tarahumara

In the village of Kirare, in Mexico's Copper Canyon, a Tarahumara man helps his wife with her chores. The California Native has been a leader in tours to Copper Canyon for almost 30 years.

Anthropologist Carl Lumholtz predicted that the Tarahumara Indians would disappear within a century. A hundred years later, these gentle people, who inhabit Mexico’s Copper Canyon, continue to be the most populous indigenous group in northern Mexico.

Spanish explorers had entered the Sierra Madre Mountains by the mid-16th century. Gold and silver were soon discovered and mines began operating. The Indians were pressed into the labor force, often enduring the harshest conditions.

The Jesuits established their first mission pueblo in 1611. Although many attempted to ease the burden of the Indians, a great deal of prejudice existed. An early Jesuit wrote, “They are inclined to idleness, drunkenness and other vices. They are ungrateful, dull and stupid…very cunning and alert in evil things…They have no sense of personal honor nor the honor of their daughters.”

Forced to live in artificially-created communities, the Indians were susceptible to a variety of diseases, and epidemics swept the area. As the demand for labor increased, the Spanish raided the mission pueblos. The Jesuits managed to protect some of their charges, but many Tarahumara fled, hiding deep in Copper Canyon. The expulsion of the Jesuits from the Americas, in 1767, ended their efforts to protect the Indians, and the Franciscans, who succeeded them, were not as effective.

Mexico attained independence in 1821 and soon established huge land grants in Tarahumara country. The Indians were uprooted again, and fled, often onto lands of other indigenous people. Fighting often resulted.

The Revolution of 1910-21 resulted in the re-creation of the pre-hispanic communal landholding system known as the ejido. The Tarahumara received some benefits from this, as much of this land has economic potential for lumbering, agriculture, and tourism. Around 60,000 Tarahumara still inhabit caves and simple dwellings in Copper Canyon.

The California Native has for many years assisted these people, donating clothing, school supplies and money. Some of our travelers have returned to volunteer in local clinics. Tourism is a positive factor, and visitors gain a new appreciation for these noble people who have survived and thrived despite Lumholtz’ dire predictions.

Deep in the heart of Mexico’s Sierra Madres, in the town of Creel, the center of Copper Canyon country, is the clinic of Santa Teresita. The lives of thousands of Tarahumara Indian children have been saved here because of the dreams and dedication of one man, Father Luis Verplancken.

Father Verplancken was a Jesuit priest who first visited the Tarahumaras in the late 1950s. He saw a great need for health care for these Indians who inhabit this remote area of mountains and canyons. At the time their children had an alarmingly high mortality rate.

Verplancken put his ideas into action by starting a traveling health care facility, housed in a 4-wheel drive station wagon. He quickly discovered that a little help went a long way—one dollar’s worth of penicillin, for example, could treat hundreds of children.

The word spread and by 1964, Verplancken and his volunteers received enough donations to establish a small hospital in an old railroad warehouse. The demand for medical care was so great that some Tarahumaras walked three days from their remote villages to reach the hospital.

A major obstacle that both the town and the hospital faced was the lack of a dependable water supply. With the help of more donations, a pipeline was built from the nearest fresh water source, which was four miles away over extremely harsh terrain. Three handcrafted pumping stations had to be constructed to lift the water 600 feet up to the level of the town. For the first time, Creel and the hospital had a dependable supply of fresh water.

In the mid-1970s, plans were drawn for a more modern hospital. With the help of his nephew, who was studying architecture at the time, Verplancken designed what today is known as the clinic of Santa Teresita. This clinic was literally “hand-made.” Along with a dedicated group of volunteers, Father Verplancken quarried the stone, crafted the brick and cut the trees.

The clinic opened in 1979, and houses a seventy-bed hospital with x-ray and laboratory facilities, a pharmacy, dental facilities and an outpatient clinic.

After 52 years of service to the Tarahumara community, Father Verplanken died of cancer, but the clinic lives on.

Today, the clinic still depends on volunteers and donors. Over 90% of the services and medications are provided free of cost, and the remainder are provided to the local residents at a token fee.

Many guests on California Native Copper Canyon tours have visited the clinic and donated money, medicines and supplies. One woman, after returning from a recent trip, sent four sets of crutches that she purchased at a garage sale in the United States.

Now is the time to book your trip for Easter in Mexico’s Copper Canyon. The Easter, or Semana Santa, celebrations of the Tarahumara Indians make this time the high season of the year. Small towns which are sleepy most of the year are now alive with celebrations, 24-hours a day. The Tarahumara, who call themselves the Raramuri, celebrate for a week, with dancing, parades, bon fires, ceremonies in the churches and much drinking of tesguino, the Indians traditional corn liquor.

To begin to understand the Tarahumara ceremonies, one has to have a basic understanding of the Indians’ religion. Read our story about this unusual version of Catholicism practiced by these colorful cave-dwelling people.

A California Native guest purchases crafts from a Tarahumara weaver in Mexico

Visitors to the Copper Canyon area are always pleasantly surprised by the wide variety of craftsware and folk art available for purchase. The remote life and character of the Tarahumara Indians has fostered a tradition of crafts making as a part of their life-style.

While traveling through the region you will find very inexpensively priced baskets, belts, dolls, pottery and musical instruments.

The baskets are made out of the leaves of the agave as well as pine needles and range in size from tiny to large. Visitors purchasing baskets find that they can pack them one inside the other to conserve space during their trip. Once at home, the baskets of pine needles hold their scent of pine forests and become a wonderful reminder of the trip, and they are utilitarian as well as beautiful. The Tarahumara pottery is quite sturdy and is designed to be more functional then decorative.

Music is an important part of the Indians daily living and also plays an important roll in their ceremonies and festivals. Their musical instruments include violins, drums and wooden flutes. They learned the art of violin making from the Spaniards in the 18th century.

Carved wooden dolls dressed in typical Tarahumara fashion are for sale in a variety of sizes and portray the various activities of Tarahumara life—mothers wearing shawls while carrying babies on their backs, ladies weaving on hand-looms, and men carrying tools or musical instruments and wearing their traditional headgear.

Crafts can be purchased from the Indians who set up their merchandise on rocks along the trails and in all sorts of unlikely nooks and crannies. Crafts are also available in stores, and one that we recommend is the Mission Store in Creel, located right on the town square. Profits go to the hospital which serves the Tarahumara Indians.

Easter in Copper Canyon is the most colorful time of year. Small towns which are sleepy most of the year now are full of tourists—both Mexican and foreign—who have come to see the Easter celebrations of the Tarahumara Indians. The tourists cluster with their cameras in the Indian villages, but most of them have little idea of what is going on.

To begin to understand the Tarahumara ceremonies, one has to have a basic understanding of the Indians’ religion. The Tarahumara are outwardly Catholic, but their version of Catholicism is unlike any form we are familiar with.

In 1602, the Jesuits brought Christianity to the Indians, who adopted it, but interpreted and modified it to conform to their own customs and ideas. In 1767, King Charles III of Spain expelled the Jesuits from the New World, and the Tarahumara, on their own now, continued to develop their religious beliefs and rituals. Their resulting theology is as follows:

God is the father of the Tarahumara and is associated with the sun. His wife, the Virgin Mary, is their mother and is associated with the moon. God has an elder brother, the Devil, who is the uncle of the Indians. The Devil is the father of all non-Indians, whom the Tarahumara call chabóchi, “whiskered ones.” At death, the souls of the Tarahumara ascend to heaven while those of the chabóchi go to the bottommost level of the universe.

The well-being of the Tarahumara depends on their ability to maintain the proper relationship with God and the Devil. God is benevolent, but they must not fail to reward His attentions adequately. The Devil is the opposite, and will cause the Indians illness and misfortune unless they propitiate him with food. God is pleased by the dancing, chanting, feasting, and offerings of food and corn beer, that are a part of all Tarahumara religious festivals. The Devil is also pleased because the Indians bury food for him at these fiestas.

Of all the religious ceremonies throughout the year, The Easter celebrations are the most important. Hundreds of men, women, and children converge on the local church from villages as far away as fifteen miles. These celebrations are for socializing and having a good time, but the Indians also expect their efforts to please God so that He will give them long lives, abundant crops, and healthy children.

The Easter rituals concern the relationship between God and the Devil. Although God and the Devil are brothers, and occasionally get along, the Devil is usually bent on destroying God. Most of the time God fends the Devil off.

But each year, immediately prior to Holy Week, the Devil succeeds by trick or force in rendering God dangerously vulnerable. The Easter ceremonies are intended to protect and strengthen God so that He can prevent the Devil from destroying the world.

Each of the men and boys of the community takes part in the ceremonies as a member of one of two groups. The first group, the Pharisees, are the Devil’s allies, and carry wooden swords, painted white with ochre designs. The second group, the Soldados, the Soldiers, are allied with God, and carry bows and arrows.

The celebrations begin on the Saturday prior to Palm Sunday, with speeches and ritualized dances. The Pharisees, their bodies smeared with white earth, and the Soldados dance to the beating of drums and the melody of reed whistles. About midnight, a mass is held in the church. Shortly after sunrise, bowls of beef stew, stacks of tortillas and tamales and bundles of ground, parched maize, are lifted to the cardinal directions, allowing the aroma to waft heavenward to be consumed by God. The food is then distributed among the people. At mid-morning the Soldados and Pharisees set up wooden crosses marking the stations of the cross, a mass is held, and the priest leads a procession around the churchyard, with the participants carrying palm branches.

Three days later, on Holy Wednesday, the ceremonies resume, and for the next three days there are processions around the church. The point of the processions is to protect the church and, by extension, God and God’s wife.

On the afternoon of Good Friday, the Pharisees appear with three figures made of wood and long grasses representing Judas, Judas’s wife, and their dog. To the Indians, Judas is one of the Devil’s relatives, and they call him Grandfather and his wife Grandmother. Judas and his wife wear Mexican-style clothing and display their oversized genitalia prominently. The Pharisees and Soldados parade the figures around the church, dancing before them. The Pharisees then hide the figures away for the night.

On Saturday morning, the Soldados and Pharisees engage in wrestling matches, battling symbolically for control of Judas. The Soldados then take possession, shoot arrows into the three figures and set them afire. The people retire to continue the celebrations at the many tesguino drinking parties.

Down in the little town of Batopilas, tucked deep within the folds of Mexico’s Copper Canyon, I am witnessing something that is typically missing in this day and age: a craftsman in the process of creating a custom product. In this case the craftsman, José “Che” Rentería, is creating a unique pair of huaraches, sandals, for me.

I arrive in Batopilas after an exhilarating drive down the winding dirt road from the mountain town of Creel and make my way over to the Plaza de la Constitución to find the sandal maker. His door is closed and the tools covering the two wooden workbenches in front of his house lie dormant. As with many things in Mexico, I must wait.

After dinner I return to find Che working under the harsh light of a bare incandescent bulb. He wears a white shirt with the words “Austin, TX” embroidered on the breast. The lines etched in his face reflect the rugged contours of the canyon in which he lives. I tell him that I want to buy a pair of his sandals. He measures my feet with a trained eye and says definitively, “Ocho.” He asks if I can come back tomorrow. I tell him I will return around noon, and he nods his assent. With that, I am off. No deposit, no order form…he doesn’t even know my name. It is comforting to know some people still operate on trust. Perhaps it is the result of living in a place where time moves very slowly.

Che was born in Batopilas in 1934 and has lived in the same house for all of his 72 years. He makes his living as a leatherworker and is a master of the craft. Fifteen years ago he started making the unique Tarahumaran huaraches, and he is the only person in Batopilas who makes them.

The huaraches worn by the Tarahumara Indians, a sturdy people native to the Copper Canyon area, are rather simple sandals. The soles are made of old tires; the pair made for me still includes some white letters indicating that they are “All Terrain” sandals. A leather footbed is glued to the rubber with what looks like Che’s own homemade glue. What makes the Tarahumaran huaraches so distinct from other sandals is a very clever lacing system. A single leather strap per sandal, originating between the big and index toes, is threaded through two holes cut into the sole to create support for the heel. The strap is then wrapped around the ankle three times before being tied to itself by the heel. The result is a very comfortable, stable sandal. In fact, the Tarahumara, considered to be the greatest long-distance runners in the world, chose their traditional huaraches over high-tech running shoes as they ran to first, second and fifth place finishes at the Leadville Trail 100, a high-altitude ultra-marathon in the Colorado Rockies. These are simple, sturdy and functional footwear.

I return the following day at noon and find Che playing with his grandchildren outside of his house. He retrieves the bottoms of my sandals and asks me to wait while he assembles the straps. Using an old blade, he removes the hard surface from the straps with an assured steadiness acquired from years of working in this medium. The trimming ensures that the leather against the feet will be soft and comfortable. As he works, he asks me where I am from. When I say Los Angeles, he asks, “Hollywood?” I tell him that I live very close to Hollywood, and he disappears into his house, returning with a stack of photos showing him at, of all places, Universal Studios Hollywood. A few years ago he went to California to visit his daughter who lives there, and I wonder if he felt as far from home as I do here in the bottom of a canyon in Mexico.

Che finishes his work and begins the tutorial. He ties my right sandal for me, going through the motions very slowly to ensure that I understand how it’s done. I find them to be much more comfortable than I had anticipated, and they fit perfectly. “¿Bueno?” he asks. “Muy bueno,” I respond. We shake hands, his skin almost as tough as the leather with which he works, and I stride off in my new huaraches. With every step, they will serve as reminders of this old-fashioned craftsman plying his trade in this beautiful village in the bottom of the Copper Canyon.

Kevin Maddaford

In the summer of 1993, two of our California Native guides, Doug Stewart and Tarahumara woman Lynn Reineke, escorted a small group of Indians from the depths of Mexico’s Copper Canyon to Leadville, Colorado, where they astounded the world of marathon racing by coming in first, second and fourth place in a 100 mile ultra-marathon race, wearing their native garb and sandals made out of discarded tires.

Who were these strangely-dressed people, who came from obscurity to outpace hundreds of experienced runners?

They call themselves the Rarámuri, the Runners, and they inhabit the rugged and remote area of mountains and canyons in Mexico known as the Barrancas del Cobre or Copper Canyon. They are known to the outside world as the Tarahumara.

No one knows how long the Tarahumara have lived in their rugged homeland. Archaeologists have found artifacts of people living in the area three thousand years ago, but it is not known if they were the ancestors of the present day Indians.

There is no recorded history of the Tarahumara prior to the coming of the Spaniards in the sixteenth century. Their first European contact may have been with Coronado’s expedition as it passed through the Sierra Madres searching for the legendary Seven Golden Cities of Cibola. In 1607 the Jesuit missionary Father Juan Fonte established the first Jesuit mission in their territory.

During the next one hundred and fifty years, the Jesuits built twenty-nine missions and introduced the Indians to Catholicism, domestic animals, the plow and the axe. Their influence came to an abrupt halt in 1767 when the King of Spain expelled their order from the New World. The Franciscans took over from the Jesuits, but their influence on the Tarahumara was minimal and the Indians were pretty much left alone until the Jesuits returned in 1900.

The Tarahumara have traditionally lived in isolated family units and small settlements. The Spaniards tried to bring them into more concentrated communities but the strong-willed Tarahumara managed to resist these efforts, and today a large number still live in small, isolated groups. During the time of the Jesuits, mineral wealth was discovered in the region and many Indians were forced to work as slaves in the mines. This and the encroachment of the Spaniards upon their lands, led to many bloody revolts throughout the seventeenth century.

Today the Tarahumara number around 50,000. They still inhabit the same region they have for centuries—the rugged Sierra Madre Occidental of northern Mexico. They live in caves and small wood or stone cabins and practice subsistence farming. The majority practice a form of Catholicism liberally inter-mixed with their traditional beliefs and ceremonies.

Among the peoples of North America, the Tarahumara are considered to be the most primitive, the least touched by modern civilization. They are also the most unmixed of any of the Indian tribes of Mexico.

Many of the men and most of the women still dress in their traditional styles. The ladies wear wide multiple skirts, full sleeved blouses, a head band or bandana, and a shawl for carrying a child or other objects on their backs. The little girls dress the same as their mothers and often carry a little brother or sister on their backs. The men wear a breech-cloth held together by a wool girdle wrapped around the waist, a cloth head band, and a loose cotton shirt.

Running up and down the steep canyons is an important part of the Tarahumara culture, not only as a means of transportation and communication in this rugged area, but as a sport in which villages compete against each other. From the time they are small children the Tarahumara take great pride in their running skills.

In the Rarámuri philosophy, respect for others is of prime importance. They give greater value to persons than to objects, and business matters take second place to respect for human beings. On our trips through Copper Canyon we also learn to respect other people, especially the Rarámuri, as we meet them, discover their unique culture and perhaps adopt some of their philosophy into our own lives.