Chapter XV: Tropical Mexico

Returning to Córdoba, I was taken by a Mexican railroad down to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The train was a kind of way-freight. All day we rambled along through tropical vegetation so dense that gangs of men had to labor constantly to keep it from covering the track. Oranges were so plentiful that they were left to rot on the trees. Pineapples were sold through the train windows at two cents each. Beautiful palm trees of many striking and always symmetrical shapes stood forth from the jungle.

But it was not all jungle. After the mountains died down to mere hills, came broad meadows dotted with cattle, the herdsmen on horseback. There were prairies almost like our own, and fertile bottomlands. At several of the stations, I saw white men of much larger build than the tropical Mexicans. The older of these men had long beards. The younger ones, who made me think of American farmer boys, caught the cars for short rides. Later I learned that they were Mormons, a number of whom went to live in Mexico years ago.

Photo by Hugo Brehme, Mexico City

Down near Orizaba, Mexico’s splendid tropical vegetation begins.
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Long after dark we reached Santa Lucrecia. Although it is important as the junction of two railways, it is only a straggling village of sheet-iron and thatch—a station and a few huts amid banana groves. The houses are perched on piles as a protection against dangerous animals and high water. Here, in this narrowest part of Mexico, the great chain of mountains stretching from Alaska to southern Chile becomes so low that Santa Lucrecia is less than a hundred feet above sea level. I found the air damp and depressing, the night hot and heavy. The moon seemed to be trying to throw off the clouds that were smothering it. The inhabitants usually sleep on their porches, in hammocks, but travelers are not so lucky. I spent a bad night in the Mexican hotel for which a place had been hacked out of the jungle. Thin wooden partitions between the rooms reached only halfway to the roof, so that I could hear every sound made by the other guests; and it was too hot to sleep much beneath my big mosquito-net canopy.

The Isthmus of Tehuantepec

Houses on the tropical Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The canoes are big
jungle trees burned and carved out into craft that slip easily
through the water.
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Here and there on the way westward across the isthmus were open-work houses, almost like woven baskets. But much of the time the railroad was the only evidence that anyone had been through the jungle before us. The telegraph poles were old rails, set upright; wooden poles rot or are eaten by ants. Now and then we saw a man toiling along behind a crude wooden plow, the yoke fastened to the oxen’s horns in the Spanish fashion. In some of the cornfields, instead of scarecrows were wooden crosses set up to frighten away “devils.” Palms and immense trees of other kinds, with masses of smaller trees and bushes between, made me feel as if we were surrounded by an endless green curtain.

In Tehuantepec the houses are very flimsy, often with walls of reeds.
Do you see the earthenware water jar, placed in the shade and breeze
so that the water will keep cool? Shelves and cubbyholes have been
dug in the earth bank that fences in the yard on one side.
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The Indians of the hot lands were different from those of the plateau. They appeared to be much more contented, more serene and happy. Fewer clothes, fewer troubles! It took very little effort to build their crude houses, and anyone who did not want to work could almost pick all his food in the jungle.

A Tehuantepec woman wearing her _huipil_ or white starched headdress.
The big bowl she carries is made of a gourd decorated with carved or
painted flowers and figures.
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In the crowded thirdclass coach were some of the far-famed women of Tehuantepec. They are spoken of as very handsome, though American taste might prefer a different type. They are of splendid physique, dignified yet not haughty, and have a charming smile. They wore a gay square of cloth wrapped about the waist, and a sleeveless upper garment. Almost all of them had a few red flowers in their jet-black hair, and many wore necklaces of American five-dollar gold pieces.

These women are not so simply dressed when they have on their national headdress, the _huipil_. This is a white contrivance of lace and ruffles, starched stiff, which hangs down the back like the war bonnet of a Comanche chief. In this regalia a woman of Tehuantepec looks very gay indeed as she stalks along, barefooted, balancing on her head a big bowl decorated with painted flowers.

The Town of Tehuantepec

In the market of Tehuantepec town. The women, who wear a very queer
costume, carry on business with little help from the men.
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The town of Tehuantepec, which is the largest town on the isthmus, is merely a big Indian village. Some of its streets are cobbled, but most are very sandy. Through a wide fertile valley runs a shallow river in which there is much bathing. The natives all know one another and one another’s business, which seems to be mostly the selling of tropical products among themselves. Tehuantepec has a very large and lively market. So many of the buyers and sellers are women that one traveler said he felt like a musical comedy star surrounded by the chorus. For a long time, after most of the men of the isthmus were killed in local warfare, there were five women to one man. The women learned to do everything for themselves and became very independent. They are still “head of the house” in their homes.

Underwood & Underwood

Cutting and carting sugar cane on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
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A big _fiesta_ or celebration was held in Tehuantepec the night I was there. A band played and fireworks were set off. One piece represented a huge duck, another a mammoth turkey, and two others a man and a woman of gigantic size. Each piece was worn over the head and shoulders of a man who capered about while it blazed away above him until nothing but the wooden framework was left. Fireworks of one kind or another provided light and noise during most of the night, and left me little chance for sleep.

Up on the cool table-land the _peons_ wear huge hats, but down where
the sun is hot and tropical the hats, queerly enough, are quite
small!
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But there were other sounds too. I had hardly dozed off when, directly under my ground-floor window, men and women began singing, accompanied by a sort of banjo. They sang the same mournful two lines over and over again. Sometimes there was laughter, too, and the sound of good-natured disputes. At midnight I looked out and saw about fifty people sitting on the ground with their backs to the wall, all smoking and drinking. A dozen times I drifted into troubled sleep, only to be wakened again. About three o’clock the noise stopped; but just as I drew a long sigh of relief the _fiesta_ band burst out right beside my window! The terrible racket lasted until daylight, when I got up to catch my train.

No, Tehuantepec had not been serenading me! When Juan, the little brown waiter, brought my breakfast, I asked him what all the noise meant.

“Oh,” he answered, “yesterday the man next door died, and those were his friends celebrating the wake.”

“And keeping all the rest of us awake,” I answered, so sleepy that I did not realize how much my words sounded like a pun.

“Ah, yes, señor,” replied Juan, “it is very sad. But what can we do? People will die, you know.”

On to Guatemala

I walked over to the town of San Jerónimo to reach a railroad that calls itself, without very good reason, the “Pan American.” There was one passenger car, divided into two classes, at the end of a very slow freight. In a long day of traveling we covered 112 miles. Sometimes the walls of vegetation were so close as to scratch the sides of the car. Gay-plumaged parrots and cockatoos screamed at us from bamboo thickets. But most of the way the country was dry and sun-baked, cactus and mesquite the only growing things. Down here where the huge _sombreros_ of the Mexican highlands would seem to be so much more necessary, the people had narrow-brimmed straw hats that made me think of a circus clown’s comic hat.

International Harvester Co.

Sisal leaves being loaded on a flat car.
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International Harvester Co.

Sisal fibre as it looks when it comes from the machine called the
decorticator.
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After a night spent in a hot and sandy little town, the same train carried us off again at dawn, and for another tropical day we dragged along southward, so close to the west coast that once we caught a glimpse of the Pacific. In the evening we crawled into Mariscal on the Mexico-Guatemala border.

The Great Peninsula of Yucatan

Northeast of this route to Guatemala lie four big states of Mexico and one of its two territories, jutting far out into the Gulf of Mexico in the peninsula of Yucatan. This is a hot, fertile country, producing important Mexican products. Its henequen or hemp gives the world rope and twine; its cacao bushes furnish us much of our chocolate and cocoa. The capitals of Campeche and Mérida are interesting towns, quite up to date in some ways. At the base of the peninsula is the state of Tabasco with its capital of San Juan Bautista (“St. John the Baptist”).

On the peninsula of Yucatan are to be found remains of the Mayan civilization. Centuries ago (no one knows exactly when) the Maya Indians came to this part of the world, spreading all the way from Yucatan to Salvador. They had a calendar that was more exact than that of the Aztecs, more exact even than ours is, and they seem to have been the most highly developed people on the North American continent before the white men came. Carved stone ruins and picture-writing on paper made of cactus fibers were found by men searching for chicle, the pitch-like substance from which chewing gum is made.