People of the Barranca de Urique

Text by Alan Weisman Photographs by Jay Dusard Isidro Güera sat on a boulder at the edge of the Río Urique, removed his straw hat to scratch his grizzled head, and watched the furniture truck descending toward town. It got him to wondering: how much gold would he have to extract from his river-powered, four-footdiameter wooden-paddle turbine, now dragging a lump of basalt over a quarterton of ore he'd hauled down the hill earlier that day, to buy himself a decent pickup? His calculations weren't encouraging: about 700 grams, he figured - and his daily yield averaged only two or three. But by the time he'd reached that conclusion, he was heartened to note that the groaning vehicle, heaped high with mattresses and chrome-legged chairs and even a cupboard with glass doors, was making no faster progress than he had that morning with his pack burros.

His village, Urique, lay a mile below the rim of southwestern Chihauhua's Barranca de Urique, part of a deep and vast geological complex. The only road in was first bulldozed during the mid1970s, and its frightening gradient and shrapneled texture make the journey a twohour, first-gear, brake-melting and tireshredding torment. Considering that, Isidro turned, dripped some mercury into the ore soup his tauna (turbine) was stirring to precipitate out what metal it might contain, and untied his bay mule. Not far away was a cheaper and more efficient way to spend his money.

"Ahí está," Luciano Mariscal tells him a few days later, and there it is: a smooth new russet-colored saddle, with handstitched skirts and a set of leather tapaderos to protect stirruped boots or huarache sandals from getting hung up in the brushy snarls of canyon country. Luciano, his hair resembling the silk-cotton growing on the huge kapok tree outside his door, has been making these fine, serviceable saddles for years; now he guides his son Juventino in the cutting and sewing. For three days, Isidro and various neighbors have come by to watch them create the custom rigging out of hides taken from local cattle and fitted to a saddletree carved from wood cut along their river. All that's missing now is the reata to hang alongside the saddle horn, but Isidro has brought one along, and it's a beauty: eight double arm's lengths of twisted rawhide the kind of lariat a cowboy north of the border would give a week's pay for, if he were ever lucky enough to find one.

Luciano fondles it, approvingly noting its uniform thickness. With his whitened head, he gestures in the direction of the barranca (canyon) slope rising behind his house. "Jesús Munoz," he says. Isidro nods. The maker Jesús Muñoz, one of many Muñozes hailing from a ranchería downriver called La Laja, has recently raised an adobe house almost directly above Luciano's and moved into town. Producing such reatas is a torturous process: cutting an untanned hide into a thin spiral for the long cords, then using homemade wooden cranks and chucks to form them into a rope, while two helpers alternately pull and slacken to maintain the precise tension. A lean, compact man in his 30s, Muñoz started making reatas when he was 10; now he modestly tells people that, with the assistance of his wife, Epimenia, and their boy, Juanito, he is finally starting to make them well.

Muñoz, Luciano Mariscal, their sons, and a string of friends and relatives-bymarriage who inhabit this canyon and nearby uplands are rugged Chihuahua's equivalent of the consummate musicians found on so many Mexican street corners: vastly talented people who, because of remote and impoverished birth, are nearly anonymous. Their splendid craftsman's skills are known almost exclusively to their mounts and to one another, but if they were to disappear, the remnants ofa Western tradition would largely vanish with them.Despite the infrequent cargo trucks that have replaced mule teams like the one Luciano Mariscal led in his younger days, an equine is still the surest and fastest means of transportation in this isolated country, which ranges from the depths of Mexico's famous Barranca del Cobre (Copper Canyon), about 20 miles upstream from Urique, to the peaks of the adjacent Sierra Madre Occidental. And while superb custom saddlers can be found throughout the American West, their ornately tooled efforts cost many times the peso equivalent of $140 (U. S.) that Luciano Mariscal charges Isidro Güera. Here, gear is handmade because there is no other way to afford it.

Once Arizona and the entire West were this way: now the place where cowboying began-Mexico-is where the purest cowboy roots remain.

Anyone wishing to visit Urique has three choices, none of them easy. The first requires several days of difficult technical backpacking from Creel, Divisadero, or Batopilas, which provide access to Copper Canyon. Creel and Divisadero are served by the Chihuahua al Pacífico Railroad (train connections are available in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, 10 hours south of the Arizona border on the Nogales-Guadalajara Highway, or in Ciudad Juárez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas). To reach the colonial mining village of Batopilas involves a day's bus ride from Creel, in accommodations rather unlike Greyhound's-passengers have been known to help push.

Or one can leave the train at Bahuichivo, a lumber depot two hours southwest of Creel, and hope that the arrival coincides with one of the twice-weekly, eight-hour round-trips of the supply truck that lurches up from Urique and has two hard benches bolted in the paneled truck bed for human freight.

The third alternative is the one chosen by Guillermo and Joel, the intrepid furniture men, who drove across the Sierra Madre from Sinaloa via Alamos, Sonora. Their 120-mile motorized voyage involved three days on logging trails using subterranean gear ratios, making monumental ascents over fractured volcanic bedrock through dense pine-oak forest, and passing unprotected through one of the most lethal opium poppy-growing regions in the Americas.

When they finally arrived, it was to a pueblo redolent with blooming lavender orchid trees and abuzz with green broadbilled hummingbirds, laid out along a single street that was cobbled in the early 1600s by Jesuit missionaries who had founded a nearby silver mine.

As their truck jostled over the river-rock pavement, they were greeted by the glances of small, sturdy horses and some splendid little mules with finely shaped heads and intelligent eyes that recalled the original Andalusian stock of the colonizing Spaniards-and by a polite populace of 1,500 inhabitants, relatively unimpressed with their factory wares.

"They want 54,000 pesos ($24 U. S.) for one of those shiny chairs," grumbles Luciano. Back when he was an arriero, a mule skinner driving a pack string to supply villages from Creel nearly all the way to Los Mochis, they didn't overstress

their customers' means. The chair he sits on, and his cutting table as well, cost a quarter of what the truckers charge and are of pine harvested, hewn, and fashioned by Tarahumara Indians, who bring such pieces down from the highlands strapped to their backs. And instead of vinyl, the chair seats are supple leather. It comes from hides cured a few kilometers downstream by four generations of the Portillo family, whose cluster of shake-roofed adobe houses is known as El Potrero. Each spring, 32-year-old Adán Portillo, a husky, pleasant man with a scraggly beard, soaks a dozen salted hides in a round stone vat filled with water and lime. The hides are from animals the family consumed the previous year. After four weeks, the hair is loose enough to be carefully scraped away with a machete. Then the hides return for a final month in the vat, now filled with tanning bark from the guamúchil trees growing in the nearby arroyo. Until they're ready, Adán busies himself with animals. At El Potrero, the canyon floor widens enough to accommodate stone pens suitable for the tricky art of mule breeding, so vital for the barranca's perfidious terrain. Actually Adán uses the less common cross, sequestering female burros with his young brown stallion. The resulting hinnies are smaller and somewhat lazier than mules (which are born of mares bred to jack donkeys), but they last longer and, like burros, can eat practically anything. That is an increasingly valuable trait these days; the entire Sierra Madre seems to have entered a three-year dry cycle, and Adán spends days away from home, taking his dozen cows high up the canyon in search of grass, then bringing them back to the river for water. Last year, no one brought in a corn crop-the local stapleand now people are scrambling to sell animals or reatas or whatever to be able to purchase corn, which for a family with livestock can run $45 (U.S.) per month. To economize, they are even making their own lime for curing hides, hauling and burning limestone they quarry above the barranca. Adán's wizened, paternal grandfather, Benito, and Adán's father, Jesús José, stand next to a boulder that had been buried under topsoil when the family first arrived here; so many years of dry farming and overgrazing have eroded away much

Of their earthy investment. Benito extends a leathery arm and points toward the Río Urique, coursing by in its rocky bed.

"If we could only use this," he says, but the technology for bringing river water uphill to their oxen-tilled fields doesn't exist here. In Urique, where a generator was installed in the 1970s, a few have tried pumping, but diesel oil is so precious here that electricity comes on only for a few hours each evening. And, with the parts to repair a broken pump practically a universe away, a crop that depends on such irrigation will wither while the owner looks helplessly at his dry field and at the sandy river that flows by so maddeningly near.

Adán's pretty wife, María Luisa, who is from a ranchito upstream, emerges from the two-room flagstone-adobe house Adán built after they met at a dance in Urique. They have five children, and they proudly watch their firstborn, seven-year-old Eleazar, romping bareback on the brown stallion as he practices herding a bull calf. If their three pregnant burras all foal, maybe they can sell some mulas and afford to buy a child-sized saddle just like Adán's. That one is practically a community showcase: built by Luciano and Juventino Mariscal on a slick-forked wooden saddletree that neighbor Fidel Pompa cousin to the Muñoz clan and at 6 foot 3 inches the biggest man in the barranca-whittled from the base of a cardón cactus and covered with one of Adán's hides.

Adán Portillo knows that there's a world beyond this canyon: he's been as far as Nogales, Sonora, where many Sierra residents have gone to work for three dollars a day in border assembly plants owned by United States corporations. "In the city," he says, "you can find everything; here, you can do everything. We grow corn and wheat, God willing; we drink goat's milk and make goat cheese from what's left over; we rope our cattle with reatas we make ourselves."

Adán and his wife enter the house built from their own mud and rock, and sit down with their family to a dinner of beans and stew, with tortillas made from masa that María Luisa ground on a stone metate. In another situation, if random chance had deemed that these two bright young adults had been born elsewhere, they would probably be burdened with the description "upwardly mobile." Here, instead of Guccis, they wear the single-thong, Tarahumara-style huaraches that Adán makes; instead of riding a stroller that collapses to fit into a station wagon, their baby Elisabeth swings from pine vigas in a hammock fashioned from a woolen Tarahumara blanket.

Outside after dinner, they watch the orange afternoon light climbing the canyon wall, as cardinals and hooded orioles flit through the mesquites and the percussive rumble of bullfrogs rises over the river. The water comes from someplace distant, flows through their lives, and is gone. "We live above it, and it passes right by," repeats Adán's grandfather Benito, joining them. "Maybe someday, we can bring it up here, and our lives will be even more beautiful."

The water flows around a wide bend, passing La Laja, where Jesús Muñoz's brother Jacinto and cousin Victoriano are down in the riverbed seeing if their tauna has spun them any gold. In the willow shade just above, Jesús' nephew Gregorio Torres and his brother-in-law Tranquilino Rodríguez work on a saddletree patterned after Fidel Pompa's impeccable designs.

Jesús himself is coming down from the hills, leading a steer on a rope he wove from cow-tail hairs.

Below he can see the river. On the trail that runs north and south along the Río Urique pass men, women, and children mounted on mules and horses, leading (ABOVE) A street scene in Urique. Flowering orchid trees, introduced from Asia by the Spaniards, contribute to the beauty of the village's dramatic setting.

Burros with goods heaped on locally built packsaddles. Jesús has been away from his new house in Urique for four days, and he won't see his own children until the following morning. But he moved there so they could attend secondary school, in hopes that they might avoid the fate of so many of their cousins whom this harsh land cannot adequately support, who leave the canyon for the fields around Los Mochis to pick tomatoes for export to the United States. Down at his brother's house, Jesús takes a pull on a bottle of lechugilla, the mescal made from maguey growing high in the Sierra. The evening is warm, and soon the barranca will be steeped in summer heat. "Maybe it will rain," the men say to each other, as they feed handfuls of precious corn to their horses. Two riders come by on big sorrel mules, carrying polio vaccine packed in styrene-foam containers from the rural clinic in Urique, headed for ranchitos high in the Sierra. They stop to chat and then move on; the Muñoz brothers uncoil a meter or two of their fine homespun reatas and throw playful loops at the chickens and children, while the women prepare a goat whose hide has been flung on the eaves for drying. Above the canyon are other villages where more fine, locally famed rope makers and saddlers live, like Cerocahui on the road from Urique, where Lorenzo Villalobos outfits pack burros and Fernando López makes the lovely, showy braided reatas called tejidos. There are towns like Guazapares, whose wooded plaza and horseback society come straight out of fading dreams of an Old West, and Témoris, where the greatest leatherworker in the region, Dimas Pérez, builds saddles known and coveted in three Mexican states. But up there, the insidious drug economy has inflated prices, and hides are increasingly tanned with sophisticated chemicals brought by rail from Guadalajara factories. Back along the river, there is little profit motive in the business of horses-only the pride that comes from self-sufficiency and fulfilling needs. At dusk, with Venus rolling along the canyon rim, Urique's Mayor Guadalupe Domínguez nods to one of his assistants, who mounts a buckskin mule and climbs a hillside to the little diesel plant. Street lamps snap on. And then, via a communications satellite parked in geosynchronous orbit 22,500 miles above, antiquated Urique is briefly linked to 20th century Mexico as people gather in adobe living rooms or tiny restaurants around 13-inch black-and-white television sets. Along with millions of viewers from Yucatán to Tijuana, they watch "Rosa Salvaje"-"Wild Rose"-a tempestuous Mexican soap opera that enthralls an entire nation each evening. Outside, some folks who have ridden in to watch from ranchitos up or downstream stand beside their horses, observing the flickering images through windows and straining to hear the sultry dialogue over the bullfrog choir echoing off canyon walls. After 10:00 P.M., Rosa's fate is left teetering on the brink of the next episode; with a communal sigh, the diesel generator goes off. The televised squawk of another realm gives way to the clink of horseshoes on the river rocks imbedded in the street, and Urique returns to itself: a shard of a time in America where once nearly everything that humans accomplished required the cooperation of quadrupeds.