Barbarous Mexico/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
OVER THE EXILE ROAD
Yaquis traveling to Yucatan, after arriving at the port of Guaymas, Sonora, embark on a government war vessel for the port of San Blas. After a journey of four or five days they are disembarked and are driven by foot over some of the roughest mountains in Mexico, from San Blas to Tepic and from Tepic to San Marcos. As the crow flies the distance is little more than one hundred miles; as the road winds it is twice as far, and requires from fifteen to twenty days to travel. "Bull pens," or concentration camps, are provided all along the route, and stops are made at the principal cities. All families are broken up on the way, the chief points at which this is done being Guaymas, San Marcos, Guadalajara and Mexico City. From San Marcos the unfortunates are carried by train over the Mexican Central Railway to Mexico City and from Mexico City over the International Railway to Veracruz. Here they are bundled into one of the freight steamers of the "National" company, and in from two to five days are disembarked at Progreso and turned over to the waiting consignees.
On the road to Yucatan the companion of my journeys, L. Gutierrez DeLara, and I, saw gangs of Yaqui exiles, saw them in the "bull pen" in the midst of the army barracks in Mexico City; finally we joined a party of them at Veracruz and traveled with them on ship from Veracruz to Progreso.
There were 104 of them shoved into the unclean hole astern of the freight steamer Sinaloa, on which we embarked. We thought it might be difficult to obtain the opportunity to visit this unclean hole, but, luckily, we were mistaken. The guard bent readily to friendly words, and before the ship was well under way my companion and I were seated on boxes in the hold with a group of exiles gathered about us, some of them, tobacco-famished, pulling furiously at the cigarettes which we had passed among them, others silently munching the bananas, apples and oranges which we had brought.
There were two old men past fifty, one of them small, active, sharp-featured, talkative, dressed in American overalls, jumper, shoes and slouch hat, with the face and manner of a man bred to civilization; the other, tall, silent, impassive, wrapped to the chin in a gay colored blanket, the one comfort he had snatched from his few belongings as the soldiers were leading him away. There was a magnificent specimen of an athlete under thirty, with a wizened baby girl of two held in the crook of one arm, an aggressive-faced woman of forty against whom was closely pressed a girl of ten shivering and shaking in the grasp of a malarial attack, two overgrown boys who squatted together in the background and grinned half foolishly at our questions, bedraggled women, nearly half of them with babies, and an astonishingly large number of little chubby-faced, bare-legged boys and girls who played uncomprehendingly about the floor or stared at us from a distance out of their big solemn black eyes.
"Revolutionists?" I asked of the man in overalls and jumper.
"No; workingmen."
"Yaquis?"
"Yes, one Yaqui," pointing to his friend in the blanket. "The rest are Pimas and Opatas." "Then why are you here?"
"Ah, we are all Yaquis to General Torres. It makes no difference to him. You are dark. You dress in my clothes and you will be a Yaqui—to him. He makes no investigation, asks no questions—only takes you."
"Where are you from?" I asked of the old man.
"Most of us are from Ures. They took us in the night and carried us away without allowing us to make up bundles of our belongings."
"I am from Horcasitas," spoke up the young athlete with the babe on his arm. "I was plowing in the field when they came, and they did not give me time to unhitch my oxen."
"Where is the mother of your baby?" I inquired curiously of the young father.
"Dead in San Marcos," he replied, closing his teeth tight. "That three weeks' tramp over the mountains killed her. They have allowed me to keep the little one—so far."
"Did any of you make resistance when the soldiers came to take you?" I asked.
"No," answered the old man from Ures. "We went quietly; we did not try to run away." Then with a smile: "The officers found more trouble in looking after their men, their privates, to prevent them from running away, from deserting, than they did with us.
"We were one hundred and fifty-three at the start, we of Ures," went on the old man. "Farm laborers, all of us. We worked for small farmers, poor men, men with not more than half a dozen families each in their employ. One day a government agent visited the neighborhood and ordered the bosses to give an account of all their laborers. The bosses obeyed, but they did not know what it meant until a few days later, when the soldiers came. Then they knew, and they saw ruin coming to them as well as to us. They begged the officers, saying: 'This is my peon. He is a good man. He has been with me for twenty years. I need him for the harvest.'"
"It is true," broke in the woman with the ague-stricken child. "We were with Carlos Romo for twenty-two years. The night we were taken we were seven; now we are two."
"And we were with Eugenio Morales for sixteen years," spoke another woman.
"Yes," went on the spokesman, "our bosses followed us, begging, but it was no use. Some of them followed us all the way to Hermosillo. There was Manuel Gandara, and Jose Juan Lopez, and Franco Tallez, and Eugenio Morales and the Romo brothers, Jose and Carlos. You will find them there now and they will tell you that what we say is true. They followed us, but it was no use. They had to go back and call vainly at our empty houses for laborers. We were stolen—and they were robbed!
"They died on the way like starving cattle," went on the old man from Ures. "When one fell ill he never got well again. One woman was deathly sick at the start. She begged to be left behind, but they wouldn't leave her. She was the first to fall—it happened on the train between Hermosillo and Guaymas.
"But the crudest part of the trail was between San Blas and San Marcos. Those women with babies! It was awful! They dropped down in the dust again and again. Two never got up again, and we buried them ourselves there beside the road."
"There were burros in San Blas," interrupted a woman, "and mules and horses. Oh, why didn't they
"The soldiers had to tear me away from my husband," said another, "and when I cried out they only laughed. The next night a soldier came and tried to take hold of me, but I pulled off my shoes and beat him with them. Yes, the soldiers bothered the women often, especially that week we starved in Mexico City, but always the women fought them back."
"I have a sister in Yucatan," said a young woman under twenty. "Two years ago they carried her away. As soon as we arrive I shall try to find her. We will keep each other company, now that they have taken my husband from me. Tell me, is it so terribly hot in Yucatan as they say it is? I do not like hot weather, yet if they will only let me live with my sister I will not mind."
"To whom do all these bright little tads, these muchachos, all of the same size, belong?" I inquired.
"Quien sabe?" answered an old woman. "Their parents are gone, just as are our babes. They take our children from us and give us the children of strangers. And when we begin to love the new ones, they take them away, too. Do you see that woman huddled over there with her face in her hands? They took her four little boys at Guadalajara and left her nothing. Myself? Yes, they took my husband. For more than thirty years we had never been parted for a single night. But that made no difference; he is gone. Yet perhaps I am lucky; I Still have my daughter. Do you think, though, that we may meet our husbands again in Yucatan?"
As we breasted the Veracruz lighthouse, the shoulder of a Norther heaved itself against the side of the vessel, the ocean streamed in at the lower portholes and the quarters of the unhappy exiles were flooded with water. They fled for the deck, but here were met by flying sheets of rain, which drove them back again. Between the flooded hold and the flooded poop the exiles spent the night, and when, early the next morning, as we drove into the Coatzacoalcos river, I strolled aft again, I saw them lying about the deck, all of them drenched and shivering, some of them writhing in the throes of acute seasickness.
We steamed thirty miles up the Coatzacoalcos river, then anchored to the shore and spent a day loading jungle bulls for the tough beef market of New Orleans. Two hundred ordinary cattle may be coaxed through a hole in the side of a ship in the space of two hours, but these bulls were as wild as wolves, and each had to be half butchered before he would consent to walk in the straight and narrow way. Once inside, and ranged along the two sides of the vessel, they fought, trampled each other, bawled as loud as steam whistles, and in a number of instances broke their head ropes and smashed through the flimsy railing which had been erected to prevent them from over-running other portions of the lower deck. In a bare space at the stern of the vessel, surrounded on three sides by plunging, bawling bulls, were the quarters of the "Yaquis." It was stay there and run the risk of being trampled, or choose the unsheltered deck. For the remaining four days of the journey, one of which we spent waiting for the Norther to pass, the "Yaquis" chose the deck. At last we arrived at Progreso. As we entered the train for Merida we saw our friends being herded into the second class coaches. They left us at the little station of San Ignacio, on their way to a plantation belonging to Governor Olegario Molina, and we saw them no more.
In Yucatan I soon learned what becomes of the Yaqui exiles. They are sent to the henequen plantations as slaves, slaves on almost exactly the same basis as are the 100,000 Mayas whom I found on the plantations. They are held as chattels, they are bought and sold, they receive no wages, but are fed on beans, tortillas and putrid fish. They are beaten, sometimes beaten to death. They are worked from dawn until night in the hot sun beside the Mayas. The men are locked up at night. The women are required to marry Chinamen or Mayas. They are hunted when they run away, and are brought back by the police if they reach a settlement. Families, broken up in Sonora or on the way, are never permitted to reunite. After they once pass into the hands of the planter the government cares no more for them, takes no more account of them. The government has received its money, and the fate of the Yaquis is in the hands of the planter.
I saw many Yaquis in Yucatan. I talked with them. I saw them beaten. One of the first things that I saw on a Yucatan plantation was the beating of a Yaqui. His name was Rosanta Bajeca.
The act, though not intentionally so, perhaps, was theatrically staged. It was at 3:45 o'clock in the morning, just after roll-call of the slaves. The slave gang was drawn up in front of the plantation store, the fitful rays of the lanterns sputtering high on the store front playing uncertainly over their dusky faces and dirty white forms. There were seven hundred of them. Now and then a brighter lantern beam shot all the way to the towering tropical trees, which, standing shoulder to shoulder, walled in the grass-grown patio. Under the hanging lanterns and facing the ragged band stood the administrador, or general manager, the mayordomo primero, or superintendent, and the lesser bosses, the mayordomos segundos, the majacol and the capataces.
"Rosanta Bajeca!"
The name, squeaked out by the voice of the administrador, brought from the crowd a young Yaqui, medium-sized, sinewy-bodied, clean-featured, with well-formed head erect on square shoulders, bony jaw fixed, dark, deep set eyes darting rapidly from one side to another of the circle which surrounded him, like a tiger forced out of the jungle and into the midst of the huntsmen.
"Off with your shirt!" rasped the administrador, and at the words superintendent and foremen ringed closer about him. One reached for the garment, but the Yaqui fended the hand, then with the quickness of a cat, dodged a cane which swished at his bare head from the opposite direction. For one instant—no more—with the hate of his eyes he held the circle at bay, then with a movement of consent he waved them back, and with a single jerk drew the shirt over his head and bared his muscular bronze body, scarred and discolored from previous beatings, for the whip. Submissive but dignified he stood there, for all the world like a captive Indian chief of a hundred years ago, contemptuously awaiting the torture of his enemies.
Listlessly the waiting slaves looked on. A regiment of toil, they stood half a dozen deep, with soiled calico trousers reaching half way to the ankles or rolled to the knees, shirts of the same material with many gaping mouths showing the bare bronze skin beneath, bare legs, bare feet, battered grass hats held deferentially in the hands—a tatterdemalion lot, shaking the sleep from their eyes, blinking at the flickering lanterns. Three races there were, the sharp-visaged, lofty-browed Maya, aborigine of Yucatan, the tall, arrow-backed Chinaman and the swarthy, broad-fisted Yaqui from Sonora.
At a third command of the administrador there stepped from the host of waiting slaves a giant Chinese. Crouching, he grasped the wrists of the silent Yaqui. The next moment he was standing straight with the Yaqui on his back in the manner of a tired child being carried by one of its elders.
Not one of that throng who did not know what was coming, yet not until a capataz reached for a bucket hanging high on the store front did there come a tension of nerves among those seven hundred men. The whipper extraordinary, known as a majocol, a deep chested, hairy brute, bent over the bucket and soused his hands deep into the water within. Withdrawing them, he held high for inspection four dripping ropes, each three feet long. The thick writhing things in the dim lamplight seemed like four bloated snakes, and at sight of them the tired backs of the ragged seven hundred straightened with a jerk and an involuntary gasp rippled over the assemblage. Laggard slumber, though unsated, dropped from their eyes. At last all were awake, wide awake.
The ropes were of native henequen braided tight and thick and heavy for the particular purpose in hand. Water-soaked, to give them more weight and cutting power, they were admirably fitted for the work of "cleaning up," the term whereby corporal punishment is known on the plantations of Yucatan. The hairy majocol selected one of the four, tossed back the remaining three, the pail was carried away and the giant Chinaman squared off with the naked body of the victim to the gaze of his fellow bondsmen. The drama was an old one to them, so old that their eyes must have ached many times at the sight, yet for them it could never lose its fascination. Each knew that his own time was coming, if it had not already come, and not one possessed the physical power to turn his back upon the spectacle.
Deliberately the majocol measured his distance, then as deliberately raised his arm high and brought it swiftly down again; the bloated snake swished through the air and fell with a spat across the glistening bronze shoulders of the Yaqui!
The administrador, a small, nervous man of many gestures, nodded his approval and glanced at his watch, the mayordomo, big, stolid, grinned slowly, the half dozen capataces leaned forward a little more obliquely in their eagerness, the regiment of slaves swayed bodily as by some invisible force, and a second gasp, painful and sharp like the bursting air from a severed windpipe, escaped them.
Every eye was riveted tight upon that scene in the uncertain dimness of the early morning—the giant Chinaman, bending slightly forward now, the naked body upon his shoulders, the long, uneven, livid welt that marked the visit of the wet rope, the deliberate, the agonizingly deliberate majocol, the administrador, watch in hand, nodding endorsement, the grinning mayordomo, the absorbed capataces.
All held their breath for the second blow. I held my breath with the rest, held it for ages, until I thought the rope would never fall. Not until I saw the finger signal of the administrador did I know that the blows were delivered by the watch and not until it was all over did I know that, in order to multiply the torture, six seconds were allowed to intervene between each stroke.
The second blow fell, and the third, and the fourth. I counted the blows as they fell, ages apart. At the fourth the strong brown skin broke and little pin-heads of crimson pushed themselves out, burst, and started downward in thin tricklets. At the sixth the glistening back lost its rigidity and fell to quivering like a jellyfish. At the ninth a low whine somewhere in the depths of that Yaqui, found its devious way outward and into the open. Oh, that whine! I hear it now, a hard, hard whine, as if indurated to diamond hardness by drilling its way to the air through a soul of adamant.
At last the spats ceased—there were fifteen—the administrador, with a final nod, put away his watch, the giant Chinaman released his grip on the brown wrists and the Yaqui tumbled in a limp heap to the ground. He lay there for a moment, his face in his arms, his quivering, bleeding flesh to the sky, then a foreman stepped forward and put a foot roughly against his hip.
The Yaqui lifted his head, disclosing to the light a pair of glazed eyes and a face twisted with pain. A moment later he rose to his feet and staggered forward to join his fellow bondsmen. In that moment the spell of breathless silence on the seven hundred snapped, the ranks moved in agitation and there rose a hum of low speech from every section of the crowd. The special "cleaning up" of the morning was over. Five minutes later the day's work on the farm had begun.
Naturally I made inquiries about Rosanta Bajeca to find out what crime he had committed to merit fifteen lashes of the wet rope. I ascertained that he had been only a month in Yucatan, and but three days before had been put in the field with a harvesting gang to cut and trim the great leaves of the henequen plant. Two thousand a day was the regular stint for each slave, and Bajeca had been given three days in which to acquire the dexterity necessary to harvest the required number of leaves. He had failed. Hence the flogging. There had been no other fault.
"It's a wonder," I remarked to a capataz, "that this Yaqui did not tear himself from the back of the Chinaman. It's a wonder he did not fight. He seems like a brave man; he has the look of a fighter."
The capataz chuckled.
"One month ago he was a fighter," was the reply, "but a Yaqui learns many things in a month in Yucatan. Still, there was a time when we thought this dog would never learn. Now and then they come to us that way; they never learn; they're never worth the money that's paid for them."
"Tell me about this one," I urged.
"He fought; that's all. The day he came he was put to work loading bundles of leaves onto the elevator which leads to the cleaning machine. The mayordomo—yes, the mayordomo primero—happened along and punched the fellow in the stomach with his cane. A half minute later a dozen of us were struggling to pull that Yaqui wolf away from the throat of the mayordomo. We starved him for a day and then dragged him out for a cleaning up. But he fought with his fingers and with his teeth until a capataz laid him out with the blunt edge of a machete. After that he tasted the rope daily for a while, but every day for no less than a week the fool fought crazily on until he kissed the earth under the weight of a club. But our majocol never faltered. That majocol is a genius. He conquered the wolf. He wielded the rope until the stubborn one surrendered, until that same Yaqui came crawling, whimpering, on hands and knees and licked with his naked tongue the hand of the man who had beaten him!"
During my travels in Yucatan I was repeatedly struck with the extremely human character of the people whom the Mexican government calls Yaquis. The Yaquis are Indians, they are not white, yet when one converses with them in a language mutually understood one is struck with the likenesses of the mental processes of White and Brown. I was early convinced that the Yaqui and I were more alike in mind than in color. I became convinced, too, that the family attachments of the Yaqui mean quite as much to the Yaqui as the family attachments of the American mean to the American. Conjugal fidelity is the cardinal virtue of the Yaqui home and it seems to be so not because of any tribal superstition of past times or because of any teachings of priests, but because of a constitutional tenderness sweetened more and more with the passing of the years, for the one with whom he had shared the meat and the shelter and the labor of life, the joys and sorrows of existence.
Over and over again I saw this exemplified on the exile road and in Yucatan. The Yaqui woman feels as keenly the brutal snatching away of her babe as would the cultivated American woman. The heart-strings of the Yaqui wife are no more proof against a violent and unwished-for separation from her husband than would be the heart-strings of the refined mistress of a beautiful American home.
The Mexican government forbids divorce and remarriage within its domain, but for the henequen planters of Yucatan all things are possible. To a Yaqui woman a native of Asia is no less repugnant than he is to an American woman, yet one of the first barbarities the henequen planter imposes upon the Yaqui slave woman, freshly robbed of the lawful husband of her bosom, is to compel her to marry a Chinaman and live with him!
"We do that," explained one of the planters to me, "in order to make the Chinamen better satisfied and less inclined to run away. And besides we know that every new babe born on the place will some day be worth anywhere from $500 to $1,000 cash!"
The cultivated white woman, you say, would die of the shame and the horror of such conditions. But so does the brown woman of Sonora. No less a personage than Don Enrique Camara Zavala, president of the "Camara de Agricola de Yucatan," and a millionaire planter himself, told me:
"If the Yaquis last out the first year they generally get along all right and make good workers, but the trouble is, at least two-thirds of them die off in the first twelve months!"
On the ranch of one of the most famous henequen kings we found about two hundred Yaquis. One-third of these were men, who were quartered with a large body of Mayas and Chinamen. Entirely apart from these, and housed in a row of new one-room huts, each set in a tiny patch of uncultivated land, we discovered the Yaqui women and children.
We found them squatting around on their bare floors or nursing an open-air fire and a kettle just outside the back door. We found no men among them, Yaquis or Chinamen, for they had arrived only one month before—all of them—from Sonora.
In one house we found as many as fourteen inmates. There was a woman past fifty with the strength of an Indian chief in her face and with words which went to the mark like an arrow to a target. There was a comfortable, home-like woman with a broad, pock-marked face, pleasant words and eyes which kindled with friendliness despite her troubles. There were two woman who watched their fire and listened only. There was a girl of fifteen, a bride of four months, but now alone, a wonderfully comely girl with big eyes and soft mouth, who sat with her back against the wall and smiled and smiled—until she cried. There was a sick woman who lay on the floor and groaned feebly but never looked up, and there were eight children.
"Last week we were fifteen," said the home-like woman, "but one has already gone. They never get well." She reached over and gently stroked the hair of the sister who lay on the floor.
"Were you all married?" I asked.
"All," nodded the old woman with the face of a chief.
"And where are they now?"
"Quien sabe?" And she searched our eyes deep for the motive of our questions.
"I am a Papago," reassured De Lara. "We are friends."
"You are not working," I remarked. "What are you doing?"
"Starving," said the old woman.
"We get that once a week—for all of us," explained the home-like one, nodding at three small chunks of raw beef—less than a five-cent stew in the United States—which had just been brought from the plantation store. "Besides that we get only corn and black beans and not half enough of either of them."
"We are like hogs; we are fed on corn," put in the old woman. "In Sonora we made our tortillas of wheat."
"How long will they starve you?" I asked.
"Until we marry Chinamen," flashed the old woman, unexpectedly.
"Yes," confirmed the home-like one. "Twice they have brought the Chinamen before us, lined them up, and said: 'Choose a man.' Twice."
"And why didn't you choose?"
This question several of the women answered in chorus. In words and wry faces they expressed their abhorrence of the Chinamen, and with tremulous earnestness assured us that they had not yet forgotten their own husbands.
"I begged them," said the old woman, "to let me off. I told them I was too old, that it was no use, that I was a woman no longer, but they said I must choose, too. They will not let me off; they say I will have to choose with the rest."
"Twice they have lined us up," reiterated the homelike one, "and said we must choose. But we wouldn't choose. One woman chose, but when she saw the rest hang back she pushed the man away from her. They threatened us with the rope, but still we hung back. They will give us but one more chance, they say. Then if we do not choose, they will choose for us. And if we do not consent we will be put in the field and worked and whipped like the men."
"And get twelve centavos a day (six cents American) to live on," said the old woman. "Twelve centavos a day with food at the store twice as dear as in Sonora!"
"Next Sunday morning they will make us choose," repeated the home-like woman. "And if we don't choose—"
"Last Sunday they beat that sister there," said the old woman. "She swore she'd never choose, and they beat her just like they beat the men. Come, Refugio, show them your back."
But the woman at the fire shrank away and hung her head in mortification.
"No, no," she protested, then after a moment she muttered: "When the Yaqui men are beaten they die of shame, but the women can stand to be beaten; they cannot die."
"It's true," nodded the old woman, "the men die of shame sometimes—and sometimes they die of their own will."
When we turned the talk to Sonora and to the long journey the voices of the women began to falter. They were from Pilares de Teras, where are situated the mines of Colonel Garcia. The soldiers had come in the daytime while the people were in the field picking the ripe corn from the stalks. They had been taken from their harvest labor and compelled to walk all the way to Hermosillo, a three weeks' tramp.
The Yaqui love for the one who suckled them is strong, and several of the younger women recounted the details of the parting from the mother. Then we spoke of their husbands again, but they held their tears until I asked the question: "How would you like to go back with me to your homes in Sonora?"
That opened the flood-gates. The tears started first down the plump cheeks of the cheery, home-like woman, then the others broke in, one at a time, and at last the listening children on the floor were blubbering dolefully with their elders. Weeping, the unhappy exiles lost their last modicum of reserve. They begged us please to take them back to Sonora or to find their husbands for them. The old woman implored us to get word to her boss, Leonardo Aguirre, and would not be content until I had penned his name in my note-book. The bashful woman at the fire, aching for some comforting, hopeful words, parted her dress at the top and gave us a glimpse of the red marks of the lash upon her back.
I looked into the face of my companion; the tears were trickling down his cheeks. As for me, I did not cry. I am ashamed now that I did not cry!
Such is the life of the Yaqui nation in its last chapter. When I looked upon those miserable creatures there I said: "There can be nothing worse than this." But when I saw Valle Nacional I said: "This is worse than Yucatan."