The principal market is a large structure in the rear of the Cathedral, and has large gates at each corner through which a line of people are passing at all times during the business hours. The entrance is nearly always obstructed by women with fruit for sale, whose presence was tolerable from the fact that they sold it extremely cheap. Every available space is filled with native merchants—mostly women—who offer for sale home and foreign goods and a great variety of indigenous fruits. Vendors outside of the enclosure suspend straw mats on poles for shelter from the torrid sun. Beneath each one sat a woman or girl with her articles for sale spread about and before her—a little fruit, some vegetables, or even some cooked meat. Inside the building one can get a three course meal of native concoctions for a few cents, or can buy the luscious fruits of the country, including oranges, bananas, zapotes, or pineapples, for a song almost. Although the place is generally crowded there is no jostling or confusion. It would be hard to find a quarrelsome or disorderly person or any one who would raise his voice above the tone of polite conversation, and even the babies—of whom there are always many—refrain from crying. The dealers are all bargainers and will invariably ask at least twice as much as they would readily accept. A look of surprise or astonishment at a price given will invariably bring the query, “What will you give?” There is no such thing as a fixed price, and yet the lowest price that will be accepted does not vary much among the different merchants, as I found on several occasions.
There is a second native market in the western part of the city. Near this market is a road which is the great highway for the market people coming from lowland and highland. It was a sight that never grew tame or monotonous to me to watch the never-ending procession of men, women, children, burros, and mules continually coming to the city, and, on several mornings, I went out to watch it. Men and women come marching down the middle of the road in Indian file—the men with great loads on their backs, and the women with large market baskets on their heads, filled with fruits, vegetables, pottery, eggs or poultry. Oftentimes they travel for three or four days to market with nothing but the cold stones or mother earth at night for a bed. The whole load, when marketed, may not bring more than a couple of dollars in gold, but they would consider that pretty good pay for a week’s work. In this way the fruits of the hot lands are brought to the city by those simple folks in just the same manner as their ancestors have done ever since the founding of the city. Sometimes an Indian bearing fodder or other provender is scarcely visible underneath his load. It is rather comical to see an enormous box about the size of a small house trotting down the street on what seems to be its own pair of brown legs. Little boys and little girls, as soon as large enough, assume their share of the burdens and carry their little bundles in the same way as their elders. One writer describes a market woman whom he saw as follows: “She carried an open-work basket of fowls and ducks on her back on which was also slung a baby; in her arms she carried a fine young pig, and on her head was a tray of _tortillas_. As she jogged along the baby cried, the porker squealed and the poultry made noise enough to drown her own groans.”