the places they live
in; and to be expelled from the estate they were born on, and turned
out into the world to get a living, we are told by writers on Mexico,
is the greatest punishment that can be inflicted upon them.

There was nothing that we could see in the appearance of these _peons_
to distinguish them from ordinary free Indians; and our having
travelled hastily through the district where the system prevails does
not give us a right to judge of its working. We can but compare the
opinions of waiters who have studied it, and who speak of it in terms
of the strongest reprobation, as deliberately using the moral weakness
of the Indians as a means of reducing them to slavery. Sartorius,
however, takes the other side, and throws the whole blame upon the
careless improvident character of the brown men, whose masters are
obliged to lend them money to supply their pressing wants, and must
take the only security they can get. He says, and truly enough, that
the system works wretchedly both for masters and labourers. Any one who
knows the working of the common English system of allowing workmen to
run into debt with the view of retaining them permanently in their
master's service may form some faint idea of the way in which this
Mexican debt-slavery destroys the energy and self-reliance of the
people.

But in one essential particular Sartorius mis-states the case. It is
not the money which the masters lend the _peons_ to help them in
distress and sickness that keeps them in slavery. It is the money spent
in wax-candles and rockets, and such like fooleries, for Easter and All
Saints; in the reckless profusion of drunken feasts on the days of
their patron saints, and on the occasion of births, deaths, and
marriages. These feasts are as utterly disproportioned to the means of
the givers as the Irish wakes which reduce whole families to beggary.
The sums of money spent upon them are provided by the owners of the
estates, who know exactly how they are to be spent. If they preferred
that their labourers should be free from debt, they could withhold this
money; and their not doing so proves that it is their desire to keep
the _peons_ in a state of slavery, and throws the whole blame of the
system upon them.

I have spoken of the _peons_ as Indians, and so they are for the most
part in the districts we visited; but travellers who have been in
Chihuahua and other northern states tell stories of creditors
travelling through the country to collect their debts, and, where money
was not forthcoming, collecting their debtors instead,--not merely
brown Indians, but also nearly white mestizos.

Mexico is one of the countries in which the contrast between great
riches and great poverty is most striking. No traveller ever enters the
country without making this remark. The mass of the people are hardly
even with the world; and there are some few capitalists whose incomes
can scarcely be matched in England or Russia. Yet this state of things
has not produced a permanent aristocracy.

The general history of great fortunes repeats itself with monotonous
regularity. Fortunate miners or clever speculators, who have happened
to possess the gift of accumulating in addition to that of getting,
often make colossal fortunes. Miners have made the greatest sums, and
made them most rapidly. Fortunes of two or three millions sterling are
not uncommon now, and we often meet with them in the history of the
last century. They never seem to have lasted many years. Before the
Independence, the capitalist used to buy a patent of nobility, and
leave great sums to his children to maintain the new dignity; but they
hardly ever seem to have done anything but squander away their
inheritance, and we find the family returning to its original poverty
by the third or fourth generation.

Mexico is an easy place to make money in, in spite of the continual
disorders that prevail. In the mining-districts most men make money at
some time or other. The difficulty lies in keeping it. There seems to
be no training better suited for making a capitalist than the life of
the retail shopkeeper, especially in the neighbourhood of a mine. A
good share of all the money that is won and of all that is lost stops
in his till. Whoever makes a lucky hit in a mining-speculation, he has
a share of the profits, and when there is a "good thing" going, he is
on the spot to profit by it.

When once a man becomes a capitalist, there are many very profitable
ways of employing his money. Mines and cotton-factories pay well, so do
cattle-haciendas in the north, when honest administradors can be got to
manage them; and discounting merchants' bills is a lucrative business.
But far better than these ordinary investments are the monopolies, such
as the farming of the tobacco-duty, the mints, and those mysterious
transactions with the government in which ready cash is exchanged for
orders to pass goods at the Custom-house, and the other financial
transactions familiar to those who know the shifts and mystifications
of that astonishing institution, the Finance-department of Mexico.

We rode from Puebla to Orizaba. Amozoque, the first town on the road,
is a famous place for spurs, and we bought some. They are of blue steel
inlaid with strips of silver, and the rowel is a sort of cogged wheel,
from an inch and a half to three inches in diameter. _(See page 220.)_
They look terrific instruments, but really the cogs or points of the
rowels are quite blunt, and they keep the horse going less by hurting
him than by their incessant jingling, which is increased by bits of
steel put on for the purpose. Monstrous as the spurs now used are, they
are small in comparison with those of a century or two ago. One reads
of spurs, of gold and silver, with rowels in the shape of five-pointed
stars six inches in diameter. These have quite gone out now, and seem
to have been melted up, for they are hardly ever to be seen; but we
bought at the _baratillo_ of Mexico spurs of steel quite as large as
this.

My companion sent to the Art-exhibition at Manchester a couple of pairs
of the ordinary spurs of the country, such as we ourselves and
everybody else wore. They were put among the mediaeval armour, and
excited great admiration in that capacity!

We slept at Nopalucan that night, and rode on next day to San Antonio
de Abajo, a little out-of-the-way village at the foot of the mountain
of Orizaba. Our principal adventure in the day's ride was that, finding
that our road made a detour of a mile or so round a beautiful piece of
green turf, we boldly struck across it, and nearly lamed our horses
thereby; for the ground was completely undermined by moles, and at
every third step the horses' feet went into a deep hole. We had to get
off and lead them back to the road.

Orizaba is the great feature in the scenery of this district of Mexico.
It is one point in the line of volcanos which stretches across the
continent from east to west. It is a conical mountain, like
Popocatepetl, and about the same height; measurements vary from twenty
feet higher to sixty feet lower. The crater has fallen in on one side,
leaving a deep notch clearly visible from below. At present, as we hear
from travellers who have ascended it, the crater, like that of
Popocatepetl, is in the condition of a _solfatara_, sending out jets of
steam and sulphurous acid gas. About three centuries ago its eruptions
were frequent; and its Mexican name, _Citlaltepetl_, "Mountain of the
Star," carries us back to the time when it showed in the darkness a
star-like light from its crater, like that of Stromboli at the present
time, when one sees it from a distance.

San Antonio de Abajo is a quaint little village, frequented by
muleteers and smugglers. Tobacco, the principal contraband article, is
grown in the plains just below; and, once carried up into the paths
among the mountains, it is hard for any custom-house officer to catch
sight of it.