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Anahuac written by Edward Burnett Tylor

E >> Edward Burnett Tylor >> Anahuac




When there was a government, there used sometimes to be fighting
between the revenue-officers and the smugglers; but now, if there is a
meeting, a few dollars will settle the disputed question to the
satisfaction of both parties, so that the contraband trade, though
profitable, is by no means so exciting as it used to be.

On the road towards San Antonio we saw ancient remains in the banks by
the road-side, but had no time for a regular examination. We slept on
damp mattresses in a room of the inn, where the fowls roosted on the
rafters above our heads, and walked over our faces in the early morning
in an unpleasant manner. We started before daybreak, and a descent down
a winding road, through a forest of pines and oaks, brought us by seven
in the morning from the region of pines and barley down to the district
where tobacco and the sugar-cane flourish, at the level of 3,000 to
4,000 feet above the sea.

We met a jaunty-looking party in the valley, two women and five or six
men, all on good horses, and dressed in the extreme of fashion which
the Mexican _ranchero_ affects--broad-brimmed hats with costly gold and
silver serpents for hat-bands, and clothes and saddles glittering with
silver. Martin rode up to us as they passed, and said he knew them well
for the boldest highwaymen in Mexico. Had we started an hour or two
later we should have met them in the forest, and have had an adventure
to tell of. As it was, the descent of three thousand feet had brought
us from a land of thieves to a region where highway robbery is never
known, unless when a party from the high lands come down on a marauding
expedition. It is an unquestionable fact that the Mexican robbers,
whose exploits have become a matter of world-wide notoriety, all belong
to the cold region of the plateaus, the _tierra fria_. Once down in the
_tierra templada_, or the _tierra caliente_, the temperate or the hot
regions, you hear no more of them; or at least this is the case in the
parts of Mexico we visited. The reason is clear; it is only on the
plateaus that the whites, preferring a region where the climate was not
unlike that of Castile, settled in large numbers; so that it is there
that Creoles and mestizos predominate, and they are the robbers.

We rode over great beds of gravel, cut up in deep trenches by the
mountain-streams; then along the banks of the river, among plantations
of tobacco, looking like beds of lettuces. As we were riding along the
valley, we saw before us a curious dark cloud, hanging over some fields
near the river. Our men, who had seen the appearance before, recognized
it at once as a flight of locusts, and, turning out of the high-road,
we came upon them just as they had settled on a clump of trees in a
meadow. They covered the branches and foliage until only the outline of
the trees was visible, while the rest of the swarm descended on a green
hedge, and on the grass. As for us, we went and knocked them down with
our riding-whips, and carried away specimens in our hats; but the
survivors took no manner of notice of us, and in about ten minutes they
left the trees mere skeletons, leafless and stripped of their bark, and
moved across the field in a dense mass towards some fruit-trees a
little way off. For days after this, when we met with travellers on the
road, or stopped at the door of a cottage to get a light or something
to drink, and chatted a few minutes with the inhabitants, we found that
our descent of the mountain-pass had brought us into a new set of
interests. News of the government and of the revolutionary party
excited no curiosity,--talk of robbers still less. At every house the
question was, "?_De donde vienen, Senores_?" "Where are you from,
gentlemen?"--and when we told them, "?_Y estaban alli las langostas_?"
"And were the locusts there?" The whole country was being devastated by
them; and the large rewards offered for them to the peasants, though
they caused dead locusts to be brought by tons, seemed hardly to
diminish their numbers. Firing guns had some slight effect in driving
off the swarms of locusts; and in some places the reports of muskets
were to be heard, at short intervals, all day long. Some idea of the
destruction caused by the locusts may be formed from the fact that in
six weeks they doubled the price of grain in the district. Fortunately,
they only appear in such numbers about once in half a century.

We had ridden a hundred miles over a rough country in the last
forty-eight hours, and were glad to get a rest at Orizaba; but on the
morning of the third day we were in the saddle again, accompanied by a
new friend, the English administrador of the cotton-mill at Orizaba.
Until we left the high-road, the country seemed well cultivated, with
plantations of tobacco, coffee, and sugar-cane; but as soon as we
turned into by-paths and struck across country, we found woods and
grassy patches, but little tilled ground, until we arrived at the
Indian village which we had gone out of our way to visit, Amatlan, that
is to say, "_The place of paper_."

In its arrangement this village was like the one that I have already
described, with its scattered huts of canes and palm-leaf thatch; but
the vegetation indicated a more tropical climate. Large fields, the
joint property of the community, were cultivated with pine-apples in
close rows, now just ripening; and bananas, with broad leaves and heavy
clusters of fruit, were growing in the little garden belonging to each
hut. The inhabitants stared at us sulkily, and gave short answers to
our questions. We went to the cottage of the Indian alcalde, who
declared that there was nothing to eat or drink in the village, though
we were standing in his doorway and could see the strings of plantains
hanging to the roof, and the old women were hard at work cooking.
However, when Mr. G. explained who he was, the old man became more
placable; and we were soon sitting on mats and benches inside the hut,
on the best of terms with the whole village. The life of these people
is simple enough, and not unsuited to their beautiful climate. The
white men have never interfered much with them; and it has been their
pride for centuries to keep as much as possible from associating with
Europeans, whom they politely speak of as _coyotes_, jackals. The
priest was a _mestizo_, and, as the Alcalde said, he was the only
_coyote_ in the settlement; but his sacred office neutralized the
dislike that his parishioners felt for his race.

These Indian communities always rejoiced in being able to produce for
themselves almost everything necessary for their simple wants; but of
late years the law of supply and demand has begun to undermine this
principle, and the cotton-cloth, spun and woven at home, is yielding to
the cheaper material supplied by the factories. Though so averse to
receiving Europeans among them, they do not object to go themselves to
work for good wages on the plantations. Those who leave their native
place, however, bring back with them tastes and wants hitherto unknown,
and inconsistent with their primitive way of life.

Another habit of theirs brings them into contact with the "reasonable
people," not to their advantage. They are excessively litigious, and
their continual law-suits take them to the large towns where the courts
of justice are held, and where lawyers' fees swallow up a large
proportion of their savings. There is a natural connexion between
farming and law-suits; and the taste for writs and hard swearing is as
remarkable among this agricultural people as it is among our own small
farmers in England.

Theoretically, the Indians in their villages live under the general
government, like any other citizens; for, since the establishment of
the republic, the civil disabilities which had kept them down for three
centuries were all abolished at a sweep, and the brown people have
their votes, and are eligible for any office. Practically, these
advantages do not come to much at present, for custom, which is
stronger than law, keeps them under the government of their own
aristocracy, composed of certain families whose nobility dates beyond
the Conquest, and was always recognized by the Spaniards. These noble
Indians seem to be pretty much as dirty, as ignorant, and as idle as
the plebeians--the ordinary field-labourers or "_earth-hands_"
(_tlalmaitl_), as they were called in ancient times,--and a stranger
cannot recognize their claims to superiority by anything in their
houses, dress, language, or bearing; nevertheless, they are the
patrician families, and republicanism has not yet deprived them of
their power over the other Indians. In early times, when men of white
or mixed blood were few in the country, it suited the Spanish
government to maintain the authority of these families, who collected
the taxes and managed the estates of the little communities. The common
people were the sufferers by this arrangement, for the Alcaldes of
their own race cheated them without mercy, and were harder upon them
than even their white rulers, just as on slave-estates a black driver
is much severer than a white one.

Near some of the houses we noticed that curious institution--the
_temazcalli_, which corresponds exactly to the Russian vapour-bath. It
is a sort of oven, into which the bather creeps on all fours, and lies
down, and the stones at one end are heated by a fire outside. Upon
these stones the bather sprinkles cold water, which fills the place
with suffocating steam. When he feels himself to have been sufficiently
sweated, he crawls out again, and has jars of cold water poured over
him; whereupon he dresses himself (which is not a long process, as he
only wears a shirt and a pair of drawers), and so goes in to supper,
feeling much refreshed. If he would take the cold bath only, and keep
the hot one for his clothes, which want it sadly, it would be all the
better for him, for the constant indulgence in this enervating luxury
weakens him very much. One would think the bath would make the Indians
cleanly in their persons, but it hardly seems so, for they look rather
dirtier after they have been in the _temazcalli_ than before, just as
the author of _A Journey due North_ says of the Russian peasants.

To us the most interesting question about the Mexican Indians of this
district was this, _Why are there so few of them?_ There are five
thousand square leagues in the State of Vera Cruz, and about fifty
inhabitants to the square league. Now, let us consider half the State,
which is at a low level above the sea, as too hot and unhealthy for men
to flourish in, and suppose the whole population concentrated on the
other half, which lies upon the rising ground from three thousand to
six thousand feet above the sea. This is not very far from the truth,
and gives us one hundred inhabitants to the square league--about
one-sixth of the population of the plains of Puebla, in a climate which
may be compared to that of North Italy, and where the chief products
are maize and European grain.

In the district of the lower temperate region, which we are now
speaking of, nature would seem to have done everything to encourage the
formation of a dense population. In the lower part of this favoured
region the banana grows. This plant requires scarcely any labour in its
cultivation; and, according to the most moderate estimate, taking an
acre of wheat against an acre of bananas, the bananas will support
twenty times as many people as the wheat. Though it is a fruit of
sweet, rather luscious taste, and only acceptable to us Europeans as
one small item of our complicated diet, the Indians who have been
brought up in the districts where it flourishes can live almost
entirely upon it, just as the inhabitants of North Africa live upon
dates.

In the upper portion of this district, where the banana no longer
flourishes, nutritious plants produce an immense yield with easy
cultivation. The _yucca_ which produces cassava, rice, the sweet
potato, yams, all flourish here, and maize produces 200 to 300 fold.
According to the accepted theory among political economists, where the
soil produces with slight labour an abundant nutriment for man, there
we ought to find a teeming population, unless other counteracting
causes are to be found.

The history of the country, as far as we can get at it, indicates a
movement in the opposite direction. Judging from the numerous towns the
Spanish invaders found in the district, the numbers of armed men they
could raise, and the abundance of provisions, we must reckon the
population at that time to have been more dense than at present; and
the numerous ruins of Indian settlements that exist in the upper
temperate region are unquestionable evidence of the former existence of
an agricultural people, perhaps ten times as numerous as at present.
The ruins of their fortifications and temples are still to be seen in
great numbers, and the soil all over large districts is full of the
remains of their pottery and weapons.

How far these settlements were depopulated by wars before the Spanish
Conquest, it is not easy to say. During the Conquest itself they did
not offer much resistance to the European invaders, and consequently
they escaped the wholesale destruction which fell upon the more
patriotic inhabitants of the higher regions. Since that time the
country has been peaceable enough; and even since the Mexican
Independence, the wars and revolutions which have done so much injury
to the inhabitants of the plateaus have not been much felt here.

In reasoning upon Mexican statistics we have to go to a great extent
upon guess-work. A very slight investigation, however, shows that the
calculation made in Mexico, that the population increases between one
and two per cent. annually, is incorrect. The present population of the
country is reckoned at a little under eight millions; and in 1806, it
seems, from the best authorities we can get, to have been a little
under six millions. Even this rate of increase, one-third every
half-century, is far above the rate of increase since the Conquest;
for, at that rate, a population a little over a million and a quarter
would have brought up the number to what it is at present, and we
cannot at the lowest estimation suppose the inhabitants after the siege
of Mexico to have been less than three or four millions. So that, badly
as Mexico is now going on with regard to the increase of its
population, about 1/2 per cent. per annum, while England increases over
1-1/2 per cent., and the United States twice as much, we may still
discern an improvement upon the times of the Spanish dominion, when it
was almost stationary.

Why then has this fertile and beautiful country only a small fraction
of the number of inhabitants that formerly lived in it? That it is not
caused by the climate being unfavourable to man is clear, for this
district is free from the intense heat and the pestilential fevers of
the low lands which lie nearer the sea.

It is a noticeable fact that the remains of the old settlements
generally lie above the district where the banana grows; and the higher
we rise above the sea, the more abundant do we find the signs of
ancient population, until we reach the level of 8,000 feet or a little
higher. The actual inhabitants at the present day are distributed
according to the same rule, increasing in numbers, according to the
elevation, from 3,000 to 8,000 feet, after which the severity of the
climate causes a rapid decrease.

In making these observations, I leave out of the question the hot
unhealthy coast-lands of the _tierra caliente_, and the cold and
comparatively sterile plains of the _tierra fria_, and confine myself
to that part of the country which lies between the altitudes of 3,000
and 8,000 feet, between which limits the European races flourish under
circumstances of climate which also suited the various Mexican races,
who probably came from a colder northern country. Now, if we begin to
descend from the level of the Mexican plateau--say 8,000 feet above the
sea--we find that less and less labour will provide nourishment for the
cultivator of the soil, until we reach the limit of the banana, where
the inhabitants ought to be crowded together like Chinese on their
rice-grounds, or the inhabitants of Egypt in the time of Herodotus.
Exactly the opposite rule takes effect; the banana-country is a mere
wilderness, and the higher the traveller rises the more abundant become
both present population and the remains of ancient settlements.

I suppose the reason of this is to be found in the habits and
constitution of the tribes who colonized the country, and preferred to
settle in a climate resembling that of their native land, without
troubling themselves about the extra labour it would cost them to
obtain their food. The European invaders have acted precisely in the
same way; and the distribution of the white and partly white
inhabitants of the country follows the same rule as that of the
Indians.

So far the matter is intelligible, on the principle that the
constitution and habits of the races which have successively taken up
their residence in the country have been strong enough to prevail over
the rule which regulates the supply of men by the abundance of food;
but this does not explain the fact of an actual diminution of the
inhabitants of the lower temperate districts. They were not mere
migratory tribes, staying for a few years before moving forward. They
had been settled in the country long enough to be perfectly
acclimatized; and yet, under circumstances apparently so favourable to
their increase, they have been diminishing for centuries, and are
perhaps even doing so now.

The only intelligible solution I can find for this problem is that
given by Sartorius, whose work on Mexico is well known in Germany, and
has been translated and published in England. This author's remarks on
the condition of the Indians are very valuable; and, as he was for
years a planter in this very district, he may be taken as an excellent
authority on the subject. He considers the evil to lie principally in
the diet and habits of the people. The children are not weaned till
very late, and then are allowed to feed all day without restriction on
boiled maize, or beans, or whatever other vegetable diet may be eaten
by the family. The climate does not dispose them to take much exercise;
so that this unwholesome cramming with vegetable food has nothing to
counteract its evil effects, and the poor little children get miserably
pot-bellied and scrofulous,--an observation of which we can confirm the
truth. A great proportion of the children die young, and those that
grow up have their constitutions impaired. Then they live in close
communities, and marry "in-and-in," so that the effect of unhealthy
living becomes strengthened into hereditary disease; and habitual
intemperance does its work upon their constitutions, though the
quantities of raw spirits they consume appear to produce scarcely any
immediate effect. Among a race in this bodily condition, the ordinary
epidemics of the country--cholera, small-pox, and dysentery--make
fearful havoc. Whole villages have often been depopulated in a few days
by these diseases; and a deadly fever which used to appear from time to
time among the Indians, until the last century, sometimes carried off
ten thousand and twenty thousand at once. It seemed to me worth while
to make some remarks about this question, with a view of showing that
the theory as to the relation between food and population, though
partly true, is not wholly so; and that in the region of which we have
been speaking it can be clearly shown to fail.

After spending a long morning with the Indians and their _cura_, we
took quite an affectionate leave of them. Their last words were an
apology for making us pay threepence apiece for the pineapples which we
loaded our horses with. In the season, they said, twelve for sixpence
is the price, but the fruit was scarce and dear as yet.

Our companion, besides being engaged in the Orizaba cotton-mill, was
one of the owners of the sugar-hacienda of the Potrero, below Cordova,
and we all rode down there together from the Indian village, and spent
the evening in walking about the plantation, and inspecting the new
machinery and mills. It was a pleasant sight to see the people coming
to the well with their earthen jars, after their work was done, in an
unceasing procession, laughing and chattering. They were partly Indian,
but with a considerable admixture of negro blood, for many black slaves
were brought into the country in old times by the Spanish planters.
Now, of course, they and their descendants are free, and the hotter
parts of Mexico are the paradise of runaway slaves from Louisiana and
Texas; for, so far from their race being despised, the Indian women
seek them as husbands, liking their liveliness and good humour better
than the quieter ways of their own countrymen. Even Europeans settled
in Mexico sometimes take wives of negro blood.

I have never noticed in any country so large a number of mixed races,
whose parentage is indicated by their features and complexion. In
Europe, the parent races are too nearly alike for the children of such
mixed marriages to be strikingly different from either parent. In
America and the West Indies we are familiar with the various mixtures
of white and negro, mulatto, quadroon, &c.; but in Mexico we have three
races, Spanish, pure Mexican, and Negro, which, with their
combinations, make a list of twenty-five varieties of the human race,
distinguishable from one another, and with regular names, which Mayer
gives in his work on Mexico, such as _mulatto, mestizo, zambo, chino_,
and so forth. Here all the brown Mexican Indians are taken as one race,
and the Red Indians of the frontier-states are not included at all. If
we come to dividing out the various tribes which have been or still are
existing in the country, we can count over a hundred and fifty, with
from fifty to a hundred distinct languages among them.

Out of this immense variety of tribes, we can make one great
classification. The men of one race are brown in complexion, and have
been for ages cultivators of the land. It is among them only that the
Mexican civilization sprang up, and they still remain in the country,
having acquiesced in the authority of the Europeans, and to a great
extent mingled with them by marriage. This class includes the Aztecs,
Acolhuans, Chichemecs, Zapotecs, &c., the old Toltecs, the present
Indians of Central America, and, if we may consider them to be the same
race, the nations who huilt the now ruined cities of Palenque, Copan,
Uxmal, and so forth. The other race is that of the Red Indians who
inhabit the prairie-states of North Mexico, such as the Apaches,
Comanches, and Navajos. They are hunters, as they always were, and they
will never preserve their existence by adopting agriculture as their
regular means of subsistence, and settling in peace among the white
men. As it has been with their countrymen further north, so it will be
with them; a few years more, and the Americans will settle Chihuahua
and Sonora, and we shall only know these tribes by specimens of their
flint arrow-heads and their pipes in collections of curiosities, and
their skulls in ethnological cabinets.

One of the strangest races (or varieties, I cannot say which) are the
_Pintos_ of the low lands towards the Pacific coast. A short time
before we were in the country General Alvarez had quartered a whole
regiment of them in the capital; but when we were there they had
returned with their commander into the tierra caliente towards
Acapulco. They are called _"Pintos"_ or painted men, from their faces
and bodies being marked with great daubs of deep blue, like our British
ancestors; but here the decoration is natural and cannot be effaced.

They have the reputation of being a set of most ferocious savages; and,
badly armed as they are with ricketty flint- or match-locks, and sabres
of hoop-iron, they are the terror of the other Mexican soldiery,
especially when the war has to be carried on in the hot pestilential
coast-region, their native country.

CHAR XII.

CHALCHICOMULA. JALAPA. VERA CRUZ. CONCLUSION.

[Illustration: INDIANS OF THE PLATEAU. _(After Nebel.)_]

The mountain-slopes which descend from the Sierra Madre eastward toward
the sea are furrowed by _barrancas_--deep ravines with perpendicular
sides, and with streams flowing at the bottom. But here all these
_barrancas_ run almost due east and west, so that our journey from Vera
Cruz to Mexico was made, as far as I can recollect, without crossing
one. Now, the case was quite different. We had to go from the Potrero
to the city of Jalapa, about fifty miles on the map, nearly northward,
and to get over these fifty miles cost us two days and a half of hard
riding.

By the road it cannot be much less than eighty miles; but people used
to tell us that, during the American war, an Indian went from Orizaba
to Jalapa with despatches within the twenty-four hours, probably by
mountain-paths which made it a little shorter. He came quite easily
into Jalapa at the same shuffling trot which he had kept up almost
without intermission for the whole distance. This is the Indian's
regular pace when he is on a journey, and I believe that the Red
Indians of the north have a similar gait.