Address:
W.J. Cash
Calle Rio de la Plata 22
Mexico, D.F.

Report From Mexico
By W.J. Cash

 	Mexico, D.F., it strikes me as a newcomer, is probably the earth's 
noisiest city per square inch. All night it roars with the most omi-
nous roar I have ever heard -- a roar that still is a long menacing
growl away out on the Calle Rio de la Plata where I live, and which
is somehow like those somber clouds which hang over Chapultepec,
visible from my window.

	The growl is punctuated and made complete in its effect by
the almost constant shrilling of the lonely policemen's whistles,
whose eerie sound must certainly date from the Aztec period. It
is over-fanciful to say that, awakening suddenly, one can imagine
uneasily that the old Popocatapetl has stirred at last from his long
slumber and is pouring fire and doom down upon the town, or that
Huitzilopochtli, the ancient war god, is again on his throne in the
great oppressive pile on the Zocalo, with the priests tearing out
the smoking hearts of 70,000 captives in his honor. But, to the
North American mind, Mexico is an over-fanciful city.

	By day downtown, one is driven often to seek comparative
sanctuary in the Alameda with its muffling screen of old trees.

	The explanation seems simple. The Mexican obvioulsy delights
in noise with childlike joy. With excuse or without he sounds his
horn at least once every thirty seconds. And if he hasn't a horn,
he makes up for the lack by the use of his powerful, if most usually
tubercular, lungs. Nearyl everything on wheels, indeed, does have
a horn --busses and street cars as well as automobiles. And no
piddling, half-hearted horns but mighty deep-throated ones, fit to

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serve battle fleets in the fog.

	Contrary to the popular opinion in the United States -- to my own,
until I came here -- the city swarms with automobiles, nealry all of
United States make and nearly all relatively new. I have seen fewer
jalopies here than anywhere I have been in the last five years.
Morever, the cars run generally to the more expensive makes. The
taximen stick largely to the cheaper three, but with private owners
Buick seems most popular, with the larger Packards and Cadillacs vi-
sible in great numbers. The Mexican, I hear, still holds to the notion
that a long black automobile is the best symbol of rank and power,and
promptly buys one the moment he can.

	Downtown there are a few traffic lights, but for the rest the
cars dash about on their own at breakneck speeds. The drivers are
the most skillful I have seen -- else the whole automobile population
would at once be dead. For the pedestrain, crossing a street is an
enterprise to be undertaken only after extreme unction. But the
little Indians glide nonchalently among the speeding machines with
cat-foot agility, remaining miraculously unhurt.

	More wonderful than the noise and the traffic is the building
activity. I have never seen anything like it. Even (in) Florida
in the 1920's the effect was less spectacular, since it was spread
over a greater territory. One gets the impression that every other
street is being torn up to be rebuilt. And downtown the city gives
exactly the effect which I imagine is made by a city which has been
heavily bombed and is in the process of reconstruction.

The unfinished gridiron building at Juarez and Reforma, with its
front knifed away and its walls cracked and seamed (apparently no effort

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has yet have been made to restore it) by the earthquake of last April, adds 
versimilitude to the effect. And for block after block the scene is
unbrokenly one of old town houses coming down and huge new skyscapers 
going/up --no flimsy, goods-box skyscrapers like those of much of the 
American hinterland, but massive and impressive structures, most usually 
in the pyramid style so often seen in New York, though the influence 
here seems to be that of Mexico's past.

	Nor is it only the downtown district. From my window I can see
a dozen apartment houses rising, all in the modern functional manner of 
which Mexico has become the chief exponent. I can walk fifty feet
around the corner and see a dozen more. And throughout the whole so-
called "river area" of the city (stretching along the west side of the
Paseo de las Reforma from, roughly, the/[neighborhood opposite the] American Embassy to the Heights 
pf. Chapultepec) much the same thing is going forward, as also in the 
Colonia de Valle, the fashionable Heigths of Chapultepec, etc.

	Perhaps the government employment programs have something to do 
with all this building activity. But the main occasion for it, I am 
told, is that the form r owners of the haciendas have finally about
given up hope of getting their government-confiscated lands restored
and are pouring into the city to invest their liquid funds in real
estate holdings, at once to insure their incomes and in the hope of
avoiding further confiscation.

	About politics I am much too new here to risk any opinion. I
can report, however, that in a single day I have had two diametrically
opposed assurances.

	One came from a man in the employ of the United States, who for
	
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many years has regularly travelled over all Mexico. There is no
doubt at all, he told me, that Mexico is solidly lined up in support
of the United States foreign policy, and that not only the government
but the great majority of the people will back Washington to the hilt
if war comes. The Indians out in the country, he admitted, are concerned 
only with their own affairs and don't much care about the war one way 
or the other, when they know about it -- which isn t often: And the 
towns swarm with Nazi and Communist agents. But these, he said, have 
now been decisively defeated and are reduced to knawing their nails 
in rage, while the great body of the people who are concerned with 
political matters are lined up behind the government.

	The other assurance came from a studious young woman from the
western United States who has been down here for two years and who is 
an intimate of a number of Mexican journalists of decided anti-Nazi
sympathies. According to her report, the Good Neighbor policy has
been successful only in the superficial ways. Even in the government,
she alleged, only the foreign minister and the education minister
are really whole-hearted in their commitments to Washington. Further-
more, she said, the government is far from really enjoying the
support of a majority of the people, won the last election only by
fraud and force, and the nation is actually divided about fifty-fifty
between pro-Americans and pro-Nazis. After all, they say (according
to her), it is the Gringo and the British who have done everything
evil to us in the past. Sure, probably the only reason the German
didn't do it was that he had no chance. Even so...

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	I offer there opinions entirely withjout prejuduce, having as I
say, formed none of my own.
	Viewpoint: A friend of ours, another U.S. employee, just missed
trouble the other evening. Invited out to make a night of it by two
young Mexican officers, he had regretfully to decline because of a
previous engagement. The two officers went on, anyway, an in the
course of their celebration got into a fight with the police, were
finally jailed after a long battle when the cops' whistles brought
reinforcements to their aid. Next day, when the judge began to
lecture the offficers, still somewhat in their cups, on their duty
toward the civil authority, they attacked him also. Now, of course,
they are in trouble up to their necks. A captain in the army shook
his head sadly when he talked to our friends about it. It was, he
avowed with choler, a disgrace to the army. Yes, a burning disgrace.
Any army officer should know that the way to deal with cops was
to sock them quick and hard and then get away fast before they had
time to bring up aid.

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