# Our Neighbor-Mexico/Book 3/Chapter 4

IV.
A SILVER AND A SACRED TOWN.
Native Costume.—Reboza and Zarepe.—The Sombrero.—A Reduction Hacienda.—The Church in Guanajuato.—Its Antipodes.—A clerical Acquaintance.—A mulish Mule.—"No quiere."—The Landscape.—Lettuce.—Calzada.—The Town and Country.—Fish of the Fence.—The Cactus and the Ass.—Compensation.—One-story City.—High Mass and higher Idolatry.—The God Mary.
Dust off, and clothes changed, let us go out and look at the city. The streets are full of people. This is a festa day, the day of St. Joseph, and nobody is at work. The folks are out in their best array of reboza and zarepe. The reboza is the mantle of the ladies, and their weakness; the zarepe that of the gentlemen, and one of their weaknesses. For sexes, like every thing else here, go by the contraries to what they do elsewhere, and men are much more dressy than women. The reboza is always quiet in color, black, blue, and brown being the prevailing tints. It is a thin-wove, light cotton mantle, some three yards long and three-quarters wide, which is worn over the head and shoulders in an easy and graceful manner. It is the only adornment they possess, apart from the pleasant faces that beam from within it, and which are as good-looking, that is, look as good, as their whiter sisters here or elsewhere.
The men are more set forth. They essay the zarepe. I do not find this word in my lexicon, but suppose that is the way to spell it. This is a thick shawl of many colors, sometimes striped in red, yellow, green, blue, and white; sometimes with light centre and embroidered edges. They muffle up their face, and wrap their shoulders in this gay shawl even in the hottest days. It is their pride. Some of them cost two or three hundred dollars, and they rise, with ​gold and silver lace embroidery, to the height of five hundred dollars and over. Not so the ladies' mantle. The highest-priced reboza I have seen was worth fifteen to twenty dollars, and was a plain light-blue, checked, not looking a whit better in color than a blue checked calico of a ten-cent valuation, but of course soft and fine. It has also an edging of stiffened netting, a quarter of a yard wide, which is a sign of its aristocratic rank.
The men are not content with their radiant zarepe. They essay the sombrero in silver and gold. Broad, light gray-and-white felts are faced with broad silver lace, and fantastically wrought. They have bands of silver swollen into a snake-like form around the bottom of the crown; also buttons and stars of silver. They are often very costly and ornate.
Then come their pantaloons of leather, if they are on horseback, with a row of silver or brass buttons, close packed from pocket to heel, on the seam of either leg. The extra-fashionable adorn this garment by fancy facings on back and legs, set in very prettily, and making that rude patch of our childhood and of many a manhood a really handsome ornament.
It is but proper to say that the ubiquitous European is changing these fashions, and that more soft hats and silk hats after the New York and Paris fashions are seen to-day on the plazas of all the chief cities than the magnificently gotten-up sombreros, while the zarepe is almost entirely remanded to the working-classes. Even the brimless hats, with their towering feathers and flowers and lace, are replacing modest lace veils and black shawls for church, and blue rebozas; and Mexico will soon, I fear, be undistinguishable in dress from New York.
The mines have created this city, and still enrich it. They are located in the hills behind and above the town. Humboldt reckoned that one-fifth of the silver of the world had come from one mine here, and the yield now is five millions a year. They are worked on shares—the laborer half, the owner half. These "diggings" are carried to the reduction haciendas, as grain is carried to a mill, and are either sold to the haciendados, or reduced by ​them for their toll. There are over fifty of such haciendas, some of them quite extensive. Mr. Parkman, of Ohio, has one of the oldest and largest. He is now somewhat feeble in years, and his sons carry on his business. His house, spacious and cool, overlooks his works. The miners and owners bring their ore here. It is distributed according to its apparent value, the best masses being reduced by themselves. The ore is beaten under huge hammers, ground by mules walking round a press, in which it is reduced to powder, placed in open vats, mixed with dissolving chemicals, salt, sulphurets, and powerful solvents, and trampled by horses to get the soil and solvents well mixed together. But the powerful chemicals soon injure their feet. Mr. Parkman, with his Yankee wit, provides a cheap and admirable substitute. It is simply a barrel moving along an axle. The axle stretches across the patio from the centre to the circumference. Horses outside pull it round. The barrel on the axle both revolves upon it and moves up and down it, reaching thereby all the composition, and commingling it more perfectly than horses' feet can do, yet with injury to none. It is a simple and seemingly effective remedy.
From this patio the substance is put through several waters, and the silver at last nearly extracted. It is then placed in furnaces, and by heating, the still adhering and undesired elements are driven out; and so, through fire and water, the well-sought silver is brought into a narrow compass. Even then it is ragged and unfit for working. It must be run into bars, and carried to the mint, and coined into solid dollars, halves, and quarters, for the delight and destruction of mankind. In Guanajuato they vary this form of its ultimate disposition with those more pleasing and artistic; and horses, horsemen, muleteers, carboneros, and other native peculiarities are cast in solid silver, and sold as curiosities at comparatively low rates. In fact, silver is about all that flourishes in Guanajuato. The people, like those of most mining towns, are reckless of money and morals.
The church is more than silver. How is it in Guanajuato? Not very hopeful. Like most mining towns, it is more free than ​religious. It has several Roman churches, some of which are rather handsome. But there is little power, even of this church, over the city. Making money too easy, it is feverish, gambling, dissipating, indifferent to the Church. There is room here for work of the right kind, much room. It would do no harm, but much good, if every Christian church had earnest missionaries among this half a hundred thousand population.
One thing does flourish, if the Church does not—the liquor saloons. Here, as everywhere the world over, the chief of devils is drink. But here, unlike the States, it assumes its true name. See that one on the chief street, rightly named, "El Delirio" (The Delirium); and this is "La Tentacion!!" with two admiration points—(The Temptation!!). Well named. I have seen one entitled "El Abysmo" (Hell). If our beer and whisky saloons were equally honest, some of their victims might be saved from temptation, delirium, and hell, which they now, under false pretenses, too surely bestow.
Let us wind out of Guanajuato, and see its antipodes. One need not go half round the world to find his opposite. He meets him often at the next door, nay, usually in himself. So we find the antipodes of Guanajuato fifteen leagues off. Leon is said to be the second city of the republic in size. It must be worth visiting. Five in the morning we are scampering through the streets of the city, in which the mules, like the Oregon, according to Mr. Bryant, hear no sound save their own dashings, and the city does not wish to hear even that. I am alone in the coach, and essay sleep, not very successfully, for I had unwisely been advised not to take my shawl, and more unwisely had followed that advice. The morning here is chill, though the day be hot. Since I could not sleep myself warm, I strove to sing myself thus, and to admire the sun rising over the Queretaro plain. But all of no avail. So, believing the best way to conquer any disagreeabilities is to face them, "and by opposing, end them," I concluded to take the whole dose of cold, fresh and full, on the top of the coach.
The first posta is at the brisk town of Silao, where I mount ​behind the driver, and find a seat on the same shelf occupied by a priest dressed in his robe, beads and all. It is the first sight of this sort I have seen in the country. He would not have dared to have done it in the city of Mexico. But they are less rigid here in respect to all interdicted matters. They allow bull-fights and priest's robes, neither of which can occur in the capital.
He seems clever, this priest, and is disposed to be conversational. By means of broken English and Spanish, helped on with some broken French and Latin, we contrive to get at each other's meaning quite fairly. He informs me that he is a priest of the new order of the Paulists, that he is conversant with Greek, Hebrew, Italian, and French, as well as Spanish; that he has never been at Rome, but expects to go next year. He inquires my profession. "A writer for the press," I innocently answer. It is well sometimes to have two strings to your bow. But I add, "I am a Methodist." I meant to tell half the ecclesiastical truth, if I shrunk from telling the whole. This reserve is not unwise; for Leon is the most fanatical of cities; and the knowledge that a Protestant minister was entering it, even as an observer, would have been reported to the bishop before I had been fifteen minutes in the town. What consequences might have followed, poor Stevens's fate suggests. It was only about two days' ride beyond Leon, in a less religious town, that he was massacred by order of the Church authorities. By this semi-reticence, too, I got out of my Paulist friend light that I should not otherwise have gained. He caught at the word "Methodist." "How many churches have you," he said, "in the States?" I tell him there are six leading churches: Baptist, Catholic, Congregational, Episcopal, Methodist, and Presbyterian. He asks the peculiarities of the five of which he is ignorant. They are given. "Any Lutherans?" "A few churches of that name, composed principally of Germans." "Any Calvinists?" "Many of that faith, but no church organization of that name." "Are not many indifferentestas?" I repeat that word, not catching its meaning. "Yes," he replies; "no religion, no faith, no confession, nothing?" "Yes, there are some who are not Christians, but most ​have some religious opinions they hold to, and many who are not members of Christian churches support and sympathize with them." Being asked what objects of interest were in Leon, "The theatre, the cathedral, and some haciendas," he answered. "Methodists never go to the theatre," I replied; a remark at which he winced a little, and perhaps I ought to have winced also; for it is rather a past truth, I fear, than a present one, though it ought to be true today as it was aforetime. He explained by saying that it was architecturally attractive.
A mule displayed his nature in an unusual degree. The epizootic had reduced the working force of the road, and new mules had to be brought on. One of these dirty cream-colored fellows was in the thills. He was not disposed to be conquered, even with seven obedient fellows to drag him along in the path of duty. He was not to be fooled by any such tricks, so he held steadily back while they trotted fast, and was dragged forward in spite of himself. The lash and the stones did not change his views of his duty to himself. He only held back the more. It was a novel sight to see him thus dragged along by his collar, his heels flying in violent resistance to his will.
At last, determined to end the contest by a coup de grace, down he flung himself on the ground. The seven brothers were on the full gallop, and would have dragged him to Leon. But he had cost too much to be used up that way. So the coach is stopped; the obstinate chap, after a deal of resistance, is got upon his feet; a rope is tied from his saddle under his tail, so as to make resistance less agreeable to himself; and off we start again. He begins soon, like Barbara Lewthwaite's pet lamb, to pull at the cord as bad as ever. He spurns the tail and saddle device, and after letting his legs oppose his will for a mile or two, down he goes again. He has learned the trick, and will play it till it wins. He is dragged fifty to a hundred feet on the flinty soil. It is of no use. He will not get up if he has got to go on. "No quiere" says the priest (he does not desire). This is the Spanish way of putting "he won't." Pretty evident is it that he does not desire to conform. So he is ​released, put into the hands of the mozo, and we are subdued, not he, and go into town with only six animals, while he walks in, free of harness and coach. He had to pay for his liberty, I doubt not, and a big price, too, in the flogging he got, and did not afterward very often lie down in the middle of his route.
Is the mule here called mula because of this force of will? And did the word come from mulier? The opprobrious epithet of the parent of the mule is never applied to the sex. "An ass" is an insult given only to man. Mula takes the other side in its termination, and in this instance forcibly illustrated the saying, "When she won't, she won't, and there's an end on it." No quiere settles many another attempt on the part of driving man to bring the other and higher creature into subjection.
The mountain ranges on each side are about ten miles apart. The plain is very level, and most of it very fertile and highly cultivated. The hills are full of silver, quicksilver, and other precious minerals, so my brother-priest informs me, but can not tell why they are so little mined. They are awaiting a people who can make them unveil their charms. "No quiere" they say to-day, and their human masters respect their wishes, showing thereby that they are not their masters. It will not be so always. Either these or others will subject these mountains to their sway, and compel their gorges to disgorge their treasures of ages.
The fields lie very lovely to the eye, outspreading in their everlasting verdure, fed perpetually by streams from the mountains; the beds and roadside glowing in tulips, roses, violets, and many a strange beauty none the less beautiful for her novelty. Wheat, alfalfa, barley, and corn are making glad the heart of man by their abundant growth. Haciendas claim immense territory on the left, but on the right the soil is cut up among little proprietors, or at least those who can lease and cultivate a few rods in comparative independence.
Leon draws near, spread out at the base of a range of hills that terminates the valley. The older Indians and the children note the priestly dress and take off their hats in reverence; but the ​young men, I note, are less respectful. At first I thought it was a politeness meant for me also, and returned the obeisance; but I soon found it was for the higher being by whose side I rode.
We cross a bridge and drive through the calzada—a finely shaded avenue, with drives either side, and a walk and benches in the middle. Along the benches loungers are sitting, and market-women are selling lettuce, which is the chief esculent, seemingly, here. It grows very large, and the outer leaves are torn off and thrown away. The inside ones are pressed together, and the tall, compact bunch of delicate white and green looks good enough to eat, and is as good as it looks. They sometimes put tulips and roses and other flowers in the top of these bunches, and thereby increase their attraction to the eye, but not to the palate.
A Sister of Charity here, as everywhere else, hideously dressed, has a bevy of school-girls on the calzada for recreation. The Roman Church has not lost all its wits yet. These fine-looking young ladies will cling to the nun and priest, and the young men will cling to them. Only a great outpouring of the Holy Ghost can open the eyes of this land by taking the veil from off their hearts.
The hot streets are run through in our usual Gilpin style, and we are reined up sharp at the door of the Hotel Diligencias.
I bid adios to my friend, the priest of the order of Paul, and go out to conquer the town. It is soon done. He told me the truth. Only the cathedral, the front of the theatre, and some haciendas. The last it is too hot to visit; the first is looked into, the second looked upon. I am in for a day here. There is no return stage till to-morrow at eleven. So I wander through the market-place, a dull spot, and soon exhausted; where brass coin is all their currency. Guanajuato touches nothing but silver. The plaza holds me longer. It has a very rich tropical garden, banana-trees, orange, and flowers of every hue. It has also around it broad shaded arcades lined with shops and stores. Nowhere have I seen so much of a display of dry goods. A whole side of the square is lined with these stores, and very fair in their attractions they are.
The cathedral is after the usual sort, and not especially ornate.
​Its specialty is blasphemy. Dancing girls, with their skirts open to the knee, are placed over the altar as the angels of the sepulchre or something, and over all is the image of God the Father, a gray-bearded old man, with the triangle of gold, sign of the Trinity, over his head. No wonder the first spelling-book for children, with its alphabet and a-b, ab, condenses the Ten Commandments, and puts the first one thus: "Amaras a Dios sobre todas las cosas" (Thou shalt love God above all things). That is the whole of it. Not a hint about this idolatry, which the original expressly prohibits. The commands of Sinai are perverted to their own idolatries. I bought this little tract in the market-place. It is sold by hundreds of thousands, and that is the way the Church wrests the Scriptures, may it not be added, "to her own destruction?"
The tedium of the day was greatly relieved by a horseback ride with an English resident, Mr. George Gray. I found out him and his brother, both bachelors, one a clock-maker, one a machinist, sons of a mine-worker who came out some forty years ago. The clock vender said business was dull. "Yankees like a clock in the house; Mexicans, a saint," he said, half bitingly. But what use have they for clocks? Time is of no account with them.
His brother takes me to ride; that is, lends me a horse, and goes with me. We drive among the small proprietors, to the east and north of the town. The gardens are green with irrigation. They are full of esculents, with little patches of flowers among their honest lettuce and maize, like a pretty and not useless child among her industrious associates. It is difficult to raise wheat here. The land has to be flooded with water for a long time, and otherwise carefully nurtured, and then it produces but little. Better exchange its silver for Minnesota's wheat. Both will profit by the change.
Here are large fields laid down to chilli, a sort of pepper, almost the only condiment with their beans and cakes. Others are green, very, with alfalfa, or lucern, the favorite green food for mules and horses. It looks a little like clover, though seemingly richer and juicier. Many pastures are brown, awaiting the rain of heaven, and not that from the ground. Wells are busy. They ​are dug two and two, together or opposite. The swinging sweeps, which once existed generally in the North, here stand together or over against each other, and the boys are plying them all day long. Thus the fields are always producing, and Nature never rests, if man often does.
An old woman with a long stick having a knife on the end is cutting green buds from the prickly-pear (the nopal) that lines the roadside. "She is getting fish of the fence," said my friend. Not allowed to eat meat in Lent, they gather these buds, and cook them as a substitute. Hence this saying. The nopal is the fencing stuff of the country. It grows in orchards, grows along the way-side, wild and cultivated. It is as homely as the ass, of which it is the vegetable counterpart in universality, ugliness, and utility.
It has one redeeming feature, as has also that creature. Its blossoms are beautiful. Seldom does one see more exquisite and delicate tints than break out all over these horrid bushes, and seldom does one see so exquisite and delicate a leg and foot on beast or bird, or man himself, as concludes with a good ending the exceedingly bad beginning of the ass. It is straight, small, delicate, a natural Chinese beauty of ankle and hoof. The finest horse's leg and foot are coarse to it. So, if you will only look for it, you will find some redeeming trait in every creature of God. But this trait often makes the others more homely. Glance from a donkey's legs to his head and ears, and you are amazed at the terribleness of that opposite termination. You can not see how the two could possibly exist in the same creature. You even believe it to be a cursed degradation. It must be witchery. It can not be nature. So the nopal seems the uglier as you turn from its delicate blossoms to its leather lap-stone leaf and ungainly trunk, and general asinine vegetable humiliation.
But each serves quietly, says nothing, and waits patiently the hour when the fairy curse shall be removed, or that unfairy curse resting on all creation, the curse of sin, of Eden, and of man, and they shall have a complete symmetry after the exquisite fragments and indices that each now possesses.
MEXICAN WASH-HOUSE.
​We ride home among Indian huts, in a delicious sun-setting, under greenest of trees and among corresponding verdure. Along the banks of the almost waterless river, boys are flying kites, and women washing their few garments. A frock is on a bush, and a lady, in her reboza alone, is sitting in the stream, awaiting the drying of her tunic. The dogs and children are enjoying themselves, as much, perhaps, as if they were the children and dogs of the Prince of Wales or President Grant. Possibly more.
FUNERAL OF GOVERNOR MANUEL DOBLADO.
We pass down a long street of one-storied houses. They are all of that height. Not six in the city are two-storied. The widow of Governor Don Manuel Doblado occupies one of the former sort. He died in New York, and it is thought would have been president had he lived. Her house is spacious, and has every luxury, including that best of luxuries, its height. A very sumptuous funeral was granted him in Guanajuato, as he deserved.
Most of the houses are very poor, and the people look poorer ​than the houses. Many are empty, the houses, and people probably also. Hither come thousands from San Luis Potosi, Queretaro, Guadalajara, and other points, when revolutions roll; for the governor of this State will have peace if he has to fight for it. It is the State of Guanajuato, and that city gives the nerve that gives the peace.
The next morning I attended high mass. It was St. Joseph's day, and held in high remembrance. So the bishop is out in his full and faded costume. A large number receive the wafer. A red-jacketed boy, followed the priest who gave the wafer, presenting something like a love-feast ticket. Was it one? Have they revived that lost art of Methodism? When the bishop entered, the crowd, dreadfully ragged and poor as most of them were, kneeled down the whole length of the church, making a narrow lane each side of him, and he stretched out his hands for them to kiss as he moved up to the altar. How eagerly they clutched at them! I saw one old woman get the seal-ring to her lips. She looked as if she had touched heaven. I have seen others than uneducated papists overworship their minister, but never so believingly and devoutly as these.
The ceremony is after the usual spread-eagle sort. A great crowd kneel at the beginning, but they come and go, and the shifting performance moves forward before a more shifting congregation. This is the bishop who has since refused to obey the laws of the State enforcing toleration, and has called on his people to resist those laws. His ignorant followers could be easily worked up to persecution. What would he have said had it been told him that among the spectators of his performances that morning was a minister of the anti-Roman Church, meditating on the coming establishment of his Church in this city, and the extinction of this ruin of-souls and faith in that purer doctrine and life? Had he suspected so much, or had our priest of the coach-top dreamed it, there would have been small chance of that minister's having had
Around the uppermost balcony of the church are shields of green, with words in gold upon them. One whole side is appropriated to Mary directly; the rest possibly incidentally. Among her shields are those with these inscriptions: "Mater Creatoris," "Mater Salvatoris," "Virgo Potens," "Virgo Clemens" (Mother of the Creator, of the Saviour, Virgin Powerful, Merciful). The central and primal and ultimate idea of every motto is the Virgin. As if to refer all this to her, and give her at once divine honors, all the opposite side has such phrases as these: "Sedes Sapientiæ," "Causa Nostræ Lætitiæ," "Fœdaris Arca," "Janua Cœli," "Refugio Peccatorum," "Stella Matutina" (Seat of Wisdom, Cause of our Joy, Ark of Faith, Gate of Heaven, Refuge of Sinners, Morning Star).
These may refer to the Church herself, and not to Mary. But below, at an altar, she is called "Refugio Peccatorum," one of the very phrases found up here also. There is no hint that this is not intended. If so, then see how high a pitch of idolatry these priests and bishops have been guilty of, are guilty of to-day, in thus ascribing all the work of salvation to Mary. The people believe it is so, whether they have themselves a sense by which they can escape or not. The crowd have none. The Church is the Church of the Virgin; with her they rise or fall.
A little image of the Virgin and the Child was being carried to a village by a few of its men, to grace a feast there. We passed it on our way back. On their shoulders they bore it, in a white box closed on all sides but the front, set off with flowers. It was sheer idolatry. Leon's cathedral has its graven god and worshiped woman, and poor ragged wretches for an audience. When will it receive the true Gospel? Not without difficulty. They are very fanatical, these poor people. A German came here to preach, and they threatened him with a coat of tar and feathers, and he did not open his lips. They were the most reverential to the priests of any city I have been in. As I stood among the kneeling crowds of the ​cathedral, I noted more than one lowering countenance. Large numbers are at the earliest orisons and the latest vespers. The bells clang all day long. It is church, church, and nothing but church. There will be a big fight here before this Diana of Leon is dethroned. But it will come. These poor people inwardly sigh for a happy Christian experience. How happy they would be if they once experienced it! How they would throw off their rags and rejoice in a religion that lifted up soul and body! Pray for Leon, the city of superstition, that she may pre-eminently be the city of faith.
Gladly is the coach welcomed the next morning, and the ride is taken, hot and dusty, to Guanajuato.