J CG-7 Londres 190, Depto. 109 Colonia Juarez Mexico 6, DF, Mexico
September 2, 1966
The story is so oft told here that its survival can be attributed to geographical accuracy if not historical truth: When Hernando Cortes returned to Spain after his conquest of Mexico in the 16th Century someone asked for a description of the country. Wordlessly, he crumpled a piece of paper in his fist and tossed it on the desk.
Four hundred years later the mountain passes and high narrow plateaus represented by Cortes’ wadded paper still contain hundreds of thousands of the Mexican people, their isolation physical as well as cultural and linguistic, their ways of life insignificant tributaries of the modern Mexican mainstream. Civilization has brushed these persons, but knocked them aside rather than taking them aboard. A traveler sees them constantly in rural Mexico: Cadaverous barefoot men, squatting aside a bus station in Jalisco, oblivious to the exhaust fumes that swirl over their heads; the bright-eyed but pot-bellied children offering scaly, gray iguanas for sale at roadsides in the northern part of Guerrerro State, swinging them from strings before the horrified, mystified eyes of tourists; the women street vendors of Puebla and Torreon and Monterry and Poza Rica and Cordoba (and even Mexico City), sitting on the pavement behind pitiful piles of shriveled peaches and shelled walnuts, one child quietly at play in the dust, one child at the breast, one child anticipated, all exhausted before dawn by their walk in from the country.
No one realizes the presence of those persons more than the Mexican government. Its vigor, sincerity and effectiveness in solving their problems are discussed and disputed frequently by Mexicans and foreign observers alike; yet a cardinal aim of the Mexican Revolution remains that of bringing to the campo — the country — the same economic opportunities and social benefits that are available in the city. Geography asides the obstacles are many. Some villages refuse to permit the building of schools simply because no one there has ever received any education, and thus its value is unproven and unknown. In hamlets where education does gain a toehold teachers cram as much work as possible into the first four years, for after that time a child is big enough to work in the fields and thus leaves the classroom forever. Again, the caciques, the Mexican equivalent of a parasitic ward boss, perpetuate themselves, politically as well as financially, through the ignorance of their constituents.
Tlaxcala is a state where the economic evils of the past, the misery of the present, and the first glimmerings of what lies ahead lie exposed like geological strata. The state is Mexico’s smallest, 346,699 persons living in an area only one-third again as large as Mexico City historically the Tlaxcalans have held themselves aloof from the remainder of Mexico. Cousins of the Aztecs, the dominant pre-Conquest tribe in Mexico, the Tlaxcalans first appear in history in the 12th Century as residents of the western shore of Texcoco Lake near the present site of Mexico City. Apparently the Tlaxclans weren’t nice people to have in the neighborhood, for their turbulent tempers and general irrascible nature led to a coalition of other tribes which sought to drive them away. But the Tlaxcalans proved as tough as they were ornery, beating their foes handily. Having thus made their point, the Tlaxoalans left the area voluntarily, migrating across the Valley of Mexico into mild, fruitful valleys mountain-locked by the Sierra de Tlaxcala and three of the greatest mountains of central Mexico: Popocateptl., Ixoccihuatl and La Malinche.
Apparently the Tlaxcalans acquired their present tribal name at this time, for the word Tlaxcala means “land of bread,” an apt description of the new homeland. The mountain barriers gave the Tlaxcalans physical security, and the society they created was akin ritually to that of the Aztecs, replete with bloody human sacrifices knighthood for warriors and elaborate temple-building. Unlike other tribes of Mexico, however, the Tlaxcalans refused to recognize the soverignty of the Aztecs and declined to pay the demanded tribute. Time and again Aztec armies marched forth to subdue the gnat of a nation, only to sulk home again with bloodied heads. Their presence was particularly infuriating to the great chieftain Montezuma when he ascended the Aztec throne just prior to the arrival of Cortes. Montezuma’s armies held other tribes in subjugation all the way into the province of Verz Paz, in what is now Guatemala and Nicaragua — yet couldn’t cope with the Tlaxcalans, only 75 miles distant from his castle in Chapultepec. An army headed by Montezuma’s favorite son went into the Valley of Bread; son and army alike were slaughtered. In a blind rage Montezuma collected the entire Aztec army and swept across the valley. The Tlaxcalans faded into the protective mountains, bided their time, and then decimated the Aztecs with a counterattack.
Cortes’ route to Mexico City a few years later lay directly through the domain of the Tlaxcalans. After two days of bitter fighting each army was convinced it could not decisively defeat the other, and a truce was arranged. The Tlaxcalans saw the Spaniards as a vehicle through which they could carry war to their old foes, the Aztecs. The Spaniards saw the Tlaxcalans as fierce and useful allies and a counterbalance to the Aztecs’ superior numbers. The alliance indeed was mutually beneficial: The Spaniards, with Tlaxcalan aid, overcame Montezuma and took command of the Aztec kingdom. When the Tlaxcalans chose to return to their mountain-guaranteed privacy, their tribe was the only one in Mexico exempted from slavery by Cortes when the Spaniards carved the land into estates as spoils of war.
My curiosity about the Tlaxcalans was first piqued by the appearance of a brigade of their blood cousins at the Cinco de Mayo parade in the city of Puebla, which is near their state. The fete celebrates the victory on May 5, 1862, of the Mexicans over a French force. Tribesman from Tlaxcala fought alongside the regular Mexican army, wielding machetes and clad in loose-fitting white peasant garb and huaraches. The contingent that marched in the Puebla parade this year contained perhaps 150 men, wearing the same dress as had their ancestors 104 years previously, sharpened machetes drawn and glistening in the morning sun in a “port arms” position. The Indians, despite their military organization and brigade designation, are not a part of the Mexican army, never have been, and say they never will be; however, they are quite prepared to deal with any intruder, foreign or domestic, who snoops around their valley and mountain ridges uninvited. Other military units present that day included marching infantry, cavalry detachments, a string of armored personnel carriers and tanks; yet the savagery implicit in a man who chooses a machete as his basic weapon in an era of gunpowder and nuclear devices made the Indians most menacing group there. The thought crossed my mind that had I been a Frenchman and met similar opponents on the battlefield, emitting the shrill monotone whistle that is the Tlaxcalan battle cry, I would have made prompt inquiries about boat reservations home.
Modern highways now cross Tlaxcala from north to south, passing through the pleasant capital city, which also bears the name Tlaxcala. The state lies just above the expressway portion of the Mexico City-Veracruz highway, and is only slightly more than an hour distant by car from the Federal District. Yet in the eastern portion of the state roads deserving of the name have not breached the rocky foothills of La Malinche. And it is this area that the Mexican government is attempting to acquaint with schools, health services, potable water and other non-despoiling features of civilization.
My look at this program, and what it has accomplished, was in company with Angel M. Lara, a field representative for the Community Development Foundation, a privately-owned United States organization, and Norman Gall, a U. S. journalist who wanted to compare Mexican rural work with what he had seen in four years of roaming the Andean region of South America. Lara, a native of Mexico but now a naturalized U. S. citizen, served earlier with the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic. Articulately enthusiastic about the campo and the people he finds there, Lara has worked in Mexico since March.
Lara’s foundation works on contract with the Agency for International Development (AID) and the Alliance for Progress; it is privately endowed, however, and has no links with the U. S. government other than its (contractual ones. As explained by Lara, CDF is mainly a conduit for and overseer of AID food commodities that are used by local governments in community development projects. “These are not our projects, or American projects,” Lara emphasized at the start of our trip; “these -are Mexican projects.”
In Mexico, CDF is a junior partner of the Secretario de Salud Publica — SSP, or Department of Public Health — which is in charge of community development in the country. The system, briefly, works this way: SSP’s field representatives, known as promotorios, encourage communities to join in cooperative efforts such as building of roads and schools. Because of a lack of hard cash, and the immensity of its people’s wants the Mexican government is not able to do these things directly as a governmental function. The Mexican campesino, despite the backbreaking routine of his life, nonetheless has considerable idle time during seasons when he cannot plant or harvest, or when his crop does not need tending. For the community projects, therefore, the labor pool consists of the campesinos themselves. The only criteria on whether a chosen project is acceptable is that it benefit the entire community, and not just a family or single neighborhood.
Residents who elect to participate are reimbursed for the work in food supplied by the Alliance for Progress, with CDF acting as liaison with the SSP. Each day’s work entitles the campesino to one “ration” of food, consisting of 5.5 pounds of corn; 2.75 pounds of wheat flour; and 250 grams (about a quarter pound) of bulgur wheat, which can be ground into flour for baking, cooked with stew, or prepared like oatmeal. The ration is intended as a supplement, not as a full diet, and the campesino shares it with all living creatures on his farm, animals included, Each village with a project appoints a chairman to log the time worked by each resident, and the rations are distributed by SSP functionaries from a central warehouse. In the case of Tlaxcala, the warehouse is SSP’s main clinic, where hundreds of burlap bags with the blue-imprinted Alliance for Progress emblem fill two large rooms.
It was from this warehouse that our look at Tlaxcala began, four of us sitting knee to knee in the front seat of a four-wheel drive truck, the Tlaxcala promotorio at the wheel. I generously suggested that my station wagon would be more comfortable. Lara chuckled. “After an hour or so, if you want to come back for it, we can,” he said. As we shall see, I wasn’t disposed to do so.
Our first stop was a roadbuilding project which will link three isolate mountain villages to the main highway which runs into the city of Tlaxcala. For seven centuries the villagers’ sole access to the Tlaxcala market, where they sell their farm produce and buy their meager needs, has been via burro down a rock-strewn mountainside which slopes at perhaps 40 degrees. Often the campesinos walked all night so that they could be in the city at first light, when Mexican markets begin doing business. In addition to the rigors of his trip the campesino wasted valuable time away from his fields on market days.
The project looked like something out of an old Second World War movie about the building of the Burma Road. The task of the villagers — some 800 families live in the three towns, and virtually every family head took part, to some degree — was to hack a path across three separate mountain ridges, a distance of six kilometers (3.7 miles). Engineers from the Secretario de Obras Publicas — SOP or Department of Public Works — went through first and laid out the route, a series of gradually ascending horseshoe and hairpin curves that skittered from ridge to ridge, each level a hairbreadth higher than the preceding one.
The quantity of manpower made things easier for these villagers, for SOP “rents” its bulldozers In return for 25 man-days labor on government road-building projects in the state. At first blush this smacked to me of forced labor; why should the government ask payment (even in work) for machinery bought with public funds? The answer was logical. The villagers live outside the money economy and pay no taxes other than occasional market-place levies. The work they do in exchange for the bulldozer means the highway to which their own crude road will connect will be maintained properly, and at virtually no expense to the government, Viewed practically, the bulldozer meant that villages didn’t have to remove by hand the earth and rocked blasted away by SOP-supplied dynamite as the road progressed up the mountainside. The campesinos themselves, at any rate, considered the bulldozer rental a fair deal.
Two men and a teenaged boy were at work this day when our truck lurched across the last gully on the hardpacked roadbed and halted at the start of what was to be the final horseshoe on this particular ridge. We climbed across the rocks to where the men were drilling — with hand drill and hammer — shot holes for further blasting. The men’s aim was to cut out a shelf on the face of the ridge with the blasting; the bulldozer, in addition to smoothing the roadbed, shoved excess rock and earth to bridge dips in the route. The men halted their work a few moments to chat, and their story went something like this:
“Because we have no road some of our people now go to town only once or twice a year. Market day, which could be a time of relaxation and pleasure, is drudgery because of the walk. Much of our produce we cannot take to Tlaxcala because there is no way to transport it, and it spoils. No teachers want to come to our villages because they do not like the isolation; they would rather be where they can go to Mexico City or Veracruz without having to walk down a mountain. Some people in our villages act as small storekeepers because they are able to haul things home with them. But their prices are high, as much as twice what we would pay in Tlaxcala at the market. They are very unpopular and the people talk against them. But nothing can be done, for they are the only ones who have the goods.”
These men are short (not more than five feet five inches) and wiry, their slightly-slant eyes giving an oriental cast to their faces. None had any formal education, and they said they hoped to make the building of a school their next project.
Three second-class bus companies are already bidding for the concession to operate the lines between Tlaxcala and the villages in anticipation of the traffic that will be generated. (No one in the villages owns a car or truck nor ever expects to do so.) The villagers, however, see no reason to permit an outsider to make a profit or: the bus service: If sufficient funds can be raised to buy a bus they will form a cooperative and use the proceeds to finance other projects. Lara considered this type of cooperative action significant, and a logical outgrowth of the community spirit generated by the road project.
Lara also termed these villagers lucky in that they could muster enough manpower to “hire” the bulldozer. In villages of lesser population it isn’t uncommon for campesinos to do the entire project by hand, at a rate of less than a kilometer (.62 miles) per year. Mexican statistics are notoriously unreliable, but one estimate is that there are 50,000 villages tucked away in the mountains, deserts and jungles of Mexico that lack a road connection to the outside world. Indians desirous of shielding their tribal cultures from degenerating influences aren’t always eager for a road to come, and it can be safely said that many of the villages will remain isolated through the remainder of this century. The Indians can cite examples to substantiate their fears of what a road can do in the way of “civilizing” a village: The chiefs of the three villages responsible for this road are negotiating with a Mexico City promoter for motorcycles races to be held as part of the opening ceremony. Just what the roar of a Harley-Davidson would acid to the Tlaxcalan Indians I was unable to determine. Indeed the contrast would be vivid with other parts of rural Mexico, where buses frequently stop in open country while campesinos file out, produce on their backs, and begin trudging across trackless fields towards homes incalculable miles distant.
With less than a month’s work remaining on the road SSP had already distributed 6,000 of the Alliance for Progress food rations, meaning a labor contribution of 6,000 man-days. The standard wage for laborers in Tlaxcala State is 12 pesos daily (96 cents), meaning the cash value of the campesino labor was $5,760. If the Mexican government had bad to produce that amount in cash to meet a payroll the road would never have been constructed.
Out of the mountain we came, the truck’s gearbox grinding alarmingly at the downgrade, the rear end bouncing over boulders still to be cleared from the roadbed. A few miles on the modern paved two-lane highway, and then a turn onto a hard-packed dirt road that feeds to the ejidos — communal farms — and small private properties to the east of Tlaxcala city, literally in the shadow of the dark, foreboding, cloud-fringed La Malinche. Six miles of straight, fast driving on a dirt road that stretches through green fields of corn and the maguey cactus, a light green plant whose arms stretch to six feet on either side of the center core. And then ahead of us is a tile-covered church cupola, attached by an elevated walkway to the crumbling adobe walls of an old hacienda. This is the village of Buenavista. It isn’t on Lara’s schedule for the day but we stop anyway and go into the church through a door cut into a stonewall that is fully three feet thick. It is a musty, dark place, crude wooden benches before the gold and purple trappings of the altar, an electric light gleaming feebly and ineffectively from the ceiling.
Before the Mexican Revolution of 1910-17 and the subsequent land reform the hacienda occupied some 2,500 hectares (6,075 acres). Now it is divided into one private farm of 494 acres, with the owner retaining possession of the main building, and upwards of 100 ejidos, or small communal properties. A tour of the main hacienda building, ramshackle and decrepit as it is, served as a fast short-course in agrarian Mexico circa Porfirio Diaz (1876-1911), last of the pre-Revolutionary dictators. As did other Mexicans, the Tlaxcalans fell into debt slavery to the haciendas under Diaz losing the freedom guaranteed them by Cortes.
The hacienda system in Tlaxcala as elsewhere, was constructed around a master-worker segregation as rigid as that developed in the ante-bellum South. The walkway from the hacienda to the church, for instance, enabled the hacendado and his family to walk directly from their living quarters to their private second-floor pew for mass without corrupting themselves by mingling with campesinos who entered God’s temple via the ground floor door. The second floor pews of the hacendado so overhung the lower floor that the campesinos could not idly gaze up during mass and-see their master in prayer. (The altitudes of religious segregation are curious: In the First Methodist Church in my native Marshall, Texas, a Southern town, local historians pointed with nostalgia to the balcony which formerly seated God-fearing slaves.)
The main hacienda building was perhaps 40 yards square, the walls of stone coated with adobe, which with accurate conciseness can be described as cheap but sturdy mud. The interior layout is also common throughout Mexico:
An entrance gate cleaving the front wall, with carved wood doors broad enough to admit a horse-drawn carriage.
To the right, the servants quarters and kitchen, with space in the rear for chickens and other yard animals.
To the left, the stables and more servants quarters, the hacendado’s horses enjoying more comfort than his household workers.
Straight ahead, across the open garden, the rooms of’ the hacendado and his family, spread in an unconnecting line facing a porched veranda. If the family outgrew these quarters the servants in rooms adjacent to the kitchen were ejected.
Caste and servitude were omnipresent in hacienda life. The campesino’s day began at six o’clock, when the church bell summoned him to an hour’s labor for his master, cutting wood or tending the garden around the main house while his wife and daughters did skullery maid chores in the kitchen. In the narrowest sense this was not compulsory labor; yet if a campesino failed to answer the bell he was not permitted to work in the fields that day. The campesinos lived outside the hacienda walls in low mud huts that stood in squalid rows, separated one from the other only by mud or dust. These crude dwellings survive, and private ownership has not reduced the depth of the mud, nor prevented pigs from establishing semi-permanent rooting rights in the doorways. Still the campesinos now answer to no master more severe than the hunger pangs of their own stomachs, or the state-run ejido bank from which they obtain yearly crop loans. And the surplus produce –corn, pulque, and barley — which they raise on their land may be hauled into Tlaxcala for the Friday market. Previously, cash income of this nature would not have been available.
Two other features of the main hacienda house remain as evidence of the workings of the system. One is a gazebo in a corner of the center courtyard, with benches on four sides, and a table slightly off center. It was here the hacendado conducted business with his capataz, or straw boss, the man responsible for overseeing the field work of the campesinos. Despite his status on the hacienda, given body in a strapping mount and armament consisting of pistol, rifle and whip, even the capatez was considered too lowly a personage to mix with the hacendado personally. Thus the hacienda’s business was conducted from the gazebo, and neither the capataz nor any other hired hand, save for the household servants, ever saw the interior of the house. Also surviving is a guntower on the northeast corner of the main house, located so that the field of fire lies directly through the cluster off campesino mud huts. Tlaxcala was the scene of no great Revolutionary battle, and it is the only Mexican state I have visited which contains no great Revolutionary shrine. (By contrast, Puebla, only 50 miles to the east, heard one of the first volleys of the Revolution when state police, striking two days in advance of the Nov. 20, 1910, uprising date announced by Francisco 1. Madero, raided the headquarters of an oppositionist party. The headquarters is now a national shrine honoring the former residents, members of the Serrano family who died in the abortive battle.) But by 1910 not a single hacendado, in Mexico slept comfortably at night, and perhaps the tower and gun ports in the walls brought a bit of security to the now-deposed overlord of Buenavista.
The once-splendid garden now has gone to seed, and chickens scratch through the outlines of what once were flower beds. Someone’s wash flutters from lines strung across the gazebo, and a fat old cat slept on the bench once reserved for the all-powerful and feared capataz. The stables are completely abandoned to ruin.
In the entrance wing is a small grocery, its store-length front hacked through the stone wall. There we stopped briefly for lunch: Thick slices of Tlaxcalan cheese, heavily coated with a salt preservative, stuffed into hard rolls, and room-temperature bottles of Corona, a Mexican lager. (Tab for four persons: Four pesos 50 centavos, or 36 cents.) The stock was what I’ve seen in country stores throughout Mexico: Cheeses in an open display box, their ripening aromas mingling in the early afternoon heat; canned tuna, sardines and mackerel; unwrapped bars of soap; assorted bins of dried chile peppers, black- am’ brown and red and green; barrels of rice and frijoles; some cigarettes, a handful of candies in a glass display box, the only item shielded from the heat, dust and flies. While we ate a small boy skipped in to buy beans; the owner weighed them and made notations in a ledger book. Formerly campesinos were obligated to buy supplies from the hacienda store — the tienda de ray, or payroll store — and the hacendado used exorbitant prices to bind them to his land through debt. Now, however, their mobility gives them access to markets throughout their walking area, which makes for stabilized and probably fair prices.
Into the truck again, and now the road deteriorated rapidly until it was little more than a muddy path across the fields, alternating between axle-deep chugholes and axle-high rocks. “Shall we return for your station wagon?” Lara asked with a grin. As we neared the dark slopes of La Malinche the sky darkened, and the air took on the moist chill of a Pennsylvania autumn. Swirling gray clouds covered the mountain beginning at the end of the treeline, and an occasional drop of rain flicked from them against our dusty windshield. At one point the road vanished into a pool of water the hue of automat-coffee. To the right was a ravine, to the left a stretch of grassy but solid ground. But the latter was occupied by a bearded old man driving two donkeys laden with wood, all three drenched by the rain from which they had recently emerged. Our driver halted and beckoned for the old man to pass first so that we could use the shoulder after him and avoid the hole. No. Off came his straw hat, and he bowed graciously and motioned us through. Again, a polite wave of the arm by our driver. No, no, you first, gestured the old man, refusing to take priority over anything as important as a truck with governmental markings. The Alphonse and Gaston pantomine was repeated for three or four minutes while the burros munched grass. Then with a curse end a grinding of gears our driver lurched forward into the puddle and stalled immediately. The old man stared at us curiously, as if we were some unique species of fool, as we struggled for 15 minutes to half-lift, half-push, the truck back onto dry ground. Then he walked away silently, flicking his donkeys with a switch. We didn’t say anything either.
Then into the village of Matamoros, a cluster of perhaps 80 houses with red tile roofs, sheltered under the brow of La Malinche. We drove into a common yard of eight of the houses and were inundated by children before the truck stopped rolling. Lara asked for the lidere — the leader — and learned that this personage, the most important man in town, was still in the fields. So we backed into the street — actually a passageway through this section of the village, unmarred by marks of previous vehicles — and went to the house of another man Lara had met on previous visits. The men collected rapidly, their women and children standing reservedly in the shadows inside doorways, hearing but unseen. A dog came over, too, and a teenage boy heaved a rock that sent him limping and yelping into the distance.
Lora’s task was to persuade the villagers of Matamoros to buy a tractor. The Community Development Foundation, in a program supported by the United States Chamber of Commerce and private Mexican businessmen, was attempting to bring mechanization to villages now entirely dependent upon the horse-drawn plow for culvivation. Matamoros is an ejido village, and its residents have no access to credit for loans other than for seed. The U. S. and Mexican businessmen wanted to guarantee the loan for the tractor for a pilot village to demonstrate that ejido residents (a) could increase production through mechanization and (b) could be relied upon to repay loans. Lora chose Matamoros as a possible pilot because of two successful earlier cooperative projects there. First, the villagers contributed ten thousand pesos ($800) to buy the steel framework for a four-room school and covered it with adobe brick which they handmade at the site. (The government makes these framework structures available as a low-cost means of encouraging villages throughout Mexico to put up their own schools. As is the case with rural road projects, if the government had to bear the entire construction cost, most of the nation would still be sans education.
The villagers’ labor and cash contribution is considered sort of a payment in lieu of taxes.) Secondly the villagers of Matamoros had financed an electrification project which brought lights into their homes. The per-household cash outlay for these two projects came to a bit over $100 — a staggering sum when one considers the average farm income in Mexico is $l2O per year. Lara laughed again. “Three of the first five pesos ever earned in this village are still here,” he said. He was also unimpressed with the government’s per capita income figures. Because of the vagaries of weather income would have to be averaged over a 10-year period to produce any meaningful figure, he said. “I spent several hours here one day earlier trying to compute, with the campesinos, their earnings. They don’t know themselves and probably wouldn’t tell an outsider if they did.”
Before talking business, however, we were drawn into a village ritual. One of the women, responding to her husband’s sotto voce commands, ran into a house across the way and returned with a wide-necked earthern urn and several cups. While this was being done one of the campesinos gave me a guided tour of the village’s maguey cactus orchard. The maguey is a truly all-purpose plant. Its fibers can be woven into rope or cloth. Its flattened leaves can be used as writing paper (and in fact were the material on which was recorded much of the early history that is known of the Aztec empire). Its roots, mashed into a paste and cooked, supposely are tasty and nutritious (although I admit to never having sampled the dish). Finally, the maguey is the source of pulque, the “campesinos beer.” When the plants reach maturity at ten years the campesinos cut out the core stalk, leaving a conical depression in the center into which seeps the agua miel, or sweet water, which fills the maguey’s spreading limbs. In the three months before the maguey goes dry and dies each plant seeps perhaps 500 liters of agua miel, which is collected twice daily and stored in urns. Fresh from the plant the agua miel is sweet and harmless; however, the longer it sits the more potent it becomes, and after three days is converted into full-strength pulque. And it was this drink which the campesinos insisted we sample before the talk began. Our self-appointed host used his finger to clear the mouth of the urn of sodden mosquitoes and other insects and poured a round. To the eye pulque is watery liquid paste; to the nose pulque is a sweet-smelling stranger that starts warning bells ringing throughout the system; to the mouth and throat pulque is a surprisingly-bland syrup; to the stomach pulque is an unmitigated disaster that should be avoided by gringo newsmen except under the most demanding of circumstances.
Our initiation over, Lara began his sales pitch. He squatted in the dust under the eave of the house, clip board over his khaki-clad knees, and talked to the campesino group simply and directly. “First of all,” he said, “I’m not here to sell you anything, nor to give you anything for nothing. I can promise you no tractor. What I can do is tell you about it, and let you decide for yourselves if you want to buy it. But if you take it you will be expected to pay for it.” He elicited understanding nods from the campesinos. So far, so good. Now the questions began. “There are 80 of us here,” said a fellow with a large drooping moustache. “What happens if Juan here is using the tractor on a day when I need it?” “You must work that out yourselves,” Lara responded. “Maybe you should think about buying two tractors…”
Is it” it really worthwhile?” demanded another man. “We live well now, and are not in debt. How do we know that the tractor is good?” Lara now lapsed into cajolery. “Do you like to go to Tlaxcala on Sunday?” he asked. “Would you not like to see a movie sometimes, or to be able to spend cash to buy some thing pretty for your children? Or for your novia? (girl friend).” The last comment drew a chorus of guffaws, and the campesino laughed too. Lara became serious. “It is a matter of money,” he said, but it is also a matter of making your lives easier. If you had a tractor, you would not spend all your daylight hours in the fields during the planting season, and perhaps your children would be free to go to the school which you have built for them. Who here would not like to have a few hours free time each day to do what he pleased?” The discussion continued a full half hour, Lara pausing several times to accept another cup of pulque, the campesinos endorsing him silently and acceptingly with their eyes as he did so. Finally the campesinos agreed: They would discuss the matter further among themselves, when all family heads could be present. Lara, meanwhile, would submit an application in the village name. The rain was upon us now, literally rolling down La Malinche into Matamoros, and we handshook our way through the campesinos to the truck,
“The important thing for me to remember, as an outsider,” Lara said later, “is to persuade these people to do things for themselves without putting myself into the role of a dictator.”
For the Mexican government the situation is analogous: Strong-arm and dictatorial methods in the past have caused the Mexican Indian to carry out specific chores, but under their pressures he withdraws deeper into his own culture. If the Indians of Mexico, and particularly of such states as Tlaxcala, do decide to enter the 20th Century the choice will be theirs, and not that of Mexico City. But human conscience demands that the Indians at least be given the opportunity to make a choice between the drudgery of Isolation and an introduction to civilization.
Received In New York September 12, 1966.
©1966 Joseph C. Goulden, Jr.
Mr. Goulden is a 1965 Alicia Patterson Fund fellowship winner on leave from The Philadelphia Inquirer.Permission to publish this article may be sought from The Managing Editor, Philadelphia Inquirer.
