The world of music

Narrativity and Selfhood in Mayo-Yoreme Mortuary Rituals

Helena Simonett

Abstract

Although today much of the Mayo-Yoreme sacred myths and their inherent symbolism is rather
esoteric knowledge, known to a few only, the community’s performance of the responso (ritual of
honoring the dead) is important for the re-establishment of relationships between humans and the
supernatural beings and between living persons and the ancestors. The communal experience of
the responso and the sense of being-enjoined are characteristic of the spiritual experience and
fundamental to the musical experience as well. Since life/death of any individual is an experience
tied to other individuals, I argue that a philosophical inquiry of selfhood—of both the individual
and the community—may help us reason about and make possible an understanding of the
responso.

Les morts n’ont pas d’autre existence que celle que les vivants imaginent pour eux

(Jean-Claude Schmitt 1994)

Death is universal, but the rites of death are manifold. In most cultures death is part of a
more general vision of life. As Nigel Barley in his book Dancing on the Grave (1995: 27)
put it, “It is more accurate to say that notions of what it means to be dead are always part
of a more general idea of what it means to be a living human being in the first place.”

Drawing on indigenous cosmology and Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic ontology—in

particular, the hermeneutic dimension of the transcendental properties of being—and his
narrative theory, this paper analyzes the ritual of honoring the dead (responso) which the
Mayo-Yoremem1 of northwestern Mexico perform one week after a member of their
community passes away, and again at the first anniversary of the departed. The

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community is invited to a nightlong celebration that takes them into juiya annia, the
enchanted world or the world of sensation, as a last obligation to commit the dead’s soul
to God and its journey to guoibúsan téhueca, above or beyond the seven heavens—a
celebration that ends in the morning hours at the cemetery. The responso both explicates
the temporal character of human experience and brings to expression an experience of
Being. Not only is the fundamental human question of what Being means performed in
the elaborate rituals, the very narrativity of the ritual actions reinforces the (historical)
community in front of itself. The hypnotic repetition of short musical phrases in pascola
music and the pulsation of the percussion instruments of the deer dance, in conjunction
with sleeplessness and the consumption of caffeinated and sometimes alcoholic
beverages, triggers a trance-like state of mind and facilitates the practitioners’ entrance
into the spiritual world—a world deeply rooted in pre-Contact cosmology, despite the
rigorous attempts of the missionaries and the Catholic Church to eradicate such beliefs.
The ritual interchange that occurs during the fiesta (pájco) produces and reinforces
solidarity among community members, but it also joins the Yoremem with their
ancestors, the natural forces and the deities that live in the ritual space.

The Mayo-Yoreme: A Brief Historical Background

Some nomadic tribes roamed the region as early as 12,000 B.C. The first permanent
settlements emerged around 250 B.C. In 1529, Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán initiated the
conquest of northern Mexico, a territory which was named Nueva Vizcaya. This
northwestern province of New Spain and heartland of the Spanish frontier comprised a
vast yet sparsely populated territory of high mountains, deserts, fertile valleys, and
seashores (today the states of Durango, Chihuahua, Sinaloa, and Sonora). The Spanish
explorer encountered nomadic tribes and found clusters of agrarian communities living
upon the banks of five rivers which drop from the Sierra Madre range into the Gulf of
California: the Sinaloa, Ocoroni, Fuerte, Mayo, and Yaqui rivers. The inhabitants of these
settlement clusters or rancherías, scattered over large territories and sometimes shifting
locations, were linguistically and culturally related, but not all of them lived peacefully
with their neighboring groups—a reality which the Spanish colonizers would use to their

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own advantage. Most ranchería people depended on agriculture as well as on wild foods
that they hunted and collected in the surrounding bush (see Spicer 1962).

The history of the opening of the missions on the Sinaloa River in 1591 and the
advancement of the Black Robes northward to the Sonora River four decades later is
described by the Jesuit scholar Peter Dunne (1940). Dunne’s work is largely based on
Padre Andrés Pérez de Ribas’ Historia (1645), the most comprehensive eyewitness report
on the missionary enterprise in northern Sinaloa and southern Sonora.2 Along the Fuerte
River—my main area of ethnographic fieldwork among the Yoremem—the missionaries
identified four naciones (“nations” are loose affiliations of communities based on racial,
linguistic, and territorial criteria recognized by colonial authorities): the Ahomes,
Zuaquis, Tehuecos, and Sinaloas.3 The chain of missions on the Fuerte River and the
Jesuits’ systematic congregation of Indians into villages began after repeated military
campaigns into the region’s hills and valleys. It included Ahome, San Miguel,
Mochicahui, Charay, Sivirijoa, Tehueco, Toro, and Vaca. After the Bourbon monarchy
expelled the Jesuit order from all Spanish dominions in the Americas in 1767, the
awaited transition from frontier mission to parish did not succeed (Kessell 1976). Under
the supervision of Franciscan friars, Nueva Vizcaya’s mission system continued to
function, but the Sinaloan missions were largely abandoned. Some of the adobe ruins still
exist.

Mortuary Rites

It is certainly true that Spanish missionaries and Indians regarded each other through the
lenses of their own cultural concepts. Neither was willing, or able, to change their
mindset. The pioneer missionaries reported on “ferocious” native customs “that were so
distant from divine light,” among them to cremate the body or bury it in a cave and to
place some food and drink in the grave to serve as provisions for the last journey.4
According to the Jesuit Pérez de Ribas, “[The Ahome] had only one custom that was
nearly intolerable and excessive, and that was their crying for their deceased. This
wailing lasted for a year in the home of the dead, and the screaming was so loud that it
seemed more like the howls of the damned. They would wail for an hour every morning

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and evening, and this was done in several tones of voice that brought forth responses
from other houses” (1999: 207). A custom, he claimed, that the missionaries were able to
eventually root out. The very existence of burial customs, on the other hand, was taken as
a sign that the Natives indeed had an idea of “another life or the immortality of the
soul”—taken by the missionaries, thus, as a good reason “to preach the truth of the Faith
concerning the other life that awaits mankind” (Pérez de Ribas 1999: 164). Ahome
elders, the Jesuit reported somewhat amused, believed that the souls of the deceased lived
in the surrounding valleys. Thus, “Concerning their knowledge of where souls went, what
they did, and where they remained, they were foolish, confused, and blind” (Pérez de
Ribas 1999: 164). With the introduction of the Christian practice of burying the dead and
the teaching of basic catechism, the missionaries were convinced that the Natives
eventually would give up their “superstitious nonsense”—if not right away, so in the next
few generations. A strategy of accommodating and redirecting, rather than destroying,
pagan religiosity seemed more appropriate to the pioneer missionaries. Subsequent
reports sound increasingly more pessimistic about a probable success of the missionary
enterprise in the northwestern province of New Spain. The German Jesuit missionary
Ignaz Pfefferkorn ([1795] 1949: 248), who had worked for eleven years in the Sonora
province until the expulsion of the order from Spain and the overseas colonies in 1767,
for example, remarked: “The great work of converting [the Sonoran tribes] was really
begun in the seventeenth century and was continuously and vigorously carried on until
the deplorable banishment of the missionaries. Yet, even after such a period of time, there
appeared a very meager likelihood of any earnest, enduring improvement among these
savages. One found among them few signs of a rational way of thinking and only very
weak proofs of a fundamental Christianity.”5 As the padres seemed to prefer an imperfect
Catholicism to none, the new missionary faith began to assimilate pre-Columbian
practices. On the other hand, the indigenous people never conceded the power of self-
determination that presupposes the capacities for thought, imagination, and action despite
the violence and censorship employed by the colonizers. In fact, as Roger Savage said in
a paper on music and the cultural imaginary, “The quest for this self-identity [continues
to] militate against the nihilistic triumph that consecrates the loss of a community’s
anchorage in the history or histories that sustain it” (2005: 7). Indigenous peoples’

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capacity to re-elaborate and reformulate their own cultural practices has proven to be a
compelling strategy for ethno-cultural survival (see Crumrine 1977; and also Millán
2007).

Today’s burial practices in Mexico are regulated by the civil government. The costs of a
traditional burial, even a modest one, exceed by far the scarce economic resources of
indigenous people. Although there are some state programs to alleviate the financial
burden caused by death for the poor, the family may never be able to pay off the depts.
Because of the hot climate, the funeral is organized immediately upon death. During the
first night, family and neighbors hold a wake (velorio). The next day, a mass is read by
the Catholic priest at the local church, and the casket is carried to the municipal cemetery
where it is buried in the presence of the maestro rezador (indigenous lay catechist). The
mourners may first stop at the centro ceremonial (the indigenous church) to perform
pascola and deer dance in the presence of the open casket; the musicians may continue to
play at the open grave.6 The burial mostly keeps to the mestizo funeral practice and
although it may be emotionally significant for the family members, it is the Yoreme
mortuary rites, the responsos, that really matter. Of all the fiestas, the responso is “the
most indigenous, pre-Columbian one” (communication with Yoreme oficiante Bernardo
Esquer López, 10 May 2008).

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Fig. 1: The “cuerpo” (the body symbolized by paper flowers) at the deceased’s house
before the beginning of the responso. (Photo by author, 2007)

The first responso is performed a week after death occurred (finishing on the eighth day);
the second responso is held at the first anniversary of the dead to release the family from
their year-long mourning (luto) and the spirit of the deceased from its final year of
bondage in this world. Yoremem believe that the deceased will not be “received in the
otherworld” if not properly sent-off with a fiesta. Thus the dead fully depends on the
bereaved to comply with their duty (communication with Sabás Valézquez Feliciano, 24
April 2006). People so poor that they can hardly buy a jar of coffee and a bag of sugar to
serve the visitors who attend the wake will find themselves unable to fulfill their
emotional cargo or promise to the departed as ascribed by custom. Though lacking music
and dance, the responso will then be carried out by the maestro rezador (indigenous lay
minister), who, with his prayers and chants, clears the way of obstacles and helps the soul
find its way to the glory (according to Christian interpretation and the way it was usually
conveyed to me, the foreign anthropologist, by both particulares and oficiantes; see
below for an emic view).

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Fig. 2: Ramada prepared for the responso ceremony later that night, El Bajío, San
Miguel Zapotitlán, Ahome. (Photo by author, 2007)

Masking Indigenous Music-making and Dancing

The few colonial references made to singing and music making in Nuevo Vizcaya mostly
speak of the establishment of proficient mission choirs and the apparent innate musical
talent of the Indians (Pérez de Ribas 1999: 193). Because music, song, and dance were
important elements of pre-Christian rituals, missionaries quickly realized the power of
music to convert the Indians. The missionaries thus used orchestrated musical
performance during strategic events to impress the Natives. For instance, for the
spectacular inauguration of the church and chapel of the Mochicahui mission at the Rio
Fuerte, built by the Zuaque who “constituted the most difficult-to-defeat fortress of the
many that the devil possessed in this province,” two trios of flutes and trumpets were
each placed at the church and at the chapel that answered each other with their music
(Pérez de Ribas 1999: 225). Mass was sung with solemn music and “the dances and
drums that once called the Zuaque to war against the Christians, which they triumphantly
celebrated with severed heads, were now celebrating festivals for Christ and His Most
Holy Mother” (ibid.). Pérez de Ribas cheerfully concluded that “there is no doubt that
these triumphs and conversions are celebrated by the angels in heaven, and by the
Catholic monarchs in their courts as well, because so many infidels have been successful
in their conversion to our Holy Faith and have come to recognize and adore Jesus Christ,
the King of Kings, as their God. Finally, this conversion of thousands of barbarous
people who before lived in darkness was accomplished through divine grace” (1999:
226). Only a few paragraphs before, however, the padre had (maybe involuntarily)
invalidated his interpretation of the Church’s effective and glorious conversion with his
very description of the processions between the enramadas (shelters) “made of freshly
cut green branches from the monte [wilderness], which were also used to adorn the altars
within the enramadas. The streets through which the procession passed were adorned
with the same tapestries made from trees from the monte” (1999: 225). It is hard to
believe that the padre would let himself be deceived by the Natives’ thinly disguised

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practice to recreate their own sacred space of worship. Pérez de Ribas’ Historia contains
many such contradictions and, hence, lets us wonder about the intended readership of this
report. Most likely, Pérez de Ribas wrote about the Jesuits’ accomplishments to attract
newcomers to the missionary vocation and to substantiate the missionary enterprise for
the Spanish Crown. Nevertheless, once we peel off the layers of moral judgment and
extenuating statements, his ethnographic observations become valuable sources for new
interpretative readings of Yoreme ethnohistory, particularly when compared to
contemporary ethnographic work.

Markedly, as Daniel Reff (1999: 19) has pointed out, missionaries and Indians shared
fundamental beliefs that included the immediate reality of the invisible world. Thus,
when missionaries thought that they, with God’s divine intervention, had successfully
substituted Christian for native rituals and beliefs, they may, in fact, just have been
successfully fooled by their neophytes. Ethnohistorian Cynthia Radding (1997: 8) indeed
underscores the parallel production of colonial and subaltern texts during the course of a
150-year struggle for power and survival. “Indian communities create[d] new modes of
cultural expression through both internal pressures and external linkages with the wider
society” in which they lived. By accepting some elements of colonial rule and rejecting
or transforming others, Natives were able to achieve some degree of agency. Thus, the
convergence of indigenous and Hispanic traditions is a kind of “colonial semiosis”—a
term introduced by Walter Mignolo (2000), which I prefer over syncretism and
transculturation. Colonial semiosis results from conflicting world views and structures of
power, or, in Mignolo’s (2000: 17) more elaborate words, “Colonial semiosis attempts to
identify particular moments of tension in the conflict between two local histories and
knowledges, one responding to the movement forward of a global [European] design that
intended to impose itself and those local histories and knowledges that are forced to
accommodate themselves to such new realities.” Thus, I question a commonly held view
(expressed, for example, by Uriarte 2003) that both Europeans and Natives apparently
seemed satisfied by the resultant form of cult(s), that their distinct interests became
compatible, which eventually led to a coherent and systematic integration of the once
divergent beliefs. More likely, applying the concept of colonial semiosis, Yoremem
consciously masked their ceremonial practices to continue benefiting from the economic

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and religious structures imposed by mission life, hence practicing a kind of covert
resistance to the hegemonic culture exercised by the Jesuits and the Catholic Church (see
Scott 1990). Based on my ethnographic research, it is evident that the conversion of the
native inhabitants to Christianity has never been completed. The voices of their ancestors
continue to make themselves heard in the fiestas and rituals through music and dance.

Ritual Music-making and Dancing: Pascola and Venado

Despite padre Pérez de Ribas’ admirable observation skills and thick ethnographic
description of native life and customs, the Historia contains only a few references about
indigenous music making and dancing in the Fuerte River area. Apparently most
threatening were the drums that called to war. These may have been some kind of large
single- or double-headed membranophones resembling contemporary Yoreme drums
(such as the cubbau). Other percussive instruments such as rattles, rasps, and sticks also
abounded. Indigenous people fashioned unique rattles referred to by the Spaniards as
sartales de capullos, dried butterfly cocoons strung together and worn by the dancers
around their lower legs.7 It is reported that dancers wore bracelets of small, perforated
shells of animal teeth, maybe also made of deer hoofs such as the deer dancer’s belt
rattles nowadays. The one-stringed musical bow (monocordio) seems to have been
widespread as well as flutes, possibly the three-hole flutes made of reed that are still in
use. “Ironically,” Kristin Mann remarks in her dissertation on mission music in Northern
New Spain (2002: 125), “missionaries often complained that the same indigenous
peoples, who possessed such sweet and pious voices in the churches, sounded like
howling animals when performing their own songs and dances.” Native dancing was
performed to re-enact important events such as a victory in battle or a successful hunt.
Other dances involved the imitation of animals such as the coyote, birds, and others.
Although dance was not a part of the liturgy practiced by missionaries, it was a key
component of sacred indigenous ceremonies and, hence, performed at night and outside
missionary control.

Early Jesuit sources about Nueva Vizcaya do not mention string instruments being used
in liturgical rites and ceremonies; late eighteenth-century inventories, however, indicate

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the presence of harps and guitars at many missions even in the remote northern regions of
New Spain.8 Although there is not enough written historic evidence to reconstruct
indigenous performance practices and contexts, the use of the one-handed flute and side
drum in pascola music, for instance, is believed to be of native origin, contrary to what
some historical musicologists claim.9 Importantly, both Yoreme mythology and
etymologic explanation of the instrument names as well as the terms for playing
techniques support the native view.

Yoreme ceremonial music includes three types of ensembles: músicos (the three
musicians or jíponammem: alpaleero and labeleero, harpist and violinist), tampoleero
(the “drummer” or cubbauleero who plays the combination of baaca cusía and cubbau,
flauta and tambor, flute and drum), and the cantores de venado (the three maaso
buicleerom playing ba’a buejja and jiruquiam, deer singers playing water drum and
rasping sticks, respectively). Also mandatory for the execution of the ceremony are the
two types of dancers: pascolas (pajco’olam, literally “the old men of the fiesta”) and
venado (maaso yi’ileero, deer dancer). Pascolas and venado always appear together, with
the former dancing to the music provided by the músicos and the tampoleero and the
latter to the cantos de venado (deer songs). Dancers supply several percussive elements to
their respective music or ensemble produced by a pair of hand-held gourd rattles (the
venado’s ayales, or in native language ajboiyam) and a kind of a sistrum (the pascola’s
sonaja or sonaasom, a wooden hand rattle with metal discs on movable crossbars that
produce a sound ranging from a soft tinkling to a loud jangling) and idiophones worn on
the body such as the above mentioned leg rattles (tenabarim) made of cocoons filled with
pebbles, deer hoof belt rattles (rújutiriam worn by the venado) and brass bells (coyoolim
belt worn by the pascola). The pascolas take turns in performing intricate footwork
elaborating upon the rhythm of the music of harp and violins; heads down and arms with
slightly lifted elbows loosely at their sides, they look like birds. Their individual styles of
dancing consist of shuffling and heal-tapping with toe drags while hardly lifting their feet
off the dirt floor; this causes the tenabarim to rustle rhythmically and the brass bells
jingle randomly. For the masked dance that goes with the music of the tampoleero, the
pascolas create complex rhythms by hitting the sonaasom against the palm of their left
hand, and sometimes knee, letting the metal discs jiggle against each other and against

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the wooden frame. The masks—either a monstrous human or animal face painted in
black, white and red colors and equipped with tufts of long white goat or horse hair—
which the pascolas wear on the back or side of their head is pulled over the face only
when the tampoleero calls the dancer with his drum. It is the dancer, however, who
indicates—with a gesture towards the tampoleero, or some stomps in the case of the
pascola music— when he has finished his part. The musicians continue to repeat the
musical phrases of the son (tune) until all pascolas have taken their turn— depending on
the number of dancers, a succession of dances may last for more than half an hour.
Immediately after, the singers call the venado with slow pulsating beats on the water
drum and rasping sticks placed over half gourd resonators. The venado puts on the
stuffed deer head (maaso cobba), decorated with white silk paper flowers and ribbons,
and with a shattering flare of his rattles bends forward to begin dancing. The cantos de
venado are sung by the three musicians in a highly figurative language that evoke the
enchanted world of the deer. The lead singer (maaso buicleero yo’ohue) is sitting in the
middle scraping up and down in short strokes over the wider-notched rasping stick
(jiruquia yo’ohue, senior rasp); the musician on his left side playing the jiruquia asoaala
(junior rasp with narrower carved notches) and the musician on his right side striking the
water drum are the segunderos (secaariam). The latter two “follow” the lead singer’s
melody only very slightly delayed at an interval of a major third higher. The cantos
usually have three verses (AAB) and are of rather short duration. The maaso buicleerom
sing a sequence of three cantos.

It has been argued that the deer songs constitute the most archaic level of ceremonialism
in indigenous Northwest Mexico (Griffith 1998; Evers and Molina 1987; Varela 1986;
Spicer 1962). As Griffith (1998: 589) states, “Many Yaqui believe the dance and the
songs came from the time in Yaqui history when they relied heavily on hunting and
performed the dance at an all-night feast before the hunt took place to ‘please the deer
and ask his pardon for having to kill him.’” But contrary to contemporary Yaqui
interpretation of the deer dance “as gathering the wilderness world into a symbol of
earthly sacrifice and of spiritual life after death” (Evers and Molina 1987: 129), most
Yoremem do not enact a drama of killing the deer.10 Only in the ceremonial centers of
Téhueco, Charai, and La Playa Ocoroni do Yoreme pascolas perform a deer hunt when

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dictated by the canto; however, since this enactment only happens sporadically, it cannot
be considered a decisive element of Yoreme ceremonialism.11 Moreover, the dance does
not symbolize the battle between the man-hunter (hombre-cazador) who hunts for
sustenance and his victim, the deer who defends itself desperately but finally ends
offering itself to man, as Varela (1986: 36) interpreted the deer dance in Yaqui life. The
deer in Yoreme belief is the perfect creature of the monte, the enchanted natural world. It
is an ancestral figure that dwells in mythological time—expressed in the word
combination “hombre-flor” (seegua yoleme, “man-flower,” but also meaning “deer-man”
or just “deer”). The idea of the deer’s sacrifice and its subsequent resurrection is, in my
opinion, a Christian interpretation of the drama of life and death that is neither found in
Yoreme nor Yaqui traditional ceremonialism.

Unlike the venado, the pascolas have several functions within the fiesta, beyond being
dancers.12 They initiate and end the fiesta with prayers; they announce the most dramatic
moments of the fiesta by firing small rockets into the air; they induct the attending people
into the forest world with their pantomimic play; they uplift the audience’s attention with
their horseplay and jokes, from subtle to crooked to obscene. However, to reduce them
into the role of clowns, as various writers have done (including Spicer), is too simplistic.
Clowning or fooling around (hacer el payaso) is in fact not an accepted behavior for the
Yoreme pascola (communication with tampoleero Ignacio Escalante Buitimea after a
responso in El Bajío, Ahome, 15-16 February 2007, where he got into a serious argument
with an allegedly misbehaving pascola). Because the pascolas are associated with the
natural world of the monte—the opposite of the orderly pueblo—they act according to
different, “un-civilized,” rules. Their unruly, particularly their sexually suggestive, acting
has been interpreted, or better misinterpreted, by various scholars as an expression of a
phallic cult (e.g., Ochoa Zazueta 1998: 173). Below I will propose a different reading,
one based on an emic view that is rooted in Yoreme mythology.

Because the deer dance has the “seriousness of a sacred devotion,” and because its songs
address a world far removed, “a land beneath the dawn,” “a flower place,” Spicer (1962:
103-4) acknowledged the primordial sacredness of the deer dance, yet: “One may guess
that the Deer Dance was originally a sacred dance … but that in the course of being
associated with the hosting functions of the Pascola rather than with the church, lost its

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sacred meaning and functions, although not its original form.” I am not quite clear what
Spicer meant by “sacred”—but to interpret the pascola dances as profane (1962: 92ff)
because they are directed at the people who attend the fiesta rather than at the
supernaturals—a poorly informed observation, I have to add—, does not do justice to the
deep mythological nature and narrative significance of these dances as will be discussed
in the following paragraphs.

Ritual and Mythical Time and Space

While today much of the sacred myths and their inherent symbolism is rather esoteric
knowledge, known to a few initiated only, the community’s performance of the
responso—and the fiesta in general—is important for the re-establishment and
reinforcement of relationships between humans and the supernaturals, and between living
persons and the ancestors.13 Anthropologist Johannes Neurath (2002), in his profound
study of the Huichols, has pointed out that even though Natives do not distinguish
between the natural, social, and supernatural or sacred realms, these realms nonetheless
are not the same. In mythological origin plants, animals, and human beings were
inseparable, but this inseparability belongs to the mythical world, not the actuality.
Cosmologies combine practical and empirical knowledge with mythological
constructions that do not represent objective realities but rather mystifications thereof
(Neurath 2002: 197-8). Although mythological aspects are reproduced during the fiesta
and the ritual, exact knowledge of the physical world is crucial for effective performance.
Pascola dancers, for example, imitate birds and other animals of the monte through
pantomime as dictated by the cantos at the proper time of the day or night; the
tampoleero’s reed flute brings out specific birdcalls in the appropriate sones, and the
labeleero scratches the strings of his violin to make the heart wrenched bray of a donkey.
On a deeper level, however, the dancers and musicians become the animals they look or
sound alike in a spiritual transformation when they enter the sacred space under the
ramada. There is no imitative representation in the ritual. Immersed in cosmological
time, in a trance-like state of mind—stimulated by, but not dependent on, consumption of
coffee, tequila, or tobacco—the deer dancer is the deer, the harpist is the iguana, the

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tampolero is the mouse. As Barbara Myerhoff (1974: 21, 263) has pointed out in her
conclusions about the sacred journey of the Huichols, there is “no place of ‘as if’s’ in the
ritual; the participants had been transformed, and for them the experience was immediate
and direct, not symbolic. … Wirikuta [the Yoreme equivalent of juiya annia] is not an
imaginary place.”

In his book The Spiritual Quest, Robert Torrance (1994: 70) challenges us to reassess the
ritual’s creative function, to understand the stability advocated by ritual not as “an inertial
inheritance but a continually renewed endeavor.” Yoremem’s ceremonial return to their
origin in the wilderness of the monte, led by the pascola dancers, is only an apparently
backward-looking practice. “By reaching consciously back toward consecrated prehuman
beginnings whose distance from their ordinary condition they strive to overcome, the
enactors of ritual thereby reach beyond them as well. They hypostatize ancestral animals
not only as biological progenitors but as founders of the culture that distinguishes human
from animal; their culturally acquired ritual effects, by its very existence, transcendence
of the animal condition it celebrates” (Torrance 1994: 6). Thus, this journey into
uncharted territory makes possible a spiritual quest for the transcendent and unknown.

Narrativity of Ritual Action

At the beginning of the ceremony, the masked dancers are led into the “tree-world” of the
ramada by the alaguasim who prior has committed all the participating musicians and
dancers and who will both direct and attend them throughout the fiesta.14 The musicians
strike up the first son de la canaaria, dedicated to the first human who died during the
fiesta (ca’a na’a ria m means “the one who did not make fire” as was explained to me by
Bernardo Esquer, my main source for the present interpretation of the ritual happenings.
The following account purposefully leaves out important structural elements of the fiesta
in order to focus on some of the narrative aspects of the ritual action that concur with
Yoreme mythology). Now abandoned by the alaguasim, the seemingly disoriented and
anxious pascolas turn toward the musicians, all talking and gesturing at once. The
pascola mayor approaches the harp and inserts a wooden stick into the largest of the three
holes. He inspects the withdrawn stick, measures with his index finger the length to

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which the stick had been inserted, smells at it with disgust, discusses it with his fellow
pascolas, who laugh, gesticulate, and chatter. These actions are repeated several times as
they are also applied to the smaller hole. Little imagination is needed to interpret these
actions as erotic or part of a “phallic cult,” as Ochoa Zazueta (1998) classified them
(consequently he interpreted the harp as representing a women).

Fig. 3: Pascola dancer inserting stick into one of the holes of the harp. (Photo by author,
2008)

According to Yoreme thought, however, this “play” is a re-enactment of man’s survival

in the wilderness—showing habits rooted in their tribal, nomadic past when humans
depended on the monte for sustenance. Bernardo Esquer (10 May 2007) recounts: “In
mythical time, before humans knew of the harp, they knew the rotting tree trunks
scattered in the bush, and they knew that animals were hiding in the holes: iguanas in the
large holes, mice in the smaller ones, and in the smallest holes there were hives of wild
bees. They took the meat of the iguanas and mice and the honey of the bees. But they
didn’t take all of it so that the rest could continue to live and procreate. They carefully

15
covered the holes so that other gatherers wouldn’t find the animals and that they could
return for harvesting. That is why the harp is adopted as rotting tree.”

Thus, the pascolas inspect the stick to find out how many animals are living in the nest
(count the bites of distressed animals and assess the amount of excrements) and
determine how many of them they can wisely take away. I have no desire to construct an
idealized image of native people living in harmony with nature, a romantic vision that has
long inspired anthropology and popular imagination. Indeed, contemporary native people
have by and large lost the ability to live from the products of the monte, as has been
observed by ethnobiologist David Yetman (1998: 13). The kind of (mis)interpretation
made by outside observers, hence, may as well be made by Yoremem themselves, and the
pascolas in their wickedness certainly enjoy playing with an array of interpretations. The
pascolas’ uninhibited play and their suggestive joking with the audience, in fact, invite
for creative interpretations. It is said that pascolas make a deal with the supernaturals in
remote, hidden areas of the monte in order to acquire magic powers. Part of this power is
their capability to abduct the audience into the unknown, mysterious “tree-world” with all
its lingering uncertainties and, hence, to give play to the indeterminacy dormant in the
ritual process. Thus, as much as the ritual prescribes, it also awakens creative forces.

Ritual and Selfhood

For the Yoreme, the venado means a variety of things: he is a spirit, an ancestral figure, a
benefactor, and a source of life. When a Yoreme dies, the venado (through the deer
singers) intervenes on behalf of the mourning members of the community by pressing the
dead: “You are going to the third level of heaven (where the zopilote [vulture], the
mediator lives) to ask for days (soles, literally “suns”) and to ask for fatigue so that
during the day we may stay awake and during the night we may sleep”—according to the
canto del venado at the beginning of the seven-day mourning period which will end with
the first responso (Bernardo Esquer, May 2007).

Although Yoreme do not believe in the Christian concepts of hell and purgatory, there
exists an idea of afterlife that depends on peoples’ ethical behavior and that corresponds
to the mythical world in which the venado plays a major role. While the corpse of a good

16
human returns to earth from where it is absorbed by the plant and its blossom (flor) and
so becomes hombre-flor (that is, venado), humans who did not live a morally good life
become animals that hide underground, such as snakes or coyotes. According to ancient
Yoreme thought, the deer is the primal ancestor, the mythological founder and progenitor
of the tribe at the beginning of time: “The first humans originate from the flower, that’s
why the deer is called seegua yoleme, flor indígena (native flower)—hombre flor
(native/man-flower)” (Bernardo Esquer, May 2007). Hence, as Ricoeur (1992: 353)
expressed it, “the voices of our ancestors continue to make themselves heard among the
living and in this way ensure, not only the transmission of wisdom, but its intimate
personal reception at every stage. This dimension, which could be called generational, is
an undeniable component of the phenomenon of [moral and ethical] injunction and, all
the more so, of that of indebtedness.” The ancestral voices, internalized in the ritual, urge
the ethical being to identify itself with the Other—that is, with the ancestor as the
generational figure of the Other. In this way, ancestors never die but continue to inhabit
the inherited landscape and guide the living in their spiritual pursuit and search for truth.
This spiritual quest, as Torrance (1994: 56) has pointed out, “is a continuous questioning
on the subject of life itself … defined by the transcendent potentiality of its indeterminate
future, which gives it direction and purpose.” Thus, the ritual is not just an inert
inheritance, it is also a future-oriented practice. “Living and dead are both implicated to
achieve a transcendent condition no longer given, as in the mythic age, but only
attainable in a future—potentially one with the supertemporal past” (Torrance 1994: 70).

Although the dead return once a year only, at the end of the tebjuría season (end of rainy
season), to partake in the lives of the people by feasting at the tapánco (decorated altar
loaded with food and drink for the dead), they call upon the living in the rituals of the
numerous pájcom (fiestas) that are organized throughout the year to being-enjoined, a
modality of otherness identified by Ricoeur as a significant structure of selfhood. For the
Yoreme, active participation in the pájco is a moral obligation that demonstrates one’s
true character. Community members are expected to take on cargos, revolving offices
with civil-religious responsibilities that include many sacrifices, hard work, and
economic expenses, and to take seriously their mandas, promises usually made to a santo
(saint). Fulfilling one’s ritual and social obligations to others is a fundamental ethical

17
aspect of Yoreme life, thus of Yoreme selfhood. This selfhood is not an egoistic
(egocentric) self-awareness. One’s sense of who one is relates to one’s understanding of
the complexity of the surrounding natural, social and cultural world, of different
discourses and different temporalities. While the ritual allows for a communal experience
of transcendence, it knits the community together and validates its identity.

Transcendence as self-fulfillment in Yoreme way of life is always tied to the Other. The
communal experience and the sense of being-enjoined are characteristic of the spiritual
experience and fundamental to the musical experience as well. As June Boyce-Tillman
(2000: 155) puts it, “Music makes people physically more like one another because of the
effect of music on the body.” Although “music’s transformational qualities form a
significant part of the meaningfulness of all musical experience” (Sansom 2005), musical
experience can only be meaningful if embedded in the referential and the structural (see
also Blacking 1973). Pascola musicians, venado singers and dancers are, by tradition,
granted the responsibility to transmit their deep knowledge by way of sound and
movement and so to convey the meaning of Yoreme humanity. Self-expression of
individual musicians or singers is not at all important or desired. Rather, the intuitive
mode of musical and kinesthetic production, aided by the repetitive character of the
music, triggers intense experiences—both in the performers and in the audience. In the
end, it is the ontological vehemence of musical experience, the ecstatic moments of
undifferentiation and the loss-of-self that provide the most profound meaning. The
seemingly simple statement of an elderly woman that “Pascola music makes me feel so
very, very happy” entails profound experiences and emotions that have kept Yoreme
communities alive for centuries.

Conclusion

Rather than dealing with the classic anthropological inquiry into the relationship between
myth and social organization, I have analyzed the fundamental narrative character of the
myth, or part of it, as enacted in the ritual. The myth, in effect, is given meaning through
the narrativity of pascola music and dancing and the deer songs and dance, respectively.
Myths however, as Neurath (2006: 42) has stated, are more than just narrations, for they,

18
in the present moment, bestow an immediate value upon all the events that correspond to
primordial times.15 Ritual experience, thus, transcends both everyday reality and ordinary
experience of time. Music’s communicability (including its narrativity), its effects on the
body, and its transformative power are a crucial component of this ritual experience.
Ritual music, thus, falls into the category (Blacking’s) of “music for being” rather than
the utilitarian “music for having,” as it has often been examined. Moreover, Roger
Savage (2007: 4), following Gadamer’s philosophy, tells us that music’s unique
importance for “limit experiences,” such as those made in ritual, is based on its ability to
convey “insight into the world’s [and I would add, afterworld’s] essential significance as
a place one can inhabit and in which one can dwell.” Music—analogous to poetics for
which Ricoeur has argued throughout his work, and particularly in Time and Narrative—
provides the structures and synthetic strategies by which understanding and a coherent
sense of self and of life and death are possible.

All humans seek transcendental and immanent meaning; but as Jean-Claude Schmitt
(1994) has put it, the dead are what the alive imagine them to be.

Notes

Aspects of this paper were presented at the Conference on Holidays, Rituals, Festival,
Celebration, and Public Display, Bowling Green State University (2008), at the Meeting
of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Wesleyan University (2008), and at the annual
conference of the Society for American Music, Denver (2009). I would like to express
my gratitude to N. Ross Crumrine for his insightful observations and comments. I am
deeply grateful to Bernardo Esquer López, Los Ángeles del Triúnfo, Guasave, for our
many lengthy conversations and his patience when I was not able to grasp the intricacies
of Yoreme thought. My heartfelt thanks go to Alfredo Quintero and Judith Reyes for their
hospitality and continued support during my fieldwork stays since 2001. Much of what I
have learned since then I owe to the kindness of the many Yoremem I have met on
various occasions throughout northern Sinaloa. Contrary to what is often said about their

19
hermeticness, I encountered them as affectionate people who are intensely proud of their
own culture.
1
The indigenous people referred to as “Mayo” (derived from mayóa, shores of the river)
call themselves “Yoreme” (also “Yoleme,” plural Yoremem or Yolemem), derived from
the verb yore which means “the one who will be born.” The term may be best translated
as mensch or “human being,” “native,” “the people.” In the remainder of this paper I will
use the emic term “Yoreme” only.
2
Andrés Pérez de Ribas was born in 1575 in Córdoba, Spain. After being ordained to
priesthood, he entered the Jesuit order in 1602. Designated for missionary service in
Mexico shortly after, Pérez de Ribas was working from 1604 to 1620 in what today is
northern Sinaloa and southern Sonora, on the Petatlán (Sinaloa), the Gran Río de Zuaque
(Fuerte), and the Yaqui Rivers. He wrote several histories dealing with the activities of
the Catholic Church and the Spanish Crown in the New World. The first part of the
Historia deals with the Sinaloan missions, though completed in 1620, was revised and
updated from 1641 to 1645. He died in 1655 (see Pérez de Ribas 1968 [1644]).
3
Outsiders often erroneously identified the same people as different, or different people
as the same, based on insufficient knowledge and misunderstandings. One of such lasting
errors is the term “cáhita” (a subgroup of the Uto-Aztecan language), which literally
means “there is nothing,” a linguistic term applied to the area’s native people. It is
assumed that over the course of time the many naciones (nations) either merged or
disappeared and authorities began to refer to the remaining native group as “Mayo.”
4
By quoting from colonial sources, I do not intend to establish the existence of
uninterrupted native traditions or demonstrate their antiquity, but would rather like to
point out the power of native resilience. It is still customary among the Yoremem to
provide the souls with food (bread and oranges), both at the responso and the day of the
dead. The souls will nourish themselves by consuming the perfume of the offered food.
5
Ignaz Pfefferkorn ([1795] 1949: 248), apparently in concordance with other Sonoran
Jesuits, was not blinded by a zealous conversion effort: “They listened to each instruction

20
with the greatest meekness and patience without contradicting a word. Their often-
repeated hu hu, yes yes, seemed to approve the admonitions of the spiritual guide and to
promise him heed. However, this superficial acquiescence could never be trusted.
Seldom was it in earnest, and generally the sequel showed that heart and tongue did not
agree” (my emphasis).
6
The details of burial practices vary according to the deceased’s status within the
community and the bereaved’s resources to fulfill their obligation (e.g., the rite is be
more sophisticated if the deceased was an oficiante, a holder of a ceremonial duty), the
family’s economic resources, and the given spatial particularities of a village or
municipio.
7
The huge silk moth, whose scientific name is rothschildia jorulla, is still found in the
Guasave municipality, but excessive harvesting of the cocoons and an overuse of
pesticides in the surrounding agribusinesses threaten the survival of the species.
8
Varela (1986: 116) and Mann (2002: 78) suggest that string instruments—such as harp
and violin, the main instruments of Yoreme pascola music—were first associated with
secular music. According to John Schechter (1992), however, various missionary orders,
most notably the Jesuits, helped to establish the harp as a major instrument in liturgical
practice as well as in secular life. Together with the vihuela, the harp had prospered more
than any other instrument in the early colonization of New Spain. Jesuit Diego de
Valladares (1982) mentions in his 1743 report about the Fuerte River missions that the
Indians write music for their church (most likely of the Mochicahui mission) and play
organ, harp, guitars, rabeles (violins), clarines (bugles), and chirimías (flageolets).
9
Based on an abundance of iconographic sources, Montagu (1997) claims that the use of
the pipe-and-tabor by one single musician is a purely European practice, probably
originating at the beginning of the thirteenth century. In her study of Yaqui music, Varela
(1986: 110) argues that neither is there any mention of such practice in colonial sources
nor did flutes made of two parts exist prior to Spanish arrival; hence, the flute/drum
combination is of European provenance. Boilés (1966), on the other hand, established

21
evidence for the existence of autochthonous traditions in Mesoamerica and called for a
reassessment of this phenomenon.
10
For an interpretation of the deer dance and its relation to hunting among the Yaqui, see
David Delgado Shorter (2007). Shorter’s analysis is based on a more Christian reading of
the deer dance while mine elucidates the ceremonial’s fundamental indigenousness.
However, we independently came to similar conclusions about some misreadings of
native religious perceptions by earlier anthropologists.
11
Since all aspects of a deer’s life are put in scene under the ramada, there also exists a
juego (play) in which the deer is being hunted and killed by the pascola dancers: the deer
dancer leaves his headdress on the floor and picks it up later to continue dancing. This
particular play, however, is of no extraordinary importance either.
12
The role of the Mayo dance sodalities was described most accurately by N. Ross
Crumrine in his ethnography, The Mayo Indians of Sonora (1977: 97-101), where he
acknowledged the pascolas and deer dancer as an integral part of the ceremonial.
Moreover, he also pointed out the fundamentally different and incompatible concepts of
the fiesta that Mayos and Mestizos revere: the Mayo fiesta is sacred in nature rather than
secular.
13
Knowledge depends on the degree of initiation, that is, an experienced oficiante has
more complex insights into the fiesta than the particulares, ordinary people.
14
The preparation of a fiesta is a lengthy and highly complex process that adheres to
traditional rules, and that involves a plethora of individuals who, committed either by
oficio or by promesa, dedicate much time, energy, and resources to its successful
realization. The alaguasim (who can be either male or female) plays a central role in
bringing together all the necessary participants.
15
“Los mitos son mucho más que narraciones, ya que se conceden en el presente una
eficacia inmediata a todos los acontecimientos que aparentemente corresponden a los
tiempos primordiales” (Neurath 2006: 42).

22
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