Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/574

566 In advance of the railway, and on its completion, there had been a great influx of Americans into Monterey, and the streets were tolerably full of disappointed fortune-seekers. They came here as to a new country, little realizing, until too late, that this very city was old when our republic was born, and that the Mexican, both Spanish and Creole, possessed an instinct for trade and a love for lucre as keen as the shrewdest Yankee in our country. Beyond establishing a few cheap bar-rooms, they had not accomplished much in the matter of business, and even though these charged a real for a glass of beer or lemonade, they did not seem to be making money.

Race prejudice is stronger here than in the interior, for the Border States have suffered more; and if any one imagines that the Mexican is disposed to allow the American to make a dollar, except by superior skill, he misunderstands the prevalent feeling. He is quite willing el Americano shall spend his own money in the building of railroads, tramways, and hotels, but he will resist strenuously any attempt to capture Mexican trade.

At the time of my residence in Monterey, the papers contained many bitter articles against "the North American invasion,"—el invasion Norte Americano,—some indeed quite able. The Revista, the leading journal, advocated government aid in favor of immigrants of the Latin race, and even of the Mongolian, as opposed to the Saxon, with strong arguments in favor of the first. The great Saxon wave that is now sweeping over Mexico is of course irresistible, and the Mexican's recognition of it, and of his own impotency in arresting it, tends to enrage and exasperate. But though it will be impossible to stay the progress of that southward-sweeping deluge, which threatens to obliterate race distinctions and even the autonomy of Mexico, yet it is most absurd for any American to go there thinking to wrest a living from the soil. In the plateau it is mainly sterile; in the tierra caliente, no unacclimatized immigrant can long survive the fatal climate, and in every portion there are Indians by the thousand ready to labor for less wages per week than would purchase the meals of an American for a day.

During the week of my stay in Monterey, four murders were