Journey to the Tarahumara

Anyone who knows the writings of Antonin Artaud knows he spent time with the Raramuri people of Sierra Madre;also called Tarahumara by outsiders. This video is about the Tarahumara as runners. If you are unfamiliar with Artaud, here is an online text, The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud (PDF 109 pages)by Jacques Derrida and Paule Thvenin, which may help.

The first work of the Theatre of Cruelty Artaud initially intended for the stage was entitled The Conquest of Mexico, a work based on the Aztec religion and other primitive cultures of the Americas. Partly to escape his numerous failures in Paris, Artaud left for Mexico in 1936 to do research for this play and live in a land where he believed "a new idea of man [was] being born." Unfortunately, Artaud encountered a culture heavily influenced by the same European ideas he was fleeing. The playwright encountered Communist inspired political unrest and an intellectual coeterie of writers and artists, such as Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and JosÎ Clemente, who were adapting modern European styles to depict their own culture. Since Artaud was trying to escape these European styles and ideas, he found himself alienated from the Mexican artists and intellectuals and, unable to speak Spanish, soon felt isolated in a land that he hoped would provide some form of salvation for him. Perhaps as a consequence, he spent much of his time in Mexico City searching for drugs. He did befriend LuÏs Cardoza y Aragon, a surrealist poet Artaud had initially met in Paris. Aragon helped Artaud financially by arranging lectures and translating articles for the Frenchman.

Strangely, Artaud had no interest in the Aztec ruins nearby, which had become tourist sites by this point. Artaud yearned to witness authentic culture untouched by Western influence. Accordingly, Artaud arranged to visit the Tarahumaras, an isolated tribe in the Sierra Madre of Northern Mexico who made use of peyote in their religious rites. During this arduous journey, Artaud experienced a painful bout of drug withdrawal. Once there, however, Artaud participated in one of the peyote rituals. What else happened during this visit, we have only authorís own reports. Many of these reports were written or revised several years after original visit and were shaped to conform to Artaudís belief system at the time, so their veracity is questionable. These pieces were published posthumously as the A Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumara. In this work, Artaud describes a world full of syncretic symbols - crosses, faces in stone - a perfect blending of primitive symbolism and nature, which, for Artaud, typified the lost pre-Renaissance understanding of the world. He also described the peyote ceremony, during which he experienced the ìswirling energies of the earth below. (From Little Blue Light)

There are currently about 50,000 Tarahumara living in the Sierra Madre Occidental in northwestern Mexico. They live in small isolated clusters with most the population concentrated in the Barranca del Cobre, or the Copper Canyon. The Tarahumara indians are part of the Uto-Aztecan indian lineage and are closely related to the Apaches of the Southwestern United States. The area of Northwest Mexico that the Tarahumara lives in is very rugged and unforgiving. The Barranca del Cobre is a chain of five very deep canyons surrounded by very tall mountains that reach almost a mile and a half above sea level. Three of the five canyons are deeper than the Grand Canyon of the United States. The area is different though because it receives much more rainfall and is covered with more vegetation. The terrain is very rugged, so much as to lead to the fact that the area has never been thoroughly mapped or explored (Lutz 66). The area is one of th e coldest in Mexico and soil conditions are very poor. It is because of this that the Tarahumara are semi-nomadic and are cave dwellers for part of the year. ( Running Feet by Art Beauregard)