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