“Tell us about the Sierra,” asks the youngest son.
And the father tells how people live in Teotitlán del Camino. There, those who can work do so and everyone gets what he needs. No one is allowed to take more than he needs. That is a serious crime. In the sierra, crimes are punished with silence, scorn, or expulsion. It was President Juárez who brought the jail, something that wasn’t known there. Juárez brought judges and property titles and ordered the communal lands divided up. “But we paid no attention to the papers he gave us.”
Teodoro Flores was fifteen when he learned the Spanish language. Now he wants his sons to become lawyers to defend the Indians from the tricks of the doctors. For that purpose he brought them to the capital, that deafening pigsty, to squeak by, crammed among rowdies and beggars.
“What God created and what man creates. All belongs to all. Repeat that!”
Night after night, the children listen to him until sleep overcomes them.
“We are all born equal, stark naked. We are all brothers. Repeat that!”
(287)
1885: Colón
Prestán
The city of Colón was born thirty years ago, because a terminal station was needed for the train that crosses Panama from sea to sea. The city came to birth on the Caribbean Sea swamps, and offered fevers and mosquitos, seedy hotels, gambling dens, and brothels to adventurers who streamed through in pursuit of the gold of California, and miserable hovels for the Chinese workers who maintained the tracks and died of plague or sadness.
This year, Colon burned. The fire devoured wooden arcades, houses, and markets, and Pedro Prestán took the blame. Prestán, teacher and doctor, almost black, always wearing a derby hat and bow tie, always impeccable in the mud streets, had led a popular insurrection. A thousand U.S. Marines went into action on Panamanian territory, purportedly to protect the railroad and other North American properties. Prestán, who defended the humiliated people with life and soul and derby, hangs on the gallows.
The crime puts a curse on Colón. For expiation, the city will burn every twenty years from now on and forever.
(102, 151, and 324)
1886: Chivilcoy
The Circus
At dawn a circus trailer appears out of the mist, amid the leafy groves of Chivilcoy.
By afternoon, colored banners flutter over the tent.
A triumphal parade around the city. The Podesta Brothers’ Equestrian, Gymnastic, Acrobatic, and Creole Drama Company has a Japanese juggler and a talking dog, trained doves, a child prodigy, and four clowns. The program claims that the harlequin, Pepino the 88th, and the trapeze team have earned the admiration of audiences in London, Paris, Vienna, Philadelphia, and Rome.
But the main dish the circus offers is Juan Moreira, the first Creole drama in Argentine history, a pantomime with duels of couplets and knives, which tells the misfortunes of a gaucho harassed by an officer, a judge, a mayor, and the grocer.
(34)
1886: Atlanta
Coca-Cola
John Pemberton, pharmacist, has won some prestige for his love potions and baldness cures.
Now he invents a medicine that relieves headaches and alleviates nausea. His new product is made from a base of coca leaves, brought from the Andes, and cola nuts, stimulant seeds that come from Africa. Water, sugar, caramel, and certain secrets complete the formula.
Soon Pemberton will sell his invention for two thousand three hundred dollars. He is convinced that it is a good remedy; and he would burst with laughter, not with pride, if some fortuneteller revealed to him that he had just created the symbol of the coming century.
(184)
1887: Chicago
Every May First, They Will Live Again
The gallows awaits them. They were five, but Lingg got death up early by exploding a dynamite capsule between his teeth. Fischer dresses himself unhurriedly, humming “La Marseillaise.” Parsons, the agitator, who used words like a whip or knife, grips his comrades’ hands before the guards tie them behind their backs. Engel, famous for his marksmanship, asks for port wine and makes everyone laugh with a joke. Spies, who has written so much portraying anarchy as the entrance to life, prepares in silence for the entrance to death.
The spectators, in theater seats, fasten their eyes on the scaffold. A signal, a noise, the trap is sprung … There, in a horrible dance, they died spinning in the air.
José Martí writes reportage of the anarchists’ execution in Chicago. The world’s working class will revive them every First of May. That is still not known, but Martí always writes as if hearing, where it is least expected, the cry of a newborn child.
(199)
1889: London
North
Twenty years ago, he jumped onto the pier at Valparaíso, eyes of blue stone, fuzzy red whiskers. He had ten pounds sterling in his pockets and a bundle of clothing on his back. In his first job he got to know saltpeter the hard way, in the cauldron of a small deposit in Tarapacá, and later he was a merchant in the port of Iquique. During the War of the Pacific, while Chileans, Peruvians, and Bolivians were disemboweling each other with bayonets, John Thomas North performed conjuring tricks that made him owner of the battlefields.
Now North, the nitrates king, makes beer in France and cement in Belgium, owns streetcars in Egypt and sawmills in black Africa, and exploits gold in Australia and diamonds in Brazil. In England, this Midas of plebeian stock and quick fingers has bought the rank of colonel in Her Majesty’s army, heads the Masonic lodge of Kent county and is a prominent member of the Conservative Party; dukes, lords and ministers sit at his table. He lived in a palace whose big iron doors were, they say, lifted from the Cathedral in Lima by Chilean soldiers.
On the eve of a voyage to Chile, North gives a farewell ball in the Hotel Metropole. A thousand English people attend. The Metropole’s salons gleam like suns, and so do the dishes and drinks. The letter N blazes in the center of immense chrysanthemum coats of arms. An ovation greets the almighty host as he descends the stairs disguised as Henry VIII. On his arm is his wife dressed as a duchess; and behind comes the daughter, as a Persian princess, and the son in Cardinal Richelieu costume.
The war correspondent of the Times is one of the great retinue that will accompany North to his Chilean kingdom. Turbulent days await him. There, in the deserts conquered with bullets, North is the master of saltpeter and coal and water and banks and newspapers and railroads; but in the city of Santiago there is a president who has the bad taste to refuse his gifts. His name is José Manuel Balmaceda. North is heading there to overthrow him.
(269 and 270)
1889: Montevideo
Football
In London, it is Queen Victoria’s seventieth birthday. On the banks of the River Plata, they celebrate it with their feet.
The Buenos Aires and Montevideo teams vie for the ball on the little Blanqueada field under the disdainful scrutiny of the queen. At the center of the grandstand, between flags, hangs a portrait of this mistress of the world’s seas and a good part of its lands.
Buenos Aires wins, 3-0. There are no dead to mourn, although the penalty has not yet been invented and anyone approaching the enemy goal risks his life. To get a close shot at the goal, one must penetrate an avalanche of legs that shoot out like axes; and every match is a battle requiring bones of steel.
Football is an Englishman’s game. It is played by officials of the railway, the gas companies, and the Bank of London, and by visiting sailors; but already a few Creoles, infiltrators among the blond-mustachioed marksmen, are showing that craftiness can be an efficient weapon for bringing down goalkeepers.
(221)
1890: River Plata
Comrades
More than fifty thousand workers come each year to the River Plata, Europeans washed up by desperation on these coasts. Italian flags greet the visit of Edmundo de Amicis to the Piedmontese colonies of the Argentine coast, and at workers’ meetings in Buenos Aires or Montevideo speeches are heard in Sp
anish, Italian, French, or German.
Eight of every ten workers or artisans are foreigners, and among them are Italian socialists and anarchists, Frenchmen of the Commune, Spaniards of the first republic, and revolutionaries from Germany and Central Europe.
Strikes break out on both banks of the river. In Montevideo, streetcar conductors work eighteen hours a day; mill and noodle-factory workers, fifteen. There are no Sundays, and a member of the government in Buenos Aires has published his discovery that idleness is the mother of all vice.
In Buenos Aires, Latin America’s first May First is celebrated. The chief speaker, Joseph Winiger, salutes the Chicago martyrs in German and announces that the hour of socialism is approaching, while men of the gown, pen, sword or cassock clamor for the expulsion of alien enemies of order. The inspired writer Miguel Cané drafts a law to expel foreign agitators from Argentina.
(140 and 290)
1890: Buenos Aires
Tenements
Poor and rich pay the same price at the Colón theater at carnival time, but once past the door Hands go to their place and Brains to theirs, and no one commits the sacrilege of sitting in the wrong place. The lower-downs dance in the parterre, the higher-ups in boxes and lounges.
Buenos Aires is like its theater. High-class people sleep in two or three story French palaces in the North barrio, and alone sleep the spinsters who would rather die as virgins than mix their blood with some foreigner of indeterminate hue. The top people decorate their lineage, or manufacture it, with torrents of pearls and initials engraved on silver tea sets, and show off Saxony or Sévres or Limoges porcelains, Waterford crystal, Lyons tapestries, and Brussels table cloths. From the secluded life of the Big Village they have moved on to the frenetic exhibitionism of the Paris of America.
In the south are huddled the beaten-down of the earth. In abandoned three-patioed colonial mansions, or in specially built tenements, the workers newly arrived from Naples or Vigo or Bessarabia sleep by turns. Never cold are the scarce beds in the nonspace invaded by braziers and washbasins and chests which serve as cradles. Fights are frequent in the long queues at the door to the only latrine, and silence is an impossible luxury. But sometimes, on party nights, the accordion or mandolin or bagpipes bring back lost voices to these washerwomen and dressmakers, servants of rich bosses and husbands, and ease the loneliness of these men who from sun to sun tan hides, pack meat, saw wood, sweep streets, tote loads, raise and paint walls, roll cigarettes, grind wheat, and bake bread while their children shine shoes and call out the crime of the day.
(236 and 312)
Man Alone
One fire less, they say in the villages of Galicia when someone emigrates.
Over there, he was excess population; and here, he doesn’t want to exceed. Like a mule, he works and resists and keeps quiet, a man of few words, and in the foreign city he takes up less room than a dog.
Here, they make fun of him and treat him with contempt, because he can’t even sign his name, and manual labor is for inferior species. On the other hand, here they worship anyone with a lot of arrogance and applaud the slicker who can deflate the most boastful swollen head with a stroke of cunning and luck.
He gets little sleep, the lonely immigrant, but no sooner does he close his eyes than some fairy or witch comes to love him on green mountains and snowy precipices. Sometimes he has nightmares. Then, he drowns in the river. Not in just any river, but a particular river over there. Whoever crosses it, they say, loses his memory.
Tangoing
The tango, wistful offspring of the gay milonga, has been born in the corrals at the city’s edge and in tenement courtyards.
On the two banks of the River Plata, it is music of ill repute. Workers and malefactors dance it on earth floors, men of the hammer or the knife, male with male if the woman is not able to follow the very daring and broken step, or if such a body-to-body embrace seems more suitable for whores: the couple slides, rocks, stretches, and flowers in coupés and filigrees.
The tango comes from gaucho tunes of the interior and comes from the sea, the chanteys of sailors. It comes from the slaves of Africa and the gypsies of Andalusia. Spain contributes its guitar, Germany its concertina, Italy its mandolin. The driver of the horse-drawn streetcar contributed his trumpet, and the immigrant worker his harmonica, comrade of lonely moments. With hesitant step the tango spans barracks and dives, midways of traveling circuses and the patios of slum brothels. Now organ grinders parade it through shore streets on the outskirts of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, heading downtown; and ships take it to drive Paris wild.
(257, 293, and 350)
1890: Hartford
Mark Twain
The novelist’s hands whisk Hank Morgan, an offical of the Colt arms factory, into the distant court of King Arthur. The telephone, the bicycle, and dynamite journey to the times of Merlin the magician and Sir Galahad in the vale of Camelot; there Hank Morgan publishes and sells a newspaper at the modest price of two cents, founds a West Point military academy and reveals that the world is not a dish supported on columns. Although he comes from a society that already knows monopolies, Hank brings to the feudal castles the good news of free competition, free trade, and the free ballot. In vain, he tries to replace mounted duels with baseball, hereditary monarchy with democracy, and the code of honor with the calculation of costs; and finally he burns up thirty thousand armor-and-lance English horsemen with electric wires already tried out against the Indians of the United States. The adventure speeds to a deadly climax and Hank falls, asphyxiated by the miasma of putrefaction from his victims.
Mark Twain finishes writing A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court at his home in Hartford. “It is my swan song,” he announces. He has always lived by leaps and bounds, pursuing a fugitive million dollars. He has been journalist and explorer, publicity agent, miner of gold, ship’s pilot, speculator, inventor of gadgets, director of an insurance company, and unsuccessful entrepreneur. Between bankruptcy and bankruptcy he managed to invent or recall Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, and found a way to invite us all to float on a raft down the waters of the Mississippi. And he did it for the pure joy of going, not for the urgency of arriving.
(149 and 341)
1890: Wounded Knee
Wind of Snow
The Creator did not make the Indians: he sang them, he danced them.
Through songs and dances the Creator is now announcing that this old and dying earth will soon be demolished by the greenish whirlwind of a new earth. The prophet Wovoka brought word of it from the other world. In the new earth, buffalos will be revived, dead Indians will be reborn, and a ferocious flood will drown the whites. Not one of the usurpers will survive.
The prophet Wovoka’s dances and songs come out of the West, cross the Rocky Mountains, and spread throughout the prairies. The Sioux, who were the most numerous and powerful of the tribes in these regions, celebrate the annunciation of paradise, the end of hunger and exile. They dance and sing from dawn to the depth of every night.
Four days after Christmas, the thunder of gunfire interrupts the ceremonies in the Sioux camp at Wounded Knee. The soldiers riddle women, children, and the few men with bullets like so many buffalos. The blizzard strikes the dead and freezes them on the smow.
(51, 91, and 230)
Prophetic Song of the Sioux
A thunder-being nation I am, I have said.
A thunder-being nation I am, I have said.
You shall live.
You shall live.
You shall live.
You shall live.
(38)
1891: Santiago de Chile
Balmaceda
José Manuel Balmaceda wanted to promote national industry, to live and dress by ourselves, intuiting that the nitrate era would pass leaving Chile nothing but remorse. He wanted to apply stimulants and protections similar to those that the United States, England, France, and Germany had practiced in their industrial infancy. He raised the workers’ wages a
nd sowed the country with public schools. He gave Chile’s long body a spine of railways and roads. In his years as president, sacred British capital ran a grave risk of profanation. Balmaceda wanted to nationalize the railways and put an end to the usury of banks and the voracity of the nitrate companies.
Balmaceda wanted much and could do plenty; but the enormous budget that John Thomas North devoted to buying consciences and twisting justice could do more. The press let loose its thunder against the Caesar drunk with power, despotic enemy of freedom, hostile to foreign enterprises, and the clamor of bishops and parliamentarians was no less deafening. A military rising broke out like an echo, and then the blood of the people flowed.
The South American Journal announces the triumph of the coup d’état: Chile will return to the good times of yesterday. The banker Eduardo Matte also celebrates it: We are the masters of Chile, we owners of the capital and of the soil. All else is an influenceable and saleable mass.
Balmaceda shoots himself.
(270)
1891: Washington
The Other America
For ten years José Martí has been living in the United States. There is much that he admires in this multifarious and vigorous country, where no one is afraid of anything new; but he also denounces in his articles the imperial ambitions of the young nation, the glorification of avarice into a divine right, and the atrocious racism that exterminates Indians, humiliates blacks, and looks down on Latins.
South of the Rio Grande, says Martí, there is another America, our America, land that stammers, that does not recognize its full likeness either in the European or in the North American mirror. It is the Hispanic American fatherland, he says, which reclaims Cuba to complete itself, while in the north they claim it to devour it. One America’s interests don’t coincide with the other’s. Does political and economic union with the United States suit Hispanic America? Martí asks. And he replies: Two condors, or two lambs, unite without so much danger as a condor and a lamb. Last year the first Pan-American conference was held in Washington and now Martí sits in on the continuation of the dialog as delegate of Uruguay. Whoever says economic union, says political union. The people that buys gives the orders. The people that sells, serves … The people that wants to die sells to one people alone, and the people that wants to save itself, sells to more than one … The people that wants to be free distributes its business among equally strong peoples. If either is to be given preference, prefer the one that needs less to the one that is less disdainful …