XV Morelia — The Capital of the State of Michoacan — Her Streets — Her Parks — Her Churches — Her Music
Morelia, State of Michoacan, Mexico,
December 12th.
The Congress of the great State of Michoacan, as big a state as ten West Virginias, with a population of six hundred and fifty thousand, is in session at the State capital, Morelia. It meets three times a week in the Palace. A learned member of the bar and a member of Congress, escorted me to the dignified body, and formally introduced me as “Señor Licénciado Eduardos, del Estado de ‘Quest Verhinia,’ de los Estados Unidos del Norte.” All the members arose to receive me. There is only one chamber. Its fourteen members make all the laws for Michoacan, always subject to the approval of President Diaz in Mexico City. Diaz decides who shall be the fourteen members. He instructs the Governor of the State to have elected the fourteen men whom he names, and those fourteen are always chosen, and no others. President Diaz also says who shall be elected Governors of the different States, and they are always elected.
After this Congress had saluted me and I had bowed in response, we all sat down in the handsome room. The fourteen were mostly small dark men with good heads. The President of the Congress was an old man with white hair, a wrinkled face and long white mustachios. He did most of the talking on all measures. He kept his seat while he talked. The first business before the Congress was “Reports of Committees.” Each member was a whole committee. Each committee made a report, and stood up, facing the President to make it. The chief matter under consideration was a railroad concession to Americans, involving a land grant of thousands of acres. The Congress will grant it because President Diaz says the railroad should have it. After an hour or more of talking, the Congress adjourned. The members came up and were introduced. I shook hands several times with each member and still more often with the President.
Adjoining the hall of Congress were several large rooms, the walls hung with portraits of the great men of Michoacan, who helped to make Mexico free, and who helped to destroy Maximilian. This fine city of thirty-five thousand people was formerly called Valladolid. But when the Spaniards shot the patriot, Morelos, ignominiously in the back, the people changed its name to Morelia,—for Morelos was their fellow-townsman,—and they clanged the church bells and made bonfires and illuminated their houses when the last Spanish Viceroy was driven from the land.
The señor by whom I had the honor of being introduced to the Congress, I afterward had the pleasure of meeting more intimately in his law office, Señor Don Licénciado Vicente Garcia, Senator, Judge, Counselor of State, and Lawyer profoundly versed in the curious learning of Spanish-Mexican law. He is a gentleman of the Old School, a cultivated Mexican of that small class among whom have been continuously preserved scholarship and learning, since the earliest advent of the few Doctors of the Law, who accompanied the first Viceroys to New Spain. Men ripe in mediæval scholarship, apart from the teachings and doctrines of the Canon Law, they have always formed a distinct class in Mexico, even as in Old Spain, and have jealously cherished that seed of intellectual independence from which has successfully developed the opposition of the State to the incessant and covert encroachment of the Roman Church.
In Señor Garcia’s library of well stored shelves I noted many curious and ancient vellum-leaved tomes, containing some of the earliest printed codes of Mexican law, as well as treatises in French upon the Napoleonic Code, and there were some few decisions, in French, of the Courts of Louisiana. There was also a Blackstone in English and a few newly bound law treatises in that tongue,—volumes belonging to his son, he said, who was taking a special course in English in the University of the State.
Don Licénciado Garcia is a short-set man with whitening hair and gray moustache and intellectual face. You at once know him to be the student and the scholar, although with dark glasses screening his eyes, he pathetically informed us that he was fast growing blind. Indeed, he can no longer see to write or read, but employs a reader and trusts to his son for all correspondence, thus conducting his large practice with eyes and hands other than his own. We found him a busy man, for in Mexico the courts are perpetually in session, and a case once on the docket is liable to be called at any time.
There are many such men in the Mexican Republic as Señor Garcia, and to them must really be credited much of the conservative disposition of the government. They are the conservators of scholarly liberalism, and form a community of intelligence and learning upon whom President Diaz can always rely to give assistance and direction in sustaining and preserving the stability of the Republic.
Morelia is a city older than any city of the United States. Its streets were paved before Boston was out of the swamps, and before Richmond was thought of. All Mexican cities are paved, every street, every alley. A great aqueduct, built on immense arches, brings an abundant supply of sweet, fresh water. There are many beautiful parks in these Mexican cities, all kept in perfect order at municipal expense. In them, flowering shrubs, roses, geraniums and heliotropes, grown to veritable trees, are ever in bloom; there are orange and lemon, pomegranate and fig, palm and banana trees; there are statues and flowing fountains, and great carved stone seats, all free to the people.
There is plenty of flowing water on these high tablelands, and already its power, harnessed to the turbine and dynamo, is giving the people free electric lights. The Mexican towns and the city governments are run for the benefit of the people. There are no monopolies. If President Diaz hears that a mayor, a city council, or a Congress is not running things as he judges they should, he just hints to the gentleman to resign. If he does not comply, a polite invitation requests him to come to the Capital and dine with the President. If he is not hungry and fails to come, then a few soldiers (numbering in one case a small army), come down and politely escort the gentleman to the dinner. He may be shot, he may be permitted to live quietly somewhere in the President’s city with a soldier for a life companion,—but he never goes home. An Ex-governor of the State of Guerrero has been living in Mexico City, with a soldier for a chum, these twenty years!
Mexican cities are clean. A man who doesn’t sweep his sidewalk, who disobeys a notice to keep it clean, may wake up in jail. There is no “habeas corpus” in Mexico. Once in jail, a man may stay there a lifetime. And Mexican jails are not pleasant places wherein long to abide.
Each State is divided into Distritos, corresponding to our counties. Each Distrito, instead of having a county court as do our West Virginia counties, has a Jefe Politico (Political Chief) appointed by the Governor. He keeps the peace, he runs the county. If he is a bad man, the Governor with the approval of President Diaz, may have the Jefe removed or shot. The Jefe (“Hefy”) within his Distrito has the power of life and death. If a citizen raises “too much hell” in his precinct, the first thing he knows he is taken out in the woods by a band of rurales—(rural police)—and promptly shot, and he is buried where he falls. A man thus arrested and shot is said to have “tried to escape and been shot while escaping.” No questions are asked. The Jefe rules his Distrito with a hand of steel in a glove of velvet, just as President Diaz rules the nation.
Mexico has an able, intelligent, if arbitrary government. She is awake. She is progressive. I have been amazed at the wealth and beauty, the cleanliness and comfort of her towns and cities, at the splendor of her capital, at the fertility and variety of her soils and climates,—the perpetual spring of Ario and Morelia and Toluca and Mexico City,—the eternal summer and tropical heats of the lowlands of the Tierra Caliente, while between the lofty highlands and the lowlands lie the temperate levels, the Tierra Templada, where are climates ranging from those of Cuba to Quebec.
Three hundred years ago Spanish civilization was ahead of that of England and Germany. But Spain and her colonies stood still. To-day our Teutonic peoples are in the lead. Progressive Mexicans, who have no love for Spain, know this, and are fast learning what we have to teach.
No one thing has pleased me more in this splendid, opulent country than to discover that everywhere men are eager to learn the American tongue. That language is taught in all public schools, in all the colleges. It is the hope and pride of every man of means to have his son able to speak English. In fifty years, or less, English will have largely driven out the Spanish speech, and none are more eager for this result than the progressive ruling men of Mexico.
Morelia has much civic pride, and above all else she is proud of her music; proud of her bands. Once a year the musical Morelianos have a competition among themselves, and the band declared the winner is sent to Mexico City to contest with bands from other cities for the musical pre-eminence of the Republic. Great interest is taken in these musical contests. For several years the champion band of Morelia has carried off the national prize. To play in the band is a mark of distinction, and the band leader is a local dignitary. The chief band plays in the plaza throughout each afternoon. This park is filled with fine trees, with many flowers, and has several fountains and comfortable seats, where you may sit and listen to the plash of the tinkling waters and the moving melodies of the band. These seats are free to all. Then, too, there are chairs for which the city sells the privilege, and the chairs are rented for cinco centavos (five cents Mexican, equal to about two cents United States) per hour, for a plain rough-bottom chair; vicenti-cinco centavos (twenty-five cents Mexican) for a big chair with arms. You pay your money, you sit in your chair and enjoy the music as long as you care to listen. Poor peones sit on the free benches; those who have the few centavos to spare rent a plain chair. The rich merchants and haciendados rent the big chairs, and sit there with their families gossiping and applauding the music and watching the circling throngs who walk around the square. The señoritas, three or four abreast, with chaperons, walk on the inside of the broad pavement. The dashing caballeros and rancherros, the dudes and the beaux, in their bravest adornment, walk three or four abreast in the other direction on the outside. Young gentlemen may never speak to young ladies upon the streets, but they dart burning glances at them, and the black eyes of the señoritas are not slow in their response.
I spent one morning viewing the markets and watching the city life on the streets. In Mexico your social standing is marked by the shoeing of your feet, the covering of your head; your boots and your hats are the two things a Mexican first looks at when approaching you. The Mexican loves to thrust his feet into long, narrow toothpick-pointed shoes; the smaller and daintier the happier he is. For a hat, the costly sombrero, for which fifty to one hundred dollars are often paid, covers the man of means; sometimes a hat may cost twice this sum. It may be of felt, or of expensive braided straw with a band of woven gold or silver threads about the crown. Generally, a large gold or silver monogram several inches high is on one side. I wore a pair of broad-soled, oil-dressed walking shoes, with big eyelet holes for the laces. Substantial and comfortable, they would have been quite correct in the States, but the passing throngs upon the streets stared with frank perplexity at these, to them, extraordinary shoes. My sturdy foot gear became the comment of the town. As I sat in the park in the afternoon, several groups of the young and fashionable came up, and pausing, gazed intently at my novel footwear. My hat, a comfortable slouch of the trooper type, also seemed to them of wonderfully little cost—“Only five dollars for a hat!” “Ciertamente! El Señor must have paid more than that!” The American trousers, not fitting tightly to the leg, were also remarked. It is complained, that the young men of wealthy Mexican families, who are now attending Cornell and Harvard and Yale, instead of going to old Spain or to France, return in these American clothes, and insist upon wearing these loose American trousers to the scandal of conservative fashion. Among the ladies, however, the American hat has not yet conquered the mantilla, and for this I have been thankful. The graceful mantilla is so attractive and sits so daintily about the black-braided brow of the señora and the señorita who pass you by!
It is against the laws of Mexico for the religious orders any longer to live within the Republic, but at Morelia there are said to be several of these orders existing clandestinely. A group of ladies, whom we met at the station of departure, all quietly gowned in black, wearing black tapalos—like a reboso but of more costly material—about their heads, were pointed out to me as a subrosa company of nuns.
Morelia is the seat of an Archbishop. The cathedral is a beautiful duplicate of that of Valladolid, in old Spain. It is kept in perfect repair. Within, it is resplendent with gold and silver and richly colored walls and roof. It possesses many beautiful statues of the saints and one of the finest organs in the world. The rich Archbishop is said to be worth more than six millions of dollars (Mexican). He is said to own thousands of fertile acres of the best lands in the State of Michoacan. (All of this worldly wealth the Archbishop holds subrosa, contrary to the letter of the law.)
There are several hundred churches in Morelia. Here Roman Ecclesiasticism looms large and makes itself attractive to the people. We attended a night special celebration of the Mass in a fine, large church, dedicated to Nuestra Señora de Guadeloupe. The church within and without was illuminated with thousands of electric lights. A full orchestra was employed, violins, cellos and mandolins, flutes, cornets, horns and trombones, a fine organ as well as a piano, while several hundred men and boys cassock-clad, chanted and sang in wonderful harmony with the exquisite orchestral music. Many of the voices revealed the highest cultivation, and some of the male sopranos rose strong and sweet and clear as the tones of a Nordica.
As we stood near the portal of the church, listening to the music and watching the multitude of worshipers, an Indian, wild as the Cordilleras of Guerrero, whence he came, timidly entered and paused in the marble portal as one transfixed. His hard, rough feet were without sandals. His red zerape hung in shreds over his tattered, once white garments. His shock of black hair had never known a comb; and even though at last he doffed his sombrero, it was some moments before he pulled it off. He came from the outer darkness. He stood in the blazing glare of the thousand lights, forgetting to cross himself, listening to the mighty melody of the great chorus and many instruments, staring at the brilliant scene. His eyes grew large, his face stiffened, his breast heaved. He conceived himself transported to Paradise! My Protestant missionary friend watched him as did I, and then turning to me, observed, “Can you wonder that the Protestant missionary is not in it, when he undertakes to compete with the sumptuous splendor and organized magnificence of ritual and edifice in the Roman Church? Our only chance is to open schools for the children, take them young and instruct them early, and then, perhaps, when they grow up, some few of them may have learned to adhere to the simple doctrine and plain practice of our Protestant teaching.”
The Jesuits here sustain the fine college of San Nicholas for men, where Hidalgo once taught and Morelos learned, and which, founded in 1540, boasts that it is the oldest institution of learning in the Americas. The Jesuits also maintain a large school for young women. They are endeavoring to resist the tide of progress which is so fast Americanizing the land. But even here the upgrowing generations are giving steadily increasing support to the policies of the enlightened and liberal men now guiding the destinies of the Republic.