The program of the spectacle explains the winning of the West with Darwin’s words: It is the inevitable law of survival of the fittest. In epic phrases, Buffalo Bill exalts the civic and military virtues of his nation, which has digested half of Mexico and numerous islands and now enters the twentieth century striding the world with the strut of a great power.
(157)
1899: Saint Louis
Far Away
Fire sprouts from mouths and rabbits from top hats; from the magic horn come little glass horses. A car runs over a prostrate woman, who gets up with one jump; another dances with a sword stuck in her belly. An enormous bear obeys complicated orders given in English.
Geronimo is invited to enter a little house with four windows. Suddenly the house moves and rises into the air. Startled, Geronimo leans out: down there the people look the size of ants. The keepers laugh. They give him some binoculars, like those he took from officers fallen in battle. Through the binoculars the far away comes close. Geronimo aims at the sun and the violent light hurts his eyes. The keepers laugh; and since they laugh, he laughs too.
Geronimo, prisoner of war of the United States, is one of the attractions at the Saint Louis fair. Crowds come to see the tamed beast. The chief of the Apaches of Arizona sells bows and arrows, and for a few cents poses for snapshots, or prints as best he can the letters of his name.
(24)
1899: Rio de Janeiro
How to Cure by Killing
Sorcerous hands play with the price of coffee, and Brazil cannot pay the London and River Plate Bank and other very important creditors.
It is the hour of sacrifice, announces Finance Minister Joaquim Murtinho. The minister believes in the natural laws of economics, which by natural selection condemn the weak, that is to say the poor, that is to say almost everyone. Should the State take the coffee business out of the speculators’ hands? That, says an indignant Murtinho, would be a violation of natural laws and a dangerous step toward socialism, that fearsome plague that European workers are bringing to Brazil: socialism, he says, denies freedom and turns man into an ant.
National industry, Murtinho believes, is not natural. Small as it is, national industry is taking labor from the plantations and raising the price of hands. Murtinho, guardian angel of the great-estate order, will see to it that the crisis is not paid for by the owners of men and lands, who have survived intact the abolition of slavery and the proclamation of the republic. To pay off the English banks and balance the books, the minister burns in an oven any banknote that comes his way, suppresses any public service that is handy, and lets loose a hail of taxes on the poor.
Economist by vocation and physician by profession, Murtinho also makes interesting experiments in the field of physiology. In his laboratory he extracts the encephalic mass of rats and rabbits and decapitates frogs to study the convulsions of the body, which continues moving as if it had a head.
(75)
1900: Huanuni
Patiño
The horseman comes from desolation and rides across desolation, through icy winds, at a slow gait over the nakedness of the planet. A mule loaded with rocks follows him.
The horseman has spent much time boring into rocks and opening up caves with dynamite charges. He has never seen the sea, nor known even the city of La Paz, but suspects that the world is living an industrial era and that industry eats hitherto disdained minerals. He has not gone into the mountains after silver, as so many have. Searching for tin, as no one else is, he has penetrated to the heart of the mountain, to its very soul, and has found it.
Simón Patiño, the horseman stung through with cold, the miner mortified by solitude and debt, reaches the town of Huanuni. In his mule’s saddlebags he has pieces of the world’s richest vein of tin. These rocks will make him king of Bolivia.
(132)
1900: Mexico City
Posada
He illustrates verses and news. His broadsheets sell in the markets and at the doors of churches and wherever a balladeer sings the prophesies of Nostradamus, the horrifying details of the train derailment at Temamatla, the last appearance of the Virgin of Cuadalupe, or the tragedy of the woman who gave birth to four lizards in a barrio of this city.
By the magical hand of José Guadalupe Posada, corrido ballads never lose their spontaneity, topicality, and popularity. In his drawings, the knives of loudmouths and tongues of gossips will always be sharp, the Devil will keep dancing and flaming, Death laughing, pulque moistening mustaches, the unhappy Eleuterio Mirafuentes crushing with an enormous stone the cranium of the ancient author of his days. This year, a Posada drawing celebrated the appearance of the first electric streetcar in the streets of Mexico. Now, another shows the streetcar crashing into a funeral procession in front of the cemetery, with a tremendous scattering of skeletons. They sell for one centavo a copy, printed on brown paper, with verses for anyone who knows how to read and weep.
His workshop is a mess of rolls and receptacles and zinc plates and wooden wedges, all piled around the press and beneath a rain of newly printed papers hung up to dry. Posada works from morning till night, engraving marvels. “Little drawings,” he says. From time to time he goes to the door to smoke a restful cigar, not forgetting to cover his head with a derby and his great belly with a dark woolen vest.
Every day, past Posada’s workshop door go the professors of the neighboring Fine Arts Academy. They never look in or greet him.
(263 and 357)
1900: Mexico City
Porfirio Díaz
He grew up in the shadow of Juárez. The man who weeps as he kills, Juárez called him.
“Weeping, weeping, he’ll kill me if I’m not careful.”
Porfirio Díaz has been ruling Mexico for a quarter of a century. The official biographers record for posterity his yawns and his aphorisms. They do not note it down when he says:
“The best Indian is six feet underground.”
“Kill them on the spot.”
“Don’t stir up the herd on me.”
“The herd” are the legislators, who vote Yes when their heads nod from sleepiness, and who call Don Porfirio the Unique, the Indispensable, the Irreplaceable. The people call him “Don Perfidy” and make fun of his courtiers:
“What time is it?”
“Whatever you say, Señor President.”
He displays his little finger and says: “Tlaxcala hurts me.” He points to his heart and says: “Oaxaca hurts me.” With his hand on his liver, he says: “Michoacán hurts me.” In a flash he has three governors trembling before him.
The shot-while-trying-to-escape law is applied to the rebellious and the curious. At the height of Pax Porfiriana, Mexico makes progress. Messages that previously went by mule, horse, or pigeon now fly over seventy thousand kilometers of telegraph wires. Where stage coaches used to go, there are fifteen thousand kilometers of railway. The nation pays its debts punctually and supplies minerals and food to the world market. On every big estate a fortress rises. From the battlements guards keep watch over the Indians, who may not even change masters. There are no schools of economics but Don Porfirio rules surrounded by “scientists” specializing in the purchase of lands precisely where the next railway will pass. Capital comes from the United States and ideas and fashions are bought secondhand in France. Mexico City likes to call itself “the Paris of the Americas,” although more white peasant pants than trousers are seen in the streets; and the frock-coated minority inhabit Second Empire-style palaces. The poets have baptized its evenings as “the green hour,” not because of the light through the trees, but in memory of De Musset’s absinthe.
(33 and 142)
1900: Mexico City
The Flores Magón Brothers
The people sail on rivers of pulque as bells ring out and rockets boom and knives glint under the Bengal lights. The crowd invades the Alameda and other prohibited streets, the zone sacred to corseted ladies and jacketed gentlemen, with the Virgin on a portable platform. From t
hat lofty ship of lights, the Virgin’s wings protect and guide.
This is the day of Our Lady of the Angels, which in Mexico lasts for a week of balls; and on the margin of the violent joy of people, as if wishing to merit it, a new newspaper is born. It is called Regeneration. It inherits the enthusiasms and debts of The Democrat, closed down by the dictatorship. Jesús, Ricardo, and Enrique Flores Magón write it, publish it, and sell it.
The Flores Magón brothers grow with punishment. Since their father died, they have taken turns between jail, law studies, occasional small jobs, combative journalism, and stones against bullets street demonstrations.
All belongs to all, they had been told by their father, the Indian Teodoro Flores, that bony face now up among the stars. A thousand times he had told them: Repeat that!
(287)
1900: Mérida, Yucatán
Henequén
One of every three Mayas in Yucatán is a slave, hostage of henequén, and their children, who inherit their debts, will be slaves too. Lands are sold complete with Indians, but the great henequén plantations use scientific methods and modern machinery, receive orders by telegraph and are financed by New York banks. Steam driven scraping machines separate the fibers; and International Harvester trains run them to a port called Progress. Meanwhile guards shut the Indians into barracks when night falls, and at dawn mount horses to herd them back to the rows of spiny plants.
With sisal yarn, henequén yarn, everything on earth can be tied up, and every ship on the ocean uses henequén ropes. Henequén brings prosperity to Yucatán, one of Mexico’s richest regions: in Mérida, the capital, golden grilles keep mules and Indians from trampling gardens badly copied from Versailles. The bishop’s carriage is almost identical to the one the pope uses in Rome, and from Paris come architects who imitate French medieval castles, although today’s heroes venture forth not for captive princesses but for free Indians.
General Ignacio Bravo, eyes like knives, white moustache, mouth clamped tight, has arrived in Mérida to exterminate the Mayas who still beat the drums of war. The guns of San Benito salute the redeemer of henequén. In the Plaza de Armas, beneath leafy laurels, the masters of Yucatán offer General Bravo the silver sword that awaits the conqueror of Chan Santa Cruz, the rebels’ sacred city in the jungle.
And then falls the slow lid of night.
(273)
From the Mexican Corrido of the Twenty-Eighth Battalion
I’m on my way, on my way,
on my way with great delight,
because the Maya Indians
are dying, they say, of fright.
I’m on my way, on my way,
to the other side of the sea,
for the Indians no longer
have any way to flee.
I’m on my way, on my way,
God keep you warm, my jewel,
because the Maya Indians
will make a lovely fuel.
I’m on my way, on my way,
for the winter there to dwell,
because the Maya Indians
are going straight to hell.
(212)
1900: Tabi
The Iron Serpent
In the forefront the cannons thunder, overturning barricades and crushing the dying. Behind the cannons the soldiers, almost all Indians, set fire to the communities’ cornfields and fire repeating Mausers against old weapons loaded by the barrel. Behind the soldiers, peons, almost all Indians, lay tracks for the railway and raise posts for the telegraph and the gallows.
The railway, snake without scales, has its tail in Mérida and its long body grows toward Chan Santa Cruz. The head reaches Santa María and jumps to Hobompich and from Hobompich to Tabi, double tongue of iron, swift, voracious. Breaking jungle, cutting earth, it pursues, attacks, and bites. On its gleaming march it swallows free Indians and shits slaves.
The Chan Santa Cruz sanctuary is doomed. It had come into being half a century ago, born of that little mahogany cross that appeared in the thicket and said, “My father has sent me to speak with you, who are earth.”
(273)
The Prophet
Here it came to pass, more than four centuries ago. Lying on his mat, on his back, the priest-jaguar of Yucatán heard the message of the gods. They spoke to him through the roof, squatting on his house, in a language no one understood any more.
Chilam Balam, he who was the mouth of the gods, remembered what had not yet happened and announced what would be:
“Stick and stone will rise up for the struggle … Dogs will bite their masters … Those with borrowed thrones must throw up what they swallowed. Very sweet, very tasty was what they swallowed, but they will vomit it up. The usurpers will depart to the limits of the waters … Then there will be no more devourers of man … When greed comes to an end, the face of the world will be set free, its hands will be set free, its feet will be set free.”
(23)
(End of the second volume of Memory of Fire)
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