In the last analysis it is slavery, but the employers control the police, and the fictional distinction is kept up all the same. "Slavery is against the law." The workman chops off the leaf at its root, trims the sharp briars off the two edges, trims the spear-like tip, counts the leaves left on the plant, counts the leaves he is cutting, piles his leaves into bundles, and finally carries the bundles to the end of his row, where they are carted away on a movable-track mule-car line.
The Mayas had a civilization of their own when the Europeans "discovered" them, and it was a civilization admittedly as high as that of the most advanced Aztecs or the Incas of Peru. "You need have no fear in purchasing this plantation," said one planter to me, "of the laborers being able to buy their freedom and leave you.
And always the result has been in favor of the black man. "We do not consider that we own our laborers; we consider that they are in debt to us. Do you mean to tell me that there is any real slavery left in the western hemisphere?" Of course, the Yaquis were coming in at the rate of 500 per month, yet I hardly thought that influx would be sufficient to equal the tide of life that was going out by death. Why do the henequen kings call their system enforced service for debt instead of by its right name?
I found the ground uneven and rocky, a punishment for the feet, the henequen leaves thorny and treacherous and the air thick, hot and choking, though the season was considered a cool one. The lives of our black slaves were not so hard but that they could laugh, sometimes—and sing. The principal labor of the plantation is harvesting the henequen leaves and cleaning the weeds from between the plants.
I was right in that surmise, so I was informed, but I was also informed that the problem of recruits was not so difficult, after all. He goes to the field in the morning twilight, eating his lump of sour dough on the way. I was afterwards to learn how admirably the Yucatan country is adapted to preventing the escape of runaways. This method of beating is an ancient one in Yucatan and is the customary one on all the plantations for boys and all except the heaviest men. In the drying yard we found boys and men. 26 Addeddate 2008-02-07 14:33:25 Bookplateleaf 0005 … Chief among the henequen kings of Yucatan is Olegario Molina, former governor of the state and Secretary of Fomento (Public Promotion) of Mexico. It was simply a row of windowless, earthen floor rooms, half-dungeons, in each of which lay one woman on a bare board, without a blanket to soften it.
If they worked the full-timers like they work us they would die.
The jefes politicos, the rulers of the political districts corresponding to our counties, who are as truly czars of the districts as Diaz is the Czar of all Mexico, are invariably either henequen planters or employes of henequen planters. In figuring on the purchase of a plantation I always had to figure on paying cash for the slaves, exactly the same as for the land, the machinery and the cattle.
Mexican banknotes also commemorate Mexican revolutionaries, most prominently Plutarco Elías Calles, revolutionary general, president of Mexico, and founder of the political party that has dominated Mexico almost continuously from 1919. Yet this naturally barren land is more densely populated than is our own United States. Secret police had dogged their steps, their lives had been threatened, and countless methods had been used to prevent them from carrying on their work. On the contrary, I did not depend on De Lara or any other biassed source for my information, but took every precaution to arrive at the exact truth, and by as many different avenues as practicable. Americans commonly characterize Mexico as "Our Sister Republic."
The coast of Yucatan, … I turned to a young Maya who was carefully picking a fish bone.
The philosophy of beating was made very clear to me by Don Felipe G. Canton, secretary of the Camara. Lowry draws heavily on John Kenneth Turner's Barbarous Mexico, a 1910 indictment of the Porfirio Díaz era. Sunday is the day on which the youths and maidens meet and plan to marry. Inside the large, one-room building within the stone wall at San Antonio Yaxche we found, swinging so close that they touched one another, more than three hundred rope hammocks. "It is against the constitution," When a thing is abolished by your constitution it works more smoothly if called by another name, but the fact is, service for debt is just as unconstitutional in Mexico as chattel slavery. "But, no," the administrador corrected himself. "I bought a laborer for $1,000," he explained to me.
There are no springs and no place where a person can dig a well without a rock drill and dynamite.
In the fields we found gangs of men and boys, some gangs hoeing the weeds from between the gigantic plants and some sawing off the big leaves with machetes. CO-OPERATIVE, Slave Mother and Child also Henequen Plant, Calling the Roll at Sunrise on a Slave Plantation, Scene in a Yaqui Bull Pen on the Exile Road, Boy Slaves on a Sugar Plantation in the Hot Lands, Cargadores with Baskets, Seen Everywhere on the Mexican Plateau, Midnight in Mexico City "Meson," Cheap Lodging House, Two Groups of Waifs Sleeping in a "Meson", A Typical Mexican Military Execution, Before and After, Diaz and Taft Photographed Together at El Paso, Texas, Portraits of Five American Revolutionists, Primitive Plow; Mexico Is Backward in Modern Machinery, Not Because the Mexican Laborer Is Stupid, but Because He Is Cheap, https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Barbarous_Mexico&oldid=8832468, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, American Persecution of the Enemies of Diaz. He picks up his machete and attacks the first thorny leaf as soon as it is light enough to see the thorns and he never lays down that machete until the twilight of the evening.
Description: American historians preoccupied with the stirring events of the Mexican Revolution and the years following tend to neglect the basic causes of the conflict. Were these American clerks, mechanics and office men residents of Yucatan, instead of being merely hounded by a loan shark, they would be sold into slavery for all time, they and their children and their children's children, on to the third and fourth generation, and even farther, on to such a time as some political change puts a stop to the conditions of slavery altogether in Mexico.
Even the majority of the fifty henequen kings are Mayas crossed with the blood of Spain. ", The administrador had stepped away to scold a woman. Finally, I found that the people do not idolize their president, that the tide of opposition, dammed and held back as it has been by army and secret police, is rising to a height where it must shortly overflow that dam. They were working "by the piece," too, the reward being immunity from the lash. "It is necessary to whip them—oh, yes, very necessary," he told me, with a smile, "for there is no other way to make them do what you wish. The state shall not permit any contract, covenant or agreement to be carried out having for its object the abridgment, loss or irrevocable sacrifice of the liberty of a man, whether by reason of labor, education or religious vows. "Slavery? Twelve leaves are usually clipped, the twelve largest, the thirty smallest being left to mature for another three months.
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