Part 3

Under such circumstances marital fidelity on the part of the women is not, nor can it be, very deep-rooted, and frequently her seducers triumph over her virtue. However, if the husband surprises them and the woman succeeds in escaping him, he denounces her to the next court of justice and demands that she be given a certain number of blows. She invariably receives them quite resignedly, and after the ordeal returns peacefully to her domestic duties. If the woman is the offended one, she also goes before the judge and demands that her rival be treated to the same punishment. Any sickness that might befall them after this misadventure, they unfailingly attribute to witchcraft instigated by their offenders. Witchcraft enjoys such wide popularity among Indian women that there is hardly one among them who cannot relate one and even many cases of the black art in her family. To their minds superstition and credulity go hand in hand, and if one tells them of some strange occurrence ascribed to enchantment, they believe it as readily and as firmly as if it had happened to themselves or as if they had witnessed it. And if one immediately afterward asks them whether it is day or night, they will answer doubtfully, even after having looked at the sun--so wrapped up in the tale have they become.

They are very fond of dancing and of music, but they do not perform the former either gracefully or freely, nor have they any variety or art in its execution. They have no talent or gift for playing an instrument either. They are wont to sing in their idle moments or even while at work, but sadly and in a monotone.

The woman who finds herself pregnant works until the very last moment before the child is born, and resumes her tasks immediately afterward, as soon as the baby is attended to. They leave their children so much to themselves, and give them so little care, that they are forever creeping around on the floor in all the mire and dirt, and always completely naked. A diaper and a tiny _hipil_ are all they get for the first few days of their life. Around wrists and ankles they occasionally will tie tiny cords made of blue cotton to protect them, so they say, from epilepsy. Those who can afford to do so will hang a little rosary of beads interspersed with wooden honey-berries around their necks and put tiny earrings in their ears.

A pregnant Indian woman will not go outdoors during an eclipse, in order to avoid her child being born with spots or ugly birthmarks on its body; nor do they visit women who have just given birth to a child, because it is their belief that the babies would become ill with pains in their bowels.

As soon as the child is six months old they name a godfather and a godmother for the ceremony of opening the baby's limbs for the first time. To this end they set a table with some kind of pottage, and the godfather makes nine rounds of the table, with the baby placed astride one of his hips, which is the way in which it will be carried thereafter by its mother. Then they place in the child's hands, if it is a girl, a needle, a spindle, and the implements with which they weave their cloth; if it is a boy, he is given a hatchet, a machete, and other implements he is expected to use when grown up. These godparents enjoy the same distinction as those at the christening.

The women do not care about knowing their own age, and they keep track of the age of their children only until they have attained about six or eight years; after that they forget it. Although they grow into young manhood or womanhood very quickly, really old age comes late, except in the appearance of the women, who at the age of thirty-five look like women of forty-five.

Their most common diseases are pleurisy, intermittent fevers, and jaundice, while fits, fainting spells, and hysterics are exceedingly rare.

As a rule the women are abstemious, economical, and very hospitable. They love work, and are fond of raising chickens and turkeys, which they sell in order to enable them to buy what they most need, or else they prepare such fowl for banquets, marriages, christenings, the day of All Souls, or for the novenas which they celebrate for the Holy Cross or the saint of their special devotion. They do not fancy all manner of necessities, nor do they pretend to live on the work of their husbands; rather they work constantly in order to dominate them, and in this they succeed generally, at least to a certain degree. They will upbraid them if they undertake anything without asking their advice. They do not forget offenses they may have received until they are avenged. In their old age they are liable to commit small insignificant thefts, and they especially seem to like to become mendicants, even though they do not need to be. They seem to do this as a kind of compensation for what in their earlier days they may have given to the poor.

Sentiments of gratitude do not last long. However, we must in this case always except those who were reared in the homes of white people. With few exceptions (when perhaps poor methods or little care in their education, or perchance bad example and ill-treatment dominated), these Indian girls are virtuous, assiduous, disinterested, and very well-disposed toward all the different branches of service and ready to learn whatever they are taught. They are modest, and are fond of dressing themselves nicely and decently. They are so affectionate, true, and grateful, that many a time they grow old in the service of one family, and if this family meets with misfortune and perhaps becomes impoverished, they will go to work outside to help support them, of which I could mention many cases. Just the opposite happens with the men, who, although they were educated in a white family from early childhood, and many a time with the same care as the white children, the cases are rare that they do not gradually drift apart, become estranged, give themselves up to vice, and finally forget their benefactors entirely.

DRESS

The ordinary costume of the men consists of a shirt of white cotton like ours, worn outside the white drawers of the same material, which are wide and reach to the calf of the leg; a belt, white or in colors, is worn around the waist under the shirt; a kerchief; a straw hat, and sandals consisting of only soles which are adjusted to the foot by cords of agave fiber, complete his costume. While at work in the field they take all their clothes off and wear only a loin-cloth, which they call _huit_, consisting of a piece of cotton cloth fastened around the hips, the points passing between the thighs to be fastened to the belt below the navel. From this belt hangs the sheathed machete on the left side.

When they go out, the Indian women wear on their heads either a piece of cotton cloth of about half a yard in width by two and a half yards in length, the ends of which hang down the back, or else they tie a red kerchief around the head, a very bright red being their favorite color. A _hipil_ of cotton is fashioned like a wide sacque-coat, with an opening in the center to put the head through, fitting around the neck, having openings on the two sides for the arms. This _hipil_ reaches to about the calf of the leg, falling on a skirt or petticoat, also of white cotton, three or four fingers longer. It is fastened around the waist under the _hipil_, which falls loosely over it. The hem of both the skirt and the _hipil_ are very often roughly embroidered in blue or red thread. For traveling they wear sandals like the men.

LANGUAGE

The Indians of Yucatan speak the Maya language, though somewhat adulterated through contact with Spanish. Several Spanish expressions have gradually crept into their idiom, especially in cities and principal towns where the Indians are in almost constant intercourse with whites and mestizos. Many among them can speak Spanish perfectly well, but as a rule they avoid it, and will answer in Maya to those who speak Spanish to them.

STATURE, PHYSIOGNOMY, COLOR

Generally speaking, the Indians of Yucatan are of about the same stature as all intertropical races, of a round face, straight black hair, rather coarse, not very pronounced eyebrows, very little beard or none at all, a low narrow forehead, black and expressive eyes, a somewhat flat nose, small but outstanding ears, protruding cheekbones, a regular mouth with thin lips and beautiful teeth, a stout neck, broad chest and shoulders, arms, thighs, and limbs of robust and muscular build. Their hands and feet are small, and the toes of their feet stand closer together than the heels. They have no hair on their bodies except on the head. Their color is a copper-brown, darkened through constant exposure to the sun, especially as they go about almost totally naked. The color of the women is therefore much lighter, and this is also the case with such men as have been reared from childhood in homes of the white people. Among the women there are some very pretty ones, slender in form, with an airy but graceful carriage, and a very sweet voice; but the hard work to which they are subjected from early childhood causes them to lose their beauty at an early age. There are also some truly fine types among the men.

SAVAGE TRIBES

Of real savage tribes there are none in Yucatan. After the greater part of the peninsula, cities as well as villages, had been reconquered from the possession of the Indians who had taken them during their insurrection in 1847, which was general, the most tenacious and unruly ones among them settled in the eastern part of the peninsula, where they have built several towns, the principal one being Chan-Santacruz. From these fastnessess they frequently sally forth to attack and even to raze our absolutely defenseless villages. These attacks cause frightful suffering not only to members of other tribes and races, without regard to sex or age, but they are at times even greater among those of their own race, who at one time or another have either absolutely refused to join their ranks, or, after following their lead for some time, have deserted, and returned to live in peace among the white people.

Another and by far the most numerous band of those rebellious Indians went to settle in the south of the peninsula, and by virtue of the treaty they celebrated with General Vega have given up all hostilities, although they remain in complete independence of national as well as of state authorities, and in peaceful business intercourse with this city (Mérida), and also with Campeche and other points in close proximity to their abodes. Colonel Juan Sanchez Navarro drew a map, which he presented, together with his report, before the government of Yucatan on April 12 of the present year, on which map he gives an approximate idea of the localities on the peninsula still occupied by rebellious Indians who maintain a hostile attitude and those who have agreed to peaceful intercourse. The first mentioned he calls the eastern group, and the last named the southern one.

SANTIAGO MENDEZ. Mérida, _October 24th, 1861_.

NOTE BY ANTONIO GARCÍA Y CUBAS

After having written about several groups of aborigines who inhabit the central part of the republic, I wish to extend these notes with the aid of documents in my possession to the Indians of Tabasco and Chiapas.

The customs, habits, and inclinations of all those Indians in general do not, with any certainty, evoke any hope for the improvement of their race and their subsequent utility and usefulness to the nation. The task I have set for myself is a very delicate one, and there may exist a great many people who will attribute to lack of patriotism the frank statement of many defects in our population; but I observe that our nation is not moving toward its aggrandizement with the alacrity and speed which the progressives among the authorities wish to see. Therefore I consider it necessary to study and point out the defects. I do not wish it to appear as if the conceptions expressed in these lines were imputations of my own imagination, and I wish to state, therefore, that whatever is said in this report is extracted from official documents in my possession.

The aborigines living in the towns and villages of the district of Jalpa, and the same may be said of the rest of the Indians of Tabasco, despite their docility, prefer the wild, uncivilized life of the mountains to the advantages of communal life, if by so doing they are able to evade all public responsibilities and duties. They come together only for their religious festivities, and on all such occasions they are given to drunkenness and gluttony to such a degree that they contract very serious diseases which in a great many cases hasten their demise. With very few exceptions they live in complete vagrancy, and they propagate without respecting any degree of blood relationship. They insist on curing their diseases with all sorts of roots and plants, which, however, mostly impair their health, causing great mortality, especially among children. This may be regarded as the principal cause why very few among their number reach the age of fifty years.

The aborigines who inhabit the borders to the river Usumacinta and its tributaries are for the greater part natives of Yucatan, and are like all the rest of their kind, very fond of drinking. The Indians of Tenosique, about forty years ago, were known as very honest and trustworthy, but their intercourse with the rebels and emigrants from Yucatan have demoralized them to a great extent.

These and other defects, with but a few honorable exceptions, are revealed in the documents treating of the Indians of the district of Comitan, state of Chiapas, which, however, I am not going to enumerate, so as to avoid repetitions, and by so doing make this article altogether too long.

All the above mentioned shows the decadence and general degeneration of the aborigines, as compared with the very scant elements of vitality and vigor that might help in the movement toward progress in our republic. The same customs, the same reserve and diffidence which characterized the Indian of colonial days is manifestly still his today under the so-called protective laws of the republic, which barely give him the title of citizen. Yet, as I have stated before, I do not belong to those who despair of his ultimate civilization, and I believe that the most efficacious means of effecting this is by crossing his breed or race by way of colonization, introducing other nations and elements to come in contact with him.

That this efficacious means of stopping the infinite defects which retard, if they do not hinder, the natural progress of our nation, has not been attained, to my idea, lies in the fact that so far no protective laws have existed which, founded on prevision, afford guaranties and procure work for colonists. There are no laws that fix the boundaries of the immense stretches of waste-land within our country, nor a careful study of climate, geology, and production. There is not, to my knowledge, any report establishing the best methods of making all our territory productive either through sales or the renting of all lands that cannot be tilled by their original owners. Our own elements, as we have tried to demonstrate in this article, are either heterogeneous or too scarce and insufficient to accomplish the task of carrying the nation onward on the road of aggrandizement. Hence it is, according to my idea, colonization, and colonization alone, that may serve as the final remedy for our national ills.

If we had today laws such as I have had reference to, we would at this very moment see European colonists arrive continually, attracted by hopes of a splendid future which our fertile soil and our salubrious climate offer to the industrious and enterprising man. Our population would increase daily at the same pace with the United States of Brazil and Buenos Aires, where European immigration forms an element of prosperity.

It remains for our government to fix in the most decisive way the answer to this question in the interest of the future of our country.

ANTONIO GARCÍA Y CUBAS. Mexico, _May 1st, 1870_.

NOTES ON THE SUPERSTITIONS OF THE INDIANS OF YUCATAN

INFORME CONTRA IDOLORVM CVLTORES DEL OBÍSPADO DE YVCATAN.

MADRID, 1639

BY PEDRO SANCHEZ DE AGUILAR

The abuses and superstitions in which those Indians of Yucatan believe and the abuses which they cherish are mostly inherited from their forebears, and are as numerous as they are varied in kind. I am including in this report all I was able to investigate, so that they may enable the curates to disapprove them publicly, and in their sermons to reprimand the Indians on account of them.

They believe in dreams which they try to interpret to suit the occasion.

On hearing the cawing (or cackle) of a bird they call _kipxosi_, they interpret it to mean poor success to whatever enterprise they are engaged in at the time. They consider it as a bad omen or foreboding, as the Spaniards do with the female fox or the cuckoo.

If, while the Indian is traveling, he stumbles over a big stone among a pile which had been dug up to build or level a road, he venerates it by placing on the top of it a little twig, brushing his knees with another one in order not to get tired. This is a tradition of his forefathers.

If he happens to be traveling near sunset, and he fears that he will arrive late or even at night at the village he is bound for, he will drive a stone into the first tree he finds, believing that this will retard the setting of the sun. Another superstition to the same effect is the pulling out of some of his eyelashes and blowing them toward the sun. These are superstitions that came down to him by tradition from his forebears.

During lunar eclipses they still believe in the tradition of their forefathers to make their dogs howl or cry by pinching them either in the body or ears, or else they will beat on boards, benches, and doors. They say that the moon is dying, or that it is being bitten by a certain kind of ant which they call _xubab_. Once, while at the village of Yalcobá, I heard great noises during an eclipse of the moon which occurred that night, and in my sermon the next day I tried to make them understand the cause of the eclipse in their own language, according to the interpretation from the Philosopher: "The lunar eclipse is the interposing of the earth between the sun and the moon with the sun on top and the moon in the shadow." With an orange to represent the sphere of Sacrobosco, and two lit candles on either side, I explained to them plainly and at sight what an eclipse really was. They seemed astonished, and quite happy and smiling, cured of their ignorance and that of their forefathers. I gave orders to their chieftain (caçique) that he should punish in the future all those who made a noise on such occasions.

They also call certain old Indian shamans when a woman is in labor, and, with words of their former idolatry, he will enchant her and hear her confession. They do the same with some other patients. I could not find out all about this, for which I am very sorry.

There are some Indian medicine-men who, with similar enchantment, are supposed to cure the bites or stings of snakes, especially of the rattlesnakes, of which there are a great many here. The victims of such bites are sometimes delirious, and often the flesh around the wound will decay until they die. The remedy the wizards give them, according to what I heard, is to make them eat human excrement or drink the juice of lemons, or else they will take a domestic fowl and place its beak on the wound, and have it suck in this way the poison of the snakebite. The hen or chicken will of course die, and they immediately replace it by another live one, and repeat that until all the poison is absorbed.

When they build new houses, which occurs every ten or twelve years, they will not inhabit nor even enter them unless the old wizard has been brought even from a distance of one, two, or three leagues to bless it or consecrate it with his stupid enchantment. This, however, I have only heard, and I am now sorry never to have recorded it personally.

They are fortune-tellers, and they perform this feat with a heap of grained corn, counting always two and two grains, and if it comes out in even numbers, the fortune-teller will continue counting one, two, or three times over until it comes out uneven, bearing all the while in mind the main facts or reason for which he had been called on to tell the fortune, _vera gratia_. Once a girl ran away from home, and her mother, like any true Indian woman would have done in a similar case, immediately called one of those fortune-tellers, who drew lots on all the different roads until the fortune told of or pointed to a certain road the girl had taken and where she would be found. They sent out to look for her and found her in the village to which that road led. I punished that wizard, who was a native of a village at one league from Valladolid, and while I examined him with patience and slowly, I found that all the words he used in that so-called fortune-telling, while he counted the grains of corn, were no more than "Odd or even, odd or even" (_huylan nones, caylan pares_). He could not even tell me whether those words were meant as an invocation to Satan. In fact, he seemed not to know what they meant, for this particular wizard was a very great simpleton, almost imbecile.

In this city of Mérida it is publicly known that there exist several Indian sorceresses (witches), who by using certain words can open a rosebud before it is time for its opening, which is given to the one they wish to attract to their lascivious desire. They let him smell of it, or they place it under his pillow; but should the person who gives it to him smell its perfume, she is said invariably to lose her mind for a long while, calling to the one she expected to inhale it, and in whose name the rose was opened by the witch--a worthy matter which serves as medicine as well as punishment, especially if it hits the double mark. It has also been assured that the Indian women of this city are wont to throw a certain enchantment into the chocolate which is ready for their husbands to drink, and by it they become bewildered. This I only heard however, and I could not vouchsafe its truth.

I will also note here what I saw as a child, and that is that they used to drown in a hole young puppies of a breed of dogs they raise as pets as well as for food. These are a kind of dogs, with but little or no hair at all, which they call _tzomes_.[14] It is an old Jewish dogma of _cosher_. See the Apostle, _ut abstineant se a suffocatis_, etc.--that they abstain from the food of animals dying by smothering or any kind of natural death.

OF THE RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OF THE INDIANS OF YUCATAN IN 1545

REPORT OF FRANCISCO HERNANDEZ

When our people discovered the kingdom of Yucatan they found crosses there, and one cross in particular which was made of stone and mortar, of a height of ten palms, and was erected in the center of a court or enclosure, very prominent and fair, and crowned with battlements; it stands alongside of a sumptuous temple and is very much frequented by a great number of people. This is on the island of Cozumel, which lies near the mainland of Yucatan. It is said that this cross was really adored as the God of Water or Rain; as often as there was a drought they went to sacrifice quail before it, as will be told later. When asked whence or through whom they had first heard of that sign, they replied that a very handsome man had once passed through their country and that he left it with them, that they might always remember him by it. Others, it is said, answered that it was because a man more resplendent than the sun had died on that cross. This is referred to by Peter Martyr in chapter I of his Fourth Decade.