Page:Barbarous Mexico.djvu/245

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
FOUR MEXICAN STRIKES
213

blood of our forefathers, but rather that we inhabit a land of savage and brutal slave-drivers. Who can subsist on wages of three and four pesos weekly and discounted from that fines, house rent, and robbery in weights and measures? No, a thousand times, no! Because of such circumstances we petition our dear country for a fragment of land to cultivate, so that we may not continue to enrich the foreigner, trader and exploiter, who piles up gold at the cost of the devoted toil of the poor and unfortunate worker!

We protest against this order of things and we will not work until we are guaranteed that the fines will be abolished and also the maintenance of dogs, for which we ought not to pay, and that we shall be treated as workers and not as the unhappy slaves of a foreigner.

We hope that our fellow workers will aid us in this fight.

The Committee.

Tizapan, March 7, 1909.

The Tizapan strike was lost. When it was ready to do so, the company reopened the mill without difficulty, for, as corporation prospectuses of the country say, there is labor aplenty in Mexico and it is very, very cheap.

The Cananea strike, occurring as it did, very close to the border of the United States, is perhaps the one Mexican strike of which Americans generally have heard. Not having been a witness, nor even having ever been upon the ground, I cannot speak with personal authority, and yet I have talked with so many persons who were in one way or another connected with the affair, several of whom were in the very thick of the flying bullets, that I cannot but believe that I have a fairly clear idea of what occurred.

Cananea is a copper city of Sonora, situated several score of miles from the Arizona border. It was established by W. C. Greene, who secured several million acres along the border from the Mexican government