Rarámuri men doing a traditional dance
Since the 1970s, a variety of circumstances have prompted the Rarámuri (tarahumara), an indigenous group from the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, to migrate from their mountain homes and travel to nearby cities, where many end up settling permanently. Growing up in El Paso, Texas, just across the border from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, I often saw Rarámuri women and children during weekend excursions across the border to visit family members.
My curiosity to learn more about this group, who I grew up seeing but never engaging, inspired me to propose a Fulbright project to live near and work with Rarámuri migrants. I am currently living in Chihuahua City, Mexico where I spend my days visiting Oasis, one of eight government-funded rarámuri settlements in the city. My goal is to observe and participate in every aspect of Rarámuri life, from the daily tasks to the religious to the political.
I am currently working on a collection of creative non-fiction stories based on my experiences with the rarámuri. One of my hopes is that my collection will engage readers in discovering persons, even as it informs them on important transformations in indigenous political history. What follows is a selection from that collection.
“As the feast was beginning on the afternoon of December 12, 2009, I noticed two rarámuri women, Teresa and her daughter Sara, walk out of the settlement with their plates full of food. I wondered where they were going, so I stepped out to see. They sat on a cement bench across the street and were leaning against a wall with their plates balanced on their laps. I walked over and asked if I could join them. They said yes, so I sat by them with my own plate of food. The sun was beginning to set--we could see it descending in the west behind a mountain--and the temperature was rapidly dropping. From our bench, we could see the rarámuri inside Oasis eating, drinking, and laughing. Children were playing on the street in front of the settlement.
We got to talking about where we have been in life. Teresa talked about the years she spent in Juárez, and even described for me the one day she crossed the border and walked among the skyscrapers in downtown El Paso. Sara talked about the fireworks she saw over the El Paso sky one 4th of July from Ciudad Juárez. With less detail, she talked about the dangerous men selling drugs in Juárez, and the fear she felt when one of them approached her as she walked alone.
They asked me where I had traveled. I mentioned spending last summer in Turkey. Thinking that they probably didn't know where the country was, I mentioned it was across the ocean. "Is it near China?" Teresa asked me. I said it was fairly close, both being on the other side of the world.
"They say the world turns every day, and when it is day here it is night on the other side," Teresa said. I told her that was right, and described how I would call my mom at 8 in the morning from Istanbul and it would be midnight in El Paso. She laughed at the wonder of it all. "Your telephone can call across the world?" I told her it was amazing that it could.
"So the world turns on an axis, they say, like a spinning ball. It is like an axis, isn’t it?” I nodded. She continued. “On one side is the sun and on the other the moon. When one side faces the sun, the other faces the moon. On one side people are awake and on the other they are asleep. We are awake here, eating and drinking at our party, and on the other side, in China and Turkey, they are sleeping."
I confirmed that this was true.
"Now that it is going to be night over here, they are waking up over there; but we are not going to sleep tonight," Sara added.
We finished our food sitting on the bench. The meat was delicious, freshly stewed, and the tortillas were still hot from the pan. I had watched the sacrifice of the cow that morning. The rarámuri men had tied the animal's legs and laid it down in the middle of the school basketball courts. With a cross draped in white cloth placed in front of the cow, they slit its throat. The cow shuddered but was silent. In keeping with tradition, the governor of the settlement held the bucket into which all the cow's blood drained. Once it stopped breathing and they were sure most of the blood had spilled from the wound, the rarámuri men began dismembering it.
The stink became unbearable. I got up to leave, feeling light-headed and slightly nauseous. Beyond the basketball court, the women had a vat of boiling water ready. I watched from a distance as the men lifted large chunks of meat out of a cart and transferred them to the vat. It would take over twenty- four hours for the raw, freshly-killed meat to cook. The next day, the Rarámuri carried the vat of boiled meat back to the same place where the cow had been sacrificed. They performed another ritual in front of the cross draped in white cloth, offering the meat and a sample of tesguino to the Virgin in the sky. After this, the feast began.
Once Teresa, Sara and I finished eating, we returned to the settlement. The governor's sister offered me a large glass of tesguino. I accepted it, along with the blessing of a healer. By now, a cold night sky had spread across Oasis. I thought of how this same sky covered all of Chihuahua, my mother in our brick home just five hours north, and the traditional Rarámuri homeland in the Sierra Madre Mountains. Some of the Rarámuri began reminiscing about feast days they had spent in the Sierra. They recalled how much more beautiful the religious aspect, and how much more fun they have at the party, in the celebration's place of origin. A woman described for me the snow-covered pines at this time of year, and the hundreds of Rarámuri who gather and keep warm with dancing and tesguino. She met her husband at the party for the Virgin of Guadalupe, twenty years ago in the Sierra. As I listened to her, I recalled some old records I had looked at months ago in the archives. A Jesuit priest who arrived in the Sierra in the 1500s described these mountains as "the end of the world." To the Rarámuri, these mountains are the beginning.
"They are awake in China now," Teresa told me sometime around midnight.
"What do you think they're doing?" I asked her.
"The same things everyone does. They're eating and working." I sat down by her, my own glass in hand. I gave my camera to someone to take a picture of us. Looking at the image right after it was taken, I was a little shocked to see how different we looked. Me, my long brown hair and light skin, my jeans and painted fingernails. Teresa's deeply lined brown face, her ankle-length flowered skirt, the bandana holding back her hair. She is a grandmother to nineteen children, a woman who wakes every morning at 6 AM to make tortillas from scratch. I am a twenty-four year-old who has crossed the ocean and is trying to write a book for the world to read. I had taken many photographs of the Rarámuri of Oasis by now, but I had never included myself in one of the pictures. For a while before I looked at the picture I forgot that I am one of the "chabochis" fashioned out of clay and ashes."
To the U.S.-Mexico Fulbright Program