On September 26, 150 people gathered at the Universidad de Guadalajara’s Alberto Navarro Auditorium to pay tribute to Dr. Miguel Cházaro, a legend among Mexico’s botanists. After 25 years as a UdG professor, Jalisco’s best-known botanist was “retiring” to his native Veracruz, where, attested one of his colleagues, “he’ll probably keep right on collecting for another 25 years.”
Cházaro started out studying biology, but in 1973 began collecting plants in Veracruz and has never stopped to this day. In 1975 he began a study of the huizache tree (a kind of acacia). Later he turned his attention to parasitic plants, succulents and cacti. He studied for his Masters degree at the University of Wisconsin, Madison from 1984 to 1986, after which he joined the UdG.
Over the past 40 years, Cházaro has managed to collect for identification over 10,500 plants in Mexico, the United States and Central America. He is author or co-author of 13 books and, with his colleagues, has discovered 15 new species of plants. Perhaps the most famous is Agave valenciana, a gigantic Century Plant growing near the Mascota River, which he named after Oscar Valencia, a self-educated botanist living in the area. Over the years, Cházaro’s colleagues have named eight new species of plants after him, such as the strikingly beautiful flower Magnolia chazaroi. Someone has calculated that Cházaro has been involved in finding one-third of all the new species of cacti discovered in Mexico since the Conquista. So how does he do this?
“Perseverence … and a good bit of luck,” he says with a smile.
Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to accompany Cházaro on several of his excursions and I must say every one of them was interesting and a few were, let’s say, truly unforgettable.
I met him in 2007 at the launching of a book on the extraordinary Piedras Bola (megaspherulites) of Ahualulco. Although he was the author of a complete chapter of the book, he was not sitting on the stage but next to me in the audience. When I discovered who he was, I asked him why he wasn’t up there with all the other authors.
“Authors?” he whispered. “Those aren’t authors, they’re all VIPs.”
And I couldn’t fail to notice that the VIPs never once asked those who actually wrote the book to take a bow.
A typical example of a Miguel Cházaro outing was a visit to Río Los Patitos in 2009. First came the lure, by telephone: “John, I know this amazing place where a cold mountain stream is heated by three geysers which are submerged in its waters and, you won’t believe it, but these geysers actually sing!”
Who could say no? Still, I knew that in some way the real purpose of the trip would turn out to be botanical, so I wasn’t too surprised when we headed for those geysers “the long way” to a remote stretch of the same Patitos (Little Ducks) River, in the beautiful Barranca de San Cristóbal, where there just happened to be a canyon where Cházaro suspected he might find a very rare succulent called Echeveria flowering.
“We’ll take care of our botanical mission first and spend the rest of the day at the geysers,” he said. Naturally, the place where we had to search for that elusive little plant was a steep slope dotted with huge boulders lying among a thick tangle of undergrowth, with no path to be seen anywhere. Thus began a typical botanist’s plant hunt with a whole gang of people searching. Unsurprisingly, it was Miguel himself who spotted the first Echevería, which turned out to be a small plant with delicate, bell-shaped flowers. Once several specimens of the new plant had been collected, we were ready to head for the geysers.
“OK, there are two ways we can get there,” Cházaro said, map in hand. “We can backtrack down the highway to a road that leads directly to the geysers in 35 minutes, or we can look for an obscure dirt road barely visible on this map, drive to the isolated, hard-to-find village of La Lobera and then work our way down a one-lane brecha with a 1,000-foot drop on one side, hoping we can find a connection to the geysers.”
Of course, during this discourse I was repeating “option one, option one” under my breath, but whenever you suggest “going back the way we came” to a group of adventurous Mexicans, you can be sure they’ll find some excuse for taking the more dangerous and unlikely route. And that’s exactly what happened.
So it was we spent all day wandering through the most remote reaches of the Barranca and ended up reaching the celebrated geysers just as the sun was about to set. We parked, Cházaro jumped into the river and I was just digging my swim suit out of my backpack when it was announced. “Sorry, folks, time is up – we have to leave immediately!”
At the end of the day, Xipe Totec, the God of Sprouting Vegetation, must surely have been smiling. This is just one more story that Mexico’s botanists will probably be retelling around the campfire for years to come about the legendary Miguel Cházaro, botanist extraordinaire.
During the ceremony at the UdG, speaker after speaker emphasized that Cházaro is more than just another enthusiastic botanist.
“Over the years, he has risked his life again and again,” said one.
“I want to tell you about his simplicity, his humility, his sincerity and about his big, big heart,” said Primavera Forest director José Luis Gámez.
“Not in a year could we ever systematize everything in his curriculum,” quipped botanist Antonio Vázquez García.
Perhaps forest engineer Raúl López Velázquez best summed up what impresses so many people about Cházaro: “He’s not just a great botanist – he’s a great human being.”