Early last Saturday a sombreroed older man bought three cigarettes at Nacho Gutierez’s ample Aborrotes El Oso across from the Jocotepec municipal market. In line at the cash register a woman asked for two aspirina. Just down the street a bit later a child peeked over the splintered counter of a tiny store to ask for seven pesos of manteca (lard).
In the United States the number of people wishing they could do frugal shopping so easily is increasing. As if responding to such distant scenes, the U.S. media has stepped up its references to the 1929 Great Depression. This has stirred grudging interest in that unforgiving economic era.
Unsurprisingly, those who lived through those stark years, remember them differently than Internet-born iterations of that extreme time — a time that Mexico’s large underclass has seldom escaped. (Nearly 50 percent of Mexicans lived in poverty in 2010, according to a federally financed report.)
Great Depression realities, rooted in distant memory palaces, come back too easily to those who lived them. In rural Nebraska the Depression dragged on long after the rest of the country began to recover. But from its first days it began shattering vast swaths of families that had worked hard with a faith in continuing rational times. It tore through my family like a mean summer tornado. My grandparents survived the first wave of financial chaos. They continued to live in one of the state capital’s poshest hotels, bellhops walking their dogs twice a day. My grandfather, an alcoholic like his father, was a top executive of an insurance firm, also like his father. As a result, evidently, my father whom I was to meet only once, when I was fifteen, was a prodigal man, also an alcoholic, with an affinity for animals. Using his parents’ money, he set up a dog-breeding business, specializing in popular, expensive breeds. Then came a horse-raising and training enterprise, also specializing in expensive breeds. He was talented with horses — and very bad with money. As the deepening depression hit that family, both men increased their imbibing; my grandfather died pretty much broke. My grandmother, a gentle woman from a stiff, wealthy family (oil) that disapproved of her marriage, now was forced to seek their aid. My father, over-fond of expensive cars and travel, also dove into a bottle. He and my mother separated just before I was born. My mother, pregnant and accustomed to a heady life-style, was (I imagine) lost and fearful. She came from a modest background. Her father had been an Indian agent in the Dakotas.
None of this had anything to do with me. My mother, swiftly as possible, sought work. Luckily, she found it at Gold’s department store, commonly said to be the state capital’s most “elegant” (department stores were like that then). She became the hostess of Gold’s genteel “dinning room.” One of the waitresses had migrated to the city from a farm some distance away. Thus, my mother found a place for me to stay. The immediate idea, I believe, was lots of fresh air, fresh vegetables, hearty meals. I was a year old. For my care, she was to pay an amount that remained a mystery. Evidently, she often was late. I was moved from the first rural family — coming on thin times — to a ranch-like farm with gentler people. And then back to the first family. Such farm/ranches functioned on the principle of self-sufficiency. This one had only a single piece of motorized machinery, an aged Model-T, seldom used because of its delicate condition and because it used gas. The farm was built around livestock. Dairy cattle were a source of food and income: Milk, cream, cheese, butter and ultimately meat — most to be sold. Horse power made the operation go, gave us our transportation — buggy, wagons, hay racks, plows, discs — and made possible corn, wheat, alfalfa and sorghum planting and harvesting. Four Percheron draft horses could haul, pull up or out anything; two cattle horses were for the buggy, herding and swiftness — for run away cattle, bringing in the cantankerous breeding bull, for hunting predatory wolves, foxes and coyotes, and for hunting game.
When a brief lull came in the down-surge, a Model-A was purchased, a Farmall tractor and accompanying plowing, discing and planting implements. Much of it on credit. Government agricultural agents urged this: It would benefit farmers and the nation. Then the crash returned. I was a toddler when the head of the family, appeared carrying a small suitcase, wearing a cloth cap instead of his straw field hat, dressed in his go-to-church jacket and low-cut shoes. He walked down to the farm’s wide gate. Without looking back he went up the dirt road and over the hill. I never saw him again.
The changes were swift. Everyone we knew was shocked to speechlessness, then fierce words and tears by how brutal it was. They prayed and swore. Some called it holy vengeance, others the devil’s work. The preacher at the Lutheran Church, the only one nearby, tried to calm everybody. Few were reconcilable. Some were hysterical. Men who never drank got drunk. One man hung himself from his hay mow, another blew most of his head off with a 12-gauge. I rode in the back of the wagon when adults went looking for him after the telephone’s party-line reported him missing. Shot guns are messy.
While adults demonstrated their horror at what was happening, I was too little to be that way, though their fear scared me. I was too young to make comparisons. It was all just the way the world was. Impermanent. By then I’d been sent back and forth four times. I had seen my mother in her role as the hostess of Gold’s “spiffy” dinning room once. When she could persuade friends to bring her out to the farm, she’d talk to me in a quick, kind, searching voice. My grandmother came to visit. She too was kind, but farm life was a raw, disorderly world for her. For me, both of those people came from a different world, one I didn’t recognize.
None this is aimed at the sweetly sentimental, but to scrape away some of automatism, filleted and uninferential essence emanating from internet fare. Unknowing children often are good, if mere, observers, possessing no methods to compare disaster. I, for instance, did not know my mother until I was eight and half, when I went to live with her and the stranger she had married. I stayed with them until I graduated from high school. Then I moved on to find a more appropriate education and a profession in Los Angeles. By then I knew the Great Depression was a merciless human-made wreaking machine, both crude and complex, raw and insinuating. It did more damage than anyone could imagine — at least until World War II. The depression ended when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. Britain and France declared war against Germany. The U.S. was already recovering as Franklin Roosevelt out-smarted isolationist and pro-German factions in the U.S. The economy surged as Britain and other allies sought supplies from the U.S. The nation’s unemployment made a U-turn. Britain’s offer to pay for materials in gold elevated the monetary base, which in turn spurred the U.S. economy to the highest point since the depression began. Recovery was clearly solidified with the government’s 1940-41 Rearmament Program. The youngsters who went to that war were older than my generation. The depression, historians say, prepared them for a war of unparalleled dimensions.