Mexico and its Religion Part 17

In the next room there are some paintings of no very great value, which should have been kept in the Academy; also a miniature fortress and a small mineral collection, and any quant.i.ty of specimens of Indian idols, so misshapen as to be unfit for use as images of the Virgin and of the saints.

As a Vice-royal and National Museum, the whole affair is beneath contempt. If the few articles in it that are valuable were divided between the Mineria and the San Carlos, and the rest thrown away, it would be an advantage to all concerned. The Indian relics in this museum are not only much inferior to the specimens of the art of the savage islanders of the South Seas, but immensely inferior to many private collections of Indian curiosities that I have seen, and they go far to demonstrate the entire absence of civilized arts among the aboriginal inhabitants of Mexico.

In an interior court of the museum is the Botanic Garden. This, like the National Museum, is a paltry affair. With the exception of the _Manolita_, or tree that bears a flower resembling the human hand, of which there are but two in the Republic, there is nothing deserving of notice in this garden. In the large interior court of San Francisco a Frenchman has, as a private speculation, opened a garden and made a collection of the national plants of Mexico that is well worth a visit.

In this private garden is one of the finest and rarest collections of the cactus family that I have ever seen, either in Mexico or elsewhere.

The market of Santa Anna is the central market of the city. It adjoins the palace, and is close to the ca.n.a.l. The products of the chinampas are here displayed to the best advantage. As Mexico is within easy marketing distance of the hot country, we have here daily presented the fresh productions of two zones. This is one of the places where the appet.i.te of a stranger can not only be gratified with the greatest variety of delicacies ever collected in one spot, but the excellency and abundance of the articles presented are perplexing to the person who would venture upon the bold experiment of tasting every new article offered to him. As a vegetable and flower market, it has no equal.

THE ACORDADA.

The Acordada Prison is the princ.i.p.al state as well as city prison. Here are confined men charged with every offense, from rioting to murder.

Oftentimes these extremes are found together in the interior court of the prison, where the felon, with his hands steeped in innocent blood, is entertaining a crowd of novices in crime with the details of his adventures, and of his many hair-breadth escapes from the cruel officers of the law. He is as eloquent in giving lessons to novices as his compeers in our own prisons, and he carefully instructs his hopeful pupils in the best ways of avenging their wrongs upon society. Some in the prison are merry, and enjoy a dance, while others are indulging in obscene jests and ribaldry. Still, there are those that find means to labor and to work at repairing shoes or clothes in the midst of this babel of sin and tumult.

The Acordada gave its name to that night insurrection to which I have so often referred. Two regiments of artillery, quartered in the palace of the Inquisition, _p.r.o.nounced_ against the legality of the election of Pedraza to the presidency. One night they took possession of the Acordada, where they were joined by the whole body of desperadoes there confined. Among the persons at that time detained in this prison, and on that night wantonly killed, was an Englishman, who had been kept in prison for several years, charged with the singular offense of having married the daughter of an ex-marquis. There had been romance in his courtship and romance in his marriage, but it had not met with the approbation of the father, who unfortunately had influence enough to get the newly-married man into prison, and to keep him there. At last the father had relented, and on the next day the poor Englishman was to have been set at liberty. Long and trying had been the sufferings of the unfortunate man, doomed to pa.s.s the best years of his life among robbers and a.s.sa.s.sins. Though every thing that kindness could do to lighten his sufferings had been done lay his own countrymen, yet the weary years of imprisonment, superadded to the sudden blasting of his hopes, had brought premature old age upon him while yet in the prime of life. But now all was forgotten in antic.i.p.ation of a to-morrow that he was never to see. When the attack was made upon the prison, he went to the door of his cell to learn the cause of so unusual a disturbance, and was instantly killed--the first victim of the night of the Acordada.

On that fearful night the Acordada was unusually full of desperadoes, whom the civil disorders and stagnation of business had driven to crime. A battle in the night in the streets of a large city is a fearful thing, at least when cannon are the chief weapons used; but when there is added to this cause of alarm that the news had spread through the city that all the murderers and housebreakers in the prison had been let loose, with arms in their hands, to murder and to ravage the city, an idea may be formed of the terror of a population who were cowards by instinct. The contempt with which they had regarded the lower orders was to be fearfully retaliated. Hate, mingled with avarice, and inflamed by _pulque_ and bad liquor, was to do its work, and that, too, without pity. Men, untamed by kindness of those above them, were now the masters of the lives and property of all, and there was no remedy. Fear had held the common people in a degraded position, but they feared no longer. Those who had lorded it over the poor instead of laboring to elevate their condition, were now to suffer the consequences of that neglect.

It is a thankless task to labor for the elevation of the degraded, and oftentimes we are stung with the ingrat.i.tude of those whom we have desired to aid. But G.o.d, who has enjoined this unpleasant duty upon us, has borne our daily ingrat.i.tude without casting us off, and we but imitate him when we continue to minister to the ungrateful, and the unthankful, and even the unmerciful. The people of Mexico had shown more liberality, and given more than we. But they had not given it to educate and to elevate the condition of the poor, but to feed pampered priests, "who walked in long robes, and who loved salutations in the markets," and to women like them, who had placed themselves in an unnatural relation to the world. G.o.d requires of all men not only contributions of money, for that is but half charity, but personal services in discharge of the duties of good citizens, and in relieving the afflicted; and he that disregards such duties may suffer as the Mexicans did in the night of the Acordada insurrection, which turned young hairs gray, and destroyed forever the happiness of unnumbered families.

When the common people, brutalized by oppression, found themselves masters of the city, and their oppressors powerless, then burst forth the pent-up hatred of ten generations. "They call us _leperos_ and dogs," said some of them; "let us play the part of dogs--hungry dogs, among these spotted sheep." The palaces of the great were no protection against these infuriated _peons_, and women who boasted of t.i.tles of n.o.bility were not safe. The wealth that generations of unjust monopolists had acc.u.mulated was scattered to the winds. _Leperos_ now rioted on carpets from Brussels and on cushions of Oriental stuffs, and quaffed the choice wines of Madeira and Champagne. In the fury of their intoxication they lost all restraint, and indulged in every excess and enormity. Robbery and murder were the order of the day. In carrying away the plunder, disputes arose, and then they murdered each other as readily as they had murdered those who claimed the t.i.tle of citizens.

Fear was the only authority they had learned to respect, and they knew no other government than the hated police; but now, when the police were powerless, they could amuse themselves according to the instincts of their brutish natures. They had never been taught self-control, and animal indulgence was the utmost of their ambition, and they found amus.e.m.e.nt in violating all laws, human and divine. The murders, the ravishings, the wanton destruction of the richest household stuffs, and luxuries, and works of art in that night, can not all be written, nor can they ever be effaced from the memory Of those who witnessed them.

THE PARIAN.

Stretching across the Grand Plaza, opposite the Cathedral and in front of the buildings of the Munic.i.p.ality, once stood the noted mart of commerce called the Parian, an ill-looking structure, in which was acc.u.mulated the ma.s.s of foreign merchandise. In this same pile of buildings had been concocted the conspiracy which, in the year 1808, had caused the seizure of the Vice-king, Iturrigaray, and his imprisonment in the Inquisition. The complaint against the Vice-king was that he was about to recognize the political equality of the native-born population with the emigrants from Spain. For this offense, his reputation and that of his kindred was to be forever blackened by a suspicion of heresy.

In the night of the Acordada insurrection, the Spanish shop-keepers of the Parian found themselves utterly defenseless. They could no longer invoke the aid of the Inquisition in oppressing and trampling on the people, whom their wantonness, and the wantonness of others like them, had brutalized. The neglect and oppression which had reduced a laboring man to a _lepero_ had not made him insensible to the unequal laws which elevated above him a race of beings dest.i.tute of that manly courage which oftentimes gives plausibility to oppression. Now the lepero took delight in visiting upon the present occupants of this building a fearful punishment for the crime committed there twenty years before, and among the guilty crowd there was to be found many an innocent sufferer.

The isolated crowds that had been traversing the streets, and indulging their wantonness on a small scale, at length, as the night wore away, began to concentrate around the Parian, and quickly such devastation of property was made as might be expected where the rich and poor had no common interest in its preservation, and where criminal and poor man were almost convertible terms. The plunderers had little idea of the value or uses of the property they were scattering to the winds; and while they wasted millions worth of property, they wantonly shed the blood of the proprietors in the midst of their merchandise. Nor did the evil end when daylight appeared; for among the consequences of this night insurrection was the transfer of all authority to new hands.

Those who the day before had been stigmatized with the impurity of their blood, were now the governing power, who, under the forms of law, were to carry into effect the behest of the successful insurgents.

Neither the sight of the ruins of the night before, nor bales of merchandise strewed about among corpses and spattered with blood, could move the new masters of the city to pity the fallen condition of a cla.s.s of men who had proved themselves too cowardly to defend their own usurpations, and too tyrannical to instill into the lately proscribed races any ideas of compa.s.sion.

THE OVERTURN.

For three hundred years pure white blood and Spanish birth was an indispensable qualification for promotion in the vice-kingdom, and the slightest tincture of colored blood was an indelible disgrace. But one night of tumult and rapine changed the popular standard of color. And he who had boasted the day before of his pure white blood and Spanish origin, now sought to hide himself from the officers of the law, who visited with the penalty of banishment the crime of having been born in Spain. Men now, for the first time, boasted of their Indian origin, and of the slight infusion they were able to discover of colored blood in their veins; while a man of Indian descent, and who spoke a provincial dialect, was declared elected President of the Republic of Mexico: so uncertain are all divisions of rank formed on the arbitrary distinction of color.

During the night strange murmurings were heard against "the accursed enslaver of their race." The descendants of Cortez were fearful for the safety of his ashes, which had lain quietly in the convent of San Francisco[54] so long as the Inquisition possessed the power of compelling men to reverence his memory as the champion of the Cross, the favorite of the Virgin Mary, the hero of a holy war against the infidels. But now that this accursed inst.i.tution, and the infamous gang connected with its management, had become powerless, the national feeling began to manifest itself so openly that the remains were removed secretly and by night to the sanctuary of the most sacred shrine of Mexico, that of Santa Teresa, where they remained until a safe opportunity presented itself for shipping them off to the Duke of Montebello, a Sicilian n.o.bleman, who inherits the t.i.tles and also the vast estates of Cortez in the valleys of the Cuarnavaca and Oajaca, upon which none of the revolutionary governments have laid violent hands.

[54] For a more authentic account, see Appendix E.

CHAPTER XXV.

The Priests gainers by the Independence.--Improved Condition of the Peons.--Mexican Mechanics.--The Oppression they suffer.--Low state of the Mechanic Arts.--The Story of the Portress.--Charity of the Poor.--The Whites not superior to Meztizos.---License and Woman's Rights at Mexico.--The probable Future of Mexico.--Mormonism impending over Mexico.--Mormonism and Mohammedanism.

The clergy and the other white fomenters of the separation from Spain never contemplated the formation of a republic, or the arming of the _leperos_. They were alarmed at the bold reforms of the liberal Cortes of Spain, and trembled at the prospect of losing their privileges and monopolies. They judged that the safest course for them was the establishment of an empire upon the subversion of the vice-kingdom, which would be so weak a power that they could overawe it. The priests reasoned correctly, and have augmented their privileges and their wealth, as we shall presently see. The Spanish monopolists were ruined by the Revolution, as we have seen in the last chapter. But the common people were the gainers ultimately by the expulsion of the Spaniards, though the whole country suffered for a time by the withdrawal of the capital of the Spaniards. The benefit derived by the _peons_ from this revolution was the political importance which it gave them. The Parian and the _lepero_ perished together. The latter ceased to exist when the last stone of the former disappeared. The Spaniards had been banished from the country long before the authorities undertook the removal of this obnoxious edifice, and those who wished to avoid a like fate sought security in acts of benevolence; so that at Mexico charitable inst.i.tutions are now so well conducted, that it is one of the few Catholic cities in the world that can boast of being free entirely from beggars. Political power gave to the common people an importance in the social scale which they had never before enjoyed. With the cheapness of clothing the unclad mult.i.tude have disappeared, and the new generation find more employment and better wages than their ancestors did, when all branches of industry were clogged with monopolies, and they are, consequently, more industrious and temperate.

MEXICAN MECHANICS.

Still, the Mexican _peon_ is immensely below the American laborer, and still has to be watched as a thief, for the want of a little morality intermixed with his religious instruction. It is a degrading sight to stand at the door of one of the large coach manufactories at Mexico, and to witness the manner in which they search them, one by one, as they come out. The natives, who have learned the most difficult parts of coach-building from English and French employers, can not for a moment be trusted, lest they should steal their tools or the materials upon which they are employed. I saw even the man who was placing the gorgeous tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs on the Nuncio's coach carefully searched, lest he should have concealed about his person a sc.r.a.p of the valuable material. That they are thieves is not to be wondered at when their catechism teaches them "that a theft that does not exceed a certain amount is not a grave offense."[55]

LOW STATE OF MECHANIC ARTS.

With us, a mechanic is a.s.sociated with the idea of a person occupying a respectable position in life; but at Mexico he still belongs to a degraded cla.s.s, as men are there esteemed; he is a _peon_, on a footing with a common laborer. The highest wages are three shillings a day, while at least two days in the week he is kept from his usual employment by "days of obligation," that is, festival days on which it is unlawful to work. _Tortillas_, Indian griddle-cakes, with black beans (_frijoles_) and red peppers (_chilie_), are his daily food; and his lodgings are a palm-leaf mat upon a stone or earthen floor, while his _serapa_ does duty for a blanket at night. The greasy friar does not forget him as he goes his rounds in search of Peter's pence; and the priest sets before him the horrid consequences of entering Purgatory without first discharging the debt he still owes for his baptism. He and his "wife" still remain unmarried; for how can they ever raise the money to pay the priest? And if by chance he gets involved in debt, or for the debt of one of his kindred, one third part of his daily labor is embargoed by the creditor.

When the Mexican mechanic has a small kit of uncouth tools, he works upon his own account, but at the smallest possible profit. When he has finished a pair of shoes, if he be a shoemaker, he or his wife starts out to dispose of them to some pa.s.ser-by in the street before a new pair is undertaken. When the tinman has finished a sprinkling pot, he or his boy walks the street till it is sold, and then perhaps a tin bath is made; and if, luckily, from a chance customer he has obtained an extra price, a _fiesta_ is proclaimed to the family connection, and maybe the additional luxury of buying a ticket in the lottery of the Virgin of Guadalupe is indulged in, and a vow is made that if he wins a prize, one half of the profits of the stake shall be deposited as a gift at her shrine. In this way a week is pa.s.sed, and it is terminated with the entire exhaustion of the little fortune of the poor mechanic.

The kindred have had a time; _pulque_ and liquor have been pa.s.sed around freely; the women have enjoyed "equal rights" with the men; they have drunk their full share, and smoked their little cigars. The tin-man, once more penniless, with an aching head, but with a light heart, returns to his little hammer, and a piece of solder and tin got on the pledge of his future earnings. Such is the condition of native Mexican mechanics, and of the mechanic arts at the capital.

[Ill.u.s.tration: TRAVELING IN MEXICO.]

The complicated machinery by which our shoes are made, or the equally complicated machinery by which tin is worked up into culinary vessels, never entered into the dreams of a Mexican mechanic. No Mexican man of science ever thought of degrading himself so low as to undertake the improvement of the mechanic arts; yet it is astonishing to see what Mexican mechanics do accomplish with their imperfect means. I have often stopped to witness the success of a poor old man building a piano, which was both skillfully arranged and well-toned, and yet the tools employed were apparently inadequate for such a purpose. In the same primitive style were coaches built before foreigners came and subst.i.tuted coaches of modern pattern instead of the old, egg-formed coach-bodies of the vice-kingdom.

It may seem like trifling to be dwelling thus upon the character of the substratum of Mexican society, but it is from this very substratum that the wealth or poverty of a nation is to be traced. The sense of the dignity of labor is the foundation of American prosperity, while the degradation of the mechanics and laboring cla.s.s of Mexicans is the cause of the national imbecility.

THE STORY OF THE PORTRESS.

Let us look at the common people of Mexico from another point of view.

I will reproduce in substance the tale of the old Meztizo woman, who opens and shuts the great street door to all well-known inmates, by day and by night, and to such others as can give satisfactory answers. She is esteemed a lucky woman because she has the use of a small room on the ground floor for her services, where she and a number of her relatives are often hived together. Her story is very likely not true in every particular, for it can not be denied that she, like all of her cla.s.s, does not consider falsehood _per se_ as any other than a venial sin. How should she, considering the teaching she receives?[56] But the story is nevertheless, in the main, a pretty fair picture of the life of the humbler cla.s.ses in republican Mexico.

She will tell you how her husband basely left her with a family of children, and took to another woman, because they were not able to pay the priest to get legally married. Her eldest son was seized and taken to the wars, where he was compelled to stand up to shoot and be shot at, to settle the question which of two sets of white men should enjoy the right of plundering the people. Whether he should hereafter be discharged honorably, or run away, or be killed in battle, it was the same to her, for the man that recruited the soldiers would know that he had once been a soldier, and would be sure to seize him first when ordered to furnish recruits; and, let what will be the course of political events, he is certainly lost to her forever.

Her eldest daughter had been a help to her. She ground corn for the _tortillas_, and could guard the house door while the old woman went to the public wash-house to wash a few shirts which gentlemen had occasionally intrusted to her care. But a chance shot in one of the street battles had hit her, and she too was gone. Her second son had stopped too long in front of the _pulque_-shop after his day's work was finished, and was involved in a street affray, in which knives were drawn, and a man killed. Whether he was the guilty one or not, it mattered little, as he was the first to fall into the hands of the officers. For a long time he had been kept in the chain-gang, but lately he had been sent to the silver mines, where he would probably end his days carrying ore on his back like a beast of burden, a thousand feet under ground.

She had a second daughter, old enough to carry food to her son while he was in prison, and to lighten his misery by a daily visit while he belonged to the chain-gang. But since he has been taken from the city, they two are left alone in the world. She has now no money, or she would get her daughter married, as the priest would trust her if she would only pay a small part of the fee. Still she is considered fortunate; for, having the reputation of an honest women, she has got a portress's situation, and little means are thrown in her way by which she obtains a comfortable living. But her relatives, who are poorer than herself, sympathize with her, and come and eat up her _tortillas_.

Such is the substance of many a tale of misery, if you will stop and listen to the pictures which the lowly draw of their condition in any of the Mexican cities. Often they are fabricated, but very often they are true. The old woman who tells you a tale to excite your sympathies has perhaps only borrowed a tale of misfortune which she has heard her neighbor tell. Those who reproach these poor unfortunates with being beggars, thieves, and liars, forget that they have been made such by oppression. The greatest amount of suffering caused by the civil wars falls upon the poor; and among the suffering poor, the women are the greatest sufferers. If they are more intemperate than the men, it is their misfortunes, too often, that have driven them to seek a temporary solace in _pulque_. The slight hold they have on their husbands is the cause of their jealousy, and if they take part in b.l.o.o.d.y affrays, it is because they are under the influence of intoxication, and not from any inherent inclination to cruelty.

Never did a white skin cover a kinder heart than that of the poor Meztizo women of Spanish America. Their primitive hut by the wayside is as much at your service as your own castle, and you are heartily welcome to their humble fare. I never was so unfortunate as to need their a.s.sistance, but I have often been astonished at the ready charity of the poor to those poorer than themselves. I once encountered an Irishman who had begged his way from the Gulf coast almost to the Pacific, and I was greatly surprised at the cheerfulness with which a poor widow woman, keeper of a _venta_, accepted of a blessing instead of more tangible coin for a night's entertainment. In delicate health always, and not without a full share of experience among strangers, I know full well how to appreciate the kind offices which a woman only can render. When death stared me in the face, and she could do nothing for a perishing heretic except to solicit a pa.s.sing procession to chant a _misericordia por un infirmo Americano_, that kindly office was not wanting. When, with returning health, I ventured out into the street, leaning upon a staff, a poor Indian woman, forgetting her native shyness, begged me to sit down under the shade of her roof while she prepared for me a little orange-water, and when, a little refreshed by her orange-water, I tottered on, I shall never forget the look of sympathy which she bestowed upon an unknown stranger. An Indian woman is always kind, but the kindest of her race is the poor despised Indian woman of Spanish America.

It is too common to look down coldly, and not unfrequently with contempt, upon those who occupy the humbler walks of life, and to speak only of their vices. The _peon_ has his vices, and they are glaring enough, but he is certainly not worse than his white neighbor. I had been so long in California, and had seen so many exhibitions of courage in street-fights and personal encounters, that I had come almost to consider the words white man and brave man as synonymous. But when I found myself in Mexico at the breaking out of a civil war, I soon learned that white men are not always brave, and that they were superior to the Indian in little else except in the gilding with which they covered their vicious and corrupt lives. They borrow their customs from Paris and their style of living, but their morals are even below the Paris standard of virtue.

WOMAN'S RIGHTS AT MEXICO.

The law, which sinks the civil existence of the wife in the husband, and which charges the husband with liability for the debts and trespa.s.ses of the wife, is sometimes stigmatized as harsh, unnatural, and tyrannical. If those that consider it so could for a little while enjoy the matrimonial freedom of Mexico, they would soon discover abundant reason for praising the wisdom of our ancestors in hedging about with so many disabilities an inst.i.tution which is both the safeguard of public morality and of our free government. Family government, self-government, and political freedom dwell together; while despotism and family license are inseparable. At Mexico, old family relations are not broken up by new marriages. Household family worship is unknown, but, like so many pagans, each one trudges off to say her prayers separately, and at a favorite shrine. The wife has her separate property and interests, which she manages with the aid of her "next friend." The husband, too, has his separate interests, and too often his "next friend" is his neighbor's wife.

After my return from Mexico, I heard a woman in a public a.s.sembly advocating, as social reforms, the inst.i.tutions of a country in a state of moral and political decomposition. I felt like exclaiming, "Cursed be that woman who would introduce into our happy country the social customs of paganism; and cursed be that people who listen to her infidelity!" May a like evil fall upon those legislative tinkers who have deprived the husband of the power of creating a trust for the protection and support of his wife in time of necessity.

We have examined sufficiently the social condition of Mexico to show that there is no natural sympathy between the whites and the colored races, or the governing and governed races of Mexico. For a brief period, indeed, Guerrero, a man of Indian descent, occupied the presidency; but he was deposed and murdered, and the government has ever since been in the hands of the whites. The present Pinto war in the southwest looks toward again reviving the Indian rule. It is carried on too languidly to promise success, as there seems to be no one in the movement possessed of the energy of that Indian drummer, Carrera, who usurped the supreme power in Guatemala. On the other hand, Mexico is like a ripe pear, ready to fall into the lap of any unscrupulous adventurer who chooses to make common plunder of its churches, its church jewels, and the inordinate private fortunes of its priesthood and n.o.bility.