Field journal excerpt 1-2 November 2001, Sierra Tarahumara, Mexico2 Catalina invited me to stay at her house for the Day of the Dead as she prepared tesguino and killed two chickens for her husband who died six years ago. She lives with several teenaged Raramuri girls from the high school: Tonita, Ribechi, Margarita, and Rosa. It was my impression that Catalina has taken on the role of protector for adolescent girls. They clearly love her and she them. They worked together making corn tortillas. They went through huge bowls of dough in a seamlessly coordinated fashion, mushrooming round bubbles of dough off of the main mass and forming them into squashed spheres, taking these up and patting them into the desired flat shape while carefully assuring their perfect roundness by finger-tipping around the edges every several pats, walking these over to the wood stove (an oil drum, cut in half and upended with a pipe hole punched in) and composing them on the hot surface. A cast aluminum tortilla press was also in action, with two round plastic liners to keep the dough from sticking. A firm touch of a hand on a cooking tortilla told them whether it was ready to be turned, moved, or taken off the stove and flipped into a woven sotol basket lined with maseca papers. What was remarkable to me was that this was not assembly line production but a sophisticated coordination of individual action such that there seemed to be but one mind, one purpose. Each woman wove in and out of the tortilla traffic, now at one task, then another, taking up where another had just left off without a blink. My attempts to synchronize with them were clumsy. I kept seeming to be in the way, or off-timed such that I found myself waiting for an available spot on the stove only to have a more efficient Rosa or Margarita snake in and pop a raw tortilla on the next open spot. I didn't know the rules or the rhythm. My first corn tortilla was normal sized, about six inches in diameter, and then I realized every one else was patting theirs at 3 or 4 inches, especially for the dead to eat. That one ended up in the compost bucket. I managed to get a good line of tortillas for the dead going, though I was helping at the periphery of the steady whirl, doing all the steps myself instead of coordinating with the complex dance the others were in. Catalina arranged the cooked tortillas in piles of three. As she was giving the fiesta for a man, her husband, there was a tortilla for each of his three souls. A woman, having four souls, would receive them in piles of four. From an outsider's perspective, and from what I imagined to be the men's perspective as they sat playing the guitar, eating cake, drinking strawberry soda pop and pisto (cane liquor), it looked like the women of the house were simply, making tortillas. It wasn't until I tried to join in that the complex coordination required for what they were doing became apparent. I found it mentally tiring, like driving in fast freeway traffic. I thought about how one would go about learning to coordinate like that. I exited after an hour or so, excusing myself once the full moon came up over the cliff enough to see my way down the rocky slope to the candlelit church below where the matachines were dancing their way into the night punctuated by the coyote cries of the dance leaders. In the enculturation system I grew up in we are ruthlessly trained to be individuals. To go away, alone, and find or create something novel then return and present it to an audience for judgment, to be ignored or rewarded. So when I find myself among people who are highly skilled at collaboration, who have a honed awareness of the rhythms needed to work together, drink together, dance together, think together, I feel in dire need of a remedial course in how to be a social animal. Edward Hall said: we in the West have this notion that each of us is all by himself in this world-that behavior is something that originates inside the skin, isolated from the outside world and from other human beings. …
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Mar 23, 2024
Shouan Chen + 3
Open Access
