c. 1996 Religion News Service
ANGAHUAN, Mexico _ Speaking in a soft singsong, the town elder recalled villagers’ fear when a strange hillock spewing fire and smoke broke through the furrows of Dionisio Pulido’s cornfield.”People began to cry, but it was the adults crying, and then the little ones as well,”said Jorge Gomez Amado of that dark Saturday in 1943 when a new volcano was born.”That night, no one slept.” Today, more than 50 years later, Paricutin, a towering black volcano surrounded by petrified lava and miles of ashen sand, still dominates the physical and spiritual landscape of this remote area of Central Western Mexico.
Villagers in this beautiful mountainous valley have televisions that bring them the latest news, they’ve talked with scientists who have explained geothermal principles of the volcano, and many have traveled all over the United States to earn a living. Yet, like their ancestors before them, they still tell myths and stories to explain the cataclysmic eruption that forever changed their lives.
The volcano, Gomez Amado explained to a visitor as he carefully cradled a tape recorder in his worn red handkerchief, was born because of the devil’s wager with Jesus over who could attract more attention.
Others explain the eruption in biblical terms as one of a series of divine punishment for feuding villagers. First, they were visited by a plague of locusts, then by months of violent earth tremors. Finally, they received the worst punishment, when the beautiful Itzicuaro valley was smothered in gray silt and two entire towns were buried under a black river of ash and lava.
Despite Mexico’s pride in its modern, secular image, these villagers, like many Mexicans, interpret the world through a popular Catholicism peopled with miraculous saints, repentant sinners and a vengeful God. In a country where justice often goes awry and laws are ignored with impunity, these religious stories give order and meaning to their lives: The evil are punished, the good are rewarded and history itself takes on a supernatural, religious cast.
The volcano blanketed a 15.5-square-mile area with lava, burying the villages of Paricutin and San Juan Parangaricutiro and forcing its residents to rebuild new towns elsewhere. Its ash destroyed cropland and silenced all forest life in a 186-square-mile area.
Before it gave a last shudder and fell silent, in March 1952, Diego Rivera, Mexico’s famous painter and muralist, visited the site and painted a tableau; scientists from all over the world camped on its hillsides, recording its every lava shower and ash flow; and adventurers from the United States reported on its natural fireworks in The New York Herald and in post-World War II movie newsreels.
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Villagers’ stories about these events have a decidedly different tone than the scientific and media accounts of the day. They feature a dancing devil, a God angered by a felled cross, and a national gathering of Catholic saints and the Virgin of Guadalupe to decide which Mexican village would be sacrificed to appease the volcano.
Their myths don’t just explain the end of one way of life before the volcano. They also give meaning to the present. Such religious myths, anthropologists say, are often born in oral culture such as this one, where collective memories are passed on through myths, jokes and songs rather than historical archives and computer data bases. “Mexico subsists on myths, especially in the countryside,”said Mexican researcher Isabel Mora Ledesma, who has studied the Paricutin religious stories.”They are part of the identity and history of Mexico. They usually spring up among the people as a way to explain the unexplainable.” It says something about this town’s fierce traditionalism that this oral Indian story-telling persists. The volcano Paricutin, named after one of the destroyed towns over which it stands, lies in the heart of the ancient Tarascan empire. In pre-colonial Mexico, the Aztecs never succeeded in conquering the Tarascans, or, as they are known today, the purepecha.
Today, as much of Mexico assimilates, Indian villagers who live near the volcano cling as fiercely to their culture as their ancestors.
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Unlike many other Mexican Indians, everyone in the town of Angahuan still speaks the Indian tongue of purepecha. Women walk the streets in the brightly colored skirts, aprons and embroidered blouses that date from the Spanish conquest. And this year, when the rest of Mexico adopted American daylight savings time for the first time, the entire village simply refused to keep pace.”Even though they changed the hours everywhere else, I go up there and don’t get to eat breakfast until 10:30 because everyone is working on the same time frame they did before,”said Andrew Roth-Seneff, an American anthropologist who does research in the town.”They haven’t changed whatsoever in their hours. It’s not relevant to their lifestyle. It’s not tied up to the use of the watch.” The eruption, said Roth-Seneff, who heads the anthropology department at the nearby Colegio de Michoacan, became a way for villagers to interpret the rivalries, murders and land disputes that divided the valley’s three villages during a time of national turmoil over agrarian reforms.
One village backed the church and business interests. Another supported the government policy of seizing and redistributing hacienda land. A third village was equally divided.
Villagers translated these battles over souls and money into religious morality tales, with saints often serving as the protagonists. That’s not surprising in towns like this one, said Roth-Seneff, where saints are viewed as the patrons of the pueblo who can intervene in favor or against its villagers.
Villagers, ever conscious of their power, treat the statues and paintings of these saints respectfully, making sure they have pretty clothing, flowers and decorations and three meals a day, which typically consist of incense smoke. These saints are so important to the villagers, said Roth-Seneff, that it was only the news of their departure from one pueblo, as the lava lapped at doorways, that convinced many reluctant residents to leave.
Valente Soto Bravo, a purepecha educator who often can be found having a cup of coffee in a new tourist lodge perched above the volcano, has collected a wealth of local lore about the eruption. He shares one popular purepecha song, translating it into English:”How is it that Paricutin destroyed what was so beautiful, orchards that gave so many fruits?”the song laments.”San Juan was so beautiful. Now all that can be seen of it are its church towers from afar.” The eruption, he said, interrupted a shared life of festivals, traditions and even unique linguistic peculiarities among three Indian communities, two of which were forced to leave the valley.
Yet, like everything else about the volcano, even this exodus has a divine purpose in villagers’ religious myths. As the villagers of Paricutin ran from the encroaching lava in June 1943, with the few possessions they could carry, some neighboring townsfolk shut their doors against them. The community of Paricutin was damned, many believed, because it supported agrarian reform.
In disputes related to land conflicts, its villagers also felled a hillside cross, which neighboring villagers still recall as a sign of heresy.”This is their living hell, look upon it with your own eyes,”preached one priest from a neighboring town as they fled, village elders recalled years later.
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These same elders had a far more favorable religious myth about why the volcano destroyed their town. In their version, as recorded by researcher Mora Ledesma, the town’s saint, San Salvador, in a meeting with other saints and the Virgin of Guadalupe, volunteers to have the town’s sons bear the brunt of a punishment that would be visited on Mexico to save others from suffering.
The community of San Juan, the second town that evacuated the valley, sees its departure in yet another way. Residents resettled in an urban area a few hours away where many villagers and their children went on to become successful professionals and entrepreneurs. Town elders describe this in near-biblical terms as a delivery to a new promised land.
In the town plaza of San Juan Nuevo, or”New San Juan,”vendors hawk Indian specialties: churipo, a spicy and filling beef stew, and corundas, or round balls of corn meal filled with spices and steamed in a corn leaf.
But only the elders still speak purepecha, and many other Indian traditions have been lost. Still, these relocated villagers continue to commemorate their collective memories of the past.
Villagers have installed their miraculous Christ, El Senor de los Milagros, in a glass case in the place of honor in a brand new church. The church is filled with beautiful murals that tell the story of the eruption.
In May 1944, villagers left San Juan with their miraculous Christ to escape the lava flows that had already reached its borders. In a two-day journey, this procession of people, livestock and worldly possessions came to their new home, with the Christ as their standard.
Every year, the villagers take the icon on a pilgrimage back to the lava-covered ruins of the church where it once resided to pray, sing and dance.
Today, the miraculous Christ draws pilgrims from all over Mexico.”People say that the Christ continues to grow,”one Angahuan villager remarked,”and I think it is so.” Or, as Gomez Amado would put it, for a while the devil and his work _ the fiery volcano _ attracted more attention as he bet in his wager. Now, however, the volcano has been silenced, and El Senor de los Milagros, the Christ of San Juan, has been restored to his rightful place.
MJP END LEVANDER
