HOW A CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGIST HELPED UNLOCK THE SECRETS OF THE MAYA CALENDAR

 

Barbara Tedlock with Maya Woman in Guatemala

BARBARA TEDLOCK

Cultural anthropologist Barbara Tedlock has spent a lifetime exploring the spaces between the lines in numerous ethnic cultures. Equipped with a masters degree in Ethnomusicology along with a masters and PhD in Anthropology, she and her husband Dennis Tedlock, best known for his translation of The Popul Vuh: Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life, traveled the world to engage in a new kind of cross-cultural understanding to learn how cultures think, dream, heal, honor their ancestors, and live.

Though publication is an important aspect for anthropologists, diving into the field may well be their life blood. Tedlock is also a key figure in anthropological dream research. Though she has authored many books, this post will center on Time and the Highland Maya, exploring how the Maya view time.

TIME AND THE HIGHLAND MAYA

The Tedlocks' fieldwork began in June 1975 for three months, then ten months in 1976, and lastly another three months in 1979. They conducted formal, structured ethnographic surveys as well as informal, unstructured interviews. They read from ethno-historical documents with consultants and viewed previously reported "facts" through observation and eventually through their own apprenticeships. Studies were conducted in five K'iche' communities, with the majority of time being spent in Momostenango, Guatemala. They interviewed weavers, merchants, farmers, town officials and various religious specialists ranging from members of a Catholic Action group to dozens of priest-shamans.

Barbara discussed a 1722 historical document with a Momostecan elder, a Maya calendar that was written in the K'iche' language. Tapes were made during both formal and informal interviews. In the middle stages of Barbara's work in Momostenango, she and Dennis undertook formal training as calendar diviners and were initiated in August, 1976. This allowed them to perform calendrical divinations for K'iche' Maya who solicited their services.

San Andres de Xecul in Momostenango (Photo TraveloGuatemala) 

MAYA CALENDAR

Quoting Barbara Tedlock, "The ancient Maya were great horologists, or students of time. They measured the lunar cycle and solar year; lunar and solar eclipses; and the risings of Venus and Mars with accuracy. In many cases their measurements were more accurate than those of the Europeans who conquered them.

"But unlike the Europeans," she continued, "the Maya were interested not only in the quantities of time but also in its qualities, especially its meaning for human affairs."

Though the Tedlocks were quick to understand Maya astronomy practices, efforts to inhabit their symbolic world became more nuanced and demanding.

Chichen Itza By Night (By Astrojem.net)

As explained by Barbara, the very foundation of their calendar—composed of myriad overlays of cycles of differing lengths and portents—rested on a cycle of 260 named and numbered days. The names of this cycle had no obvious correlation with astronomical events and the names of its days and their divinatory interpretations were largely lacking in astronomical references.

HIGHLAND VS. LOWLAND INTERPRETATIONS

According to Barbara Tedlock, among the Lowland Maya of the Yucatán, the ancient ways of interpreting time are known from inscriptions on thousands of stone monuments (stela) and from the few ancient books that survived the fires of Spanish missionaries and a handful of early colonial documents. But the contemporary indigenous people of the Yucatán region have long since forgotten how to keep time in the manner of their ancestors, she observed.

However with the Highland Maya, she wrote, and especially those from the western highlands where the Tedlocks chose to land, the situation is reversed. The monuments there are bare of inscriptions, according to Tedlock, and not one of the ancient books escaped the flames. But it is among the Highland Maya rather than their Lowland cousins that time continues to this day to be calculated and given meaning according to ancient methods. Scores of indigenous Guatemalan communities speaking Mayan languages keep the 260-day cycle and, in many cases, the ancient solar cycle as well.

Guatemalan Western Highlands

TOLZK'IN CALENDAR

For this reason, Barbara Tedlock chose this particular region in western Guatemala's high

lands to study and do her work. And it is here where she was confirmed as a day keeper. "The Tzolk'in calendar," said Tedlock, "was primarily used for making predictions and communicating with the gods or ancestors. 

"The Maya believe a god rules each day and depending on that god's traits, it could be good or bad for certain activities. The calendar is easy to remember and that's why it has been passed down and used to this day. It fits into the culture of the people.

The 260-Day Calendar Arranged by Number
From Time and the Highland Maya, by Tedlock

"It fits into their agriculture, their spinning, their weaving. It's something people use and it doesn't conflict with our calendar," she explained. "People look at the characteristics, the god, of every day, If it's a day that relates to money, then it's time to pay bills."

RECRUITMENT

Being indoctrinated as a day keeper for a non-indigenous person is almost unthinkable. But the Tedlocks came to it through a great backstory which I'll share. They were indoctrinated under the formal apprenticeship of a diviner in Momostenango in the 70s. This is no small undertaking and day keepers are recruited in shamanistic fashion, with "divine election" through birth, dreams, and/or illness.

They'd been spending a lot of time in various Highlands pueblos, touring churches, asking questions, and a day keeper divined that they were annoying people at shrines. He told them they had entered shrines without being ritually clean. A little scared by his remarks, they left the Highlands for the city where Barbara became seriously ill. Her illness eventually passed. They returned to Momostenango, renewed contact with the day keeper, and were then allowed to enter their apprenticeships.

DIVINE ELECTION

For Barbara Tedlock, "divine election" came about through illness. The unusual opportunity to learn divination was provided to them by a gifted, socially prominent priest-shaman who had noticed their intense interest in the topic and observed Barbara's cooperation in answering questions he asked during the calendrical divinations he performed for her during the illness. His high status and reputation allowed him to risk potential public and private criticism for accepting foreigners as students. Both Barbara and Dennis were trained and initiated together because it was divined that their joint indiscretions had caused her illness, also and because their teacher had a series of dreams that recommended "united" service" for them.

Barbara's role in learning of divinatory service involved a role not formally discussed in the sociological or anthropological literature on the topic of fieldwork, namely, participant-as-observed. Shortly after beginning formal training, Barbara realized that her teacher's personal commitment to their training was extremely serious. If they failed as students, he failed, and their social disgrace would become his.

VILLAGE LIFE

With that being said, they settled into village life in Guatemala, became initiated as day keepers, learned the rituals, and made fewer treks north. As time went on, their contemporaries in the US said they had "gone native," not unlike the consensus among Margaret Mead and her husband's fellow anthropologists during their work in Papua New Guinea and the South Seas.

As for their roles as anthropologists, the Tedlocks returned to them in full as soon as the liminal period was over, on the day of their initiation. Barbara Tedlock's account of the ritual life of an Indigenous community in Guatemala offered a rare glimpse at the importance of ancient religious symbols in the daily world of a twentieth-century Indigenous people. Her participation in the calendric rituals that permeated every aspect of life in Momostenango gave her a unique perspective on the fascination with time that has long characterized the Maya culture.

Tedlock is the author of a number of books including The Woman in a Shaman's Body; Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations; The Beautiful and the Dangerous: Encounters with the Zuni Indians. Her books explore cross-cultural understanding and communication of dreams, ethno-medicines, and aesthetics.

Guatemala

If you enjoyed this post, check out Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, on Amazon. My website is www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are also on Amazon/ And my journalistic overview of the Maya 2012 calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, is on Amazon.

NANCY DREW AUTHOR HAD DEEP ATTRACTION TO MEXICO AND THE MAYA WORLD

Who of us girls as young teens did not love Nancy Drew? The sleuth known for her voracious appetite for getting into trouble, being at the center of crime scenes and mysteries? Who taught us how to signal SOS with a tube of lipstick, break out a window using spike heels, and remember to always keep an overnight bag in the car, just in case?

CAROLYN KEENE? UMM, NO

For years I thought Carolyn Keene was Nancy's author but later discovered Keene was a pen name for Mildred Wirt Benson. The prolific Benson would write 135 of the first Nancy Drew detective tales that came to shape Nancy's "steely bravery," according to an article by Jennifer Fisher in "Zócalo." Benson's image of Nancy would create "the tenacious, bold and independent heroine we have come to know."

Mildred Wirt Benson aka Carolyn Keene

The real author of our favorite girl detective was an Iowa homegrown born in 1905, daughter of a country doctor, and the first student—male or female—to earn a masters degree in journalism from University of Iowa (later home to Iowa Writers Workshop). For 50 years Benson worked in journalism while penning famous mysteries, covering the courthouse beat, crime and corruption at "The Toledo Blade" and "The Toledo Times."

HEADING TO NYC

As a child, Benson was an avid reader of children's classics. Her first short story, "The Courtesy," appeared in "St. Nicholas," a children's magazine, and won her second place in a monthly contest. Finding Iowa too dull for a woman with an agenda, she ventured to NYC and landed a job with an icon in publishing, Edward Stratemeyer. In 1934, "Fortune Magazine" said of Stratemeyer, "As oil and gas has its Rockefeller, literature has its Stratemeyer."

Stratemeyer published The Bobbsey Twins and The Hardy Boys and famously hired ghost writers for a flat monthly fee. Benson's pen name remained a mystery until the 1970s when researchers discovered Benson was the Oz behind the curtain. During the Great Depression and WWII, parents were candid with their children, according to Fisher's article, and didn't hide life's gravities. Enter Nancy Drew, a new kind of heroine for a new age of young girls. Stratemeyer penned a three-page outline for Benson and depicted Nancy as an "up-to-date American girl at her best—bright, clever, resourceful, and full of energy."

TREATED AS AN EQUAL

In 1973 Benson wrote an essay about her famous heroine, stating Nancy was treated as an equal by her father and by many in law enforcement and she never gave up when the going got tough. Her spirit struck a chord. Nancy Drew personified "the dream image which exists within most teenagers," Benson said. According to Fisher's article, this 1930s teen remained culturally relevant for more than 80 years, even as young women's roles changed dramatically. Mothers and grandmothers passed the books down to their daughters. "Women still tell me how they identified with Nancy Drew and that Nancy Drew gave them confidence to be whatever they wanted to be," Benson said in an interview in 1999.

In 1928 she married an AP telegraph operator, Asa Wirt. In 1936, he was transferred to Chicago, and that same year, her daughter Margaret Joan Wirt was born. Neither change of location nor motherhood would deter her, however, from her writing, but things petered out with Stratemeyer as he tried out various other story lines. In 1940 Asa had a stroke. AP transferred him to Toledo, Ohio. He had another stroke in 1943 and permanently left his AP job. These were hard years for her family especially as WWII was raging. But for Mildred, this gave her an opportunity. "The Toledo Times" took on female reporters for the first time, under the stipulation that they knew once the war was over, their work days would be numbered. In 1947 Asa died from complications with another stroke. 

Her mother came to live with her and her daughter while Mildred reported for the newspaper. In 1950 she married Edward Benson, an editor at "The Toledo Times." These years were happy ones and they traveled to Puerto Rico and Central America where Mildred gained a fascination with the Maya ruins. In 1959, enroute to Puerto Rico, Benson died unexpectedly. 

The next years again were hard as she worked the beat at her newspaper gig. Another juvenile publisher asked if she would consider writing young adult books, but she felt the world had changed too much, and she decided to focus on her reporting, now at "The Toledo Blade."  

MAYA CONNECTION

As she always loved to travel and loved the Maya pyramids, she began to charter bush pilots to visit less accessible archeological digs. She canoed down the Usumacinta River to Yaxchilan on a three-day trip with local guides. "I used to hang my hammock in Maya temples, and once, when no other shelter was available, I hung it in a corn crib. Those were my adventurous days." 

Canoeing Down Usumacinta River

She traipsed through crocodile-infested rivers and hacked her way through jungles with a machete. She trained as a pilot in the 1960s and took solo trips to Guatemala. Benson was becoming her own best role model for the very Nancy Drew we all came to love. 

In a particularly harrowing Nancy Drew-like experience, she was even locked inside a room in Guatemala by locals who thought she knew too much about criminal activity in their town. Channeling Nancy, she overpowered one of her captors and escaped. "Like any good sleuth," reporter Fisher went on to explain, "she later returned to Guatemala to learn more about what had happened to her."

Mildred Wirt Benson in Skywriter

THE SMITHSONIAN

In the 1990s, twenty years after dedicated Nancy Drew lovers had discovered Keene's real name and ID'd Mildred Wirt Benson as Drew's creator, Benson donated a series of papers she'd written about her heroine, along with her trusty Underwood typewriter used for creating Nancy, to the Smithsonian where it sits to this day. And finally, the mystery author got public credit by her native Iowa in 1993 when the University of Iowa had a Nancy Drew Conference. That same year, she was named Person of the Week by ABC's Peter Jennings.

Mildred Wirt Benson's Trusty Underwood

Asked later if she would ever give up writing, Benson said, "The undertaker will have to pry me away from my typewriter." That's pretty much what happened. At 96, in 2002, she was sitting at her trusty Underwood when she died. 

Unintentional Feminist (From CBC.ca) 

If you enjoyed this post, check out Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, on Amazon. My website is www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are also on Amazon/ And my journalistic overview of the Maya 2012 calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, is on Amazon.

PROLONGED DROUGHT CAUSED THE COLLAPSE OF THE ANCIENT MAYA EXPERTS SAY

Chichen Itza

Raging wild fires, one hundred year floods, and thousand year droughts. No, I'm not talking about the Maya—not yet—but about current weather patterns that are becoming all too common. A view into the past may well help prepare us for our environmental future.

In the past month I've read three new articles on studies that link the collapse of the ancient Maya to drought—from Nature Communications, Phys-Org, and Nature World News. To be sure, this is not new news. Archeologists across the globe have long debated the reason behind the Maya collapse and have come up with numerous theories. Radical environment change rises to the top of the list, always accompanied by extenuating circumstances linked to lack of water and how societies cope in times of food scarcity because of this. 

The Maya's rise to greatness was compromised by the most severe drought of the past seven thousand years. It devastated the Yucatán Peninsula and grand Classic Era Maya cities collapsed in four phases of abandonment—spaced about 50 years apart—around 760, 810, 860, and 910 A.D.  

NOT LONERS

The ancient Maya were not alone in civilization collapse due to radical environmental changes, but because that collapse occurred within the past thousand years, we may relate to it more. Before the collapse of the ancient Maya, countless great civilizations fell: the Minoan Greeks, the Hittites, Sumerians, Assyrians, Babylon, and ancient Rome for starters. The list goes on and on.

Minoan Greek Art

Early on, in 1946, the noted archeologist and Maya scholar Tatiana Proskouriakoff commented on a climate disaster that could have imperiled the Maya. She put it like this, "Though it is conceivable that the disappearance of the population may have been a gradual process, the catastrophically sudden extinction of the arts can be explained only in the terms of some widespread and unforeseen disaster that afflicted most Maya cities soon after a.d. 800."

The last known inscription on a carved Maya stella was listed as 910 A.D. in the Peten. In prosperous times, stella recorded major events detailing triumphs of kings and defeats of enemies. From 900 A.D. on there was either nothing to report or no backing for it. The kings could not maintain prosperity and when rain didn't come and crop harvests were not large enough to feed the population, disillusionment set in.

Recent testing of skeletal remains at various Maya sites shows evidence of disease and malnutrition right across the board—in nobles and peasants. Slash and burn agriculture caused land exhaustion and deprived the ground of nutrients. As the population grew, the peasants increased intensive farming techniques in an attempt to feed the masses. Their production system became over-burdened. Not enough food to go around.

LACK OF RAIN

And influential Maya archeologist, scholar, and author Michael D. Coe, in The Maya, Eighth Edition, Places and People, his last in the series, The Maya, writes researchers discovered a major drought that corresponded to the lapse between the early and late classic periods—a time in which no new stella (large limestone slabs placed in front of pyramid temples) were erected and in which earlier stella had been defaced. Defacing stella can be compared to spray painting graffiti on buildings today, showing a lack of respect for authority, I wrote in Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy.

Maya Carving at Palenque

In accordance with the environmental dilemma, I read an article on Mayapan, a prominent Post-Classic Maya city in the northwest Yucatán Peninsula, by Marilyn Masson. Posted in "Nature Communications," Masson, Principal Investigator for the Proyecto Economic de Mayapan, wrote that prolonged drought likely fueled civil conflict and its eventual collapse. So great was the city that it was considered the ancient capital of the Maya on the Yucatán Peninsula in the 13th century.

MAYAPAN

Mayapan (By En-Yucatán)

A latecomer to the pantheon of great Maya cities, Mayapan emerged as a regional capital on the Peninsula from the 13th to 15th centuries, after the demise of Chichen Itza. With a population of 20,000, it collapsed and was abandoned after a rival political faction, the Xiu, massacred the powerful Cocom family that ruled Mayapan. Historical records date the collapse between 1441 and 1461. But there's new evidence, thanks to Masson, professor and chair at University of Albany's Department of Anthropology, who co-authored the study which was assisted by a team of researchers. They studied historical documents for records of violence and examined human remains from the area and time period, looking for signs of traumatic injury.

Masson and her team found shallow mass graves and evidence of brutal massacre at monuments and structures across the city. "Some were laid out with knives in their pelvis and rib cages, others were chopped up and burned," she said. "Not only did they smash and burn the bodies but they also smashed and burned the effigies of their gods. It's a form of double desecration, basically." 

ADVANCED RADIOCARBON DATING TECHNOLOGY

Professor Douglas Bennett, University of California/Santa Barbara anthropolgy department, lead study on Masson's team, had new information to add. He dated the skeletons using accelerator mass spectrometry, an advanced radiocarbon dating technology, and found they dated 50 to 100 years earlier than the city's supposed mid-15th century downfall. 

Archeologists at Work

Plenty of ethno-historical records exist to support the city's violent downfall around 1458, said Masson. But the new evidence, thanks to Bennett's advanced radiocarbon dating tech, puts the evidence of massacre 100 years earlier. Combined with climate data that the Peninsula experienced prolonged drought around that time, the team began to suspect environmental factors may have played a major role in the desertion of the site along with the violent chaos that preceded that desertion.

RAIN AND MAIZE CROPS

The Maya depended heavily on rain-fed maize but lacked any way to store grain longer than a year due to the humid jungle climate. The impacts of rainfall levels on food production are believed to be linked to human migration, population decline, warfare, and shifts in political power, the study states.

"It's not that droughts cause social conflict but they create the conditions whereby violence can occur," Masson said.

WARS ENSUE

Location of Mayapan (By ResearchGate)

The study suggests the Xiu, who launched the fatal attacks on the Cocom of Mayapan, used the droughts and ensuing famines to foment unrest and rebellion that led to the mass deaths and the migration from Mayapan as early as the 1300s.

Said Masson, "I think the lesson is that hardship can become politicized in the worst kind of way. It creates opportunities for ruthlessness and can cause people to turn on one another violently."

It's hard to not compare our present news cycles with these past events.

Following this period of drought and unrest however, Mayapan bounced back briefly thanks to healthy rainfall levels around 1400.  "It was able to bend pretty well and bounce back before the droughts returned in the 1420s, but it was too soon," Masson said. "They didn't have time to recover and the tensions were still there. The city's government just couldn't survive another bout like that. But it almost did."

According to Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, it's amazing how many cultures do collapse and one of history's disturbing facts is that collapse is caused by the destruction of the natural resources on which these cultures depend. The Anasazi, Easter Islanders, the kingdom of Angkor Wat in Cambodia...and the Maya. Declines of societies, he wrote, swiftly follow their peaks.

ON THE TAIL OF CHICHEN ITZA

Chichen Itza 

Mayapan rose to power in the footsteps of the decline of mighty Chichen Itza and after the great city-states of the south such as Tikal and Calakmul had gone into steep decline. During the late Postclassic Era (1250-1450 A.D.) Mayapan was the cultural and political center of the waning Maya civilization and had great influence upon smaller city states surrounding it. The sprawling complex spreads over four square kilometers and houses four thousand buildings. The ruins include temples, palaces and ceremonial centers, with architectural influence in the style of Chichen Itza. 

Tikal in Guatemala (ByLivescience.com)

Focusing on the present, as food insecurity, social unrest, and drought-driven migration in parts of the modern world continue to be of great concern, Masson said there are lessons to be learned in how other previous empires handled environmental hardships.

FAMINE OF ONE RABBIT

Pre-Spanish conquest, the Aztecs survived the infamous Famine of One Rabbit fueled by a catastrophic drought in 1454. The emperor emptied out the food storehouses from the capital to feed the people and when that ran out, he encouraged them to flee. Many sold themselves into slavery on the Gulf Coast where conditions were better but eventually bought their way out and returned to the capital, and the empire emerged stronger than ever. This strategy enacted by the Aztec imperial regime, said Masson, is likely what allowed for their recovery.

Her conclusion was that inspite of drought, civil conflict, institutional failure, and military conflict, a resilient network of small Maya states persisted that were encountered by Europeans in the early 16th century. (Just in time to be met, ironically, by the Spanish invasion).

HISTORY REPEATS?

In the face of present day climate change, these complexities and challenges faced by great Mexico and Central American civilizations are important as todays's world evaluates the potential success or failure of modern state institutions designed to maintain order and peace in the face of future climate change. Although Mayapan is a tale of only one city, correlations to present day world problems make the study of Mayapan extremely relevant now.

Climate change and its effects are real.

Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy

                                             by Jeanine Kitchel on Amazon

If you enjoyed this post, check out Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, on Amazon. My website is www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are also on Amazon. And my journalistic overview of the Maya 2012 calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, is on Amazon.

WITCHCRAFT, SORCERERS AND MAGIC THRIVE IN CATEMACO NEAR MEXICO'S GULF COAST

Brujo capital or tierra de brujos—home of witches and sorcerers. That’s what Catemaco in the state of Veracruz is famous for. It’s one of the reasons we decided to stop there enroute to our new home on the far eastern coast of Mexico, in Quintana Roo, back in 1997. We were not disappointed.  

The six hour drive from Tuxpan took us onto a curving, two-lane road with jungle encroaching on both sides. Vegetation teemed with banana, coffee, and mango trees and small wood-frame houses, set far back from the blacktop, were hidden in the greenery. We followed lumbering service trucks filled high with goods as well as an unmarked black pick-up carrying four armed soldiers sitting at attention in the open bed. The road climbed a thousand foot mountain and eventually brought us to the Catemaco zocalo where a brightly painted yellow church sat on the town square. Sitting on a lake and tucked into the mountains in the heart of tobacco-growing country, Catemaco is a pretty place.

Church on Catemaco Zocalo

In 1912, long cut off from the rest of Mexico, the railroad finally came to Catemaco. Roads connecting it to the rest of the state didn't happen until the 1950s. Some say its remoteness allowed for the development of a unique and spiritual ambience. From pre-Hispanic times, the area became known for sorcery and magic.

While mostly indigenous in the century after the Spanish conquest, due to its remote location, by the 18th century, the area had become a refuge for escaped slaves from Haiti, Africa, and Cuba. They brought with them their spiritual beliefs and customs. By the time European civilization caught up with Catemaco, the Spanish had introduced Catholicism to a population of several native groups blended with various nationalities.

The established group of shamans and sorcerers incorporated Catholic saints and rituals into their magic practices. The area also has long been a center for herbs and potions as plants with curative powers grow in abundance in the surrounding jungle. Catemaco, where indigenous plant wisdom runs deep, is well known for herbal cures and extracts and has provided relief for hundreds of different ailments.

Over the years, herbalists and spiritualists merged. Centuries later, the blend of the two traditions can't be traced back to a single defining moment, but it was apparent that what Catemaco stood for was powerful and unique to the region.

In 1970 Bruno Mayor, or Head Sorcerer of Catemaco, Gonzalo Aquirre, who'd inherited the position from his predecessor Manuel Ultrera, head brujo for decades, took note of this and decided to create something from it.

Though the concept of witches has historically been feminine, the majority of brujos in Catemaco are men. It could be because indigenous and African cultures favor men as spiritual healers. Since 1970, sorcerers of all kinds have united for a national congress of sorcerers of Catemaco. Due to pushback from the Catholic church in 2008, the name was changed to Festival of Magical Rites.

Brujeiras Are Scattered Through Town

The Catemaco festival is not promoted as part of Halloween or Dia de los Metros (Day of the Dead). The main event, occurring the first Friday in March, starts as a black mass on the edge of Lake Catemaco, led by the brujo mayor, or high witch or sorcerer. The annual celebration dovetails with spring equinox and corresponds well with renewal and rebirth rituals. Founded by Gonzalo Aquirre in the 70s, the festival attracts around 200 shamans, healers or curanderos, herbalists, psychics and fortune tellers. It's become a major moneymaker for the city as well as a tourist attraction. Brujerias or magic and herb shops are sprinkled throughout the town, with a wide range of offerings.

Gonzalo Aguirre, 1970s, Founder of Festival

Besides the sorcerers, the pride and joy of the town is its crater lake, a small gem in the midst of the Las Tuxtlas biosphere which encompasses Catemaco. The stikingly beautiful lake was formed by a now extinct volcano. Its set against the undulating Sierra Madre, the mountain chain that runs through Mexico and Central America. City tours include a boat ride and the colony of baboons inhabiting one of the deserted islands are a big draw. Children selling peanuts and bananas swarm about as sightseers prepare to board covered pangas. The lake has a dozen small isles which attract native howler monkeys and white and black herons. The baboons were brought from Thailand decades ago as part of a wildlife experiment sponsored by a local university. When funding ran out, they were left to fend for themselves and learned to eat water lilies and dive for fish. 

Lake Catemaco

Our experience in Catemaco many years ago made it into my travel memoir, Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya. Here's an excerpt: " The next night we stayed at Catemaco, just past Veracruz on the gulf, known for its witches' festival each spring equinox. It was a pretty spot, but from the reaction of the townspeople, they hadn't seen many foreigners. I felt like an oddity. I was approached by a bruja as we walked across the near empty town square. She promised me she was a good witch and would help me.

"Why me? I thought as I looked at this diminutive socreress who wanted to alter my life. I just quit my corporate job after 15 years. We built our dream house in the Yucatán, and now we were going there to relax on the beach. Life is good right now. Why did she have to come up to me? i tried to dissuade her from helping me out with her charms. i wanted no flotsam and jetsam corroding my future. I didn't need a reading, a spell or a potion. 

"I gave her a big smile, pretended i didn't understand her, and walked across the square at a rapid gait with Paul at my side. I'd save sorcery for another time."

And that, dear reader, was my experience at Catameco. We went back to our hotel, freshened up, walked to have dinner on the shore of the lake. We could hear the monkeys howling in the distance on one of the islands. Life was exciting and exotic, and we were a mere two days into our new life, driving towards our dream. 

If you enjoyed this post, check out Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, on Amazon. My website is www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are also on Amazon. And my journalistic overview of the Maya 2012 calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, is on Amazon.

HOW OVERFISHING HIJACKED MEXICO'S SECOND LARGEST INDUSTRY

WHITE GOLD FEVER

Teacapán, a small fishing village one hundred miles south of Mazatlan, became known as a town blessed with a fortune under the sea when a fisherman made a discovery that would change his life and the lives of everyone he knew.

Gulf of California

It was 2007 and fishing, at one time the main industry for Teacapán, had long since peaked. Years of overfishing had depleted the local supply of fish. The town's fishermen were struggling to provide for their families. Businesses failed as the local economy dried up. That's when Belen Delgado, a local fisherman, caught his first glimpse of the callo de hacha, a large black scallop with a tender white interior, one of the most prized species in the Gulf of California.

CALLO DE HACHA

Belen Delgado (Photo Cathy Brundage)

What was to come was unexpected, and fast. He'd heard a shrimp boat had snared and netted a callo de hacha. He knew this meant that a massive bank of the valuable shellfish sat just off the town's shore. A discovery like that could revitalize Teacapán and allow it to prosper. But reaching the ocean floor was only the first challenge. If there was a treasure below, he would have to protect it.

Native to the Sea of Cortez, callo de hacha, named for its hatchet-looking large black shell, is a rare species of scallop. Its tender white inside, the size of a silver dollar, is prized throughout Mexico, Delgado said in an interview with "Snap Judgment." At the time, he wagered the net worth of these shellfish was worth millions of US dollars.

He'd heard the same about the callo from another fisherman, a shrimper, who had begun to find one or two in his nets. Callo de hacha can live in shallow and deep waters. By what he heard fellow fishermen friends were bringing in, he figured there had to be mountains of it below, some as far as 70 feet under the surface. But the locals couldn't net that; they'd have to dive for it.

Callo de hacha (Photo Cathy Brundage)

DIVING FOR DOLLARS

Delgado called a Baja diver who fished for mollusks and asked him to come to Teacapán. After doing a deep dive, he surfaced and told Delgado that he was sitting on a gold mine. Everywhere he stepped there was callo de hacha. It was a massive colony of shell fish—30 miles long and a mile wide—worth millions.

Belen met with his local fishermen friends in secret. They hid their immediate catches in large coolers. He explained to the others that they had to save and protect what they had. He would drive to Mazatlan and speak to the director at the Federal Fishing Authorities Department to see how they could preserve their find. 

The director asked what he wanted. "To not let it get out of control," he explained. "To keep it for our local fishermen—to give them permits—but to also have quotas."

Belen Delgado was not your ordinary fisherman. He was also a biologist. Born the youngest of nine, he was the only one in his family to go to college where he studied fish biology. Through his studies he learned the importance of protecting the fish population where one lives and how to teach others to protect their resources.

Pangas in Teacapán

DWINDLING RESOURCES

He well remembered how red snapper in their local waters used to be five feet long and there were so many fish it seemed the ocean was boiling. But the catch lately for all of them had been lackluster. If the Baja diver was right, their waters sat directly above a mother lode of the most expensive seafood one could catch in Mexico. Callo is a true delicacy, its white tender meat, known to be the finest that could be found. But in 2007, fishing boats sat unused in the estuary of Teacapán, a once thriving ecosystem. Overfishing and chemical runoff from nearby farms had destroyed it and his local friends were forced to fish out in the open ocean, more dangerous and more costly. 

Delgado knew that Mexico's long coastline with a fishing fleet involving over 100,000 small vessels known as pangas made enforcement on the seas and on the land that served as the launching places a challenge. Illegal fishing was rampant.

OCEANA STEPS IN

Oceana, an international organization that focuses on achieving change on ocean policies, states Mexico struggles with sky-high rates of illegal and undocumented fishing. And according to Sea Around Us, a British Columbia research initiative, every pound of officially reported fish is shadowed by a second, illegally caught pound, meaning the country's true fish catch was double from what was officially recorded. Between 45 and a staggering 90 percent of official fish production in Mexico could go undocumented.

Oceana's study showed that Cancun's waters, part of the first independent audit of Mexico's fisheries, was not alone in hiding a troubling secret. Scientists have nearly zero idea on how the populations of fish like grouper and bluefin tuna are doing there. Oceana's Mexico team released a report in June 2019 that showed severe lack of reliable and publicly available data on the health of Mexico's seafood stocks, making it impossible to manage the country's fisheries. This jeopardizes food security for coastal communities and risks the livelihoods of the one million people who work in the seafood sector.

Mexican Red Grouper 

The report continues that most of Mexico's fisheries are in bad shape, with 17 percent overfished or depleted and 63 percent not able to withstand any additional fishing pressure. The audit pulled these findings from existing government statistics, meaning that the actual state of the fisheries could in fact be even worse. Of the 83 fisheries with available government data, only four percent have verifiable science backing official conclusions on metrics of fish abundance and annual catch.

DATA COLLECTION

Even though Mexico has been a top fishing country for decades, the government only started collecting fisheries data in 2000. Unfortunately, often the data collected is ignored. Since 2000, the government has known certain species are overfished but they have chosen to ignore it and not rebuild these valuable fisheries.

After becoming aware of the gold mine Teacapán was sitting on and with his knowledge of how Mexico works, Belen Delgado at first told no one. But slowly, word got out and hundreds of boats began fishing for the callo. 

Even though he said he knew it would not have a happy ending, he decided to hire divers and go for it. But before that, he tried to talk his friends into fishing just one hundred pounds a day.

NO STINKIN' QUOTAS

"We don't have to destroy ourselves," he told them. "We can have one hundred pounds as a quota."

He decided to set an example and rather than send out all four of his fishing boats, he only sent out two a day.

By this time researchers had come to view the colony of callo and told Delgado and the other fishermen, if taken care of, it could potentially last ten years. But at the rate things were going,  Delgado knew it wouldn't last half of that.

Teacapán fisherman 

His friends insisted there was money to be made. Delgado pushed back and said if we don't limit our catch, we'll flood the market. By fishing only one hundred pounds per boat, we'll get a higher price for longer. He told them he knew of other places in Mexico where they limited and set quotas to protect the fish populations. 

Most of the locals said why not fish what we can? But before fishing authorities could do anything, there were hundreds of boats in the water bringing in more than one hundred pounds of callo each per day. People who had been making ten dollars a day were now making hundreds, selling on the black market up and down the Pacific coast.

Soon fishing boats were coming in from as far away as Mazatlan; it was mayhem. TV reporters showed up to detail the news of this "cocaine of the sea."

PIRATES

"There were three hundred ships in the water," Delgado said. "Men were having fist fights. And then came the pirates who would launch boats in the middle of the night, coming from miles away, then speed off in the darkness with their catch."

At first his local friends said there's plenty for everyone. But they didn't understand that if they alone fished, they could keep the price steady. Outsiders undercut the cost of callo. Divers had to dive deeper, and then tragedy struck. A local diver got the bends. With no hyperbolic chamber in town, Delgado drove the boy to a nearby town that had the chamber and he made it. But other divers were not so lucky. Eventually seven divers died. 

Teacapán fishing boats (Openocean.org)

A CAUTIONARY TALE

"We were fished out within a year and a half," Delgado said.

The fishermen had tossed so many callo shells over the sides of their boats, that it poisoned the water, killing off any cayo left. Fishing in Teacapán is again non-existent.

Delgado is retired now, but occasionally takes his boat out to where they fished for it 15 years ago. 

"Could it happen again?" he was asked. 

"By now, yes. Some may come back, but not as big."

NOT AN UNCOMMON CRIME

Like elsewhere in the world, states the Brookings Institute, illegal fishing threatens the productivity of fisheries and the economic viability of that sector, including marine biodiversity and food security.

Just like other illegal economies such as drugs, the article continues, Mexico's illegal fishing involves rings that smuggle the poached species to distant markets such as China. It also involves poor local fishermen who illegally harvest marine resources. Not unlike drugs, it sets off conflicts between local communities and businesses and with Mexico's regulatory and enforcement authorities. Though not on the scale of the violence associated with Mexican drug markets, it still creates a wrinkle in the flow of the economic system. And like drugs, significant trans-shipment of fish contraband takes place through the United States.

As with all else, we live in an inter-connected world, sharing not only air but oceans and the commerce associated with them. We need to respect not only the laws of the oceans, the diversity that lives within it, by following the laws of both nature and the courts that try to govern our natural resources, and work together—while we still have nature's bountiful resources at our disposal. 

If you enjoyed this post, check out Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, on Amazon. My website is www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are also on Amazon. And my journalistic overview of the Maya 2012 calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, is on Amazon.

Cover photo: Fisherman with net by GringoNomadinTeacapán