Tempest Over Mexico
by [Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown, $3.00]
A STRAIGHTFORWARD narrative like this, told with real feeling, is a relief after some of the recent glib guidebooks about Mexico. The book is a saga of Cuernavaca. The tempest breaks over all Mexico, but the author lived through the worst of the revolution of 1910 in that little city where Cortez built his palace, which lies in golden valley of Morelos, ‘the valley all men coveted.’ The writer has a sympathetic understanding of the people and she has given a vivid personal account of their struggle for independence. There is incidental detail, delightful to one who has been in Mexico, the smell of the countryside, and the sounds in the little cobbled lanes.
The author, Rosa King, an Englishwoman, went to Cuernavaca in 1907 to make a living for herself and her two small children. She had known the town before and started off with a prophecy sadly ironical: ‘Here I shall . . . make my home, where all is peace and beauty, and nothing has ever changed or ever will.’ She opened a tearoom for the British and American tourists and it proved so popular that she added a curio shop, selling the native pottery to her clients. In 1910 the Governor of Morelos, a friend of President Díaz, suggested that she buy the Bella Vista Hotel (a four-hundred-year-old hacienda) and turn innkeeper for the visitors expected for the celebration of the Centenario, the hundredth anniversary of Mexico’s independence from Spain. Mrs, King followed his advice, and her remodeled hotel, with its lovely patios (and thirty bathrooms), was soon full of guests.
Then the revolution came which swept Porfirio Díaz from power, and Cuernavaca became the centre of fierce fighting.
Almost all the historic figures of the time passed through the Bella Vista inn. With General Zapata, commanding officer of the troops, by her side, Mrs. King welcomed President and Mrs. Madera on their first official visit to Cuernavaca; General Huerta, who came later to capture Zapata, stayed at the Bella Vista enjoying plums at breakfast; and a beautiful Rumanian spy, sent by Pancho Villa, lodged there and betrayed her hostess and the town. The siege of the city by the Zapatistas—when ‘we starved with dignity,’ as the author says— is perhaps the most moving incident in the book. Despite all that Mrs. King suffered from that encircling army, she speaks with admiration of Zapata and thinks only Hidalgo and Madero outranked him in the list of Mexican patriots. Victoriano Huerta, she felt, never had a real hold on the people.
The march out from Cuernavaca with the retreating Federal army is a thrilling story. That weak, weary company staggered along for three terrible days, constantly fired upon in the stony lanes and almost dead from hunger and fatigue before they reached Toluca and safety. Only 2000 of the 8000 who started survived the journey.
One admires the humor that could comment on the refugees’ ‘communistic donkeys, working only when we worked’ with bridle and fist, and could laugh over the loss of those precious American bathtubs looted from the Bella Vista.
Later, Mrs. King took charge of another inn at Orizaba, but there a Mexican general fell in love with her very young daughter and the girl had to be smuggled out of town, so they moved on to Vera Cruz, then the Capital under President Carranza.
A short review seems to emphasize unduly the melodrama of the tale. The best of it is the spirit with which Mrs. King, a foreigner caught in this revolution, cast in her lot with the Mexicans. ‘ Whatever happens,’ she says, ’I am on their side. What is for their good I want.’ These are the words of a brave woman whose understanding of the sufferings of Mexico overshadowed her own.
ELIZABETH MORROW