Page:Barbarous Mexico.djvu/139

Rh of others—snoring, tossing, groaning brothers and sisters in woe.

During my most recent visit to Mexico—in the winter and spring of 1909—I visited many of these mesones and took a number of flashlight photos of the inmates. The conditions in all I found to be the same. The buildings are ancient ones—often hundreds of years old—which have been abandoned as unfit for any other purposes than as sleeping places for the country's poor. For three centavos the pilgrim gets a grass mat and the privilege of hunting for a bare spot large enough to lie down in. On cold nights the floor and yards are so thick with bodies that it is very difficult to find footing between the sleepers. In one room I have counted as high as two hundred.

Poor women and girls must sleep, as well as poor men and boys, and if they cannot afford more than three cents for a bed they must go to the mesones with the men. In not one of the mesones that I visited was there a separate room for the women and girls, though there were many women and girls among the inmates. Like a man, a girl pays her three cents and gets a grass mat. She may come early and find a comparatively secluded nook in which to rest her weary body. But there is nothing to prevent a man from coming along, lying down beside her and annoying her throughout the night.

And this thing is done. More than once, in my visits to mesones, I saw a young and unprotected girl awakened from her sleep and solicited by a strange man whose roving eye had lighted upon her as he came into the place. The mesones breed immorality as appallingly as they breed vermin. Homeless girls do not go to mesones because they are bad, but because they are poor. These place are licensed by the authorities and it would be a