The Heart of the Trouble in Mexico

I

IN the flower-wreathed cemetery of the city of Tepic, capital of the newly made State of Nayarit, with the pine-covered summits of the Sierras as a background to the east, while to the west rich undulating country descends to the tierra caliente, the hot coast-land, and the ever blue Pacific with the islands of the Three Maries on the horizon, stands the weather-beaten tomb of one Manuel Lozado, bandit leader and local hero.

Manuel Lozado is notable because he waged war against three presidents of Mexico: Benito Juarez, Lerdo de Tejada, and Porfirio Diaz, and because he raised and equipped armies of peons strong enough to attack great cities like Tepic and Guadalajara in a struggle lasting from 1870 to 1877; he is even more notable, I think, because, quite unconsciously, he has given the key to the Mexican problem in one of his favorite pieces of strategy. It was his custom, when a new campaign against the central authorities was in contemplation, to send his bodyguard down from their lairs in the high Sierras, to the fertile plains, with orders to cut down all the banana plants, thus destroying the chief food-supply of the native villages. The peons starved for a while, and watched their women and children starve; then they came in a body up the mountains, and begged Lozado to enroll them in his army of bandits, to lead them forth to war and plunder, which, for them, meant simply food.

Here is the clue, the answer to the everlasting enigma of turbulent Mexico. Banditry and plunder are the last resource of hungry peons, always on the verge of starvation, and, when their meagre sustenance is cut off, immediately pressed beyond the verge.

Have we ever asked ourselves this simple question concerning Mexico — how does a bandit chief like the magnetic and hard-hitting Francisco Villa, year after year, gather and hold together armies of four or five thousand, to wage protracted war against the federal troops of President Carranza? How did Venustiano Carranza, in the days when he was himself a rebel, the fellow bandit and ally of Villa, assemble the troops with which he made headway against President Huerta? How was Emiliano Zapata able for years to maintain considerable armed bands in Morelos, and even to capture and occupy Mexico City? Or, to generalize, how did the hundred dictators of Mexico, in the years following the break with Spain, muster the forces that for generations made their country an armed camp? How did Hidalgo, in 1810, enroll his first followers in the earliest war of independence, fighting the battles that rank, in Mexican tradition, with Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill?

We may, if we choose, solve the problem in part by ascribing to these leaders — bandits or patriots or both — an innate love of strife and conflict, just as Bacon attributes to a certain portion of mankind a natural and corrupt love of the lie itself; but what about the rank and file, the men who are ready, not only to enlist, but to be killed? Is your everyday Mexican so bloodthirsty, so enamored of fighting for fighting’s sake, that the hard campaigns of banditry, the excitement of being killed, make to him an appeal that is irresistible?

Or — to put the question in an even simpler form — who are the men who actually supply the rank and file in the armies of the Villas, the Zapatas, the innumerable bandit leaders? Why are they, seemingly, at all times ready and eager to leave their peaceful livelihood, to abandon home and family, for the wild crusade of outlawry which holds so many chances of sudden death? For we must realize that the Villas, the Zapatas, however turbulent they may be on the one hand, however patriotic on the other, would be quite powerless to break the spell of Mexican peace if they went forth to battle single-handed. We have men of the same adventurous temper in our own country; but they are compelled to limit themselves to solitary hold-ups and train robberies. If every such knight of the road among us was able to enroll, almost overnight, an army of four or five thousand American citizens and voters, ready to die in the hills about Harrisburg or Colorado Springs, should we not have reason to seek for the explanation, not so much in human depravity, as in some enduring cause of discontent, some deep sense of wrong, which made men eager to dare and die for the least chance of liberation?

One has read, in the last few weeks, scores of columns concerning Mexico, including not a little invective; but one finds in all of it hardly a line that shows a fundamental understanding of the peoples of Mexico. Neither newspapers nor magazine writers nor Congressional committees have brought that side of the matter to the light. They seem barely conscious that there is any problem to be solved. And the odd thing is that, in the governing powers of Mexico in Mexico itself, there seems to be the same blindness, the willful blindness, perhaps, of a group of men who do not wish to see.

II

The new Mexican Constitution, adopted at Queretaro at the end of 1916, and in operation since the spring of 1917, declares that all who are born in Mexico are ‘Mexicans’ and citizens; if duly qualified, they are voters also. But there is in the country itself no such uniformity as this definition implies: Mexico has no citizenry qualified to make the new Constitution a genuine organ of government. The Constitution of 1917, just like the older Constitution of 1857, was made for an imaginary Mexico, not for the Mexico that really exists. And because it is built, not upon reality, but upon a fairy tale, the new Constitution has wholly failed to bring the blessings of peace and wellbeing which its sponsors promised.

The fundamental fact about Mexico appears to be this: if you take away the thin veneer of Latin civilization which came in the wake of the Conquistadores four hundred years ago; if you lift off the upper layer of two million Spanish Creoles, with their cathedrals and palaces and haciendas, and with the thin network of railroads and industries bestowed upon Mexico mainly by Americans, Britons, and Canadians, you will find the native Mexico of the days before Montezuma, to all intents untouched, unchanged. You will have a population of genuine Mexicans, — for the name itself is aboriginal, — either of pure race, or with a very small infusion of Spanish blood; a population as varied, of as many widely differing types and tongues, as are the nations of Europe; with gifted and able races like the Quichés, the Mayas, the Zapolecs, the Aztecs at the one end of the scale; with tribes Like the Tarahumare and Tepehuane at the other, still so primitive that they dwell in caves, yet deeply imbued with a devout pantheism. You will find this; but you will find nothing resembling the population of ‘Mexicans,’ the uniform and equally equipped citizenry postulated by the Mexican Constitution.

When we call the aborigines of Mexico Indians, perpetuating the geographical blunder of Columbus, we fall into a double error: first, we imagine them to be a uniform population; next, we think of them as close kin to the Indians of the United States. In reality, the great mass of the indigenous peoples of Mexico appear to be about as remote in race from our Cheyennes, let us say, and our Arapahoes, as they are from authentic Indians, like the Bengalis, or the Tamil and Telugu peoples of Madras. There are, in Northern Mexico, tribes like the valiant Yaqui, the huge pugnacious Seri of Tiburon Island in the Gulf of California, the fighting Apache, neighbors but not kindred of the Yaqui — tribes which appear to belong to the same great race-stock as the Arapaho and the Cheyenne; but Seri and Yaqui and Apache are alien in type to the great bulk of the Mexican population, and are quite distinct from them in the kind and degree of their civilization. From the standpoint of the above authentic Mexican peoples, Seri and Yaqui and Apache are foreigners of the northern desert country, not genuine children of Mexico at all. The true indigenous civilization of Mexico, the civilization of the real Mexicans, appears to have been developed, not in the northern desert country beyond the Rio Grande, but in the hot, teeming south, between Mexico City and the Guatemalan border; in all probability it included Guatemala and Honduras.

One may give this ancient civilization the name of Maya-Quiché, from two of its foremost peoples, still numerous and robust to-day. It has its authentic scripture in the Quiché tongue — the Popol Vuh, unearthed at Chichicastenango by the Dominion Padre Ximenez about 1675, and printed in full, with an interleaved French translation, by the Abbé Basseur de Bourbourg in 1865. To anyone acquainted with the Vedas and the Puranas of India, the Popol Vuh has a familiar ring. Its cosmogony begins with universal night, — what the Sanskrit Scriptures call the Night of Brahma, — when darkness was upon the face of the waters. Then there follows the development of the worlds, first formed like thin cloud-wreaths in the abyss, and gradually hardening into hills and plains, under the formative will of ‘the Creator, the Moulder, Heart of the Heavens, Heart of the Earth.’ Then beasts and birds are formed, to people the forests and ravines; but, although they have voices, they have no articulate speech; they cannot invoke their Creator, or call upon the Heart of the Heavens in prayer.

Therefore the Divine Powers set themselves to make man, the being who can pray and praise the Creator, so that the Divine Powers may receive adoration from their handiwork. But not at once is intelligent man brought into being; two races are made but to fail: the men formed of wet clay, who melt and dissolve, and the manikins made of wood, whose hearts are hard, so that they cannot worship. A race is at last brought into being, intelligent, reverent, full of a penetrating wisdom that sees all things, the far as well as the near, what is in the heavens equally with what is on the earth. And this perfect race renders praise and glory to the Heart of the Heavens, its Creator.

But the Divine Powers are full of apprehension lest this race so highly endowed shall rival their divinity; therefore, they becloud its far-reaching vision, dimming its eyes, as a mirror is dimmed when it is breathed on. So men became as we know them, limited in vision, yet able to pray and praise.

Such is the Popol Vuh, the ancient Quiche Scripture. And it is significant that the reverent pantheism of the Popol Vuh is in essence the religion of aboriginal Mexico to-day. The Norwegian explorer, Carl Lumholz, who devoted years to a sympathetic study of the untouched tribes of the Western Sierras, describes the beliefs and practices of tribes like the Tepehuane and the Tarahumare in terms exactly corresponding to the old Quiché Scripture, although he never mentions the Popol Vuh, and, perhaps, had never read a line of it.

The high antiquity of the MayaQuiché civilization has its proof, not only in the primitive cosmogony of the Popol Vuh, but also in an elaborate system of astronomy, evidently based on accurate observation through thousands of years, as it arrived at a more accurate computation of the solar year than that of the Julian calendar, which Julius Cæsar in turn borrowed from the ancient Egyptians. Further evidence of the age and magnitude of the MayaQuiche civilization is furnished by the great ruins of Mitla and Palenque and Chichen-Itza, of Quirigua in Guatemala, of Copan in what is now Honduras. If we add indigenous metal-work, lacquer, the weaving of elaborately decorated textiles, the cultivation, not only of maize, but of cocoa and tobacco, both native to Mexico, we shall have some sense of the varied richness of the ancient national life beneath the thin veneer of the Latin Mexico of to-day.

It is hardly to be supposed that the builders of Mitla and Chichen-Itza lived in wigwams. Nor do their descendants to-day. For, just as there are primitive cliff dwellings in the northwestern Sierra, so there are, in the far more civilized southern country, towns peopled wholly by aboriginal tribes, towns in all likelihood exactly the same in style and structure as they were in Montezuma’s day, or a thousand years before Montezuma. Take a town like Cheran, for example, in Oaxaca, with four or five thousand inhabitants, practically all full-blooded Tarascos, where the score or so of Spanish traders must give up speaking Spanish and learn the Tarascan tongue, or starve: there must have been just such towns in the Tarasco country in Montezuma’s day, or a thousand, perhaps five thousand years before Montezuma’s ancestors came down to the Valley of Anahuac, from somewhere beyond the northern desert, somewhere, perhaps, beyond the Rio Grande. There are towns as completely aboriginal in the Aztec country about Mexico City, and in the Otomi country, somewhat farther north.

The Aztecs, whom we think of as the aborigines of Mexico, are in reality as little this as the Goths and Vandals are the aborigines of Spain. The Aztecs, in truth, carried out their drive to the southward centuries after the Goths and Vandals, and, like them, adopted a civilization far higher than their own. Like captive Greece, the Mayas and Quichés, or whatever branch of their race then inhabited the Valley of Anahuac, led captive their rude conquerors, and instilled into them their science and their arts.

But the Aztecs either brought with them, or developed in their new home, one original feature: the abominable system of human sacrifices to their war-god, Huitzilipochtli, the memory of which blackens the name of aboriginal Mexico, and which Hernando Cortes did well utterly to destroy.

It is, by the way, a fair guess that only a small part of those who are called Aztecs to-day, and who speak the Aztec tongue, are genuine descendants of the first invading Aztecs; just as only a minority of the natives of Bengal, who speak a language classed as Aryan, are true offspring of the first Sanskritspeaking invaders.

III

But the fact that I wash to drive home, the fundamental truth concerning Mexico, is this: beneath the thin veneer of Spanish Creole race and culture, aboriginal Mexico persists to-day, with its many races and its many tongues, substantially unchanged since Montezuma’s day, or the earlier day when Montezuma’s ancestors beheld, where Mexico City now stands, the eagle perched upon a cactus, holding in its talons a writhing serpent — the prophesied emblem which is still the national device of Mexico.

Substantially unchanged in race and speech, yet vitally changed in one respect; and here is the heart of the Mexican problem. Within a generation after Cortes landed, on Good Friday, 1519, at the spot, which he therefore named the City of the True Cross, or Vera Cruz, the Spaniards had reduced the whole of aboriginal Mexico to slavery, and slaves they have practically remained to the present, day, in spite of a series of constitutions.

Cortes held, and all his followers held, that the title to the newly conquered lands inhered in the King of Spain; and to Cortes and his followers the King of Spain, as ultimate owner, apportioned the fertile Mexican lands. Exactly the same theory of royal ownership persisted a century later, when the foundations of the Thirteen Colonies were laid; and names like Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia perpetuate the theory of kingly ownership.

But, while the older tenants of the Thirteen Colonies have long since departed to the happy hunting-grounds, the conquered aborigines of Mexico remained, and remain to-day, serfs attached to the soil which once belonged in fee simple to their ancestors. And the vital matter is, that they have neither forgiven nor forgotten the first seizure of their lands.

We hardly realize, perhaps, how completely unchanged the first Spanish dominance of the Conquistadores is, even to-day; to how great a degree the vast feudal lordships assigned by the royal letters patent of Charles V and his successors remain intact. The Mexican census of 1910 reveals the fact: some seven thousand families of Spanish Creole descent own nearly all the fertile soil of Mexico; and since Mexico measures in all some 750,000 square miles, it follows that these feudal estates average over a hundred square miles each. Many of them are immensely greater. The Terrazas estate in Chihuahua contains some 13,000,000 acres, an area as large as Holland and Belgium combined; the Terrazas family owns, not a kingdom, but a pair of kingdoms. And there is an estate in Yucatan said to contain 15,000,000 acres.

In the home life of these feudal families of Spanish origin, there is, without doubt, much that is attractive and courtly and gracious; just as there was much that was attractive and gracious in the life of the old slave-owning families of Virginia. But the foundation was, none the less, slavery, a system inherently unjust and evil. While not in name slaves, the natives of Mexico, the peons, were made slaves in fact. The name peon, by the way, is of Latin origin, and means no more than ' footman,’ with the same origin as ‘ pioneer.’ They are still slaves, inheriting in its full bitterness the curse of Adam, toiling for starvation wages and kept in squalor and perpetual debt. The average daily wage for the peon on the large hacienda, the great landed estate, was about twenty-five centavos, the equivalent of twelve cents; and on this he had to support a family, or see them starve.

Exactly the same system of plunder goes on at the present day, wherever the native has any land left which a Spanish Mexican finds worth coveting. We hear a good deal about the treacherous Yaquis, with their passion for murder and outrage; I should like to tell the story, for once, from the Yaqui point, of view.

The Yaquis were valiant, and in their way industrious and fairly advanced. They were in no sense savages; they were even members, in good standing, of the Roman Catholic Church; and for centuries they had lived in comfort and well-being, tilling the rich Yaqui Valley, and desiring only to live their lives in their own way, in peace.

But the Diaz; government passed a law, which, in view of its operation, can only be called iniquitous, requiring the registration of written titles for all land, and permitting the denunciation of land, title to which was not thus legally recorded. The natives, who held their land through immemorial possession, had no written title-deeds, nor did they know enough of legal procedure to obtain titles and have them registered. Therefore the Spanish Creoles, whenever they coveted the native lands, took advantage of this enactment, and denounced them. Not only did Diaz recognize the claims of the new owners as valid: he sent federal soldiers to drive off the native owners; and when, like the Yaquis, they resisted, to carry them off, with their wives and children, into slavery, to be starved and beaten to death on the tobacco plantations of the Valle Nacional and in the henequen fields of Yucatan. That is the story from the Yaqui side; and it is typical of all Mexican history.

I have spoken of Hidalgo, the first Mexican patriot, and of his battles, the Concord and Lexington of Mexico, in 1810. In the autumn of 1910, the centennial of Hidalgo’s uprising was magnificently celebrated in Mexico City, and the central figure of that more than national festival was Porfirio Diaz, who had brought great prosperity to his country, but who had also wrought or tolerated certain deep-laid wrongs. That splendid celebration was his swan song. Within a few months the more than monarch of Mexico was a fugitive, destined to die in exile, discredited and deserted. The evil that he had done, or allowed to be done, outweighed the good. Injustice to the native races, such as the wrongs inflicted on the Yaquis, brought about his ruin.

IV

Francisco Madero was, without doubt a weak hysteriac, a vain dreamer of the Kerensky type, utterly unable to bring his dreams to any practical fruition; yet one thing must be said for him: he did realize and proclaim the intolerable wrongs of the great mass of native Mexicans, the huge injustice that they suffered, the practical slavery in which they were held by the few thousand feudal families of Spanish Creoles. And because he saw these things and courageously proclaimed them, he was heralded from one end of Mexico to the other as a Messiah; the natives applauded and acclaimed him as no man in Mexico had ever been acclaimed; and within a few months after the great centennial celebration, he swept Porfirio Diaz and his seemingly impregnable government into the sea.

Madero was, I say, a weakling and a dreamer. Seemingly honest and disinterested himself, he allowed a swarm of his kinsmen to descend upon the national resources. Some $30,000,000 in cash which Diaz left in the Treasury melted away under the fingers of Hernando Madero, the President’s uncle, like snow under the Mexican sun. Nor did Francisco Madero take any really effective steps to right the wrongs of the natives, which he had so eloquently proclaimed. He did, it is true, confiscate the estates of some of the friends of Diaz, — the Cientificos, the clique of learned statesmen who had developed the country, and opened it to foreign enterprise under the aged President, — and he distributed the confiscated lands among the peons. But he did this in such a haphazard way, with such slight guaranties of permanence, that the peons, for centuries unaccustomed to the ownership and practical management of land, immediately sold their new allotments for whatever they would bring, and proceeded to squander the proceeds.

Of Huerta, it is enough to say that he could never have overthrown Madero, if Madero’s utter failure had not already discredited him. When Huerta fell, he left the stage to an abler man than himself, Venustiano Carranza.

Carranza was, on the one hand, a provincial official of the Diaz régime, for some time Governor of the State of Coahuila; on the other hand, he was a disciple of Madero, or at all events ready to carry on Madero’s agitation. Whether he is at heart an enemy of the United States, therefore a friend of our enemies; whether he is sincerely convinced that the introduction of foreign enterprise, so consistently fostered by Diaz, amounts in fact to robbery of Mexico’s resources — these are questions that I shall not attempt to answer. It is enough that, in order to gain and to retain power, he has taken, this position of hostility.

I have spoken of Carranza as a far abler man than Huerta. In proof, let me cite two facts. From the revolutionary chaos of an inconvertible paper currency, which anticipated the best effort of Bolshevist Russia, he has brought the finances of Mexico back to a gold basis, and he has gathered a much larger revenue than Diaz collected, even at his flood-tide of success: during the later years of Diaz, the national revenue averaged about $100,000,000 Mexican; Carranza has raised it to over $150,000,000. These are remarkable achievements.

Unfortunately, the people of Mexico have not profited; and here we come upon one of the ugliest facts of the Carranza régime. While, under Diaz, the Mexican federal army cost about one fifth of the nation’s income, and on that limited sum maintained complete internal peace, Carranza has allowed his military supporters to help themselves to a full two thirds of the national revenue, while armed bands, like Villa’s, continue to lord it over whole provinces.

But the point which I wish to make is this; though ostensibly a pupil of Madero, convinced of the evils which Madero so passionately denounced, Carranza has done nothing really effective to right these evils. Perhaps his plan is radically wrong; perhaps he has no sincere wish to find a true solution; perhaps the military despots, in the main Spanish Creoles, who rule Mexico in fact while he rules in name, will not permit him to act. However this may be, the fact stands. The original peoples of Mexico remain disinherited. They keenly feel the injustice of their position. They will leave everything, to take up arms and follow any leader who promises them redress.

The Carranza plan, embodied in the new Constitution of 1917, seems inherently bad. Emiliano Zapata had at least a consistent scheme, though not, perhaps, a very practical one — to confiscate one third of every feudal estate, and distribute the land among the landless natives. This would have worked no substantial injustice, since a considerable part of each of these big estates has always remained uncultivated, though often quite fertile.

The Zapata plan has its defects, but the Carranza plan appears fantastic. The Constitution of 1917 lays down the rule that each of Mexico’s twentyeight states shall decide just how much land may be included in a single estate; that the excess above this limit, which might easily differ in each of the twentyeight states, shall be taken under condemnation proceedings, paid for by government bonds, and distributed among the natives seeking land. The noteworthy thing about this plan is, that there is not the slightest attempt to ascertain how much land the natives need, how much they can profitably cultivate, how much would really solve the long-standing problem and right the deep-seated wrong.

But worse than this fantastic element appears to be the fact that even this plan is not being worked out in good faith. It is credibly reported from Mexico that estates have indeed been confiscated, estates which belonged to friends of Porfirio Diaz; but that these estates have not been allotted to the landless natives, but have instead been handed over to the military supporters of Carranza.

The fact, therefore, remains that the older natives of Mexico, who are the great majority of the nation, feel that they have been robbed and dispossessed by a foreign minority, and that this injustice continues. They are indignant, fretting feverishly under their wrongs; they are so eager to right these wrongs, that they are ready, at a moment’s notice, to leave their homes and fly to arms, following any leader who will promise them liberation from bondage and redress. Because Emiliano Zapata promised this, he was able to hold Morelos by armed force for years. Because Francisco Villa promises it. he is still at the head of an effective army. Because Manuel Lozado promised it and died, as his followers believed, in trying to keep his promise, his tomb is a shrine.

No matter what government holds Mexico City,—whether Spanish Creole or foreign, — the long and dangerous inflammation of the Mexican body politic will continue until justice in this fundamental matter is done. If wisely undertaken, and along sane lines, it could be accomplished, without confiscation, without perceptible injury to any justly grounded interest, without disturbance or revolution. But it must be taken in hand, if Mexico is to have security and peace.