When Concha Rosales was 16 she did something she hated. She asked someone to help her without getting angry about it. Something she hadn’t done since she was six or seven, she later said. Her false siblings were too surprised to make fun of her. Chema and Guadalupe Rosales, the man and woman who had (unknown to Concha) informally adopted her, gave each other quizzical glances and later agreed it was just another odd bump along the road to growing up.
This was in the early 1960s. In Mexico women were often seen as something like chattels, certainly as beneath men. Concha, as she grew into her tenth year, began to acquire a boldness that didn’t fit that role. She rose early to start her chores – grinding masa by hand for her immediate family – a hard task. Her hands and knees were callused from that and other work. She did her house chores, quickly helped her mother so she could get out to the corral and ranch work, despite Lupe’s objections. Ranch work meant often risky chores for a child her age. Yet Concha had an affinity for them, one that worried Lupe and Chema. Most bothering was her rejection of the school in the nearest pueblo. She was too attracted to dealing with horses, cattle and ranch work in general. She didn’t care to give much attention to poorly taught classroom by-rote learning. Those “lessons” seemed to be presented by tired habit and with little interest. It was all too “slow” for her to spend time with such stuff. Losing time in such a manner nurtured a crisp kind of desden (disdain) in her, Lupe said.
Concha was a “watcher.” That was education for her, though she didn’t know it at the time. Her aggressive choices – untypical of young girls – were attributed to the fact that, as an infant, she was the only survivor of the flight of a rickety homemade bus off a rain-slick mountainside. “Maybe she landed on her head,” some relatives and neighbors joked unkindly. Such remarks stung her family and prompted Concha to watch such people more sharply. From them and similar folks she got the idea that what many of the things that people she privately called “big mouths” often said backfired on them. That taught her an interesting, if unarticulated, lesson, one she later found contained in a Buddhist axiom and even converted into a Catholic-tinged admonition: “Pensar antes hacer” – “Think before you act”; “pensar antes hablar” – “think before you speak.”Another early lesson she paid attention to came from her grandfather, who was active in the Jalisco-centered La Cristiada (Cristero Rebellion, 1926-1929), fighting against President Plutarco Calles’ attempt to destroy Mexico’s Catholic Church. Grandfather Cleto Ruis Rosales lost part of his left hand in that war, leaving his thumb and his index and middle fingers, but not much else down to his wrist. He had been left-handed, and it took him a while to get his right-hand well trained. Fragments of the same bullet scattered into his face, blinding him in the left eye, leaving several scars on that side of his face. He learned to make his left hand function with a nimbleness that always surprised folks, and no one who didn’t know about his bad eye ever noticed that “disability.” Concha greatly admired his ambidexterity, how straightforward he was about his scars if someone asked. Once her grandfather began taking her hunting she got the inkling that some people could turn a disadvantage into an advantage. Her grandfather had found a way to fire a rifle as accurately with his left hand as with his right. She noted that neither her father or grandfather made much fuss when Concha got thrown by a mount, spooked by a rattler, or scared by a cotton tail bouncing out of nearby brush. They brushed her off, checked for banged-up bones. “The most important thing in life is learning how to fall,” they’d say, as wise folks have said for centuries.
As a toddler Concha learned that when the rains began to stop it was time to comb mountainsides for medicinal plants. Few rural folk had much faith in doctors – for good reason. They used the ample mountain-born pharmacopeia of remedies, some of them pre-Hispanic. By the time Concha was five she often went looking for remedies by herself, or with some other family youngster. Because the rains brought out certain snakes, she gave up going barefoot, and wore huaraches for this chore. She asked her elders of the extended Rosales how Mexico’s most exotic traditional cures were made and applied. This pleased her parents and grandparents, because they believed that folk medicines were being replaced by expensive, useless commercial remedies.
Concha was about 12 when she found a broken-bladed machete de la tierra caliente in a pile of metal rubbish in which someone might someday find something of use. About 15 centimeters of the point of this straight-bladed tool, designed ideally for cutting sugar cane, had been broken off. (In much of Jalisco the machete used by most campesinos ends in a large strong hook at the end of the blade.) Concha borrowed a lima (file) and began shaping a new point for “her” machete. Then she went to Chago Rosales, the family’s most adept skinner and “leather-maker.” He was a widower who kept a well-known disorderly house. Concha offered to clean the house twice a week for a month if he would make a sheath for her cut-down machete. Chago said two weeks was enough, but that he had to talk to her father first.
With the scabbard, Concha never went anywhere without her recovered machete. She was wearing it the day she and her eight-year-old cousin, Rosa, went looking for cannabis and arnica in an old barbed-wire guarded patch at the corner of a potril (colt pasture). Cannabis mixed with alcohol was an ancient liniment used for aching joints. Arroyo-born berros, watercress would ease the kidney “complications” of her cousin’s father. (Cannabis and arnica were common remedies for arthritic problems at the time. So was fried rattlesnake grease.)
They were on foot and climbed through the barbed wire fence of the potril. About half way across the field, there was a rattling sound from the horse path they were entering. Concha stopped her cousin and pushed the younger girl behind her. Enjoying the warm afternoon sun in the middle of the trail was a large, handsome rattler. Concha remembered her father and one of his younger boys discovering a coralillo (coral snake) near an ojo de agua. The kid, taken with the snake’s red, yellow\white, and black bands, didn’t want to kill it. “If it’s around,” said his father, “somebody may run into it. It’s poison is a sure killer.”
Concha stepped into the brush along one side of the snake, making sure Rosa was behind her. Remaining coiled, the snake moved to face her, tail up, rattles chittering. Concha, even years later, said Rosa was too delicate for campo life. Now she began to whimper, and cried out, “We have to run ... back.” Very noisy. “Shut up,” Concha said. “We have to go back,” Rosa was crying the words. Delicate and stubborn. “If you keep yelling I’m going to feed you to that rattler.” That made the girl cry more, louder. The snake’s rattling picked up, and he seemed ready to strike.
Concha unsheathed her machete and waited until the rattler relaxed a bit. But it didn’t. Terrified Rosa was crying, pulling at Concha’s belt.
“Go back,” Concha said, pushing Rosa toward the fence where they’d entered, realizing she couldn’t deal with the snake with the girl draped around her. They were making too much noise, scaring the snake. His head was up, his narrow, tongue flicked the air, testing it. A rattler getting ready.
Unhappily, Concha slapped Rosa, told her to get away. The hysterical girl was shocked by the slap, and began to run back along their path. The snake’s head moved quickly back and forth, as it tried to make up its mind what was going on. Concha stepped to the side, the machete struck the rattler’s neck. Once, three times. The muscled neck was strong.
Finally Concha saw that the rattler was dying. She went on, looking for arnica, berros, cannabis, thinking of the muscles they would help. She’d have to come back with her horse for the snake. It was almost eight feet long, and it’s well-cured meat was health-making, too.