with Spanish blood but
preserving many of the Indian characteristics intact; and these do not
agree with normal culture. For it must be remembered that in Mexico
there is to-day, owing to the wholesale expulsion of the Spaniards at
the establishment of independence, hardly a family of unmixed blood; and
those who do claim uncontaminated descent from the Spanish _hidalgos_
are looked upon with utmost disfavor almost--ostracized, indeed. On the
other hand, the Mexicans have come to look upon Americans of the North
with respect and even affection, and to welcome them to their country
and often to their homes. The result, of course, has been partly to
establish a heterogeneous culture, neither Spanish, Indian, nor
American, and yet a commingling of all three, at least in outward form.
But beneath the veneer of the new culture the Mexican woman preserves
the characteristics which have been hers for centuries and which in
their greater part came down to her from her Indian forebears. She is
still passionate, jealous, vengeful, sudden and violent in all her
impulses, most of which are founded upon that which she calls her love,
but which, as a rule, is but passion. Her traditions do not agree with
her surroundings as she would fain make them; and the question as to
which will finally survive in permanent conquest is one that can be
answered by time alone, that convenient arbitrator to which to refer all
vexed questions of this sort. To that tribunal may be left the questions
for the future which have been suggested to thoughtful readers
concerning the Mexican woman.

CHAPTER III

THE WOMEN OF SOUTH AMERICA

As in our retrospect of the feminine history of Mexico, so in our review
of the past of the women of South America, it is necessary to begin with
a consideration of an extinct civilization,--necessary not only to the
completeness but to the interest of our subject, for the chief claim of
these chapters to the reader's attention rests on the consideration of
those primitive cultures. Were it not for the dead civilizations of the
Aztecs and the Incas, with their surrounding and dependent cultures,
there would be but little to say concerning the women of Mexico or South
America. For in their later aspects these American cultures represent
simply a more or less decadent Spanish and Portuguese civilization,
modified indeed by circumstance and the infusion of alien blood as well
as custom, yet so close in all material