Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 160, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 July 1910 — FROM OUT THE FAST. [ARTICLE]

FROM OUT THE FAST.

Some Natives and Indiana of Mexico Not Yet Modernised. ■Within all its wonderful awakening Intellectually and industrially, one runs across some curious examples s>f the reverse of all this here in Mexico, according to a writer in the Mexican Herald. ' v Some time ago I happened to be riding up the barranca of Naolinco, in the State of Veracruz. I knew by the distance and the direction in which I had gone that I could not be very far from Jalapa, so I was rejoiced when I saw in the distance the smoke of a little Indian hut. I at once rode up to it. A pack of half a dozen dogs heralded my approach and all the family hurried out to see the visitor. The family consisted of four generations. I inquired of a stout, ablebodied young man the way to Jalapa. He said he understood it was just over the ridge, but that he was-not sure, as he had never been there. Upon inquiry I found that not one of the family except the great-grandfath-er, a little, wizened old parchmentfaced Indian, had ever been there, and he only in the days when he roamed the hills as a guerrilla. I afterward found that it was only about five miles from there to Jalapa. In San Angel there is an old lady who keeps a very good restaurant on one of the main plazas of the city. A few days ago I dropped in there for lunch and she began to make inquiries about Mexico. I soon found out that she had not been to the capital for thirty years, though it is only eight miles distant, and she can go there at any time for 20 cents. What Is stranger still, she has not been to Tizapan, a neighboring village about a mile distant, for over twenty years. Yet she is a very active looking woman, slightly over middle age. She boasted, however, with evident pride, that a son of hers, who seems to have been the black sheep of the family, and consequently more beloved than any of the rest, had in his wandering been as far as Veracruz and had seen the great sea boats landing their cargoes on the wharves. Some three years ago I visited a tribe of Indians in the state of Guerrero who had never learned Spanish, and very few of whom had been outside their own little Indian district. The mayor of the place, a stout, com-manding-looking Indian, very dark of features, had never been ten miles from his home. So ignorant was, he that some years ago he wrote to the federal government threatening to go to the capital with his followers, some 2,000, and depose the president if the federal taxes were not lowered in his district.