Frederick Starr

In Indian Mexico Frederick Starr

Excerpt from In Indian Mexico: A Narrative of Travel and Labor The reading public may well ask, Why another travel book on Mexico? Few countries have been so frequently written up by the traveler. Many books, good, bad, and indifferent, but chie?y bad, have been perpetrated. Most of these books, however, cover the same ground, and ground which has been traversed by many people. Indian Mexico is practically unknown. The only travel-book regarding it, in English, is Lumholtz's Unknown Mexico. The indians among whom Lumholtz worked lived in northwestern Mexico; those among whom I have studied are in southern Mexico. The only district where his work and mine overlap is the Tarascan area. In fact, then, I write upon an almost unknown and untouched subject. Lumholtz studied life and customs; my study has been the physical type of south Mexican indians. Within the area covered by Lumholtz, the physical characteristics of the tribes have been studied by Hrdlicka. His studies and my own are practically the only investigations within the field. There are two Mexicos. Northern Mexico to the lati tude of the capital city is a mestizo country; the indians of pure blood within that area occupy limited and circum scribed regions. Southern Mexico is indian country; there are large regions, where the mestz'zos, not the indians, are the exception. From the time of my first contact with Mexican indians, I was impressed with the notable dif ferences between tribes, and desired to make a serious study of their types. In 1895, the accidental meeting with a priest from Guatemala led to my making a journey to Gen. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.