Chapter VIII: Varied Products and How They Are Sold

To the average stay-at-home American, Mexico is only a sun-scorched desert. He usually knows only about the northern section of it, so much like the thirsty parts of Texas and Arizona. His imagination pictures great stretches of half-desert framed in purple mountains.

In reality, Mexico has a great variety of natural features and corresponding variety in climate and products. It has great snow fields which never melt, sandy wastes, highlands swept by cold winds, delightful temperate valleys, tropical jungles dense with vegetation.

Although snow falls on the mountain tops, there is really no winter. There are two seasons, the wet and the dry. The dry season (during our winter months) is generally the pleasanter. But the rainy season is not unpleasant, for it seldom rains long at a time. From June to September, there is a shower almost every night, and in the morning the sky is a brilliant blue, every leaf and flower fresh and fragrant, as if the whole universe had been freshly washed. From October to May there is almost no rain. The great plateau has a kind of perpetual spring, except that the nights are cold. After sunset the policemen of Mexico City, and many other inhabitants of the high places, wrap a cloth about their throats and over their mouths, believing the night air to be bad for the lungs. A visitor from the north enjoys the air, day or night.

Rochester Photo, Mexico City

A collection of the wonderful fruits of Mexico—oranges as big as our
grapefruit, luscious figs, bananas, and some other fruits which we
in the United States never see.
]

Mexico Has Many Products

Almost everything can be grown in Mexico, because its elevation varies from sea level to a height of more than two miles. Wheat is grown in the highlands, two crops a year in some places. Most of it is brought to threshing mills in great fiber mats, usually on men’s backs. But corn, rather than wheat, is the Mexican “staff of life.” Some scientists think that Mexico is the original home of the maize or Indian corn; certainly this is Mexico’s chief agricultural product. It grows not only in the highlands, where there are evergreens and oaks, but also in the hot lands. Beans and barley, tobacco, cotton, sugar cane, coffee, sisal hemp, cacao, and many kinds of tropical fruit are grown in Mexico. Cattle and sheep are raised, timber is cut, precious metals and oil are obtained from the ground.

From sisal hemp, which grows best in Yucatan, are made ropes, hammocks, and much of the binding twine used in our wheat fields. Cacao comes in the form of large, flat, brown beans contained in pods that hang from the lower branches of a big bushy plant. The beans are dried in the sunshine, ground up, and mixed with sugar to make chocolate and cocoa.

Like the Chinese, the Aztecs used no wool until they learned to do so from Europeans. But they grew and used cotton, and they wove henequen, maguey and cactus fiber centuries before the Spaniards came. Henequen, a variety of sisal hemp, has the longest fiber and is therefore used for binding twine. From the cactus Mexicans take a thorn, with a long fiber attached, to use for rough sewing. Such a natural needle and thread has been common since before the days of Montezuma. Even after they learned the advantages of wool, the Mexicans wove by hand cactus fiber or hemp _sarapes_ and blankets with strange designs and colorings, as did the Indians of our Southwest. Now such things are rarely handmade, even in Mexico.

In the tropical parts of Mexico are great forests containing enough mahogany to make that wood as cheap as oak, if it were not so difficult to transport. The most valuable hardwood logs are too heavy to float downstream, and building railroads to bring them out is expensive. On the coasts are many kinds of palm trees, and large plantations of coconuts. The coconut meat, called copra, gives us a valuable oil. Excellent oranges are grown in the valleys; bananas, olives, indigo, and the chicle from which we make chewing gum are produced in the hot parts of the country.

In the United States we can buy the same things in cities and towns which are far apart. That is because we have great companies sending their products all over the country. But in Mexico, as in China, each village has its particular product, which sometimes cannot be bought anywhere else. Irapuato is noted for strawberries. Celaya makes a kind of fudge, which is sold in tiny wooden boxes. At Querétaro opals from the mines near by are peddled on the streets and at the station. Lariats and ropes are the specialty of San Juan del Río. The bad roads prevent towns from exchanging products, and so does the _acabala_. This is a tax levied by local officials on what is brought into a town to be sold.

The Spaniards taught the Mexicans, partly or entirely, how to make many things. But one art that is genuinely Indian is the making of pottery. Coming down directly from Aztec times, Mexican pottery to-day has almost the same forms and colors as the pottery found in prehistoric mounds. Much skill is shown in the modeling of _tipos populares_, little painted earthenware vases shaped like the human figure and often as small as our smallest dolls. They are complete, even to the tiny sandal thongs.

A Land of Markets

Many Mexican products are sold in public markets. When Cortés came to Mexico, he and his followers were amazed at the size of the Mexican markets; and so is the traveler of to-day. The tiniest village has its marketplace, where business is sometimes still carried on by barter, that is, by trading one thing for another without using money. In Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, where Mexico City now stands, Cortés says he saw sixty thousand people in the markets four days out of five and on every fifth day a hundred thousand.

Rochester Photo, Mexico City

A warehouse in a Mexican sugar mill. The juice of the sugar cane is
boiled down and run into molds of this shape, after which it may be
refined until it becomes the snow-white sugar that we use on our
tables.
]

Native markets are interesting sights in any part of the world, and very decidedly so in Mexico. Though there are stores much like ours in all the larger towns and cities, the common people do most of their buying in the market. This is usually a stone-paved yard covered by a sheet-iron roof. As it is seldom big enough to hold all the sellers and buyers, especially on the chief market day (often Sunday), the streets all about the market swarm with queer-looking people. One sees much vivid color and all manner of goods.

Ragged men and women squat on the narrow sidewalks or even in the street. Spread out before them are gay blankets, _sarapes_, clothing, old shoes, new sandals, rawhide thongs, lassos, native saddles, drygoods. For block after block are displayed sweetmeats, fruits, food (cooked and uncooked), native fabrics, precious stones and other stones that are merely pretty, matting, shells, feathers, baskets with colored designs, native herbs and medicines. Sections of the cobbled floor and street are covered with Indian pottery—jugs, pots, earthenware kettles.

There are big round cakes of what looks like maple sugar, though it is really ordinary sugar—what the Indian gets when he boils down sugar-cane juice in one of his crude kettles. We see a coarse kind of flour (it looks as if it had been mixed with gravel!), lumps of rock salt, a kind of native spaghetti, red and green peppers, red and black beans, ears of corn, shelled corn, corn meal, corn cakes, slabs of meat, fish which looks none too fresh. Chickens, their wings broken or their legs hobbled, lie forlornly on the stony ground. Ducks and turkeys are tied to the posts that support the roof. The turkey, by the way, is a native of Mexico. The Aztec name for it was _guajalotl_, a word which, as you might guess, came from the sound made by the gobbler. The Mexicans still call it _guajalote_ instead of using the Spanish name.

Every market has its babies, crawling about under foot or carried papoose-fashion on the mother’s back. Dogs, flies, noises, confusion do not increase the visitor’s pleasure, but the Mexican of the lower classes does not mind. He loves excitement. Everything is sold by count or measure instead of weight, just as in Aztec days, when almost the only money consisted of transparent quills filled with gold dust, T-shaped pieces of tin and copper, and cacao beans. Bundles of corn husks are used as wrapping paper. Many of the purchases are very small—ten peanuts bought for a cent, a handful of tiny potatoes, slices of squash and pumpkin, a cent’s worth of cabbage, eggs by the _mano_ (or “hand”) which means five at a time. If you wish to buy five dozen eggs, you will have to buy a dozen “hands,” paying for each “hand” at a time—for the Indians are not good at arithmetic.

About the streets wander peddlers of fowls, almost hidden beneath a dozen or more cages of chickens. Gamecocks are carried in little cigar-shaped baskets so that they cannot get hurt or hurt one another. Other peddlers have parrots, screeching parakeets, and canaries; still others oranges, bananas, mangoes, pineapples, pomegranates, and the large, oblong, pulpy fruit called papayas.

An Indian, driving his flock of turkeys to market with a long whip (much like the whip used by a Chinese duck herder), may sell one or two turkeys along the way, but he will not sell them all at once, even in the market. He seems to feel that this would cheat him out of his day in town. I know an American who tried unsuccessfully to buy all the broom corn in a market, at a higher price than the sellers could get for the finished brooms. They said that if they sold it all they would have no work to do for the coming month!

The Mexican Market Is a Queer Place

If you stop to buy a _tortilla_, all the other _tortilla_ sellers will begin to shriek that the _tortillas_ you are looking at are very poor ones, and that theirs are better. Beggars wander about. An old woman stoops to pick up three or four grains of corn that someone has dropped, and tucks them carefully away. You stop at an open-air restaurant in the market, where you perch on a narrow wooden bench and eat from a very rough table. But being a foreigner, you attract so much attention that you decide to dine thereafter at a hotel.

Then there are “readers.” Because most of the people cannot read, men and women who can are scattered through the crowd to do so. They read very fast indeed, usually from strips of cheaply-printed colored paper. Sometimes the strips are political arguments, sometimes poetry, sometimes stories. The readers are paid for their work by selling copies of each sheet after they have read it. Now and then a couple of musicians, one with a rude harp, another striking a steel triangle, sing mournful songs.