I cant spell spaghettios and my coputer was recently killed while I was updating you all on my so called adventures. Im currently trying to fix problem numero dos so I can update my blog and access the Cheff Boardi website in order to fix problem numero uno. Ill keep you all updated, but can I say, that recently in Gonogochi an hour outside of Creel, a man and child were attacked by wild animals, the man was eaten and the child escaped, all wittnesses say they were African Lions. I hate to say I told you so over something like this, but yeah, for you mo fos who thought I was fricken dilusional, I told you so. Over and Out.
-Me
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Monday, June 20, 2011
Semana Santa Day 3
The four of us, Luchi, Moni, Au and I woke up in Auroras house in Norogachi and prepared for breakfast. On this day we started talking about Machsimo, a social phenomenon in Latin America that could be considerd the antithesis of feminism. Machismo is about being a man, doing what men are want to do, and never apologize for it. Machismo says a man doesn’t wash the dishes, or clean the house, or play with the kids, that’s woman’s work. Machismo says that a man should make a lot of money, get himself a hot wife, and then a series of girlfriends who he maintains on the side, or if he cant do that, let his wife work for him while he trys to screw everything that moves. Machismo says if a wife doesn’t do what a man wants, he can it her until she does. Machismo used to be an unspoken reality throughout the western world, now it’s gone out of style in most places and been replaced by an attitude that claims to be gender neutral, while in reality I’ve seen how it really has just reversed the gender which has the right to be abusive. But that’s a rant for another day, the point of bringing this up was that au didn’t want us “the men: working in her kitchen, because she is “really submissive” and like machistas, men who like machismo. Lots of chicks here have passed that line by me trying to impress me, one even went so far as to tell me she wasn’t sure shed leave a man who hit her (shes about to graduate as a lawyer), needless to say, my american upbringing has guaranteed that everytime one of these ladies says something like this it has the opposite of the intended effect, a red light turns on and an angry buzzer screams “epic fail” and then my penis shrivels up, falls off, and rolls out of my pant leg. There is nothing more disgusting than a week woman, at least, that’s how I feel about it. So when my attempts to convince Au to let us stay and help failed, I went outside and tried to work on something useful, like saving the broken branch on Au’s peach tree, hoping to make a new tree in the process.
The funny thing about fruit trees is that many cant reproduce by seed. Each seed is a new genetic combination and wont have the same charachteristics as the parents, for instance apples produce markedly different fruit sizes, shapes, tastes, most of which aren’t pleasing to the human tongue. Every tree that produces an apple of one variety, say granny smith, was the branch of the original granny smith apple tree, or a brach from one of the branches that grew into trees. Something I’d like to start in the Sierra is a ngo agricultural station which produces trees and seeds for fruits and vegetables that are adjusted to the climates of the Sierra, with communities at 200 feet above sea level and others at 8,000 feet above sea level the weather conditions between villages can vary drastically, even if the villages are only 70 miles apart as the crow flies. However if you look at a USDA hardiness zone map of Mexico, the Sierra Tarahumara is lumped into the same area as Texas and Chihuahua. This means that the seeds that are shipped to the NGO’s here as well as the seeds available in the major agricultural regions, are adapted to very very warm regions of the world, with long growing seasons. In Creel, the last frost is in late May, it sometimes still snows in that part of the year, and the first frost is in September, there is only rain from mid June until mid September. What this means is that for the people living in the Sierra, the seeds and plants they receive in development programs aren’t accustomed to growing in their region, which means that many of the plants die or never reach a fruiting stage. Most of the fruit trees blossom in April or may and their blossoms are killed and they don’t produce fruit, had a cold region variety been planted, say a variety hardy up until Zone 4 that blossoms in August, then people would actually have trees that can produce food for them. Another example would be Tomatoes, the tomatoes sold in Cuahutemoc, the closest major agricultural city to Creel, the tomatoes sold have a growing period of 80 days. The plants begin to produce fruit 80 days after being planted. If you cant begin to grow them until the end of May, and they have to produce all of their fruit before the first frost In September then you only have a growing season of about 100 days, only 20 of them ever see tomatoes. Had a cold region variety like “Subartic plenty” which has a growing season of 45 days been used, then the plants would have 55 days to produce fruit, which can be stored by sun drying and bottling, helping the people to shorten the hunger season, December through June, when chronic malnutrition becomes acute malnutrition and people begin to die from immune systems weekened by a lack of nutrients, anemia is a particularly common problem in the Sierra Tarahumara, and one of the main causes of death during childbirth for women in the developing world. That’s actually part of the current project I’m working on, trying to test appropriate technologies like cold frames, short season variety fruits and vegetables, and low cost food preservation techniques like fruit leather, canning, and root cellars, to see if they are viable ways to shorten the hunger season or eliminate it. What id like to do in the future is have several agricultural stations set up throughout the different climatic zones of the Sierra, where we could collect weather and climate information, and report it, so things like USDA maps could be created with information that reflects reality, at these stations different fruits and vegetables could be tested, and propagated on a large scale, the food could be sold to help support the station, and the seeds and cuttings could be sold to people based on what they can afford to pay, with the one condition being that they too should propagate seeds and cuttings and that they should give or sell based on the capacity to pay to other villages. The stations could be a place where people could come to see capital non intensive solutions to the agricultural problems in the Sierra Tarahumara, eliminating the perceived risk in trying something new. We could demonstrate that a new technique is not a gamble with one possible outcome being a crop production worse than the poor production that already exists in the Sierra. People would be able to see with their own eyes what did and didn’t work.
After I had finished working with the cutting we had breakfast and headed to the main plaza for more dancing. The drums were still beating (they had never stopped since Semana Santa began) It was another long day of following the pintos as they danced around the town, I spent most of the day engaged in idle chat, making new friends, and just hanging out, wishing I had enough money to buy food. AS the day came to a close the dancers made their last tour around the city and then as they were approaching the concrete arches next to the Diconsa store, the made a hard right, during the day, all of the dancers had accumulated together to form a giant group of dancers and as the son began to set we headed down a dirt road toward the grave yard. The effigy of Jesus that the dancers had been carrying was now wrapped in burial shrouds. He was to be buried in the grave yard. We passed brown picket fences and little houses of different colors, we arrived at the grave yard during “the golden hour” the time of day that photographers love due to its yellow and orange hues. The Grave yard was a beautiful little fenced plot, with wooden crosses and stone tombs, with dead grass, a dirt and an occasional pile of horse manure (the tarahumara tend to give their larger animals plenty of freedom of movement) and on one side a large granit cliff rose 50 feet or so above us, its walls were slightly slanted and different people, some spectators and others dancers, were sitting on the lower slants of its walls, some were above on the top of the cliff looking down at us. We reached the open tomb where Christ would be placed, and a small preacher known as Juan, a Jesuit, began the ceremony with a prayer to Onoruame in Raramuri the language of the Tarahumara Alta, the region of the Sierra that is farther away from the BArrancas. I didn’t understand the prayer and with so many people I couldn’t here what he said when he repeated the prayer in Spanish, I only caught occasional pieces, he thanked god for sacrificing his son for us, he talked about how Jesus was human like us and that we should try to follow his example, and that was basically all I got out of it. Jesus was then placed in the tomb and we headed back to town where people were getting ready to begin to visit friends and family. It’s a custom that the night of burying jesus people can go to their friends homes and expect to find a giant feast awaiting them, Au wanted us to go to two of her friends houses, so we hiked up to a bed and breakfast close to Cheerio’s house, Cheerio is a friend in Norogachi, his house becomes important for the story in a little while, all you need to know is its about a 10 minute walk from the main plaza. The Hotel is a colonial style building, think Santa Fe architecture, it has a flat roof, wooden beams coming out of the top, it was a square frame with a garden in the middle. There were various European and American tourists, including a very verbose French man and our friend the “human ones” guy. The owner was a heavy, happy talkative woman, plae in complection, and married to a menonite. He had visited the states and wanted to talk to me about America, but our conversation failed to touch on the profound so lets leave it at we chatted a bit and then all of us gathered up a bowel of fish soup, potato salad, bread, tortillas beans and lentils. We went to the garden and ate and chatted amongst ourselves about what had happened that day and engaged in the Sierra’s primary pass time: gossip. After chatting with the owner of the Bed and breakfast we headed to the house of another friend of Au’s. This house was higher up in the village geographically speaking and we had to do some hiking to get there, but it was all worth it. As we passed the picketed gate and then entered the white house we were welcomed by the smell of cooked fish, beans, and salad. The fish was small trout, prepared according to Tarahumara custom, the guts removed, and the whole fish fried in oil, then salted to taste. The salda was lettuce, tomatoes, and onion slices, with a cesar dressing, the beans were stewed and the potatoes were mashed with butter. It was like a mini thanksgiving in the heart of the Sierra Tarahumara.
After thanking our hosts for the tasty meal, we started heading back to the house. On the way, Moni and I took a detour to the house where the people were beginning to drink tesguino. Semana Santa is atypical of Tarahumara festivities in the sense that during most of the week, prior to burying Jesus, tesguino is prohibited. The moment Jesus is buried; it starts to poor forth in its sugary, corn flavored goodness.
This must be like Sylvester Stalone week because Rambo 3 is on. I have to admit that I am a little surprised that the Muhajadeen are the heroes in this movie, my how america’s opinion has changed in the last two or three decades.
Anway, we went to the house and everyone, the former volunteers, the dancers, the people of the village, were all drinking tesguino while the Matachin dancers were being painted with red, black, and white paint, made from different soils in the Sierra. While we drank people asked me the usual round of questions, where are you form, whats it like there, how did you come to the Sierra, etc, etc. However Lori one of my coworkers, and a native daughter of Norogachi, showed up. When she saw me drinking tesguino she said, “Vagabond, you can’t drink tesguino!”
I looked back at her in annoyance, “I already told you, celiac means I can’t eat wheat, barley, and rye, and sometimes oats because of cross contamination, Corn isn’t on that list,” I lifted the gourd of tesguino to my bearded lips, and soaked it in like a mop sucks up water off a floor (if tesguino ever spilled, I can assure you, it would be worth drinking off the floor.)
Lorena shook her head. “No, no, no. I’m not talking about the corn, I’m talking about the Basihuare, its wheat Manu, its wheat.”
I choked and sputtered like an old Ford. “WHAT?!?!?!?!” I cried out in protest. “It can’t be! I won’t believe it. Of Basihuare is a mountain grass not a wheat.”
“No manu,” Lorena said cooly. “It’s a wheat, its Spanish name is triguillo, little wheat.”
Yeah. I was totally fucked. I walked home in the dark at 3 am that morning with my hung low, and a belly burning from indegestion, a symptom of my celiacs kicking in. But I refused to believe it, it was a mountain grass, triguillo was a misnomer. A fucking misnomer. God. Damn. It. And tomorrow I was going to drink more tesguino than was humanely safe, or had been drunk by any other chavochi before me, Or I would die trying....
The funny thing about fruit trees is that many cant reproduce by seed. Each seed is a new genetic combination and wont have the same charachteristics as the parents, for instance apples produce markedly different fruit sizes, shapes, tastes, most of which aren’t pleasing to the human tongue. Every tree that produces an apple of one variety, say granny smith, was the branch of the original granny smith apple tree, or a brach from one of the branches that grew into trees. Something I’d like to start in the Sierra is a ngo agricultural station which produces trees and seeds for fruits and vegetables that are adjusted to the climates of the Sierra, with communities at 200 feet above sea level and others at 8,000 feet above sea level the weather conditions between villages can vary drastically, even if the villages are only 70 miles apart as the crow flies. However if you look at a USDA hardiness zone map of Mexico, the Sierra Tarahumara is lumped into the same area as Texas and Chihuahua. This means that the seeds that are shipped to the NGO’s here as well as the seeds available in the major agricultural regions, are adapted to very very warm regions of the world, with long growing seasons. In Creel, the last frost is in late May, it sometimes still snows in that part of the year, and the first frost is in September, there is only rain from mid June until mid September. What this means is that for the people living in the Sierra, the seeds and plants they receive in development programs aren’t accustomed to growing in their region, which means that many of the plants die or never reach a fruiting stage. Most of the fruit trees blossom in April or may and their blossoms are killed and they don’t produce fruit, had a cold region variety been planted, say a variety hardy up until Zone 4 that blossoms in August, then people would actually have trees that can produce food for them. Another example would be Tomatoes, the tomatoes sold in Cuahutemoc, the closest major agricultural city to Creel, the tomatoes sold have a growing period of 80 days. The plants begin to produce fruit 80 days after being planted. If you cant begin to grow them until the end of May, and they have to produce all of their fruit before the first frost In September then you only have a growing season of about 100 days, only 20 of them ever see tomatoes. Had a cold region variety like “Subartic plenty” which has a growing season of 45 days been used, then the plants would have 55 days to produce fruit, which can be stored by sun drying and bottling, helping the people to shorten the hunger season, December through June, when chronic malnutrition becomes acute malnutrition and people begin to die from immune systems weekened by a lack of nutrients, anemia is a particularly common problem in the Sierra Tarahumara, and one of the main causes of death during childbirth for women in the developing world. That’s actually part of the current project I’m working on, trying to test appropriate technologies like cold frames, short season variety fruits and vegetables, and low cost food preservation techniques like fruit leather, canning, and root cellars, to see if they are viable ways to shorten the hunger season or eliminate it. What id like to do in the future is have several agricultural stations set up throughout the different climatic zones of the Sierra, where we could collect weather and climate information, and report it, so things like USDA maps could be created with information that reflects reality, at these stations different fruits and vegetables could be tested, and propagated on a large scale, the food could be sold to help support the station, and the seeds and cuttings could be sold to people based on what they can afford to pay, with the one condition being that they too should propagate seeds and cuttings and that they should give or sell based on the capacity to pay to other villages. The stations could be a place where people could come to see capital non intensive solutions to the agricultural problems in the Sierra Tarahumara, eliminating the perceived risk in trying something new. We could demonstrate that a new technique is not a gamble with one possible outcome being a crop production worse than the poor production that already exists in the Sierra. People would be able to see with their own eyes what did and didn’t work.
After I had finished working with the cutting we had breakfast and headed to the main plaza for more dancing. The drums were still beating (they had never stopped since Semana Santa began) It was another long day of following the pintos as they danced around the town, I spent most of the day engaged in idle chat, making new friends, and just hanging out, wishing I had enough money to buy food. AS the day came to a close the dancers made their last tour around the city and then as they were approaching the concrete arches next to the Diconsa store, the made a hard right, during the day, all of the dancers had accumulated together to form a giant group of dancers and as the son began to set we headed down a dirt road toward the grave yard. The effigy of Jesus that the dancers had been carrying was now wrapped in burial shrouds. He was to be buried in the grave yard. We passed brown picket fences and little houses of different colors, we arrived at the grave yard during “the golden hour” the time of day that photographers love due to its yellow and orange hues. The Grave yard was a beautiful little fenced plot, with wooden crosses and stone tombs, with dead grass, a dirt and an occasional pile of horse manure (the tarahumara tend to give their larger animals plenty of freedom of movement) and on one side a large granit cliff rose 50 feet or so above us, its walls were slightly slanted and different people, some spectators and others dancers, were sitting on the lower slants of its walls, some were above on the top of the cliff looking down at us. We reached the open tomb where Christ would be placed, and a small preacher known as Juan, a Jesuit, began the ceremony with a prayer to Onoruame in Raramuri the language of the Tarahumara Alta, the region of the Sierra that is farther away from the BArrancas. I didn’t understand the prayer and with so many people I couldn’t here what he said when he repeated the prayer in Spanish, I only caught occasional pieces, he thanked god for sacrificing his son for us, he talked about how Jesus was human like us and that we should try to follow his example, and that was basically all I got out of it. Jesus was then placed in the tomb and we headed back to town where people were getting ready to begin to visit friends and family. It’s a custom that the night of burying jesus people can go to their friends homes and expect to find a giant feast awaiting them, Au wanted us to go to two of her friends houses, so we hiked up to a bed and breakfast close to Cheerio’s house, Cheerio is a friend in Norogachi, his house becomes important for the story in a little while, all you need to know is its about a 10 minute walk from the main plaza. The Hotel is a colonial style building, think Santa Fe architecture, it has a flat roof, wooden beams coming out of the top, it was a square frame with a garden in the middle. There were various European and American tourists, including a very verbose French man and our friend the “human ones” guy. The owner was a heavy, happy talkative woman, plae in complection, and married to a menonite. He had visited the states and wanted to talk to me about America, but our conversation failed to touch on the profound so lets leave it at we chatted a bit and then all of us gathered up a bowel of fish soup, potato salad, bread, tortillas beans and lentils. We went to the garden and ate and chatted amongst ourselves about what had happened that day and engaged in the Sierra’s primary pass time: gossip. After chatting with the owner of the Bed and breakfast we headed to the house of another friend of Au’s. This house was higher up in the village geographically speaking and we had to do some hiking to get there, but it was all worth it. As we passed the picketed gate and then entered the white house we were welcomed by the smell of cooked fish, beans, and salad. The fish was small trout, prepared according to Tarahumara custom, the guts removed, and the whole fish fried in oil, then salted to taste. The salda was lettuce, tomatoes, and onion slices, with a cesar dressing, the beans were stewed and the potatoes were mashed with butter. It was like a mini thanksgiving in the heart of the Sierra Tarahumara.
After thanking our hosts for the tasty meal, we started heading back to the house. On the way, Moni and I took a detour to the house where the people were beginning to drink tesguino. Semana Santa is atypical of Tarahumara festivities in the sense that during most of the week, prior to burying Jesus, tesguino is prohibited. The moment Jesus is buried; it starts to poor forth in its sugary, corn flavored goodness.
This must be like Sylvester Stalone week because Rambo 3 is on. I have to admit that I am a little surprised that the Muhajadeen are the heroes in this movie, my how america’s opinion has changed in the last two or three decades.
Anway, we went to the house and everyone, the former volunteers, the dancers, the people of the village, were all drinking tesguino while the Matachin dancers were being painted with red, black, and white paint, made from different soils in the Sierra. While we drank people asked me the usual round of questions, where are you form, whats it like there, how did you come to the Sierra, etc, etc. However Lori one of my coworkers, and a native daughter of Norogachi, showed up. When she saw me drinking tesguino she said, “Vagabond, you can’t drink tesguino!”
I looked back at her in annoyance, “I already told you, celiac means I can’t eat wheat, barley, and rye, and sometimes oats because of cross contamination, Corn isn’t on that list,” I lifted the gourd of tesguino to my bearded lips, and soaked it in like a mop sucks up water off a floor (if tesguino ever spilled, I can assure you, it would be worth drinking off the floor.)
Lorena shook her head. “No, no, no. I’m not talking about the corn, I’m talking about the Basihuare, its wheat Manu, its wheat.”
I choked and sputtered like an old Ford. “WHAT?!?!?!?!” I cried out in protest. “It can’t be! I won’t believe it. Of Basihuare is a mountain grass not a wheat.”
“No manu,” Lorena said cooly. “It’s a wheat, its Spanish name is triguillo, little wheat.”
Yeah. I was totally fucked. I walked home in the dark at 3 am that morning with my hung low, and a belly burning from indegestion, a symptom of my celiacs kicking in. But I refused to believe it, it was a mountain grass, triguillo was a misnomer. A fucking misnomer. God. Damn. It. And tomorrow I was going to drink more tesguino than was humanely safe, or had been drunk by any other chavochi before me, Or I would die trying....
Semana Santa Day 2
That morning I awoke in Auroras room. She and Monica had shared the bunk and I was sleeping on the twin bed next to them in a single room house with an outhouse for a bathroom, and a camping stove for a kitchen. Outside the sun was bright, it broke through the large apple trees and through the craks in the window and door, illuminating this magical little cavern of a room.
Our breakfast was potatos, cooked with chilaca chiles, onions and tomatoes into a delicious soup. It was there were we discussed our plans for the day. Monica was going to go look for her friends in town and Aurora and I were going to go to Rocheachi (the place of the fish) a small town outside of Norogachi which rests directly on the hiway between Guachochi (the place of the cranes) and Creel (named after Enrique Creel the towns founder and the son of a wealthy American miner and a local woman.) We got into the truck and backed out of the dirt driveway onto the hiway and headed off on a long stretch of pavement which slowly ate its way farther and farther into the pine oak forests of the high Sierra. We passed a dead rabbit in the road an Aurora commented about her bad luck with running over animals. Her short bad leg made breaking difficult and stopping quickly was nearly impossible. AS we headed through the mountain road and arrived at Rocheachi we parked in the middle of the mouth of the road and waited for the red Creel-Guachochi bus that made several passes in both directions during the day. We talked about music and town gossip and when the bus pulled up I ran up, welcomed Luis, and then asked the driver when they left on Saturdays.
“We have an 9:30 and a 1:30 stop from Guachochi to Creel on Saturdays,” he told me.
With that I thanked him and headed back to “La Blanca” the white truck with the Foundations logo on its side. I got in and headed off. Luis was in a good mood, which was usual; he was a happy, smart, observant Tarahumara dude with 29 years under his skin and in his mind. He liked rock music and couldn’t speak a word of Tarahumara even though his aunt is the famous Tarahumara musician Mariposa de la Sierra, and his older brothers were completely fluent. He would like to learn but lacks the resources and the time. This would probably be a convenient time to discuss language loss in indigenous peoples in Mexico and the United States.
The native people of Mexico and the United States have very similar histories, up until 1492. At that point their cultures, histories, and fates took markedly differing trajectories based on the differences between the dominating forces in their political economies (basically systems of production for those of you who aren’t social science majors.) One of the major divergences is language.
The United States is a country with a long history of racial, cultural, and linguistic intolerance, luckily, as in many areas, the founders of our country foresaw these problems and worked around them in a mixed bag of good ideas and bad ideas. One of the better ones was not having an official language. Why not have an official language, you might ask. Well, if you must know, there are over 200 languages native to the United States, most of the European colonized areas of our country spoke French, Spanish, or even Russian long before English speakers ever set foot on said colonized soil. The united states is a country built on the idea of a melting pot, the idea being that the more cultural resources we have to draw on the stronger and more appropriate our resolutions to problems can be. In an increasingly international world, the promotion of linguistic diversity helps a country economically, not hinder it. When you see people on the street screaming English only or wigging out about the number of people they see in life speaking another language inside of “their” country (as if their ethnic origin somehow gave them ownership of the nation all of us belong to, you are seeing the sector of America most likely to doom us to a century of economic, cultural and political downfall, they just aren’t quite smart enough to grasp the importance of polyglots in an international society. They fail to understand that when I fill out government forms in Spanish, or talk to the bank clerk in Spanish, or am chatting in Castilian with my friends on the streets, its not because we can’t speak English, (in fact as a polyglot its very likely I speak English better than they do) it’s because I’m exercising my linguistic muscles. Yeah. That was a giant fuck you to the English only folks. I hope you enjoyed it.
However as in most areas of life, our nations de jure tolerance of languages has been historically negated by a de facto intolerance that has been hell bent on eradicating non English languages in the United States the way Hitler was hell bent on wiping out the Worlds Jews under the Final Solution. The difference being that there is no American Calvary to form a D Day and save the innocent when American decided to don a prick mask and act like the bad guy. The down side of being the most powerful nation in the world is that there is no one to kick your ass when you deserve it, and so the United States began a long process of wiping out Native American languages, Spanish, Ebonics, Gullah http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullah_language and French speaking communities in the Appalachians and Louisiana (seriously what kind of ass holes thought wiping out the language that brought us Zydico music was a good idea?)
Via boarding schools, federal school district programs, and just the overwhelming social engineering power of generalized and institutionalized prejudice, the United States did a pretty good job eliminating its linguistic treasure chest, up until the 1990s when the education system got a little more enlightened and a dollar sign was placed on being a polyglot. However as late as the 1970s children in the public school system were physically and emotionally abused for speaking languages other than English, through the power of discrimination, and bullying the emotional abuse and economic abuse continues in rural schools in the states where Native American students are told that in order to be “real Americans” they have to stop using their languages and only use English. How typical of societies constructed on the wholesale slaughter of other societies, in order to purge the guilt of how our country was born we try to remove the daily reminder by eradicating whats left of the victims in any way possible. This was the experience of many of the native american students I knew in my experiences taking American Indian history classes in college. It was also the experience of my father, who like all Puerto Ricans born after 1917, has been an American Citizen his entire life, albeit with limited rights during the period of his life where he lived in Puerto Rico. Upon arriving in Pensylvania at the age of 8, without any ability to speak English at all, he was punished so thoroughly by his teachers and peers in school that he lied to us until I was 18, telling us he couldn’t speak Spanish at all, hoping that he wouldn’t have to teach his children a language which he felt caused him extreme amounts of emotional distress as a child. He thought that not teaching us Spanish would somehow make us more american and reduce the amount of prejudice we would have to endure. He was mostly wrong, and now he regrets that decision, but my mother used to tell me, when I would ask why he wouldn’t teach us Spanish, that she didn’t know why, but that he still cries when she brings up that part of his life. Whether or not he was physically abused by his teachers for speaking the only language he knows is something I may never know. But this was exactly the experience of most students who spoke a language other than English at that time. If you want to see a real life example check out the Andrew Windyboy interview on the webpage of the following link. Click the URL, there will be a large photo of native american students at a boarding school, underneath the picture there are two links, one says “Watch Andrew Windyboy Interview” click on that one and prepare yourself for a ride.
http://www.richheape.com/boarding-school.htm
Mexico’s history of linguistic and cultural intolerance is no better than that of the states. In fact, if these two countries shared one thing and only one thing aside from their border, it would be the widespread jingoism and xenophobia that plague both countries. The difference is that most Mexicans are mestizos, people of mixed indigenous and European decent. That doesn’t necessarily make them more tolerant of native Americans, often what we hate most in others is what we hate most in ourselves, anti-native american feelings here can rival anything seen in the states, but on the other hand there has always been a sector of society here that has been MORE proud of its indigenous heritage than its European heritage. One of Mexico’s heroes, Benito Juarez, was the countries only indigenous president, which is of course, one more than the united states has had. Emiliano Zapato, the revolutionary that made gigantic rimmed sombreros famous, created the ejido system of socialized land tenure, and helped overthrow the pro-european, racists, positivist dictatorship of Porforio Diaz was a native american and was a polyglot, speaking his native language as well as Spanish. The primary difference between the U.S. and Mexico as far as how Native Americans have been treated has been that after the war of independence in 1810 that overthrew Spanish rule, the war between Europeans and natives has been more balanced, although still far from fair, than that same race war in the United States. In Mexico, a larger portion of the population self identified as indigenous and did their best to represent their native american fellow citizens to the best degree that they knew how. In the racial white wash that was and to some degree still is the united states, no such group of people existed or exists in the United States. The result is that prejudice against native Americans is not acknowledged or even condemned in the states, while racist names for sports teams such as the Atlanta Black Crackers, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Black_Crackers, have long gone the way of the dinosaurs in the U.S. many people still think that Native Americans are overly sensitive about being used as mascots. They must be, in the Sports Illustrated March 4, 2002 Article “Indian Wars” 83% of Native American respondents to a Sports Illustrated Poll said that professional teasm should stop using native american names, mascots, and logos. Some teams have chosen to make deals with the tribe whose name they use, such as full ride scholarships to all tribal members, free tickets for the the whole tribe, a certain percentage of royalties going to tribal funds, and giving the tribe the right to override and review the use of logos, names, and mascots, which is a great compromise. But it doesn’t change the fact that Native Americans are still marginalized from real power in the country, that, in all honesty, should be there country, if you follow the “finders keepers” logic of the English only folks. I could site you plenty of personal experiences at Utah Valley University, or even the number of people who laughed while watching the film “True Gritt” in the scene where the anti-hero protagonist Rueben J. rooster Cogburn kicks a couple of native american kids flat onto their faces off of their porch just for the shits and giggles of being an ass hole. Had those kids been black, laughing at that scene would have been a social faux pas, not something the majority of the theater did in social unison. But whatevs. The point is that in mexico there has always been a stronger sense of indigenous rights than in the states. Indigenous rights are even specifically mentioned and listed under certain articles of the Mexican constitution. The down side is the Mexican state has always been to corrupt and powerless to enforce its own laws and so once again the de facto situation has been one of racism, prejudice and abuses. The Guarajio a tribe that live next to the Tarahumara were considered extince until the 1970s when it was discovered that they were alive, albeit, all slaves to local ranchers (slavery was illegal in Mexico before it was in the U.S., but that hasn’t stopped people in either country from continuing the practice in the black market and below the radar of government policies.)
The other advantage that natives in Mexico have had over those in the states has been the same lack of power that kept the federal government here from enforcing its noble laws protecting indigenous people. This lack of power resulted in something that the Brittish Empire called “benign neglect” in reference to a similar situation of powerlessness that they faced in Africa. By neglecting the colonized population both of these states guaranteed political marginalization, lack of education, underdevelopment of infrastructure and econmy that have left large sections of the population empoverished and illiterate, but with the added bonus of having their languages and cultures left intact. In Mexico the Catholic church has filled the gap left my government and has done its own amount of social engineering among native peoples. But the same native peoples have always had a larger influence on the process than their counterparts in the states. And that’s a story for another blog.
How this all ties into todays story is that Louis is an example of the same processes that are eliminating the worlds indigenous languages. AS a young man his only options for education were to attend boarding schools. He now has a degree in architecture and works in an NGO here In Creel, but he can not speak his own language, in spite of the fact that most of his family member can. Its something that bothers him, and it has an strong impact on his social life in the Sierra. Being a Tarahumara who cant speak Tarahumara puts him more in the mestizo camp, even if he doesn’t want to be, and it is something other Tarahumara look down on. The same pressure to live his home for a boarding school has had the same impact on hundreds of students in the Sierra, it has cost them their language, their customs, and the cosmology they would have grown up in, not because they were beaten or punished for being tarahumara, but rather because there was no one to teach them how. However as his brother Alex has pointed out to me, being Tarahumara is more about self identity than anything else, while speaking the language and having the skin color help, they aren’t prerequisites. There are planet of people with the first tow qualities who suffer from an internalized racism so strong that they disaknowledge all things Tarahumara and have all but completely mestisoized themselves. What Louis has that they don’t is the desire to be Tarahumara and a pride for his heritage, that’s all he really needs.
We road in the truck enjoying the music on Auroras I Pod, pulled into Norogachi and then parked at her place. Aurora and Moni had things to do and
-Pause- Sorry reader, but Rocky two is playing in the background and like a gigantic pack of ravenous kids is chasing behind Rocky to help him train, I have never seen a gayer movie in my life, how did this film ever come to represent american machismo? –unpause-
Yeah so anyway Lousi and I headed over to the town plaza in front of the church. The church has a fenced in patio and the enterance to the patio had a large arc made from pine bows, similar arcs were stretched over the town where the dancers path lay. Now, normally in a Tarahumara town during Semana Santa people dance Phariseo, two groups of people, pharasees and soldiers, dance out a gigantic cosmic battle and good triumphs over evil and a large effigy of Judas is burned, gigantic pecker and all (the efficgy of Judas usually could qualify as a star in freak porn, his wanker being large enough that in some villages its used to help carry him around on the shoulders of the dancers.) None of this is true in Norogachi, in Norogachi, as long as anyone can remember, the dance of Semana Santa has been el pinto. El pinto is characterized by men in loin clothes painted with white spots dancing in two lines. Several of the men have drums, a couple have crowns made of turkey feathers. The dance in two lines taking a few steps forward a few back and then doing the occasional twirl. If I ever right a book about this, I promise to deliver on better ethnographic detail, but right now im just trying to get memories out into something a little more permanent than brain cells
Louchi and I checked out chicks, talked about life plans, and eventually he got hungry and went back to Au’s place and I followed the dancers. The dancers circled part of the village with the constant sound of drumming in the back ground. The drumming never stops from the moment it starts at the beginning of the semana santa ceremonies until the end of the week. 24 hours a day drumming can be heard as the dancers make their way through the city. The dancers circle around the city and large crowds of men follow directly behind them with larger crowds of women behind that. I didn’t realize that there was a devision of sexes in the crowds and so I lumped up with the lady folk, a large sea of bright, contrasting colors as we made our way around the town. I bumped into JD a friend in the Sierra as well as his family and he told me about the difference between the ceremonies here and in Rowerachi a village he has worked in for over 20 years. Rowerachi is a smaller village and he felt the primary difference, aside from the fariseo/pintos dances was that Rowerachi was a village where the dancing was more of a family event while in Norogachi it had become a tourist event. The town new it and hated it, while the Tarahumara leaders in Norogachi did everything they could to make the event a religious ceremony meant for the people of the village the municiapality did everything they could to generate tourism and fill county coffers. There were mobile restaurants, cotton candy, ice cream vendors, and tourists everywhere and the locals felt like that degraded this pinnacle dance in the Tarahumara religious calendar. The dance isn’t just important as a key event in the relationship between the Tarahumara and Onoruame, their god, its also an important moment for fomenting group and ethnic identity. It’s a catholic ceremony on paper but in reality its Tarahumara to the core and by participating in something so distinctly tarahumara during a ceremony that is supposed to be something imposed by the western world the tarahumara exercise their right to chose their own path, to navigate the waters of forign domination and self discovery, but like anyone else in the world, they don’t enjoy going through such intensly personal experiences in the company of outsiders and strangers. Much less so when said intense personal experience is made a spectical by those same people. No one wants their moment of self discovery, identity formation and religious ecstasy treated as a substitute for the circus. Not only is it distracting its also demeaning.
Speaking of which, as my conversation with Jd ended and I headed back to the place I left Luichi, I saw a lot of annoying tourists, most of whom were just taking pictures, a serious offense in Norogachi, but also a man with a sign that made him look like a protestor. The dude, a white guy with ragged patchy grey hair, in his 60s, with a black wife beater and khaki pants was turning in circles trying to force people to read his sign. I was kind of curious so I lowered myself into the basketball court where he was unsuccessfully harassing the people around him by silently shoving the sign in their faces. I walked around him so I could get a good read, it said, in English something about giving up diversity and the evils of culture in order to celebrate our human oneness. Where the fuck did this dude come from? He was like the image of the ugly American transplanted in the heart of Tarahumara country, fortunately he was stupid enough to write the sign in English, saving the local people from being insulted and his ass from a beating at the same time.
This kind of behavior is exactly why the local Tarahumara governor, Chelina, had forbidden photos at Tarahumara events a few years before. At a similar festival, held in the church patio, an older gentleman died. Everyone thought he was drunk because drunk passed out people are not unusual at Tarahumara religious festivals, however one person did notice, a European photographer. Instead of making it known to everyone else that the man had died, the photographer began taking photos of the man’s corpse which he later published in a newspaper in Europe. Outraged by this incredibly offensive crime, Chelina forbid all photos in Tarahumara ceremonies in Norogachi. Like most things Tarahumara this rule was very relaxed and expected personal liberty more than the enforcement of law, so there were plenty of people taking pictures, Tarahumara, non Tarahumara, me, but what the rule did was it forced people to think about what kinds of Photos they were taking, why, and how they were going about it, which had the intended effect, it kept most people from acting like ass holes, except for our friend the “human oneness” dude. He was still acting like an ass hole, and he didn’t even need a camera to do it, he just took off, ala Westboro Baptist Church, and tried to piss people off. Maybe someone who spoke English should have said something to him, but seeing as to how the damage he was doing was minimized by his linguistic incompetence, I figured it was best to leave him alone and hope that one of the many denizens of Norogachi who have lived in the states as immigrants wouldn’t notice the sign, and with that I headed back to the church and started watching the dancing again.
At the church I met a soon to be volunteer, among a group of used to be volunteers. In spite of the anthropological sales pitch that posits the Tarahumara as the most remote tribe in North America, and Christopher Mc Dougal’s statement on the John Stewart’s The Daily Show that absolutely no one in Mexico is trying to help the Tarahumara, the Sierra Tarahumara is an incredible example of the heroism and good will that exists in Mexico as well as the youthfull optimism and idealism that fights against incredible and dangerous odds to better The Republic. In nearly every central Tarahumara town in the Sierra there are schools built by various religious and non religious groups that are staffed by young Volunteers from Mexico and abroad. The most prolific of these organizations is the Maristas, a catholic group dedicated to the education of the worlds poor. They have established numerous boarding schools in the Sierra where Tarahumara kids can live during the school week and receive a quality education. In reality nearly all of the “do gooders” that live in the Sierra Tarahumara arrived as volunteers for the Maristas or the Jesuits, or volunteer in an NGO established by someone who did. This lady was one of the former. She had just finished a degree in Child Psychology in a University in Guadalajara and wanted to come spend a year in the Sierra Tarahumara volunteering with the Marista Boarding School in town. Her friends had already done their time with the Maristas and were showing her around. She was 23, plump, smiling and dressed in the loose flowing, colorful dresses that are so common among Mexico’s hippies. She wore a red head scarf that was tightly wrapped around her head, it was trying to keep her many ideas trapped inside so she could use them later. It only partially succeeded. She asked me why I was there and after starting up a conversation invited me to follow the dancers with her. She told me about her day, they had hiked to the top of a geographical feature that could qualify as a large hill or a small mountain depending on the height of the viewer among other factors, and after arriving to their destination they traveled to an underground cave, a large hole in the earth, and went spelunking. There were bats and it was dark and it was absolutely amazing, an experience she swore she would never forget. She told me about her time as a volunteer in the southern part of the country, and what the markets were like and after having done the loop with the dancers she took me to the building she was sleeping in at the boarding school and showed me a purse she had bought there. It’s the funny thing about volunteers, even though we don’t get paid and the world would like to believe we do it out of selflessness, that we are mini mother Teresa’s just ready to come out of the oven, given enough self sacrifice and suffering for a noble cause, we’re actually normal people, and if we can’t get paid in money we at least enjoy a healthy revenue of stories, adventures, and memories. You will know a true volunteer when they start to show you their photos and souvenirs from their experiences. It’s the retirement fund we’ve built up over time, when we can’t volunteer and be do-gooders anymore, because reality kicks in and we need to make up for all the years of forgone materialism, we will always have our memories and the material objects we shared those experiences with. This lady hadn’t quite reached that point, but it was the same principal. By showing me her purse she was reaching into the past and pulling back an experience. By interacting with her purse I was on some level interacting with the part of her life she was the most proud of. I understood that and was thankful for the experience. However it was getting late and she had to run off with her friends and I needed to find mine so we went different ways. After finding my friends and eating dinner with them we spent the rest of the night in the main plaza in Norogachi, it sits between the church, the marrista boarding school, and the largest “grocery store” in town, a diconsa store, a one room shop filled with the most basic necessities, toilet paper, soda pop, potato chips, candy, and the occasional vegetable, established by the federal government in order to bring “food” to small villages. These stores probably do a better job at bringing diabetes to the rural villages of Mexico, but on the other hand, even if a snickers bar and bottle of coke is nutritionally bank rupt, it kills hunger pain when there’s nothing in the house to eat. When the corn and the beans from last year’s harvest and there’s no rain to grow vegetables or the wild plants that the Tarahumara love to harvest (this hunger season lasts about 7 months of the Year in the Sierra Tarahumara), these long shelf life junk foods are a medicine to make chronic hunger and malnutrition slightly less painful. It might not be the most nutritionally sound way of going about it, but when there’s no food in your belly, nutritionally sound isn’t very high on the priority list.
In the town square we watched the dancers, all of the different groups of them, each group from one specific village outside of Norogachi, dancing around giant bonfires. There brown bodies, painted with white spots, glimmered in dancing shades of yellow and orange, moving back and forth, all night long. I called it quits about two in the morning, and prepared myself for the next day……
Our breakfast was potatos, cooked with chilaca chiles, onions and tomatoes into a delicious soup. It was there were we discussed our plans for the day. Monica was going to go look for her friends in town and Aurora and I were going to go to Rocheachi (the place of the fish) a small town outside of Norogachi which rests directly on the hiway between Guachochi (the place of the cranes) and Creel (named after Enrique Creel the towns founder and the son of a wealthy American miner and a local woman.) We got into the truck and backed out of the dirt driveway onto the hiway and headed off on a long stretch of pavement which slowly ate its way farther and farther into the pine oak forests of the high Sierra. We passed a dead rabbit in the road an Aurora commented about her bad luck with running over animals. Her short bad leg made breaking difficult and stopping quickly was nearly impossible. AS we headed through the mountain road and arrived at Rocheachi we parked in the middle of the mouth of the road and waited for the red Creel-Guachochi bus that made several passes in both directions during the day. We talked about music and town gossip and when the bus pulled up I ran up, welcomed Luis, and then asked the driver when they left on Saturdays.
“We have an 9:30 and a 1:30 stop from Guachochi to Creel on Saturdays,” he told me.
With that I thanked him and headed back to “La Blanca” the white truck with the Foundations logo on its side. I got in and headed off. Luis was in a good mood, which was usual; he was a happy, smart, observant Tarahumara dude with 29 years under his skin and in his mind. He liked rock music and couldn’t speak a word of Tarahumara even though his aunt is the famous Tarahumara musician Mariposa de la Sierra, and his older brothers were completely fluent. He would like to learn but lacks the resources and the time. This would probably be a convenient time to discuss language loss in indigenous peoples in Mexico and the United States.
The native people of Mexico and the United States have very similar histories, up until 1492. At that point their cultures, histories, and fates took markedly differing trajectories based on the differences between the dominating forces in their political economies (basically systems of production for those of you who aren’t social science majors.) One of the major divergences is language.
The United States is a country with a long history of racial, cultural, and linguistic intolerance, luckily, as in many areas, the founders of our country foresaw these problems and worked around them in a mixed bag of good ideas and bad ideas. One of the better ones was not having an official language. Why not have an official language, you might ask. Well, if you must know, there are over 200 languages native to the United States, most of the European colonized areas of our country spoke French, Spanish, or even Russian long before English speakers ever set foot on said colonized soil. The united states is a country built on the idea of a melting pot, the idea being that the more cultural resources we have to draw on the stronger and more appropriate our resolutions to problems can be. In an increasingly international world, the promotion of linguistic diversity helps a country economically, not hinder it. When you see people on the street screaming English only or wigging out about the number of people they see in life speaking another language inside of “their” country (as if their ethnic origin somehow gave them ownership of the nation all of us belong to, you are seeing the sector of America most likely to doom us to a century of economic, cultural and political downfall, they just aren’t quite smart enough to grasp the importance of polyglots in an international society. They fail to understand that when I fill out government forms in Spanish, or talk to the bank clerk in Spanish, or am chatting in Castilian with my friends on the streets, its not because we can’t speak English, (in fact as a polyglot its very likely I speak English better than they do) it’s because I’m exercising my linguistic muscles. Yeah. That was a giant fuck you to the English only folks. I hope you enjoyed it.
However as in most areas of life, our nations de jure tolerance of languages has been historically negated by a de facto intolerance that has been hell bent on eradicating non English languages in the United States the way Hitler was hell bent on wiping out the Worlds Jews under the Final Solution. The difference being that there is no American Calvary to form a D Day and save the innocent when American decided to don a prick mask and act like the bad guy. The down side of being the most powerful nation in the world is that there is no one to kick your ass when you deserve it, and so the United States began a long process of wiping out Native American languages, Spanish, Ebonics, Gullah http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullah_language and French speaking communities in the Appalachians and Louisiana (seriously what kind of ass holes thought wiping out the language that brought us Zydico music was a good idea?)
Via boarding schools, federal school district programs, and just the overwhelming social engineering power of generalized and institutionalized prejudice, the United States did a pretty good job eliminating its linguistic treasure chest, up until the 1990s when the education system got a little more enlightened and a dollar sign was placed on being a polyglot. However as late as the 1970s children in the public school system were physically and emotionally abused for speaking languages other than English, through the power of discrimination, and bullying the emotional abuse and economic abuse continues in rural schools in the states where Native American students are told that in order to be “real Americans” they have to stop using their languages and only use English. How typical of societies constructed on the wholesale slaughter of other societies, in order to purge the guilt of how our country was born we try to remove the daily reminder by eradicating whats left of the victims in any way possible. This was the experience of many of the native american students I knew in my experiences taking American Indian history classes in college. It was also the experience of my father, who like all Puerto Ricans born after 1917, has been an American Citizen his entire life, albeit with limited rights during the period of his life where he lived in Puerto Rico. Upon arriving in Pensylvania at the age of 8, without any ability to speak English at all, he was punished so thoroughly by his teachers and peers in school that he lied to us until I was 18, telling us he couldn’t speak Spanish at all, hoping that he wouldn’t have to teach his children a language which he felt caused him extreme amounts of emotional distress as a child. He thought that not teaching us Spanish would somehow make us more american and reduce the amount of prejudice we would have to endure. He was mostly wrong, and now he regrets that decision, but my mother used to tell me, when I would ask why he wouldn’t teach us Spanish, that she didn’t know why, but that he still cries when she brings up that part of his life. Whether or not he was physically abused by his teachers for speaking the only language he knows is something I may never know. But this was exactly the experience of most students who spoke a language other than English at that time. If you want to see a real life example check out the Andrew Windyboy interview on the webpage of the following link. Click the URL, there will be a large photo of native american students at a boarding school, underneath the picture there are two links, one says “Watch Andrew Windyboy Interview” click on that one and prepare yourself for a ride.
http://www.richheape.com/boarding-school.htm
Mexico’s history of linguistic and cultural intolerance is no better than that of the states. In fact, if these two countries shared one thing and only one thing aside from their border, it would be the widespread jingoism and xenophobia that plague both countries. The difference is that most Mexicans are mestizos, people of mixed indigenous and European decent. That doesn’t necessarily make them more tolerant of native Americans, often what we hate most in others is what we hate most in ourselves, anti-native american feelings here can rival anything seen in the states, but on the other hand there has always been a sector of society here that has been MORE proud of its indigenous heritage than its European heritage. One of Mexico’s heroes, Benito Juarez, was the countries only indigenous president, which is of course, one more than the united states has had. Emiliano Zapato, the revolutionary that made gigantic rimmed sombreros famous, created the ejido system of socialized land tenure, and helped overthrow the pro-european, racists, positivist dictatorship of Porforio Diaz was a native american and was a polyglot, speaking his native language as well as Spanish. The primary difference between the U.S. and Mexico as far as how Native Americans have been treated has been that after the war of independence in 1810 that overthrew Spanish rule, the war between Europeans and natives has been more balanced, although still far from fair, than that same race war in the United States. In Mexico, a larger portion of the population self identified as indigenous and did their best to represent their native american fellow citizens to the best degree that they knew how. In the racial white wash that was and to some degree still is the united states, no such group of people existed or exists in the United States. The result is that prejudice against native Americans is not acknowledged or even condemned in the states, while racist names for sports teams such as the Atlanta Black Crackers, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Black_Crackers, have long gone the way of the dinosaurs in the U.S. many people still think that Native Americans are overly sensitive about being used as mascots. They must be, in the Sports Illustrated March 4, 2002 Article “Indian Wars” 83% of Native American respondents to a Sports Illustrated Poll said that professional teasm should stop using native american names, mascots, and logos. Some teams have chosen to make deals with the tribe whose name they use, such as full ride scholarships to all tribal members, free tickets for the the whole tribe, a certain percentage of royalties going to tribal funds, and giving the tribe the right to override and review the use of logos, names, and mascots, which is a great compromise. But it doesn’t change the fact that Native Americans are still marginalized from real power in the country, that, in all honesty, should be there country, if you follow the “finders keepers” logic of the English only folks. I could site you plenty of personal experiences at Utah Valley University, or even the number of people who laughed while watching the film “True Gritt” in the scene where the anti-hero protagonist Rueben J. rooster Cogburn kicks a couple of native american kids flat onto their faces off of their porch just for the shits and giggles of being an ass hole. Had those kids been black, laughing at that scene would have been a social faux pas, not something the majority of the theater did in social unison. But whatevs. The point is that in mexico there has always been a stronger sense of indigenous rights than in the states. Indigenous rights are even specifically mentioned and listed under certain articles of the Mexican constitution. The down side is the Mexican state has always been to corrupt and powerless to enforce its own laws and so once again the de facto situation has been one of racism, prejudice and abuses. The Guarajio a tribe that live next to the Tarahumara were considered extince until the 1970s when it was discovered that they were alive, albeit, all slaves to local ranchers (slavery was illegal in Mexico before it was in the U.S., but that hasn’t stopped people in either country from continuing the practice in the black market and below the radar of government policies.)
The other advantage that natives in Mexico have had over those in the states has been the same lack of power that kept the federal government here from enforcing its noble laws protecting indigenous people. This lack of power resulted in something that the Brittish Empire called “benign neglect” in reference to a similar situation of powerlessness that they faced in Africa. By neglecting the colonized population both of these states guaranteed political marginalization, lack of education, underdevelopment of infrastructure and econmy that have left large sections of the population empoverished and illiterate, but with the added bonus of having their languages and cultures left intact. In Mexico the Catholic church has filled the gap left my government and has done its own amount of social engineering among native peoples. But the same native peoples have always had a larger influence on the process than their counterparts in the states. And that’s a story for another blog.
How this all ties into todays story is that Louis is an example of the same processes that are eliminating the worlds indigenous languages. AS a young man his only options for education were to attend boarding schools. He now has a degree in architecture and works in an NGO here In Creel, but he can not speak his own language, in spite of the fact that most of his family member can. Its something that bothers him, and it has an strong impact on his social life in the Sierra. Being a Tarahumara who cant speak Tarahumara puts him more in the mestizo camp, even if he doesn’t want to be, and it is something other Tarahumara look down on. The same pressure to live his home for a boarding school has had the same impact on hundreds of students in the Sierra, it has cost them their language, their customs, and the cosmology they would have grown up in, not because they were beaten or punished for being tarahumara, but rather because there was no one to teach them how. However as his brother Alex has pointed out to me, being Tarahumara is more about self identity than anything else, while speaking the language and having the skin color help, they aren’t prerequisites. There are planet of people with the first tow qualities who suffer from an internalized racism so strong that they disaknowledge all things Tarahumara and have all but completely mestisoized themselves. What Louis has that they don’t is the desire to be Tarahumara and a pride for his heritage, that’s all he really needs.
We road in the truck enjoying the music on Auroras I Pod, pulled into Norogachi and then parked at her place. Aurora and Moni had things to do and
-Pause- Sorry reader, but Rocky two is playing in the background and like a gigantic pack of ravenous kids is chasing behind Rocky to help him train, I have never seen a gayer movie in my life, how did this film ever come to represent american machismo? –unpause-
Yeah so anyway Lousi and I headed over to the town plaza in front of the church. The church has a fenced in patio and the enterance to the patio had a large arc made from pine bows, similar arcs were stretched over the town where the dancers path lay. Now, normally in a Tarahumara town during Semana Santa people dance Phariseo, two groups of people, pharasees and soldiers, dance out a gigantic cosmic battle and good triumphs over evil and a large effigy of Judas is burned, gigantic pecker and all (the efficgy of Judas usually could qualify as a star in freak porn, his wanker being large enough that in some villages its used to help carry him around on the shoulders of the dancers.) None of this is true in Norogachi, in Norogachi, as long as anyone can remember, the dance of Semana Santa has been el pinto. El pinto is characterized by men in loin clothes painted with white spots dancing in two lines. Several of the men have drums, a couple have crowns made of turkey feathers. The dance in two lines taking a few steps forward a few back and then doing the occasional twirl. If I ever right a book about this, I promise to deliver on better ethnographic detail, but right now im just trying to get memories out into something a little more permanent than brain cells
Louchi and I checked out chicks, talked about life plans, and eventually he got hungry and went back to Au’s place and I followed the dancers. The dancers circled part of the village with the constant sound of drumming in the back ground. The drumming never stops from the moment it starts at the beginning of the semana santa ceremonies until the end of the week. 24 hours a day drumming can be heard as the dancers make their way through the city. The dancers circle around the city and large crowds of men follow directly behind them with larger crowds of women behind that. I didn’t realize that there was a devision of sexes in the crowds and so I lumped up with the lady folk, a large sea of bright, contrasting colors as we made our way around the town. I bumped into JD a friend in the Sierra as well as his family and he told me about the difference between the ceremonies here and in Rowerachi a village he has worked in for over 20 years. Rowerachi is a smaller village and he felt the primary difference, aside from the fariseo/pintos dances was that Rowerachi was a village where the dancing was more of a family event while in Norogachi it had become a tourist event. The town new it and hated it, while the Tarahumara leaders in Norogachi did everything they could to make the event a religious ceremony meant for the people of the village the municiapality did everything they could to generate tourism and fill county coffers. There were mobile restaurants, cotton candy, ice cream vendors, and tourists everywhere and the locals felt like that degraded this pinnacle dance in the Tarahumara religious calendar. The dance isn’t just important as a key event in the relationship between the Tarahumara and Onoruame, their god, its also an important moment for fomenting group and ethnic identity. It’s a catholic ceremony on paper but in reality its Tarahumara to the core and by participating in something so distinctly tarahumara during a ceremony that is supposed to be something imposed by the western world the tarahumara exercise their right to chose their own path, to navigate the waters of forign domination and self discovery, but like anyone else in the world, they don’t enjoy going through such intensly personal experiences in the company of outsiders and strangers. Much less so when said intense personal experience is made a spectical by those same people. No one wants their moment of self discovery, identity formation and religious ecstasy treated as a substitute for the circus. Not only is it distracting its also demeaning.
Speaking of which, as my conversation with Jd ended and I headed back to the place I left Luichi, I saw a lot of annoying tourists, most of whom were just taking pictures, a serious offense in Norogachi, but also a man with a sign that made him look like a protestor. The dude, a white guy with ragged patchy grey hair, in his 60s, with a black wife beater and khaki pants was turning in circles trying to force people to read his sign. I was kind of curious so I lowered myself into the basketball court where he was unsuccessfully harassing the people around him by silently shoving the sign in their faces. I walked around him so I could get a good read, it said, in English something about giving up diversity and the evils of culture in order to celebrate our human oneness. Where the fuck did this dude come from? He was like the image of the ugly American transplanted in the heart of Tarahumara country, fortunately he was stupid enough to write the sign in English, saving the local people from being insulted and his ass from a beating at the same time.
This kind of behavior is exactly why the local Tarahumara governor, Chelina, had forbidden photos at Tarahumara events a few years before. At a similar festival, held in the church patio, an older gentleman died. Everyone thought he was drunk because drunk passed out people are not unusual at Tarahumara religious festivals, however one person did notice, a European photographer. Instead of making it known to everyone else that the man had died, the photographer began taking photos of the man’s corpse which he later published in a newspaper in Europe. Outraged by this incredibly offensive crime, Chelina forbid all photos in Tarahumara ceremonies in Norogachi. Like most things Tarahumara this rule was very relaxed and expected personal liberty more than the enforcement of law, so there were plenty of people taking pictures, Tarahumara, non Tarahumara, me, but what the rule did was it forced people to think about what kinds of Photos they were taking, why, and how they were going about it, which had the intended effect, it kept most people from acting like ass holes, except for our friend the “human oneness” dude. He was still acting like an ass hole, and he didn’t even need a camera to do it, he just took off, ala Westboro Baptist Church, and tried to piss people off. Maybe someone who spoke English should have said something to him, but seeing as to how the damage he was doing was minimized by his linguistic incompetence, I figured it was best to leave him alone and hope that one of the many denizens of Norogachi who have lived in the states as immigrants wouldn’t notice the sign, and with that I headed back to the church and started watching the dancing again.
At the church I met a soon to be volunteer, among a group of used to be volunteers. In spite of the anthropological sales pitch that posits the Tarahumara as the most remote tribe in North America, and Christopher Mc Dougal’s statement on the John Stewart’s The Daily Show that absolutely no one in Mexico is trying to help the Tarahumara, the Sierra Tarahumara is an incredible example of the heroism and good will that exists in Mexico as well as the youthfull optimism and idealism that fights against incredible and dangerous odds to better The Republic. In nearly every central Tarahumara town in the Sierra there are schools built by various religious and non religious groups that are staffed by young Volunteers from Mexico and abroad. The most prolific of these organizations is the Maristas, a catholic group dedicated to the education of the worlds poor. They have established numerous boarding schools in the Sierra where Tarahumara kids can live during the school week and receive a quality education. In reality nearly all of the “do gooders” that live in the Sierra Tarahumara arrived as volunteers for the Maristas or the Jesuits, or volunteer in an NGO established by someone who did. This lady was one of the former. She had just finished a degree in Child Psychology in a University in Guadalajara and wanted to come spend a year in the Sierra Tarahumara volunteering with the Marista Boarding School in town. Her friends had already done their time with the Maristas and were showing her around. She was 23, plump, smiling and dressed in the loose flowing, colorful dresses that are so common among Mexico’s hippies. She wore a red head scarf that was tightly wrapped around her head, it was trying to keep her many ideas trapped inside so she could use them later. It only partially succeeded. She asked me why I was there and after starting up a conversation invited me to follow the dancers with her. She told me about her day, they had hiked to the top of a geographical feature that could qualify as a large hill or a small mountain depending on the height of the viewer among other factors, and after arriving to their destination they traveled to an underground cave, a large hole in the earth, and went spelunking. There were bats and it was dark and it was absolutely amazing, an experience she swore she would never forget. She told me about her time as a volunteer in the southern part of the country, and what the markets were like and after having done the loop with the dancers she took me to the building she was sleeping in at the boarding school and showed me a purse she had bought there. It’s the funny thing about volunteers, even though we don’t get paid and the world would like to believe we do it out of selflessness, that we are mini mother Teresa’s just ready to come out of the oven, given enough self sacrifice and suffering for a noble cause, we’re actually normal people, and if we can’t get paid in money we at least enjoy a healthy revenue of stories, adventures, and memories. You will know a true volunteer when they start to show you their photos and souvenirs from their experiences. It’s the retirement fund we’ve built up over time, when we can’t volunteer and be do-gooders anymore, because reality kicks in and we need to make up for all the years of forgone materialism, we will always have our memories and the material objects we shared those experiences with. This lady hadn’t quite reached that point, but it was the same principal. By showing me her purse she was reaching into the past and pulling back an experience. By interacting with her purse I was on some level interacting with the part of her life she was the most proud of. I understood that and was thankful for the experience. However it was getting late and she had to run off with her friends and I needed to find mine so we went different ways. After finding my friends and eating dinner with them we spent the rest of the night in the main plaza in Norogachi, it sits between the church, the marrista boarding school, and the largest “grocery store” in town, a diconsa store, a one room shop filled with the most basic necessities, toilet paper, soda pop, potato chips, candy, and the occasional vegetable, established by the federal government in order to bring “food” to small villages. These stores probably do a better job at bringing diabetes to the rural villages of Mexico, but on the other hand, even if a snickers bar and bottle of coke is nutritionally bank rupt, it kills hunger pain when there’s nothing in the house to eat. When the corn and the beans from last year’s harvest and there’s no rain to grow vegetables or the wild plants that the Tarahumara love to harvest (this hunger season lasts about 7 months of the Year in the Sierra Tarahumara), these long shelf life junk foods are a medicine to make chronic hunger and malnutrition slightly less painful. It might not be the most nutritionally sound way of going about it, but when there’s no food in your belly, nutritionally sound isn’t very high on the priority list.
In the town square we watched the dancers, all of the different groups of them, each group from one specific village outside of Norogachi, dancing around giant bonfires. There brown bodies, painted with white spots, glimmered in dancing shades of yellow and orange, moving back and forth, all night long. I called it quits about two in the morning, and prepared myself for the next day……
A tale of two Ranchos that start in O and end in Chi
In the organization I work for, some communities in the Sierra Tarahumara are forbidden communities. What that means is that they used to be communities that we worked in, in very personal ways, coming, going, and giving advice, throwing in a shoulder and a helping hand on projects. Then due to a rise in drug trafficking violence as La Sinaloa cartel began to take back territory it had lost to la linea cartel (Juarez) we were forbidden to go to these communities. They are deep inside the barrancas and due to the warmer climate, produce both marijuana and opium crops during longer parts of the year.
One of our workers had an automatic rifle put into his face going into one of the forbidden communities and a pistol put in his face going out. It sounds dramatic but it was just a traffic stop, the narcos in the community wanted to keep an eye on who was going into the community and who was going out, his truck had a lot of equipment in it for a project so they wanted to check it for guns and drugs. It was just business. However, it was a frightening enough experience that it began a slow process of him leaving the Sierra for good, never to return, until “There are no more gunfights in the Sierra,” yeah, like that’s ever going to happen. When I came back to the Sierra after a four month stint with “the friend who can’t be named” (because I don’t want libel charges if our friendship goes sour), I came back to this beautiful landscape of pine oak mountains and semi tropical canyons to find it empty of nearly all of the friends I had come to see as Heroes in between November 2009 and January 2010. Many had been let go of in a management change that proved a disaster for one of the NGOs down here, the others had quit and left citing security reasons. To give you an idea of the kinds of security problems they were referring to, nearly everyone had experienced run ins with narcos, and to give you an idea of how the ngos here feel about it, one actual requires its employees to sign a disability waver. If you are injured working for ngo tan tan tan, then they in no way can be held responsible and they are not obliged to keep you employed if you are injured (shot) and they aren’t required to pay your medical bills. Yeah, even good hearted folks can act like capitalist tight wads when the money runs tight, which it almost always does in ngos. So seeing as to how their lives could end at the turn of any canyon corner, many of my pals split, one was a guy we will call Lionel, he’s the dude who had the guns placed to his face. When I came back he had already left, but returned in the first week of my return (June 28th to July 5th 2011) to finish a project. He had me accompany him on the project because he didn’t want to be in the Sierra alone and we both knew it would probably be the last time we saw each other. As his ex observed, friendships in the Sierra are very intense, and they feel like they started long before they actually did, because you have so few people you can trust, and the experience is so intense, you just get to know each other better than you would in normal places, and although I had hardly known Lionel for only a few months, he was an incredibly intense friend, and I agreed to go with him to several communities.
The first community was Osachi. I woke up that morning, left my apartment with the broken lock on the front door (the door was always unlocked whenever I left because it could only be locked from the inside) and prepared for what seemed like a normal day, it was sunny with the promise of rain (it does nothing but rain on and off from mid June to September), I passed the peace plaza, a plaza which rested a block down the street from my apt where 13 people were massacred at a wedding by narco-folk (they even killed a baby execution style), turned the corner and headed through town looking for Lionel. He wasn’t at the office of the foundation where he worked, which is where I work now, so I walked around town looking for him. Finally he pulled up in an ugly grey Nissan we call Griselda, I hopped in and he laughed at me, telling me that one of the things I was famous for in creel was being totally lost, with everyone panicking trying to find me, and then the moment something is supposed to happen, I just show up. I’d like to believe that I am famous for being the most kick ass American in Creel, but that’s definitely not the case, apparently I’m the most punctual and the least trusted to be punctual. We drove to the house of a friend and coworker of his we will call La Guerra (the whitey, because she’s just as white as I am but 100% Mexican and proud.) La Guerra and her Tarahumara husband and daughter hooped in the truck and Leon began the long ride through Creel, down the highway, past the statue of the Tarahumara man dancing Matachin at the roundabout and then we headed towards the canyons and our final destination, Osachi.
Osachi is not a forbidden community, although it sees its fare share of violence and drug trafficking like anywhere else in the Sierra, it doesn’t see enough of it to make it “forbidden,” which is ironic, because since I’ve been there at least one violent murder has occurred and several bodies have been dumped there. Yeah. Welcome to the Sierra Tarahumara. We turned a sharp right off the road headed to Diversadero and headed into the mountains and dirt roads that characterize so many Tarahumara communities. The roads are made of dirt and rock, and often poorly constructed, because the federal and municipal governments do not provide the Tarahumara with the equipment necessary to make good roads, but if the communities want doctors and aid to make it where they live, they have to have roads, so they carve them out of the mountains with picks, yes, you read that, picks, metal picks.
AS we headed down the canyon we listened to music, the usual mix of Mexican rock and English language classics. Everybody who works here has a soul that is at least 10% hippy, and it’s not unusual to hear songs from bands like REM, the Beatles, the rolling stones, Janis Joplin, or even groups as obscure as Country Joe McDonald and the Fish, famous for their Woodstock anthem against the war in Vietnam.
So while we jammed out to the tunes that influenced all of us growing up we passed through some smaller communities until we got to a large river. The river is about 4 feet deep and 50 feet across, and before I could protest, Lionel plunged the Griselda into the river, I watched in horror as the water rose to just below my window. Lionel began to explain,
“When crossing Rivers there are three rules, rule 1, keep the same speed at all times, rule 2 always drive straight, rule 3 don’t stop.”
“Rule 4, know how to swim,” I pitched in, as I nervously eyed the water outside.
“The thing is,” Lionel continued, “as long as you follow these three rules, the movement of the vehicle will keep the water inside of hood of the car, far below that outside of the car, it’s like when you were a kid, and you’d push your hand against the bathwater and the water rushing up against the backside of your hand was always higher than the water on the palm of your hand. It’s the same principal. We made it up the bank on the other side of the river, and I asked if that had ever not worked for him.
“Yeah, one time after it had just rained I tried to cross and the water made it into the engine and the truck got stuck.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I hiked to the community we are going to and had to ask the governor (traditional Tarahumara representative) to bring his big wood loading truck and pull me out.”
“Did it do any damage to the truck?”
“No, I just had to wait a few hours while the engine dried out and then it was ready to go.”
Yeah, I felt like I’d learned something for the day. We crossed several of the river’s bends until we finally reached the canyon road that led out of the river bed and the large canyon that separates Osachi from the hiway going to Divisadero. We began to drive up the dirt road, into the green mountainside, covered in pines, oaks, poplars, and ferns and we headed upward. At this point I thought this would be my last two months in the Sierra and so I was just taking in all that I could. My dream was about to end in a handful of weeks and I needed to savor every second of the experience. We finally reached the high mountain villages with their wooden fences, open fields of wildflowers, and deep green corn fields. After opening some gates and chilling out to more tunes we reached Osachi. Osachi was like any other Tarahumara community in the area at that time, it was green, beautiful, with a government school in the middle of the village, and log cabin and adobe houses spread around the corn fields. Women in brightly colored, often contrasting outfits of a long wavy dress, a loose wavy blouse and a bandana covering their hair tended to their kids, grinded Pinole, cared for the goats, and took care of many house hold chores. Children frolicked and played in the fields of corn and wildflowers. We pulled up to a small one room hut made of concrete blocks and a tin roof, and Lionel and I hopped out and wished La Guerra and her family good luck on their journey further into the Sierra. I grabbed my large green vortex backpack out of the back of the truck and they headed off, Lionel and I entered the concrete block house and started setting up camp. Inside the building was a metal stove made from half of a metal barrel and a metal tube. The place had one small wooden table, a calendar donated by the organization I work for, some military ammunition boxes used to keep mice out of the food and some candles, and a pile of dishes. I asked Lionel who the building belonged to and he told me it was built by a university in Monterey that used to have a garden program in the village but now they almost never went there and they allowed the workers from various organizations to work there.
After we set up camp Lionel handed me some tools, and told me to get ready for a hike. We headed out the door and started working our way up a hill made of bed rock, covered in scattered white rock that had broken off the bedrock and small stunted pine trees. Lionel explained to me that at one time the trees in the Sierra Tarahumara were large, but due to lumber needs over the last 100 years and the industries dominance on the job market, all of the old growth forest had been cut down. The result was the loss of many species that lived only in the Sierra Tararhumara, including the world’s largest wood pecker. Roughly the size of a hawk this wood pecker made its nests in the gigantic trunks of old growth pine trees. When the pines were cut down the Lorax disappeared and he took the wood peckers with him. In this story, replanting the forest offered no opportunity to bring back what was lost. Dr. Seuss was wrong on that count. We hiked down the other side of the hill and into a forest on the side of a canyon wall descending at a 45 degree angle into the canyon below. At the end of the trail we arrived at a series of springs that could have been something out of a fairy tale, they had crystal clear water and leaf covered bottoms. The shores of the springs were covered in ferns about two feet in height and yellow flowers. The only feature of the springs that kept one tide down to reality were long black tubes that led to cement holding tanks about a meter and a half by a meter and a half. Lionel was down by the first tank and was working on installing some metal pipes. I said it looked like something out of a fairy tale, but at this point I couldn’t look at Lionel tinkering away and not think about gnomergon in World of War Craft. I told you I was a fucking nerd. Lionel asked for some help and after allowing my brain to be fried by the beauty of the springs I went over to give Lionel a hand and asked him what we were working on.
“We’re working on whats called an ariete in Spanish, and a hydropneumatic pump in English. It’s a pump that only requires the force of gravity for an energy input. The water goes from the springs to the first holding tank, from there it falls down a long metal tube to the next holding tank where it uses the force of the water to force a weighted valve up, the weight from the valve falls down on the water that remains, pushing it up the tube coming out the side of the tank. The water that shoots out of the weighted valve is caught by the holding tank where it builds up to a level where it finds the whole leading to the third holding tank to the left and slightly down the hill from it. The third holding tank collect the water nearly to the rim of the tank and then sends it down a second long metal tube to a second ariete in a fourth tank which pumps some of the water back to the first holding tank the rest of the water heads down into the river below.”
I was impressed, this was way cooler than anything I had ever seen in WOW.
“So what are we doing?” I asked.
“We’re installing the last set of pieces and hope its going to work.”
Leonel was hunched over into a large cement tank, ringing together metal tubes and corners. He asked for help and together we managed to sweat and grunt our way through putting everything together. Leonel looked up with a huge grin on his face. He jumped up and ran up the forest trail to the first cement tank and turning the key on his contraption he allowed the water to begin to fall. The pumps began to clank, fizzle and spray and the plastic tube headed toward the village began to shake with each pump of water. Leonel ran up and down the hill checking his contraption for errors, and when he couldn’t find any he sat down on the hill and began to cry.
I’ve never been super good with emotions so I just sat there, confused, trying to figure out what the fuck was going on. He looked up at me and asked for my forgiveness “Its just that I’ve been working on this project for two years, two years, and its finally working. You have no idea how happy I am.
We ran up and down the line checking for leaks and breaks in the tubing, and later that night we went back to the concrete shack in Osachi and just hung out. Although we barely knew each other we began to talk about our childhoods, our fears, our ambitions, Leonel told me about his childhood growing up in Mexico’s country side, trapping snakes and spiders, running through the hills, breaking bones, breaking hearts. I told him more about my recently failed attempt at a relationship with a close friend, about growing up in mormonlandia as a kid who was never a true believer, “You know, it was when I was with the friend who must not be named that I realized that I have never seen my parents flirt in my entire life. I didn’t realize it unti she and I were talking about our childhoods, how open her parents where with their emotions and how much mine kept their affection private. I think maybe that fucked me up romantically a little bit.”
Leonel sat there staring at me with his mouth wide open to the point I though his brain was going to come rolling out over his tongue and onto the floor “You never saw your parents flirting growing up?”
“Not really, I mean I saw them hold hands a few times, and I can remember one time when they kissed, I remember it because it never really happened, see that’s really weird isn’t it? I mean that’s not normal at all.”
“No its not” Leonel said in disbelief.
We sat in a contemplative silence, until I asked, “so dude, you’re pretty good with the ladies, how do you flirt?”
Leonel’s eyebrow raised slightly and asked “Are you asking me for flirting lessons?”
“Uh… yeah, I guess I am,” I replied.
So right then and there I got a hands on lesson on flirting, the accidental bump, the raised eybrow, the double take, telling a chick you’re going to kiss her not asking her first, being dominant without being an ass hole. Later to the sound of Mountain toads singing in the night hoping to make contact with another toad that would let them get into their toad-pants, Leonel grabbed me by the hand, rushed me outside, and taught me the constellations in the night sky. The clouds were thin and didn’t help mus but they lent the night sky a cool ambience that settled onto the pine forests around Osachi like a cool sheet. The stars twinkled through the thin veil of vapor, and had I been any gayer than I actually am, it probably would have been romantic. Instead of that, its just awkward to type up and post on the web, but hey, if you’re still reading, my homoerotic flirting lessons obviously don’t bother you that bad.
The next morning we packed our bags and hiked out towards the canyon that seperates Osachi from San Eleas and the road to Creel. We talked about Spanish literature and biology as we hiked down the slopes, we hid in a cave while it rained and we talked about Don Quixote, a book I still haven’t gotten around to reading and Leonel assured me I was missing out on. We crossed the wood and rope bridge, as Leonel told me about an old man who had just fallen through some of the rotting planks and died on the rocks below a week before I couldn’t help but see the bridge as an old lady hunched over the river reaching out to the bank on the other side and collapsing in on herself as her old, calcium deficient bones couldn’t support the weight of her flesh, her frame fell apart piece by piece and we needed those fucking pieces to get back to creel outside of a little wooden box.
AS we hiked up the mountain Leonel taught me about mountaineering, and the importance of paying attention to your feet, and where they are going, at the expense of any dangerous situation you might be facing. It turns out paying attention to the cliff and the fall that pose a serious threat to your life in know way helps you move past those dangers to a safer place, all they do is distract you from focusing on the task at hand, stepping on safe ground and moving forward until you are in a safe place. Mountainerring and life have more in common than most people would think and that lesson has come in handy to me in more ways than keeping myself from falling down a cliff and banging my brains out on the rocks below.
AS we made it to San Eleas we called M, Leonel’s boss, and asked her to send a truck to pick us up. As we waited for our ride to arrive, Leonel asked me why I Didn’t stay in my own country and try to fix the many problems in the U.S. Failing health care, a shitstorm of an economy, a national debt that is bound to ruin our country. I didn’t have a good answer for him then, because I didn’t realize that even though I had been doing this “humanitarian” work for years, volunteering to better other peoples lives, the real motivation, the one that tugged at my heart strings like a puppeteer directs a marianet, was self enrichment. I was convinced for the majority of time I’ve worked in Mexico that I was doing this to improve other peoples lives, I hadn’t quite realized that I have been drawn to this, by the universe or my subconscious, because it was something I needed in my personal self fulfillment. It sounds selfish and totally american but its true, I’ve grown from and benefitted form these experiences in ways I couldn’t have done without them. I have come to learn about courage, devotion, selflessness here in ways I couldn’t I the states, Ive learned a lot about my moral boundaries and weekenesses, I’ve been forced to explore darker elements of my personality that I wouldn’t have realized existed without this experience, and I’ve come into contact with people whose examples both positive and negative will shape my viewpoints and ultimately the outcome of my life in ways I probably wont ever completely appreciate. I told Leonel some bull shit about the primary problems In my country being due to a government no one has the courage to face. As a Mexican, well aware of his governments role in the drug trade he understood, or at least that was the impression I got from our conversation. AS the truck pulled up towards us we talked about his experience with the Zapatista,s his parents were Zapatista supporters and her was able to visit Zapatista villages as a kid, their policy against alcohol and the impact that policy had on the villages he had seen fomented and cemented his opinion against alcohol and drinking. “The difference between poverty and misery is alcohol, “ he told me. I imagine its probably a little more complicated than that, as Anthropologists are want to point out, but he had an interesting point, and I’ve certainly seen enough evidence to back his opinions up in my life in the Sierra and in Salt Lake City. Leonel would have made a good mormon, he just didn’t realize it, and im not a missionary so I wasn’t going to tell him that.
On another day, Leonel and I made a trip to a village outside of Sisoguichi. We went to the village and met with an old man who led us to a small canyon filled with bees, red rock, and crimson dragon flies. Leonel wanted to take some photos in order to determine later if it would be a good place for a community damn to help the village irrigate their soils and increase crop production. In the sierra, it starts to rain in June, really picking up around the 24th and begins to die down againin September. It doesn’t rain at all the rest of the year, and with only three months of rain, moisture is the single greatest limiting factor in agricultural production. Leonel’s family worked in water projects and that was his major contribution to the foundation. The emphasis on water programs was his brain child, the dams and watershed management that is spreading throughout the Sierra are his legacy.
As we headed back that evening he tried to talk me into leaving the Sierra. He told me that most of the friends I had made at the end of 2009 had left due to the insecurity in the Sierra, considering the little good we were doing in comparison to the risk we were taking, it just wasn’t worth it.
“Its like my sister says, A dead humanitarian is no good to anyone, unless they die a martyr, but we aren’t going to be martyrs, Vagabundo.” He had a point, in mathematical terms a humanitarian that takes care of themselves first, is a humanitarian that saves more lives or at least improves more lives. However , I’m not sure that the true measure of a humanitarian can be measured in quantitative data. Liberation Theologists like Brazilian Leonardo Boff would argue that serving those who everyone else has abandoned, bringing hope to the hopeless, is in fact valueable in and of its self, how can you measure the value of one human life over another? There isn’t anyway to measure hope, or to observe the impact of its absence. And serving those who have no other options available to them is certainly just as valuable as saving any quantity of people. Further more, in all reality, the odds that a humanitarian will be killed by working in a dangerous situation, say the odds that I will be killed by a stray bullet in a cartel fight, or kidnapped and ransomed, are much lower than the odds that I will get hit by a truck and die. As some budhist sects like to point out, you begin to die the moment you are conceived, many people never even make it to birth, you need to be aware of that, and aware that some day you will die, that is inevitable, being aware of this you need to live every day of your life in a way that you will be able to look back on fondly when you do reach your end, and I can think of no better way to do that than to work in places that traditional humanitarians have abandoned. However Leonel still disagreed and decided that he needed to tell me a personal story.
A few years before a young and idealistic Leonel decided to go to a community called XXXX the community was a well known hub for narcos and was considered a dangerous place, but he needed to go anyway, he wanted to work on some projects there, and it is one of the only villages in the Sierra where the majority are indigenous but from two different tribes, Tepehuan and Tarahumara. He wanted to see the difference between the two groups, the internal dynamics of the village, how the groups interacted with each other. He decided it would be best to go and meet up with a priest so the narcos wouldn’t suspect he was there for reasons pertaining to their trade. That didn’t stop him from being stopped on the road, having an AK47 pointed into his face, and having his truck inspected for drugs and guns, by cartel hitmen on the road into the village. The process was repeated on his way out of the village a few days later, this time by a teenager with a pistol.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Besides shitting myself?” he replied, “I just lifted my hands off the steeringwheel and let them review everything. The kid was the one who scared me most, he was more jumpy and I was afraid he would get scared and shoot me without a good reason.”
AS Leonel finished his story a truck driving in the other direction slowed down, and rolled down its window. Leonel stopped the truck and rtolled down his, the gentleman wanted to know where we had come from and if we had seen a new broken down truck in the road, we gave him the information he needed, said good bye and drove off. We laughed nervously as Leonel rolled up his window. The Sierra had just become a little more serious, it wasn’t the joke it had been as I was just getting to know Leonel in November of 2009.
You’re probably wondering what this has to do with Oxxxxchi, the prohibited village I was working in when I began to write this post. Well Oxxxxxchi is a prohibited community, which means we aren’t technically supposed to be working there, and as we were headed there driving closer and closer to the barranca, to the height of marijuana and opium poppy production in mexico. I couldn’t help but think of Leonels experience. AS we drove down the mountain roads, as we were stopped and by soldiers guarding the road, as we pulled into the village, the thought of being pulled over and having the barrel of a gun put into my face couldn’t leave my mind. I was glad when we finally arrived to the small town with its health clinic, its small schools, its rusted purple playground equipment. I thought about it even harder during the community meeting, when I noticed there was a pistol present, under the control of a man who did not seem happy that I was in the village. We discussed the projects of the foundation and created a community map to show where participants in the program lived in respect to the health clinic and then where the local water sources where. The people hadn’t planted yet because even in early june there still wasn’t any rain in the region. We headed out and were happy to pass San Raphael, getting us out of the danger zone, but when we went back a few weeks later to measure the flow of water in the mountain springs we would be using to bring water to the village, I couldn’t help but think more about Leonels warning as we noticed fields of what we suspected where marijuana on the other side of the barranca, and our armed friend showed less felicity to see me in the village. AS we were leaving, we pulled over to make sandwiches, at which point a truck pulled up behind us, and slowly passed us, all of the people in our truck were imagining the process of being reviewed at gunpoint by the inahbitants in the other truck when they drove by and the person in the driver seet waved at me. It was a man I knew from Creel who had once told me he was a hitman. Creel is 6 hours away from this village and we all suspected we knew what he was up to, I had hoped his comment about being a hitman was a joke, and to this day I don’t believe it. Im sure he works in the drug trade, but hes not hitman material, plus he was laughing about it when he told me that. The thing is, he could have just been camping, or visiting family, or working in one of the mines nearby. That’s the worse thing about this drug war, the lack of trust, and the inability to tell whos involved in what. It creates an atmosphere of suspicion and fear that makes developing any kind of fiendship difficult. The man in the truck isn’t a bad man, at all, not from anything ive seen, but if you create enough poverty, you can make anyone a criminal, that’s what American policy towards immigrants has created in northern mexico. The “hitman” was a good guy working for a painting company in California and later in Arizona, he even has a kid with american citizenship on the other side, but he got busted by la migra, deported, and now hes stuck in a region of the world where work is almost as rare as trust, and the worst industry available is also the highest paying and for many people, the only option. You can tell yourself money isn’t important , that he should resist the temptation, but guess what. Money is important. If you want a house, you have to have money, if you want a car, you have to have money, if you want food, you have to have money, if you want a girlfriend or a wife, you need all of these things, and money. The most common reason for joining the drug trade that I hear down here, is “Sicarios have girlfriends” and its true. This guy already lost his girlfriend and his child to american forign policy, telling him he should live in poverty the rest of his life and give up on the few luxuries that are available would be pointless not to mention hypocritical if you had enough money to get online and read this blog. And while it made me feel safer to know that someone who probably worked in this region knew me, and liked me, it was just another reminder of the danger we run working in this field. It forced me to come think a little harder about my differing opinion on the importance of staying alive as a humanitarian and the value of serving those who have been abandoned by the larger body of humanitarians. Not hard and long enough to change my opinion (that’s what she said!!!) but hard and long enough the shake the foundation of my personal philosophy on humanitarianism. Its an unfolding conversation that I imagine will last the rest of my life.
Over and out
-Me
One of our workers had an automatic rifle put into his face going into one of the forbidden communities and a pistol put in his face going out. It sounds dramatic but it was just a traffic stop, the narcos in the community wanted to keep an eye on who was going into the community and who was going out, his truck had a lot of equipment in it for a project so they wanted to check it for guns and drugs. It was just business. However, it was a frightening enough experience that it began a slow process of him leaving the Sierra for good, never to return, until “There are no more gunfights in the Sierra,” yeah, like that’s ever going to happen. When I came back to the Sierra after a four month stint with “the friend who can’t be named” (because I don’t want libel charges if our friendship goes sour), I came back to this beautiful landscape of pine oak mountains and semi tropical canyons to find it empty of nearly all of the friends I had come to see as Heroes in between November 2009 and January 2010. Many had been let go of in a management change that proved a disaster for one of the NGOs down here, the others had quit and left citing security reasons. To give you an idea of the kinds of security problems they were referring to, nearly everyone had experienced run ins with narcos, and to give you an idea of how the ngos here feel about it, one actual requires its employees to sign a disability waver. If you are injured working for ngo tan tan tan, then they in no way can be held responsible and they are not obliged to keep you employed if you are injured (shot) and they aren’t required to pay your medical bills. Yeah, even good hearted folks can act like capitalist tight wads when the money runs tight, which it almost always does in ngos. So seeing as to how their lives could end at the turn of any canyon corner, many of my pals split, one was a guy we will call Lionel, he’s the dude who had the guns placed to his face. When I came back he had already left, but returned in the first week of my return (June 28th to July 5th 2011) to finish a project. He had me accompany him on the project because he didn’t want to be in the Sierra alone and we both knew it would probably be the last time we saw each other. As his ex observed, friendships in the Sierra are very intense, and they feel like they started long before they actually did, because you have so few people you can trust, and the experience is so intense, you just get to know each other better than you would in normal places, and although I had hardly known Lionel for only a few months, he was an incredibly intense friend, and I agreed to go with him to several communities.
The first community was Osachi. I woke up that morning, left my apartment with the broken lock on the front door (the door was always unlocked whenever I left because it could only be locked from the inside) and prepared for what seemed like a normal day, it was sunny with the promise of rain (it does nothing but rain on and off from mid June to September), I passed the peace plaza, a plaza which rested a block down the street from my apt where 13 people were massacred at a wedding by narco-folk (they even killed a baby execution style), turned the corner and headed through town looking for Lionel. He wasn’t at the office of the foundation where he worked, which is where I work now, so I walked around town looking for him. Finally he pulled up in an ugly grey Nissan we call Griselda, I hopped in and he laughed at me, telling me that one of the things I was famous for in creel was being totally lost, with everyone panicking trying to find me, and then the moment something is supposed to happen, I just show up. I’d like to believe that I am famous for being the most kick ass American in Creel, but that’s definitely not the case, apparently I’m the most punctual and the least trusted to be punctual. We drove to the house of a friend and coworker of his we will call La Guerra (the whitey, because she’s just as white as I am but 100% Mexican and proud.) La Guerra and her Tarahumara husband and daughter hooped in the truck and Leon began the long ride through Creel, down the highway, past the statue of the Tarahumara man dancing Matachin at the roundabout and then we headed towards the canyons and our final destination, Osachi.
Osachi is not a forbidden community, although it sees its fare share of violence and drug trafficking like anywhere else in the Sierra, it doesn’t see enough of it to make it “forbidden,” which is ironic, because since I’ve been there at least one violent murder has occurred and several bodies have been dumped there. Yeah. Welcome to the Sierra Tarahumara. We turned a sharp right off the road headed to Diversadero and headed into the mountains and dirt roads that characterize so many Tarahumara communities. The roads are made of dirt and rock, and often poorly constructed, because the federal and municipal governments do not provide the Tarahumara with the equipment necessary to make good roads, but if the communities want doctors and aid to make it where they live, they have to have roads, so they carve them out of the mountains with picks, yes, you read that, picks, metal picks.
AS we headed down the canyon we listened to music, the usual mix of Mexican rock and English language classics. Everybody who works here has a soul that is at least 10% hippy, and it’s not unusual to hear songs from bands like REM, the Beatles, the rolling stones, Janis Joplin, or even groups as obscure as Country Joe McDonald and the Fish, famous for their Woodstock anthem against the war in Vietnam.
So while we jammed out to the tunes that influenced all of us growing up we passed through some smaller communities until we got to a large river. The river is about 4 feet deep and 50 feet across, and before I could protest, Lionel plunged the Griselda into the river, I watched in horror as the water rose to just below my window. Lionel began to explain,
“When crossing Rivers there are three rules, rule 1, keep the same speed at all times, rule 2 always drive straight, rule 3 don’t stop.”
“Rule 4, know how to swim,” I pitched in, as I nervously eyed the water outside.
“The thing is,” Lionel continued, “as long as you follow these three rules, the movement of the vehicle will keep the water inside of hood of the car, far below that outside of the car, it’s like when you were a kid, and you’d push your hand against the bathwater and the water rushing up against the backside of your hand was always higher than the water on the palm of your hand. It’s the same principal. We made it up the bank on the other side of the river, and I asked if that had ever not worked for him.
“Yeah, one time after it had just rained I tried to cross and the water made it into the engine and the truck got stuck.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I hiked to the community we are going to and had to ask the governor (traditional Tarahumara representative) to bring his big wood loading truck and pull me out.”
“Did it do any damage to the truck?”
“No, I just had to wait a few hours while the engine dried out and then it was ready to go.”
Yeah, I felt like I’d learned something for the day. We crossed several of the river’s bends until we finally reached the canyon road that led out of the river bed and the large canyon that separates Osachi from the hiway going to Divisadero. We began to drive up the dirt road, into the green mountainside, covered in pines, oaks, poplars, and ferns and we headed upward. At this point I thought this would be my last two months in the Sierra and so I was just taking in all that I could. My dream was about to end in a handful of weeks and I needed to savor every second of the experience. We finally reached the high mountain villages with their wooden fences, open fields of wildflowers, and deep green corn fields. After opening some gates and chilling out to more tunes we reached Osachi. Osachi was like any other Tarahumara community in the area at that time, it was green, beautiful, with a government school in the middle of the village, and log cabin and adobe houses spread around the corn fields. Women in brightly colored, often contrasting outfits of a long wavy dress, a loose wavy blouse and a bandana covering their hair tended to their kids, grinded Pinole, cared for the goats, and took care of many house hold chores. Children frolicked and played in the fields of corn and wildflowers. We pulled up to a small one room hut made of concrete blocks and a tin roof, and Lionel and I hopped out and wished La Guerra and her family good luck on their journey further into the Sierra. I grabbed my large green vortex backpack out of the back of the truck and they headed off, Lionel and I entered the concrete block house and started setting up camp. Inside the building was a metal stove made from half of a metal barrel and a metal tube. The place had one small wooden table, a calendar donated by the organization I work for, some military ammunition boxes used to keep mice out of the food and some candles, and a pile of dishes. I asked Lionel who the building belonged to and he told me it was built by a university in Monterey that used to have a garden program in the village but now they almost never went there and they allowed the workers from various organizations to work there.
After we set up camp Lionel handed me some tools, and told me to get ready for a hike. We headed out the door and started working our way up a hill made of bed rock, covered in scattered white rock that had broken off the bedrock and small stunted pine trees. Lionel explained to me that at one time the trees in the Sierra Tarahumara were large, but due to lumber needs over the last 100 years and the industries dominance on the job market, all of the old growth forest had been cut down. The result was the loss of many species that lived only in the Sierra Tararhumara, including the world’s largest wood pecker. Roughly the size of a hawk this wood pecker made its nests in the gigantic trunks of old growth pine trees. When the pines were cut down the Lorax disappeared and he took the wood peckers with him. In this story, replanting the forest offered no opportunity to bring back what was lost. Dr. Seuss was wrong on that count. We hiked down the other side of the hill and into a forest on the side of a canyon wall descending at a 45 degree angle into the canyon below. At the end of the trail we arrived at a series of springs that could have been something out of a fairy tale, they had crystal clear water and leaf covered bottoms. The shores of the springs were covered in ferns about two feet in height and yellow flowers. The only feature of the springs that kept one tide down to reality were long black tubes that led to cement holding tanks about a meter and a half by a meter and a half. Lionel was down by the first tank and was working on installing some metal pipes. I said it looked like something out of a fairy tale, but at this point I couldn’t look at Lionel tinkering away and not think about gnomergon in World of War Craft. I told you I was a fucking nerd. Lionel asked for some help and after allowing my brain to be fried by the beauty of the springs I went over to give Lionel a hand and asked him what we were working on.
“We’re working on whats called an ariete in Spanish, and a hydropneumatic pump in English. It’s a pump that only requires the force of gravity for an energy input. The water goes from the springs to the first holding tank, from there it falls down a long metal tube to the next holding tank where it uses the force of the water to force a weighted valve up, the weight from the valve falls down on the water that remains, pushing it up the tube coming out the side of the tank. The water that shoots out of the weighted valve is caught by the holding tank where it builds up to a level where it finds the whole leading to the third holding tank to the left and slightly down the hill from it. The third holding tank collect the water nearly to the rim of the tank and then sends it down a second long metal tube to a second ariete in a fourth tank which pumps some of the water back to the first holding tank the rest of the water heads down into the river below.”
I was impressed, this was way cooler than anything I had ever seen in WOW.
“So what are we doing?” I asked.
“We’re installing the last set of pieces and hope its going to work.”
Leonel was hunched over into a large cement tank, ringing together metal tubes and corners. He asked for help and together we managed to sweat and grunt our way through putting everything together. Leonel looked up with a huge grin on his face. He jumped up and ran up the forest trail to the first cement tank and turning the key on his contraption he allowed the water to begin to fall. The pumps began to clank, fizzle and spray and the plastic tube headed toward the village began to shake with each pump of water. Leonel ran up and down the hill checking his contraption for errors, and when he couldn’t find any he sat down on the hill and began to cry.
I’ve never been super good with emotions so I just sat there, confused, trying to figure out what the fuck was going on. He looked up at me and asked for my forgiveness “Its just that I’ve been working on this project for two years, two years, and its finally working. You have no idea how happy I am.
We ran up and down the line checking for leaks and breaks in the tubing, and later that night we went back to the concrete shack in Osachi and just hung out. Although we barely knew each other we began to talk about our childhoods, our fears, our ambitions, Leonel told me about his childhood growing up in Mexico’s country side, trapping snakes and spiders, running through the hills, breaking bones, breaking hearts. I told him more about my recently failed attempt at a relationship with a close friend, about growing up in mormonlandia as a kid who was never a true believer, “You know, it was when I was with the friend who must not be named that I realized that I have never seen my parents flirt in my entire life. I didn’t realize it unti she and I were talking about our childhoods, how open her parents where with their emotions and how much mine kept their affection private. I think maybe that fucked me up romantically a little bit.”
Leonel sat there staring at me with his mouth wide open to the point I though his brain was going to come rolling out over his tongue and onto the floor “You never saw your parents flirting growing up?”
“Not really, I mean I saw them hold hands a few times, and I can remember one time when they kissed, I remember it because it never really happened, see that’s really weird isn’t it? I mean that’s not normal at all.”
“No its not” Leonel said in disbelief.
We sat in a contemplative silence, until I asked, “so dude, you’re pretty good with the ladies, how do you flirt?”
Leonel’s eyebrow raised slightly and asked “Are you asking me for flirting lessons?”
“Uh… yeah, I guess I am,” I replied.
So right then and there I got a hands on lesson on flirting, the accidental bump, the raised eybrow, the double take, telling a chick you’re going to kiss her not asking her first, being dominant without being an ass hole. Later to the sound of Mountain toads singing in the night hoping to make contact with another toad that would let them get into their toad-pants, Leonel grabbed me by the hand, rushed me outside, and taught me the constellations in the night sky. The clouds were thin and didn’t help mus but they lent the night sky a cool ambience that settled onto the pine forests around Osachi like a cool sheet. The stars twinkled through the thin veil of vapor, and had I been any gayer than I actually am, it probably would have been romantic. Instead of that, its just awkward to type up and post on the web, but hey, if you’re still reading, my homoerotic flirting lessons obviously don’t bother you that bad.
The next morning we packed our bags and hiked out towards the canyon that seperates Osachi from San Eleas and the road to Creel. We talked about Spanish literature and biology as we hiked down the slopes, we hid in a cave while it rained and we talked about Don Quixote, a book I still haven’t gotten around to reading and Leonel assured me I was missing out on. We crossed the wood and rope bridge, as Leonel told me about an old man who had just fallen through some of the rotting planks and died on the rocks below a week before I couldn’t help but see the bridge as an old lady hunched over the river reaching out to the bank on the other side and collapsing in on herself as her old, calcium deficient bones couldn’t support the weight of her flesh, her frame fell apart piece by piece and we needed those fucking pieces to get back to creel outside of a little wooden box.
AS we hiked up the mountain Leonel taught me about mountaineering, and the importance of paying attention to your feet, and where they are going, at the expense of any dangerous situation you might be facing. It turns out paying attention to the cliff and the fall that pose a serious threat to your life in know way helps you move past those dangers to a safer place, all they do is distract you from focusing on the task at hand, stepping on safe ground and moving forward until you are in a safe place. Mountainerring and life have more in common than most people would think and that lesson has come in handy to me in more ways than keeping myself from falling down a cliff and banging my brains out on the rocks below.
AS we made it to San Eleas we called M, Leonel’s boss, and asked her to send a truck to pick us up. As we waited for our ride to arrive, Leonel asked me why I Didn’t stay in my own country and try to fix the many problems in the U.S. Failing health care, a shitstorm of an economy, a national debt that is bound to ruin our country. I didn’t have a good answer for him then, because I didn’t realize that even though I had been doing this “humanitarian” work for years, volunteering to better other peoples lives, the real motivation, the one that tugged at my heart strings like a puppeteer directs a marianet, was self enrichment. I was convinced for the majority of time I’ve worked in Mexico that I was doing this to improve other peoples lives, I hadn’t quite realized that I have been drawn to this, by the universe or my subconscious, because it was something I needed in my personal self fulfillment. It sounds selfish and totally american but its true, I’ve grown from and benefitted form these experiences in ways I couldn’t have done without them. I have come to learn about courage, devotion, selflessness here in ways I couldn’t I the states, Ive learned a lot about my moral boundaries and weekenesses, I’ve been forced to explore darker elements of my personality that I wouldn’t have realized existed without this experience, and I’ve come into contact with people whose examples both positive and negative will shape my viewpoints and ultimately the outcome of my life in ways I probably wont ever completely appreciate. I told Leonel some bull shit about the primary problems In my country being due to a government no one has the courage to face. As a Mexican, well aware of his governments role in the drug trade he understood, or at least that was the impression I got from our conversation. AS the truck pulled up towards us we talked about his experience with the Zapatista,s his parents were Zapatista supporters and her was able to visit Zapatista villages as a kid, their policy against alcohol and the impact that policy had on the villages he had seen fomented and cemented his opinion against alcohol and drinking. “The difference between poverty and misery is alcohol, “ he told me. I imagine its probably a little more complicated than that, as Anthropologists are want to point out, but he had an interesting point, and I’ve certainly seen enough evidence to back his opinions up in my life in the Sierra and in Salt Lake City. Leonel would have made a good mormon, he just didn’t realize it, and im not a missionary so I wasn’t going to tell him that.
On another day, Leonel and I made a trip to a village outside of Sisoguichi. We went to the village and met with an old man who led us to a small canyon filled with bees, red rock, and crimson dragon flies. Leonel wanted to take some photos in order to determine later if it would be a good place for a community damn to help the village irrigate their soils and increase crop production. In the sierra, it starts to rain in June, really picking up around the 24th and begins to die down againin September. It doesn’t rain at all the rest of the year, and with only three months of rain, moisture is the single greatest limiting factor in agricultural production. Leonel’s family worked in water projects and that was his major contribution to the foundation. The emphasis on water programs was his brain child, the dams and watershed management that is spreading throughout the Sierra are his legacy.
As we headed back that evening he tried to talk me into leaving the Sierra. He told me that most of the friends I had made at the end of 2009 had left due to the insecurity in the Sierra, considering the little good we were doing in comparison to the risk we were taking, it just wasn’t worth it.
“Its like my sister says, A dead humanitarian is no good to anyone, unless they die a martyr, but we aren’t going to be martyrs, Vagabundo.” He had a point, in mathematical terms a humanitarian that takes care of themselves first, is a humanitarian that saves more lives or at least improves more lives. However , I’m not sure that the true measure of a humanitarian can be measured in quantitative data. Liberation Theologists like Brazilian Leonardo Boff would argue that serving those who everyone else has abandoned, bringing hope to the hopeless, is in fact valueable in and of its self, how can you measure the value of one human life over another? There isn’t anyway to measure hope, or to observe the impact of its absence. And serving those who have no other options available to them is certainly just as valuable as saving any quantity of people. Further more, in all reality, the odds that a humanitarian will be killed by working in a dangerous situation, say the odds that I will be killed by a stray bullet in a cartel fight, or kidnapped and ransomed, are much lower than the odds that I will get hit by a truck and die. As some budhist sects like to point out, you begin to die the moment you are conceived, many people never even make it to birth, you need to be aware of that, and aware that some day you will die, that is inevitable, being aware of this you need to live every day of your life in a way that you will be able to look back on fondly when you do reach your end, and I can think of no better way to do that than to work in places that traditional humanitarians have abandoned. However Leonel still disagreed and decided that he needed to tell me a personal story.
A few years before a young and idealistic Leonel decided to go to a community called XXXX the community was a well known hub for narcos and was considered a dangerous place, but he needed to go anyway, he wanted to work on some projects there, and it is one of the only villages in the Sierra where the majority are indigenous but from two different tribes, Tepehuan and Tarahumara. He wanted to see the difference between the two groups, the internal dynamics of the village, how the groups interacted with each other. He decided it would be best to go and meet up with a priest so the narcos wouldn’t suspect he was there for reasons pertaining to their trade. That didn’t stop him from being stopped on the road, having an AK47 pointed into his face, and having his truck inspected for drugs and guns, by cartel hitmen on the road into the village. The process was repeated on his way out of the village a few days later, this time by a teenager with a pistol.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Besides shitting myself?” he replied, “I just lifted my hands off the steeringwheel and let them review everything. The kid was the one who scared me most, he was more jumpy and I was afraid he would get scared and shoot me without a good reason.”
AS Leonel finished his story a truck driving in the other direction slowed down, and rolled down its window. Leonel stopped the truck and rtolled down his, the gentleman wanted to know where we had come from and if we had seen a new broken down truck in the road, we gave him the information he needed, said good bye and drove off. We laughed nervously as Leonel rolled up his window. The Sierra had just become a little more serious, it wasn’t the joke it had been as I was just getting to know Leonel in November of 2009.
You’re probably wondering what this has to do with Oxxxxchi, the prohibited village I was working in when I began to write this post. Well Oxxxxxchi is a prohibited community, which means we aren’t technically supposed to be working there, and as we were headed there driving closer and closer to the barranca, to the height of marijuana and opium poppy production in mexico. I couldn’t help but think of Leonels experience. AS we drove down the mountain roads, as we were stopped and by soldiers guarding the road, as we pulled into the village, the thought of being pulled over and having the barrel of a gun put into my face couldn’t leave my mind. I was glad when we finally arrived to the small town with its health clinic, its small schools, its rusted purple playground equipment. I thought about it even harder during the community meeting, when I noticed there was a pistol present, under the control of a man who did not seem happy that I was in the village. We discussed the projects of the foundation and created a community map to show where participants in the program lived in respect to the health clinic and then where the local water sources where. The people hadn’t planted yet because even in early june there still wasn’t any rain in the region. We headed out and were happy to pass San Raphael, getting us out of the danger zone, but when we went back a few weeks later to measure the flow of water in the mountain springs we would be using to bring water to the village, I couldn’t help but think more about Leonels warning as we noticed fields of what we suspected where marijuana on the other side of the barranca, and our armed friend showed less felicity to see me in the village. AS we were leaving, we pulled over to make sandwiches, at which point a truck pulled up behind us, and slowly passed us, all of the people in our truck were imagining the process of being reviewed at gunpoint by the inahbitants in the other truck when they drove by and the person in the driver seet waved at me. It was a man I knew from Creel who had once told me he was a hitman. Creel is 6 hours away from this village and we all suspected we knew what he was up to, I had hoped his comment about being a hitman was a joke, and to this day I don’t believe it. Im sure he works in the drug trade, but hes not hitman material, plus he was laughing about it when he told me that. The thing is, he could have just been camping, or visiting family, or working in one of the mines nearby. That’s the worse thing about this drug war, the lack of trust, and the inability to tell whos involved in what. It creates an atmosphere of suspicion and fear that makes developing any kind of fiendship difficult. The man in the truck isn’t a bad man, at all, not from anything ive seen, but if you create enough poverty, you can make anyone a criminal, that’s what American policy towards immigrants has created in northern mexico. The “hitman” was a good guy working for a painting company in California and later in Arizona, he even has a kid with american citizenship on the other side, but he got busted by la migra, deported, and now hes stuck in a region of the world where work is almost as rare as trust, and the worst industry available is also the highest paying and for many people, the only option. You can tell yourself money isn’t important , that he should resist the temptation, but guess what. Money is important. If you want a house, you have to have money, if you want a car, you have to have money, if you want food, you have to have money, if you want a girlfriend or a wife, you need all of these things, and money. The most common reason for joining the drug trade that I hear down here, is “Sicarios have girlfriends” and its true. This guy already lost his girlfriend and his child to american forign policy, telling him he should live in poverty the rest of his life and give up on the few luxuries that are available would be pointless not to mention hypocritical if you had enough money to get online and read this blog. And while it made me feel safer to know that someone who probably worked in this region knew me, and liked me, it was just another reminder of the danger we run working in this field. It forced me to come think a little harder about my differing opinion on the importance of staying alive as a humanitarian and the value of serving those who have been abandoned by the larger body of humanitarians. Not hard and long enough to change my opinion (that’s what she said!!!) but hard and long enough the shake the foundation of my personal philosophy on humanitarianism. Its an unfolding conversation that I imagine will last the rest of my life.
Over and out
-Me
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
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