Chapter II: On Both Sides of the Border

For Americans, Mexico is easy to reach. If you like an ocean voyage you can take a steamship from New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, or almost any of our other large ports. If you prefer to go by land, you can step into a sleeping-car and be carried all the way to Mexico City.

Not only Texas, but New Mexico, Arizona, and California border on Mexico. In fact these last three states are closer to it than Texas is, for the western half of the boundary—beyond the Rio Grande—is merely an imaginary line. Along that there is no barrier to cross, though customs officers and other officials may make you feel that there is. Americans who are forgetful of their geography often think of the Rio Grande as forming the entire boundary.

On the opposite sides of the frontier stand many pairs of towns—like twins facing each other! The largest border town on the United States side is El Paso (Texas), which means “The Pass.” It is almost in the center of the long boundary that stretches from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, just where the Rio Grande begins to be the dividing line. There are four bridges between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez across the river. One of them is used by street cars that run in both countries. Think of going to a foreign country in a street car!

San Diego & Arizona Ry.

The market place and church in Juárez, across the Border from El Paso,
Texas.
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I first entered Mexico much farther eastward, at Laredo, Texas. I might have gone across in a train, but I decided that I would rather walk. I wished to see the boundary shaft, with its silver sides bearing the coats of arms of the two countries. This is in the middle of the bridge. Besides, there was the famous river itself to be seen.

The Rio Bravo del Norte

The “Wild River of the North,” as the Mexicans call the Rio Grande, seemed a queer name for the sluggish and dreary stream that flowed slowly past beneath me. Its thirsty banks reminded me of the Mexican coat of arms which, like our own national emblem, has an eagle on it, but an eagle perched on a spiny cactus and holding a rattlesnake. Rough, barren country, sparsely inhabited, borders the Rio Grande. Nothing larger than a rowboat can navigate the river; there are almost no fish in it; it turns no mill wheels or electric-lighting machinery. Its only job seems to be to form the boundary, and even that it does not always do properly. For one thing, it bends and twists and wanders as if it were not sure just where it wished to go. Thus the border it marks is more than two thousand miles long, though only about half that distance in a straight line. It changes its mind—I mean its course—so often that we have to have a commission in Washington to keep the farms along it from changing nationality every time it decides to take another twist.

Boundary marker on bridge at Laredo.
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The water in the Rio Grande is often so low that people can wade across it almost anywhere. Because it wanders most near the Gulf of Mexico, into which it flows, the eastern part of the international boundary is five times as long as it might have been. The river is not a very efficient boundary because it does not keep out smugglers, of things and of people. Gangs of bandits sometimes make raids across it, for they have only to ride or wade through it. Men steal cattle on one side and drive them across to the other. People who would not be allowed to enter the United States as immigrants often find ways to get across the Rio Grande. Our officials cannot watch every twist and corner of that wandering, shallow river.

The Mexicans themselves come and go freely, for we do not like to shut out our next-door neighbors. About 40,000 Mexican men come over every year to work for us, picking cotton, repairing railroads, and doing other hard manual labor which the native American is glad to leave to others. Since the World War more than half the goods that Mexico imports come from the United States and nearly eighty per cent of the things she exports go to that country. Part of the total, of course, is carried in steamships, but more and more of it crosses the Rio Grande.

The Two Laredos

To a large extent, the western part of our United States was once Mexican. Not only the four states that border on Mexico have Spanish names, but so have Nevada, Colorado, even Montana. I was not surprised, therefore, to find Laredo in Texas almost a Mexican city. More than half the people in the streets had the black hair and the brownish skin of Mexico. Most of the signs in store windows were in Spanish. Even at the United States post office the clerks spoke Spanish better than they did English. There was soon to be an election, and I noticed how Spanish were the names of the men running for the offices of mayor, sheriff, and so forth.

Yet Laredo is rich and prosperous and American compared to Nuevo (New) Laredo across the river. The moment I had crossed the bridge into Mexico I was surrounded by Mexican scenes. Men wandered listlessly about the streets with candy and fruits and queer biscuits for sale, some of them carrying their wares on boards on top of their heads. Most of the streets were not paved at all, and were deep in dust. Beggars followed me. Down on the edge of the river women washed clothes in the muddy stream—a kind of laundry we shall see often in our travels. The women beating soaked clothing on rocks instead of rubbing it on washboards reminded me of the little American boy who, soon after his family took him to Mexico, came running into the house shouting, “Mother, come quick and see our washerwoman trying to break stones with father’s best shirt!”

The shallow and meandering Rio Grande at Laredo, Texas, as seen from
the international bridge.
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There is a hotel in Nuevo Laredo now, and some other modern buildings. As we go on into Mexico we shall find, indeed, that our southern neighbors have many fine streets and great buildings. Most of the houses I saw in Laredo were typically Mexican. Nearly all of them were covered with stucco once gaily painted pink, blue, orange or some other bright color, but now much faded. They were all one or, at most, two stories high. Like Spanish houses everywhere, they were “wrapped around the yard instead of having the yard wrapped around the house,” as someone once put it. On the outside they were bare and ugly, crowded against the edge of the street and with no space between them. But inside they had little _patios_ gay with growing flowers and other vegetation. Two words which we must learn before we go far in Mexico are _patio_ and _plaza_. The first is the unroofed flower garden that makes a kind of courtyard for a house; the other is a park, nearly always with beautiful trees, shrubs, and flowers, in the center of a city. In the daytime most of the people, at least the women and children, live in the _patio_. In the evening, dressed in their best clothes, they stroll about the _plaza_ near the bandstand.

On Mexican Railroads

There was a funny little street car, hardly ten feet long, in Nuevo Laredo. It brought me finally to the railroad station, which looked like nothing but a shed made of _adobe_, that is, of mud-and-straw bricks. The station was closed, but by and by two men in important-looking uniforms came, and began selling tickets and checking baggage. Then the train arrived, a very American train, for it had come from San Antonio in Texas.

Before we went on into Mexico, however, some second-class cars were added to the train. These had wooden-slat benches, two lengthwise along the sides of the car and ten pairs of seats back to back in the middle. They had no cushions and no elbow-rests, and would have seemed very uncomfortable to Americans—even though they were made in Indiana! But the fare on such cars is so much less than on the others that the great majority of Mexicans travel second-class.

San Diego & Arizona Ry.

A Mexican boy water carrier who lives near the border between Mexico
and the United States.
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I decided to go second-class myself. Not only did it seem an easy way to save money, but it gave me a chance to be among the real, everyday Mexicans. As all Mexican trains burn oil, soot and cinders did not bother us as we rumbled away across the flat and sandy country. But every car was a smoking-car and the women were smoking as freely as the men. Behind us were an ordinary American coach marked “first class,” Pullman sleeping-cars, and a dining-car, carrying American and rich Mexican passengers.

The railways of Mexico were originally English or American. On my first Mexican trip the conductor and the engineer were white Americans, and the fireman was a negro. The conductor did not take up the tickets, but left that to another uniformed man called the auditor. He, like the brakeman and the train boy, was Mexican. The Mexican word for brakeman, by the way, is _garrotero_, which means “twister” or “choker.” In the days before airbrakes were used on trains, he had to help stop the cars by twisting what looked like an automobile steering-wheel on the top or the platform of each car.

Not long after my first visit to Mexico the Mexican Government began to operate most of the railroads in the country. Except for our Southern Pacific, which runs down the western side of the country to Guadalajara, Mexico’s second largest city, and the Mexican Railway from Vera Cruz to the capital, all the lines are combined now under the name National Railways of Mexico. The American conductors and engineers were discharged, and later on so were the American managers and superintendents. At present there are only about 16,000 miles of railroad in all Mexico. New York and Ohio together have about the same mileage.

We left Nuevo Laredo at three o’clock in the afternoon, or what would now be called fifteen o’clock! A Mexican law did away with “A. M.” and “P. M.” on the ground that they were confusing—and even dangerous in railway time-tables. Some of the European and South American countries have done the same sensible thing. Instead of stopping at twelve o’clock noon and beginning over again with one, two, three, they simply go right on counting. So fifteen o’clock means three in the afternoon, twenty o’clock is eight in the evening, and so on up to twenty-four o’clock or midnight. It is really very simple, and most people when they are used to it decide that this is a better way of marking the time than ours.

My First Mexican Journey

General Zachary Taylor took several weeks to get from Laredo to Monterey during our war with Mexico. Now one can cover the distance in six hours. For the first hour or two I noticed that the land was very flat and dry, much like southern Texas. Almost the only vegetation consisted in those tough, spiny, worthless plants called cactus, mesquite, and chaparral. For miles I did not see a house, or a human being, outside the train. There were no cattle, nor even birds. The land seemed to be too dry for them. Yet, oddly enough, there were some fences—one or two barbed wires stretched on crooked sticks. The wind howled mournfully through the thorny mesquite bushes, but there was not a cloud in the sky, and the sunshine almost burned us when we stepped out into it at the stations.

Before long, hazy mountains began to appear. By six—I mean eighteen—o’clock, big saw-toothed ranges stood near us on both sides. Sometimes, as the shadows of the setting sun played over them, they seemed to be running a race with the train. Still there were few people, or cattle, or houses. Now and then we might catch sight of a wild-looking man, dressed in sheepskins, tending a little flock of white goats. Here and there some flat, mud-colored huts appeared. The strong wind sifted sand from the half-desert all over us.

Then we reached Monterey, gleaming under the moonlight. It is the largest city of northern Mexico. Behind it stands a high notched ridge that looks so much like a seat that it is called Saddle Mountain. Monterey (spelled Monterrey in Spanish) has the largest steel mills in the western hemisphere south of the United States, and one of the largest in the world. Some Mexicans complain that the city is too _americanisado_, or Americanized. They think it has copied too much from the United States. But to me it certainly looked much more like Madrid than like one of our own cities. Most of the streets, I found, were very narrow. They had such cramped sidewalks that when two people met, one of them usually had to step down. The houses nearly all showed bare walls close up against the street, and every window was barred with iron as if it belonged to a prison. The Catalina River, which is supposed to flow through the town, was so dry that mule and donkey paths wandered along its stony bed, and sellers of fruit, vegetables, and gaudy cloth had set up their little booths as if in a street.

Still, I could believe the people who told me that Monterey is not so Mexican as other cities farther south. Sometimes I even heard English in the streets. Already I had several times heard myself called “gringo.” That is a slang word for “American” all the way from the Rio Grande to Patagonia. Sometimes the people who use it mean to be insulting, but most of them think it is a perfectly good, kind name for us. No one is sure just where this nickname came from. The most common explanation is that the Mexicans often heard American soldiers, during our war with Mexico, singing a song by Robert Burns that began:

“Green grow the rashes, O!”

The city of Monterey, with Saddle Mountain in the background.
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You can see how, out of “green grow,” they could easily make “gringo.”

Our southern neighbors, all the way to Cape Horn, also call us Yankees (they spell it _yanquis_) and an American from Louisiana is just as likely to be called a _yanqui_ as one from Connecticut. Even this nickname is sometimes used with an unpleasant meaning.

Keystone View Co., Inc.

Would you think it was fun to wear a sombrero as big as this?
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