Barbarous Mexico/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
THE COUNTRY PEONS AND THE CITY POOR
A whole book, and a large one, could very profitably be written upon the slavery of Mexico. But important as the subject is, it is not important enough to fill a greater fraction of space in this work than I have allotted to it. Most necessary is it that I dig beneath the surface and reveal the hideous causes which have made and are perpetuating that barbarous institution.
I trust that my exposition of the previous chapters has been lucid enough to leave no question as to the complete partnership of the government in the slavery. In some quarters this slavery has been admitted, but the guilt of the government has been denied. But it is absurd to suppose that the government could be kept in ignorance of a situation in which one-third the entire population of a great state are held as chattels. Moreover, it is well known that hundreds of state and national officials are constantly engaged in rounding up, transporting, selling, guarding and hunting slaves. As I previously pointed out, every gang of enganchados leaving Mexico City or any other city for Valle Nacional or any other slave district are guarded by government rurales, or rural guards, in uniform. These rurales do not act on their own initiative; they are as completely under orders as are the soldiers of the regular army. Without the coercion of their guns and their authority the enganchados would refuse to travel a mile of the journey. A moment's thought is sufficient to convince any unprejudiced mind that without the partnership of the government the whole system of slavery would be an impossibility.
Slavery similar to that of Yucatan and Valle Nacional is to be found in nearly every state of Mexico, but especially in the coast states south of the great plateau. The labor on the henequen plantations of Campeche, in the lumber and fruit industries of Chiapas and Tabasco, on the rubber, coffee, sugar-cane, tobacco and fruit plantations of Veracruz, Oaxaca and Morelos, is all done by slaves. In at least ten of the thirty-two states and territories of Mexico the proportion of labor is overwhelmingly of slaves.
While the minor conditions vary somewhat in different places, the general system is everywhere the same—service against the will of the laborer, no pay, semi-starvation, and the whip. Into this arrangement of things are impressed not only the natives of the various slave states, but others—100,000 others every year, to speak in round numbers—who, either enticed by the false promises of labor agents, kidnapped by labor agents or shipped by political authorities in partnership with labor agents, leave their homes in other parts of the country to journey to their death in the hot lands.
Debt and contract slavery is the prevailing system of production all over the south of Mexico. Probably three-quarters of a million souls may properly be classed as human chattels. In all the rest of Mexico a system of peonage, differing from slavery principally in degree, and similar in many respects to the serfdom of Europe in the Middle Ages, prevails in the rural districts. Under this system the laborer is compelled to give service to the farmer, or hacendado, to accept what he wishes to pay, and even to receive such beatings as he cares to deliver. Debt, real or imaginary, is the nexus that binds
Farm peons are often credited with receiving wages, which nominally range from twelve and one-half cents a day to twenty-five cents a day, American money—seldom higher. Often they never receive a cent of this, but are paid only in credit checks at the hacienda store, at which they are compelled to trade in spite of the exorbitant prices. As a result their food consists solely of corn and beans, they live in hovels often made of no more substantial material than corn-stalks, and they wear their pitiful clothing, not merely until the garments are all rags and patches and ready to drop off, but until they actually do attain the vanishing act.
Probably not fewer than eighty per cent of all the farm and plantation laborers in Mexico are either slaves or are bound to the land as peons. The other twenty per cent are denominated as free laborers and live a precarious existence trying to dodge the net of those who would drag them down. I remember particularly a family of such whom I met in the State of Chihuahua. They were typical, though my memory of them is most vivid because I saw them on the first night I ever spent in Mexico. It was in a second-class car on the Mexican Central, traveling south.
They were six, that family, and of three generations. From the callow, raven-haired boy to the white-chinned grandfather, all six seemed to have the last ray of mirth ground out of their systems. We were a lively crowd sitting there near them—four were happy Mexicans returning home for a vacation after a season at wage labor in the United States. We sang a little and we made some music on a violin and a harmonica. But not one of that family of six behind us ever smiled or showed the slightest interest. They reminded me of a herd of cattle standing in a blizzard, their heads between their front legs, their backs to the storm.
The face of the old patriarch told a story of burdens and of a patient, ox-like bearing of them such as no words could possibly suggest. He had a ragged, grizzled beard and moustache, but his head was still covered with dark brown hair. He was probably seventy, but was evidently still an active worker. His clothing consisted of American jumper and overalls of ordinary denim washed and patched and washed and patched—a one-dollar suit patched until it was nothing but patches!
Beside the patriarch sat the old lady, his wife, with head bowed and a facial expression so like that of her husband that it might have been a copy by a great painter. Yes, the expression differed in one detail. The old woman's upper lip was compressed tight against her teeth, giving her an effect of perpetually biting her lip to keep back the tears. Perhaps her original stock of courage had not been equal to that of the man and it had been necessary to fortify it by an everlasting compression of the mouth.
Then there was a young couple half the age of the two. The man sat with head nodding and granulated lids blinking slowly, now and then turning his eyes to stare with far distant interest upon the merrymakers around him. His wife, a flat-breasted, drooping woman, sat always in one position with her head bent forward and her right hand fingering her face about the bridge of the nose.
Finally, there were two boys, one of eighteen, second son of the old man, and one of sixteen, son of the second couple. In all that night's journey the only smile I saw from any of the six was a smile of the youngest boy. A passing news-agent offered the boy a book for seventy-five centavos. With slightly widening eyes of momentary interest the boy looked upon the gaily decorated paper cover, then turned toward his uncle and smiled a half startled smile. To think that anyone might imagine that he could afford to purchase one of those magical things, a book!
"We are from Chihuahua," the old man told us, when we had gained his confidence. "We work in the fields—all of us. All our lives we have been farm laborers in the corn and the beans and the melons of Chihuahua. But now we are running away from it. If the bosses would pay us the money they agree to pay, we could get along, but they never pay all—never. This time the boss paid us only two-thirds the agreed price, yet I am very thankful for that much, for he might have given us only one-third, as others have done in the past. What can I do? Nothing. I cannot hire a lawyer, for the lawyer would steal the other two-thirds, and the boss would put me in jail besides. Many times I and my sons have gone to jail for asking the boss to pay us the full amount of our agreement. My sons become angry more and more and sometimes I fear one may strike the boss or kill him. That would be the end of us.
"No, the best thing to do, I decided at last, was to get away. So we put our wages together and used our last dollar to pay for tickets to Torreon, where we hope to find work in the cotton fields. I hear we can get one peso a day in busy times. Is it so? Or will it be the same story over again there? Perhaps it will. But what else can I do but try? Work! work! work! That's all there is for us—and nothing in return for the work! We do not drink; we are not lazy; every day we pray to God. Yet debt is always following us, begging to be taken in. Many times I have wanted to borrow just a little from my boss, but my wife has always pleaded with me. 'No,' she would say, 'better die than to owe, for owing once means owing forever—and slavery.'
"But sometimes," continued the old man, "I think it might be better to owe, better to fall in debt, better to give up our liberty than to go on like this to the end. True, I am getting old and I would love to die free, but it is hard—too hard!"
The three-quarters of a million of chattel slaves and the five million peons do not monopolize the economic misery of Mexico. It extends to every class of men that toils. There are 150,000 mine and smelter workers who receive less money for a week's labor than an American miner of the same class gets for a day's wages. There are 30,000 cotton mill operatives whose wages average less than thirty cents a day in American money. There are a quarter of a million domestic servants whose wages range from one to five dollars a month. There are 40,000 impressed soldiers who get less than two dollars a month above the scantiest rations. The common policemen, of Mexico City, 2,000 of them, are paid but fifty cents a day in our money. Fifty cents a day is a high average for street-car conductors in the metropolis, where wages are higher than in any other section of the country except close to the American border. And this proportion is constant throughout the industries. An offer of fifty cents a day without found, would, without the slightest doubt, bring in Mexico City an army of 50,000 able-bodied laborers inside of twenty-four hours.
From such miserable wages it must not be guessed that the cost of the necessities of life are less than they are here, as in the case of other low wage countries, such as India and China. On the contrary, the cost of corn and beans, upon which the mass of the Mexican people eke out their existence, is actually higher, as a rule, than it is in the United States. At this writing it costs nearly twice as much money to buy a hundred pounds of corn in Mexico City as it does in Chicago, and that in the same money, American gold or Mexican-silver, take it as you like it. And this is the cheapest staple that the poverty-stricken Mexican is able to lay his hands upon.
As to clothing and shelter, the common Mexican has about as little of either as can be imagined. The tenements of New York City are palatial homes compared to the tenements of Mexico City. A quarter of a mile in almost any direction off Diaz's grand Paseo de la Reforma, the magnificent driveway over which tourists are always taken and by which they usually judge Mexico, will carry the investigator into conditions that are not seen in any city worthy the name of civilized. If in all Mexico there exists a city with a really modern sewer system I am ignorant of its name.
Travelers who have stopped at the best hotels of the metropolis may raise their eyebrows at this last statement, but a little investigation will show that not more than one-fifth of the houses within the limits of that metropolis are regularly supplied with water with which to flush the sewers, while there are many densely populated blocks which have no public water whatsoever, neither for sewer flushing nor for drinking.
It will take a few minutes' reflection to realize what this really means. As a result of such unsanitary conditions the death rate in that city ranges always between 5 and 6 per cent, usually nearer the latter figure, which places that percentage at more than double the death rate of well-regulated cities of Europe, the United States and even of South America. Which proves that half the people who die in Diaz's metropolis die of causes which modern cities have abolished.
A life-long resident once estimated to me that 200,000 people of the country's metropolis, or two-fifths the entire population, spend every night on the stones. "On the stones" means not on the streets, for sleeping is not permitted on the streets or in the parks, but on the floors of cheap tenements or lodging houses.
Possibly this is an exaggeration. From my own observations, however, I know that 100,000 would be a very conservative estimate. And at least 25,000 pass the nights in mesones—the name commonly applied to the cheapest class of transient lodging houses.
A meson is a pit of such misery as is surpassed only by the galeras, the sleeping jails, of the contract slaves of the hot lands—and the dormitories of the Mexican prisons. The chief difference between the mesones and the galeras is that into the latter the slaves are driven, tottering from overwork, semi-starvation and fever—driven with whips and locked in when they are there; while to the mesones the ragged, ill-nourished wretches from the city's streets come to buy with three precious copper centavos a brief and scanty shelter—a bare spot to lie down in, a grass mat, company with the vermin that squalor breeds, rest in a sickening room with hundreds
During my most recent visit to Mexico—in the winter and spring of 1909—I visited many of these mesones and took a number of flashlight photos of the inmates. The conditions in all I found to be the same. The buildings are ancient ones—often hundreds of years old—which have been abandoned as unfit for any other purposes than as sleeping places for the country's poor. For three centavos the pilgrim gets a grass mat and the privilege of hunting for a bare spot large enough to lie down in. On cold nights the floor and yards are so thick with bodies that it is very difficult to find footing between the sleepers. In one room I have counted as high as two hundred.
Poor women and girls must sleep, as well as poor men and boys, and if they cannot afford more than three cents for a bed they must go to the mesones with the men. In not one of the mesones that I visited was there a separate room for the women and girls, though there were many women and girls among the inmates. Like a man, a girl pays her three cents and gets a grass mat. She may come early and find a comparatively secluded nook in which to rest her weary body. But there is nothing to prevent a man from coming along, lying down beside her and annoying her throughout the night.
And this thing is done. More than once, in my visits to mesones, I saw a young and unprotected girl awakened from her sleep and solicited by a strange man whose roving eye had lighted upon her as he came into the place. The mesones breed immorality as appallingly as they breed vermin. Homeless girls do not go to mesones because they are bad, but because they are poor. These place are licensed by the authorities and it would be a simple matter to require the proprietors to set apart a portion of the space exclusively for women. But this the authorities have not the decency to do.
Miserable as are the mesones, the 25,000 homeless Mexicans who spend their nights there are fortunate compared to the thousands of others who, when the shadows fall upon them, find that they cannot produce the three centavos to pay for a grass mat and a spot on a bare floor. Every night there is a hegira of these thousands from the city's streets. Carrying what pitiful belongings they have, if they have any belongings, moving along hand in hand, if they are a family together, husband and wife, or merely friends drawn closer together by their poverty; they travel for miles, out of the city to the open roads and fields, the great stock farms belonging to men high up in the councils of the government. Here they huddle about on the ground, shivering in the cold, for few nights in that altitude are not so cold that covering is not sorely needed. In the morning they travel back to the heart of the city, there to pit their feeble strength against the Powers that are conspiring to prevent them from earning a living; there, after vain and discouraging struggles, at last to fall into the net of the "labor agent," who is on the lookout for slaves for his wealthy clients, the planters of the lowland states.
Mexico contains 767,000 square miles. Acre for acre, it is as rich as, if not richer than the United States. It has fine harbors on both coasts. It is approximately as near the world's markets as are we. There is no natural or geographical reason why its people should not be as prosperous and happy as any in the world. In point of years it is an older country than ours. It is not overpopulated. With a population of 15,000,000, it has eighteen souls to the square mile, which is slightly less
