Identifier: barbarousmexico00turn (find matches)
Title: Barbarous Mexico
Year: 1911 (1910s)
Authors: Turner, John Kenneth
Subjects: Mexico -- Politics and government 1867-1910 Mexico -- Economic conditions
Publisher: Chicago : C. H. Kerr & company
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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ted on the streets or in the parks, but on the floors of cheap tenements or lodging houses. Possibly this is an exaggeration. From my own ob-servations, however, I know that 100,000 would be avery conservative estimate. And at least 25,000 pass thenights in mesoncs—the name commonly applied to thecheapest class of transient lodging houses. A meson is a pit of such misery as is surpassed onlyby the galcras, the sleeping jails, of the contract slavesof the hot lands—and the dormitories of the Mexicanprisons. The chief difference between the mesones andthe galeras is that into the latter the slaves are driven,tottering from overwork, semi-starvation and fever—driven with whips and locked in when they are there;while to the mesoncs the ragged, ill-nourished wretchesfrom the citys streets come to buy with three preciouscopper centavos a brief and scanty shelter—a bare spot tolie down in, a grass mat, company with the vermin thatsqualor breeds, rest in a sickening room with hundreds
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O 2 % < ^ s 2 ^. ~ V. THE COUNTRY PEONS AND THE CITY POOR 117 of others—snoring, tossing, groaning brothers and sistersin woe. During my most recent visit to Mexico—in the winterand spring of 1909—I visited many of these mcsoncs andtook a number of flashhght photos of the inmates. Theconditions in all I found to be the same. The buildingsare ancient ones—often hundreds of years old—whichhave been abandoned as unfit for any other purposes thanas sleeping places for the countrys poor. For threeccntavos the pilgrim gets a grass mat and the privilegeof hunting for a bare spot large enough to lie down in.On cold nights the floor and yards are so thick withbodies that it is very difficult to find footing between thesleepers. In one room I have counted as high as twohundred. Poor women and girls must sleep, as well as poor menand boys, and if they cannot afford more than threecents for a bed they must go to the mcsoncs with themen. In not one of the mcsoncs that I visited was th

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