Saying Goodbye in the Sierra Madre

01.23.07 | 1:00 PM ET

Alfonzo was standing by the cemetery rock wall, weeping with a crowd of men who had been drinking and grieving for the past 48 hours. They carried their sombreros or ballcaps in their hands; their hair had been molded like clay.

“Pancho,” he said to me, motioning at the banjo strapped on my shoulder, his hand raised in a vaguely Italian gesture of pronouncement. “We need to talk.” Alfonzo’s face unhinged; he couldn’t finish his sentence. He began weeping. 

“Country, Pancho, country,” demanded Cornelio, a stocky older man who lived near our cabin. He was clearly the person most affected by country music in the Sierra Madre, also known as Copper Canyon. He once heard a song by Johnny Cash during a rare visit to Chihuahua City. The English word “country” had remained with him ever since. After a long drinking bout, he would often pound on our door at dawn and call out, “country, country, Pancho, get out here and play some country.” I would see him the following day. He would nod, I would nod, but neither of us would utter a word, as if we hardly knew each other.

A young village woman had died in Chihuahua City giving birth. She was working as a maid to a Mexican family, a common job for young Raramuri/Tarahumara women; her husband had found day jobs making adobe bricks. They lived in one of the shantytowns or colonias on the outskirts of the dusty city, which was now only a four-hour bus ride from Creel, a nearby mountain town in the Sierra Madre. 

Without a priest, the locals had prodded a visiting Mexican carpenter into service, who changed into his good pants and clean shirt, and then offered some verses of solace and led the chants of the rosary at the mission. After two days of viewing in the home of the mother-in-law, the burial took place in the graveyard, referred to in our village as the pantheon. 

Following a narrow trail along the cornfields, I cut behind the mission walls and slowly made for the log cabin on the other side of the hollow. Sweeps of pines and towering canyon walls served as borders for fields of corn. 

I had never been to a round-the-clock home viewing before. A brigade of kids and ragged dogs met my entrance at the dirt clearing around the cabin. A collection of corn cobs littered the grounds, like the corn cobs and mounds found at 12th century Anasazi sites in my childhood haunts in Arizona. Several older men, including Alfonzo, El Chapareke and Bernabe, were chatting outside. A few others sat quietly on benches made of split logs. I was greeted with the Raramuri handshake—that dusting of the palms of our fingers—and then waved inside.

Despite the blaring um-pah-pah of norteño music on a boom box in the corner, an air of regret hovered inside the sparse mourning room. Women huddled around the coffin in the emptied chamber. The variance in their dresses struck me; on one side sat those in home-stitched colorful skirts and matching tops and scarves, wearing huaraches, and on the other side sat women in polyester skirts, blouses, and plastic shoes. All the women were portly figures. 

I spent a few minutes staring at the young woman. Her death was a horrible reminder of modernity’s price for this community. Many Raramuri women made up one of the last indigenous groups in the world that still delivered their babies on their own, sometimes in the forests. One friend once saw a woman cut the umbilical cord of her child with a piece of broken glass. The girl in the coffin had actually gone to the hospital in Chihuahua City for her delivery. I made my peace and departed.

The funeral, Bernabe told me outside the cabin, would also be a festive occasion. They were celebrating with the dead, inviting them to escort the departed soul away with them. Due to the fact that it took at least a week to prepare tesguino, tequila had broken through the dike of tradition and poured forth.   

“After the funeral, the dead can leave us in peace,” Bernabe said. “Go away and not bother us.”

The Raramuri concept of immortality was so strong, Carl Lumholtz wrote, “that death means to them only a change of form.” According to William Merrill, a Smithsonian anthropologist who spent three years in a remote village for his groundbreaking study, “Raramuri Souls,” “People must overcome their feelings of sadness as soon as possible after the death of a loved one because if one’s souls are sad, they will want to leave the body to be with the deceased.”

The service at the mission lingered for hours. It appeared as if the village couldn’t bear to part with the young woman. When it started to drizzle, everyone hovered by the towering wood doors, as if they had received a slight reprieve.

About halfway through the service, I entered the mission, took off my hat, and chose a spot on the men’s side of the sanctuary. I spotted my companion Carla sitting in a quilt of women on the right. The Mexican carpenter was finishing the rosary. Haggard and long faces rejoined in groans. The fiddler and guitar players slumped in the one pew to the side of the altar, barely able to pull themselves together to play a pascol song at the carpenter’s urging. The young woman’s husband, a close cousin of the guitar player, wept by his side. 

Then I caught Cornelio’s eye. Or rather, he picked up on my appearance in the mission. A grin rippled across his crooked face and propelled him from his kneeling stance.

“Pancho,” he screamed. “Country, country, we need some country!”

I tried to flee, but it was too late. Cornelio snagged my arm, chiding me for leaving my banjo at the cabin.

“Get it,” he shouted. 

I felt like running away. Instead I saw the guitar player who waved me on.

By the time I returned, the distraught villagers flanked the procession led by the carpenter, the desperate young husband clutching a blaring boom box. A band of guitar players, a fiddler and soon my banjo straggled along, attempting to play a ranchera love song. Splashing through puddles, we swept the mission plaza with our shuffle and marched around the corn fields and then slowly made it across the arroyo. The procession reached the cemetery rock walls, with the carpenter and sober adults and children in front, fracturing into multiple ceremonies. 

We marched up and down the graveyard, which had more tequila bottles than headstones. Some of the bereaved stumbled onto graves and even fell atop the coffin when we arrived at the young woman’s burial ground. We received our cue to crank up the tunes. Martin, the lead guitar player, nodded for me to follow. We didn’t manage to play more than a couple of cumbias, all out of tune, the dazed husband singing verses from other songs, still clutching at his boom box. 

There was more than one burial ritual taking place. An elder called out orders in Raramuri while the coffin was being prepared. The Mexican carpenter and several others continued to recite prayers and the rosary in Spanish. The fiesta for the dead spirits bantered around the edge of the crowd in laughter and song.

While the elder intoned a speech, family members opened the coffin one more time. Two women wailed and clutched the body, while a younger cousin stuffed in additional clothes, a bottle of Coke, and a package of cookies. The coffin had already been stockpiled with specific portions of corn, beans and tortillas. 

An aunt suddenly collapsed, overcome by the booze, a sleepless night on a bus from Ciudad Juarez, and the tragedy of the death. A few turned and watched her crumple onto the ground. Within a short time, a couple of teachers from the local boarding school were fanning her, holding her legs in the air. 

The elder then led family members in a circular ritual procession, sprinkling drops of esquiate, a roasted corn mixture, and Coke and bottled fruit juices on the coffin and themselves, in order to satisfy death and ward off evil spirits. As the coffin was finally lowered, children pitched four handfuls of mud onto the grave. 

After a moment of silence, people veered off to the rock walls, supporting each other’s stumbles. I wandered toward Alfonzo and Cornelio and a couple of other men. They all possessed the weary looks of sorrow and deprivation. They passed around an unmarked bottle.

“I’m happy you are with us in these moments,” Alfonzo said.

“One more song,” Cornelio bellowed.

I smiled and kept the banjo slung on my back. Alfonzo raised his hand again as if to make a pronouncement. “We, Raramuri,” he said, “have a hard life.” He couldn’t hold back the tears. His voice had long since broken, his lower lip quivering. “I have been on the other side,” he said, “but we Raramuri…” He unraveled, weeping, as another man comforted him, offering him the bottle. 

I stood quietly, watching him, trying to understand what he wanted to say. His allusion to “the other side,” I assumed, referred to the United States. Within a couple of minutes, Alfonzo tried again to speak, but he was too upset, and shook his head and walked away. 

Cornelio staggered over and leaned against my shoulder for support, grinning his riddled grin, and quietly said, “Pancho, we’re all leaving for the other side one day.”

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