Book Review: In the Sierra Madre

In the Sierra Madre, by Jeff Biggers

Reviewed by Sara Levine

“The Sierra Madre. No other mountains in the world posses such a timbre of intrigue and wonder.” So opens Jeff Bigger’s book In the Sierra Madre, and so he would like us to believe.

In 1998 author Jeff Biggers and his companion (now wife) Carla moved to the small Rarámuri village of Mawichi in northwestern Mexico. The Rarámuri are an indigenous group living in the remote canyons of the Sierra Madre Occidental whose native language and traditions remain constant, though the modern world steadily encroaches upon them. While Carla worked on a project regarding bilingual education in Rarámuri communities—mentioned only in passing by the author—Biggers spent his days as a jack-of-all-trades, helping out around the village and exploring.

Biggers was immediately fond of the Rarámuri people living in the village—he was prior to his arrival enamored by what he already knew of their resilience and their traditions. He expects readers to feel this instant love and admiration as well, rather than a growing affection over the course of the narrative. He is a deft storyteller and his depictions of these people are lively and endearing. His portraits of El Chapareke—a musician famed for his skill playing the local, eponymous stringed instrument—and Bernabé and Maria—the elderly couple in whose home the author was living for the year—are particularly vivid.

For a village so small, however, these portraits are sparsely rendered. Why so few of them? While individuals appear throughout the narrative in vignettes of various length and intimacy, most often, the people in his narrative appear collectively as the Rarámuri. Of these people he has almost no words of criticism, no reservations about customs or attitudes (these he saves for the tourists, missionaries, and even outsider Mexicans who come and go throughout the book). He makes passing references to the tension between the younger Spanish-speaking generation, and the older monolingual generations. He also mentions the presence of externally financed projects in the town, both in the form of a tourist project channeled through a local cooperative that crumbles under the strains of disparate interests, and the garden of one of the men with whom he often chops wood. Biggers writes, “His wife, Anna, ran a small shop out of their house and cultivated one of the few vegetable gardens in the village, which were supported by a Canadian aid organization.” Might this windfall for Anna and her husband incur jealousy in the small community? These sources of friction would have been interesting points of exploration, and perhaps have made for a more multi-faceted portrayal of the community.

While stories of his daily experiences from the mundane (chopping wood) to the unusual (Holy Week festivities) pepper his prose, much of the book is based on archives and information gleaned from sources far from the isolated regions of the Sierra Madre in which this story takes place. Every story Biggers tells is followed by pages of exhaustively researched historical accounts. These lengthy digressions meander on, one topic bouncing off another, with so much detail that it is often hard to remember what inspired him to digress in the first place.

Biggers clearly wants very much to find connections between his own life and the lives of the Rarámuri people. To this end, he recounts his own family’s history, seemingly grasping for ways in which his own history intertwines with the people of Mawichi. His search for these threads of connection often feels as if he is over-reaching, at one point going so far as to imagine his ancestors watching the “Trail of Tears” pass by their homesteads.

Ultimately, however, these perceived connections feel forced because his motivations for looking for them are unclear. What does he learn from the exercise other than a pat conclusion of difference? Why does he go to this community, other than to accompany his girlfriend? This is not a redemption story, nor does Biggers come to any profound conclusions about himself. This is not a memoir, yet more than a travelogue. The book mostly seems a jumble of stories of the local color that then inspire Biggers to muse upon the history—whether it be political, social, or religious—of the region.

A persistent trope throughout this account is the movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which he portrays as one of the most culturally resonant movies of our time. While the title is certainly famous, and apropos, it is debatable whether the movie is the cultural icon that can hold all this together. The author’s over-reliance on this film as a bonding mechanism for the book feels dated and forced.

Biggers is an accomplished banjo player, with a large repertoire of folk and country music that proves popular at tesguinadas, the festive Rarámuri community gatherings dominated by the local corn home brew, tesguino. He is clearly more than tolerated by the community. However, these enchanting glimpses of village life are fettered by his historical digressions and tangentially related stories of the many people who have passed through the Sierra Madre Occidental. While written with evident enthusiasm these passages of what might most aptly be described as interesting esoterica, lend the novel a jerky, disjointed quality that is both confusing and distracting. There is no story arc to speak of in In the Sierra Madre. In fact, it is hard to tell exactly how this book is organized: the chapters are not immediately recognizable as cohesive units, there is seemingly no chronological element to its meter, and even the seasons—the fundamental organizing principle of life in a farming community—do not appear in any coherent way. Biggers’ love for these people and this place is profound, but it is never entirely clear why. Ultimately the intrigue and wonder we are promised in the open lines of the book never materializes.

This book is part of a genre whose best exponents are Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux, two writers whose poetic and historical digressions from the matters strictly at hand are deservedly beloved, and if one were heading off to the Sierra Madre Occidental of Northern Mexico, In the Sierra Madre would make an often interesting, sometimes captivating, introduction to the region. At its best, In the Sierra Madre is an absorbing glimpse of a threatened culture and the challenges it has faced both past and present.

Sara Levine’s own Mexico travel writing has appeared in Travelers’ Tales’ What Color is Your Jockstrap? She lives in Berkeley, California.

Recent Vagablogging.net guest book reviews include Melanie Mock’s review of Women Who Run, and Aly Young’s review of Tales from the Expat Harem.