Sixteen-year-old Concha Rosales and her eight-foot rattler have prompted reader comments. Some don’t say it outright but seem stirred by a fear of snakes. Some frankly say that no “rational” 16-year-old girl would be so “reckless.”
Serendipitously, in the last days of October, a team of scientists released a study showing that part of this reaction is embedded in us by ancient evolutionary inheritance reaching back to our primate relatives 60 million years ago. We, like them, have a special pronounced cerebral ability to recognize snakes. That’s because of a region of the brain known as the pulvinar. Anthropologists and scientists have just reported that this cluster of neurons is a legacy from our primate past. Evolving humanoids found safety in trees at night; it was a fairly secure place to sleep. Unfortunately, snakes like to hunt in trees at night. Pulvinar neurons were a slowly developed response to this danger. And that danger-warning reaction survives today, causing many of us to be not merely wary of snakes, but somewhat hysterical about them. In other humans the pulvinar response seems to twine with experience (or a more practical primal response) to prompt a calmer vigilant way when sensing the presence of snakes.
Thus, uncontrollable fear of snakes is not always common among children. Example: Shortly after I was born my mother divorced my father, a charming drunk who came from a line of alcoholic business executives. He inherited their taste for booze but not for success. Long before that a single mom was seen as a feminist triumph; she found herself looking for a job as the tail end of the Great Depression continued plowing under swaths of the Great Plains. She also sought a place for her two-year-old son. I was deposited in places with abundant fresh air and food: three economically depressed farms/ranches. In contrast, her life was lived some distance away in a metropolis, where there were more job opportunities.
Late one afternoon, when I was four, she got a female co-worker to give her a ride into the boonies. What my mother found on her surprise visit was a four-year-old standing on a split-bottom chair trying to tie live snakes to a wire clothes line. She was aghast, almost to point of hysteria. That puzzled me. The snakes were nonvenomous young bullsnakes and kingsnakes, yellow belly racers, etcetera.Often those who work in the countryside – cultivating crops, raising livestock, living with all the demanding tasks that make up what is contained in the word “rural” or “campo” – are observant enough to learn a myriad of valuable things. It teaches them early about hard-pressed people in a challenging world, and the weight of the worth of that raw world on the sensitive scale of lasting perception. Others in similar circumstances may miss this learning aura of hope: Hope that crops will survive rough seasons, droughts and floods. That livestock, hardy creatures, will thrive with a modicum of common sense handling and care. Concha Rosales, for no apparent reason, was an instinctively conscientious “watcher” of such things. Yet there were some youngsters (and adults) in the extended Rosales family who saw little, or none, of this. They saw drudgery, and more of it ahead.
But Concha, at that moment still educationally stuck, was hungry to plumb things for much more, and found it. But it wasn’t easy. “All my friends, my sisters and cousins are reading many books, some very hard to understand.”
To jar her out of being stuck, a gringo had given Concha some much-hailed Mexican literature that was too advanced for a sixteen-year-old. So the reading was switched and Concha was given books and magazines and newspapers about Mexico’s female heroines in the War of Independence, in the 1910 Revolution. Famous corridos (“running” ballads) were pointed out to her; music of the Revolution praising the camp followers, wives, girl friends, self-acknowledged prostitutes (see the 1989 film of Carlos Fuentes’ novel, “The Old Gringo,” starring Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda). These women went with menfolk into battle. Two hugely popular corridos, “Adelita” and “La Valentina,” permanently gave those women the two archetypical names used to identify all soldadas.
Happily, there are corridos about almost every thing and every event, beginning in 1801 when the first one appeared in this country. Music of the first “real” Mexican corrido, “El Corrido de la Pulga” by Pepe Quevedo, was published in 1821.
In the 1960s wandering mariachis were everywhere, not only on weekends but nightly canvasing local cantinas, fiestas of the smallest pueblo. Once this “course” in Mexican female heroines began, Concha’s father and I took her to nearby pueblos to hear brave women praised. One was Doña Beatriz Hernandez, the woman who forced the first Spaniards in what would become the state of Jalisco to make up their minds and stop moving the pueblo of Guadalajara from place to place. With strong words Doña Beatriz embarrassed the cabildo, the town council, into making a choice of location, one that she forcefully suggested: the Valley of Atemajac. That makes her the founding mother of the city.
Then, Concha was taken to Patzcuaro to see the statue of Gertrudis Bocanegra. Of Spanish parentage, Gertrudis was born in 1765, and scandalized her family and friends by marrying a Purépecha indian. She and her husband and their ten-year-old son were active in Father Miguel Hidalgo’s War of Independence. Her husband and son were killed fighting the Spanish. She was arrested by Spanish Royalist troops and executed in 1817. Her statue stands in Patzcuaro’s main plaza. There, Concha was told the legend of 16–17 year old Princess Erendira of the Purépechas, the indigenous rulers of Michoacan, who led her people into a fierce war against the Spanish. Using stolen Spanish horses, her people learned to ride into battles against their enemies. In 1529-1530, the forces of Nuño de Guzman entered Michoacan and some parts of Guanajuato with an army of 500 Spanish soldiers and more than 10,000 Indian warriors. In 1530, as the Governor and President of the Primera Audencia, Nuño de Guzman plundered the region and ordered the execution of the Purépecha leader, Tangaxuan II, provoking a chaotic situation and widespread violence.
An early activist in the 1910 Revolution was Aquiles Serdan, a 1909 supporter of Francisco I. Madero. All of his immediate family was equally dedicated to maderismo, particularly his sister, Carmen. To baffle the enemy’s security agents, Carmen used the male pseudonym of Marcos Serrato while distributing anti-government pamphlets. On the eve of the Revolution, the Serdan family agreed to stockpile arms and ammunition in their Puebla house in preparation for the armed struggle. Carmen Serdan, using her male pseudonym, increased her work against the dictator Porfirio Diaz. Then an informer betrayed the Serdans, and the house was besieged November 8, 1910. The Serdans became the Revolution’s first martyrs. “So many of those women die,” Concha said.
“Pos, about a million people died during the Revolution,” she was told. “Though some now say that is exaggeration.” But people she knew who were alive then, and the gringos who were here then agree that it was about a million. They say a great many of the dead were women ... and children. “Artillery and pendejos, it didn’t make any difference.”
That was in the early 1960s when there were still old-timers around, veterans of the Revolution and the uprisings that erupted throughout the 1920s, who could tell her first-hand stories of heroines.