Found Speechless Barter Methods In Mexico

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31139, 16 August 1966, Page 12

Found Speechless Barter Methods In Mexico

Mr C. H. Thomas, a graduate in geography of the University of Canterbury, is now a tutor at the University of Alberta which regularly arranges field trips to Mexico. Mr Thomas is there now preparing for a tour he will conduct for 70 graduate teachers from all parts of Canada. He is also completing an M.A. thesis on the area.

Mexico is fascinating, Mr Thomas says in a letter to his father-in-law, Mr J. A. Nicol, of Christchurch. Close to some of the most modern commercial and residential areas in the world he found speechless barter still in progress.

An Indian woman approached a vendor of tomatoes. She put down several grains of maize with no response. When tier offer reached 18 grains, one tomato was handed over. There was more haggling without words and then both exchanged a quantity of goods at the agreed rate of one tomato for 18 grains of maize. Mr Thomas also saw a clay pot being bought for a given number of grains of maize. Yet nearby, educated peasants were doing brisk trade with money.

Another contrast appeared in wages. Mr Thomas says the purely indigenous people on the land have an average income of about £8 10s a year. But, he says, “this country is coming out of the sixteenth century overnight.” Mexicans were “getting ahead under their own steam ” The nationalisation of oil and bther resources had, in Mr Thomas’s view, reduced profiteering by outside interests. Yet other countries, notably America and Germany, had made considerable contributions to Mexico’s progress

through investment and industrialisation. X

Greater Mexico City now has a population of six million, the largest in Latin America and fourth largest in the world. Mr Thomas says new highways leave even Americans gaping. One feature which Impressed him was hundreds of miles of hedge in median strips (to reduce glare from oncoming lights) which were regularly watered and trimmed by hand.