Code east, colorado, puert0, california, sp, laciry,
sanfernando, mexico city, unam, pearson, rutgers
Francisco R. Almada
Search for Knowledge
Why menudo is white?
By
Rodolfo F. Acuña
When I began my research on Sonora, Mexico, I knew little
about my mother's home state other than my family's constant references to it
when I was growing up. I could always count on my mother singing /Sonora
Querida/ and on the ravings of the cooks (everyone in my family thought they
were cooks) on the superiority of the sonorense cuisine -- which I had to admit
tasted better and fresher than other regional varieties.
In retrospect some of their bragging was downright
chauvinistic such as that Sonorans made their menudo blanco because they washed
the pancita thoroughly. According to my relatives the /guachos/ (depreciative
term for non-Sonorans) were too lazy to wash the pancita so they added red
chili to hide the unwashed tripe.
I never thought seriously about researching Sonora until
it came to selecting my dissertation topic, which was once a difficult choice.
In history the rule of thumb was that you could not duplicate theses. It had to
be original research. I remember cases where graduate students stole other
graduate students' topics. So you guarded your choices theories often swearing
people to secrecy.
Like most grad students of my time, my priority was to
select a topic on the /real/ Mexico, which of course meant Mexico City. Without
knowing it I was committing the sin of the chilango <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilango>
believing that the provincias had little to offer. If it was worth studying at
the time it was in D.F.
Not much time was devoted to paying heed to Leslie Byrd
Simpson's book /Many Mexicos/.
From the moment I
was admitted to the doctoral program my advisor said pick a topic, "you're
going to have to exhaust the secondary sources and that takes time."
Mexico City was out of the question. Two/three days riding a bus to and 2/3 days
back. I was short on cash and time so it narrowed down my choice to the
borderlands.
I chose Sonora because it was close. As Manuel Servin (my
advisor) pointed out it was the staging area for the occupation of California
and that Donald Rowland, another committee member was a Bolton Scholar. I could
drive to Tucson and then occasionally to Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora
where I could buy books and hit the major libraries and archives. The Bancroft
Library was mecca (a short six hour drive).
All of this had to be sandwiched into a schedule that
included full time teaching, grad work and community activism. As a
consequence, there was an awful lot of stress in my family life. All of this
would not have been possible without Francisco R. Almada's /Diccionario de
Historia, Geografia y Biografia Sonorense/ that capsulized Sonoran history and
opened the journey. (Later his /Diccionario de historia, geografía y biografía
chihuahuenses /and other works on Chihuahua were a treasure trove in research
for my /Corridors of Migration/.
Some of my wannabe Chicana/o scientist friends would
probably not appreciate Almada's method, which was pure story telling. He was
not a professional historian, and like many Mexican historians of the time such
as Chihuahua medical anesthesiologist Rubén Osorio Zúñiga, it was not Almada's
main occupation, he did it for the love of history.
Incidentally Osorio wrote classics in the field that most
Mexicanists have never read. Among Osorio's many titles is /Pancho Villa, ese
desconocido : entrevistas en Chihuahua a favor y en contra andTomóchic en
llamas/ that recounted the bloody siege of a small Chihuahua village in the
1890s.
Francisco R. Almada was born in Chínipas, Chihuahua ---
in the Sierra Madres in the southwestern part of the state about forty miles
and nine hours over the Sierra to Alamos, Sonora, the silver capital of the
region and where Almadas ancestors hailed.
Today Chinipas, a small mining camp, is calledChínipas de
Almada, which was the ancestral home of the Chinipa Indians and where waves of
Tarahumara were herded into first the Jesuit and thenFranciscan mission.It is
an isolated place with a turbulent history.
Almada is listed as a teacher, investigator, historian
and politician, and served twice as interim governor of the state of Chihuahua.
He started out as an assistant teacher and became the director of the school at
the age of 20. To my knowledge he never a tenured university professor/
In his early teens Almada joined in the antireelectionist
movement that opposed the dictator Porfirio Díaz. His career involved electoral
politics, serving as president of the municipality of Chínipas, with stints in
the state legislature (1922, 1924) and in the federal Chamber of Deputies.
Almada served in other capacities and was founder and president of the
/Sociedad chihuahuense de estudios Históricos/ (Chihuahua Society of Historical
Studies). Some of his published titles include:
Diccionario de historia, geografía y biografía
chihuahuenses/, 2a.
Edición, Inédita, 1927
Gobernantes de Chihuahua/, 1929
Apuntes Históricos de la Región de Chínipas/, 1937
Diccionario de historia, biografía y geografía del
estado de Colima/, 1939
Guadalupe y Calvo/, 1940
La imprenta y el periodismo en Chihuahua/, 1943
Gobernantes del Estado de Chihuahua/, 1951
Diccionario de Historia, Biografía y Geografía
sonorenses/, 1952
Hombres de Nuevo León y Coahuila en la defensa de Puebla
y prisioneros en Francia en 1862,
La revolución en el estado de Chihuahua/, 1965
La revolución en el estado de Sonora/, 1971
La invasión de los filibusteros de Crabb al estado de
Sonora/, 1973
His /Diccionarios de historia, geografía y biografía/ of
Chihuahua and Sonora helped me immeasurably. It allowed me to form my own
theories and an understanding of colonialism and the value of history
maintaining it.
Almada recreated the history of the ancestors of the
conquerors but at the same time preserved the history of the conquered although
in reality the Tarahumara were never dominated. The others-- the conchos, the
tepehuanes and others were exterminated.
It is not so much that Almada and others did not care
about this genocidal process, it was just that they did not think that it was
that important. They wanted to preserve their history as written from the
perspective of /his history/. It gives us a limited understanding of the past
and is based mostly on written documents.
The importance of history is not so much the story, but
how and why it occurred. I have the utmost respect for Francisco Almada but I
wonder why he was not more sensitive to the plight of the Chihuahuan and the
Sonoran natives. After all Almada's ancestors in the 18^th century had gone
before the Spanish Inquisition to obtain a limpieza de sangre <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limpieza_de_sangre>,
a worthless document certifying that they were pure Christians.
The importance is not that they went before the
Inquisition; however, but why people who underwent that horrific experience
became more Catholic than the Pope.
You have to start with the story. WHY? Why the Middle
East? Why is the story of the children at the border dismissed? Why the is
reaction of a people who make the sign of the cross so inhumane? Francisco R.
Almada helped me understand the story and my search for the why? I may not be
able to fully understand my ancestors, no one choses their relatives.
But understanding is much better than inventing
stereotypes about guachos and infantile explanations of why the menudo is
white.
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