The Children of Sanchez (6 page)

The major television programs are sponsored by foreign controlled companies like Nestlé, General Motors, Ford, Procter & Gamble and
Colgate. Only the use of the Spanish language and Mexican artists distinguish the commercials from those in the United States. American department-store retail practices have been made popular in most of the large cities by stores like Woolworth’s and Sears Roebuck and Co., and self-service supermarkets now package many American brand foods for the growing middle class. English has replaced French as a second language in the schools, and the French tradition in medicine is slowly but surely being replaced by U.S. medicine.

Despite the increased production and the apparent prosperity, the uneven distribution of the growing national wealth has made the disparity between the incomes of the rich and the poor more striking than ever before. And despite some rise in the standard of living for the general population, in 1956 over 60 percent of the population were still ill fed, ill housed, and ill clothed, 40 percent were illiterate, and 46 percent of the nation’s children were not going to school. A chronic inflation since 1940 has squeezed the real income of the poor, and the cost of living for workers in Mexico City has risen over five times since 1939. According to the census of 1950 (published in 1955), 89 percent of all Mexican families reporting income earned less than 600
pesos
a month, or $69 at the 1950 rate of exchange and $48 at the 1960 rate. (There are 12.50
pesos
to the dollar.) A study published in 1960 by a competent Mexican economist, Ifigenia M. de Navarrete, showed that between 1950 and 1957 approximately the lower third of the national population suffered a decrease in real income.

It is common knowledge that the Mexican economy cannot give jobs to all of its people. From 1942 to 1955 about a million and a half Mexicans came to the United States as
braceros
or temporary agricultural laborers, and this figure does not include “wetbacks” or other illegal immigrants. Were the United States suddenly to close its borders to the
braceros
, a major crisis would probably occur in Mexico. Mexico also has become increasingly dependent upon the U.S. tourist trade to stabilize its economy. In 1957 over 700,000 tourists from the United States spent almost six hundred million dollars in Mexico, to make tourism the single largest industry in the country. The income from the tourist trade is about equal to the total Mexican federal budget.

One aspect of the standard of living which has improved very little since 1940 is housing. With the rapidly rising population and urbanization, the crowding and slum conditions in the large cities are actually
getting worse. Of the 5.2 million dwellings reported in the Mexican census of 1950, 60 percent had only one room and 25 percent two rooms; 70 percent of all houses were made of adobe, wood, poles and rods, or rubble, and only 18 percent of brick and masonry. Only 17 percent had private, piped water.

In Mexico City conditions are no better. The city is made more beautiful each year for U.S. tourists by building new fountains, planting flowers along the principal streets, building new hygienic markets, and driving the beggars and vendors off the streets. But over a third of the city’s population lives in slumlike housing settlements known as
vecindades
where they suffer from a chronic water shortage and lacking elementary sanitary facilities. Usually,
vecindades
consist of one or more rows of single-story dwellings with one or two rooms, facing a common courtyard. The dwellings are constructed of cement, brick, or adobe and form a well-defined unit that has some of the characteristics of a small community. The size and types of the
vecindades
vary enormously. Some consist of only a few dwellings, others of a few hundred. Some are found in the commercial heart of the city, in run-down sixteenth- and seventeenth-century two- and three-story Spanish colonial buildings, while others, on the outskirts of the city, consist of wooden shacks or
jacales
and look like semi-tropical Hoovervilles.

It seems to me that the material in this book has important implications for our thinking and our policy in regard to the underdeveloped countries of the world and particularly Latin America. It highlights the social, economic, and psychological complexities which have to be faced in any effort to transform and eliminate the culture of poverty from the world. It suggests that basic changes in the attitudes and value systems of the poor must go hand in hand with improvements in the material conditions of living.

Even the best-intentioned governments of the underdeveloped countries face difficult obstacles because of what poverty has done to the poor. Certainly most of the characters in this volume are badly damaged human beings. Yet with all of their inglorious defects and weaknesses, it is the poor who emerge as the true heroes of contemporary Mexico, for they are paying the cost of the industrial progress of the nation. Indeed, the political stability of Mexico is grim testimony to the great capacity for misery and suffering of the
ordinary Mexican. But even the Mexican capacity for suffering has its limits, and unless ways are found to achieve a more equitable distribution of the growing national wealth and a greater equality of sacrifice during the difficult period of industrialization, we may expect social upheavals, sooner or later.

I
CAN SAY I HAD NO CHILDHOOD. I WAS BORN IN A POOR LITTLE VILLAGE
in the state of Veracruz. Very lonely and sad is what it was. In the provinces a child does not have the same opportunities children have in the capital. My father didn’t allow us to play with anybody, he never bought us toys, we were always alone. I went to school for only one year when I was about eight or nine years old.

We always lived in one room, like the one I live in today, just one room. We all slept there, each on his little bed made of boards and boxes. In the morning, I would get up and make the sign of the cross. I washed my face and my mouth and went to haul the water. After breakfast, if they didn’t send me for wood, I would sit in the shade. Usually, I would take a
machete
and rope and would go into the countryside to look for dry wood. I came back carrying a huge bundle on my back. That was my work when I lived at home. I worked since I was very small. I knew nothing of games.

My father was a mule driver in his youth. He would buy goods and transport them to distant towns for sale. He was completely illiterate. Later he set up a tiny stand on a road near the village where we were born. Then we moved to another village where my father opened a small general store. He had only twenty-five
pesos
in his pocket when he arrived there, but with that capital he began to work up his business. He had a
compadre
who sold him a large sow for twenty
pesos
and that sow gave him eleven pigs in each litter. At that time, a two-month-old pig was worth ten
pesos
. One was a gentleman with ten
pesos
then!
Pesos
were really worth something! And that was how my father began over again, with much perseverance and saving he lifted
his head again. He began to learn to reckon, to add figures for his accounts and, all by himself, he even learned to read a little. Much later he opened a really big store with a lot of goods, in the village of Huachinango.

I follow my father’s example and keep little notes of what I spend. I write down the birthdays of my children, the numbers of my lottery tickets, and what I spend on the pigs and what I earn from their sale.

My father told me very little about himself and his family. All I know about him is that I knew his mother, my grandmother, and a man who was my father’s half-brother. We didn’t know his father. I never knew my mother’s side of the family because my father didn’t get along with them.

My father had no one to help him. You know how it is, in some families they don’t get along well with one another, like, for example, my daughter Consuelo and her brothers. Some little disagreement comes between them and each one goes his own way. And that’s how it was with my father and his people. They lived apart.

In my own family we were more united, but my brothers grew up and left home, each one going his separate way. Because I was the youngest, I stayed at home. My oldest brother joined the army and was killed in an accident. His rifle went off and he killed himself. Then there was Mauricio, the next oldest, he had that store in Huachinango, the second store, because the first one closed up when the Revolution came. My brother Mauricio was in the second store when four men came to rob it. He grabbed one of them and disarmed him. But another one struck my brother from behind and killed him. He died quickly, his belly was ripped open. That’s two. Another one was my sister Eutakia. She died over there in Huachinango, when she was still young, about twenty years old. Then there was a brother of mine, Leopoldo, who died here in Mexico City in the General Hospital. So out of the five brothers and sisters—there were six, except one died very young; I was a twin—so there were five of us, and of these five I’m the only one left in the family.

My father was not a loving or affectionate man. Naturally, like the majority of heads of families, he was very economical. He never noticed exactly when I needed something, and in the provinces there wasn’t much to spend money on. There were no theatres, no movies, no football, no anything. Now life is fuller but at that time there was nothing. So every Sunday my father gave us only a few
centavos
to spend.
There are all kinds in this world and not all fathers spoil their children. My father believed that too much attention to a child would ruin him. I believe that too. If one spoils a child, he won’t grow and develop and become independent. He will be fearful.

My mother was born in a small town, I barely remember the name of it. She was a person who didn’t talk much and because I was the youngest, she never told me anything. My mother was a quiet person, a woman with a great heart and she gave me much affection. My father was harder, stricter, more energetic. My mother was a decent and upright woman, conscientious about everything, including her married life. But my parents had their quarrels because my father had another woman and my mother was jealous.

I was about seven years old when my parents separated. The Revolutionaries had already sacked the store … the business was finished, the family was finished, our home was broken up, and naturally, I went with my mother and with my brother, who worked as a
peón
on a sugar
hacienda
. I, too, worked in the fields. Two years later my mother got sick and my father came on a
burro
to see us. We were living in a very poor little house. It had a roof only on one side of it; the other side was uncovered. We borrowed corn because we really had nothing to eat. We were very, very poor! There were no medicines of any kind for my mother, no doctors, no anything, and she went to my father’s house to die. So their reconciliation took place at the very end.

Well, when my mother died, my tragedy began. I was about ten when I went to live with my father. I stayed there for two years and then left home to work. We had no stepmother until much later, at the very end. I had already left home when this happened. My father married a woman there, a woman who robbed him, took everything away from him and threw him out into the street, she and her brothers. They were about to kill him one night, for his money, but some neighbors stopped them, and then the woman left him. They had had a legal wedding. The woman, together with the people there, took the house and everything from my father.

Then he bought another little house on the other side of town, the same town, and he went into business again. But there he got deathly ill. Yes, at times we men want to be very strong and very
macho
, but at bottom we aren’t. When it is about a question of morality or a family thing that touches the very fibers of the heart, it hurts and a
man cries when he is alone. You must have noticed that many people drown themselves in drink and others grab a pistol and shoot themselves, because they cannot bear what they feel inside. They have no way to express themselves or anyone to tell their troubles to, so they grab a gun and that’s all. They’re finished! And at times those who believe themselves to be
machos
are really not so when they are alone with their conscience. They are only braggarts of the moment.