Respectable Sonora

...A Guaymas man still says that the rival port of Mazatlan, to the south, has the world's champion footpads...

...And central-mindedness cannot fail to grow where the current is constant between Mexico City and its states...

...I went to school in San Francisco...

...Awright...

...They come mostly from interior states like Chihuahua and Zacatecas...

...From Los Angeles leaves also the Mexican air liner...

...With his black eyes he raked an ancient bus and passdd between us again...

...In reminiscence, the attitude toward a Huerta is that he was a catharsis, toward Villa that he was a dull farmer whose sublimation was delayed until his few wild oats had been sown, toward the indicted group of the 1929 revolution that they knew what they wanted, but that it is no longer what any number of Sonorans want...

...Here there ain't a cleaner state than Sonora...

...Sure...

...Sonora, too far from Mexico City to be broken to the federal bit...

...Barkeeps wiping glasses in the cantinas are not worried yet, but the young people are not doing the brass-rail drinking...

...After the sergeant had listened, and committed the event to eternity on the blotter, would the word ever cause a flutter in the camp of the federal myrmidons...

...Whatever is the catalyst that precipitates stability in government, Mexico is fumbling for it...

...The great ranges of Sonora, where calves never see barbed wire till they are rounded up, where a ranchero is the focal point of trails, not of fences, have been discovered by the amalgamationists of business...

...Then we'll sentence him...

...Got any letters to banks...

...On Saturday night the black mantillaed girls amble around the plaza in front of the cathedral...

...From the angle of wasted pesos alone, it would be well if Mexico could have, as Emerson did in 1841, "a slight feeling •—the slightest possible—of the ridiculous" at the sight of a soldier in peace time...

...As a result a lot of foreigners have been pretending they've been held up and borrowing money to get home...

...I "An American, from Tucson, Arizona, and "^—^ Boston, Massachusetts...

...Or he is the same man grown a little older and little looser, with the same defects of preparation, with no land and a restless weathercock in his brainpan...

...in Sonora ain't a cleaner city than this one...

...In happier days, before the airplane adulterated the western yarn, when William S. Hart still crinkled up his eyes in the first-run houses, the story-book Sonora was filled with Riding Kids from Powder River, refugees from justice or outraged virtue...

...Revolution in Mexico is prohibition in America: a hub of opinion around which only bores revolve...

...A letter from Navahoa, whose isolation may be judged by the fact that the last Navaho rugs are now made there, can be opened within sight of Popocatapetl's snows the next day...

...In early February Ortiz Rubio, president-elect, left Los Angeles and went down through Sonora with a troop train preceding him and his own private car guarded by ready rifles...

...Get him...

...Lemme see your passport...

...Now the train leaves every day except Sunday, and the little boxes of cotton waste that ride underneath are first filled at San Francisco...

...We got him...

...Last fall the University of Mexico burst into print in the United States when its coach, a Yale man, called out the first college football squad south of the Rio Grande...

...Do you question everyone...

...The dullest people in the world, next to those in the now moribund night-club of New York, were formely to be found among the American thrill chasseurs who crossed the border at Laredo, Juarez (El Paso) Naco, Nogales and Tia Juana...

...Every aged seiiora is a restauranteure at heart...

...Will this be the decade when Mexico finds herself...

...The entire change in Sonora, and it may be fairly expected throughout Mexico, is perhaps best totaled as a change from a defensive, punitive attitude to an assertive, protective one...

...Yet in middle February Ortiz Rubio, presidentelected, was shot...

...Thence it chuffed southward through Magdalena, at whose shrine 10,000 Indians kneel in Easter week, Hermosillo, the capital, and Empalme of the great railroad shops, where with flame and steam in the night it greeted the train from the jungles of the south...

...I was measuring the excitement in the mind of an American police sergeant if an oiler from San Pedro reported a theft on the docks, or a New Orleans longshoreman lost a week's wages when he met a stranger out at Pontchartrain, or a Negro watertender rested in the wrong Hoboken doorway...

...The government has certainly taken a bond, however, that they will no longer gamble in Mexico...

...No jolly bohemian band of the forcibly expatriated awaits new members on the other side of the line...

...Aside from the American ownership in cattle control already mentioned, there is a new-found bonanza in fish...

...These sincere avowals show how stiff is the job waiting for the Mexican progressive...

...One potential danger remains in the underpaid army...

...How...

...They are underfed because they are underpaid...

...I know...

...Keno, roulette, their sisters and their cousins and their aunts have been proscribed by the government...

...This, says Sonora proudly, happened not here, but in the City itself, full as it is of Communists and other irregulars...

...In the summer they will teach their people, and four years hence they will come home to stay...

...We're leaving him in the calabozo for three months...

...They had won the scholarships that are assigned to Sonora...

...Communists and anti-Filipinists flourish less readily where law commands that four out of five employees in every enterprise be Mexican...

...And monopolies augur the herding of the minds under their control...

...Do I look suspicious...

...I asked the federal agent a week later, when I met him near the sugarcane corner of the public market...

...Every peon whose life impinges, however indirectly, on the artery of the railroad, is touched...

...Napoleon would shudder to see the dark little infantrymen, some of them apparently not over sixteen years old, sitting under an old railway car with their rifles on the ground beside them, rolling tiny brown cigarettes to top a doubtful dietetical structure...

...The Gulf of Lower California has long been known to sportsmen as one of the few accessible sea pools teeming with gamey fish...

...The reins of their control return like sunbeams to where the golden dollar rolls through the sky...

...In that event Mexico will have to make an Andorra or Monte Carlo out of Laredo...

...There are still a few of what medical symptomists call "hot red points," but they are in the cheeks...

...One does not move to the shade of the Chinaman's grocery awning when being barraged with a plain-clothesman's catechism...

...Although the contrast may or may not be a valid one, southwestern newspapers recorded early last month that five Indians who were rustling cattle near Douglas, Arizona, were pursued by cowboys and shot to death...

...Central-mindedness is venom to insurrection...

...Child-welfare laws that were already more humane than those of the southern states have been further tightened by the Sonora legislature at the meeting now in session, according to a ranchman senator...

...Six tall, young Yaquis, of the fierce tribe that flustered Mexican generals as late as Carranza, took the southbound for the capital, where they were to be students in the university...

...The officers wear beautiful, ironed-looking uniforms, with the gold emblem of line of duty like a split ram's horn hanging around their necks...

...We don't know who it is, but he's been sticking up sailors mostly...

...There are no wars in Sonora, and rumors of wars are facing the firing squad of disparagement daily...

...It is too hot for me there in the daytime...

...Yet in the same September something far more significant happened in Sonora...

...If this be sunset, not all our measuring the sky will tell us under what point in the arch we stand...

...If one wishes to gamble he must turn to the private chance palaces of the southwestern tuberculosis belt...

...Sonora, the mustang, has gone respectable...

...A revolutionista is an unwise, probably young man, whose parents have not money enough to send him either to cousins who live near the high school in Phoenix, Arizona, or to the University of Mexico...

...Such burning of their pay as there is takes place in the cylinders of a four-wheeled combustion engine from Detroit, not in their own alimentary canals...

...Over Agua Caliente's new race-track and golf course it whines, discovers the railroad in southern Arizona, and follows southward till a continent has been pinched into an isthmus at Guatamela City...

...But the young men who follow the giggling perfume wear pearl grey felts and blue serge and in the afternoons measure out heavy, soft, silver dollars in the Banco de Sonora...

...Now Guaymas, halfway down the Gulf and the midmost port of Sonora, is building the first big icing plant in Mexico...

...They speak high-school French when they do not want the madre to understand, and they have a calculating eye...

...What're you doing in Mexico...

...What do you say...

...The situation is a model, complete to scale, of the bootstrap-pulling impasse that hangs up international disarmament conferences, and inflates national debts...

...In December American newspapers flaunted joyfully a THE COMMONWEAL May 7, 1930 "revolution eighty miles west of Hermosillo...

...But we've had some reports that there was a hold-up man here, and the federal government put me on the case...

...They live and lounge in front of barracks, but they eat their meals where they can get them, from an all-sufficing salary of about $.77 a day...

...Whujja suppose...

...Just let him think it over awhile...

...In the public school this takes the form of poster barbs flung at alcoholism...

...They travel In pullman aloofness, while the cloaked soldiers lean silently on their guns at the platform's end, waiting for the lower-class coaches to be backed onto the train...

...Sonora, which used to boast freedoms that no parrakeeted Yucatan nor red-hilled Chihuahua dared assume...

...Well, we have to be particular who comes into Mexico...

...And already, though the plant is unfinished, more dugout canoes are paddling along outside the surf line of Sonora's beaches and there are more spearmen every day to plunge the harpoon through silvery five-footers...

...Probably not...

...Did you get the hold-up man...

...I guess you're awright...

...The attitude of another shows in what quarter the confident new wind lies: he asserts that within a generation Mexico will buy Texas back from the United States...

...Every other day, up to December, a pullman used to leave Los Angeles and cut the barbed wire of the border at Nogales, Arizona...

...Speak of it in Sonora and weariness gathers in your hearer's face...

...Mazatlan...

...It gets pretty hot here then...

...We cannot tell...

...When the proprietor left the room to buy himself a tortilla and a glass of warm goat's milk his lumberman friend, who apparently had heard of the antitestimonial drive in American advertising, whispered to me that the revolution was nothing more than a street riot...

...How is it that I never see you in the plaza...

...Visiting...

...We stepped momentarily apart to let the little soldier pacing in front of the calabozo pass us, his bayonet angling back in the sunlight...

...But the army cannot be demobilized until civil peace is intuitively a reality, and civil peace cannot be intuitively a reality until the army is demobilized...

...Mexican officers are taller and cleaner...

...Mexico sours in the mouth as a vantage point for vice, after a quiet discussion of two stud poker hands with a uniformed patrolman in a Tucson carnival...

...Another knows that Vasconcelos, Rubio's rival for the presidential palace on Chapultepec Hill, who now gives music lessons in Los Angeles to keep his son and daughter in a California college, planned while he was minister of education to sell Chihuahua, Lower California and Sonora to the United States...

...Have I that furtive look...

...American interest in it is excusable, for the American mind has been fertilized by linotype droppings of large capitals...

...It does not prove that Mexico is lawless, but that her president cannot be protected from a man with a sleeve holster any better than Mussolini...

...One must be polite over these things, thought Sonora, but the new president has not been told what Sonora now thinks of revolutionistas...

...Over her field kitchen, a brazier of live coals that glows softly red in the shadows at dusk, she makes many a tamale of chopped meat, mixed jelly-roll fashion with Indian meal and jacketed with a thick corn cob's overcoat...

...Perhaps it is the railroad...

...Every day twenty-four tons of dressed fish, strange and delicious, can be sent north in as many hours to Los Angeles (which, it will be admitted is the safest American city for the introduction of the exotic in anything, from deism to sea food...

...No, usually we get all the dope at the border immigration office in Nogales and Naco...

...Ranches that rule mesas, mountains, canyons and valleys wide as Rhode Island are being combined in giant yoke...

...The soldier turned precisely at the corner...

...Nope, he come from Texas...

...The army may become an anachronism...

...Later Sonoran fish will be eaten in Chicago...

...American funds support this factory, but it has also the very particular solicitude of high federal officials in a cooperation whose benefits are distributed to Sonora in terms of steady employment...

...Where was he from, Mexico City...

...The men are small, dark and all of a size...

...He's been stopping a lot of drunks, too...

...A sober, grizzled old hotel keeper, eager for more American custom, told me that his was the only antiseptic inn with running water and view of the revolution's stamping ground...

...Unemployment in Mexico can hardly approach for many years the crisis of tension that exists in the United States...

...But it seems now as though the flame that scorched is out, and the cool night, when in Mexico life breathes deepest, is at hand...

...When rodeos are on like that which flourished recently in Tucson, or Old Home and Revival weeks, like that held in Tombstone, there is open gambling under the nose of the police...

...Oh, they sent a lieutenant-colonel down on the job to help me...

...All that is over for good...