Who hasn’t heard or read about him? He is known as someone who traveled and described what he saw on his travels. But in his descriptive works, Carl Lumholtz, author of the travel book “Unknown Mexico”, put more than pure description, and in his language admiration for the cultures and customs he studied appears.
Lumholtz was the first to put the Sierra Madre Occidental, and the Rarámuris, Tepehuanes and Huichols, at the forefront of universal knowledge, to begin with. “An ocean of mountains,” is what Lumholtz called the Sierra Madre, which measures 1,400 kilometers in length and was traveled on muleback by the Norwegian explorer on three different expeditions, between 1890 and 1897.
His “Unknown Mexico” is considered “a pioneering and passionate call for ethnic tolerance and in favor of the rights of indigenous people.” in the search for “barbaric and savage races,” as the racist language of his day described them. , Carl Lumholtz found himself, and with contact with the people of the mountains, his Europeanizing and superiorizing arrogance would be diminished. More humble at the end of his journey, Lumholtz, however, never ceased to be an essentially isolated being.
HE WAS SENSITIZED HIMSELF
Young Carl managed to convince the wealthiest families of his time, such as the Carnegies and the Vanderbilts, to contribute funds for an expedition, which he finally formed and began on September 9, 1890 in Bisbee, Arizona, with an internment point at Mexico in Agua Prieta, Sonora. After an initial incursion along the Aros River, Lumholtz entered the northern part of the state of Chihuahua, through the region of the Casas Grandes plains and then headed south, to the Tarahumara area, where he touched the points of El Yepo, Choguita, Norogachi, Guachochi, Baborigame.
He was amazed at the Tarahumara game of pelota, he admired the nobility of the indigenous people: “You can see in their appearance a certain attitude of nobility and reserve that had not disappeared in contact with the whites and mestizos. The omnipotent peso has no devotees among such Indians (referring to the Tarahumaras), since they need nothing of what money can provide, and they are more captivated by persuasion, benevolence or justice than gold. Lumholtz spent a full 18 months sheltered in the rugged highlands of Chihuahua, recording the Tarahumara language and sacred songs, drinking Tesgüino, and discovering the hidden things of this ethnic group’s culture. At a party, Lumholtz observes a young woman courting a man: “She tries to get the waiter’s attention by dancing in front of him rudely and without changing places; but she is so embarrassing that she continually moves with her back towards him. You can also sit close to him, pull his blanket and sing him a loving song in a sweet voice: “Se-ma-te rehoy i-rú, Se-ma-te-re-hoy i-va (Beautiful man, by the way, beautiful man , by the way)”.
THOSE WITH LIGHT FEET
There is so much talk today about the prodigious ability and endurance of the Rarámuris to run distances, that we rarely go to the root of this quality of the ethnic group. Lumholtz recorded, more than 130 years ago, and in a systematic and detailed manner, the way in which racing competitions developed among families and villages. He placed emphasis on the not only traditional character of the race, the ball race, as we call it today, but also on the importance that this sport had for life and coexistence, for the social cohesion of these people who, after being Expelled from the ancestral plains and the fertile mountains by the European invaders, they were forced to retreat, to take refuge in the solitudes of the great Sierra Madre, the inhospitable land of the ravines to which they had to adapt, acclimatize and where they had to acquire the necessary skills to survive, to live well and to ensure that, at a distance of more than 400 years, the Tarahumaras, the Rarámuris, preserve their culture, their idiosyncrasy, their clothing, their language. Your pride.
The ball race was one of the factors that kept them firm and cohesive as an ethnic group and as a clearly differentiated culture.
THE BALL RACE
As an example, the race, which is how Carl Lumholtz relates it:
The race is always carried out between individuals from two localities represented in numbers of four to 20 runners. Both parties wear some distinctive feature, for example, those of one group have red bands on their heads, and the others have white bands. It is a peculiarity of the game to push a small ball, about an inch and a half in diameter, made of oak root, as each game runs. The one running further ahead hits it with the toes of his right foot, making it roll about 100 meters. The one who throws it and everyone else in his group follows it, without stopping running; and the first one who reaches it, starts it rolling again, without ever touching it with his hand…
There is no track especially dedicated to racing, but… Whenever possible, the flat tops of low hills that extend in a circle are preferred; But when they do not have a similar place, they go and return over a hill, always starting from some small esplanade or other convenient point, close to the center, where people gather for the purpose. The leaders of both parties arrange the time and place, as well as the number and length of the rounds. You can measure a circuit from three to 12 miles, agreeing to travel up to 20 circuits when they are short.
In that richly descriptive tone, and thanks to his great ability to perceive the reality he contemplated, Lumholtz constructed his masterpiece that records what no one before him took the trouble to record.
HIS PIONEERING WORK SET A PRECEDENT
The work “The Explorer of the Northwest of Chihuauhua: Carl Lumholtz (1890-1898). Archeology and Ethnography of the Sierra” states:
In 1893 the Official Gazette published the statistics of the 11 million 395,712 that made up the national population, in which the indigenous people represented 38%, which is why the Porfirista government considered them a “problem”, since they hindered the capitalist project that It was driven by the production of goods and the exploitation of natural resources. However, Lumholtz’s objective, in addition to being archaeological, was ethnographic; he sought to record and understand the inhabitants of the places he explored.
The aforementioned Casa Chihuahua monograph also records that “Between 1891 and 1898 he made four expeditions to Mexico, the first accompanied by a group of eight scientists, including geographers, laboratory scientists, archaeologists, botanists, zoologists and geologists, until he ended up exploring alone and in periods as long as three years; time in which he managed to collect numerous archaeological pieces, bone remains, botanical and zoological species, as well as extensive photographic records (more than 2,500 shots) and sound records (60 wax cylinders with recordings of Tarahumara songs).”
He wrote his essay, the product of extensive and detailed tours of the Sierra Madre, “Unknown Mexico”, in New York, 1903, and said: “Leif Erikson, the Man of the North, was in the eleventh century, the first European to set foot on the American soil. Perhaps it does not seem inappropriate, for the same reason, that the adventurous instinct of the Vikings has driven a descendant of that first discoverer towards a peaceful conquest through the fields of science in the Sierra Madre of Mexico. I have described what I saw, impartially and faithfully, to the best of my ability, and I hope that my book will instill in all who read it the deep affection I feel for the magnificent country that served as the cradle of civilization in the Western Hemisphere.
The words of Carl Lumholtz reveal his vocation: “I like society with man; But how much serenity and calm inspires… communion with nature!
One hundred and some years after his odyssey, the remembrance of Lumholtz’s trip puts on stage again the old and new problems of development, the old and new problems of the relationship of the State with the ethnic groups, and the old and new problems of a racist attitude disguised as indigenism. But that is another story, different story.
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