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……