QUIROGA: a MEXICAN MTJNICIPIO — BRAND 



51 



furniture, but the 1940 census indicates that about 

 20 percent of the population sleep on mats 

 (petates) laid on the floor, 74 percent sleep on beds 

 (principally wooden frame beds with slats and no 

 springs), and the remainder sleep on crude canvas 

 cots or on planks or slats placed across wooden 

 horses (this arrangement is called a tapexco). 

 Usually there is no separate dining room or 

 comedor, and the people eat in the kitchen or at 

 a table on the back porch or veranda. The most 

 important fixture in the kitchen is the hearth or 

 fireplace {chimenea) , which usually consists of a 

 sohd platform of stone and mud (this is of cement 

 or of brick in a minority of the houses), and an 

 elevated back of the same material, upon which 

 are placed the tlu-ee hearthstones (paranguas) in 

 the shape of a U. Quite often these three stones 

 are plastered over with mud. The fire is built 

 within the -parangua; tortillas are cooked on a 

 terra-cotta or metal sheet (comal or erox) which is 

 placed directly above the fire; and the various 

 cooking pots and kettles of terra cotta, copper, 

 and aluminum are arranged at the edges. Other 

 than this type of cooldng equipment, there are 

 perhaps 8 or 10 oil stoves and 4 or 5 wood stoves 

 in Quu'oga. Most of the homes use only cut 

 sticks ileha) of oak and pine for cooking, supple- 

 mented by corncobs, twigs, refuse from the 

 elaboration of wooden chairs and bowls, dried 

 cow dung, etc. Other fuel used included charcoal 

 in 60 homes, charcoal or wood in 53, and tractolina 

 (crude distillate of petroleum) in 8 homes. Only 

 the wealthier families in the center of town have 

 stoves or use charcoal. As mentioned previously, 

 239 buildings have electricity, which is used in the 

 homes only for illumination and the occasional 

 radio (there are 2 or 3 electric irons) ; 389 homes 

 use petroleo (kerosene); and the remainder use 

 either candles or pitch-pine splinters (ocote) for 

 illumination. 



The present settlement pattern and the house 

 types ui Quiroga town apparently have little in 

 common with their Tarascan predecessors. Al- 

 though the pre-Conquest Tarascans lived in ag- 

 glomerated settlements, it is certain that the 

 organization in more or less regularly laid out 

 streets and blocks was due to the Spaniards. Con- 

 cerning the house styles and materials the evidence 

 is not so clear. Om* only evidence from the pre- 

 Conquest period is provided by a few archeologic 

 fragments, and by the illustrations and some casual 



comments in the Relaci6n de Michoacan. In an 

 arroyo near the Yacata del Lindero northwest of 

 Quiroga some archeologic material has weathered 

 out which includes lumps of cooked earth which 

 retain the casts and markings of wooden poles and 

 grasses. These could indicate either thatched roofs 

 or walls of wattle and mud. However, the accu- 

 mulated mounds of large clods of cooked earth and 

 stones of various shapes near the yacata would indi- 

 cate that the walls were of mud (imshaped adobe) 

 strengthened with stones, and probably the roofs 

 were of thatch or wattle and mud. The illustra- 

 tions in the Relaci6n de Michoacan show houses 

 of a rectangular outline that seem to have roofs of 

 both two and four sheds or slopes. The wall 

 material is indeterminant ; while some of the roofs 

 seem to be of grass thatching, others have the 

 appearance of shakes. In the text of the Relacidn 

 there is mention of wooden houses. The situation 

 at the time of the Conquest was probably that the 

 majority of the houses were of stone and adobe 

 walls with thatched roofs, but that some of the 

 houses were of hewn plank sides and shake or small 

 plank roofs. The accoimts of the sixteenth cen- 

 tury (Relaciones Geograficas; '* Sahagun, 1938; 

 and Ponce, 1872) concerning the Tarascan settle- 

 ments are practically unanimous that the walls 

 were of adobe and the roofs were of grass, al- 

 though a few wooden houses are mentioned ia 

 the first and last sources listed above. Appar- 

 ently the shapes, sizes, and materials of the 

 houses continued the same after the Conquest 

 as before, but stones were used primarily in 

 the foimdations, the adobe mud was shaped 

 into Old World forms of adobe bricks, and the 

 working of wood was made somewhat easier by 

 the introduction of steel axes and adzes. Be- 

 fore the end of the eighteenth century, in those 

 Tarascan areas that had an abundance of pines, 

 the houses came to be predominantly of wood 

 (shake-covered four-shed roofs, plank sides, and 

 wooden floors) of the style known at present as 

 the Tarascan Sierra troje. Although we beUeve 

 that this style of house dates back to special 

 houses used by the priests in pre-Conquest times 

 (on the basis of textual material in the Relacidn 

 de Michoacan), it is behoved by some to have been 

 introduced in colonial times by Mexican and 

 Spanish missionaries upon their return from so- 



'■ See Bibliography, Manuscript materials, Meiico City, Museo Nacional 

 de Antropologia ,Fondo Francisco del Paso y Troncosa. 



