Are We Apt to Grasp New Ideas?, by Enrique Flores Magón (1914)
Article from ‘Regeneración’, January 31, 1914, Los Angeles
Through our short lecture tour that we were invited to make along the West Coast of this land of the “Free” from the American Bastille of McNeil’s Island, I have learned many valuable things about the doubts that the English-speaking radicals of this country entertain toward their brown-skinned Mexican brothers.
Now that our energetic and indefatigable Comrade William C. Owen, because of the heavy task that he has imposed on his shoulders, going out on the road lecturing and carrying on other kinds of useful work for the Cause, has been unable to send in time all his English copy for this issue REGENERACION, I dare to couple my poor English with the brilliant and powerful of his in this section, with my most hearty apology to the English language and its grammar, against whom I have not any ill feelings at all to willingly mangle them.
Two motives I have to go now alter the English language; one of them is not to leave too short of their usual reading matter to our readers of this section, and the other one to help Truth to brace up; no matter if I have to struggle like a Titan to make myself understood in a tongue that is not my own.
* * *
“The Mexicans, as a rule, are ignorant,” l have been frequently told; and as frequently asked, “Are they apt to grasp the New Ideas?”
* * *
It is true. We Mexicans, as a whole, are very ignorant and awfully “uncivilized,” too. A large percentage of Mexico’s population, about 65 per cent, do not know even how to put their mark under their names; they do not know either what an automobile is, or if you shall eat your pie with the aid of your fork or simply with all of the ten fingers of your hands. They are not mathematicians as many distinguished spellbinders as the Honorable Mr. Berger or the not less Honorable Mr. Debs and others of their like would like my poor ignorant Mexican bothers to be to let them have a right to live and to be free.
Yes, it is true. We “greasers” as a whole are very ignorant and awfully uncivilized, too. So ignorant that we cannot appreciate how beautiful and uplifting it would be to allow our masters to take away from under our feet the land that from time immemorial we used to own in common around our humble towns, which were known as “commonable lands,” and to which our forefathers and still many of us had the stupid idea of sticking to with all our might to make an independent and a free-of-care simple life, instead of going to the big cities to be educated in their sweat-shops and their slums as we should be if we were a little “wiser.”
If we were at least somewhat civilized, we would not be so blamed foolish as to be fighting to death now for the mere trifle of getting back all of our lands, our forests, our waters, our mines and everything else that very “civilizedly” have been taken away from us through chicanery, treachery and by means of force, at the point of bayonets, by the Mexican as well as foreign capitalists, who so kindly went down to Mexico to civilize us, whip in hand, and to develop that country, moved by their love for — the despicable “greaser”? Oh, no! but for — the profits that there were in it.
* * *
Yes, we Mexicans are very ignorant, uncivilized, uneducated. Millions of us never have stepped into one of those wonderful temples of science called schools, where we could have learned so many useful things as to hate other men just because they happened to come into the world by the other side of a line called frontier, or because they have a fair skin or an olive, black or yellow one; as to appreciate money above every other thing until to do the most dirty things on earth to get hold of it; as not to think a bit of others comfort and welfare, but in follow the self-exposing maxim: “First Number One,” as to learn how to make business so as to skin our neighbor “within the Law,” scientifically and, hence, most honestly, and to fatten at his cost; as to learn so many useful, brotherly, honest and highly civilized things on which to build up a prosperous, rich and happy community as this of Los Angeles or San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, New York, Chicago, etc., where only the chronic loafers are idle and die of hunger and the hot-headed, red-rabid anarchists and I.W.W.s dare to kick just for the fun of kicking.
* * *
Yes, indeed, we Mexicans are very ignorant, uncivilized, uneducated.
But let me tell you that there lies our strength and our aptness to grasp the New Ideas much quicker than the so-called civilized peoples.
Let me tell you, although it might sound funny to you, that our ignorance, our lack of civilization and of education is our greatest blessing and our greatest help to keep us from sinking into the mire in which the so-called civilized people have sunk under the present social system, and to digest the New Ideas quicker than they do.
I am speaking, of course, about the folks who have been away from the great industrial centers and who in Mexico form the greatest majority, being as it is largely an agricultural country, a fact that is widely known all over the world, which saves me the trouble of going into figures that I do hate so strongly, perhaps because they are the best weapon in the hands of our masters to leave us in the simple apparel of our first ancestors.
* * *
Our greatest blessing is, indeed, to be ignorant, uncivilized, uneducated!
Blessing, because that way our minds are like the mind of a child, pure, simple, honest, virgin, unspoiled by our so-called civilization.
Our greatest blessing is because that we do not have in our minds such a great number of prejudices and atavisms that you, my poor “civilized” brothers have in your minds. Because we have not to struggle first as you do with all our mighty will against those prejudices and atavisms to expel them from our brains in order to make room for the New Ideas. Because to assimilate the New Ideas, we have not to fight steadily and vigorously with our innermost souls for years and years and years as you have to do to get rid of the wrong ideas that they taught you in your schools since your childhood and the others you learned through your daily life amidst the mephitic [foul-smelling] environments of the fictitious civilization that you have “enjoyed.”
Having as we have our minds as a child’s, pure, simple, honest, virgin, unspoiled by the capitalistic so-called civilization we are apt to grasp the New Ideas far quicker than the “civilized” peoples.
* * *
Many a folk has told me that we are so religions, so fanatic, so church-ridden that only for that fact we are hopeless and so can’t take the New Ideas.
Perhaps we Indians and half-breed Indians, who form almost the entire population of Mexico, might be too religious to the eyes of our critics, but in fact we are not so much, at least at the bottom of our hearts.
In Mexico, contrary than in the United States of North America, you will not read on the Mexican money as in the American the “In God we trust.” In Mexico, contrary than in the United States, you will not find the black-crows called Chaplains in the military barracks, the war ships and the jails and penitentiaries and — to finish to fill up the cup! — being paid by the Government with money extorted from the working class to brutalize the working class.
In Mexico, contrary than in the United States, you will not find the President of the Republic as your clown Woodrow Bluff urging the people to pray…. to cure them from evils and other nonsenses! A President from Mexico never would dare to open his mouth to say such foolish things because he would know that he would he hissed and hooted by the “religious, fanatic and church-ridden” Mexican people.
In Mexico, contrary than in the United States, you will not find people apparently intelligent who will drop on their backs because of the fright that seizes them when you let them know that you do not believe in God. In Mexico, contrary than in the United States, you will not have to swear in court by a problematical God that you will say the truth, and you will not find a single judge who in open court would sentence a father to a $3 fine because he was teaching his own child that there is not any stupid thing as that that they call Santa Claus, as happened to a man somewhere in the Middle West, if I do not remember wrong, at the end of last year, and which news was transmitted by wire throughout this country and played up by “The Los Angeles Times” and other papers from different localities, in a prominent place and inside of a fancy box.
In Mexico, contrary than in United States….. But, what for to continue accumulating data upon data that could fill as many books as an encyclopedia?
There was a wise man in Mexico — and, by the way, this great thinker was a pure-blooded Indian, and therefore knew what he was talking about — who said: “The Mexican Indian might be very religious, if you please, but as soon as he gets into a pair of shoes he does not go to church any more,” — except when following his sweetheart to flirt with her to the shadows of the old saints, I should add, — “when he gets a pair of pants he forgets the church; and when his gets a coat, besides, he curses the church.”
Which means, in a few words, that if you get the Indian economically free, to hell goes the church and the old bonneted-and-skirted-crow together with it!
* * *
That is why the Mexican Liberal Party is fighting down in Mexico for “Land and Liberty.” Because the LAND, and nothing else, is the basis of Economic Freedom. Because HE WHO HAS THE LAND CONTROLS EVERYTHING ELSE, as mines, waters, forests, MACHINERY, means of transportation, etc., etc. And for this same “Land and Liberty” you Americans, Englishmen and every workingman from the world over, will, sooner or later, have to fight; and to fight it out to death or victory, as your brothers in Mexico are fighting, without flinching, tenaciously and desperately.
That is why [José María] Rangel and thirteen others of the finest type of men, all clear cut revolutionists, were on their way to Mexico to fight once more, when betrayed and cowardly trapped by such as a Campbell — who could not act otherwise for being so his idiosyncrasy of a parasite upholder of Law and Disorder — and who, Rangel and companions, are languishing now in the hideous jails of Barbarous Texas, waiting for you working men of all the world to come to their rescue, sending your vigorous protests to the imparters of injustice and your contributions to their defense funds, so as to save them from long terms in prison or from the scaffold to which Rangel and four more are openly threatened to be sent, most iniquitously and against all justice, by certain authorities and lackeys of the Capitalist class.
You know now how we ignorant, uncivilized and uneducated Mexicans are apt to readily digest and assimilate the New Ideas, the just ideas that will bring into existence that beautiful chimera known as the millennium by the Christians and that is nothing else, in fact, than a kind of society based on Freedom, Equality and Fraternity, in which the human being be politically, socially and economically free in the whole sense of the word.
And now that you know, would you deny your steady moral and financial support to the Mexican Revolution and to Rangel and the other thirteen gallant warriors of this first spark of the Universal Social Revolution?
Will you?
ENRIQUE FLORES MAGON.