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A STRANGE CALLING.

Owing to the widespread illiteracy among the poorer classes in Mexico, public newspaper readers have become a feature of Mexican life. Few men of the peon classes arc able to read or write. Consequently the newspaper reader is enabled to earn a living by making the rounds of the drinking places and reciting the news of the day. A certain amount of literary skill is required to follow this strange calling successfully; the reader is, in fact, a sort of peripatetic news distributor. He selects only two or three items which he knows will interest his audionco. The Orizaban reader, for example, started with the most important topic of the day. He read an article which discussed the financial panic then in progress in the United States, and the hard times it had caused in Mexico through the closing of mines and other enterprises controlled by Americans. Things were improving, said the newspaper, and thousands of Mexicans who had lost employment would soon be going back to work, and earning plenty of money to buy food md drink. The reader next selected what journalists would term a “human interest” appropriate gestures, he entertained .) is audience with a despatch from Northern Mexico, which related how a Irink-crazed peasant had set fire to :hc hut of a neighbour with whom he ind a feud, and had shot down his en•niy as he attempted to escape. Purmod by the rurales, the murderer had fallen, riddled with bullets, after opening lire on his pursuers.

Permanent link to this item

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/STEP19120109.2.11

Bibliographic details

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXII, Issue 22, 9 January 1912, Page 3

Word Count
253

A STRANGE CALLING. Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXII, Issue 22, 9 January 1912, Page 3

A STRANGE CALLING. Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXII, Issue 22, 9 January 1912, Page 3

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