During my 18-year stay with him and my mother my Dad developed an interest in the spiritual and social welfare of two different Indian tribes, those being the Navajo in and around Holbrook, Arizona, and the Mixe (MEE-hee) of Oaxaca State in southeastern Mexico. Maybe he had been interested in Native Americans long before this. I don’t recall it being a dinner-time topic.
You should know that my parents owned few durable possessions, and no property whatsoever their entire lives, so picking up, packing up, and leaving was a relatively easy task. All “homes” were rented month-to-month, and only one time in my memory was anything resembling permanence bought on credit, that being living-room furniture during a brief stay in Cortez, Colorado. The parsonage at Burns, such as it was, was not rented, but was considered part of my Dad’s compensation as the pastor.
In today's parlance we would be considered homeless, but by the standards of the day it felt more like freedom than poverty. So in the mid 1950's we had picked up from some forgotten-somewhere and moved to Holbrook, Arizona, a not too wide spot on the iconic "Mother Road.” At the time it was simply Route 66, just another U.S. highway comprised of two lanes of blacktop, punctuated by different towns which were amazingly similar. We rented a house, a hovel actually, in Holbrook and set up the Lord's work intending to save the souls of the Navajo Nation; we stayed initially in a motel right on U.S. 66 in the heart of Holbrook, as I remember, while we searched the sparse rental market of that small town. I don't remember the year, but I know it had to be after 1954 because my sister had married and was no longer traveling with us as we moved about, in our endless search for the elusive center of God's will.
I remember attending only one in-home service on the Navajo reservation; perhaps there were more and I simply became bored with the repetition, but I don't think so. The meeting I remember was held in the hogan of one of the few Pentecostal native Americans, possibly as a grudging courtesy. I do recall that the entire interior of the Hogan was adorned with hand made weavings, floor and walls covered with the soft natural woven fabrics from sheep and goats, as much art as utility. Unfortunately my father's calling conflicted with other competing brands, including the Quakers, LDS, and of course the Catholic "Whore of Rome" which had already staked out the spiritual turf of many Navajo people. None of our competing brothers in Christ welcomed our intrusion, doctrines, methods, or lack of official credentials for that matter. Ultimately, the ability to follow the Call, and the slow drizzle of interested money dried up. It should also be said that Pentecostal fundamentalism of any brand did not dwell easily with traditional ways of native people. The Pentecostal God demanded not only center-stage, but exclusive billing. Yahweh did not share with lesser dieties, and the spartan absence of feasts and celebrations made promotion of the Calvinistic offshoot difficult to sell to minorities. Many native people were confused by this exclusive demands of Yaweh, and still are. The Whore of Rome aka Universal Catholic Church,has always been much more practical, demanding top billing, but not unwilling to share the stage with pagan beliefs.
Due to this apparent oversight or lack of concern by The All-Knowing, that things were not going to work out, we moved on from Holbrook, with no Souls on our belt to count coup, and by Summer's end we were in Coos Bay, Oregon, where we stayed put for one whole school-year, and 6-weeks of the next, before moving on to Burns, Oregon. I joined the 6th grade class (already in progress); a ritual I had somewhat conquered already. My Dad took the Burns church at the request of the Assembly of God Oregon district leadership; at the request of was code-speak for, "No reputable minister will take the assignment because its a career-killer and a dead-end so we're going to put lipstick on it and offer it to you." It should be said that my Dad didn’t take every assignment he was offered; he always turned down the easy ones, the ones which would result in stability, membership, and eventual retirement benefits.
Burns was a troubled church in which the members had split over some real or imagined doctrinal or financial difference, leaving the church in danger of default on its bank loan, which meant the District would be on the hook or have to forfeit the property and structure. It cost the District nothing to send my Dad because any pay he earned would come from voluntary congregational offerings, augmented by his own labor, and the thrift of my mother. So we arrived to help the committed members of an emotionally and doctrinally divided church in its feeble attempt to repair itself, and began to pay the District back for the mortgage it had been covering. On our first night in the parsonage, a badly constructed, probably non-permitted strip of near-residence, leaning against the western wall of the church itself. Shortly after retiring for our first night's sleep in our new digs, we were welcomed to Burns by gunfire, and the sound of multiple bullets ripping through the roof and rafters of the church. My Dad and I went up into the crawl space above the church the next day, found the splintered paths of several bullets, and dug out a smashed .30 caliber slug from a wooden joist. Welcome to Burns!
While working with the committed remaining members, and the slow build-up of new congregants to rebuild the spirit and membership of the church over the ensuing two and a half years, my Father discovered and became obsessed by the plight of the Mixe Indian tribe of Oaxaca, Mexico. And so, the next phase of life, which I like to refer to as "Saving the Indians Revision 2.0" kicked off, in the form of an exploratory visit, by car, to Oaxaca, San Juan de Mitla, and Matias Romero during the Summer of 1957. It was never clear to me what put the Mixe at his top of mind...he said only that we were called. I suspect he had read about them in some book; interestingly enough, sometimes the hint that God leaves for the will-seeker is as subtle as a library book, an event that faithless others might mistake as chance. My father was an avid reader, and he favored books written by recent (20th century) explorers, particularly those roamers exploring Latin American rivers and jungles. Looking back, I'm somewhat surprised we didn't end up on the Amazon River in Brazil after my Dad read The Rivers Ran East, by the Lambs.
I'm not sure either what drew my father's sympathies to Indians. Perhaps he felt kinship with anyone who had been ousted from their land, as his family had been from their tenant-farms by the financially strapped, returning landowners in the 1930's. In any case, he usually sided with them emotionally, morally, and historically, citing the broken promises and slight-of-hand that the U.S. and other governments, including Canada, Spain and Mexico, had used to take land, identity, natural resources, including corralling the Indian tribes onto reservations and village encampments while generously sharing alcohol, syphilis, tuberculosis, small-pox, and measles with them. It goes without saying, Custer was no hero in my family. Though my Dad claimed that his interest in the Mixes was spiritual, his calling, by default, involved my mother and I who were not called, or if called had been out somewhere doing something else when that call came in. My view then and now is that we were conscripted without representation or appeal. Today, some might say we were trafficked, or kidnapped…which would be wrong…but, whatever it was didn’t feel exactly voluntary.
God, in His infinite wisdom, had called him to the Mixe Indians 2,000 miles away, near Mexico's border with Guatemala, instead of directing him toward the destitute Paiute Indian village within the shadow of his church in Burns. During our two plus years in Burns, he and the church showed little interest, and no detectable empathy toward the Harney County Paiute, as I remember. I'm not sure what would have happened if a Paiute person from the village had come through the front double doors of our church, none ever did. But I doubt a warm welcome and a spirit of equity in Christ would have been among the gestures extended by most, though I’m sure my Dad and my Mother would have welcomed the individuals. I mention this, not as criticism, but only to note one of our more ironic human foibles, that being: we often can't or don't want to see the needs that are closest to us. I know that has been one of my own habits.
The Mixe Tribe of Oaxaca, Mexico.
The Catholic Encyclopedia says of the Mixes, that they are, "A mountain tribe in southern Mexico, noted for their extreme conservatism, constituting together with the neighboring Zoque, a distinct linguistic stock, the Zoquean. The Mixe occupy a number of towns and villages including the village of Yautepec, Villa Alta, and Tehuantepec in southern
Oaxaca and number altogether about 25,000. They maintained their independence against both the
Aztec Empire and the powerful Zapotec with whom they are still at enmity and even yet can hardly be said to have been subdued by the
Spaniards, as they hold themselves aloof from the whites, maintaining their own language almost to the exclusion of Spanish, keeping their own customs and adhering to many of their ancient
rights and
superstitions even while giving ostensible obedience to the
Church and manifesting a docile attachment to their resident
priests. With the other tribes of the
Oaxaca, the Mixe were brought under subjection by the
Spaniards in 1521-4. In 1526 the work of evangelization was done by the
Dominicans under Father Gunzalo Lucero and continued with them, shared after 1575 by the
Jesuits, until turned over to
secular priests under later settled conditions. The work of conversion was slow and unsettled for many years in consequence of the exceptional attachment of these tribes to their ancient religion. Idols were frequently discovered buried under the cross in front of the
chapel, so that they might be worshiped in secret under the pretense of devotion to the
Christian symbol, and
heathen sacrifices were even offered up secretly from the very altars, under the impression, intelligible enough to the Indian, that the sacredness attaching to the
Christian environment enhanced the efficacy of the
pagan rite. This prevails to a great extent today."
I'm not sure when this article was written, or who authored it, probably some Jesuit Father, but it fails to mention the Mixes' even more active resistance to Catholicism in the mid-20th Century, and their rejection of anything even hinting of Spanish or Mexican culture. The Mixes, in one village just forty-five years before my father and I arrived there, killed the two resident priests, then burned and razed the church. When we were there between 1956 and '58 perhaps 8 or 10 vertical feet of the roofless church walls were standing, encroached by the ever advancing vegetation. All other church material, including icons, had been removed and destroyed or disappeared, and the useful secular materials had been incorporated into other structures over the years, including the walls of an unused, one-room school building.
There was no obvious sign of Catholic ritual being practiced at the time we were there...no crosses over doors or beds, no crucifixes on chains around their necks, and certainly no graves with crosses, because the Mixe took their dead, and even some living members, into the jungle and "gave them back" to Creation. Some of the villages on the outer fringe of Mixe territory had the names of Catholic saints, but that wasn't the doing of any Indian, and those names were not on their lips if they identified their village one to another. Also, I can vouch for the continuing enmity between the Mixe and Zapotec; every Zapotec guide we used to get us from San Juan de Mitla back into the interior was noticeably, and verbally, uncomfortable upon entering Mixe country. They were anxious and vigilant even in the fringe villages, and refused to spend the night in Mixe villages or on their land.
On one trip into the backcountry that I remember, the Zapotec guide quite literally abandoned us at some invisible line of demarcation. We were left to find our way to our destination village, in a continuously drumming, mind numbing downpour which had lasted uninterrupted for days. We stood soaked, weak, and clueless as to where our destination village was, watching the guide, flee back down the trail with our pre-paid money tucked away somewhere on his soaked body. At the time, my father was taking a medicine comprised of graduated doses of Arsenic which presumably would kill the amoeba in his body before either the medicine or amoeba killed him...the "race" was on, but at this time on the trail in that downpour it was not predictable which organism would die first, my Dad or the amoeba. He was weak, feverish, having frequent diarrhea, which seemed to be mostly made up of his own blood, and what appeared to be chunks of flesh from his own intestines. Fortunately, the drumming downpour washed the fecal messes away.
We hopefully discussed the possibility that the fleeing guide would rethink his actions and return, and so we stood stationary for some in the downpour, waiting. It soon became all too apparent that he had experienced no change of heart, so we moved toward what we thought was the smell of camp smoke...probably the scent that had initiated our abandonment by the guide. Indian camp smoke had a particular smell which distinguished it from burning slag or nature-caused fires. The camp smoke smelled foody, greasy, and woody at the same time. At some point, perhaps a thousand yards from where the guide had abandoned us, we emerged into a clearing containing less than a dozen huts, with several cooking fires still smoldering. The few dogs in the compound kept their noisy distance from us, and all the time we imagined we felt the eyes of the village scrutinizing us from the even deeper shadows of the rain-soaked tree canopy which lined the compound. We held up our arms, turning to show our unarmed torsos, miming for a presumed audience, but there was no reciprocal greeting. Finally, we carefully opened our backpacks, using overly dramatized movements, and placed "knick-knack" gifts, trinkets such as pencils, marbles, and hair-bands, near the smoldering cooking fires...and, left the compound slowly, with long, measured steps, never looking back. Though the compound was only a short distance from the sheltering tree-line, it was perhaps the longest walk I ever took.
We knew that our destination village was at a higher elevation on the western side of one of the mountains which formed the continental divide. Knowing that, we chose the trails which were most well-traveled, and which also trended uphill further into the clouds. We joked that the rain sliding in streams down our trails was a reminder that the water was still flowing West...a good sign that we had not unintentionally crossed the continental divide. We agreed that if the streams and creeks began flowing East, we were likely truly, and possibly permanently, lost.
I remember that in the jungle thickets of southeastern Oaxaca it never seemed to be fully daylight during the brightest daytime, yet full darkness came slowly in the evening. And, so it was this night...we walked in increasing darkness which did not entirely deepen before we smelled and saw smoke on the hillside ahead of us. We heard dogs, and children, and then walked into a smoky clearing on the side of the mountain, surrounded by small plots of vegetables, mostly corn, dotted with huts and with chickens running loose. There were curious, but not hostile or suspicious glances from the humans. This was no family compound, but a true village, and as it occurred, the correct village. Shortly thereafter, we were at the family-hut of the Wycliffe bible translator, sitting under a reasonably dry cabana, conversing in English, drinking clean water, free of Chlorine tablets, from an actual glass container, as the hissing Coleman camp lanterns burning "white gas" beat back the now full darkness.
~~~
Generalities:
The Mixe were not particularly fond of anyone except, occasionally, other Mixes, and even that attachment was not to be counted on. They occasionally fought each other, in rarely deadly skirmishes between neighboring villages; these villages, at least those nearby, were more than likely extended family who had left the main family due to some dispute in the not too distant past as families do. According to the Wycliffe translators the Mixe tribal name meant "The People," a claim not unusual among tribes of the world, except that in the case of the Mixe, they intended the concept to mean "The Only People." That is, all others, including we loosely tolerated whites, were somewhat less than human, or perhaps they meant they Mixe were suprahuman. This unequal view included other tribes, especially the Zapotec, Mediterranean Europeans, and in particular "Mexicans" who were the mixed-blood result of Spanish, Black, and non-Mixe Indian cross-breeding. For the Mixes, "mixed blood" was a sign of weakness, a symbol that one's "race" had been conquered. Mixed blood was the symbol of losers. They, on the other hand, had never been conquered, in blood, in culture, in battle, or in language. Regardless of their fascism at the time, according to Wikipedia in more recent times, the Mixe name for themselves is
ayuujkjä'äy meaning "people who speak the mountain language"
[1] The word "Mixe" itself is probably derived from the
Nahuatl word for cloud:
mīxtli. Calling themselves "The Cloud People" definitely makes sense because the villages I visited were often at or above cloud level against the Western slopes of the Continental Divide.
Light-skinned, blue, grey, or green-eyed people like me and my father drew less negative attention from the Mixe, though there were still activities we just did not risk doing, for instance, we did not ever take a cooking pan to the river to wash it; instead, we brought water from the river in a container which could not be mistaken as a gold-pan such as a canvas water-bag. Then the skillet or other shallow pan was washed well away from the gravel and sand of the river bed. The Mixe had a deep distrust of anyone who showed even the slightest interest in panning for gold, and "Oro" was a word that never crossed our lips when we were back there because "Oro" was one of the many Spanish words they recognized.
According to Mixe myth, in the 1930's the Mexican government of that time sent a large contingent of uniformed and well-armed military men into Mixe country to inform the Indians that they were indeed the legal subjects of the Estados Unidos de Mexico in all aspects of their collective and individual lives, and that the soldiers were sent to assist the tribe in shaping up, and doing their civic duties as citizens and subjects, and generally assisting with the burdens of progress, including of course, paying taxes and bribes, or as it was known in the ‘50’s “Mordita!” (the bite)...in essence it was Manifest Destiny Latin-American style, and the Indians were expected to shoulder the burden of civilization in a team effort with the other Mexican citizens. That military unit was never seen again...not a man, animal, piece of equipment, article of clothing, or weapon ever resurfaced nor was one found being worn or used. They, the entire contingent, and their belongings, including branded pack and riding animals, simply disappeared in the mountainous greenery of southeastern Oaxaca. The Mexican government of the time decided it could wait, as governments do, and kicked the can down the road for some future administration to gain the voluntary support of these mountain people.
As a teen-aged boy, my greatest admiration for this Mixe people was their refusal, indeed even a lack of discussion, as whether to be governed by anyone or anything except their own traditions and conscience, and their unconditional refusal to compromise their values even when faced with extinction. I don't know what any individual Mixe thought or felt about this or any other nuanced concept, because aside from exchanging unintelligible pleasantries and smiling, I was unable to communicate any knowledge or information. I know they were motivated by pride, independence, faith, family, subsistence, and tribal identity, but they also seemed not to understand (or care) that their lack of adaptation and denial of compromise might lead to extinction of their way of life, if not their very individual lives.
Marrying and sexual activity outside the tribe was strictly forbidden, and cruelly enforced, in particular for a female even suspected of sexual collusion with an outsider. Even within a specific family, young women were near chattel, and in practical day-to-day village life it appeared to me at the time that a boy of 12 or 13 years was socially more powerful and respected than his mother. Men from the outside world were well-advised to not make eye contact with younger Mixe women, or in any fashion single them out for attention, and in no case would a visitor purposely go near or stay within sight of where the village women washed clothes, bathed themselves and the children, naked or partially so, in the rivers. This was no "Shangri-La" waiting for the handsome, white explorer to flash his teeth and conquer hearts and minds of the simple and grateful natives. Instead, best case, we were tolerated and mostly ignored guests. At the same time, young mothers had no modesty whatsoever about nursing a child, perching it on her hip or forearm, while she worked in the compound. It was also very usual for a child of walking age to approach his mother, uncover a breast and nurse while standing or sitting, then suddenly disconnect to run off and play. Bathing, on the other hand, seemed to occupy an entirely different mindset among the tribe. Because I was a young, curious boy of 12 to 15 years old, my father reminded me, cautioned me often, of the undesirable and perhaps lethal results which my curiosity about nudity could bring to us all.
With one or both of my parents, I visited three different Mixe Indian villages for several weeks at a time, on three different occasions between 1956 and 1959. Between these village stays, we were in transit or arranging logistical matters for future hikes, and at least one small-plane flight, where we landed on a mud strip scraped off a mountain ridge; we landed uphill to slow the plane, and several weeks later when retrieved, took off downhill so as to gain sufficient speed to be airborne when the plane reached the cliff at the end of the runway. We dropped sickeningly, then caught sufficient air to climb and survive. This was my first ever airplane ride, and, it did not result in my becoming a fan of flying.
In addition to trying to get back into the Mixe villages, my dad was trying to set up bank accounts in the villages closest to the Mixe territory, for instance Matias Romero and Acayucan, for native pastors and churches. A small stipend would allow the pastor to do more than just labor at his primary job from dawn to dark...he might have some time to shepherd. The civil rights of Indians in Mexico at the time precluded most of them from accessing banking services. My father even visited a powerful Mexican citizen who was an Assembly of God church member in Mexico City, trying to gain his support against the informally but solidly segregated banking system; the individual, "General Medina," had been a military general at one time, and was still politically well-connected; when we visited his home church I remember the iron gates to the church yard were closed, and armed guards posted at the gate once the service started. Turns out he was famous, but not widely popular. However, he and my Dad were able to influence a handful of bankers to allow checking accounts to be funded for a few Indian "pastors" and because of The General the bankers did not plunder the accounts, or overcharge with fees.
I was 12-years old at the time of the first visit, and I must admit that by now some of my memories about specific trips have become homogenized into one blurred memory from all three trips. What I know for sure is that on the first trip we had driven our own car, a green four-door 1949 Hudson, down from Tucson, through the Nogales port of entry. On another trip we rode a train, starting out again in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico and winding it's way down, and across Central Mexico into the jungle east of the divide. On the train trip we rode class-C buses between villages, and train lines. On the 3rd trip I believe we rode buses from the U.S., having somehow left a car in Brownsville, Texas or perhaps we sold our car then bought a new one in Brownsville...the details fade with time.
On the first trip down we stayed in a succession of motels until we arrived at our destination, San Juan Pablo de Mitla. Once there we stayed in an old courtyard hotel 15 or 20 miles southeast of Ciudad de Oaxaca, where we would stay on subsequent trips. There the hotel's mascot, a larcenous Spider monkey, wandered freely in the court-yard dining area stealing fruit from the plates of guests, and generally making a pest of himself. The first year we stayed there while gathering trail supplies, and arranging for a Zapotec guide with a pack-burro. The Wycliffe kids and I played in the ruins and tombs of the Zapotec temple ruin hovered over by the ever present Catholic mission.
The second time, we stayed long enough to arrange for supplies and us to be flown in to a ridge-top "runway" thereby cutting down our trail time by at least four days. From the landing strip we were within a full-day's walk, that meant first light til last light, of the Mixe village where we met up with a Wycliffe translator and his family temporarily staying as a guest of the village while he worked on translating one of the Gospels, a transcript which would later be recorded onto a vinyl record by a native reader, with the goal to be played to groups of Mixes on a hand-cranked record player. We had met him, his wife and two children during an earlier sortie to Mitla, and the adults of both families had developed a non-competitive affinity for each other. My guess is the Wycliffe people just didn’t want to have our early demise on their consciences.
On this first trip we back-packed in, hiking on a trail which had been a trade route for hundreds of years, using a guide from Mitla to get us to the first Mixe village on the fringe of their territory. Though he himself was Zapotec, he felt confident in guiding us to this outer village without incident. The guide was an affable Zapotec man, probably in his forties, whose European name was Ignacio. He knew the trails and country, as well as some of the families along the trail on the way to our destination Mixe village. Since our destination was one of the Mixe villages on the very fringes of Zapotec territory he would be safe taking us there, but once there, he would unload his burro of our supplies, and head back toward home during daylight, because Zapotecs and Mixes had long-term conflicts, worsened by the belief among Mixes that the Zapotecs had collaborated with the Spaniards and other Europeans; and, of course there was the issue that Mixe's felt the Zapotecs were not truly and completely human, a "fact" which most Zapotecs could not come to appreciate. Point being, Ignacio would be well on his way before dark, after dropping us off.
We were hauling our own food, water, and camping gear, as well as, courtesy gifts for those who provided us hospitality along the way. Additionally, we carried some printed materials for a Wycliffe bible translator, a woman who was reputed to have gone "native." To some extent our delivery of materials was a ruse, an excuse to make contact with her, to make sure she was OK, and that if she had "gone over" to make sure it was voluntary. That village, among the Mixe's most exterior villages, appeared to be relatively close-by to Mitla on the map, but on the trails there were no straight lines, so we had no idea how many trail-miles it was on foot, but reckoned it to be at least 20 percent further than air-miles.
The trails were almost indistinguishable from the dry stream beds running downhill from the continental divide, except that over the hundreds if not thousands of years of human trade, the pack animals and humans had worn a trench several inches deep and wide, through some of the solid rock; Ignacio, however didn't need the gouges in the rock to know his direction, having been this way many times before.
There were many ways to die or get sick along the trail back then. There were Jaguars, poisonous snakes, including the Fer d' Lance viper; there were disease bearing insects spreading malaria and yellow fever, as well as, dysentery amoeba in the water and in the leafy vegatables that one might buy locally or eat in restaurants. Consequently, all drinking water was boiled or dosed with chlorine and any vegetables were bought "dirty" or if already "washed" were boiled before being eaten; but, germs weren't the only water-borne risks; we stopped for a rest by a pristine blue-spring, and pool of water surrounded by liquid looking limestone, but did not fill our canteens because Ignacio pointed out that it was poisonous...it was an Arsenic spring. The spring had no warning sign; one would simply know by word of mouth that it was poisonous, and if you didn't know it was probably because you shouldn't be there in the first place. One of the first cultural lessons we learned in Mexico was that any "accident" involving us was our own fault because if we had stayed home it wouldn't have happened...case closed...Mexican judicial theory at its finest. Some civilized communities of the world still blame the victims, but I digress.
On that first night, we sought and received permission to camp against the outside wall of a hut in a small village compound along the trail; these small compounds were typically made up of a single extended family, two or perhaps three, even rarely four generations including grandparents, their sons and wives, and possibly their sons and daughters. These one room huts were thatched from the fronds of a particular palm tree that was plentiful in that area, short of trunk, with leaves reachable from ground level; mud was packed between the stems and leaves of the palm fronds and other small-diameter wood to discourage peeping, resist animals, and keep out the wind. We placed our ground tarp and sleeping bags with our heads toward the hut's outside wall, built a fire at our feet for cooking and large animal repellent, and surrounded our camping area with a thin white line of Chlordane powder, across which (theoretically), no scorpion, spider, or snake would venture. During the night, we heard a Jaguar hacking up a hair-ball out in the darkness; when sleeping in the open, big cats always sound a lot closer than they truly are...at least that what we told ourselves. My Dad and I had gathered enough dry wood to maintain a fire all night, and though neither of us was assigned a specific time to watch, between us we kept the fire going until dawn, and breakfast.
That morning, after a sumptuous breakfast of jerked beef and corn tortillas we gave gifts and Pesos to our host family, who had lent us their wall for the night, and when Ignacio appeared from his friends' or relatives' house we set off up hill again. As we topped every successive ridge, there was the inevitable drop into the next valley beyond, but the trend downward was never as steep as the trend upwards, and our trail was turning up more obviously with every mile. We forded streams, taking care to remove boots and socks, and used copious amounts of antiseptic foot-powder in a vain attempt to keep our feet dry. I never tired of these vistas -- streams, ridges, valleys and distant mountains, and by mid-afternoon of the second day, we could see our destination village, Santa Maria, it's short and convenient Latino name, in the distance, clinging just below the hill's brow. It seemed almost close enough to touch, but it took another 3 or 4 hours of uphill winding to reach its fringes. I don't remember the Mixe-name of the village, now. All of the villages we visited had a map name and an indigenous name which could be spoken with difficulty, but not easily written in English or Spanish.
When we reached the village, Ignacio's demeanor changed noticeably; whereas on the trail he had been large and in-charge...El Chefe...in this Mixe village he became docile, eyes cast downward while asking directions to the white-woman's house, carefully avoiding even the appearance of arrogance or challenge. When we arrived at her house, as I remember it was the only solid structured house in the village, made mostly of adobe or other rough materials, only the roof was thatch, and the house had multiple rooms; the local Indians had built the house for her, a gift which recognized her white need for excessive space, solid walls and doors, and privacy...something entirely missing and unmissed in Indian life. Though we had never previously met the woman, it was apparent even to me at my unsubtle, self-centered teen age, that she had indeed "gone over." She was by all appearances and social posturing a white-Indian woman, except for her assertiveness, which as it dawned upon me many years later, was somewhat like various characters played by Katherine Hepburn.
She had come to study and learn their dialect and the nuances of their unwritten language in order to assist in constructing audio-Gospels on 78 rpm disks, but she was eventually absorbed, seduced by their world over the years. She spoke English, Spanish, Mixe and Zapotec, though her everyday conversations were in Mixe. Her existence seemed somewhat cloistered and Nun-like, and we saw no evidence that she had a "love interest" with anyone in the village. She was a part of village life, while at the same time being entirely other...a valued social curiosity to her neighbors, and an icon in her adopted village.
If we were expecting that happy-faced, "...glad to see other American Christian white-people...bustling about to make us feel at home..." response to our appearance, that fantasy dissipated immediately. She was not particularly happy to see us, and any attempt to hide her impatience at our appearance was very thinly veiled. I remember a particular affectation of speech, because my parents laughed about it, and in fact we later unkindly mimicked her style. Instead of saying, something to the affect of, "Well I want you to stay here and be my guests" she instead said, "Well I suppose you'll be wanting to stay." And, "Well I suppose you'll be wanting to eat." After the question came a silent hesitation, perhaps hoping to be filled with a negative response, each supposition seemed to be more an invitation to leave, than an invitation to share. Lucky old Ignacio on the other hand was headed back down the trail, with his burro, and some of our Pesos hoping to be out of Mixe territory and at least camped out on Zapotec turf by full darkness.
By noon the next day, it became obvious why the Wycliffe woman was tight-skinned and sinewy; the woman didn't eat, at least not in the sense that we were used to. Any passion she might have had was not being wasted on food preparation or presentation for herself or her guests. We gratefully shared what little she prepared, commenting how everything tasted so good when out in the mountain air, but at first opportunity we went outside the sight of the village, built a small cooking fire, boiled some water for dehydrated chicken noodle soup, toasted some tortillas, and ate some of our satisfyingly salty local jerky, affectionately called "Burro" or at least we hoped it was a figure of speech.
The next few days were spent sneaking our own food, so as not to insult our hostess, while still conserving for the presumed trail days ahead, trying to learn more about what lay beyond this outer village, and what to expect from those interior people. She seemed somewhat flattered to be considered a source of knowledge; during those conversations she was as friendly as she ever got. Our surreptitious mission of sizing her up was never mentioned directly. In fact, I don't remember either of my parents mentioning her organizational affiliation with Wycliffe, her colleagues back in Mitla or their curiosity about her welfare, but as we left, she voluntarily stated to the effect, "Tell them I'm OK and I'm working." That was it. We came back into Mitla two additional times in the next two years, but never again trekked up through Santa Maria, and to my knowledge she never came out, and no one ever saw her again, except for her beloved Mixe in her home village. Some years later, while looking at a photo of some unknown, sparse, uncontrived, vegetarian hippie woman in a commune somewhere, probably near Eugene, Oregon, her skin stretched like canvas across her bony face I thought of that missionary woman again, and it occurred to me that she had probably just wanted to belong...to be "in a community" and when she found that place of belonging with the Mixes she gave it her heart and future...as we would say in today's parlance, "She went all in." I understand now, though I didn't get it then.
Being now without Ignacio's animal to pack our gear, we consolidated the load, minus the materials for the woman, into our own 3 backpacks; we expected to buy certain commodities such as dried-beans, tortillas, and perhaps even a chicken along the way. However, our trip uphill out of Santa Maria toward the interior was cut short. I can't remember how far we had trekked before some blisters on my Mom's feet turned septic in the heat and humidity. It became immediately clear that this was well beyond a simple case of water blisters, which would eventually dry out and turn into callouses, and it was also apparent that we probably had limited time to get her back to medical attention, before gangrene took over one or both of her feet.
That level of medical attention, however, was back in San Juan de Mitla at least two-days, or more likely three, distant...and it was equally obvious that she could not walk out under her own power, and we could not carry her. We dosed her open sores with sulfa-powder, and through many fruitless conversations, but productive gesturing, we finally found an affluent Indian who owned a saddle horse. He agreed to trek out with us while combining some trade in Mitla and would charge us only for the use of his horse. The poor horse appeared to be on the same diet as the Wycliffe missionary woman. My mother, though not a large woman, actually showed more sympathy for the horse than she did for her own condition, but grudgingly climbed aboard, laughing that she thought she heard the horse grunt and comment that "one of you has to get off" then he sighed with resignation.
We were the apparent subject of many humorous conversations and exchanges along the trail, between our travel companion and the other Indians whom we encountered along the way...but we didn't know why until later. The Wycliffe guy in Mitla told us that the laughter was probably because three men (two white guys and an Indian) were walking, while a white woman rode the horse. In essence her riding the horse diminished us as men in the eyes of the other men, and also cast question on her own feminine qualities, the implication being she might be a bit "butch," so the Indian owner was likely "kicking us to the curb" in order to justify himself with his peers. I believe this was true, though we had no direct confirmation; but, years later my Father asked an Indian riding a horse while his pregnant wife walked behind carrying an additional burden for market, "Why does the woman not ride?" The Indian answered, shrugging, appearing confused by the question, "She does not own a horse, Senor!"
We dragged back into Mitla around sunset three full days later, retreating in defeat back to the old court-yard hotel where my mother's feet healed in the relatively clean and dry air, under daily attention of the local Physician. When she could travel with reasonable comfort we continued traveling Southeast to Matias Romero, a rail-road town, also on the transisthmus highway from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico. To the North of that highway lay Mixe country. To the South lay the reputedly uninhabited forbidden lands...so-called because the original people and their culture had demised there, for reasons not entirely understood. Nowadays, the "forbidden land" is replete with tourists in diesel puffing tour buses, wearing down the ancient stone steps of recently discovered pyramid structures left over from the Mayans and their predecessors.
Matias Romero was vibrant with activity; not only was it a railroad and highway town, it was a main market town where the most southeastern Mixe, Zapotec, and Mexicans alike put aside their cultural, religious, ethnic, and political differences and agreed to do commerce with each other, at least long enough to make a buck or two. The market lined both sides of a dark, block-long board walkway, lined on both sides with the stands covered by a corrugated tin roof, since even the so-called “dry season” was not without almost daily rain. We stayed just across the street, looking down from the 2nd floor on the back side of the market, windows open to the marketplace, its noise, insects, and smells filling our room. The hotel was owned by an Asian-Mexican gentleman whose parents had immigrated from China, as I remember, shortly before he was born. I don't remember the name of the hotel but the locals just referred to him and his hotel, interchangeably, as El Chino, roughly translated, “the Chinese guy.” El Chino was not luxurious but it was relatively clean and secure, and our second-floor accommodations made it less likely that a drunk Indio would wander into our room. While not as rambunctious as a fiesta or holiday, market-day was a time when people came to town, and cut loose a bit, perhaps similar to rowdy Accountants having a convention in Las Vegas, or cowboys at the end of the trail in Dodge City. Some of the strictest and most disciplined Mixes seemed to take a moral holiday from their usual “fascism” during market week.
The market had the freshest meat around. I know this because on market days, shortly after dawn, the live-stock was driven into street between our hotel and the meat-stands and noisily slaughtered right there in our front yard. Nothing was wasted! The hide and hair was sold for leather. The fat was trimmed off and sold to the renderer, probably to make soap. The neck, shoulder, ribs and legs were all hacked into somewhat recognizable cuts, most of the blood was collected, as were stomach, liver, heart and intestines. The skulls would be boiled to make "head-cheese" or Cabeza as it is termed; the tongue was cured and seasoned for Lingua, the stomach and some intestine was cut in strips for tripe, or Tripa, and sausage casings. The blood and other offal was used for sausage mixtures. I'm not sure where the hooves went, and I never developed the courage to ask, but even the tails were skinned and glowingly described as "ox tail."
Matias Romero was also a center for drying and roasting the coffee which the Indios brought down from the cooler highlands to trade or sell. The "green" coffee was laid out on the vacant lot’s concrete slabs resembling parking lots, and dried in the sun, raked and turned, before being roasted and sold at market, or transported to other markets in heavy burlap gunny-sacks. Local "coffee" beverage when ordered at a restaurant in Matias Romero would get you a cup full of medium-brown liquid which was made-up of 1/2 thick, potent coffee and 1/2 canned evaporated milk, usually Carnation, with way too much raw sugar added. The resultant "buzz" would have likely got you jail time in at least 37 states in the U.S. at the time, and perhaps a life-sentence in Texas. To get black coffee one had to specify "Cafe sin Leche" that is, coffee without milk, and even then you got only the 1/2 cup of coffee which you would have received with cafe "con leche."
On market nights there was an abundance of street musicians, lights, and activity; in particular I remember the marimba music sounding somewhat sad and foreign, in that the melodies were not the typical Mexican songs, but more ethereal, arguably ancient melodies, or at least Cousins of ancient indigenous tunes; my memory is vague but I want to say that there were two, and even three-man marimbas in the markets...and yes, the musicians were male only. As in many societies, idle public, artistic pursuits are the purveyance of the males only. The nearest analogy of market-days that I can come up with is a community festival, but market happened once a week, and lasted until the goods were sold out.
When the market emptied, the El Centro of Matias Romero returned to its normal sweltering routines, where nothing happened as planned, and never happened on time, or as described. In that part of Mexico at that time, events and conditions truly controlled the human activities; this lack of predictability produced little or no frustration or concern among the locals, who seemed to adapt to the lapses of efficiency with good humor. Gringos, on the other hand, had a different set of expectations, on occasion loudly and rudely voiced. The North American tourists I saw believed apparently that life should always work as planned, and if it didn't someone always had to blamed, and preferably publically and loudly reprimanded. There’s a reason why traveling Americans are typically disliked, though the wealth they bring is welcome.
In Mexico and Matias Romero specifically, I learned first hand about "ugly Americans" and on all too many occasions was embarrassed for "us." A prime example of our presence was an event I personally witnessed at a sidewalk currency exchange window in Ciudad de Oaxaca, when an American who was exchanging pesos for U.S. dollars, waved a sheath of pesos under the clerk's nose, and asked loudly "How much are these worth in REAL money?" At the time, there was little effort on the part of Americans to learn any Spanish, or if known, they were hesitant to use it, and would become loud and abusive when some lowly restaurant waiter, street vendor, or hotel maid did not speak English. Even as a young person, I never understood the logic of abusing someone who was preparing your food or cleaning your room out of your sight; the reasons why this was a bad idea seemed all too obvious to me even at 12-years old. However, the Mexican way was to simply shrug, claim to not understand (No comprendo!) and let the rage roll off. In fact, life was pretty ideal in southern Mexico, provided you had no hard goals or timetables, and few expectations. Which brings me to the local "3rd class" or Class C buses, for which timetables were approximately approximate, or entirely random.
These buses were the village-to-village transportation for regular folks, their kids, marketable goods, and their belongings. By the time they departed for parts unknown, they were stacked high with baskets, boxes, and sometimes live animals tied to the roof of the bus. These vehicles had started their long lives as school buses in some other country, and after changing hands became local transports which had no underfloor compartments; these buses were typically painted light-blue, with the destinations permanently painted on the front and rear of the bus, except, the permanent destinations seldom matched the buses’ actual destination on a given day. Small and portable livestock, i.e., chickens, baby pigs, and sometimes even calves, went aboard the bus, inside with the owner mostly, usually with legs tied together, as did, fresh fruit or vegetables which might spoil in the sun on the roof. Children sat on parents and grandparents. Old people always had a seat, and the aisles were packed as tightly as any Japanese train I ever saw leaving Yokosuka Station. If you were sitting next to a young mother long enough, you would end up being her changing-table for a diapering episode.
The upside was you would also likely be offered food or drink by other passengers, and for sure by the venders who came alongside the bus with fruit and amoeba-laced shaved ice beverages at each stop. One of the adventures of riding 3rd class, was that you could easily end up somewhere you weren't going, if only because, the buses with their permanently printed destinations, were frequently alternated to another route, which was not written on the bus...encouraging one to always find another someone who could answer with certainty, usually not the driver, that "Yes, this bus is going to Acayucan." The apparent routine for communicating route or equipment changes by the bus operators was to tell one person who was waiting somewhere outside the ticket window, and depend on word-of-mouth to spread to all interested, which meant, of course, if you "No habla..." you didn't get the word, and if you trusted the destinations printed on the buses, you almost always ended up somewhere other than your intended destination.
After leaving Matias Romero we pressed eastward to Acayucan, a smaller city on the Atlantic side of the divide. Matias Romero had been hot, with manageable humidity though in the high double-digits. Acayucan air was hot, humid, the air thick and loaded with airborne, jungle "organics" making up a syrupy brew to breathe. My mother, not usually prone to complaining, was as bad off physically and emotionally as I ever saw her. A great part of her issue was that she did not efficiently perspire, and drinking water or tea only caused her to retain fluids and be even more swollen, hot, and miserable. Perhaps she was also going through menopause, though that never occurred to me at the time. She never had a moment of relief. Though the temperature might dip for a half hour during a downpour, the standing water thereafter would increase the humidity and insects. The insect netting would subdue the breeze, and sometimes discourage the mosquitos.
Meanwhile, my father and I sweated like the proverbial hogs. Cooling rivulets of salty water coursed down our chests and backs, clung in our hair, dampening our clothing and causing a cooling evaporative result. But, for my Mom there was simply no escape from the heat. Sundown brought no relief...even with windows wide open in the room. It was time to leave.
We went to a small Mixe Indian village named San Juan Evangeliste, that could be a jumping off point into Mixe country, cooler high-country, from East of the continental divide. My dad had the idea that we could get transportation up the river until the river became unnavigable, then hike in across the Continental Divide from the East. His reasoning was that the approach to the continental divide was more gradual from the East, than the almost straight up ascent from the West; we were destined to never discover the soundness of this logic, because it became more an more apparent that my Mom was not going to make it. Even in San Juan Evangeliste, next to the cooler river, and sleeping in an airy hammock, she simply could not function at the level required to hike and carry in the heat that existed, and, we could not leave her on her own in an Indian community where a "White" women was a magnet for all sorts of interest, much of it undesireable. And while this inability embarrassed her no end, it was not feigned inability, or a matter of motivation; so in San Juan Evangeliste we called off the mission, deciding that we would stay put for perhaps a full day or two then head North along the cooler coast route to Veracruz and on to Brownsville, Texas.
But while in San Juan Evangeliste I witnessed two very interesting events: The first was, Indian men wildly riding their horses on the flood plain of the river, without use of reigns, ropes, or saddles. They rode fast and furious in a thunderous group, weaving in and out, sitting far forward almost on the horses' necks while steering with only their knees, and pulling them to a stop using the horse's mane; it was as though they were truly conjoined beings. I had never before, nor since, witnessed the level of horsemanship that these young guys demonstrated, or the wild abandon and sheer joy of riding that they showed.
The second event involved two large dugout log canoes and a Ford pickup truck. At this time, there was no bridge across the river to San Juan Evangelista, unless one diverted all the way to the Gulf coast and then came back on the North side of the river. Yet a dirt road of sorts came from the South right down to the water's edge, and seemed to emerge from the river again on the San Juan Evangelista side. On that particular day, we were waiting on the south side of the river for our canoe to come over, and while we waited two other canoes appeared from upstream I believe.
The men took a thick plank from each canoe, and lashed the two boards between the canoes, one forward and one aft approximately 5 feet apart. About then the pickup truck, a Ford F-100 I think, appeared. The two canoe owners then put a another wide plank into the "back" or shore side, of each canoe, running the full length of the canoes and setting atop the lashed cross-boards. I don't recall if all the boards were in the canoes, or some were in the bed of the truck. Then, they ran long, thick boards up onto the stern of each canoe from the river-bank, and signaled the pickup truck to drive forward. As I watched the pickup inched up the gradual incline, driver hanging out the window, tires on each board, and slowly drove onto the floating canoes; the driver stayed in the cab; the two canoers poled their craft and it's cargo across the stream to the other shore, arriving perhaps a quarter of a mile downstream on the gradual flood plain for their efforts against the current. I can remember being surprised, and openly impressed...high praise from a teenage boy who probably would have feigned boredom during the Second Coming of Christ.
Our mission that year then ended in defeat, as we boarded a Class C bus for the Gulf Coast, where we would catch the cooler gulf breeze and a standard Class A bus on to Veracruz and finally a port of entry to the U.S., probably Brownsville, Texas; the crossing point is a fact that has been lost to time. We would try to reach the Mixe's again, but thereafter all of our attempts would be from the Pacific side of the country where the heat and humidity were somewhat milder, and our farthest sortie into the Mixe country would occur without my mother being present.
All attempts to gain traction in our quest to save the Indians from eternal damnation were failures from my perspective, though we did manage to smuggle some useful non-hybrid corn seed-stock back to them in the hopes that their meager crops could be enlarged; also we attempted to convince the Mixe farmers to wrap the wooden plow stab with sheet metal so that the gritty red volcanic earth wouldn't wear the wooden “bald” out so often. In that regard we failed. The tribe was not ready to take a chance on angering the earth, or the spirits which might dwell there. In essence, wood was "natural" and processed metal wasn't natural, and so it pissed-off the spirit of the soil. In retrospect, I think they were right, but not for the reasons they believed. My guess is, the only human living which doesn't poison the Earth is "subsistence" living, where the humans have about an even chance of survival vs. the Earth’s survival. In any case, my Dad and perhaps my Mom didn't consider these attempts as failures because we were doing the best we could, at the mission God had set us on. Perhaps these were tests or trials...similar to God requiring Abraham to make Him a sacrifice of his first-born son. Maybe we were just supposed to obey, not succeed. As it turns out, we all have our way of rationalizing our unique experience of the world and its challenges. I have opted for randomness…chance, and the passage of time…and my Purpose is tied up in family, here and now.
My Dad later tried to make the trip alone, and also failed; he barely got back out from the interior to the San Juan de Mitla hotel with his life. That year there was a regional drought at the time he went back into Mixe country alone, and though the Indians did not harm him they would not share or sell any food to him because they feared for their own futures, and White strangers were not considered part of their community or social commitment; their crops and animals were dying of thirst as usually reliable rain didn’t come, and the predictable rivers and streams dried up. Upon his return to Tucson several months later he was almost unrecognizable, having lost 40-or more pounds due to dysentery, dehydration, and a lack of food.
Nowadays when I look at those same mountains and villages in "Mixe country" on Google Earth, there are highways, electrical power and phone lines, and traveler's services all stringing the villages together. The towns are mere hours away by bus and car from Oaxaca instead of being days away by trail, and centuries away culturally. There are satellite dishes on the roofs, and cars parked in the yards, and even small airfields where light planes can land in good weather. Some people easily call that progress; maybe even the Indian residents call it progress; I imagine their lives are certainly easier, healthier, and longer than their grandparents and great grand parents. I guess I remain unconvinced that it is progress, though its certainly a progression of sorts. What the Mexican Army couldn't do in the 1930's has been done in the last half century without a shot being fired by an army, except now the occupiers are armed with the weapons of capital consumption, obesity, Diabetes, MTV, and substance abuse.
Joseph Cambell said (sort of) that deeply engrained cultural myths take many generations, perhaps 30 or more, to completely die out...I wonder if the Mixe still believe they are "The (only) People" and if so, how they manage to cling to that myth in the face of all other information which now floods their villages; or is all that nonsense left to the Old Ones while the knowledgeable current generation pursues hyper-real life...Rev 2.0 of the latest simulacrum that is life and reality as simulated on the Internet and Television.
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Post Script: In December 2016, at the age of 73, this writer accepted a position as a Clinical Behavior Therapist for a non-profit agency working with the Tohono O'odham Nation, aka Papago's, in South-Central Arizona. The O'odham People are the 2nd largest Indian Nation within the U.S; smaller in land and population only to the Navajo Nation. As a People, they are plagued with adult on-set diabetes, obesity, substance misuse, more than their share of vehicle accidents and domestic violence. The intergenerational trauma of European, Mexican, and American colonization and occupation has been at work now for many generations, and like most North American tribes, they seem caught between cultures, neither here nor there; colonization's work will be completed soon enough, as the death rate of the O'odham exceeds the live birth, infant, and adolescent survival rate, creating a decline of somewhat over one-percent of population per census.
I like working with the kids, because it seems possible that their lives could be changed, maybe even improved. I fear the vast majority of my adult clients are doomed to disease, injury, and early mortality as they try to stare down the Existential boredom of reservation life. I'm not sure how long I will want to do this work. I want to do a good and honest job in trying to help, but I don't in any sense feel that I'm on a mission with great purpose as I meander between my own two Eternities, birth and death.
Final post script: In April 2018 I resigned my therapist position on the Rez. There were many reasons, including my need to spend the next few weeks caring for Jennifer after her most recent joint replacement surgery. But the main “move” as the suicide by hanging of one of my clients, 15-year old Michael. He had practiced his final act, we had discussed all the reasons why living was a slightly better choice than dying. But, sometime in February his despair gained the upper hand on his hope and he hanged himself from a Palo Verde branch overhanging a wash. I heard the news via a cell phone call as Jennifer’s surgeon and I met post-surgery and I was learning that all had gone well. I returned to work for awhile, but had trouble meeting with school kids…which was a significant part of my client contact. It took a while to wrap up my case-load and turn it over to a hopeful young Tohono O’odham named Sky. Sky I was hopeful, and confident that he could make a difference.
