Embracing new causes in Mexico

Natalie Vivian Scott

Natalie Scott's Christmas card, circa 1930.

Spratling and Natalie each began traveling in Mexico in the mid-1920s (inspired and instructed by Tulane’s anthropological Mayan expeditions led by Frans Blom and Oliver LaFarge).  Both ultimately settled in the picturesque mountain village of Taxco by 1930.  Here Natalie embraced new causes, preservation of Taxco’s ancient architecture; promoting another intellectual / artistic / literary colony; opening her “Kitagawa House” for lodging creative people; her social and anthropological work among the Indians of Mexico, disappearing for months at a time on horseback into the Mexican wilderness, gaining enormous expertise on native folkways and Mexican history, eventually leading anthropological museum expeditions among the indigenous peoples. 

As a staff member of Frances Toor’s important magazine Mexican Folkways, her cohorts in this endeavor included such luminaries as Diego Rivera, Dr. Atl, Frida Kahlo, Anita Brenner, Rufino Tamayo, Carlos Chavez, Katherine Anne Porter, Miguel Covarrubias, Rene d’Harnoncourt, Hubert Herring, historians Carleton Beal, Stuart Chase, Leslie Simpson, artist Roberto Montenegro, Moisés Saénz, an array of scholars, sociologists, historians, authors, painters, and philosophers.

By far Natalie’s most lasting Taxco legacy would be the social causes she pursued on behalf of the impoverished peasant population.  She pioneered social medicine for the community, inaugurating a sanitation system while bringing the first physician to the town.  Natalie founded a school for the peasant children which she operated for the balance of her life, providing an early education to generations in Taxco, enabling them to escape the worst consequences of poverty, feeding them three nutritious meals daily, taking the children off the streets from early morning until evening, assuring each child of medical care, even surgery in Mexico City in many urgent cases.  Not surprisingly, she became the godmother of many Tasqueños infants, many born in her bed as she brought their expectant mothers out of unsanitary hutches for safe deliveries in more sterile surroundings.