A Treasury of Mexican Folkways

CROWN, $5.00

SCHOLARS and travelers alike have described the arts and customs of the Mayas and Aztecs of Mexico, present and past, and good roads have introduced the most casual motorists to the flavor and look of Tarascan and Zapotec villages. Miss Toor’s monumental new work, while not scanting these more obvious cultures, goes on to describe the cults and the crafts of any number of less accessible peoples: the Huicholes of the states of Nayarit and Jalisco, who worship (and sacramentally eat) aphrodisian gods; the Mixes of Oaxaca, who adore mythical twohorned water serpents; and the Tzeltales of the state of Chiapas, whose dead each year take raucous vacations from a Christianized heaven.

Miss Toor, a Professor of Folklore at the University of Mexico, has hiked and ridden through the Mexican hinterland for twenty-five years, and during the twenties and thirties edited Mexican Folkways, her own sparkling journal. The immensely detailed folkloric thesaurus which results now from so many years of field work falls into four parts, each of which might have been a useful book in itself. The first part, “Work and Worship,”describes such fundamental activities of primitive life as the getting of food, shelter, and clothing, together with the rites of religion which pertain to that life.

Part Two, “Society — Custom — Fiesta,” takes up variations on the life cycle. The Catholicized Zapotecs of Y’alalag in the state of Oaxaca, for instance, cross the coastal mountains on foot to pray at Juquila for babies to carry on the work of the family. Tarahumara women, at the parturition, stand over nests of plucked grass, cling to the branches of trees for support during travail, and go back to work within twenty-four hours — a couple of days before their husbands get over the shock. The education of children in the more pagan groups is spotty for the reason that their parents do not approve of the schools. In the towns, they observe, children are taught only to lie and to steal and be disobedient. Facts of life are come upon early, mostly by close observation, and marriage, more often tribal than civil, soon follows puberty. In Oaxaca, the neighbors shoot off firecrackers if the bridegroom can report that his bride is a virgin. Fiestas, both tribal and Christian, supply the grim cycle of seasons with the color and emotional warmth which nature, a picturesque miser, withholds.

Part Three contains a complete guide to the regional dances which, amongst primitive people, are a structural part and not merely an ornament of the processes of living and dying. The hundred tunes reproduced here, some with a rudimentary bass for guitar or piano, include hymns and ceremonial dances along with ballads and popular songs.

Howard Cline, Alfredo Barrera, Ralph Beals, Donald Cordry, and other colleagues contribute myths and legends to the delightful fourth part of the volume. Margaret Park Redfield relates an enchanting myth of creation in which a Maya St. Joseph, as Adam, begets the Three Kings of the Orient, while Anne Chapman tells a tale from Chiapas in which Santo Tomas invents brandy to make Santo Cristo too merry to flood the world again with a watery stream.

To illustrate more than 500 densely packed pages of fascinating and factual text, there are 170 photographs showing nearly every phase of native Mexican life, 100 ink drawings by Carlos Merida, and ten handsome color plates of regional costumes.

MACKINLKY HELM