Mexico-Sierra Madre
114 images Created 13 Sep 2012
Sierra Madre, a strange and silent world far from the cliché of a colorful and tropical Mexico. Ghost town still peopled, with more than four hundred of bonanza, a gold rush when thousands of miners worked hard for the Silver Barons. This Mexico Profundo, a deep Mexico of vertical landscapes, awesome canyons and highlands is the true backbone of the country, an iconic locations of the Mexican collective imaginary and still today in many ways a frontier land where trust must be won on the field. During the Mexican Revolution’s years the local hero of these desert landscapes of cactus and western locations, utilised for many movies, was Pancho Villa still remembered in many villages and towns. The heart of the Sierra Madre is a giant cluster of mountain chains split by labyrinths of canyons, the Barranca del Cobre, the Copper Canyon bigger and deepest than Colorado’s Grand Canyon, crossed only by a legendary railway, the Ferrocarril Chihuahua al Pacifico. To really understand the Sierra Madre you must go down, at the bottom of the canyons looking fot the scattered people living in the immensity of this emptyness, like the Raramuri, better known as Tarahumara, defenders of a syncretic cosmogony of exceptional symbolic value, mainly on the days of their Tarahumara Holy Week. A ritual universe has been narrated by the french writer Antonin Artaud, in his Au Pays des Tarahumara.