BarbarousMexico JOHN KENNETH TURNER

62 BARBAROUS MEXICO
marriage within its domain, but for the henequen planters
of Yucatan all things are possible. To a Yaqui
woman a native of Asia is no less repugnant than he is
to an American woman, yet one of the first barbarities
the henequen planter imposes upon the Yaqui slave
woman, freshly robbed of the lawful husband of her
bosom, is to compel her to marry a Chinaman and live
with him
\\re do that," explained one of the planters to me,
"in order to make the Chinamen better satisfied and less
inclined to run away. And besides we know that every
new babe born on the place will some day be worth anywhere
from $500 to $1,000 cash!"
The cultivated white woman, you say, would die of
the shame and the horror of such conditions. But so
does the brown woman of Sonora. No less a personage
than Don Enrique Camara Zavala, president of the
"Camara de Agricola de Yucatan," and a millionaire
planter himself, told me:
"If the Yaquis last out the first year they generally
get along all right and make good workers, but the
trouble is, at least two-thirds of them die off in the first
twelve in on tlzs !"
On the ranch of one of the most famous henequen
kings we found about two hundred Yaquis. One-third
of these were men, who were quartered with a large
body of Mayas and Chinamen. Entirely apart from
these, and housed in a row of new one-room huts, each
set in a tiny patch of uncultivated land, we discovered
the Yaqui women and children.
We found them squatting around on their bare floors
or nursing an open-air fire and a kettle just outside the
back door. We found no men among them, Yaquis or