Every spring along Oaxaca’s Southern
Sea, pilgrims visit El Pedimento, one of the many encantos
known to the people of the region. Native speakers of Chontal,
Zapotec, Mixtec, Chatino, and Huave arrive on foot, in taxis,
and on trucks, to leave petitions and offerings at this
place of answered prayers.
Almost every town in coastal Oaxaca has its encanto, a
physical space where a fissure leads to an unknown, metaphysical
world. In the past, conquests and disasters led to the eradication
of a few encantos. Today, development and emigration threaten
these enchanted places.
In rich, evocative text and brilliant photographs, The
Edge of Enchantment: Land, Dreams, and History in Oaxaca
addresses the history and culture of the Native people of
the Huatulco region, those living in the area and others
who have migrated north. This extraordinary book, the result
of years of passionate research, intimately describes the
land as the lifeline of these people and asks what transpires
when their sovereignty is threatened. |
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From the foreword: Numinous Landscapes
Community lies at the heart of Native life. By community,
I mean both the shared histories, practices, and beliefs
that sustain our sense of identity and the specific places
we call home, to which we remain rooted. What delights me
most about this marvelous book, and makes me particularly
proud of its publication by the Smithsonian’s National
Museum of the American Indian, is the way in which, through
stories of the peoples themselves, The Edge of Enchantment
invites us into the Native communities of coastal Oaxaca.
Native scholar Jace Weaver has written of the “numinous
landscapes that are central to [Native] faith and . . .
identity,” but rarely have those landscapes been so
rapturously portrayed as they are in The Edge of Enchantment.
For the better part of the last decade, anthropologist
and folklorist Alicia Gonzáles, a senior curator
at the Museum, and photographic artist Roberto Ysáis
have visited the towns and hamlets of the Huatulco–Huamelula
region of México, speaking with and photographing
many of the people who live there. Over time, the scholar
and the photographer, and the people of coastal Oaxaca,
became a greater part of each other’s lives. The trust
that grew up among them pervades this book, as it does the
exhibition of the same name on view at the Museum’s
George Gustav Heye Center in New York. Dr. González,
whose writing captures enduring modes of memory and expression,
has structured her book to reflect boundaries the people
of Huatulco and Huamelula use to define their communal sovereignty.
By printing many of his photographs on old cloth and paper,
or as antique postcards, Roberto Ysáis has created
an imagery that pays homage to traditional forms of photography
in México, as well as to the beauty of the people
and landscapes of this part of the world. Together, this
culturally empathic photography and narrative create a powerful
new vocabulary through which the histories of these nearly
hidden communities are related
In The Edge of Enchantment, people speak intimately about
work, family, property, history, religion, dreams. Edmundo
Cruz Martínez describes what it was like to fish
the ocean by night from a dugout canoe, using only a lamp,
a harpoon, and trident spear. Two elderly women remember
their initial unhappiness with the men chosen for them to
marry. On the eve of the Day of the Dead, doña Celia
Piñon talks about the observances to follow as she
prepares her special mole poblano. Indeed, several holidays
are celebrated in these pages, including the Feast of Saint
Peter, when the town of San Pedro Huamelula reenacts its
history and, through a communal, ritual marriage to an alligator
. . . , reaffirms its ties to the land.
Some of what is described in this book strikes me as particularly
illuminating of the Indian cultures of México and
Central America, and wonderfully so—the specific syncretism
of Mesoamerican and Catholic beliefs, for example, and the
fondness (one I confess I share) for legal language and
documents. Other issues—including the importance of
sustaining our cultures, languages, and lands—will
resonate with indigenous peoples throughout the world. The
loss of lands, the disruption of communities, and the struggle
for survival have long marked our experience.
The kind of profound intellectual exchange with Native
communities that characterizes The Edge of Enchantment is
crucial to the work of the Museum. Indeed, nothing is more
important to me, as founding Director of NMAI, than the
Museum’s relationship with the Native peoples of the
Western Hemisphere who form our constituency. In 2004, we
will open our Museum on the National Mall in Washington,
D.C., the culmination of many years’ work, generously
supported by the U.S. Congress and Native and non-Native
individuals and families, corporations, nations, and tribes.
I am committed to ensuring that the exhibitions and public
programs presented on the Mall reflect our partnership with
Native communities with the same substance and passion you
will encounter in this book.
Finally, as an institution of living cultures, the Museum
must reach beyond its walls to work with Native peoples
seeking to document and preserve their own histories and
cultures. During the course of Dr. González’s
and Mr Ysáis’s work in the region, the jurisdictions
of Huatulco and Huamelula decided to move forward with plans
to build their own museums. The research, historical resources,
and photography developed for this book will be available
to scholars and other visitors there, allowing us, in some
small way, to return something to these communities, which
have given us so much. W. Richard West
(Southern Cheyenne and member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho
Tribes of Oklahoma)
Director, National Museum of the American Indian |
