A tragedy in Oasis

I returned on Monday from a week-long trip to Mexico City to interview for jobs (I ended up getting a position as an Assistant English Teacher at a prestigious British international school). When I returned to the Colonia Martín Lopez, I stopped in with Chita to catch up on the events I missed. The only thing she talked about was the murder of a young rarámuri man, aged about 20 or 21. This is what happened:
Around 12:30 AM on Sunday, a drunk chabochi wandered into the settlement and found a rarámuri girl standing by the entrance. The girl was 12-year-old Mara, the oldest daughter of Rosa Angela. The drunkard was attempting to rape her in front of the church when the young rarámuri man, Lorenzo, husband of Laura and father to two infant girls, walked by and saw the rape taking place. Since most of the rarámuri sleep and wake with the sun, it was unusual that any rarámuri would have walked by in time to stop the rape. Lorenzo interfered and pulled the drunk chabochi off the girl. The drunkard swung at Lorenzo and a fight ensued. At some point, the drunkard pulled out a small knife and stuck Lorenzo several times in the abdomen. He also cut Mara's legs when she tried to interfere. The drunkard took off when Lorenzo stopped defending himself and lay still on the pavement. Mara alerted the closest rarámuri family, who alerted Chita, who immediately called the police and went to the settlement to set matters straight herself. She attempted to help Lorenzo, but he had been stabbed too many times--he needed a hospital. Chita says the police arrived very quickly and were very helpful--within minutes they caught the drunkard and sent for an ambulance, but Lorenzo died before the ambulance arrived.

Chita is of course very distraught and spent a lot of time describing how impotent she felt. One of her life goals is to help the rarámuri of Oasis attain a healthier lifestyle--better education and economic opportunities, better nutrition, and a safe neighborhood for the children to play in.

It turns out Lorenzo was Esperanza's cousin. I returned to Oasis two days after the murder occurred, and I found the rarámuri very serious and quiet. As far as I can tell, daily activities are still continuing: the children go to school, the women sit outside to sew, and they walk up the street to go grocery shopping. Julissa and Jiovana told me about the murder themselves, but they spoke as if they were telling me the plot of a movie; in other words, they don't seem to have been traumatized by the event, although they say that they will never again step out of their houses after dark.

There has been one important change. The races have been suspended indefinitely, since they need to take place at sunset due to the treacherous heat during the day.

A few scattered reflections about rarámuri concept of time vs. Western concept of time

Many months ago, an anthropologist friend mentioned off-hand that the rarámuri have a different way of measuring time, that the entire concept of time as I know it is non-existent in rarámuri culture. That time is an invention, in all the forms that we rely on: seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries. The rarámuri measure time differently; even concepts that I take for granted, such as the idea of "a long time" and "a little while" take on different meaning in rarámuri culture, or perhaps do not exist at all. Once I attended a political meeting with about 15 rarámuri women from Oasis, of all ages. The youngest was 2 years old and the oldest was probably well past her sixties. We all had to fill out registration forms so that the political campaign could have our information to contact us, and of course the forms ask everyone their age. The younger rarámuri women born in the city know how to read and write, but many of the women born and raised in the Sierra do not know how, so campaign volunteers helped them by asking the questions on the forms and filling them out for them. When they asked the women their age, most of them answered "I don't know." I heard one volunteer, a young man dressed in a suit, say to Teresa, grandmother of 19 and great-grandmother of one, "which month do you like? Just choose one." He was smiling at her, teasing her lightly, but I thought it was disrespectful.

Cuka and Esperanza don't know how old they are. Cuka has three children, aged 14, 12 and 9. Esperanza has two children, aged 15 and 6. From looking at them, I figure the women are about 32 or 33 years old, but they could well be younger...or older. Chita, the mestizo neighbor who knows all the happenings in Oasis, says that Cuka arrived to Oasis with her parents and her new husband when she was probably about 14 years old, but there is no way to be sure. Rarámuri mothers who live deep in the Sierra usually don't travel to hospitals or clinics to give birth, so their babies never receive birth certificates. What's more, they are so physically far from Western society and its conventions that they never attend school, which means they never learn to keep track of time with a calendar. When I asked Esperanza how old she was, she answered, "I don't know. My mom never knew what year it was."

With migration to the city, most young rarámuri enter school and become familiar with Western ideas of time, although I think many of them (including Julissa and Jiovanna) find themselves between two cultures, two sets of established norms and ideologies. In traditional rarámuri culture, age is measured by the body's changes. As a female, you are a teweke (girl) until menstruation begins, and then you become an iweke (woman) and it is time to begin activities that iwekes do: find a partner, have children, learn to sew and cook and care for children. The idea of teenage or adolescent years is non-existent, although I can see traces of Western influence in many rarámuri families in Oasis. For example, Esperanza's daughter is 15 and does not have a partner, does not plan to have one anytime soon, and does not know how to cook or sew. Esperanza once said that she wants her daughters to enjoy their youth and not work or take on the responsibilities of marriage and adulthood until they are about 18--a very Western way of measuring time and age. More and more, mothers who do not know their own age are adopting this idea and raising their children by it.

And yet, the women often tease me for being 24 years old and still unmarried and childless. They teasingly call me "teweke" (girl) when most Westerners would consider me a young woman. They often ask me when I am going to settle down and have kids, and are very amused when I say I have no plans in the near future.

My anthropologist friend remarked once that events in Oasis are never scheduled for a specific time, and that "a long while" for us is often considered a short time for the rarámuri. I have observed this in the hours upon hours that the rarámuri spend dancing matachines during December and dancing as fariseos during Holy Week. Dancing often doesn't stop even throughout the night, and physical exhaustion does not seem to be a factor in calculating how long the dances should last. The same with the races: in the Sierra, they can last for days, but even in the city I have witnessed races of distances and length of time that I could never even dream of completing myself, but are a norm within their culture. It is very difficult to articulate and form conclusions about such a theoretical topic, but I really feel that the way the rarámuri measure age and the passage of time is an extremely important marker of cultural identity. Certainly a lot of these thoughts have caused me to question why I measure my life the way I do, and why I possess certain ideas and behaviors--all things to explore in more writing to come.