JW: This is an interview that I did with Richard Schneider on April 5th, April 4th, 2010 in Alamos about his experiences when he first came to Alamos, particularly with the Guarijio. Okay, Richard, tell us about when you came and what Alamos was like when you first came.

RS: Well, let’s see, the first time that I remember being in Alamos and deciding I wanted to get out of town, I met Craig Leonard, and Craig and I had a friend that had an uncle with a ranch up above San Bernardo, so we jumped in a truck and went out there and spent time on the ranch up on the upper Rio Mayo and then heard about the Guarijio and where they were living.

JW: What year was this, do you think?

RS: I would say about maybe ’19, maybe 1982, something like that, ’83. So we went out there, and we had bicycles with us, and they told us that these Indian people were living in a place called Mesa Colorado which is on the river, so we rode bicycles for a number of hours and came down the hill and into Mesa Colorado, and what we found was a bunch of Indian people that were extremely shy and very afraid of us to the point that I remember feeling like, I felt kind of guilty about being there because they had this look on their face. They had a history of people doing things to them, and they didn’t know what we were up to, and we were totally awed, because we were two white guys on bicycles. So, I just remember that feeling that I finally found one person that would talk to me in Spanish and just, just, I just remember - very shy. That was my first time rolling into Mesa Colorado, and then as time went by over the next year or two or three, we would go back out to the ranch, and then go back there again, and at one point we were …. I was on a motorcycle and ran into a bunch guys cutting firewood along the road, and they were they looked like they were sort of, they looked like they weren’t from there. I started talking to them, and one of the guys’ name was Raymundo, and he was a Canadian although maybe of Canadian Indian descent or something. His story was that he just had showed up, that he knew of the tribe, and that he was involved in preserving Native American culture and had gone to bat for these Indian people, the Guarijio in Mexico City in order to get them recognized as an independent Indian group through the Federal government of Mexico so they could get - so they could get all the support from the Institute of Indigenous and all the Federal help, so he packed a couple of the Indian people down to Mexico City. One of them, who was the chief, who is a friend mine, his name is Jose Raylas?? and he ended up getting, convincing the Mexican government that they were in fact an independent group and this part, and they had showed up with all these people to have a big, a celebration to celebrate that fact. He was with a bunch of people from the Museum of Anthropology from the City of Chihuahua. They had brought a bunch of peyote with them, which they can legally have, and they were going to have a big fiesta that night. As I remember, Raymundo wasn’t all that happy about us being there. Two, two gringos. I think he sort of felt like maybe we didn’t deserve to be there or we were going to somehow color the incident, but I don’t think he realized that we’d spent a lot of time in the area and we weren’t, we just didn’t just happenstance on it. Anyway we went to the party. They had a big fiesta. What he was interested in doing is, is having the celebration, and rather than having everybody drink, which was typical, he would have them drink this peyote tea, and they did. We all did, and he had, and there was a big celebration.

JW: This was a new thing for them.

EW: Hi. (Earle Winderman walks by.)

JW: Was this a new thing, experience for the Indians?

RS: You know, I think so. Peyote doesn’t grow in there, in there - around here, and I know that the Tarahumaras used to go a long ways to get it out of Cuila??. Maybe historically at some point it was part of their experience, but I don’t think that was something that they, that they did as a tribe, but it set the tone for the reverence and sort of the - the tribal - he was trying to promote tribal integrity and get these people to recognize that they were special, and that they had something to offer and that it was good for them and good for everyone to maintain their cultural integrity.

JW: What more do you know about this guy and his back ground, and what happened to him afterwards?

RS: You know, I don’t know much about the guy. I know he was Canadian. I know that he had traveled amongst a lot of Indigenous tribespeople. That he was well connected with the - that he made a huge focus of - about cultural integrity. I know (Tourist bus horn blares.) that he took some of the members of the tribe up to the United States, and I think his feeling was, is that these Indigenous tribes needed to know about each other, and if they knew about each other then through that knowledge they could maintain their cultural integrity and respect and validate their worth through the other tribes that were acknowledged, so he made a point to try to connect up these different Indian groups that might not know about each other.

JW: Was he connected to a university?

RS: I have no idea. My sense is that he wasn’t.

JW: Do you know of anything he published after that?

RS: I don’t know of anything he published. I do know that I went to a second event up there that he put together, and he had obviously hooked up with somebody who had financial backing, and they came in, and they brought, they paid to have a whole lot, a number of native peoples from all over - South America, the United States, to come to Mesa Colorado to have a big fiesta, and I happened to be there also when that happened.

JW: What year was that, do you think?

RS: Just a guess, maybe ’87. ’88. Just a guess. There were, there were Apaches there, there was a Canadian tribe or a couple, there were, there were Huichol, Tarahumara, there was people from South America. They’d obviously paid for plane flights and to bring all these people in, and as far as anything published, they made a video, they did a, they videoed this whole thing as a production, so somewhere somebody has video, lots of video footage of this event. The guy was from Tucson, I believe, who funded it and was the one, the one that did, was the videographer.

JW: What can you tell us about the ceremonies, the dancing, the rituals that you saw there?

RS: The Guarijio do a really pretty basic ritual where they have one guy that sings, and he has a rattle, and he sings sort of a melodic hypnotic sort of song. He sings a lot of different songs involving the planting, the coming of rains, the planting of plants, thanking the gods, and the women are in the background, and they’re kind of arm in arm - locked arm and arm, and they pat their bare feet on the bare ground as he sings - as he rattles. As he shakes his rattle, and there’s one guy, there’s a guy that is generally in charge of - he was like the singer for the tribe. When I went to the event where there were all these other tribes there, they all did different things. The Huichol did this big circle dance thing. They had the hat with the feather. The Apaches did their dancing and every tribe was different. I did see a lot of similarities between the Mayos and the Guarijios in ways as far as the deer dance and some of that, some of that was very similar.

JW: Did they all appear to use the rattles? They are called tenabari?? Is that it?

RS: Tenabaris (butterfly cocoons).

JW: Tenabaris.

RS: I think tenabaris are the, are the, are the … The tenabaris are the sound makers that they strap on their, on their ankles and on their legs.

JW: But did all of the tribes…?

RS: Booli??. I think they called, the rattles are called booli??.

JW: Booli??.

RS: Booli??, and which is like a gourd - I think it is a word for a gourd, but they call the rattle a booli?? I believe because they are all made out of gourds.

JW: But those we have here in Alamos are made of cocoons, butterfly cocoons.

RS: But that’s the tenabaris.

JW: Okay.

RS: The butterfly cocoons are the tenabaris. The rattle.

JW: Who used these?

RS: The Mayos used those. I don’t know if the Guarijio did, the Mayos used those and probably the Yaquis also.

JW: So, were you able to determine how the people fed themselves, took care of themselves, what crops did they plant? What did you learn about them while you were there?

RS: Well, I did an interview, a video interview with the chief of the Guarijios last year. Last year, and I asked him those questions about what they used to eat.

JW: What is his name?

RS: Jose Raylas??. He is still alive. He is probably one hundred years old. He is going blind with cataracts. He fell off a cliff getting honey when he was a young man, broke his leg with a compound fracture which was never repaired, so his leg, his, I don’t know, calf bone is - looks like this still (he positions fists together but a bit askew). I never - it just healed over. I mean, we're talking tough. He talked about when he was a kid how they worked for food for, with, with - there was a, one of the big land owners was the Enriques that were up in there, so they were kind of slave labor, so they worked for food, built fences, and ate a lot of natural stuff: roots and berries and fish and …. They, he knows as a lot about native edible plants, and I suspect that they planted some, that they planted corn also. Once the, once the Federal assistance started coming in, then they were offered staples, maseca, corn, different …. It’s a lot easier to eat packaged food than it is to try to grow it, so everything seemed to me that a lot if things changed with that.

JW: We were told the other day in a lecture that they now have a tortilla factory.

RS: It wouldn’t surprise me.

JW: So, Richard, what other adventures can you tell us about in the years since you came here, when you went off by yourself or with others on your motorcycle?

RS: I mean sticking to the topic of the Guarijios, I have a couple of adventures that I did in their neighborhood, not on motorcycle, but hiking and on a mule. I hired a, I hired a guide and went back for a week and a half to a place called Babicora?? which is a Guarijio village which is back in the mountains out of Mesa Colorado and all of the buildings are all palm thatched roofs, so its kind of unique down in that, down in that little canyon.

JW: What, when did you go, what year was that? Mas o menos.

RS: 1990, maybe. Not sure. 1990 or so. I went twice. I went with a guy named Antonio. Antonio Enriques who was half Guarijio, and he took me back there, and then I went with another Guarijio guide the next time, and we stayed at a place called El Sau?? which was an old rancho. One thing that you notice when you get back in the mountains is that the trails connect the water holes, and the historical places where people end up building ranches are next to the water. So that’s where, wherever there is water you are going to find, generally find, historic dwellings there because it's all about water. Then the other thing I’ve noticed as time goes on, when they decide to build a road, then they connect the ranches. The road connects the ranches together, so it’s kind of like the ancients needed the water, and so the dwellings were created next to water and then the roads followed the trails, and it was all about, basically it was about water, it seemed to me. So, I went back there. One time I went back I took, I bought a whole bunch of black and white, beautiful black and white striped nylon rope that was about three quarters of an inch or so, five eighths. I bought a whole huge roll at a, at a sale up north. I brought this rope down, and I cut it into pieces that were about thirty feet long, and I took it with us in order to trade for some stuff. I just thought this rope is gorgeous - it’s, it not only looks good, but it’s very durable, efficient. You could make headstalls, whatever out of it. So I trades for some different things - some handmade little stools, and to this day, people are still walking around up there with pieces of this rope that I took up there. It’s highly prized. I went up and traded that. That was, I hiked in there, and that was all Guarijio. I remember meeting one guy that didn’t want his photo taken - a Guarijio guy. The story was he didn’t want his photo taken because there were, that he was wanted for murder, but the murder was an accident, and everybody knew it was an accident, but he was afraid to go, and go into town because he figured that they would just take him away. He didn’t want his photo, and then years later I discovered that he finally decided to come in, and he got it all straightened out, so that was one interesting story.

JW: Did you do much filming when you were on these trips?

RS: I took a lot of photographs, but I didn’t do any video.

Transcribed by Ellen Ryan, Alamos History Association

February 3, 2020

Interviews are transcribed to the best of my ability. There may be errors that need correction. Double question marks indicate an unknown word, sentence or section.