The Devil's Book of Culture: History, Mushrooms, and Caves in Southern Mexico

the devil’s book of culture

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Benjamin Feinberg

The Devil’s Book of Culture history, mushrooms, and caves in southern mexico

University of Texas Press, Austin

For joel and osc a r , high peaks around a swamp And for k , who peed on Chapter 3

Copyright © 2003 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2003 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819. ∞ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper). library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Feinberg, Benjamin, 1965– The devil’s book of culture : history, mushrooms, and caves in southern Mexico / Benjamin Feinberg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-292-70550-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 0-292-70190-x (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Mazatec Indians—Ethnic Identity. 2. Mazatec Indians—Psychology. 3. Mazatec Indians—Folklore. 4. Human geography—Mexico—Huautla de Jiménez. 5. Mushrooms, Hallucinogenic—Mexico—Huautla de Jiménez. 6. Mushroom ceremony—Mexico—Huautla de Jiménez. 7. Caves—Mexico—Huautla de Jiménez. 8. Huautla de Jiménez (Mexico)—History. 9. Huautla de Jiménez (Mexico)—Social life and customs. I Title. f1221.m35 f45 2003 304.2'089'976—dc21 2003001144

Contents

Preface ix Acknowledgments xv

on e Introduction: A Toyota in Huautla 1 t wo Historical and Geographical Overview: The Master Narrative of the Past

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t h r e e From Indians to Hillbillies: Explicit Stories about the Mazatec Past 59

fou r “Like Rock, but Mazatec”: Fiestas in Huautla 98 fi v e The Secret Past 115 si x “¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hongo?” Mushrooms, Culture, Experts, and Drugs

sev e n The Underground World 191 eigh t Conclusion: The Devil’s Book 229 Notes 239 Bibliography 251 Index 267

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Preface

The Sierra Mazateca came to international attention in the 1960s as North American youth came to the region to experience the magical primitive in the form of hallucinogenic mushrooms, at the same time that anthropology classes were being horrified by the violent primitive nature of Venezuelan Indians and a few years before television audiences would thrill to harmonious primitive nature in the form of the “Stone Age” Tasaday in the Philippines. The Sierra became the sort of place where something valuable could be discovered—something secret that the rest of the world had lost, something that required a quest into a dense geographical and psychedelic space. The mushroom seekers and others who came to the Sierra did not notice, but the inhabitants of the strange world they encountered were already participating in discourses that used terms like “primitive” and “modern”—and these worldly natives incorporated the input of their new visitors to refashion their sense of identity, to continuously adapt their own varied concepts of culture and secrecy, which sometimes mirrored those of their visitors. Late one gray evening in early 1994 in Huautla de Jiménez, a mysterious stranger offered me a key to Mazatec culture and history in the form of what he called a “book”—really a sheaf of papers. What does it mean that “culture” in the present, or “history” as a component of that culture, becomes objectified as a material item that can be transferred between individuals? And what does it mean that the materialized culture does not take just any old shape but assumes the form of a book? And why is this book not openly read and distributed, but transferred in the dark, under the signs of secrecy, betrayal, an evil stranger, and sexual indiscretion? My interpretation of this incident expanded in complexity when Mazatec friends confirmed to me that the mysterious stranger was much like El Chato, a supernatural figure who provides wealth in exchange for male fertility and who is sometimes glossed as “the Devil.”

I did not accept El Chato’s offer, but decided instead to turn my investigation away from “culture”—that nebulous object of traditional ethnographic inquiry—and toward the discursive practices and exchanges through which culture takes on a life of its own. In this case, culture is not Tylor’s “complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (1958 [1871]:1), but a valuable, dangerous, and magical book exchanged at night between a supernatural villain who lives in a cave and a foreign student who stepped into a late-night taco joint—a wealth-generating thing passed from one mediator to another. My own book, in Tylor’s terms, makes few claims or assumptions about actually or historically existing Mazatec culture—after all, I refused the Devil’s book. Instead, I search out the spaces where discourses of “culture” and identity have been elaborated in a process of conversation and negotiation between differently situated inhabitants of the Sierra, and also between them and a whole stream of outsiders who bring their own attitudes about identity—missionaries, educators, bureaucrats, anthropologists, cavers, and mushroom-seeking tourists, among others. The people of the Sierra Mazateca contribute to the construction of their identity by responding to and participating in discourses that may have originated elsewhere. This book is not a traditional ethnography in that it does not try to reproduce El Chato’s book of Mazatec culture, entering into the depths of this magical, possibly imaginary entity, usurping the authority that can be gained only through collaboration with dark forces; instead, it traces the surface manifestations of that aspect of culture that is about culture and that helps to reproduce culture. Specifically, this book looks at the different voices that enter into three broad, multivocal arenas of talk and attempts to draw out the relationships between these voices and different conceptions of “culture.” My assumption is that “culture” emerges through the dialogue between the different kinds of discourses that inhabit these arenas—from the everyday, unplanned conversations in houses and on street corners to relatively formalized genres like storytelling and shamanic chants, and from academic articles to popular culture texts like postcards, tabloids, and websites. These discourses may be explicitly about culture or implicitly metacultural, but they are not just external descriptions of culture—they provide the frameworks through which individuals negotiate their identities and create a lived world. The first area is history. Chapters 2 through 5 focus on how different viii

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voices articulate the place of Mazatec history within the nation. Chapter 2 sets the scene with a “straight” version of the Mazatec past, derived from oral histories and secondary sources, that shows how the relationships between the Sierra and the outside world have been refashioned and renewed in different historical periods. Chapter 3 looks at explicit talk about history, first examining the narratives of selected “outsiders” about Huautla’s past and how these stories create a certain kind of conventional relationship between “before” and “now.” For differing reasons, indigenista Mexican anthropologists, Catholic and Protestant missionaries, and tourists have created a sharp delineation between these two periods that leaves most Mazatec residents in a residual, degenerate category—that of the cultureless “hillbilly.” Mazatec schoolteachers and other intellectuals have begun to claim the right to create their own historical narratives and not simply act as the passive objects of outsiders’ knowledge; their versions of the past exist in a creative dialogue with those of “outsider” authorities. This chapter closes by examining other Mazatec versions of the past-present relationship that challenge the models of the experts. Town fiestas are holidays filled with colorful ritual that seems to define community identity and construct continuity with the past. Chapter 4 looks closely at the talk—not the ritual—surrounding Huautla’s fiestas and how this talk reproduces particular images of the relationship between insiders and outsiders and between the present and the past. Chapter 5 examines versions of the relationship between the past and present told in more marginal spaces, including the folktales of peasants and the rumors exchanged by subcultural visitors. Stories about a “secret past” both manipulate and undermine the neat oppositions between epochs that are laid out in hegemonic and intellectual versions of history and challenge the dominant construction of identity as “ethnicity.” Chapter 6 examines the role of hallucinogenic mushrooms in different constructions of Mazatec identity. For most Mexicans and for smaller numbers of foreigners, Huautla is synonymous with hallucinogenic mushrooms and the great mushroom priestess, María Sabina, who died in 1985. Since the late 1950s, when the banker, self-styled “ethnomycologist,” and all-around Renaissance man (or quack) R. Gordon Wasson put Huautla on the map with a sensationalist Life magazine article describing a shamanic ceremony, outsiders have journeyed to this remote and forbidding place. Today these pilgrimages continue—with most visitors searching for the opportunity to ingest the more powerful varieties of ndixito (little ones who spring forth), especially the derrumbes, or “landslide” mushrooms, in the context of a “traditional” curing ceremony overseen Preface

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by a Mazatec man or woman curer who often traces a lineage back to María Sabina herself. Mazatecs and outsiders may debate the meaning of mushroom practice, but few would deny that the discourse about mushrooms dominates cultural representation in the Sierra; the fungus is the engine of the Mazatec mimetic machinery that spins out different models of identity. Chapter 6 describes the various popular discourses about expertise and “drugs” that flow from talk about mushrooms in the Sierra Mazateca. The chapter then examines the careers of three Mazatec curers, looking at how both the actual mushroom rituals and the practices surrounding these rituals construct a travel-based model of power and identity. This model, I will show, stands in contrast with the discourses about shamanism that are voiced by tourists, New Age writers, teachers, and intellectuals—discourses that are not as distinct as the opposition between insider and outsider may make it appear. Mushroom discourse, which is also discourse about culture, emerges from conversations across group boundaries. While the “magic world” of mushroom discourse is the most visible arena in which different cultural representations sprout forth, and the remembered past is an important arena for the construction and contestation of hegemonic poles of identification, the geography of the Sierra provides another privileged site for the elaboration of different conceptions of culture and identity. Chapter 7 examines the underground world of the Sistema Huautla, one of the deepest and most extensive cave systems in the world, a dark and empty void that plays a central role in Mazatec culture making. This chapter discusses the thirty-year experience of North American cave explorers in the region. From there, I will follow the stories about dealings with underground spirit-owners and devils and show how the meanings of these stories differ for peasants, Huautecos of the commercial class, and intellectuals, thus forming another site for metacultural contestation. Mazatec talk and action about culture and identity produce, in each of three spaces—history, mushrooms, and caves—a tension between a view of culture as bounded and objectified and another view that locates culture precisely at moments of mediation and exchange. While one view positions history, mushrooms, and caves as essential attributes of a Mazatec identity, the other sees each area as a discursive space in which culture is continuously being generated and mediated in ways that may be dangerous or lucrative to the individual actor. Neither of these views of Mazatec identity is necessarily prior to the other, and both can and do coexist. I hope to demonstrate how my strange encounter with the Devil x

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mediates these different views of culture and expresses a contradictory construction of identity that borrows from the mysterious past, the mushroom, and the cave. But first I must introduce my own voyage into the Sierra Mazateca, and there is no better way to do that than by describing myself as I am often seen in Huautla—not as a “gringo,” “American,” or “anthropologist,” but as the vehicle that continually crossed over from lowlands into highlands and from Mexico back to the United States. So I will begin by talking about my truck.

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Acknowledgments

Many individuals have helped make this book possible. My greatest debt is to the people of the Sierra Mazateca. While none of these individuals are responsible for the way I have chosen to speak about them, many of them contributed more than I could have expected in time, caring, patience, wisdom, and love. My compadres Ines Cortés Rodríguez and Juvenal Casimiro García, and their children, Julia, Begonia, María de los Angeles, Daniel, Juvenal, and Pablo Miguel, welcomed me into their house and have been true friends for nine years. Other Huautecos whose help was invaluable include Celerino Cerqueda García and his family, including Julia, Mauricio, and Jorge Luís, who repaired my printer; my esteemed landlord the Maestro Isidro; Doña Rosa Estrada de García and Ascunción García Estrada; and Renato Dorantes García. Many thanks also to Fortunato Canseco Olmos and Virginia Perez Aguilar of Matzazongo, the late Pedro Octavio Sánchez Morelos, and to everyone else with whom I lived, worked, and played in the Sierra Mazateca. I am grateful to have received a Fulbright/García Robles grant sponsored by CIESAS of Oaxaca and a Tinker grant from the Institute of Latin American Studies of the University of Texas at Austin. I was also aided by attending an NEH summer institute on the Maya world, as well as by the support of colleagues, students, and administrators at Warren Wilson College. Sections of Chapter 6 originally appeared in Critique of Anthropology 17 (4), in December 1997, and are reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd. Sections of María Sabina: Her Life and Chants have been included with the kind permission of the author, Alvaro Estrada. This work has benefited from suggestions and encouragement from many friends and colleagues who have read and discussed parts of it with me, particularly Jim Reische, Carol Hendrickson, Katie Stewart, Henry

Munn, Carol Howard, Henry Selby, Bob Fernea, Susan Lepselter, Greg Urban, Erica David, Sam Scoville, Scott Head, Vania Cardoso, Guillermo de la Peña, Daniel Nugent, Sandra Joshel, Virginia Garrard Burnett, John Dudas, Edward Abse, and Patricia Fuentes-Cross. Susan Martin provided the wonderful map, and Jim Perdue provided assistance with the photographs. I am grateful to Theresa May of the University of Texas Press for believing in this project, and for the excellent work of a perceptive copyeditor, Sue Carter. Thanks to Louise Meintjes for the coffee and Marmite. My deepest thanks go to Michael Duke, who helped shape my thoughts during many long conversations over tacos and Victorias in Huautla. All anthropologists should have the benefit of a perceptive colleague who coincidentally ends up sharing the same field site for overlapping periods. Many others provided help during the long, often delayed process of finishing the book—and nothing could have been accomplished without the steady encouragement of Joel Feinberg, Betty Feinberg, and Katie Fisher. If there are any errors left at this point, I lay the blame squarely at the cloven feet of the Devil, who has blocked me at every turn.

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the devil’s book of culture

1.1. The Toyota prepares for its journey. Photo by author.

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Introduction a toyota in huautla

I bought the truck in the first week of July 1993, using a good chunk of the first installment of my Fulbright grant and a little extra borrowed from relatives. I was so excited. It was my first truck, the truck of my dreams, a silver 1987 4-wheel drive Toyota pickup with an extended cab and black stripes on the sides. Doug, the previous owner, showed it to me in the parking lot of the store where he worked selling customized golf equipment in Round Rock, Texas. Doug took me to his home, a brick, ranch-style house on a quiet dead-end. His two little girls ran out to greet him, eagerly asking permission to eat at a friend’s house. Doug apologized for the messy condition of his garage, but I could not see even a speck of dust. Everything seemed perfect. My eye lingered on a bumper sticker on one of the inside walls of the garage, above the neatly stacked boxes. “Don’t blame me,” it said. “I voted for Bush.” The next day I had a mechanic from LemonBusters inspect the truck. “What a relief,” he told me when he was done. “After a day filled with clunkers, to check out a machine like this.” He told me that he had never seen an engine with that many miles (125,000—all of them, according to Doug, on the highway) that looked so good and so clean. It seemed almost like new, he told me. I bought the truck then

and there. The advertisement had asked for $6,500, which seemed very steep, so I decided to bargain and offered $5,900. “Sure,” he said, without hesitation. For a moment I felt like Homer Simpson, realizing too late that I could have offered him far less. “Doh!”

a tv show A few weeks later, as I settled into the lovely, rainy town of Huautla de Jiménez in the highlands of Oaxaca’s Sierra Mazateca, I was reminded of an old British television show, The Prisoner, which originally aired in 1967, just as the wave of hippies in Huautla was cresting. In those first days in Huautla as I tried to get my bearings—both as a traveler and as an anthropologist—various aspects of this TV show floated into my consciousness. Later I would realize that The Prisoner was an apt metaphor for my situation. You may remember the basic plot of the show: in the opening credits, the secret agent, played by Patrick McGoohan (who was also the show’s producer), angrily resigns from his job, and then, while he is sleeping, he is gassed and taken away from his London apartment. After the credits, in every show, he wakes up in his room in “the village.” McGoohan has been renamed Number 6, and the person in charge is Number 2. “Who are you?” “You are Number 6.” “I am not a number; I am a free man.” Maniacal laughter. The village is Bentham’s Panopticon taken to its technological extreme. Every inch is monitored by hidden cameras, bugs, and other, even more insidious devices. But Number 6 seems to be the only occupant who is consciously aware that he is living in a prison. Every week, Number 2 and his (or her) cronies try to break the mind, will, and spirit of Number 6 through elaborate mind games, most of which seek to confuse his sense of his own identity. They want “Information. Information. Information.” Number 6 resists: “You won’t get it.” “By hook or by crook, we will.” He never breaks, and usually mind-games Number 2 right back, but he never is able to escape or discover who or what Number 1 is. Number 2’s failures always result in his or her replacement, so each episode features a Number 2 with a different face, voice, and style. Number 2 always observed; Number 6 was always the object of that observation. As an anthropologist, I thought, I should identify with Number 2, the one who observes, the one who sees, the possessor of the gaze. So why did I feel like Number 6? 2

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I kept thinking of the representation of space in the show. The best and scariest scene in the whole series occurred in the first episode. Number 6 enters a store and tries to buy a map. The salesman shows him several maps, all exactly the same but drawn to different scales. All show a community called “the village,” surrounded by “the mountains” on one side and “the beach” and “the ocean” on the other three, with no hint of an outside world beyond the map’s edges. This terrifying rendering of the map as something that reinforces one’s sense of incarceration and confusion instead of giving one a vantage point from which to see and by which to escape triggered ruminations about how meaning and power are inscribed in space. The map of “the village” is not like the world map, with its named, clearly bordered societies, each marked by its national hue (Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983; Gupta and Ferguson 1992:6). The village’s representation of its geography is something else, just as the definition of the meaning of space, in the Sierra Mazateca, often upsets expectations in its juxtaposition of generic and specific terms. The emphasis on information was another thread that tied my disoriented consciousness to The Prisoner. Information: That’s what Number 2 wanted so desperately, and Number 6 as well. Number 2 was always seeking information about Number 6. Number 6 was always trying to figure out not only where he was but also what Number 2 was after—and why. I was an anthropologist doing fieldwork, so I too was looking for information. What was it they wanted? Foucault (1980:155) has described power as an eye, an inspecting gaze that finally ends with the interiorization of the overseeing function. The goal of collecting information, in the worlds of Foucault and McGoohan, is linked not so much to the actual data retrieved, but rather to the process of knowing, gazing, classifying, and thus to creating subjects as objects of knowledge. It is part of “a machinery that assures dissymmetry, disequilibrium, difference. Consequently, it does not matter who exercises power” or what their motive might be (Foucault 1977:202). It also doesn’t really matter, for Number 2, what kind of information he collects, as long as it is yielded up willingly and the individuals confess their personal truth. When I arrived in Huautla, I too sought information, but as a clumsy and novice field-worker, I was not entirely sure what that meant. So I turned to the people around me, my Huauteco friends and acquaintances, to see what they thought I was doing. It seemed to me, after reflecting on their versions of my job, that they fetishized information as much as Number 2 did—whatever it was, it was spatially located in hidden places Introduction

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(spy headquarters, museums, remote villages) and controlled by specialists (spymasters, scientists, elders, anthropologists). Within this discourse, the information I would want would be found in categories with labels like “the customs” and “the way things were before.” But what was this information that people talked about but never detailed? “Information” seemed to function more as a sheer simulacrum than as a symbol or an icon; its meaning was understood but it referred to nothing. So we can imagine the anthropologist puzzling over the question of how “information” is constructed in his universe and flashing back to a television program that presented a particular version of what it means to collect data. The focus on identity was another aspect of The Prisoner that seemed relevant to my plight as a fledging anthropologist. In the show, identity is a major site in the battle between the powerful and the weak. The Number 2s continually try to fashion and confuse the identities of their subjects, especially Number 6—giving them numbers instead of names, for one (obvious) example, but also creating identities that, from Number 6’s perspective, are patently false. For Number 6, the “community” of the villagers is really a mask for a prison of guards and prisoners. For social scientists, the categories of perceptual evaluation that create groups and identities are “the crucial stakes of political struggle which is a struggle to impose the legitimate principle of vision and division” (Bourdieu 1990:134). From my perspective on the problem of how identities—national, community, region, class, faction—come into being and are affirmed or challenged, The Prisoner serves as a model of the clear links that always exist between the struggle for and against power and ways of identifying the self and the other. Are indigenous villages best described as “closed corporate communities” (Wolf 1957)? Scholars have described the cultural makeup of these communities in relationship to a bigger world in various ways: as a “little tradition” that differs from the “great tradition” of the cities (Redfield 1930), as isolated “survivals” of a pre-Columbian indigenous tradition (Vogt 1970), as units that have imposed a cultural homogeneity as a form of self-defense against the Spanish Empire and the Mexican state (Gossen 1986). But if we look at communities as “total institutions” like those studied by Goffman or represented in The Prisoner, we may be led toward another model. “Total institutions,” he writes, “do not really look for cultural victory. They create and sustain a particular kind of tension between the home world and the institutional world and use this persistent tension as strategic leverage for the management of men” (Goffman 1961:13). Recent work has debunked the notion of the isolated Mexican village 4

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forever re-creating its traditional, dysfunctional, or oppositional heritage in a remote space where the rest of the world relates only as a threatening outside force. This debunking suggests more links with the village of The Prisoner. Both types of village appear as traditional, autonomous units. Yet both, in reality, are closely tied to outside spaces—prisoners and guards come to the village from all over Europe while Huautecos go everywhere—to California, Mexico City, and around the world in the kitchens of cruise ships. All sorts of people come in to Huautla and the Sierra as well—New Age tourists and mushroom eaters, bureaucrats and construction workers, missionaries, educators, anthropologists. Many more alien voices arrive in television signals that bounce off of satellites and land even in the remotest reaches of the jungle. Oaxaca’s indigenous people fully participate in a transnational economy and mass culture (Cohen 2000; Kearney 1995; Nagengast and Kearney 1990; Stephen 1991), just as McGoohan’s villagers clearly participate in an international economy of espionage. Yet both units define themselves through the tropes of “autochthony” and “isolation.” Both communities highlight the idea that apparent spatial isolation or marginality is a trope that is used deliberately for ends that relate to power: McGoohan’s village is somewhere in a generic European periphery; one episode suggests Portugal, another the eastern Baltic, though the program was really filmed in Wales. And Huautla is a lost corner of “Mexico Desconocido.” Finally, I was reminded of The Prisoner by the music. In the program, there are always men parading around town playing musical instruments, horns and drums and the like. They always seem engrossed in their work. It is hard to tell why they do it or what they are doing. Are they invoking some sort of strange carnivalesque resistance to the lie they are living, or are they celebrating the power of their rulers? Or are they just bleating the dumb noise of the silent majority, the masses who “absorb all radiation from the outlying constellations of State, History, Culture, Meaning” (Baudrillard 1983:2) but radiate nothing but constant background noise? In Huautla, there is always music. After someone dies, there are processions after three days, ten days, twenty days, and forty days. Still more remembrances follow on anniversaries, sometimes up to seven years after the death of the finado (dearly departed). And there are other processions for saints and weddings, so always there are big throngs of people plodding through the often muddy streets. The women walk first, carrying umbrellas for rain or excessive sun, and the men follow under hats, stoically braving the elements and staring into space. In between the two groups are the musicians, squawking out the eerily upbeat music called Introduction

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banda or else making the mariachi noise. A priest, before a wedding in Santa Rosa, is annoyed by the mariachis of the father of the bride as they play just outside the church doors while he tries to lead hymns inside, but there isn’t much he can do. It is all around him, this constant ruckus that occasionally condescends to let him play too, whatever that means. The father of the bride is wasted, even though it is barely noon. “Ándale, cabrones!” he shouts (“Let’s go, bastards!”), and the musicians and his half of the wedding party stagger into the church, where they will sit in bored silence for almost an hour. Meanwhile, the music continues, suggesting gaps in all authoritative understandings, including the priest’s and the anthropologist’s, and infiltrating consciousness like my unbidden memories of The Prisoner while I was working at creating a serious ethnographic account of life in southern Mexico. The music reminded me that there were other ways of forming and commenting upon reality than those of the expert. These other ways, though, may take forms that, at first, appear to be nothing more than background noise. The purpose of this book is not (merely) to argue against a clearly flawed construction of the notion of culture, space, and cultural difference. Instead, my aim is to explore and analyze the constructions of culture, space, and cultural difference that are actually deployed in a particular Mexican discursive space (or constellation of spaces) that I will for simplicity’s sake call the Sierra Mazateca. My purpose will not be served by conjecturing whether or not one of these metacultural styles is more accurate or appropriate than another. I will follow them (and use them) as they create, transform, and move through different worlds and different types of metacultural terrain. This approach differs from most of the literature about identity and ethnicity, which typically depicts these phenomena as a complex struggle between different identifications. In this literature, the twentieth-century processes of nation building and globalization are seen as threatening preexisting lower levels of identity through forced or voluntary acculturation. Recently, researchers have demonstrated that many of these lower level identifications have survived this assault and even become increasingly important, often political, poles of attraction. My approach, in this book, is not to describe identity in terms of this reputed struggle between local and global identities, but instead in terms of the relationship between different styles of representing identity, localness, and globalness; inside and outside, us and them. Thus the story I tell is not about the encroachment of national, capitalist, or hegemonic culture against an 6

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Indian culture determined to defend itself; it is instead a story about the ongoing relationship between styles of representing culture in a marginal place where the noise of mourners and revelers and rumormongers challenges or complements the authoritative blasts from loudspeakers and church podiums. This is the shift from culture to metaculture.

culture, metaculture, and space Anthropology is the discipline that has explicitly formulated and debated the notion of “culture,” which is usually taken as its object of study. Anthropologists may or may not have invented this concept, but they have certainly tried to usurp the right to discuss this topic as “experts” and scientists. Our notions of culture have evolved, both through our explicit arguments about its nature and through the practices that organize our work and provide us with financial support. Malinowski is a great hero because he went out there to find data, showing that culture has an empirical existence in the “field,” and his work showed up the earlier armchair anthropologists and forever revamped the concept. Culture has usually been thought of as a thing that exists in certain places (the more remote, the better the chances of finding it). It is something to be found, written down in a notebook, and, like the shards collected by archaeologists, brought back to the lab for analysis. But the term “culture” is not sufficiently complex (unlike, say, “quantum mechanics”) that it can be kept out of the hands of the people without education. Before anthropologists appeared on the scene, people used ideas like “culture” in various ways. Even the Yanomamö of introductory anthropology classes organize their allegedly fierce existence through a notion like this, separating the spheres of “things of the village” (glossed by Chagnon as Culture) and “things of the forest” (Nature) (Chagnon 1992). The Yanomamö, until quite recently, lived and died in almost complete isolation from the discourses of “culture” that we recognize and participate in. But in this purported isolation, they are unique.1 Other people, including those less “savage” Indians of the Sierra Mazateca of southern Mexico, have defined culture and identity as part of an ongoing conversation with discourses that circulate throughout the entire human world (and perhaps part of the nonhuman world as well). The practice of self-documentation is not restricted to the first world, nor is it limited to the “postmodern” period of the late twentieth century, although our current historical epoch has seen the emergence of new Introduction

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styles of indigenous ethnographic self-representation.2 Scholars working in Oaxaca, Yucatán, and Guatemala have shown how important indigenous ways of understanding and representing notions of “culture” are in Zapotec, Mixtec, and Maya communities from Tehuantepec to California.3 Their studies situate the importance of “the crisis of representation of concepts such as culture, language, and ethnicity” not at the level of the production of ethnographic texts for academic American audiences but instead at the level of “how and why ethnicity and culture are constructed in specific historical and political contexts, in which there is a profound difference in power relations” (Stephen 1989:259). Ideas about culture emerge in local contexts; they are not simply applied by authoritative outsiders. This book will treat Huautla and the Sierra Mazateca in much the same way that John Dorst treats Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania: as a Site, “an idea, an image, a matrix of ideological discourses” (Dorst 1989:10). These metacultural discourses, which deal with the identity of people related to this particular place, are deployed by actors all over the world; but I will simplify their production, at this moment in the study, in order to make a strategic point. The most important difference in the production of discourses about “culture” in the Sierra Mazateca involves the separation of three groups of people. The first consists of outsiders: visitors, tourists, mushroom eaters, representatives of the state, anthropologists, and missionaries. In the second group we find Mazateco campesinos (peasants) and other relatively powerless types. The third group consists of “middlemen”: local intellectuals, businessmen, curanderos (curers), teachers, and politicians. Much of this work will focus on the third group, both because these were the people most eager and ready to share their views with an American anthropology student and because of the interesting dialectic between the intermediary-border and core-center positions that emerges in Mazatec metacultural discourse. This classification will inevitably be undermined in the course of my analysis, as actors often speak in ways that show that they are not fixed in any of these often blurred and interpenetrating groups. Nonetheless, I believe that these distinctions are useful; many studies in the past have naively accepted the metacultural statements of middlemen as transparent representations of the feelings of the group. What I describe as a distinct metacultural style, they take for a higher level of articulateness and consciousness (Benítez 1964; Bernard and Pedraza 1989; Hernández 1990; Inchaústegui 1994; Neiburg 1988). The switch in register from an anthropological inquiry into a particular culture to an investigation of metacultural discourses implies several 8

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things. It implies, first of all, that the anthropologist cannot accept culture and identity as given categories, but must search for the ways in which these concepts are produced and deployed by the players in the ethnographic situation. The goal is to discover the content and form of metacultural ethnotheories, and the sites in which these are produced, elaborated, and contested, instead of assuming that these must correspond to our own notions about culture. Through the active articulation of their lives with metacultural discourse, individuals and groups propel culture through time (Urban 2001).4 Second, talking about metacultural discourses, instead of culture, may help us solve the problem posed by the title of Jean Jackson’s (1989) article “Is There a Way to Talk about Making Culture without Making Enemies?” Jackson discusses how the shared use of the word “culture” by anthropologists and members in movements that promote the preservation of “Indian culture” can result in these two groups’ unwittingly colluding to misrepresent the situation. In these cases, both groups use the notion of culture to pose “continuities between the past and present, in cases warranting a more sophisticated analysis because such continuities may in fact exist only superficially, the underlying meanings being radically different” (Jackson 1989:127). Since culture is usually considered to be something that is given to individuals and is beyond their capacity to alter, Jackson argues that “when we do speak of people as political actors who are changing culture, we run the risk of seeming to speak of them in negative terms, the implication being that the culture resulting from these operations is not really authentic” (Jackson 1989:127). By describing metacultural discourses rather than culture itself, we can avoid this troublesome confusion about “authentic” and “invented” culture, and the moral judgments these distinctions imply. Third, in searching for these ethnotheories about culture, we must be prepared to recognize the places where our investigation is influenced by the assumptions and tropes stemming from the metacultural theories we bring with us from our immersion in both academic and popular discourses about culture. Perhaps the most important trope that we—both anthropologists and the people we study, it turns out—use to discuss and categorize culture is space. The usual conception of cultural geography, which dominates most of the social sciences, treats space as “a kind of neutral grid on which cultural difference, historical memory, and societal organization are inscribed” (Gupta and Ferguson 1992:7). As Gupta and Ferguson point out, this vision emphasizes images of rupture; different spaces are clearly Introduction

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demarcated from each other, and across these borders we find the indwelling entities to be different from each other in every way, isomorphically. Space equals place equals culture, and culture equals language (Clifford 1992:99). The perceptual map of the social sciences takes the political map of nation states as its model; just as solid lines separate administrative units, so do other solid lines separate geographically distinct, natural, and culturally unitary groups of Croats, Serbs, Mazatecs, or whatever. These groups are free to fight over the location of the boundaries, but not the principle of the map. Since culture, in this model, is found in autonomous, culturally unified territories, cultural specialists typically sought out locations that seemed to most closely fit that description. These formed the mines from which that precious entity, a valuable noun-thing like guano or gold, could be extracted. Rural villages seemed like the closest fit, and so the village (or “closed corporate community,” as social scientists chose to call it in Mexico [Wolf 1957]), became the privileged site of fieldwork for anthropologists. Collecting culture became a sedentary process of dwelling, as the researcher, ignoring the constant comings and goings of the natives and the products and discourses they consumed, set down roots in a village and slowly expanded until he had absorbed the culture, not just of the inhabitants, but of the place. As Clifford writes, despite the recent emigration of anthropologists out of literal villages, fieldwork still is a “special kind of localized dwelling” (Clifford 1992:98).5 The work of Bakhtin on “metalinguistics” has assaulted the naturalizing isomorphism between language and culture that this dominant perception depends upon, as well. His critique of the essentialized notion of “language” parallels the critique of “culture” that the stress on “metaculture” implies. For Bakhtin, language is an inherently mutable entity; it never exists in a pure state but always in an encounter with an other, foreign language. It is not a single code or genre that speakers learn, but rather multiple, intersecting codes (spoken by different professions, ages, etc.) that no native speaker could ever master. Language is creolized at its point of origin; what matters is not the language as it exists in a clearly marked home territory, but the constant interpenetration across the numerous linguistic borders that occurs with every utterance (Bakhtin 1981, 1986; S. Stewart 1983). Thus, even if one accepts the common analogy between language and culture, Bakhtin’s work shows that one cannot use this analogy to support the traditional social scientific map that divides the world into different cultures, clearly separated from each other. 10

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Furthermore, different spaces and cultures have always been hierarchically interconnected, and not naturally disconnected; thus instead of describing change in terms of the articulation of previously isolated cultures, the task of the anthropologist is to “rethink . . . difference through connection” (Gupta and Ferguson 1992:8). A corollary of this view of culture is that it cannot be taken as a thing, a noun that belongs to a particular group; rather, it is a process of managing the interconnections among differently construed groups, or metaculture. So the situation in the Sierra Mazateca can be recast from the way it is conventionally told, as a battle between cultures—Indian and mestizo, capitalist and peasant—and transformed into an account of the relationship between different styles of imagining and representing how identity works.6

In Huautla, everyone loved the Toyota and everyone used it. When I lived up at the Socorros’, they cleared a space on the roof for it and lovingly covered it with a tarp. Mani and Junior would wash it for me and sit inside the cab for hours, just hanging out. Sometimes I let them listen to the radio or to cassettes, until Junior played music in there all night and killed the battery. He spent several nights in the truck, even though it seemed like an uncomfortable place to sleep. The little girls also liked to sit in the cab and bring along the baby. Once, somebody let all the air out of one of my tires. Mani said that it was one of the two kids from a neighbor family who often stared sullenly at me and said incomprehensible things. They were bad kids from a bad family, said Junior. The father didn’t know things, he had tons of children and didn’t buy them clothes or send them to school, so they just wandered around all the time, getting into trouble. They denied being the culprits, or each blamed the other, but Mani said that their father beat the shit out of them for doing it. When I moved into an apartment in the lower barrio, next to the Restaurant Rosita, I left the truck parked on the street. It was locked, so nobody sat in the cab, but everyone used the bed. They would put Introduction

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the dirty little wild child, Eudelia, in there like it was some sort of pen. And the teenagers would sit in there and look cool and smoke cigarettes. And at night, Gloria, the nineteen-year-old sexpot from Guerrero who worked at the restaurant, would make out for hours with her boyfriend, always leaning against my Toyota.

linear and pictorial metacultural styles The different “theoretical perspectives” that are debated by scholars bear a remarkable similarity to the “metacultural styles” that are employed in the “real world” by peasants and organic intellectuals and storekeepers and bureaucrats and tourists and college professors. As Gudeman and Rivera argue, the border between the practices at the periphery and the theories of the core can be understood as conversation rather than a gulf, as “practice and text, voices ‘on the ground’ and ‘in the air,’ and dominant and subordinate texts are appropriated and transformed, become intertwined, and play themselves out in long and ever-thicker conversations” (1990:162). By abandoning or “writing against” (Abu-Lughod 1991) culture as a concept that freezes difference and subordinates it to the expert’s explication, hopefully we can narrow the chasm between authors who speak about and informants who represent a preexisting culture so that the individuals sometimes trapped in these categories can converse with each other in a less encumbered manner. I am borrowing the terms that Volosinov uses to describe and classify various types of reported speech to describe different metacultural styles which are used both by scholars and by differently situated actors “on the ground” in places like the Sierra Mazateca. Reported speech was a particularly important area of concern for Volosinov and Bakhtin, since their view of language held that “all speech is reported speech, for all speech carries with it a history of use and interpretation by which it achieves both identity and difference. It is within this rather remarkable capacity for making present the past that speech acquires its social meaning” (S. Stewart 1983:277). Explicitly reported speech is more common in some places or speech genres than others. In the Sierra Mazateca, people are always saying “they say” or “he says” or “I say” or “some say,” until they almost reach the level of the Cuna, who are said to talk almost entirely in direct quotations (Taussig 1993:109). But even utterances not prefaced 12

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with “they say” can be seen as implicit quotations, as the speaker quotes some sort of preexisting “I” upon which the I of the moment is temporarily modeled.7 This line of reasoning can also be applied to culture: all culture is reported culture; all instances of cultural behavior evoke previous cultural performances and the differences and similarities that those performances were used to create. The representation of culture as reported culture problematizes the links between the present and the past (tradition, education, etc.) by stressing the agency of the reporter, who ceases to be a passive vehicle of a culture. The idea of reported culture also establishes the interconnectedness of culture; every instance of cultural “reporting” establishes a kind of link between separate entities, the reporter and the reported. An utterance of reported culture is a sign that “represents, depicts, or stands for something lying outside itself”; it is not a reflection of an interior essence, a culture, as the term is conventionally used (Volosinov 1986:9). When we view cultural utterances as reported culture, the style in which the reported voice, or culture, is incorporated into the voice of the reporter becomes as important, semiotically, at least, as the content of the utterance. The style in which reported cultural utterances are incorporated fundamentally distinguishes disparate ways of using difference and similarity to put the world together.8 Volosinov distinguished between two different styles of reported speech, or instances when a speaker incorporates another’s utterance into his own. The linear style establishes “clear-cut, external contours for reported speech, whose own internal individuality is minimized” (Volosinov 1986:119). The author and all his characters speak the same language, or style; the borders that separate them from each other are impermeable. When applied to culture, the linear style maps neatly on to the most familiar ways of representing the world. One way to describe this style is to draw on the image of the Olympic Games, the modern world’s preeminent ritual representation of itself to itself. Each nation is clearly distinguished from all the others—they all wear different colored uniforms and have different national anthems. As soon as an athlete appears on the television screen, the viewer knows his or her nationality. But the very traits that distinguish them also unite them. Athletes and nations are differentiated in the same style: through different uniforms, anthems, colors, flags, and the three letters that always appear after an athlete’s name—a standardized abbreviation of his or her country. As on the standard map of the world, with its color-coded nation-states, the apparent heteroglosIntroduction

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sia on the level of content is contained within a homogeneous style; it just sounds like heteroglossia. National difference is absolute yet uniform—it is in every case represented as a nation-state, a set of borders, a color, and a name. There is no place for identities that reject this common style, or idea of a difference not expressed through the unifying Olympic goals of athletic excellence and the competitive pursuit of shiny metals. The rise of nationalism firmly entrenched the linear style of reporting culture as the legitimate and official way of conceiving the world; using images of the unchanging past to build for a new future, paradoxically making “an argument for the uniqueness of different cultures that is couched in a style common now to all parts of the world” (Spencer 1990: 285). As in a painting by Modigliani, Ernest Gellner writes, there is very little shading; neat flat surfaces are clearly separated from each other, it is generally plain where one begins and another ends, and there is little if any ambiguity or overlap. Shifting from the map to the reality mapped, this is a map of states, each identified with one culture and style, supervised by an educational system and a state that monopolizes legitimate culture as it does legitimate violence. (1983:140)

Increasingly in the twentieth century, difference within nation-states came to be seen as ethnic difference. In one view, different ethnic groups are seen as mini-nations—different “peoples” within a nation, each of which possesses its own language or dialect, culture, and territorial base. The proliferation of linearly imagined “ethnic groups” within a nation may sometimes threaten the state’s authority during periods of stress, but that challenge is often deflected as nations use ethnicity to create a national unity out of difference. Ethnicity, when properly managed, can, like strongly developed regional identities, serve as a microlevel model for patriotism. The linear style of imagining ethnicity obscures the power relationships that connect its elements through the imposition of hard borders, which makes it a more attractive means of composing a nation than certain other possibilities, such as class. It also naturalizes relations of power through the use of culture—markers of poverty can be read as tradition, exploitation as an immutable way of life handed down from our ancestors. While many nations tried to annihilate signs of internal cultural difference in the early twentieth century, many now find spaces to celebrate that difference, as long as it is linear difference reported identically—through different commodities to sell to tourists, different forms of 14

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dress associated with different territories, different clan tartans and village huipiles,9 different fields to elaborate and sell expertise. As Stuart Hall writes, capital, in this phase of globalization, wants not to obliterate difference but to operate through it under a single overarching framework. “It is trying to constitute a world in which things are different. And that is the pleasure of it but the differences do not matter” (Hall 1991:33). The beauty pageant has proved to be a model space for the elaboration of national unity through uniform pleasurable difference in countries from Guatemala to Indonesia, as each region is represented through typical clothes, dances, beautiful women, and competition.10 In Oaxaca, the yearly Guelaguetza 1.2. Teenager from Huautla brings together Indians from all over the dances at the Guelaguetza in state to perform “traditional” dances in Oaxaca. Photo by Fernando a contest in front of appreciative crowds. Palacios Chazares. The Tuxtepec pineapple dance always wins. The linear imagination of the nation can take various forms besides the common metaphor of the contest or beauty pageant.11 Sports, museums, beauty pageants, advertisements, and ritual feasts—all can serve to create a surface homogeneity out of heterogeneous, possibly conflictive representations.12 Vision, division, and expertise are the primary tropes of the linear style of reporting culture and of the decontamination of cultural representation.13 Bourdieu associates these words—vision and division—with the act of achieving symbolic power by carving up social space into different groups. Those with the power to create these groups (members of an implicit, unmarked, superior group) do so by seeing the lines between them; the act of seeing distinctions, which in our language seems like such a passive, objective non-action, is transformed into an act of aggression, even violence, as the sickle-lidded eyes of power stand or hover above the pulpy, butterlike social world and carve it up until its appropriate form is “revealed.” The linearly reported world is a seen phenomenon, and that sight must derive from the “overview”—the privileged space in the heavens, or the Introduction

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center, that is made by this act of powerful seeing. The overview denies its own role in the creation of the groups it sees; it portrays itself as a place of objective, neutral vision. The space of the overview becomes the home of the licensed expert, classifying from above becomes the practice of the expert, licensing experts becomes the practice of the state, and experts proliferate. These experts do not always agree; they may struggle over competing visions of the borders between groups or different labels for categories: Are the inhabitants of a given region Quebecois or Canadian, Breton or French, European or Oriental, Indian or Mexican? But the struggles over identity are not confined to this level of the disputes between experts over the borders between linearly reported and visually divided cultural groups. There is another style of imagining and reporting cultural identity and difference that coexists with the linear style, but it makes very different use of the eyes and the expert. The pictorial style of reporting culture is much harder to imagine and describe than its linear counterpart. Volosinov tells us that pictorially reported speech obliterates the precise borders between the various reported voices, as well as between them and the reporting voice. At the same time, it individualizes the reported speech. “This time,” he says, “the reception includes not only the referential meaning of the utterance, the statement it makes, but also all the linguistic peculiarities of its verbal implementation” (Volosinov 1986:121). So, to apply this concept to culture, we could say that in a pictorially reported universe, the borders between groups are vague and unclear, but, unlike the linear model represented by the Olympics, the way in which these groups are allowed to express their identity is not uniform. Pictorially reported culture is slippery and elusive; it is “given to digression, deflection, displacement, deferral, and difference. Culture in this ‘model,’ if we can call it that, resides in states of latency, immanence, and excess and is literally ‘hard to grasp’” (K. Stewart 1996:5). Borders become places of heightened importance. Instead of mere lines or walls separating distinct groups whose identity and meaning are seen as inhering essentially from within (from the cultural core, or the past, or another deep, inward part), the borders become complex places where identities are generated: Rather than thinking of the border as the furthermost extension of an essential identity spreading out from a core, this makes us think instead of the border itself as that core. In other words, identity acquires its 16

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satisfying solidity because of the effervescence of the continuously sexualized border, because of the turbulent forces, sexual and spiritual, that the border not so much contains as emits. (Taussig 1993:150–151)

It is harder to conceptualize the pictorial view of culture because it does not model itself on the familiar map, or even the familiar use of vision. Richard Handler comments that “it is almost impossible to translate nonreifying accounts of culture and identity into terms that institutional powers can understand” (quoted in Spencer 1990:291). Gellner contrasts the pictorial view of culture with the linear view in terms of different painting styles. If the linear view is like a painting by Modigliani, with its sharply delineated borders, this other map, he writes, resembles a painting by Kokoschka. The riot of diverse points of color is such that no clear pattern can be discerned in any detail, though the picture as a whole does have one. A great diversity and plurality and complexity characterizes all distinct parts of the whole: the minute social groups, which are the atoms of which the picture is composed, have complex and ambiguous and multiple relations to many cultures; some through speech, others through their dominant faith, another through a variant faith or set of practices, a fourth through administrative loyalty, and so forth. (1983:139)

The stress on interconnections in the pictorial mode makes it harder to conceptualize than the linear style. The practice of expressing this style also complicates its representation, since it is not based on the clear, privileged, site of vision—the overview. The linear style, presupposing the overview and its alleged uncontaminated distance from the objects it arranges, can authoritatively explain the objects of its gaze at will; it can use its language of expertise to tell its audience where one culture ends and another begins, it can map itself onto sites modeled after itself. Museums, for example. Each culture can be represented, separately, in different marked cases that are to be looked at, not touched. The organization of the museum and the lack of contamination of the exhibits mimics the authenticity of the represented others and promotes a form of distanced, reasoned judgment. The pictorial style of viewing culture also mimics the cultural landscape it purports to depict. For one thing, difference and power come from making connections, crossing borders—not simply standing above them and looking down. The borders are not explicitly mapped out, but Introduction

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are embedded in narratives about nearby, magically real lands, such as the magic world of the mushrooms and the demonic world of the underground in the Sierra Mazateca. Power, in the Sierra Mazateca, lies in the space of the intermediary, in the practice of coming and going. The pictorial style of representing culture in the Sierra Mazateca locates the generation of identity and power in that fluid practice, not in a cultural core of identity that experts—organic and otherwise—describe as “Mazatec,” “Indian,” or “Prehispanic.” For the linearly reporting experts, stories and other cultural traits function as tokens of a separate, authentic, Mazatec world with deep roots in the ancient past. In the pictorial style, those same stories and traits mimic and perform their view of culture and power by traveling back and forth across the border between here and there. And instead of being seen clearly from the privileged space of the expert on high, these borders are felt in journeys across dark, dangerous, and mysterious spaces: mushroom hallucinations and underground tunnels and caves, even the oddly textured terrain between past and present. The pictorial style also draws from the linear style, with its stress on vision and expertise. It too produces versions of the overview and the expert, but these are changed from those forms that we find more familiar. The power of the overview is fetishized and made into magic—the shaman becomes an expert by magically seeing across distances. But, as I shall argue in a later chapter, this version of sight is more tactile than the other—it emphasizes the contact and agency involved in vision that the official experts deny. While the shaman flies like an eagle, she also traces and follows footsteps like a possum; her power comes from traveling to and from outside places during the velada, and also from drawing patients and clients from distant places to see her, reproducing the same sort of power derived from movement across space. The pictorial style of reporting culture puts more emphasis on the agency of the reporting voice. Individual utterances are not read as mere instantiations of a prior, self-evident reported culture. Differences between the reported cultures are not seen as self-evident, and attention must be paid to the details of the reporting voice in selectively incorporating elements from multiple, shifting “cultures,” sometimes in order to reestablish an image of a bounded cultural totality. Pictorially reported culture asserts each individual’s ability to construct his or her own, authoritative metaculture; it thus attacks the privileged authority of the linear expert.14 The pictorial view of space and culture resonates with descriptions of globalization, which, according to Kearney, “entails a shift from two18

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dimensional Euclidean space with its centers and peripheries and sharp boundaries, to a multidimensional global space with unbounded, often discontinuous and interpenetrating sub-spaces” (1995:549). However, unlike many theorists of globalization and postmodernity, I do not propose that the pictorial view of culture is typical of a particular age or stage of development, as is suggested by temporally essentializing terms like “postmodernity” and by sentences like: “The binary absoluteness of cultural areas and identities is giving way to models of border areas as places of interpenetrating spaces and more complex, non-unitary identities” (Kearney 1995:557). Changes in fashionable theoretical styles of describing the world should not be misinterpreted as changes in the world itself. Rather than engaging each other through the process of progressive replacement, these styles coexist in a political dialogue, and probably always have. I do not want to muddle my presentation by asserting that the pictorial style of representing culture is necessarily a form of resistance to the dominant linear style. However, it does seem to be an alternative form of multiculturalism that may serve to question some of the power that is based on the linear style of reporting culture. In contemporary Mexican society, it is clear that metacultural discourse based on what I have called the linear style of reporting culture is most associated with power and the state. The pictorial style, on the other hand, may prove to be characteristic, if not of resistance, at least of marginality.

high and low culture, or culture and not culture The linear style of representing culture depends upon another critical metacultural technique—the distinction between the high and the low. Stallybrass and White (1986:3) suggest that, since the early modern period, this high/low “opposition in each of our four symbolic domains— psychic forms, the human body, geographical space and the social order— is a fundamental basis to mechanisms of ordering and sense-making in European cultures.” This technique not only distinguishes between the cosmopolitan high culture and the various low “Others” that are seen and labeled by experts; it also enables experts to determine what aspects of any particular “culture” qualify as authentic or valid, and which are markers of acultural deviation or backwardness. This may seem paradoxical. After all, I have argued that the linear view represents all of its “cultures” in the same style, and this would seem Introduction

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to eliminate a hierarchy between horizontally related, non-overlapping units. But the distinction that is made in the linear metacultural discourse is not so much between higher and lower ranked cultures, but between that which qualifies as “culture” and that which does not. Returning to the example of the Olympics, few people can achieve the high standards required to make the team or to be fully “cultural”; behaviors, languages, and groups that do not qualify are written off as backward, contaminated, impure. Following Anna Tsing’s example, I am using the word “hillbilly” to stand for this trope of the noncultural. In Mexico, for example, “hillbilly” is the most common meaning for the word “indio.” The concept of the hillbilly—as a type, not as a specific group of people—forms the linear way of creating a bounded label for problematic exceptions to its view of rooted identities, in situations where border crossings play a central role and identities are blurred. Unlike the pristine “primitive”—the authentic member of a disappearing enclosed culture—the disturbing hillbillies “confuse boundaries of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and they muddle universalizing standards of propriety, deference, and power” (Tsing 1993:7). This contaminating and contaminated mass must be purged from any relationship to the cultural except subservience. They must be continually taught what they lack, but always with the hopeless, resigned understanding that they will never regain what was lost. Most of contemporary life is presented as acultural; the real “culture” must be represented as belonging to the past, something that isn’t quite dead yet but exists only in scraps and traces. It is the task of experts to uncover the valid culture and separate it from its contaminating surroundings, a form of distinction that the hillbillies lack the ability to execute. The cultural worlds of linearly defined cultures are divided into opposing lists of traits, one associated with the “real old ways” and the other with impurity and backwardness. Thus, early twentieth-century “cultural workers” evoked the true folk culture of Appalachia with such signs as “dulcimer,” “ballads,” “our racial heritage,” “pre-modern,” “100% American,” “Elizabethan,” and “old Southern aristocracy” at the same time that they talked about a corrupt, penetrated nonculture characterized by “the banjo,” “chewing tobacco,” “feud songs,” “the radio,” and “bad taste” (Whisnant 1983). In the Sierra Mazateca, different categories of experts have made different lists emphasizing different traits, but the “true culture” is indelibly linked to the idea of the “Prehispanic.” Other valorized “old ways” include a stringed instrument that is virtually extinct, a pure form of the Mazatec language, huipiles and calzones, hallucinogenic mushrooms consumed in a noncommercial context, and a political system 20

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based on consensus. These cultural artifacts are opposed to an actual acultural state marked by television, radio, popular music, a version of Mazatec heavily marked with Spanish influences, Western clothing, drugs and the commercialized trade in mushrooms, and political parties. Cultureless hillbillies are always described, in Huautla as in Tennessee, as “backward,” “ignorant,” “aimless,” “tasteless,” and “indecent.” The word “indio” is interesting because it can refer to a full-fledged member of the idealized culture as well as (and more typically) to “hillbilly.” Sometimes the word “indígena” is substituted for “indio” when the first meaning is intended. The Huauteco businessman and intellectual Renato García Dorantes refers to “our brothers, humble indígenas, in their calzones and huipiles.” Another man says that a curandero who does not show up for a scheduled appointment is “very indio. He doesn’t know anything.” Sometimes the same traits that mark real indígenas, such as calzones, can also, in other conversations, index a degraded indio state. Gente de rancho, or people who live in small, isolated settlements, are said to preserve the customs better than the inhabitants of Huautla, but they are also frequently derided as ignorant and without culture. In practical usage, the people who on the surface would seem like the closest approximations to the real, just about extinct culture are the ones who are most typically described as hillbillies, while the more “westernized”-appearing Huautecos are not. If the true Mazatec culture can only be found in the past, then contemporary approximations of it are read as degenerate. Two impossible but distinct cultures are presented before people who cannot hope to achieve respectability within either grouping. Inevitably, those who seem the farthest from membership in the national “Mexican” culture become voiceless, cultureless hillbillies. The experts who speak for these cultural groups claim to view culture in terms of categories such as clothing, language, music, ritual, and religion. In fact, they use these categories as the raw material to construct a new type of ethnicity based on another level of categories—art, photography, academics; the reporting media of a transcultural expert class. On my first trip to the Sierra Mazateca in 1987, a friend and I hiked for several days from the lowlands up to Huautla. It was our first extended trip into an indigenous region of Mexico. When we saw particularly exotic or poor people in villages like Ayautla, we would not use the word “Indian” to describe them. “Look at that Okie,” we would say. “No, that guy over there is a real Okie.” Because of the need to push valid culture into the past, linear metacultural discourse seems obsessed with the representation of history and Introduction

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the past-present relationship. But pictorially reported culture lacks this dependence on history, and the past plays a smaller and different role in this metacultural style, which is less obsessed with the need to separate genuine and spurious cultural attributes.

On my two trips back and forth between Huautla and Texas in my Toyota truck and on several other trips between Huautla and places like Oaxaca, I was pulled over by the police at least five times. On almost all of these occasions, the police treated me politely, with the utmost professionalism and respect. They just wanted to check my papers, never implying that I had committed any violations, except for once. The pages of documents that came courtesy of my Fulbright, including special permissions signed by the secretary of interior, seemed to work wonders, as I was able to explain that I was in the country with a grant from the Mexican government. Once, the police officer told me that I looked nervous. In fact, I was nervous, and still startled by the sudden appearance of the flashing lights in my rearview mirror, which interrupted an exciting daydream. He searched the truck, telling me that he thought I was carrying something, since I was so nervous. But he remained courteous throughout. On another occasion I was rear-ended while negotiating my way through the nightmare urban traffic in the state of Mexico just north of Mexico City, by far the worst traffic situation I have ever experienced. A cop appeared right away, and he instantly told me that the accident was not my fault. He asked me to look at the damage to my vehicle to see if I needed reparations. I was exhausted and just wanted to get the hell out of there despite the dents, so I said it was fine and drove off. Only one traffic cop tried to screw me, and that was in the north-

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ern port city of Tampico, the reputed hometown of Subcomandante Marcos of the EZLN. I was driving through town, lost, searching for the highway south. A cop on foot pulled me over. I had no idea why. He asked me for something, which I eventually figured out was my receipt. Receipt for what? For the bridge. Oh yeah, I had paid a toll to cross the bridge to get into the city, but I had been given no receipt. I told him this, but he did not believe me. You must have gone into the city on the bridge, he told me, and if you have no receipt it means that you did not pay. That is a crime, he said. I tried to understand how it would be possible to cross the bridge without paying the toll. He did not help me. It is a crime, he said, pulling out some kind of police pad, presumably to write down my offense and scare me into paying some sort of fine or bribe. I was frustrated. I don’t agree with you, I said. Huh, he said. I don’t agree with you. It is not a crime. Oh, he said. It’s not. Take off. And I drove away to resume my search for the highway south.

fieldwork in the sierra mazateca My relationship with the Sierra Mazateca can be characterized as a succession of different modes of travel and not just as a prolonged dwelling. I have come to Huautla as a backpacker, an anthropology student, a seller of discount sneakers from the Nike factory outlet store in San Marcos, Texas, as a godfather visiting my compadres, as a college professor leading a group of undergraduate students on a travel immersion course, and as the sponsor of a quinceañera15 ceremony and party. Like many ethnographers, my introduction to the place where I would eventually conduct my fieldwork came long before I saw myself as an anthropologist. I first came to Huautla in 1987 while backpacking around Mexico with two friends. I had not yet been to grad school and the literature that I imposed on my surroundings was not so much Karl Marx or Robert Redfield as L. Frank Baum and William Burroughs. I desired only

Introduction

23

to be shocked, amazed, and startled, but like a viewer of a horror movie I expected the shocks to occur according to a particular set of conventions. And so when a drunken rancher who had picked us up hitchhiking in northeastern Mexico suggested—after pulling out a pistol, firing it, and yelling “Detroit Rock City! Bob Seger! Silver Bullet Band!” upon learning that my companion was from the Motor City—that we just had to go to a far-off place in Oaxaca with too many vowels in its name, I figured that this plan made as much sense as anything else. A month later, in the village of Jalapa de Díaz, we stepped down from a bus and asked when the next bus left for Huautla. We were told that no such bus existed. This seemed strange, since our map clearly showed a paved highway that led from the city of Tuxtepec, through Jalapa, all the way to Huautla and beyond to the town of Teotitlán del Camino. Yet, we soon discovered, there was no passable road. Eventually I learned the story behind this paradox. In 1976, in one of his final pronouncements as president of Mexico, Luís Echeverría announced the completion of various development projects, including this highway. Even though the road had not been built (except for the first section heading east from Teotitlán), Mexico’s mapmakers took the president at his word, and every 1.3. Pedro Sánchez at work, 1987. Mr. Sánchez, a carpenter, appears to be carrying a rifl e, but it is in fact another tool. Honduran border guards assumed that it was a rifl e when they discovered this photograph in my bags in 1988, and interrogated me at length about my involvement with guerrilla rebels. Photo by author.

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map of Mexico has indicated a paved highway connecting Huautla to major cities to the east and the west since 1976. (The final stretch of the highway, linking Huautla and Jalapa, was finally completed in 1994, just before another presidential election.) In any case, in 1987 I was left with no other recourse than to walk the fifty-odd kilometers to Huautla. Despite the blisters (for some reason I was hiking in $20 Kmart steel-toed work boots), this experience had an eye-opening effect on me, especially the two days spent in the enchanting village of Ayautla, or Place of Fog, located almost halfway up the path. In Ayautla, an extremely hospitable campesino named Pedro Sánchez put us up and regaled us with marvelous stories of intrigue and the supernatural. He told us about caves filled with jewels and men who eat the hearts of freshly slaughtered possums, and he sucked the worms from my brain. I was so struck by Mr. Sánchez that I visited him again the following year, and on this occasion he made a provocative invitation. “You should come back sometime,” he said, “and stay for longer. You could stay here in my house and learn our language. It wouldn’t take too long.” His offer was open-ended and generous. “If I am dead,” he said, “my wife and children will always be here to take you in. And my house can always be found right on this spot.” Then he turned serious. “Whatever you do, don’t go stay in the center of town. The people there are rich and bad and not hospitable; they will charge you money for food and a bed. Do not go there.” Enchanted by the ethnographic fantasy of long-term dwelling offered by Pedro Sánchez, I returned to Ayautla in 1993 after four years in graduate school at the University of Texas. This time I approached Ayautla, again on foot, from Huautla. By the time I arrived, after a nine-hour hike, it was getting dark and I was feeling dehydrated and a little nervous. I quickly discovered that Pedro Sánchez had in fact died and his widow had taken their children away from Ayautla, back to her hometown of Tenango. Where their house had been, I now stood dejectedly in front of a telephone pole in the middle of a cornfield. Left with no other alternative, I walked over to the center of town and knocked at the door of the largest house. Its owner let me in and agreed that I could eat and sleep in his house, in exchange for 3,500 pesos. To make a long story short, I discovered that evening that various political and practical considerations militated against making Ayautla a site of long-term dwelling. Ayautla was a bitterly divided, mostly monolingual village with a recent history of intense factional violence. If I stayed there I would have been the anthropologist associated with a particular factional leader, and my access to Introduction

25

other people would have been seriously compromised by suspicion and my inability to speak Mazatec fluently. So I returned to the larger, more bilingual and cosmopolitan town of Huautla, where I was invited to stay with a family near the central plaza. After a few months, I felt the need for more privacy, so I rented a room from a teacher who rented out his entire upper floor. My presence as a foreigner was not so strange in Huautla; I could go about my business without constantly explaining myself. Gradually, I met more and more people and made more and more friends, often by accident. The Socorros initially invited me to stay with them, I met the Cerquedas when one of them fixed my printer, and the Estrada family owned the restaurant near my apartment. I became very close to each of these three families, and our long, open-ended conversations provided much of my material. These families were constantly entertaining relatives and other visitors, bringing me into contact with a constant stream of new voices. I tried to keep as busy as possible during my initial year in Huautla, driving or hiking to more remote villages such as San Agustín, Matzazongo, Pochotepec, and Aguacatitla, where I met campesinos who often shared their opinions about the relations between their homes and Huautla. Some of my more interesting excursions came through my role as a member of the Lobos basketball team, which traveled together to tournaments in different communities. I also took monthly trips to Mexico City, where I interviewed Huautecos who had migrated to the city. I sought out “outsiders,” too—cavers, hippies, and teachers, for example—who were usually eager to share their impressions of Mazatec culture. I conducted a few formal interviews with men like the head of the Council of Elders and the chief of police and the woman who ran the Casa de la Cultura; most of my research progressed through informal conversations and observations of public activities and discourse. And, while most of my informants knew that I was collecting “information” for a dissertation, the informal style of our conversations and their lack of familiarity with the processes of collecting ethnographic material sometimes troubled me. So, I use pseudonyms for some of the people who have shared their stories with me. In other cases, where I am reasonably sure that the individual would welcome the publicity or where I am repeating stories that are widely known, I have used real names. Ethnographies often look at the typical patterning of key cultural events such as rituals; I was drawn toward how individuals make sense of their world through talk. Thus, readers will not find many comprehensive accounts of “Mazatec culture” in this book; instead, they will find out 26

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how the variously situated conversations with my informants negotiate value systems and models for identity through their frequently oblique comments upon that culture. Someone else, someday, may endeavor to write the Book of Mazatec Culture. I merely describe the way that book is passed from hand to hand; rarely do I even open the cover.16 My fieldwork did not end when my Fulbright money ran out and I returned to Texas in 1994. I have returned to Huautla at least once every year since then, generally for short visits. Generally, as soon as I arrive, my compadre suggests a trip somewhere, usually to visit a rarely seen relative or compadre in a distant village. My fieldwork, which has been more mobile than static, mimics the translocal nature of the metacultural discourses that I am pursuing. If the creation of Culture is, as Quetzil Castañeda (1996:37) suggests, “a heterogeneous entity constituted in and through the contested crisscrossing of borrowings across boundaries forged by such transcultural traffic,” then anthropologists must orient their research around such crisscrossings and also recognize their crucial role, not just as observers of these processes but as participants—whether as students, backpackers, travel course leaders, or basketball players. Discussions of fieldwork can no longer avoid explicitly addressing the process of writing. The reader may note that much of this book is not written in a conventional academic style. On occasion, the stories told by my informants are not clearly distanced from my interpretation of these stories. Perhaps these breaks from the conventional form represent my attempt to contest the fixity of identity (as an anthropologist, a gringo, an Indian) and enact the hybridity that characterizes identity in this particular place by going back and forth between different voices and styles of writing. Perhaps this is a bogus hybridity because all the voices are mine, projected onto others from my computer. It is my desire that this crossing back and forth between modes of representation corresponds well with the content of the work, which describes a metacultural style that is all about border crossings. My own identity in Huautla can be seen through this style as well; I was sometimes known there merely as “La Toyota”—an identification with the strange, useful, and envied vehicle that eventually carried me away, only to bring me back painted a darker (and inferior, in most people’s eyes) color. Gary Gossen (1999) writes that he too was identified closely with his truck while visiting and living in Chamula, Chiapas, and he suggests that the vehicle represents the nagual, the spirit (formerly animal) companion. As the author of this book, I hope to exert some control over my reported voices, since I am the creator and master of the world of this Introduction

27

text. But I also hope that these stories break out occasionally and interrupt me, and that the guests at the wedding hear, every once in a while, banda music wafting in from the streets.

“a toyota in huautla!” two more stories about identity Walking down the alley below the market, I was summoned into a small drinking establishment by a stocky fellow well into his cups. He invited—no, he insisted—that I accept a drink, a shot of either aguardiente or mescal, I don’t remember. He kept asking me to guess how old he was. Then he said that he was fifty-five. The point was that he sure looked good for a fifty-five-year-old man. Who would ever guess that he was that old? Fifty-five-year-old pure Huauteco. He flexed his enormous muscles. I acted appreciative. He knew that I was the guy with the Toyota. Imagine, he said, seeing a Toyota in Huautla. I’m an Indian, he said. I eat dirt (tierra). I am a man of the earth (tierra). A Toyota in Huautla de Jiménez! He wanted me to drive him to Oaxaca for the Pan-American Rally (a car race from somewhere in the United States to somewhere in South America). He had gone in 1991 and in 1992 and was wearing the T-shirt commemorating the 1991 event. In 1991 I bought this shirt, he said. In 1992 I bought several. This year I will buy five or six, he said. He said that when I drove him in the Toyota to Oaxaca he would pay for everything; we would lack nothing—gas, his little house there, women, liquor. “You will see what kind of man I am,” he said. “I will buy you a café cappuccino.” My companion, Michael Duke, related this assertion to the earlier part of the conversation. “With dirt?” he asked. “No,” said the man. “Es otro. Es aquí.” (That’s another thing. That’s here.) Here he was an Indian campesino, salt of the earth, humble, a man who is amazed and awed by an unusual model of pickup truck. There he was a man of the world, suave, knowledgeable, competent. A man who drinks cappuccino with his friends as he watches the cars zip by. The aggressive, muscle-bound drunk became an irritant to me throughout my stay in Huautla. Often he would badger me about my “promise” to take him on a trip in the Toyota, or he would invite me to his ranch to see him work. When in Huautla (for he did indeed spend a lot of time in Oaxaca, and I once saw him there on the main square) he lived in a house with a second-story window overlooking the narrow road up by the house of my compadres. At night, when I walked down to my apart28

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ment, he would yell at me. “Gringo!” he would shout. “¡Gringo loco!” He went up to Oaxaca for the race, and told me about it. Not much, he said. The cars go by, vroom vroom. One market Sunday he spied me on the main street, and ran after me, yelling “Gringo!” and wearing his favorite non-automotive T-shirt, the one with the image of Zapata and the words “¡Viva Zapata! ¡Cabrones!” He asked why I hadn’t been around to take him in the Toyota. He asked where the Toyota was. I told him that the Toyota wasn’t feeling well, that it was a little sick. He was enraged. He told me that he had good friends in the police, in the federal judicial police and he could have me arrested. “Calm down, friend,” I said and he said we were not friends. He said that if there was anything wrong with the Toyota that I would bring it to him and he would fix it. I would give him money and he would fix it. “Give me money or I’ll fuck you, cabrón.” I told some friends about this man and they told me not to worry, because he was a crazy man. He beats up his own mother, they said, to relieve my apprehension. I saw him again that day, and he started in afresh. I told him that I wasn’t worried about his legal threats, because all the papers for my truck were good. “But are they good good?” he insisted. “Yes,” I replied. “I have a letter signed by the Secretaría de Gobernación.” “Oh,” he said. “Come with me, friend. Let’s have a drink.” There is another story about identity and culture that contrasts with and complements this one. In October of 1993 I lived in a small house with a family I will call the Socorros—Ernesto, Camilla, and their six children. Visitors frequently stayed at the little house, since the family loves having company, especially the sophisticated urbanites who come to take hallucinogenic mushrooms at night and relax in the mountains during the day. On this occasion, a woman from the city of Toluca named Margarita had been staying with the Socorros. She had come with another woman, her lover, and had suffered a series of setbacks. First, the mushrooms they had bought had failed to take effect. Then, while climbing the ladder to the toilet in the vacant house next door, the lover had fallen and broken her foot. After getting a ride to the hospital, Ernesto and Margarita had walked all the way back down the mountain, through dangerous neighborhoods without a flashlight in the middle of the night. The lover had returned to Toluca, but Margarita stayed on, living in the vacant house next door. She said that she would live in Huautla, that hopefully she would find a job teaching at one of the high schools (she taught philosophy back home and was fond of Nietzsche and Carlos Castañeda). Then her mother came to visit. This mother was a very powerful woman and a domineering bully. Introduction

29

She lived in a great house in Toluca and kept the household under close scrutiny. She had been a deputy for the pr i in the national Chamber of Deputies on two occasions (in Mexico, deputies are not allowed to serve consecutive terms). She arrived with an entourage: her other daughter, the daughter’s husband, and a twenty-four-year-old man whom I mistook for her son and who was introduced as “a friend of the family” but who was in fact, according to Margarita, the mother’s lover. They brought many gifts for the Socorros and stayed for several meals. I asked her what she did and she said that, well, besides the politics, she writes a little, about the cultures and indigenous groups of her state, the Otomís, and so on, and she paints. She presented herself as an authority on every subject, boasting particularly about her ability to walk for miles through any kind of country. She called her political work “a little like Don Quixote, always fighting for marginalized groups.” Her young man friend, she volunteered, worked on a study of the pre-Columbian diet, which would be very useful to us today, since the people back then could work an entire shift on one and a half or two tortillas! Today, he said, we have substituted bulk for health. The mother added that many of today’s “groups” still eat the same Prehispanic foods, and used this observation to move the conversation toward a discussion of the local customs. She was curious about today’s wedding, which involved a distant relative or a neighbor, or something like that. She wanted to see it and asked about the local wedding customs. Without waiting for much of a reply, she compared the customs with those of her people, the Otomís and such, the “groups” of the state of Mexico. Ernesto produced a book on Mazatec customs and legends from a shelf, and the woman read out loud at length from the text, brushing off Ernesto’s comments (“Así es”—That is so) and additions, his i n t e r ru pt ions , and continuing to read, as we all joined her in admiration of her style. She continued to read page after page, authoritatively educating us on the intricacies of this particular Mazatec custom. When she was done, Ernesto and Camilla played the cassette of local music from their infant son’s baptism and danced very happily, performing the quaint and joyful ethnics for an appreciative audience. The next day after breakfast the mother came down in tears. “We’ll see you,” she said, and left, first talking at length with Camilla. She had argued with Margarita, who told me later that the mother dominated all the four children and had built a house in Toluca with a wing for each and their families when they get them. The mother said that Margarita’s desire to live in Huautla was an affectation, and Margarita said no, she doesn’t understand it’s because I 30

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want to. Margarita went on a hike and the next day, on an “impulse” left for Oaxaca City to seek work and escape from the mother, who she was afraid would come back for her. She left with her Carlos Castañeda book and never returned to Huautla. The drunk man’s mobile, shifting sense of identity, his easy manipulation of various personas, contrasts with the deputy’s fixing of identity with an authoritative reading that reduced the objects of her speech to passive spectators of their own identity, capable only of a few back-channel responses and a lively dance. Both metacultural performances mark the importance of space. The drunk bully tells us that his Indian personality is a thing of here and his cappuccino-sipping self relates more to the city. The politician bully compares the here of Huautla to the here of her people in the state of Mexico. Both also stress the mobility of the speaker. But for the mother, that mobility is limited to herself. She can hike anywhere and not tire, she can move from writer to painter to champion of the oppressed (parallel positions on a single upper level), but the meaning of the lives of her objects, her “marginalized groups” is fixed by geography and culture. It is fixed into the book that she reads from, fixed into Huautla and Mexico, fixed into Mazatec and Otomí, fixed into wedding customs and dietary habits. She is a privileged traveler, able to soar above and see the groups in their spaces, and make comparisons between them. Her travel makes borders clear, while the Others are incarcerated in time and space (Appadurai 1988). The drunk man’s travel also gives him power, a power from unfixing those borders, moving across levels. Like the hardworking Prehispanic “groups,” he eats dirt, but only here. The identities described by the deputy and her book are deployed by him only to contrast with each other and evoke that movement, dangerous and exciting, from one to the other. This identity consists of a constant travel in and out, up and down, like the race cars that speed across the Americas, going to Oaxaca to enjoy the good life, bringing the pornography he carries in his market bag, attracting strange vehicles from Japan and persuading their owners to cut wood in the ranch with a machete. These two interconnected modes of describing identity—by fixing it into spaces through reading and seeing it from above, the practices of expertise, and by enacting it through constant journeys across and through potent borderlands—will be touched on and pursued over and over in the pages that follow.

Introduction

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Early in February, driving from Huautla to Oaxaca, I flipped the truck on a particularly desolate stretch of road. I had not slept much the night before, having returned to my room from an evening with Don Ricardo in Santa Cruz at about 3 A.M. Rosario knocked on my door at seven, as we had arranged, wanting a ride to Teotitlán, where she would catch a bus to Veracruz. I didn’t eat any breakfast. As we cruised along the continual curves, ups, and downs on the way down to the valley called La Cañada, she accused me of driving recklessly. I ignored her. At Teotitlán I turned south onto the highway to Oaxaca, a road that is well paved in most of Oaxaca state. Had I turned north, into Puebla, I would have found myself on the worst, most pothole-filled stretch of supposedly paved highway in all of Mesoamerica. At every village along the road, the children did not attend school or work in the fields but stood along the road, sometimes holding shovels and pretending to fill the holes with dirt, lifting a string barrier across the lunar-like excuse for a highway as vehicles crept or bounced along, yelling “for a soda, for a soda” and making the hand signal for something to drink. At the last minute, they would drop the string and let you pass, scrambling for coins if you threw any, or cursing at you if you did not. I believed that if they ever did fix the road (and they did, beginning in 1994), these kids would dig new potholes to avoid going back to other pastimes. South of Teotitlán, you pass two towns at half-hour intervals— Tecomavaca and Cuicatlán—and then there is nothing but mountain for about three hours until you reach the Valley of Oaxaca. About fifteen minutes past Tecomavaca, I went around a turn at fairly high speed, and then the pavement gave way and the surface was all 32

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gravel. I spun around, cursed, slammed into the side of the mountain and ended up on my side. I turned off the stereo and clambered out through the passenger side window. All seemed lost, but at least I had slammed into the mountain instead of sliding across the road into a deep ditch. And at least I was wearing my seat belt, uninjured, and carrying no passengers in the back. They would surely have been killed. Two men came running up and placed a branch across the road at the curve to warn oncoming traffic. Then a truck filled with workers came by and stopped. After much consultation, someone tied ropes to my truck; we all pulled and pushed and finally flipped it back up on its wheels. I got inside with the key, and it started right up like nothing had happened. The men told me that I had to get out of there fast, before the federales came. If the federales caught me, I would be fucked. If they saw me driving the truck in that shape— the windshield shattered, the front all smashed—I would be charged with a crime and they would screw me. They told me to turn off at Cuicatlán, because I would never make it all the way to Oaxaca. They told me that if police stopped me, I should not tell them the truth. I should tell them that a big truck had forced me off the road and then driven off. I passed the turnoff to Cuicatlán without thinking. I then drove straight through the federales’ checkpoint at a railroad crossing. Suddenly I saw all these heavily armed, helmeted cops. Luckily, they seemed lost in conversation or else staring off into space, and I passed through. I made it all the way over the mountains to the first town of the northern arm of the Valley of Oaxaca, hunched over the whole way, as the motor began making increasingly omiIntroduction

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nous noises. In the traffic in the center of this busy town, a motorist coming toward me began waving and yelling at me. I slowed down and stared at him. I heard him shout that there were federales just ahead, and that I should turn back. I did, and pulled into a mechanic’s garage, where I left the truck for the night. I took a bus for the remaining thirty kilometers to Oaxaca. The next day I came back and found a body specialist, who fixed me up in about two weeks for around $600, a very good price, considering how smashed up the Toyota had been. We could find no Toyota parts in Oaxaca, so he fashioned a temporary windshield out of Plexiglas. It turned out that he thought that I was a missionary, which worked in my favor, since as an evangelista he was partial toward missionaries. When at last he was disillusioned, he left my truck filled with tracts. I am deeply grateful to him.

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2

Historical and Geographical Overview the master narrative of the past

When entering a strange country, travelers need a map to guide their way. However, as Number 6 learned to his great dismay, the “simple facts” do not always speak unambiguously to clear the path of troubling and confusing obstacles. All maps are embedded in conventional cultural frames of understanding space and time. The word “overview” in the chapter title is used ironically: the overview is a particular, historically defined strategy of controlling space and time that claims a distanced, objective sight that subsumes all other apprehensions of the landscape and the past under its neutral, classifying gaze. But the sky over Huautla is rarely clear, and other discursive elaborations both compete with and recontextualize the overview, staining its aura and blurring magical categories like “geography,” “economics,” and “history.” The “simple facts” move from their privileged location “above” the world down into it; they are forced, like the Wizard of Oz, out of their hiding place in the “background,” which allowed them to comment upon reality from behind the safety of a curtain woven, upon further inspection, out of exploitation and illusion. Deprived of his “master narrative,” the historian tells a story that joins a conversation with other stories. This does not invalidate his story—it just puts heavy quotation marks around his categories, sinking their magical, extradiscursive pretensions. But we can still learn something valuable by playing around with his concepts, even if they are not sacred, and by reading his map. This chapter should be read as my map, and the reader should place her own quotes around the metaphors of “background,” “overview,” and, especially, “master narrative.” The past is remembered and categorized in various ways in the Sierra Mazateca. Time is typically divided into two broad periods—“before,” during a kind of ethnographic present characterized by isolation and the dominance of tradition, and “after,” characterized by participation in

the national and transnational worlds. Sometimes “before” refers to the period before the Spanish Conquest, while at other times “before” refers to a more recent transition, like sometime in the last generation. In this chapter, I hope to briefly present another reading of the Mazatec past that focuses on the ongoing relationships between the Sierra Mazateca and broader structures of economic and political power, structures that have been reconstructed and renewed in each historical period.

geographical and economic overview According to the 1990 census, 168,374 Mazatec-speaking people inhabit an area of approximately 2,400 square kilometers, a region that is almost entirely contained within the very northern tip of the state of Oaxaca, along the borders with the states of Puebla and Veracruz (King 1994). This region actually consists of several distinct geographical zones with distinct climates which can be classified in a number of ways, but I will stick with a simple method based on elevation. This method distinguishes between the cold highlands (tierra fría) over 1,800 meters, a temperate mountainous zone between 800 and 1,800 meters (tierra templada), and the lowlands under 800 meters (tierra caliente). It is no coincidence that the borders between the latter two zones roughly correspond to the political border between the District of Teotitlán, which includes most of the highlands, and the District of Tuxtepec, which includes most of the lowlands. Cattle and sugarcane (used to make aguardiente, a type of liquor) are the main crops of the sparsely populated lowlands area. In 1955 the Mazatec lowlands region was subjected to a massive state hydroelectric and social engineering project when the Miguel Alemán dam was constructed, flooding most of the area. Peasants from the flooded areas were transplanted to new communities in the distant state of Veracruz. This dislocation caused a great deal of hardship, and according to some, great numbers of older people died of sadness (Barabas and Bartolomé 1973).1 The lowlands area is oriented toward the east, toward the city of Tuxtepec. Very few people live in the cold highlands region, but the temperate highlands region is more densely populated than the lowlands. Its primary crop is coffee, although in the highest areas coffee cannot be grown and the campesinos rely on the subsistence staples that are grown everywhere: corn and beans. Most of the coffee is grown in the lower reaches of the highlands, in municipios such as Tenango, and these areas saw a dramatic 36

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2.1 A Huauteca woman and two of her granddaughters pose on a Huautla rooftop. Photo by author.

2.2 Map of the Sierra Mazateca. Map by Susan A. Martin.

La Guacamaya

North

Río Sapo

Matzazongo

MEXICO

MAP AREA

Pet a lapa

Mexico City Huautla

Chilchotla María Luisa

Presa Miguel Aleman

San Antonio San Jerónimo

Puente de Fierro Santa Cruz de Juárez

San Mateo

To Teotitlán

Tenango

HUAUTLA

San Lucas

Ixcatlán

San Andrés San Agustín

Nindo Tokoxo Santa María

To Tuxtepec

San Miguel

Jalapa de Díaz

Santa Catarina Mazatlán

0 0

km mi

San Juan Coatzaspán

10 10

Carlota Ayautla Santo

Domingo

Tierra Fría = 1800m and above

Town

Road

Tierra Templada = 800-1800m

Hacienda

River

Tierra Caliente = below 800m

Bridge

Historical and Geographical Overview

37

increase in population in the 1960s and 1970s which was reversed in the 1990s. The main route out of the highlands leads westward on the paved road from Huautla to the district capital at Teotitlán. In recent years, Huautla has taken over most of the administrative functions, and the small mestizo town of Teotitlán has become little more than the way out, a place to change buses on the way to Oaxaca, Puebla, or Mexico City. This division between highlands and lowlands is not exact. There are lowland areas all over the place, and they tend to be the most difficult to get to. A great canyon plunges straight down on the southern edge of the Huautla Plateau, and the people who dwell in the inaccessible reaches within are 2.3 A farmer plants corn sometimes said to be dangerous folk—banwith a digging stick near dits and marijuana growers. Another lowMatzazongo, 1998. Photo lands area can be reached from a variety by John Dudas. of paths that plunge down to the north of Chilchotla. I frequently hike down one of these paths to the jungle village of Matzazongo, where the residents consume an almost endless variety of fruits as well as forest animals such as the paca, a large rodent, and the temasote, a miniature deer. The entire region is very humid. The rainy season lasts from June through September, and is very rainy indeed. The dirt roads become impassable walls of mud, and landslides frequently close the paved road to Teotitlán. Often, in the highlands, one finds oneself inside the clouds, unable to see more than a few feet. The great quantity of water flowing through underground rivers adds to the mist as it is forced out of cave openings. While it is the people of the Mixteca Alta who are known as “Cloud People,” the people of the Sierra Mazateca could easily claim that title. The driest and hottest season lasts from March through May, and during this period one can see forever from the top of the Mountain of Adoration just south of Huautla, all the mountains covered with a green, tangled, coffee forest. The rugged topography has made it difficult to get around; all the trails are very steep, very rocky, and often very muddy. 38

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The main language of the area is Mazatec; there are perhaps four distinct dialects, although most people claim that these are mutually intelligible. The Huautla dialect is spoken by the largest number of people. There is one municipio, however, right in the center of the highlands, whose inhabitants speak Mixteco. Monolingualism varies from place to place and is decreasing.

a sketch of the history of the sierra mazateca The history of the area can be described as a succession of different stages of travel, mediation, and incorporation, rather than as it is often written, as a succession from a period of isolation into a period of incorporation.2

Before the Spanish Conquest Archaeologists know more about the late Prehispanic period in the core areas of Mesoamerica: the Nahuatl-speaking areas around Tenochtitlán, the Maya areas of Yucatán and Guatemala, and the Mixtec and Zapotec centers of Oaxaca. It seems likely that the Sierra Mazateca was not the home of a hidden or lost civilization, but a marginal area on the periphery of the system of small warring and trading states ruled by hereditary nobles.3 The inhabitants of the region fought with the Mixtecs, who sometimes conquered sections of the Sierra and were then driven off, except, some speculate, in the area of San Juan Coatzaspán, the Mixtecspeaking municipio in the center of the Mazatec highlands. It is likely that the Mixtec traders also set up shop in Huautla; one of the five neighborhoods of this town is still called the Barrio Mixteca, although this name could have derived from any historical period. Archaeological remains in the area also suggest close ties of some sort with the neighboring Mixtecs (Steele 1987; Renato García Dorantes, personal communication). In 2000, I was led to an impressive ruin midway between Chilchotla and Huautla—a raised platform with several stone structures and small pyramids. The owners of the land where this ruin lies prevent outsiders from coming near it, and most of the artifacts have apparently been looted. During the fifteenth century, the Sierra was brought into the sphere of influence of the Aztec-led Triple Alliance. The Aztecs built administrative centers on the margins of both sides of the Sierra, at Teotitlán on the highland (west) side and at Tuxtepec on the lowland (east) side. But they did not rule their territories directly; instead they extracted tribute from Historical and Geographical Overview

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the local nobility in goods and labor. Don Francisco de Castañeda, the Spaniard sent to the district of Teotitlán del Camino in 1581 to investigate the region, believed that the relation between the local states and the empire was one of alliance rather than subjugation. He wrote that the Mazatecs were a republic for themselves, allied with Montezuma; they gave him no tribute. Each year they gave as tribute to their Señores Naturales (Indian nobles) many large blankets, cacao, medium embroidered blankets, huipiles, and skirts and maxtlas and feather shields and bentalles and zelas and bracelets of feather and bows and arrows and slave Indians, every eighty days a tribute. (Quoted in Rivas Manzano and Irogoyen Coría 1992:21)

The local elites were bilingual, speaking Mazatec and Nahuatl; the rest of the population was monolingual. Presumably, many Mazatec laborers helped to construct the temples and edifices of Tenochtitlán, and some probably left their hearts in the mouths of the hungry Aztec gods. Neiburg believes that the story, which is still told in Huautla, about giant eagles which would descend upon hapless Mazatec farmers in their fields and carry them away to be devoured, is in fact a form of historical memory rendered in the form of myth. The giant eagles, he suggests, are in fact the Aztec eagle warriors, who descended on the passive, unhappy peasants like a force of nature and carried them back to their capital to rip their hearts out and feast on the fleshy parts of their limbs (Neiburg 1988). It seems that the Mazatecs have had to deal with the dangers of the difficult journey between the capital and the Sierra for many years. The Sierra Mazateca was not isolated politically or economically during the late Prehispanic period. According to Guttiere Tibón’s sources, Cozcacuauhtli, a Mixtec noble loyal to Montezuma, was named the king of Huautla in 1458, and at that time Mixtecs installed themselves in Huautla’s Barrio Mixteco as an administrative and trading elite. All tribute and trade items from the highlands passed through Teotitlán, and Teotitlán was a leader in huipil production; huipiles from the Sierra Mazateca were traded as far away as Soconusco on the Pacific coast of Chiapas (Tibón 1983). In addition, trade networks connected the highland and lowland zones of the Mazatec region. Highland areas were not isolated, but emerged in a process of intercommunication and symbiosis with lowland areas, as De la Peña argues for Morelos. This intercommunication and symbiosis took 40

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different forms in different periods, but “this pattern is a function not of nature but of a political decision, renewed throughout different periods of history” (De la Peña 1981:27). The region may not have been centrally important from the perspective of the major preconquest states, but its peasants, nobles, and traders were very much a part of the interconnected Mesoamerican world system.

The Colonial Period and Independence Shortly after the fall of Tenochtitlán, the Spanish established control of the Sierra Mazateca. Many Mazatec lords had fought on the side of the invaders against the Aztecs, and the zone was “one of those most easily subjected to the new regime” (Villa Rojas 1955:71). For Villa Rojas, history ended in the Sierra Mazateca at the time of the conquest, as “the cycle of the aboriginal world came to an end; from then on it would be the whites who would hold the reins of destiny” (Villa Rojas 1955:70). He argues that the Mazatecs retreated into isolation and, outside of history and social and commercial traffic, the mountains became a refuge for an obsolete Indian world for over four hundred years until the isolation was broken in 1949 (Villa Rojas 1955:72–74). Social scientists writing about the Sierra Mazateca seem to have accepted Villa Rojas’ assertion of the nonhistorical nature of this period, or else they have been frustrated by the lack of historical documentation. In any case, the historical summaries of the Sierra offered by Eckart Boege, Federico Neiburg, and María Ana Portal skip the period between the immediate postconquest period and the late nineteenth century, when the forces of progress are said to have interrupted the slumber of this unknown indigenous “magic world” (Boege 1988; Neiburg 1988; Portal 1986). While I lack the resources to construct a detailed history of the region, I can suggest a few possibilities that contradict Villa Rojas’ characterization of Mazatec history as four hundred-plus years of isolation and stagnation. One of the first actions of the Spanish in New Spain was to concentrate the scattered population of the Sierra into towns with precise borders. Each of these concentrated settlements was responsible for providing tribute and labor to various encomiendas (grants of one or more Indian towns to a Spaniard with the right to collect tribute) that were established in the Sierra Mazateca in the early sixteenth century. The sixteenth century in the Sierra Mazateca, as in the rest of Mexico, witnessed a great drop in population, as the region was struck by at least three terrible epidemics (1540–50, 1570–80, 1590–1600) (Villa Rojas 1955:71). Except for the Historical and Geographical Overview

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Jesuit missionaries who established churches in the region throughout the sixteenth century, the Spanish preferred to stay outside the mountains and to rule and collect tribute from the bases established by the Aztecs in Tuxtepec and Teotitlán. The first territorial division of 1536 left Huautla under the rule of Teotitlán, and the second division, in 1579, left the Sierra Mazateca, along with Teotitlán and La Cañada, as part of the encomienda of the conquistador Juan Navarro (Tibón 1983:45). William Taylor suggests that for most Indians in Oaxaca, prepared by the constant petty wars between nobles over tribute, the Spanish Conquest did not seem like a drastic change, as “the rural farmers were spectators at one more in a long series of political battles fought by outsiders” (1979:13). In the region of northern Oaxaca, Indian caciques (rulers) were unusually successful in maintaining their power, although this often meant imitating their new overlords. Two Mazatec caciques changed their names to syllables more easily pronounced by Spanish tongues; they became Hernán Cortés and Pedro de Alvarado (Tibón 1983:45). This subtle subterfuge reminds me of the small highland municipio which, I was told, elected an opposition slate a few years ago. The newly elected leaders, all members of the PPS, told the state that they were in fact members of the PRI, in order to maximize their chances of receiving support. The Sierra Mazateca offered the Spanish very little in terms of precious resources; there was no gold or other metals, and the encomiendas of the sixteenth century quickly failed (Boege 1988). The Spaniards divided the region up into small administrative units and retreated to the valley towns of Teotitlán and Tuxtepec. The inhabitants of the Sierra apparently used pictorial documents to mark the possessions of the encomenderos, litigate disputes over tribute payments, describe the boundaries between communities, and list the succession of caciques (Cline 1962). A small number of powerful families seem to have maintained political and religious leadership. The map of Huautla discovered by Espinoza that dates from the eighteenth century (1751) seems to list a line of nine caciques “since 1710” (Cline 1962:10). According to Wilhelm Bauer, a German ethnographer who visited Huautla and Chilchotla in 1903, a Mazatec “king” was recognized by the Mexican government as cacique until 1857, when hereditary titles were abolished. This form of leadership continued informally for years afterward, until “the last cacique, ruler of Chilchotla,” the son of the great Manuel Vicente, who died in 1869 at the age of 103, was assassinated in the 1880s by discontented followers (Bauer 1908; Cline 1962:12–13). Bauer interviewed the widow of this final leader, and she told him that 42

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caciques were selected by one or more towns for a life term on the basis of their character and personality and that they received voluntary tributes in goods (corn, beans, cane, coffee, clothing). The cacique served as the judge and as the religious leader. He ran the practices of the cult, and each cacique had a unique holy animal; an icon of the leader’s animal held a place of honor in the church in Chilchotla. These animals included snakes, tigers, eagles, and alligators, but the leaders seemed to have a special preference for black dogs (Bauer 1908; Cline 1962:13). If this description is accurate, it would appear that communitywide rituals of the sort that were extinguished elsewhere in Oaxaca by 1700 continued for a long time afterward in the Sierra Mazateca along with a strong noble class.4 Instead of being consumed by the Spaniards’ ferocious dogs, Mazatec caciques seem to have co-opted the power of those beasts somehow and used it to maintain their authority.5 These selected-for-life leaders also ruled over more territory than today’s municipal presidents. Cline asserts that Huautla and Chilchotla were once under the same cacique. Frederick Starr was shown a 7’ x 3’10” painted map of Huautla when he visited in 1900, which purportedly depicted a cave that held the remains of the “kings.” An 1883 expedition called this cave the “cemetery of the kings and nobles of the Mazatec nation” and supposedly extracted skeletons and pottery from a crypt (Cline 1962:13). It would appear that something like the Prehispanic system of lordship, with its hereditary nobility, may have survived past the end of the colonial period in the Sierra Mazateca.6 Religious celebrations and curing practices also required trade between the highlands and the lowlands. Macaw feathers and “ancient paper” from the lowlands, sold in the Huautla market, are important ingredients in the “magic bundle” that was buried under houses and crosses, and macaws with all their feathers plucked became choaní, or red gnomes, and were used in curing (Tibón 1983). Travel between the lowlands and the highlands of the Mazatec region, as in the Andean/Amazonian area studied by Taussig (1987), was thus both sacred and curative. So, while we cannot make many assertions about the Mazatec past before the twentieth century, it seems fair to assume that the Sierra did not consist of a series of mutually hostile, egalitarian “closed corporate communities.” The highlands and lowlands were interconnected through trade, marriage, land ownership, religion, and travel, and Huautla was the commercial center. The attractive force of renowned religious leaders and healers may also have encouraged travel. A bilingual class of traders and administrators connected the highlands to the district capital Historical and Geographical Overview

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in Teotitlán and the cities beyond. Most of the traders were Mexicano (Nahuatl) speakers from the dry villages atop the western edge of the Sierra, including San Bernardino and Vigastepec. Mazatec farmers cultivated corn and beans and other subsistence staples, but they also, during the colonial period, produced the cochineal dye for export. By the time of María Sabina’s childhood around the turn of the twentieth century, she tells us, the production of cochineal had ceased some time before (Estrada 1981). The society of the Mazatec highlands was stratified by class, but unlike the societies in many other indigenous areas, most of the class positions were filled by people who did not consider themselves to be ethnically distinct. There was no mestizo elite in the central town of Huautla, although there were a few haciendas scattered about. While the effects of nineteenth-century Mexican events in the Sierra Mazateca are rarely discussed, at least one incident demonstrates that the region was not a completely isolated “Prehispanic” island. During the war against the emperor Maximilian and the French, Liberal Juarista guerrillas led by Pérez Figueroa fled to the Sierra Mazateca, pursued by imperialists under the command of the Austrian general Hotze. The Juaristas were greeted and aided by sympathetic leaders in Huautla and Mazatlán. The leader of Mazatlán was named Teodoro Flores, and his first son, Jesús Flores Magón, born in Huautla, would later become a leader during the Mexican Revolution (Tibón 1983:35). Another Juarista leader was a general named Mariano Jiménez. In his honor, or perhaps by his decree, the name of Huautla was changed from San Juan Evangelista Huautla to Huautla de Jiménez.

Late Nineteenth Century and Revolution In 1893, the Porfirian modernization of Mexico reached the Sierra Mazateca as the first foreign-run hacienda began to cultivate coffee and started a transformation of agriculture and life throughout the mountains. From then on, the Sierra Mazateca would be a coffee region. Some of these early coffee haciendas, like the German-owned Plan Carlota near Ayautla and the Spanish-owned finca at María Luisa, are said to have employed thousands of workers and to have been extraordinary sights to behold. The workers were not paid with real money, and a cash economy did not spring up in the highlands. Not all the coffee was grown on large, foreign-run haciendas, however. This stereotypical pattern for Porfirian Mexico did not dominate the highland region of the Sierra Mazateca. “Apostles of coffee,” convinced by the 44

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2.4 Campesino in Buena Vista cleans coffee, 1998. Photo by John Dudas.

científico dogma that only export crops could save Mexico by bringing it forward into the twentieth century, crisscrossed the mountains of Oaxaca preaching the value of the new crop. The Oaxaqueño Matías Romero, as well as Carlos Gris, came to Huautla on one such tour and met with leading Huautecos. The great Huauteco president, orator, and dealer in bird feathers Gregorio Herrera is also said to have played a major role in persuading people of the Sierra to convert to coffee production. One leading Huauteco elder, interviewed by Tibón in the 1950s, remembers traveling to Mexico City as a fifteen-year-old to meet with Romero, who had become the minister of haciendas for the national government. He was very impressed by the trip and by Romero and Gris, whom he called “men who saw clearly, precursors of the Mexico of today” (Tibón 1983:37).7 In the lowlands, however, things were changing even more dramatically. Porfirio Díaz, a native of Oaxaca, was grateful to the Mazatec lowlands because that region had supplied him with soldiers at the beginning of his career. To express his gratitude, Díaz brought “progress” to the lowlands in the form of post offices, telephones, and roads (Villa Rojas 1955:73). While coffee trees were being planted throughout the highlands Historical and Geographical Overview

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(especially in the lower, intermediate zones), the lowlands were filled with cattle ranches, many of them owned by mestizos. Many lowland peasants lost their lands and became indentured peons or wage laborers, while highland coffee growers, aided by that crop’s suitability for cultivation on small plots, retained their land and adapted coffee production to their preexisting institutions (González 2001:204). The two regions of the Mazateca began to be less integrated and more separate, although men like the grandfather of my compadre continued to travel throughout the region, owning cattle in the east, growing milpa in the west, and hiking back and forth selling their wares. While some large haciendas operated in the highlands, for the most part the serranos maintained their ability to accept new products and innovations from the outside while retaining control over the use of these products within the mountains and discouraging outside comerciantes from setting up shop in Huautla and the other villages. Unlike the lowlands, the Sierra Mixteca, and the Chiapas highlands, there was not (and still is not) a class of store owners who represented themselves as ethnically distinct gente de razón living among a mass of campesinos naturales.8 There was and is a class of bilingual merchants who regard themselves, often, as culturally superior to the “ignorant” campesinos, but this distinction is not framed in ethnic terms. While many Huautecos participated in some way or another in the revolution, its main impact, as in Chiapas, was felt as an invasion by various competing armies that looted, pillaged, kidnapped, and terrorized the population. Many new towns were founded by refugees who fled Huautla during this period, and other smaller towns in calmer areas, such as Chilchotla and Rio Sapo, grew due to the influx of Huautecos. The revolution brought the first large-scale invasion of outsiders into the Sierra, and the inhabitants responded by hiding and fleeing. I will discuss the revolution in more detail in Chapter 3.

From the Revolution to 1950 After the revolution, the land owned by the hacendados was divided up into smaller parcels. But a new class of middlemen, or acaparadores, which included many of the old hacendados, usurped control over the profits deriving from the cultivation of coffee and became caciques in the twentieth-century sense of the term (bosses who deliver their communities’ allegiance to the national regime in exchange for economic rewards and state backing when necessary) (Neiburg 1988). In the 1920s and 1930s, the Mexican state made efforts to establish 46

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itself directly in rural Mexico, particularly in indigenous areas. The men and women who spearheaded these efforts were filled with the ideological fervor of the heroic age of indigenismo, but lacked adequate resources to establish much actual power in the countryside. In the 1930s, President Cárdenas enlisted the help of the North American missionary and linguistics organization, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, to aid in the integration of indigenous areas by learning local languages and teaching Spanish to the natives. In the Sierra Mazateca, the municipal president served as a middleman between the expansionist national government and the local community, and Florence Cowan’s analysis of the Sunday morning public speeches by presidents in the 1940s and 1950s suggests that this sort of mediation, along with the recitation of moral homilies, constituted the bulk of the president’s job. As Cowan wrote, The speeches serve much as a local newspaper to convey government news, both national and local, to the townspeople. The president takes advantage of the large crowds who gather on market days to address them publicly and thereby convey to them verbally the information he is instructed to relay to them. The president is much in the position of a “go-between” between the people and the government. He represents the people before the national and state government and the government before the people. This shows up clearly in the speeches he gives . . . The “old people” (all living officials, both past and present) really run the town and tell the president what to do and say. However, it is the president’s “push” that puts affairs over. (1952:324)

The president gave, and still gives, his speech during the height of market activity, at about 9:30 a .m . Before 1945, men stopped all their market activity to listen, holding their hats respectfully above and to one side of their heads. But in 1945, the administration of Raymundo Pérez introduced a loudspeaker, and from that date on there was no interruption of market activities, and people steadily paid less attention to the speeches. The main themes in the speeches were exhortations to participate in public work projects, to behave morally, and to abide by federal and state laws (especially the requirements to register for military conscription and to send children to school).9 This sort of mediation could prove to be dangerous. Presidents are remembered for the degree to which they created and “pushed” for “progress” for the town. If they contradicted the interests of the state and Historical and Geographical Overview

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the caciques, they risked assassination. On the other hand, if they were seen as being too compliant in regard to the interests of outsiders, they risked criticism for having “sold out” their fellow villagers. In 1928, for reasons that are debated, Genaro Vásquez, the governor of Oaxaca, ordered the assassination of the entire government of Huautla. On June 3, soldiers led by Domingo Aguilar lured President Avelino Pineda and all eight of his officers out of their houses one night by telling them that they were wanted for a meeting. They were brought along the path to a place near Santa Cruz de Juárez, where they were tied up and shot. Some say that three of them escaped. One man had brought a razor blade with him. He cut the rope that tied his hands behind his back and passed the razor to the man next to him, who did the same thing. Three men slipped away into the darkness and returned to Huautla. Some say that the governor did not order this execution, but that his orders were intercepted and changed by local criminals (García Dorantes 1996). During the early twentieth century, the people of the Sierra Mazateca highlands were integrated more directly into the nation, but access to the powerful position of intermediary was limited to a privileged few. The municipal president was the political intermediary, men and women of wisdom were the spiritual intermediaries, and coffee buyers and Huauteco merchants were the economic intermediaries. Huautla grew and thrived along with a cash economy during this period, and Pike reported that, in the 1930s, the town was clearly the “capital of the Sierra” (Pike 1956a). New villages also appeared, founded by Huautecos in search of land. Huautla played an analogous role to that of the presidents, shamans, and merchants—it, along with a few other important places, was the geographical intermediary between outside and inside. Huauteco merchants continued to travel throughout the Sierra and between the highlands and the lowlands, buying, selling, and trading goods, some of which came from outside the region, borne on their backs or the backs of mules. Besides the Huautecos, the leading arrieros, or mule drivers, were Mexicano-speaking men from the villages on the western end of the Sierra. All of these traders had to face many hardships and dangers, including the ever-present threat of banditry. The villagers of San Miguel and Santa Catarina, where coffee could not be cultivated, blocked the main pass between Huautla and the eastern lowlands and were famous for waylaying travelers, often throwing their bodies into the plentiful bottomless chasms that mark that area. The infamous Carrera family ruled Santa Catarina for many years and are said to have been responsible for hundreds of murders.10 Merchants carried small packets 48

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of ground up chilis to defend themselves, hoping to blind their attackers by throwing the powder into their eyes. These merchants and arrieros continued to give the Mazatec region a sort of integration and unity not found elsewhere in Oaxaca. It would not necessarily be correct, however, to frame that unity within the metacultural label of ethnicity.

From 1950 to the Present Beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, a series of changes affected life in the Sierra Mazateca.

roads In 1950, the municipal president Espiridión Morelos began work on the road that would connect Huautla to Teotitlán and, by extension, Puebla, Mexico City, and Oaxaca. At first, there was no direct help from the national or state government; the work was done by Huautecos performing their faena duties, the obligatory communal work that every man was required to participate in. Later, petitioned by the crusading municipal president Erasto Pineda, the government supplied the heavy equipment needed to cut through the forbidding slopes. The first vehicles could arrive in Huautla by 1959, although it took about eight hours to traverse the fifty-nine kilometers from Teotitlán. A few years later another road connected Huautla with Chilchotla. In 1989, the road to Teotitlán was given a paved surface, cutting the travel time to two hours. The early 1990s saw an explosion in road building throughout the Sierra, as many previously unconnected villages received “communication.” In 1994, a few months before the presidential election, work finally began on the paved road out to Tuxtepec that Luís Echeverría had supposedly completed eighteen years before, and Huautla now has quick and easy communication with the eastern lowlands, as well as the cities of Tuxtepec and Veracruz. When the original road opened in 1959, the dominant Huauteco merchants, many of whom had opposed its construction, maintained control over the market through force and intimidation. Outsiders were not allowed to sell their products directly; one fruit dealer who tried to undercut the Huauteco price was forced off the road into a ravine. But, over time, the fears of Huautla’s merchant elite were realized. Residents of the smaller villages no longer rely on the visits of Huauteco arrieros, but travel to the cities, especially Tehuacán, and buy goods directly. More than one Huauteco has expressed nostalgia for the days when it was easy to make money, as long as one had a strong neck and shoulders and a burro Historical and Geographical Overview

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or two. Now, I am told, anyone can get anything for the same price, and one must struggle to make a living. The commercial centrality of Huautla as a site of mediation has diminished, replaced more and more by direct relationships between each individual locality and the rest of the world. The Mexicano arriero communities also suffered, particularly San Bernardino, which had been the first rest stop on the old foot trail from Teotitlán and whose residents had sold meals and pulque to tired travelers. San Bernardino is now virtually a ghost town, although it remains an important local pilgrimage destination as the site of an extremely sacred icon, and its fiesta is one of the biggest in the Sierra.

the dam In 1955 the construction of the Miguel Alemán dam, as part of the massive Cuenca del Papaloapán hydroelectric project, flooded much of the lowland Mazateca, dislocating 20,000 people. The project was first proposed in 1941, but was considered too expensive until 1944, when a flood devastated Tuxtepec and ruined the sugarcane harvest for the surrounding area. While the stated goal of the project was to “elevate the quality of life for the population,” María Ana Portal (1986:10) argues that the real motives were “to incorporate the natural and human wealth of the lower part of the Cuenca into the model of industrial development that the Mexican State adopted at the end of the 1930s.” Those lowland dwellers whose villages were not flooded found themselves in a new, dramatically changed ecological and economic environment, in which the focus of their struggle to earn a living was determined by the needs of agribusiness, in this case by sugar refineries. The highland region was not affected by the construction of the dam, and the two major zones of the Mazateca grew still further apart. inmecafe

In 1958 the Mexican state decided to become directly involved in the production and commercialization of coffee, creating the Mexican Coffee Institute (i nm ec a f e ). After a campaign by Erasto Pineda, this organization began operating in Huautla in 1961 with the stated aims of attacking the exploitative acaparadores, increasing the standard of living, and increasing production (Neiburg 1988:50–51). After an initial period of conflict between agents of the state and acaparadores during which several government workers were murdered, the two sides formed an alliance that maintained the structure of political loyalties. In many areas, Mazatec caciques colonized the state organizations in order to maintain power (Boege 1988; Neiburg 1988). The activities of i nm ec a f e changed several aspects of life and pro50

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duction in the Sierra, including the monetization of the economy and the intensification of processes whereby the campesino produced for the market instead of consumption. Old forms of mutual assistance vanished, as far as coffee was concerned, and were replaced by wage labor. However, i nm ec a f e did not change the balance of power between acaparadores and campesinos, or reduce the debt of the latter. Debtor producers continued to sell coffee to private acaparadores, who then resold to i nm ec a f e . Neiburg concludes that “the ancient power groups, even if they lost the preponderant place they had enjoyed, continued controlling to some degree—riding on the structures created by the State—important aspects of the commercialization of coffee, and maintained political power” (1988:57). Erasto Pineda, the Huauteco leader who fought against the acaparadores and for increased state intervention, was murdered by his enemies on June 3, 1963, the thirty-fifth anniversary of the massacre of Avelino Pineda’s government in 1928. He was, they say, a good man who cared about the poor people, the humble people. He saw that the price of coffee was kept down by the acaparadores, causing much suffering. He provided the “push” for the road, the electrification, the arrival of i n i and i nm ec a f e . On the day he was killed, he went from house to house greeting people and shaking their hands. Then, on the path below town toward the Puente de Fierro, he was ambushed and gunned down by the Mafia, which ran things. Nobody was ever punished for the crime, but little by little it became known who the murderers were, and one by one they all died one way or another. Now, says his daughter, who runs a small restaurant in the lowland village of Rio Sapo, where her grandfather brought her after the murder, not one is alive. In 1993, as part of the privatization effort of the Salinas regime, i nm ec a f e closed its offices in Huautla and disappeared. Huauteco coffee producers did not regard this closing as marking any important change. “They were corrupt,” I was told. “They were thieves. They were the same as the coyotes.”

wasson and the hippies

Gordon Wasson may not have been the first outsider to come to Huautla in order to ingest psychedelic mushrooms, but he was the most self-promoting, and his writings would lead to an important change in Huautla’s place in the symbolic economy of Mexico, Europe, and the United States. Wasson, a vice president of the bank founded by J. P. Morgan, believed himself to be something of a Renaissance man. One of his many Mexican admirers described him as Historical and Geographical Overview

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a modern-day Medici (Tibón 1983:121). Startled by his Russian wife’s enthusiastic love of mushroom hunting and his own initial disgust for the little fungi, Wasson founded the science of ethnomycology, dedicated to understanding the role of mushrooms in culture—classifying mycophilic and mycophobic cultures and discovering the crucial role played by mushrooms in the origin of religion. This noble quest led him to the mountains of Oaxaca for the first time in 1953. He arrived in Huautla first on horseback and then later by plane. There, he experienced the mushroom ritual firsthand with several different men and women of wisdom, including María Sabina. He told the story of this experience in an article published in Life magazine in 1957 (Wasson 1957). This article concealed the exact identity of the remote locale of these mysterious Indians by calling the mountains the “Sierra Mixeteca” and giving María Sabina the pseudonym “Eva Mendez.” This did not prevent the curious from discovering the true location of Wasson’s strange paradise. The first seeker, photographer Howard Taylor, discovered Huautla after weeks of searching by finding someone in Oaxaca who recognized the patterns of Eva Mendez’s huipil. Taylor participated in a velada, or nocturnal ritual, with the 108-year-old woman of wisdom María Antonia Cerqueda, and saw strange and frightening visions of his hometown of San Francisco (just as Wasson had hallucinated a magical New York skyline). Taylor left Huautla, vowing never to touch the mushrooms again, but many more came after him (Tibón 1983:130–133). By the late 1960s, a permanent camp of jipis existed down by the Puente de Fierro (Iron Bridge) about three miles below Huautla. In 1969 the army rounded up and evicted these visitors. Army checkpoints at Teotitlán and the puente kept most of the hippies out until the region was opened up again in the mid-1970s; the visitations resumed, but at a much lower level. Today, only a trickle of visitors come through Huautla in the summer. Unlike the hippies of the 1960s, these tourists generally stay in hotels and attempt to demonstrate respect for the natives and their customs. While Huautecos usually express disgust at the mass of mushroomseeking hippies in the 1960s, they are proud of the visits of particularly noted individuals. The list of notable visitors to Huautla varies from informant to informant. It includes celebrities such as John Lennon, Jim Morrison, Donny Osmond, Muhammad Ali, and various Latin American soccer stars. Many Huautecos began to cherish long-running relationships with recurring visitors and the financial advantages that these relationships could bring. They adapted the discourse about hallucinogenic mushrooms brought by these outsiders and began to regard hongos as 52

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something that made their town and region special. Whereas mushrooms had once been a subject only talked of privately and at night, considered an embarrassment by the town’s commercial elite, they now became an icon for the town, and images of the holy mushroom can be found painted on the walls of the school, the basketball court, the Casa de la Cultura, the water cistern, and many businesses. The influx of tourists has allowed for the creation, for many Huautecos, of individual one-on-one relationships with representatives of the outside world that bypass the traditional intermediaries—the municipal president and the men and women of wisdom. The discourse surrounding mushroom use and Mazatec relationships with foreign mushroom seekers will be discussed more fully in Chapter 6.

p o l i t i c a l pa rt i e s a n d d e c l i n e o f “ t r a d i t i o n a l” authority In the early 1970s, the son of one of Huautla’s richest comerciantes returned home to begin practice as a doctor after receiving a university education in Puebla. While living in the city, he had become a devoted member of the Popular Socialist Party (pps ). Now, in Huautla, he tirelessly promoted his party and its socialist and nationalist themes.11 The town divided along barrio lines, with the upper barrios (those neighborhoods up the hill from the central square) supporting the pr i and the lower barrios rallying around the pps . After a bloody (heroic or divisive, depending on your point of view) struggle, the rebels firmly established a viable opposition party. The old system of choosing municipal presidents behind closed doors by a council of former officeholders was replaced by a two-party system and hotly contested elections. Leaders were no longer only intermediaries between the population and the state; they now also served the interests of political parties which made more demands on their local followers. Huautecos increasingly began to view their leaders as pawns of national parties who were not interested in Huautla’s prosperity but in lining their own pockets. The behavior of the pps militants in the 1980s seemed to confirm this skepticism. According to my informants, the Mexican state co-opted Pepesista activists in Huautla by giving them jobs at i nm ec a f e . Now in control of a lucrative state institution, the Pepesistas were seen by coffee growers as “the ones who steal from us.” One often hears some variation of “they all eat off the same plate” from Huautecos talking about politics. By 1993, the pps was declining as a legitimate force in Huautla politics, and the party received less than 8 percent of the vote locally in the 1994 presidential elections. Historical and Geographical Overview

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But a few years earlier, in 1992, another political split had divided the community. For the first time, the state pr i refused to nominate the candidate chosen by the group of ex-officeholders who called themselves the Council of Elders for municipal president, and instead decided to run an associate of Emilia Guzmán, the state deputy from the district that included the highland Mazateca. The elders launched a protest movement against this “imposition,” running their own candidate under the banner of the “dissident pr i .” For the first time, culture and ethnicity became explicit political issues, as the elders depicted themselves as the defenders of Mazatec tradition and customs. The campaign between the official and dissident branches of the pr i was the most violent political dispute in Huautla since the 1970s. Two young supporters of the dissidents were killed, allegedly by relatives of Guzmán, who fled the region. Opponents claim that Guzmán’s family can act with impunity not only because of her affiliation with the pr i , but also because of an affair between Emilia and the father of Oaxaca’s young governor. Opponents responded by covering the center of Huautla with graffiti denouncing Guzmán: “Muera al pr i ” and “Asesina Emilia tiene sida ” (Death to the pr i and Murderer Emilia has a ids ). The violence continued on the day of the elections as numerous fights broke out in the long lines of voters. There were numerous “irregularities” in the balloting, and supporters of the dissidents are said to have burned several ballot boxes. The votes were never counted. Because of the problems, the state attempted to appoint a president itself. This solution was not accepted, and the dispute continued, until finally all the parties agreed on a strange compromise: Huautla would be governed by three presidents who would share authority. One man (not the original candidate) from each faction—the official pr i , the dissident pr i , and the pps —became part of a three-headed leadership. This arrangement seemed to satisfy nobody except for the three men who became co-presidents. By 1993, Huautecos of all political persuasions had come to refer to their leaders derisively as los tres magos (the three wise men). They were said to be incompetent, if less corrupt than their predecessors, who had no rivals to monitor their activities. Huautecos grew frustrated at their failure to provide water during the drought of 1994 or advance the town in any noticeable way. In late 1994, all three co-presidents were temporarily driven out of the municipal palace by a group organized by the Council of Elders. Later in the same year, the various Huautla factions changed affiliation. The pr i disidentes moved their headquarters into a building on Avenida Juárez with a sign that reads “Indigenous Council of Elders” and affiliated 54

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themselves with the pa n (National Action Party), a center-right party. The local pps merged with the official pr i , and a handful of e zl n supporters formed the Civic Front. After another flawed election and despite a New Year’s Day taking of the palace by the Panistas, a new pr i president took office on January 1, 1996, and the pr i controls the Huautla presidency to this day (2002). The presence of political parties has advanced unevenly in other municipios, grafting itself onto existing factional divisions. In most municipios, the pr i continues to be unopposed, operating, as in Ayautla, through established caciques. In Santa María Asunción, people say that there still exists a consensus that chooses and approves the leadership, and because of this the residents of that town participate enthusiastically in the faenas and continue to support a high standard of living. But more municipalities are characterized by partisan, rather than merely factional, conflicts, and many of these conflicts lead to bloodshed. In 1995 the president of Mazatlán, a community plagued by continual political violence, was jailed for the murder of two of his opponents. The arrival of the parties seems to be part of a process that has changed perceptions of the role of political intermediaries in Huautla and the rest of the Sierra. Instead of representing a faction held together by the mutual obligations of compadrazgo, partisan leaders are increasingly seen as belonging to a separate class. The loyalties of important and powerful men are not to their godchildren and compadres, but to other members of their class both inside and outside of the Sierra. George Collier (1994: 9–10) calls this change, which he has analyzed in the Tzotzil municipio of Zinacantán in Chiapas, the transformation from a politics based on rank (where political relations structure economic ones, and leaders, who do not have different lifestyles than their followers, unite with low-level followers to compete with each other) to a politics based on class (where economic relations structure political ones, and wealthy leaders unite against followers to use wealth as a route to political power and prestige). Becoming an intermediary, in the Sierra Mazateca, is the way to achieve power and wealth. But this second form of intermediary, in which one betrays or “sells” one’s compadres and home community, is seen as illegitimate and evil, although sometimes worthy of respect. I will discuss this more in Chapter 7.

media

Since the 1970s, the traditional role of the municipal president as the sole transmitter of information between the Sierra and the outside world has come under attack. Cowan notes that Huautecos Historical and Geographical Overview

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stopped paying close attention to the president’s weekly lectures when they became amplified electronically in the 1940s. In the 1990s, very few people seemed to pay any attention at all. Most households in Huautla own a radio, and the commercial elite all boast television sets and satellite dishes, which allow them to receive information from all over the world, although the most watched programs are the telenovelas. One family I know sells satellite dishes. Every weekend they travel to another pueblo or comunidad to install a new dish. One Saturday they hiked three hours down a muddy trail into the jungle to install a satellite dish in a community that still had no electricity. The buyer, who purchased the dish with his subsidy from the government’s proc a m po program, was planning on running his television with a generator. The dealer was active in the leftist opposition—at this point the pr d —and viewed his business as a means of furthering a social and democratic revolution. Armed with satellite dishes, he says, a campesino hears about the world from sources besides caciques and government-controlled TV.

collapse of coffee and migration In the late 1980s, the price of coffee collapsed, greatly intensifying the economic crisis for residents of the Sierra Mazateca. Whereas growers had once received as many as 8,000 pesos for each kilogram, by 1993 the price hovered around one new peso, or 1,000 old pesos (and of course the value of a peso had also declined in this same period to approximately 35 cents). For many growers, the cost of harvesting their crop, which included the usual daily wage of 15 pesos per day for pickers, exceeded the value of the coffee, and they let the beans die on the branch. The crisis has increased awareness of how people are involved in an unpredictable, confusing, and malicious international system. In 1993, I was talking about coffee with Enrique Leyva, a member of Ayautla’s dominant family, in the patio of his great house. “Coffee,” he told me, “has gone to shit.” Three years before he had stopped even bothering. “But who is to blame?” he asked. “Whose fault is it? The government of Oaxaca? Of Mexico? Brazil? The United States? We the Mazatecos? Who is to blame?” In order to replace some of their lost income, people searched for other opportunities. Some began to grow other crops, such as sugarcane, where this was possible. In the lowlands, some are turning to marijuana, but drugs are not a part of the highland economy. More educated Huautecos have turned to teaching as the best way to provide a decent living for their families. In fact, I have been told that Huautla has been transformed eco56

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nomically from a coffee zone to a teacher zone. But most young men have turned to migration as their only escape from starvation. People have been migrating from the highlands to the cities for a long time, but the process intensified after the building of the road in the late 1950s. Most middleaged Huauteco men that I know have lived and worked for some period of time in the cities. Now, in the smallest comunidades and ranchos, as well as in Huautla, virtually all young men must migrate, and many (though not all) of the villages are empty except for women, the old, and children. In the highland villages where I have asked how much of the population lives in the cities, I am generally given a number between one third and one half. “Do you miss your husband? Do you mind that he is not here with you and your children?” I asked a young storekeeper in one village. “No, I do not miss him. He comes sometimes, and he sends money. I live here with my parents and my children. It is better that he is not here.” Though some Huautecos lived and worked in the United States in 1993, when I began my fieldwork, these few represented a tiny minority. Unlike the Zapotec and Mixtec speakers of central Oaxaca, who have established large immigrant communities in New York, Michigan, and both sides of the (Oaxa)California border, the great majority of Mazatec migrants aimed for a closer, less ambitious destination. They went to Tehuacán and Oaxaca and Michoacan, but mostly they headed for Mexico City in great numbers, where they worked cleaning bathrooms, assisting carpenters and taco venders, in laundromats and zipper factories. Some became successful, as lawyers, accountants, or small business owners. Most continued to struggle. Sometimes they are abused by the pompous chilangos; they are called racist names like “Oaxaco.” Most migrants come back home as often as they can on one of the two direct buses that go every night between Mexico City and Huautla. The smaller town of Mazatlán has its own direct buses to the capital, owned by the municipio. In 1993, the driver fell asleep one particularly foggy night, and the bus plunged off a cliff, killing fifteen. Another accident near Huautla killed fourteen in 1995. A few, however, do not come back, and become chilangos themselves. One of these told me that she missed a few things about Huautla, like the bread and the homemade tortillas, but the people back there were backward, conservative, narrow minded, and stubborn. Huautla was no place for a progressive, liberal-minded woman to raise her children. On a trip to Huautla in 2000, I discovered that, for the first time, many Huautecos are migrating to the United States. An enterprising young Huauteco man has established a business as a coyote. For a price of approximately $1,200, he transports the more adventurous sons of the Historical and Geographical Overview

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commercial elite to the Pacific Northwest, where they have found jobs in factories that pay $10 per hour. This new option has triggered a great deal of excitement among the youths of Huautla’s centro, who are the only people in the region who could afford to fantasize about this way of getting to the otro lado.

evangelicals Despite their many efforts dating back to the 1930s, evangelical Protestants have not been particularly successful in obtaining converts in the highlands of the Sierra Mazateca. Most of their success has come in the lowlands, particularly in Jalapa, and in a few highland villages such as Santa María Ascunción and Chilchotla. The evangelical movement has impacted these communities in different ways. In Jalapa, there has been conflict between Protestants and Catholics, while in Santa María the two groups have been able to coexist peacefully. In Huautla, where there is only a small Protestant presence, a traveling group of evangelicals was forcefully driven out by a mob, and the Protestant leader had his nose broken by a hurled chair. Protestantism provides an alternative language for the imagination of community and identity, and as seems to be the case elsewhere in Mesoamerica, it attracts the majority of its converts from the more upwardly and downwardly mobile segments of the population. The rhetoric of evangelical conversion will be addressed in Chapter 3.

conclusion History can be read as a series of processes of movement back and forth between different spheres within a wider world. The specific nature and scale of this incorporation may have changed, as movement within the region has declined in importance while direct relationships with the state and other national and international centers of power have increased, but the importance of the role of the mediator has shown some continuity, although the form this mediation takes has continually evolved. Huautla has continued to play a key role in the economic and cultural integration of the Sierra—through the collection of tribute, as a trade center, as a coffee collection site, and finally as a center in the state’s educational bureaucracy. The following chapter will look more closely at the way in which different metacultural discourses describe history and the relationship between the past and the present.

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3

From Indians to Hillbillies explicit stories about the mazatec past

Many refined traits of the ancient culture were destroyed. We can only revive them thanks to sciences such as archaeology and history. —school textbook, mexico In your country, is history true? Because here in my country, it is all lies. —schoolteacher, sierra mazateca The Past is always a particularly important space for would-be hegemonic discourses to colonize. It represents a world that is over, that happened, that is often read through the frame of objective, unchangeable Truth, even though memory, our primary vehicle for reaching the past, is almost infinitely malleable. In this chapter and in the two that follow, I will describe some of the ways in which dominant and subaltern discourses intersect in the terrain of the Mexican and Mazatec pasts. After taking a close look at the way the revolution is represented in stories and on the landscape, this chapter will turn to a description and analysis of the various sites where ideas about “history” and “culture” are or have been promoted. These sites, both discursive and material, include the indigenista discourse which emerges through the publications of Mexican anthropologists and the National Indigenist Institute as well as the actions and publications of Protestant and Catholic missionaries (both for Mexican and American audiences). We will then turn to the ways in which “history” and “culture” are produced by Huautecos and Huauteco organizations themselves, including schoolteachers and institutions such as the Casa de la Cultura, which give a voice to native intellectuals. In this chapter, we shall see how “history” comes to be located in specific historical periods. In particular, the various discourses articulated by missionaries, anthropologists, textbooks, and educators locate the indig-

enous Mazatec history—the “before” in the before/now dichotomy—in the Prehispanic past, and this history resonates with the official national past in which Indians ceased being historical actors at the moment of the conquest. This version of the past-present relationship also creates an “epic distance” between the past and the present; the past is represented as a distant time of peak moments, of “firsts” and “bests.” This distance allows for and demands the rise of a class of experts who must teach this history to the masses, or at least deride them for their ignorance. Bakhtin (1981:15) has argued that the representation of this distance between the inaccessible past and the storytelling present parallels the distance, in contemporary society, between the rulers and the ruled. This Prehispanic representation of history carries over into the related domain of “culture,” which is fixed into particular named practices that are made to stand for this broader concept, just as particular historical eras stand for all of the past or the past-present relationship. We shall then explore other, more everyday notions of the past-present relationship not licensed by the sign of “history” (Dirks 1989). Some of these versions of the past-present relationship focus less on constructing rigid borders between historical periods (or ethnic groups) than on following the traces left on families and the landscape by the upsets and migrations caused by past events. Most residents of the Sierra are not concerned with that version of the past-present relationship, “history,” that corresponds to the “ethnic” theory of identity, although they recognize the correspondence between that theory and power. The local, everyday past that I turn to in Chapter 6 does not, unlike the epical view, misrepresent the different relationships between the Sierra and the core that held in the periods of the past as isolation. These stories touch on themes and events that are ignored by the hegemonic histories, which emphasize the Prehispanic. One of those events, largely ignored by dominant histories, is the Mexican Revolution, and that is where this chapter will begin.

some stories of the revolution In 1994 I had the opportunity to interview one of the few survivors of the revolutionary period in Huautla. The following is an excerpt from my field notes for this conversation: Dorotea (a pseudonym) says that she was born in 1903. She came to Huautla during the height of the revolution, in 1914. She was a girl 60

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then, around eleven years old. Her family was moving from the Sierra Mixteca to escape the terrible famine that was devastating that region. There was a shortage of corn; there was no corn. There were no cars at that time, so they journeyed on foot—four days from her land to Huautla, one day from the town of Teotitlán at the base of the mountains. The journey was filled with peril. At one point they had to cross a river with a fiercely rising current. Later, still before they arrived in Huautla, her father took sick from intestinal fever. Since they were strangers who knew nothing of medicine or any doctors, they could not help him and he died. Arriving in Huautla, her mother died of sadness, leaving her children orphans in a strange town, knowing nobody. And, still worse, there were hardly any people in Huautla, because of the revolution. There were only bad troops. All the people were fleeing. The troops went to Huehuetlán, they went to Chilchotla. So she and her little family—younger brothers and sisters and a few Huautecos—fled to a cave they found nearby. They did all their cooking in the cave, and ate well, without light, in the dark, so that the soldiers would not see them. By 1916, the situation was beginning to calm a little, but the troops still occupied Huautla. Guards watched every entrance and registered everybody who came and went.1 Alone with her younger siblings, Dorotea fled the soldiers toward Huehuetlán. The group of children walked through the mountains, terrified of soldiers and wild animals, and the people who lived along the way would give them tortillas and coffee. When they arrived at Huehuetlán, it too was full of soldiers, the troops of Aguilar. The soldiers were there ten days and left the town bald. They cut down all the corn and took all the horses, pigs, bulls, chickens, turkeys, everything. Everything was left clean; even the clothes were stolen, and of course the aguardiente. Dorotea had no choice; she stayed there anyway and watched. She hung out by the soldiers’ camp. She never felt any fear of them. The soldiers recognized her courage and adopted her as a sort of pet. They gave her food. There were all kinds of soldiers in that time—of the armies of Huerta, Zapata, Carranza, and Aguilar. So many weapons. There was one group of jarrochos from Veracruz, puros negros malos2 who robbed the houses and demanded food. How those soldiers could eat! But they only amused her, she was not scared. They left one poor man hanging on a great tree all day long and she was there, watching it. There was a general named Pedro Fierro and he had a brother who was a priest named Liazar. They kidnapped the priest, but he kept coming back. On the path near Matzazongo, they caught the general, and From Indians to Hillbillies

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they took his head to Teotitlán, where they threw it off the tower in front of his anguished mother. These soldiers were Carrancistas. But, little by little, things calmed down and people returned to their places, although soldiers remained in the barracks they had built in Huautla in 1918, and a strange new regime took over that jailed parents who failed to send their children to the new school. Dorotea stayed in Huautla until her death in 1994, at the age of ninety-three, in a small house right next to what used to be the barracks (it is now the House of Culture) with her daughter and her two beautiful Siamese cats (also a mother and daughter).

Dorotea was the only survivor of the revolution whom I met and interviewed. There cannot be many survivors around, after all. People always tell me about old men and women who have lived for 100 or 115 years, but I have only talked to the one woman over ninety. Other older people have talked to me about the revolution, the great moment of twentiethcentury Mexican history, and their stories complement that of Dorotea. They represent the revolution as a time of great fear, when mysterious outside armies arrived to rob, steal, and abuse the people. Never do these stories address the motivations or ideologies of the armies or their leaders. Never do they mention differences between the various revolutionary or counterrevolutionary factions. And never, in these explanations told to an outsider, are any local people—Huautecos or other denizens of the Sierra Mazateca—given any agency as players in the drama, except for the agency involved in flight. The revolution is a big event, greater than individuals, outside all control, like a force of nature. It varies in magnitude over space and time. In one place it may be strong (“La revolución era más fuerte allá”) while in another it may be weak (más débil).3 It was stronger in some years and then gradually petered out to more manageable levels. It is what caused great migrations from the strong areas to the weak ones outside its reach. It was manifested through troops and soldiers and conscription gangs, like the Carrancista one that nabbed María Sabina’s first husband while he was doing business, interrupting the life of his family until he managed to escape. It is the revolution of Mariano Azuela’s novel The Underdogs— “like a hurricane. If you’re in it, you’re not a man. . . . You’re a leaf, a dead leaf, blown by the wind.” Doña Rosa told me the story of what happened to her husband’s family during the revolution:

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3.1 A survivor of the Mexican Revolution and her daughter at their home in Huautla. Photo by author.

Earlier was the time of the revolution, when various bands of soldiers came to Huautla to rest and plunder and loot and eat. They did not fight each other here in the Sierra, they just preyed on the local population. They would come into a house and demand food, and if the quantity was not great enough—these were big, strong, young men, soldiers pues, and they required vast bowls of beans—they would beat or shoot you. These were the soldiers with the big hats and . . . you know the ones. One group came over from Oaxaca, from the south. The people were very frightened, especially the children. They did not know what was going on and they had never seen people like this. Many fled or hid. The little brother of my father-in-law heard them shooting one day and got scared and started to run, and he was hit in the back. They shot many bullets, shooting and shooting, and the child died from his wounds.

Perhaps it is significant that both of these stories about the revolution were told to me by women. Mary Steedly (1993), writing about an upheaval in Sumatra at the time of the Indonesian war of independence, From Indians to Hillbillies

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notes a difference between men’s and women’s stories about war. Men’s stories stress the heroic agency of individuals, groups, and armies fighting for one side, cause, or ideology against another. In this way they individualize the greater narrative of History. Women’s stories, Steedly tells us, are about individuals trapped by great and random events, and their struggles to survive. Similarly, Kathleen Stewart (1996:15–16), writing about narratives in West Virginia, notes that Appalachian stories are not about “self-assertion and self-control,” but about “encountered scenes in which meaning lies immanent in things.” It is a view of the past that remembers history “not as the straight line of progress but as a flash of unforgettable images.” One woman, a young and very “modern” schoolteacher, showed me a photograph on the wall of her house depicting her husband’s grandfather and great-grandfather. She told me that they “fought in the revolution.” Again, she was not specific—not mentioning any particular army or goal. It was an event that you were pulled into or from which you hid, usually underground. I asked her more about the stories of these two men, and she responded with the usual generalities—how the revolution was when everyone went to hide in the hills and caves and buried their money and forgot where they put it. And she told me that out near Chilchotla there is a ruined old colonial Spanish ranch. This excerpt from my field notes describes a trip past that ranch: I drove down the road to Chilchotla. We were going to a wedding in Santa Rosa, still farther, and two old women rode with me in the cab of my truck. One of them pointed out a place full of caves where the people went during the time of the revolution. We didn’t live through those times, she said, but our parents told us stories. The people went to hide in the caves, she said. They left their homes and hid, some moving to other pueblos, because the soldiers came and were looking for them. She didn’t say they fought for one army or another, but it was a time, she made clear, of “much fear” for “the people.” The soldiers would kill them. It was especially hard in Aguacatitla and Santa Cruz de Juárez.

Through these stories, the revolution is remembered in the physical landscape of the Sierra, as this landscape has been modified and filled with meaning by the human beings who have passed through it. Caves, in particular, trigger this particular historical recollection. They are made to embody the fear that afflicted the people. They are named places whose names are made to embody the nameless dread and anxiety that comes 64

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in a time of chaos and invasion, a peripheral consciousness of disordered contact or interchange with the core. Then, in the late 1960s, caves would be occupied by a new invading force, as armies of hippies moved into them while hiding from the army and the police. The revolution also marked the landscape through the dispersal of the population and the creation of new communities like Río Sapo, Santa Catarina, and Pochotepec out of the wild, frightening monte (wilderness). When I pressed Dorotea about the identity of the soldiers who were the protagonists in one of her stories, she became a little confused. Her daughter interceded on her behalf. It is not like they announced their identity, she said, or words to that effect. It is not like they carried signs saying “We are with Huerta, or Zapata, or Carranza.” They were just soldiers. These stories deny the distinctions historians make between labeled groups of people. They also seem to resonate with the official representation of the revolution in Mexico, which denies the complexity and heterogeneous nature of this event, reducing it to a homogeneous signifier speaking in one voice for the authority of the state and the inheritor of the revolution, the Party of the Institutional Revolution (pr i ), which ruled Mexico until 2000. The official version of history turns the opposed revolutionary heroes—Carranza, Madero, Zapata, Villa, and in the Sierra Mazateca, Flores Magón—into complementary statues in the Museum of the Revolution, a museum whose ownership is asserted by the state and the pr i (Alonso 1988; Benjamin 2000). Their names and images are spread throughout the countryside, on schools, streets, statues, subway stations, government helicopters, towns. These names do not serve to honor the great struggle of Mexican peasants to fight for improvements in their situations, to demand lands and respect. They honor, instead, the great benevolence of the Mexican state, for whom they serve as monovocal icons, a state which stretched from the center to the periphery to grant reform to its grateful subjects. Even in the revolutionary centers of Morelos and Chihuahua, celebrations of the revolution deny any local role, instead stressing the top-down nature of the event (Friedlander 1975; Daniel Nugent 1993). In Huautla, municipal president Gregorio Herrera (1906–08) is said (by local historian Renato García Dorantes) to have been a great agrarian leader who was still remembered in the 1940s as the most stirring orator in the town’s history (Cowan 1952). Today, except for García, who displayed a photograph of Herrera in the Casa de la Cultura (House of Culture), any role that Herrera or any other Huauteco may have had in the revolutionary period is forgotten.4 One man who prides himself on his From Indians to Hillbillies

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pure Huauteco lineage, when asked about Herrera, confessed that he had never heard the name before, and he told me that neither name—Gregorio nor Herrera—is Huauteco, so this man could not have been from Huautla. It would seem that there is little room in the public memory of the revolutionary period for named Mazatec actors and heroes; there is room only for dangerous outside marauders and local victims, whose skill and agency were manifested through clever strategies of evasion, of survival. In a sense, the local stories about the revolution mimic the basic hegemonic outline of that event’s significance—a division between actors who are affiliated with the future state and passive, usually nameless villagers who are affected by these heroes’ actions. But the moral significance of the leaders’ actions is reversed. In local stories of the revolution, the passive locals go from beneficiaries to victims, and the actions of leaders are shown to be inherently dangerous, chaotic, and without benefit to anyone. There is no connection between local demands and any future benefits that might have arrived in the Sierra in the 1920s when large haciendas were broken up and divided into smaller plots; in fact, such benefits are scarcely recognized, much less associated with the revolution. Of course, as Neiburg (1988) has shown, the land reform simply resulted in a new form of exploitation (by coffee buyers) and did not bring much immediate benefit to Mazatec coffee growers. In fact, the state’s actions to assert a greater presence in the Sierra in the 1920s are remembered much like the revolution—as random, senseless violence. My field notes record Doña Rosa’s story of her unfortunate fatherin-law, whose little brother died so senselessly during the revolution: I asked about her fine old house and Rosa told me that this house was built by the father of her husband, a man who was murdered in a time of much violence, sixty-five years ago (which would be 1929). They came to look for him, the authorities did, because he had not sent his children to school that day. That was the pretext. They went to his house, where they found that he had gone to a fiesta. So they continued to the fiesta, where they confronted him. He said that he had not sent his children to school that day because it was more important that they come with him to the fiesta, that you could not make people go to school by force, that it was voluntary. They called him names and he became angry and responded. Then all those people beat him, and shot him. He had a fierce little dog that would follow him wherever he went. During the confrontation, this dog tried to hide, to back up as far as it could under a chair. But when it saw that its master’s life was in danger, 66

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the dog raced out to defend him. Those people, the authorities, shot the dog and then killed the man.

The murder of all the municipal authorities in 1928 is remembered as random and pointless as well. One Huauteco told me that the governor ordered the murders—who knows why? Another version of the story is that the orders were changed, and the soldiers were not supposed to kill anybody. The Mexican Revolution constitutes what Bruner and Gorfain (1984: 56) call a “great national narrative.” This is a story that “becomes so prominent in the consciousness of an entire society that its recurrent tellings not only define and empower storytellers but also help to constitute and reshape the society.” Authoritative tellings of these stories attempt to fix meanings and solidify order, but the stature of these great national narratives ensures the development of a dialogic discourse, where challenging retellings of the same story question and expand the meaning. The official, capitalized “Revolution” is a singular event, “not a heterogeneous mix of ideas, movements, factions, and caudillos” (Benjamin 2000:131). As Ana Alonso shows, the Mexican past is produced, managed, by the state: Public space, museums, educational institutions, advertising, political rhetoric, television and film—are monopolized by the state. . . . revolutionary nationalisms tend to emanate from the state and serve to consolidate its hegemony. . . . The “Revolutionary” is produced as a unitary domain in which personal, class and regional enmities and differences are erased and overcome by a vision of a struggle in which all fought on the side of “the nation” and “the people.” (1988:42–43)

This production is accomplished, in part, through what Alonso calls the “de-particularization” of the revolution, the process of emptying a historical event of its specific contexts so that it becomes universalized, the specific property of no one. As a general property of the nation, the past is made to harmonize the interests of the classes, regions, and factions that actually fought against each other between 1910 and 1920, and becomes something that struggling individuals cannot claim for themselves, but must be given to them from above, from the state. The state asserts its claim on the revolution through a particular spatial strategy. In Huautla, there are no museums, but the schools and streets are named after the usual pantheon of national historical heroes. Thus there From Indians to Hillbillies

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is a Calle Héroes de Chapultepec, after the five military school cadets who threw themselves off the tower of their facility rather than surrender to the conquering American army; a Calle de los Constituyentes; and a Calle Francisco I. Madero. The town’s main secondary schools are named a little more regionally. The first is the Benito Juárez, named for the nineteenth-century Zapotec president of Mexico who drove out the French, defeated the Conservatives, and privatized church and communally held Indian lands. The second is the Ricardo Flores Magón, named for one of the main intellectual architects of the revolution, an anarchist who was born in the Sierra Mazateca, allegedly in San Antonio Eloxochitlán (now named San Antonio de Flores Magón), who died in Leavenworth Prison in Kansas. The Mexican state never stops naming itself by naming places and objects after revolutionary heroes. President Salinas de Gortari, it is said, had a particular fascination for the revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata. Every president chooses a past hero to serve as his guiding totem animal. Salinas chose two: Benito Juárez, for his devotion to law and for his policies of privatization, and Zapata, allegedly because he represents social justice. The Mexican president who oversaw the largest scale reversal of the revolutionary gains made possible by Zapata named his son Emiliano and traveled around the country in a presidential helicopter (the equivalent of Air Force One) named Zapata. The use of rebels like Zapata and Villa to support an authoritarian regime (that, of course, murdered Zapata and Villa) is inherently unstable and subject to contestation. The state’s usurpation and occupation of this figure was seriously challenged on January 1, 1994, with the rebellion of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (e zl n ) in Chiapas. While the Zapatistas may have lost the war, they did demonstrate the absurd incongruity of the pr i ’s representation of itself as the party of Zapata, and it is unlikely that the state will be able to use him again, at least in the near future. As the state’s monovocal self-reference encroaches on the visible spaces that divide up and map daily life, using the signs of the national (including co-opted, de-particularized signs of the local like Flores Magón and the mushroom murals), another popular memory must retreat from these public spaces and map itself directly onto more hidden worlds, such as the underground and the magic world. The “epic distance” that the official version of the past places between the “peak times” and the present infuses all official “history” with “authentic essence and significance, . . . conclusiveness and finality” (Bakhtin 1981:16). The other popular 68

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memory retreats from history and, in Bakhtin’s terms, “novelizes” the relationship between the past and present. That is, the depicted past is brought into closer, freer contact with the depicting present; “it is brought low, represented on a place equal with contemporary life, in an everyday environment, in the low language of the contemporary” (Bakhtin 1981: 21). I will examine this process of bringing the past into the present later; first I will examine how four lenses on the past—indigenista anthropology, Protestant and Catholic missionaries, Mazatec intellectuals, and Mazatec schoolteachers and school textbooks—represent the relationship between the distanced past and contemporary lives. As we will see, peoples like those of the Sierra Mazateca are consistently represented as passive vehicles (outside history) for the activities of agents (within history) who seek to bring them from their (metaphorical) childhood stage into one or another historical project (development, Christianity, ethnic nationalism, or some combination thereof).

the indigenista version of the past While the chaotic events of the Mexican Revolution seem to have left profound traces on the landscape of the Sierra Mazateca and the memory of its inhabitants, stimulating mass migrations and the founding of many new villages, more “official” histories of the “region” ignore that period. Instead, they categorize the revolution as part of the “World” of the nation-state, an expanding entity that progresses through the steadily advancing clocked time of history (Anderson 1983). The past of the Sierra, by contrast, belongs to another World, cut off or “isolated” until just a few moments ago, from historical events. Indigenista activist anthropology first entered the region in the 1950s, with the “salvage” work of Alfonso Villa Rojas, which was tied closely to the construction of the dam named for President Miguel Alemán. One of the goals of the Papaloapán hydroelectric project was to forcibly integrate the inhabitants of the Mazatec region, and this integration required the presence of social scientists to document the disappearing culture and aid, in as painless a way as possible, the transformation to a new society. Other social scientists of the earlier indigenista period—North Americans affiliated with the Summer Institute of Linguistics/Wycliffe Bible Translators—had done preliminary work along these lines, recording various aspects of Mazatec culture and reporting that, despite the presence of some superstitious beliefs, the Mazatecs’ obvious precocious From Indians to Hillbillies

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intelligence should allow easier progress to a higher stage of culture (the Mexican national culture) (Cowan 1946). Villa Rojas describes the Mazatec past as one whose entire historical meaning can be placed within the dynamic contest between two opposed “worlds”—the “Prehispanic age” and the “modern era.” The Prehispanic age is the time of origins, the baseline for civilization or change. In the historical section of his report, Villa Rojas describes (with remarkable certainty, considering the quality of his ethnohistorical sources) the various Prehispanic wars, alliances, and conquests that characterized the region from the eleventh through the fifteenth century. He concludes this section dramatically with the arrival of Cortez, asserting that “this is how it was when the cycle of the aboriginal world reached its end; from here on it would be the whites who held the reins of destiny” (Villa Rojas 1955:70). Thus, the “aboriginal world” ceased to be historical at the moment of Cortez’ conquest, then simply became more and more archaic and anachronistic as history advanced elsewhere, first in the hands of the whites and then, after the Mexican Revolution, in the hands of the mestizo “cosmic race.” This tale of the abrupt switch from one world to another was repeated by American anthropologists who were more sympathetic to the older ways. Henry Munn (1973:96), a hippie mushroom seeker turned anthropologist who married a Huauteca woman, wrote that “until only recently, isolated from the modern world, the Indians lived in their mountains as people lived in the Neolithic.” This Neolithic world is characterized by cyclical, repeating time, as opposed to the encroaching modern world with its endlessly advancing progress.5 It is the Deep Mexico celebrated by Bonfil Batalla (1987), the chronotope in which Chiapanecan peasants become the “colorful culture” of “Maya tribesmen with a SpanishCatholic veneer,” according to Evon Z. Vogt (1970:vii, 2). On several occasions, I have spoken with American and German travelers about their experiences in Huautla from the 1960s to the mid-1980s. In each case, these men used measurable travel to the past as the most immediate shorthand for describing the Sierra Mazateca of that epoch. “It was like going back to the Stone Age,” said an American caver. “It was like traveling 3,000 years back in time, and going to San Andrés was still more,” a German who had lived in Huautla for three years told me. “Now everything has changed. It’s only like going back fifty years.” Intermediate historical periods hardly exist in this construction of history, which may no longer be fashionable for anthropologists but still is the first concept to come to mind for foreign travelers. 70

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It turns out that Villa Rojas’ story of the Mazatec Prehispanic past is entirely inaccurate because it is based on Mariano Espinoza’s misreading of a date on a map that was, at the beginning of the twentieth century, still preserved in Huautla’s municipal palace (Espinoza 1961 [1910]). One corner of this map showed a row of stylized heads (presumably a line of caciques) and the notation “desde 1710” (since 1710). Espinoza read the date (which apparently was difficult to read) as 1190, and Villa Rojas inexplicably took his word for it, producing a history that was off by five hundred years (Cline 1962). It makes sense, though, that Villa Rojas would believe that Huautla’s archives still recorded a history over five hundred years old; he wouldn’t ascribe any historical significance to events of the colonial era, a historical period which for him and his associates simply did not occur in the Sierra Mazateca. Villa Rojas explicitly states his philosophy regarding the single meaning of the Mazatec past, explaining how the goal of studying history is to demonstrate how “the attitude towards life and towards the most important aspects of the universe continues to have its roots in the tribal world of Prehispanic antiquity” (1955:59). He describes isolated “little closed worlds” dominated by “old Prehispanic traditions”—that is to say, “superstition, magic, and fear of the supernatural” (Villa Rojas 1955:31, 27, 32).6 After the conquest, the modern world failed to uproot these traditions because of the failure of the colonizers, the stubbornness of the Mazatecs, and, most importantly, because of the geographical and physical remoteness of the region. Isolation from social and commercial traffic left the Sierra outside national progress—“a refuge for an aboriginal world” (Villa Rojas 1955:72). Inroads against this isolation were made in the late nineteenth century in the lowlands, due to Porfirio Diáz’ gratitude to the region for providing him with soldiers in the early stages of his career. But, according to Villa Rojas, the highlands region remained lost in its cloudy, archaic, and Prehispanic world until 1949, when the Papaloapán project began, and “the physical isolation was broken, leaving the natives in immediate contact with people and technology from another world very distinct from their own.” Thankfully, i n i chief Alfonso Caso intervened, sending anthropologists who would study the way of life of the Indian and note their most urgent problems. In this way, the social readjustment of these natives could be achieved with the greatest efficiency, avoiding, as much as possible, the multiple evils that can rise in these situations of violent social change. (Villa Rojas 1955:74) From Indians to Hillbillies

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A few years earlier, Villa Rojas (1945a, 1945b) had argued that a reliance on “force of habit” had robbed Mexico’s Indians of their ability to act for themselves or fashion a “spontaneous response” to national changes. He suggested that Mexico therefore did not need to seek the Indians’ consent to their acculturation, as long as they were properly guided by social scientists sensitive to cultural particularities. This indigenista view of indigenous history is reproduced through elementary school textbooks used in Huautla in the 1990s. Despite changes that eliminated many of the more blatantly racist images that permeated school materials, newer textbooks continue to cut Mexico’s Indians out of the nation’s history at the time of the conquest. They remain alive only as living reminders of the nation’s glorious Prehispanic past, which is presented as the heritage of all Mexicans. For example, a history text used in Huautla’s primary schools devotes twenty-eight pages to the Prehispanic epoch. This section ends with a lesson on the “Prehispanic heritage”— the only part of the book that addresses Mexico’s Indian population. The book tells us: The Spanish Conquest interrupted the development of the cultures of Mesoamerica. The Spanish destroyed most of the temples, images, and books of the Indians. Many refined traits of the ancient culture were destroyed. We can only revive them thanks to sciences such as archaeology and history. . . . The Conquest brought a tremendous death toll, but part of the Indian population survived. Thanks to them [the survivors], the culture and sensibility of the Prehispanic world have stayed alive.

The textbook associates the advanced, adult phase of Indian society in the past with its “refined traits,” which must be revived by experts certified by their association with “science.” This association forms the heart of an “epic” version of history that places a barrier between the past (and the wealth of meaning and symbolic capital stored therein) and the present that only licensed experts (not you) can overcome using specialized, mystified technology.7 If the “refined traits” disappeared, then what survives, apparently, is something that is associated with childhood. All of the photographs and graphic illustrations in the section on “our Prehispanic heritage” depict ruins or maps of ancient kingdoms except for one: a photo of a group of smiling Tojolabal girls from Chiapas wearing their brightly colored traditional costumes. Like Eunice Pike’s memoirs of life in Huautla in the 1930s and 1940s, and like National Geographic magazine (Hervik 1999), these new indigenista textbooks can only rep72

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resent contemporary Mexican Indians as children, beings without agency who must be carefully nurtured by their guardians: the Mexican state and mestizo society. The Prehispanic heritage that the book describes exists outside of the temporally advancing events that characterized the Prehispanic past and the postconquest progress of mestizo Mexico—wars, politics, individual struggles, and tragedies. Suddenly, they become a “culture,” and this identity/chronotope (“being-a-culture”) is manifested through particular traits that correspond to the categories frequently used by anthropologists. Thus, the Prehispanic heritage is confined in the following nine areas: the forms of writing, astronomy and calendar, sciences, architecture, agriculture, cuisine, botany and medicine, arts, and language. After summarizing indigenous societies in terms of these nine groupings of cultural traits, with frequent expressions like “today, as in ancient times,” the textbook lists the “principal ideas” that the students should absorb, presumably to regurgitate on a test. These principal ideas are that “many elements of the indigenous culture survived and are a heritage for all Mexicans”; that this heritage exists in particular separated areas—agriculture, agricultural rites and traditions, myths, and artisanry; and that “the culture of today’s Indians conserves many elements of the ancient tradition.” In summary form, the time line of Villa Rojas’ Mazatec past, a version still enshrined in the education system, looks like this: 1. 1117–1521, Prehispanic Historical Era: Mazatec ancestors come from the north, exist as an independent kingdom for 280 years with an advanced culture with a focus on the arts and sculpture, fight many wars with the Mixtecs, are conquered by the Aztecs, and finally ally themselves with the Spanish in the war against Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec emperor. 2. 1521–1949, Prehispanic Ahistorical Era: Mazatecs continue in an anachronistic Prehispanic world isolated from the events and progress of history. The same traits that once constituted a vibrant “culture” are now “backward” and “superstitious.” “Civilization” has deteriorated into an acultural “force of habit.” The War of Independence, the civil war of the mid-nineteenth century, and the Mexican Revolution— historical events pertaining to the real, historical world of the mestizo society and state—do not rupture the seamless continuity of this period and are not mentioned. 3. 1949–present, Collision of Ahistorical Prehispanic World with Modern Historic Mexican World: Supervision is necessary in order to successFrom Indians to Hillbillies

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fully bring the Mazatecs from the one into the other. And so, as part of the process of moving from Oblivion and Isolation to the realm of the Modern World and Mexico (domains within Historyland), the Sierra moved out of (Prehispanic) Indian World and entered the intermediate purgatory phase: Anthropology World (Cohn 1980). This intermediate location puts its dwellers in great danger; it is a place of hypocrisy, filth, greed, inauthenticity, and backwardness—it is a place without a capable culture of the past or the future, and its inhabitants, neither Indians nor modern Mexicans, fall into the most universally despised category of all. They are cultureless hillbillies.

One practice of historians is to create periods and to argue and debate the importance of these periods. Reputations are made by asserting and defending one period against another, or recombining the years in a more satisfactory, more pleasing way, or a way that is jarring, but surprisingly stimulating. Metahistorical talk in the Sierra Mazateca—at least that talk that is located in the schools, churches, public spaces, and texts like those of Villa Rojas and Summer Institute of Linguistics missionaries Eunice Pike and Florence Cowan—tend toward a strict, polar division into two opposed temporal categories: Before and Now. This chronotope, or metahistorical model/story, represents, perhaps, the archetypal form of what Bakhtin calls the epical style of representing the past. This style is the temporal counterpart of the linear style of representing culture, which maps internally coherent but clearly demarcated “cultures” onto geographical spaces and groups of individuals. The epical style intrudes a barrier—an epic distance—between the past and the present and posits that only a powerful arbiter such as the state can cross that border to secure meaningfulness and legitimacy. The time line of the Mexican and Mazatec pasts offers many possible points for the historian to split time in half, like an earthworm, into Before and Now segments that crawl off into separate, organic, and nonoverlapping segments. Here is a list of a few possible points of division: • The Spanish Conquest of the early sixteenth century and the attendant population loss and conversion to Christianity • The introduction of coffee in the late nineteenth century • The Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920 • The gradual emergence of a cash economy in the twentieth century • The arrival of schools in the 1920s • The arrival of i n i in 1951 74

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• • • •

Wasson’s arrival in 1954 The building of the roads, beginning in the 1950s The arrival of the political parties in the 1960s and 1970s María Sabina’s rise to international fame and the arrival of the hippies in the 1960s

As we shall see later in this chapter, commentators in or about the Sierra Mazateca invoke nearly all of these historical events in their narratives about Before and Now. But the discourse of the missionaries, anthropologists, educators, and Mazatec intellectuals—the self-described agents of cultural change—ignores the historical events of the intermediate past (the revolution and the introduction of coffee) and focuses instead on two great periods of change: the conquest and another more vaguely specified period in the present or the recent past when the Sierra supposedly broke out of its long isolation and joined the rest of the world. The local intellectuals and bilingual schoolteachers who have attacked what they see as the state’s homogenizing project, as enacted in the activities of the above groups, and who hope to revalorize Mazatec culture, language, and history, also maintain the historical framework of their ideological opponents, treating the loss of political autonomy in 1521 and the feared loss of the Prehispanic cultural heritage in the current period as the only major loci of historical change. The hundreds of years of colonial experience and the nineteenth century are lost in this chronotope, in which the Prehispanic and the modern ages appear as the only historical eras. For example, Gutierre Tibón interviewed several Mazatec leaders and intellectuals in the 1950s as he researched the history of the region. In the section of his book on the “ancient past,” Tibón documented Huautla’s tribute payments to Tenochtitlán and conjectured about the movements of peoples during the Prehispanic period. “Tell me about the ancient history of Huautla,” he said to an informant. The man responded much as my informants would: “What I know, by having lived through it, is the history of the Revolution in the Sierra Mazateca; for ancient history is that of my grandfather, don Catarino García” (Tibón 1983:40). People know of the revolution from their parents or grandparents; immediately before that everything becomes “before,” “ancient,” even “Prehispanic”—the property of los viejos. One evening in the spring of 1994, I had the opportunity to participate in a discussion with Don Alfonso Terán, a former municipal president and leader of one of Huautla’s most powerful families. Don Alfonso spent much of the interview detailing the differences between the Huautla of From Indians to Hillbillies

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“before” and the town today. His account emphasizes the transition from fixed and clear values and customs to declining family values. Terán emphasized two aspects of the past in particular: the respect given to elders and the formality of wedding customs. Huautla of the past was simpler—“the use of reason was very humble”—but roles were well understood and elders “were majestic people. . . . For some they were like Gods. They were thunderous and what they have to say is what you have to do.” The change in romance and alliance is even more important for Terán, and he meticulously explained every detail of the old system, emphasizing the lack of choice for children, especially girls. As he discussed the “loss of respect” in modern times, his young daughter from his second marriage wriggled happily on his lap, occasionally stopping to scream with gleeful enthusiasm. “There was nothing of hugging or daughters talking to boys,” he said nostalgically. When asked when things changed, Terán specified a period in the 1950s when people such as himself began to leave for the cities. “Thirty years going back, still they followed the customs,” he said. “The customs were very pretty, man. I was living them and they were beautiful. But I left for the city and learned other things, not the custom of my parents.” Terán’s construction of the past repeats the clear division between before—a period of isolation, custom, and values—and after—a period of declining respect and unclear roles. Like other members of Huautla’s elite families, he describes this change as a loss of culture.

“ a very favorable base ” : the north american protestant missionaries of the 1930s and 1940s and contemporary evangelicals In the 1930s two North American women, Eunice V. Pike and Florence Cowan, became the first foreign Protestant missionaries to work seriously in the Sierra Mazateca. Both were trained by the Summer Institute of Linguistics/Wycliffe Bible Translators, and their primary goal was to learn the Mazatec language and develop a written script for it so that they could produce and distribute a Mazatec language New Testament to aid in the development of a Mazatec Christian community. The two women spent many years in Huautla and in the smaller community of Río Santiago, and were joined in later years by George Cowan, Florence’s husband. Pike’s brother, Kenneth, also worked as an sil missionary/linguist in Mexico, but he focused on the Mixtec language. Pike and Cowan also considered themselves to be anthropologists of a sort and published numerous short 76

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articles in América Indígena (Cowan 1946, 1952; E. Pike 1948) and Practical Anthropology (E. Pike 1960, 1962; E. Pike and Cowan 1959). Pike also published three volumes of memoirs for a popular churchgoing audience that stressed the themes of Christianity and travel writing (E. Pike 1956a, 1958, 1991). The strange and secretive history of the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Mexico has been thoroughly documented (Stoll 1982), but this might be an appropriate moment to review the highlights of this history before I describe the metacultural and historical views held and diffused by people affiliated with this institution. In the nineteenth century, many Mexican leaders, including longtime dictator Porfirio Díaz (president, 1874–1910), began to believe that much of Mexico’s backwardness could be linked to the population’s adherence to Catholicism. Díaz and the científicos (late-nineteenth-century Mexican intellectuals who espoused an ideology of rationalism, capitalism, and progress) enthusiastically embraced the northern European model of economic and cultural development and attempted to import as many traits as possible from the north while stamping out remnants of the backward indigenous and southern European past. Díaz decreed that all Mexican towns should build covered bandstands in their central plazas because he had seen them in the United States. He imported experts who, equating corn with economic and cultural stagnation because it was an Indian crop, encouraged foreign investment. His administration also encouraged foreign missionaries to come to Mexico, since he hoped that conversion might create a “Protestant work ethic” and a more suitable (and less Indian) workforce for a modern nation. Nothing much came out of this first wave of Protestant missionizing in Mexico, although Protestant ideas were linked to some of the radical Liberal intellectuals, such as Madero, who succeeded in toppling Díaz in 1910 (Burnett 1992). In the 1930s, the leadership of the Mexican state once again turned to foreign missionaries to help them out in rural areas. Despite the efforts of early postrevolutionary zealots, who established “mission schools” in Indian areas to teach literacy and revolutionary and nationalist values, the new state was only slowly and with great difficulty establishing itself in remote regions like the Sierra Mazateca (Knight 1988). Cameron Townsend, the charismatic leader of the sil / w bt , took advantage of this situation to arrange a deal with President Cárdenas, who apparently became a good friend as well. “Our project fell into their scheme perfectly,” a proud Townsend told his flock (Stoll 1982:68). The sil was allowed—even encouraged—to translate and preach in Indian areas. From Indians to Hillbillies

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In exchange for this license, they would provide the government with information about the Indian population and its languages, and the sil linguists would undertake to teach Spanish to the Indians as well as exert a more subtle, modernizing influence. Townsend proved his value to Cárdenas in 1938 when he lobbied intensely against any American reaction to the Mexican president’s bold nationalization of the oil industry (Stoll 1982). The SIL thus presented itself differently to its various audiences. To the Mexican state, the men and women of this organization were primarily scientists and educators. To their American backers, who were uninterested in the spread of the state into the hearts and minds of Mexican Indians, they were the ambassadors of the Kingdom of God, bringing more heathen souls into the blessed realm of Heaven. And while it is not known if many missionaries felt that these conflicting representations formed any real contradiction, it is certain that they never made any real effort to fulfill their part of the deal by teaching the Indians Spanish. sil Spanish textbooks were woefully superficial and disorganized, and served only to inculcate the message that “the only true knowledge comes from books, and the only person with the authority to teach ‘the truth’ is the schoolteacher” (King 1994:120). In the communities where they worked, the missionary-linguists also had to juggle their identities according to their situations. Pike and Cowan began by stressing their role as linguists and providers of medicine, and only gradually and subtly began to talk more about Christianity as they began to accumulate completed Mazatec translations of tracts and Bible chapters, which they would give to women who came for medicine. Today they are remembered more for their remarkable fluency in Mazatec and for their medicines than for their missionary activities, which were only moderately successful. Older (very traditional Catholic) women who describe themselves as friends of “Victoria” (Pike’s name in Huautla) remember Pike as a kind and generous woman, “not the abusive type of Protestant missionary,” in contrast to a Pentecostal group that was run out of town under a barrage of stones, sticks, and thrown chairs in 1993. Some, however, remember how Victoria would “pull people to her,” the phrase used to describe the activity that characterizes powerful and ambitious people, and two men criticized the sil for gathering a lot of information and removing it from the community, so that nobody knows what it was that they were constantly scribbling, and nobody else can profit from it. This criticism has been applied to the sil in other towns in Oaxaca as well (Stephen 1989; Stoll 1982). 78

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In the 1970s, new criticisms of missionary activities and policies in Mexico, many of them voiced by Mexican anthropologists, began to emerge. Many critics accused the sil of being an imperialist organization affiliated with the ci a , or at least engaged in ethnocide. The government of that period, which used a xenophobic, anti–United States rhetoric in an effort to co-opt leftist opponents, understood that foreign missionaries made convenient scapegoats, and the visas of sil linguists were denied after 1979. In their construction of the place of Mazatec-speaking Indians in history, the sil missionaries were deeply engaged with the discourses of indigenismo. Cowan’s 1946 article, published in América Indígena, was a Spanish-language ethnographic sketch of the “Mazatec tribe” (Cowan 1946). She describes various “customs which reveal the primitive witchcraft hidden underneath their other religious ceremonies,” although she suggests that many songs, legends, and other aspects of Prehispanic culture have vanished, leaving only the “simple facts” (Cowan 1946:27, 33). She concludes that the surviving Mazatec culture is of such a high grade that its people are surely good candidates for inclusion in the Mexican nation: We see that the Mazatec tribe is progressing and at the same time conserving part of their own culture; this culture is so advanced in comparison with that of the poorer Indians of other groups that it is itself a very favorable base upon which a still more elevated social structure can be built, so that they can be truly included with the Castellanized population of the republic. (Cowan 1946: 39)

Cowan seems to be writing tactically, putting herself squarely in the niche that Cameron Townsend had carved for the sil in Mexico. Stoll describes Townsend’s sales pitch as follows: “First teach Indians to read and write in their own languages, Townsend advised (thus creating a public for his translated Bibles); then the Indians could make an easy transition to Spanish in the classroom” (Stoll 1982:68–69). Cowan argues for the suitability of this program in the Sierra Mazateca. She also acknowledges the high level of development of the Mazatec culture. But this high level is described as an ability to preserve—“Having advanced so far in developing and preserving their own culture, the Mazatecos ought to be inculcated into the Spanish culture of the Republic of Mexico with ease, once they are afforded the necessary resources and instilled with the necessary confidence” (Cowan 1946:27). What makes From Indians to Hillbillies

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this group special in her account is the fact that they did not (or not as much as other Indians) lapse into a culture-less hillbilly stage. They maintained a culture, and were now ready to receive a better one, if only it could be made available to them openly, honestly, and without racism. The confidence of which Cowan speaks can be instilled through Protestant religious instruction that teaches the equality of all men. Mazatec leaders of the mid-twentieth century seem to have adopted a discourse about progress, identity, and history that is similar to Cowan’s. Don José Guadalupe, the federal deputy who represented the Sierra Mazateca in the 1950s, believed that progress and fusion with modern Mexico were inevitable and advantageous, but that the Mazatec region, due to the relatively advanced culture of its natives, had already anticipated much of modernity. He told Gutierre Tibón that the traditions and languages of the area would disappear in a few generations (after the completion of the road in 1958) but that Mazatec civic values would contribute to modernization. He claimed that the Mazatec people were political “precursors,” as they had had women’s suffrage for forty years. “We modernize ourselves very rapidly,” he said. “We are spiritually prepared for it. I only hope that the Mazatec group, that has conserved until these days many of the best qualities, physical and moral, of the ancient man of America, gives to Mexico a dignified contribution from her past” (Tibón 1983:48). The very isolation that, in this reading of history, kept the Mazatecs so far away from modernization, gave them the most trouble-free path into national integration. That is because this integration, in its purest version, should be between a pure “Prehispanic” civilization and a modern mestizo world. Integration did not work as well with cultures that had degenerated into the swamps of hillbillyness because of either an insufficient Prehispanic grounding or partial, improperly supervised contacts with the outside. The Mazatec leaders of this period did not invert the dominant cultural hierarchy, which ran from mestizos at the top to degenerate Indians at the bottom; rather, they incorporated themselves into it at a relatively high position as “pure Indians.” Don José saw that many Mazatec customs had to disappear as part of integration, but he believed that the advantages outweighed the losses. His greatest fear was that the replacement of the old would be incomplete, leaving his people with inauthentic, non-modern, hillbilly traits. For example, polygamy “will also disappear,” he said, “or will take the form, that I abhor, of the ‘casa chica.’ This does not deal with customs, but with bad customs” (Tibón 1983:51).8 80

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Pike’s published anthropological writings are greater in number than her partner’s. Her article for América Indígena is a dry description of the Mazatec wedding ceremony (the famous washing of the heads) (E. Pike 1948). Her articles for Practical Anthropology, on the other hand, relate how various aspects of Mazatec culture affected her primary task—teaching them the Bible and Christianity (E. Pike 1960, 1962; E. Pike and Cowan 1959). While Cowan, writing for a Mexican audience, stressed how the culture from the Mazatec past had made the people particularly suitable subjects for progress (incorporation into the “Spanish culture” of the Mexican State), Pike took a “pragmatic” approach to the existing Mazatec culture: elements that did not interfere with the inculcation of Christianity could stay; the rest had to go. The development of this approach to local culture was a major theme in the pages of Practical Anthropology. Missionaries, anthropologists, and linguists were urged in these pages to separate specific North American, Mexican, and indigenous values from the “essential supercultural values of Christianity” (Wonderley and Nida 1963:242). When indigenous values did not contradict this message, the missionary’s proper task was to prop up the prestige and worth of the indigenous culture, since only as equally valued, self-respecting Indians could indigenous Mexicans successfully enter the national culture (Winter 1962). Missionaries encouraged meetings between evangelical Indians from different language groups, such as the First Evangelical Indian Congress at Lake Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, in 1962, which they hoped would help forge a new pan-Indian identity, giving individual Mexican Indians a greater sense of power and self-worth than was possible through identification with a small language group or a home village. Ralph Winter, who attended and helped to organize this congress, believed that pan-Indian unity could be achieved through the cultivation of three traits that all Indians would share: a common language (Spanish), a common body of music (Christian hymns), and a shared interest in the Bible and Christian practices (Winter 1962). The pr i backed the sil , encouraging the acculturation of Indians, but the goal of their policies was for the Indians to enter the national culture as peons, so the Mexican state did not support congresses like the one at Michoacán. In fact, in the 1970s, nationalist critics would use events such as these to demonstrate how foreign agents, posing as missionaries, were organizing the Indians to subvert national sovereignty. Still, it is interesting (and perhaps ironic) to witness the similarities between the view of the past and future of Indian cultures articulated From Indians to Hillbillies

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by the sil and men like Winter, on the one hand, and the view of later pan-Indian activists, many of whom campaigned against the sil , on the other. Winter, like his indigenista contemporaries, believed that the essentially “Prehispanic” societies of indigenous Mexico had decayed, were still decaying, and were in danger of further uncontrollable decay; decisive action needed to be taken. He used the specter of the hillbilly to demonstrate the special danger of the current period, writing that “as progressive individuals desert their culture, perhaps to become bums in the cities, their less progressive brethren are even more likely to stagnate into ‘hillbillies’ who do little to reflect the genuinely vital elements of the older aboriginal culture” (Winter 1962:86). Echoing Villa Rojas, this view of history describes a period of agency, a period of decay into an increasingly culture-less, passive, hillbilly stage, and then an opportunity to reconnect Indians with “culture” and agency in the modern world. For Villa Rojas, this opportunity consisted of development and acculturation. For Winter, it involved the construction of a new, modern pan-Indian identity based on Christianity and those ancient traits which are consistent with it, led by Christian Indian intellectuals. For the ethnic nationalists and native intellectuals of the 1980s and 1990s, this opportunity to rise out of stagnation came through (1) the emergence of a new pan-Indian culture based on the revalorization of native languages and (2) the leadership of a new intellectual class whose expertise lay in reframing tokens of traditional culture as both icons of identity and as signs of an expertise conventionally understood by the dominant culture through its own categories—art, literature, photography, and scholarly activity. Pike’s memoirs, unlike the articles by her partner, do not emphasize the value of Mazatec culture as an asset in the process of modernization. Three themes emerge most readily from these books written for an American, Christian audience: isolation, the childishness of the Mazatecs, and the characterization of traditional culture as an obstacle to progress and Christianization. Pike often stresses her isolation and distance from civilization. This is understandable, considering the long trip on foot and by burro that was required in order to reach Huautla from Teotitlán in those days. Phrases like “so far from . . .” continually crop up—and the title of her first book, Not Alone, itself refers to a sense of isolation among a distant tribe. That isolation is denied by the title—not by reference to the Mazatecos who became Pike’s friends, but because of the uniform presence of Pike’s God, who follows her wherever she goes. The great sense of remoteness and iso82

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lation from Castellanized Mexico dominates her books, despite repeated references to the Huauteco Spanish-speaking comerciantes who lived in the center of town and seemed, from her description, very much a part of the national culture. Pike’s descriptions evoke a sense of the Mazatecs as a people not yet born, or at least not yet in adulthood, because of her constant references to children. In the first book, it seems that most of Pike’s contacts were with children, and adults are represented with childish traits, such as an innocent obsession with technology that treated all technological artifacts as toys. This focus on children complements the focus on isolation to support a view of history in which the people of the Sierra are outside—not yet participants, inhabitants of an ahistorical zone. And although Pike arrived in the Sierra in the 1930s, she never mentions the historical events of what was then the recent past—the revolution and the tumultuous, assassination-filled twenties. She admits that there was violence, which locals attributed to “politics,” but can offer no further description. “ ‘Yes, it is true that people have been killed over there,’ someone told her, ‘but nobody would kill you, you are not in politics.’ Politics, I had never been able to figure out what that word meant, it seemed to include everything from the business of a mayor to the ownership of property” (E. Pike 1958: 19). In this hidden world of children, history does not exist, and the presence of politics is problematic, anachronistic perhaps even to the point of being ironic, and difficult to understand. By representing contemporary Mexican Indians as children, Pike’s memoirs, like indigenista school textbooks and the National Geographic, describe beings without agency who must be carefully nurtured by their proper guardians: the Mexican state and mestizo society for the textbooks, the international Christian community for the missionaries. Finally, Pike repeatedly stresses the function played by traditional culture as an obstacle to progress. The funerals and weddings that constitute most of Mazatec social life were the “social engagements that turned aside so many other Mazatecs” and the celebration of the Day of the Dead led Pike to mourn the “heart-rending futility” of trying to help loved ones with candles instead of Jesus: “These poor people were substituting a feeble candle for the glorious promise of God” (E. Pike 1958:12, 36). Only through conversion to Christianity could these people move ahead from crime, ignorance, witchcraft, and drunkenness to a progressive life characterized by “honest work” (E. Pike 1958:51). The Catholic Colombiano and Josefino reformers of the 1960s and 1970s followed Pike’s line more than Cowan’s, constructing a Before/ From Indians to Hillbillies

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Now dichotomy that they summed up with the phrase “Before there was darkness, Now comes the light” (Boege 1988:260–261). As for Villa Rojas and Pike, the stated goal of these Catholic missionaries was to bring Indians from the localized and homogeneous “Before,” characterized by custom, domination by Nature, and fear of culture-bound witches, to the national and universal “Now,” characterized by reason, civilization, and universal priests. The Mazatec-language hymnals distributed by these Catholic reformers are overtly paternalistic, including a long poem “to the Mazatec people” that describes them as children. Today, a sizeable minority of residents of the Sierra Mazateca have responded to the efforts of the Protestant missionaries and converted to evangelical Protestantism. Protestants have often been described as agents of hegemonic incorporation into the national community who rob Indians of their cultural heritage and group identity, replacing these with values more amenable to capitalism (Annis 1987; Boege 1988). Boege argues that in the Sierra Mazateca, as elsewhere, “the sects deprive ethnic groups of the consciousness of their own history and the ability to compete as a group, and in this sense the sects are an apparatus of hegemony” (Boege 1988:285).9 According to this view, the sects deny the unity with nature that some critics view as the basis of a Mazatec identity, separating work from nature, and are oriented toward a money economy rather than reciprocal obligations. The Protestants work to save, and do not reinvest their money in reciprocal relations by drinking or participating in fiestas or politics. The rhetoric of some evangelical converts seems to support this narrative about Protestantism. I spoke with “Carlos,” a leader of a wealthy family in a lowland village, during the process of his conversion. He told me that alcoholism was his community’s greatest problem, and he felt a duty to help out his community by feeding and clothing the children of alcoholics. He criticized the hypocrisy of Catholic priests, who worship idols, believe that Heaven can be bought, admire the legs of women in church, and commit adultery. He denied the importance of ethnic difference—asserting that “on Judgment Day it will not be rich here, poor there, whites here, dark-skinned people there. Everyone will be mixed.” He also expressed his belief in the value of making money and criticized the economic habits of the people of the village. “The trouble with people here,” he said, “is that they don’t want to gain. They are afraid to try. They just grow crops to survive.” Carlos describes campesinos in terms of what Gudeman and Rivera (1990:131) call the folk or house model of economics: they sell to buy rather than buying to sell. Carlos did not agree 84

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with the philosophy of a group of non-mainstream Protestant mendicants who passed through town preaching the value of poverty. These Mexican missionaries eat no meat or eggs, only beans and tortillas. They walk barefoot, dress in rags, and grow their hair down to their shoulders, imitating the life of Christ. In this village they were treated well and respected, but “you need to eat meat to be strong” (Carlos fed me dried beef, patting his round belly above his unbuttoned trousers, telling me that nobody in the village eats meat, but he eats it every day). “You have to wear clothes. What if you have a job in an office, and you come dressed in rags. You can’t do it,” said Carlos. For Carlos, his new evangelical faith created a spiritual conflict, since he made most of his money through his monopoly of the production and distribution of aguardiente in the area. Although he no longer drank hard liquor, only a little beer, he was still proud of his little factory. He gave me a tour, showed me how the liquor was made, and insisted that I sample all of the different varieties of his product. This pride was tempered by guilt—“liquor is the greatest problem facing this community. I know that if I died right now I would go to Hell.” At the same time, he felt an obligation, encouraged by his version of religion, to work as hard as he could to accumulate money in order to accumulate more. He produced seventy liters daily and each liter sold for 5,000 pesos, for a total daily income of 350,000 (at that time about $117). It was a gut-wrenching decision, but aided by a vision of historic change and inevitability. “The factory would not be the same in a few years, anyway.” There will be inspectors and taxes and paperwork and progress, and he wouldn’t be able to make as much money. I have since heard that Carlos completed his conversion and no longer produces or sells aguardiente. While he was feeding me liquor, Carlos told me another story, expressing his ambivalent feelings about the bloody factional feuds that have characterized his village’s history, and which he would now, in his conversion, place behind him in the realm of backwardness. His father, the man who built his house, was killed when Carlos was two years old. His father had a lot of money, Carlos said, and the killers were motivated by envy. When Carlos was twenty-one or twenty-two, he said (he was now thirty-two), he tracked down the people who had murdered his father and suggested that he had achieved substantial revenge. It was a strong thing that he did, but also terrible. Una cosa bruta. But it was also a deed that he preferred to leave behind in his old life; he felt no pride or satisfaction about this unpleasant matter. For Carlos, then, conversion to Protestantism was part of a proFrom Indians to Hillbillies

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cess that corresponded with the way he framed his politics and that of his brother, the municipal president. The family supported progress against backwardness and ignorance, believing that the moral reforms of Protestantism were the community’s best defense against the swamp of hillbilly depravity: drunkenness, subsistence agriculture, and bloody factional feuds. But conversion does not mean an abandonment of a sense of ethnicity. Instead, Carlos seems to have achieved the same sense of ethnicity as other, non-Protestant leaders and intellectuals in the Sierra Mazateca, the same people who view Protestants as a threat to that ethnicity and view converts as ignorant dupes of predatory outsiders. Carlos shares these experts’ distanced overview, “ethnic” language, and preference for the “pure code” over the inauthentic “power code” of the past;10 he enjoyed being a spokesman for “we the Mazatecos.” It would be a bad thing, he said, for the Mazatec language to disappear, just as it is a bad thing when Spanish words enter into and mix with Mazatec, as in the use of Spanish numbers in Mazatec speech. Ethnicity is an explicitly described thing that inheres in particular customs as traits such as a language. It is possessed in greater amounts by leaders, experts, and other culture brokers who are capable of distinguishing the authentic from the spurious and who bear some responsibility for educating the hillbilly masses. Carlos describes these hillbillies as the alcoholic dupes of liquor dealers and hypocritical, lecherous priests; for the other experts the evangelist converts are hillbilly dupes of fast-talking foreign missionaries who are too ignorant of their own culture to defend themselves. For Carlos, Protestantism is not a thing that comes into the mountains from outside; it brings no contradiction with a linearly imagined Mazatec identity. Other stories about Protestant conversion, told by non-Protestant Huauteco intellectuals, blame this phenomenon on ignorance. The backward campesinos, too ignorant of their own culture to understand when slick-talking outsiders are fooling them, are lured into believing that riches will come to them if they convert. One woman who runs a tiny store in Huautla’s upper barrio was not deceived. “They say that the world will end, and that the tigers and snakes will be tame. That’s stupid,” she says. “How can tigers be tame and harmless? That doesn’t make any sense,” she says. And besides, she sells beer and aguardiente in her store, and if she converted she would have to stop. So it would be a stupid decision for her, she said. In Jalapa de Díaz, a large town on the western edge of the Mazatec lowlands with a very large Protestant population (as much as 60 percent), 86

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I was told that conflict over religion, and not conversion, was a symptom of a lack of culture. An old man (who had once been cured of a hernia by María Sabina) told me that there are many religions there, but they are really the same. He was Catholic, but still friendly with the sil evangelistas, he said. The only difference between them was that they have one God and the Catholics have many. He said that people fight over politics and religion because “they don’t know anything; they have no culture.” “It’s you over here, us over there. ¡Vámanos!” he said. “Like an animal without culture,” he said. “The religions are all the same.” The experts’ condemnation of ignorance as the cause of conversion differs from another version, in which missionaries are mysterious figures like the Earth Lords, who provide magical and illegitimate wealth. Some people are said to have become prosperous because of the help received from missionaries, who possess helicopters, medicines, and unlimited resources. Rather than simply reflecting a transition to more “modern” values or the imposition of a dominant or hegemonic culture, the discourse surrounding Protestant conversion provides an arena for the elaboration of the themes of progress, hillbilly ignorance, magical wealth, cultural capital, and deception that characterize Mazatec metacultural talk.

mazatec intellectuals: rescuing the past Outsiders like North American anthropologists and missionaries are not the only ones who talk at length about the meaning of “before” Mazatec culture and history. In Oaxaca, as in Chiapas, Guatemala, and throughout Latin America, “insiders” are increasingly taking back the authoritative role of the “expert” from those who would classify, discuss, and interpret them without their participation. In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, indigenous schoolteachers and other intellectuals called for Indians to take responsibility for their own education and representation, instead of being educated and represented by outsiders and agents of the state, in order to revalorize their culture, strengthen their identity, increase political participation, and thus work to bring their oppression to an end. Kay Warren (writing about Guatemala) has pointed out the perhaps ironic development that “North American anthropology is exploring social constructionist perspectives on ethnicity at the very moment Mayas have rediscovered essentialism” (1992:209). For Warren, this “strategic essentialism” can be a powerful tool for Mayas because it rejects the From Indians to Hillbillies

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white definition of Indians as a weaker and inferior other. The authenticity of these leaders is not undercut simply because they use many of the same techniques as “outsiders” to describe their culture, but their rhetoric must be viewed in the proper perspective. Instead of seeing these local intellectuals solely as the representatives of a group, we could view the ways in which they engage and participate in the dominant metacultural discourses, recognizing that insider anthropologists and organic intellectuals do not unproblematically represent a “native’s” perspective. Like “isolation,” the “insider” and “native” are tropes that are deployed along global flows of travel, trade, media, and migration. In the Sierra Mazateca, these tropes are deployed as part of a metacultural discourse that, while it valorizes an often disparaged culture, also excludes and criticizes most of its objects—the people of the Sierra Mazateca—for their ignorance and lack of culture. People affiliated in some way or other with the Casa de la Cultura (a building near the town center, formerly a military barracks and prison, now dedicated to the promotion of “culture”)11 and the National Pedagogical Institute, including the bilingual teachers who take Professor Carrera’s course, tend to describe their activities and goals as “rescue.” Mauricio, an older bilingual teacher and administrator in Florencio’s course who described himself as “not a leftist,” explained that it was necessary to “conserve the culture, to rescue the culture so that people from outside cannot impose things on us.” The first director of the casa described her goal with the same terms: to rescue and conserve, and to spread the word of the casa’s existence. But what, specifically, is it that should be rescued? Mauricio seemed a little flustered when I asked him to elaborate, but answered in generalities: the culture, the tradition, the customs. The mestiza director gave more specific examples. The huipiles that people make now in Huautla are not the proper ones for Huautla, and they should be. The legends and such should be made into theatrical productions. And the language, of course, which she did not speak, should be rescued, although everyone must learn Spanish. A man from Cuauhtémoc, a village in the municipio of Chilchotla famous for its artists and musicians, taught theater at the casa. He said that he was not interested in Shakespeare and the like, but in producing and performing works about rescuing the local culture. He was working at the moment on a play about the ancient wedding ceremony, which he said had disappeared fifty to seventy years ago. He had more ideas about elements of past culture that could be described in the theatrical context: polygamy, the old straw roofs, the old clothes, and a twelve-string instru88

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ment that he claimed was the authentic vehicle for local music, although no one, not even the viejos, knew how to make or play it anymore. He admitted that he was having trouble finding an audience for his works, just as the director of the casa admitted that she was having difficulty in getting the population to pay attention to the casa. What are rescued, then—saved from danger, delivered—are tokens of old-fashioned domestic life, the stuff that attests to a specifically local, autochthonous way of life that was rooted in the soil and did not reflect any contact with the outside world. As in Chadds Ford, the postmodern Pennsylvania tourist site described by John Dorst, the idea of rescue creates “simulacra of an archaic economic, social, and moral order” (1989: 65). The idea of the Sierra Mazateca that this discourse produces is, again like Chadds Ford, characterized by a “mystifying dialectic of vagueness and specificity . . . an image that combines pre-industrial rural domestic economy, generalized agrarian rusticity and the abstract idea of tradition” (Dorst 1989:11–20). It is the idea of tradition and custom that must be rescued in Huautla, and not knowledge of any specific historical events. Just as an “eclectic historicism” was pushed aside by a “closely monitored authenticity” in Chadds Ford, so the rescued “tradition” of Huautla, in the most common versions, has no place for actual history (Dorst 1989: 92). Instead, the idea of tradition replaces chaotic personal representations of the past with the imposition from above of a single, unified representation of the idea of the past as a coherent, bounded place outside the real world—a place that can be represented on stage, a place whose portrayal requires the use of experts to verify its authenticity, a place whose essence is the depthless and generic evocation of the idea of depth, rootedness, and specificity. The representation of one’s attitude toward the culture of the past as “rescue” involves an active stance, but it also represents the rest of the culture as one in a state of passive decay. And representatives of the casa and the National Pedagogical University, as well as other intellectuals with similar interests, often represent the Mazatec people, as a group, as a people without a culture: hillbillies. Mauricio explained that “we, as people, are necios [stupid, ignorant, foolish, stubborn]. We don’t want to study, we don’t want to learn, we don’t want the culture, we don’t want to listen to the government. But we have to go to school if we want to advance.” This is a fairly typical lament: “We don’t want to know about our culture.” One bilingual schoolteacher who was once active in promoting cultural activities but no longer is, since she lacks the time and was frustrated by From Indians to Hillbillies

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the politics, talked about how the Mazatecs were too “egoist” to learn about their past and their culture. She would like to learn, herself, but like most people she was too wrapped up in the concerns of surviving and making a living to indulge herself in luxuries. A young Huauteco accountant with a newfound interest in discovering his cultural roots also expressed this view of the past as loss. He was engrossed in a book about María Sabina and told me how sad he was that this part of the culture was being lost because of the commercialization of the mushrooms. Moments later the conversation turned to the problem of envy, and he blamed this on the fact that the people around here “still lack a bit of culture.” “Rescue” transforms particular cultural elements of everyday life into a “tradition” that is preserved, and preservation, in this case, is a sort of performance. This performance divides the Sierra into two classes, the rooted audience, fixed in the allegedly autochthonous past, whose significance they cannot understand, and the mobile performing experts, who move between the sealed-off, uniform past and the present, just as the racing fan mentioned in Chapter 1 moves between “eating dirt” in Huautla and drinking cappuccino in Oaxaca. This presentation of the past to the present receives much of its justification from the ideology of “walking in two worlds,” although I have not heard these exact words used in Mexico.12 The past is uniform and coherent, as expressed through the idea of “before,” and it is isolated completely from the outside world. For Florencio Carrera, the Mazatecs of the past lived in a deeply spiritual and symbolic world, an “eastern” way of thinking rather than the “Western” way that intruded in 1521. Like the anthropologists Boege and Bonfil Batalla, he says that life and culture were based on the production of corn; this fostered a communal system involving reciprocity completely unlike the Western system of capitalism. But this past has vanished, except in the more remote communities, and knowledge of it has been taken away to locked, foreign libraries. And, although the specific nature of the past Mazatec ethnic group is described in a way that could apply to any Mexican Indians, Florencio makes clear distinctions between ethnic groups. The Mixtec-speaking inhabitants of San Juan Coatzaspán, for example, are represented as other, as descendants of Prehispanic conquerors who were driven out of the Sierra everywhere except that one remote place. Actually, Carrera represents the Mixtecs of San Juan as the most extreme example of degradation; they don’t have different customs and traditions; they lack customs and traditions altogether. All they have is their language. 90

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Local intellectuals, a particular type of intermediary, represent the past according to the conventionalized linear style of representation as a bounded whole separated from the world of the present. This past can be rescued by experts, who thus assert their privileged status as travelers between worlds. It consists, for the most part, of a generic, ahistorical idea of historical depth and specificity—“tradition” or “custom”—that is occasionally concretized into specific tokens of an archaic way of life centered on domestic production, tokens of an autochthonous world with no visible contact with the outside world of mestizos and capitalism. This focus on domestic production can be seen in cultural representations produced in 1996 and 1997 by the Casa de la Cultura. In both years, Renato García Dorantes, the director of the casa, put together and sold a calendar called the “Agricultural, Ritual, and Festival Calendar of the Mazatecs” (García Dorantes 1996). The calendar is printed in Spanish and Mazatec, although the book that accompanies it is in Spanish. The photographs that appear in the calendar create a space that can be inhabited by a simulation of a Mazatec World that can be entered into, displayed, bought, and sold. In the 1996 calendar, nine of the twelve photographs show old, somber, craggy-faced men and women in traditional dress, many of them engaged in traditional activities. One depicts a young woman wearing a huipil. Another photograph shows the center of Huautla as it appeared fifty years ago. The final—actually the first—photograph shows a young smiling woman wearing a huipil and sitting on a mat. She is light skinned and does not look like a typical resident of the Sierra. In fact, I was told that she was an Argentine visitor and that Renato included this photograph because he liked her. The calendar demonstrates the way in which the Mazatec culture is linked to the past, with images—photographs of old people—that index antiquity. At the same time, the calendar uses this represented culture to create the idea of a young and vigorous, linearly represented culture through its participation in the representing medium of photography. And the January photo of the young Argentine demonstrates the way status can be accrued through the circulation of tokens of the simulated Mazatec culture—the huipil as well as the calendar—as commodities to be consumed by an international consumer class. Huautla’s most expensive hotel, the Rinconcito, which occupies prime real estate above the bank in the central square, also demonstrates this presentation of authentic Mazatec culture. A snack stand owned by the hotel is decorated by a painting of “the authentic Mazatec woman” near another depiction of Huautla in 1968. The hotel sells souvenir postcards— From Indians to Hillbillies

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one shows a man “cleaning coffee” in front of a traditional-appearing thatched roof house. The depicting culture signifies its own participation in progressive modernity by representing itself as static, traditional, and authentic to a intended audience of mobile, modern tourists. This depiction takes place in front of a living, current cultural manifestation—the Huautla market—that is excluded from meaningful participation. The construction of elite status through the process of “rescuing” an image of the past embodied through images of autochthonous selfsufficiency can also be seen in another one of García Dorantes’ projects. On a rancho outside Huautla, he has constructed a model of a traditional Mazatec house. This model, which functions as a museum, is filled with authentic pieces of furniture that represent a traditional and essentially Mazatec way of life, which Renato can explain to outsiders, down to the spider webs in each of the four corners, which must never be knocked down. Next to the model house, Renato is growing a garden of plants that are used for traditional curing and cooking. At the main house of the rancho, which is quite modern and decorated with political posters, Renato hopes to host groups of outsiders—not run-of-the-mill tourists or mushroom seekers, but serious scholars who can use Renato’s property for academic conferences and seminars focusing on Mazatec culture. García Dorantes, who is an intelligent and reflective autodidact with a genuine love for his vision of Mazatec culture and history, has effectively museumized that culture, creating a closed-off object that can then participate in sophisticated intercultural exchanges. The calendar can be contrasted with a cultural magazine called La Faena: La Herencia Cultural de los Mazatecos, which Juan García Carrera began publishing in 2000. The magazine contains articles, interviews, poetry, and accounts of various Mazatec legends and stories. While many of the stories take place in a “before” period, and several articles promote the importance of the Mazatec cultural heritage by ref3.2 “The Authentic Mazatec Woman.” A sign in front of the Hotel Rinconcito in the center of Huautla, 2001. Photo by Katie Fisher. 92

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erencing outside experts, the magazine, as a whole, does not locate the Mazatec cultural heritage in a timeless past. The photographs show men and women of all ages, not dressed in traditional clothing, but actively working as beekeepers, bakers, and shamans. And the history described in interviews and articles does not uniformly refer to the mysterious “before,” but includes events such as the arrival of the first bakers in Huautla in the 1930s and the election of the first female municipal president in San Juan Coatzaspán. With the publication of this magazine, a much greater public space has been opened for the elaboration of Mazatec cultural identity. However, the only place where I have seen this magazine sold is at the expensive hotel in the center of town. It is not clear that much of a domestic audience exists for this sort of cultural elaboration.

unfrozen aztec schoolteacher? When I ask Huautecos how their town survives now that the price of coffee has collapsed, they invariably respond that it survives through the business of education. Virtually all of the schoolteachers in the Sierra are Huautecos, and most Huauteco families include at least one practitioner of this profession. The teachers’ incomes circulate, and their lump-sum pensions provide the basis for investment in local businesses. If the “postmodern condition” can be characterized in part by the transition from an economy based on the circulation of profitable things to one based on circulation of profitable information (Harvey 1989), then Huautla is not lagging behind. As one ex-i nm ec a f e worker who settled in Huautla told me: “Huautla lived on coffee. Now it lives on teachers.” The schoolteachers, like the indigenistas, tend to use the conquest as the event that separates Before and Now. When they talk about history, they talk about the Prehispanic period, or else they talk about a specific set of practices—”the customs”—that characterize the postconquest survival of this Prehispanic world through the agency of “culture.” And although many (but not all) of these educators view their efforts at ethnic valorization as opposed to forces and policies of acculturation typified by mainstream education, missionary activity, and some indigenista programs, their use of history parallels that of Villa Rojas, Pike, the Josefinos, and the sep because it represents today’s Mazatecos as occupying a cultureless, ahistorical, passive childhood or hillbilly stage; they themselves are the actors who must overcome inertia to force these hillbillies to reclaim their faded glory. From Indians to Hillbillies

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Huautla was once a town of traveling merchants, the commercial center of the Sierra Mazateca, a place where goods and ideas from the ranchos, comunidades, pueblos, highlands, lowlands, and cities mingled together. To some extent, it still is. But that role is far less important than it once was now that inhabitants of the remotest areas can access these goods much more easily. Today, Huautla is less a center of commerce than a center of education, an exporter of teachers. Bilingual bicultural education (bbe ) replaced Castellanization as the official model used by the Secretariat of Public Education (sep ) in 1978 (Guzmán Gómez 1986). Nearly all of the bilingual teachers who work in the primary and secondary schools throughout the highlands are Huautecos. Their homes are in Huautla, but their jobs are off in the “communities.” If they work nearby, in Chilchotla or San Miguel or Loma de Chapultepec, for example, they commute (on foot or in a pickup taxi) for up to an hour and a half each morning and evening. If their jobs take them still farther, to Ayautla or San Juan Coatzaspán or San Lucas, they live in teachers’ quarters attached to the schools in these villages, returning home for the weekends. Every Friday evening, some male bilingual teachers, usually different ones each week, would gather to taquear y tomar (eat tacos and drink beer) at a taquería near my room. When they saw a gringo at another table, they would often take advantage of the opportunity to join him, talk a while, explain their worldviews, and represent themselves as the proud spokesmen of their glorious if downtrodden race. Sometimes this representation would carry them away into heights of oratory that annoyed the humble proprietor, and he would shake his head or even intervene. Later, he sometimes apologized to me for the out-of-control behavior of these particular clients. “This is not a cantina,” he screeched. “This is a taquería.” And he pounded his fist into the table. Huauteco schoolteacher metacultural and historical discourse is far from uniform. Even the need for bilingual education is not accepted by all within the community.13 Some parents insist that only Spanish should be taught to their children, since that is the only language that will be of use to them. Some teachers agree and insist that teaching in Mazatec in the schools, and especially stressing the importance of Mazatec and teaching it as a written language, will severely hamper the ability of children to succeed in Mexico City and Puebla, where all that will matter is their level of fluency in Spanish and their acquisition of work skills and the techniques of self-presentation that mean so much in the urban world. Teachers and parents who argue this line are opposed to the intellectuals, especially Juan Casimiro Naba and Florencio Carrera, who preach the 94

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merits of learning to write in Mazatec. They often accuse the bilingual schoolteachers of being drunks or worse: some teachers, they claim, are illiterate themselves and don’t even know Spanish. Political differences also crosscut the teaching community. In Huautla, some teachers were affiliated with the pr i , others with the pps and the opposition wing of the teachers’ union. The battles between these groups have turned ugly several times in the last twenty-five years or so. At one point the large secondary school in the center was divided in two, the green-painted Ricardo Flores Magón staffed by Pepesistas, and the blue Benito Juárez run by loyal Priistas. This particular conflict has calmed in recent years, and a non-Priista teacher at the Benito told me, doing her best Ronald Reagan imitation as she pointed out the two-story fence that separated the Benito from the Ricardo, that “one day soon this Berlin Wall will fall.” But school-centered controversy and conflict is continual in the Sierra, as municipal presidents, caciques, and others close schools, or try to, and campesinos protest school closings and corruption, and teachers fight each other. Sometimes teachers are killed, like the woman (the wife of my landlord) who was murdered in an agency in the municipio of San Lucas in the late 1980s, gunned down by teachers and thugs allied with the extremely pro-pr i faction of the official union, the “revolutionary vanguard,” because of her husband’s activities with the opposition caucus within the union.14 The teachers whom I encountered at the taquería were far more likely to assert ethnic labels than were other inhabitants of the Sierra. “We are indígenas,” one told me. “We are not Indians. Indians are people from India.” These teachers also use the word “Mazateco” fairly frequently. This is a word that is used very infrequently by campesinos. But teachers talk about “the Mazatecs” and refer to other language groups in Mexico as “tribes”—the Aztec tribe, the Mayo tribe, the Otomí tribe. They also frequently attach the before/now dichotomy to the Spanish Conquest rather than later events. Ignoring recent historical events like the revolution, they talk at length about the glories of Prehispanic Mexican society, particularly the architectural triumphs of the Aztecs and Mayas—the calendars and the great agricultural and astronomical knowledge of the ancients. The Mayan and Aztec development of astronomy, in particular, is used to show that the ancient indigenous cultures were the equals of the Europeans in matters of science and technical expertise. Several teachers have stressed to me the importance of remembering their own ethnic heritage, particularly the historical knowledge. This history, though, is almost always the generic national indigenous past—“Our From Indians to Hillbillies

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ancestors the Aztecs,” as one fellow at Aquí Me Quedo put it one night. Another teacher told me in her place of business that she was interested in learning about her past, but did not have the time. The past she mentioned was mostly the generic Prehispanic world of Tenochtitlán and Monte Albán (the great Aztec and Zapotec ruins). Many teachers, but not all, claim that the various ethnic groups of this period were not engaged in war against each other, and deny the usual assumption that the Aztec Empire was built by conquest and subjugation. “We had solidarity and unity, just as we do today. The United States now is like Spain was then, and we need to be united to defend ourselves.” On the one hand, these politically active schoolteachers stress the need to learn the specific history that pertains to them as members of a localized ethnic group. On the other hand, this specificity is generalized into the national indigenous heritage, represented by the most showy ancient peoples, the Aztecs and the Maya. So the history recalled by bilingual education teachers does not challenge the hegemonic construction of the indigenous role in Mexico’s history. Like the official chroniclers, they fit indigenous history into the Prehispanic past, where it becomes a national heritage, a unifying force, and ignore any indigenous character for the postrevolutionary period, which could potentially disrupt that national unity. But, like the earlier metacultural discourse of the missionaries and the indigenistas, the rhetoric of these teachers produces, almost as a side effect, the possibility of a new pan-Indian (not specifically Mazatec) identification. The cultivation of this Indian-ness can lead to a variety of political positions, including that of the Zapatistas. It can also lead individuals to a locally recognized position of power by situating themselves as cultural translators. One evening, two teachers were telling me about how foreigners are corrupting the Mazatecs and destroying their autochthonous culture. In particular, one said that the foreigners pollute the mushroom ceremony, treating the fungi as drugs. “To us they are not drugs. They are sacred,” they repeated. “Foreigners should not come here,” they said. Then they listed all the foreigners they have met and talked with. Obviously, these contacts gave them a great deal of pleasure. The representation of an autonomous ethnic group moving along its isolated path through history (like a nation-state) does not lead them to insist on any real isolation or separation from the insidious “foreigners” but instead to use this representation to accrue the cultural capital given to those who represent one group to another, as intermediaries. 96

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conclusion In conclusion, the sil workers in Huautla more or less aligned themselves with Villa Rojas and the indigenista view of history, which locates historical action in the Prehispanic past and the intervening period between the conquest and the present day as a time of trying to preserve, but tending to lose, the old culture, leaving today’s Mazatecs as a relatively cultureless group. Cowan argued that they possessed enough culture to make the transfer to a higher stage easy, whereas Pike tended to view the fragments of this culture as an obstacle to advancement to a higher stage, but both agreed that acculturation was necessary, and in this case required the spread of evangelical Christianity throughout the population. Each of these discourses uses linear reported culture, emphasizing the clear geographical and temporal borders between cultures and epochs, and seeing individual actions as reflections of bounded units such as “tradition” and “Christianity.” Locally, the discourse surrounding evangelical Christianity provides an arena for all sides to construct similar hierarchies based on the struggle between progress and ignorance—hierarchies that make temporal distinctions within the Mazatec population. Local intellectuals and schoolteachers also engage the dominant construction of history through their stress on a separate, autonomous Before that is identified with the Prehispanic world. Like “outsider” commentators, they tend to see contemporary Mazatecos as occupying a passive, intermediate stage that requires rescue—in this case not by the state or Christianity, but by a conscious effort to revivify and embrace the essential qualities of the distant past.

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4

“Like Rock, but Mazatec” fiestas in huautla

folklorization The spectacles of village and town fiestas, particularly celebrations of patron saints’ days and occasions like Holy Week, have long fascinated observers of rural Mexican life. The fiestas, which probably began in the late colonial period (De la Peña 1981), have been variously described as leveling mechanisms, in which the rich pay for everybody’s pleasure, or as a sort of consolidation of the wealth of the privileged—the occasion when material riches are converted into status and prestige. García Canclini, in his exhaustive study of fiestas and rural craft production in Tarascan villages in western Mexico, combines these two positions: “While it includes elements of collective solidarity, the fiesta displays those inequalities and differences that stop us from idealizing Indian ‘communities’” (García Canclini 1993:32). García Canclini also sees the fiesta as a sort of hybrid between locally and nationally/transnationally driven impulses; on the one hand, it is “a collective event . . . firmly rooted in production, celebrations set according to the rhythm of the agricultural cycle or the religious calendar, where the domestic unity of life and work is reproduced in the joint participation of the family” (García Canclini 1993:87). On the other hand, fiestas play a different role in their “re-functionalization” for the uses of capitalist development (and a consumer public that purchases crafts and images). From this perspective, the fiestas are the place where the dominant culture strives; they aim to impose their economic and cultural models on subordinate cultures and, at the same time, to appropriate that which they cannot destroy or bring

under control, using alien forms of production and thought once their function has been redesigned such that their survival does not stand in contradiction to capitalist growth. (García Canclini 1993:84)

This imposition robs fiestas of their roots in locality and particular economic and material conditions through the activation of the sign of the “typical.” García Canclini argues that Tarascans, Mazatecs, and Mayas depicted as Indians, squalor exhibited as picturesque, and beliefs that correspond to an alternative relationship with nature, illness, or the future that are seen as superstitions are all mechanisms to hide the true condition of those peasants who supply us with cheap vegetables, fruit, and crafts. (García Canclini 1993:66)

Fiestas develop folklorized communities as the place of a particular sort of past, a common heritage for all Mexicans instead of a unique celebration of a particular contemporary reality. This process of folklorization, or “folking over” (Keil 1978) is defined by Feld as a situation in which “dominating outside parties legitimate condensed, simplified, or commodified displays; invoke, promote and cherish them as official and authentic custom, while at the same time misunderstanding, ignoring, or suppressing the real creative forces and expressive meanings that animate them in the community” (Feld 1988:96). The problem with this definition, at least insofar as it relates to Mexican fiestas, is its phony counterpoint to the hegemonic promotion of ignorance: the “real” expressive meanings of the event or custom in question. Rather than distinguish between a bogus, “false” appropriation and an underlying “real” cultural meaning (a distinction that maintains, in the second category, the autonomous, closed-off “real” culture), I would prefer to distinguish between two different but interlocking metacultural styles. The first, “folklorizing,” style creates “culture” in the form of “customs” and “traditions” as the “heritage” or property of the wider society, as a space where authentic culture can be admired, bought and sold, and appropriated for various political uses. The second, pictorial style, uses these same events to enact and describe another version of the relationship between local and national worlds.

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different readings of huautla’s fiestas Like García Canclini, I see the fiestas as embodying a hybrid form of representation, the intersection between a hegemonic, folklorizing construction of the event and another construction more typically voiced by Huautecos. The first half of his hybrid model, the part depicting hegemonic uses of the fiesta, seems like an accurate analysis of part of the fiesta-related discourse in Huautla. This sort of discourse is evident during the Day of the Dead period (late October through November 3) as well as during the Holy Week festival in February or March. For example, one tourist who came to Huautla for the Holy Week fiesta told me that she brought her little family to Huautla instead of the beach for three reasons: to enjoy the fresh air, to meet people (“different people”), and to see the customs of Mexico. Our customs and traditions. For this woman, Huautla and the Sierra Mazateca are important elements of a chronotope that conflates geographical and historical space. It is the space of our past, the place where our “customs,” which are transmitted smoothly from the past in a manner which is uncluttered by irrelevant economic details, are preserved for “us,” the people of the real world, to visit. For some Mexican middle-class families, a vacation in Huautla fulfills the same functions that are satisfied, for the American middle class, by a few weeks at summer camp. It is a place where, through the presence of Others and liminal experiences, they learn to be truly “themselves.” American campers (see Tillery 1992) temporarily take on American Indian identities as they immerse themselves in forest skills, crafts, and lore, while their Mexican counterparts fuse themselves with actual existing Indians through participation in the fiesta and, often, the consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms with an Indian shaman. I appreciate and appropriate García Canclini’s assessment of this part of the representation of rural fiestas, but I do not accept his much briefer account of the fiesta’s other, more local meaning. Like Eckart Boege (1988) and Federico Neiburg (1988) (scholars who have published ethnographies of the Sierra Mazateca), he adeptly analyzes mimetic appropriations and transformations of “indigenous” or “local” culture but fails to observe any similar process that may be occurring at the level of this “local” discourse itself. Instead, these investigators reproduce the vision of a localized peasant culture, deeply rooted in production and the material processes of manipulating the environment—“beliefs that originate from their daily experience with nature,” the base that is used, distorted,

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and transformed by higher, more complex levels of the world capitalist system (García Canclini 1993:31).1 Of course, the fiestas that I observed in Huautla (Day of the Dead, Our Lord of the Three Falls, Holy Week) cannot be taken as typical, either for rural, indigenous Mexico as a whole or for the Sierra Mazateca. Huautla is a center, a commercial town of 20,000, and not a village dominated by campesinos. The Huautla Holy Week fiesta lasts over a week. To any casual observer, the most obvious change in the community is the massive increase in the size of the market. The central plaza is surrounded by new stalls where vendors sell hats, clothes, toys, pots, and pans. Unlike most of the vendors who come to town for Huautla’s regular Sunday market, these men and women are not from other parts of the Sierra. They are merchants based in the cities—mostly Puebla, Oaxaca, and Tehuacán— and they travel around the country, following the fiesta route. Most of them sleep in the interiors of their caravan-like portable market stalls. The small open field that lay near the house where I rented a room, close to a school, the town square, and several other houses but out of sight of the road, was surreptitiously used as a latrine. I had to use extreme caution (especially at night) to avoid stepping in one of the seemingly hundreds of exposed piles of shit. It was a pain, for me and for my neighbors. There are more events during the fiesta—church services, a traveling fair featuring rides and an unfortunate girl who was turned into a snake for disobeying her parents, performances by an orchestra and dancers performing Mexican folk dances, and the basketball tournament—but the throng of out-of-town comerciantes most obviously characterizes the event. So it is not surprising that an eleven-year-old girl who minded her mother’s tiny little store way up on the edge of Barrio El Fortín explained to me, when I asked, that the fiesta was “the time when people from the city came to sell. . . . They sell clothes, all kinds of things.” Her father, a truck driver, was out of work, and there were many kids in the family so her parents would not be buying any new clothes, she said. No, they would not be doing anything to celebrate the fiesta, she said. I also asked a restaurant owner in the center what happened during the fiesta of Semana Santa. She said it’s “the time when people come from all over, people who don’t live here and aren’t from here.” They come from Tehuacán, Veracruz, all over. “They come for diversion because everybody gets a holiday from work.” In 2001, still more people came to Huautla for the Day of the Dead in order to see the popular rock group Santa Sabina, who performed on the basketball court on the town square. Huauteco

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descriptions of this event, which I did not attend, all emphasized the throng of merchants who arrived, selling souvenirs to the audience. So, while the tourist sees the fiesta as a place and time to experience a particular “folkloric” space-time—the generically picturesque national past—the girl and the restaurant owner characterize the event as a particular form of interaction between the spheres of the local and the outside. This split, within a particular discourse—the fiesta—emerges through almost every similar event or discourse in the Sierra. Those areas that are represented, on the one hand, as essentialized instances of a “local” or “past” culture clearly distinguished from the actual contemporary culture of the rest of the country or world are also, on the other hand, represented by the supposed inhabitants of that “culture” as first and foremost spaces of interaction and interchange between the local and national/global spheres. Tourists, using the linear style of reporting culture, see Huautla as the privileged space of an idealized “everyday life” clearly separated by a hard border from everyday life. Locals, through a pictorial view of culture, stress the permeability of that border, as well as the agency involved in different methods of traveling back and forth across it.

walking identity: security obligations and tournaments Huautla’s town fiesta has presumably changed over the years, especially since the construction of the road to Teotitlán and the outside world. I would hesitate to call the influx of traders from the cities a new phenomenon, or simply a phenomenon of incorporation and acculturation. But the nature of the travel involved in fiestas, and the border that travel crosses, has changed. In the past, before the roads made most of the Sierra accessible to outsiders, the traders throughout the region were usually Huautecos who traveled on foot or burro along trails throughout the lowlands and highlands, all the way to the cities, or Mexicano-speaking men from the Sierra’s western slopes. In this period, fiestas were still moments of interaction between different towns in the Sierra; everybody would go to whatever town was celebrating its special day. Don Alfonso Terán, a former municipal president, remembered that in his youth Huautecos celebrated an important fiesta on September 8. For Alfonso’s father, an important man of wisdom, the fiesta was primarily an opportunity to reinforce his many relationships with people from other communities. “At this fiesta,” he said, “people would come from many places, and all the 102

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people came to sleep in our house. Twenty or thirty people would come to visit, and we had to feed all of them. And then there is more friendship with the people.” These moments of travel were of much greater importance before than they are now. I hear that all the Huautecos used to journey, on foot, to the distant village of Santa María Ixcatlán for the fiesta of Our Lord of the Three Falls until finally, back in the 1930s, they decided to save themselves the trouble and hold an identical fiesta at home, in Huautla. And just as Huauteco traders no longer venture down the steep paths to fill the market stalls at “remote” villages like Matzazongo, where the unused market quietly decays as men who work in the cities bring goods to their families themselves, so men and women are far less likely to venture to other towns’ fiestas, although some still do. I happened to be in the village of Ayautla in 1987 when a fiesta was being celebrated in Huautla. My host told me that in the past, even though there was no road, all the men from Ayautla would attend the fiesta. Now, only two or three went. He said that it was no longer important enough to merit the effort of the trip. There isn’t much reason to make the effort, since the border, the one that matters, is increasingly reduced to the single dimension of the border between one’s town and the ciudad. The travel that constructed and transgressed borders and relationships within the Sierra under the sign of the Earth Lords is no longer of much use. In January, on the Day of the Three Kings, only a few trickle up the Mountain of Adoration to ask the Lord Chikon Tokoxo for prosperity. Before, they say, the whole town would ascend that sacred peak. This older form of travel, which inscribed a sort of identity and regional unity onto the whole region—highlands and lowlands—with the feet of the travelers, survives in at least two of the “customs” still practiced at the fiestas. I became aware of the first while watching a game that my team was not involved in during the Huautla basketball tournament. A great crowd of men, perhaps twenty-five or thirty, bumrushed some unfortunate misbehaving drunk and dragged him, all of them running and yelling, behind the crowd to the municipal building, where they tossed him into the jail cell. I noticed that the men were dressed in the white shirts and pants of campesinos that were so out of fashion in cosmopolitan Huautla. I asked my companion who they were and what was going on. He said that the men were not Huautecos at all, but from Chilchotla and various other villages. They provided the security for the fiesta, he said. The custom was for out-of-towners to help to provide this service, “Like Rock, but Mazatec”

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and these men would not drink anything during the night. They had complete authority for the evening, nobody had the power to command them, he said. At the time, this struck me as an amazing concession by the local administration in a region where power is so jealously guarded between factions and between neighboring municipios. I now see it as a surviving institutionalized form of regional interchange between Sierra communities, of the sort that used to be far more common back when different towns would send men back and forth to assist each other on communal development projects. This particular interchange may date from the period, in the mid-nineteenth century, when both Huautla and Chilchotla were (or may have been) ruled by a single cacique (Bauer 1908), although this historical explanation is not necessary. The second institutionalized form of intraregional travel and integration at fiestas, the basketball tournament, is of more recent origin; basketball was invented by the Canadian James Naismith in 1891. The Aztecs, Olmecs, and Mayas played a similar ball game, of course, but the source of the current Mesoamerican Indian fascination for the sport more likely comes from Naismith’s version and not Quetzalcoatl’s. It is important to note, though, that basketball is not seen in the Sierra as anything new, or as an instance of acculturation. I asked the official in charge of the tournament in San Antonio, said to be the oldest in the Sierra, when the tournament there began. “Years and years,” he told me. I asked, “Since when, before you were born?” “Yes,” he replied (and he was not a young man by a long shot). “Forever.” Soccer is the most popular sport in Mexico, but in all the indigenous and mountainous areas, basketball is clearly Number One. Soccer requires a large, flat, clear playing field, and there are few such places in the Sierra Mazateca. I know of only one soccer field in the vicinity of Huautla, and that is three miles away in San Andrés—a curved, muddy field filled with obstacles such as a ten-meter-high pile of rocks. But every community, no matter how small or remote, boasts a basketball court and a team, and in the early 1990s every young male had or wanted a Chicago Bulls baseball cap. Many houses displayed posters of Michael Jordan on their walls, next to the saints and the calendars featuring pictures of scantily clad American women. He has joined whatever pantheon is described by such interior decorations. (The mania for the Chicago Bulls logo has reached such a point in Oaxaca that weavers in Teotitlán del Valle, a prosperous Zapotec town in the Valley of Oaxaca, include it on their rugs.) And the basketball tournament is the main event at many fiestas. 104

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I was invited to join a team called Los Lobos (the wolves) for the Huautla tournament, and I joined them again for the event in San Antonio. Despite my height (6’3”), I was a second stringer. (I choose to attribute my mediocre performance mostly to my unfamiliarity with the workings of the zone defense, which is the preferred mode of playing in all of Mexico.) The Huautla tournament started late, and the championship game did not end until 3:30 in the (freezing cold) morning. Nonetheless a large crowd stayed until the very end. Most rooted for an all-Huauteco team, called El Tri after the nickname of the national soccer team (and the three colors of the flag, and, who knows, maybe the popular rock band). The Lobos had been organized by a young lawyer from the Terán family, one of the largest and most powerful families in Huautla. Apart from a violent-tempered Huautla mestizo whose father was a politician, Terán’s little brother, and our leading scorer, a chain-smoking ball hog called “El Negro” who once threatened to shoot me unless I gave him 10 pesos, we were led by Terán’s friends from Mexico City (where he worked). We were enormous, part of the freak show at the fiesta: a hulking 6’5” gentle giant (“El Gordo”), his reedy, temperamental 6’1” friend (“El Flaco”), and myself. We were the villains, the powerful outsiders who demolished one opponent after another until the final game, when our captain decided to play up that image by starting all his monsters alongside El Negro; Gringo, Gordo, Flaco, and another chilango (native of Mexico City) who stood just under six feet. The Mazatecos are, they say, the shortest ethnic group in Mesoamerica (Weitlaner and Hoppe 1967). The crowd booed and hissed as we faced the local favorites. The game stayed close, and they taunted the hot-headed mestizo and El Flaco until the former slugged someone in the crowd and the latter was assessed a technical foul for arguing a referee’s call. They yelled and laughed: “¡Viva el Tri!” “¡Viva el pr i !” “¡Viva el Ejército Zapatista!” But in the end the bad guys won, and the Lobos walked off with the first-place prize, a highly reluctant bull. The prizes at these tournaments are not insignificant; generally a bull for first, another bull or two goats for second, and maybe a goat for third and a basketball for fourth. Bulls, which the Lobos sold, dividing the money among the captain, the Huautla mestizo, and El Negro, with trifles for the rest of us, were worth at least 1,000 new pesos ($300) at the time, sometimes much more. The bigger tournaments offered larger prizes. These were donated by the town president or by one of the wealthier ranchers in the area. Most of the economic reasons for the travel which once inscribed a regional identity of a sort (particularly at fiestas) have vanished, but the “Like Rock, but Mazatec”

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basketball tournaments continue to provide a form of cohesion based not on sameness but on interaction between differentiated communities, and on the exhibition of difference through competition.2 At first I was inclined to feel guilty for my team’s participation in these tournaments because we were intruding with our obvious advantages on their local celebration. But that is missing the point of the celebration, which is not (even in any conceivably “pure” state) merely, as García Canclini suggests, a demonstration of the community’s “daily experience with nature,” but an exhibition of the community’s ties with other communities—both inside and outside the region. The more people are attracted to the tournament, the more prestige accrues to its organizers, just as mushroom shamans boast clients from distant sites (“even Japan!”). In this way, the basketball tournament is similar to the Chamula Festival of Games in highland Chiapas, in which the presence of outsiders (vendors and tourists) complements the meaning of the ritual for the Chamula participants. Like the Mazatec fiesta, the Chamula Festival of Games makes a statement about the relationship between insiders and outsiders and how interaction does or should proceed between them—a metacultural statement. However, the highly ethnocentric Chamulas, according to Gossen, use the festival to stress the dangers of allowing foreigners to corrupt them or change their identity, staging and winning an ethnic battle like the one they face everyday so that, while the event underlines their dependence on outsiders for trade, at the end “they ‘feel’ why it is crucial to keep the center of the moral universe, San Juan Chamula itself, free from foreign intervention and moral corruption” (Gossen 1986:248). The Chamula festival does not imply any sort of isolation for Chamula, but rather a mode of dealing with the outside world that must come from a position of autonomy and moral superiority free from mixture. The Mazatec fiestas represent the relationships between communities and between communities and the “outside,” but I do not read them as constructing any sort of need for internal unity against outside penetration the way the Chamula festival does. Instead, they construct a community that is innately linked to external relationships. These relationships are not represented as inherently evil or threatening, nor are they used to construct a form of identity like ethnicity. But the sort of intermunicipality interdependence and complementarity once described by the fiesta has been largely replaced by a representation of marginality and dependence on external political and economic forces, as “people from the city come to sell,” shit all over the town, as often as not kick their asses at basketball, leaving the town to slowly pick up after them. 106

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The related discourses that I will examine in later chapters—shamanism and the underground—also describe relationships between inside and outside that are necessary and a source of prestige and wealth— but that can also be morally dangerous. In those cases when an individual crosses the line, and wealth or success is attributed to dubious, fraudulent, or secretive dealings with powerful outside forces (such as goat devils or wealthy businessmen), people will become envious and voice their suspicions through rumor. I didn’t hear any criticism of my captain, Terán, perhaps because I was a part of his team, but I would not be surprised if his successful use of giant chilangos and foreigners was resented by some in this conventional way. At the least, this strategy made us the bad guys—but this is also a position of respect in a town where people claim to vote for the pr i because, while they may be evil, they are the most powerful, los más chingones. Perhaps, unlike the evil forces who are symbolically allowed to win and then driven out in Chamula, we symbolically asserted the truth that those who can manipulate the powerful forces of the world as intermediaries will always win, and there is nothing you can do about it.

day of the dead, grupo cuauhtémoc Through the travel involved in fiestas and basketball tournaments, a kind of regional unity and integration is mapped out by the feet of the travelers. It is the nature of this form of unity that it does not have a center; its essence is the crossing of borders. The forms of regional identity asserted by the Casa de la Cultura during the fiestas, especially Día de los Muertos, advance not on feet, but through the loudspeaker. The loudspeaker-driven identity names itself and has a center: the building or institution to which the loudspeaker is affixed. The loudspeaker is not performed; it is listened to, witnessed, or, more typically, ignored. When the municipal presidents began to use a loudspeaker to make their weekly Sunday speech to the town in the 1940s, for example, the market stopped closing and the men no longer gathered in front of the town hall; the event became increasingly insignificant (Cowan 1952). In the weeks surrounding the Day of the Dead in 1993, loudspeakers all over Huautla broadcast a Mazatec identity throughout the day and the night. One of the main vehicles of this identity was the music performed by “Grupo Cuauhtémoc.” The ethnomusicological area of the Instituto Nacional Indigenista has taped and released two cassettes of this group’s “Like Rock, but Mazatec”

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music. The group consists of two men: Luís Pulido Fuentes, who sings and plays guitar and violin, and Saúl V. Pereda García, who sings and plays guitar. They are pictured on the cover of the second cassette, holding their instruments on the road near their hometown of Cuauhtémoc. No houses are visible in the picture, only the rocky road, the cut made in the side of the mountain, the abundant green vegetation, and the two staring young men. The cassette identifies its content as “Grupo Cuauhtémoc de Santa María Chilchotla Oaxaca. Música Mazateca.” On the inside cover the following message is written: The Musical Group Cuauhtémoc of Santa María Chilchotla offers you in this tape another series of compositions that refer to some of the customs of our pueblo, as well as various pieces of advice that we give to the youth so that they pay attention to the words of the grandfathers and help the exaltation of the Mazatec communities (through their work and intelligence). (Grupo Cuauhtémoc de Santa María Chilchotla 1993)

The song titles seem to follow up on this promise to provide inspirational advice: “Perhaps Because of Our Ignorance,” “We the Poor,” “Let Us Leave Good Things to the Pueblo,” “Why Is There No Thought?” “We Don’t Imagine What Will Come to Pass,” “Of the Drill,” “Who Would Have Thought That This Would Happen?” and a version of the region’s musical anthem, the song always played at weddings, funerals, and other occasions where music and dancing are called for: “Flor de Naranjo” (Orange Flower). I enjoy listening to the music, with its beautiful vocal harmonies; I even bought a cassette. But the music does not sound like the styles I heard in Huautla. Except, of course, in the weeks around the Day of the Dead, when the music of Grupo Cuauhtémoc was blasted all the time, from the Casa de la Cultura, from a downtown shoe and record store, and from a hotel. For about two weeks in late October and early November of 1993, downtown Huautla had a single, continuous soundtrack. The Day of the Dead is celebrated throughout Mexico and among the Hispanic populations of the United States, although it is especially prominent in the states of Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Michoacán. They say that the spirits of the deceased return to Huautla on the Day of the Dead. Actually, two classes of ghosts return on separate days. On the first day, the spirits of dead children come back. People gather in the cemetery around the 108

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graves of dead children in their families. On the second day, the dead adults return in great numbers, and even more people go to the cemetery to gather around their graves. At home, the families make little altars under an arch of leaves. On the altars they leave candy, fruit, and soda for the dead children to eat. For the adults, they leave these same items, but also bottles of beer and packs of cigarettes—the dead don’t have to worry about a healthy lifestyle. The fruit tends to spoil and get moldy. Sometimes children steal some of the candy from their dead counterparts when nobody is looking. If their parents caught them, they would get slapped. In 1993, enormous crowds of people jammed Huautla’s cemetery for both nights of the festival. The cemetery sits below town, sloping down the mountain from the road. There are no paths between the stone tombs, so visitors have to walk over them. There was no room between

4.1 A Day of the Dead household altar in Huautla, 1993. Photo by author. “Like Rock, but Mazatec”

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the people, except on the edges of the cemetery, where vendors sold soda, candy, punch, beer, and shots of liquor. They came at dusk, and they came again at three in the morning. It was cold and windy and foggy. People surrounded the tombs of their relatives with candles. Some people were drunk and jostled their neighbors or fell down. Almost everybody had those cheap little triangular firecrackers. Children and even grown men and women sat lighting and throwing one after another after another, deaf and dumb to anything outside this monotonous action that they seemed driven, by some greater force, to repeat. ba m ! ba m ! ba m ! Those with foresight and/or money had constructed shelters over the graves of their loved ones to protect them from the weather in case of rain. It rained intermittently in 1993. Many people returned home to Huautla for the Day of the Dead—people who lived and worked in the ciudad. Others came who had no connection to Huautla, tourists who wanted to see this quaint national holiday in one of the states where the tradition is strongest. It was a great party. I talked to one woman, passing the night by two small tombs under a shelter on the edge of the cemetery. She told me that they were the graves of her two children. I looked at the dates of their births and deaths and saw they had both died very young, at the ages of eight and six. Then I saw that they had both died on the same date, November 1, and I realized, with a start, that that was today’s date, the Day of the Dead. Yes, she told me, they died on the way back from the cemetery, when the truck they were riding in, loaded with people, crashed. There is another aspect to the celebration of the Day of the Dead besides the altars in the home and the party in the cemetery, and that is the practice of huehuentoning. The huehuentones are something like trick-ortreaters. They are boys and young men who go from house to house in disguise, singing and dancing “Flor de Naranjo.” In return, they are given fruit and liquor (for the adults). Huehuentones must have their faces hidden, and they must not wear a stitch of their own clothing—all the clothes are borrowed from someone else. In the past, their faces were hidden behind heavy papier-mâché. These days, they generally wear commercial plastic wrestling masks. These are cheaper, more popular among children (who all have their favorite wrestling figures), and don’t make you sweat as much. The huehuentones wander the streets for several weeks before the actual Day of the Dead. In 2001, several celebrants adopted more contemporary alternative identities for the Day of the Dead—they sported Osama bin Laden masks. One can see that the Day of the Dead celebrates and forces various 110

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forms of travel—between the world of the living and the dead, between the city and the town, and from house to house. People are forced to acknowledge their relationships with their neighbors and to acknowledge their ties to the soil where their relatives are buried. For city-dwelling Huautecos, the return home for the Day of the Dead is especially important. If one does not come home for this event, it may be taken as a sign that one is abandoning any identification with Huautla or the Sierra and that one is choosing to identify full time with the new life in the city. In a public lecture at the Casa de la Cultura during the period of the Day of the Dead in 1993, Florencio Carrera interpreted the event as a tradition of Huautla de Jiménez, representing the life cycle of a Mazateco: birth, development, and death. He went on to describe a series of customs in great detail, using many phrases like “the Mazatecos say” and “That is what the Mazatecos do.” He referred to Prehispanic meanings of certain symbolic elements of these customs—such as the association of cacao beans with money. He said, “Our ancient ancestors believed” this or that, but admitted some changes, particularly in the lives of the rich. Licenciado Carrera’s lecture retained the focus on the period known as the “Prehispanic age” as the key causal period for local history and culture. He described a “Mazatec” identity that derives from ancient ways, has a pure form, and can and should be taught from sites of privileged knowledge, like the figure of the expert (himself) and the casa. But knowledge about this culture has been hidden, and is necessarily incomplete. It exists in particular spaces that the devious activities of outsiders and traitors have prevented him and others from gaining access to. “We don’t know much about Prehispanic cultural development,” he said, “because the codices are our only sources, and they are all outside the country in libraries locked with the best keys.” Carrera treats cultural capital much as he would economic capital, as something that is concentrated in particular physical (and metaphorical) sites, especially in books, and that is hoarded by the powerful. In his version of this story, the powerful hoarders are foreigners. The other spaces where culture is concentrated, besides the book knowledge about the Prehispanic period, are particular cultural events which he names in his speech: the wedding ceremony, the dancing of the huehuentones, and the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms. “To be a Mazatec or a Huauteco,” he says, “you must try the mushrooms.” The effect of Carrera’s speech is to create a horizontal interior identity whose meaning comes from the epical past of the homogeneous ethnic group, in contrast to the meanings that I have suggested, which perform “Like Rock, but Mazatec”

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and mark different kinds of travel between inside and outside. At one point, Carrera’s version of Mazateco-ness seemed to elicit resistance from his audience, although it is unlikely that anyone involved would have interpreted this response as resistance. He said that the word “huehuentones” meant “black men” in Nahuatl and that the Mazatecos had this word in their own language as well. He said the word, and the audience laughed. Clearly, from Carrera’s perspective, the “Mazatec” event should have a Mazatec title. From the perspective of the audience, in which the huehuentón tradition was not framed simply as a “Mazatec” event, this translation from Nahuatl, the former language of interregional communication and government bureaucracy (up to at least the early nineteenth century), did not make much sense. After Carrera, Renato García Dorantes spoke of the cultures of our old ones, “our indígenas; indios, our brothers.” How we must respect men in calzones and women in huipiles, and how we are not going extinct, but are changing: we are artists, photographers, and musicians. He said that we should all listen to the music of these Mazatecos from Chilchotla, how it is like “rock, but Mazateco.” García Dorantes, perhaps more even than Carrera, presents a linear version of reported culture, in which hard borders are placed between different “cultures,” but all are imagined and represented in the same style. In the past, the border between cultures was performed through clothing—thus the reference to huipiles and calzones. But García Dorantes and other Mazatec intellectuals do not wear these sorts of clothes anymore, if they ever did; these clothes have become the domain of poorer campesinos, people who do not live in the center of Huautla. Instead, García Dorantes proposes that the sharp cultural differences which he hopes to represent are now, in the modern world, associated with artistic and intellectual practices—forms of art and expression that use the archaic forms of differentiation (clothes, customs, language) as their material. Thus we must respect those who still wear the old clothes, for without “our old Indians,” we cannot become new Indians. He sees that the generic uniform of differentiation once consisted of the categories of Costume, Customs, Language, Religion. Now it consists of Photography, Art, Music, Academics, Heritage (consisting of the old categories subsumed into this new place on the list). The artistic practices that form the content of the new linearly reported Mazatec culture are identified as identical, in category, to forms in the mainstream culture. The only difference is their origin under the sign of the “Mazatec.” They are “like rock, but Mazatec.” 112

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This statement evokes the historical meanings that “rock” has carried in Mexico. For some, rock has symbolized disorder or foreign imperialism, but its chief role in Mexico has been as an element in a modernizing aesthetic—as a symbol of full Mexican participation in a progressive, modern world (Zolov 1999). Rock, in García Carrera’s hands, stands for his vision of Mazatec culture as a clearly defined subset of that world. The music that is played in the Casa de la Cultura evokes a generic, pan-American Indian-ness. This is Andean panpipe music (e.g., the song that Simon and Garfunkel made famous, “El Condor Pasa”), and it also always seems to be played at the booths of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (pr d ).3 Music like this also accompanies a film made by García Dorantes about the Day of the Dead in Huautla. A narrator intones the words “Día de los Muertos, Huautla de Jiménez” as the creepy “Prehispanic” music played and we were treated to images of fog and mist. Later in the film, the narrator relied on the symbolism of Nahuatl poetry to explain the meaning of the event. The audience laughed at images of uncomfortable children trying to sing off key. A man who lived near the casa later criticized the poor production quality of the film, explaining that if one is going to make something, one should make it right. He compared the movie to the ta po bus station in Mexico City, constructed by President López Portillo, which he used as an example of something that was done right. In conclusion, intellectuals like Carrera and García Dorantes use music, customs, and fiestas to construct a horizontal, interior, ethnic identity that draws heavily on generic versions of the epical “indigenous” past. The idea of the “Prehispanic” period is used as the basis of a specific “Mazateco” identity that is represented by the generic signs of indigenousness: panpipe music and the Aztec culture. This form of identity is opposed to another one that is not broadcast from above, from specific sites of power, knowledge, and prestige, but is inscribed in relations of interchange and travel. This second form of constructing identity is not prior to or more “authentic” or “indigenous” that the version promoted by intellectuals and outsiders. Both of these forms of imagining culture coexist, and probably have coexisted (albeit with a different balance) for as long as middlemen have sought power by mediating between the Sierra and the wide world, and representing the one to the other.

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it shames them I will end this chapter with a brief account of another public celebration that was performed on the basketball court in the center of Huautla on Mother’s Day, 1994. I watched part of this event from the balcony of the building that housed the offices of various federal agencies (post office, federal election commission), accompanied by a seventeen-year-old friend and informant named Alejandro. Alejandro was born in Huautla but had also lived with his mother for a while in Mexico City, where he worked in the Ford factory. He had also worked as a towel boy in Cancún, where he took a lot of photographs of foreign women sunbathing topless. He wore an earring and was contemptuous of all local “traditions.” The schoolteachers had made all of their students buy special uniforms, a different color for each class.4 One by one, they came out and danced around to different Mexican and American pop songs. I noticed that a long table sat at one end of the court, and that about ten old women wearing huipiles sat there. In front of each was a colored soda. Each of the sodas (not Coke or Pepsi, but Peñafiel or Sidral) was a different color. None of the women were drinking. They just sat there, looking slightly confused. “Who are those women?” I asked Alejandro. “What, are you blind?” he responded. “Those are old women.” “Yes, but why are they there?” “Don’t be stupid. Because they are the oldest women here in Huautla.” I decided to change to a different tack. “It’s a hot day. Why aren’t they drinking their sodas?” “Because it shames them.” “Then why do they have them?” “Because the teachers give them to them. The teachers give them sodas, but they make them ashamed.” For some reason, even to celebrate Mother’s Day, the teachers who organized the event felt the need to display a version of indigenousness, which they embodied in the form of the old, huipil-clad women. Later on, I noticed that several of the women had begun to tentatively sip, then drink, then gulp, their sodas. More joined in, and before I knew it the soda bottles were almost all empty.

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5

The Secret Past

Several factors come together to create the possibilities for another charged historical space floating around the Sierra Mazateca: the secret past. The Sierra is a place in which the idea of the past is very important; it is one of those places where Mexicans can visit their own past, their own heritage. As a “remote” and “indigenous” area, it is also a location of the ideas of “specificity” and the power of particular places which have been lost by the modern world. But the idea of this specific past is represented generically. Huautla and the Sierra Mazateca constitute a place of “place”; a depthless representation of “depth”; a generic representation of specificity. There are no ruins to gape at and say, “There it is, look at it in its mystical unfathomable mystery,” no tangible pyramids like those of Tenochtitlán or Chichén Itzá to serve as a “locus of the strategic organization of knowledge and deployment of practices in which the multiple guises of the West are realized (made real) through the ‘mysterious’ difference of [an Indian] otherness textualized and experienced as culture and civilization” (Q. Castañeda 1996:11–12).1 And yet we know, we must know, that the “past” is here, somewhere, so it must exist somewhere that we cannot see, or are prevented from seeing. The past exists, but it is secret, or hidden. Two local intellectuals attempted to document a visible past by writing about colonial buildings, producing the bilingual Spanish-Mazatec book Patrimonio Próximo a Desaparecer: Joyas Arquitectónicas de la Sierra Mazateca/tsoMni chji si tjin i’nde tsan i’nde nasin sroba (Rivas Manzano and Irogoyen Coría 1992). But for the wider, national, audience, artifacts of the colonial past cannot capture the historical meaning of the region the way remnants of the Prehispanic era can. In the absence of ruins, visitors and other non-Indians talk about the way the past is hidden by the mountains or the Indians. In the taquería

Aquí Me Quedo one evening, I spoke to one mestizo who had worked and lived in Huautla for fourteen years, but had not learned any of the language. He told me that Mazateco, which he called simply “dialect,” was the oldest language in the world, because the people spoke it before the Spanish came five hundred years ago. I mentioned that the history here, right here, is not well known, or not written, and he disagreed and said no, it is. The people here have it written, he said, but they don’t show it to outsiders for two reasons. The first was lack of preparación (education) and the second was distrust. And there was the strange culty couple drinking a beer at noon at the Restaurant Rosita. They had lived eight months in Huautla and liked it; they wouldn’t go back to Puebla anymore. They said that all the information about aquí (here) is written, it’s there, it’s all seen, they said, when they discovered that I was an anthropologist. The origin, they said, who founded it, why it is called “Twelve Eagles” [sic], the customs.2 But one must ask permission from the ancestors, from the culture. And then it will give you all the information. But the history of this place is not written down, I protested. And they said that it was. It is all written in the other dimension, in the book of life. Or so they said, the perky didactic young woman with the Moonie air about her and the sad-eyed older man. They were investigators too, they told me. They were investigating nature but on the metaphysical plane. They asked if I was studying the origins, if I already knew that. It’s all here on the metaphysical plane. I mentioned the caves; I asked if they had visited any. They had not, but responded that this was a very energetic place. Conocimiento (knowledge). And of course there is the ubiquitous Eduardo, the bearded renegade from Veracruz who reads Tarot cards for a living, telling tourists and merchants their fortunes for $2 to $6. It was Eduardo who read the cards for Dr. Noel Sloan, a member of the team of cavers exploring the great cave of San Agustín. Sloan later described Eduardo (a white man from a wealthy Veracruz family, direct descendent of a hero who led the town against the Americans during the 1917 occupation) as a local shaman, and told Outside magazine: It was kind of weird. He dropped the cards in four piles. The first three were for yourself, your family, and any question you had. When he dropped the fourth, which is for friends and those around you, it was the death card. That was four o’clock in the afternoon. Which is when Ian [a member of Sloan’s team who drowned in the cave] died. (Vetter 1994:64) 116

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Eduardo was also misidentified by the American journalist Derek Peck (1998), who described him as “a jovial Indian man in his mid-30s, wearing dirty pants and scruffy leather sandals and smiling optimistically, who offer[ed] to lead us to a room” when Peck and a companion arrived in Huautla on the bus. For Peck, the sight of Eduardo represented a disappointment of his “occult expectations,” since Peck knew the “strange and magical history of the place.” For Peck, the secret past could be accessed through participation in an authentic mushroom ritual, but the real past was difficult to find; phony versions leap at you in scruffy leather sandals as soon as you arrive in town; it takes perseverance to hold out for the real article. It seems a number of Mazatec families have gotten into the business of hosting pseudo-veladas, as the mushroom-taking ceremonies are known, in order to make a few extra bucks off the occasional gringo seeker before he can locate a real shaman. Politely, Peck looked at the room, then said he’d prefer to be in the center of town. Peck eventually found his “real shaman” and the real secret past by locating a descendant of María Sabina. Eduardo is proud of his famed tarot card reading, but seems to devote more time and energy to talking up outsiders about Huautla and getting them to buy mushrooms and the accompanying ritual from the family that houses him in the center of town—the family that happens to sell the most expensive ritual around. When he talks of the Sierra his voice deepens, as he conveys awe and mystery. “Huautla is one of the sacred places in Mexico. Huautla and Real de Catorce.”3 Real de Catorce is the town near the spot in the desert in the state of San Luís Potosí where the Huichol Indians go to consume peyote. Eduardo, who actually does know a good quantity of Huautla’s lore and specific history, believes that the past is apparent on a mystical level, in the mountains and waterfalls, accessible through the ingestion of the hallucinogenic mushrooms. He claims to have seen the spirit known as Chikon Nindo Tokoxo during one of his veladas (trips). He told me a secret about Chikon Tokoxo. It seems that the chikon, the guero (light-skinned one) is really none other than Quetzalcoatl, the legendary Toltec king who became a god and was forced to leave the valley of Mexico a long time ago. The stories say that Quetzalcoatl was a fair-skinned man who traveled east from Tula. So Eduardo’s story is plausible, though he solemnly assures me, as he does in almost every utterance about something or other, that it is a great and terrifying secret fact. Yes, Benjamín, the chikon is Quetzalcoatl. Eduardo simultaneously evokes a past that is secret while reaffirming the dominant The Secret Past

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tendency to associate history in indigenous areas with the Prehispanic period and to incorporate that period into two of the official Prehispanic cultures, the Aztec and the Maya. This past does not involve the succession of municipal presidents or the struggles to cultivate coffee and make a living; it is something far more hazy and distant. And if the Sierra is a privileged space of history, and if history in such places can only refer to the Prehispanic World, and if there are no markings of such a history left in ruins or in the memories of the inhabitants, then brave explorers must hope for a secret past whose traces can be glimpsed in the unintelligible mumblings of the natives, the contours of the mountains, and the hazy landscapes of the “magic world” entered through the mushrooms. But even this hazy past is collected in a particular spot and in a particular, conventional form—that of the book. Even if this tropic book takes a strange form—as the “book of life” or the “book of nature”—some form of book exists inside, in a place of insiders, and the relevant, important information is “written” therein. I was offered possession of that book, as I will explain later, but I turned it down. Mexican writers interested in mushroom practices and influenced both by Wasson and indigenismo saw the meaning of the mushroom trip in the access it provides to the secret past. Wasson talked about this past as the time when religion began in the snowy steppes of Siberia, and for the Mexican anthropologist Benítez, the trip brought one to the “savage world” of the past. The goal of the ritual is to go back to a pure state “before the fall.” Even María Sabina, added Benítez (1964:79), was not aware of this true goal. I will discuss the relationship between the secret past and the mushroom ritual in greater detail in Chapter 6; here, I will examine another Mazatec way of looking at the past that both complements and contrasts the tales told by indigenistas, missionaries, tourists, and the Casa de la Cultura.

other versions of before and now I have, in earlier chapters, described how the historical discourses of elites, tourists, and intellectuals tend to differentiate between Before and Now; and how they associate the Mazatec Before with the Prehispanic era, and the Now with either a degeneration into stagnation (the hillbilly image) or incorporation into the Modern World. They describe the world of Before as something that is rigidly distinct from that of Now, except in its inclusion as a “heritage.” They also describe the world of Before as 118

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a world fully determined by a local Mazatec culture (even if this culture is filtered through the application of traits of the more well known Aztec and Maya worlds). It was a world of culture that was isolated from the Modern World of trade and the nation-state; that is why its inhabitants were “Indians” and not simply “hillbillies”; “shamans” and “people of tradition” rather than “ignorant fools.” There is another discourse about the past that contrasts, in some respects, with this more “official” or “dominant” version. First, this discourse, like the one described above, divides time into the categories of Before and Now. But unlike the historical narratives of the missionaries, intellectuals, and indigenistas, these stories generally do not describe a past that was isolated from the outside world. Second, this second set of stories about the past is not historical in the same sense as the first set; the idea of “history” is associated with the metanarratives of ethnicity and the nation-state, and most Mazatec reckonings of the past deny the story of an ethnic group moving smoothly through time from a past into the future. Other Huautecos and inhabitants of the Mazatec region, besides the local intellectuals and politicians, make use of the trope of reckoning time through a division between Before and Now. Indeed, María Ana Portal (1986) argues that this division of time is a central feature of Mazatec folklore, at least in the lowland villages she studied. Portal argues that the role of serious stories, which are only told by the important figures that she calls local intellectuals, is to explain how things were “before”—in this case before the coming of the nation-state and the Miguel Alemán Dam—back when nature was king and all the world formed a single, coherent system (Portal 1986:20). Today, according to Portal, these stories evoke a time when knowledge was passed down through mythic, analogical thought rather than the “Western” system of education, and thus the stories keep this world alive as a “subaltern” message in today’s capitalist universe. Many Huautecos talk about how things were different “before,” but this does not necessarily mean that the world of “before” was isolated from Mexico in a world that took the form of a nature-based totality. Rather, they suggest a history of ongoing yet changing marginality. Sometimes, people talk in generalities about the past. They speak of a time when leaders were more respected and the town more united; they speak of dietary changes and a related decline in life expectancy, of a time when knowledge of medicinal herbs was widespread and there were no pills, when some men had as many as thirty wives, when all marriages The Secret Past

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were arranged, when children spoke only when spoken to and never wandered unattended, when houses had roofs of straw instead of tin. Back then, they say, you could grow a ton of corn high and healthy without using any fertilizer. Now you need to use a lot of fertilizer, and you still don’t get nearly as much corn. In the old days, the price of coffee was high, and it seemed that everyone had a lot of money. With a little bit of money, they say, you could buy many things—all you needed. And the land gave far more coffee and corn. This year there was hardly any corn, and it was all shriveled up. And there is much less coffee, too, with lower prices. They are much poorer than before. According to one story, back then people had much corn and many animals, and the supernatural spirit-owner Chikon Tokoxo roamed around with his pet coyotes, which would eat the people’s chickens. So the people killed the coyotes, and that so angered the chikon that he moved to another part of the Sierra. Without the chikon, some say, the land will not give corn. Some places in the Sierra testify to conditions in the way-before, in the time of giants. There is a cave near Nezahualcoyotl with bones from the people of before. The bones are huge because the people were bigger then. Pedro Sánchez of Ayautla told me that there was no Sun then, and the people could grow no crops and ate only meat, which made them gigantic. That is why all the archaeological ruins are so big; they were built for giants. Then one day the Sun came out and killed all the giants. They tried to shoot the Sun down, said Pedro, and he showed me a children’s picturebook of Bible stories, where David was shooting his slingshot at Goliath. Behind Goliath is the Sun, and Pedro tells me that that was David’s target. The nineteenth-century Oaxaca historian José Antonio Gay (1881) tells the same story. The giant people could not stand the light of the Sun, and they died. The name of Huautla itself comes down from this “before” time. Before, Huautla was called something else, according to one informant. It was called, Ni’ya (Inside the House), he says. But then the giant eagles came down, and they would find some poor campesino struggling in his milpa (cornfield) or walking through the mountains to collect firewood, and they would swoop down and carry him off to their nest to be devoured, he says. The people constructed vast nets over their fields, he says, and worked beneath them in relative safety until the time came when the giant eagles were no longer a threat. Federico Neiburg (1988) believes that this story was a reference to the relationship between the people of the Sierra and the Aztec “eagle-warriors” of Tenochtitlán, who would in 120

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fact collect tribute in the form of Mazatec bodies, which were taken back to their blood-soaked pyramids, where the heart would be ripped out and the extremities cut off and sometimes eaten. Another version of this story mentions the giant eagles, but forgets their habit of consuming unwary peasants. Instead, they just ate chickens, which is a nuisance, but not so dramatic as the alternative. While many of these stories of the way things were “before” hint at dramatic changes in the recent past, and particularly an increase in “communication,” they do not evoke an enclosed, isolated, “natural” world. People rarely talk of a past before the introduction of coffee, for example. They talk about changing relationships between the inside and the outside, except for stories about the time of the giants. But these giants, who may have lived in the sort of autonomous, autochthonous, “Prehispanic,” nature-oriented society depicted by Portal and the dominant versions of the past, are not considered by contemporary people of the Sierra to be their ancestors. Many stories about the past are specifically linked to geographical features, like the caves where campesinos hid from soldiers during the revolution or the Cueva del León where travelers in times past would rest or seek shelter during storms. The only story I was ever told about the Spanish Conquest was linked to a spring called Agua Hoja de Comezón (Itchy Leaf Water) near Aguacatitla. The story is that the Spaniards brought with them a foreign plant—hoja de comezón—and planted it on purpose all around their place so that the Indians would die if they came near. And they did die, when they touched it. They could not remove the little spines; they became infected from so much scratching and then died. But one campesino dedicated himself to thinking about how to get rid of all this stuff without touching it and finally succeeded in eliminating the foul weed. This story of the distant past does not tell of an isolated native culture represented by Mazatec rulers; even though there is an ancient ruined city nearby, I was never told a story by campesinos about the Prehispanic past. Instead, this reticence suggests an ongoing relationship with outsiders, a relationship characterized in this case by violence and indirect resistance. The resilient Mazatec peasants do not fight the invaders, but in the end their persistence and craftiness are rewarded. The story of the alien plant that brings slow death may be a way in which local peasants remember the agonizing deaths brought by other Spanish organisms, the carriers of small pox, measles, and typhoid. At other times, people talk of their own specific individual or family histories. They talk of when their town was founded, or brag of a Spaniard The Secret Past

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or Frenchman in their family tree. I was talking with my compadre Juvenal about the origins of the “Mazatecs” and how some people thought they were Toltecs who came down from the north while others thought they came over from the coast, the region of the Olmecs. He seemed interested, so I interrupted my lecture and asked him, as a good anthropologist, what he thought. He said he didn’t know but that his people were from Ojitlán, over close to the state of Veracruz. Because of this he is like a Jarrocho; he is half Veracruzano, half Oaxaqueño. And so, being of the Veracruzano race, he likes el movimiento (making a dancing motion). Juvenal, like most other mountain folk who discussed the past with me, discards the register of ethnicity in favor of an identifying register that relates to the political borders imposed by state lines. The use of ethnicity in remembering the past validates the hegemonic take on history: History happens in the Mexican and Mestizo World, while Ethnicity and Culture happened in previously isolated, autonomous ethnic enclaves. Juvenal, and others like him, denies this separate past, although it would not occur to them to think of this memory as a “denial” of anything. They are, were, and always have been a part of Mexico—the world that is defined by the borders between states, not by linguistic or cultural groups. Juvenal makes much of the border between the states of Oaxaca and Puebla, which separates the Oaxaca municipio of Chilchotla from the Puebla village of Matzazongo. When his compadre comes from Matzazongo to visit, he insists that he is different because he is from a different state. This leads to a confused discussion because the anthropologists insist on centering the analysis around the word “Mazatec,” a word with unclear, shifting, and confusing meanings for the people to whom it is alleged to apply. So he is not Mazatec, says the anthropologist. Right, he is not, he is from Puebla, says Juvenal. But later, he admits that the man is Mazatec, since he is still from the Sierra Mazateca and speaks the same language. In Huautla, I was sipping aguardiente and speaking to a woman who ran a small store high in the upper barrio of El Fortín. She was talking about how hard it was to make a living these days, compared to the past. She said things were better back in the old days before the road because now you can’t make any money selling anything. Everybody already has it. Everybody has access; they don’t need anything. Huautla has always been a town of merchants and intermediaries; the changes in the economy cannot be represented as the merger of two previously isolated worlds. Rather, they are changes in the degree of “communication,” which require the development of new spaces of middleman activity, such as that colonized by the local intellectuals. 122

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So, the use of the register of political rather than ethnic borders, as well as personal and family histories that center on relationships with the outside world of one sort or another, seem to deny the dominant version of the past which assigns the Sierra Mazateca to its own, isolated, indigenous world. Even some of the “folklore” type stories about the mythic “before” (in particular, the stories about the man-eating eagles and the murderous plant) can be read as stories about a marginal relationship with outsiders rather than as a relationship to a closed-off, united, and autochthonous place at one with nature. There is another way in which the usual Mazatec discourse about the past denies the official, “ethnic” version. I have argued throughout this book that the concept of ethnicity cannot be assumed to subsume all theories of identity, and that in the Sierra Mazateca there exists a dialogue between two different styles of imagining identity and culture. One of these styles, which I have called, after Volosinov, the linear style of reporting culture, roughly correlates with ethnic theories of identity. One of the most important aspects of ethnic theories of identity is the stress on a particular kind of past, the history of the group, in which the present is determined by the past through either a biological inheritance or a cultural heritage. The ethnic group is located in a particular place, and it has a past (Hall 1991:21). Anthropologists such as myself often search for alternative and subaltern reckonings of the past. These alternatives, however, need not merely be alternative retellings of the content of the past or alternative periodizations. A “subaltern” history may not be a history at all—it may take the form of a realignment of the past-present relationship. Rita Astuti argues that nonethnic theories of identity produce different versions of the past than do ethnic theories, which are dependent on particular ethnic histories. She demonstrates how the Vezo of coastal Madagascar theorize identity not as an “ethnicity” with which they are born, but as something that results from activities that people perform in the present. In this alternative ethnotheory, people “are what they do for their livelihood” (Astuti 1995:466). Astuti’s insights seem to fit the Mazatec situation pretty well. In general, identity in this part of Mexico is described through words about activities rather than words about inheritance. The main distinction is between the “people of the city” and the “people of the country.” People within the Sierra are further divided into “people of business” (either comerciantes or store owners), “people of the country” (campesinos), and the more extreme group of “people of the ranch,” which refers to men The Secret Past

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and women from small and remote farms or communities. These words refer to places, but these places are understood as the sites of particular activities that determine identity—people change as they move from the village to the capital and begin to perform a new kind of identity which leaves different sorts of identifying marks (from calluses and machete scars to red eyes and shoes). Occasionally, this system of identification co-opts terms from the ethnic register. But the word “Indian,” when used to refer to “people of the ranch,” is not understood as an inherited and unchangeable ethnic identity. Instead, as Friedlander (1975) showed, this term refers to an identity defined by a particular sort of activity—agricultural labor in mountainous areas. When one informant mentioned a “sacred” area he knows about, I understood that he was referring to a place that has some special significance to the group with which he most identifies. So I was surprised when he told me that this very sacred place (that I should take him to visit) was far away in the state of Veracruz. When I asked why it was sacred, he said that it was because it was mountainous, and a lot of people lived there; “humble people, campesino people.” This informant was voicing the sort of identity that Astuti identified in Madagascar, in which different places mark different identity-creating activities rather than different “kinds” of people. In the Sierra Mazateca, the seeming lack of importance of the past in everyday life, as well as the lack of concern about the sort of history promoted by the Casa de la Cultura and similar institutions, does not mean that the people who live there are without any sort of identity. Instead, they, or some of them at least, construct a nonethnic sort of identity that is not dependent on the elaboration of a collective group history. This is an identity that denies the “epic distances” of hegemonic history—the distance between the peak times of the past and the decay of the present, teller and listener, this ethnicity and that ethnicity, elite and marginal. Instead, it “novelizes” identity by freeing it from the monovocal “ethnic” story, allowing familiar investigation without the piety that goes with hierarchical distance (Bakhtin 1981). But this nonethnic reckoning of the past-present relationship and of culture coexists with the other version of history that I have described at length in earlier chapters. While the version of identity and the pastpresent relationship that is voiced by most campesinos does not entail an important role for “history,” they are aware that this other conception of the past also circulates, and furthermore is associated with power. And as a discourse that does not directly resonate with their own self124

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conception, and yet is related to power, it becomes objectified in particular ways. “History” becomes a mysterious yet valuable item that is possessed by the powerful, often secretly. Intellectuals tell stories about powerful anthropologists and missionaries robbing the cultural heritage, taking it away to foreign lands and locking it in their vaults and seminar rooms; peasants tell tales of intellectuals and other comerciantes stealing old photographs and valuable archaeological artifacts and hoarding them within their houses. When asked directly about “the past” or “history,” people’s responses are different from those that are given when they are asked about their own personal or family pasts. These general categories are the domain of specialists with secret knowledge. I am told, over and over, that people don’t really know much about the past or history, or else people only understand these categories as referring to the national past that is learned in school. I am referred to old people, the viejitos, who still retain the memories of the old days and customs. The past, when spoken about in these general terms, like other forms of capital, is located in particular places in the mountains and in particular individuals, as well as in particular realms of discourse—the categories of customs and traditions. The people who refer me to the elders are not exactly sure what it is that I want to know, but they are aware that it is something of value that can be extracted from the Sierra and taken away to foreign lands. As something of value, associated with power and mystery, it takes the conventional shape of a book. I was offered this book one cold night, but that story will have to wait until Chapter 8.

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6

“¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hongo?” mushrooms, culture, experts, and drugs

This ethnography focuses on the particular webs of politics and poetics that infuse three different discursive spaces with a kind of meaning that comments upon culture and identity. The first of these spaces—history, the past, the movement of time, chronotope—only refers to an actual geographical space through the Einsteinian identity between space and time. The last of these spaces—the underground—refers more directly to a physical location that stores and emits another kind of geographical/ cultural knowledge. The space that I deal with in this chapter is also couched in geographical terms; it refers to a parallel “world,” the “magic world” that is made to inhabit the discourses that circulate in Huautla, Mexico, and the rest of the world, binding these “real” towns and nations together and creating a particular sort of power. “Huautla de Jiménez” and “Sierra Mazateca” are not words that tend to evoke any recognition in the United States, but in Mexico the utterance of these syllables usually produces a lightbulb over the head of the Mexican with whom one is conversing, whether it be a pgr police officer at a roadblock in Chihuahua, a student or waitress in Mexico City, or a carousing rancher in coastal Tamaulipas. The lightbulb quickly changes shape and resolves itself into a very familiar form, the shape of a mushroom. “Hongos,” they say, and “María Sabina.” Huautla is known nationally and, to a lesser extent, internationally, because of psilocybin mushrooms, and it knows itself this way as well. In this chapter I report on the mushroom discourse, and the use of María Sabina, the great Huauteca shaman celebrity, la santísima sacerdotisa.1 I will not undertake a systematic analysis of the mushroom velada as a performance. I will not describe the clever and beautiful linguistic and musical flourishes employed by the best chanters. For one, I do not believe that there is such a thing as the “Mazatec mushroom ceremony” or a typical

ceremony that can be analyzed in the abstract, although there are certain commonly occurring features. Second, I disgracefully only consumed the Diositos with the locals on three occasions during my first year in the mountains (and a few more times since on return visits), and each experience was different, and interesting, but largely unrecorded (and not fully remembered). These evenings with three curers do not constitute a satisfactory sample to enable me to authoritatively discuss the ritual, although “expertise” in the field of “mushrooms,” or “drugs” anywhere for that matter, is something too easily and frequently claimed. One can argue about the actual importance of mushroom experiences in the lives of Huautecos and other Mexicans, but it is clear that the particular conversational genres that involve talking about mushrooms form a key area in the struggles of individuals and groups to negotiate their identities. The discourse about mushrooms gives people a common language to use to try on different attitudes, identities, and roles beyond the simple dichotomy between insider and outsider. Through the mushroom discourse, people of the Sierra Mazateca employ the colonial mimetic languages of expertise and of the mushroom/drug opposition in a variety of meaningful ways to enact different subject positions.

a selective history of psychedelic mushrooms in mexico I begin with a brief survey of six important moments in the history of mushroom discourse that demonstrate the continuing dialogue between Indians and outsiders about mushroom practices—the continuing play of representation that has created links between the Sierra and the rest of the world. This discursive history begins in the distant past, where some information is known about mushrooms, but not much. Mushroom history then flattens into a prolonged silence, only to begin its flowering as mushroom discourse (as we know it) in the mid-twentieth century. 1. Prehispanic Times. Sahagún reported the use of mushrooms (called nanacatl in Nahuatl) by priests. Sahagún and Francisco Hernández, Felipe II’s doctor, believed that mushrooms brought their users into the presence of the Devil (Benítez 1964). 2. The Long Silence. From the colonial period to the early twentieth century, mushroom use was not noticed or remarked upon by any outside observers. If mushrooms were being used in the Sierra, they were not being talked about by outsiders. “¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hong0?”

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3. The First Hallucinogenic Adventurers. During this time, adventurers like Antonin Artaud and Aldous Huxley began traveling to Latin America and describing their experiences with hallucinogenic plants. Mexico became associated, for readers of this literature, with peyote. 4. The Pike-Wasson Files. Eunice Pike, a missionary who studied Mazatec in Huautla and Río Santiago, wrote to Gordon Wasson about the mushrooms; he went to Huautla to investigate, and his writings led to the descent of a torrent of “experts” and later hippies into Huautla. Although Robert J. Weitlaner and his daughter took mushrooms in the Sierra Mazateca in 1936, Gordon Wasson was the first man to travel to the Sierra Mazateca specifically to study and experience the indigenous use of mushrooms and to write about this experience in terms that would interest a mass audience. Wasson was a wealthy entrepreneur—a vice president at Morgan Bank—who dabbled in anthropology and botany as hobbies. After he married a Russian woman, he discovered the intense interest that she and her family had in mushrooms and mushroom hunting. His own family background had led him to regard fungi as repulsive, disgusting, abhorrent organisms, yet his wife’s obsession with mushrooms fascinated him. This fascination led the Wassons to found a new science— ethnomycology—and to develop a thesis that divided the world’s peoples into two types: those with “mycophilic” cultures (like the Russians) and those with “mycophobic” cultures (like his own wa sp kinfolk). He developed a diffusionist theory, asserting that “mycophilic” cultures (and shamanism) originated in the great forests of Siberia. It should be noted that Wasson was not focusing on hallucinogenic mushrooms as he elaborated this theory; the fungi that repelled him and fascinated his wife were the normal, edible varieties. In the early 1950s Wasson encountered the writings of two North American anthropologists who had traveled to Huautla, Robert J. Weitlaner and Ruth Basset Johnson. Both mentioned the ceremonial use of mushrooms. Wasson became excited and wrote to Eunice V. Pike, the linguist/missionary associated with the Summer Institute of Linguistics/ Wycliffe Bible Translators who had spent many years learning Mazatec in Huautla. She responded with a long letter that peaked Wasson’s curiosity, although Pike herself was not predisposed to favor mushroom use. She wrote, “I lament the survival of the use of hongos because we don’t know of a single case when they have brought beneficial results. I would prefer that they consult the Bible when they want to discover the intentions of Christ, instead of seeing them deceived by a curandero and by the hongos” (quoted in Benítez 1964:21). 128

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Pike’s doubts were entirely in keeping with her ideas about Mazatec society, which she described in ways that emphasized the childlike nature of the people she lived with (E. Pike 1956a, 1958). She saw herself as a bearer of the sacred truth contained in the Bible, which she would give to the people through her work in translation. Like the early Spaniards, she saw mushrooms as a rival form of belief that served only to deceive simple people and prevent them from accepting the true faith. She was frustrated by the way that superstitions about the mushrooms contaminated acceptance of her message. Huautecos were reluctant to read the Bible because they believed that they would have to guardar la dieta afterward just as they would after eating mushrooms—they could not accept or give gifts or engage in sexual relations for four days (E. Pike 1960; E. Pike and Cowan 1959, Duke 2001). Wasson first arrived in Huautla in 1953 and took mushrooms with a curandero named Aurelio. This man greatly impressed Wasson because of his explanation of the disappearance of Wasson’s seventeen-year-old son, Peter. At that time, according to Pike and some of Wasson’s informants, mushrooms were only taken for two specific reasons: to know the future (or the unknown) or to cure a disease (or discover its cause or its chances of cure). So Wasson asked Aurelio to discover the whereabouts of Peter, who had been missing for several months. Aurelio told him that Peter was missing because he was avoiding military service; he was probably in New York (he had disappeared from Boston), and later on Aurelio saw him in a uniform in Germany. Wasson thought that this was impossible, since there was no mandatory military service in the United States, and what could this illiterate man know about New York or Germany anyway? They were probably the only foreign place names that he knew. He condescendingly thanked Aurelio anyway, and apparently the mushroom trip profoundly affected him. When he returned to the United States, Wasson found out that Peter had, in fact, run away to New York. When Peter finally called home, he told his family that he had decided (having recently concluded an unhappy love affair) to go ahead and join the army. He was stationed in Germany. Wasson was impressed and returned to Huautla in 1955, when he met María Sabina. He interviewed María Sabina, recorded her chants, and published an article about her in Life magazine (Wasson 1957); Wasson and the old woman and Huautla became internationally famous. After Wasson published this account of his adventures, a series of experts in a variety of fields—chemistry, botany, ethnology, and linguistics—descended upon Huautla. One of them, the chemist Albert “¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hong0?”

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Hoffmann, discoverer of l sd , isolated the active ingredient in the fungi and synthesized it in the laboratory. On one of Wasson’s subsequent expeditions, he was accompanied by a man who claimed to represent the institution that had provided him with a grant. His fellow visitor was actually a ci a agent, interested in collecting drugs for the agency for experimentation with mind control; he returned to Langley with a suitcase full of psilocybin (Tim Weiner, personal communication, April 2002). Wasson continued to write about Huautla, and his publications were soon joined by the works of various Mexicans. These works form a strangely uniform body of literature. Each publication recycles, almost intact, the same information that appears in all the others. As Michael Duke (1996) shows, the ur-text for this discourse on mushrooms is the Wasson material, all of whose writings repeat the same stories (Wasson 1972a, 1972b, 1976a, 1976b, 1977, 1982, 1983; Wasson, Ruck, and Hoffmann 1978). For example, the first half of Benítez’ Los Hongos Alucinantes tells the story of Wasson’s encounters with the mushrooms, and the second half presents information about María Sabina, also a staple of the Wasson text. My own chapter on mushrooms participates in this discourse by recounting the origin myth of Wasson’s first trip to the mountains. This genre of writing focuses on the hero’s voyage to a region that is remote, unknown, isolated, and part of the distant past. Wasson’s original account in Life magazine disguised María Sabina by calling her Eva Méndez, and hid her homeland by giving it the pseudonym of “Sierra Mixeteca,” a cross between Mazateca and Mixteca. A hardy photographer from San Francisco went to Oaxaca to crack Wasson’s code and discover the real Eva Méndez. After weeks of failure, he saw a photograph in Oaxaca City in which a woman was wearing a huipil with the identical pattern worn by Méndez in a Life photo.2 “Where is that?” he asked. “Huautla,” he was told. He went to Huautla, had a terrifying bad trip, and fled back home, never to return. But the secret was out. 5. The Hippies. Then came the time of the hippies. In the mid-sixties, large numbers of jipis came to Huautla to take mushrooms and cavort about. It was important for these folks to take hallucinogenic drugs in an authentically exotic context, surrounded by Indians. Huautla became for North America what Nepal was at the same time for Europe and what Morocco may have been a decade earlier for William Burroughs. It was the place associated with a particular kind of otherness that could be literally consumed—revelatory, decadent, liberating, and bizarre. A place with tiny natives and no rules. 130

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But the tiny natives were not pleased with the behavior of these guests, who camped in large numbers down by the river. They say that the hippies did not spend very much money in Huautla, and would often try to haggle with shopkeepers or look around the store for half an hour and then not buy anything. Still worse, they would defile the mushrooms by taking them during the day, openly, freaking out in public. And they would use drugs such as marijuana and take their clothes off in public. Most Huautecos agreed that something had to be done, and in 1968 the municipal president asked the government to remove the outsiders. The army was sent to Huautla, and until 1976 the entire region above Teotitlán del Camino was guarded by military checkpoints and kept off limits to foreigners. This was the period of Luís Echeverría’s presidency. His political strategy was largely based on anti–United States nationalist rhetoric. Richard Nixon privately encouraged Echeverría to harass American hippies, whom the Mexican president considered to be corrupting agents of a decadent imperialist culture.3 The municipal presidents of Teotitlán and many other small Mexican towns as well as the army and federal police eagerly adopted this policy, and many of the foreigners who did make it to this part of Oaxaca in the early seventies ended up penniless, in jail, with unwanted haircuts. For the gringos who came to Huautla in the sixties and seventies, taking mushrooms in context and imitating a particular notion of the primitive gave them the perceived authority to critique their own society. Charles Manson, for example, boasted, “I’ve been to Mexico and taken mushrooms”; this experience—whether true or not—served to authorize his subject position as a social critic (Screck 1988). The natives, in this dynamic, were generally invisible to these seekers of wisdom; or they were seen merely as obstacles to be overcome or gotten around. There were exceptions—for example, noted curanderos, as well as the few who learned to act like R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural. Like the cavers who were also exploring the region at the same time, the hippies devised different “strategies” for getting by the locals and getting to their real goal; some pretended the natives weren’t there; others gave them candy. In the end, though, both the mushroom seekers and the cavers realized that they could realize their desires elsewhere, in other places where there weren’t so many “problems.” For the tourists, the Indian provided a form of non-Western “order” against which a Western “disorder” could be performed and symmetrically fitted. The Mexican army with its machine guns and its scissors pushed that order too far into decadent third world disorder and ruined “¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hong0?”

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6.1 “Don’t Panic, It’s Organic”: A sign of foreign tourists in Huautla, 2001. Photo by Katie Fisher.

the whole equation. But many continued to make the pilgrimage to Huautla even after the army barred the road. These intrepid adventurers bypassed the army on back trails and camped in caves by a river; a 1970 New York Times article documented their “idyllic existence” in a “mushroom paradise.” 6. The Present Time. There is still a steady trickle of visitors seeking mushrooms. Most of them come to Huautla in June, during the height of the rainy season. In the 1980s, a small number of outsiders created permanent or semipermanent settlements in the area. On my first visit to Huautla in 1987, I encountered the most visible of these groups, an international band that operated its own business in the heart of Huautla—a bakery/coffee shop called El Cristo Rey (Christ the King). In 2001, I spoke with one of the members of this band, a German man who had just returned to Huautla after a long absence to make another stab at longterm residence. Bert originally came to Huautla, in 1985, as a seventeen-year-old running away from an autocratic father powerful enough to have the Mexican army scour Oaxaca for him (unsuccessfully). In Huautla, he 132

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joined the growing community forming around an older Mexican man called “The Godfather” who operated the bakery. The Godfather was an imposing figure, heavyset with an enormous beard. As Bert recalls, the Godfather was “Christian, but because of the mushrooms, really Christian.” He decorated the coffee shop with religious murals, and the group spent most of its time “baking bread, eating mushrooms, and studying the Bible.” According to Bert, the group’s downfall came as a result of the Godfather’s marriage to a girl, fifteen years his junior, from one of the most powerful Jewish families in Mexico City, a family connected to senators, judges, lawyers—all the bigshots involved in drug trafficking in the state of Guerrero. They were appalled by their daughter’s relationship with an older mushroom guru and tried to convince her to come home, but she refused. So they arranged for a bust. Swarms of federal police descended on El Cristo Rey, arresting everybody and turning the place upside down searching for marijuana and mushrooms. Bert claims that they didn’t find anything incriminating, and the whole operation was a cover for the kidnapping, by her parents, of The Godfather’s young wife. His evidence for this is that all of the arrested hippies were released after a week or two, except for the girl. Her family had her locked up in a mental hospital.4 Today, most tourism in Huautla is domestic and very short term; visitors come in the greatest numbers from Mexico City, and also from Veracruz and other cities. Most of the foreigners are European. And, whereas most of the hippies who came to Huautla in the 1960s were American, there were very few Americans in the 1990s. There were more Spaniards, Italians, French, and Germans. This may be changing again, as the onset of the internet has abetted the spread of information about drug tourism. One can now purchase María Sabina coffee cups at the Stain Blue website, for example, and a new wave of Americans may be beginning to reach the Sierra Mazateca, not seeking mushrooms, but rather a legal hallucinogenic plant called salvia (aka María Pastora) that is then sold in head shops and over the internet, from websites like “Mazatec Garden.” The new traffic has reached the point that the New York Times, for the first time since 1970, devoted an article to Huautla’s drug tourism (Weiner 2002). I never saw any salvia seekers in the 1990s, but I did see a diverse range of visitors. Some of the people from Mexico City look like hippies, but others come in large family groups. Most appear respectable, and the locals tell me that the current batch of visitors is not nearly as flagrantly disrespectful as their predecessors. “¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hong0?”

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mushrooms evoke the world Mushrooms are the engine of the Mazatec “mimetic machine,” fueling a discourse of imitation, comparison, alterity, and sameness. Talk about mushrooms, whether it appears in texts or everyday conversation, invariably involves representations and evocations of some sort of “other,” creating a discursive map with paths from Huautla to every corner of the world. We should not separate these representations into opposing categories, like “insiders” and “outsiders.” We should not conclude that the representations by “outsiders” are immoral, unethical, and hegemonic, and thus distinct from the representations by “insiders,” which are not necessarily either authentic, moral, co-opted, or resistant. The representations may be different when they are made by differently situated actors, but the mimetic play of representation is passed back and forth between all sorts of individuals, plaguing any effort at systematic categorization. “Insiders” co-opt, imitate, and refashion stories told by “outsiders” and vice versa—mushroom tales continually violate cultural boundaries. The mushroom discourse creates a sort of Hyperspace; it invites one inside, to an inner world, but that inside is nearly always represented by an allusion to somewhere else and some other time. You travel, by taking mushrooms or talking about them, to the faraway lands that both are and are not the Sierra Mazateca. Wasson, more than anyone, listed all the places in the world in describing the Sierra Mazateca and the effects of the mushrooms. He saw a sort of nonspecific Asiatic architecture, he said. It was not Japanese, Chinese, Indian, or Musulman, but something else. It was like the architecture seen by the visionaries of the Bible, he said. And he recognized the characteristics of the Elizabethan and Dominican epochs, and he came into the presence of the Platonic forms. All of these places crammed together, a combined generic other made to resonate with the self through connections with the glories of his own cultural and spiritual past—the great spiritual civilizations of the Middle Ages, the ancient Near East, and ancient Greece. He went still further, identifying mushrooms with the beginnings of religion on the tundra of Siberia, and with the beginnings of his civilization in the Vedas of India. His texts refer mostly to soma (an ancient Asian hallucinogen) and India; Huautla is only the gateway, the all-important place of contact with the other, the self, and the origins. The American journalist Derek Peck also wrote of archaic architecture. “I’ve visited this place often in my dreams and have never been able to hold onto it,” he wrote for Salon.com, “and now here

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I am walking freely amid the classical architecture, huge pillars and arches and pink marble corridors” (Peck 1998). The Mexican anthropologist Fernando Benítez wrote his book about the mushrooms of Huautla shortly after Wasson’s initial visit and relied greatly on the banker’s words, but his own interests differed. So he traveled to different places through Huautla, places that corresponded less to the Asiatic racial past dreamed by Wasson at the dawn of religion than to the Mexican national past imagined through the split inheritance of the mestizo race. Yes, he said, the curanderos are like Moses leading his people through the desert. But for them, who are not Western, the mushrooms spawn the unmixed images of the Prehispanic, Indian past. He said, on what authority I am not sure, that they see images like those of the Popul Vuh and the Aztec codices. For him, the whole scene made him think of peoples from the far corners of the Earth that represented the paragons of primitive purity and otherness in the anthropological literature of the time—he said they were like the Australian aborigines with their dreamtime and like the Amazonian Indians (Benítez 1964). The mushrooms made him speak of the people of eternal timelessness all around the world and brought him into direct contact with the “Prehispanic” world that gave him and his fellow mestizos their authority. I looked up María Sabina on an internet search engine several years ago and came up with one response (a more recent search brought up 210 matches). It said: There is a world beyond ours, a world that is far away, nearby, and invisible. And there is where God lives, where the dead live, the spirits and the saints. A world where everything has already happened and everything is known. That world talks. It has a language of its own. I report what it says. The sacred mushroom takes me by the hand and brings me to the world where everything is known. It is they, the sacred mushrooms, that speak in a way that I can understand. I ask them and they answer me. When I return from the trip that I have taken with them, I tell what they have told me and what they have shown me.—María Sabina.

Clicking on the underlined words leads to a web page titled “The Theory of Hyperspace,” which “predicts that our universe still has a dwarf twin, a companion universe that has curled up into a small sixdimensional ball that is too small to be observed.” This theory is cred-

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ited to a Dr. Michiu Kaku—Professor of Theoretical Physics. Here, once again, María Sabina and her sacred mushrooms are made to create links to someplace else, in this case a place of scientific theory that is also a grand theory about space. It seems that the discourse about mushrooms and Huautla functions like a page on the world wide web that doesn’t have much information on it, but that has a large number of links to other pages, from ancient India to the ancient Maya to the Bible to physics. Like the mushrooms themselves, the discourse about mushrooms brings us to a million different worlds that are “far away, nearby, and invisible.” The Mazatec-speaking people encountered by Pike and Wasson used the mushrooms to make different kinds of comparisons. For most of the bilingual comerciante class of Pike’s time (the 1930s through the 1950s), they represented simple ignorance and superstition (Duke 1996). The people were worshipping the Devil, said the early Spanish conquerors. They were deceived by the phony curers, said Pike. They deceived themselves, said the comerciantes. Mushrooms represented no specific place; rather, they represented the antithesis of civilization, whether that civilization should take the form of Christianity or modern Mexico. Poorer Huautecos of that period did mention specific places when explaining or describing mushroom practices, and these places seemed to relate to class and the condition of poverty. María Sabina did not mention any place, when describing her initial fungal adventures as a girl, but compared her use of mushrooms to a rich girl’s use of toys (Estrada 1981). A twenty-one-year-old man told Eunice Pike that mushrooms were given to his people by Christ because they were too poor to buy medicine. He went on to say that eating mushrooms was like watching a movie in the United States (Benítez 1964). Rather than bring one face to face with God, where the hippies went, mushrooms enabled a journey to an imaginary First World of toys, tall buildings, and movie theaters. These days, Huautecos use the discourse of mushrooms to make and occlude distinctions, to assert both specificity and universality. Don Juan Peralta tells us stories late at night in his hardware store in the center, of thieves punished and Japanese made insane by the power of the hongos, which create invisible rays between people. He asked Gilberto, an unhappy chap from Chalco, near Mexico City, why he wanted to trip, what needed to be cured. Satisfied with Gilberto’s response, he opened a drawer to show us his gun and went into a long Mansonesque rap, eyes glowing and staring, hands moving, gun visible in an open drawer. “We are both men. I have two balls, just like you,” he said. “Two of them.” Unlike some other informants, he said that the mushrooms don’t just 136

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speak dialecto but every language, and he listed five or six. Finally his wife appeared behind a curtain, visibly angry. “Go away, come again tomorrow,” she said. He continued a few more minutes while she fumed, spitting in disgust. Peralta’s message here is that mushrooms reflect a (male) sameness—we all have two balls—at the same time that they reflect difference—the mushrooms of Huautla are unique, he says, and the tourists “profane” or “joke with” the mushrooms, unlike the “Indians.” These differences appear on the levels of geography and ethnicity, the differences typically seized on by the linear mode of reporting culture. The differences assert an underlying sameness, in that they are the sort of differences that can be seen and labeled by a unified authority. In fact, Don Juan invokes the state to validate these mushroom-related classifications. The government, he tells us, says that the indios are intelligent people, and it is legal for the indio to use the mushrooms. Other people connect the mushrooms with another external, imaginary space—the “Mazatec World,” a theme park populated by isolated traits placed together in such a way as to form a simulacrum of a time when they supposedly merged together into a unified, natural whole. Mushrooms, says Alejandro, are the first path to know the Mazatec World, and then to progress and prosperity. To be Mazatec, says Professor Florencio Carrera, one must try the mushrooms. The “Mazatec” that Carrera and other Huauteco intellectuals are talking about here is a hierarchical approximation that can never be fully reached, except in the past, in the true time of the “Mazatec World.” María Sabina, the great curer, is the perfect symbol of this world, in part because she is already dead. Leonardo, the accountant whose father owns an enormous hotel-restaurant complex in the center of town and is the bank’s landlord and thus probably Huautla’s richest citizen, sat in the restaurant one slow afternoon reading Juan García Carrera’s (1986) La Otra Vida de María Sabina. He said that he was very interested in learning about María Sabina. He had only taken mushrooms three times, and they make him scared. He isn’t actually frightened when he takes them, but it will be a while before he eats them again, he said. He talked about how mushrooms have been commercialized. Its not like it was when María Sabina was around, he said. This is a culture, or a part of a culture that is dying, that is being lost. I mentioned to him how it seemed that all the curanderos (Leonardo referred to them with the generic, universalizing term “shamans,” evoking Wasson’s evocation of Siberia) seemed to accuse the others, to call them frauds, and I mentioned envy. He said that the reason for envy is that the people still lack a little bit of culture. “¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hong0?”

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In Leonardo’s juxtaposed statements, culture is something that exists only in the future or the past. It died with María Sabina, or has yet to come to fruition in a full merger with modern Mexican society. The mushroom, when spoken of by experts like Florencio, reminds people of this status—caught between two worlds, denied full participation in both. For the curers of today, Marta tells me, as we sit at a table in her mother’s restaurant, mushrooms are just a business. Between the gringos and chilangos, who are drunk on mushrooms in the day, and the charlatan curers, who only eat a tiny bit during their fraudulent rituals, the whole thing is just a shadow of the past. The story of María Sabina’s own family echoes this narrative of decay. The great priestess’s descendants, it is said, reverted to the hillbilly vices of squabbling and drinking. Some returned to remote ranchos. María Apolonia, who inherited her mother’s title as a curer, is said to be an alcoholic. It is a world that is lost, that we are denied immediate contact with, that we can only approach through a mediator. Yet curers still fight for and claim expert status. None, however, achieve the wide acknowledgment given the dead María Sabina (more on the careers of individual mushroom professionals and the way they describe themselves later in this chapter). In general, when talking about mushroom expertise, at least to me, people in the Sierra Mazateca only talk about María Sabina and the institution of mushroom curanderismo; they mention very few individual current curanderos by name. The mushroom expert almost always is contrasted to the “official” expert of the state, the mestizo or foreign medical doctor. Marcelino, himself a curer and a relative of María Sabina who lives in El Fortín, compared learning to be a curandero with training to be a doctor. Both involve studying and learning skills like how much to give people. He said anybody could learn, even foreigners like myself. Marcelino aligned his form of knowledge directly with medicine, as more or less the same thing. More often, the two forms are placed in a sort of competition in stories about ailments that no doctor could cure, but curanderos could. Often, the fortunate patients in these stories are wealthy outsiders. There was the crazy, psychotic woman who spent a month in Ayautla, tripping almost every day with a skilled curandero with the patience of Annie Sullivan. At the end of the month she was cured—healthy, calm, humble, and functioning. And there was the rich man from Tehuacán with a terminal disease who spent millions of pesos seeing specialists all over the world, even in the United States, to no avail, until his maid suggested he go to Huautla, where he was cured. Imagine that! 138

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The tone and content of these stories reminded me of a genre of article in the American tabloid called the Weekly World News. In these articles, a member of the upper reaches of human society is brought low by bodily afflictions, which can only be cured by contact with some representative of the “low”—the wacky, the grotesque, the repellent, the savage. The “high” stratum of experts always fails or makes things worse in horrible ways—doctors rape their patients or don’t have a clue, but happiness comes when the rich stud falls for the five-hundred-pound lady or is operated on by a six-year-old. An elite lack is liquidated by cleansing contact with a low or primitive other. In the doctor versus shaman stories told by people from the Sierra Mazateca (generally from comerciante families), the tellers seem to position their own curing tradition as the site of the “low” that can purify the afflicted “high.” Federico, a merchant from Pochotepec who had just returned from Mexico City, for example, told me the story of María Sabina’s conquest of the pompous doctors. “She was great,” he said. “She was a priestess,” he said, “because she competed with doctors. A doctor cuts here,” he said, as he mimed slicing his abdomen, and she just [and here he babbles, ooga booga ooga, and flutters his hands over his stomach]. And the first person (treated by the doctor) is in pain. “I can’t go to the bathroom.” And the other is cured, just with [babbling, ooga ooga], just with words. How is that possible? She went to Europe, to Spain, to the United States. She went against the scientists and she won. She won. How is that possible?

Federico’s story makes several points about expertise and metacultural mushroom discourse in the Sierra Mazateca. First of all, the story has a Ripley’s Believe It or Not or Weekly World News quality to it. I mention the American Weekly World News not because I think the Mexicans read it, but because I want to stress that the Mazatecos are included in a system of discourses in which the same stories make sense; they are not lost in a narrow indigenous world that can only be described or explained through invocations of the strictly local. As in the tabloid, the stories always include the bemused admission that the result, while true, is obviously improbable. How could she beat all those scientists? María Sabina is constituted as the anti-expert figure, like the Weekly World News bald man who grafts hair from his armpits on to his head. Like the bald man, she is almost comic and grotesque, as she waves her hands and says ooga ooga booga. Like similar stories told all over the world, this one describes “¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hong0?”

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the gaps and failures in authoritative and official attempts to enclose the world in totalizing systems of knowledge such as medicine. How is that possible, that this little old lady, with her awkward movements and her silly-sounding words, defeated the greatest doctors of New York and Spain? And that the patient of these great doctors is left with one of the lowest and most grotesque maladies, expressed by Federico with the lament, “I can’t go to the bathroom?” This story intersects with the large body of stories that circulate in the Sierra Mazateca about people’s distrust of doctors, about people who refused to see a doctor and lived to ridiculously old ages, about how doctors messed people up and they were better off fixing themselves with herbs and healthy diets and strong doses of aguardiente. These stories are like the “urban legends” that Americans tell and that have been documented in the works of Jan Harold Brunvand.5 Some of these stories even overlap with those recounted by the Weekly World News. Once while I was talking with my friend Mauricio, a young man from Huautla who fixes computers in Tehuacán during the week and sells satellite dishes on the weekend, I casually made some joke about extraterrestrials and ufo s. He became suddenly serious. “You don’t believe in them?” he asked. I asked if he did and he said that he had seen them, that they were beings of pure energy with no bodies. He said that they operated on people and cured them of diseases. He said that they operated on a six-year-old girl here whom the doctors could not help, without touching her, and that the girl was fine the next day.6 While little old María Sabina clearly plays the anti-expert in Federico’s story, she is also a revered regular old expert, a figure to be imitated and admired as the pride of the region. She not only beat the doctors as a wacky difference, she also beat them on their own level, as a medical expert representing, like Marcelino, an obscure but valid form of medical knowledge. In this incarnation, she and Marcelino are linear experts. That is, expertise is expressed in the same style as in the clearly different world of the doctors—through training, curing, and above all, competition—but each world has its own experts with their own costumes, languages, and techniques. They met in some version of the Olympics, and María Sabina took the gold medal home to the Mazatec World. But her expertise could only come from this travel; she could not have been famed or an expert had she remained in Huautla as a practitioner of an ancient, local art. In this way, she can be described as a pictorial expert—her expertise comes from her activities at the cultural border rather than in the cultural core. 140

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Federico’s story also emphasizes the way in which power is imagined in the Sierra Mazateca—as a property of the space of mediation between worlds, the space of coming and going, buying and selling. María Sabina, he tells me, traveled to various named places—Europe, Spain, the United States. Just before telling the story, he told me what he did for a living. He said that he held many offices, that he was a mason, a carpenter, a painter. Right now, as he was walking into his house fresh off the road from Mexico City, he was planning on starting a business, buying and selling. María Sabina’s successful travel served as a model for his mobility between careers and locations. The different forms of expertise that coincide within the figure of the mushroom expert are in some way equivalent to the different uses of the terms “indio” and “indígena.” On the one hand, María Sabina and the other curanderos are Indian experts; they represent the Indians or the Mazatecos in the gathering of experts representing other groups—they embody the Indian form of knowledge. On the other hand, as experts possessing large amounts of cultural capital, they are the antithesis of the Indian, inasmuch as the word functions as a synonym for “hillbilly,” the absence of culture. Thus, Juvenal told me that a particular curandero from another pueblo was not very good. He is indígena, he said. He tells people that he will have a velada for them and then postpones it—this time because he had a toothache. Juvenal said it was like going to see a doctor for an emergency, and the doctor won’t see you. This discourse of expertise is used to critique the official experts—the licensed doctors, and so on—but it also, in its mimicry of the form in which experts are created, recreates a hierarchy of knowledge that corresponds to a hierarchy of individuals from most to least cultured, in which those at the bottom are identified as Indian. Juvenal turns this weapon not only on a poor monolingual curandero, but also on the more ardent claimers of expertise, the local intellectuals who are busy establishing themselves as the representative experts of a Mazatec ethnic community. After a film about the Mazatec huehuentón tradition made by Renato García Dorantes was shown in the Casa de la Cultura, he remarked that the film was very poor in quality. I reminded him that Renato had admitted beforehand that the film was “not professional, but made with the best intentions,” but Juvenal was unmoved. “If you are going to do something,” he said, “you should do it right. Like López Portillo said about the ta po [the East Bus Terminal in Mexico City], “Look how nicely that turned out.” (It is a beautiful bus station.) “Like this . . . [the movie]. No.” While locals tell many stories abound about miraculous cures made on “¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hong0?”

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wealthy outsiders whom the doctors could not help, they themselves seem to view mushroom curers and doctors in more pragmatic terms, and they do not discount the medical doctors. People with sick family members seek out the advice of medical professionals and curanderos alike. Edgardo, a talkative store owner who had lived in Huautla for many years but was originally from a town in the Valley of Oaxaca, told me the story of his daughter, who was not right in the head. After she was seven years old she kept growing physically but went backward mentally like a baby. She would wander off and go to the center of town or up to the hospital and they would have to go get her. Sometimes, he said, she would be aggressive. They tried all kinds of treatments and visited many curanderos, he said. Some said this and others said that. All the curers had their own form of doing things but the final result was that her problem was something from birth; it was biological, they said. Then the family took the girl to doctors all over. They even institutionalized her in a place near Oaxaca, but it was very bad. The chief of the institution was a friend—he still is a friend, he is still alive—so they trusted him. But he just sits in his office and his employees, the doctors and nurses, they just do what they want, he said. They mistreat the patients. They tie them up. They tie them to their beds, he said. They give them electric shocks. They give them drugs that turn them into robots, he said. She looked like this, her eyes were like this, like a robot. And the medication that was supposed to go to the patients never got there. People like this need love and care, not this, he said. So we got her out of there, he said. We went all the way to the governor. The whole family went, together, to tell him how they were mistreating people, killing them. The whole family, strong, he said. So we got her out and she was treated by a natural doctor in Tehuacán. She used herbs and other medicines and little by little the girl became composed. The doctor would read her hand, first rubbing it with a palm. Now she is all right and can work and all. One doctor said we should have her get married, he said. But she could not do what a campesino would expect, carrying wood and making tortillas. Another doctor said we should sterilize her. We said we would think about it, he said. She does not want to marry, he said. There is a campesino boy near here, like her a little slow in the head, he said. We asked if she would want him and she said no way, why would I want a crazy idiot like that? She is twenty-nine. The natural doctor also used mushrooms to find out what happened when she herself was robbed. She had a maid for a while, and one time she left the house for five or six days and left the maid at home. The maid’s old mother lived there too, in a room in the back. When the doctor returned, 142

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she found that the old woman was still there but all the stuff was gone, a whole truckload: TV set, stereo, everything. She took mushrooms and was told that the maid would show up and in fact she did. A few days later the doctor saw her in a car, and she and an assistant attacked and beat her and took her to the police. But at the police station the maid told how they had beaten her, a poor maid, and anyway she had already sold the goods and the money was gone and they never recovered anything. In Edgardo’s story the unnamed curanderos function as experts on the same level as doctors. Edgardo, believing that his daughter suffered from a reversible psychological ailment, sought the curanderos out first. They all responded differently, each according to his “form,” but in the end they could not help him, so, since the problem was labeled as “biological” and “from birth,” he sought out medical doctors. These doctors served his family even worse, as his daughter was lost in a gruesome torture chamber of an institution where nurses stole the drugs and patients were abused and neglected. Like the curanderos, the doctors are not represented as a monolithic bloc; they disagree, and each suggests a different treatment. The two groups—doctors and curanderos—have overlapping responsibilities, and despite the atrocities committed at the asylum, Edgardo does not dismiss all doctors as frauds. In fact, the asylum is criticized in an ancient political discourse that always fails to blame the top administrator for the crimes of his underlings—if the king only knew what his officers were doing, he would surely intervene. Edgardo’s story does oppose “natural” and “artificial” systems of medical knowledge; the most positive example of the “natural” system, though, is not an Indian mushroom curer but an urban mestiza practitioner of “natural medicine” in Tehuacán. Thus this opposition, as detailed in stories like that of Edgardo, does not necessarily map neatly onto the opposition between the local and the external, or the Indian and the mestizo. Many people like Edgardo evoke the difference between an impersonal and cruel dominant medical system (that is countered, significantly, by the “strong family”) and a more “natural” system often associated with mushroom curing. In doing so, they are not defending an autonomous cultural heritage against a penetrating state discourse, but participating in a set of discourses about nature and expertise that travel far beyond the limits of the Sierra Mazateca. Finally, there are others who tell stories about using mushrooms to solve personal problems without the aid of a curandero. Like the article about the bald man who grafted hair from his armpits to his head, these tales deny the necessity of mediation and a hierarchy of access to Truth. “¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hong0?”

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I am thinking of Lupe, the bilingual wife of a local comerciante who owns a stall in the market. About five years ago, her life seemed to hit bottom. She had two sons, and didn’t want any more children. Her husband’s sisters hated her for this, and told their brother: this woman can’t give you children so find another who will. Lupe told him that she was his wife, and that he knew why she didn’t want any more children. If he didn’t think she could, she told him that she would show him she could with another man. If you want another woman, she told him, go fill yourself with children but get away from here. Her husband left her for a younger woman, with whom he had a baby girl and with whom he lived for two years. Her older son was away studying in the city, and she was left alone with her younger son. Things were hard for them, and one day she decided that she would take mushrooms. She had never taken them before. Lupe went to some land she owned in her native village a short distance from Huautla and found some mushrooms. She told her son what she was planning on doing and he laughed at her, not believing. So she ate the mushrooms. A short time later, nothing seemed to be happening, so she made herself a little meal of tortillas and beans and went to bed. She had heard that often there is no effect when one takes mushrooms for the first time. But a little while later she woke up, feeling strange. It was a while before she remembered that she had eaten mushrooms. The mushrooms worked and worked until six in the morning, and explained why her husband had left. She understood how his sisters had been working against her; she saw them throwing dirt from the cemetery on her house and felt herself being buried. This and much more, all through the night, and the mushrooms were also working to cure her husband of his madness. She continued to take mushrooms, five or six times that year, and went to visit a curandero. It is true that what the curanderos do is effective, with eggs and feathers and copal, but she prefers to take mushrooms by herself or just with her family. It was another year before her husband came back. They had just bought the big truck before he left, and she liked to ride in it. She saw that her husband’s sisters resented her for this, but with the help of the mushrooms she saw that she had worked for that truck, and had every right to use it. Omar, she said to her husband, this is your house. I am your wife. Take this chair and sit in your house. Lupe’s story is one of the few mushroom tales told to me that made no reference to other places, other worlds, people from outside the Sierra. It seems to be a tale about a woman who finds herself trapped in desperate straits using the mushrooms to take control of her life. Lupe did not men144

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tion the various circulating “cultural rules” about using mushrooms; in fact she violated several of them, by traveling into that mysterious place without a guide and by eating food at the beginning of her voyage. She has no need for expert guidance; she asserts that she has the same special insights as the curanderos. She said, I don’t like to trip with other people, because then I focus on them and their problems. I always see and know what the cause of their problems is, but that is not what I want, she said. When I take mushrooms, she said, I want the focus to be all on me. For Lupe, the mushroom story is not about mimetically conjuring other places or embodying a localized identity, as it is for Professor Florencio (“to be Mazatec, one must eat the mushrooms”), but it is about a more personal and individualized quest for dignity and health that does not respect cultural borders. To sum up this section: Mushrooms are used as part of the struggle over the definition of a legitimate way of appropriating culture. On the one hand we see the constant use, by Wasson and others, of the mushroom-eating culture of the Sierra Mazateca as the starting point for the “cultured play of allusions and analogies. . . which reinforce each other and create enchantment of artistic contemplation” (Bourdieu 1990:53). These allusions distance the speaker from the represented world and distance the people of that world from the meaning of their own practices, which can only be read through an overview that encompasses places like the Prehispanic past, Vedic India, and the steppes of Siberia. The same distancing takes place when experts identify the source of the meaning of Mazatec mushroom practices as emanating from the mysterious and always just vanished Mazatec World. Experts who describe the mushroom user as an essential member of this dying place set up a hierarchy of culture in which ordinary people are always too close, too contaminated to ever attain a high status. These representations of mushrooms as tokens of a past culture are the Mazatec version of populist nostalgia, which, according to Bourdieu, is a basic element in the relationship of the petit bourgeois to the peasantry and its traditions (Bourdieu 1990:58). The invocation of the Mazatec World, whose name alone—like Disney World, West World, Future World, or Auto World—brings with it associations of boundedness, enclosure, and commodification, also constructs what Bakhtin called an “epic distance” between the past and the present. This distance, Bakhtin tells us, parallels the difference in status between the expert who identifies a “ready made truth” and the people who are the subjects of his expertise (Bakhtin 1984:182). “¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hong0?”

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Experts who define mushroom use as part of a closed, imaginary Mazatec culture are engaging in what I have called the linear style of reporting culture, and they are doing so explicitly. But some stories about people who achieve expert status through their manipulation of the psychedelic world also implicitly report culture through the linear style. This is accomplished through the comparison between great curanderos like María Sabina and Marcelino and officially licensed medical doctors. The curanderos become “our doctors,” just as the music of Grupo Cuauhtémoc is “rock, but Mazateco,” in the words of Professor Florencio. A single style of expert is accepted, whose content can be filled by shamans, herbalists, or podiatrists. Like the doctors, the Mazatec experts are assumed to be licensed by a licensing authority—the state or some facsimile of it. But this accommodation to the dominant notion of expertise is not the only form of metacultural meaning to emerge out of these stories. They also allow for a critique of medical knowledge through the figure of the anti-expert, and they provide a figure for the teller to imitate—the curandero who accumulates important contacts all over the world and becomes an inhabitant of the magic space between worlds. Finally, stories like those told by Edgardo and Lupe both fail to see the mushroom story as something belonging to a closed culture, deriving from the past or elsewhere, and they also fail to stress the importance of licensed experts. These two features, it seems to me, go together. Freed from the imposition of an epic distance between the expert with his readymade truth and the imperfect approximations to that truth produced by real people, they use mushrooms and the mushroom discourse for their own ends and in the construction of their own stories. The mushrooms work not in the form of publicly constructed categories of ethnicity and tradition or the public constitution of expertise through competition, but in the private realm of family and household. Edgardo alternates between curanderos, doctors, asylums, and natural healers in a story about how a family came together, strong, to fight an evil and impersonal system and how his daughter took control of her senses. Lupe did not need a curandero or received wisdom to help her become her own expert, on a domestic scale, and rescue her family from the craziness of her husband and the scheming witchcraft of his sisters. They do not belong to the past, to the Mazatec World, or to the Mazatec Culture with their “objectified and finalized images of people” (Bakhtin 1984:182) and their stories reflect their contamination and relative freedom.

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mazatec nostalgia for the sixties The stories told and written by Huautecos about the wave of foreigners who visited the region in search of mushrooms in the 1960s constitute another arena where the chronotope of a sealed-off native world is challenged—replaced by a vision of secret, lucrative, and potentially immoral mediation that at the same time serves as a source of pride. Beginning in the mid-1990s, public celebrations of this period began to appear in books, magazines, and public art. Mazatec writers and comerciantes remembered the 1960s with pleasure—nostalgic for their own past and for a moment when they encountered the nostalgic gaze of the other and assumed a central role in world history. Memory of the hippies’ presence resonates with Western tales about the dangerous immigration of savage others. Huautla and the surrounding area were swamped by these outsiders, many of whom slept in caves by a nearby river or in the market in the center of town. More and more townspeople became alarmed, and in 1967 the municipal president Isauro Nava asked the army to come take care of the problem. From 1969 until 1976, the state police and the army maintained a base at the bottom of the road leading into the mountains from the mestizo community of Teotitlán and prevented foreigners from arriving by the road. Still, some managed

6.2 “This was Huautla de Jiménez, Oaxaca, in 1968.” A mural in front of El Rinconcito expresses nostalgia for the moment when Huautla entered world history. Photo by Katie Fisher. “¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hong0?”

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to bypass these obstacles and make it to Huautla by back trails. A 1970 New York Times article described an “idyllic existence . . . below cascading waterfalls, in winding limestone caves, in empty mountain huts and in animal shelters.” The Mazatec construction of the hippies and other mushroom seekers is and has been ambivalent. One the one hand, many Huauteco intellectuals are quick to point out the inauthenticity of the outsiders’ appreciation of the mushrooms. Outsiders, I was frequently told, use mushrooms as a drug, while Mazatecos use them to cure diseases, to see the future, or because they are part of a cultural heritage. When Huautecos discuss the sixties, they often point out how foreigners failed to observe the “diet” that proscribes inappropriate mushroom use—they used them outside, sometimes during the day, they smoked marijuana, and they did not observe four days of sexual abstinence before and after a “trip.” People still tell stories of the shocking excesses of some visitors—especially the youth who wandered around town naked, during the day, and tried to eat an unfortunate live turkey. The negative view of outsiders is expressed in the two published biographies of the famous curandera María Sabina written by Huauteco natives. The first of these was written by a man named Alvaro Estrada, a member of a wealthy family from the center of town who lived and worked in Mexico City as an engineer. His remarkable book, which appeared in English as María Sabina: Her Life and Chants, in 1981, is told in the first-person voice of the great shaman. In this account, María Sabina bemoans the arrival of the foreigners, who changed the meaning of the mushroom ritual forever. “From the moment the foreigners arrived to search for God, the saint children lost their purity. They lost their force; the foreigners spoiled them. From now on they won’t be any good. There’s no remedy for it” (Estrada 1981:90–91). This remark, which paints a familiar romantic image of a doomed, feminized Indian culture lost in a magical hallucinogenic utopia, unable to survive the “effects” of the sudden “invasion” of Western culture, with its echoes of the Spanish Conquest, has been widely disseminated in the literature on mushrooms and Mazatecs. This is unfortunate, because this view is by no means the only, or even the dominant, Mazatec perspective on the Sixties. After Estrada’s book appeared, no other Huauteco version of the sixties appeared until the publication of journalist García Carrera’s La Otra Vida de María Sabina in 1986, the year of the great shaman’s death. In some ways it reproduced the form of Estrada’s book—much of the story is told in the first-person voice of María Sabina, and García Carrera repeats 148

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many of the same stories that appeared in the original text. The tone of this second version is quite different, however. Much of the narrative is given over to María Sabina’s complaints about how she was treated by powerful figures, from Gordon Wasson to the wife of President López Portillo, who made a film about her, to stores and hotels that profited off of her name, to the wealthy Mazatec comerciantes of El Centro, to Alvaro Estrada himself. In this account, the story becomes a little more complex. It is not just that outsiders polluted an original indigenous authenticity. Instead, a series of intermediaries—Mazatec as well as foreign—capitalized on their various opportunities to deceive the woman they were representing. María Sabina juxtaposed herself with these villains. She was a virtuous intermediary who used her power with the spirit world to benefit her clients and not to enrich herself. Her rivals, instead of investing the spiritual or cultural capital they gain from relationships with outsiders back into the community, use it selfishly to benefit themselves and to adopt lifestyles that distinguish themselves from ordinary, humble Mazatecos. In La Otra Vida de María Sabina, the story of the hippies is used less to express ethnic grievances and bemoan a dying authenticity than to articulate class hostilities in a culturally appropriate register—the chief targets, in García Carrera’s story, are not just decadent gringos and manipulative Mexican businessmen but also wealthy Mazatecos such as Alvaro Estrada, who betray their community. While Huautecos—particularly educated Huautecos—often begin their discussion of mushroom use by criticizing outsiders’ inauthentic uses of the fungi, they also tell a different story, in which they express their pride at relationships they have been able to cultivate with particular outsiders. The appreciation that foreigners may have had for Huautla contrasts with the racist condemnation that Mazatecos felt from their mestizo neighbors and from the national government. This condemnation was particularly apparent in the 1960s, when Mexican media accounts of the hippie invasion painted a negative, condescending picture of Huautla as a place of decadence and witchcraft, led by a “diminutive” president, where the rampant immorality and vice of the gringos was easily indulged by shamans described as “filthy poisoners” (Estrada 1996:72, 78). In this context, a certain celebration by Mazatecos of their relationship with gringos, and even a certain identification with gringos, can be seen as an assertion—against generations of racism—of the validity and worth of their culture and lives. If the hippies of the sixties were often thought of as “disrespectful” polluters of sacred tradition, they could also be viewed in other ways. “¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hong0?”

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For comerciantes they were potential customers, criticized as cheapskates who insisted on negotiating prices, sleeping outside, and eating simple meals. For the majority of Huautecos, according to Alvaro Estrada, they were simply seen as curiosities—objects of amusement that did not affect the community in any real way—not nearly as important as the price of coffee and the other “real” events of the sixties—a political assassination, increasing migration to Mexico City, and the beginning of party politics. Still, much of the current nostalgia for the sixties revolves around relationships that were forged in this period with foreign visitors. Alvaro Estrada published a book in 1996 called Huautla en Tiempo de Jipis. This book mostly consists of personal reminiscences of the author’s life as a middle-class Huauteco teenager in the 1960s. The tone is extremely nostalgic, and much of the narrative focuses on Estrada’s romantic affair with a gringa named Delyn and his association with her group of worldly friends—who sang beautiful songs and spoke knowingly of the personal lives of celebrities. He found his friendship with Delyn to be “ideal in a town where the few women with a disposition to accede to sexual relations were kept by the old comerciantes” (Estrada 1996:36). A surprisingly large portion of the book is given over to lists and descriptions of the music and books that the foreigners exposed Estrada to. He lists all the songs on two Bob Dylan albums, “The Times They Are A-Changin” and “The Freewheelin,” and writes out all the lyrics to “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Seven of the book’s eighteen photographs are of albums—Dylan as well as Peter, Paul, and Mary, and Ian and Sylvia. For Estrada, the association with the foreigners was motivated by more than simple commercial gain, curiosity, or disgust at their disrespect for sacred rituals. He was powerfully moved by their way of life and by their music, as well as their accessible bodies. Estrada, who now lives in Mexico City, ends the book with a strange account of a Bob Dylan concert that he attended in 1990, and his disappointment that Dylan didn’t play any of the sixties hits that had meant so much to him. For Estrada, then, the story of the sixties in Huautla provides an opportunity to claim an equal status with other “experts”—an association with a powerful foreign culture and musical tradition—while at the same time validating Mazatec culture against centuries of dismissal by its non-indigenous neighbors. Like María Sabina, who was visited in a vision by a group of powerful men sitting at a table piled high with books and papers, and who has learned to speak with them as an equal, joking and drinking beer (a beverage coded as non-Indian), Estrada asserts his power through his connection with outsiders and their magical language and technol150

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ogy—in this case, not just literacy, but also recorded music. Estrada’s dreamlike rendition of the Dylan concert in Mexico City reminds me of a Western adventurer’s heroic account of an Indian mushroom ritual in the mountains and of Maria Sabina’s vision of her magical visit with powerful Others. This assertion of equal status with outside “experts” is also a theme in more everyday, oral memories of the sixties—we were here, in the center of history. Juan García Carrera, the author of La Otra Vida de María Sabina, began publishing a magazine in 2000 called La Faena, dedicated to the exploration and celebration of the “cultural heritage of the Mazatecos.” This magazine also explicitly invokes a nostalgia for the past, including the 1960s. For example, the April/May issue of 2000 includes an interview with a baker named Amador García Cerqueda who tells stories about the first bakers to set up shop in the region. The editor, however, hypes this story on the magazine cover with the line, “The Seventies: The Bread That the Rolling Stones Ate,” and opens the article this way: In the Sixties, the inhabitants of magical Huautla saw many citizens of other nations arrive; among them well-dressed men and women, others mixed up and with long hair, and some as well that hid their true personality and passed as students or workers from their respective countries. Nobody believed that among them passed the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and Led Zeppelin; or some other apprentice of rock and roll. But one thing for certain is that none of our visitors returned to their places of origin without eating the bread elaborated by Don Amador García Cerqueda, Mazateco of 70 years of age today who since the age of fifteen has been dedicated to this noble office. Afterwards, the strange guests would each one develop their hallucinogenic experience in this indigenous city, and/or their bath in the light of day in the “falls of Adam” at the Iron Bridge on the way to Chilchotla. (Prensa La Faena 2000a:9)

Contemporary Mazatec talk about the sixties challenges the story told by most outsiders—that Mazatec society up to this point was an isolated, unchanging culture that lived according to an ancient “tradition” that began to die out when foreigners arrived and forcibly exposed the Indians to the modern world. These stories claim the right to produce their own history, and not simply to appear as traditional objects whose “magical” but fragile way of life is positively or negatively affected by historical currents of the real world. The usual model—of an isolated “¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hong0?”

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culture “affected” by the outside world—ignores the way that Mazatec conceptions of power and history all seem to incorporate the figure of the outsider. Rather than disrupting a native model that could not account for their presence, the intruders of the 1960s found themselves already there as an important constituent element of Mazatec identity. Power, in the Sierra Mazateca, is conceptualized as deriving from the process of travel and mediation across a series of charged border spaces. Political leaders represent their community before the nation-state, and curanderos travel into another world of powerful beings to represent their clients. These worlds share many features; curanderos often magically visit actual places of non-indigenous power in their chants—the towns where coffee is sold and neighborhoods in Mexico City where patrons may live. María Sabina, in her greatest trip, found herself in front of a desk, piled high with papers and books, where noble ancestors and even Benito Juárez chatted with her. He gave her a Book of Wisdom, which she, an illiterate woman, would see while under the effect of mushrooms, until she finally memorized its contents. The American mushroom seekers of the early sixties did not bring Alvaro Estrada a Book of Wisdom, but the Dylan records they brought him served a similar function, as objects that embodied a certain sort of magical literacy that enabled magical travel across stimulating borders. The supernatural beings that may benefit Mazatec businessmen and campesinos also represent mediation between worlds. Chikon Tokoxo, the Lord of the Mountain who dispenses material wealth, appears as a Spanish gentleman riding a white horse, and owns a great factory inside his mountain. A demon called El Chato gives fortune to unscrupulous comerciantes—he is also white (see Chapter 7). As Gary Gossen (1999: 27) writes, “We and our cobeings are already in [indigenous] discourse; they have been actively incorporating and historicizing us for centuries.” So when the foreigners began arriving in droves in the sixties, Mazatec campesinos and comerciantes were able to appropriate them as a new manifestation of the Other intermediary. These intermediaries can be used in ways that benefit the community, or they can be used as El Chato is— creatures that are visited at night with whom one makes an illegitimate deal in order to enhance one’s wealth and status at the expense of one’s neighbors. One important way in which the hippie outsiders are incorporated involves the trope of secrecy and concealed identities. The Earth Lord Chikon Tokoxo often conceals his identity; he appears simply as a traveler encountered by a tired campesino or mule driver resting on a trail. The 152

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chikon offers an exchange, which the humble Mazateco either accepts or declines. If he accepts the offer, he discovers, upon arriving at his house, that he has been given far more than he bargained for—a great quantity of gold or an equivalent substance. Mazatec folklore is filled with similar stories of mysterious strangers with hidden identities and of magical wealth found in spaces of mediation—especially caves. A list of all the important sixties figures alleged to have passed through Huautla would fill pages. It includes Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Jimmy Osmond, Janis Joplin, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Pelé (as well as other famous athletes), Donovan, and, of course, all of the Beatles. John Lennon’s name comes up with more regularity than any of the others, and several Beatles songs—especially “Let It Be” (“Mother Mary comes to me, whispering words of wisdom, let it be”) and “The Fool on the Hill”—are said to be about Lennon’s experience with María Sabina.7 The curer Estela Navarro claims that, as an eight-year-old girl, she helped translate for Lennon and led him to the house of María Sabina. In all of these accounts, the storytellers admit that there is no hard evidence for their claims—after all, we all looked alike to them—but they remain dead certain that, among the hippie hordes, there had to be these mysterious, powerful, semi-divine figures, rock stars who came to individual Mazatec shamans because they recognized that here, in Huautla, they could find the truth. Outsiders with hidden identities could become the source of hidden wealth—wealth that men desire but that spreads envy. Many Mazatecos, especially curanderos, have acquired reputations for reaping benefits through the manipulation of tourists. Campesinos hope to get their share, hoping to get visitors—who are creatures of the underworld, or at least of mediation with that place, and so are presumed to have knowledge of the portals between worlds—to accompany them to caves, where they will find various treasures. I am told that, back in the sixties and seventies, many people did indeed become wealthy through these kinds of expeditions. Nostalgia does not entail a fixed content. In the case of Huautla, it asserts the power to speak, not just of a loss but as equal partners in a historic event, challenging the primitivism that relegates Indians to the position of tokens of fixed order against our changing history (K. Stewart 1988). These memories of powerful hippie benefactors and betrayers with secret identities reveal some of the key features of nostalgic Mazatec discourse. On the one hand, it recreates an image of Mazatec culture as intimately tied to the outside world; the other is a powerful constituent component of Mazatec identity, and that identity includes a view of power “¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hong0?”

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as emerging from political, economic, and supernatural relations of mediation between inside and outside. On the other hand, it marks a moment when the insiders received a new source of pride and prestige. Mysterious strangers validated a truth that everybody felt but nobody really knew, and couldn’t confirm until much later—that Huautla is a center in and of the civilized world.

mushrooms, high culture, and drugs She is a music woman, says She is a trumpet woman, says She is a woman violinist, says. (Estrada 1981:131) Where the finest liquor is being distilled, says Valuable beer, says Measured beer, says. (Estrada 1981:174)

Members of local marginalized groups may become associated or may associate themselves with powerful first world nations or other valorized times or spaces against the dominant “cultures” of the third world nations in which they reside. The Cuna of Panama, for example, fix on American whiteness in their strategic assault on the “black” Panamanian state (Taussig 1993). Something similar happens in Mexico, and thus one hears that the Mazatec language is very similar to English, that a Mazatecspeaking monolingual friend of a cousin could understand a gringo’s babble, and other similar anecdotes. Perhaps these ideas are presented to me out of simple hospitality: we are like you, my friend, the differences which separate us are counteracted by astonishing and unlikely similarities. “We are all the same, human beings.” “Mazateco is the English of here.” This could mean nothing more than “it can be observed that our languages share a trait; neither is Spanish,” but it also seems noteworthy that language, an arena in which Sierra dwellers still are denied validity as equal participants in the Mexican nation, should also be the vehicle for this bypass toward association with another potential source of high status—foreign “high” culture. The mushrooms can forge this link as well, facilitating the spiraling manipulation of individual and group identity. Huautecos, mainly of the commercial class, engaging in the sphere of discourse concerned with prescribing/suggesting How the Hongos Should Be Consumed, may rend 154

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the fungi away from Peasant Low Culture (if that’s where they ever lived) and “trip” off into a higher ranked Mazatec bliss. Thus Alejandro the butcher, an avid proponent of the fungi, tells me that one should mentally prepare oneself for a trip, for best results. He realizes that, as Bourdieu puts it, the denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile—-in a word, natural—enjoyment, which constitutes the sacred sphere of culture, implies an affirmation of the superiority of those who can be satisfied with the sublimated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished pleasures forever closed to the profane. That is why art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfill a social function of legitimating social differences. (1990:7)

Put on the good music when getting ready to trip, Alejandro says, something classical, say, and not your common, vulgar música ranchera. Alejandro believes that taking mushrooms can help one become rich because it gives you the proper mind-set to prosper. He sometimes asks me to bring him New Age self-help books from the United States, but says that the peak of the mushroom experience comes when you arrive face to face with God. Which leads one back to another link forged by the mushrooms, a link between the user and God, a link that María Sabina considered inappropriate. “It was difficult for me to explain to them that the vigils weren’t done from the simple desire to find God,” she said, “but were done with the sole purpose of curing the sicknesses that our people suffer from” (Estrada 1981:86). “Many people have come in search of God,” she went on, “people of all colors and all ages. The young people are the ones who have been the most disrespectful,” she said. “They take the children8 at any time and in any place. They don’t do it during the night or under the direction of the Wise Ones,” she said, “and they don’t use them to cure any sickness either” (Estrada 1981:90). Both the butcher and the famous curandera are making a similar strategic move. Both separate themselves from a decadent popular low culture by making a statement about the use of the mushrooms to find God. But for the butcher, finding God, or at least coming into contact with Him, is valorized as a merger with a classy, high culture, while for María Sabina, “finding God” is one of the polluting attributes of the vulgar youth who sought her out; her people are superior because of the different way they use mushrooms. They don’t have barbaric and false needs like finding “¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hong0?”

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God. His association of mushrooms with high culture links him, as well, with the discourse of at least some of the American adventurers of the 1970s. A young man identified as David, from San Francisco, told the New York Times reporter that “the difference between l sd and the mushrooms is the difference between a hamburger and a t-bone steak.” Mushrooms, especially taken in the protective environment of the Sierra, are simply classier than the mundane, “drug” alternatives. “Mushrooms are not drugs.” You hear that a lot in Huautla de Jiménez, a discourse that distances the local population from the masses outside, a discourse that is predicated on a knowledge of what “drugs” are in Mexico. It was the hippies who brought drugs in the early sixties, and then people started growing marijuana, and then soldiers came, and police, and violence and arrests and shoot-outs and bad stuff. Everyone is against drugs, and everyone in Huautla identifies them with the outside world and the cities, although plenty of Mazatec youth are marijuaneros, smoking joints as they walk through the campo and listening to puro rock. Drugs are opposed to mushrooms the way that rock and noise are opposed to tranquillity; they reflect the antithesis, or so they say, to all the values of Huautla. The urban visitors may light a joint in the mountains because it makes them feel so tranquil, but not the Huautecos. “We just take a little bit, maybe five mushrooms,” says Doña Rosa. “Just for curing, nothing of drugging. People from outside,” she says, “they come to take more. And they mix it with marijuana,” she says. “That makes them crazy. Here we don’t do that,” she says, “we don’t take drugs; we don’t have this custom.” Jorge, a bilingual teacher, made the same distinction. “For us,” he said, “for we the Mazatecos, they are sacred, religious things that are different from mushrooms elsewhere.” I asked if he meant the hallucinogenic mushrooms in Chiapas. “Yes,” he said, “those are similar but different.” Then he continued. The distinction that he wanted to make, it was clear, was not between Huautla and Chiapas, but between larger constellations of people. On the one hand, there are the insiders, “us,” and on the other side there is a great “them,” a category of ignorance and disrespect. Mushrooms make these distinctions clear. “To us,” he said, “they are medicine, a cure. To foreigners who lack respect, they come and take them like [and here he mimics smoking a joint] or [then he mimics shooting up in his arm].” His remark echoes the statement given by Felicio Pineda, Huautla’s municipal president, to the New York Times reporter in 1970. “We cannot allow the vice to spread,” he said. “The mushrooms are a great medicine. Taken in right quantities they can do miracles.” 156

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Drugs are particularly potent materials for the constitution of identities and social and political meaning. This is, in part, because of the great contradiction at the heart of drug discourse: drugs appear to have effects and meanings that are fixed, innate qualities of the physical substances ingested into the body. In fact, despite these real physiological effects, these meanings are as fluid and subject to contestation and negotiation as any area of discourse. In Jamaica, the crack-ganja opposition is used to elaborate and comment upon an opposition between an alien, corrupting foreign culture (crack) and a “natural” African essence (Broad and Feinberg 1995). In the Sierra Mazateca, the opposition between mushrooms and “drugs” accomplishes a similar goal; it opens a space for the difference between a corrupt national society and a one hundred percent natural, spiritual, healthy imaginary mountain home. This point is clear and easy to repeat, and so everybody does it, especially when representing themselves, Huautla, and mushrooms to foreigners like myself. Even the severely drunk man who repeatedly bumped into me on the bus ride to Teotitlán mastered this discourse. He got on at San Jerónimo and had to stand; everyone else was sitting. He had a long story, all about crime and drugs, and lots of time to tell it to me. He said he was carrying three kilos of hierba that he had acquired in Tenango or some such place. Pelón Fayuquero, he kept insisting that his name was; born in 1957 so he is thirty-seven but the people say that no, he doesn’t look that old. How old do you think I am? He claimed to be from Huautla, though he lived in Teotitlán. He said he had one, no two, hectares of hierba. You know where? Cuicitlán. He had me feel the gun, a 38, he said, in his pants, leaning into me with his hip. Obviously, he wasn’t just glad to see me. He would not tell me all this except he knew that I wasn’t from here, otherwise he wouldn’t say anything. He would not believe that I was from the USA. “No eres Americano. Eres Mexicano (You are not American. You are Mexican.),” he said, pleasing me immensely. He could tell by my palabra (word). He had a lot of American friends, he said, and a lot of Mexican friends. I was not American but Mexican. He said he was in jail once in Mexico City for twenty days and some time in Oaxaca. He said he had done some business that day in San Jerónimo, where he got on the bus. Patting his gun, he hissed ominously: “You will read in the newspaper tomorrow.” Es cierto, I replied. He kept bragging about his ability to provide me with anything I want: You want hierba (herb)? he repeated whenever the conversation lagged. You want hongo? If so, talk to Pelón Fayuquero. He said he had been drinking and “¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hong0?”

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smoking pot since two in the afternoon. It was about ten. I asked what kind of work he did. He laughed and replied, “A que me caiga” (Whatever I get) several times. He insisted that he would not charge for the hierba and hongo he supplied me with, and bad-mouthed those who overcharged for drugs. He would give them to me for friendship, he said. That’s the kind of guy Pelón Fayuquero is; he does things for friendship. And he named all the American boys and girls who came to visit him, some of whom he worked for, one of whom was a drug dealer now in jail. He does not charge, but if he is in the bote (jail) and he calls; if I can help him out, fine. If not, fine. He would not hold it against me. The Americans, he claimed, paid 7 million pesos to get him out of jail in Oaxaca. He would not answer the police’s questions when they asked who he worked for. “If I was what you say,” he told them, “would I be dressed like this, in this campesino shirt and these market shoes?” He also claimed that there was no danger because he knew the Policía Judicial Federal. He was connected all the way around. Someday he would take me walking from Teotitlán to Huautla. He was, he said, a nephew of María Sabina. My aunt taught me many things. Never deceive anyone, she said. Because if I deceive, who am I really deceiving. He pointed his finger at his stocky, burly chest. Myself. He said he only takes three pairs of mushrooms each year. Because hongos are a spiritual thing, to fortify the spirit. If you take more, like six pairs, it’s like doing a drug and does not fortify the spirit. And he said he only smokes pot two or four times a year. “Quiere hierba? Quiere hongo?” Look for Pelón Fayuquero. Some would happily jump to the conclusion that this opposition between mushrooms and drugs constitutes, or at least facilitates, a devastating critique of the dominant mestizo society, or resistance.9 But one can also read this discourse in another way because, as my aunt María Sabina told me, when I deceive others, who am I really deceiving? This opposition, when firmly established by Alejandro, Jorge, and Pelón Fayuquero, corresponds to the hegemonic representations of history that I have described earlier. Drugs are the insidious agents of history that can only further the degeneration of an always partially degenerated “other world” that exists in the chronotope of timelessness, outside history—a place-time represented more than adequately by the mushroom. The mushroom perfectly signals this “other world” chronotope because of its tremendous semiotic powers: the mushroom trip, because of its psychedelic properties, iconically brings one into the presence of this timeless past demanded by the hegemonic readings of Mexican history. 158

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The “natural” Mazatec world invoked by the opposition between mushrooms and drugs is always something just behind us, something that is now suspect in a world of charlatans, commercialized trips, and tourists looking for God. This world is always in danger of decaying still further, as mushroom use decays into drug debauchery, as the pure timeless Prehispanic Indians are always already degenerating into cultureless hillbillies. If mushrooms symbolize the timeless natural other world—as impossible to find as classical music in Ayautla—drugs are icons of this hillbilly threat, an aimless, ignorant search for pleasure that leads only to destruction. The time-space of real mushroom experience is continually pushed further back away from the ciudad; in the margins of Huautla they say that the mushrooms in the center don’t work because of all the crowding, noise, and contamination. In the comunidad of Santa Cruz de Juárez they say that all the curers in Huautla are liars and cheats. Everywhere there is this danger of decay surrounded by contemptuous accusations. The same discourse that posits an essential Indian worth opposed to decadence and decay lends itself to the elimination of individuals from membership in the elevated “true” Indian caste. Mushrooms are not drugs, and the Indians are not disordered. In fact, as in Panama, “the Indians are there to fix history and restore its sublime order. They are Origin” (Taussig 1993:157). “Drugs” and the decay they represent play the role ascribed to Panamanian blacks, who “are cast as historical jetsam, matter out of place, the irrationality of history, while the [mushroomized] Indian roots an order, an order of nature—as against history: matter in place” (Taussig 1993:159). Drugs represent the “bad savage . . . , the sign of the permanent wound inflicted by history, the sign of waste, degeneracy, and thwarted narrative,” while mushrooms speak of the “good savage . . . of unsullied Origin, a sort of Eden before the Fall when harmony prevailed” (Taussig 1993:142). Mushrooms embody the good Indian and they enable us to mimetically preserve this extremely important construct independent of the survival of individual human beings. Taussig says that the good Indian is best seen as unthreatening, domestic Woman; perhaps this insight best explains why María Sabina, instead of another male curandero like Aurelio (who tripped with Wasson first), became the dominant publicly circulating icon of the Mazatec area and mushroom use. Nobody has to look very far to find exemplars of disordered cultureless druggy history; the mushroom-seeking visitors play this role perfectly. Stories about the vile hippies of the sixties always mention their drug use “¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hong0?”

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prominently, and the same refrain appears to describe current mushroom tourists. There was the gringo who used to sell cakes and let his long blond hair dangle in his wares, mixing with them and polluting them. He sold those cakes all over, as far as Teotitlán, Oaxaca, and Tehuacán, until the police took him away because he had pot hidden in the cakes. And of course the freak in the sixties who tried to eat a live turkey in the market square. Like the tourists who come to Chamula for the Festival of Games, these outsiders find themselves unwittingly cast as signifiers of chaos and danger (Gossen 1986). Unlike Gossen, I do not decode this discourse as an “indigenous” resistance to assimilation into the national culture. Instead, I see the opposition between mushroom order and drug disorder as the basis for the metacultural incorporation of Huautla into Mexico and the wider world. In one case, the power of the state itself was directly invoked to validate this distinction. It was Don Juan Peralta, the hardware store owner, who told Michael, Gilberto, and myself about how he didn’t like the tourists who profaned the mushrooms, because they are sacred. The government has said that mushrooms are legal for indios to use because the indios are intelligent people. They are not to be used for profane, noncurative reasons. Mushrooms impose this order against history in the earth, and then those constant iconic representations everywhere you look in Huautla fix this order in everyday consciousness. You cannot escape it. You are constantly reminded that Huautla means mushrooms, and that Indians mean order, and this may have less to do with the identity of the people of the Sierra than with the assertion that a power exists that sees, creates, and fixes distinctions into the landscape and into human bodies; order against history, Indian against mestizo, mushrooms against drugs. As Doña Rosa said, we don’t have the custom of taking drugs; identity is thus mapped onto customs which are mapped onto groups of people and geographical regions. Each area and each nation has its customs, and here one of the customs is that we have customs and not drugs. But while the mushroom-drug dichotomy can be used to solidify this linear style of reporting culture—firm borders around groups whose difference is represented in a single style—the paradoxical rants of men like Pelón Fayuquero, which employ the same opposition, seem to develop a different sort of model of difference and identity. Señor Fayuquero desires power; he wants to be recognized as a player, and the way he uses the conventional mushroom-drug story establishes himself in the position of power as it is recognized in the Sierra Mazateca, 160

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in the position of the intermediary who goes back and forth between worlds. He can sell me drugs, or he can experience the spiritual fortification that comes from three dedruggified pairs of mushrooms. He hobnobs with Mexicans and Americans, and has learned to tell the difference. Like the rapper Ice T, he can live on bread and water or lobster and steak. He rides the bus out of the mountains forever in my imagination from Puerto San Jerónimo through Puerto Soledad down into Teotitlán del Camino. The statement that “mushrooms are not drugs” might fix his identity and thus control him, as Number 2 sought to fix 6 as a number, but like 6, Pelón evades pigeonholing categories through constant manipulations. “If I was what you say,” he says, “would I be dressed like this, in this campesino shirt and these market shoes?” The opposition between mushrooms and drugs, as it appears in the discourse of the schoolteacher and on the walls of Huautla, is an explicit metacultural statement outlining a linear model of culture and identity, fixing an easily seen difference between social groups that are allied with concepts like order and history. The discourse of Pelón Fayuquero, like that of the muscle-bound Toyota admirer mentioned at the end of Chapter 1, reports this opposition as part of its own implicit metacultural statement, which uses tropes of travel between, under, and through borders such as the one between mushrooms and drugs.

men and women of wisdom: mushrooms, power, and books Valuable Book, says Measured Book, says It’s certain, says It’s true, says Admirable Book, says Immense Book, says It came forth Lord, it came forth sacred, says Many years ago, says. (Estrada 1981:180) I am a lawyer woman, says I am a woman of transactions, says. (Estrada 1981:189)

Mushrooms constitute the centerpiece of Mazatec metacultural elaborations—they are the motor of representation and counterrepresentation in “¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hong0?”

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Huautla, if not in other areas of the Sierra. Although the fungi themselves are, they say, less common than in times past, so that local curers and dealers must send for them from faraway spaces, driving up the price, images of hongos sprout everywhere: in the lettering of the taquería María Sabina, the Casa de la Cultura María Sabina, the water tank of Huautla de Jiménez; in murals on the elementary school named for Ricardo Flores Magón and on the ceiling of one of the town’s ice cream shops; as nothing more than a simple icon on the backboards of the basketball court in the center, on the center of the basketball court in the i n i compound; and embroidered onto the skirts, pants, shirts, and dresses sewn and sold by local artisans and entrepreneurs. 6.3 The mushroom These are some of the physical sites of the image in commerce visual representation of the mushroom; the and local identity: the places where it appears to the eye—-someMartyrs Tortilla Shop, times as a Panoptical eye, as in the ice cream 2002. Photo by Katie mural, where a monstrous eyeball wells up Fisher. beneath the fungus from underground. Are these mushroom images the visible hidden cameras of The Prisoner’s village? Striving—inevitably with only limited success—to trap the play of identity and difference, prisoner and guard, commodified other and commodifying self? But the mycophilic organization of the play of identity and difference sprouts from many other sources besides the visual, mostly from the chatter on the streets that presses close to any gringo—have you tried the mushrooms yet?/you should try the mushrooms/my great grandmother María Sabina taught me all about mushrooms—and the reams of written material documenting mushroom use and the mushroom experience from almost every conceivable position—The Life of María Sabina, The Other Life of María Sabina, María Sabina and Her Magic Mushroom Velada, on and on—all ultimately sounding the same. The discourse is omnipresent, it surrounds and engulfs you; it projects you into another world. This space, this space of “space,” or “magic world,” to use Wasson’s often repeated label, has been opened and shaped from a variety of angles. Wasson sought the racial past, the survival of an ancient Asiatic religion, 162

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and his writings of this ecstatic primitive attracted hordes of first world pilgrims eager to consume the primitive in the form of Mexican indigenousness. Then, as Eric Zolov (1999) has pointed out, the Mexican middle class developed its own hippies—performing a desired modernity by miming foreign hippies performing a desired primitive authenticity by miming Mexican Indians. Hip urban youth can listen to the soulful rock group called Santa Sabina, who played in Huautla for the Day of the Dead in 2001, and in Oaxaca City they can visit the Sabina Bar. A newspaper ad for this bar displays photos of smiling, elegantly attired teenaged girls and a trippy mural of the shaman herself surrounded by planets, mushrooms, and butterflies. The ad offers some lighthearted suggestions for avoiding a hangover, and concludes with the slogan “Say No to Drugs” (Noticias de Oaxaca 1999). But the chain does not end with these elite appropriations. The Mazatec-speaking mushroom stitchers, talkers, vendors, eaters, and chanters are not the bottom, the base of a rising pendulum oscillating between attractions and distinctions. They do not play the role that Bourdieu (1984:34) ascribes to the French working class, whose aesthetic tastes are said to emerge naturally from “more direct, more immediate satisfactions” like the “sense of revelry, the plain speaking and hearty laughter which liberate by setting the social world head over heels, overturning conventions and proprieties.” Mazatec representations cannot be isolated from “Western” appropriations of them so easily; they are not the natural by-products either of their “culture” or of the raw materiality of their being, their Nanook-like struggle to survive. Mazatec-speaking Wise Ones enact a representation of something both through shamanic mushroom practice and through shamanic mushroom meta-practice. In all likelihood, it is not one thing but many things, many of which escape my ability to contain, contact, or describe. But one thing seems to strike me, for whatever reason, and that is how shamanic mushroom discourse seems to perform as well as copy the way that power is perceived to circulate from the vantage point of this corner of the world, and also how it theorizes identity, otherness, and the process of interpenetration; this is a piece of culture that is about culture, or metaculture. From this angle, Mazatec language, real Indian chants, and mushroom knowledge cannot be isolated from presumably inauthentic tourist appropriations of indigenous religious practice: the mimetic force of mushroom identity derives from and depends upon its interlocking unity with the “outsider’s” gaze. Shamanism evokes and transcends a particular sort of “¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hong0?”

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border which becomes in this evocation what I have called a pictorial mode of reporting culture. This practice, which uses foreigners just as the foreigners use the locals, produces a specific sort of power and also the sorts of envy that accompany it. I have looked at the conversations about mushroom rituals between outsiders and Huautecos. Now I jump from the periphery of the mushroom discourse to the very center. I begin with the mushroom ritual and move outward to explore discourses that are produced at two distinct sites: the event itself, and the conversations that precede and follow it with the men and women who manage the event. A close examination of the careers and stories of three Wise Ones, including two personal acquaintances of mine—Ricardo Rocha of the village of Santa Cruz de Juárez and Estela Navarro of the center of Huautla de Jiménez—as well as the internationally famous María Sabina, who died in 1985 but whose story has survived through Wasson’s recordings of her chants and through two versions of her autobiography transcribed by Huautecos, should illuminate several different themes that seem to inhabit the Magic World. The chanting voice of María Sabina, as recorded by Wasson and included as an appendix in Alvaro Estrada’s version of the great curer’s autobiography, runs through the chapter as a supplement and corrective to my stories and analysis. We will see how the discourse surrounding shamanism emphasizes travel, both the Wise One’s drug-aided travel across a named landscape and the travel of clients to see a Wise One, and we will explore how this representation of travel forges theories of place, space, and a form of power that accrues to the shaman as an intermediary. This intermediary position also produces a fear of envy, and we will see that all three of our Wise Ones worried about envious neighbors. All of these stories and themes demonstrate how the shamanic discourse is not a native worldview or cosmology that belongs deep in the heart of some “non-Western,” “indigenous,” “Mazatec,” “disappearing,” or “oppositional” culture. These stories and practices instead highlight a view of the world and its peoples that focuses attention on the vague and confusing borders between groups, particularly between those at the margins and those at the centers of power. The border, here represented by Wise Ones, mushrooms, and the humans and discourses that come from all over the world to congregate around them, becomes far more meaningful than any imaginary hinterland or cultural core. It is seen as a complex place, embedded in strange practices and bizarre narratives, infused with danger, envy, and betrayal. 164

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6.4 A woman who conducts mushroom rituals in front of her household altar, 1998. Photo by John Dudas.

6.5 The same room shown in Figure 6.4, now used to prepare a teenage girl for her quinceañera, 2001. Photo by Katie Fisher.

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description of my mushroom experiences in the sierra mazateca: a conventional story First, let’s take a look at what happens when you visit a Wise One to take mushrooms and he or she starts to sing and chant. This is the obvious place to start—where traditional accounts of the magic world begin and end—the true stuff (and the real nonstuff or epiphenomena). The Wise One knows your name and where you are from, at least. Maybe he or she knows a little more, so from the Wise One’s perspective you appear as if a guest on Oprah or Jenny Jones: Carlos, from Tejas, just wants the experience; Armando, of Mexico City, depressed since his wife divorced him; Jorge, German, writing a book on herbal medicine. Sitting there in the darkness, you tingle with anticipation and the first effects of the drug. The Wise One prays, or sings, and fiddles with copal incense. You may be left alone in the darkness, or he or she may stay with you. A candle may be left flickering on the altar, or you may be left in absolute darkness. Estela left me and a companion alone most of the evening in a smoky cabin while she attended two Italians in another building at her husband’s rancho. My companion and I finally left the cabin because we felt suffocated by the smoke, and sat outside by another fire surrounded by coffee trees. Julia, the expensive curer from the center of town, sat and sewed, or left me alone to contemplate the extremely loud popular music and announcements blaring from a loudspeaker in the elementary school next door, seemingly from right inside my head. “Ignore the noise,” she advised me, frowning. I remembered what another Wise One, a man who lived way up in María Sabina’s old neighborhood, had told me as we struggled up the mountain toward his house. “The mushrooms don’t work in the Center. There are too many people, too much noise.” He was wrong, of course, but Julia was insane if she thought I could ignore the amplifiers right next door, no matter how lost I was in the monotonous and predictable commands and analysis offered on that occasion by those pesky niños santos. With Don Ricardo Rocha, in the neighboring village of Santa Cruz de Juárez (a one-hour walk from Huautla), I felt that I got my money’s worth. I ran into Rosario, a human rights lawyer from Veracruz whom I had met earlier in the month, on the street. She invited me to walk with her and her Quebecois boyfriend to Santa Cruz to meet Ricardo. She and the fellow were going to participate in a ceremony, and I could come and at least meet Ricardo, who was said to be an interesting man. He was asleep when we arrived, but his family served us coffee and he stumbled 166

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out to join us and chat. He seemed like an upbeat, cheery old fellow in his “I [heart] Jesus” baseball cap, and we signed the book that he kept that noted the names and addresses of all his clients. Rosario, the Quebecois, and I paid for the doses for ourselves, Ricardo, and his assistant. Each of us foreign men was judged to be unusually large and was given what was called a “double dose.” A family of comerciantes from Huautla joined us—the mother, who sold gorditas in the market, her nineteen- and sixteen-year-old sons, and the eldest son’s fiancée. The wedding, scheduled three days hence, was the nominal reason for the trip. They arrived late, after we had already eaten our mushrooms, and we three outsiders sat on chairs in the back of the room, with the Huautecos on benches in front; we silently observed them in the pitch darkness for the rest of the night. My personal account is a conventional story in the literature; it shows the level of my commitment, or adventurous spirit, or the authenticity of my cultural immersion. This immersion requires a prior clearly recognizable subject position within “the West,” which is somehow juxtaposed or transcended in the psychedelic Other.10 It is a great moment, told from the point of view of the naive, doubtful pragmatist (Dana Scully of The XFiles, Carlos Castañeda [1968], Wasson’s first velada with María Sabina) and his or her partner, the earnest spiritualist sincerely seeking any kind of truth hidden within other cultures and their secret practices, the ones who told old chinga sabi11 that they were looking for God (Fox Mulder on The X-Files). At first I did not plan to tell it, but conventional stories are there for a reason and should not be ignored; we must enter and explore them and probe around, hoping to get caught instead of dreading that “exquisite pain” that we, like the unfortunate folklorist killed by an urban legend in Candyman, must experience as we allow ourselves to be caught, contaminated, and broken by our own myths. It is a convention that parallels all of ethnography, I suppose. These true accounts of participation represent the peak moments in the ethnographic enterprise. The Western self participates, observes, feels, and then textualizes the experience. Castañeda writes his notes in three columns: what happened, what was said, and what was felt. Something ambiguous is gained in the process. Ricardo asked the Huauteco family if they had eaten mushrooms before. The mother had once, a long time back, and the bride-to-be also had, but nothing had happened, they had not taken effect. Now they ate them again, sitting in front of us before the candles were put out. Ricardo showed them a chart with a man and a woman surrounded by saints and “¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hong0?”

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images of Christ. He interpreted the chart, explaining how it described Christ’s design for the institution of marriage, prescribing the utter merging of the two families into one unit. He told the young couple that it was very important for them to attend church frequently, at six in the morning, at least three times a week. “Yes, Godfather,” said the young man. “Six in the morning.” We all stood and pressed close to the couple, touching and stroking them with all of our arms. Then all the lights went out, we sat, and Ricardo and his assistant proceeded to sing and chant for about five hours. During the chants in Mazatec, the assistant would repeat Ricardo’s syllables a second or two afterward, creating an impressive effect. I did not know where the voices came from; I forgot the dimensions of the room in which I sat; I imagined various spatial arrangements for my companions and frequently became convinced that one of them was slipping into or out of the room. Occasionally I fought the urge to get up and leave myself. Unlike Wasson, I was very familiar with these sensations, which had been internally textualized in my youth through the frames of “tripping”—going somewhere else for knowledge or experience not easily accessible here—or “frying,” a more internally oriented experience that presumably produces pleasure out of annihilation (like sniffing glue), not exchange or travel. I tried to pay attention to what songs in Spanish I could and to follow the difficulties of this unfortunate family, but mostly I tried to relax and enjoy the chanting and ignore the ubiquitous, seemingly internal monologue and its harping self-criticisms. The songs and the chants of Don Ricardo traveled over and through a landscape of places he saw and/or named. Every once in a while I heard my name, or that of the other participants in the “trip,” and then I would hear “Estados Unidos” or “Veracruz” or “Canada,” referring to our respective places of origin. Sometimes he referred to Rosario by name; at other times her presence was indexed by the words “licenciada” (college graduate) or “derechos humanos” (human rights). Ricardo saw many things; at one point he saw a shining golden field of corn in the west that seemed to spread out forever. On another occasion he came to Chiapas to check out what was happening with regard to the Zapatista rebellion, which was at that time less than two months old. He exhaled the syllables of “Chiapas” and “Zapatista.” “Where there is war,” he sang. “That there be peace. Where there is war, that there be peace. That the president of the republic not sell us.” Afterward, he explained some of his vision and asked if any others had shared it. “Did you see the shining field of corn? One thousand hectares. No. It was vast and beautiful; you didn’t see 168

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it?” And after a pause: “It means prosperity.” Many other events marked that particular ritual, including the identification of a witch who had brought a great deal of trouble to the family of Huautecos, one of whom experienced a great deal of discomfort and anxiety during the ritual. But I can only focus on what I can understand and what I heard, and that was the constant marking of space.

traveling for good and evil His work lies among the nerves, not in the underworld, but on the heights, places of as much anguish as the depths, where the elation of elevation is accompanied by the fear of falling in to the void of chasms. (Munn 1973:108)

Like English speakers, the Mazatec mushroom eaters refer to the experience (in Spanish) as a “trip.” But unlike the term used by American devotees of the hallucinogenic experience, this signifier refers to a voyage through a space that is identical to, or at least closely parallel to, the actual geographical and physical spaces of the world. The man who eats mushrooms travels through and marks places. The places are seen with the eyes and mentioned with the voice; they are embodied within the “child saints.” “Yes, I traveled there,” people will say, “by means of the mushrooms.” Through mushroom chants such as those voiced by skilled practitioners like Don Ricardo and María Sabina, one can hear the emergence of a local sense of place and travel in the tracing of path maps that both connect the participants in the event and perform the power to manage intercultural and interregional communication in a locally conventional way. These connections are intimately associated with the travel-oriented sense of power, in which naming a place—embodying that place in the voice—bears a close relationship to visiting that place, knowing it, and accruing the power derived from including the place in one’s network of mutual obligations. Magical travel shares the power of the Earth Lord who gave places their names, dropping them as he passed by while chasing another spirit through the mountains (Inchaústegui 1977). It recognizes these networks of obligations as the ultimate source of power, which helps to explain why the ritual performer Estela, during her ceremony, named the areas and streets of Mexico City where various of her benefactors reside.12 In the 1970s, Henry Munn quoted another man of wisdom invoking the names of such sources of power in his chant: “¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hong0?”

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“Father Bank. Big Bank. Where the light of day is. Córdoba. Orizaba.” He names the cities where the merchants of Huautla sell their principal commercial crop—coffee—in the market. “Where the Superior Bank is, says. Where the Big Bank is, says. Where the Good Bank is, says. Where there is money of gold, says. Where there is money of silver, says. Where there are big notes, says. Where the bank of god is, says. Where the bank of well-being is, says.” (Munn 1973:116)

These representations of the role of the mushroom masterer as master traveler are elaborated more clearly in conversations with Wise Ones that occur in the context of what we might call “normal reality,” that condition marked by the absence of the niños santos. There are two explicitly stated reasons to take mushrooms: to cure a specific ailment and to see the future. But the content and style of casual conversations with Wise Ones reveal additional meanings to the experience beyond those that are admitted. Some have books, some do not. In the book are written the names and addresses, or at least the hometowns, of all the clients who have used the services of the Wise One in question. Ricardo began to keep a book about seven years ago, and I glanced through the pages before signing. Men and women had come to him from all over Mexico, the United States, South America, and Europe. Many had come, like the unfortunate family of Huauteco comerciantes, from other parts of the Sierra Mazateca. One had even come from as far away as Japan. There is always one from Japan. Japan represents the ultimate signifier of exotic and absurd distance, the power of the Powerful One to stretch across the globe as magically as capitalism. Don Juanito tells me of the arrogant young japonés Samuél, who ate six pairs despite many warnings and went insane, roaming about on all fours and slobbering like a dog to his great shame the next morning, when he awoke without much face. “Even Japan,” I have heard, many times. Books are important, but not all have to be the same kind of book. Ricardo is also extremely proud of another book. “I am the curandero on page 131 of the María Sabina book,” he shrieks with excitement.13 He is referring to a compilation of musings, trippy drawings, and narratives of mushroom experiences by one Enrique González Rubio Montoya, which includes a chapter called “Clairvoyance of Don Ricardo, Curer of Santa Cruz” (Rubio Montoya 1992). Rubio Montoya reports a night spent with Ricardo, in which the curandero had known that the author had just traveled by airplane to the United States and that his companion was seeing a woman who was deceiving him. 170

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Ricardo has a book, as does Marcelino. Other men, like Juan Peralta, have books that were dedicated to them by foreigners. He shows it to me so that I can read the inscription, “To Don Juan Peralta.” The book is a master’s thesis in French called Les Granjes du Jour. María Sabina had a book, but that is something different. Julia’s husband, “a great and powerful Wizard,” does not have a book, to my knowledge, but the phone rang as I spoke to him. He had finished a hard day of labor on one of his pieces of land (he cultivates bees for honey, as well as coffee and corn), and he had been drinking (although I am told that he only rarely imbibes). He was talking about how the truth is here, right here, in no other house. And how the others, like Ricardo, chant and sing but don’t know anything. Pura mentira. Puro engaño (Pure lies. Pure deception). Ricardo says he knows but only here do they know. t h e t ru t h . Ricardo is sick and cannot even cure himself. And people come here from all over the world, from Europe. I can communicate from this house with any government in Europe. Through communication, through knowledge. He listed many countries in Europe. They come well recommended. They come back. This house has been the center of power for six hundred years. When he hung up the phone he said that people call from Germany to say when they will come here. Does Ricardo have this? ¡Es bueno! and he laughed. For this master, the truth may have been “right here,” in the center of Huautla, but the power that accompanies that truth was expressed through the telephone line, in the connection that mushrooms both produce and mimic between this world and another. Stephanie Kane and Anna Tsing have also discussed the relationship between shamanism and travel. Kane, writing about the Emberá Indians of Panama, says: While shamans are strongly linked in service to their own family groups, the reputations of great shamans are spread by word of mouth, attracting people from great distances. Discourse about shamanism is a discourse of journeys. Long journeys to meet shamans of powerful repute are undertaken by those who want to tap their power, either because they want to learn how to become shamans themselves or because they search for a cure—endeavors that are often one and the same. Journeys give narrative form to a patient-student’s search and to the actual curing event itself. Journeys bring a patient-student to the homes of shamans, and from the ritually marked spaces in the central platforms, the shamans use their songs to call spirits to come and lend vision. (Kane 1994:142–143) “¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hong0?”

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The distances that men and women travel to visit Wise Ones in the Sierra Mazateca do not have to stretch across the vast deserts and oceans that lead to big cities and foreign countries, although these days, at least when locals are talking to a foreign anthropologist like myself, these latter sites seem to take on the most significance, dominating the discourse. Even in the old days, before Wasson and the hippies, travel was an important part of shamanic discourse. Alfonso Terán, the ex–municipal president whose grandfather was a great and powerful Wise One (as attested by María Sabina herself [Estrada 1981]), tells me how people traveled from all over the Sierra to see this man, from Tenango and all of that part, just as clients in Panama who are not “ethnic” outsiders travel to seek particular Emberá healers. The difference, in the post-Wasson era, seems to be that the travels between comunidades and ranchos once traced by the Earth Lord seem trivial in comparison to those of the trekkers sucked in from faraway sites like Japan, just as the old trade routes that once connected the whole region—Mazateca Alta and Baja—are now dead and insignificant as trucks plow into the remotest regions directly from the city. Shamans make particularly attractive subjects for ethnography. They are entertaining; they say strange, compelling, exotic, and insightful things. They sometimes speak in a register that titillates the outsider’s desire for an “authentic” and “anti-Western” discourse. Sometimes they are read or listened to as the vehicles for a resistance to the evils of capitalist advancement that is based in localized, ancient, non-Western values, as Neiburg (1988), Boege (1988), and Barabas and Bartolomé (1973) suggest may be the case for parts of the Sierra Mazateca. It was the shamans who tried to chant down the Miguel Alemán dam that flooded most of the lowland Mazateca in 1955, and today some men and women of wisdom oppose the road-building process that is desecrating sacred bits of land. Sometimes this reading may be accurate; I don’t know. But reliance on shamans as spokespeople for the elicitation of the “cultural” worldview, counterhegemonic ideology, folklore, and so forth, may prove to be misleading, as a closer examination of the careers of two curers, Ricardo and Estela, may demonstrate. Such a reliance overly simplifies the process of speaking-for or representing, missing the more complex nature of the relationship between Wise Ones and the “cultures” they speak for and to.

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ricardo: mushrooms for protection As I walked with Rosario and Jean-Jacques along the road to Santa Cruz de Juárez that first afternoon, we passed some children who asked us for money. When we gave them none, they insulted us and laughed. After we passed further on, they screamed more—“gringo, gringo” and things I could not understand or don’t remember, although I did catch the name of Ricardo Rocha—and threw rocks, still laughing at us. Perhaps, I thought, we were not loved, at least by some, in Santa Cruz de Juárez. Perhaps Don Ricardo Rocha, the pleasant old shaman, was not loved either in his hometown. Later conversations confirmed this suspicion. Ricardo says that he began to “move it” in 1954, three years after the disastrous climate change of 1951 left Santa Cruz with no rain for four or five months, destroying the corn and coffee crops and causing a great deal of hardship and disease (although nobody died). By “moving it,” Ricardo means that he began making things happen in this, the material, world; he became a player. It was Ricardo, he says, who brought the road, the water, and the electricity to his village; “I moved it.” He admits that he is hated by some townspeople because of his activities. Apparently, many people in the community did not want the road, did not want to work on its construction, and did not appreciate the six workers sent by the government. They were envious of Ricardo and thought that he was too young to be managing these things. Ricardo took on the role of middleman between them and the government, a role with inevitable repercussions for his local reputation. “They thought that I was doing all the bad things that people do—to sell them, to sell everything. I know they think that. I know that’s what they say. But look at how I live, look at my house. I didn’t make any money at all. Even now I am still working with my hands.” Ricardo says that he first decided to take mushrooms when he was working in another village in the Mazatec lowlands, in Río Seco. He liked it down there, and, along with two of his brothers, bought some land and raised goats. He lived there for twenty years: ten years during which the people liked him well enough and ten years of envy, when the people wanted to kill him. He says that his motive for taking mushrooms was protection from envious rivals whom he suspected of plotting against him. “I returned to take [mushrooms] again so that they wouldn’t do me any harm because I thought that they were going to kill me.” Through the mushrooms he could foresee and ward off the inevitable enemy attacks “¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hong0?”

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that accompany the continual intrigue of factional Mazatec politics. There the mushrooms signaled three microphones to him, in the place that is called Mirador in this Cerro Mirador, which means that you can see a long way, how beautiful it was and there he returned to work, all the way until now. Three microphones—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Others put it differently. When I returned to Huautla after this interview with Don Ricardo, I told a friend about my visit. He said yes, but “he is not good. He is bad.” I asked why and he made the symbol for money with his hands and grimaced. “He has a lot of money.” I asked where the money comes from. “He sells ceremonies. He charges a lot. But it is not good. He doesn’t know.” And besides that, says my friend (who has some professional interest in trashing Ricardo, since his wife, Estela, also performs ceremonies), Ricardo doesn’t speak Spanish. This last criticism is not accurate. Although Don Ricardo is clearly more comfortable speaking in Mazatec, and conducts 90 percent of his ceremony in this language, he speaks Spanish with perfect competence. Even Rubio Montoya (1992:131) mentions Ricardo’s fluency in Spanish, writing that “his song was not in the Mazatec dialect like that of María Sabina, but in Spanish, and with Christian litanies.” Estela and her husband commonly use monolingualism as a critique of their rivals, and this perhaps relates to the Huauteco discourse about the comunidad, the space of ignorance, backwardness, monolingualism, all the things that constitute the negative side of Indianness. Another man, active in Huautla’s leftist opposition party, describes Ricardo as “a cacique, pués, the Rochas are the family of caciques in that town.” In the spring of 1994, the three presidents of Huautla received a complaint that one of Ricardo’s sons was firing gunshots into the air, and one of the presidents, accompanied by an armed posse, came to Santa Cruz to arrest him. The culprit was taken to Huautla and put in jail, exacerbating the ongoing conflict between the state legal system and the municipal presidency. The state-appointed sheriff told me that the presidents did not have the power to arrest and detain this man, and he forcefully protested this action. Perhaps the sheriff’s statement also suggests some closer ties between the Rochas and the government of Oaxaca that validate the various accusations against the family. Anyway, Ricardo’s shamanistic activities have done nothing to diminish the suspicions of those who believe that he is “selling out” his people. The first outsider came to eat mushrooms with him in 1984, but it was not until 1990 or 1991 that he began keeping a book, when someone told him that he should do so in order to be like María Sabina. He admitted 174

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that the people of his village felt that he was profiting from this sideline, but he argued forcefully that this was not the case, that he did not charge any money for this service, that he continued to live the same poor and humble lifestyle as everybody else, that performing rituals was hard and draining work.

ricardo’s view and habermas’ overview In her chants, María Sabina described a magical kind of vision. “I am a woman who searches,” she said; “a lord eagle woman” and “an opossum woman” and “a woman who sees . . . who looks into the insides of things and investigates . . . the tracks of the feet” (Estrada 1981:125, 136). Habermas (1989) has shown how the public sphere, an organization of discourse that arose in the post-Renaissance period as a critique of or alternative to the medieval representation of power and discourse before the people, was based in large part on the concept of the overview. The overview is a critical component of what I have called linearly reported culture, where different “cultures” are separated by hard borders but are represented through the same style. This separation is enabled by proposing an objective, uncontaminated space of analysis metaphorically “above” the object of analysis. The idea of the overview perhaps reaches its fullest manifestation in Bentham’s design for the Panopticon, a prison space engineered for maximum surveillance. One of the key points of this chapter is that the overview, the emblem of the dominant, linear way of imagining social space, becomes objectified in shamanic discourse and infused with magical meaning. Ricardo recognizes the relationship between power and a particular mode of seeing, and reproduces it both through his mushroom practice and through his stories about his relationship with outsiders and the experience that marked his birth as a Man of Wisdom. It is important, then, that his first important trip occurred at a place called El Mirador, meaning “The View” or “The Viewer,” a place at the edge of the highlands that affords a commanding view of all the Mazateca Baja. The metaphorical or magical sight that accrues the Mazatec Man of Knowledge under the influence of the child saints—evidenced by his tour of Mexico, the Sierra, Chiapas, the thousand hectares of corn—is grafted onto the actual landscape of the Sierra through this conjunction with a physical feature that bestows enhanced sight. There, at that place, he was given God in the form of three micro“¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hong0?”

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phones, the power to communicate his visions audibly with the aid of a magical mimetic technology, given to him by masters who have apparently kept up with the times. They only gave María Sabina a book. I do not mean to suggest that this Overview is the “Western” epistemology of space opposed by the “non-Western” Indian way, but I do suggest that the Overview is symbolically associated, in a marginalized place, with power, and power here is also associated both with light-skinned wealthy outsiders and with the position of traveling back and forth between the outside and the inside. In the mushroom ritual, the Overview is represented and objectified; the idea that one can see a great distance from an objective height is included within a context of exploring from within through language. In the chants, the places are “seen,” but this sight is embodied through the words that continually trace maps from one named place to another.

6.6 View of the Sierra Mazateca from the Mountain of Adoration. Photo by author.

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estela—mushrooms for candy Estela, unlike Ricardo, is not from the comunidad, but from the pueblo of Huautla; in fact the mero centro de Huautla de Jiménez. Also unlike Ricardo, she can claim a personal connection to la santísima María Sabina and has been around foreigners her entire life. One of her favorite childhood stories concerns her relationship with John Lennon, who came to town when she was only eight years old (in 1967 or 1968). She ran into Lennon in the central market. He was wearing the same glasses as in all the photographs, black pants, a black shirt, and really nice boots. He was accompanied by a tall, thin woman—not the Japanese one. She was French, probably. At that time very few vendors in the market could speak Spanish, and Lennon could speak no Spanish or Mazatec, so precocious little Estela, using an English-Spanish dictionary left her by another for-

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eign friend, helped the rock star with his purchases and took him where he wanted to go, to the house of María Sabina. He gave her a peso coin, one of those big ones that they used to make, when a peso was a lot of money, especially for an eight-year-old girl. That night Lennon stayed in a hotel in the center. Back then, there was only the one hotel. There was no electricity, so the hotel lobby was filled with candles, very pretty. He played a song on the guitar, the one that goes “duh duh duh duh . . .” [“And I Love Her”], and Estela danced in the center of the room. Twenty-seven years later, she is still dancing to the same song. Other less famous outsiders would come to the household of Estela’s mother and father. When she describes this period of her life, she speaks of the excitement, but also the gifts. Visitors like the psychiatrist Salvador Roquet would bring gifts. “Every time he came he brought me shoes, and sometimes a doll or a game. When the shoes broke I would go barefoot so he would bring more,” she said. “Without these things, we had nothing,” she said. When she was a teenager, a gringo asked for her hand in marriage. Her father told her that the decision was hers—a very nontraditional response for the monolingual old man—and that she should think about it carefully. She decided that she had no desire for him and did not want to leave Huautla to live in the United States with some hippie, in a situation where she had no control, she said. I return from Mexico City with a new blender that I have bought for the family. Her middle son, nine-year-old Antonio, comes in and sees it. “What did you win on Llevátelo?” he asks his mother, referring to the country’s most popular TV game show. People from all over Mexico and the world visit Estela and stay in her humble house. I lived there for two months, but her most fruitful alliances are with several Spaniards who own hotels in Veracruz and are the godparents of some of Estela’s children. These hotel owners have provided substantial gifts on special occasions, such as baptisms, where they are allowed to perform starring roles and violate local norms; one godfather, at least, miserably failed to respond with the proper catechistic response, dressed outlandishly in locally produced mushroom-embroidered pants, and appeared with both a wife and a mistress and publicly kissed and groped the latter. When these Spaniards summon her, Estela packs her bag and hops a bus to Veracruz to do their bidding. One of them operates a tour for European therapists and mental health professionals under the name of the Center for Transpersonal Psychotherapy. About twenty middle-aged Europeans spend a week on the coast learning traditional

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breathing techniques and then come to Huautla, where they take mushrooms under Estela’s supervision for several days. They sleep on mats spread on the dirt floor in the house, taking up all the surface area. Estela and her oldest daughter run around in a frenzy, while her husband and I relax with our coffees, enjoying the flow of people and gently poking fun at the guests. “Look at that one,” he says. “He looks like George Bush. Is that how you say it? How funny.” A larger portion of Estela’s modest income is derived from the sale of embroidered shirts, dresses, pants, tablecloths, and handkerchiefs. She draws the designs and buys the material, and then pays other Huauteco women to do the stitching. All out-of-town guests are given a sales pitch, and she also travels to Mexico City or Veracruz about once a month to sell to certain regular buyers. Estela is, first and foremost, a woman of transactions (like María Sabina). She gains her status and cash flow by positioning herself as an intermediary between the Sierra Mazateca and another world. Her customers buy embroidered shirts and mushroom rituals as tokens of a separate, indigenous world, and view Estela as a model representative of that world. “How wonderful it must be for you,” gushes a beaming sixteen-year-old from Mexico City who had tripped with Estela the previous night, “to live here in this beautiful place all the time.” For Estela, in turn, the mushroom ceremonies and stitched designs are not tokens of a clearly separated place, but markers of the border and the position of the border crosser, whose identity derives not from a horizontally imagined ethnicity, but from the vertical webs formed by relationships of friendship, compadrazgo, and commerce that crisscross a powerfully charged distance. She does not pretend to view the clothes she sells as being authentically or traditionally “Indian.” Instead, they belong to the process of coming and going, buying and selling, being outside one’s home. “Why don’t you wear some nice calzones [traditional pants], Benja?” she asks me. “Some nice calzones with little mushrooms on them, and a nice embroidered shirt with flowers or mushrooms. That’s what the Spaniard wears. That’s what the other gringos wear. You would look very handsome.” Nor does she, really, associate the mushroom ritual with any idea of Mazateco-ness. In fact, she uses the mushroom discourse to elucidate the negative stereotype of monolingual Indians, criticizing her rivals (often incorrectly, as in the case of Ricardo Rocha) for not understanding Spanish and thus failing to provide a proper service for visitors. Her ceremony, she sometimes boasts, is conducted entirely in Spanish—she sings

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Spanish hymns, prays, and has the client read from a book of Catholic prayer and dogma that is written in both Spanish and Mazatec. She also, as I mentioned earlier, names the places that are powerful to her; these are not mountain springs or waterfalls or caves inhabited by spirit-owners, but streets and neighborhoods in Mexico City where her most important contacts live. Her children, as they have grown, have oriented themselves away from “Mazatec” identity; they do not speak their parents’ language and publicly affiliate themselves with the city of Oaxaca and national popular culture. Flushed with excitement, Estela and her eldest daughter (thirteen years old) are back from a week in the capital city, where they were exhilarated by the Independence Day celebration in the Zócalo. I joke that Juvenal’s wife has become media chilanga.14 Juvenal, who still stubbornly insists on calling himself a campesino and talks about retiring one day out to the rancho, frowns knowingly. Estela grins. But her position, in this particular epistemology, is not that of “a campesino” or “an Indian” or “a chilanga.” She is not a this or a that or a half-this and half-that—constructions that imply a particular view of culture and identity as emerging from underlying horizontal “identities” or “cultures” that are combined in particular ratios. In this metacultural discourse, Estela occupies the space profoundly represented by mushrooms themselves; the space of mediation and the manipulation of space, which cannot be subsumed under a proportional relationship between cultures and culture fragments. The importance of Estela’s contacts and the constant flow of guests inevitably lead to a discussion of envy. On one occasion I drove Estela and a young relative to Veracruz, where the girl planned to seek employment as a maid (her heart wasn’t in it, and she ended up coming home). Estela explained to the girl her hostile relationship with her next-door neighbor, the wife of one of Juvenal’s brothers. “Because I am not lacking in friends and that enrages her,” Estela said. One day all those people had come over to Estela’s house and she told this neighbor not to clean on her property because it does not pertain to the neighbor and the woman was angry, almost crying and said that Estela was the reason she was sick. Estela responded with an insult. “She doesn’t ever talk to me, or anyone really, she is so jealous. I cannot talk with her husband. Joaquín has many girlfriends, and this also pisses her off, makes her madly jealous.” Estela counts all the foreigners she knows, all her friends, and recounts what they do for her, especially the free stuff they give her, the help. She doesn’t need anything, was married by both laws, and is 100 percent Huauteca. For this, nobody, except her husband, can command her. 180

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maría sabina and her book Because it is the paper of the judge It is the Book of the law It is the Book of government I know how to speak with the judge The judge knows me The government knows me The law knows me God knows me So it is in reality I am a justice woman I am a law woman It is not anything salted, it is not a lie Jesus Christ. (Estrada 1981:111–112)

In Richard Adams’ classic novel Watership Down, which I read over and over again as a child, a young rabbit with shamanic powers encounters a message board with writing on it. The rabbit does not know what writing is, but senses that it is something evil—the sign triggers a feeling of impending doom and a vision of a field covered with blood. The rabbit shaman understands the connection between the written word and a dangerous and alien form of power, and his response is panic and flight. In this situation, his response was correct—the sign announced the beginning of a construction project that required the annihilation of his blissfully ignorant rabbit town. Mazatec shamans also identify books and writing with a dangerous form of power, but instead of simply avoiding them as an alien force, they co-opt that power through the construction of magical books like that of María Sabina. The book of María Sabina was slightly different from the books possessed by contemporary shamans like Don Ricardo and María’s relative up in El Fortín, Don Marcelino—books of processed pulp that merely record the names and addresses of clients and the dates of their appointments. Her book was given to her by powerful spirits during the incident that witnessed the birth of María Sabina as a legendary healer. When she was a child, she had seen a Man of Wisdom sing and chant under the influence of the mushrooms. She told Alvaro Estrada that his language was very pretty. I liked it. At times the Wise Man sang, sang, and sang. I didn’t understand the words exactly, but they pleased “¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hong0?”

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me. It was a different language from what we speak in the daytime. It was a language that without my comprehending it attracted me. It was a language that spoke of stars, animals, and other things unknown to me. . . . The Wise Man Juan Manuel animated him [a sick uncle] with his strange language. (Estrada 1981:39)

At this point in her young life, María Sabina associated mushrooms with a special, non-everyday form of language that spoke of an unknown but very “natural” world. So, since she and her sister had no toys to distract them from their poverty (García Carrera 1986), they ate the strange fungi in the fields where the two girls worked tending the goats. The mushrooms made us ask God not to make us suffer so much. We told him that we were always hungry, that we felt cold. We didn’t have anything: only hunger, only cold. I didn’t know in reality whether the mushrooms were good or bad. Nor did I even know whether they were food or poison. But I felt that they spoke to me. After eating them I felt voices. Voices that came from another world. It was like the voice of a father who gives advice. Tears rolled down our cheeks, abundantly, as if we were crying for the poverty in which we lived. (Estrada 1981: 39–40)

For the first time María Sabina “felt” the voices that spoke this strange language, but the transmission was still completely oral, which makes sense, as the world in which the young girl lived out by the village of Río Santiago was almost entirely devoid of books, papers, and literate people. But this does not mean that the people of Río Santiago lacked a consciousness of the importance of literacy, even in the first decade of the twentieth century. Gordon Wasson goes to great pains to deny the fact that María Sabina was illiterate: The reader should note that María Sabina is unlettered, not illiterate. The poets who composed the Iliad and Odyssey, the Vedic Hymns, the Song of Deborah were all unlettered. The whole world was unlettered then, and immense areas still are. María Sabina was never exposed to the written word in the society where she grew up. The pejorative illiterate applies to those who, in a world where writing reaches everywhere, have not the wit to learn to read and write. (Wasson 1981:15)

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Wasson’s whole intellectual project, which depicts the mushroom ritual as a contemporary survival of the sorts of religious practices that created all of the world’s great religious traditions, depends on this rigid line between “worlds” or “cultures.” For María Sabina to be a great figure worthy of study, she must come from an uncontaminated, separate world, like that of our ancestors. As a marginalized Mexican, she could not be an Indian walking in the glory of ancient knowledge but could only be an ignorant, superstitious hillbilly without “the wit to learn to read and write.” But books and writing have been a part of the consciousness of indigenous Mexico for many hundreds of years as an important symbol that infuses hierarchies and center-periphery relationships with power and meaning. In the late Prehispanic period, Mixtec, Mayan, and Aztec leaders used the written word to legitimize their rule, and shamans shrouded their texts in mystery to heighten their power. Bishop Landa reports that Mayan priests anointed their divining books with water from a mountain where no woman treads. Linda King (1994:35) explains that “the Mayan codices were not intended to be read in a quotidian sense; they were essentially esoteric in nature and required lengthy study and preparation because only shamans could decipher the secret knowledge locked in the texts.” Books occupied a central place in Prehispanic rituals, and recitations were accompanied by singing and dancing (King 1994:48). The Texcoco king and poet Nezahualcoyotl linked writing with “intoxicating flowers” in a poem that describes the singer’s heart as “a book of paintings” and metaphorically pictures individual human lives as erasable paintings in a divine book (Nezahualcoyotl 2000:249): In María Sabina’s words: I am a woman violinist, says Because I am a woman of letters, says Because I am a Book woman, says That is your Book, says. (Estrada 1981: 151)

After the conquest, the Maya and Nahuatl languages were adapted to European-style phonetic alphabets and became the mediums for law and administration in Indian areas, as well as for works of prophecy like the Chilam Balams. The religious specialists of the colonial period used books in their rituals. John Chance (1989:162) writes that “most maestros [de idolatría—masters of idolatry] operated with the aid of a small ‘calendar

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book’ that was handed down to them or purchased in another pueblo. Written in the Roman alphabet, these books contained the names of all the days in the ritual calendar.” After around 1700, the community-level rites that these maestros oversaw were vigorously attacked by the church and the books destroyed, but the emphasis on a covert sort of literacy continued. After Mexican independence, indigenous written languages were repressed and gradually disappeared, but books and papers, now only in Spanish, remained powerful symbols of the difference between those with wealth and power and those without. As King writes: If illiteracy is a culture of silence, those who cannot read and write and who conceptualize their situation in terms of blindness, deafness, or dumbness perceive literacy as an instrument that will provide them with the means to overcome their economic and social subordination. It will enable them not only to “read the word” but also to “read the world.” . . . It provides a metaphor for becoming a full member of mestizo society, for one who is illiterate is outside this society in the same way as ethnic minorities who do not speak the dominant language. (King 1994:160)

María Sabina, although she lived in a remote area with no schools and few books, was not isolated from the idea of literacy. Her first husband, the young comerciante Serapio Martínez, who traveled on foot to Córdoba, Veracruz, Tehuacán, and Puebla buying and selling dishes and the thread that was used for huipiles, was literate. She said of him that “he liked to dress in clean clothes and didn’t appear to be a wastrel. I found out later that he was good-hearted. He didn’t drink much aguardiente, almost none, and he didn’t like to work in the fields. With pride I say that he knew how to read and write” (Estrada 1981:41). Unfortunately for María Sabina, who was much less lucky with her next husband, Serapio died of a disease contracted in the lowlands, at the house of his mistress, after six years of marriage. At this point in her memoir, María Sabina clearly distinguishes between two sets of characteristics. On the one hand we see the good comerciante, who is not limited to the Sierra but goes back and forth between the mountains and the city, wears clean clothes, does not waste his money, and is literate. On the other hand we see the bad campesino, best represented by María Sabina’s abusive second husband Marcial Carrera, a drunk who “hit me frequently and made me cry. He didn’t like to work in the fields and didn’t even know how to use a hoe with dexterity” (Estrada 184

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1981:51). The bad campesino is associated with liquor, filth, violence, waste, and laziness. In Serapio’s case, disdain for work in the fields seems like a virtue, since he works hard in his chosen profession, transporting the merchandise on his back on those long, eight-day treks to and from Puebla, while in Marcial’s case it is clearly a vice that only confirmed María Sabina’s opinion that “really, I didn’t have any need for a man because I knew how to support myself. I knew how to work” (Estrada 1981:51). So if the great shaman was not literate herself, literacy clearly had a place in her world. She remarks on this herself, telling Estrada first how “in truth I was born with my destiny. To be a Wise Woman. To be a daughter of the saint children,” and then: And I never went to school where I could have learned to read, to write or speak Castilian. My parents spoke only Mazatec. I never learned another language. What’s more, I didn’t know what school was, nor did I know if it even existed; and if there had been a school I wouldn’t have gone, because there wasn’t time. In those days, people worked a lot. (Estrada 1981:40)

In her old age, she admits the importance of Spanish and literacy, but signals the parallel function of mushrooms for someone like herself who lives in the chronotope of poverty, where all time is consumed by constant work. María Sabina realized her destiny in between her first and second marriages, during the period when she supported her mother and her three children through “arduous constant work . . . I worked like a strong man” (Estrada 1981:45). She planted corn and coffee, chopped wood, bought pots in Teotitlán to sell in Huautla, and sold bread and candles from Huautla in the outlying ranchos and comunidades. During this period, her sister María Ana fell sick. In her desperation, María Sabina resorted to the little saints. She gave her sister three pairs and ate something close to thirty pairs herself.15 A short time later, María Sabina had a remarkable vision. She found herself in front of a table piled high with important written papers. Behind the table sat six or eight imposing people, the “Principal Ones of whom my ancestors spoke” (Estrada 1981:47). She knew that they “weren’t of flesh and bone . . . they weren’t beings of water or tortilla” (47). The mushrooms spoke to her, and a magical, white book appeared on the table and grew until it was as big as she was. She was told that this was her “¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hong0?”

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Book of Language. The Principal Ones disappeared and she found herself reading this sacred book, which contained the language of God. She realized that she had achieved perfection and become one of the Principal Ones herself. She knew in that moment that “Wisdom is in Language. Language is in the Book. The Book is granted by the Principal Ones” (47–48). In that and subsequent mushroom trips, she learned the wisdom of the book until it was firmly planted in her memory and she no longer needed to see the original text. But she still often visits with the Principal Ones at their cluttered table, and together they drink beer and aguardiente (Estrada 1981). In this story we can see how the young Wise Woman, despite her lack of schooling, was given the sacred power over language that is the domain of the Principal Ones. This form of power is clearly mimetic of a form of power that María Sabina sees operating in the world around her, where wisdom and power come down from men who sit around tables piled high with books and documents. As Henry Munn (2000:253), who translated Estrada’s book into English, comments, “This woman of words, who is completely illiterate, is fascinated, haunted, obsessed by the idea of writing.” Power comes from language, but not in just any form; real power comes from written speech, or at least the idea of written speech.16 This Book of Wisdom is also a magical Book of Gender. The diminutive María Sabina takes on and uses icons not only of non-Indian power and the power of her indigenous noble ancestors, but signs of the power of men. This woman, who is said to have cursed and who drank like a man, reads a book (a male activity for both Indians and whites) and sits as an equal with male powers, participating in the male activities of drinking beer and aguardiente. I don’t know what Mazatec word María Sabina used for the Principal Ones, but the Spanish words are “los principales.” Principales were the hereditary members of the Indian upper class during the Prehispanic and colonial periods. Their appearance in María Sabina’s story next to the phrase “of whom my ancestors spoke” could signify the persistence of a form of ancestor worship, as the shaman communes with an ancient Mazatec noble class. But these are also the words that people of this region use to refer to important and powerful people, such as the bigshots in the state and national governments. These are the people who run things, making secret decisions and manipulating the people for reasons that are only known “entre ellos” (between them). When Colosio was shot, everybody knew that the conspiracy was one of those things that happened entre ellos, and that we would never know the truth.17 Yet association 186

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with the secret rulers is greatly desired, a fortune to brag about, and the secret nature of the power of los principales does not always lead to their condemnation. It is important to note that María Sabina, when referring to her first trip to the guelaguetza festival in Oaxaca City in the years of her fame, used the same word for the powerful mestizo humans that she met there as she had for her spirit masters/divine ancestors/drinking buddies: “I put on my best huipil and sat there next to the Principal Ones” (Estrada 1981:89). While Wasson, along with other outsiders and intellectuals, represents María Sabina as the icon of disappearing native knowledge from the Prehispanic world of the past—the Mazatec world that was rigidly separated from the historical world of the capitalist world system—her own memoirs and chants seem to contradict that representation. Not only do her life history and that of her first husband involve trade and interaction with historical Mexico, but her chants repeatedly refer to her relationship with Benito Juárez, the Zapotec Indian from Oaxaca who became one of the great, official heroes of Mexican history, as in the following excerpt from chants recorded by Wasson: We are going to demonstrate our courage, our character, says The Judge knows me, the Government knows me, says God knows me, says Benito Juárez, says Mother Guadalupe, says Mother Magdalene, says I am a saint woman, says I am a spirit woman, says. (Estrada 1981:140)

The little woman has adapted the national pantheon of historical deities to her own use. Juárez becomes “Our Benito Juárez.” Yet he is still associated with power—the Judge and the Government—and the chanter accrues some of that power by enlisting this figure, along with other saints and figures of stars and nature, to certify her claims to divinity. For María Sabina, the past is not sealed off from the present as part of another world; it is something whose power can be tapped through the tracing of particular syllables. The past is a source of power, located in particular places, accessible through a particular form of specialized geographical knowledge, just as the wider world of the Mexican state is, and that power is not only an alien force that must be resisted or accommodated; it can be entered into and manipulated. María Sabina is what she calls herself—“a “¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hong0?”

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woman of transactions” who uses language not only to create hard borders between the past and the present, the mountains and the state, but also to situate herself as a person who tunnels through those boundaries on the backs of words, shuttling power, divinity, identity, and euphoric experience back and forth. For María Sabina, the worlds of magic and of Benito Juárez are not fixed at particular points in the past, but the past is itself embedded in a magical landscape which she is enabled through her chants and her “little saints” to touch, see, and visit. Through her association with books, Benito Juárez, and principales, María Sabina asserts her right to be treated as an authority on the same level as other powerful figures. She is a woman violinist, a woman of letters, and a Book woman whose chants declare her friendship with the archbishop and the Pope and assert her membership in “Our people of reason” (Estrada 1981:151). Just as pictorially reported Mazatec memories deny the separate and inferior history created by official histories, the little shaman boldly asserts that she belongs in the circle of these men of power, drinking beer with them as equals, since God gave her a book and paper: “Because we are all children of God” (Estrada 1981:151). The contemporary curer Estela made similar claims about the material items used in her rituals. When asked why the ritual ended with the consumption of a glass of sweet wine, she replied that “the priests drink wine in their rituals in the church. They are no better than me, so I should have wine as well.” One could look at this shamanic mimesis of the way power is derived in the world as a sort of parodic resistance of an imposed colonial regime. Keesing (1992:7), for example, argues that the use of dominant terms and categories often constitutes “a logic of opposition and inversion,” in which “the categories and semiology of domination are mirrored, inverted, even parodied.” Tsing (1993:27) makes a similar argument about the role played by a Meratus shaman in Borneo. “Her opposition occurred in the mimicry, hyperbole, and distortion of her attempts to get closer to power, rather than in defining herself against this power. In her obsession with ceremony, Uma Adang overfulfilled state requirements for attention to order.” The application of this formulation to the verbal performances of María Sabina and other Mazatec Wise Ones, it seems to me, accepts the categorization of these Wise Ones as representatives of a linearly conceived marginalized group. It also ignores the seriousness with which María Sabina honors her book, replacing a focus on the epistemology of this “woman of transactions” speaking in a marginalized place in favor of imposed categories, such as parody, imported from a privileged analytical space, an overview. 188

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Or one could see María Sabina as an unthinking agent of a dominant ideology, expanding a political common-sense to the realm of the supernatural and thus fixing it in the cosmology of the universe. Power and wisdom, she tells her listeners, come from “Principal Ones,” “lawyers,” “men of letters,” and books, and thus the lowly Indians should not bother making more egalitarian claims for knowledge of their situation and destiny. Or one could take a more traditional view and argue that all of her chanting, singing, and praying is an ongoing part of the indigenous Mexican response to colonialism, presenting a passive, compliant face to the conquerors while establishing hard, impenetrable borders as a mode of defense. This line of reasoning sees Indians developing complex cosmologies, religions, and other practices to heighten ethnic difference and thus maintain a space of autonomy outside the reach of the dominant Spaniards/mestizos/gringos (Boege 1988; Bonfil Batalla 1987). It should be clear by this point that María Sabina’s religious discourse is not an autonomous product of an indigenous, non-Western culture, even if one sees that “culture” as a conscious or unconscious construction motivated by self-defense or oppositional impulses. It is about a particular way of organizing power, discourse, and culture (through books, Principal Ones, and the intermediary position). And it also creates a similarly organized power. María Sabina’s literacy and book knowledge are simultaneously 1. A parallel alternative to the official hierarchy of book-based knowledge in which mushrooms and mushroom-spirit books replace the other badges of authority and the Wise One replaces the official “expert.” María Sabina’s use of the book does not construct “Mazatecs” as a “people of the book,” but establishes a discursive field in which individual power comes through the book as a vehicle for magical travel and knowledge, like Chikon Tokoxo and my Toyota. 2. An objectification of the dominant hierarchy of knowledge of power and discourse that reproduces its power for María Sabina and other practitioners, and emphasizes how this power is derived from the position of the intermediary, the “woman of transactions.” 3. A transformation of the linear metacultural style based on the Overview through an objectification that makes it “pictorial.” María Sabina reads the book and soars like an eagle over a space that she views clearly from a great height in order to “see the insides of “¿Quiere Hierba? ¿Quiere Hong0?”

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things.” But she does this as part of a process of probing around in language, exploring through words, following the traces left by footprints, both of the men and women who travel to visit her and of the signs she encounters during her velada. The mighty far-seeing eagle/Sun is made equal to the ground- and tree-crawling nocturnal possum that always accompanies it in her chants. The Expert uses the Overview, but in a changed way. There is something weird about her book.18

I too was offered a book of knowledge, but rejected the offer and did not become a man of wisdom, for reasons that relate to a space that sits next to the Magic World and carries overlapping associations—the Underground.

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7

The Underground World

the story of the cavers Since the 1960s, two types of travelers have constituted the bulk of the foreigners who make their way to Huautla. First and foremost, there are the tourists who come for the recreational or transcendent value extracted from hallucinogenic mushrooms taken “in context.” But there is also a second group: cave explorers drawn by the lure of the Sierra’s vast limestone underbelly. Members of Canadian, British, Dutch, Polish, and American expeditions have all crawled and climbed down into the interior of the Huautla Plateau. The first cavers to enter the region often ran into problems: harassment from local authorities and others who confused them with the more numerous hippies (“we looked the part”) or were taken aback by the foreigners’ mysterious interest in the underground. On one occasion, some bully from San Agustín cut the rope that held a caver precariously dangling over the sixty-meter entrance pit. Fortunately, she was near the bottom, fell only about fifteen feet, and was not hurt. Bill Russell, one of the men who first discovered the caving potential of the Sierra Mazateca, recalls many more problems. There was always a strange tension between the cavers and the locals. In some towns, such as Tenango, the locals would approach the cavers with marijuana. After refusing several offers, Russell says, the cavers were approached by the municipal president, who informed them that they had “passed the test” and then offered them a deal involving a much larger quantity of drugs. Another caver from the sixties recalls how children would throw rocks at them. First one would begin, tentatively, and then the rest would join in. “Nothing like this ever happened elsewhere in Mexico.”

The representation by foreigners of the Sierra Mazateca as a strangely dark and sinister place is not limited to cavers. An Australian expatriate, now living in Mexico City, told me about his experience visiting Huautla in similar terms. “The people are just creepy,” he said. “I mean, they’re real Indians, scary ones. Not your happy, smiling Maya Indians in Yucatán but real Indians who just don’t like you.” The cavers from different countries reacted differently, according to my American informants. The Canadians “had these ideas about the natives” and would ignore them. “Act like they weren’t there, just go about their business.” The French, of course, would prance about in their tiny bikini underwear. But they still seemed to get along fine with people, at least better than the Canadians. The Americans regarded the local people as a “problem,” an obstacle to their progress. They made little or no attempt to understand Mazatec reactions to their presence, except through humorous labels, such as Bill Stone’s identification of the “Mazatec calling card.” The Mazatec calling card, Stone explained, was a human turd that would appear in front of the door of the gringo cavers’ temporary residence in San Agustín. Over and over again, American cavers told me that “nothing like this happened anywhere else in Mexico.” Everywhere else, the caves were “just holes in the ground” as far as the locals were concerned. Locals in the Sierra Mazateca would watch the cavers pulling out their specialized equipment and ask how much each rope, backpack, flashlight, or pair of shoes cost. After hearing the answers, they would ask again what the purpose of the expedition into the cave was; what the cavers hoped to find. Strangely, they never believed the reply—just to see what’s there. “Everywhere else in Mexico they never had a problem with that.” Finally, in 1969, the hassles became too great. The hippies had been booted out of the region by the army, and the level of hostility toward outsiders reached a new high. The cavers were allowed into the area with permission from the president of Huautla, but in the countryside people threw stones at them, and on the way out they were detained by the police at Teotitlán del Camino. The president of Teotitlán accused them of possessing drugs, held them in jail for hours of threats, intimidation, and negotiation, and finally demanded an enormous bribe. The Americans decided to stop coming to the area. After all, there were plenty of other caves in Mexico without all of these problems. But the hiatus on Mazatec-area caving lasted only six years, until a group of plucky Americans decided to return in 1975. Over the years, the persistence of the American cavers paid off, and they developed strong 192

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enough relationships with the authorities of Huautla and the inhabitants of the village of San Agustín to allow peaceful access to the subterranean realms. One caver in particular, a would-be astronaut named Bill Stone (who is known as Guillermo Piedra in the region), has returned consistently to the Sierra and has made the exploration of the great Sótano de San Agustín his life’s obsession. When the numerous underwater sections of this cave system impeded further progress with conventional scuba tanks in the early 1980s (the explorers had to carry more tanks on their backs into the abyss than was feasible), Stone and his associates developed a complex redesign of closed-system technology, which allows divers to “re-breathe” exhaled air that has passed through a series of filters. The re-breathers were incredibly complicated and fragile, perhaps too complicated for use in such forbidding circumstances—the m k 4 apparatus, Stone solemnly told a gathering in Huautla, contains seven computers. Stone assembled a team to explore the Sótano in the spring of 1994, hoping to connect the entrance near San Agustín to a known exit (proven through dye tests in the water) in the Santo Domingo canyon many miles away. This connection would have made this cave the deepest in the world, as well as far and away the most challenging. But the expedition seemed cursed from the beginning; several key members never showed up, those who did feuded, one member nearly drowned twice when a rainstorm whipped up six-foot waves in a normally placid underground stream, and there were equipment problems. Many members of the team questioned Stone’s leadership ability; they feared that he might lead them to their doom. “I am not a people person,” Stone admitted (Vetter 1994). Finally, in late March, Ian Rolland, a twenty-nine-year-old father of three and the team’s most experienced diver, drowned in one of the underground “sumps,” or flooded passages. In his official report, Stone blamed the death on a complication linked to Rolland’s diabetes, but at the time other members of the team suggested that Rolland had made an error with the re-breather, forgetting to press a crucial button when he reentered the water after surfacing on a sandbar. The machine gradually fed him less and less oxygen until he blacked out. After the five-day-long ordeal of hauling the corpse to the surface and a week’s rest, Stone and his girlfriend, Barbara bem Ende, decided to continue the expedition, and, despite a storm that almost killed another team member, eventually expanded the cave significantly, although not to the end. By the time he gave up and returned home, Stone had pushed Sótano de San Agustín to the number four spot in the world rankings. That same The Underground World

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day on the other side of the world, other explorers pushed a French cave still deeper, and Stone’s cave, despite his more than thirty days underground, fell to number five. He has continued to search for the connection in new expeditions that begin where the cave empties into the lowland river, however, and it may yet be made. Rolland’s death was big news in the area around Huautla. The people of San Agustín went to great lengths to help retrieve the body and bring it out of the steep valley where the cave entrance is located. The cavers were stunned when the entire village showed up for a funeral ceremony honoring Rolland. “It was amazing,” said Kenny Broad. “The Mazatecs were waiting for us with flowers in their arms, incense burning on a little altar. They’d cut hundreds of steps in the steep hillside, and they helped carry Ian to their church, where they had a memorial service with singing and prayer” (Vetter 1994:64–65). People talked about the caves and the tragedy, and I found myself getting drawn into a complicated discourse about caves, cavers, and the underground realm that affected my ideas about other aspects of Sierra Mazateca life, folklore, and politics. Some local residents accused the cavers of harboring secret motives like expropriating underground wealth, and others used the rhetoric of the supernatural to criticize the expedition. Above ground, the cavers and I encountered a set of ideas about the underground world that were embedded in stories about ill-gotten loot, pacts with goat devils and light-skinned Earth Lords, and vanishing goldladen airplanes. The expedition provoked the creation of still more stories dealing with the underground realm, and stories that deal with other subjects, such as the sort of cultural capital represented by anthropology, are also sunk into this highly productive genre. The different uses of these narratives by campesinos, comerciantes, and local intellectuals in the Sierra Mazateca, I submit, do not just express resistance to foreign intrusion or the workings of capitalism, but illustrate the variety of local responses to the “outsider” presence and illuminate the processes of negotiation of models of cultural difference and the slippery, dark border between us and them. Stone’s Marco Polo–type story of heroic adventurers seeking glory and knowledge in the dark corners of the Earth resembles Wasson’s outsider discourse about mushroom exploration, but it makes little sense when viewed through the lens of local perspectives about caves. One perspective on the local point of view comes from the anthropological literature on the significance of caves and magical wealth in the Americas from ancient times to the present.

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anthropological accounts of caves, magical wealth, and earth lords Archaeologists tell us that, for Prehispanic Mexicans, especially the Maya, caves were crucially significant as portals where humans could communicate with the other world and the ancestors, below the earth in Xibalba. Caves were places of origin—the birthplace of the Sun and the moon, of lineages, of maize, and of rain and wind—as well as portals between the visible and the invisible world (Schele and Freidel 1990; Bassie-Sweet 1991). Karen Bassie-Sweet even suggests that the snake image itself, an omnipresent Mesoamerican symbol, actually represents the personification of a cave passage. The snake is shaped like a cave, and it is connected 7.1 Shrine to the Earth Lord near the summit of Nindo Tokoxo. Photo by John Dudas.

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to those spheres linked to the other world: rain, vision quests, and birth, for example. In the Sierra Mazateca, campesinos often explain their reluctance to enter caves by claiming that they are inhabited by dangerous snakes, a fear that cavers say is not justified. This contemporary association of snakes with caves has been found throughout the Maya region (Laughlin 1976; Fought 1972; Bassie-Sweet 1991). Caves are also connected to holy mountains, places in the center of the universe that mark the vertical axis in the Mesoamerican view of space, where Earth rises up to the layers above just as the cave descends to the world below. This axis penetrates the earth at its center, dividing the world up into four quadrants linked to the four cardinal directions, each of which may be recognized by its color and its directional deity. The four directions, for the ancient Maya, were represented by the world tree—the sacred ceiba, whose roots spread downward into Xibalba and whose branches climb into the heavens. In the Sierra Mazateca, the most important location on the sacred mountain (the Mountain of Adoration, or Nindo Tokoxo) is a spot marked by three crosses and an ancient, contorted sacred tree. Immediately behind this spot there is a small opening—a hint of a cave if not an actual cave—where people leave offerings to the Lord of the Mountain. The great urban civilizations of the classic period built on the imagery of the sacred mountain and the cave as sources of legitimate power. The great pyramids were artificial, manmade mountains whose entrances were conceived of as caves, just as caves in real mountains were seen as doorways. Many pyramids, most notably the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán, were built over cave systems (natural or manmade), depriving access to them for the non-elites who had previously used them as pilgrimage sites and clearly making a connection between the role of the elite priests and rulers and the chthonic process of traveling between worlds (Brady 1991). Recent archaeological work by Janet Steele (1987) has shown that caves in the Sierra Mazateca were used in the Prehispanic period for a variety of functions, including elite burials. After the Spanish Conquest, these manmade mountains and caves were replaced by churches, and worship and sacrifice retreated to real caves hidden in the countryside (Clendinnen 1987; Chance 1989). While the Spanish found these rites barbaric, the Indians may have associated their new overlords with underworld power. In Huautla, I have been told that during the colonial period, the Spaniards sent their finest warriors and priests to the Sótano of San Agustín to enhance their strength and wisdom by undertaking mushroom rituals.1 196

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In contemporary Mesoamerica, caves and holy mountains are often connected to Earth Lords and other supernatural beings that can provide wealth. Stories about the Devil, magical wealth, and morally dubious contact with underground beings are common throughout rural Latin America. Michael Taussig’s (1977) well-known argument is that Latin American peasants, accustomed to systems dominated by use-value, regard systems of capital accumulation based on wage labor and exchange-value as evil and unnatural, and express this antipathy by describing the wealth generated by this latter system in terms of demonic pacts or influences. Other observers of the Devil have elaborated upon Taussig’s scenario. Marc Edelman (1994:60) argues that “the devil-pact stories constitute a significant, nearly ubiquitous cultural matrix through which to view relations of power and exploitation and through which to express a variety of socially conditioned anxieties and psychic conflicts.” Specifically, the Devil’s pernicious role is not limited to economic exploitation; he is also a “commonly available idiom or interpretive framework” used to make sense of other forms of abuse, such as the “predatory sexuality” of a local cacique (boss) (Edelman 1994:61, 71). In a similar vein, Ruth Behar (1987) has argued that in colonial Mexico, the figure of the Devil was used by women as a last resort in an effort to reconcile the contradictions between church teachings and a reality of male dominance and abuse. David Nugent argues that peasant society does not inherently generate the opposition to accumulation and exchange-value that is expressed in Devil stories; this hostility is a social form that must be historically produced and explained. He demonstrates how in one Peruvian community accumulation is “seen as liberating and empowering at one time, but as evil and dangerous at another” (Nugent 1996:263). Thus, the Devil is a multivocal symbol whose meaning can change for different members of peasant society at different times. Several anthropologists have commented on how the figure of the Earth Lord—a light-skinned “owner” of the sacred mountain who rewards peasants with material wealth and bountiful harvests, but who also can cause destruction—has expressed the relationship between Indians and dominant ethnic groups. The Earth Lord seems to represent the capriciousness and inevitability of non-Indian wealth and power (Rosenbaum 1993). Richard Wilson (1991) has shown how the religious practices associated with the Earth Lord in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, were affected by genocidal violence. Noting that the Earth Lord “should be seen as a fluid and continually redefined figure and not a relic of the Mayan past,” Wilson demonstrates how the Guatemalan military appropriated the symThe Underground World

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bolism of mountain spirits for itself, as an authoritarian presence whose permission is required for all activities and whose wrath can be devastating (Wilson 1991:51). More recently, Abigail Adams (2001) has argued that this same Guatemalan Earth Lord should be seen as a manifestation of the Maya metaphors of “roads” that individuals may travel on and that link communities through ritual travel. The Devil is linked to a variety of morally dubious sites, figures, and domains, including the local Earth Lords or spirit-owners (chikones) of geographical features, underground wealth, and cultural wealth of the sort collected by anthropologists and local intermediaries and intellectuals. Chikones are the light-skinned spirit-owners, or Earth Lords, of the Sierra Mazateca. Every region has its own chikon. They reside underground in geographical features—caves, mountains, springs—that are named for the resident chikon. The most powerful chikon in the Huautla area lives in the Mountain of Adoration, or, in Mazateco, Nindo Tokoxo (Nindo means “mountain”; x is pronounced “sh”). This chikon is called Chikon Tokoxo, but he is sometimes called Chikon Nindo Tokoxo, or even, on occasion, just Nindo Tokoxo. The Mazatec word “chikon” is glossed as the Spanish guero, which refers to any light-skinned person, including foreigners and mestizos. But the meaning of the word goes beyond its Spanish gloss, since all of the spirit-gods (or “owners”) are light-skinned, and they are known collectively as the chikones.2 Not only does the significance of these sites, figures, and domains change over time, as Wilson and others have shown, but they are given different meanings by different sorts of local actors; they do not homogeneously express a resistance to external power, wealth, and influence that is based on a commonly held and understood local identity. On the one hand, intermediaries (some tradespeople, politicians, and local intellectuals) may use these stories to strengthen a model in which “culture,” as embodied in these stories, is located in an essential core; it is an object that must be possessed and spoken for by a special class of experts. On the other hand, peasants and other residents of the Sierra use the stories to describe culture in terms of relationships across morally charged borders. This response is not just a reaction to the penetration of capitalism; this is, after all, a region without large-scale capitalist enterprises that use wage labor. Rather, it is a sometimes critical expression of an enduring local model of cultural, economic, and political power based on mediation, one that allows for the representation of both virtuous and selfish demonic intermediaries.

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the underground as mediation between worlds and as a source of wealth In the discourse of the Sierra Mazateca, caves mediate between two worlds—the seen and knowable land above and the unseen, mysterious, and potentially diabolical world below. Caves are dangerous places. They are filled, perhaps, with venomous snakes and other wild beasts. “We,” the insider-locals, are people who are afraid of the caves and stay away from them. “You,” the cavers, are people without fear, who come and go between these worlds without any apparent problems. Of course, sometimes even you encounter difficulties down there; a Polish caver fell and broke his back fourteen years ago, and a young man from Britain died just this year. Why would anyone go down there, to a dark and dangerous place? Power, in the Sierra Mazateca as in much of rural Mexico, is believed to reside between the local and the national, in the sphere of translating and mediating—buying and selling. Caciques have this power—they are accused of “selling” their pueblos for profit. Coffee buyers, of course, are the most hated middlemen. They steal the labor of campesinos for immense personal gain. I elaborated this theme in the previous chapter; shamans set themselves up as the mediators between two worlds, mimetically imitating and reproducing the processes that produce power and wealth in their world. The discourse of the underground also imitates, reproduces, and criticizes the usurpation of status and wealth by “intermediaries”—the men who travel back and forth between the imaginary worlds of the Sierra and the mestizo, not as suffering workers, but as masters of their two situations, which they correctly see as one. The two worlds that meet in the cave are, in fact, two worlds from above: the Sierra Mazateca and the quasi-diabolical world of commerce, foreigners, and the nation. That is why outsiders feel at home in there; that is why, perhaps, the laws of the Earth Lords do not affect men like Bill Stone who are blissfully unaware of these “owners” of the caves and mountains that they are trespassing. They say that men from the Sierra, when they wish to become rich, have various options. One is to bury offerings to the Chikon Tokoxo, the lord of all the parts around Huautla, who lives (or lived—in some versions of the story this Lord moved away in the recent past) inside the Mountain of Adoration just east of town. Perhaps they bury a turkey egg; in times past, maybe they interred a whole live turkey (Baird 1991; Inchaústegui 1977).

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In any case, the chikon can then bless them, and their labor will bear fruit. There is a catch to this exchange, however, as with all exchanges. After the greedy comerciante dies, now a rich man, he is forced to work, inside the mountain in the rancho of the chikon, and from this fate there can be no escape. One man saw his father, dead many years, walking the empty streets one foggy night up by the Plan de la Salida.3 The old man was dressed in rags, and broken chains trailed behind him. “Father,” said the son, “where have you been?” The old man gestured toward the mountain. “I am coming home,” he said. “I have escaped.” But of course he was wrong, for as soon as the words escaped him he dissolved back into the mist and was gone—reclaimed. There is a still more sinister way for men of this neighborhood to gain wealth—corrupt men who would, in other regions, turn to drug trafficking or other lucrative vices. There is a cave down by the Puente de Fierro, where the road to Teotitlán intersects the unpaved track to Chilchotla and points northeast. The cave lies not fifty meters from the bridge where all traffic comes into Huautla from the outside, where the tourists come, the trucks filled with beer and soft drinks, and over which the overloaded pickups pass as they haul the brown-gold coffee out to Tehuacán. This place, not coincidentally the symbolic gateway to Huautla, carries a dubious moral charge. They say that Huautla’s only prostitute works at the puente, and then there is the cave. A devil lives in this cave, pués The Devil, and his name is dangerous to repeat; he is called El Chato. The one who would be rich, the head of his household, comes to the cave of El Chato alone, at midnight, bearing some candles to see with, perhaps some incense to burn as an offering, and a blanket to lay on the cave’s muddy ground. Once the candles and incense are lit and the blanket is spread, El Chato makes his appearance, coming from within the Earth. El Chato appears as a half-man, half-goat who walks on his hooves. It is not wise to speak more of him. He and the man are both on the blanket, and something described by one embarrassed informant as “unnatural” (yet strangely compelling) passes between them.4 Afterward, the blanket is covered with the man’s blood. But he leaves, and little by little he achieves, or even surpasses, the desired level of affluence. But he continues to bleed, like a woman, every month, and, says my embarrassed informant, “does not become a woman, but loses his sexual identity as a man.” He becomes, forever, El Chato’s lover. Perhaps that is a fair trade-off, since many men seem to have made it. How else could we explain, argues a campesino from a village deep in the Sierra’s low, jungly interior, all the rich men in Huautla? All the new 200

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trucks, and new houses, and abundance, in these years when most men are getting poorer and the price of coffee has collapsed. Huautla, the gateway to the region, the town that has “born the brunt of the hammer blows from the outside world, so that the rest of the region could remain the same,” as Professor Florencio Carrera, the town’s most respected intellectual explained it, is thus also the town where more men would possess this secret underground knowledge. This knowledge is, of course, illegitimate. Those whose wealth and power come from the nether world cannot admit as much; they have made vile pacts with the Devil and abetted the spread of Envy. But there are many more men who hunger for that wealth, although they cannot admit it, except perhaps to outsiders like myself who can understand because we are people of that world, living representatives of El Chato or, on a good day, an Earth Lord. Come outside a moment, whispers a fellow in Aureliano’s charming little bar. Once alone in the alley, he tells me of a cave he knows. You just bring the equipment, he tells me. I know of the cave, and it is a good one, but I don’t have equipment. Shh. We will be rich, right. But don’t say anything to anybody. When we go back inside, we are talking about something else. I have had conversations like this more than once, with variations. The Underground is proposed to me as a source of wealth, or brave men offer to show me caves, but there is always a need for secrecy, and more than a hint of danger. They know, of course, from thirty years of experience with spelunkers, that gringos are interested in caverns, but that makes perfect sense. There was the time seven years ago in Ayautla; flashlights and whispering as my arrival became the occasion to head down to the cave to look for some kind of treasure, talk of a gold idol, and a foreigner who succumbed to some tragedy inside. Sick and blistered from a long hike and a day of bingeing on aguardiente, I slept instead. And there was the fellow I met on the ferry from Guaymas, Sonora, to Baja California, where he worked in the mines. “You must come with me, back to my village in Oaxaca,” he told me. “I know there is a fortune in minerals in the soil below the village. My pueblo is ugly and poor, but it will be rich and progressive. But the people there, they are ignorant and do not believe me. They say I’m crazy. But if you came with me, they would listen to you.” This man did not come from the Sierra Mazateca, but another sierra to the southwest. These discourses, though, are not bound to any named geographical feature or “cultural region.” There is another story in the Sierra that speaks of the role of caves as the passageway between two worlds, one of which, the demonic below, The Underground World

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is closely associated with the imaginary “outside.” In June 1933, a plane called Cuatro Vientos (Four Winds) left Spain on a daring “goodwill” mission; its mission was to fly across the Atlantic Ocean from Seville to Havana to Mexico. This was, at the time, the longest flight in history. On the morning of the 10th, the plane was seen near the Gulf of Mexico, heading west toward Mexico City, where President Rodríguez awaited it. Bad weather was approaching, but the plane’s pilots apparently decided to risk the storm and continue over the Sierra Mazateca. The plane was never seen again by anyone who wants to testify about it, but according to the men of the Sierra, it was seen again. Some say that the Cuatro Vientos crashed in the lowlands, near the village of La Guacamaya northeast of Chilchotla, across the river that forms the border between the states of Puebla and Oaxaca. They say that a man from this region found the wreck and saw that the plane was filled with a great quantity of gold. Unable to resist this temptation, the man took a pistol from one of the injured but still-living pilots and shot them both. He lived a long time, this murderer, spending his money with great abandon and accumulating many wives, only bragging of the deed and showing off the gun when he had become very old. All the money had been spent by the time he died. They also say, some of them, that the plane crashed into a cave. Some disagree on this point. By the 1950s the rumors about the fate of the Cuatro Vientos had grown so loud that the state government of Puebla became involved. In 1953 the governor of Puebla, acting on rumors of eyewitness accounts of the plane’s crash, issued an indictment against a man for the murder of Barberán, one of the pilots. Nothing happened until 1957, when the army arrived in the region of the alleged crash to investigate these reports. They found parts of a motor, which they sent to Switzerland, to the company that constructed the motor of the Cuatro Vientos, for verification. The company replied that the parts sent in were not from the missing plane. The army returned to this area one more time, in 1969, and camped in Chilchotla for one month. This investigation had two objectives, to find the legendary missing airplane and to search for drugs. It is rumored that this time the investigating officer did find conclusive evidence regarding the fate of the Cuatro Vientos, but for some reason this information was never made public. Perhaps the general came to some private agreement with the parties involved. The story of the Cuatro Vientos is not limited to the Sierra Mazateca; it is a favorite of conspiracy theorists throughout Mexico, and there is at least one published book on the subject. The detailed information that I present here, including specific dates, was given 202

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7.2 Men in Matzazongo relax after planting corn. Photo by John Dudas.

to me by a mestizo Mexican mountain climber who was part of the San Agustín caving team and who had done considerable research into the legend of the Cuatro Vientos. Other men in Huautla and Matzazongo, near the mysterious and secretive La Guacamaya itself, have also repeated different versions of the story. I have been told to be careful, if I plan to ask many questions about the Cuatro Vientos in the area around Matzazongo and La Guacamaya. That would be a very dangerous investigation. On one visit to Matzazongo, an acquaintance offered to guide me to a “beautiful” and “unknown” cave some distance away. I agreed to make the journey, since I enjoyed hiking to new locations and crawling around in the region’s majestic caverns. He informed me, however, that we would have to leave the next morning very early, at 3 a .m . The afternoon before the scheduled hike, I was caught in the middle of a drinking war between two groups of men who evidently disliked each other intensely. After the forced consumption of eight beers in what seemed like less than an hour, I was able to escape this confrontation when my acquaintance pulled me away. He was seething with rage over how I had been treated, and felt a need to calm down by consuming, and insisting that I consume, two more beers at a nearby store. This failed to adequately soothe his temper or eliminate the foul taste of the insult, however, and as soon as we crossed the footbridge to the side of the river where he lived, he expressed his anger by discharging his firearm several times in the air. “You can’t play The Underground World

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with me,” he said. “I don’t care if you are the patrón himself. You can’t play with me!” The next morning, my acquaintance woke me and a companion from the United States at 3:30. He whispered that we should walk silently and point our flashlights at the ground until we were far away from any houses. First, we scrambled and slid down a series of steep, muddy foot trails until we reached the flat pasture near the river. In the moonless night, we were guided across the pasture by the red, hungry eyes of the patrón’s herd of cattle. Then we crossed the river, skirted Matzazongo, and began to ascend, silently, with the beams from our flashlights directed only at our feet. We carried no water, and I had consumed no fluids since the previous day’s drinking duel, so I soon began to feel the effects of the climb. My acquaintance, still angry and in no mood to dawdle, disappeared ahead of me. My American companion tried to remain some distance between the swift Mazatec farmer and the slow and out-of-shape gringo, but finally he too disappeared. I reached an intersection of the path and stopped to catch my breath, listening for any clues. I heard nothing but my own labored breathing and the rustling of a few jungle creatures, but decided to take the most vertical path. A few minutes later I caught up to my companions, who were now joined by a friend of my Matzazongo acquaintance, decked out in a cowboy hat, a haircut with a stylish tail, and knee-high rubber boots. “What took you so long?” he asked. After another half an hour, just before dawn, we reached a small farmhouse in the middle of a sea of sugarcane. After I satisfied my ravenous thirst by sucking the raw cane juice from the stalks, we introduced ourselves to the family and enjoyed a satisfying breakfast. After eating, we were guided to the entrance of a vast cavern just three minutes from the house. A stream ran through the cave, and we were told that this was the source of the family’s water. The grandfather of the family led my American friend and me toward the back wall of the cavern, but our two Matzazongo guides stayed by the entrance. I thought that this was strange, since the whole trip had been their idea. When we reached a place where the cavern ended, and a narrow tunnel continued further, the grandfather said that this was as far as he went, and gestured for my companion and me to continue. We crawled through the tunnel and arrived at another room. From this room, we could only have continued with ropes, which we did not carry, so we inspected the room and then returned. The grandfather asked us what we had found. It was apparent that he and his family had expected us to return with some item of value, 204

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and they were disappointed with our story: we saw nothing, except some initials scratched on a wall and a rock buried in the floor that looked, at least superficially, like bone. During our descent back toward Matzazongo, my two Mazatec companions stopped to squat at an intersection. They spoke to me in low, serious tones, explaining that they knew people who grew marijuana, but needed outside buyers who could pay good money for it and transport it away from their canyon. The army would never find it, they said, because the soldiers were too afraid of the snakes to really search. I explained that I could not risk carrying drugs back to America, and we continued back, out of the territory of La Guacamaya, where our presence was forbidden, I found out later, and back to Matzazongo, where we enjoyed several thirst-quenching pitchers of tepache (a mildly alcoholic sugarcane drink). These stories of underground wealth illustrate a particular representation of borderlands and the construction of intergroup interaction and business. Campesinos of the Sierra use the allegory of the underground to explain and critique the power and wealth of the comerciantes and other businessmen who live by “selling” others, spreading envy through secretive dealings with a hidden demonic world. These morally deficient intermediaries may be local, like coffee buyers or culture brokers, or they may be outsiders—like the anthropologists who gather valuable “culture,” the foreigners who find relics in caves or give money for drugs, and the gringas who allegedly harvest children’s organs in Guatemala (A. Adams 1999). While their behavior is not seen as being exactly legitimate, it is understandable and even, at times, admired. The intermediaries themselves, whether they are comerciantes or local intellectuals, tend to interpret these stories differently; as “survivals” that attest to a “cultural heritage” of the Mazatecos, back in the imaginary time when they were allegedly independent, isolated, sovereign, “Prehispanic.” I would suggest that this representation of the world below is probably very old—but that is because the patterns of economic relationships that separated comerciantes and local intellectuals from campesinos are also very old, dating back at least to the Spanish colonial organization of the “república de indios” along vertical lines of dependency. The local intellectuals, comerciantes with an interest in folklore, and other interested observers and collectors of the folklore scene speak of cave and chikon stories through what I have, following Volosinov, called the “linear mode of reporting culture.” This style of representing culture and cultural difference, as noted, creates hard borders between each of its objects—its “cultures”; but each of these cultures is made to represent The Underground World

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itself in more or less the same way. The linear style creates “clear-cut, external contours for reported [cultures], whose own internal individuality is minimized” (Volosinov 1986:121). In the introduction, I described the Olympics as an ideal example the linear mode of reporting culture. The borders between each nation are as clear as the differences in their uniforms. Yet each nation is represented identically—through a uniform of a particular color, a flag, a national anthem, and a shared ideal of athletic excellence and competition. We also see this view in a wave of 1990s television commercials that provoke a sort of awed, millenarian, multicultural feel. In these commercials we see Others sitting and walking in an exotic landscape such as an Arab market, a Sicilian convent, a California beach, or an African or Chinese village. We do not understand the strange language the Others are speaking, but we can read the subtitles. Though all these cultures appear dramatically different on the surface, we are reassured by the content of their form, the meaning of the subtitles. They are all talking about commodities produced by multinational corporations like at&t , ibm , and Isuzu. Difference in language, dress, and setting resolves into a sameness in the way this difference is represented and through the common fixation on the commodity. The boy runs across the village shouting ecstatically, “Leather seats! Leather seats!” The linear view of culture clearly forms the dominant metacultural discourse in Huautla, and throughout Mexico and the world. Particular stories, objects, or beliefs are presented as tokens of a type, expressions of a particular bounded “culture” with a “tradition” that comes down to us from the time of beginnings, which in Mexico is given the name “Prehispanic era.” That is the meaning of a linearly presented story in this sense—that it is part of a Mazateco heritage, for example. “To be a Mazatec one must eat mushrooms.” “You are interested in the customs; we have many customs.” In the course of my research, I have been searching for a way to conceptualize pictorially represented culture, as derived from Volosinov’s “pictorial reported speech.” Volosinov describes this tendency as obliterating precise boundaries while individualizing reported speech. I believe that a pictorial mode of representing culture and culture difference is embodied in Sierra Mazateca discourses about caves and the underground world (as well as mushrooms and the “magic world”). These stories create a world where the meanings of cultures exist precisely at their borders, rather than their primordial hinterlands. The cave, the depth, the roots—these are the spaces of cultural interaction, betrayal, and 206

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construction—and the men who go into the cave world or negotiate with the beings that dwell within are being very Mazateco precisely by dealing with the other, becoming intermediaries. It is a mode that perceives history not as the rise and fall of essences, but of constant interpenetration of fluid beings that entangle and devour each other as a mountain can devour an unwary peasant or explorer. Rather than viewing the world as “populated by endangered authenticities—pure products going crazy,” the pictorial mode depicts humans as acting in a world where they are always “caught between cultures, implicated in others” (Clifford 1988:5, 11). Borders between groups are not explicitly drawn by experts, but embedded in puzzling narratives that slip and squirm to elude one’s grasp, but that provide evaluations as well as representations of different practices and members of society. And in the Sierra Mazateca, this mode paints its constructed border as immoral, but also eternal and not historical. Jane Hill (1991) has described the way in which Mexicano speakers in Puebla create the idea of an autonomous indigenous sphere through stories that note the “penetration” by the Mexican state. This, like my story about Oaxaca, is a way of constructing culture through a narrative that is centrally about borders. But the discourse of caves around Huautla does not reproduce the great story of political economy, of a bounded, linearly imagined ideal world penetrated from the outside by capitalism. It focuses instead on the agency of “insiders”—local people—who go into the demonic world, or summon beings from there, in pursuit of their own selfish interests. This difference is in fact a key difference between the linear and pictorial views of culture and caves within the Sierra. The campesinos and others who tell stories about caves with goatdevils, burials of turkeys, and fallen airplanes are critiquing the local men who achieve or aspire to the position of middleman—whether they be caciques, coffee buyers, comerciantes, or intellectuals. In this part of Mexico, the majority of the people who occupy these positions are not considered outsiders; most of them even speak the indigenous language and are closely related to poorer campesino families. This critique is current; dealings with the devil are not represented as anything that is old and vanishing or brand new—it is both timeless and contemporary. The middlemen respond in their interpretation of these stories by representing them as tokens of a type; the vanishing folklore of the Mazatec culture that must be “rescued” or it will die. The stories are associated with the past, an association that defuses their political impact. Some comerciantes will tell you that the chikones and duendes (poltergeists) don’t live near Huautla anymore; the world has changed too much and The Underground World

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there are too many people. They have gone back into the remoter areas, like the coyotes that once accompanied Chikon Tokoxo on his nocturnal romps. The cave stories are also reconfigured in a way that supports the aims of the middlemen. As something that must be “rescued” and “taught” and put into written words, they reconfirm a hierarchy of knowledge and expertise. As I discussed in Chapter 4, many people, especially teachers and functionaries of the Casa de la Cultura, told me how ignorant the campesinos and indios were of their own culture, how it needed to be taught and presented to them by institutions like the schools and the casa.

the anti-caver sentiment in huautla A small number of Huautecos voiced opposition to the activities of Bill Stone and his team. A few days after Rolland’s death, I accompanied a very agitated man to the house of his neighbor, a woman named Julia who earns a good living by running expensive mushroom ceremonies and by selling embroidery (she has a certificate guaranteeing her mastery of artisanry from a center in Veracruz).5 The man was agitated because he had just been attacked by an apparition. Julia said that the apparition was Chikon Tokoxo, and that the chikon did not like it when people did not respect him. Because he is the owner of all of this, she said, all of Huautla. And they come and build with their machines, she said, tearing up his land. There are many places. The people from the city, they don’t know, she said. They don’t know about any of this. They don’t have respect, she said. That is what I thought, when I heard they were going to build the road in there [the new paved road that now connects Huautla with Tuxtepec, and that passes through the sacred mountain Nindo Chikon Tokoxo]. He will do something, she said. They will have accidents, she said; people will die. Like in San Agustín, look what happened, she said. A man died in there, a man from England. They don’t know, she said. She mentioned another occasion when a brand-new tractor was pulled into the ground, just pulled in. She told the agitated man that he should pray. Nindo Tokoxo is the only one, she said. He commands, she said. He gives us our jobs, our missions. Like you are a teacher, and I am an artisan, and another is a doctor. Nindo Tokoxo gives us all these jobs, she said. I mentioned Julia’s warning about “getting permission” to one of the cavers, who mentioned it to another, who mentioned to Stone that some 208

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were saying that Ian died because they didn’t respect the “cave gods.” Stone brusquely replied that “it was something else.” On Sunday April 9, 1994, Stone gave two presentations of his activities. The first was public, in the kiosk in the center of town in front of a good crowd. He presented slides of his exploration, which he compared to the expedition depicted in Jules Verne’s classic Journey to the Center of the Earth, and to space exploration. He emphasized the high-tech nature of the equipment and the years of training and experience required to learn to operate it under such perilous circumstances. He blamed Rolland’s death on a diabetic reaction, a “disease,” rather than human or mechanical error. Renato, the patron of the Casa de la Cultura, then remarked that the “indios Mazatecos” of San Agustín had helped to evacuate the dead man from the cave, because the dead are all equal regardless of color, race, or social status. Then he opened the event to questions from the crowd. Elvira, a schoolteacher at the Benito Juárez primary school, asked if there were any Mexicans on the team. Stone said that there were, although neither was present. The woman persisted, arguing that Stone and his backers should give grants to the Mazatecos so that they could participate in the expedition and experience the thrills Stone had described. The Mazatecos should learn these skills, since it is their land, she said. Stone responded by pointing out that this expedition required a great deal of expertise and training; that people who lack these qualifications should start caving in an easier cave; that it would be like taking up mountain climbing and starting with Mt. Everest. His emphasis on space age technology and training aimed at marking the gap between his team and his current audience. Stone performed his second presentation later that night, in front of a select audience of Huautla bigwigs and politicians and the directors of the state and federal government agencies, invited by the owners of the town’s only upscale restaurant, the Bellas Rosas. After Stone’s slide show, two of Huautla’s three presidents came forward and spoke. The official pr i president obsequiously expressed the community’s admiration for Stone, noting that it was grateful to Stone for making the Sierra Mazateca known nationally and internationally.6 Then the pps president spoke. During his speech, he raised his voice and spoke with great emotion. He said that Stone’s talk had reminded him of science fiction. He said that on this occasion, science had failed. Science failed. If all of the members of this team had been checked out medically, how could one have died of a disease? Then he said that “Mazateco knowledge” had also failed. Huautla, famous for its mushThe Underground World

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rooms, for María Sabina, and for its bordado, will now also be famous for its caves. But, he pointed out, all of this has an owner, and that owner is Chikon Nindo. You must ask for permission from Chikon Nindo. Then the president returned to Stone’s comparison of his work with that of the astronauts. He said that the men who go into space, who conquer the moon, will find the celestial. Those who go into the depths of the Earth, into the abyss, will end up in “another place.” But the president finished by calling Stone’s team “heroes, true heroes.” Meanwhile, the exhausted, mostly depressed spelunkers fidgeted in their chairs or stared blankly into space, unable, except for Stone (the Mexican members of the team were not present), to understand a single word. I later talked with Elvira, the teacher who had questioned Stone. She told me that she had no doubt that the cavers were taking large amounts of valuable material from beneath the ground, from the territory of Huautla and the neighboring towns. She dismissed as an obvious lie Stone’s claim that there was nothing down there but water, and expressed frustration at the people of Huautla, who lacked the knowledge and pride to defend their precious underground resources from these deceitful outsiders. It would feel good, perhaps, to label these three criticisms of the cavers as instances of a native “indigenous resistance”—based on a mystical bond to the Earth and to place, and a Prehispanic conception of the sky and underworld—to penetration by arrogant outsiders. But such an interpretation, while accurate to an extent, fails to fully satisfy upon further examination. All three of the critics of Stone’s mission occupy what I have called “middleman” positions in the economy of goods, services, and knowledge. One is a schoolteacher and local intellectual who has taken an active role in the efforts to label, promote, and teach “Mazateco culture,” although her group was marginalized by the group that created the Casa de la Cultura. Another is a political leader who mediates between his constituency and the national party, the Popular Socialist Party, an institution that is organized as a series of patron-client relations descending from its entrenched cacique leader Marcela Lombardo. The third is a wealthy artisan/shaman whose status and income are derived in part from her presentation of Mazatec goods and identities, as commodities, to urban consumers (although, to be fair, she is also recognized as a powerful shaman by a substantial local clientele). They use adroit combinations of the “linear” and “pictorial” modes of describing the caves in order to promote the legitimacy and necessity of the role of intermediaries. Julia stresses the importance of information 210

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that outsiders “don’t know,” demonstrating that she needs to be included in their plans. Later, two members of the team would visit her, purchase expensive mushrooms and embroidered items, and receive her blessing and a good-luck packet of hoja de San Pedro. After that, she would speak well of the cavers and their mission. Both the teacher and the president discuss the need for translation in the cavers’ activities, either by receiving permission from the chikon or by including Mazatecs in the expedition. All of their criticisms invoke an essentially “Mazatec” ownership of the world underground and categorize that world as part of Mazatec culture. The pps president and the schoolteacher explicitly use the word “Mazateco.” This is a word that correlates with the dominant, linear division of space and identity, which divides people into “ethnic groups” based on the seemingly natural attributes of language and spatial contiguity. Like the nation-state, this construction of space and identity creates an internal uniformity and clear borders that are not directly linked to differences of power. “Mazateco” is a word that, in the Sierra Mazateca, is only voiced by outsiders and middlemen. Campesinos and other people not clearly embedded in the middleman/ teacher/local intellectual class use other words when they engage in talk about caves and the underworld, words which foreground the fact that identity is always claimed as part of a system of hierarchically ranked, interpenetrating positions. In the Mazatec language, the expression that comes closest to translating as “we,” in the same way that we might use “we Mazatecos,” actually means something like “we useless people,” or so I have been told. This word, “yoma,” is a word one would use to describe a cripple, a very poor person with dirty, torn clothes, or a man with a broken leg. While this expression, depending on the context in which it is used, can have positive (humble, poor, honest) or negative (ignorant, poor, dirty) connotations, it is hardly an emblem around which to rally a community. Rather than signifying an “ethnic group,” it demonstrates the moral values linked to a particular relationship to power. Similarly, as in Mixtec-speaking areas, the word for the language that the people speak, Mazateco, means “poor words,” and is rendered in Spanish only as “dialecto”—less than a language (Nagengast and Kearney 1990). The suitability of these terms has caused some debate among the Mazatecspeaking linguists who are creating a written form for the language. Some want to valorize “the worthless ones” as the authentic, Mazatec word for themselves, while others believe that the phrase, if it is to be the definition of an identity conceived along the lines of modern, primordialized ethnicity, should be modified to a less pathetic variant. The Underground World

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The use of ethnic labels like “Mazatec” to describe a bounded community represented by privileged spokesmen is consistent with a view of the underground world as part of a cultural heritage. But the pictorially rendered discourse of caves represents identity not as a geographically bounded world, but as something that emerges from situationally defined borders between worlds. The underground serves as an archetypical border, not as a “Mazatec” property. Non-middlemen Mazateco speakers seem to use “Mazateco” differently, especially when the word is forced down their throats by an outsider, like an anthropologist. An American resident of Huautla, puzzled by the affirmative response to his query about whether or not a clearly mestizo shopkeeper was “Mazatec,” asked a Huauteco man this question: “But I am not Mazatec, right?” The man responded, after some thought, that “Well, yes, you are Mazatec, because you are living in the Sierra Mazateca.” It would seem that for most residents of the Sierra, “Mazatec” makes sense primarily as a geographical description that follows from the name of the region, and not as an important label of “ethnic” identity. A Mazatec would be a person who lives in the Sierra Mazateca. The outsiders and middlemen invert the relationship of this sign, so that the Sierra Mazateca becomes the place where the Mazatecs live. This construction of the “Mazatecs” as an ethnic identity calls for leaders who speak for that reified group to “outsiders,” as anyone who is not part of the ethnicity is now labeled. The pps president and the curer/artisan use the figure of Chikon Tokoxo, the ultimate middleman, to demand their inclusion in any important activity occurring in the region. The presentation of the “Mazateco” plays an important role in this demand. Mute signifiers of this identity are deployed strategically, surrounding the heroes with acceptable authenticity. At the Bellas Rosas conference, politicians, comerciantes, and directors of government agencies sat in chairs around tables. Four men from the village of San Agustín, the site of the expedition, stood in the back of the restaurant. They were dressed in the ragged, dirty clothes of campesinos. Renato García Dorantes, the sponsor of the Casa de la Cultura, recognized them and their efforts. Renato and Professor Florencio cleverly switch between the first and third person when referring to the “Mazatecos,” generally finding more of a home in the “they” form. “Our Mazatec brothers” are represented through traits (huipiles and calzones, the Day of the Dead, and the wedding customs) which are descriptive or considered natural, traits that reduce their ability to historicize their experiences or question their representation. 212

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These local intellectuals transform a rhetoric of the underground that critically describes a corrupting interpenetration initiated by those who would “sell” their compadres and their pueblos into a barrier between “cultures” represented as material and cultural capital, or properties. This barrier legitimizes the need to negotiate and to buy the use of the “Mazateco” lands, underworld, and “heritage” from the managers of these holdings. Chikon Tokoxo is transformed in the process as well. From a being of borders and exchanges, he becomes linearized into “the One” or “the God of the Mazatecos,” as the schoolteacher Elvira titles him, and as more shamans began to speak of him in the 1990s (Edward Abse, personal communication). The tensions between these interpretations of this divine being are a part of his story; neither reading should be understood as being prior or “more authentic” than the other. The chikon exists, and perhaps has existed for some time, both as a being of cultural borders and interchange and as an index of local identity. The criticism of the cavers voiced by these intellectuals is very different from the criticism enacted back in the 1960s by the man who cut the rope at Sótano San Agustín. It has been suggested that indigenous Mexicans now have the ideological tools to use the elite constructions of their identity—as ethnicities—as weapons for resistance and political mobilization (Feinberg 1991; Nagengast and Kearney 1990; Stavenhagen 1994; Stephen and Dow 1990; Warren 1998). This may be true, and it is not inconceivable that leaders like the three mentioned above (all of whom are resolutely anti-pr i ) may be able to construct an ethnically based institutional opposition. The same opposition, though, would serve to enhance, in this traditional manner, the prestige of the leaders and the experts, and many Huautecos would likely read it in this fashion. Most of the Huautecos I talked to did not claim to feel invaded by the gringos’ expedition. They were incredulous as to why anyone would do such a crazy thing, and some assumed that there had to be some financial motivation, but they did not resent the foreign intrusion of “Mazateco lands.” A San Agustín campesino and something of a leader in this small community expressed this general ambivalence when asked if the cavers would be harmed by the chikon of that particular cave. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “Because they are from outside, they don’t know of this. It’s different.” Then he was asked if it would be a good idea to seek the chikon’s permission. “I suppose so. Yes, it can’t hurt.”

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stories of the chikones: a closer look I have described the figures of the chikones, or spirit-owners, as the bearers of a critical representation of economic exploitation embedded in a pictorial view of cultural interaction and as a token of a linearized Mazateco culture claimed by the managerial class of middlemen. These Earth Lords are found throughout Mesoamerica and have been analyzed as critiques of non-Indian power. In a discussion of the figure of the Earth Lord in Chamula, Brenda Rosenbaum (1993:35), for example, writes: What a powerful description of ethnic interaction and Indian ambivalence toward the Ladino world! Ladinos own all the riches, and indigenous people who want to partake of them must betray their own kind; but eventually, Ladinos will destroy the natives, anyway. The message is clear—those who adopt Ladino values and strategies to become rich at the expense of their fellow Chamulas will suffer eternal damnation. By surrendering to the powerful attractions Ladinos offer, Chamulas renounce their autonomy.

A closer examination of stories about these characters, however, shows that transactions with magical creatures that bring riches are not always negatively assessed. Also, the binary division in styles of explanation does not neatly correlate to the class division in Huautla and the surrounding Sierra. Perhaps it should be redescribed as 7.3 Seeking the Earth a continuum ranging from the most to the Lord’s blessing on the least critical; and I should note that indisummit of Nindo Tokoxo. viduals can move along this continuum to Photo by author. voice more “campesino-type” or “comerciante-type” stories about the underground and Chikon Tokoxo. These stories provide a discursive space where the legitimacy of different social and economic practices is negotiated and defined. They do more than simply criticize the workings of capitalism and trade; they also establish a legitimate sort of comerciante, grounded in the values of a patronage-based political and economic organization, and an illegitimate counterpart who ignores those values or takes unfair advantage of them. 214

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The Chikon Nindo Tokoxo is a spirit-god who lives inside the mountain just north of Huautla, the Cerro de la Adoración or Nindo Tokoxo. The Mazatec word “chikon” can also be used to identify light-skinned humans like myself. In the areas of town where more people speak Mazatec, I have heard the word used as people point at me. But the meaning of the word goes beyond its Spanish gloss, since all of the spirit-gods (or “owners”) are light skinned, and they are known collectively as the chikones, although I have only heard stories about the Chikon Tokoxo. The chikones may help the deserving poor, the humble campesino, the struggling comerciante fighting to survive. How many exhausted, desperate men struggling under a heavy burden to climb a steep muddy path far from home have encountered this tall, white, black-hatted man mounted on a great white horse? As the startled traveler rubs his eyes, he notices the gleam from the horse’s golden stirrups and trembles with fear and anticipation in the knowledge that he is in the presence of “one of them.” Perhaps the chikon offers a transaction—the contents of this bag, say, for your mule, or a bull you are driving. And the chikon never takes the bull, but the bag is filled with gold. This happened to a humble campesino, not from Huautla, a deserving man who spoke no Spanish but “guardaba bien el Mazateco” (“guarded well the Mazatec language”). Or the chikon asks, as he asked my compadre Juvenal’s father as he rested under a tree, “What would you like, traveler? Would you like a horse, or a new house?” But Juvenal’s father only replied that he wanted to be already in the town that was his destination, and he fell asleep. When he awoke, he was still under that same tree. Juvenal asserted that his father had made an error, that he should have asked for a nice new house. Apparently the chikon can give you things, material objects, money, but he cannot do your work for you. In most of these stories, in fact, the traveler makes the same mistake that Juvenal’s father did; he refuses the transaction, either out of stubbornness or a failure to recognize the stranger, and regrets this wasted opportunity for the rest of his life (Inchaústegui 1984). Many of today’s comerciantes share the same founding myth, of the heroic ancestor comerciante who struggled, always on the edge of starvation, hauling goods from one village to another, usually alone, facing great hardship and many risks. These were the men who encountered the chikones and were rewarded for their hard work and virtue. In one class of stories, the gift of the chikon is more subtle. He does not ride into town with a bag full of gold, but simply provides that magical spark that allows hard work and use value to be transformed into exchange value and a gradually escalating standard of living. The Underground World

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A woman I know whom I will call Begonia, for example, was telling me one rainy evening about the struggles of her small family to survive, how her two young sons had to tend cattle from the age of five, how they never played as other children did, but worked all the time. And while they tended cattle and fashioned firecrackers to sell along with candy at school, and her husband was away in Mexico City for fifteen days or a month at a time, she sewed at home, a rundown shack that wasn’t even theirs (they shared it with some nephews), all day on an old sewing machine. During the fiesta of the Day of the Dead the older son would sit under the municipal palace and sell firecrackers. Still, the situation was desperate, and sometimes she did not think the family would pull through. One day, on their way to another village, the family passed over the mountain Nindo Tokoxo, and, near the top, they stopped to rest and eat a small meal. They talked about their precarious economic situation, and the woman is sure that the chikon heard them, because right after that things began to get better. They never stopped working, but the hard work finally seemed to pay off. Today, her youngest son is an electrician who lives at home and repairs televisions and radios. The older son lives in Tehuacán, where he operates several lucrative businesses. The family also sells satellite dishes throughout the Sierra Mazateca every weekend. The mother continues to sew and to put away the money she earns. She does not charge more than 20 or 30 pesos for a dress, because “the people can’t pay more.” If they can’t pay, she understands because she was poor once. One day she hopes to save enough to buy a new plot of land for a school in her home community across the valley from Huautla. In this case, the chikon appears as the god of the virtuous comerciante who works hard and treats his or her associates fairly, and not as a devil, like El Chato, who provides wealth in exchange for souls. While El Chato is sought out by men who believe that “work is for burros” (Prado Pineda 2000:25), the virtuous comerciante, as described by that particular autobiographical story, does not forget her people, knows what it is like to be poor even after she becomes rich (“my sons know how to repair their own clothes, and how to use a machete, and what it is like to be barefoot or in sandals and go without food; they know how to clean and cut coffee”), and feels an obligation to return some of her wealth back to the poorest members of her community. Despite their hardships, the children never disobeyed or complained. They remained loyal and devoted to their mother; even when they went away to study and work in Tehuacán, they came straight home at every opportunity to be with their family and have their laundry washed. Neither son has ever bought any clothes—the 216

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mother still makes everything. The older son is now an aspiring politician who finances his party’s campaigns in part by making large donations to Huautla’s schools. Begonia directly contrasted her situation with that of Alfonso Terán, twice municipal president, owner of a paper store, a bus line, and other businesses, leader of the political faction known as “los viejos,” “PRI dissidents,” or “the council of elders.” Alfonso, the woman told me, has so much wealth; he was deputy, and president twice, he has three houses, a big house in Tehuacán. But his two children grew up this way [rich] and didn’t need to work or study. The girl did not like to study and got married, and the boy just played around and is a teacher in the primary school. And Alfonso left his wife, abandoned her for the regidora,7 a younger woman. Begonia’s story about legitimate wealth that comes from hard work, dedication, and the additional help of Chikon Tokoxo is explicitly contrasted with the story of the illegitimate wealth accumulated by Don Alfonso. The key distinction is between a continued link with the other members of the community, the clients and consumers responsible for the businessman’s wealth and the politician’s power. This link involves a continued sense of a shared lifestyle, an understanding of poverty that is translated across generations—Begonia’s children know what it is like, Alfonso’s do not—and a focus on the home community rather than external centers of wealth and power. Begonia’s sons always come home from Tehuacán, where Juan lives like a monk, for the things that really matter in life, while Alfonso, it is clearly noted, has “a big house in Tehuacán.” Begonia wants to build a school in her home village, while Alfonso, well, he still has “a big house in Tehuacán.” The virtuous comerciante blessed by the chikon is in this case morally superior to the illegitimate leader and businessman, who runs out on his wife and whose children wallow in decadence (although a similar event would later plunge Begonia’s family into crisis—her husband left her for a younger woman, returning home after two years). The wealth of Begonia’s family continues to grow, while Alfonso’s family acts just like those lucky campesinos who squander their magical fortunes through years of debauchery, fighting, and happy excess. Begonia’s story reaffirms a Huauteco discourse of legitimate power deriving from the rank-based political and ideological system where economic relations are turned into enduring social ties, followers/clients are assured the resources to subsist, and economic divergence between leaders/middlemen and followers/ clients is limited and they do not lead substantially different lifestyles. She The Underground World

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critiques as illegitimate the class-based politics represented in this case by Alfonso, where economic relations need not turn into social ties, there is no obligation to support followers, the wealthy live different lifestyles than the poor, and local leaders feel closer ties to other members of elite groups, including those outside the community, than with their client groups (Collier 1994:9–10).8 But her story also indexes the difference between her and the campesinos by contrasting her values of hard work, saving, and using money to create more money with their (and Alfonso’s) spendthrift ways. Relationships between all of these continually negotiated cultural categories—virtuous and demonic comerciantes and campesinos—are expressed through a narrative about the accumulation of wealth that uses the figure of Chikon Tokoxo and the idea of the underground. Rather than suggest that these different figures represent different stages in Mazatec political, economic, and ideological development, or capitalist penetration, I prefer to see them as enduring, if evolving, dimensions of a continually conflicted discourse about wealth and power. This is the reading that the chikon, the “pictorial” figure of the cultural borders, suggests to me. Although Collier is certainly correct in arguing that what he calls the “politics of class” is becoming more prevalent in rural Mexico, this “politics” has lived as one of the possibilities available for explanation or criticism in stories of wealth and the underground. Instead of seeing an indigenous worldview (that of the campesino) vanishing before the onslaught of capitalism, I see this version of politics and economics as one of the interconnected and opposed versions that exists within the figure of the chikon. The stories of Chikon Tokoxo can be read as a continuing commentary on the accumulation of wealth and power within a rank-based political system, as well as a commentary about that system. These sorts of political systems dominated rural Mexico, with the encouragement of government agencies, for most of the postrevolutionary period. Under a rank-based system, leaders do not lead substantially different lifestyles from their followers. Their closest ties are to these followers, for whose well-being they are responsible, to some degree; they repay their people for their support through ritual expenditures and gifts (Collier 1994). The discourse of the chikon enacts a discussion of the “good leader,” or the “virtuous comerciante,” who, despite his wealth, knows the lifestyle and problems of those less fortunate and provides for the humblest campesinos. The discourse criticizes those who use their wealth in ways that create envy—by flaunting it or, in other cases, by hiding it. These are the men who are said

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to have sold their souls, who have forgotten the finely tuned understandings of the rank-based system. Some say that the chikon has gone, left Huautla for other regions. It seems that the chikon owned a pack of coyotes, dogs that accompanied him when he rode forth from the mountain. Unfortunately, these coyotes, being wild animals as well as pets (as their master is a force of nature as well as a white man), had the habit of eating the chickens of the Huautecos. Men must defend their property, and the men of the Sierra shot and killed all of the raiding coyotes, which so angered the chikon that he pulled up stakes and moved to another mountain, perhaps over by Cuicatlán outside the Sierra Mazateca, where another one of his women lives. Since, among other things, the presence of the chikon is necessary for a successful corn harvest, his absence helps to explain why corn has failed so often in the last twenty years. Even the best years are only a pale shadow of those bountiful seasons when campesinos could grow enough corn—even without fertilizer—to satisfy all their needs. This vaguely ecological story of the absence of the chikon, told to me in its most complete form by a San Agustín campesino, is quite different from the version that came out of a conversation I had with Doña Rosa, the matriarch of the Restaurante Rosita. Rosa was regaling me with stories about the duendes and chikones who used to wander in these parts, particularly down by the rivers and streams. I asked her if these beings still existed. “Probably not,” she said. “Most likely no. Things were different before,” she said. “The whole world was different. There are too many people here now. They don’t like people. They have probably moved off into the monte, places that are wild and far away from people,” she said. While my hardworking young friend from San Agustín used the story of the absence of the chikon as a way to discuss hard times and blame them on greed, Rosa constructs a wall between an absolute past (“before”) and the present so as to defuse the critique of comerciantes and middlefolk like herself that inheres in the chikon discourse. She has no land, and all of her income comes from the people who eat at her restaurant, mostly teachers and other government employees stationed in Huautla, along with the occasional tourist. She is a staunch supporter of the “official” wing of the pr i and expresses a profoundly outward-looking sentiment, arguing against bilingual education (“We don’t want Mazatecospeaking teachers. We don’t want our children speaking Mazateco. They need Spanish to go to the city and move forward.”) The young women of the household watch telenovelas religiously, while the boys watch soccer

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and Los Simpsons. Although she proudly speaks fluent Mazateco, she can sometimes be heard degrading the ignorance of “gente de rancho,” or monolingual people from the countryside. Most of her children live outside Huautla—in Tehuacán, Puebla, or California. Rosa delights in stories of the past, but for her forward-looking view of the world, these stories make sense as part of a body of “folklore” belonging to an absolute past that is not directly linked to contemporary problems.

underground wealth As noted, the vast fortune that lies beneath the surface of the earth comes in many forms, including the hidden gold of the revolution and the coffee lords, money that falls out of the sky in doomed airplanes, mineral wealth that could be mined or developed, and archaeological artifacts that bring both economic and cultural capital. Not surprisingly, the form of ancient undiscovered wealth is changing, and the value of the loot is different for campesinos and comerciantes. Treasure tales are common throughout Mexico, and most focus on the buried wealth of the revolution. In that time of great uncertainty and panic, when mysterious armies roamed the land pillaging and plundering, many hid their fortunes as a precaution and then joined the millions who died from injuries, accidents, or disease during that frantic period. In the Sierra Mazateca, many families fled Huautla and the other towns where the soldiers congregated, taking refuge in inaccessible wilds or caves. All along the river, from the puente to Chilchotla, people hid themselves underground. A ninety-four-year-old woman tells me that she lived there, an orphan from the Sierra Mixteca, for two years with her brothers and sisters, only leaving at night and covering the flame when they cooked to avoid detection. She left no fortune in her lowly cave, but somebody must have buried something somewhere, right? I know of no revolution-era treasure that has been found, but I can tell you about a few mid-twentieth century finds. There was the Cuatro Vientos case, and then there was the German fortune at Plan Carlota, near San Bartolomé Ayautla. The German masters who had run this enormous coffee plantation since the late nineteenth century foolishly abandoned their land when they were “called back” to the old country at the outbreak of World War II, but not before they hid their vast wealth at a secret site somewhere on the property. Not surprisingly, they never returned, and a local man moved to the plantation and discovered, or so they say, the 220

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loot. Like the man who discovered the gold of the Cuatro Vientos, this man squandered his wealth through many years of decadence. His capital produced no new goods that were converted into more capital, but only a diseased liver, numerous wives, and uncounted squabbling descendants. When he died, they fought bitterly over the land until it was discovered that not one of them possessed a legal deed, and the great hacienda of Plan Carlota reverted back to jungle. Recently, as time has spread out backward to bring to light a new epoch, the “Prehispanic,” the content and age of the hidden treasure has changed as well. More residents of the Sierra believe that the caves and lands below are filled with “Prehispanic artifacts” that are worth large amounts of money. I heard one rumor, that when they rebuilt the municipal town hall some years ago, quite a few valuable relics were discovered. This was kept quiet, and the relics allegedly ended up in the private collection of Renato, the town’s most ambitious culture broker and one of the wealthiest men in town. I should not exaggerate. This process—the proliferation of alleged relics originating in the period before time began (the Prehispanic epoch)—has not advanced in the Sierra Mazateca to the level it has achieved in other regions (most notably Chiapas, where some enterprising fellow in every village tried to sell me Maya products). But this archaeologization of magical wealth seems like an inevitable by-product of the archaeologization of Mexico’s “indigenous” sector that began after the revolution. The ideologies of “indigenismo” and “mestizaje” celebrated Indian cultures, but only insofar as they served as one of the parent races of the mestizos, “the cosmic race.” The relevance of Indians to today’s Mexico resides in the past, in the Prehispanic period, which is accessible through “the glorious ruins.” So people in the Sierra Mazateca, an indigenous region lacking great pyramids, must assume that such treasures exist, but have not yet been found. Or, if they have been found, they have been spirited out of the region or secretly transformed into more tangible forms of wealth by lucky campesinos or unscrupulous comerciantes. There are some old artifacts in the region that people have long known about, but these items have not, at least until now, been read through an archaeological interpretive practice as signs of the existence of a prior civilization that function as commodities or museum pieces. Rather, they have been used pragmatically to bring the past and present together. The old bones at Peña de Campana, for example—great giant bones that presumably supported the frame of a specimen of that giant race that lived before—these bones are used by the shamans of that village to cure The Underground World

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diseases. They are rubbed against the part of the sufferer’s body that is afflicted. Stories about these bones and others like them usually concentrate on the effect that the object has on the man who possesses or discovers it. A store owner in Huautla told me that a relative of his found a giant skull in that same part of the mountains where bones are used for curing. One day, while drinking, he became possessed by a tremendous anger, and he struck the skull a great blow with his machete. The skull did not break or shatter, but instead reacted quite unexpectedly: it bled! The relation between the past and the present that emerges from many of these conversations about bones differs from the archaeological perspective, which creates an absolute past, separated from the present except through a rigidly defined set of links consisting of a few items of material culture, human remains, and a “heritage” that can be interpreted by experts. The former type of discourse focuses less on expertise than on individual experience and the essential unknowability and mystery connected with the objects and contact with them. Except for gold relics, archaeological treasures cannot be directly translated into wealth in the way that the gifts of the chikones or the cargo of the Cuatro Vientos can. The finder must find a dealer who knows how to convert these items into cash. Or the possessor must occupy a position in society that enables him to convert relics into cultural (in addition to or instead of economic) capital. In Huautla, only “outsiders” and middlemen have access to such a position. Traditionally, under the rank-based political system, important men achieved status by giving wealth to their followers through channels such as compadrazgo. Status based on the accumulation of culturally valued objects is alien to this system and subject to the sorts of critiques that inhere in tales of demonic transactions. This sort of status is oriented upward and outside the community of followers, toward other members of an elite community. Rather than being redistributed, even symbolically, cultural capital is displayed in front of the masses as an assertion of the possessor’s superiority, which does not require any downwardly oriented transaction to validate it. Figure 7.4 illustrates the connections between different sorts of real or magical wealth and the people who acquire or are said to acquire them. The Earth Lord Chikon Tokoxo may provide wealth for a variety of differently situated Mazatecos. When the recipient is a campesino, the story usually follows one of two paths. Either the recipient fails to recognize the offer, remaining ignorant and poor, or else he “wastes” the money on nonrenewable goods and pleasures (drink, women, shiny things) and rela222

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7.4 Relationships among supernatural beings, magical wealth, and power.

tionships with his kin. Campesino wealth follows the same pattern when the fortune comes from the earth, as in the case of the Cuatro Vientos or buried stashes of German treasure; it may bring a happy life and good times, but does not lead to a permanent lifestyle change that transforms the campesino into something else. Stories of comerciantes’ wealth follow a different pattern, often involving a moral judgment. In stories like Begonia’s, the hardworking comerciante benefits from the chikon’s blessing and acquires the impulse that enables work and investment to pay off. Her family demonstrates their moral character by investing their earnings back into the community. This differentiates them from other, less virtuous, businessmen who seek wealth from the chikon or El Chato; these men do not, as an honorable man would, circulate their money through relationships, but hoard it, using it only to benefit their immediate family and separate themselves from the people. Finally, as the next section shows, cultural wealth is analogous to wealth extracted from these other sources. Cultural wealth may be usurped by an outsider—a missionary or an anthropologist, for example, and taken away to locked libraries in distant lands. Or, it may be taken by a Huauteco culture broker, as in the rumors that circulate about Renato García Dorantes and Alvaro Estrada. These men, like the ex-president The Underground World

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who used his fortune to buy a house in Tehuacán, use their money to establish relationships with other members of their class or with outsiders. Through the control of “Mazatec culture,” located in specific objects or objectified knowledge, they betray a reciprocity-based morality in a conventional way, embodying the negative possibilities of the middleman position. María Sabina’s use of her cultural wealth is more positive, although she is criticized, in some accounts, for sliding into the role of the semi-demonic culture broker. As a positive intermediary, she used her book of culture, gained through relationships of magical travel, to heal other campesinos in an idiom in which healing involves careful attention to relationships among individuals and families. Thus, the virtuous shaman, like the virtuous comerciante, uses the power of magical, real, or spiritual wealth to bolster the interpersonal ties that make up her community, while demonic intermediaries use their wealth to shore up a class-based hierarchy. Figure 7.4 also highlights the two different meanings of Chikon Tokoxo (and, by extension, other mediating figures). In the linearly reported speech of some comerciantes, he becomes a token of a bounded group whose borders are defined by experts or leaders but appear as preordained. He is an emblem of Mazatec identity, the owner of Mazatec lands. Pictorially reported metaculture, on the other hand, shifts the emphasis from the “Mazatec” to the border, as Chikon Tokoxo remains an “owner,” not of a specific territory, but of the process of mediation and exchange. This boundary is not obviously visible in language and geography, but emerges through the active speech of travelers and storytellers. Rather than marking the limits of an identity that can be spoken for by an elite class, this view of the Earth Lord marks all middlemen as potentially suspect, in the ways described in the lower half of the chart.

cultural capital and the underground world Culture, like language, is often described as a “treasure” that must be preserved (J. Hill 1995). This metaphor speaks of a substance of great value, something, in fact, whose value is so special that it can only be appreciated by a special class of experts; the common rabble cannot be trusted with the possession of anything as valuable as “culture.” Cultural capital is treated, in critical stories of the underground, in much the same way as economic capital. Some men who possess cultural capital are believed to have acquired this fortune through dishonest deal224

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ings and compromising pacts. This wealth is illegitimate and hides the real truth. The man who accumulates cultural capital is not like the virtuous comerciante who returns a share of his wealth to kin and community, but a dishonest sower of envy who sells his neighbors for a privileged sort of dealing with figures outside the Sierra. Look at Renato García Dorantes, the man who allegedly stole those relics found under the municipal town hall. Renato is the most visible culture broker in Huautla and boasts a large privately held collection of photographs and documents. He recently increased his presence on the scene by taking over the position of patron of the Casa de la Cultura, whose programs he announces to the world over a loudspeaker. He has close relationships with outsiders who visit Huautla—the spelunkers, lawyers working for indigenous rights, anthropologists, the retired American couple that lives in town, and some wealthier tourists who return year after year. Some of these visitors rent one of Renato’s homes outside town. But Renato’s important position as a representative of “Mazatec culture” vis-à-vis distinguished visitors is countered by an undercurrent of criticism from within Huautla—criticism that takes the form of rumor and innuendo. They say that he stole many of those photographs; that he “borrows” them and refuses to give them back or even acknowledge the presence of their rightful owners. They criticize his business dealings, the source of most of his wealth, as highly unscrupulous. (He finds some poor campesino desperately in need of cash, shows up at the doorstep and buys the land for a fraction of its worth, then sells it at his leisure for immense profits). Even more damaging, they claim that he cannot really speak Mazateco, that he is not really from Huautla, but Ayautla. “If you listen to him, you can see that he does not speak it, hardly ever, and not well, only a few words.” The site where any metacultural discourse is produced and distributed communicates information about that discourse, its producers, and consumers. While Renato performs his status in front of the entire town by blasting information from the loudspeakers of the Casa, his detractors retaliate surreptitiously through the slower moving network of rumor. It is widely assumed that Renato’s motives in taking over the casa have much more to do with money and power than with the promotion of Mazatec identity and pride. The story of Renato’s family and his previous venture into public life provides some evidence for this assumption; his father is said to have ruthlessly monopolized the local trucking business after the dirt road first connected Huautla to the outside world for motorized vehicles, and his brother, as a leader in the Popular Socialist Party, The Underground World

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is subject to the criticisms directed toward all politicians by their opponents—that he used his political capital inappropriately to enrich himself and his associates. Renato does not escape criticism of his family: “Renato would talk very beautifully about Communism and giving money to the poor,” one critic remarked. “But in the end they only gave money to themselves. They were corrupt.” Even some supporters of the pps endorse this view of Renato’s involvement; it was a good cause and he helped, but his interests were his own. Other Huautecos working on promoting “culture” admire Renato’s determination but admit that his objectives are more personal—we can use his energy and resources, they say, and forgive his profit and self-promoting orientation. Henry Munn, a friend of Renato’s, remarked to me that an earlier version of this chapter was unduly hard on him. I have no reason to suspect Renato’s motives—he seems to me to be genuinely driven to learn about Mazatec culture and history. I am merely pointing out his perhaps undeserved role in the discourse of secret self-aggrandizing motivations. After Henry made his comment, his wife, a trilingual (Mazatec, Spanish, and English) Huauteca, came to my defense. “But that’s what we really say about him,” she said. The group of Mazatec intellectuals who formed the Mazatec Center of Investigations in the late 1980s were keenly aware that they could become targets of the discourse of magical wealth and betrayal as well. The stated goal of this organization was to break with “intellectual neocolonialism” by creating Mazatecs who can speak for their own culture instead of serving as informants for foreign anthropologists who do not provide access to their findings to the “objects” of their knowledge (Dalton 1990:76). Yet these men, most of whom are far from wealthy and worked long hours for minimal, if any, compensation, soon discovered that they might be regarded as secret accumulators themselves. Florencio Carrera, a leader of the group, stated that “the problems that we have in the region when we return [from conferences or training] are the jealousy and egoism of some. Others had the impression that we were coming to take something from them. Others were thinking that we weren’t going to contribute anything for our people” (Dalton 1990:75). The same suspicion that has been directed toward García Dorantes also has undermined some of the outside researchers and “experts” that have come to the Sierra to study aspects of Mazatec language or culture. Particularly, resentment has been expressed toward the linguist/missionaries of the Summer Institute of Linguistics/Wycliffe

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7.5 The author searches for culture inside the Sierra Mazateca, 1995. Photo by Mike Cosaboom.

Bible Translators. They come here, they spend all this time filling up their notebooks with information, and then they leave without leaving behind any record of their data. Most Huautecos remember “Virginia” Pike (the longtime SIL linguist who learned Mazatec fluently) fondly and with admiration, but at the same time several thought that their secrecy, and the failure to share their information, was at best unfortunate and at worst akin to theft.9 Most Huautecos didn’t really know what I did, except that I was a “serious” student who sometimes carried around a laptop computer and was more interested in their community than most outsiders. But some seemed to possess a concept of the “anthropologist” and assumed a knowledge of what my goals must be. These men would point me toward individuals who knew what the “customs” were, particular privileged sites of valuable cultural knowledge, that I could take away to a place where it could be exchanged for prestige, money, and/or power. Generalized “customs” seem to be the main trope for discussing “culture” in Huautla; people rave about the customs, but rarely mention any specifics. If the Huautecos are pressed, the promised treasures rarely seem to measure up to expectations, and the final list seems a little mundane: the marriage ceremony

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(the fabulous washing of the heads), the Day of the Dead, the “Orange Flower” song cycle, funeral processions, and of course the use of mushrooms. But there exists a notion that something of potential exchange value lies hidden within that list, something that I may be secretly extracting from the mountains, slowly filing it away in the indecipherable English words that enter my computer. Wealth like this, gained through deception, not displayed or redistributed, often involves a pact with the devil.

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8

Conclusion the devil’s book

One foggy evening, a figure that may or may not have been human offered me possession of all of Huautla’s history in the form of a magical, historical book. I had been feeling a little homesick and sorry for myself. Despite the effects of a lingering cold I worked myself out of my room and down the street to La Fogata, a late-night taquería in downtown Huautla across the street from the bus terminal. La Fogata, I now realize, is a perfect place to encounter the Devil. It is the most “classy” taco joint in town, meaning: it has a large color TV that usually shows dubbed American comic movies with a lot of partial nudity, like the one about the wacky misfit medical students; it only serves beers in cans, Tecate and Modelo Especial, for about twice the price of bottled beers in more economical taquerías like Aquí Me Quedo; rather than normal tacos, it serves exotic snacks with flour tortillas not found elsewhere in Huautla, items like arabes, gringas, suizas, and quesadillas, and these prices are pretty high. Naturally, La Fogata caters to a narrow clientele: government employees, including cops stationed in Huautla, and the occasional schoolteacher. The television screen, the dress of the clients, and the location across the street from the corner where the buses leave for Oaxaca and Mexico City all point to La Fogata’s orientation toward popular middle-class Mexico, away from Huauteco particularity and “indigenousness.” A man called out to me and invited me to his table, where he sat in front of several empty cans of beer. I was reluctant; all I wanted was a soda to clear the mucus from my throat, but he insisted that I sit with him, and he offered me a beer. I refused the drink but joined him anyway. He seemed to know what I was, and he expressed this knowledge bluntly, without shyness or tact. “You are a gringo. It is true, isn’t it, that you are a

goddamn little gringo?” He claimed to be Cuban, although his accent and vocabulary (every sentence was capped with at least one “cabrón”) were as Mexican as a Gloria Trevi calendar. “I know why you are here. You’re here to study the Indians. To know their customs, their history. And I can give it all to you. I have it all, here.” And he did; this ugly, resplendently mustachioed mestizo who may also have been a bureaucrat from the state government in Oaxaca City. He waved a stack of papers. I leaned forward and saw that they seemed to be government documents of some sort or other, recognizable as such by the stamps, the elaborate signatures, the row after row of capital letters. “Here it is,” he told me. “All the history of Huautla de Jiménez. All the customs, the rituals; the washing of the heads and the wedding ceremony. And not just for Huautla but for all the parts around, the whole Sierra, the highlands and the lowlands. When the Jesuits came, everything.” The offer flabbergasted me, and I gazed into the Principal One’s flat, drunk, mestizo face. Here I was, being offered the same opportunity as the great María Sabina: “You will have it all here, in one place, so you won’t have to go wandering around. I will give it to you for free.” I glanced at the folder, but he snatched it from my sight. He said that we would go to a copy shop and copy them all. But then he started asking questions about what I carried in my bag; in particular he wanted a blank, artistically bound journal (for note taking) that I had just received in the mail. He asked if I would give it to him. I refused. “No matter,” he said. “Let us go copy my book.” By this time I felt a strange reluctance to receive the documents, and rose to leave. He stood in my way, and embraced me repeatedly. Our conversation continued, and it became clear that, in exchange for the cultural wealth he offered me, I was expected to make the same sacrifice that comerciantes offered to El Chato, not in a cave, but back in this Devil’s room (or “copy shop,” strangely open late at night in Huautla). He embraced me again in the doorway, and someone in La Fogata said something about it, so he threw me against the wall and yelled “Idiot! Fool! Anybody who says something bad about me is an idiot!” He shoved me again and I fled back to my apartment. This confusing encounter between a foreign anthropology student and a man who clearly was not from the Sierra Mazateca became more significant to me as I continued living in the mountains, hearing accounts of secret histories and powerful books. But it was only after I started to investigate stories about El Chato and underground wealth that this encounter began to make more sense to me. Whoever this man was during

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the day, in this encounter he fulfilled the role of El Chato perfectly. Years later, I asked several Huauteco acquaintances whether he could have been the notorious goat-devil. They all said yes.

the devil’s book of history The history that was offered by this mysterious stranger was located in a particular form, a book that is passed from a devil to a man. History, in this particular anecdote, adopts the guise that cloaks the past in many stories told by Mazatecos and outsiders in the Sierra Mazateca. Like culture, it is not an objective fact that is accessible to all who care to look for it. Instead, it is the “secret past.” It is located in particular sites—“customs,” “ceremonies,” and historical eras—that should, and can, require a tremendous amount of work to track down. Locals and the mountains themselves conspire to hide the past in foggy recesses, although it may be accessible through shamanic journeys. Honest men would search for this history without supernatural aid, just as honest comerciantes work hard with only a blessing from the Earth Lord to increase their wealth, which they redistribute within their community and family networks. But some seek a shortcut to find this valuable past and accrue the attendant cultural capital; we may produce our access to history through exchanges across cultural borders, then take our secret treasure and scurry far away with it, locking it up in museum vaults with hidden keys, returning nothing to its true owners. The past, then, is not the taken-for-granted possession of the true representatives of the group, whether authentic peasants or intellectuals engaged in “rescue.” It is an embodied valuable thing analogous to other valuable things, and access to its secrets comes from transactions across borders. And despite my benefactor’s kind words and warm assurances, no transaction is ever truly “free.”

the devil’s book of knowledge My encounter with El Chato shares several features with María Sabina’s encounter with Los Principales, who also offered her a magical book of relevant knowledge. María Sabina was given a Book of Knowledge by a panel of beer-drinking Principal Ones seated behind a desk piled with papers. In a taquería in the center of Huautla across the street from

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the bus terminal, a place of communication between the Sierra and the sources of power, I was given the opportunity to see a similar book by a strangely sinister fellow who may have represented the magical state bureaucracy. His table was piled with alien, status-confirming beers (in cans), and around him men consumed strange tacos with foreignsounding names made with exotic, flour tortillas. This man, then, was, like the Principal Ones, not a “being of water or tortilla.” María Sabina’s knowledge came to her from sources of magical power across equivalent borders—the border between the material world and a land of spirits accessed through the child saints, the border between the indigenous Sierra and the land of literate non-indigenous agents (Wasson, John Lennon, other mysterious visitors of the 1960s), the border between the present and the past (Benito Juárez and the Principal Ones), the border between the Sun-ruled day and the stay-awake night, and the border between the Earth’s surface and the underworld. True “local” knowledge does not come, as it does in the tales of linearly reported culture, from rootedness in a deep, horizontally shared local culture, but from individual action across the different yet equivalent gaps between “places.” Knowledge arrived in the form of a powerful book, the ultimate symbol of non-indigenous authority, which was in the process transformed into a symbol of the individual shaman’s ability to co-opt that authority through magical travel. María Sabina would find her book and read it to know the solutions to the problem at hand, and after many years she knew the book so intimately that she would not need to open it; it was memorized completely. But I was only afforded one fleeting glance, and memorized nothing. The deal fell through because the space of the Magic World sits precariously next to and around and inside another, darker space with overlapping associations—the space of the Underground.

the devil’s book of culture The creature who offered me a “book” of knowledge seemed to share more characteristics with the Earth Lord Chikon Tokoxo or the demonic Chato than with the benevolent Principle Ones who gave María Sabina the secrets she needed to cure her sister. Like Chikon Tokoxo and El Chato, he was relatively light-skinned, if not white, and the knowledge that he offered me was more tangibly related to individual material gain than to the wisdom presented to the shaman. His book shared qualities with the underground wealth allegedly sought by cavers, or found in 232

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disappearing airplanes and abandoned plantations—it could be obtained secretly and carried connotations for the sexual identity of the recipient. (It is also, then, a Devil’s Book of Gender.) Cultural and historical sources of wealth like that sought by anthropologists and Mazatec intellectuals are not qualitatively different, “higher” forms of wealth than gold and pickup trucks. They are valuable yet opaque goods that are located in specific sites such as books and caves and veladas, and they are accessible only through specific kinds of morally questionable, gendered transactions. Had I gone with El Chato to photocopy Mazatec culture in some subterranean Kinko’s, my dissertation would have written itself; my hard drive would have filled with kilobytes with the speed of a download with an ethernet connection. I quickly would have found a prestigious, highpaying academic job. Articles and books would have written themselves while I idly played Tetris and watched the accolades and dollars come rolling in. But I would have had to pay a price for this success. No children would spring from my loins; I would become as barren as a coffee broker.1 Looking for culture is nothing to take lightly. It is part of a quest for wealth and power, inherently a dangerous game.

the devil The stories told in and about the Sierra Mazateca encapsulate multiple perspectives both on the workings of power in contemporary Mexico and on the nature of identity. There are deep similarities in metacultural patterning among the speech genres surrounding history, mushrooms, caves, cultural wealth, Earth Lords, and men like myself in the Sierra Mazateca. We are all paths to fortune that is gained through processes of mediation across morally tinged borders. The process of traveling back and forth—through the ingestion of the child saints, through the search below the earth for ancient treasures, through exchange with mediating figures such as El Chato and Chikon Tokoxo and John Lennon and chilango or gringo benefactors—may bring great wealth that is desired for oneself but excoriated in others. This wealth is suspicious; by crossing borders it has the potential to betray kinsmen (although it may also aid them), and thus the process takes place in secret, as processes and things are transmuted reciprocally into each other through talk—in stories, chants, rumor, and innuendo. Yet people desire it for themselves—they seek out magical technologies that enable them to move forward and lift themselves up toward a progressive future. I am one such technology, as are my white-skinned Conclusion

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analogues who live under mountains and in caves. The book is another one. The discourses of secrecy share the bipolar character of other diabolic economies. As Comaroff and Comaroff (2001:26) explain: “At one level, they consist in the constant quest for new, magical means for otherwise unattainable ends; at another, they vocalize a desire to sanction, to demonize and even eradicate, people held to have accumulated assets by those very means. The salvific and the satanic are conditions of each other’s possibility.” Other shamans are condemned as charlatans, other historians as artifact-hoarders, other middlemen as manipulators of the tourists; yet men still ache to show me new caves, to take me to new sites that become magical through the magical process of our journey together, which includes my body—stuffed full of the power of the names of the places I have been. These transformative technologies are local, yet they are not local models of time and space that can be boxed off into the chronotope of tradition, of passive transmission into the unfolding future from a simpler past. Instead, they refashion and rewrite forms of global power through travel, as these forms are seen and felt through indigenous genres, to apply to new situations, and they stress the actor’s ability to figure out these new applications. Foreign drug seekers and cave explorers do not threaten an imperiled Mazatec culture. They do, however, provide fresh raw material for the renewal of competing local discourses about what “local” means. The phrase “diabolic economies” describes these discourses of travel, secrecy, and power. The burial of a turkey egg in a sacred mountain may seem diabolic to some, as would homosexual intercourse with a half-goat demon in a muddy cave to others. But as arenas of talk, these domains are no more or less diabolic than other domains of magical mediation; politicians, intellectuals, treasure seekers, and culture brokers all are written into this twilight territory, as are humble campesinos happening upon the wonderful cargo of a downed aircraft, or their descendants, who hope to strike it rich by squatting on the path, lowering their voices and asking strangers about the possibilities of taking marijuana across the border. What is “diabolic” is not the subject matter, but the form that creates the opportunity for immediate, undeserved wealth through relations of travel and secrecy. The word “diabolic” comes from Greek roots that, when thrown together, mean “thrown (bol) apart (dia).” Diabolic metacultural discourse takes the reified objects thrown together (into “sym [together] bols”) in linear reported speech and rearranges them as processes that 234

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take place across borders that are then re-represented as things—diabolical things that are qualitatively different from the real, exposed things of linearized speech. So, to return to my anecdote of one minor, unplanned social encounter with a stranger, never seen before or again, in a Huautla taquería. Unlike “Mazatec culture,” which we imagine dwelling deep within the pure heart of the mountains, this example of Mazatec metacultural discourse involves two “outsiders,” yet loses nothing in authenticity. In this encounter, “culture” is not a thing beyond and above individuals, a whole that moves through time in a bounded space, a thing that can be spoken for by a master who approaches this object over years of study. It is a thing whose reality emerges through a narrative of the transaction between a young male anthropologist from another country and a mestizo whose foreignness to Huautla is apparent. So while culture takes the form of a book, the form of the tale highlights the processes of getting access to the book, not the book itself. A thing (the reified “culture of the Mazatecos”) is revealed as a process (the metacultural exchange between two alien beings) and then turned into a secondary kind of thing (the magical book), just as mushroom discourse takes an object (the fungus that some represent as an icon of the Mazatecs) and diabolically transforms it through language into a process of travel that is re-formed into the thrown-together symbol of María Sabina’s book or Don Ricardo’s microphones. Why a book? A book is in itself a marvelous model for the transmutation of process into thing and back again. As an artifact of the linear style of reporting culture, it provides a permanent, unalterable truth. Once words are set down in print, they cannot be erased. Books assert the power of an elite to impose a truth. In Mesoamerica, they have asserted this power for many centuries. Books define the lines between literate and illiterate, noble and commoner, Spaniard and Indian. But the local discourse does something else; in asserting the ability of local actors to use books to access both ill-gotten and legitimately gained knowledge—from El Chato and the Principal Ones—it asserts that the power of the wielders of books stems not from the inherent differences between categories but from ongoing relationships between people and ongoing travel between spaces of marginalization and spaces of power. It marks not the presence of an eternal, objective truth but the right of the speaker, however poor and isolated from established centers of power and knowledge, to claim access to truth.

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the devil’s book of resistance Does the pictorial style of reporting culture constitute a counterhegemonic resistance to dominant metacultural discourses? On the one hand, my answer is that it does. The linear style incorporates difference, so long as that difference is manifested through terms that are understood in a single code—a “culture” that can be read by experts in a book that contains a standardized set of elements: customs, history, religion, and so on. The pictorial style, by contextualizing the creation of that book, highlights the power relations involved in culture-creating transactions and subjects those elites who seek to speak for others to critical examination. Linear appropriations of the past that apply a universal set of categories to subaltern ethnic experience, as Michael Hanchard shows for the Black Movement in Brazil, often fail to offer meaningful opportunities for genuine resistance on behalf of marginalized groups. Instead, the “me too” approach catalogues historical events and cultural practices, reducing their meaning to the fact of their existence as a property of a bounded group that can be represented by leaders. This may create an appealing self-image for people who have been represented as “without culture,” but this approach (which Hanchard calls “culturalist”) ignores the critical dialogue with a history that is seen as an ongoing struggle; a dialogue that is already there in the stories, gossip, and rituals of the peasants (Hanchard 1994:166). Resistance movements that embrace culture as the medium of struggle will encounter a contradiction: culture may be represented on one level as something shared throughout a population, but linearly reported culture always privileges some “experts” who can define the culture and mark the distinction between “real” culture and hillbilly decay. Culture serves as a vehicle of symbolic capital for an elite that, in Huautla as in American anthropology, “helps produce unequal distributions of consciousness, authority, agency, and power” (Briggs 2002:482). The rumors surrounding the immoral acquisitions of culture brokers, like my tale of an encounter with El Chato, demonstrate a consciousness that mastery of culture is not innocent. On the other hand, pictorial representations of culture and history may sometimes reinforce the exploitative practices that they critique. Critical examination of the way wealth and power are derived from potentially immoral transactions with an outside world also, to some extent, normalizes the selling out of the community. The assumption that power almost always naturally corrupts handicaps the Mazatec intellectuals who have begun to assert some local control over the representation of culture and 236

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history, only to find themselves immediately under suspicion as potential exploiters and secret accumulators. The pictorial style of reporting culture does not constitute an “authentic” campesino form of resistance, nor is it a “backward” obstacle to modern political struggle. Effective forms of political mobilization will not retreat into a linearized metaculture of tradition and authenticity, but neither will they deny the possibility of effective change by assuming that all would-be leaders have always already sold out, that marginalization is inescapable. Instead, they will creatively oscillate between different styles of representing culture in ways that provide a meaningful, positive history without freezing that history so that contemporary people seem degraded; they will allow mediators to effectively deploy global discourses of knowledge without becoming alienated from their community and its forms of understanding the world. In the Zapatista movement that began in Chiapas, which masks its spokesmen and hides its true leadership, which paradoxically demonstrates its Maya roots by speaking through a greeneyed European face, which is grounded locally but whose reality emerges from lines of communication across regional and national borders, and which spurns “Maya” authenticity for a celebration of a pluricultural, marginalized world, we can see how creative manipulations of metacultural discourse can be linked to counterhegemonic political mobilization.

my book of culture So why did I decline the gift of culture? I have been asked this several times, first by my dissertation committee. Is not a magical book of culture the holy grail sought by anthropologists, like Lucy’s skeleton or Krippendorf’s Tribe? Don’t I yearn for the material success and professional acclaim that comes with capturing these details and passing them on to a wider audience? Of course I do, and I do not consider myself morally superior to those who seek out the Devil’s blessings, nor did homophobia turn me from his goatish caresses, although a lingering cold may have dampened some of my adventurous spirit. Sure: like all of the Mazatec campesinos and comerciantes that I met, I want the pleasures of material wealth, and humbly ask Chikon Tokoxo to bless me at the start of each year—but not at any cost. By rejecting the Book of Culture and writing against the culture concept, I express the hope that wealth of some kind can come from more open exchanges instead of El Chato’s secret pact. I hope that valued cultural exchange can Conclusion

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come from exploring the creative metacultural process over time; I will not be satisfied with scurrying off with the cursed thing. Deals with El Chato prevent human reproduction, and the reification of culture as a thing in the linked discourses of anthropologists and locally active experts of all sorts obscures the metacultural processes of cultural reproduction and transformation. As I write these final lines, I will soon prove my humanity to my Huauteco friends by witnessing the birth of my first son, grown in the uterus without tannis root or supernatural aid. I do not wish, through the publication of this book, to take the metacultural process and return it to a finished, valuable thing created, like our imagined Western children, in a single, transcendent moment of ecstasy.2 Instead, like Mazatec children and Mazatec culture, the book and my relationship to the Sierra Mazateca only acquire meaning through an ongoing process of energy, dialogue, exchange, and—hopefully—love.

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Notes

1. introduction: a toyota in huautla 1. I am not being totally honest with this example. Recent histories of Amazonia have challenged Chagnon’s premise that the Yanomamö have ever been isolated from the “outside world”; these histories have described many aspects of their culture as responses to the presence of non-Indians in South America (Ferguson 1995; Tierney 2000). 2. John Dorst argues that the ethnographic practice of representing culture has become increasingly prevalent, particularly in the suburban Pennsylvania communities he describes: To put it in a formula, the culture of advanced consumer capitalism or, less acceptable but more fashionable, postmodernity, consists largely in the processes of self-inscription, indigenous self-documentation and endlessly reflexive simulation. Theorists of ethnographic representation have for some time now acknowledged that all cultures generate texts about themselves (taking “text” in an expanded sense), but postmodernity virtually consists of this activity. (Dorst 1989:2) 3. For example, see Campbell (1994); Campbell, Binford, Bartolomé, and Barabas (1993); Fischer and Brown (1996); Nagengast and Kearney (1990); Rubin (1997); Stephen (1989); Q. Castañeda (1996); Warren (1998). 4. My use of the term “discourse” is largely taken from Sherzer (1987) and Urban (1991a). Sherzer declines to come up with a general definition of the term, arguing that “discourse is an elusive area, an imprecise and constantly emerging and emergent interface between language and culture, created by actual instances of language in use and best defined specifically in terms of such instances” (1987: 296). Discourse “creates, recreates, focuses, modifies, and transmits both culture and language and their intersection,” although Sherzer argues that certain marked speech genres such as poetry are more important for this role than others (1987: 295). Other authors, such as Ries (1997) and K. Stewart (1996), focus more on the importance of everyday talk in reproducing and contesting social worlds.

5. This naturalizing isomorphism between space and culture has been thoroughly criticized on several grounds. First, the ethnographic evidence clearly indicates that language does not equal culture, in Oaxaca or anywhere else, although in some cases language may correspond to people’s classifications. Serbs and Croats and Bosnian Muslims all speak Serbo-Croatian, and yet consider themselves to be separate peoples. Anthropologists and historians in Oaxaca have long discounted any strong correlation between language or dialect and group affiliation (Chance 1989; Nader 1990). In perhaps the most extreme example of this noncorrelation, certain Amazonian Indians practice linguistic exogamy; in an extremely multilingual region, men must take a wife from a village where the publicly spoken language is different (Sorensen 1967; Jackson 1974). Clearly, while language is a privileged cultural index, it does not necessarily index membership in a particular linguistically homogenous people or culture. The relationship between languages can also, as Urban (1991b) shows, serve as a meaningful symbol of the bases of social cohesion and power. 6. Arjun Appadurai (2000:7) has analyzed the processes by which the reified map took center stage in social science discourse and argues for a transition from analyzing regions as things to the contested processes that create regions. He writes that “the large regions that dominate our current maps for area studies are not permanent geographical facts. They are problematic heuristic devices of the study of global geographic and cultural processes. Regions are best viewed as initial contexts for themes that generate variable geographies, rather than as fixed geographies marked by pre-given themes. These themes are equally ‘real,’ equally coherent, but are results of our interests and not their causes.” 7. Deleuze shared Bakhtin’s belief that all speech is reported speech. Brian Massumi (1992:33) characterizes Deleuze’s view as the understanding that “free indirect discourse—reported speech not attributable to an identified speaker—is the fundamental mode of language.” The writing convention of using quotation marks for the speech of others allows for only two kinds of language: reported speech directly attributable to specific others and speech unambiguously claimed by the author. In order to mimic the less clear-cut patterns of incorporating reported speech that I witnessed in the Sierra Mazateca, I do not always use quotation marks in this book. 8. These styles are not the same thing as speech genres. All reported speech is embedded in particular speech genres, such as joking or lamenting. These genres may be blurred or interpenetrating, but without their presence, speech is meaningless no matter how grammatically correct (Gossen 1977; Bakhtin 1986). 9. Huipiles are the traditional dresses worn by women, and calzones are the traditional white pants worn by men. 10. See Hendrickson (1995) for an account of the multileveled cultural politics involved in Guatemalan beauty pageants. 11. In Indonesia, for instance, political and cultural life under Suharto’s New Order is modeled on the Javanese ritual feast or wedding, to which all the groups in the nation are invited to speak their piece in an atmosphere of eventless order. The government’s symbolic use of a variety of traditional rites “reveals a marked

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domestication and centralization of what was formerly an active diversity of idiosyncratic and locally based cultural powers” (Pemberton 1989:37). Anna Tsing also describes how the nation is represented in the Indonesia Museum as an elite wedding with ethnic minorities as differently dressed guests. Tsing (1993: 24) argues that this particular linear presentation “suggests that minority groups are ‘invited’ into the nation as long as they bow to Javanese standards.” These “standards” entail the reduction of difference to clearly identifiable, superficial dimensions—in this case costume—that can be arranged, ordered, incorporated, and presented as a trouble-free display to tourists and citizens. 12. The genre of 1990s television commercial presents a linear model of global diversity. In these ads, exotic humans appear in all of their tribal finery, but, in a multiculturalist twist, as strangely prescient consumers who demonstrate a quirky knowledge of luxury cars or internet stock trading. A small child chases a car stirring up a dust cloud in an unpaved Middle Eastern village. He speaks in his original language, but subtitles reveal his less-than-exotic obsession. “Leather seats,” he yells, over and over again. Other commercials employ oddly up-tospeed Irish fishermen, Tibetan monks, New Guinea tribesmen, Maasai warriors, and old women in an Italian village. The difference at the level of a specific set of symbols—costume and language—combines with a sameness at the level of content—everyone expresses difference through the shared language of global consumer capitalism (see Feinberg 2002). 13. The linear style of reporting culture corresponds to that form of social science that Kathleen Stewart (1991:395) calls “decontaminated critique.” Anthropologists employing this style of representation create a “self-conscious, self-controlled distance between observer and observed” (K. Stewart 1996:25). They claim a relativist authority to translate between cultures in a single transcendent language, and from this privileged overview, they fix “culture” and different cultures as “object[s] of analysis that [are] whole, bounded, and discrete” (K. Stewart 1996:25). The decontaminated anthropologist linearly reports cultures as clearly separate and different, but that difference is represented in a single style. 14. Similarly, Urban (2001:5–6) contrasts a metaculture of “tradition” in which each cultural element manifests a single abstract cultural element with a metaculture of “modernity” in which “past expressions of culture are only lightly hinted at by Ω [a particular cultural entity], haunting it without being fully apparent.” My pictorial rephrasing of this idea as metacultural styles of reported speech eliminates the metaculture of progress implied in the (linear) terms “tradition” and “modernity” while maintaining the underlying distinction. Abu-Lughod makes a similar argument in the article “Writing against Culture.” The term “culture” freezes difference into discrete, bounded groups whose characteristics are boiled down into generalizations by a reporting expert. Writing against culture highlights the constructed nature of all notions of typicality, while recuperating individual agency by “reconstructing people’s arguments about, justifications for, and interpretations of what they and others are” (Abu-Lughod 1991:154). 15. Quinceañeras are celebrations for fifteen-year-old girls. They have recently become popular, particularly for more prosperous families in Huautla (or families Notes to Pages 15–23

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that would like to be seen as prosperous). They can be extremely expensive, as the godparents must provide or pay for food, refreshments, and beer for a large gathering, a mass in the church, party favors, a local mariachi band, and a large musical combo from the city. 16. In 1998, on a short visit to Huautla, I met a graduate student studying issues related to shamanism in the Sierra Mazateca. It turned out that he had read my dissertation. When I asked what he was working on, he told me that he was after that “book that you refused.”

2. historical and geographical overview: the master narrative of the past 1. There is some controversy over the effects of this resettlement. Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán (1975) accused Barabas and Bartolomé of being “happy savage anthropologists,” and Partridge and Brown (1983) also vigorously object to Barabas and Bartolomé’s assertions that resettlement constituted “ethnocide.” They point out that lowland communities had long been integrated into the capitalist system as landless peasants or small property holders before the construction of the dam, and argue that resettled Mazatecos were able to use elements of their traditional culture to successfully adapt to their new homes. Barabas and Bartolomé (1983) responded by accusing Partridge and Brown of using the scientific language of positivism to muddle the issue; they reasserted their claim that “forced acculturation,” whether prettified by the positivist language of “development” and “incorporation” or not, still constitutes “ethnocide.” 2. Examples of this view are Villa Rojas (1955), McMahon (1973), Barabas and Bartolomé (1973), Wasson (1981), Tibón (1983), and Portal (1986). 3. Villa Rojas has outlined a version of the Prehispanic Mazatec past, but it is based on speculation and Mariano Espinoza’s flawed dating of a Huautla map (Espinoza 1961 [1910]; Villa Rojas 1955). He believes that the Mazatecos are the descendants of the Nonoalcas, who themselves were the descendants of the great urban civilization of Teotihuacán. These people migrated south, according to Villa Rojas, and had founded a kingdom in the Sierra Mazateca by the twelfth century. 4. See Chance (1989) for an account of the abandoning of community-level pagan practices in the Villa Alta region after 1702, when fifteen practitioners were sentenced to death and beheaded, their heads impaled on stakes and their bodies quartered and displayed. After this traumatic event, a new period of religious syncretism began, eventually leading to “the emergence of the civil-religious hierarchy in its classic form in which cofradía offices became integrated with civil ones to form a unified ladder of prestige and community service” (Chance 1989:174). 5. On several occasions during my stay in Huautla, I have observed locals admiring black dogs belonging to outsiders. The owners of such dogs are frequently offered money for them, and the black Doberman belonging to my colleague Michael Duke was stolen. 6. In Sons of the Shaking Earth (1959), Eric Wolf argued that the Prehispanic

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aristocracy quickly lost all power in New Spain—either incorporated into a mestizo class that was alienated from increasingly egalitarian “closed corporate communities” or absorbed into the peasant mass. Recent work has challenged Wolf’s view of the egalitarian nature of Mexican indigenous communities during the colonial period. Ethnohistorians, such as Restall (1997) for Yucatán, Chance (1989) for Oaxaca, and Ouweneel (1995) for central Mexico, have documented the ways that the Prehispanic system of lordship, with its hereditary nobility, continued to adapt itself and survive until the end of the colonial period. This survival may have extended still later in the Sierra Mazateca. 7. The first great boom in Mexican coffee production took place in the single decade between 1890 and 1900, when national production quadrupled. Although coffee was introduced in some areas of the state of Oaxaca as early as the 1860s, this was the period when it became a major export crop throughout the state and the nation (González 2001:198). 8. People of reason means whites or mestizos. Naturals means Indians. I have heard mestizo shop owners and dentists use these terms in the lowland town of Jalapa de Díaz, but never in the highlands. 9. Municipal president Erasto Pineda, in his speech on January 29, 1950, repeatedly stressed the need to obey authorities, the backwardness of the Huautecos, and the need for progress through greater participation in the nation of Mexico. “Let us have discipline on behalf of our superiors,” he said, “on behalf of the government of the State, on behalf of the President of the Republic, just like a nation who has respect goes when the nation is unified, when the government is unified” (Cowan 1952:334). “Let it be obeyed,” he urged, referring to conscription, “whatever the superior government of the Republic says, disposes, by means of the superior government of the State. Let us thus obey law for law’s sake, men. It isn’t just two, just three years that it will thus be. It will be like this as long as we live, and also however longer there are those who are to come. As it now stands, it is law. Thus there will be military discipline in the nation, as far as it is Mexican territory. Please let us remember this, that our government may be well pleased and give us whatever good we ask of it a few days hence, when we thus collaborate, when we thus cooperate with it, in whatever good it is doing on behalf of the Mexican people. I thus beseech you to let this be obeyed with a good will” (Cowan 1952:335). 10. At least one member of this notorious family is said to have performed a bandit ritual to provide extra lives (or at least make yourself very difficult to kill). This ritual involves ingesting the heart of a possum (a durable beast with the ability to fake death), preferably while it is still beating. This individual eventually fell in a gun battle at a wedding, but he absorbed many bullets before he stopped killing his enemies and collapsed. 11. The pps is a classic example of a “satellite party.” This is a party that is closely linked to the ruling party (at this time the Party of the Institutional Revolution) but appears to the public as a legitimate opposition party. The role of satellite parties is to draw off support from legitimate opposition groups. The pps co-opted opposition from the left, while the parm (Authentic Party of the Notes to Pages 45–53

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Mexican Revolution) was a satellite party that undermined opposition from the right. While, at the national level, these parties were created and nurtured by the pri, at the local level they could be vehicles for genuine passion and real social cleavages.

3. from indians to hillbillies: explicit stories about the mazatec past 1. The verb registrar could also mean “enroll”; that is, they grabbed every unfortunate Huauteco or traveler they could find and signed them up. 2. Jarrocho is the slang term for natives of Veracruz. Puros negros malos means “pure bad blacks.” The coastal area of southern Veracruz is one of the regions of Mexico (along with Guerrero and parts of coastal Oaxaca) with a high concentration of people of African descent. 3. Kay Warren (1998:92–93) has pointed out that the more recent violence of the civil war and brutal counterinsurgency campaign in Guatemala is remembered in the same way, as an abstract “violencia” that had more “force” in some places than in others. 4. This is perhaps too bold a statement. Huautecos were not remembered as playing a role in the revolution in any of the stories I collected, in discussions in the Spanish language. It could be that a different genre of revolution stories exists in the Mazatec language. 5. Mexican anthropologist Roger Bartra (1992:47) describes the impulse for “civilized” speakers to describe their others in terms of a different notion of time or a different kind of temporal movement: “The idea of a homogeneous vision of the sense of time shared by all primitive men stems neither from the reality of non-European peoples nor from the barbarians who live immersed in the heart of Western civilization. This supposed homogeneity is the imaginary construct of a mechanical rationalism anchored in the notion of progress. . . . Incapable of understanding the new mythology in which they find themselves immersed, many civilized men see the rural primitive world as a space that dwells outside of time or within a mythical time.” 6. I should note that Villa Rojas’ view is only one (perhaps dominant) view within the indigenismo of this period, as shown by the variety of positions expressed in América Indígena. See, for example, Beatty (1944), de Hostos (1943), García (1945, 1951), Monzon (1947), Vazquez (1944). 7. See Q. Castañeda (1996), Feinberg (2001), and Hervik (1999) for accounts of the archaeological mystification of the Mexican past. 8. The casa chica, or “small house,” refers to the practice, associated with machismo, whereby men maintain a mistress for sexual pleasure while their wives uphold the family name and raise the children. 9. Secta (sect) is the word typically used in Mexico to denote Protestant denominations.

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10. The “power code” in Mazatec makes itself more weighty by incorporating Spanish words and other elements. The “purist code” achieves its high status by excising all Spanish influences, even in circumstances where the indigenous word is rarely used (J. Hill and Hill 1986). In the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of the people of the Sierra Mazateca were monolingual, the powerful distinguished themselves through the power code. Now, when more people are bilingual, the purist code may be emerging as the vehicle of status and power in Mazatec. 11. The Casa de la Cultura was itself the object of political competition. The first director was a mestiza from another region of the state who was chosen by Amelia Guzmán, the local pri deputy in the Oaxaca Chamber of Deputies. In 1994, Renato García Dorantes took over the patronage of the casa and reoriented its operation away from events like aerobics workshops and toward the promotion of Mazatec identity and culture. 12. Rosemary Henze and Lauren Vanett (1993) have criticized the applications of this metaphor to indigenous education in Alaska on the grounds that it makes a series of insupportable assumptions—that cultures exhibit internal uniformity, that everyone means the same thing by “walking in two worlds,” that children have two available cultural worlds that can be merged in the bilingual, bicultural individual, that children and young adults are able to pursue the best of both worlds, and that schools and other institutions can mediate between traditional and Western culture. What happens is that locals are presented with two idealized worlds—a “Western” world represented by unattainable objects signifying wealth and status, and a “traditional” world presented in a pure form that is beyond the reach of local people. The actual world of the audience, for inhabitants of the Sierra Mazateca as well as the Alaskan Yup’ik, is downgraded: the theatrical presentation of the two impossible choices “gives no validity to the other world (or worlds) that many Yup’ik [and Mazatec] people are actually walking in right now—a world that is not just a transitional stage, but one that has a culture, language, and life of its own” (Henze and Vanett 1993:125). 13. See Mario Acunzo’s detailed analysis of the politics of bilingual education in another region of Oaxaca (Acunzo 1991). 14. This opposition group, the National Coordinating Organization of Education Workers (cnte), was strongest in Oaxaca and Chiapas. Of the more than 150 cnte activists murdered during the Salinas regime, the majority were killed in Oaxaca (Russell 1994:295).

4. “like rock, but mazatec”: fiestas in huautla 1. Similarly, in a very thorough recent ethnography of ritual among the Náyari of northwest Mexico, Philip Coyle represents the indigenous significance of Holy Week as fundamentally expressing the complex cosmovision of an isolated agricultural people. This meaning, according to Coyle, has been distorted by the

Notes to Pages 86–101

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increased penetration of the state, transforming the event into an expression of drunkenness and anomie (Coyle 2001). 2. W. Hill and Clark (2001) suggest that the original Mesoamerican ball game may have served a crucial function in the development of community identity, hierarchy, and regional governments. The ball game provided a setting for the channeling of ritualized aggression toward productive ends, allowed the sponsors of teams and festivals to accumulate debt relations with people from other communities, and allowed certain individuals—athletes and team sponsors—to take on a valued role as representatives of a community. These same patterns can be seen today at fiestas centered around basketball tournaments. 3. Thomas Abercrombie (1991) has commented on the pan–Latin American uses of Andean music. 4. It is rumored that schools schedule events like these so that unscrupulous principals can force all the students to buy uniforms that they provide, and that they make quite a profit on the deal. Every once in a while, a big stink is made about this sort of corruption.

5. the secret past 1. There are ruins in the Sierra, but these are not reconstructed or widely known. None of the ruins are presented as objects of touristic interest. 2. “Huautla” is the Nahuatl version of the town’s name. In Mazatec, the name is Tehao, which means “Eagle’s Nest.” 3. This insight of Eduardo’s was relayed to me, as were many others, by my colleague Michael Duke.

6. “ ¿quiere hierba? ¿quiere hongo? ” mushrooms, culture, experts, and drugs 1. The saintly high priestess. 2. In Mexico and Central America, each town or village can be distinguished by differences in the patterns on the traditional costume, in this case the huipil. During the colonial period, the Spaniards mandated this custom to aid in their identification of their subjects. 3. See Zolov (1999) for a description and analysis of American and Mexican government policy toward jipis in this period. 4. Some Huautecos have a different recollection of this incident. They have heard rumors that these bakers were smuggling marijuana to their customers by baking it inside pies and loaves of bread, and that they were taken away to jail. 5. For example, The Vanishing Hitchhiker (Brunvand 1981). 6. In 1994 I met a painter and sculptor from the village of San Antonio Eloxochitlán, just west of Huautla, who specialized in strange paintings of campesinos being visited, abducted, or experimented on by extraterrestrials.

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7. But didn’t Paul McCartney write both of these songs? 8. “Children” here refers to the mushrooms, which are often called niños santos—child saints. 9. This seems to be the position taken in Gossen’s descriptions of Chamula rituals, for example (Gossen 1979, 1986). 10. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing discusses this problem as it affected her relationship with a Meratus shaman in Borneo: “Much of the literature on the dialogic nature of ethnography presents just two positions: the Western anthropologist and the Other. My experience with Uma Adang suggests that this neat dichotomy obscures the nuances of cross-cultural relationships and privileges the unself-consciously elite observer who comfortably represents the West” (Tsing 1993:22). 11. A Mazatec nickname for María Sabina that roughly translates to “Old Lady Sabina.” 12. It is not just mushroom curers and mythic figures who have the habit of naming places to accrue a sort of power. On my first trip to the Sierra Mazateca in 1987, Pedro Sánchez of Ayautla surprised me by saying that he “knew” a variety of countries, including the United States, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Panama. Later I asked him a question about his travels, and he denied that he had ever left Mexico. He had been recounting a list of countries that he knew of and thus could claim some sort of relationship with. 13. I thank Michael Duke for this anecdote. 14. Half-chilanga. “Chilango” is a usually derogatory term for a native of Mexico City. People in the rest of the country (referred to by those in the capital as la provincia—the provinces) often view chilangos with suspicion, but the term can be used in a joking way, too, like “gringo.” 15. I was told by Ricardo Rocha that mushrooms are always eaten in pairs because the child saints mimic the human family, based on the male/female pair. 16. A story told by the Guatemalan Mayan anthropologist Víctor Montejo demonstrates how widespread this story of the book is in Mesoamerica. Montejo tells of a dream he had as a child, in which he was led to the top of a hill where a desk was covered with papers and books. He was able to glance at the cover of one of the books, and saw his own name in large letters. He knew at that moment that it was his destiny to be an author. The similarity between Montejo’s birth as an intellectual who represents his people to the broader world of academic power and María Sabina’s birth as a shamanic intermediary who represents her patients to spiritual powers is striking. 17. Luís Donaldo Colosio was the candidate for the Mexican presidency in 1994 for the ruling Party of the Institutional Revolution (pri). He had been handpicked by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. In March 1994 he was assassinated by a gunman at a campaign rally in Tijuana. 18. The presentation of spirit-books to shamanic leaders by supernatural beings is not an uncommon incident in the global story of colonialism and marginality. Often, the revelation of these books or papers leads directly to rebellion, as in the case of the Sonthal uprising of the 1850s in India. Rebels captured by the British told the following story, as reported in the contemporary press and cited by Guha: Notes to Pages 153–190

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Seedoo and Kanoo were at night seated in their home, revolving many things. . . . a bit of paper fell on Seedoo’s head, and suddenly the Thakoor (god) appeared before the astonished gaze of Seedoo and Kanoo; he was like a white man though dressed in the native style; on each hand he had ten fingers; he held a white book, and wrote therein; the book and with it 20 pieces of paper . . . he presented to the brothers; ascended upwards, and disappeared. Another bit of paper fell on Seedoo’s head, and then came two men. . . . hinted to them the purport of Thakoor’s order, and they likewise vanished. But there was not merely one apparition of the sublime Thakoor; each day in the week for some short period, did he make known his presence to his favorite apostles . . . In the silvery pages of the book, and upon the white leaves of the single scraps of paper, were words written; these were afterwards deciphered by literate Sonthals, able to read and interpret; but their meaning had already been sufficiently indicated to the two leaders. (Guha 1988:79–80)

7. the underground world 1. This is one of many examples of how indigenous Mesoamericans did not view the light-skinned conquerors as a different kind of human being wielding a completely new kind of power, but incorporated the conquerors and their activities into indigenous conceptions of how power is wielded. In another case, Restall (1998) shows how the Yucatecan Maya contextualized the Spanish conquest so that the behavior of the Spaniards made sense according to Maya norms. 2. See Feinberg (2001) for an account of the connections between the representations of contemporary Earth Lords and their Prehispanic counterparts—fleshand-blood classic period Maya kings. 3. Huautla consists of five barrios, although the significance of some of these neighborhoods has faded over time. The Plan de la Salida straddles the road from the center of town toward the Mountain of Adoration and ends at a fork where one road veers off toward the towns of San Andrés, San Agustín, and Tenango; the other continues up toward the mountain and another series of towns through the barrio of El Fortín. The road up the mountain—the María Sabina highway—ends at the hospital and the house of María Sabina, clearly visible because of its proximity to an immense satellite dish. 4. Another version of this story, published in La Faena, is more elaborate. El Chato has an assistant and sits on a fabulous throne surrounded by jewels. When two brothers came to ask him for wealth, he took them into another room, where they saw Jesus Christ agonizing on the cross. El Chato asked the brothers to kill him; one refused and remained poor his entire life, but the other did as he was told and the next day received several mules loaded with riches. This brother died a wealthy man, but never married, and received monthly visits from El Chato. After death, El Chato carried away his body and soul, and he serves his lover as a slave, guarded by El Chato’s pet goats (Prado Pineda 2000).

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5. A growing number of Huautecos work as artisans or buy handmade clothing made by other women to sell. The most commonly sold items are bordados, or embroidered goods. These can be dresses, skirts, pants, shirts, tablecloths, napkins, or just cloth squares. The artisan makes up the designs, which vary from abstract patterns to birds and flowers to mushrooms. Pants with mushroom designs seem to be particularly popular. 6. As noted earlier, in 1994 there were three municipal presidents as the result of a compromise after a disputed election. The three presidents represented three factions known as the “Official pri” the “Dissident pri” (or ancianos), and the pps. 7. A member of the municipal government. 8. George Collier has described the emergent distinction between class- and rank-based politics in the Mayan town of Zinacantan in Chiapas. He suggests that the rise of new class-based forms of leadership, along with increased economic and political inequality within indigenous communities, was an important factor in the 1994 Zapatista uprising. 9. Lynn Stephen and James Dow reported the same suspicions in a Zapotec town in the Oaxaca valley (Stephen and Dow 1990).

8. conclusion: the devil’s book 1. Is it surprising that so many successful academics, like successful coffee dealers, are childless? 2. See Weismantel (1995) for a description of how an indigenous community in the Andes constructs parenthood as stemming from continuous care over a period of years and rejects the Western-bourgeois notion that suppresses temporality in kinship by tracing real fatherhood to a one-time transmission of genetic material or “blood.”

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Index

acaparadores, 45 acculturation, 72, 81, 104 agriculture: coffee cultivation, 36; in colonial period, 44; decline of coffee, 56; in highlands, 36; in lowlands, 36 Aguacatitla, 26, 64, 121 arrieros, 48–50 Astuti, Rita, 123 Ayautla, 21, 25–26, 55, 94, 120, 138, 159, 201, 220, 225 Aztecs, 39–42, 95–96, 104, 113, 118–120, 135, 183 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 10, 12, 60, 69, 74, 145 basketball, 26, 103–106 Bauer, Wilhelm, 42–43 before and after, 35, 59, 74–76, 84, 90, 93, 95, 118–121, 123 Benítez, Fernando, 118, 130, 135 bin Laden, Osama, 110 Boege, Eckart, 41, 90, 100, 172 book: as embodiment of culture and history, ix, 118, 125, 229–233, 235, 237–238; of life, 116; of María Sabina, 150, 152, 161, 181, 185–186, 188–190; of Mazatec culture, 27; on Mazatec customs, 30; in Prehispanic and colonial ritual, 183–184; of shamans, 170–171

borders, 15, 16–18, 31, 103, 123, 161, 164, 180, 188, 194, 198, 205, 207, 218, 223–224, 232 Bourdieu, Pierre, 15, 145, 155, 163 Brunvand, Jan Harold, 140 caciques, 42–43, 48, 104, 199, 210 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 77–78 Carrera, Florencio, 88, 90, 94, 111–113, 137, 146, 212, 226 Casa de la Cultura, 59, 88–89, 91, 107, 111, 124, 141, 162, 209–210, 212, 225 cavers, 116, 131, 191–194, 196, 199, 201, 208–210, 213 caves, xii, 43, 116, 120–121; exploration of, 191–194; owners of, 198; as possession of group, 208, 213; Prehispanic significance of, 195–196; as refuge, 64, 220; as source of wealth, 200–205, 220, 223, 230, 232; as space of mediation, 199–206; use by hippies, 132, 147–148 Central Intelligence Agency, 130 Chamula, 106–107, 214 Chikon Tokoxo, 103, 117, 120, 152, 189, 198–200, 208, 210, 213–219, 222–224, 237 Chilchotla, 38–39, 42–43, 45, 49, 58, 61, 64, 88, 94, 103–104, 122, 200, 203, 220

cochineal, 47 coffee: cultivation of, 36, 75; decline of, 56–57; introduction of, 44–45; marketing of, 50–51, 54 Collier, George, 55 colonial period, 41–42, 183–184, 196 Colosio, Luís Donaldo, 186 community: closed corporate, 4, 10, 43; transnational, 5 compadrazgo, 55, 179 Conquest, Spanish, 42, 74, 93, 95, 121, 196 Council of Elders, 54, 217 Cowan, Florence, 45, 76, 78–80, 83, 97 Cozcacuauhtli, 40 crime, 48–49, 51, 158 Cuatro Vientos, 202–203, 220–222 Cuauhtémoc, 88 cultural capital, 111, 141, 194, 220, 223–225, 228, 233 culture: analogy with language, 16; authentic, 9, 89, 91, 167, 207; hidden, 111; high, 154–156; indigenous uses of, 7–8, 91–92; as kind of identity, 73; mycophilic and mycophobic, 128; as object of study, 7; as process, 238; revalorization of, 75, 82, 87, 90, 137–138; struggle over, 145; as thing, 92–93, 102, 111, 146, 198, 206, 224, 235–236; as wealth, 224 customs, 80, 91, 93–100, 125, 156, 160, 227 Day of the Dead, 82, 100–102, 107–113, 212 Devil, the, 197–198, 200–201, 228–229, 237 Díaz, Porfirio, 45, 71, 77 drugs, 96, 131, 133, 148, 156–161, 168, 191, 202, 205 Duke, Michael, 28, 130 Dylan, Bob, 150–152

268

Earth Lords, 87, 103, 152, 194, 197–199, 201, 222, 224, 231–232 Echeverría, Luís, 24, 49, 131 education: bilingual, 94; mission schools, 77–78; schoolteachers, 75, 89, 93–96, 114, 156; school textbooks, 72–73 El Chato, ix–x, 152, 200–201, 216, 223, 230–233, 235–238 El Cristo Rey, 132–133 El Mirador, 174–175 encomiendas, 41 Estrada, Álvaro, 148–152, 181, 186, 223 ethnicity, 6, 49, 60, 86, 90, 96, 106, 111, 119, 122–124, 149, 179, 213 ethnic labels, 95, 141, 211–212 experts, 6, 12, 15–16, 19–20, 86–87, 111, 138–141, 143, 145–146, 150– 151, 190, 198, 208, 213, 222, 226 EZLN. See Zapatistas fieldwork, 10, 23–27 fiestas, xi, 98–114 First Evangelical Indian Congress, 81 folklorization, 98–99, 102 Foucault, Michel, 3 García Canclini, Nestor, 98–101, 106 García Carrera, Juan, 92–93, 137, 148–149, 151–152 García Dorantes, Renato, 21, 65, 91–92, 112–113, 141, 209, 212, 221, 223, 225–226 Gay, José Antonio, 120 Gossen, Gary, 27, 106, 152 Grupo Cuauhtémoc, 107–108, 146 Guelaguetza, 15 Guzmán, Emilia, 54 Habermas, Jurgen, 175 Herrera, Gregorio, 45, 65 hillbillies, xi, 20–21, 74, 80, 82, 86–87, 89–90, 93, 118–119, 138, 141, 183

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hippies, 130–133, 136, 147–154, 159–160, 163, 178, 191–192 history: as decline, 119–120; epic, 60, 68–69, 72, 74, 111, 113, 124, 145, 217; hidden, 90, 115–118, 231; indigenista version, 69–74; memory, 59; missionary version, 79–84; non-historical pasts, 119; as object, 125, 230–231; official version, 65, 67–69; role of, x–xi, 21–22; schoolteachers’ version, 94–96; as source of power, 187–188; time travel, 70 Hoffman, Albert, 130 Holy Week, 100–101 huehuentones, 110, 112, 141 Huehuetlán, 61 Huicholes, 117 huipiles, 40, 112, 114, 212 indigenismo, 45, 59, 69–74, 79, 93, 97, 118, 221 information, fetishization of, 3–4 inmecafe , 50–51, 54 Instituto Nacional Indigenista, 51, 74, 107 intellectuals, 59, 82, 91–92, 94, 112, 115, 122, 137, 205, 213, 225–226, 236 isolation, trope of, 5, 7, 60, 71, 88, 115, 119, 121–123, 151, 205 Jalapa de Díaz, 24, 58, 86–87 Johnson, Ruth Basset, 128 Jordan, Michael, 107 Kaku, Michio, 136 La Faena, 92–93, 151 La Guacamaya, 202–203, 205 Lennon, John, 153, 177–178, 232–233 Life magazine, 52, 130 linear reported culture, 13–15, 17, 19–21, 86, 91, 97, 99, 102, 112–113, 123, 140, 160–161, 175, 189, 205–206, 210–211, 213, 224, 232, 235–237

literacy, 152, 181–190 Loma de Chapultepec, 94 Manson, Charles, 131, 136 maps, 3, 10, 13–14, 24, 35, 38 María Sabina: biographies of, 148–150, 162, 170; chants of, 154, 161, 164, 181, 183, 187; childhood of, 181–182; descendants of, 117, 138, 158; fame of, 52, 75, 126, 130, 135–137, 139, 146, 159, 174, 210; images of, 162–163; life story of, 181–185; relationships with foreigners, 153, 155; relationship with Wasson, 129–130, 180; stories about, 138–140, 153, 177; visions of, 136, 150, 152, 171, 185–186, 231–232 Matzazongo, 26, 38, 61, 103, 122, 203–205 Maya, 195–198, 237 Mazatec Center of Investigations, 226 Mazatec language, 3, 9, 40, 116, 154, 211 Mazatlán, 55, 57 McGoohan, Patrick, 2 media, 55–56 mediation, 58; by anthropologists, 221; by curers, 143, 180; by drug dealers, 160; by Earth Lords, 152; at fiestas, 107; by foreigners, 152–154; with government, 173; illegitimate, 149; by intellectuals, 91, 223, 225; magical, 234; by María Sabina, 149, 188–189; by presidents, 47–48, 55; through underground, 198–199, 205, 223–224 merchants, 47–50, 82, 94, 101, 122, 136, 139, 149–151, 179, 184–185, 214–219, 223–225 metaculture, 8–19, 31, 88, 94, 96, 99, 101, 163, 206, 224, 234–236 metalinguistics, 10 migration, 57–58 Index

269

Miguel Alemán Dam, 36, 50, 69, 71, 119 mimesis, 134, 163, 188 missionaries, 59; Catholic, 83–84; Jesuit, 42; Protestant, 58, 76–84, 87; Summer Institute of Linguistics, 47, 76–83 Mixtecs, 39–40, 90 Munn, Henry, 70, 169–170, 186, 226 mushrooms, x–xii; as access to past, 117–118, 134–136; and Bible reading, 129; as discourse, 134–146, 154–161; fame of, 102, 126; history of, 127–133; as icon of Mazatec identity, 111, 137, 145, 154, 160; literature about, 130; opposed to drugs, 96, 127, 148, 156–161; outsiders and, 51–53, 100, 117, 147–148, 155–156; ritual use of, 117, 126, 164, 166–170, 176, 179, 181, 185–190, 196; used for curing, 138, 142, 144; used for protection, 173–175; used to see future, 143 music, 107–108, 112, 114, 146; rock music, 112–113, 150 myths, 40, 119–121, 167, 219 nature, 119, 121, 137, 143, 159 Neiburg, Federico, 40–41, 66, 100, 120, 172 Nezahualcoyotl: king, 183; village, 120 Nindo Tokoxo, 38, 196, 198, 208, 215–216 Nixon, Richard, 131 nostalgia, 147, 153 Oaxaca, 28–29, 32–34 Olympic Games, 13, 20, 140, 206 Otomís, 30–31 overview, 15–17, 86, 175–176, 189–190 Oz, Wizard of, 35

270

PAN (Partido de Acción Nacional), 55 Pan-American Rally, 28 Panopticon, 2 Peña de Campana, 221 pictorial reported culture, 16–19, 22, 99, 102, 113, 140, 164, 188–189, 206–207, 210, 214, 218, 224, 236–237 Pike, Eunice, 48, 72, 76, 78, 81–84, 97, 128–129, 136, 227 Pineda, Erasto, 49–51 Plan Carlota, 220–221 Pochotepec, 26, 65, 139 politics: elections, 54; nineteenth century, 42–43; political parties, 53–55, 75; political violence, 48, 51, 54–55, 66–67, 85–86, 94, 173–174; politicians, 29–31, 209–211; of rank and class, 55, 217–219, 222 population, of Sierra Mazateca, 36 Popul Vuh, 135 Porfiriato, 44–46 Portal, Ana María, 41, 50, 119, 121 postmodernity, 7, 19, 89, 93 power, 18, 31, 55, 125, 141, 151, 160, 163, 169–171, 181, 187, 198–199, 235–236 PPS (Partido Popular Socialista), 42, 53–55, 95, 209–210, 225 PRD (Partido de la Revolución Democrática), 56 Prehispanic period: history in Sierra Mazateca, 39–41, 127; idea of, 20, 30, 70–73, 80, 93, 95–97, 111, 113, 117–118, 121, 135, 145, 159, 187, 205–206, 221; as source of wealth, 221; sports in, 104; use of books in, 183; use of caves in, 195–196 presidency, municipal, 47–48, 107 PRI (Partido de la Revolución Institucional), 42, 53–55, 65, 81, 95, 209, 217, 219 Principal Ones, 186–189, 230–232, 235

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progress, 45, 47, 70, 77, 79–80, 87, 97, 113, 173 Protestants, Evangelical, 58, 84–87, 97, 133 Puente de Fierro, 200 Quetzalcoatl, 104, 117 Real de Catorce, 117 reported culture, 13 reported speech, 12–13, 206 rescue, 88–92, 97, 207–208, 231 Revolution, Mexican, 45, 60–69, 74, 220 Río Santiago, 76, 128, 182 Río Sapo, 45, 51, 65 Río Seco, 173 ritual, 117–118. See also mushrooms Rocha, Ricardo, 164, 166–171, 173–176, 179, 181 Roquet, Salvadore, 178 ruins, 39, 43, 115, 119, 221–222 salvia, 133 San Agustín, 26, 116, 191–194, 213, 219 San Andrés, 104 San Antonio, 104 San Bernardino, 44, 50 San Jerónimo, 157 San Juan Coatzaspán, 39, 90, 93–94 San Lucas, 94 San Miguel Huautepec, 48, 94 Santa Catarina, 48, 65 Santa Cruz de Juárez, 64, 159, 164, 166, 173 Santa María Ascuncion, 55, 58 Santa María Ixcatlán, 103 Santa Sabina, 101, 163 shamanism, 18, 117, 137, 161, 163–176, 181–190, 222 Sótano de San Agustín, 193, 196 space: and memory, 64, 67–68; representation of, 3, 9–10, 31, 115, 162 Stone, Bill, 192–194, 199, 208–210

strategic essentialism, 87–88 Summer Institute of Linguistics, 45, 47, 69–70, 76–83, 97, 128, 226–227 Taussig, Michael, 16–17, 43, 197 television, 56 Tenango, 25, 172, 191 Teotitlán del Camino, 36, 38–39, 42–43, 49–50, 52, 60, 82, 102, 131, 147, 185, 192, 200 Terán, Alfonso, 75–76, 102, 172, 217 Tibon, Gutierre, 75, 80 tourists: and drugs, 52–53, 130–133, 137, 155–156, 160, 178–179, 191; famous, 51, 151, 153; at fiestas, 100–102, 110; hippie, 130–132, 147–154 Toyota, 1–2, 11–12, 22–23, 27–29, 32–34, 161, 189 trade: at fiestas, 101–102; nineteenth century, 43; Prehispanic, 40; twentieth century, 47–49. See also merchants travel: to fiestas, 102–103, 105; magical, 18, 134, 161, 168–172, 189–190 treasure, hidden, 64. See also magical wealth Trevi, Gloria, 230 Tuxtepec, 36, 39, 42, 49–50 urban legends, 140 Vasquéz, Genaro, 48 Vigastepec, 49 Villa Rojas, Alfonso, 41, 69–74, 82, 97 vision, trope of, 15, 176. See also overview Volosinov, V. N., 12, 16, 123, 206 Warren, Kay, 87–88 Wasson, R. Gordon, xi, 51–52, 75, 118, 128–130, 134, 145, 149, 162, 164, 168, 182, 187, 232 Index

271

Watership Down, 181 wealth, magical, 64, 87, 194, 197, 201–202, 215, 217, 220–224, 230–231, 237–238 Weekly World News, 139–140 Weitlaner, Roberto J., 128 Winter, Ralph, 81–82

272

writing, process of, 27 Xibalba, 195 Yanomamo, 7 Zapatistas, 23, 55, 68, 105, 168

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