Santa Cruz of the Etla Hills

Everyone visiting Mexico has seen the country Indians in the markets of the larger towns. Their ill-fitting, once-white, cotton clothes are ragged and dirty; the men have uncut hair and craggly beards and torn straw hats with high crowns and wide brims. The women wrap themselves in dark blue shawls, the familiar rebozo, and sit on the ground in the market streets, with their bare feet tucked under them. They offer a few tomatoes, or some embroidery, or a basket of beans, or two or three clay water jars, or a burro-load of firewood or charcoal for sale. The visitor is told that they come on foot from many miles away. Except for the different wares they sell, they all look alike. Such as these are the people of Santa Cruz Etla when they come to market in Oaxaca City. But not so at home in the hills. Here they are people of great dignity and importance. They are “householders.” They call each other by their first names preceded by the titles Don and Doña. Greeting each other on the ravine trails, they shake hands all around with the deepest courtesy. Everyone assumes responsibility in the town government, entertains guests in his house yard with dignity, and carries on his affairs with the poise of a well-to-do farmer in the United States. This for five days of the week. Then on Saturday he takes his products to market to get cash for his few store-bought necessities. There, in the market of Oaxaca, he is suddenly a poor, ragged Indian, indistinguishable from all the other ragged Indians of Mexico. Don Amado resented this and determined that his people should not remain nonentities. They would have respect because they would become citizens of a separate community, not just a barrio of San Pablo, a nearby city of some 300 souls. Having made this decision, the Sage of Santa Cruz, community leader and the only adult in the village of thirty families who could read, set about getting a charter to give legal status to Santa Cruz as a town. Seven years later, in 1930, the Mexican government instituted a program for rural improvement and inadvertently helped Don Amado toward the realization of his dream by granting him permission to erect a school building in his community. By 1934 the village had built itself a school-house and had its first teacher, 19-year-old Rosita. That summer Santa Cruz Etla had an honored guest — la professora Americana Doña Elena who came from Los Angeles, California, to study the sociological details of life in Santa Cruz Etla. She became so deeply interested that she returned for extended visits during the next two decades. She came to know the people of Santa Cruz Etla as individuals, she shared their daily lives, their hopes, and their homes. So her sociological study is a warmly human account of the daily lives and adventures of her Mexican friends who met twentieth-century educational techniques under sixteenth-century conditions. As yet, none from Santa Cruz Etla has fulfilled on Amado's life-long dream that Santa Cruz would produce another Benito Juarez, the Abraham Lincoln of Mexico, who began life as an illiterate Zapotecan Indian in the hills beyond Santa Cruz Etla and who went on to become a highly educated lawyer and a champion of Indian rights in the days of Carlotta and Maximilian. But who knows? Such a leader may still come from the next generation of students in the school of the town of Santa Cruz Etla. About the Author Dr. Helen Miller Bailey, a native of California, was educated at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Southern California. She is now chairman of the social science program at East Los Angeles Junior College. During the past twenty-five years Dr. Bailey has traveled extensively in Mexico, Central America, and South America, and is co-author of Our Latin American Neighbors, Your American Government, and Latin America: Cultural and Political Development, a textbook to be published by Prentice-Hall in 1959.