Bakers and Basques: A Social History of Bread in Mexico

5: “We have no bread”: Hunger, Opportunity, and War

83 Chapter Five “We have no bread” Hunger, Opportunity, and War ; / At the high point of the revolution’s violence, in fall of 1915, Coronel Ignacio C. Enríquez, interim president of Mexico City, ordered his subaltern Pablo des Georges to take the next day’s train to San Andrés Chalchicomula, Puebla, where he was to pick up four thousand cargas (around 710 tons) of wheat that the Constitutionalist government had recently purchased . Once he weighed and sealed the sacks, he was to load them on the train and deposit them in the municipal warehouse in Mexico City. Enríquez told Georges to telegram him “if any difficulties arise in the fulfillment of your assignment.” Enríquez concluded the memo by reiterating his “attentive consideration and particular appreciation” and signed “El Coronel.”1 Mexico City residents, and the fledgling government, urgently needed the wheat that Pablo des Georges was to retrieve. During the previous winter, women in Mexico City had been sacking panaderías in desperate attempts to keep their families from joining the famished who lay dead on the streets. Hunger hit the capital long after other regions that were ravaged by the revolution , where people ate no more than weeds and prickly pears or succumbed to starvation.2 The capital, the privileged consumer hub where producers Chapter Five 84 brought their best goods, had managed to delay the food crisis. But when it crashed suddenly upon the city in early 1915, hunger left no doubt that the old political order had collapsed. If hunger was the most poignant sign of disorder and suffering, food was among the most important signs of political legitimacy . Pablo des Georges’s mission, then, was as much about building the new government as it was about feeding the people. Georges’s task seemed simple, especially to the coronel, who had only recently arrived from the northern state of Chihuahua to occupy the municipal presidency of Mexico City. He had little understanding of the complications of the food supply in the capital. The numerous obstacles that Pablo des Georges encountered, and dutifully noted in his diary, revealed how limited the emerging revolutionary government was in its efforts to provide basic public needs and how dependent it remained on the businessmen who had achieved their dominance under Porfirio Díaz. Revolution and the City After three decades of rule, Díaz was swiftly forced from power by peasants and provincial elites. The octogenarian dictator conceded to a dignified exile in France after a brief period of battles in northern Mexico in 1910. When Francisco I. Madero won presidential elections in 1911, Mexico appeared to have embarked on a peaceful, moderate transition to electoral democracy. But the new president soon found himself squeezed between the lower classes, who demanded deeper social reforms, and the elites, who defended the status quo.3 In February 1913, Madero’s general Victoriano Huerta joined a counterrevolutionary coup that ended in the murder of Madero. For the subsequent year and a half, Huerta controlled the capital but struggled against the armies of Emiliano Zapata in the south and Pancho Villa and Venustiano Carranza in the north. Under Huerta, the capital became a recalcitrant island of nostalgia where the wealthy seemed mostly unruffled. In January 1914, the Centro Vasco held the annual Three Kings Day party for their children in the Palacio de los Azulejos. The social pages announced that “all the principal Basque families were in attendance.” The event was “elegant, as expected.”4 In March, the panadería owners raised money for Spaniards fleeing from Chihuahua, where Villa threatened to execute them and expropriate their estates, but the owners felt secure enough to stay with their businesses in Mexico City.5 The Spanish government sent the steamship Carlos V (named for the monarch who “We have no bread” 85 reigned during the conquest) to give them passage back to Europe. Few in the city accepted the offer and instead honored the sailors with a banquet at the exclusive Casino Español. “The Spaniards in Mexico today,” toasted Telésforo García, spokesman of the Spanish immigrant community, “are as industrious conquistadores as those of yesteryear.”6 As if to prove it, several months later Braulio Iriarte and Pablo Díez inaugurated their compressed yeast factory. However, this confident air of tranquility in the capital was shattered as united factions of revolutionaries forced Huerta’s surrender. Constitutionalists led...