(327)
1870: Sāo Paulo
Nabuco
Everyone eats off the black slave. Not only the coffee barons and the sugar lords, but every free Brazilian, no matter how poor, has at least one slave working for him.
Joaquim Nabuco denounces this deep infection in fiery speeches. Born of landowners and professional politicians, Nabuco proclaims that Brazil will not enter the modern world as long as land and politics belong to a handful of families, and as long as the whole country rests on the backs of slaves.
The poet José Bonifácio heads up a group of abolitionists from São Paulo University. Working with him in addition to Nabuco are other brilliant orators such as Castro Alves, Rui Barbosa, and Luis Gama, who was sold by his own father in Bahia and managed to escape slavery to denounce it.
(74)
1870: Buenos Aires
The North Barrio
A blue-bloused horseman blows the bugle that warns of danger. Clatter of hooves, hubbub of bells, stampede of pedestrians: the new streetcar comes dashing on rails at the mad speed of six miles per hour. A Buenos Aires newspaper promises to reserve a column every day for the victims.
The streetcar manages a death or two to avoid disappointment, but in a short while no one talks of its homicidal furies. Yellow fever has invaded Buenos Aires and is killing off three hundred a day.
Because there is no place to bury so many paupers, the Chacarita cemetery is born of this plague, as is the North Barrio, because the rich flee from their traditional bastion. The ten blocks south of the Plaza de Mayo have always decided the fate of all Argentina, and have always prospered at its expense. There, until now, have lived the gentlemen who make politics and business in the Cafe de Paris and the ladies who shop at the London Store. Now they are chased out by the yellow fever, which feeds cruelly on the low district surrounded by garbage dumps and swamps, cradle of mosquitos, broth of plagues; and the mansions emptied by the exodus become tenements. Where one family lived before, two hundred will crowd in as best they can.
This city scattered over river banks has grown prodigiously. A couple of centuries ago, Buenos Aires was a sad, lost village. Today a hundred and eighty thousand people live here, half of them foreigners: masons, washerwomen, shoemakers, day laborers, cooks, night watchmen, carpenters, and other newcomers whom the trade winds have blown in from the Mediterranean.
(312)
1870: Paris
Lautréamont at Twenty-Four
He had speech impediments and got tired from nothing at all. He spent nights at the piano, spinning chords and words, and at dawn his eyes were pitifully feverish.
Isidoro Ducasse, the imaginary Count of Lautréamont, has died. The child born and raised in the Montevideo war, that child who asked questions of the river-sea, has died in a hotel in Paris. His publisher dared not send his “Cantos” to the bookshops.
Lautréamont had written hymns to the louse and to the pederast. He had sung to the red light of the brothels and to the insects that prefer blood to wine. He had scolded the drunken god who created us, and proclaimed it better to be born from the womb of a female shark. He had flung himself into the abyss, human scrapmeat capable of beauty and madness, and on his way down had discovered ferocious images and astounding words. Every page he wrote screams when you tear it.
(181)
1871: Lima
Juana Sánchez
Melgarejo the destroyer has fallen. Stoned by the Indians, he has fled from Bolivia, and suffers out his exile in a hovel in the Lima slums. All the power he has left is in his blood-red poncho. The Indians killed his horse Holofernes and cut off its ears.
He spends his nights howling before the home of the Sánchez family. Melgarejo’s sad, booming voice sets Lima atremble. Juana doesn’t open the door.
Juana was eighteen when she arrived at the palace. Melgarejo shut himself in with her for three days and three nights. His guards heard screams, blows, snorts, groans, never a word. On the fourth day Melgarejo emerged.
“I love her as much as my army!”
The banquet table was turned into an altar. In the center, surrounded by candles, reigned a nude Juana. Ministers, bishops, and generals paid homage to her beauty, falling to their knees when Melgarejo raised a glass of flaming cognac and sang verses of devotion. She, an erect marble statue, with no more clothes than her hair, looked down and away.
And she said nothing. Juana said nothing. When Melgarejo went on a military campaign, he left her shut up in a La Paz convent. He returned to the palace with her in his arms and she said nothing, a virgin woman every night, every night born for him. Juana said nothing when Melgarejo seized the Indians’ communal lands and gave her eighty properties and an entire province for her family.
Now, too, Juana says nothing. With the door of her mansion in Lima stoutly barricaded, she does not show herself or answer the desperate roarings of Melgarejo. She does not even say to him, “You never had me. I wasn’t there.”
Melgarejo weeps and bellows, his fists thundering on the door. In this shadow, shouting the name of this woman, he dies of two bullets.
(85)
1873: Camp Tempú
The Mambises
The blacks, lustrous from torches and other lights, undulate and spin and jump and talk to the gods howling with pain and pleasure. For the New York Herald correspondent this commotion is as incomprehensible as the seasons, which in Cuba come all at once within an endless summer. The journalist blinks hard when he discovers that the same tree has at the same time one branch bursting in full verdure and another yellowing in its death throes.
This is the land of the Mambí, in the forest of eastern Cuba. Mambí meant “bandit” or “rebel” back there in the Congo, but on this island Mambí is the slave who fights to become a person again.
Before joining the patriot army, the Mambises had been fugitive slaves in the mountains. The Herald correspondent calculates that in five years the colonial war has taken eighty thousand Spanish lives. Many soldiers have been felled by disease or bullet; and many more by Mambí machete. The war has turned sugar mills into fortresses armed against attacks by blacks from the outside and escapes by blacks inside.
In this camp of ragged, almost naked Mambises, everything is shared. The journalist drinks water with molasses for lack of coffee, and after a few days swears eternal hatred for sweet potatoes and hutia—a small animal that provides food for anyone who can catch it in the crannies of a tree or rock. This war could last forever, writes the journalist. Here, lianas give water when there is no nearby river, and the trees provide fruit, hammocks, sandals, and good shade for those who need to sit down and swap jokes and stories while their wounds heal.
(237)
1875: Mexico City
Martí
Recently his pointed mustache got a blunting in Havana when he started two short-lived newspapers, The Lame Devil and Free Fatherland; and for wanting independence for Cuba, a Spanish colony, he was sentenced to prison and forced labor. Earlier, when he was still a very young child, he had wanted to translate Shakespeare, and had set fire to words, and sworn vengeance before a black slave hanging from the gallows. He had guessed, in his earliest verses, that he would die in and for Cuba.
From prison they sent him into exile. The marks of the shackles have not disappeared from his ankles. No more patriotic Cuban than this son of a Spanish colonial sergeant; none more childlike than this inquisitive exile, so astonished and indignant at the world.
José Martí is twenty-two when he attends in Mexico his first joint demonstration of students and workers. The hat makers have gone on strike. They have the solidarity of the Fraternal and Constancy Society of Hairdressers, the Fraternal Society of Bookbinders, the typographers, the tailors, and the intellectuals, “workers of the Idea.” At the same time, the first university strike erupts, against the expulsion of three medical students.
Martí organizes benefit recitals for the hat makers, and in his articles describes students marching
with workers through the streets of Mexico City, arm-in-arm, all in their Sunday best. These enthusiastic young people, he observes, are right. But even if they were wrong, we would love them.
(129, 200, and 354)
1875: Fort Sill
The Last Buffalos of the South
The southern plains were carpeted with buffalos, which multiplied like the tall grasses, when the white man arrived from Kansas. Now the wind smells of decay. Skinned buffalos lie on the prairie. Millions of skins have gone to eastern Europe. The extermination of the buffalo not only brings in money, but, as General Sheridan explains, it is the only way to bring lasting peace and allow civilization to advance.
The Kiowa and Comanche Indians now find no buffalos within the Fort Sill reservation. In vain they invoke good hunting with dances to the sun god. On their federal government rations, pitiful rations, they cannot survive.
The Indians escape to far-off Palo Duro canyon, the last place with buffalos in the southern plains. There, they find food and all the rest: they use the skins for shelter, blankets, and clothing; the horns and bones for spoons, knives, and arrowheads; the nerves and tendons for ropes and nets, the bladders for water pitchers.
Soon the soldiers arrive, amid clouds of dust and gunpowder. They burn huts and provisions, kill a thousand horses and herd the Indians back into their enclosure.
A few Kiowas manage to escape. They wander the prairie until hunger defeats them. They surrender at Fort Sill. There the soldiers put them in a corral and every day throw them bits of raw meat.
(51 and 229)
Into the Beyond
The buffalos of the last southern herd hold a meeting. The discussion does not last long. Everything has been said and night continues. The buffalos know they are no longer able to protect the Indians.
When dawn rises from the river, a Kiowa woman sees the last herd passing through the mist. The leader walks with slow tread, followed by the females, the calves, and the few surviving males. Reaching the foot of Mount Scott, they pause, motionless, with their heads down. Then the mountain opens its mouth and the buffalos enter. There, inside, the world is green and fresh.
The buffalos have passed. The mountain closes.
(198)
1876: Little Big Horn
Sitting Bull
When he speaks, no word tires or falls.
No more lies, he says. Eight years ago, the United States government guaranteed to the Sioux, by solemn treaty, that they would forever be owners of the Black Hills, the center of their world, the place where warriors talk with the gods. Two years ago, gold was discovered in these lands. Last year, the government ordered the Sioux to leave the hunting grounds where miners were seeking gold in rocks and streams.
I have said enough. No more lies. Sitting Bull, chief of chiefs, has assembled thousands of warriors of the plains, Sioux, Cheyennes, Arapahos. He has danced for three days and three nights. He has fixed his eyes on the sun. He knows.
He wakes before dawn. He wets his bare feet in the dew and receives the heartbeat of the earth.
At dawn he raises his eyes beyond the hills. There comes General Custer. There comes the Seventh Cavalry.
(51 and 206)
1876: Little Big Horn
Black Elk
At the age of nine he heard the voices. He knew that all of us who have legs, wings, or roots are children of the same father sun and of the same mother earth, whose breasts we suck. The voices told him that he would make flowers bloom on the sacred cane, the tree of life planted in the center of the land of the Sioux, and that mounted on a storm cloud he would kill drought. They also announced wars and sufferings.
At ten, he met a white man for the first time. He thought the fellow must be ill.
At thirteen, Black Elk is bathing in Little Big Horn River when shouts warn him that soldiers are coming. He climbs a hill and from there sees an immense dust cloud full of hooves and yells, and from the cloud many horses stampeding with empty saddles.
(51 and 230)
1876: Little Big Horn
Custer
Black Kettle, the Cheyenne chief, had warned him of it when they smoked the peace pipe together. Custer would die if he betrayed his promises, and no Indian would dirty his hands scalping him. Afterwards Custer burned down that camp and Chief Black Kettle was riddled with bullets amid the flames.
Now, General George Armstrong Custer is just one more of the dead of the Seventh Cavalry, which the Indians have wiped out on the banks of the Little Big Horn River. Custer had had his golden hair shaved off the night before. His smooth cranium seems intact, and he still wears that rather stupid expression of men who have never been defeated.
(51, 91, and 198)
1876: War Bonnet Creek
Buffalo Bill
Shortly after the defeat at Little Big Horn, some soldiers descend upon the Cheyenne Indians camped on the banks of a brook, and in the shoot-out Chief Yellow Hand falls.
Buffalo Bill is first on the scene. At one slash he scalps the Cheyenne chief, and at one gallop flies to the footlights of distant cities. The history of the West is becoming a theatrical spectacle as it unfolds. The battle is not yet over and the scalper is already selling his epic feat in the theaters of Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, and New York. In memory and vengeance of General Custer, Buffalo Bill raises his arms before the packed auditorium: in one hand appears the knife and from the other, which clutches a scalp dyed with blood, hangs a cascade of multicolored feathers. The hero wears a heavily ornamented Mexican suit, with a pair of revolvers in his belt and his fifteen-shot Winchester slung from his shoulder. Soon the scene will adorn the covers of cowboy dime novels selling throughout the country.
Buffalo Bill, most famous of cowboys, has never herded a cow in his life. The living symbol of the winning of the West, the immortal superman, has earned his fame exterminating Indians and buffalos and talking endlessly about his own courage and marksmanship. They baptized him Buffalo Bill when he was working for the Kansas Pacific Railroad: he says that in a year and a half he fired 4,280 shots and killed 4,280 buffalos although women prevented him from going all out.
(157)
1876: Mexico City
Departure
Eleven times General Santa Anna had been president of Mexico. He bought his generals’ loyalty by selling bits of the country and imposing taxes on dogs, horses, and windows; but he often had to flee from the palace disguised as a pauper. Although he specialized in losing wars, he had many statues of himself erected galloping in bronze, sword on high, and by decree he turned his birthday into a national holiday.
When he returned from exile, all his friends had died, and all his enemies too. Buried deep in an armchair, always with a fighting cock in his arms, Santa Anna rubbed old medals or scratched his cork leg. He was blind, but thought he saw carriage-loads of princes and presidents drawing up at his door. He was deaf, but thought he heard supplicatory multitudes coming to plead for an audience, clemency, or a job.
“You wait!” Santa Anna would yell. “Shut up!”—while the last of his lackeys changed his wetted trousers.
Now from his house on Vergara Street, mortgaged, always empty, they take him out to the cemetery. The cocks march ahead of the coffin, confronting people and looking for a fight.
(227 and 266)
1877: Guatemala City
The Civilizer
Justo Rufino Barrios, president of Guatemala, closes his eyes and hears a din of railroads and steam engines violating the silence of the monasteries.
There is no stopping synthetic dyes in the world’s markets, and no one buys the cochineal and indigo that Guatemala sells. It’s time for coffee. The markets demand coffee and coffee demands lands and hands, trains and ports. To modernize the country, Barrios expels the parasitic monks, seizes from the Church its immense properties and gives them to his closest friends. He also expropriates the lands of Indian communities. Collective property is abolished by decree and compulsory peonage is imposed. To
integrate the Indian into the nation, the liberal government makes him a serf of the new coffee plantations. The colonial system of forced labor returns.
Soldiers tour the plantations distributing Indians.
(59)
1879: Mexico City
The Socialists and the Indians
It is painful to say so, but we must. Colonel Alberto Santa Fe says it from Tlatelolco prison: the Indians were happier under Spanish rule. Today they are pompously called free and they are slaves.
According to the socialist Santa Fe, who has set off an Indian insurrection in the valley of Texmelucan, the ills of Mexico stem from the poverty of the people, which in turn stems from the concentration of land in a few hands and the lack of industry, because everything comes from abroad when we could make it ourselves. And he asks himself: would we do better to lose independence and become a North American colony, or to change the social organization that has ruined us?
In the newspaper The Socialist, Juan de Mata Rivera also proclaims that the Indians were better off in the colony, and demands that their lands be returned to them. There is no law granting rights to thieves over the fruits of violence and infamy.
At the same time, campesinos of Sierra Gorda publish their “Socialist Plan.” They call the rapacious big estates and governments that have put the Indians at the landowners’ service the root of all misfortune. They propose that haciendas become “townships,” that community property in farmlands, waters, woods, and pastures be restored.
(129 and 274)
1879: Choele-Choel Island
The Remington Method
Argentine soldiers conquer twenty thousand leagues of Indian land.