The Harvest

Through the pale predawn, a chill wind swept down from the sierras of northern Mexico. By the river Santa Engracia, it rustled the small stands of russet corn that marked the Francisco I. Madero ejido (one of Mexico's some 14,500 communal villages), and kicked up dust patterns among the thatched huts that housed the colony's 52 families.*

In the half-open shack of young Jose Castillo, the wind fanned lingering coals that Joee and his wife Magdalena had heaped under their henequen cot the night before. Jose stirred, roused Magdalena. Soon a kerosene lamp was fluttering, lighting up the small cot where the four-year-old slept and the old orange crate, hanging from the roof, which cradled the baby. Odd bits of harness, bunches of chili peppers, the makings of a peon's tea (lemon and mint leaves, pecan bark), hung from the walls.

Rugged Path. Belly filled with tortillas, beans, one egg and coffee, Jose saddled the burro (cost: $1.50), and jogged off to harvest corn on the ten-acre plot that had become his seven years ago when the Lazaro Cardenas government divided most of the great feudal haciendas among the peons. Merced, a neighbor with whom Jose exchanged work, met him at the field. With vigorous strokes of their machetes they began felling the brown, dry stalks of ripened corn, four or five at a whack. Except to stop and lunch on the rice, tortillas, beans and chili sent out by Magdalena, Jose and Merced swung the machetes steadily until sundown. By that time they had cut and shocked two acres..

Before supper Jose wandered down the village street to buy supplies at Silva's store. Inflation had pushed up prices: beans from 2-c- to 7-c- a lb., rice from 4-c- to 12-c-. Jose figured the arithmetic of his economic life: his two crops of corn a year (total: 380 bushels) would net him $300. That was better than prewar, though not in relation to things bought. He would have enough to pay Silva for provisions advanced, spend some $30 on clothes for the family. Maybe he could buy a cow. But the electric lights and bathtubs that Mexico's social planners had dreamed of were far away.

Guns & Hatchets. At Silva's the talk was of political unrest. In nearby Ciudad Victoria, townspeople had demonstrated against the mayor whom Mexico's official PRI (Party of the Institutional Revolution) had "imposed." Some had actually attacked the Municipal Palace and battered down the doors with hatchets. Police had settled that with guns, killed one demonstrator. Jose listened, said little. PRI had helped to make him a freeholder, yet he blamed the party for letting the price of beans rise. He was good-humored-ly cynical about politicians and their fine cars and fancy women.

*Mexico's 1940 census showed that one-half of the country's 3,830,871 agricultural workers live on communal lands.

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