Western Mexico is still a frontier land, with its rugged vertical landscapes split by labyrinths of deep canyons scattered by syncretic indigenous peoples and mining ghost towns, still people. The Tierras altas, the highlands of the Sierra Madre, are the true backbone of the country, iconic locations of the Mexican collective imaginary. The best way to understand this strange and silent Mexico Profundo, far from the colorful and tropical cliché and too often depicted by mainstream media only as a tragic location of narco wars, is a journey on the steps of the cult book Unknown Mexico by Carl Lumholtz. This Danish explorer and ethnographer, who in 1905 was one of the founding members of the famous Explorers Club, 1890 to 1898, traveled along Northwestern Mexico, looking for the prehistoric culture of "cliff dwellers," the Anasazi of Colorado plateau, that seemed to have vanished into thin air, speculating that they had migrated south, still living there but instead discovered hidden syncretic indigenous cultures. Many exceptional people traveled along the Sonoran Desert and the Sierra Madre. Still, Carl Lumholtz was pivotal in bridging the gap between the earlier view of these lands as mere wasteland and the discovery of a confluence of Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo cultures to an unusual degree exposed to the juxtaposition of geologic time, human prehistory, but also a contradictory contemporary world. Lumholtz realized quite early the advantages of using modern media. More than 2,500 photographs documented his four expeditions from 1890 to 1898, with the earliest extensive photographic record of the indigenous peoples of northwest Mexico. Like Roald Amundsen and Ernest Shackleton, Lumholtz was a hero in a golden age of exploration, his popularity endured over the twentieth century as his books were reprinted and translated for broader audiences, and in recent years appreciation of his work appears stronger than ever.
The heart of this Mexico of vertical landscapes is a giant cluster of mountains cut by the canyons of the Barranca del Cobre, the Copper Canyon, bigger and deepest than Colorado's Grand Canyon, where only a few scattered native people famous for their symbolic cosmogony live in the immensity of this emptiness. The Raramuri, better known as Tarahumara, are the most numerous Indian people of Northern Mexico, with a living syncretism also narrated in a famous novel, Au Pays des Tarahumara by the French writer Antonin Artaud, one of the significant figures of the twentieth-century European avant-garde. The Coras with their Judea Cora, a Holy Week famous for the secrecy of their rituals, and a spectacular, syncretic manifestation considered by anthropologists one of the more interesting of Latin America. A wild-eyed atmosphere where the Judea, the "infernal militia" of hundreds of painted borrados, struggle four days and four nights with violence often uncontrollable until the Holy Friday when finally all quietens.