of miracles came about, and a multitude of celestial apparitions came in support of the new worship, because of which the astonished Indians could not but believe that their gods, along with their monarchs and rulers, had been defeated in a just war.
Missionaries dedicated themselves and, with the aid of troops, made wondrous conversions. The religious constructed their convents in high places like forts and gave those buildings all the solidity necessary to resist in case of attack. Very rare are the temples and houses of the clergymen that do not suggest the reasons that led the founders to make them works of fortification. They were together in them during the night, and by day they occupied themselves with gathering the Indians into settlements. It is clear that their sermons and preachings were not at first able to have any effect, because as they did not have the gift of languages, it was not easy to make their listeners understand dogmas, mysteries, and doctrines that assume many preliminary lessons. Catechisms and small books of rules were created in the languages of the land, not so the Indians could read them, because they didn’t know how, but rather to repeat them in the pulpits and to make the people memorize them. There is not a single version of the sacred books in any language of the land; there is not a basic book that contains the fundamentals of the faith. But how could these works exist for the Indians, when their conquerors themselves could not read them? What I want to show by this is that the religion was not taught to those men, nor did they become convinced of its divine origin through proofs or reasoning; the entire foundation of their faith was the word of their missionaries, and the reasons for their belief, the bayonets of their conquerors. The Inquisition could not understand the motives of the Indians. Such was the Indians’ state of degradation and so strong the idea that was held regarding their incapacity,
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that never could they be persuaded that an Indian was able to be the creator of some heresy, or even be the stubborn sectarian of any doctrine whatsoever. This exception came to be a protection, as a concession in favor of the Indians, owing to the judgment that had been formed of their stupidity.
Besides the tribute that the Indians paid to the royal treasury, or to their encomenderos, other ecclesiastical contributions with the name of obvenciones were created. They were exempted from the tithe and the parochial fees because their exploiters had carefully calculated that a man who possesses nothing, nor has more needs than the basics, could pay little of the tithe. The calculation was very correct, because in effect the Indians did not have territorial properties, or any kind of industry, generally speaking. They lived and live in huts covered with thatch or palm fronds, whose size is generally from fifteen to sixteen feet in length, by ten or twelve in width, oval in form. There, of course, are gathered the children, the domestic animals, and an altar on which are the saints or household gods. In the middle is a fire that serves to heat the water in which corn is cooked, their sole food, with few exceptions. There are not five among a hundred who have two garments, which are limited to one long shirt of ordinary cloth and some sandals; their women or daughters, dressed with equal simplicity or poverty, do not know that inclination so natural to their sex of looking good in front of others. In the same proportion referred to previously, there are not property owners, and they are content with gathering thirty-five or forty fanegas of maize per year, on which they live satisfactorily. When, because of some labor or day work, they have earned a small amount of money, they go to make some feast to the saint to whom they are devoted, and they expend their small personal money on fireworks, masses, feasts, and intoxicating drinks. The rest of the year they spend in idleness, sleeping many hours of the day in the warm lands, or in games of their liking in the delightful climates of the cordilleras. Two in a hundred learned to read; but today their situation has been greatly improved in this regard. In several provinces, the clergymen had such power and exercised such authority over the Indians that they ordered them whipped publicly when they did not pay the obvenciones on time or committed some act of disobedience. I have frequently seen many married Indians and their wives whipped at the doors of the temples for having missed mass on some Sunday or feast day, and this scandalous act was customarily authorized in my province!
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Those who were whipped were obligated afterward to kiss the hand of the person who whipped them.
In speaking of the ecclesiastical influence in the land and of the moral situation of this privileged class, it is impossible not to collide with interests sustained by superstition and created by despotism. The principle of national sovereignty, recognized subsequently in those lands, might have uprooted prejudices destructive of liberty and made presumptions to blind obedience disappear if the declarations of abstract doctrines alone, even the most solemn, were sufficient. The force of habits created for three centuries will still remain an obstacle, so that at mid-century, enlightenment and philosophy have to triumph over this colossus after a terrible and hard battle. In those lands, the persons of the bishops were, without hyperbole, as reverenced as the person of the great Lama among the Tatars. When he went out into the street, the Indians knelt down and bowed their heads to receive his blessing. The friars in the towns and small villages distant from the capitals were the teachers of doctrine and the masters of common lands, in the large cities, directors of the conscience of landowners and women. The convents of the Dominicans and the Carmelites possessed and possess riches of great importance in rural and urban real estate. The convents of the religious in Mexico, especially the Conception, the Incarnation, and Saint Theresa, possess in property at least three quarters of the individual buildings of the capital, and the same happens proportionally in the other provinces. So one can be assured without exaggeration that the wealth that the clergymen and religious of both sexes possess amounts to the annual proceeds of three million in income. Put this revenue in the weight of the balance with respect to their influence, and one is able to calculate approximately what it will be among a poor population where properties are very badly distributed.
Now I enter into another delicate subject that can be considered one of the elements of discord in those countries and that will offer great obstacles to their legislators, depending on the degree to which they abandon infantile and frivolous questions and concern themselves more deeply with the true interests of their patria. I speak of the distribution of lands that the Spaniards made and the way those lands are divided today.
The Spanish government had to make concessions of lands to those persons who had contributed most to the conquest of that rich and beautiful
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territory. Naturally, the conquerors selected the best situated and most fertile plots of land in the order in which each one was believed to have the right or did have the right to receive this kind of compensation. The rich and considerable possessions of the Counts del Valle, de Santiago, San Miguel de Aguayo, the Marshall de Castilla, the Duke of Monteleone, and others occupy an immense and arable territory. The other rural farms that surround the towns and cities, which belong to the convents and pious establishments, have their source in royal concessions, others in testamentary bequests, gifts inter vivos, and some few come from contracts of purchase and sale. The third class of large landowners is that of families descended from rich Spaniards who bought, in distant times, lands from the government or from Indians when they had an extremely low price, and they were successively augmented until they formed haciendas that today are worth from a half-million pesos to two million, like those of the Reglas, Vivancos, Vicarios, Marquess del Jaral, Fagoagas, Alcaraces, and others. The fourth class is that of small landowners, who have rural farms whose value is not more than between six and fifteen thousand pesos, acquired by purchase or inheritance or other similar title. Here is how the greater part of the lands of the Mexican Republic were distributed, especially those that surround cities or great population centers. All these possessions are in the hands of Spaniards or their descendants and are cultivated by Indians who serve as day workers. Of the seven million inhabitants that will now occupy that immense territory, at least four are Indians or people of color, among whom nine-tenths are reduced to the state I have discussed before. Consequently, there does not exist in that land that gradation of fortunes that constitutes a common scale of
