The Opelousas courier., 1886-05-29
THE
A PICTURESQUE TYPE OF THE
MEXICAN COUNTRY GIRL.
Her Dress and Characterization
Mingling Her Religious Obser-
vances With Coquetry-Her
Married Life.

turesque a type of the peasant girls as
can be met on the hills of Normandy
or in the valleys of Switzerland. In the
more unfrequented portions of this re-
public, writes a City of Mexico CORE
peasant girl is seen in all her primitive
simplicity. AS the numbering stage
coach, with it's dozen passengers,
slackens up at the adobe gate Of some
hacienda, and the driver shouts his
"Buenos Dias!" or words of greeting,
the first to issue from the gray-walled
hacienda is a Mexican muchacha. True
to the vein of curiosity which forms a
fiber of the feminine heart, the muchacha
must see who are the new arrivals.
She stands at the great gate of the
hacienda shyly watching the newcomers.
She is but a developed child; simple,
picturesque, content; one whose face is
not freckled, whose limbs are not atten-
uated and never knew the manacling of
o stocking. Her hair is not golden; her
feet are bare, and the two long braids of
jetty hair falling behind are caught at
the ends with the inevitable bit of bright
ribbon. When speaking she generally
catches the braids and filings them over
her breast and her brown, bare shoulders.
She wears no Pompadour, no Grecian
coil, and no bangs, but her hair, parted
in the middle, is as glossy and black as
the famous atzabatche of her native hills.
She wears only a short skirt, and that in
Innate, low-cut ~vesture of white texture
and scant pattern so well known aud
seldom mentioned, which hangs sus-
pended from her nut-brown shoulders,
and is caught inside the skirt before it is
gathered in at the waist. She is entirely
unconscious of a want of further clothing.
Among the different types of woman
in America none is more unique than the
Mexican muchacha; for she is a woman
governed rather by the characteristics of
a race than by the shackles of ed
u~cation, coquettish from instinct, grace
full because natural. The traveller re-
members well q creature who watches
him with less of ineuisitive curiosity than
sly coquettishness in those very black
eyes. But beyond the mere attraction of
her chances are the associations which en-
viron that creature. She is the repre-
sentative of a romantic race whose civil
cation, coeval with the palmiest days of
Egypt and Persia, paltakes strangely of
the Orient. Like her sister on the
Ganges, the Nile, and the Euphrates, she
makes her-tortillas of u~nleavened bread;
she carries water on her head as grace
fully as Rebecca, and spins like Pene-
lope. But her race has bent below the
iuttering of a cross emblazoned flag,
which, wherever it has gone, has left be-
hind it a trail of desolation. It was be-
meath that Castilian flag that the native
American woman became Spanish
in the olden time of strength
and conquest; and unchanged
in manner, appearance, or taste, she has
acquired the new characteristic coquetry
SO essentially Spanish. While the pretty
| oval face, the bright black eyes, and the
quick, glib tongue of the Mexican
muchacha is the same as it was five hum
dred or a thousand years ago, she has
attained other characteristics brought to
| her by the chivalric soldiers of Cortez.
The entire life of this little lady is
wrapped up in her church, her guitar,
her fandango, her cigarette, her lover
and oftentimes her fan. When used
| by her, this latter is a weaponof immense
| power and caliber. Behind it she keeps
| the overloaded batteries Of those black,
brilliant eyes, and she can cary by
means of motions made by her fan either
hope or horror to the heart of her lover.
But among the distinctively Mexican
peasant girls, the language of the fan is
little understood, and certainly not as
often practiced as among the senoritas
who are bellies in the cities and towns.
| Still, when they once master this futter-
ing language they soon become adopts.
The muchacha is intensely religious in
her W peculiar way. Over her bed is q
niche with her favored saint, to whom she
burns candles, and before which
she kisses her tiny c%ruciix and tells the
beads of her rosary. To her the confess
sion-box IS holy ground, aud the bowl of
holy water at the door of her favorite
| church is sacramental. Still the monot-
ony of her service wears on the young
| heart, and oftentimes while in her church
pattering her prayers in a low humble,
crossing herself with lightning rapidity,
and glibly telling her beads, she is all
the time keeping up an exchange OF
messages with her eyes with her lover
kneeling some distance off. The church
sften becomes the trysting- ground where
notes are slyly exchanged and where APP
pointments are made for future meetings.
The guitar. is thummed exquisitely by
some Of these girls, but their singing is
seldom sweet.
Life would lose half its charm to the
muchacha if she could not have her fan
dango. The DANA is her passion, and
| her en-. her feet are ever alert to the
thin strains of the guitar. Red calico is
the p~redominating costume among
the ladies, and among the gen
tIemen white unbleached cotton
or manta suits. The room, gem
orally Iow-roofed and with a dirty floor,
IS lighted with numerous tallow-dips,
while a typical orchestra of three or four
guitars keeps compass for the flying feet
weaving the mysterious mazes of the
swinging, swaying danzas, the ineom-
+, pressible jaraba and other popular dances.
Her cigarette is almost as indispensa-
Bile s her lover. Without it her print
tive meals lack seasoning She can tWirl
the cigarette paper as easily as she turns
round her finger her Ramon or Francisco,
her Ricardo or Felipe-whatever the
lovers name may be. That feat of twist
ing the tobacco into a slip of paper
abouk two inches square is with difficulty
learrad by foreigners, still the swarthy
beauty can with three or four rapid
movements of four fingers and her
thumbs roll up q cigarette while she is
flirting, crush fiat the tied ends,
and ask for a light, all with
@&E5x9&N R. -  - -.-- s-&-