THE MEXICAN HUT
@1994, by Kathy Green
[NOTE: I wrote this article not for a newspaper, but as an assignment for the Institute of Children's Literature. K.G.]
Suppose you lived in a one-room log cabin with a wooden floor and a fireplace. You warmed yourself by the fireplace in the winter, cooked your meals over the fire, sat on a hard wooden chair, and did your homework by a kerosene lamp or candle. In other words, imagine that we still built our houses as the pioneers did a hundred years ago.
"Impossible!" you say. "No one does that, anymore!"
In our country, no. But do you know that in one North American nation, whole villages still do? Can you guess what that nation is?
Mexico!
In cities, for rich and middle-class people, houses have all the comforts that we Americans have grown accustomed to. But in old villages, the houses look much the same as they did when Mexico was still a region of Aztec, Maya, and other Indian nations, and the Spaniards still lived across the ocean.
In those days, there lived three different social classes: nobles, craftsmen, and peasants. Each resided in a different kind of house. The peasants, of course, had the poorest style of housing. They lived in one- or two-room huts with thatched roofs, dirt floors, and little furniture.
Instead of doors, they hung blankets in their doorways. They kept their family tools inside, place here and there. For example, farmers kept digging sticks and fishermen kept nets. Their wives kept baskets, blankets, looms on which they wove cloth, and cooking pots.
In one corner, many families made fire pits out of stones and sticks of woods. The mothers cooked the two daily meals over those fire pits, and the families sat on woven mats to eat. At night, they slept on mats and the men covered themselves with mantles, a type of cloak they wore during the day. When the families got up the next morning, they rolled up their sleeping mats and placed them against the wall.
After the Spaniards came, they introduced many changes to the lives of the Mexican Indians--plows, burros, etc. But to this day, the huts in Indian villages have not changed muhc.
A villager still lives in a one- or two-room hut. Nowadays, he's apt to make his roof out of adobe tile if he can afford it (many cannot), and the parents may sleep in a bed and sit in chairs. But the children still sit and sleep on mats. The hut still has a dirt floor and no electricity. The mother may still build her cooking fire in the corner of the floor.
In many respects, to look at the way Mexican villagers live these days is like looking into the past. It's a window into the pre-colonial years. Think about that, the next time you watch Zorro, Pancho Villa, or The Cisco Kid.