More from Sybille

A Visit to Don Ottavio:

That Customs inspection is a malevolent rigmarole. One

fails to see its practical point. The peso is considered hard

currency and Mexico has no money restrictions. Cigarettes,

spirits, French scent, textiles, tea and coffee are all much

cheaper in Mexico than in the United States, so no one would

bother to bring them in contraband. Everybody has registered

their visible cameras. Indeed,’it is revealed that few of these

hopeful spinsters have brought much besides the print dresses,

the one warm tailored suit and the raincoat prescribed by

Terry Guide, which most sensibly admonishes one to travel

light, and it seems futile to suspect them of smuggling sewing

machines, harvesters and electric wash tubs. All they are bent

on is spending their dollars on a huge loot of native arts and

crafts, and bringing them home in original Mexican baskets.

To subject the luggage of these benefactresses to those thorough

and callous indiscretions can have no other purpose than using

power and inflicting discomfort on the temporarily powerless

by the temporarily powerful.

British passport officials sometimes bring to bear the pressure

of their better accents and better clothes on the elderly refugee

fumbling in her handbag for that letter of invitation from the

lady at Great Marlborough. Here, the passportees are borne

down upon by the underpaid, the brutish and the ignorant.

One might be in the Balkans or the East. For the individual

there is more danger, more degradation, more delay, but also

more hope—there is always the bribe. There is also no hope at

all. Among Anglo-Saxon officials the decencies are often

replaced by loyalties and so turn to ashes; here, the decencies

civic or human do not exist. There is corruption as a matter of

course, cynicism without thought, ill-will as a first reaction,

life and pain held cheap, and the invincible ignorance of man

of man.

* * ** * * *

The first stop is a town called Saltillo. It is the capital of one

of those enormous territories stretching from the U.S. frontier

roughly to the. Tropic of Cancer: the States of Coahuila,

Chihuahua, Baja California, Sonora and Durango, which are

the limbo and ante-room to Mexico. Chihuahua alone is the

size of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, the others

afinount to a good chunk of Western Europe. Between them,

the population is rather less than that of the city of Birmingham;

which means that there is just about one person to every barren

square mile. It is hot, stony, dry country, almost without rivers

or rain, part desert, part mountain, part mining district

Innocent of art and architecture, yet innocent also of the

amenities, these states are a kind of natural poor relations to the

Western American ones across the border, and a reminder that

a very large portion of the earth’s surface is, if not uninhabit-

able, unattractive to inhabit. Some are born there, no one

goes to Sahuaripa or Santa Maria del Oro except to drill a

shaft, lay a railway or quell a rebellion.

********

Since 1810 and Secession from Spain, Mexico has had a dozen

full-blown Constitutions and a larger number of Declarations

of Independence, Principle and Reform. Many of the con-

stitutions were modelled after that of the United States. In

their time, some were called liberal, some radical, some

centralizing. All were wonders of theoretical perfection; all

followed as well as initiated a great deal of bloodshed. The

Constitutional Assembly would sit in a besieged mountain

town while two rebel generals advanced on it from the North;

another general of yet uncertain allegiance would be advancing

from the Coast; there would be a Counter-President at Vera

Cruz and a Revolt in Mexico City. There would be a Con-

stitutional Party and a Reform Party, an Agrarian Party and

a Liberal Party. There would be Church interests and Land-

owners’ interests and Creole interests, and the interests of

foreign capital.

Some of these interests combined, others did

not. There would be an elected President whose election was

illegal, a constitutionally elected President who was murdered

after election, and a President by pronunciamento. One would

not be recognized by the American administration, another

not supported by British oil interests, a third would be fought

by the French. Between actual sieges and pitched battles,

liberators, reformers and upholders of the Faith rushed

about the countryside with armed bands, burning crops and

villages, murdering everyone in sight. Meanwhile the people

got poorer and confused, and in turn more frightened, angry,

fatalistic, murderous and cowed. This millennium continued

for a hundred and twenty years, from Hidalgo’s revolt against

Spanish rule until Calle’s suppression of the Spring Revolution

of 1929. Sometimes a general would be more victorious than

usual and have a chance to look around and create Order.

Sometimes more people would be involved in the actual

killing, sometimes less. BUT THERE WAS NEVER ANY PEACE. The

unhappy country only enjoyed two breathing spaces: the

U.S. Mexican War of 1848 in which it was defeated and lost

half its territory, and the forty years’ despotism of the Diaz

Dictatorship.

(Only once again did Providence spare Mexico. In the war

of 1.914, Germany drafted a secret note proposing an alliance

against the United States, offering in return the restitution of

what could hardly be _called the Mexican Alsace-Lorraine,

the states of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Utah

and Nevada. In a moment of abstraction, Dr. Albrecht, a

member of the German Embassy, left the dispatch case with

the draft in a carriage of the Third Avenue Elevated Railway

of New York City. The contents were published in the New York

World. Mexico remained neutral.)