INTRODUCTION: GEOGRAPHY AND ETHNOLOGY

Although historians and anthropologists may understand the indigenous history of northwestern Mexico as multiple processes of cultural change in which discrete and composite groups continuously fashioned and refashioned their identities in the context of attempts by outsiders to dominate them, very different convictions shape indigenous views of the past. As the text quoted above indicates, the Rarámuri or Tarahumara rendering of history emphasizes the importance of memory in preserving an incorruptible worldview as well as the polarization that distinguishes “the people” from outsiders. The reproduction of knowledge is a culturally embedded social process for this particular northwestern Indian group – just as it is for non-Rarámuris (known to natives as chabochis, or children of the devil).

The recounting that follows, although told with deep regard for indigenous cultures, is one that will be most intelligible to outsiders. It will be told as a history, not of a simple tension between survival and incorporation but of complex processes of resistance, obfuscation, accommodation, appropriation, subversion, revival, and invention. Nor is it a history in which critical symbols of cultural identity such as language, religion, land, and purity of blood can be neatly isolated to account for ethnogenesis. Moreover, in the northwest the interaction of native peoples with European intruders bore the peculiar stamp of a frontier volatility that lasted beyond the colonial period. Incorporation of the region by Spain and Mexico took place erratically over more than three centuries as expansionist states competed in North America, transforming interaction and migration patterns among groups less sedentary than Indian peoples to the south.