Chapter 6 Two Months in Mexico In New York, in the winter of 1941, we met
Signor Montes de Oca, former Secretary of the Treasury of Mexico and at that time President
of Mexico's Banco Internacional.
Though he was of small stature, he was a great man, and he bore himself as such.
He had an all-encompassing knowledge of politics, economics and world affairs, spoke four languages
was widely read and knew everything Lew had ever written.
He immediately invited Lew and me to come to Mexico for a series of lectures at the university, which he would sponsor.
He offered my husband a lifetime position, a house with a garden, a car and chauffeur, and a tremendously high salary.
But Lew refused. He was happy to come as a guest, but he remained firm in his decision to make his home in the United States.
We were supposed to leave in January 1942. America was at war with Germany. We had our first papers, but we were not yet citizens. However, we had no difficulties getting the necessary visas, for our Mexican friend had taken care of everything.
We left on January 11th. It was our first flight since leaving Europe and our first of numerous visits to Central and South America. This flight still lingers in my memory. Though we traveled in the greatest comfort, we even had a sleeper. It took more than 20 long hours to reach Mexico City.
Our reception at the airport almost befitted royalty. If suddenly band music had started, I would not have been surprised. A deputation of university professors was waiting for Lou. The customs formalities were quickly dealt with.
The airport seemed near the city, which, at 3 in the afternoon, was very crowded. Our hotel was on the Calle Madera, one of the liveliest streets in Mexico. Our suite, my room, were so full of roses, gardenias and white callas that for a moment I dreamt I was back on the stage after a performance. The subsequent seven weeks we stayed in Mexico until February 25th were perhaps the greatest surprise of my life. Not only because, Lou, for the first time since we
Most interesting was the life in the street. The population of Mexico's capital is mixed. Indians and mestizos, persons of mixed blood, are predominant. People seem to be very poor, but it was almost astonishing to see no really well-dressed people in the street.
They must prefer to get around by car, I thought. Otherwise you would not see that
tremendous number of elegant autos clogging the roads. The shops seemed almost provincial
to me. Only the boutiques for art, silver and jewelry were beautiful.
Never in my life had I seen so many poor people as in Mexico. People in rags with naked dirty
feet unwashed it seemed for months. The women were usually pregnant or carried small children
Women and children either sold candies, not very attractive to our eyes, or lottery tickets, which were eagerly bought.
It was the old story, the poorer the population, the more they gamble.
At every street corner they sold lemonade, which was necessary since the water was only drinkable if distilled or boiled.
Tortillas, the chief nourishment of the poor, a sort of pancake made of cornflour and water, were sold.
Tortillas, the chief nourishment of the poor, a sort of pancake made of corn flour and water, were also sold in the streets.
I was impressed by the great number of blind people, caused, I was told, by the lack of silver nitrate,
which in Europe and the United States is instilled into the eyes of every newborn baby as a preventative.
One of the most moving impressions we had was in the Avenida Juarez, one of the widest streets in Mexico,
in Mexico. Opposite a park full of palm trees, at a corner on the bare ground sat a little
blind boy, perhaps five or six years old, singing a simple monotonous melody. Whenever
Lew and I passed, day or night, he was always sitting there alone, no mother, no sister,
no one taking care of him or bringing him food. Music seemed to be the way most of the
blind people earned their living. I saw a man with a large sombrero shadowing his empty
For me, the greatest difference between New York City and Mexico City was that in the streets of New York you see so many restaurants and food shops, while in Mexico you see few food stores.
This, however, has changed since the discovery of paperbacks.
Nowadays, one can buy books cheaply not only in drugstores, but in every supermarket in New York.
Amusing to watch were the old Indian men who leaned against the walls of houses and did their knitting,
while old women walked around smoking long brown cigars.
From time to time, so-called bath cars drove through the city.
They picked up everyone who seemed unwashed and dirty,
Vaccination of the population had also been taken over by the government. The Indians were so afraid of this vaccination that they immediately hid when the large white vaccination trucks appeared in the streets. All the saleswomen and salesmen in grocery stores, perfumeries, and drug stores had to have blood tests before they could get vaccinated.
Louis had arranged with Montes de Oca that he would speak about money. On Wednesday, January 14, 1942, he held his first lecture at the University. Two days later was the first round table seminar. That was the steady schedule for almost two months of our stay.
Lew had luncheons and meetings where I was not present. He must have met about every person of distinction in Mexico.
On Sundays we regularly had dinner at Montes de Oca's house, far away from the noise of the city.
His home was located in a small old village with badly paved roads and huge shady trees.
Opposite his home was the little house formerly owned by the Austrian coachman who came to Mexico with Emperor Maximilian.
Montes de Oca had bought this place around 1927. People used to say it had been a convent, but our host denied this.
The large, wide mansion was built around a park with lovely old trees and palms, climbing plants growing in a water basin, and tropical flowers everywhere, even climbing into the windows of the rooms.
Peacocks were proudly strutting around in the park, enjoying the sun, the males making love to the females while spreading their feathers, which looked like Montezuma's feather crown.
Our hosts received us in an open-air hall on the ground floor. About 10 or 12 other guests were usually invited for dinner, among them Dr. Gustavo Velasco, Montez de Oca's favorite relative and spiritual heir.
Dr. Velasco was not yet married then. He and Lupe, his future wife, were later to become very close friends of ours. Gustavo is one of Lew's greatest admirers and an ardent disciple of his teachings. As he said in his speech in honor of Lew's memory at the Mont Pelerin Society meeting in September 1974, I translated at least half a dozen of Mises' writings. I also was able to finish the translation of Socialism, which Montes de Oca had begun years before, but which he had been
and Unable to Complete on account of his work as president of Banco Internacional and because
of the illness which caused his death in 1958. Montes de Oca was not married, but he had
many relatives to whom he was devoted. The hostess at his parties was a niece of his,
Maria Louise Diaz Lombardo, a beautiful young woman, educated in France. Like most of the
people we met in Mexico, she spoke three or four languages fluently. Luncheon was served
in a hall that resembled the refectory of a cloister. A huge buffet occupied one side
of the wall, the other side faced the park, and the walls were covered with beautiful
old tapestries. Large French windows opened onto the green, and the magic purple of the
long bourgogne via that framed the windows was reflected all over the sunny room. The
whole length of the dining room was filled by a huge table, high-backed chairs behind
each place. One could well imagine monks having their repasts in this refactory. The meal,
a formal occasion, was served beautifully. The conversation was animated, but as always
on such occasions, not very deep. After we had taken our coffee, other guests would arrive,
perhaps as many as a hundred. Montez de Oca had invited the Lennar Quartet to entertain
at these affairs for the duration of our stay. We all would go into the garden. The peacocks
The guests would mingle with the guests and suddenly chamber music would start.
The quartet played Mozart, Bach and Beethoven, and the atmosphere and beauty of this garden
were like a dream.
The guests were never punctual at these Sunday dinners, which astonished Lew and me, who
were so used to being on time.
Here everyone came three-quarters of an hour later than they were asked to.
One Sunday Lew decided not to be the first to arrive, but this time we were wrong.
We arrived at 2 p.m. and we were surprised to see that everyone had arrived and was waiting
for us. Montes de Oca had invited the Minister of Finance, Eduardo Suarez, and his wife to
meet Lew, and everyone knew about it, except us.
One hardly ever understands the names of guests when they are being introduced. Lew and I
spoke at length with a rather good-looking man who had very smooth black hair and was
It's not very talkative. You mostly listen to what Lew had to say. He had a nervous laugh
and trembling hands but a very agreeable voice. His wife was good-looking, well-shaped, dressed
in the latest American fashion. She had lovely hands and feet, which I, rather enviously,
confirm all Mexican women have, including the Indians.
This time, since it was a special occasion, they served a completely Mexican dinner. First
After the crabs came a plain tomato soup, then crabs o'grotton in huge shells, round and larger than lobsters. I never had seen this kind.
After the crabs came cold wild duck, steamed with many sliced onions, olives and green peppers, swimming in a sweet sour sauce.
With this was served tortillas with chili so hot I thought I was eating pure pepper.
For dessert there was lemon ice and a lovely sweet wine.
Afterward the guests went into the park and again the peacocks followed us screaming loudly
and not very melodiously, but when the chamber music, the highlight of the day, started even
the peacocks were silent. We left immediately after the concert, though Montes de Oca would
have liked to have kept us for supper. As we were walking on our way to a taxi a car overtook
us and the nice couple with whom we had talked so long without knowing their names stepped
During Lew's lectures at the university, he was on very good terms with the faculty, though the faculty was obviously leaning to the left.
But Lew was a famous colleague, and they showed him the proper respect.
The rector himself invited Lew several times for luncheons and conferences, and one of the best-known Mexican scholars,
Professor Silva Herzog, the dean of the University of Mexico.
Mr. Roth invited Lew several times for luncheons and conferences, and one of the best known Mexican scholars, Professor Silva Herzog, the Dean of the Economics Department, was one of our steady companions. He was almost blind, and one of his two charming daughters always accompanied him, so we knew them very well. He was one of the few scholars we met who did not know much English, but he understood French, which was helpful. I think we saw Mexico in a way that very few tourists ever see it, thanks of course to Montesquieu.
Montez de Oca and Gustavo Velasco
Our hosts made plans for every day that Lou did not have to work.
One day, knowing our love for the mountains, Montez de Oca arranged an excursion to the
foot of Mount Popo Catepetal to get to know some friends of his.
We arrived early in the morning in Montez de Oca's car with Dr. Velasco driving.
We followed the Puebla Railway, the view of Popo Catepetal and Ixta Chihuahua, the sleeping
The woman, as the Indians call her, always before our eyes. Her strong bony face, her long hair hanging down in the back, her breasts, her legs all covered with snow, made a spectacular sight.
We first stopped in a small village to look at an old church with an interesting open chapel, open because the Indians are frightened of closed churches.
The church was big but very poor. It was almost bare with a few wooden benches inside. There were various figures of the Virgin Mary clad in old silk dresses. They have special dressmakers in Mexico, mostly old spinsters, who sew nothing but dresses for the saints.
The walls of the church were originally covered with frescoes, a language and colors that the Indians understand better than the Spanish.
Later these frescoes were painted over, but now they are trying to restore them.
We drove on and the road changed drastically as we left the paved highway and got on a very dusty side road, which led up to the mountains.
On both sides of the road were Indian huts, made of pieces of raw wood. They had no windows and were poorly roofed with thatched straw.
The road was so dirty that clouds of gray dust immediately penetrated the closed car, covering our faces and hands.
I shall never understand how the Indians could live in these huts under these conditions.
And they were always gay and friendly. One of the villages was even called Place of the Happiest.
Gradually the road became steeper, and soon we had passed the last village.
Only once in a while a single lumber worker's hut became visible through the trees.
Then there was nothing but trees and mountain bushes.
On the roadside huge bushes of yellow plants, like the Indian broom bushes, were glowing in the sun.
We were now up to 3,600 meters on the Paso de Cortes, the road on which Cortes traveled from Veracruz to Mexico, which leads up to Ixtechuatl.
We drove up to 4,000 meters. Many cars were parked here because, from this point, people start to climb up the mountain.
How different from European mountains this was! In Europe in February, everything would be covered with snow starting at 1,300 meters.
Trees would stop at 1800 meters. In Mexico we had eternal sun, and the snow started at about 5000 meters.
We stopped at the house of a friend of Montes de Oca, a certain Señor Marinos, for lunch.
He was a former colonel who had served under Pancho Villa. Later he became Mexico's postmaster general, and in 1940 he retired to live for his hobby, the cultivation of flowers.
He had fields full of carnations and the most beautiful roses, some as black as velvet,
others looking like green thistles. His house was built completely of stone. The dining
room was furnished with lacquered black furniture from Oaxaca. The house and everything in it
was tasteful and unusual. The meal was prepared by friends of his, two brothers who had built
They did not speak English, so Lew and I got all the necessary information from Montes de Oca. He told us that their father had been married three times and fathered 30 children, the oldest son 48, the youngest 6. His wife was 50, and he was still so full of vigor, he would no doubt soon be looking for another wife.
The two brothers took us up to a chapel built in 1553. It was built in a cave filled with
flowers. The walls were covered with primitive signs, letters of thanks to the saints after
recuperation from illness and disease. Near the entrance to the cave were heaps of withered
flowers mixed with wheat. Near them, on a step, sat an Indian woman, staring motionless
into the depths of a well. Floating on the water was the dress of another woman, an unhappy
I was the lucky person who wanted to get rid of disease or was asking for a special favor.
Praying, the woman rubbed her body with the withered wheat taken out of the heap of faded flowers.
The chapel was filled with statues of saints, and candles were everywhere,
candles shaped like hearts or other parts of the body, flickering irregularly in the breeze.
And there were flowers everywhere, their beautiful clean odor mixed with the smell of burnt candles.
The niche of the Virgin was empty. Outside the chapel stood an old lonely olive tree, surrounded by a fence. Here, it was said, Brother Martin de Valencia had prayed together with the singing birds. Next to the tree was the churchyard. As the ground was too stony for a garden, the dead were put in the earth, stone plates covering the holes with their names and dates. Everyone stepped over them. Here there were no flowers, no candles.
Mexico City long after sunset. It had been a beautiful but tiring day. Lew and I both
had only one wish, to get under the shower and into clean clothes. And none too soon.
For the first and last time in my life, I saw my darling husband hunting fleas. We were
both bitten from head to toe, but he outdid me in catching them. He found five while I
I only caught two.
Lew was very, very busy during our two-month stay in Mexico.
He also gave lectures outside Mexico City in small towns that had no air conditioning
and where the heat reached 90 to 95 degrees.
After those lectures he came back completely exhausted.
He also spoke to the law school in Mexico City on economics and politics and once he
lectured at the Bankers Club.
Among the many interesting people we met were the conductors Carl Alvin, whom Lew knew from Vienna, and Eric Kleiber from Berlin, who at that time was conducting a series of Beethoven concerts.
Once he invited us to attend a rehearsal of the Fifth Symphony, for Lew's lectures concluded with the evening concerts.
Everything went smoothly during the rehearsal, and only once or twice did Kleiber use his baton to stop the orchestra.
It was interesting to note how he, without knowing any Spanish, could make himself understood
to the musicians.
One evening he told us about the difficulties he had to face during rehearsals.
The musicians did not want to work overtime, not even when they knew that they would be
paid for it.
The Mexican way had always been to put leisure time above money, and Kleiber had great difficulty
in bringing the performance up to his standard.
In a way he was helpless against their philosophy of life.
One day in February something very funny happened to Lew.
In the afternoon he went to see Montes de Oca in his office.
In the course of the conversation Montes de Oca told him that he would take him to the
dinner after the seminar.
Which dinner?
asked Lew.
Montes de Oca laughed.
You really are a professor, he said.
Don't you remember that today is the day when the university gives a banquet in your honor?
Now it was my husband's turn to be astonished.
I never got an invitation, he said.
Montes de Oca was startled.
But this is impossible.
The rector himself has arranged everything, has ordered the invitations, has reserved
a room in the papillon, at that time Mexico's best restaurant.
He went to the phone and rang up the Dean of Economics Department, Silva Herzog, who
told him that he had only just now discovered that the banquet had been arranged, but that
But they had forgotten to send the guest of honor an invitation.
One day, Lew and I went alone to Tupultepec to visit the castle where the unhappy young
Austrian imperial couple had lived.
As usual, we took a bus, which was an experience in itself.
A smiling young Indian with beautiful white teeth helped us down to the bus.
He was clad in overalls and a clean blue shirt, and both Lew and I believed him to be one
of the passengers.
But then he asked us for the fare, and we realized that he was the conductor. The bus
was very crowded, but immediately someone offered me a seat.
After our visiting Chapultepec, Lew and I got very hungry. We went to a nice-looking
restaurant opposite the park entrance, where many cars were parked and benches stood around
a fountain. Entering, we saw that a luncheon meeting was under way, and we were about to
leave when a waiter took us to a nice table from which we overlooked a room with the luncheon
and Guests, about 80 men sitting at long tables. A band was playing, two girls were dancing,
a mixture of a Mexican dance and an Austrian Tyrolene, and the food looked delicious. When
we saw the wall decorations, Lew and I looked at each other. These were Austrian paintings,
girls dancing in drendel dresses and wearing the famous Tyrol hats. After a while the proprietor
Hopper came up to our table to greet us, and when I spoke to him in German, telling him
that we were from Vienna, he almost fell on a chair and told us his story. His name was
Hopper, and he had come to Mexico from Bergenland, an Austrian province near Vienna, twelve years
before. His wife was from Salzburg. He bought the land for his restaurant in 1934, scrubbed
floors in the beginning, but in time became very successful. He went back to Austria in
and he told us that the wall paintings we admired so much were done after picture postcards.
He proudly presented us to his wife and showed us his kitchen which, he said, a Mexican owner would never do.
We really could not tell which was more sparkling, the kitchen or his wife.
When we returned to the hotel we could not sleep for hours.
There was a fire in the cellar.
The fire brigade came and besides the rattling of the pumps,
On February 25th, we left Mexico by train, a new experience for Lew and me. We had never before seen such a beautiful train. The cars shone like silver, and the lights shone like gold.
However, I assume they were made of aluminum, and we could not have been more comfortable
than on this journey.
If we had flown back, we would never have seen so much of the country.
We arrived in New York on February 27th, and Lew immediately plunged back into his work.
In 1946 and again in 1949, Lew lectured in Mexico, and Montes de Oca and Gustavo Velasco
took us on a trip through central Mexico.
We saw the country in a way very few tourists ever get to know a foreign land. In 1958
we again went for a conference arranged by some ten members of the Mount Peleron Society.
But this time, Lew and I were not happy. Montes de Oca was seriously ill and we both felt
the shadow of his impending death. Indeed, we were never to see him again. I shall always
Please remember Montes de Oca as one of the finest men I ever met, and I shall always
be grateful to him for his hospitality and the great understanding with which he advanced
Lew's work in Mexico and South America and, without knowing it, helped reestablish Lew's
confidence and optimism after our trying escape from Europe and the first difficult
Months in New York.