Chapter IV: Something of Mexican History

Perhaps we ought to know a little about the history of Mexico before we go farther into the country. Hundreds of years before Columbus came to America, two tribes of the Nahua nation of Indians came down from the north into what is now Mexico. They were energetic and enterprising, as people from a bracing climate usually are compared to those who live in tropical countries. But gradually the first tribe, called Toltecs, seem to have lost some of their ambition and fighting spirit. It is said that in the eighth century the capital of the Toltecs was at a place now called Tula, just north of the Valley of Mexico, in which the capital of to-day is situated. They were excellent architects, as we can easily believe from the ruins of many of their buildings that remain. They knew how to fuse metals, to cut and polish the hardest stone, to make earthenware and fabrics (cloth), and they invented a calendar and a kind of writing. Although it was hardly writing as we understand it, being more nearly picture drawing, the Toltec emperors wrote in it a kind of poetry and philosophy.

About the end of the twelfth century, three hundred years before Columbus sailed, the Aztecs moved southward and drove the Toltecs before them. Although they belonged to the same race, the Aztecs were more ferocious and gloomy than the Toltecs, and they had a very cruel religion. They finally established their capital, Tenochtitlan, where the City of Mexico is to-day. It is said that they waited for a sign to show where the capital should be located. This sign was the sight of an eagle perched on a cactus with a rattlesnake in its claws; from it comes the coat of arms of present-day Mexico.

Meanwhile, for many centuries, a tribe called the Mayas had been living still farther south. They also seem to have come down from the north, but much earlier than even the Toltecs. Some scientists believe that all the original inhabitants of the western hemisphere came from Asia by way of Bering Strait and Alaska. This is not at all impossible. I have seen Mongolians of the Gobi Desert and Indians of the New World who could hardly have been told apart except by their clothes. Perhaps wave after wave, or tribe after tribe, of people who were originally Asiatic swept down across the two Americas until there were inhabitants even at the southern tip of South America. These original settlers are generally spoken of as Indians, but they might better be called Amerinds to distinguish them from East Indians.

The Mayas of Yucatan were never conquered by the Toltecs and the Aztecs, but in the eleventh century famine and pestilence broke out among them. Those who survived went on to what are now Guatemala and Honduras. They took their civilization with them, and as we shall see when we come to the ruins of their cities, they were far more civilized than the Indians who lived in wigwams and roamed our western prairies shooting buffaloes. In fact, they probably reached a higher state of civilization than any other inhabitants of America before Columbus’ day. The ruins of the Mayas at Uxmal and Chichenitza in the Mexican state of Yucatan, at Cobán and Quiriguá, Guatemala, and at Copán, Honduras, are still being explored, mostly by Americans, and we are learning more and more about this remarkable people.

The Aztec Religion

By the time the Spaniards came to Mexico, the Aztecs had spread their rule from the Atlantic to the Pacific. They had adopted or thought out for themselves a civilization like that of the Toltecs, and in their way were as far ahead of the nomad Indians of our plains as the Europeans were above the savages of Africa. But the Aztecs were a curious mixture of mildness and ferocity. This is not so surprising as it may sound; in my travels I have found many wild tribes that in some ways were as gentle as children. The laws of the Aztecs were severe, and their taxes were heavy.

The priesthood were rich, powerful, and very numerous. The chief god of the Aztec religion was the god of war, who was called Huitzilopochtli! As if it were not bad enough to have so dreadful a name, he had to be kept pleasant by human sacrifices. If a week went by without someone’s being killed in his honor, he was likely to grow peevish and do the whole Aztec nation great harm. There were altars to him all over the country, and they were constantly drenched in human blood. In a museum in Mexico City you may see an elaborately carved stone of sacrifice which the Aztecs had in their capital.

Keystone View Co., Inc.

On this stone the Aztecs used to offer human sacrifices to their war
god. It is now in the National Museum, Mexico City.
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Every year the most nearly perfect young man in the nation, after being given twelve months of feasting and high living, was sacrificed on this stone before a multitude of people. Gladiators fought, as in Rome, in honor of the bloodthirsty god. Men armed only with wooden spears for protection were attacked by other men carrying weapons made of obsidian—a black stone as hard as flint and sharpened to a razor edge. The people really enjoyed the thrills they got from sacrifices and contests, but they pretended, and perhaps really thought, that the gods demanded these. Babies and beautiful girls were sacrificed to appease the rain god. The Aztecs, besides sacrificing hundreds of their own people every year, made war against their neighbors in order to get victims—men, women, and children—for the sacrifices.

The Spaniards Arrive

There was a saying or legend in Mexico that some day the mild gods of the Toltecs would return. According to the legend these gods had white skins. When the Spaniards came, they found the conquest of the Aztec nation made easier by the fact that many of the Indians thought the Toltec gods had arrived.

Hernando Cortés landed in 1519 at a place now called Tabasco, near the present Vera Cruz, with about two hundred men. After sending a message to the Aztec emperor, Montezuma, commanding him to submit to the king of Spain, Cortés forced a thousand Indians to carry his baggage, and started for Tenochtitlan. The swift Indian runners (who took fresh sea food to the royal tables in the capital every day) met him with the very proper answer that Montezuma would continue to rule his own country without help from a king he had never heard of before.

Keystone View Co., Inc.

The Aztecs used this stone as a calendar. It is now in the National
Museum, Mexico City.
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Cortés pushed on over the mountains toward the capital. But he might not have conquered Mexico and given Spain what was for a long time her richest colony, if it had not been for three advantages. One was the legend already referred to. Another was the simple honesty of the Indians, who did not then know how tricky these people from Europe could be. But perhaps Cortés’ greatest advantage lay in the quarrels among various tribes of Indians. If all the people of Mexico had stood together, they probably could have driven out the Spaniards—in which case Mexico might have been Aztec to this day.

The kingdom or republic of Tlaxcala, now a poor little state southeast of Mexico City, long warred with the Aztecs. At first its people fought Cortés, but later they became his allies against their Aztec enemies. Near Mexico City is still an ancient tree which is called the Tree of the Sad Night because under it Cortés sat all one night and watched his beaten soldiers retreating. But he reorganized among the friendly Tlaxcalans, and finally came back to Tenochtitlan and overthrew Montezuma. By 1540 all the territory from Panama to what is now our state of Washington was called New Spain.

In a way the Spaniards may be regarded as the “more gentle” gods of the legend, but in some respects they were just as cruel as the Aztec war god. Cortés had the bloody sacrifice stone cast down, and destroyed the dreadful blood-spattered temples, driving out the priests. But the people were distributed as slaves among the Spaniards. The Spanish priests destroyed many of the native art treasures and inscriptions, so that the record of Aztec civilization was largely lost. These priests considered anything that had to do with the Aztec religion or culture as wickedly superstitious. The conquerors thought of Mexico simply as a mine to be worked for the benefit of Spain, without any attempt to be fair to the Mexicans themselves. Commerce with other countries was forbidden on pain of death.

Underwood & Underwood

Tree of Noche Triste (“Sad Night”), Guadalupe, under which Cortés is
said to have wept as his defeated soldiers passed by.
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In the central _plaza_ of Dolores Hidalgo stands a statue of the
priest Hidalgo, the “Father of Mexican Independence.”
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For three centuries Spain ruled Mexico in this stern way, through viceroys sent out by the king. Finally, in 1810, when the Spanish at home were busy fighting Napoleon, a priest named Hidalgo rose against the viceroy then in office and tried to overthrow Spanish rule in Mexico. But Hidalgo was captured and executed the next year. There are statues to his memory, and streets named for him, all over Mexico. He is often called the father of his country, or the Washington of Mexico. Later the revolt was taken up by another priest, named Morelos, who was executed in 1815, and for whom one state and the capital of another state are named. In 1821 Mexico City was surrendered by the last Spanish viceroy. His name, by the way, was O’Donojú—can you guess where his ancestors came from? A Mexican named Iturbide proclaimed himself emperor, but he was banished, and when he came back to Mexico again he was shot. Since 1824—except for the short-lived empire of Maximilian (1865–7)—Mexico has been a republic.

Mexico as a Republic

Since it was largely the example of the United States that caused Mexico to proclaim her independence, it was natural that she should form her constitution and laws very much after ours. But Mexico’s history as a republic has not been as happy as our own. Our people had long had town meetings and colonial assemblies; the people who had been ruled by Spanish emperors and their viceroys for three centuries, and before that by Aztec emperors, had little idea of how to govern themselves. After the revolution in Mexico there was chronic civil war and disorder until 1876. While there were only fifty-seven viceroys in the three hundred years that Mexico was a Spanish colony, there have been, in the century since the revolution, sixty-six presidents, two emperors, and a regency. Frequently the presidents have been killed while in office. One of them ruled for thirty-four years, but another was president for only forty-six minutes!

Even to-day many Mexicans and other people of Spanish-America cannot understand any kind of political change except a violent one, resulting in the death of the ousted leader. I remember being in South America when Woodrow Wilson was elected president of the United States. You know that he was a Democrat and that the man in office when he was elected was a Republican. Even some of the educated Spanish-Americans showed great surprise that the Republican Taft let the Democratic Wilson take over the office. They would say to me: “Is not President Taft the commander-in-chief of the army? Then why does he not order the army to drive this Wilson out of the country, and keep the office himself?” How dreadful such a state of affairs would seem to us!

Photo by H. L. Summerville, San Antonio

The Alamo is often called the birthplace of Texan independence. It was
the scene of a heroic defense against the Mexicans in 1836.
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We must not overlook our own war with Mexico during that country’s years of disorder, for it is a more important part of our neighbor’s history than of our own. Many Americans now think that the war was more our fault than Mexico’s. There was bitterness and misunderstanding on both sides. Texas, then a part of Mexico that was being settled more and more by Americans, had won its independence in 1836. In 1845 it asked to be admitted as a state of the United States and it was annexed in spite of the protest of Mexico. A dispute as to the boundary increased the antagonism between Americans and Mexicans, and the slavery question was also involved. After about a year and a half of fighting, Mexico City was taken by General Scott, who came up to it from the coast just as Cortés had. By the treaty of peace signed in 1848, Mexico ceded to us a large territory that included the present California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, and parts of New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming.

Rare carving was used in decorating the Spanish missions. This window
is in San José Mission, San Antonio, Texas.
]

During our own Civil War there was foreign intervention in Mexico. France wished to get a foothold in the New World, despite the Monroe Doctrine; so she sent the brother of the emperor of Austria, a well-meaning but weak man named Maximilian, over to be emperor of Mexico, with a French army to support him. But the Zapotec Indian Juárez, with the help of the half-Indian Porfirio Diaz and others, defeated Maximilian after the French had abandoned him. They had him shot, and that was the last time Europe tried to introduce royalty into the western hemisphere.

A map showing possessions remaining in the hands of Spain after the
Louisiana Purchase.
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Porfirio Diaz

Porfirio Diaz was the greatest of the sixty-six presidents Mexico has had since the revolution. He remained in office for thirty-four years. As already mentioned, Diaz was partly of Indian blood. He was born a backwoodsman, in the state of Oaxaca. After studying law he fought in the war between Mexico and the United States. He remained in the army for a while after the war, went back to law, and gained increasing prominence until he was elected president in 1876. He united the various chieftains by convincing them that if they did not stop fighting among themselves the United States would intervene. He organized the _rurales_, a kind of country police on horseback who made Mexico safe for travel. He persuaded foreigners to invest money in industrial developments, increased the number of schools, and improved Mexico in many other ways. But he was a very stern ruler, and did not allow the mass of the people much individual liberty.

Diaz was elected president for the eighth and last time in 1910. By then he had become a deaf old man, so that a rich landowner named Madero was able to drive him out. He went to Europe to spend his last years, and we are glad that he, unlike most presidents of Mexico, was not killed. With all his faults he did much for his country. Indeed, as soon as Diaz’ dictatorship was over, Mexico fell back into its old state of civil war. Madero was assassinated two years later. Among the men who since that time have ruled Mexico, as president or by some other name, was Carranza, who defeated the bandit generals Villa and Zapata and was recognized as president in 1915. He was actually elected president the following year, but was driven out of office and shot in 1920. Then came Huerta, then Obregón, then Calles.

The new Mexican constitution allows a man to be president only once, for a four-year term.