spirits, religion, modernity and other issues; comments by R.

Ruth Behar Translated Woman. Chapter: “¡Viva el General Pancho Villa!” and Palmié’s Wizards and Scientists.

Esperanza’s story, Ruth Behar’s story, and Mexican-US history in many ways are entangled, connected and complexly overlapped. The anthropologist storytelling of a relationship with a “proud” and “courageous” woman from the other side of the border recreate the journey of Esperanza’s story into the US. And one particular moment of the story is how Esperanza is cured and guided though the help of a spiritist, Chencha, who is a medium of Pancho Villa. Chencha, this “manly woman” or “macha”, run a spiritist center in San Luis de Potosí that attracts people from the rural and urban areas. When Chencha goes into trance first Amalia Diaz de Bonilla, one of Villa’s many women as Esperanza says, comes to let the audience know that Villa is looking forward to celebrate his own birthday party. Then Villa comes and starts talking with the audience asking them to march as his army, what people do within the center. Then Villa asks them how they are, and people begin to tell their problems and testimonies. For each person Villa founds ways to cure and bless her or him, and more importantly to cut the evil produced by the envy or the harm made by the enemies.

Then, Chencha/Villa asks Ruth Behar if she wanted to know how to cure, and if so she/he asked her to bring her/him 3 coins of 1 peso (almost out of circulation at that time). Behar founds herself in the position of asking the rest of the people for 3 coins completely devaluated and wonders how genius Chencha/Villa was to ask the rich Gringa for coins without value. She manages to find them and Chencha/Villa tells they are one for her, one for her family and one for the pueblo, and she must always have them if she wants to learn how to cure.
The spirit of Pancho Villa, of Niño Tomasito, of Amalia Diaz de Bonilla, and other entities of the spirit world are part of our same world but their depictions are a problematic issue for the scientific rationality heir of the enlightened enterprise. Pancho Villa’s images available in the Mexican urban and rural landscape, especially in the markets, showing “the man who dared to invade the US”, with prayers to the man who “triumphered over the powerful” and “made his enemies back down” are part of “popular cults” (for a lack of better worlds) also present in all Latin America in different forms. Religious experience that convey the strength and powers of men and women that defy the powerful and help the poor are often mixed with political experiences such as Pancho Villa’s, and this should not be seen as contradictory or problematic.

In Argentina the Guachito Gil or the Difunta Correa are examples of these types of experiences disengaged from official religious institutions. One problem, though, is how to relate these experiences with the discussion of traditional/modern, hegemonic/subaltern, patriarchal/women-empowering societies such as Mexico, Argentina or Canada? In some aspects curing or doing harm with the help of Pancho Villa could be seen as the weapons of the poor paraphrasing Scott? Behar mentions that Esperanza found her way to curse her violent and evil husband who became blind, the same happened to her mother doing harm to her biological father who died alone “like a dog.” This should also be seen as a gender vengeance? But is it religious experience an antidote to political, economical and symbolical injustice? Is it kinship and the sexual domain the epicenters of spiritual and religious struggles? Or is it more than that? Behar starts her book with the story of a serpent that has not only to be killed by Esperanza but also its tongue has to be cut in order not to let the serpent tells Esperanza killed it. Pancho Villa is more a metaphorical force for the historical imagination relocating and unfixing the fixity of gender while genderizing history and giving strength for the female and class struggles?

These “problematic” issues (spirits, mediums, Villa’s presence in the living, power relations) raised in Behar’s story are at the core of Palmié’s Wizards and Scientists. He asks what makes “certain claims on the past contextually negotiable and dispels other beyond the threshold of credibility” (5)? Things like ghosts or the spirit of a black slave called Tomás behind Palmié’s back are usually not considered as part of the anthropological or historical work. But, Palmié asks, stories of black slaves corpses killed by the slavery/colonial/industrial/modern machinery are not “part of the ethical and intellectual heritage of the West as a whole” (9)? So here “religion” becomes “politics” and vice versa. [Note: I was writing this, reading Palmie’s book with the TV on, when a CBC documentary about the murdered of Alexandra Wiwcharuk in Saskatoon in 1962 was on air (http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/main_beautyqueen.html) and at one point the author Sharon Butala from Saskatchewan narrates how she started hearing the voice of the girl asking for justice and wrote the novel The girl in Saskatoon (2008)].

Palmie needs 77 pages to introduce his research and the types of discussions he is trying to engage with to show the impossibility in many instances of split religion, spirituality, politics, economics and history not only in the Caribbean region but in the Western world too. He made explicit that in many aspects modernity started in the rationalization and industrialization of the sugar plantations in the Caribbe before that in the metropolis. I agree with Palmie, is it possible to separate slavery, sugar plantations, spirits, witchcraft, capital accumulation, industrialization, and modernization of metropolis and colonies? Is it possible to separate the development of western Canada and the construction of the Canada Railway from the dozen of thousands of Chinese workers, the weight of thousands of corpses in the modernization of Canada, and stories of ghosts and spirits1?

What Palmie is trying to do is to think in the dark side of modernity localizing an incomplete form of Afro-Cuban knowledge, morality and social action, he wants to “entertain the possibility that the modernity we struggle to understand, and perhaps might wish to abandon, is not just ours. It also belongs to those whose physical abuse and intellectual denigration was the price paid for its achievement. Before we decide to exit from whatever it is we find ourselves imprisoned in, their voices should be heard” (77). Palmie is also trying to engage in an Afro-Atlantic analysis of the witchcraft of modernity, how can we call the harm (daño) done by the whites in the period of slavery and the dehumanization of human bodies for economic purposes?

I see a huge connection between these two books in that they both are recuperating the spiritual practices of Mexican women and Afro-Cuban people. These practices that were considered as being part of a backward Mexican or Cuban are reevaluated by feminist anthropologist such as Behar or historian-anthropologist such as Palmie or chicano writers such as Cisneros who make altars for the muertitos, or who now like Cisneros say, “‘Nos estamos haciendo muy brujitas’ (We’re becoming very witchy), and laugh” (Behar 1993: 342).

1 In Chinese-Canadian Dreams and Disillusions: ‘Tales from Gold Mountain’ by Irene Tanner-Yuen the author tells the story of “Chu embarks on a two-month long voyage to Canada in search of his father, a poor farmer who left his family months ago to find work. Chu finds work in Canada on a work gang, building the railroad. But there he encounters the bitterness of the Chinese men that were there before him, who experienced mistreatment and prejudice of the white overseers.
Search no more, young man!, one grizzled old worker said. Don’t you know that too many have died here? My own brother was buried alive in a mudslide.
My uncle was killed in a dynamite blast, muttered another, No one warned him about the fuse. The angry memories rose and swirled like smoke among the workers. One day, Chu enters a half-finished tunnel even though the other men warn him of ghosts inside. He meets the ghost of his father inside, who explains to him that an accident killed many Chinese and white men. A ton of rock dropped on us and crushed us flat. They buried the whites in a churchyard, but our bodies were thrown into the river…We have no final resting place. Chu and the other workers gather bundles of chopsticks and straw to perform a symbolic burial on a mountaintop. Afterwards, a rope turns into a snake, to guard the graves of the Chinese who were killed in the accident. (http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/childrensliterature/105222).”