11 Prior to my personal encounter with the people of Cherán K’eri, I already knew that the Purépecha were a mystery
17 The Meseta Purépecha
21 Inside and outside the festival
22 Fractal repetition
24 Structures
26 The “cargo” 27 Circulation
29 Games
31 Fame and the Purépecha
34 Cherán K’eri
39 Deforestation and resin
42 Stories from the Cherán uprising of April 2011
44 Going back to tradition
46 My arrival in the Meseta Purépecha
53 About the authors 54 Map
57 Photographs
247 List of photographs and locations
Cheranástico
21 Inside and outside the festival
Each Purépecha festival marks a temporal and spatial boundary that divides up the world. It is possible to observe a festival from the outside, but there is no way of understanding it from that vantage point. Crossing the festival’s boundary represents venturing into a maze of colors, textures, meanings, and forms designed to induce a loss of sanity and rationality. A festival provides a means to enter the world and time of the ancestors, which can be experienced only from the inside.
We turishis (nonindigenous people) find Purépecha festivals astonishing due to the huge outlay of money and energy involved and the equally unrestrained drunkenness. Moreover, one festival is barely considered over when another one begins, and one or more smaller festivals have to be completed in order to launch or conclude a major festival in a fitting manner. Seen from the outside, then, a Purépecha festival may look like a drunken binge and a wasteful squandering of financial resources, but on the inside there is a time-honored respect for rules and traditions.
Cherán
Fractal repetition
I came to understand the festivals by resolving to take them as I found them, without ever asking why things were as they were. By mastering this personal technique to some extent, I was able to grasp a unifying thread through this confusing labyrinth. I came to appreciate that Purépecha festivals are comprised of fractals, basic structures that repeat themselves at varying scales, and that they therefore incorporate elements from other festivals.
At a wedding, for example, the newlyweds can be seeing leaving a house and heading to the other side of town, accompanied by guests, bridesmaids, and a bizarre retinue of devils, baby bulls, katárakuas, and other
Cherán
Cherán
characters that inevitably raises the question: “Who on earth are all these figures?” In fact, they are merely ritualistic elements from other festivals happy to show up at a wedding. It is therefore futile to try to decipher all the components of one festival without tracing their origins in other ritualistic events. And if weddings contain elements from other festivals, do these same festivals also contain elements of weddings? The answer turns out to be affirmative: there are indeed festivals with sham weddings in which children, tacuchis, or bachelors pretend to get married.
Cherán
Quinceo
24 Structures
Almost all Purépecha festivals revolve around a wooden structure such as a post, cross, arch, branch, or support for fireworks that is put up in a specific place to form the hub of the celebration. For the Santoniño festival in honor of the Infant Jesus, for example, an enormous
post is planted in front of the house containing the holy image. This post, adorned with a star of Bethlehem, is taken from a pine from the forest, painstakingly chosen then regaled with food and music before being cut down. All these structures require the efforts of dozens of men, who receive food and drink in return for their labor. As I have already pointed out, a festival contains smaller festivals within it.
One of the most remarkable of these contraptions is the katárakua, which is an X-shape cross carried on the back. It is adorned with wild honeycombs (panales) and live animals such as eagles, snakes, foxes, squirrels, or any other animal found in the woods. Each panalero bears his katárakua on his back and dances with it in
Quinceo
Cherán
the festival of Corpus Christi, the most intensely celebrated festival in all the Purépecha regions. Outsiders often wonder why they do this and ask what meanings are hidden behind the celebration. The Purépecha state that it is impossible to answer this question fully but that it involves gratitude. The Purépecha are expressing gratitude for their capacity to leave the town every day and go into the forest to find their sustenance. On the day of Corpus Christi, however, exactly the opposite occurs, as the Purépecha allow the forest to penetrate the culturalized world of the town, which is itself turned wild as a result of this magical intervention.
Cherán
Cherán
Cherán
The “cargo”
A festival has one highly formal component: the cargo. A carguero takes on the social commitment to his town to spend as much as possible for the festival to be enjoyed to the maximum. The carguero and his wife swear to God, the saints, or the authorities that they will save money throughout a whole year to ensure that alcohol flows freely, food is abundant, and music continues relentlessly in order to bring dancers to fever pitch. Cargueros could not assume such an onerous responsibility without the support of relatives and friends, who in their turn draw on the support of their own relatives and friends, thereby creating an ever-expanding structure of community solidarity.
During the festival itself, the carguero is the person who has the least fun. He can be seen darting here and there, with a concerned look on his face, issuing instructions, arranging chairs, removing dirty plates, greeting new arrivals … In exchange for these burdens, the carguero is treated as the bigwig of the town. He and his wife head the processions, the women bedeck the man with embroidered cloths and adorn the woman with colored ribbons, and both their heads end up covered in confetti, in gratitude for their services to the town.
Images of God and the saints are treated in the same way—they are showered with confetti, garments, cloths, candies, toys, and adornments as if they were cargueros. I wonder whether the forbidding faces of these images reflects the fact that the creation and recreation of the world is itself a kind of great festival and that their cargo consists of worrying about making rain, renewing the grass on the mountains, and ensuring the survival of wild animals.
Cherán
Cherán
27 Circulation
The festival is the circulatory system of the universe. The elements generally stay quiet in ordinary time, but during a festival they are activated, energized, and mobilized in all possible directions. The blood of sacrificed animals, for example, can be so abundant that it turns streets into the urban arteries of a cadaver that seems to be coming back to life.
Alcohol is another primordial element in this circulatory system. It is brought by men, who can be seen in the streets laden with crates of beer and bottles of aguardiente, which are handed over to the carguero for safekeeping. Later on, he passes it on to his colleagues, who are responsible for distributing it to the guests. Alcohol is drunk in company, so anybody offering it is obliged to drink alongside the person accepting it, so the distributors are drawn into drunkenness by others who are already drunk. In order to avoid succumbing too soon, the distributors of alcohol enlist the support of friends and relatives, thereby ensuring that the drinking spree is more democratic and horizontal.
Along the same lines, some women bring a basketful of fruits to the festival and hand it over to the wife of the carguero, in gratitude for the invitation, the alcohol, the food, and the days of work put in by the women who cook the meals. This fruit is shared among the cooks. So, female guests convey their gratitude, which is then passed on to the female workers via the carguero’s wife.
Cocucho
Elements such as fruit, meat for tamales, and alcohol circulate via routes established by debt and reciprocity, but the direction of this circulation is determined by aesthetic considerations: savory items are exchanged in Purépecha festivals for sweet ones, which are exchanged in their turn for something spicy; darkness is taken over by bright colors; immobility turns into dynamism, and raw food is combined with cooked ingredients. Accordingly, on the Day of the Dead in the community of Aranza, neighbors bring fruit to the home of a grieving family, which, in exchange for this gift, hands out spicy, fat-free tamales known as nakatamales, as if fruits heal grief, as if raw food is fitting for the deceased—and as if these culinary experiences trace the line between one world and the other.
Cocucho
29 Games
A Purépecha festival is no game but, as a transgressive state, it does permit, or indeed trigger rivalries, plots for revenge, and bouts of mimicry that are playful and rowdy. For example, a game can consist of a practical joke, as when one man squeezes a sapote in the face of another and everybody laughs. The victim just stands there, his face covered in black juice. Why does he put up with this? “Because it is time,” comes the reply. In other words, it’s playtime, and so brothers-inlaw can squeeze sapotes in the faces of those who took a sister away from them. This occurs in the San Juan festival. Other pranks involve throwing a bucket of water over onlookers at a procession or putting a handful of flour in a reveler’s mouth.
Mimicry is pure fun, albeit laced with irony. Purépecha festivals feature parodies of hairy, white Europeans, known as tacuchis, who dance with a miringua (seductive woman) played by a man in drag. Paradoxically, the tacuchis are also called negritos (little blacks)—not for the color of their skin, obviously, but rather for their dark, sinister origins in the colony. The most striking festive mimicry, however, takes the form
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of tiny pieces of craftwork on childhood themes, including weddings between children. This nostalgia for childhood gives rise to miniature stars, kings, angels, devils, and even elderly people. In the approach to the Corpus Christi festival, shops prepare miniature foodstuffs that they trade with children for salt, all in a spirit of fun.
A festival incites competition between towns, neighborhoods, craftspeople, hotheads, cargueros , dancers, and musicians eager to demonstrate who is the best, the biggest, the most flowery, the most exuberant, the most united, the most Purépecha. And all this competition even extends to the saints, who try to outdo each other in lavishness, uproar, and sacrifices. This process enables the communities in the Meseta Purépecha to forge their separate identities.
Cherán
Sevina
31 Fame and the Purépecha
Before mentioning the aspects that have made the Meseta and the other Purépecha regions famous, I think it is appropriate to first examine this people’s own opinion of itself. All Purépecha see themselves reflected in the expression “Pure ambákiti !”—an emphatic affirmation of a way of doing things that demonstrates that they have the key to the good life and the authentic insights and values required to live
San Juan Parangaricutiro
Cherán K’eri
Cherán is a city with around 20,000 Purépecha inhabitants served by a wide range of stores and asphalted streets. Living there enabled me to shake off the stereotype of indigenous villages in remote rural settings untouched by modernity. It dispelled any idea I might have had of indigenous settlements as archaic and reminded me that, thousands of years ago, there were urban indigenous hubs as big as—or even bigger than—any of the famous Asian and European cities. Cherán K’eri has a history stretching back more than 500 years and it is set in the midst of a vast and magnificent protected forest, as were Monte Albán, Tula, and Machu Pichu in their heyday.
Etymologically speaking, Cherán K’eri means “the big Cherán,” and Cherán probably means “fright.” So, the Big Fright. The story goes that, in the olden days, a politician attracted a crowd here and made a fine speech promising major construction work that would turn the town into the capital of Mexico and bring development and prosperity in its wake. He was continually interrupted and taunted by a scruffy old man at the back of the crowd: “Liar! … Shut your mouth right now! … You’re boring us!” Finally, the heckler couldn’t take any more and threw a stone at the head of the sycophantic politician, who promptly fled, crying, “Let’s go somewhere else—these people sure are scary!” Ever since then, the city has been called
34
Cherán
Cherán K’eri, and it still scares the hell out of demagogic politicians.
The most characteristic feature of Cherán has been overlooked, however, in the numerous accounts of the city: it has the coldest and wettest climate of the entire Meseta Purépecha. The coldest months of the year start around All Souls’ Day (November 1) and culminate in the Fire Festival that starts the Purépecha New Year (February 1). During these months, the forest is shrouded in a layer of frost at night, and even in the warmer months delicate outsiders have been known to shiver in the city’s square in the evening.
Cherán K’eri is also distinctive because, despite being a small city, it has preserved an indigenous character—or rather personality— that sets it apart from the other municipal centers in the State of Michoacán. This is not to say that it is one of those magical places that attracts tourists through the unity of its buildings and colors (but neither is it shabby). Cherán is exceptional because its spatial organization is replete with contradictions. Seen from an indigenous viewpoint, Cherán is marked by its urbanization and modernity, but in terms of a modern municipal hub it has a strikingly indigenous and ancestral feel.
Chéran K’eri became famous after its armed revolt in April 2011, but any examination of this landmark, however cursory, demands an overview that enables us to put its Purépecha population’s indomitable rebellious spirit into a historical context.
Decades ago, Cherán was a small town and its Purépecha inhabitants were much more “traditional” than they are today. In those days, hardly anybody spoke Spanish and the economy was driven by farming corn and rearing livestock, large and small. Families, both rich and poor, followed an intensely symbolic way of life revolving around festivals and … still more festivals. There were social differences as regards the amount of
Cocucho
field of technology, particularly in the obsessive use of tools such as weed eaters, chainsaws and bandsaws, four-wheelers, trucks, and heavy machinery that the Purépecha handle with fascinated enthusiasm.
All this history of change and permanence, of rebellion and transnationalism, has to be understood as part of a spiral of periodic violent upheavals known as zafarranchos that have occurred since time immemorial and have reemerged in reaction to a breakdown in the channels of tolerance between various different groups and political interests. Zafarranchos have occurred in 1914, 1940, 1960, and 1980, suggesting that they are bound to appear every 20 years, taking the lives of local leaders with them. Zafarranchos show that hostilities are rooted in the internal life of the Purépecha, but their periodicity points to a deeper reason, beyond the scope of this text: Purépecha time is not linear but spirals, and its consistency is dense and pasty, like mole stirred in a pot by a grandmother with a giant spoon.
These precedents explain the reasons behind the uprising that brought international fame to Cherán in terms of an arithmetical operation: rebellion and resistance look to the past while migration contemplates a future of hope and progress—and zafarranchos are the end result of the failure of these two viewpoints to agree on the most suitable direction to be taken in the present.
Cheranástico
39 Deforestation and resin
There are still vestiges of the traditional, Purépecha-speaking Cherán that adhere to the premises of the indigenous lifestyle. In recent years, resin extraction has provided the most reliable means for obtaining the financial resources that allow for the continuation of this lifestyle. Resin (or crude turpentine) is a glutinous substance that oozes from pine trees, but its production is as slow and dense as Purépecha time. Collecting resin involves stripping bark off a pine tree and scraping its pulp or cellulose with an axe to make the tree “weep” tears of resin. This is extremely hard work because the collection of any substantial amount of resin requires walking several miles up and down the forest to visit one tree after another and patiently gather their output of resin. The Purépecha associate pine
Stories from the Cherán uprising of April 2011
Many accounts of the Cherán uprising have been published, and it is pointless to add another one to the list. The crux of the matter is that the people of Cherán were sick of the clandestine felling they had been enduring since 1988 and launched an attack against the groups of rapamontes —but, to ensure victory, they also confronted their own municipal authorities, which were implicated in the desecration of the forest, in collusion with organized crime. Under the auspices of the insurgency, Cherán expelled political parties from its territory and transformed the political landscape by inaugurating a local government based on traditional customs. One of the most striking aspects of the rebellion was the role played by women: they were responsible for ringing the bells calling for resistance and introducing a social order in keeping with their own culture. The insurgency was sustained by longstanding demands for indigenous justice and defense of their territory, mixed with more contemporary environmental concerns.
The crucial question is: What led the people of Cherán to revolt? The clearest answer is that the rapamontes had the temerity to cut down the centuries-old pines of Sipiatiro, associated with sacred sites that are repositories of both water and the Purépecha
Cherán
identity of the citizens of Cherán. In other words, social, political, and economic explanations for the uprising need to be complemented by a recognition of the mythical, cosmological thinking that underlies, even today, this people’s deepest values. However, not all the inhabitants of Cherán agree with the version of these events in circulation today. The division between “goodies” and “baddies” is viewed with particular skepticism, as the untrammeled felling of the forests could not have gone ahead without the participation of local people. The ensuing flurry of accusations has left almost nobody untainted by the exploitation of trees in the forest.
Other eyewitness accounts tell of distress at seeing death at close quarters:
“I saw my friends die when they were shot … I saw how death slackened their bodies and left them there, stretched out. It wasn’t my turn for death that day. They put a rifle to my head and at that moment I thought about my children. Then, [the executioner] pulled the trigger and gun jammed. He cocked it and fired into the air; it did go off that time. He put the gun against my head again, and the bullet didn’t come out again. Then, somebody else shouted, ‘Drop it, let’s get going!’ I think that God wanted me not to leave the world that day so that I can tell you this story …”
In those turbulent days, in which the citizens of Cherán routed the rapamontes, who ended up being lynched by a crazed mob, some astonishing things happened. Some people maintain that these “baddies” had entered a pact with dark forces, because, otherwise, how could they have revived once they were untied, after hanging there for so long with their tongues dangling practically down to their chests?
