How does a 16-year-old girl kill an eight-foot rattlesnake? Today’s semi-cute answer is a worn cliche: “Very carefully.” Actually, despite the simpering intent, it’s accurate.
Concha Rosales and her eight-year-old cousin, Rosa, were scouting thickly grown, yet-to- be grazed wild plants bordering a horse trail. They were looking for herbal remedies in the family colt pasture when they encountered an obstacle. The rattler was handsome and big, both in girth and length. After a chill night in the rocky foot hill bordering the pasture, it was dozing in the afternoon sun in the middle of the trail.
The populous extended Rosales family was made up of a number of children whose insatiable curiosity distinctly included snakes. Concha grew up riding horses, and horses did not like snakes; they reacted to them with bucking-running fear. Both of these circumstances made poisonous snakes a liability. Keeping Rosa behind her, Concha stepped off the path and approached the rattler, deciding to kill it. Too many kids, too much livestock, too many nosy dogs. Fearful, Rosa began crying. Concha led her back the brecha and briskly sent her home. Concha then went back toward the snake, whose tail was no longer twitching. She stopped and took up her watcher’s stance. Snakes are deaf. They sense the presence of other beings by vibrations. The handsome large rattler began to relax. It checked out the disappearance of interlopers, moving its head, flickering a dark tongue, testing for vibrations. Though Concha carried a trimmed long-bladed machete, she didn’t take it from its sheath.
Finally, when it turned to seek another comfortable resting place, she followed silently as the Mexican pit viper curled its way to a warm flat rock near some undergrowth. Snakes are vulnerable to predatory birds, and prefer to doze near piles of stones, boulders, sturdy brush. At this time, in the early 1960s, the mountains surrounding Guadalajara were populated with swarms of birds, reptiles and many animals, everything from deer to small bears to tigres (pumas). A good number of these were not friends of snakesAs the rattler was selecting a new comfortable, safe spot, Concha unsheathed her straight-blade machete. The generally dusty trail made for quiet following. As the rattler inspected an inviting spot, Concha stepped quickly, quietly forward, and with three swift strokes cut off its head. She left it squirming on the rock, and walked on, looking for herbal remedies.
When Concha came back with a morral – full of herbs – she skinned the rattler, rolled the up skin carefully, then butchered the meat from the viper’s spine and ribs, wrapping and tying it in the broad leaves of wild hoja grande.
A campesino ranch girl, Concha did this skillfully. She regularly helped butcher cattle, pigs, sheep, chickens, rabbits and had fired a shotgun expertly at pheasants and ducks, etc. Commercial food was expensive, and her family was large. All of its mature members were hunters.
But Concha was primarily a vaquerita, a “horse girl.” She had begun riding as soon as she could persuade someone to saddle and bridle a horse for her. That’s all she needed. She’d tie the horse close to a corral fence, climb the fence until she could reach a stirrup and then hoist herself into the saddle. If she had had her horse in the portril, she would have hauled the rattler to the ranch, butchered it a bit better, and had time to study more.
This is what Concha told me when she got back to the ranch. She had stopped going to the poor, and poorly staffed, school in the nearest pueblo. Concha’s unofficial parents, who could barely read or write, had asked me to get her in the habit of reading. I had given and loaned Concha several books, then realized they were too advanced. Yet the pueblo school, with all its windows broken, its two bad toilets and splintered benches for the students, was as shabby in its teaching as it was in it furnishings.
So Concha received a hard-used incomplete 15-volume set of ersatz Mexican history. The margins of the pages had notes correcting government fantasies about the Republic’s astounding history. She went through that “historical national history” in pretty good time. I told her to keep the history so she could refer to it on national holidays and search out what really had happened. She increasingly found the government’s fabrications amusing.
At that time in campo pueblos, even in some county seats few books were available, and often few newspapers. Some people had television sets, though not at mountainside ranches. But in place of news, tv disseminated mostly fairy tales, so they missed little.
I had offered Concha the simplest Spanish-language books I had. And while out fixing the ranch’s alabre de puas (barbed wire fencing), we’d take a break, and I’d pull out a book and read it with her. She didn’t believe a village could be as dour as the one depicted by Jalisco’s Agustin Yañez in his famous “Al Filo del Agua” (The Edge of the Storm). It is, he explains for the unknowing, a farmer’s, a rancher’s term for the beginning of the rainy season, and became to mean the beginning of an event. In this case Yañez means the historical suspended moment before the outbreak of the 1910 Revolution which turned Mexico into another place.
When that novel began to wear a little, we’d read Carlos Fuentes’ “La Muerte de Atemio Cruz” (The Death of Artemio Cruz), which scandalously proclaimed the 1910 revolution a failure. For Concha, Fuentes’ changing points of view, present and past time, flashbacks switchings, had to be taken apart, straightened out, justified, evaluated.
The irony, (ironia, a word she’d recently learned) of a 16-year-old girl that tradition said didn’t need an education, who had quit school and was now learning about her country by reading two of its greatest authors, was not totally lost on her. At the same time, some people were criticizing her boldness, her “unfeminine” forwardness and habits, such as wearing pants. Young boys would shout rude jokes at her. But always from a distance. They, like others, remained attentive to the straight-blade machete she carried. But such attitudes disturbed her.
So we talked about Mexico’s female heroines. The 1910 Revolution was still considered one of the most significant factors in Mexican history at that time. Revolutionary general Lazaro Cardenas, Mexico’s most revered president, was still alive. And the fame of the “Adelitas” were still regularly celebrated. Adelitas were women who traveled with their soldier husbands and paramours, most famously in old photographs of families riding atop railroad cars. Yet one of the historically most noted heroines, though not greatly known in the campo, was “La Corregidora,” Doña Josefa Ortiz de Dominguez. Wife of the chief magistrate of Queretaro, she was a liberal with connections to all levels of government and the Catholic Church. Historians report that her home became a “center of tertulias” (parties) during which a wide range of philosophical and political issues were discussed. The men who were to initiate Mexico’s war of Independence (Hidalgo, Allende, etc.) often attended. It was she who relayed the urgent message to Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costillo that this conspiracy had been discovered by the authorities, that her husband was about to arrest him and his fellow conspirators.
There were many heroines in that early attempt to gain independence, and in later efforts. But the most well-known and widespread acts by women warriors occurred in the 1910 Revolution and were still fresh in the 1960s. Generally the idealization of the tens of thousands of “soldaderas” who took part in the Revolution was epitomized by scores of corridos, but chiefly by several versions of the corridos “Adelita” and “La Valentina.” Ultimately “Adelita” came to signify the camp follower/inamorata/wife of a revolutionary soldier who went into battle with him. It was so popular that all women following revolutionary armies, no matter whether a wife, lover, or purely a camp follower/often prostitute, were identified by a single name. Some fought by spying, by carrying messages, food, medicines, maps, intelligence. Some fought by “seducing” federal officers to join the revolution or to release revolutionary prisoners. Unfortunately when caught, they were brutally treated.
At that time peripatetic mariachis wandered pueblo and city streets beginning in the late afternoon and often, if cantinas stayed open, late into night. And they weren’t expensive.
A Spanish-language history book that gave goodly space to Mexico’s soldaderas was found. That was useful medicine for Concha’s self-regard, which at the time was being much battered not merely by strangers but neighbors and even relatives. Shortly after that, November 20, Revolution Day, a mariachi band showed up at the Rosales ranch. They had been instructed to intently rehearse the songs “Adelita,” and “La Valentina,” for these two corridos were to be repeatedly requested.
After reading some of that history, Concha did not hesitate to go into the nearest pueblo that had a good leather diestro, the rattlesnake skin draped across her shoulder. She was going to get a snake-skin vest made.