In the 1970s when I was researching my PhD, local or regional history was all the rage. My dissertation focused on municipalities in the north of the state of Guerrero from the early 19th century to 1940. I got to know those northern towns, and the state in general, probably better than any previous Englishman. I knew the names of state governors and town mayors, of revolutionary generals, important battles and political events. However, it was much harder to sense what it actually felt like to live (and perhaps fight and die) there. I did my best, meeting the few surviving, now elderly, veterans of the 1910-1920 revolution. And documentary sources told me, for example, that in 1905 piped drinking water and a clock in the church tower were installed in Huitzuco, the hometown of a powerful revolutionary family. But ask me what daily life was like and I would have struggled to answer.
However, I can now tell you in some detail what it was like to be a German dentist In 1930 in the town of Tamazunchale, in the Huasteca Potosina region of the state of San Luis Potosi. The town had 2,497 residents, of whom 1,334 were female. One of the more exotic ladies of Tamazunchale was a female German dentist, Wilma Gertrud Elfriede Schwedhelm Linnemann, born in Hanover in 1899. In March 1925 she arrived, after a long sea journey, in Veracruz on the Gulf Coast of Mexico, en route, she hoped, to the USA. I know this because Elfriede’s son, Walter Schwedhelm, born 1 December 1928 in Xilitla, state of San Luis Potosí, wrote a brief memoir of some 18 years of his life. And my friend Karin Sartorius (Walter’s daughter) has just translated and published it.
While Elfriede had been at sea the German bank that was supposed to transfer her money to Mexico became insolvent, so she had to sell her fur coat and silk scarf to pay the train fare to Mexico City. Quite how big the market for fur coats was in the tropical heat of Veracruz, Walter does not tell us, but fortunately, a German lady Elfriede had met onboard ship travelled with her to the capital and invited her to stay with a cousin who lived there. Elfriede had trained as a dentist at the University of Heidelberg, and, as luck would have it, the cousin, Dr. Siegmund Doguin Rutnick, had a dental practice in the Grand Hotel Tut-An-Kamen in the centre of Mexico City. He offered her a job, and later marriage.
Siegmund, who was born to poor farmers in Prussia on the border with Lithuania in 1893, had arrived in Mexico in 1924 intending to make enough money from dentistry to buy a livestock farm in the Huasteca Potosina. He and Elfriede married on 30 June 1926 and a few months later he purchased his ranch near Ciudad Valles. The couple settled in a town in the hills called Xilitla, population 2,651, because it was much cooler than the hot and humid climate of their ranch.
So hilly was Xilitla that its streets were all “wide steps going up the mountain.” The family built a house with several bedrooms, a bathroom and toilet (a rarity in the Huasteca), a large lounge, dining room, kitchen, a room for the dental practice, and stables. In other words, by local standards it was palatial. The family owned horses and mules – Walter had his first horse at age three. Behind the house Siegmund grew and processed coffee. Siegmund was evidently a gregarious man who understood the importance of powerful personal-political connections in Mexico. The godfather (an important relationship in Mexico still) of his daughter Alma was Saturnino Osornio, the strong-man governor of the state of Querétaro who was deposed under pressure from the federal government, accused of involvement in murder, and his son’s padrino (godfather) was the notorious, powerful rascal Gonzalo Santos who later became governor of San Luis Potosí and subsequently a minister in the national government.
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| Walter on his horse |
Walter lovingly describes the idyllic mountain views from his home, walking in the woods where he found wild mushrooms, orchids, lianas and epiphytes, and swimming in rivers and under waterfalls. He and his sister were cared for by a young boy Domingo (it was the custom for nannies to be boys, not girls or older ladies).
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| Elfriede in Xilitla c.1928. In the foreground is a jaguar skin: jaguars were once prevalent in much of Mexico, but now are quite an endangered species. |
Walter’s family were not the only foreigners in Xilitla: “There were two French families, some Italians, an Englishman, and several Arabs.” A Spanish family owned a small grocery store, while an Arab family, one of the town’s wealthiest, were proprietors of a clothing store. Important Mexican families included that of Colonel Castillo, the cacique (political boss) and the Jonjitud family whose sons went on to political careers, one as state governor, the other as the leader of the national teachers’ union (unions were as much part of the political system as they were representative of workers in the new revolutionary government system). The town built a hydroelectric plant powered by a waterfall and brought clean running water to Xilitla (remember that Huitzuco, Guerrero, introduced piped water 25 years earlier). In other words, the Mexican Revolution had brought a degree of modernity to this remote little town.
Siegmund was Elfriede’s second venture in wedlock (she married a German military officer in Germany, but he stole her money and left her penniless – she had a lot of bad luck with money, it seems). But then, in 1933 Siegmund became “involved with a girl in town” (she also had bad luck with husbands) and Elfriede, who was a no-nonsense sort of person decided to leave, as Walter’s memoir notes:
So, one day before dawn, while my father was at the ranch, my mother woke us up, got us dressed, took our horses, and we left Xilitla as quietly as possible. My mother had already packed everything overnight. We went to Huichiguayan, where we boarded a bus to go to Tamazunchale.
Elfriede was once again penniless. Nevertheless, she and her children settled in a single rented room where they all slept on one bed and cooked on a gas stove, and Elfriede set up her laboratory and her dental equipment (it took too long to get results from Mexico City). I was surprised to learn that she had a competitor in such a small town – a Japanese dentist no less. I would bet good money that Tamazunchale had more dentists per capita than most rural towns in 1930s Mexico, certainly more exotic foreign dentists. After a while, Elfriede’s practice provided enough funds to rent a house and buy a little furniture, and eventually she had an adobe house built. This house had no water supply, electricity or sewer system. Water was collected from the metal roof, supplemented by water carried from a spring by a young boy, and stored in barrels. The “dining room” was a shack with a grass roof, one half for a servant, the other equipped with an adobe oven. Hands were washed in a pewter sink before dinner and clothes in a wooden pail. A metal tub outside was the bathroom: one stepped into the tub and poured water from a bucket. The toilet was a small outbuilding whose only claim to modern hygiene was scraps of newspaper. Lighting was hurricane lamps and candles (there was no electricity). On the other hand, trees – orange, mango, avocado, lemon, banana, papaya, mamey, and vegetables – grew around the house so fruit and vegetables were abundant.
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| Elfriede in front of the dining room of her house in Tamazunchale |
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| Elfriede in the orchard of her first house in Tamazunchale with Walter and his sister Isabel Alma |
There was, however, a lawless element to Tamazunchale (as there was in most of 1930s Mexico). But this dentist was prepared. One night a man entered the room in which Elfriede and her children slept, intending to rob them. Elfriede calmly talked to the man, shone a torch into his eyes, and while he was dazzled reached for the gun she kept by her bed, chased the man from the house, later spotted him in town and had him arrested. A second burglar, threatened to kill Walter if he continued speaking a foreign tongue, but Elfriede instructed her son (in German) to go outside and call for help. The burglar fled, wrapped up in one of her robes and tangled in the mosquito net (this was malaria country), pursued by Elfriede and neighbours, and was apprehended.
Elfriede was a hard worker. Although both dentists had enough work in Tamazunchale, she also started a mobile practice in the smaller towns in the mountains of the Huasteca where no dentist had ever pulled a tooth before. She contacted the municipal authorities, who provided premises for her practice and living space, and instructed them to advertise her services. Then she hired a muleteer and one or two mules, and off she set with her children, all three on horseback, riding for 32-40km per day. The family carried a picnic lunch of tortillas dipped in tomato sauce and fruit, sometimes supplemented with pan dulce (Mexico’s ever present sweet rolls), purchased from a farm. The roads were dirt tracks through beautiful tropical forest. Rivers were crossed on horseback – there were no bridges.
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| Walter travelling between towns wih Elfriede, a guard and the muleteer, c.1939 |
Elfriede carried her gun in her purse, hanging from her saddle. It came in handy when a man armed with a knife demanded her money, or else. Elfriede told him he was welcome to her cash, reached for her purse, but instead took out her gun. The robber was, Walter noted, “quite surprised” and fled.
They stayed in each place for two or three months, travelling for a year before returning to Tamazunchale. Most of Elfriede’s clients wore traditional dress, and spoke only Nahuatl, so quite how she communicated with them Walter does not say. Most came for tooth extractions, but Elfriede also provided vaccinations and first aid for infected wounds. Walter describes the towns they visited. In one, Calnali, a fiesta day ended in a shot out, because two rival cacique families, the Torres and Austriaa, with their retinue of bodyguards, decided, unfortunately, to come to town on the same day. Nobody was hurt but the gunfire caused much alarm and a few wounds. Don (an honorific title) Pancho, head of the Austria clan, lived in Tepehuacán, where Elfriede and the children stayed in the Austrias’ house. On one occasion, Pancho travelled to Tamazunchale for treatment, accompanied by 20 or so bodyguards. Elfriede also looked after the teeth of the Torres family, who lived in Tlanchinol, and also became friends.
The people of the Huasteca were generally poor farmers who grew crops for their own consumption, kept some chickens, turkeys, perhaps pigs and a cow. Their homes were of sticks covered with mud and a straw roof. The majority were illiterate and few spoke any Spanish. Their medicines were local herbs, the leaves of a plant provided their detergent, and they made soap from ash and fat. About their only contact with the modern world was the fabrics they bought at local markets to make their clothing – they had no electricity or modern domestic equipment or machinery.
Elfriede must have been a good money manager, as well as an excellent dentist, since she saved enough money to build a new house and dental surgery by the main road that ran by Tamazunchale. Later, when the road became part of the Pan American highway, she converted her home into a hotel, the Hotel Isabel, which catered to American tourists travelling the new highway.
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| The Hotel Isabel. Elfriede is seated outside in a rocking chair. The sign to her right reads "Consultorio Dental" (dentists's clinic) |
Walter and his sister attended the local school, but the education offered was not to the standards Elfriede demanded (it probably still is not), so she employed a teacher from the German school in Mexico City as a resident tutor.
The busy, prosperous life of Elfriede and her family was rudely interrupted by World War II. When Mexico entered the war on the Allied side, all Germans were ordered to move to Mexico City. Elfriede ignored the order, but the mayor of Tamazunchale, wanted to buy her home cheaply, and when she refused to sell, he informed the authorities that she had not obeyed instructions. The family was arrested, but as their journey took them through San Luis Potosí, the state capital, Elfriede managed to get a note to Gonzalo Santos, now the state governor. Although the family was briefly imprisoned in Mexico City, Walter’s godfather soon had them released. Siegmund’s choice of padrinos paid off handsomely.
Walter’s account ends with the family moving to Mexico City, and setting up a practice there so that the children could receive a university education. Naturally enough, Walter trained to be a dentist. He retained a deep affection for the Huasteca Potosina, its luxuriant tropical forests and its people. He frequently took his children there to visit the places of his childhood. Karin recalls:
“I do remember the visits to Tamazunchale. We went there every summer and went to swim in the rio Axtla, met many people, and visited many of these towns. They would recognize my father as "el hijo de la doctora Elfrieda o la doctora alemana" [the son of doctor Elfriede or the German doctor]. Lovely places, actually, just now not really available to visit, as the cartels have too much power there.”
Walter’s memoir is brief (97 pages), but it paints a vivid picture of the wonders and perils of 1920s and 1930s rural Mexico, its tastes and smells that I would struggle to find in many of the books on my bookshelves. As I finished it, I wished I had been able to meet him and chat about those times. I would also have enjoyed a conversation with the redoubtable Elfriede.
