EL PODER DE NEGOCIACIÓN DE VENDEDORES O PROVEEDORES

The tension between the primitive life of the Indian and the intrusion of Catholicism is a recurring theme in Porter's Mexican works. She seemingly delights in the Indians' preference for the non-Christian god, yet in her published version, "Xochimilco", all references to Xochitl and to religion are removed. In "Children of Xochitl" she celebrates the Indians' continuing bond with their religion. The fact that there are seventeen churches in the town, in varying degrees of decay, used for the non-Christian worship of Indian gods pleases Porter. It is significant that her most lyrical and optimistic depiction of how the Indians lived, "Xochimilco", excludes religion. Walsh, in his article "Identifying a Sketch by Katherine Anne Porter", speculates that Porter might have wanted "Xochimilco" to be a more limited account of her visit there, dealing only with the externals of what she saw while in "Children of Xochitl" her observations led Porter to consider how the Indians live.34 The published version is more utopian, and one wonders whether Porter felt that by including religion in "Xochimilco" she would dilute the utopia. Walsh and Alvarez suggest in the Uncollected Early Prose o f Katherine Anne Porter that Porter removed the mythological framework of the goddess Xochitl so as not to offend her readers with her anti-Christian bias (73).

In "Children of Xochitl" the Indians dominate the landscape but the choice of the word "children" reinforces the idea of a state of prelapsarian innocence, and the Indians' non-participation in the economic fabric of modern-day Mexico. So calm are the lives of the women, in particular, compared to those of outsiders that: "There are no neurotics among them. No strained lines of sleeplessness or worry mar their faces"(82). Each woman seems incapable of thinking, let alone worrying: "There is a trance like quality in her motions, an unconsciousness in her sharpened profile, as if she had never awakened from a pre-natal dream"(83). This unthinking state starts early: the children, we learn, are "playing inconsequently, without toys or invention, as instinctively as little animals"(81). Porter's descriptions portray the Indian as an instinctive creature, bound to the earth. On one hand, they appear passive; yet all the details of their lives show a great deal of autonomy and control. "Children of Xochitl" is more ambivalent than the later te x t because it raises questions which are eliminated in "Xochimilco" by its relentlessly positive and unquestioning approach.

In both versions, however. Porter includes an anecdote about the Indian boatmen which serves as a metaphor for their harmonious lives. They avoid colliding under a low stone bridge: rather than rushing under the bridge first, each boatman gives way to his colleague with the utmost politeness: "'Have a care, comrade!' says one, when he is 34 Walsh in "Identifying a Sketch by Katherine Anne Porter": 557.

crowded a little too closely. 'Pardon me!' says the other, and somehow in the midst of the work he finds a hand with which to doff his shaggy hat, and to make a bow"(84). Porter reproduces this detail in "Xochimilco", only changing the "shaggy hat" into a "tattered sombrero". The portrait of the Indians, particularly in "Xochimilco", paints an Edenic tableau which prefigures the triumphant murals of the painters Diego Rivera (1 8 8 6 - 1957), Josée Clemente Orozco (1 8 8 3 -1 9 4 9 ) and David Siquieros (1 8 9 8 -1 9 7 4 ), who all glorified the Mexican Indian's way of life. Walsh points out that Porter did antedate the moralists - Rivera did not return from Europe until July 1921. What is significant, however, is that Porter in these sketches, and in the earlier "The Fiesta of Guadalupe", creates in words the same idealised images the moralists would later paint. It is a bipolar world which shows the Indians' suffering and exploitation on the one hand, and on the other, their joyful celebration of life.35

Where "Xochimilco" contains no reference to religion, and "Children of Xochitl" shows how the Indian has appropriated the props of Catholicism and turned them successfully to his own use, "The Fiesta of Guadalupe" describes Indians whose acquiescence to Catholicism has stripped them of their dignity. Written barely a month after Porter arrived in Mexico for the first time in November 1 9 2 0 , it is her observation of the Feast of the Virgin held on December 12 each year. "The Fiesta of Guadalupe" is Porter's study of Indians who have been utterly repressed by the Catholic Church, and her profoundly bleak account of the fiesta is an indictment of the church rather than the Indians. Porter shared the revolution's hatred of the church.

Porter followed the Indians on their pilgrimage to the basilica: she watched the native dances outside, she accompanied the supplicants to the well where Mary, the Virgin of Guadalupe, was last supposed to have appeared to Juan Diego, and then she went into the cathedra 1.36 Porter does not, however, share the Indians' faith. She is appalled by the degree of their physical sacrifice for such a meagre return; "I followed a great crowd of 35 lbid:556.

36 The Virgin of Guadalupe was Mexico's first indigenous saint and is still the most popular: her image occurs in churches all over Mexico. The legend of the Virgin's appearance to the christianised Indian, Juan Diego, in December 1531 is particularly potent. According to the legend, Juan Diego was walking over a hill - formerly dedicated to the Aztec earth goddess Tonantzin - on his way to a monastery when the Virgin

appeared to him and told him to build a church on the hill. The Bishop, Juan de

Zumarraga, was unimpressed until the Virgin reappeared on December 12, and told Juan Diego to gather roses from the intended site of the church and take them to the bishop. Juan Diego put the flowers inside his cape and when he opened it before the bishop the image of the Virgin was imprinted on the cape. The cape now hangs above the altar and is the pilgrims' goal. December 12, the anniversary of the second appearance, is the one celebrated by the pilgrims, who often complete the last miles on their knees as an act of particular penance or devotion.

tired burdened pilgrims, bowed under their burdens of potteries and food and babies and baskets, their clothes dusty and their faces stained with long-borne fatigue." 37 The fact that the pilgrims have walked for days, "for the privilege of kneeling on these flagged floors and raising their eyes to the Holy Tilma"(35), Porter considers degrading. This time she peppers her te x t with negative adjectives: "doleful", "awful", "tired", "burdened" and "reasonless". Even the colourful serapes of the Indian men, the women's distinctive costumes and the traditional dances they perform outside the church do not give her any Joy. Novyhere in this description is there the enchantment Porter felt a few months later when she visited Xochimilco.

Critics have referred to Porter's description of the Indians' blind submission - "There is a rapt stillness, a terrible reasonless faith in their dark faces"(35) and "I see the awful hands of faith"(36) - to prove Porter's disillusionment with Mexico and the Indians. Her disillusionment is, however, with the organised religion of Roman Catholicism, which controls its followers and has subjugated the Indian:

It is not Mary Guadalupe nor her son with his bleeding heart that touches me. It is Juan Diego I remember, and his people I see, kneeling in scattered ranks on the cold floors of their churches, fixing their eyes on mystic, speechless things. It is their ragged hands I see, and their wounded hearts that I feel beating under their work- stained clothes like a grand volcano under the earth and I think to myself, hopefully, that men do not dream forever (37).

Porter sees the Indian under siege from all sides, but most significantly from the church, as she explained in "The Mexican Trinity". In an acutely accurate summation of the impossible task of the revolution. Porter concluded that Mexico was controlled by "the great triumvirate. Land, Oil and the Church" which, combined with external pressures, left the revolution with little room to manoeuvre. The church was the linchpin of the triumvirate as she explains:

If the oil companies are to get oil, they need land. If the Church is to have wealth, it needs land. The partition of land in Mexico, therefore, menaces not only the haciendados (s ic )... but foreign investors and the very foundation of the Church....

The recent encounters between Catholics and Socialists in different parts of Mexico have been followed by a spectacular activity on the part of the Catholic clergy. They are pulling their old familiar wires, and all the bedraggled puppets are dancing with a great clatter.... For the peons there is always the moldy, infallible device: a Virgin - this time of Guadalupe - has been seen to move, to shine miraculously in a darkened room!....

The peons are further assured by the priests that to accept the land given to them 37 "The Fiesta of Guadalupe" in Uncollected Early Prose o f Katherine Anne Porter. 33. The piece first appeared in El Heraldo de México on December 1 3 ,1 9 2 0 . It was also included in the The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings o f Katherine Anne Porter.

394 -3 98. Page references here are to the Uncollected Early Prose o f Katherine Anne Porter.

by the reform laws is to be guilty of simple stealing, and everyone taking such land will be excluded from holy communion - a very effective threat (402-3).

Porter was born into conservative Protestantism. She converted to Catholicism in 1906 when she married her first husband, John Henry Koontz, and remained a Catholic for the rest of her life. As she grew older, she seemed to embrace the church once again, but as with other things in her life, what she appeared to like about the Catholic Church was its trappings: wearing a crucifix, and home visits by the clergy when she was no longer well enough to leave her house. However, as "The Mexican Trinity" and "The Fiesta of Guadalupe" show, Porter was vehemently anticlerical while she was in Mexico and remained appalled by the Mexican church's cynical exploitation of the Indian.

The outrage Porter felt on behalf of the Indian cannot be overemphasised. Where critics have sought to explain her despair in Mexico solely as the result of her disillusionment with the revolution's progression, they should re-examine her works in the light of her repeated and continued attacks on the Catholic Church, which she consistently portrayed as corrupt and debased. Her description of the Indians in "The Mexican Trinity" is meant not to denigrate the Indian, but rather to explain how the Indian has become so submissive: "... this inert and slow-breathing mass, these lost people who move in the oblivion of sleepwalkers under their incredible burdens; these silent and reproachful figures in rags, bowed, face to face with the earth; it is these who bind together all the accumulated and hostile elements of Mexican life"(402).

Centuries of oppression have defeated the Indian, and the Catholic Church has played a crucial role. An uncompleted short story from 1922, "The Dove of Chapacalco", reinforces the idea that Porter was preoccupied with the corruption of the Catholic Church in Mexico. Porter worked on the story in Texas after she left Mexico for the first time in August 1921.38 The story illustrates the degeneracy of the church. Porter based her archbishop of Chapacalco on the conservative archbishop, Francisco Orozco y Jiménez of Jalisco, who was opposed to land distribution. She describes the archbishop in her plot outline as an "extorter of money from the Indians". The dove of the title, and a precursor to Marla Concepciôn, is Vicenta, a young Indian girl who has been forced to become the archbishop's mistress. In "The Dove of Chapacalco", Vicenta is aware that she owes her freedom from the convent to the archbishop, but she also realises that life with the archbishop is a different form of servitude. Vicenta wants complete freedom and once the revolutionary, Angel Gômez, helps her escape from the archbishop, she leaves him because he, too, will not grant her freedom. The story, ostensibly a "love" triangle, also chronicles the archbishop's attempts to hold on to his dwindling power by resorting to any 38 It appears for the first time in print in Uncollected Early Prose o f Katherine Anne Porter. 1 0 7 -1 3 0 .

means of exploiting the Indians. Porter leaves the reader in no doubt as to the depth of corruption to which the archbishop has sunk:

In his way, the Archbishop was an esthete, who loved the subtle flavored essences of beauty a little decayed, mingled with the rancid taste of his powers and cruelties.

It was this confusion of aromas that pleased him most in his love for Vicenta ... the soft handed Indian girl who could read Latin, who clawed him like a tiger kitten in her brief angers, who went to Mass fresh from his arms and said her rosary devoutly (1 2 1 ).

"The Dove of Chapacalco" is Porter’s strongest fictional condemnation of the Catholic Church, but since it was neither completed nor published, its significance is much reduced. The archbishop is a cruel, decadent character whose exploitation of the Indians is sickening. In the strength Vicenta displays, she can be seen as an embryonic Maria Concepciôn.

"Maria Concepciôn" was written and published in 1922. As noted, the story was very important to Porter's development as an artist because it marked her move from journalism to fiction. It is also significant because it is the first time in American literature that a Mexican Indian was made the subject of a story. Walsh considered the story the most ambitious of all of Porter's fiction because: "As foreigner she attempted to penetrate the Indian psyche, a mystery to the average middle-class Mexican, and create an authentic Indian world of which her heroine is both typical product and exceptional member."39 The American in the story, the archaeologist Givens, is a minor character who elicits Maria's pity since he has no woman of his own to cook for him.40

"Maria Concepciôn" is the story of a woman who tries to define herself using an external and alien society's code of self-improvement. She fails, and having realised her failure, returns to her old Indian life. She is both a victim and a survivor. Critics, however, have invariably interpreted the story only as a celebration of both Maria's strength of character and the Indians' preservation of their way of life. Brinkmeyer, in

Katherine Anne Porter's Artistic Development, summarises the story as celebrating: "the deep-seated powers of the instinctual self and the traditional community to resist the usurping force of modern civilization".41 But the story might equally be seen as a reflection on the impossibility of change. If a strong character such as Maria cannot 39 In Katherine Anne Porter and Mexicor. 73.

40 Givens is thought to have been based on the Mexican anthropologist Manuel Gamio (1 893 -19 60), who is now considered to be one of the intellectual heroes of the Mexican Revolution. Porter based the archaeological descriptions in "Maria Concepciôn" on her visits with Gamio to Teotihuacân. Gamio was an expert on Mexican Indian culture and his

Forjando Patria (1 9 1 6 ) is credited, according to Walsh, with launching social anthropology in Mexico.